YouSaid · the spoken record
Peter Wang
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- 2021-12-23
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- 2021-12-23
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“Have access to way more intelligence capability if you're plugged into five million other really, really smart cyborgs. Why would you leave?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have no reason not to build multiple if you build multiple, there's no reason not to integrate them all into a collective sense making substrate. And that thing will certainly have immersion intelligence that none of the individuals and probably not any of the human designers will be able to really put a bow around and explain.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's called the metaverse. That's right. Here's the enterprise. Maybe we should all go shoot it. Yeah, everyone upvotes and they're going to go shoot it, right? But we already are part of a human online collaborative environment and collaborative sense making system. It's not very good yet. It's got the overhangs of zombied sense-making institutions all over it. But as that washes away and as we get better at this, we are going to see humanity improving at speeds that are unthinkable in the past. And it's not because anyone's freedoms were limited. In fact, the open source, when we started this with open source software, right? The collaboration, what the internet surfaced was the ability for people all over the world to collaborate and produce some of the most foundational software that's in use today. That entire ecosystem was created by collaborators all over the place. So these online kind of swarm kind of things are not novel. It's just, I'm just suggesting that future AI systems, if you can build one smart system,”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not, I mean, you have a lot of this kind of freedom, but even as you're doing this, you are actually, I guess, the denouement of all this is that we are already intelligent agents in such a system, right? In that one of these robots of one of five million little swarm robots or one of the borg, they're just posting an internal bulletin board. I mean, maybe the Borg Cube is just a giant Facebook machine floating in space. And everyone's just posting there. They're just posting really fast. And like, oh, yeah, it's called.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have philosophical breakdown. Because we're in the West and we're pumped full of this stuff and fully free individual with all your freedoms and all your liberties and go grab a gun and shoe whatever you want to. No, it's actually you don't actually have a lot of these, you're not unconstrained, but the areas where you can manifest agency, you're free to do those things. You can say whatever you want on this podcast. You can create a podcast, right?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the cause, right? So, this is all again a fight of fancy, but I think as we extrapolate up, what does it feel like to be an independent individual with some bounded sense of freedom, all sense of freedom is actually bounded, but with a bounded sense of freedom that still lives within a network that has order to it. And I feel like it has to be a feeling of serendipity.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then she can let your brothers and sisters know, hey, Peter is going to go do this thing. Would you like to help him? Because we think that this will make this thing go better. And they'll say, yes, we'll help him. So the whole thing could be actually a very emergent, the sense of, you know, what does it feel like to be a cell in a network that is alive, that is generative. And I think actually the feeling is serendipity that there is random order. not random disorder or chaos, but random order just when you need it to hear Bruce Breenstein, you turn on the radio and bam, it's Bruce Springsteen, right? That feeling of serendipity, I feel like this is a bit of a flight of fancy, but every cell in your body must have, like, what does it feel like to be a cell in your body when it needs sugar, there's sugar. When it's oxygen, there's just oxygen. Now, when it needs to go and do its work and pull, like one of your muscle fibers, right? It does its work. And it's great. It contributes.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I don't think you have to lose any freedom when you're in that mode because I think what happens is we think, we still think, and I mean, you're still thinking about this in a sense of a top-down command and control hierarchy, which is not what it has to be at all. I think the experience, so I'll just show my cards here. I think the experience of being a robot in that robot swarm, a robot who has agency over their own local environment that's doing sense making and reporting it back to the hive mind, I think that robot's experience would be one when the hive mind is working well, it would be an experience of like talking to God, right? That you essentially are reporting to, you're sort of saying, here's what I see. I think this is what's going to happen over here. I'm going to go do this thing because I think if I'm going to do this, this will make this change happen in the environment. And God, she may tell you, that's great. And in fact, your brothers and sisters will join you to help make this go better.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you ever read like some sci-fi where there's like hive minds, like the Wernervenge, I think, has one of these and then some of the stuff from the Commonwealth saga. The idea that you're an individual, but you're connected with a few other individuals telepathically as well. And together you form a swarm. So if you are, I ask you, what do you think is the experience of if you are, like, well, a borg, right? If you are one, if you're part of this hive mind, outside of all the aesthetics, forget the aesthetics. Internally, what is your experience like? Because I have a theory as to what that looks like.