YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Strogatz

lines on the record: 125
first: 2020-01-07
most recent: 2020-01-07
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

“And then you would think many players, I mean, it was a much bigger tournament the second time many more entrants. And you would think a lot of them would submit tit for tat now that they learned how well it did. They didn't, though. Everybody thought they were cleverer than that, and they would submit things that they thought basically could do pretty well against tit for tat by occasionally taking advantage of it. Just rarely, just like testing it, you know, or test the other program. And then if there was too much retaliation, they'd back off and go back to being nice. And it turned out that that little variant, that kind of mutation, if you will, was a really deleterious mutation because it led to exactly what you're talking about. It would lead to a breakdown of trust that had been delicately established before then. And it was very hard to get it back.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uh huh, uh very interesting. There were actually in a primitive way computer programs that tried a similar thing in this Axelrod tournament after he announced to the community what the results of the first one were, that it was at the time good to be nice and forgiving.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then No, it's a good example, a real world example of what we're talking about. There's the one-shot businesses and there's long-term relationship kinds of businesses. Yeah, and they will tend to evolve different strategies. It's understandable.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's funny. That's good. I mean, I wonder about that story. I mean, that's sort of not really right, is it? Because if the fish don't bite, you're not going back to that store.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like my dad, my dad didn't go to college, neither did my mother, but my dad had a shoe store, and he said to me, it doesn't matter what shoes I want to buy, you have to know what sells. You know, you have to know what the people want to buy. And so it's sort of true in research. I mean, it might sound a little mercenary to put it that way, but we're sort of in the business of selling ideas. I don't literally mean for money. I mean, our currency is status and getting nice jobs and getting recognition and also the thrill of discovery and all that. But still, a great discovery that no one appreciates is not really a great discovery because science is a social enterprise. It's not just enough to do the work. You have to communicate it and help other people understand why it matters.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's only so much you can do. But skill is so much what we emphasize. Technique, I guess I should call it. Technique is so much what we emphasize in school. And it's just one part of the portfolio. Courage is a big part. Judgment. These are hard, they're intangible. I don't even really know how to define a lot of these. A nose having good taste, knowing what's going to be cool if it works, knowing what other people might find interesting.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Raw Skill certainly has its place. You know, if you don't have any skill, and I'm talking like skill in the sense of technique, like if you are a composer and you couldn't really play. On the piano to hear what you're trying to compose, you're going to have trouble. And in math, you have to have certain technical skills. And I'm sure in every discipline in computer science, if you can't program with some facility.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He still not. There were other kids that were more math Olympiad caliber who could solve any textbook problem you gave them. Duncan wasn't like that, but he could muscle his way to a solution. It wouldn't be elegant, but he could get it done. And he was fearless. And so we worked in this area that, I mean, I had to tell him at the beginning, look, I know nothing about social networks that's going to use a part of math called graph theory, which I'm not an expert in. If we were talking about crickets and oscillations, I know about that, but I don't know about networks. And actually nobody really knows. So we're going to be way out of our comfort zone here. We might embarrass ourselves. And so we were very secretive about what we were doing. We didn't tell people. We worked on it for maybe a year or two. And we had nothing to show for it for that whole time. But the hope was that it could be really big when it finally came out if we got lucky. And it turned out we did.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, as far as what does it take to, you know, how do you decide about the quitting? I knew something about Duncan's personality, which was that before I had even really gotten to know him, I had observed a picture of him on his office door of him hanging by his fingertips literally on a cliff 100 meters above the sea in Australia, a place called Point Perpendicular. He's a rock climber, and he's a little bit of a crazy person. He's also physically very, very impressive. He looks like a green beret, like someone that could kill you if he wanted to. He's the kind of guy who hangs off of precipices by his fingertips and does it for fun. So it seemed to me like with that student, we could work on something extremely risky and extremely exciting and he would not be afraid. And he would find a way to make it work. He wasn't the technically best man.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, a big thing is personality. I mean, in Duncan Watts' case, since I was just talking about him with the cricket problem that became the small world problem, and maybe I should just say, I mean, it's gross, it's kind of come off like bragging, but just to finish that thought, this paper is now among the 100 most highly cited papers of all time in any scientific discipline. I mean, it's the biggest home run I'll ever hit in my life, for sure. And long after I'm dead, it's the one thing that Duncan and I will be remembered for. This was a monumental... Game changing bit of work that started from just a crazy question.