YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Young

lines on the record: 121
first: 2020-11-16
most recent: 2020-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh, wow. It was a great pleasure to have you on. You have a great guest list, so I'm very proud to have ranked so highly. Thank you.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of, it seems like a counter example. It seems definitely like a hmm, that's interesting, you know, that you just decided that you're going to have a chest prodigy. It's definitely interesting, but I think as an example, I feel like to me, the idea that we are authors of our own life is super central to my value system, that I would never want to rob my son of that feeling, that whatever he chooses to do and excel and believe in life, that this is something that he is the agent of as opposed to like, okay, I'm living my dad's life plan for me chapter three or something like that. That's my stance, son, and I know people certainly differ, but that's how I think about it.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allow them to kind of become their own person. And that sometimes means making their own mistakes too. Like you think that they should do X and they're not doing this. So I'm giving kind of like my younger self-advice, but when my son is, you know, in his young 20s, he may see things differently from me. And I'm certainly not going to be in a position to like, oh, no, no, you need to do this or that. But I think that the main kind of lesson in my mind of the kind of Polker example was just how far you could go, like how far you could go in sort of changing someone's kind of like base nature. And it's definitely a provocative experiment. I think certainly a counterweight to a lot of the ideas that you get from psychology and certainly behavioral genetics that most of us are fixed and we have no changeable traits. And like, it's all like this is just certainly definitely a”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely don't have the kind of attitude toward parenting that I'm going to engineer my son to be like something. I think what I want to do is to give him access to experiences so that the kind of person he wants to become is sort of influenced at least by what kinds of things did I show him possibilities. And so this is sort of the attitude I take with my readers and I take when my blog is that I don't like the kind of manipulative approach to here's how I twist and prod you into the thing. Rather, I always feel like the best way to do things is to set an example, give people resources, show them how it's done.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, there's no way that I would do that. I think for me, the Polgar example, and I do have a little bit of regrets now because the Polgars are kind of like, it's a little bit overused as a story. It's a little bit like the reason I didn't put Einstein in the book wasn't because he wasn't a good example because he's too well known. But the Polgars have been kind of like you read books in this genre and they're in a lot of books right now. So I only kind of realized that belatedly. But I found it very interesting. I definitely thought that it was a kind of interesting experiment. So in the same way that nowadays I don't really think that like the average person should try to do the MIT challenge, but it's kind of a like, this is something that could be done and use it as a kind of guidepost of things that are interesting there. And so for me, and maybe this is my own cultural biases, but”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right And so, maybe even the sort of way of doing it and maybe the value of schools like MIT and stuff is if you surround yourself with people that MIT, then you're kind of like the idea of, okay, I'm going to do some world changing innovation and I need to build up the sort of knowledge and capital to reach that point feels more natural than it might be at some other university where it's like, well, why are you doing this? I'm making all this money doing this. Side gig right now, and you should be more like me or something like that.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For advice for me, right? That's my advice for you then is work on stuff so that like no one I think it's true is that And I think there's kind of a bit of status anxiety that would like when you're young, you're kind of like you want to prove yourself and like you want people to respect you and you want to like earn that kind of social credit right now because and I think it depends on your reference group like I think if you have a high quality reference group they'll push you in those ambitious directions but you know and especially I feel like my background like I didn't like I grew up in a small town and like small towns are kind of notorious for like it's like ambitious people leave small towns there was very very much a kind of like the crab pulling the other crabs down out of the the pot kind of situation I felt like in high school and then I went to a sort of middling university where again there was like you know there there weren't a lot of people around me who had that kind of perspective on things and so when that was the sort of surrounding culture I feel like there is more anxiety and pressure to like I need to prove myself right away that I'm doing”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scraped all the money when I was doing the MIT challenge and stuff, but I think there is a difference between I am paying the bills versus, ah, this is like an okay immediate sort of making a bit of money opportunity or this is an okay immediate like get me a bit of status opportunity and I'm gonna kind of run for that rather than investing in these longer term ambitions.