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Saul Perlmutter

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-12-24
most recent: 2025-12-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“These goals, those are things we can manage. And so you should jump in and join and try to bring the elders with you and try and get them to be a little less worried, but a little bit more constructively engaged in trying to think of how are we going to make the world we'd like to live in.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, I mean, my sense is that if you can at all put aside all of the scary aspects of the news that is often presented to you, because the news is designed to be scary because I think that's how they get you to watch. And if instead you can say, we have always lived in a complicated, uncertain world, and we are just getting better and better at learning how to ride on it and work with it. And we have this opportunity and this option to work with other people, to make a world that we want to live in. I think this is your moment. I mean, as a young person coming in this generation, you should not get turned off by all the doom and gloom that you might be hearing from the elders. You should be saying those are the challenges that we can deal with. We now know how to do all sorts of things that are on the scale of these fears.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the time, of course, what happens is that anytime somebody gives you a hard time, your first reaction is to say, oh, come on, first of all, that other team, they don't know what they're talking about. They're showing, they're claiming I've made a mistake. I'm sure they made a mistake. Some of the time you have to actually look at it and you go, you know, I think maybe they're right. Same thing with the fresh young Turk that come into the thing and they say, okay, it's our turn, we're going to take over and do this thing. And you say, oh, come on, you don't know how to do that. And of course, in the end, some of the time they're the right ingredient that you need at that moment.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you get so much advantage of having bringing in new generations year after year decade after decade into any field, any topic because there's at least a half chance that they won't get stuck in the mistakes that the previous understanding made and they also are acting a little bit like when I said that it's very important to go find the people you disagree with so they can give you a hard time It's also true that there's a pleasure in usually in the young trying to show the older that they've made mistake.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think it's always been uncertain. In some sense, I think that's the human condition that we grow up, we don't know what's going to happen, and we don't know what's going to happen to us. We don't know what's going to happen around us. And in some ways, what we've been doing through civilization is making more and more little pieces of it manageable so that we can be pretty sure that we can control. It's always going to throw us curves that where we don't know what's going to happen. And our job, of course, is to be able to be nimble enough to manage what all the uncertainties are and not to have them throw us, not make them scare us, but make us feel like that's where we thrive. That's what we live on. We live on playing, managing the uncertainty.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And our science doesn't have to agree. In the science, there's a real need for us to agree because we have to, because that's where we figure out where we're making our mistakes, and it improves our picture of our model of what the reality is out there in the world. And so the objective truth of the world is actually, I think, what provides the link between our different projects that gives us the chance to figure out things that are more right and more likely to be wrong.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking very seriously the idea that there is a world out there that is the thing that we're trying to figure out and that we don't get direct access to it. We get to see what we can see through our eyes, through our instruments, and through our tools and our measurements, and we build up our models of what that objective truth is of the world out there. But it's going to do its thing, whether we get it or not. And our models are going to be not quite right. They'll almost never capture everything. For one thing, they've got to be simplifications just for our brains to understand some aspect of the world that's out there. We probably can't take it all in all at one time. So we're always using little windows, little models of what's going on out there. But at the same time, I think we make progress because we all believe that it's there no matter what we think and that we can't just go to our separate corners of the room and say, okay, you believe what you want to believe and I'll believe what I want to believe.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in some sense, at the time, you know, everybody was saying to me, oh, you've got to get yours out first because otherwise you're going to have to share the prize, et cetera. And I was thinking, but in the end, it was a relatively small community of people who were doing this kind of work. And we were all dependent on each other in some sense for different things that we were contributing. And so it was the right, it was a very warm outcome in the end because it felt like it honored a big fraction of the community, got honored by these two teams. I think that the way science has been able to make all of its progress is by”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then at the end, the two teams came up with the same result and announced it within weeks of each other. And so in the end, it was accepted as a joint discovery. And so the two teams shared the prize.