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that case, we better quit that much sooner and make sure your next problem is that much more tractable. You know, it's almost like with stocks and bonds and things. They're safe investments that don't return that much. There's riskier investments that might return a lot but could also go belly up very easily. So you have to think about, I mean, similar issues, right? Like what's your time horizon? When do I need to get out of here? How much payoff am I looking for? How much am I willing to gamble? So all those different things go into the thinking about what question should I work on next?”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of things that come into it. I mean, you have to decide how frustrated you feel, how much time you have left, like for a grad student, there's often real-world questions. Maybe I have a family I need to graduate. I need to get a job so I get really paid properly.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But seeing something wonderful in it, seeing something mysterious in it, that's a kind of skill, and that's the skill that I'm very interested in trying to develop in my students and that I've been able to leverage in my own career over and over again.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess so. Yeah. It's different mental models, knowing what questions arise in what fields, what things have long been problematic. The sociologists will tell you, the social network. And maybe from their point of view, it was. But from a mathematician's point of view, it was certainly not done. I mean, it seemed to me we don't have the foggiest idea mathematically which networks would have this small world property. I say small world because of the old idea you meet someone on a plane and you start talking to them and you realize you know someone who knows someone who knows their cousin or something so this phenomenon of it being a small world It's right under our noses yet it's not understood mathematically. We don't really know why is it so small. So there's a math problem there and recognizing what is right under everybody's noses”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which originally came from a social psychology experiment, you know, nobody in the math department is thinking about that kind of crazy stuff. I'm interested in pop culture. I'm interested in science. And so I think about weird things, and sometimes there are really important and relatively easy problems just waiting for a mathematician to look on it.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a few handshakes away from each other in terms of who hears who. So he put these two things together, this thought from sociology about social networks. And this is well before Facebook or anything else. What is the basic mathematics of things that you could think of as networks where every node in the network is just a few hops or just a few handshakes away from every other node? What would a network have to be like to have that property if it's really true that the planet Earth, the social network of the planet has this property? And what would that tell us about how crickets can synchronize and how other systems networked in this way could behave? So I'm bringing this up because look at how weird this whole thing is. We're talking about crickets. We're suddenly talking about six degrees of separation, which comes from a movie and a play by that title.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crickets are one instance of synchronization, and we thought they might be attractable one to do experiments on because they live right here in Ithaca and we could capture them and do experiments on them and maybe figure out how they are able to synchronize in their chirping. Anyway, so while Duncan was working on that, he made this interesting creative leap. His father had said something to him once. This was back in the 1990s. Have you ever heard that you're only six handshakes from the president of the United States or from anyone else on earth? And this idea, of course, everybody has heard of this six degrees of separation idea. But Duncan put this together with what he was trying to think about with the crickets that they're out there in these orchards. He wondered which cricket can hear which other cricket? Like, are they all connected just maybe to the nearest ones to them, or are they listening to the whole field or are they somehow connected in this network that's reminiscent of what if they're all”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I want to say, in desperation, we started to work on a problem about crickets. Now crickets, you know, chirp. Crickets chirp. They make a rhythmic chirping sound at night. And in Ithaca, New York, here where I live, where Cornell is, we have a species of cricket called the snowy tree cricket that they chorus in unison. They all chirp together in these vast choruses so that they make this enormous sound at night in the fall or in the summer. And that's a fantastic kind of synchronization where these are not very clever creatures, but they somehow can harmonize and all chirp in unison. And biologists have wondered, how can they do that? And it's partly interesting because the crickets are interesting, but partly because a lot of things in biology synchronize, like the cells in our heart that tell our heart when to beat our pacemaker cells get in sync, brain cells get in sync when we're having epileptic seizures. So we would like to understand how to stop that.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we couldn't make progress. We kind of got stuck. We didn't know enough about the lymph system. So then we had to do what I think of as strategic quitting, that we have to decide it's time to cut our losses. This is not going anywhere. Let's do something else. So we did. We stopped. We quit. The thing your college or high school coach tells you, don't be a quitter. Yes, I say do be a quitter. Sometimes you have to quit when it's not panning out. But then don't just give up. You have to come up with something else. So we kept thinking of things to do. And finally, in...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because I see problems that other people don't realize are problems. So an example would be, okay, so yeah, let me give you a little story. So probably on paper and maybe in reality, my most successful student is a guy named Duncan Watts, who was Australian. He was a physicist. He was in their naval defense force. He wanted to go to grad school to study chaos theory, which was something I worked on a lot. And so he became my grad student. And the first few problems we worked on together, it was just like this scenario I was describing earlier that he was getting stuck. We weren't really making good progress. One was something about the way that lymph flows in the vessels of the lymph system. It makes certain oscillations. We were interested in things that oscillate and go up and down and have cycles. So as an expert in cycles, I thought maybe we work on lymphatic oscillations. That could be important.