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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“There's also stuff on chunking that there seems to be difficulties with the medial temporal lobe areas which are involved with like binding information. So that's a big part of the intuition chapter. I talk about chunking where you're kind of assembling pieces of information together so that they can be attached. And it seems like people that are older have more difficulty doing that, which would obviously impact learning. But it's also why like, you know, someone who is older might recognize someone but they can't remember their name as easily because the name and the facial recognition just don't bind as strongly as like, oh, it's, I recognize this person and their name is so-and-so. And I know that they went to school here and this is how I know them and all of that kind of stuff. And so there might be some benefit of being more explicit in how you kind of put information together so that you combine it more easily.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're older, you need to pay more attention to having an environment that's conducive to focus. Because if you're 21, maybe you can have the television on in the background and just tune it out. But if you're maybe.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The research on aging and learning, and that's a really interesting subfield. And I did it after the book, so I didn't include any of it in the book. But one of the things that's a key finding is that the frontal areas of the brain seem to be the parts that deteriorate faster as we age. And so the two main things that tend to be harder as you get older is one is the kind of frontal the frontal areas. So think about this as kind of like your executive control of like dictating where you should focus your attention, being able to switch rules for things. So if it's like I give you a puzzle where you have to apply a certain rule to a problem, but then I switch it suddenly and you have to apply a different rule, there's more perseverance, like people who are older have a harder time switching because this kind of like, oh, the habit that they want to override, they're having a harder time switching back and forth. And so this does suggest, for instance, in areas of focus that if you”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's kind of two questions here. So, one of the questions is Are the kinds of principles and techniques that I talk about in ultra-learning age specific? And I would say probably not. It seems to be the case that retrieval works better than review. I don't see a reason why that would change as you get older. Similarly, like feedback is going to be important whether you're 79 or 17. Like they're not, I don't think that those things are going to change. So you could read ultra learning and if you were sort of like, okay, what practical step should I take to learn X or Y? I don't think that the advice would change too, too much. Now, the other point you're kind of making is ultra learning as this kind of like, can you be really successful at an ambitious learning project? How does that change your age? And that certainly does change. So we know, for instance, that like fluid intelligence probably declines from your early 20s. It kind of straight lines downward. Things like working memory and stuff also decline. I did an essay where I dove into some.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, there are certainly people that I think do kind of break the mold because they're doing a lot of things that cognitive science say are like bad practice and yet they're really successful. And so like I kind of give Terrence Tao as like the counter example of being someone who like just seems to be really, really, really smart and like there he's not really doing anything particularly special and I mean, there's other people that I talk about as well that they're kind of mild counterexamples. But in my mind, Albert Einstein definitely isn't one of them. He seems to be someone who followed a lot of the ideas, even if he wasn't necessarily doing them in a kind of structured approach. He was doing them sort of a little bit more. They just came naturally to him.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the people that I researched for the book, and I would have maybe considered him as one of the vignettes in the book if he wasn't like way too famous and people have already heard too much about him. So it wasn't because I thought he wasn't.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know whether that's true. Again, I'm going off the Isaacson biography here, but I mean, Einstein did an enormous amount of kind of deep thinking on hard problems when it wasn't necessary. So he's the patent clerk and he's working through some of these hard ideas. So I don't know whether it like, you know, fits this mold. I think this is important to keep in mind too, that when you write a self-improvement book like ultra learning, you do kind of want to create it in a somewhat structured way. So you're taking what was sort of in some ways the kind of spontaneous intuitive approaches that people who were successful using and you're trying to turn it into a structure that someone who wouldn't do that automatically could follow. And so similarly, you know, if you were to try to analyze any kind of domain of importance and then relate it to someone, you have to make it into a format that, okay, well, you need to follow these steps. So in my mind, like Einstein was.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that you're kind of making it hard for yourself in certain ways if you do it that way. And so I think this sort of narrow path to success kind of ties into one of my kind of major points, not only in ultra-learning, but in my sort of philosophy in general, which is that people really ought to do more research about what is the sort of typical way that these kinds of things succeed before they embark in projects because even if you decide, well, I'm not going to do it that way. I've got like kind of my own path that I think is going to work better for whatever reason. You should know what the status quo is. You should know what that works. You shouldn't just, oh, well, I didn't know that that's how people did this or that's how you got success in this field. And that this research is not actually even that hard to do for most things. It is not like it requires super secret knowledge. It's just most people don't know how to do it or they don't care to do it or they don't want to find out the answer because maybe it's not something that they want to hear.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing it is coming way, way late in this process. And what most people do is they write the book first and then they look around for people who will publish it, which is like screams amateur to publishers and they don't like that. And so it's very difficult, even if your book is like pretty good to get a book deal that way. There are exceptions, but it's difficult, right? And so this is sort of if you are serious about becoming a nonfiction author, the first step would be try to get an agent, right? Like obviously if you're self-publishing, none of this applies. But if you're trying to go through a traditional publisher, you want to have a published book through an actual serious publisher. That's what you want to do. And I remember I wrote this and someone was kind of like upset. Like, well, what, well, why do I have to do that? Why do I have to do it this way? And it's not that you have to do it that way. It's just that if you're not doing it that way, you're making it harder for yourself. So I think it's always fine to do something weird and, you know, creative, but you should know that that's the strategy you're picking.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you're like everyone else and you're trying to figure out what you should be doing best, I think understanding the path to success in most fields and what is the typical path is so important because generally if you are outside of that path, you're going to be facing strong headwinds. And so, yeah, if you're a remarkable Nobel Prize-winning genius, then maybe you will see some success. But if you are not, then you're kind of stacking the odds against you for no reason. And, you know, one of my favorite examples from that post is I talk about how in non-fiction book publishing, there is an established path and that path is you first get an agent because getting an agent is easier than getting a book deal and then you work on a proposal which is partly what the book is going to be and partly also kind of like a business plan to show that you've thought out why this book will actually sell enough to interest the publisher and then you pitch it and you get a book deal and then you write it and so the”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think if you are in the top 0.01%, then don't listen to me because you're smarter than me, right? Like you know what you should be doing.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through this because he didn't have the right resume, and you're not Einstein. So that's sort of the thing that I would put kind of put. And I think there are always these exceptions where someone had kind of the wrong start to things and then had this like truly spectacular one in a million kind of result that brought them stardom. You can't really count on that, right? And I think that's sort of the lesson here. And so like, you know, we kind of romanticize the Einstein stories, but if you were just doing it from a, okay, well, what is the typical path for people and how do, you know, 80, 99% of people find success in this field, that's what you should be betting on. You shouldn't be going into a poker game. You know, well, if I get a royal flush, then I'll be really good. You need to bet it on, well, you know. And so”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can kind of just do whatever you want, and then, like, someone will recognize you, and then it'll work. And if you actually get data on how these careers actually work, it's clear that's not how they work. So the kind of motivating example that caused me to write that post was reading Jason Brennan's book, Good Work, if you can get it, which is about kind of a redata-driven approach to analyzing how careers work in academia. And the picture he paints is stark. Like there's way more people going into academia than there are academic jobs. And the actual process of getting those jobs is quite rigid and that the filters are quite rigid. And so I think, you know, Einstein were using him as a bit of a counter example, but he kind of isn't because he had some sort of bad things on his resume and he had a really hard time getting a physics job. So the right way of looking at that is that Einstein struggled to.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think when I'm talking about the sort of surprisingly narrow path success, this is just sort of this kind of contrary to this idea that people have, and it's sort of this romantic idea that like in kind of high ambition fields.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was like a little bit more limited there. Not that Einstein wasn't also a brilliant at math, but it's definitely that's not what led to his huge breakthroughs was this kind of he had some intuition and then he kind of worked to formalize it whereas for other people might be like, oh, this is an interesting mathematical pattern. I wonder whether or not it would work for this particular problem. So I think that it may just be that these types of problems were kind of uniquely suited to his sort of style of doing physics. And I don't know if you look into the different time periods, it may just be the case that, okay, there were a few insights that required someone with this kind of skill set to unlock them.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The medium, the speed should change, but it doesn't seem to do that. And so kind of like working through the geometric implications of that and then getting to this idea that like, well, lengths will contract as you go faster. And these are all mind bending, but they come from this kind of rigorously working out the intuitions of this. And you can see that as being somewhat different maybe than the more mathematical physicists who were very, very strong at some of this advanced math and it was a little bit less of a kind of like, well, what's my physical intuition about this, but more like, well, what is a way of representing this? And like, you know, I'm maybe getting a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but I'm imagining people come up with matrix mechanics. This is just a little bit like, oh, this is an interesting pattern. This is one way you could do it that makes the math easier and stuff. And I think even, you know, Einstein, I believe it was Minkowski who he worked with on like the tensor stuff because he kind of.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. I think that for Albert Einstein's case, the fact that the kinds of problems he was working on, I think were also amenable to his sort of style of thinking. So, you know, I'm a big fan of the Isaacson biography of Einstein. I talked about it. I did a little kind of summary post on my blog. And you can see that Einstein is really one of the great intuitive physicists. Like he's very much a spatial visual person. And so his thought experiments are really kind of the mechanism that he's using to generate these insights. And so, you know, putting the photoelectric effect aside for a second, you know, the special relativity is this kind of, all right, we have these weird experimental results that show that the speed of light doesn't vary depending on which direction you do it, which is weird because, you know, if you think about a wave and it's going through some medium, then if you're moving relatively.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Struggles with the math for like eight years to get general relativity. So I think Einstein's a little bit of an exception in that he did have like multiple huge breakthroughs. And so when people are talking about like lists of geniuses or people who are important, sometimes that list gets populated by people who don't really deserve to be there. But Einstein is definitely like not, he's like an accurately related rated genius that seen as being extremely smart and important and actually is extremely smart and important.”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a lot of selection effect that you have a smart person who just happens to be working on the problem that will lead to a huge breakthrough. And so, I mean, we could have lived in a world where Newton spent a lot of time on alchemy and then discovered the way to turn lead into gold and then like that worked. But that's not the world that we live in. And so I think that, you know, his work on physics and the Principia and stuff like that was what led to the breakthrough. And I think Einstein's a little rare that he had kind of a couple key insights that led to physics like I mean He discovers or sort of proves through Brownian motion the existence of atoms. The photoelectric effect, which is the thing he actually won the Nobel for, not his relativity, which is what he's, you know, the thing you revolutionize physics for is not really even what he got the Nobel Prize for was the photoelectric effect, which I mean, I guess it started quantum mechanics, so it's not really can't downplay it too much, but then special relativity, and then he...”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know. I think whenever you look at these sort of outlier people, like Newton and Einstein are certainly one, you have to realize that most people never have a year where they accomplish anything like that. So I think it's just,”
2020-11-16 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Scott Young - Ultralearning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 of 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 original things that are kind of interesting and you don't know where they're going to lead. I think 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