YouSaid · the spoken record

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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“You cannot have them all get together and start walking around the room with the first person saying all the best reasons for why it is that they would recommend the investment or not or what form to do it in, and then have the next person talk and the next person talk because they will be so influenced by what the previous person says that there's a real danger that you just get heard thinking, that people lock in on what sounded like a very good argument and they don't want to embarrass themselves by bringing in some other information that they have from a different source, nor do they want to sound like they're arguing. They don't want to sound like they're conflicting necessarily with the other people or the previous person in the room. So it's much better to get all the information written down independently so people provide it separately and then aggregate it. Then people look at it together and try to figure out, okay, now how do we work with all this information at the same time? So the number of tools that people have used for playing these games.”
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 obviously part of the story is where is the information out in the world that would give you the most chance at doing good predictions in this pure case? And in this story, of course, you have to decide where do you expect the most information to lie? Is it going to be with people who are doing the technology development? Is it going to be with the people who are doing the consumer research? Will it be actual consumers themselves that are missed by the consumer research? Depending on where you think the most information sits, you might want to bring different people to the table. My guess would be that in many of these topics you want a fairly broad range 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
“So, to begin with, the fact that you have four people in the room could be a real asset, right? Because they could have different sorts of information and be able to bring different...”
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, I think it's clear that it's one of these deep problems that for all of us, for almost anything we're doing, we can fall into that trap. I mean, I've been describing it also, you know, like when you're trying to decide, let me use the medical example again. You're trying to decide whether or not something is a good idea or bad idea for medical treatment. And there's a real temptation to hunt on the websites until you find one that says what you want to hear. And I think that really what you need to do is you need to first without looking at what it says about your particular case look for which websites do you trust more about everything else besides that one so that you choose your website blinded without knowing what it would say for your particular case and then you read what it recommends.”
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
“It's a real problem. And also, we tend to, if you are a Fox News watcher when you see a New York Times article, you assume that you're very skeptical about it. And if you're a New York Times reader and you watch a Fox News story, you assume that there's something got something wrong in it, and you tend to look for all the errors in the other, but not in your own reporters.”
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
“It would be disappointing result. And it was all going to depend on what happened when they opened this blinded result. And I remember one time in particular was late at night we had gone for a long, long meeting and it was past dinner time and we were trying to decide, okay, are we going to open it now or should we wait in the morning and do it when we're fresh? Because if it comes out wrong, it's going to be really devastating at the end of the day. Maybe we should wait until we're sort of well rested, et cetera. And we all looked at you and said each other and said, nah, let's look at it. And so we decided that was the time that we're going to unblind and we're going to have to accept whatever it got. Time it was good Not every time, but that 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
“Ideas of science is to recognize these traps and then to figure out how to solve them. So the way that physics community has started to solve this particular trap is they've started using this technique called blind analysis where you don't let yourself see the results, the final graphs with the real values on the graph until everybody has agreed that you've looked for all the errors in the measurement. And then when you've checked for all the errors, then you open the envelope and you see what the numbers correspond to and you see whether is what you were expecting or what you wanted or if it goes against what you wanted or were expecting. And it's a kind of dramatic moment. So I've been in a group meetings where we were sitting there was the end of the day and one of our students was about to unblind their data they'd been working for the last year and a half. And if it came out a certain way, they would have a wonderful PhD thesis. If it didn'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
“The points for a graph, and it's going to agree with a theory or disagree with a theory, and you're very excited to see what the results are, there's a real danger that, and you see it has happened now in history, you can go back and look through the graphs of the past, and you see that there's a danger that people accept the graph when they think it's showing you what they were sort of expecting to see, either because it confirmed the theory or it disagreed with theory, whichever it was that they were kind of expecting it to show, and they're more likely to look for the errors in that graph if it's showing something that they don't expect. So that means that there's a real bias towards having graphs come out in papers that are just what the scientists was expecting to get, because those are the ones that they don't go hunting for the errors in. In recent years, that's become something where the physicists started to become aware that this was a trap that people were falling into. And one of the whole”
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
“One of the classic problems that we've become aware of, actually in the larger world we see it in something called confirmation bias, where it's very easy when you're, let's say, trying to see what some news story is telling you to fall into the danger of only reading the news stories that already tell you something that you believe and not reading the ones that are giving you information that would disagree with something you believe. And when you do happen to read an article that says something that disagrees with something that you think is right, you look for all the things, all the mistakes it's making. Whereas when you see an article that's saying, oh, somebody did a study and it agrees with some of you that you like, you don't look for its flaws in the same way. And this happens actually not only in politics and when you read the newspaper, but in a science project. So when you're measuring some graph,”
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 I do still play. And the thing that I was always interested in when I was playing was not solo music. I was interested in playing string quartets and other kinds of chamber music. And I think the pleasures in that are very much some of the same pleasures as in group efforts for solving a scientific problem that you have a group of people who are all contributing something, but they have to listen to each other. And the degree of paying attention back and forth, I think, is what makes that so enlivening. And it's also, I think, one of the things that makes a group science project fun.”
