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Samuel Arbesman

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2016-11-28
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2016-11-28
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  1. “Wow That's fantastic. So I would say those are good. Let me actually. And also another one, which I have not yet started, is Robin Hansen's The Age of M. I'm really excited to kind of see. And so the subtitle for that one is work, love, and life when robots rule the earth. And I've heard unbelievable things about it. So I'm very excited and looking forward to that one as well”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “So two books I'm kind of in the very early stages of reading, but I'm excited by are Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable about technology and kind of trends, as well as algorithms to live by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. I'm really excited about those.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Oh, yeah, certainly. I think having ways of try not to lose touch, even if just not losing touch as quickly, I think is really important.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “The actual complexity and complication is revealed to us. And it's a lot better to have ways of kind of glimpsing the underlying complexity underneath something that feels kind of very simplified and very pristine. And so whether or not that's as simple as playing with the command line on your computer. If you have access to it or following more carefully what's happening with a progress bar as something's being installed, even if sometimes those progress bars are fairly divorced from the reality of what's happening underneath, I think paying attention to those little details can actually provide you a little bit better sense of what's happening. Certainly not enough, always, but it can at least give us a hope of getting a glimpse of what's going on kind of beneath the hood.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So I would say one way that a lot of people think about technology, like every day, like when you're looking at your iPhone and it does something weird, we often think with technology, like it's okay to kind of outsource our understanding because there's always some expert, like an Apple genius who can fix it or can understand it. And I think we recognize that in many cases that might not actually be true. There might be no expert who can fully understand the system, then it'll be more than we'll be a little bit more deliberate in actually trying to understand these technologies. And I think one thing that from an engineering perspective, we need to build into these technologies, as well as something I think people just need to be mindful of looking for, is trying to find ways of kind of glimpsing what's happening underneath the hood of a technology. And because I think for too long, we think a system is like perfect or really nice until something goes wrong and suddenly we're like.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So I think, and yeah, there can definitely be concerns, but I think as long as we recognize that these technologies and their tools or instruments for doing things, and we've always used tools to kind of be better able to do our jobs and complete our tasks, these feel in some ways qualitatively different because of our reduced understanding. But I think as long as we kind of recognize what the end goal is and still strive to always try to understand them as best we can, I think it can be okay.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “So I would say I certainly approach it with a sense of humility. Don't think that a single mode of thinking can explain everything and have multiple different types of models, but also don't try to change too much too quickly. I think, especially when someone kind of comes into an organization, there's a tendency to really make a mark and change a lot of different things. And that desire should be tempered with this recognition that when a system might be highly nonlinear, highly interconnected, and sensitive to change in ways you can't expect, therefore you have to respect that. You have to kind of respect the complexity of the system. And only in doing that can you kind of recognize what is in your capability and ability to actually change.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Oh, yeah. No, I think, yeah, the more models you have, the better you're going to be able to approach these systems. And another kind of approach that I advocate with these technologies is like having simulations, like the same way that in playing with SimCity, you might gain a better sense of the complexity of a city rather than not necessarily the details of the city because SimCity is clearly an oversimplification of a real city. But you still kind of understand the nonlinearities in a city's performance or the bounds of how it operates. I think the same kind of thing if you have a simulation for a technology, you'll gain kind of a better appreciation for how it works and like maybe even how it bites back and does weird things you want to expect. And I think that kind of thing is really important.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “But we certainly should not give short shrift to the biological mode of thinking when we're dealing with our own technologies.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Structure and ends up therefore being more amenable to kind of this biological You might have this desire to really think about it in a simple way. But in fact, it might be more appropriate because, and if a technology has a messy organic feel to it, has evolved over time and kind of accreted bits and pieces, if it looks biological, maybe we can actually learn from how biologists look at biological systems. And so we can look at the details and kind of catalog bugs in order to kind of gain further understanding. Or in the case of like maybe a really complicated machine learning system, we might have a really powerful output, but it might require, but it might be really difficult to kind of understand what's going on under the hood and how it arrived at that output. And so therefore, we have to kind of use this iterative, slowly slow approach to understanding how the system did what it did. There's almost like more biological approach where you kind of get bits and pieces. And based on that, slowly get a larger picture of what's going on. I think you need both. You need kind of both the physics mode of thinking as well as the biological approach.