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very good advice. That if you could just like, no, no, no, just keep going down and doing kind of crazy, interesting kind of projects that build your skill and do this kind of thing. And like, because you're basically increasing the quality of problems you can work on in your 30s and 40s. And then if you're working on really high quality problems when you're 35 or 45, like that's where you want to be rather than I'm, you know, finding a way to make a little bit of money when I'm 22 or something. I mean, that's hard to do. It's hard to do, especially if, you know, like I also didn't come, it's not like my parents were super rich or something like this. Like I paid my way through university and I.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day, but I have some ideas and stuff, then I would be trying to like, yeah, you need to earn enough money to like live because you can't always get in a situation where people will prop up your kind of ambitions or fantasies. And I do think it makes sense to do things that have some reward potential because if you do things that are just totally crazy and they have no basis in the real world, that also might be a waste of time. But I think Prematurely trying to kind of, okay, this is what the opportunity is, and I'm going to like get the value right now out of it seems to me to be like a kind of something that's super talented people do maybe mistakenly.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This isn't an innovation example. I was planning going into medicine, very smart, but then gets a waitressing job and is like earning good tips, like earning for her at that time good money. And so That stealing away energy from studying. She doesn't go into medical school and that path closes. And to me, it's sort of like optimizing for waitressing salaries is totally the wrong thing to do at that point in your life, especially if you're bright and you have some ambition. You should have totally been all in on the medicine path because it has way higher value in the long run. But I think it's one of those things that when you're 20 and you maybe your family's not super rich and you see yourself making a lot of money and you're like, I could have a house at 23 or something like this, it's very tempting to go down that route because you have this limited experience. And so I think what I would kind of change maybe about my own perspective is that if you have some ability and you have like, and you know this about yourself, if you're listening to this, you know that, you know, you're reasonably clever and you're hardworking and you're listening to podcasts like this and you're not just like, okay, how do I get through the?”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I sort of recognize more is just that if you do have that kind of personality where you have some prospects for things, you're a little bit clever, you're willing to work on interesting innovative projects, just working on really interesting innovative projects and like pouring your whole heart into them is probably what you should be doing. Whereas you see people like suboptimally trying to optimize for things like here's how I can make a little bit of money doing X when it's sort of like, no, no, you're working on like the coolest thing and now you want to like find some way to like, you know, do something else. So I'll give an example. Like I know someone who was planning on going.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be like generally speaking about what I would think about, my first thing would be that I think one of the tendencies I had when I was younger was like a stronger compulsion to monetize isn't the right word but like Prove things would be successful. And I think the MIT challenge and the Euro that English were a little bit of a like kind of a dip in that. And I think they only happened because I'd already kind of gotten my kind of blogging business and this sort of thing underway. But I think”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would I give so people always ask me what I would give myself as advice for a 20 year old? And it's weird to say this, it sounds like really arrogant to say this, but when I go back, there's not actually a lot that I would change. And I think part of it is just that I actually have respect for my younger self because I think as you get older, you get more complacent and soft in ways. So there was things that I did where I was like, I was really ballsy that I did that, that I don't know whether I would have the guts to do now, which is a weird way of thinking about it because we often think in terms of like just strictly increasing capacities. But I think, you know, and I think also doing things under uncertainty is different, like it's very easy to look back with hindsight, know something worked out and be like, well, I wouldn't have worried so much about X, but like maybe because you were worried about it actually happened. So I tend to avoid doing that.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that are kind of interesting, and you don't know where they're going to lead. I think that that's having that in you is kind of rare. And I think that cultivating it is probably good for yourself and society.