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 was thinking about this from the point of view of who been some of the more influential teachers in my life. And some of them, you know, it's obvious my research advisor was very influential when I was going my PhD in physics and others are in that category of teachers in certain courses that you've taken. For those people who've studied an instrument in their lives, you're a teacher of that instrument has stayed with you for usually had stayed with you for many, many years while you were growing up. And so in my case, my violin teacher was a very influential person. Her name was Francis Duffy. And she was able to teach a certain degree of this mix of extreme care and precision, but with a spirit and a goal of making music, not of just doing something right.”
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
“It's very tricky because you have all sorts of balancing acts to do. So there's the fact that you want groups of people to share a lot of their approaches and all their resources. They share their software with each other to work on it. But there's a danger then that if they've shared too much, then you don't get the independent comparisons that you can often find the errors with. So you in some sense need to encourage sort of splinter groups to be working on things while the whole group is coming to a consensus at the same time. And these balancing acts actually go throughout the whole third millennium thinking story in that book is that most things you're doing, you're having to get that right balance between several different things you're trying to achieve that aren't necessarily obvious that you would do them at the same 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
“So, in general, science has become less and less of a single person activity with the image of the lone scientist putting on their lab coat and going down to the lab and disappearing. That's not been my experience at all. And even rather small groups are still often groups of people doing projects. And a lot of science just requires enough. Different expertise and different parts, and the scales have gotten big enough that they often are fairly big teams. The projects I was doing were smallish in the sense of maybe 30 people all working together on something. But the very next stage of those same projects in the more recent years are now hundreds of people on those projects.”
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
“What I've seen, that for me at least, that's been the thing that's made a huge difference is that combination of people who come in with a wide variety of skills, but who aren't so ego-driven that they can't just join a group together and bounce ideas with each other and listen to each other. And that combination of people who are very capable but are also able to enjoy the team nature and thinking together. That's the thing that I usually am looking for in a group, a little bit with that, you always want the person to be very skilled and capable, but you also want them to have a little bit of that can-do spirit that they think that it's worth staying in the room with the group of people and worrying the problem for that extra time that most people wouldn'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
“And yet very can do that we're going to be able to figure this thing out so that you, if it doesn't work, you think there's got to be a different way we can do this. And that is, I think, one of the real secrets of how sciences work. In some sense, it's the breaks of making mistakes that so many of the things that science involves is the skepticisms and the doubts that keep you from falling into certain kinds of mental traps. But you can't drive a car which just brakes. You need an accelerator pedal. And I think that accelerator pedal is this can-do sense that we can figure this out. It's a hard problem, but once you identify the problem, we have a reasonable chance of figuring out how to solve it.”
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 it's a very strange thing because what you really want is this funny balance between being very humble and very willing 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
“Eventually, people figure out these problems. And it takes a certain kind of confidence, a certain kind of, and you can call arrogance, I think to manage, to stay with a problem long enough to do these problems that are worth our solving.”
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 think the part that's less humble is actually sort of an interesting one. There's another side of the culture of science, which I think has to be arrogant in a very interesting way, which is that science has benefited by having a culture that allows you to believe or maybe even fool yourself into thinking that you can solve difficult problems long enough to solve them. And the problem is that most of us, I don't think are built to stick to a problem as long as it really takes. And so I think we tend to think, well, I tried very hard on that problem. I spent at least a day on it. Maybe I spent a week on it. And then you give up. Whereas the culture of science has, I think, led people to think we can solve that problem. And if we didn't figure it out that week, we'll keep working on it and we see some progress maybe by a month or so from now, we'll try something different. And then another month.”
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
“In this particular respect, I think I aspire to being as humble as I can, right? Because I know that I've done things wrong and I figured things, I've missed, they've made mistakes, and I've caught them sometimes myself, but other times I've only caught them because somebody else was there, which gave me a hard 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
“Well, I always describe the aspirational aspects of science as opposed to what actually happens day to day. Day-to-day, people do things wrong. Day to day, they don't follow the prescriptions of, I think, what this best idea of what science and this third millennium thinking that I'm describing has offered us. As a whole, though, that's the aspirational goal, to be open to being to listening when somebody gives you criticism. And it's very difficult to do. Not every scientist does it every time. big picture eventually people listen to the referee's comments on papers they they listen to the objections raised in a conference when they're giving a talk and it ends up actually making a big difference it means that you know they may not want to hear it the first three or four times but eventually they think you know i've got to answer that question and that sharpens up their thinking”
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 we happen to go through different waves in our They tend to corner people into groups where they are only talking to people who already agree with them. And then they find that the other groups sound scary and the other groups from the outside, it's very easy for a group that's talking among themselves and you're talking with a different group for the other group to look like they're just bad in some way, evil or out to do something that you don't trust. But when people actually communicate with each other and think through problems together, almost invariably they start discovering that the actual people themselves that may be in these separate bubbles of communication turn out to really share almost all of the same big goals and the differences are much more just the question of what do they think the answer is to some factual question rather than really their priorities being completely different.”
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
“There's a couple aspects to this. One is that I think it's very hard to think outside of your own head when you're by yourself. And as soon as you start talking to other people, it opens up the range of possibilities. Even more difficult, but even more important is talking to people that you think that you disagree with. And so science has built a whole tradition of taking your work and putting it in front of people who are going to give it a hard time and are going to show all the flaws in it. And that's actually one of the most successful ways to think about where you may be going wrong. Our society as a larger society seems to have lost a lot of that skill or that memory of why it is that you talk to people that you disagree with and where the usefulness becomes 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
“And pushed the edges of what is it that we are fairly sure about, but what things would we be amazing if it turns out that the world was a little different than we thought? And that is actually where our strength comes from, that ability to be constantly questioning. And it sounds like a weakness to always be doubting, but it turns out that I think that's really where our superpower lies.”
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 these parts of the story where you need to be able to understand that most of what we did as scientists has made successful is to consider the possibility that we're making a mistake and that we're getting something wrong. And that is probably 95% of an experimental scientist's life is looking for where are the mistakes this time. In the experiment they're running, in the theory that they're working with, day to day, most measurements have some error to them. You have to figure out what the amount of error is that is permissible for the particular measurement you're making. And that's part of the mistakes that are there in front of you. What you're really looking for is you're really hoping you find mistakes in the fundamental theories that you're working with. When you found out that there's something wrong with our understanding of gravity, that was really exciting. And that was what made Einstein one of the things that made him famous. And most scientists, they're constantly trying to figure out”
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, but there's 25% odds I'm wrong on this one, in which case maybe your point might be the right point in this particular discussion and it makes it a much more of a fluid discussion, much more possible for groups to think through problems without being attached to their position.”
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, in our day to day lives, it comes up all the time. We are having to make, well, some of them, we're very used to, we make a bet on whether it's safe to cross the street. And we are pretty good at that. Some of them we occasionally are forced to think very hard about when we have to make a healthcare decision. So, you know, should you take this medicine? Should you, you know, people have to decide whether to get a certain operation, those you actually have to think through very carefully what the odds are and what the and how much you should risk. But those are things that we, I think, so recognize that we do, but it's hidden in many, many of the other just day-to-day activities that we do. And when we make decisions as a group, we don't usually remember that and we don't remember that actually we should be using this as a way of not getting overly attached to any part of the argument, but being willing to consider, well, I could be wrong. I mean, I'm 75%, 80% sure.”
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, when you say the scientific method, I mean, often many of us have been taught something called the scientific method in school, which was just this hypothesis testing concept. But that's just one piece of this whole culture of grab bag of a whole bunch of different ideas that together make an approach to think about the world. It includes things like thinking of the world probabilistically, that we don't tend to know, very rarely know anything absolutely true or absolutely false. Generally, we have a fairly strong sense that this is very likely to be true. Something else we would bet our lives on being true. Something else we're not sure is true. And that's actually a very useful differentiation. It's not black and white, yes or no. It's this one I'm going to bet 90% on, but this one I'm only going to give 70% bet on. And that makes us very powerful, it turns out. We actually can do a lot more that way than in just saying absolutely.”
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 it seems like the one thing that we should all be enjoying today, if we had had that moment to just breathe and ask each other of what is the world that we want to live in, this would be the moment where we could all be saying, turn to each other and saying, okay, now finally we can build a planet that we just all be proud to live in. And at that very moment, we're having a hard time interacting with each other and communicating well enough in a productive way so that we can do these work.”
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 we can actually manage that. We could even manage the thing that killed the dinosaurs, the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth, and that one wiped out most of the families of species on the planet. That's something even that we have the possibility of being able to solve that problem.”
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, it's remarkable. I think we actually live at an incredible moment in history and prehistory, and in fact, maybe even cosmic history, where we are the first generations on this planet who have the ability to solve planetary-sized problems. I think the idea that there could be a pandemic and we actually know what to do about a pandemic. billions of people living on the planet many more than when we were children and we at the time when we were children most of the world was going to bed hungry today that's a very small percentage and we've we now know how it's possible to feed a planet we could even handle things like you know climate changes that have happened throughout history have wiped out civilizations at different points in different ways today for the very first time ever we know how you could stabilize a climate”
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, it's a bit of an odd name because what we really want to capture is the direction in which we think the best of our scientific style of thinking has been helping our whole society be able to do better in working through problems together. And we want to try to capture what does that really look like so that people can realize that there's so many elements of it that they could all be using in their daily life and also that they could be using when they're talking to other people and working out problems together. And in some sense, I'd say that We've learned by now how to solve really dramatic problems and difficult problems and interesting problems in the world. The one that I feel is the leftover problem that we can make a huge difference if we can solve is just how to talk to each other, how to work problems out together so that we can actually use all these other techniques that we've learned.”
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