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, out of the square. Being interested in wacky things like humanities or philosophy or sociology, that has often really worked well for us.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That theorem is deep. That's the standard of excellence, but not really for me. I mean, whether it's just because I'm not capable of it, I don't know, but I kind of like shallow and broad. Maybe shallow is too self-deprecating. But broad, there's so much to be gained by thinking out of, oh, I don't want to say that cliche, out of the box.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally makes sense, right? So problem selection is such an art form that sometimes it's better to go, as you say, after the second hardest problem. Maybe the gold ring is premature. We have to build up to it. So there are people who try for the hardest thing and they never succeed because they're going for pie in the sky all the time. There's also, you sort of hinted at it the idea of comparative advantage. What is it that I bring or my student brings that might give us an edge that other people don't have? So there are all these different things to think about, the kinds of edge that we tend to have, we, I mean really, I guess me and my students, is that we're very widely interested in many things. Some mathematicians are narrow and deep. Deep is our highest compliment, actually, in math. That person is deep. That work is deep.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a very hard decision because you've spent a lot of effort, you've grown attached to a certain question. If you quit on it, you may feel like, well, that was all a waste. But on the other hand, if you keep banging your head and not making progress, then there's an opportunity cost. You could have been thinking about something else, and maybe you would have made progress on that new thing. And since you don't know how it's going to turn out, because this is an issue of genuine discovery and uncertainty, it's not clear what to do.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For whatever reason is not turning out as interesting as you originally hoped. And then there becomes a, I know sometimes on your show you like to talk about sunk cost and other fallacies. Here's a student who has spent a lot of effort on something They've put in the cost, right? Should they keep banging their head on that same problem, or is it now time to give up? Like, you know, when is it time to quit?”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something that we think about a lot because really the first issue for a student is what to work on. Getting a PhD is all about discovering something new, staking a claim in the intellectual firmament, in the mathematical landscape. You have to come up with something new and interesting that is yours. You have to innovate. And where do you find a good idea? Because everyone's trying to do the same thing. And these are all so smart, ambitious people too. One of the things that comes up a lot is that the first few ideas that you'll try, they might seem promising, but then at some point the going gets rough. It's hard to make progress. Maybe you don't have the technical tools to solve the problem, even though you're fascinated by it.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dilemma is happening. But yeah, anyway, so I don't know how much it really tells us about morality, but it's an interesting story. It may tell us something.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From self-interested individuals playing against each other. Now, is that really what happens in evolution? That remains to be seen. There are some examples of it in evolution. Animals that hunt, say, picture, I don't know, lions, the female lions out on a hunt, it can be dangerous to try to go after a big, scary wildebeest. And they can kick you or hurt you when you're trying to kill them. So maybe it's better to let the other lions get a little ahead of me, and I'll just kind of bring up the rear. You know, you could be a free rider. And it's tempting. That is all the lions are kind of playing a type of prisoner's dilemma with each other where it's tempting to cheat on the rest of the, what would it be called a herd? No, that's not what it's called. What is it with the lions? A pride. A pride. A pride. Okay. But anyway, so there are instances in biology where something like a prisoner is...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah good Well yeah, I mean there's a computerized version of it which is tit for two tats Or some number of TATs. And so there are generous tit-for-tats. Yeah, anyway, it's an ongoing story in game theory. This is a branch of game theory that people call evolutionary game theory. But just to not get too lost in the weeds, the point was it starts to give the contours of a story in which morality can evolve.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the tit for tat. Now, but the story is more complicated like everything in life because although Axerhod did find that tit for tat worked well in his tournaments, it's not some kind of universal best way to behave. It turns out it's a little too ungenerous. It's a little bit stern. And here's the weakness of tit-for-tat. Sometimes people make mistakes. And not because they're mean. I mean, just mistakes happen. Sometimes you are trying to be nice and a person interprets it as an insult. Now, if that person is following a tit-for-tat morality, and so are you, then when this accidental defection happens, they'll say, well, now, okay, now I got to give it back to you. So then they'll defect, but now you being a tit-for-tat player have to defect on them. Now you're in this vendetta that it's very hard to get out of.