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to explore. I just had a university, so I've been learning languages, I'm doing all sorts of different things. Whereas now I kind of feel like, all right, these are the sort of my strengths and weaknesses and what I've done well. And so like, where can I really apply that to make an impact? So I do think that there is some benefit of that, but I do think that part of the challenge is just that, I don't know, I feel like people are just way too unambitious in general and not in like the ambition like I want to be better than other people way, but they just don't think a big projects. They don't work on them. They don't have like, you know, big dreams to do cool things or if they are, it's usually just something like, I don't know, you just boils down to something like social status like I want to be the, you know, the person that does this that's better than other people. And I don't know, I feel like I don't know how you change that, but I do think that rewarding kind of a culture where you want to do kind of ambitious.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, I think that prevents us from doing a lot of things. Some of that's probably wise. I mean, you know, if you spent all your life doing things that you're not as talented for, then maybe you won't spend time doing the things that are good. And I do think that they're, you know, in a limited lifespan, there probably is a kind of exploration training phase. And then like, all right, that was the best opportunity for you. Now you just work on it for 15 years to make your mark. I think there's probably some merit in that as well. I think it was even Robin Hansen who kind of made the point that like, you know, your 20s and maybe even your 30s are for like training and then like your 40s and early 50s are like make your mark and then you're done right so like you kind of have to think about your career life cycle in that way and even for me i i feel like i'm transitioning more into the exploit versus explore mode of my career that um when i was 23 and i was doing the mit challenge i was really kind of well there's just this huge vast terrain of”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we praise them for doing stuff and for trying things and for exploring their talents. And, you know, I think there's probably some developmental parts of it, but like kids try and do lots of things, right? It's normal as a kid to, you know, do art and to do every single kind of sport and to do all these things. We don't say, oh, yeah, you're not good at this. You better stop now, right? But as adults, we have this threshold for like, okay, well, you need to be at least this good to even be doing this, right?”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you think of that? I mean, I think it's true. I've written about it before, perhaps less eloquently than Paul Graham or with less authority probably. But I've written about this before. I think one of the things that, you know, and I feel this myself, is that there's this opportunity cost problem. And I think this might itself be one of the, like we're talking about like what are the things that deter innovation is that once you get good at something and it starts producing rewards, it's very difficult to kind of like climb down that gradient and do stuff that's like quite unrewarding. And so maybe this is also part of the problem like we're talking about how do you perform, how do you do things. And the issue is that like when you're a kid, you're bad at everything, right? You're objectively like kids are objectively terrible at all things. And I say this like having a son and so like apologies if he listens to this one day, but they are like they're not good at anything.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely think this is not a zero sum game. Innovation is the most positive sum game there is, so I think that if there was some part of the world that became a new Silicon Valley for something new, that would be very, very good for the world. And yet, you know, what are the things preventing that?”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Found a lot of the easy innovations, or it's possible that there is spaces that are unexplored, but we haven't found the kind of first frontier innovation there. So Alan Turing. Mean this is open up an entire explosion of fields for research and thinking and stuff, but it kind of hinges on someone sort of opening that crack and then you can have this kind of explosion of growth that kind of leads off of that idea. So I don't know. I don't know what the reason is why things have seemed to have slowed, but I definitely think that if we had a better understanding some of the principles of innovation and of like how it works sociologically and I say this not necessarily being an expert even on that literature, I'm sure people will point out all the things that we have discovered on that. But I think that this is something that if we understood better, it could lead to more experimentations in how do we think about group structures, how do we think about networks, how do we think about prizes, incentives, cultures even of innovation that might lead us there because I think”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some arguments that we have a different culture than we did before that there's been an increase in sort of barriers to innovation. It could be related to just low hanging fruit like making advances in physics in Einstein's day could happen by a guy and a patent clerk and now well theoretically at least it's requiring you know to figure out that there's the Higgs boson required you know billions and billions of dollars at CERN to build like the largest machine on earth to like to just figure that out I mean you know we're a long way from when he figured out Brownie in motion and just like kind of back the envelope this is how big atoms are by just looking at like dust in in a water glass like there may be the case that we've just”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industry, and I mean even like startups and stuff, they're kind of let's apply the internet business model to Industry X has become kind of a motif. So it's hard to even say that That Airbnb and Uber represent separate innovations, that they're both kind of like, what if we take the hotel industry and the taxi cab industry and run them like their software industries? And it turns out that works. And like, so it's kind of hard to even sort of think about computation and stuff as being like how many of those are discrete innovations. And so I don't know. I think that like.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. So, yeah, like the whole reason of why, and I've become persuaded by the thesis that progress and innovation have stalled in the world, that like, you know, the first half of the 20th century had more innovation than the second half. And I mean, we're only into the, you know, we're not even halfway through the first half of the 21st century I mean, one of the arguments that was given is that, well, we see all this innovation in computers, but in the first half of the 20th century or in the second half of the 19th century, there was huge innovations everywhere, like in every single aspect of life. And so the fact that innovations have been confined to a single kind of”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, I don't know, there's probably additional things that are necessary to make that broadly applicable. I think maybe just live streaming alone is not enough. And I think that's maybe why we haven't yet seen an explosion, is that there's like one or two more innovations that we need to lock that in. But I'm bullish on the fact that we don't really understand innovation at a sociological level. And I think that this is an area where if we had a better theory of innovation and a better theory of how we could do that culturally and socially, rather than just like the typical way that I think it's proceeded where we're trying to explain how we've innovated up to this point rather than like, well, what are the additional kind of social innovations that would themselves prime more innovations? I think there's lots of opportunities for technology that we haven't scratched yet.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This kind of nascent community of Twitch streamers and live streamers for certain things part of me suspects that there's additional ingredients that are necessary to make this apply beyond normal problems. Like I even did a live stream project. I was so excited about this kind of thing that We did a live stream project for quantum mechanics admittedly, I was a little bit kind of lukewarm on the result, I think it would have been nice if live stream had been a thing when I was doing the MIT challenge. But I think the major problem of that is that it's very difficult to parse what's happening there. Like a live stream for a speed run could be like four minutes so everyone could easily watch it and study it whereas if I've got like 400 hours of me doing a task like it's kind of impossible for you to watch it really easily learn from it”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My feeling is just that this sociological sort of pattern of like how we gain knowledge not as an individual but as society I think is fascinating and I think it's we haven't even scratched the surface of all the ways that technology could assist that. So that's a different problem for like how do we disseminate what is the college curriculum to a larger group of people. That's a totally different problem than how do we actually innovate and improve things in society.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A video record of you doing it. Is not true for most fields. I just think that this is a real lost opportunity that we have in a lot of, like even within a company, like even within Google or something, why don't we have, well, the best programmers who are competing for the top, for being the best programmers are constantly on a live stream of what they're programming, you know? Yeah. I mean, it could be a little bit harder because, I mean, there are some certain factors about speedruns that make them kind of amenable to this. So maybe there's additional innovations I'm missing. I'm sure that people at Google and stuff have thought about this.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Christopher Columbus, discovering the new world that there was something new to discover was itself kind of an innovation and that the printing press, for instance, changed the culture from a manuscript culture to a book culture. And being a book culture created facts because all of a sudden what was written in a book would be fixed and stayed for all time. So you could point to so-and-so wrote this in this particular book in a way that, you know, the ancients were often dubious of experimental evidence because it was just this kind of like, well, you know, things change and you thought this one day and you think this the other day and you need to have some indelible record of what someone said in one moment even make that process possible. And so he talks about this and I think this is sort of goes into this idea that like I think speedrunning, which maybe I'm wrong, but I think speedrunning is a really culturally underrated force because it is, I think that's a real innovation that in order to claim”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cultural shifts triggered by very particular events happening that created just the right kind of mechanism that created science. So it's very weird to think of science as an invention because a lot of it's just obvious to us right now, but he kind of goes through rigorously how like European languages didn't have a word for discovery until Christopher Columbus discovered the New World because”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very interested in this kind of sociological aspect of learning because I think I'm a big fan of a lot of the work on progress studies and stuff, just the idea that we are not innovating at the rate we should and at the rate that arguably we ought to be innovating at if we want to solve big problems like global warming and hunger and poverty and disease and pandemics and things like this that we ought to be innovating a lot more. And so understanding the kind of, you know, this was not something I talked about in ultra learning because it was all about like kind of psychology and cognitive science, but this sociological aspects of innovation and learning are really fascinating to me. And another book I recommend is David Witten's, I think it's called the Invention of Science, might be the history. Invention of science, I think. And he's a historian who goes through kind of the scientific revolution. And this is just one perspective, but like he kind of points out that there were”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this turns out to be a game breaker because now anyone who wants to see what you did can watch it. So it's one of those things where like not only it's like the patent system a little bit, like not only to get the patent, you have to show how it works, right? And so you're allowing people to innovate on it. And so”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what this shows is that this is just kind of a natural phenomenon where you're seeing, ah, this is how innovation happens. This is how we make kind of learning progress in society is through these sort of network structures that a few key innovations unlocked this kind of explosion in performance growth for a field because all of a sudden, you know, the original way that speedrunning worked is it was through these sort of magazines or like these kind of old school 1990s websites where people would just like have someone verify it and then they would publish it. So I don't know like I'm not an expert on the on the movement but I think there was some kind of magazine that they would publish like sort of like some of the best times and stuff. The problem is you can't learn from that. What switched up and what changed I think the entire domain was that the proof for that you got a particular speedrun time was to post live stream.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seen is sort of low status, like as though this is a bunch of guys in their basement on Twitch playing games, but I just think like this is like people should be studying this. Like there should be academic papers written about this because the Tetris example I gave, which is that Tetris was really, really popular in like the late 80s, early 90s. You know, the whole world was playing it and people were bad at it. Like they weren't that good. And now there's this much smaller group of people playing who are insane. They're now playing like a level which it like glitches out the game so you can't even see the blocks falling and you can like it's going so fast but also the entire level's glitched out so you can't even see what's happening and they're like beating those levels and stuff it's crazy and”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of innovation is the difficulty of just like coming up with an idea, but like once you're aware an idea exists, it's like, oh, that's one of the things I could do. But I don't know whether it's the case as I was sort of claiming in that article, perhaps mistakenly, that like a known barrier just knowing that it has been surmounted allows people to perform better, like just knowing that someone has done X in this time without knowing how they did it or having some kind of like detail of their method, which may require some innovation to figure out is enough. And so what I wish I had focused on in that article and only made about it because it's super interesting is the speed running community, which like I'm not super into, like I don't do any speed running and I don't really even play video games, but speedrunning as a kind of cultural phenomena is just fascinating to me and it's extra fascinating to me because it's kind of”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How I have some regrets about that article. And the regret I have is that it was one of those things where I should have just focused on one explainer and I just threw in the banister thing and now I regret it because actually someone pointed out to me that the banister thing apparently wasn't true, that like if you look at the, I don't have the link for it, but they were like, did some of my research like that's like a commonly quoted thing that like you broke the barrier? And if you look at like trend lines for performance and stuff, it wasn't the case that like, oh, they needed an example. Like it was just that we were just generally innovating in kind of the mile long running and it was generally going down like this. And so I don't know. I don't know the full argument, but they were basically refuting that idea that this just sort of like needing an example to do something. There seems to be something to it at the very least that like.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, Cal has his own mental model of how this works, and I'm not really a debating type. So if he disagrees with me, I just, this is just sort of my kind of layman interpretation of what I've read about Cognitive seconds.