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, but there were some parts of it that were very conflictual and very, you know, people give each other a very hard time at the conferences. But for example, the other leader of the other team and myself, we would commiserate with each other about how difficult it was to keep our whole teams working effectively independently. And we did, at least on two occasions, where we had, we all depend on the weather when we're doing astronomy from the ground. And so one time they had terrible weather, and that meant they were going to lose everything they'd been working for for that particular sequence of searching and then following. And so we took some observations for them so they could keep going. And then there's another time where we got bad weather and we traded nights with my counterpart, the leader of the other team, so they could help us be able to stay on our trajectory of how many nights”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at the beginning, it was funny because in the early days we were trying to say this is a great project. Everybody should be doing this. And then pretty soon another team was doing it. And that meant that now we were in a bit of a race because there were only a few telescopes in the world that had the capabilities of doing what we wanted. And we were now both applying to use the same telescopes. In fact, we would sometimes pass each other in the airports going to these telescopes. And so it was a very toughly fought race going from France.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And we used to do all sorts of things to make sure that we would be on those rare nights that we happened to be there at the telescope and there was a supernova that everything was going to work. And we had teams of people flying out from one part of the world to another because that's where the telescopes were at that time that we had to fly to. And we had teams of people back at the lab who were collecting the data from the different parts of the world and giving instructions for what they were seeing and what they recommended. So it was a bit of a show during that period.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, these exploding stars, the supernova, they're amazing tools because you can see them across the universe and the kind that we're using is all the same brightness and they make a great measuring tool. But they're a terrible thing to work with because no warning about when they're going to explode in any galaxy around, they only explode every few hundred years in any given galaxy that you're looking at. And they rise in just a couple weeks and they fade away within a month or so. And you have to catch them during that rise so you can measure them at their peak brightness. And so the most annoying research tool that you can imagine, and that's why it took so long for us to get to the point of knowing how to work with them as a very standard tool where we could turn out many of them all the time and study them.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, no, it was worse than that. In fact, we started the project. So the 98 result started in 87 was when we first proposed the measurement. And we thought it was going to be a hard project. We thought that was going to take three years because we were going to need 30 of these exploding star supernova to make the measurement with. At the end of three years, we had zero supernova, not 30. And it was only after five years that we had really excellent first one that was well measured. And then, but by then we'd learned how to make batches of these measurements. And so for the next three years, we collected a dozen or more a year until we finally had the numbers that we needed to get the answer.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the mystery of the past 20 years. So we've seen that this acceleration is happening. And so what we've been starting to do for the past 20 years is try to measure properties of that acceleration to see if we can figure out what that dark energy could be. There's a huge number of theories. I think there was estimated that in the last 20 years, 25 years, there's been an average a new theoretical paper about the stark energy written every 24 hours published in the last 25 years. And so there's way more theories than there is than there are constraints and measurements. And it's taken us 20 years or so of developing these projects to the point that we're just now about to be entering the next five years or 10 years. We'll be making all the measurements that we were hoping to make for 20 years ago that we're in.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perhaps of empty space itself. But right at the moment we're thinking it could be a new substance, new field that spread throughout space that actually powers a more rapid expansion and acceleration. And that's what we're calling dark energy.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the original picture that we had started with when we were doing the measurements that we were talking about that led to our current understanding, the original picture had it that the universe begins with a very rapid expansion that we can explain where we think it comes from, but then has been slowing down ever since because gravity will attract everything else. And then if that were the case, then the only thing that we really needed to know about to figure out the future is to measure how much it's slowing down, because that tells us how dense the universe is and that's gravitationally slowing the expansion. So that's what we thought we were setting up to measure back when we started that project of 25, no, 30 some odd years ago. And then when we made, when we actually finally got to the point that we could make the measurement, we found the surprise that actually the universe is not slowing down, it's speeding up. So that led to is expectation that there's some property”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right, if you promised that you could certainly get back and you'd be happy and healthy, and you get to do all the other explorations, then absolutely I would go to Mars.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am somebody who loves the fact that there are people who would like to go to Mars, but I would never go. Because there's so many things I enjoy doing, and I enjoy coming across and getting to explore with people that I would hate to give all that up just for this one thing, the one expiration of just going to Mars.