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so yeah, okay. I mean, the argument would be, if you play this kind of style, Axelrod actually did do an evolutionary version of the tournament where programs that did well got to reproduce more copies of themselves. So, just like you described. And so then he looked over many generations, how did the population evolve? And he found that it sort of evolved toward players that played this style called tit for tat. Which is they always cooperated on the first move, the really simple programs. In fact, it was the shortest computer program submitted, only four lines of code. On the first move, cooperate, and on every subsequent move, do whatever the opponent did on the previous move. You just give it back to them. If they cooperate, you cooperate.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. They're so inscrutable. They're so unpredictable that you don't know what they're going to do. And it's almost like you're playing them anew each time you play. So you might as well defect on them. Because you don't know, you can't figure them out. You can't build up a relationship. So be nice and clear for giving and retaliatory. And that's what emerges as a way to thrive in this environment and what's so interesting about that is that this is a culture that has evolved around the world many times. This is eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This is Old Testament morality. And computers discovered it on their own. This was not programmed into them. This is just what worked.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should be retaliatory. You have to inflict punishment. If someone has abused you for no reason, that is, they gave an unprovoked defection on you. Then you have to hit back. So be nice, be forgiving, be retaliatory, and finally be clear. The programs which were too confusing and too subtle and too brainiac, like there were some programs that tried to make a statistical model of what the opponent was doing.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's principle one. Be nice. Principle two that was found out, you know, and I'm not talking again here about any kind of moral philosophy. This is just what worked in the tournament. Be nice, but be forgiving. If the other player cheats on you sometimes, well, don't just retaliate forever. You got to let bygones be bygones after a while. So it's good to be nice and forgiving, but it's also not good to be a patsy”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Playing against you in this vicious prisoners' dilemma game. And what's so interesting is nobody's being nice for moral reasons. These are egoists, okay? These are classic Adam Smith, self-interested. I'm doing what's good for me, players. They're not trying to be nice. They're not altruists for any moral reason. They're just trying to do what's good for them. But it turns out being nice is good for them if they're in an environment where there's a lot of other players equally strong who can inflict as much harm on them as they can on the other player. Right.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He found that the programs that tended to do well in the tournament had four properties in common. And he summarized these four properties by saying that first they were nice, which he defined as meaning. They never were the first one to defect. If they were playing another program, they would always begin by cooperating on the first move, and then if the other program cooperated back, they would continue to cooperate because they were nice programs. They would never defect first. So they could set up these long strings of cooperation with other players and both do really well. So being nice was principle number one. That actually works well in an environment where there's a lot of”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the problem is if we both have this mindset, it's always tempting to then say, well, maybe just this one time I'll take advantage because there's so much reward to be had by doing that. So anyway, so back to Axelrod. He set up, I mean, it's been a real paradox, like how to play prisoner's dilemma. If you imagine playing the game repeatedly, if I'm going to see you again and again, maybe then there's more chance for cooperation to evolve between us because although in the short term I might benefit from screwing you, you could always screw me back and maybe if we just sort of develop trust, this could be good for both of us over the long haul. So why we're talking about this, as you asked me earlier about morality. And I found Axelrod's experiments very illuminating in this respect. That what he found when he ran these tournaments of all these programs playing against each other.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. So in the thinking where we're only going to play once, and I'll never see you again, then it's always presented as the rational thing to just be a tough guy and defect on your partner. And both players think that way. And it's considered a dilemma is that if we would both just cooperate with each other, it would be good for both of us.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To defect is the jargon. Exactly. To defect is the jargon used in the field. If you defect on your co-player, your partner,”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way in game theory. You're cooperating with the police, but you're not cooperating with your friend by being a rat. And it's relative to your friend that we're talking about. So that's the question. It's in each player's interest, I'll think of these as players playing a game now. It's in each prisoner's interest to rat out his friend, but if both of them rat out each other, then the police have a very easy case, and it's bad for both guys, they'll end up going away for a pretty long time. In the normal setup, the person who doesn't cooperate, if one rats out the other and one keeps quiet, the guy who kept quiet goes away for a very long time. So that's the worst outcome is to be a sucker where you keep quiet and your friend cheats on you. So anyway, the point being that this prisoner's dilemma is this interesting, complicated scenario where it's in everyone's narrow self-interest to be mean and not cooperative.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Play nicely with each other and are you going to sort of cooperate? The scenario that is always talked about is you and your friend are both being held by the police accused of having committed a crime. Okay, so the name comes from this 1950s era scenario of the two guys are being questioned separately by the police and they're each in their own room and the police say, look, we've got lots of evidence on both of you guys. We know you committed that burglary together. If you will just confess, we'll go easy on you and we'll go hard on your partner. We'll put him away for a long time. And you'll get off easy. Let's go. You have to confess. And of course, they're saying the same thing to the other guy. And the question is, are you going to rat out your friend, which is considered not cooperating? So the word is used in a strange.