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Visual media is maybe a little bit more compelling. And similarly, when novels were the only kind of form of entertainment, people would like binge read novels who maybe now would be like binge watching reality TV or on Facebook or something. And so as technology has developed, we've developed increasingly enticing options. And so the more you engage in those habitually, I think the more it is hard to reduce that impulse. Like if you eat junk food all the time, it's going to be hard in a particular moment to be like, I'm going to eat this kale salad rather than a hamburger because your kind of context that you're in is like, oh, you know what would be better right now, the hamburger. Whereas if you never eat junk food or you only eat it in like very limited context and it's just they're like, well, I just need kale salads for lunch, right? Like it just makes sense for you to do that. It doesn't require willpower. And so I think of it more in this way.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to what the right way to live life is and stuff. And so I don't want to say like, oh, you shouldn't meditate or like people who. Sometimes you need to question the very specific claims as stated. And so, one of the specific claims is that because I meditate for an hour every day, I'm going to be much more focused. And I don't know whether that's true. Maybe it is. If it is, it's definitely not the mental model I have of how the mind works. I think that when we're talking about does Twitter destroy your ability to concentrate, I think that the mechanism for a statement like that to potentially be true is that Twitter is super appealing. It is super enticing. And if it is one of the kind of default habitual responses you have at any moment, you have to put in a lot of energy resisting that, right? Like if you think about in an era before television, people could regularly like sit and listen to long radio programs. You know what I mean? Like those are regular like sit around the table and listen to radio. We don't do that anymore. And why I think probably because.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think meditation can be good, but I think it's important to know what meditation is for. And I feel like a lot of the research on meditation is quite poor. I say this is a non researcher, so I'm certainly going to get in shit for it because people are people are like, the problem with meditation is that the people who like meditation, and I mean, I've been on multiple meditation retreats. I've done meditation daily for periods of months. So I'm not like just some guy who didn't get it. And like, I understand why people meditate. But the problem is a little bit that like it is very tied in with essentially religion. It's Buddhism. And so I think that that can sometimes I don't like attacking anyone's spiritual beliefs and there is a really strong philosophical component to meditation.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if Cal is talking about focus in that way, which I think he is, then I kind of agree with him that if you're not on Twitter, if you don't have these variable ratio reinforcement schedules that are constantly like, ooh, it would be more fun to be on YouTube right now. Ooh, it would be more fun to check my phone right now. Like if you don't have those things constantly as active primed habits in your behavioral repertoire, it is easier to focus on reading a hard book. And I think that's what you could get better at reading a book. But as the ability to like for instance, I'm skeptical of people who say, well, I meditate for an hour a day. And so therefore, I'm going to have enhanced focus capacity. Because to me, that sounds like the brain training thing, which we know to be false. But if we're talking about, well, I'm removing a lot of these distracting options from my kind of like list of habitual responses to things, will that allow me to sustain endurance and persistence on harder activities?”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, like the motivational gradient is going to be to go on Twitter all the time, right? And so when we're talking about focus there, is that a cognitive capacity or is that just like your affective ability to like choose this harder thing?”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Am I free to do whatever I want? I think the way it's stated is probably too crude to like, well, what's the model that he has in mind there? So, and again, I think like as a practical consequence, yeah, maybe. I don't know the research so much on that. I think it is potentially possible at least to have like tons and tons of focus in your working hours and then just be like in this buzz on Twitter all day. I'm a little bit less pessimistic than Cal is that like, well, that's going to destroy your brain in a kind of way. I don't know whether that's true. But what I will say is that what I think is going on is that from a motivational perspective, Twitter is like the variable reinforcement schedule. It's the skinner box that like gives you the rewards intermittently. And so you're willing to press it constantly and perpetually all the time. And so if you're choosing between Twitter and reading this hard book.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Approach with some of these things, and I'm more skeptical of that. But I think for the average person, what is the message? And I think the message is you ought to focus more. And I think there's probably aspects that a normal person properly ascribes to being the ability to focus that you could improve.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their brain is incapable of focusing, it's because their phone's buzzing or because they're like, oh, this is boring and I'm getting distracted and I don't like enjoy what I'm learning or I don't find it interesting. So people lump a lot of things together. So if I were to be writing like a scientific paper and I was trying to like, you know, making a bet on whether a scientific paper would find that there's like focus training programs, improve the ability to focus in the way that cognitive psychologists typically measure, I'd be a little bit pessimistic about it just because they're probably measuring it in this tightly controlled experimental setting. If I were talking about are there ways that we could robustly reduce procrastination, reduce distraction, reduce the ability to like get frustrated and give up or like want to waste your time on something else, then yeah, I think that's totally trainable. I think that that's something that you probably could improve on. Again, Cal Newport tends to take more of a faculty.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question when we're talking about focus is what kind of thing are we talking about here? So if we're talking about the capacity for you to focus, like a kind of a cognitive ability, I think it's doubtful that you could robustly improve that particular faculty just by doing specific training. You could probably improve it in specific ways, but they're going to be, again, specific. So you could improve your ability to like focus in on maybe like certain types of problems because you've built up a kind of like sort of quite specific cognitive strategies for doing that. Now that being said, well, why even talk about focus at all if I don't think it can be improved? Because I think that when we talk about focus casually, we're not just talking about a kind of cognitive faculty. We're also talking about, well, what are all the habits and routines and strategies and affective processes that influence focus? So the reason most people can't focus is it because”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, and I mean Cal and I are good friends and we co instruct a course on focus. So there's a certain sense where we are in agreement on the trainability of focus. Where I'm maybe I would disagree with Cal somewhat is that I think Cal views it from a capacity point of view. So it's like he's using the kind of muscle metaphor for focus. And, you know, all the research I've done on transfer really suggests that That's not the right way of thinking about the brain is this muscle metaphor. Like for instance, doing brain training games that improve working memory, don't help your working memory for things that aren't brain training games. So it's kind of one of those things that if you did a muscle analogy and said, well, I'm going to improve my working memory. You're kidding yourself because that's not how it works. Now you can improve your working memory for probably pretty specific things like chunking is an example of that or by, you know.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assume you understand the Fourier transform in later classes. So if you just kind of like, well, I'm just going to memorize the equation, but you don't really understand what it does, then you get to something later and it just doesn't make any sense to you. And you're like, ah, crap, I have to go back down and understand this. I do think the more that you really understand ideas and really understand the principles behind them. And if you have that as a kind of an aim, then you're learning for better transfer, I think. And I think it just happens to be. Getting a good mark on an exam if you don't know anything after that's like useful for anything else, right?”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use some like, oh, this was seen in a previous assignment set. So if I had done that problem, I had a leg up. But I mean, most of the exams you do, they give you kind of novel problems. So you have to have like a minimum level of understanding. But I mean, my general approach to learning is to focus on understanding over memorization. I mean, I'm using some examples as exceptions. I mean, there are some things that like in language learning, for instance, that I focus on performance over understanding. But I mean, generally, if you're focusing on understanding, that's probably going to lead to better transfer than if you're focusing on memorization and that had long been a bias in how I approached learning things. So I think, you know, there is probably a case to be made that if you were strictly concerned with performance on an immediately subsequent exam, you could sometimes get better performance with just memorizing. But I mean, even with like a long curriculum, like, you know, they...”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deeper and deeper into understanding. And so those tend to be the things that transfer better because the more you understand a quite abstract feature of a problem, the more you can spot it in other domains that you've understood enough to get to a place where you could see that that's the pattern that follows. And so if I were to contrast a different way of learning, like a different way that was just focused on, well, I want to have high exam performance, so I'm just going to like memorize the most common solution types and just memorize how to do them. And I don't understand why it works, but I'm going to just do it that way. I think in MIT classes, that's probably a bad strategy just because there's too much diversity of problems. Like, I think that in some schools, they do actually teach that way because the students can't perform like the kind of novel problems on exam solution sets. And I mean, there are exceptions. MIT.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source