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the further galaxies, everywhere we're just adding a little bit extra space and slightly bigger because of that. And it's still infinite. It's just now there's more space between all the points”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's one of the biggest standard mind-boggling questions that everybody comes to, and I certainly have come to it over and over again, when you hear the words, the universe expands, that's the first thing that comes to mind. The universe is everything. How could it expand? And the only answer that seems to make any sense is you have to picture even an infinite universe and you ask yourself, okay, today, as I said, there's galaxy and then there's a lot of space and there's another galaxy and there's a lot of space in another galaxy. And in an infinite universe, that's expanding, all those distances just get a little bit further apart. So it's not expanding into anything else. It's that we're adding extra space between all points. So it's almost like inflating it from the inside, that we're just putting more and more space between any two, between me and you and between this galaxy and the next galaxy.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possibly infinite soup of elementary particles that are hot and dense, and during that period it's like a very thick, almost like a pea soup because it has little clumps where the galaxies someday eventually form and slightly emptier spots, but it's basically a non-stop plasma of these elementary particles. So those are two different extremes of time”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in some sense, the current universe to me seems like it's almost entirely empty. And every now and then, in this huge, empty void, you see a little dot, and if you go close up to it, you realize that that dot is actually a whole pinwheel of a galaxy with little points of light of stars in them. And then you go wishing by it and it disappears into the background and goes back to being a less little dot. And then eventually you see another dot showing up way out there in the future in the horizon. And you get closer and closer and you start realizing, oh, it's another galaxy. And I think that's my picture of the current.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that for me I've been very interested in the fact that Einstein's theory of relativity allows for three-dimensional space to possibly have a weird curvature to it. And this isn't something that our brains evolved to picture it all. So you constantly are having to force yourself to imagine that there's what looks like infinite space. You're traveling as far as you want some direction, but it's possible that there's curvature in it. You'll find yourself back somewhere where you were before. If you just keep going in that direction, and I think I always have loved boggling my own brain. I like that feeling of not quite getting something, but almost being able to picture it. And I think that for me, that's a bit of a broad pleasure.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the astrophysicists are generally studying the physics of almost anything that you see in the sky. And whereas the cosmologists are specifically asking the question of what was the evolutionary order, how did things come about in this order from here to here to here that led to where we are today?”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've been a really liking the fact that as a cosmologist, you get to be in this really interesting place because you're using our understanding of the very smallest elementary particles and forces to understand the biggest, largest structures in the universe. And so you get to be sort of nestled right in the middle scale while you look out at things that are tremendously larger than us and look down into things that are tremendously smaller than us. And we're in that nice sort of middle place that we get to look at both.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“confident about what it's saying telling you and then you believe oh well it's typed there right on the screen it must be right and yet you need to have that same sense of gauge of how much do you trust this result as you would when you're trying to figure out how much do i trust a statement i'm making or a statement somebody else is making and i think that's the the game that you have to play at least with the current version of ai now of course ai will be changing and we'll have to keep We are constantly keeping ourselves, is it helping us or are we getting fooled more often? Are we letting ourselves get fooled?”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to think about a problem AI can often help you find the bit of information that you need to use these techniques that we're teaching. And so I think ideally what I've been asking in this round as we're teaching this set of 24 concepts that we're trying to teach in this critical thinking course, that for each one of them I'm asking the students to think very hard about how would you use AI to make it easier to actually operationalize this concept, to really use it in your day-to-day life but also how would you use this concept to tell whether or not AI was fooling you and whether the AI was sending you in the right direction or the wrong direction because many of them are just tools for thinking about where are we getting fooled and we can be fooling ourselves the AI could be fooling itself and then could fool us and as we know at least the current generation of AI is very good at being over”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of it as a two-edged, I mean, it can do both. And much like we might have felt that way about calculators originally, that we weren't sure, should every student be using calculators because shouldn't they know how to do multiplication and division? And in fact, we still teach how to do additions of traction multiplication and division first, but then we send them loose with the calculators. Tricky thing about AI is that it can give the impression that you've actually learned the basics before you really have and that there's a little danger, I think, that students may find themselves just relying on it a little bit too soon before they know how to do the work themselves, the intellectual work themselves. So I think that's the danger. Now the positive is that when you know all these different tools and approaches to”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A whole different education, and it was a real pleasure to see groups of people who really enjoyed figuring out problems together and thinking together. And I think that was one of the things that was as important for me growing up as watching my father as a scientist.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember at one point somebody was asking me how want of influence was there of having parents in these areas and I was thinking well my father was obviously a very big influence just because as a scientist and he would be doing calculations and I'd be seeing the graphs and the calculator and just slide rules back in those days and I think I was attracted to the fact that you can learn things about the world that are very precise and organized. And I think I always enjoyed watching and I was attracted to that. But at the same time, I realized that I think probably just as influential was watching my mother who was a social professor. She studied public policy and public administration. And then in her case, the work was often done in larger collaborations and just watching how she would work with collaborators, I think, was”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think that we've known for a long time that thinking tools are really important. That's, I think, one of the reasons we teach expository writing to students everywhere. They're not all planned to be writers, but I think the focus of how you think about a problem when you write is a very important thinking tool. Set of other thinking tools that feel like they're very important in this technological, scientific world, and even a world where you just have to make probabilistic decisions with other people. And that so much of this has to do with how you can think together with people in a productive way, that you want that vocabulary of ideas to be shared by everybody. So I would love it to be as a standard basic course in every university.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that it's one of the things that people have, it's one of the secret ingredients of what science really consists of that I think could help everybody. And so I worldwide.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So now it's starting to spread to other universities. We began it at Berkeley. It's now been taught at Harvard and University of Chicago and Irvine. I think now Columbia is picking it up.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly enough, it would help you think about problems in the world. And then for each of them, we started asking how could you teach that idea? Is there a way that you could get it across so that it wasn't just for one topic that you taught it, but anytime you read a newspaper article, anytime you walked down the street and you had to make a choice, you would find yourself using the ideas. And often that meant that we came up with activities and games and sometimes just good discussion questions. that mixture is actually the way we end up teaching the course. And I think it ended up being at both fun, but I think also a little bit effective.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Practically it was Friday afternoons and it often went past dinner and this went on for like nine months that we were meeting and what we were doing is we were walking through what would be a whole collection of ideas where if you had all those ideas”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were not really sure how teachable it was when we began all this. So there was a group of, well, three faculty. There was a social psychologist in the public policy school. That was Rob McCohn. And then there was a philosopher, John Campbell. And the three of us started meeting. We put a sign up saying, are you embarrassed watching our society make decisions? Come help invent a course, come help save the world. And about 30 students, graduate students, postdocs started showing up every week at the end of a Friday.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to say it probably gives you a sense of exactly where his depth level is for his analysis. At that point, he realizes he's no longer adding enough information.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really track down exactly which thing was the source of the pattern recognition, but in fact it does a very good job of figuring out patterns that we otherwise wouldn't catch. I often think that it's really good to try to play these two against each other. Some of the pattern recognition is wrong, that we just recognize things that we think we see a pattern and it's not really true. So we use our very thoughtful rational mind to go back and analyze them and use things like statistics to tell whether that pattern could appear just from random noise and that the randomness looked to us like a pattern. So that's very useful to apply your rational mind, your logical rational mind to the pattern recognition side of the mind to weed out the good from the bad parts of what you've come up with. But also the other way around, sometimes you need to feed the pattern recognition mind by focusing the rational mind for a long time on eventually it seems to force the pattern finder to go working while you're”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, because we know that our brains are doing a very interesting combination of work when they're trying to understand what's going on out in the world. Some of it is the logical stuff that we're very conscious of, that we're very aware that, okay, I've just seen this and I've seen that, so I'm putting them together and I'm betting that probably that means that this aspect of the world must be the case. But some of it, you're really puzzled. You don't see how is it possible that this thing and this thing turned into this thing and people work on it and work on it, work on it, and then someday they go to sleep and they wake up in the morning, they think, hey, I think I know how that works. And we think, and these are some evidence that the unconscious mind also has partly, it gives us other ways of solving problems, maybe a little bit more like the way these neural networks do, where you don't, you can't.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advantage that if you are always being careful that you're not going to lose the fundamentals that you need to live, then probably you'll look out to do your hunting and your farming early enough so you'll have food for the next season. So I can imagine that that could have been a very useful cultural and maybe even psychological thing to evolve. It has to be balanced. You need to be not driven by fear to the point that you don't step out of your cave and out of your house and you don't try out ideas because if you just use the old ideas, the world changes. And the old ideas don't necessarily track what the world's doing. And they're not even the best ideas. Often they were good enough models of what was going on at the moment when somebody came up with them, but there could be much better ways of...”