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost like a neuronal input of a much higher bandwidth and fidelity going back to a central system that is then able to perceive much broader dynamics that we can't see. In the same way that a phased array radar, right? You think about how phased array radar works. It's just sensitivity and then it's hypersensitivity and really great timing between all of them. And with a flat array, it's as good as a curved radar dish, right? So with these things, it's a phased array of cybernetic systems that'll give the centralized intelligence much, much better, much higher fidelity understanding of what's actually happening in the environment.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An octopus letters. An octopus, you know, it really acts as a collective intelligence of eight intelligent arms, right? Its arms have a tremendous amount of neural density to them. And I see if we can build, I mean, let's go with what you're saying. If we build a singular intelligence that interfaces with humans, that has a sense of agency so it can run the cybernetic loop and develop its own theory of mind as well as its theory of action. All these things, I agree with you that that's the necessary components to build a real intelligence, right? There's got to be something at stake. It's got to make a decision. It's got to then run the OODA loop. Okay, so we build one of those. Well, if we can build one of those, we can probably build five million of them. So build five million of them. And if their cognitive systems are already digitized and already kind of there, we stick our antenna on each of them, bring it all back to a hive mind that maybe doesn't make all the individual decisions for them, but treats each one.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't think having a deep connection with it is necessarily going to stop us from building a thing that has quite an alien intelligence aspect. Sure. So the other kind of alien intelligence on this planet is octopuses or octopodes or whatever you want to call them. Yeah, there's a little controversy as to what the plural is, I guess.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commentators talking about all the stuff that this AI system is trying to do over here, over here, because it's actually a superintelligence. So if you want to talk about humans interfacing, making first contact with the superintelligence, we're already there. We do it pretty poorly. And if you look at the gradient of power and money, what happens is the people closest to it will absolutely exploit their distance for personal financial gain. So we should look at that and be like, oh, well, that's probably what the future will look like as well. But nonetheless, I mean, we're already doing this kind of thing. So in the future, we can have AI systems, but you're still going to have to trust people to bridge the sense-making gap to them.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could engage certain kinds of individuals to make sense of them for us and be almost like, did you ever watch Star Trek Voyager? Like there's the Volta who were like the interfaces, the ambassadors for the Dominion. We may have ambassadors that speak on behalf of these systems. They're like the mentats of Dune maybe or something like this. I mean, we already have this to some extent. If you look at the biggest sort of, I wouldn't say AI system, but the biggest cybernetic system in the world is the financial markets. It runs outside of any individual's control. And you have an entire stack of people on Wall Street, Wall Street analysts to CNBC, reporters, whatever, they're all helping to communicate. What does this mean? You know, you got Jim Cramer yelling and stuff. Like all of these people are part of that lowering of the complexity there to meet to help do sense making for people at whatever capacity they're at. And I don't see this changing with AI systems. I think you would have rings.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we can then connect just a few times a year and maintain a high trust relationship. It can expand a little bit, but it also requires, these things are not all technological in nature. It requires the individual themselves to have a certain level of capacity, to have a certain lack of neuroticism, right? If you want to use the ocean big five sort of model, people have to be pretty centered. The less centered you are, the fewer authentic connections you can really build for a particular unit of time. It just takes more time. Other people have to put up with your crap. Like there's just a lot of the stuff that you have to deal with if you are not so well balanced, right? So yes, we can help people get better to where they can develop more relationships faster. And then you can maybe expand Dumbar number by quite a bit. But you're not going to do it. I think it's going to be hard to get it beyond 10x, kind of the rough swag of what it is, you know.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right that there are many different ways that we can build trust with each other My friend Joe Edelman talks about a few different ways that mutual appreciation, trustful conflict, just experiencing something like, you know, there's a variety of different things that we can do. But all those things take time. And you have to be present. The less presence you are, I mean, there's just, again, a no-free lunch principle here. The less present you are, the more of them you can do, but then the less connection you build. So I think there is sort of a human capacity issue around some of these things. Now that being said, if we can use certain technologies, so for instance, if I write a little monograph on my view of the world, you read it asynchronously at some point and you're like, wow, Peter, this is great. Here's mine. I read it. I'm like, wow, Lex, this is awesome. We can be friends without having to spend 10 years figuring all this stuff out together. We just read each other's thing and be like, oh, yeah, this guy's exactly in my wheelhouse and vice versa.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I bet if me and you and Eric sat down to play a game of monopoly and we were to make NFTs out of the contracts we wrote, we could make a lot of money. Now it's a terrible idea. Never But I bet we could actually sell the NFTs around.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should play a game monopoly someday. It was a trippy version of it that we could do. Contract monopoly is introduced by a friend of mine to me where you can write contracts on future earnings or landing on various things and you can hand out like, you know, you can land first three times, you land a park place is free or whatever. And then you can start trading those contracts for money.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something on that order. And we call them fictions, but really they're rules of the game, right? Rules that we feel are fair or rules that we consent to.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the reason why I care a lot about this is because I think the future of humanity requires us to form better sense-make collective sense-making units at something around Dumbar number, half to 5x Dumbar. And that's very different than right now where we defer sense-making to massive aging zombie institutions. Or we just do it ourselves. We go it alone. go into the dark force of the internet by ourselves.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some agency and some mass At a mesoscopic level, I think that's an important thing because one thing I do think we underappreciate sometimes is the fact that relationships have relationships. So it's not just individuals having relationships with each other. But if you have eight people seated around a table, right? Each person has a relationship with each of the others, and that's obvious. But then if it's four couples, each couple also has a relationship with each of the other couples, the dyads do. And if it's couples, but one is the father and mother older, and then, you know, one of their children and their spouse, that family unit of four has a relationship with the other family unit of four. So the idea that relationships have relationships is something that we intuitively know in navigating the social landscape, but it's not something I hear expressed like that. It's certainly not something that is, I think, taken into account very well when we design these kinds of things.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than anyone else in the landscape, anything else, any other entity of equivalent size, and they're able to essentially bully around individuals, whether it's laborers, whether it's people whose resources they want to capture. They're also able to bully around our system of representation, which is still tied to individuals, right? So I don't believe that's correct. I don't think it's good that they're people, but they're assholes. I don't think that corporations as people acting like assholes is a good thing. But the idea that collectives and collections of people that we should treat them philosophically as having some”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something about the union and about the family. So for me, I don't think it's so weird to think that groups of people have a right to a claim to rights and sovereignty of some degree. I mean, we look at our clubs, we look at churches. We talk about these collectives of people as if they have a real agency to them. And they do. But I think if we take that one step further and say, okay, they can accrue resources. Well, yes, check by law they can. They can own land. They can engage in contracts. They can do all these different kinds of things. So in legal terms, support this idea that groups of people have rights where we go wrong on this stuff is that the most popular version of this is the for-profit, absentee owner corporation that then is able to amass larger resources.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So the belief is that groups of people have some kind of higher level, I would say, mesoscopic claim to agency. So where do I start with this? Most people would say, okay, individuals have claims to agency and sovereignty. Nations, we certainly act as if nations. So at a very large, large scale, nations have rights to sovereignty and agency. Like everyone plays the game of modernity as if that's true. We believe France is a thing. We believe the United States is a thing. But to say that groups of people at a smaller level than that, like a family unit is the thing. Well, in our law, in our laws, we actually do encode this concept. I believe that in a relationship in a marriage, right, one partner can sue for loss of consortium. If someone breaks up the marriage or whatever. So these are concepts that even in law, we do respect that there is some...”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come up with the philosophies of self and of rights and responsibilities. But that love being at the center of it, I think when we design systems for cognition, it should absolutely be built that way. I think if we simply focus on efficiency and productivity, these kind of very industrial era, all the things that Marx had issues with, right? That's a way to go and really, I think, go off the deep end in the wrong way.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet WTF, right? So when you look at it that way, it's like, yeah, okay, non-equilibrium physics is a thing. And so when we think about love, when we think about these kinds of things, I would say that in the modern day human condition, there's a lot of talk about freedom and individual liberty and rights and all these things, but that's very Hegelian. It's very kind of following from the Western philosophy of the individual as sacrosanct, but it's not really couched, I think, the right way because it should be how do we maximize people's ability to love each other, to love themselves first, to love each other, their responsibilities to the previous generation, to the future generations. Those are the kinds of things that should be our design criteria, right? Those should be what we start with to then.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think molecules of water feel conscious to have consciousness, but there is some proto-micro quantum thing of love that's the generativity when there's more energy than what they need to maintain equilibrium. And that when you sum it all up is something that leads to, I mean, I had my mind blown one day as an undergrad at the physics computer lab. I logged in and when you log into Bash for a long time, there was a little fortune that would come out. And it said, man was created by water to carry itself uphill. I was logging in to work on some problem set, and I logged in and I saw that, and I just said, son of a bitch, I logged out. I went to the coffee shop and I got a coffee and I sat there on the quad. You know, It's not wrong.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think love is the start of it all and the feelings of, and this gets, this is sort of beyond just romantic, sensual, whatever kind of things, but actually genuine love as we have for another person. Love as it would be used in a religious text, right? I think that capacity to feel love more than consciousness, that is the universal thing. Our feeling of love is actually a sense of that generativity. When we can look at another person and see that they can be something more than they are and more than just what we, a pigeonhole, we might stick them in. I think there's in any religious text you'll find voiced some concept of this that you should see the grace of God in the other person, right? They're made in the spirit of what the love that God feels for his creation or her creation. And so I think this thing is actually the root of it.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sugar doesn't love you back, right? So the computer has to love you back. And what does love mean? Well, in this context for me, love, I'm going to take a page from LN de Bouton. Love means that it wants to help us become the best version of ourselves.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would hope that that is the design criteria for any of these systems. If we cannot have a meaningful relationship with it, then it's still just a chunk of silicon.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, we have to build systems that help us do the things that we do know about that can then probe the unknowns that we know about. But the unknown unknowns, we don't know. We could always, you know, nature is the one thing that is infinitely able to surprise us. So we should keep biological humans around for a very, very, very long time, even after our immortal selves have transcended and have gone off to explore other worlds, gone to go communicate with the life forms living in the sun or whatever else. I think that's for me, these seem like things that are going to happen. Like I don't really question that, that they're going to happen. Assuming we don't completely destroy ourselves.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think that out of epistemic humility, we need to keep humans around for a long time. And I would hope that anyone making those systems would believe that to be true.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we will be able to put them alongside humans so that they capture the full broad spectrum of what we are seeing as well and also looking at our responses, listening to our responses, even maybe measuring certain vital signs about us. So in this kind of sidecar mode, a greater intelligence could use us and our whatever 80 years of life to train itself up and then be a very good simulacrum of us moving forward.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a commercial. I wonder if I still get stuck under my first rung of my stair. In any case, these cybernetic systems we have, they are designed to be sent off into a relatively static environment. And whatever dynamic things happen in the environment, they have a very limited capacity to respond to. A human baby, a human toddler of 18 months of age has more capacity to manage its own attention and its own capacity to make better sense of the world than the most advanced robots today. So again, my cat, I think, can do a better job of I2, and they're both pretty clever. So I do think, though, back to my kind of original point, I think that it's not, for me, it's not question at all that we will be able to create synthetic systems that are able to do this better than at an equal level or better than the human mind. It's also for me a question.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, a lot of our current cybernetic systems, it's a cybernetic system, it will go and it will happily vacuum up some poop, right? The older generations would.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constantly working on that problem. I mean, I think we'll make more and more progress. For me, there's some things I don't really doubt too much. Like, I don't really doubt that one day we will create a synthetic, maybe not fully in silicon, but a synthetic approach to Cognition that rivals the biological 20 watt computers in our heads.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, honestly, Robert Kern did all the heavy lifting. So I have to give credit where credit is due. Robert is the silent but incredibly deep, quiet, not silent, but quiet but incredibly deep. Individual at the heart of a lot of those things that Eric was trying to do. But we did have in the, as Travis and I were starting our company in 2012 timeframe, we went to New York. Eric was still in New York at the time. He hadn't moved to, this is before he joined Teal Capital. We just had like a steak dinner somewhere, maybe it was Keynes. I don't know, somewhere in New York. So it's me, Travis, Eric, and then Wes McKinney, the creator of Pandas. And then Western business partner, Adam. The five of us sat around having just a hilarious time, amazing dinner. I forget what all we talked about, but it was one of those conversations which I wish as soon as COVID is over, maybe Eric and I can sit down, recreate it. Somewhere in LA, or maybe he comes here, because a lot of cool people here in Austin, right?”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, trying to help put together some of the visualizations around these things, but it's been a Not really pair program, but like even looked at his code, right? I mean,”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. Well, not programming in general, but certain things in the Python ecosystem. But he actually, I think what I find in listening to some of his stuff is that he does use programming metaphors a lot, right? He'll talk about APIs or object-oriented and things like that. So I think that's a useful set of frames for him to draw upon for discourse. I haven't pair programmed with him in a very long time.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in the sense of sometimes you ask me why is this stuff still so hard? Everybody's a critic. But actually, no, Eric programming.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entertaining to me, it's pretty funny. But then we met with him a couple of times, a really interesting guy. And then in the wake of the 07-08 kind of financial collapse, he helped organize with Lee Smolin a symposium at the Perimeter Institute about, okay, well, clearly, you know, big finance can't be trusted. Government's in its pockets with regulatory capture, what the F do we do. And all sorts of people, Nassim Talib was there and Andy Lowe from MIT was there and Bill Janeway. I mean, just a lot of top billing people were there. And he invited me and Travis and another one of our coworkers, Robert Kern, who is anyone in the SciPy NumPy community knows Robert. Really great guy. So the three of us also got invited to go to this thing. And that's where I met Brett Weinstein for the first time as well. Yeah, I knew him before he got all famous for unfortunate reasons, I guess. But anyway, so we met.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we were both working at a company called Enthought back in the mid 2000s, and we're doing a lot of consulting around scientific Python. And we'd made some tools, and Eric was trying to use some of these Python tools to visualize, he had a fiber bundle approach to modeling certain aspects of economics. He was doing this, and that's how he kind of got in touch with us. And so”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, the original scope of the world for any human being was their little tribe. I would say it still is for the most part.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and Eric Weinstein talks about our nuclear peace, right? I mean, it kind of sucks. There have thousands of warheads aimed at each other, Russia and the US. But it's like, on the other hand, we only fought proxy wars. We did not have another World War III of hundreds of millions of people dying to machine gun fire and giant guided missiles.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Threat of violence, let's say, well, the recognition maybe the better way to put it is the recognition that we have more to gain by working together than the prisoner's dilemma of both of us defecting.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that we can kill each other from range without like there's an asymmetric ability to snipe the leader from range, that meant that we sort of had to learn how to cooperate with each other. Come back here. Don't throw that rock at me. Let's talk ourselves out.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe there's a few exceptions, but if you look in the animal world, you see prong horns, butting heads, right? You see the alpha lion and the beta lion, and they take each other down. Humans, we develop the ability to chuck rocks at each other while at prey, but also at each other. And that means the beta male can chunk a rock at the alpha male and take them down. And he can throw a lot of rocks, actually, miss a bunch of times, but just hit once and be good. This ability to actually kill members of our own species from range without a threat of harm to ourselves created essentially mutually assure destruction where we had to evolve cooperation. If we didn't, then if we just continue to try to do like I'm the biggest monkey in the tribe and I'm going to own this tribe and you have to go, if we do it that way, then those tribes basically failed. And the tribes that persisted and that have now given rise to the modern Homo sapiens are the ones where respect.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not ideas, but it's not only ideas. There's a book I just started reading. Have you heard of A really fascinating thesis, which is that humans are the only conspecific, the only species that can kill other members of the species from range.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's death. And why is that along with the sexual reproduction, right? There is something about the renewal process, something about the ability to respond to a changing environment where it just becomes, you know, just killing off the old generation and letting new generations try seems to be the best way to fit into the niche.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same thing she was using as sort of a metaphor for religion as well. In the West, we sent her a lot of religion, certainly the religions of Abraham, we center them around belief. And in the East, it's more about practice, spirituality and practice rather than belief. So anyway, the point is here, to your point, life. I think so many people are so fixated on certain aspects of self-replication or, you know, homeostasis or whatever. But if we kind of broaden and generalize this thing of things reaching for order under which conditions can they then create an environment that sustains that order, that allows them, the invention of death is an interesting thing. There are some organisms on earth that are thousands of years old. And it's not like they're incredibly complex. They're actually simpler than the cells that comprise us, but they never die. So at some point, death was invented, you know, somewhere along the eukaryotic scale, I mean, even the protest.”
2021-12-23 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #250 – Peter Wang: Python and the Source Code of Humans, Computers, and Reality · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source