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Oftentimes, we might feel that we need to have the physics style approach because we've built these systems and so therefore they should be amenable, kind of a simplified understanding. And oftentimes that's not true. When we have a large technological system that interacts with the real world, the real world is complicated. The technological system needs to be complicated. It needs to deal with all the many edge cases and weird exceptions. Like when you build a self-driving car, for example, it can't just deal with the one case of driving on a highway in perfect weather. It might need to deal with rain or sleet or people jumping out into the middle of the road or animals doing their thing or glare. And when you build a technological system that mirrors the world in all of its complexity, you have to be kind of aware of all the details. You end up making something that's more biological.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “cataloging the diverse instances of things that don't make sense. Not only do the details matter, but sometimes that's like, those are wonderful and they're really, really exciting. And you can see kind of those trends in certain biology, like kind of the naturalists of old who would go around and collect butterflies, as well as certain types of biologists who would just kind of, they focus on certain molecular pathway or the relationship of the or the interactions of two different species within a larger ecosystem, recognizing that you can still, even you can even create models of understanding these things. They're still amenable kind of mathematical modeling if that's what you want, but focusing on kind of the details is very, very important for a larger understanding, while the physics approach might be like, let's kind of sweep away the details and just focus on kind of the abstractions that we can learn from. And I think when we think about technologies,”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Sure. So I use this kind of dichotomy of two modes of thinking, which I call physics thinking or biological thinking. And it's oversimplification and of course not all biologists use biological thinking, not all physicists use physics style thinking. So kind of with that caveat in mind, the two modes are that the physics mode of thinking takes something and tries to kind of create a simple means of understanding the vast majority. So like for example, like a single equation that explains the vast majority of the motion of objects or like or you can write down a single formula and it would explain 50% of what's going on in cities and how they and how they work. Something like that. On the other extreme you have the biological approach which says that you actually need to focus on the details and that the details and kind of”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “They're cludgy, they're messy. There's a lot in there that really no one fully understands anymore. And that's okay. As long as we still have a way of kind of like slowly, iteratively, and with a sense of humility approaching our technology, I think then we'll never be overwhelmed by what we ourselves have built.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “The way we need to think about it. And I use, and I use the analogy of I kind of look at the way certain philosophers in the Middle Ages approach the world around them. So I use the example of Moses Maimonides, a philosopher from the 12th century, I believe. And he recognized that there were things that we would never understand. Like there are natural limits to what the human mind can understand. And I think people kind of recognize this, but at the same time, over the past maybe century or two, there's been this somewhat triumphless sense when it comes to science that if there's a question, no matter what, if we put our minds to it, we can understand everything. And I think that's not always true. There are limits, and we're going to bump up against our limits to understanding. And that's true even for the technologies that we ourselves have made. And we think, oh, that we're these rational logical creatures, and therefore the constructions we make should also be logical and rational. And that's not true. These things evolve over time.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “So I would say my favorite chapter might be the final chapter where I look at one of the perspectives of technology that I think, and I would say people sometimes when they're confronted with technology they don't understand, or maybe they can't even understand, is they often respond with one of two extremes of either fear in the face of the unknown or this reverential, almost like religious sense of awe towards technology they don't understand. And I think both of these, while they're fairly common, they're not good, mainly because they end up cutting off questioning. Because if you're really afraid of something, you're so afraid, you can't even question it. And if you have this reverential awe toward something, you don't realize that maybe it's actually a lot messier than it really is. And I think somewhere in between, almost like a humble but constantly questioning approach towards technology is really”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “The ability to have code within something. And once you do though, then suddenly it can baffle your mind. And I think that that was really interesting to see. And every time I discuss it with someone, no matter what the domain, people would just give me more and more examples. And it was fantastic. And a little surprising to see that.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So I think with this, it was more initially, I knew there were many examples of this kind of thing, but as I was writing the book and as I was talking to people, it just became abundantly clear that in area after area, this kind of thing, this incomprehensibility, wasn't at the limits and edges of our experience. This incomprehensibility is found in aspects of every part of our lives. And so it's like the software on our computers, on our desktops. It can be found in medical devices, kitchen appliances, in our cars with like there are like millions of lines of code. reduced understanding and vast complexity of technology is really everywhere we look and i would say it's probably been accelerated significantly due to the fact that we now have computation embedded within everything else um there's only so many levels of kind of like levels of hierarchy of complexity you can have if you don't have”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Sure, yeah. So the idea behind the book is that we all know that technologies are becoming more and more complex and kind of more complicated over time. But increasingly technologies are becoming so complicated that not only just does the everyday person not fully understand them, but increasingly even the experts who work on them with a daily basis or even the people who built them don't necessarily”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “I imagine it was probably leading by example because I think I can remember no stories of even at a young age I was like trying to model my parents and like kind of walking around with like little books or like even if it was like some like little gray address book that really I wasn't reading because obviously it was an address book and I don't even know if I could read at that point but like I wanted to kind of be a reader and so I think it was a combination of modeling, having the books around and also being encouraged like if I didn't know something like going to look it up and I can remember like at like at dinners with my family and like when my grandparents were over we'd have these debates and then we would like one of us would go rush over and like grab the like a volume from the encyclopedia and try to actually look things up and see whether or not someone was correct and like and even I still do those things now at meals just because I feel like it's great to have that”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yes, I actually can remember when I was younger, there was a period where I think I set myself the goal of reading five Arthur C. Clark novels over the course of four days. I was trying to do more than one book per day and seeing if that was possible. And I think I succeeded. I was a big reader. And I would say I read heavily science fiction when I was younger, as well as actually I read a lot of like the collected columns of Martin Gardner who wrote like recreational mathematics, the recreational mathematics column in Scientific American. So that was like one of the first places where people read about Conway's game of life, the sort of cellular automaton world, as well as a whole bunch of other things. I would kind of read like recreational mathematics, science fiction, and pretty much anything that was super nerdy that combined philosophy and science and mathematics and technology that was my cadnip.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “That was, I think, one of the first times I had seen a book that had really done this. There were these unbelievably informational pieces as well as unbelievably fun read. It's also an unbelievably fun read. And I think I'm a big fan of most of Stevenson's work. I love his stuff. But I would say cryptonomicon was one in particular that really kind of demonstrated that you could do this kind of thing together. I really enjoyed it.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I remember when I was younger liking the novel Childhood End by Arthur C. Clark a lot. Although I have to say, I had actually forgotten most of it. So there was a miniseries version of it on the sci-fi channel recently, and I watch it. And while I was watching it, I was kind of like rediscovering a lot of the plot points because I had forgotten so much of it. So that was kind of an interesting thing. So I'm trying to, I would say those are some pretty influential books of mine. But yeah, like Foundation trilogy, Guide to the Good Life immortality. And I guess also I would say, I guess in the fiction realm, another one that I really enjoyed, Neil Stevenson's Cryptonomicon, just this, the idea that there can be a book that weaves together an amazing plot as well as some really, really profound ideas on philosophy and computer science and technology together.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Computational social science or quantitative or like network science and things like that, a lot of them read Foundation at an early age and were actually very interested, very influenced by it.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “That the Galactic Empire is going to fall. There's going to be a period of the dark ages. And so he creates this foundation to kind of shorten the amount of time there's going to be a dark age. But the idea behind is that this man, Harry Selden, his branch of science is called psychohistory, which is essentially this quantitative science of human societies and the idea is that even though each individual human is not predictable, if you get a whole bunch of people together in large enough groups, then suddenly there are actually regularities. There are rules to understanding how human societies operate. And so for me, that was actually one of the things that got me interested in thinking about computational social science and kind of quantitative science of human organizations and societies and cities. And it turns out if you actually, if you ask a lot of social scientists or scientists who are kind of involved in”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Life is meaningful. And so the book is unbelievable. It kind of deals with these very, very deep themes of humanity, like mortality, immortality, meaning life. But it also weaves in amazing stories about Alexander the Great's life or the first emperor of China and his goals, as well as a lot of philosophy and other ideas. It's fantastic. I would say that was really influential book. And then another one I would say in a very different way is The Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. So I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's a set of science fiction novels written, I think in the 50s, but a long time ago. And it takes place in the far future. And the idea behind it is that there is this scientist, Harry Selden, who realizes”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “So I would say, so another book that I really, I would say it was probably one of the best books I've read in the past few years in the nonfiction realm is the book Immortality by the Philosopher Stephen Cave, where he looks at the different ways in which humanity has tried to live forever, both since ancient times as well kind of the modern versions, like things like immortality of the soul or just simply immortality through not dying. And he looks at kind of the ancient version of it as well as the modern version of it. And eventually he kind of, he actually goes through all of these and finds them all wanting, which is kind of interesting. It's an unbelievable book. Finds them all wanting. And then he says, okay, what is, how should we respond? And he ends up falling back on wisdom literature, sort of like things like ecclesiastes or the kind of writings of the Stoics and says, these are the kind of things, like recognizing that even in the transients of life, you can still make”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “I would say I strive. And sometimes that's always aspirational because I'm a person's things I wanted to do that are kind of independent of me and I don't have control over.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “The question is Are you the worst player or are you a bad player? And if you're kind of the best you can be, but still the worst on a good team, then I think you've done your best.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Which are did you make the best version of the book possible? And I think, and those are the kind of things you actually do have control over. And I have tried kind of more and more, and not always successfully. This is kind of a continuing thing, but to try to kind of make metrics of success much more internal, where you try to do, you try to be the best version of yourself possible and kind of be true to yourself and true to your abilities. And if there are external metrics that come along with it, that's wonderful. But there's only so much you control. And so therefore, you kind of have to be, you have to recognize that. And I think if you're only measures of success are truly external measures, you're really never going to be happy. So in that case, while being on a winning team is an external metric of success, being the worst player, well, I guess.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “So that's a great question. So, I think success, and so certainly there are external metrics. There's a great book called The Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine, I believe. It's about essentially Stoic Wisdom. And I think you might even mention it and discuss it on your blog. But essentially the idea of like, and one of the things he talks about is when you think about success, there's only so much you can control, especially externally in terms of one success. And the best way to try to be successful and at the same time be happy with one's attempts is to internalize kind of the success metrics. So like, for example, let's say you're trying to write a novel. There's the external metrics like best-selling novel, well-regarded, critically acclaimed, all these different kinds of things. But then there's the internal metric.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “He said, so worst player on a winning team or best player on a losing team? Interesting. I think if you're, well, certainly being the worst player, kind of cynically the worst player on a winning team is exciting because you still get to win. But I think the less cynical reason for that would be if you're the worst player on a winning team, there's people around you who are all going to kind of force you to get better. So that might be kind of a less cynical reason to be honest. The best player on a losing team might be a little bit discouraging. I'm not sure. I think it'd be more fun to be on a winning team, even if I'm not doing that great. Because I at least have good role models to look up to. And I'll be winning alongside.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Or these articles are not necessarily as interconnected as they could be. People sometimes end up reinventing certain ideas. Sometimes that's just simply due to jargon boundaries where one field might reinvent a model that has been known for several decades in some other field because they just didn't even know that this thing was done using slightly different terms. This kind of thing, that will probably never stop happening. But I think by having open, interconnected science, we will be able to kind of make sure that the resource like that we don't waste resources and we are kind of doing research in the best possible way.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Of time with it, and it's like now you have to be willing to kind of move on to the next thing. So I think there's, I think with science, though, especially being able to not necessarily constantly update a single paper, but maybe link papers to newer papers that have information or kind of caveats or a response to the original research. I think that kind of thing is very, very powerful. And I think in the scientific world, the ability to have all of our research open and interconnected and constantly updated is really the key to actually making sure that as a scientific community, people can really query the most up-to-date state of the field and really test and see if it is the way things are, as opposed to right now in science sometimes you have things that are out of date, but also because knowledge might be either locked behind journal paywalls or”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “So I think the possibility is interesting at the same time, though, maybe as an author, at a certain point, you know the book is never done. There's always new things to add or other bits of information to update as we kind of learn new things about the world. But at the same time, maybe as an author you kind of want to just be done and say, okay, like this is a finished product and like you have to be willing to kind of release it out into the world. And so I think there are different types of products that are maybe like outputs that are more well suited to constantly being updated and other ones that are kind of just like this is a finished product and we can be done with it. And I've heard stories of like even like with novels of like people editing them like right before they're going like on stage to do a reading of their novels even though of course the novel is done because they just realize oh they want to like say things a little bit differently and of course if they can't do that in a novel and it's not even like oh the novel is being updated with new information it's just being up like there's always tinkering to be done i think there's always tinkering to be done but i think you also have to kind of recognize that you spend a lot”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Wherever you can find things, and I happen to have a lot of physical books, but the internet's also a great source of information. I would say physical books are a great hedge against technological change. I know my physical book, like 20 years from now, it will still be kind of backwards compatible with the human eye. And like an ebook, not entirely clear. But at the same time, if you want the most up-to-date knowledge in some ways in the internet and like Wikipedia in particular, it's kind of the closest thing we have to complete world knowledge and say that kind of flippantly, but I think there's some truth to that. And I think having access to that kind of up-to-date information is really, really powerful and really important. And I think a balance between the old and the perennially wise encapsulated kind of maybe in older books versus kind of the up-to-date and the recent encapsulated things you can look up online is a really good balance to kind of”

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  37. “Especially when you're learning new things, it shouldn't be wrote, it shouldn't be boring, it should be playful, and it should be exciting. You should have this kind of always the sense of curiosity. And of course, you should also be a good person while doing all these different things. And I think that kind of attitude and a perspective, I've really tried to live up to that. And it's really stuck with me. And I think those kind of kind of goals, and those are the kind of things that I'm going to be instilling into my own children.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Best teacher I've ever had. Probably my parents. They were very good in not only encouraging me to kind of always look things up and kind of showing me and guiding me on how to learn new things, but also really, they were really instrumental in just making sure I always kind of like thought about the world in playful ways. And actually, so the thing that I was always told by my father before I left to school, before I left for school when I was little, was the phrase, think, have fun, and be a mench and be a mench is sort of mensch is like Yiddish for kind of like being a good person. And essentially he wanted to kind of instill in me these three ideas that you have to think about the world. You can't just kind of have this kind of unquestioning attitude towards it. You have to have fun. You have to have kind of this playful attitude towards the world. It's not just like, I mean,”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Like, oh, these outputs are really cool. And plus, and it's also, and if they're beautiful and they're also always different. And so you can see this even kind of going back years ago when people first started doing fractal art, either kind of just like zooming into like the Mandelbrot set or generating random mountainscapes that actually look like mountains but are entirely computer generated. These are really beautiful. They eventually kind of, and there's only so many of them you can look at before you're like, okay, I've kind of seen everything that everything kind of looks the same. But at the same time, they're really, really interesting to look at and kind of see how the variety, like the sheer variety of things that can be generated computationally. And there are a lot of people who are really at the cutting edge of this, both artists as well as computer scientists and practitioners. Yeah, and I'm just really impressed by the state of this space and what is really happening. I sort of at the frontier of computers and science blended with art.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Maybe. I imagine if you don't tell someone where it comes from, you probably can get a similar kind of response, especially if it's almost indistinguishable. So there are actually their computer techniques where you can give an image to a computer program and it will actually generate it in the style of famous artists. In some cases, that actually looks pretty good. And I wonder if it would generate kind of yield the same sort of emotional reaction. At the same time, though, I think, I mean, maybe some emotional reactions for computational general out would be maybe flattened. People would say, oh, it's not, doesn't feel as authentic, or maybe it would be frightening to some people when they realize that computers can kind of be creative in certain ways. For me, it's really exciting just to kind of see the extent to which computationally generate art can be as beautiful as it is. I think that's actually really interesting to look at. And so I'm maybe less bothered by some of the epistemological issues and just kind of saying.”

    2016-11-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #15 Samuel Arbesman: Future-Proof Your Knowledge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Objects that almost have this biological appearance to them, but are so functional. And they also are really beautiful in different sorts of ways than we might think of kind of traditional designed objects.”

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  42. “You could create a small computer program that generates a tree or an entire forest of trees. And these are all computationally generated. So no one really was the person who kind of painted the tree or kind of drew the tree. But they're all beautiful and they're all really, really wonderful to look at. And you can also do this where people are now using machine learning techniques to generate text in response to images that are being shown to the computer program. And that also generates some really interesting things. Now, of course, the question is, what is the actual artistic output? Is it the computer program that generated that? Is it the result? I think in some ways maybe sometimes those questions are kind of beside the point because in the end the output is very interesting, whatever level of output you're looking at. But yeah, there's some very interesting kind of points of connection with this kind of computational art and generative art. And you also have generative design where people are using computer programs to design”

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  43. “It's where you almost create algorithms that are responsible for generating the images that you're looking at or some sort of artistic output. So, for example,”

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  44. “By reality. And art is also a beautiful output constrained by reality of the media that you're using in some very different sort of ways. I'm not entirely sure if that was a non-answer, but I think they're both very good. And at the same time, though, there are certainly certain types of forms that speak to me more than others, like certain types of contemporary art. I have more trouble with than others. Other ones I like a lot. And I also think there's a lot of very interesting points of interaction. So there's like one whole like the whole realm of like computational and generative art.”

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  45. “That is an interesting question. I think, I mean, so here's the thing. So first of all, if you ask a lot of scientists, I think they would discuss how there's a lot of art within the science and how science is conducted and the way in which you ask questions. And of course, you still have to answer those questions in a very rigorous and kind of scientific and perhaps non-artistic way. But the way you can ask questions and sometimes even the way you answer them, if you can think of like a very clever experiment, there's often a certain amount of art to that as well. So I actually think a number of scientists would kind of push back at that question. At the same time, though, I think they're both very necessary. I think they're both kind of different. I'm not even sure how different ways they are about thinking about the world. They're kind of both approaches. They're both approaches to querying the world, but they're also ways of producing this beautiful things. And so science is almost like beautiful output constrained.”

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  46. “I write in the morning. So, my goal is to always get the majority of the writing done as soon as possible so that it no longer hangs over my head the rest of the day. And so I can feel like kind of like whatever I do for the rest of my work, I have accomplished. I have accomplished the goal that I needed to do writing-wise, which is nice.”

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  47. “And narrative of the actual story I wanted to tell. And so I think initially for this most recent book, I wanted to include huge amounts about philosophy of science and the nature of the complexity of our scientific models. And I think there might still be some of that in there, but the vast majority of that has been found on the cutting room floor.”

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  48. “And I said, What do you mean by that? And so we actually had this long discussion about kind of the discrepancy between what I thought I was writing about and what I actually had written. And then I explained to her what my goal goals were. And she's like, well, write that explicitly. So I went back, worked on that chapter, clarified it. She said, okay, this actually makes sense now. And then went and kind of retooled the rest of the book. Then I went through and then showed it to my editor and kind of went from there kind of this constant iterative repetitive process of kind of going through and making sure that there was little kind of or at least smaller and smaller differences between what I thought I wanted to write and what I actually was writing. At the same time though, there were also like whole sections and whole topics that I eventually realized were just beyond the mandate and the theme of the book while they were kind of interesting. They really ended up not adding much and probably confusing things. And so I slowly but surely kind of tightened and tightened the actual theme.”

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  49. “So for this most recent book, which I have maybe a better memory of, the way I did it was I set myself a goal of kind of just a certain amount of text to create per day, at least as the initial step I said something like a thousand words a day. And so I just write a thousand words. And it didn't have to be on a single topic. It didn't have to be good. It could be kind of on various things that I wanted to write about. It could be multiple things that I wanted to write about related to the book over the course of the thousand words. And then when I got something that was book length, then I kind of took it all, printed out, kind of began rearranging it, realized that there were parts in it that I wanted to remove. There are parts that need to be fleshed out significantly. There were things that needed to be connected. And then I kind of went through this kind of iterative smoothing process. And eventually, I felt like I had something. Then I took the first chapter, kind of the introductory chapter, showed it to my wife. She read it and said, this is garbage.”

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  50. “Towards everything around me. And science is a body of knowledge, but even more important than that science is really a means of querying the world. And I think recognizing that everything we know is constantly in draft form is really, like, that's the way we should be thinking about the world. And so whether or not you're doing science or simply just living your life and reading magazines and having bits of knowledge and information about nutrition or how to take care of babies being overturned, I think these things are all really, really good and they're really exciting. And I think we just need to kind of make that more explicit in our everyday lives.”

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