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that we have a very love-hate relationship with uncertainty, right? Because in some sense, it's what people love about so many games and so many things that they're going to do for fun. They love that sense that it could go this way, could go that way. Nobody would really want to play sports where every single time you knew exactly how it was all going to come out, everybody enjoys that sense that something a little bit surprising could happen here and they look for that surprising thing to occur. But we also are very easily scared. I mean, it's very easy, I think, for us to feel like if we don't know that we're going to get to the next stage exactly the way everything is, who knows, it could be bad. It could be that we wouldn't have enough to eat. It could be that we don't have a place to sleep. And I think that that is probably an evolutionary, you know,”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I will say that in general, the people who do well in the sciences usually are doing well because they come up with something that nobody else has seen. And that that excites everybody, that they all say, wow, we didn't realize that the world was working that particular way. And that's really important to know. And that's where the excitement is not somebody usually showing more of the same of what people already thought.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Astrophysics, right? The only reason I won the Nobel Prize was not because we had done what was really fun, great experiment. It was because it came up with a real surprising result.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's one of the reasons why I think intentionally allowing for different groups competing as opposed to trying to get everybody to be in one collaborative group does make a difference because then you naturally get teams and the teams are naturally have the incentive to look for the things that the others may have gotten wrong. And I think that's actually been one of the very interesting ways in which science has been progressed. I think you've seen that people have some real pleasure in being able to find something that nobody else found. And one ways that shows up is they find the flaws in the earlier thinking. And I think that if you can manage to do that in any organization where you encourage there to be a bit of friendly competition going on, where people are trying out ideas and that they're encouraged to be disagreeing with each other, that that's not seen as unfriendly thing to do.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very rapidly growing economy. And then the other direction, maybe you might have chosen climate, large climate change and climate stasis, where things stay roughly the same. Look at all four of those combinations and ask what would be our best, in this case, investment in each of those situations because it forces you to think through the logic of where what things are robust and what things aren't robust, whether or not those particular futures are the right answer. It's a very useful way of being able to consider a wider variety than you typically will do if you're just stuck thinking about the future that everybody else is talking about, that you are reading in the same newspapers.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of backgrounds, just begin by just writing down all of the things that could drive the future with respect to is it going to be a resource availability? Is it going to be economic growth? Is it going to be economic disparity of different levels of income? Will it be odd things like climate change? How could that possibly affect the consumer computing? Will it be AI coming to fruition in some new way? So they write down a whole group of these and you choose a few of them, even sometimes just two, that look like they'd be completely unrelated to each other and then consider the extremes of those two in all four possibilities. Let's say a stagnant economy where there is not much growth versus”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do think that now this is the time where I think bringing people into a room and encouraging them to actually bounce ideas off each other and to be thinking very hard about the possible ways in which the world could be different than they think. So here is a technique that actually I think might have been developed actually originally for business purposes was this technique called scenario planning. This is something that I've been Peter Schwartz was somebody who I came across who was teaching this and he has a book on this actually. But the goal was to try and identify driving forces that could change the future in some topic area. I mean this case I guess if we were talking about Apple stock right it's presumably consumer computing and then trying to just have a group of people that come from a wide”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you hear about all of these kinds of stories where you realize that those biases, people should be jumping on and asking, how do we fix that? I mean, the other one that I remember reading about was where they compared the, I think, the sentencing after lunch and before lunch.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kinds of organizational activities that get the best of that when you can. I particularly like some decisions that need both some values in play as well as the factual issues. Some of those seem to be done very well with using random samples of the population, which of course is a little bit different from probably what you'll be doing in an investment case. But even there, you never know. It could be that having a broader random reach would reach source of information that it never would have occurred to if you were just stepping back and trying to choose your 10 people.”
2025-12-24 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Saul Perlmutter: The Accelerating Universe, Doubt as a Superpower and the Science of Collaboration · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source