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, yeah, well, so I'm thinking of a series of experiments that were done, if you could call them experiments, that were computer tournaments run by a political scientist named Robert Axelrod out of University of Michigan. So Axelrod is one of the great political scientists of our time, and he asked experts in many different domains, economics, psychology, game theory, math, physics, computer science, to come together and play, actually to submit computer programs to play this famous game called the Prisoners Dilemma. I suspect many of your listeners will know the prisoner's dilemma, but I'll just remind people. I mean, the prisoner's dilemma is a model for thinking about lots of situations that occur in real life where you and someone else have basically two decisions. Are you going to...”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, morality. Well, good thorny question there. A traditional view would be, I suppose, that cultures and religious traditions and our parents give us, they help us learn right from wrong, and morality is something that's passed along through culture. But from a different point of view, it might be an outgrowth of biology.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that's true, yeah. My interest has always been in how does order emerge from chaos. So I do find chaos interesting as a starting point, whereas some people revel in the chaos. I like self-organization. I like systems that spontaneously show astonishing feats of collective behavior where they somehow get their act together on their own with no commander, no outside force telling them how to behave. Because I think that's, you know, we see that all around us. I assume life evolved spontaneously consistent with this position I'm giving that it's all materialism. I think that's one of the great mysteries. How do you get life from non-life without a creator? It must somehow be, in my worldview, that the laws of nature and the right conditions will lead to life emerging from chemistry, but understanding the origin of life is one of our great”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just inherently chaotic. Yeah, so it's really hard and it's going to keep us occupied for a while. But still, it is ultimately chemistry and physics. I mean, there's no, I don't believe in any vital spirit or a soul or anything like that. I'm sure some people do, but I don't, I mean, to me, it's all material. It's going to ultimately be understood in purely materialistic meaning. I'm not talking about money, obviously. I mean, I don't think there's anything there but atoms and subatomic particles configured in increasingly subtle ways.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our molecules are the same, but we're configured differently. Whereas in physics, it's not like that. Any two electrons anywhere in the universe are absolutely indistinguishable. There is no diversity of subatomic particles. I mean, there are different particles. Electrons are different from protons, but every electron is completely the same in every respect as every other electron. They never break, they never age, they never chip. You know, I mean, so in that way, physics is really simple, whereas hemoglobin molecules could all be a little bit different. There's also a lot of noise in biology, a lot of randomness. That's just because of molecular jiggling.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“which are ultimately electrical problems of aberrant waves propagating in the heart electrically that shouldn't be that are making muscles in the heart contract at the wrong times so that blood doesn't flow effectively. So there are some parts of biology where it's really almost like mechanics. The heart as a pump. But there are other parts of biology, say, emotions in the brain and mental illness, things like this are still very, very problematic. So, you know, that's in a way, it's a good thing. We have a lot of work to do that'll keep us busy for generations to come. But I think it's just in the nature of biology that it's much harder, as you say, it's very complex. There are lots of parts. Also keep in mind that there's enormous diversity in biology, that my genes different than yours, even though we're both human beings.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's closer to the second, though I wouldn't be as fatalistic about it as that. We have made a lot of progress in understanding all kinds of things about, say, arrhythmia is in the heart.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very observable. You can just look up there and see what's going on and make measurements, pretty decent ones. So it's at a time scale where it's not too fast or too slow for naked eye observation, whereas the process is in the body are so fast sometimes, and the molecules or the cells involved are so small that biology is just intrinsically really hard. An economics and sociology and psychology are even harder still.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or where did we make progress? The first science to really make good progress was astronomy, which I always think is kind of surprising at first, given that the moon and the stars and the planets are very far from us. They're very remote. And you might think, like, why shouldn't biology be the subject where we make the most progress? It's very important medicine and helping sick people and prolonging life and all that. You would have thought we'd devote so much attention to that, but we had witch doctor medicine for most of history, and even to this day, there's still a lot of black art in medicine. And it's because it's intrinsically complex, where astronomy, if you think about it, has a lot going for it. The motions of the planets are very repetitive and regular. The moon is very predictable. It's also very slow. It doesn't change that much.”
2020-01-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #73 Steven Strogatz: Exploring Curiosities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT