back to indexLuís and João Batalha: Fermat's Library and the Art of Studying Papers | Lex Fridman Podcast #209
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The following is a conversation with Luis and João Botala, brothers and cofounders of Fermat's
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Library, which is an incredible platform for annotating papers. As they write on the Fermat's
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Library website, just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional
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scientists, academics, and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures, ideas, and write
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in the margins. Fermat's Library is also a really good Twitter account to follow. I highly recommend
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it. They post little visual factoids and explorations that reveal the beauty of mathematics.
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I love it. Quick mention of our sponsors. Skiff, SimplySafe, Indeed, NetSuite, and Four Sigmatic.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words
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about the dissemination of scientific ideas. I believe that all scientific articles should be
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freely accessible to the public. They currently are not. In one analysis I saw, more than 70%
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of published research articles are behind a paywall. In case you don't know, the funders of
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the research, whether that's government or industry, aren't the ones putting up the paywall. The journals
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are the ones putting up the paywall, while using unpaid labor from researchers for the peer review
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process. Where is all that money from the paywall going? In this digital age, the costs here should
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be minimal. This cost can easily be covered through donation, advertisement, or public funding of
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science. The benefit versus the cost of all papers being free to read is obvious, and the fact that
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they're not free goes against everything science should stand for, which is the free dissemination
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of ideas that educate and inspire. Science cannot be a gated institution. The more people can freely
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learn and collaborate on ideas, the more problems we can solve in the world together, and the faster
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we can drive old ideas out and bring new, better ideas in. Science is beautiful and powerful, and
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its dissemination in this digital age should be free. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's
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my conversation with Luis and Joao Batala. Luis, you suggested an interesting idea. Imagine if most
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papers had a backstory section, the same way that they have an abstract. So knowing more about how
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the authors ended up working on a paper can be extremely insightful. And then you went on to give
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a backstory for the Feynman QED paper. This is all in a tweet, by the way. We're doing tweet analysis
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today. How much of the human backstory do you think is important in understanding the idea itself
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that's presented in the paper or in general? I think this gives way more context to the work of
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scientists. I think people, a lot of people have this almost kind of romantic misconception that
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the way a lot of scientists work is almost as the sum of eureka moments where all of a sudden they
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sit down and start writing two papers in a row, and the papers are usually isolated. And when you
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actually look at it, the papers are chapters of a way more complex story. And the Feynman QED paper
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is a good example. So Feynman was actually going through a pretty dark phase before writing that
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paper. He lost enthusiasm with physics and doing physics problems. And there was one time when he
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was in the cafeteria of Cornell, and he saw a guy that was throwing plates in the air. And he noticed
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that when the plate was in the air, there were two movements there. The plate was wobbling, but he
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also noticed that the Cornell symbol was rotating. And he was able to figure out the equations of
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motions of those plates. And that led him to kind of think a little bit about electron orbits in
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relativity, which led to the paper about quantum electrodynamics. So that kind of reignited his
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interest in physics and ended up publishing the paper that led to his Nobel Prize, basically.
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And I think there are a lot of really interesting backstories about papers that readers never get to
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know. For instance, we did a couple of months ago an AMA around a paper, a pretty famous paper,
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the GAMS paper with Ian Goodfellow. And so we did an AMA where everyone could ask questions about
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the paper, and Ian was responding to those questions. And he was also telling the story of
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how he got the idea for that paper in a bar. So that was also an interesting backstory. I also
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read a book by Cedric Villani. Cedric Villani is this mathematician, a Fields Medalist. And in his
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book, he tries to explain how he got from a PhD student to the Fields Medal. And he tries to be
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as descriptive as possible, every single step, how he got to the Fields Medal. And it's interesting
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also to see just the amount of random interactions and discussions with other researchers, sometimes
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over coffee, and how it led to like fundamental breakthroughs and some of his most important
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papers. So I think it's super interesting to have that context of the backstory.
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Well, the Ian Goodfellow story is kind of interesting, and perhaps that's true for
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Feynman as well. I don't know if it's romanticizing the thing, but it seems like just a few little
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insights and a little bit of work does most of the leap required. Do you have a sense that for a lot
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of the stuff you've looked at, just looking back through history, it wasn't necessarily the grind
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of like Andrew Wiles or the Fermat's Last Theorem, for example. It was more like a brilliant moment
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of insight. In fact, Ian Goodfellow has a kind of sadness to him almost, in that at that time in
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machine learning, like at that time, especially for GANs, you could code something up really
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quickly in a single machine and almost do the invention, go from idea to experimental validation
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in like a single night, a single person could do it. And now there's kind of a sadness that a lot
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of the breakthroughs you might have in machine learning kind of require large scale experiments.
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So it was almost like the early days. So I wonder how many low hanging fruit there are
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in science and mathematics and even engineering where it's like you could do that little experiment
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quickly, like you have an insight in a bar. Why is it always a bar? But you have an insight at a bar
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and then just implement and the world changes. It's a good point. I think it also depends a lot
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on the maturity of the field. When you look at a field like mathematics, like it's a pretty mature
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field, a field like machine learning, it's growing pretty fast. And it's actually pretty
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interesting. I looked up like the number of new papers on archive with the keyword machine learning
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and like 50% of those papers have been published in the last 12 months. So you can see just the
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5.0, 50%. So you can see the magnitude of growth in that field. And so I think like as fields
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mature, like those types of moments, I think naturally are less frequent. It's just a consequence
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of that. The other point that is interesting about the backstory is that it can really make it
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more memorable in a way. And by making it more memorable, it kind of sediments the knowledge
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more in your mind. I remember also reading the sort of the backstory to Dijkstra's shortest path
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algorithm. He came up with it essentially while he was sitting down at a coffee shop in Amsterdam.
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And he came up with that algorithm over 20 minutes. And one interesting aspect is he didn't have any
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pen or paper at the time. And so he had to do it all in his mind. And so there's only so much
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complexity that he can handle if you're just thinking about it in your mind. And that like
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when you think about the simplicity of Dijkstra's shortest path finding algorithm, it's knowing that
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backstory helps sediment that algorithm in your mind so that you don't forget about it as easily.
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It might be from you that I saw a meme about Dijkstra. It's like he's trying to solve it and
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he comes up with some kind of random path. And then it's like my parents aren't home. And then
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he does. He figures out the algorithm for the shortest path. He tried through words to convey
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memes, but it's hilarious. I don't know if it's in post that we construct stories that romanticize
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it. Apparently with Newton, there was no apple. Especially when you're working on problems that
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have a physical manifestation or a visual manifestation, it feels like the world
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could be an inspiration to you. So it doesn't have to be completely on paper. Like you could
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be sitting at a bar and all of a sudden see something and a pattern will spark another
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pattern and you can visualize it and rethink a problem in a particular way. Of course, you can
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also load the math that you have on paper and always carry that with you. So when you show up to
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the bar, some little inspiration could be the thing that changes it. Is there any other people
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almost on the human side, whether it's physics with Feynman,
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Dirac, Einstein, or computer science, Turing, anybody else? Any backstories that you remember
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that jump out? Because I'm also referring to not necessarily these stories where something magical
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happens, but these are personalities. They have big egos. Some of them are super friendly. Some of
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them are like self obsessed. Some of them have anger issues. Some of them, how do I describe
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Feynman? But he appears to have a appreciation of the beautiful in all its forms. He has a wit
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and a cleverness and a humor about him. So does that come into play in terms of the construction
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of the science? Well, I think you brought up Newton. Newton is a good example also to think
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about his backstory because there's a certain backstory of Newton that people always talk about,
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but then there's a whole another aspect of him that is also a big part of the person that he was,
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but he was really into alchemy and that he spent a lot of time thinking about that and writing
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about it and he took it very seriously. He was really into Bible interpretation, trying to
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predict things based on the Bible. And so there's also a whole backstory then and of course you need
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to look at it in the context and the time that when Newton lived, but it adds to his personality
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and it's important to also understand those aspects that maybe people are not as proud to
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teach to little kids, but it's important. It was part of who he was and maybe without those,
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who knows what he would have done otherwise. Well, the cool thing about alchemy,
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I don't know how it was viewed at the time, but it almost like to me symbolizes
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dreaming of the impossible. Like most of the breakthrough ideas kind of seem impossible
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until they're actually done. It's like achieving human flight. It's not completely obvious to me
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that alchemy is impossible or putting myself in the mindset of the time. And perhaps even still,
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everything that some of the most incredible breakthroughs would seem impossible.
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And I wonder the value of believing, almost like focusing and dreaming of the impossible,
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such that it actually is possible in your mind and that in itself manifests
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whether the accomplishing that goal or making progress in some unexpected direction.
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So alchemy almost symbolizes that for me. I distinctly remember having the same thought
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of thinking, when I learned about atoms and that they have protons and electrons,
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I was like, okay, to make gold, you just take whatever has an atomic weight below it and then
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shove another proton in there and then you have a bunch of gold. So like, why don't people do that?
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It seemed like conceptually is like, this sounds feasible. You might be able to do it,
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you might be able to do it. And you can actually, it's just very, very expensive.
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Yeah, exactly. So in a sense we do have alchemy and maybe even back then it wasn't as crazy that
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he was so into it, but people just don't like to talk about that as much. But Newton in general
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was a very interesting fellow. Anybody else come to mind? In terms of people that inspire you,
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in terms of people that you just are happy that they have once or still exist on this earth?
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I think, I mean, Freeman Dyson for me.
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Yeah, Freeman Dyson was, I've had a chance to actually exchange a couple of emails with him.
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It was probably one of the most humble scientists that I've ever met. And that had a big impact
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on me. We were trying, we're actually trying to convince him to annotate a paper on Fermat's
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library. And I sent him an email asking him if he could annotate a paper. And his response was
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something like, I have very limited knowledge. I just know a couple of things about certain fields.
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I'm not sure if I'm qualified to do that. That was his first response. And this was someone that
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should have won an Obel prize and worked on a bunch of different fields, did some really,
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really great work. And then just the interactions that I had with him, every time I asked him a
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couple of questions about his papers, and he always responded saying, I'm not here to answer
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your questions. I just want to open more questions. And so that had a big impact on me. It was like
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just an example of an extremely humble, yet accomplished scientist. And Feynman was also
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a big, big inspiration in the sense that he was able to be, again, extremely talented and scientist,
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but at the same time, socially, he was able to, he was also really smart from a social perspective.
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And he was able to interact with people. He was also a really good teacher and was also to did
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awesome work in terms of explaining physics to the masses and motivating and getting people
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interested in physics. And that for me was, was also a big inspiration.
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Yeah. I liked the childlike curiosity of some of those folks that you mentioned,
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Feynman. I've, Daniel Kahneman, I got a chance to meet and interact with some of these truly
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special scientists. What makes them special is that even in older age, there's still like,
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there's still that fire of childlike curiosity that burns. And some of that is like not taking
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yourself so seriously that you think you've figured it all out, but almost like thinking that
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you don't know much of it. And that's like step one in having a great conversation or collaboration
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or exploring a scientific question. And it's cool how the very thing that probably earned people
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the Nobel prize or, or work that's seminal in some way is the very thing that still burns even after
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they've won the prize. It's cool to see. And they're rare humans, it seems.
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And to that point, I remember like the last email that I sent to Freeman Dyson was like in his last
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birthday, he was really into number theory and primes. So what I did is I took like a photo of
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him picture, and then I turned that into like a giant prime number. So I converted the picture
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into a bunch of one and eights. And then I moved some numbers around until it was a prime. And
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then I sent him that. Oh, so the, the visual, like it's still look like the picture, it's made up of
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a prime. That's tricky to do. It's hard to do. It looks harder than it actually is. So the way you
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do it is like you convert the darker regions into eights and the lighter regions in ones.
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And then there's... And then just keep flipping numbers until... But there's like some primality
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tests that are cheaper from a computational standpoint. But what it gives you is like
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it excludes numbers that are not prime. Then you end up with a set of numbers that you don't know
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if they are prime or not. And then you run the full primality test on that. So you just have to
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keep iterating on that. And it was, it's funny because when you got the picture, it was like,
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how did you do that? It was super curious too. And then we got into the details. And again,
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this was, it was already 90, I think 92 or something. And that curiosity was still there.
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So you can really see that in some of these scientists.
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So could we talk about Fermat's library?
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What is it? What's the main goal? What's the dream?
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It is a platform for annotating papers in its essence, right? And so academic papers can be
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one of the densest forms of content out there and generally pretty hard to understand at times. And
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the idea is that you can make them more accessible and easier to understand by adding these rich
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annotations to the site, right? And so we can just imagine a PDF view on your browser, and then you
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have annotations on each side. And then when you click on them, a sidebar expands and then you have
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annotations that support LaTeX and Markdown. And so the idea is that you can, say, explain a
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tougher part of a paper where there's a step that is not completely obvious. And then you can
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add more context to it. And then over time, papers can become easier and easier to understand and can
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evolve in a way. But it really came from myself, Luis, and two other friends. We've had this
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long running habit of kind of running a journal club amongst us. We come from different backgrounds,
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right? I studied CS, we studied physics. And so we'd read papers and present them to the
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each other. And then we tried to bring some of that online. And that's when we decided to
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build Fermat's library. And then over time, it kind of grew into something with a broader goal.
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And really, what we're trying to do is trying to help move science in the right direction.
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That's really the ultimate goal and where we want to take it now.
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Well, so there's a lot to be said. So first of all, for people who haven't seen it,
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the interface is exceptionally well done. Execution is really important here.
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The other thing is just to mention for a large number of people, apparently, which is new to me,
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don't know what LaTeX is. So it's spelled like LaTeX. So be careful googling it if you haven't
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before. It's a, sorry, I don't even know the correct terminology.
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Type setting language?
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It's a type setting language where you're basically program, writing a program that
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then generates something that looks, from a typography perspective, beautiful.
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And so a lot of academics use it to write papers. I think there's like a bunch of communities that
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use it to write papers. I would say it's mathematics, physics, computer science.
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That's, yeah, that's the main.
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Because I'm collaborating currently on a paper with two neuroscientists from Stanford.
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And they don't know LaTeX.
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So I'm using Microsoft Word and Mendeley, and like all of those kinds of things. And I'm being
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very zen like about the whole process, but it's fascinating. It's a little heartbreaking actually,
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because it actually, it's funny to say, but, and we'll talk about open science, actually,
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the bigger mission behind Fermat's library is like,
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really opening up the world of science to everybody. Is these silly two facts of like
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one community uses LaTeX and another uses Word, is actually a barrier between them.
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That's like, it's like boring and practical in a sense, but it makes it very difficult to collaborate.
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Just on that, like, I think there are some people that should have received like a Nobel
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Prize, but will never get it. And I think one of those is like Donald Knuth, because of tech
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and LaTeX. And then, because it had a huge impact in terms of like just making it easier for
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researchers to put their content out there, like making it uniform as much as possible.
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Oh, you mean like a Nobel Peace Prize?
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Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.
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Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so.
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I mean, he at a very young age, got the Turing Award for his work in algorithms and so on. So
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like an incredibly, I think it's in, it might be even the sixties, but I think it's the seventies.
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So when he was really young and then he went on to do like incredible work with his book
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and yeah, with tech that people don't know.
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And going back just on the reason why we ended up, because I think this is interesting. The reason
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why we ended up using the name Fermat's Library, this was because of Fermat's Last Theorem. And
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Fermat's Last Theorem is actually a funny story. So Pierre de Fermat, he was like a lawyer and he
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wrote like on a book that he had a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, which, but that didn't
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fit the margin of that book. And so Fermat's Last Theorem basically states that there's no solution.
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If you have integers a, b and c, there's no solution to a to the power of n plus b to the
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power of n equals to c to the power of n, if n is bigger than two. So there's no solutions.
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And he said that, and that problem remained open for almost 300 years, I believe. And a lot of the
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most famous mathematicians tried to tackle that problem. No one was able to figure that out until
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Andrew Wiles, I think was in the 90s, was able to publish the solution, which was, I believe, almost
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300 pages long. And so it's kind of an anecdote that, you know, there's a lot of knowledge and
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insights that can be trapped in the margins. And there's a lot of potential energy that you can
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release if you actually spend some time trying to digest that. And that was the origin story for
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for the name. Yes, you can share the contents of the margins with the world that could inspire
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a solution or a communication that then leads to a solution. And if you think about papers,
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like papers are, as Joan was saying, probably one of the densest pieces of text that any human can
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read. And you have these researchers, like some of the brightest minds in these fields, working on
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like new discoveries and publishing these work on journals that are imposing them restrictions in
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terms of the number of pages that they can have to explain a new scientific breakthrough. So at the
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end of the day, papers are not optimized for clarity and for a proper explanation of that
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content because there are so many restrictions. So there's, as I mentioned, there's a lot of
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potential energy that can be freed if you actually try to digest a lot of the contents of papers.
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Trey Lockerbie Can you explain some of the other things? So margins, librarian, journal club?
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Ofer Yusuf So journal club is what a lot of people know us for, where we every week,
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we release an annotated paper and in all sorts of different fields, but physics, CS, math,
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margins is kind of the same software that we use to run the journal club and to
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host the annotations. But we've made that available for free to anybody that wants to use it. And so
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folks use it at universities and for running journal clubs. And so we've just made that freely
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available. And then librarian is a browser extension that we developed that is sort of an
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overlay on top of archive. So it's about bringing some of the same functionality around comments,
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plus adding some extra niceties to archive, like being able to very easily extract the references
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of a paper that you're looking at or being able to extract the bib deck in order to cite that
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paper yourself. So it's an overlay on top of archive. The idea is that you can have that
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commenting interface without having to leave archive. Trey Lockerbie It's kind of incredible.
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I didn't know about it. And once I learned of it, it's like, holy shit. Why isn't it more popular,
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given how popular archive is? Like everybody should be using it. Archive sucks in terms of
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its interface. Let me rephrase that. It's limited in terms of its interface.
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Archive is a pretty incredible project. And it is, in a way, the growth has been completely
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linear over time. If you look at the number of papers published on archive, it's pretty much
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a straight line for the past 20 years. Especially if you're coming from a startup background and
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then you were trying to do archive, you'd probably try all sorts of growth acts and try to then maybe
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have paid features and things like that. And that would kind of maybe ruin it. And so there's a
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subtle balance there. And I don't know what aspects you can change about it.
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For some tools in science, it just takes time for them to grow. Archive has just turned 30,
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I believe. And for people that don't know, archive is these kind of online repositories
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where people put preprints, which are versions of the papers, before they actually make it to journals.
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A R X I V, for people who don't know. And it's actually a really vibrant place to publish your
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papers in the aforementioned communities of mathematics, physics, and computer science.
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It started with mathematics and physics, and then over the last 30 years, it evolved. And now,
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actually computer science now, it's a more popular category than physics and math on archive.
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And there's also, which I don't know very much about, like a biology, medical version of that.
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Bioarchive. Yeah, bioarchive. It's interesting because if you look at these platforms for
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preprints, they actually play a super important role. Because if you look at a category like math,
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for some papers in math, it might take close to three years after you click upload paper on the
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journal website, and the paper gets published on the website of the journal. So this is literally
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the longest upload period on the internet. And during those three years, their content is just
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locked. And so that's why it's so important for people to have websites that are open to
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people to have websites like archive so that you can share that before it goes to the journal
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with the rest of the world. There was actually on archive that Perelman published the three
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papers that led to the proof of the Poincare conjecture. And then you have other fields like
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machine learning, for instance, where the field is evolving at such a high rate that people don't
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even wait before the papers go to journals before they start working on top of those papers. So they
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publish them on archive, then other people see them, they start working on that. And archive did
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a really good job at building that core platform to host papers. But I think there's a really,
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really big opportunity in building more features on top of that platform, apart from just hosting
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papers. So collaboration, annotations, and having other things apart from papers like code
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and other things. Because, for instance, in the field like machine learning,
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there's a really big, as I mentioned, people start working on top of preprints, and they are
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assuming that preprint is correct. But you really need a way, for instance, to maybe, it's not peer
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review, but distinguish what is good work from bad work on archive. How do you do that? So like
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a commenting interface like librarian, it's useful for that so that you can distinguish that in a
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field that is growing so fast as machine learning. And then you have platforms that focus, for
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instance, on just biology. BioArchive is a good example. BioArchive is also super interesting
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because there's actually an interesting experiment that was run in the 60s. So in the 60s, the NIH
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supported this experiment called the Information Exchange Group, which at the time was a way for
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researchers to share biology preprints via mail or using libraries. And that project in the 1960s
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got canceled six years after it started. And it was due to intense pressure from the journals
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to kill that project because they were fearing competition from the preprints for the journal
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industry. Crick was one of the famous scientists that opposed to the Information Exchange Group.
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And it's interesting because right now, if you analyze the number of biology papers that appear
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first as preprints, it's only 2% of the papers. And this was almost 50 years after that first
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experiment. So you can see that pressure from the journals to cancel that initial version of a
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preprint repo had a tremendous impact on the number of papers that are showing up in biology
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as preprints. So it delayed a lot that revolution. But now platforms like BioArchive are doing that
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work. But there's still a lot of room for growth there. And I think it's super important because
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those are the papers that are open that everyone can read. Okay. But if we just look at the entire
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process of science as a big system, can we just talk about how it can be revolutionized? So you
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have an idea, depending on the field, you want to make that idea concrete, you want to run a few
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experiments in computer science, there might be some code, there'd be a data set for, you know,
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some of the more sort of biology, psychology, you might be collecting the data set that's called,
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you know, a study, right? So that's part of that, that's part of the methodology.
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And so you are putting all that into a paper form. And then you have some results. And then you
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submit that to a place for review through the peer review process. And there's a process where,
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how would you summarize the peer review process? But it's really just like a handful of people look
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over your paper and comment. And based on that, decide whether your paper is good or not. So
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there's a whole broken nature to it. At the same time, I love the peer review process when I buy
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stuff on Amazon, like for like the commenting system, whatever that is. So, okay. So there's
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a bunch of possibilities for revolutions there. And then there's the other side, which is the
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collaborative aspect of the science, which is people annotating, people commenting, sort of the
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low effort collaboration, which is a comment. Sometimes, as you've talked about, a comment can
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change everything. But, you know, or a higher effort collaboration, like more like maybe
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annotations, or even like contributing to the paper, you can think of like, collaborative
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updating of the paper over time. So there's all these possibilities for doing things better than
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they've been done. Can we talk about some ideas in this space? Some ideas that you're working on,
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some ideas that you're not yet working on, but should be revolutionized? Because it does seem
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that archive and like open review, for example, are like the craigslist of science. Like,
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like, yeah, okay. I'm very grateful that we have it. But it just feels like, it's like 10 to 20
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years. Like, it doesn't feel like that's a feature. The simplicity of it is a feature. It feels like
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it's a, it's a bug. But then again, the pushback there is Wikipedia has the same kind of simplicity
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to it. And it seems to work exceptionally well in the crowdsourcing aspect of it. So I'm sorry,
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there's a bunch of stuff going on on the table. Let's just pick random things that we can talk
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about. Wikipedia, you know, for me, it's the cosmological constant of the internet. It's,
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I think we are lucky to live in the parallel universe where Wikipedia exists. Yes. Because
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if someone had pitched me Wikipedia, like a publicly edited encyclopedia, like a couple of
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years ago, like it would be, I don't know how many people would have said that that would have
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survived. I mean, it makes almost no sense. It's like having a Google doc that everybody on the
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internet can edit. And like, that will be like the most reliable source for knowledge. And I don't
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know how many, but hundreds of thousands of topics. Yeah. It's insane. It's insane. And like you have,
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and then you have users, like there's one single user that edited one third of the articles on
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Wikipedia. So we have these really, really big power users. There are a substantial part of like
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what makes Wikipedia successful. And so like, no one would have ever imagined that that could
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happen. And so that's one thing. I completely agree with what you just said. I also...
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Sorry to interrupt briefly. Maybe let's inject that into the discussion of everything else.
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I also believe, I've seen that with Stack Overflow, that one individual or a small collection of
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individuals contribute or revolutionized most of the community. Like if you create a really
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powerful system for archive or like open review and made it really easy and compelling and exciting
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for one person who is like a 10x contributor to do their thing, that's going to change everything.
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It seems like that was the mechanism that changed everything for Wikipedia. And that's the mechanism
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that changed everything for Stack Overflow. Is gamifying or making it exciting or just making
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it fun or pleasant or fulfilling in some way for those people who are insane enough to like answer
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thousands of questions or write thousands of factoids and like research them and check them,
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all those kinds of things, or read thousands of papers.
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Yeah. No, Stack Overflow is another great example of that. And it's just, and those are both to
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do incredibly productive communities that generate a ton of value and capture almost none of it.
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Right. And it's in a way, it's almost like, it's very counterintuitive that these communities would
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exist and thrive. And it's really hard to, there aren't that many communities like that.
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Right. So how do we do that for science? Do you have ideas there?
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Like what are the biggest problems that you see? You're working on some of them.
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Like just on that, there are a couple of really interesting experiments that people are running.
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An example would be like the Polymath projects. So this is a kind of a social experiment that was
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created by Tim Gowers, Fields Medalist. And his idea was to try to prove that,
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is it possible to do mathematics in a massively collaborative way on the internet? So he decided
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to pick a couple of problems and test that. And they found out that it actually is possible for
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specific types of problems, namely problems that you're able to break down in little pieces and
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go step by step. You might need, as with open source, you might need people that are just kind
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of reorganizing the house every once in a while. And then people throw a bunch of ideas and then
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you make some progress, then you reorganize, you reframe the problem and you go step by step.
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But they were actually able to prove that it is possible to collaborate online and do progress
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in terms of mathematics. And so I'm confident that there are other avenues that could be
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explored here. Can we talk about peer review, for example?
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Absolutely. I think in terms of the peer review, I think it's important to look at the bigger
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picture here of what the scientific publishing ecosystem looks like. Because for me, there are
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a lot of things that are wrong about that entire process. So if you look at what publishing means
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in a traditional journal, you have journals that pay authors for their articles, and then they might
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pay reviewers to review those articles. And finally, they pay people or distributors to
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distribute the content. In the scientific publishing world, you have scientists that are
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usually backed by government grants. They are giving away their work for free in the form of
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papers. And then you have other scientists that are reviewing their work. This process is known
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as the peer review process, again for free. And then finally, we have government backed
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universities and libraries that are buying back all that work so that other scientists can read.
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So this is, for me, it's bizarre. You have the government that is funding the research,
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it's paying the salaries of the scientists, it's paying the salaries of the reviewers,
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and it's buying back all that product of their work again. And I think the problem with this
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system and it's why it's so difficult to break this suboptimal equilibrium is because of the way
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academia works right now and the way you can progress in your academic life. And so in a lot
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of fields, the competition in academia is really insane. So you have hundreds of PhD students,
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they are trying to get to a professor position and it's hyper competitive. And the only way for
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you to get there is if you publish papers, ideally in journals with a high impact factor.
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In computer science, it's often conferences are also very prestigious or actually more
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prestigious than journals now. So that's the one discipline where, I mean, that has to do
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with the thing we've discussed in terms of how quickly the field turns around. But like NeurIPS,
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CVPR, those conferences are more prestigious, or at the very least as prestigious as the journals.
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But it doesn't matter. The process is what it is.
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So for people that don't know, the impact factor of a journal is basically the average number of
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citations that a paper would get if it gets published on that journal. But so you can really
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think that the problem with the impact factor is that it's a way to turn papers into accounting
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units. And let me unpack this because the impact factor is almost like a nobility title. Because
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papers are born with impact even before anyone reads them. So the researchers, they don't have
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the incentive to care about if this paper is going to have a long term impact on the world.
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What they care, their goal, their end goal is the paper to get published so that they get that
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value upfront. So for me, that is one of the problems of that. And that really creates a
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tyranny of metrics. Because at the end of the day, if you are a dean, what you want to hire is
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people, researchers that publish papers on journals with high impact factors because that will
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increase the ranking of your university and will allow you to charge more for tuition,
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so on and so forth. And that, especially when you are in super competitive areas,
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that people will try to gamify that system and misconduct starts showing up. There's a really
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interesting book on this topic called Gaming the Metrics. It's a book by a researcher called Mario
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Biagioli. It goes a lot into how the impact factor and metrics affect science negatively.
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And it's interesting to think, especially in terms of citations, if you look at the early work of
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looking at citations, there was a lot of work that was done by a guy called Eugene Garfield.
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And this guy, the early work in terms of citation, they wanted to use citations from a descriptive
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point of view. So what they wanted to create was a map. And that map would create a visual
link |
representation of influence. So citations would be links between papers. And ideally, what they
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would show, they would represent is that you read someone else's paper and it had an impact on your
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research. They weren't supposed to be counted. I think this inspired Larry and Sergey's work for
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Google. Exactly. I think they even mentioned that. But what happens is, as you start counting
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citations, you create a market. And the work of Eugene Garfield was a big inspiration for Larry
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and Sergey and for the PageRank algorithm that led to the creation of Google. And they even
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recognized that. And if you think about it, it's like the same way there's a gigantic market for
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search engine optimization, SEO, where people try to optimize the PageRank and how a web page will
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rank on Google. The same will happen for papers. People will try to optimize the impact factors
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and the citations that they get. And that creates a really big problem. And it's super interesting
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to actually analyze them. If you look at the distribution of the impact factors of journals,
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you have like Nature. Nature, I believe, is in the low 40s. And then you have, I believe, Science
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is high 30s. And then you have a really good set of good journals that will fall between 10 and 30.
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And then you have a gigantic tale of journals that have impact factor below 2. And you can really
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see two economies here. You see the universities that are maybe less prestigious, less known,
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where the faculty are pressured to just publish papers regardless of the journal. What I want to
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do is increase the ranking of my university. And so they end up publishing as many papers as they
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can in journals with low impact factor. And unfortunately, this represents a lot of the
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global south. And then you have the luxury good economy. And there are also problems here in
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the luxury good economy. So if you look at the journal like Nature, so with impact factor in
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the low 40s, there's no way that you're going to be able to sustain that level of impact factor
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by just grabbing the attention of scientists. What I mean by that is for the journals,
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the articles that get published in Nature, they need to be New York Times grade. So they need to
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make it to the big media. They need to be captured by the big media. And because that's the only way
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for you to capture enough attention to sustain that level of citations. And that, of course,
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creates problems because people then will try to, again, gamify the system and have like titles or
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abstracts or that are bigger, make claims that are bigger than what is actually can be, you know,
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sustained by the data or the content of the paper. And you'll have clickbait titles or clickbait
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abstracts. And again, this is all a consequence of science or metrics. And this is a very dangerous
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cycle that I think it's very hard to break, but it's happening in academia in a lot of fields
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right now. Is it fundamentally the existence of metrics or the metrics just need to be
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significantly improved? Because like I said, the metrics used for Amazon for purchasing,
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I don't know, computer parts is pretty damn good in terms of selecting which are the good ones,
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which are not. In that same way, if we had Amazon type of review system in the space of ideas,
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in the space of science, it feels like that those metrics would be a little bit better.
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Sort of when it's significantly more open to the crowdsource nature of the internet,
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of the scientific internet, meaning as opposed to, like my biggest problem with peer review
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has always been that it's like five, six, seven people, usually even less. And it's often,
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nobody's incentivized to do a good job in the whole process. Meaning it's anonymous in a way
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that doesn't incentivize, like doesn't gamify or incentivize great work. And also it doesn't
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necessarily have to be anonymous. Like there has to be, the entire system is, doesn't encourage
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actual sort of rigorous review. For example, like open review does kind of incentivize that kind of
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process of collaborative review, but it's also imperfect. But it just feels like the thing that
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Amazon has, which is like thousands of people contributing their reviews to a product,
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it feels like that could be applied to science where the same kind of thing you're doing with
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Fermat's library, but doing at a scale that's much larger. It feels like that should be possible
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given the number of grad students, given the number of general public that's getting,
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for example, I personally, as a person who got an education in mathematics and computer science,
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like I can be a quote unquote, like reviewer on a lot bigger set of things than is my exact
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expertise. If I'm one of thousands of reviewers, if I'm the only reviewer, one of five,
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then I better be like an expert in the thing. But if I, and I've learned this with COVID,
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which is like, you can just use your basic skills as a data analyst to contribute to
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the review process and a particular little aspect of a paper and be able to comment, be able to
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sort of draw in some references that challenge the ideas presented or to enrich the ideas that
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are presented. It just feels like crowdsourcing the review process would be able to allow you to have
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metrics in terms of how good a paper is that are much better representative of its actual impact
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in the world, of its actual value to the world, as opposed to some kind of arbitrary, gamified
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version of its impact. I agree with that. I think there's definitely the possibility,
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at least for a more resilient system than what we have today. And I think that's kind of what
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you're describing, Alex. I mean, to an extent, we kind of have like a little bit of a Heisenberg
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uncertainty principle. When you pick a metric, as soon as you do it, then maybe it works as a good
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heuristic for a short amount of time, but soon enough, people would start gamifying. But then
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you can definitely have metrics that are more resilient to gamification and they'll work as a
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better heuristic to try to push you in the best direction. But I guess down the line,
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the underlying problem you're saying is there's a shortage of positions in academia. That's a big
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problem for me. Yeah. And that, and so they're going to be constantly gamifying the metrics.
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It's a bit of a zero sum game. It's a very competitive field. And that's what usually
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happens in very competitive fields. Yeah. Yeah. But I think some of the peer review problems,
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like scale helps, I think. And it's interesting to look at what you're mentioning, breaking it
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down, maybe in like smaller parts and having more people jumping in. But this is definitely
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a problem. And the peer review problem, as I mentioned, is correlated with the problem of
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academic career progression. And it's all intertwined. And that's why I think it's so hard
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to break it. There are a couple of really interesting things that are being done right
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now. There are a couple of, for instance, journals that are overlay journals on top of
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platforms like archive and bio archive that want to remove like the more traditional journals from
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the equation. So essentially a journal is just a collection of links to papers. And what they're
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trying to do is like removing that middleman and trying to make the review process a little bit
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more transparent and not charging universities. There are a couple of more famous ones. There's
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one discrete analysis in mathematics. There's one called the quantum journal, which we're actually
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working with them. We have a partnership with them for the papers that get published in quantum
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journal. They also get the annotations on formats and they're doing pretty well. They've been able
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to grow substantially. The problem there is getting to critical mass. So it's again, convincing the
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researchers and especially the young researchers that need that impact factor, need those
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publications to have citations to not publish on the traditional journal and go on an open journal
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and publish their work there. There, I think there are a couple of really high profile scientists of
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people like Tim Gowers. They are trying to incentivize like famous scientists that already
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have tenure and that don't need that to publish that to increase the reputation of those journals.
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So that other maybe younger scientists can start publishing on those as well. And so that you can
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try to break that vicious cycle of the more traditional journals.
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I mean, another possible way to break this cycle is to like raise public awareness and just by
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force, like ban paid journals. Like what exactly are they contributing to the world? Like basically
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making it illegal to forget the fact that it's mostly federally funded. So that's that's
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a super ugly picture too. But like, why should knowledge be so expensive? Like where everyone
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is working for the public good. And then there's these gatekeepers that, you know, most people
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can't read most papers without having to pay money. And that's, that doesn't make any sense.
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That's like that, that should be illegal.
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I mean, that's what you're saying is exactly right. I mean, for instance,
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right, I went to school here in the US, we studied in Europe, and you would sit like you'd
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ask me all the time to download papers and send it to him because he just couldn't get it. And like
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papers that he needed for his research. And so,
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But he's a student, like he's a grad student.
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He was a grad student. But that, you know, I'm even referring to just regular people.
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Oh, yeah. Okay. That too. Yeah.
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And I think during 2020, because of COVID, a lot of journals put down the
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walls for certain kind of coronavirus related papers. But like, that just gave me an indication
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that like, this should be done for everything. It's absurd. Like people should be outraged
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that there's these gates. Because, so the moment you dissolve the journals,
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then there will be an opportunity for startups to build stuff on top of archive. It'd be an
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opportunity for like, for my library to step up to scale up to something much even larger.
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I mean, that was the original dream of Google, which I've always admired, which is make the
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world's information accessible. Actually, it's interesting that Google hasn't, maybe you guys
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can correct me, but they put together Google Scholar, which is incredible. But they, and they've
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did the scanning of books, but they haven't really tried to make science accessible in the following
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way. Like, besides doing Google Scholar, they haven't like delved into the papers, right?
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Which is especially curious given what Luis was saying, right? That it's kind of in their genesis.
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There's this, you know, research that was very connected with how papers reference each other
link |
and like building a network out of that. Interestingly enough, like Google, I think there was a,
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there was not intended, Google Plus was like the Google social network that got cancelled, was used
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by a lot of researchers. Yes, it was. Which I think was just a, you know, side, kind of a side effect.
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But then a lot of people ended up migrating to Twitter, but it was not on purpose. But yeah,
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I agree with you. Like they haven't gone past Google Scholar and I don't know why. Well, that said,
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Google Scholar is incredible. For people who are not familiar, it's one of the best aggregation of
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all the scientific work that's out there and especially the network that connects to all of
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them. What sites, what. And also trying to aggregate all of the versions of the papers that are
link |
available there and trying to merge them in a way that one particular work, even though it's available
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in a bunch of places, counts as, you know, like a central hub of what that work is, according to
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multiple versions. But that almost seems like a fun pet project of a couple of engineers within
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within Google, as opposed to a serious effort to make the world science accessible. But going back
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to just the journals, when you're talking about that, Lex, I believe that in that front, I think
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we might be past the event horizon. So I think the model, the business model for the journals,
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you know, doesn't make sense. They're a middle layer that is not adding a lot of value. And you
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see a lot of motions, whereas like in Europe, a lot of the papers that are funded by the European
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Union, they will have to be open to the public. And I think there's a lot of... Bill Gates too,
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like what the Gates Foundation funds, like the demand that it's accessible to everybody.
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So I think it's a question of time before that wall kind of falls. And that is going to open a
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lot of possibilities. Because, you know, imagine if you had like the layer of that gigantic layer
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of papers all available online, you know, that unlocks a lot of potential as a platform for
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people to build things on top of that. But to what you're saying, it is weird, like you can literally
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go and listen to any song that was ever made on your phone, right? You open Spotify and you might
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not even pay for it. You might be on the free version and you can listen to any song that was
link |
ever made, pretty much. But there's like, you don't have access to a huge percentage of academic
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papers, which is just like this fundamental knowledge that we're all funding. But you as an
link |
individual don't have access to it. And some of it, you know, you don't have access to, you know,
link |
don't have access to it. And somehow, you know, like the problem for music got solved. But for
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papers, it's still like... It's just not yet. It could be ad supported, all those kinds of things.
link |
And then hopefully, that would change the way we do science. This is the most exciting thing for me
link |
is, especially once I started like making videos and this silly podcast thing, I started to realize
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like that if you want to do science, one of the most effective ways is to do like couple the
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paper with a set of YouTube videos, like explaining it. That also seems like there's a lot of room for
link |
disruption there. What is the paper 2.0 going to look like? I think like LaTeX and the PDF,
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seems like if you... It's interesting. If you look at the first paper that got published in Nature,
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and if you look at the paper that got published in Nature today, if you look at the two side by
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side, they are fundamentally the same. And even though like the paper that gets published today,
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you know, you get... Even code, like right now, people put like code, like on a PDF.
link |
And there are so many things that are related to papers today, you know, you have data,
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you have code, you might need videos to better explain the concepts. So, I think for me,
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it's natural that there's going to be also an evolution there, that papers are not going to be
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just the static PDFs or LaTeX, there's going to be a next interface. So, in academia, a lot of
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things that are judged, you're judged by is often quantity, not quality. I wonder if there's an
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opportunity to have like... I tend to judge people by the best work they've ever done as opposed to...
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I wonder if there's a possibility for that to encourage sort of focusing on the quality,
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and not necessarily in paper form, but maybe a subset of a paper, subset of idea, almost even a
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blog post or an experiment. Like, why does it have to be published in a journal to be legitimate?
link |
And it's interesting that you mentioned that I also think like, yeah, it's why is that the only
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format? Why can't a blog post or... We were even experimenting with these a few months ago,
link |
or can you actually like publish something or like a new scientific breakthrough or
link |
something that you've discovered in the form of like a set of tweets,
link |
a Twitter thread. Why can't that be possible? And we were experimenting with that idea.
link |
We even, yeah, we ran a couple of... Like some people submitted a couple of those,
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like I think the limit was three or four tweets. Maybe it's a new way to look at a proof or
link |
something, but I think it just serves to show that there should be other ways to publish
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like scientific discoveries that don't fit the paper format. Well, but so even with the Twitter
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thread, it would be nice to have some mechanism of formalizing it and making it into an NFT.
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Like a concrete thing that you can reference as a link that's unique. Because, I mean, everything
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we've been saying, all of that, while being true, it's also true that the constraints and the
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formalism of a paper works well. It like forces you, constraints forces you to narrow down your
link |
thing and literally put it on paper. But, you know, make concrete. And that's why, I mean,
link |
it's not broken. It just could be better. And that's the main idea. I think there's something
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about writing, whether it's a blog post or Twitter thread or a paper, that's really nice to
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concretize a particular little idea that can then be referenced by other ideas, then it can be built
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on top of with other ideas. So let me ask, you've read quite a few papers. You've annotated quite a
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few papers. Let's talk about the process itself. How do you advise people read papers? Or maybe
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you want to broaden it beyond just papers, but just read concrete pieces of information to
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understand the insights that labeled in. I would say for paper specifically, I would bring back
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kind of what Louise was talking about, is that it's important to keep in mind that papers are
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not optimized for ease of understanding. And so, right, there's all sorts of restrictions and size
link |
and format and language that they can use. And so it's important to keep that in mind. And so that
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if you're struggling to read a paper, that might not mean that the underlying material is actually
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that hard. And so that's definitely something that, especially for us, that we read papers and
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most of the time the papers are completely outside of our comfort zone, I guess. And so it would be
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completely new areas to us. So I always try to keep that in mind. So there's usually a certain
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kind of structure, like abstract introductions, methodology, depending on the community and so on.
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Is there something about the process of how to read it, whether you want to skim it to try to
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find the parts that are easy to understand or not, reading it multiple times? Is there any kind of
link |
hacks that you can comment on? I remember like Feynman had this kind of hack when he was reading
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papers, where you would basically, I think I believe you would read the conclusion of the
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paper. And we would try to just see if he would be able to figure out how to get to the conclusion
link |
in like a couple of minutes by himself. And he would read a lot of papers that way. And I think
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Fermi also did that almost. And Fermi was known for doing a lot of back of the envelope calculation.
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So he was a master at doing that. And in terms of like, especially when reading a paper, I think
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a lot of times people might feel discouraged about the first time you read it. You know,
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it's very hard to grasp or you don't understand a huge fraction of the paper. And I think it's
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having read a lot of papers in my life, I think I'm in peace with like the fact that you might
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spend hours where you're just reading a paper and jumping from paper to paper, reading citations.
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And like your level of understanding sometimes of the paper is very close to 0%. And all of a
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sudden, you know, everything kind of makes sense in your mind. And then, you know, you have this
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quantum jump where all of a sudden you understand the big picture of the paper. And this is an
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exercise that I have to do when reading papers and especially like more complex papers, like,
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okay, you don't understand because you're just going through the process and just keep going.
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And like, it might feel super chaotic, especially if you're jumping from reference to reference.
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You know, you might end up with like 20 tabs open and you're reading a ton of other papers,
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but it's just trusting that process that at the end, like you'll find light. And I think for me,
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that's a good framework when reading a paper. It's hard because, you know, you might end up spending
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a lot of time and it looks like you're lost, but that's the process to actually, you know,
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understand what they're talking about in the paper.
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Yeah, I think that process, I enjoy, I've found a lot of value in the process, especially for
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things outside my field of reading a lot of related work sections and kind of going down
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that path of getting a big context of the field. Because what's, especially when they're well
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written, there's opinions injected into the really related work. Like what work is important,
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what is not. And if you read multiple related work sections that cite or don't cite each other,
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like the papers, you get a sense of where the field, where the tensions of the field are,
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where the field is striving. And that helps you put into context, like whether the work is radical,
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whether it's overselling itself, whether it's underselling itself, all those things. And added
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on top of that, I find that often the related work section is the most kind of accessible and
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readable part of a paper because it's kind of, it's brief to the point, it's like summarizing,
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it's almost like a Wikipedia style article. The introduction is supposed to be a compelling story
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or whatever, but it's often like overselling, there's like an agenda in the introduction.
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The related work usually has the least amount of agenda except for the few like elements where
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you're trying to talk shit about previous work where you're trying to sell that you're doing
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much better. But other than that, when you're just painting where the field came from or where the
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field stands, that's really valuable. And also again, just to agree with Fionn in the conclusion,
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I get a lot of value from the breadth first search, kind of read the conclusion, then read
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the related work, and then go through the references in the related work, read the conclusion,
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read the related work, and just go down the tree until you like hit dead ends or run out of coffee.
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And then through that process, you go back up the tree and now you can see the results in their
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proper context, unless of course the paper is truly revolutionary, which even that process will help
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you understand that is in fact truly revolutionary. You've also, you talked about just following your
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Twitter thread in depth first search. You talked about that you read the book on Grisha Perlman,
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Grigori Perlman, and then you had a really nice Twitter thread on it and you were taking notes
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throughout. So at a high level, is there suggestions you can give on how to take good notes?
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Whether it's we're talking about annotations or just for yourself to try to put on paper ideas
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as you progress through the work in order to then like understand the work better.
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For me, I always try not to underestimate how much you can forget within six months after
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you've read something. I thought you were going to say five minutes, but yeah, six months is good.
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Yeah, or even shorter. And so that's something that I always try to keep in mind. And it's often,
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I mean, every once in a while I'll read back a paper that I annotated on Fermat and I'll read
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through my own annotations and I've completely forgotten what I had written. But it's interesting
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because in a way, after you just understood something, you're kind of the best possible
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teacher that can teach your future self. After you've forgotten it, you're kind of your own best
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possible teacher at that moment. And so it can be great to try to capture that.
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It's brilliant. It just made me kind of realize it's really nice to put yourself in the position
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of teaching an older version of yourself that returns to this paper, almost like thinking literally.
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That's under explored, but it's super powerful because you were the person that you can,
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if you look at the scale from one not knowing anything about the topic and 10,
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you are the one that progressed from one to 10 and you know which steps you struggled with.
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So you're really the best person to help yourself make that transition from one to 10.
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And a lot of the times, I really believe that the framework that we have to expose ourselves to
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be talking to us when we were an expert, when we were taking that class and we knew everything
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about quantum mechanics. And then six months later, you don't remember half of the things.
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How could we make it easier to have those conversations between you and your past
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expert self? I think there might be, it's an under explored idea. I think notes on paper
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are probably not the best way. I'm not sure if it's a combination of video,
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audio, where it's like you have a guided framework that you follow to extract information from
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yourself so that you can later kind of revisit to make it easier to remember. But that's,
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I think it's an interesting idea worth exploring that I haven't seen a lot of people kind of
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trying to distill that problem.
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Yeah, I'm creating the kind of tools. I find if I record, it sounds weird, but I'll take notes,
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but if I record audio, like little clips of thoughts, like rants, that's really effective
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at capturing something that notes can't. Because when I replay them, for some reason,
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it loads my brain back into where I was when I was reading that in a way that notes don't. Like
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when I read notes, I'll often be like, what? What was I thinking there? But when I listened
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to the audio, it brings you right back to that place. And maybe with video, with visual, that
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might be even more powerful.
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And I think just the process of verbalizing it, that alone kind of makes you have to structure
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your thought and put it in a way that somebody else could come and understand it. And just
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the process of that is useful to organize your thoughts and yeah, just that alone.
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Does the Fermat's Library Journal Club have a video component or no?
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Not natively. We sometimes will include videos, but it's always embedded.
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Do people build videos on top of it to explain the paper? Because you're doing all the hard work
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of understanding deeply the paper.
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We haven't seen that happening too much. But we were actually playing around with the idea of
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creating some sort of podcast version where we try to distill the paper on an audio format that
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not maybe you can have access to.
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Might be trickier, but there are definitely people that could be interested in the paper
link |
and that topic, but are not willing to read it. But they might listen to a 30 minute episode
link |
on that paper. You could reach more people and you might even bring the authors to the
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conversation, but it's tricky. And especially for like more technical papers. We've thought
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about doing that, but we haven't converged. I'm not sure if you have any tips.
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Well, I'm going to take that as a small project to take one of the Fermat's almost like
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half advertisement and half as a challenge for myself to take one of the annotated papers and
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use it as a basis for creating a quick video. I've seen like, hopefully I'm saying the name
link |
correctly, but machine learning street talk. I think that's the name of the show that I
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recommend highly. That's the right name. But they do exactly that, which is multiple hour
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breakdown of a paper with video component. Sometimes with authors, people love it.
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It's very effective.
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There's also, I've seen, I haven't seen the entire, in its entirety, but I've seen like the
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founder of comma.ai, George. I've seen him like just taking a paper and then, you know,
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distilling the paper and coding it, coding it sometimes during 10 hours. And he was able to,
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you know, get a lot of people interested in that and viewing him.
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I'm a huge fan of that. Like, George is a personality. I think a lot of people like
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listen to this podcast for the same reason. It's not necessarily the contents. They like to listen
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to like a silly Russian who has a childlike brain and mumbles and all those like struggle with
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ideas, right? And George is a madman who people just enjoy. Like, how is he going to struggle
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in implementing this particular paper? How is he going to struggle with this idea? It's fun to
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watch and that actually pulls you in. The personality is important there.
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True. But there's, you know, I agree with you, but there also, it's visible, like it's,
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there's an extraordinary ability that is there. Like, he's talented and you need to have,
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there's a craft and this guy definitely has talent and he's doing something that is not easy.
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And I think that also draws the attention of people.
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And like the other day we were actually, we ran into this YouTube channel of this guy that was
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restoring art, right? And it was basically just a video of him, like the production is really like
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really well done. And it's just him taking really old pieces of art, like, and then paintings and
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then restoring them. But he's really good at that. And he describes that process. And that draws
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attention, draws the attention of people, regardless of your craft, be it like annotating a
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paper or like restoring it.
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Procurement, excellence. Yeah. Like George is incredibly good at programming.
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Like quick, like, you know, those competitive programmers, like Topcoder and all those kinds of
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stuff, he has the same kind of element where the brain just jumps around really quickly.
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And that's, yeah, just like, it's motivating, but you're right in watching people who are good at
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what they do. It's motivating. Even if the thing you're trying to do is not what they're doing,
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it's contagious when they're really good at it. And the same kind of analysis with the paper,
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I think, not just like the final result, but the process of struggling with it. That's really
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interesting. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think Twitch proved that, like, you know, that there's
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really a market for that, for watching people do things that they're really good at. And you'll
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just watch it. You will enjoy that. That might even spike your interest in that specific topic.
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And yeah, and people will enjoy watching sometimes hours on end of great craftsmans.
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Do you mind if we talk about some of the papers? Do any papers come to mind
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that have been annotated on Fermat's library?
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The papers that we annotated can be about completely random topics, but that's part of
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what we enjoy as well. It forces you to explore these topics that otherwise maybe you'd never
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run into. And so the ones that come to mind are, to me, are fairly random. But one that I really
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enjoyed learning more about is a paper written by a mathematician, actually, Thomas Postol,
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and about a tunnel in a Greek island off the coast of Turkey. So it's very random.
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Yeah. Okay, so what's interesting about this tunnel? So this tunnel was built in the sixth
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century BC. And it was built in the island of Samos, which is, as I said, off the coast of Turkey.
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And they had the city on one side, and they had a mountain, and then they had a bunch of
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springs on the other side, and they wanted to bring water into the city. Building an aqueduct
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would be pretty hard because of the way the mountain was shaped. And it would also, if they
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were under a siege, they could just easily destroy that aqueduct, and then the water wouldn't have
link |
any water supply. The city wouldn't have any water supply. And so they decided to build a tunnel,
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and they decided to try to do it quickly. And so they started digging from both ends
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at the same time through the mountain. And so when you start thinking about this,
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it's a fairly difficult problem. And this is like sixth century BC, so you had very limited access
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to the mathematical tools that you had at the time, were very limited. And so what this paper
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is about is about the story of how they built it and about the fact that for about 2000 years,
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kind of the accepted explanation of how they built it was actually wrong. And so this tunnel
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has been famous for a while. There are a number of historians that talked about it since ancient
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Egypt. And the method that they described for building it was just wrong. And so these researchers
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went there and were able to figure that out. And so basically, kind of the way that they thought
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they had built it was basically, if you can imagine looking at the mountain from the top,
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and you have the mountain and then you have both entrances. And so what they thought,
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and this is what the ancient historians described, is that they effectively tried to draw a right
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angle triangle with the two entrances at each end of the hypotenuse. And the way they did it is like
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they would go around the mountain and kind of walking in a grid fashion. And then you can figure
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out the two sides of the triangle. And then after you have that triangle, you can effectively draw
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two smaller triangles at each entrance that are proportional to that big triangle. And then you
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kind of have arrows pointing in each way. And then you know at least that you have a line going
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through the mountain that connects both entrances. The issue with that is like once you go to this
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mountain and you start thinking of doing this, you realize that especially given that the tools that
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they had at the time, that your error margin would be too small. You wouldn't be able to do it.
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Just the fact of trying to build this triangle in that fashion, the error would accumulate and you
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would end up missing. You'd start building these tunnels and they would miss each other. So the task
link |
ultimately is to figure out like really perfectly as close as possible the direction you should be
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digging. First of all that it's possible to have a straight line through and then what that the
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direction would be. And then you are trying to infer that by constructing a right triangle
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by doing. I'm not exactly sure about how to do that rigorously like by tracing the mountain,
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by walking along the mountain. You said grids? Yeah you kind of walk as if you were in a grid
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and so you just walk in right angles. But then you have to walk really precisely then. Exactly.
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You have to use tools to measure this and the terrain is probably a mess. So this makes more
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sense in 2D and 3D gets even weirder. So okay gotcha. But so this method was described by like
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an ancient Egyptian historian. I think hero of Alexandria. And then for about like yeah for
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about 2000 years that's how we thought that they had built this tunnel. And then these
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researchers went there and found out that actually they must have had to use other methods. And then
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in this paper they describe these other methods and of course they can't know for sure. But
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there's they present a bunch of plausible alternatives. The one that for me was is the
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most plausible is that what they probably must have done is to use something that is similar to
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an iron sight on a rifle. The way you can line up your rifle with a target off in the distance
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by having an iron sight. And they must have done something similar to that
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effectively with three sticks. And that way they were able to line up sticks along the side of the
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mountain that were all on the same height. And so that then you could get to the other side
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and you could and then you could draw that line. So this for me is the most plausible
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way that they might have done that. But then they described this in detail and other possible
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approaches in this paper. So this is a mathematician doing this? Yeah this is a mathematician that did
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this. Which I suppose is the right mindset instead of skills required to solve an ancient problem
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right? Yeah. Yeah. There's mathematicians and engineers a lot of things. Because they didn't
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have computers or drones or lidar back then or whatever technology you would use modern day for
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the civil engineering. Yeah. Another fascinating thing is that like you know after effectively
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after the the downfall of the Roman civilization people didn't build tunnels for about a thousand
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years. We go a thousand years without tunnels and then like only in like in late middle ages that
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we start doing them again. But here is the tunnel like sixth century BC like incredibly limited
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mathematics and they and they build it in this way. And it was a mystery for a long time exactly
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how they did it. And then these mathematicians went there and basically with no archaeology
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kind of background were able to figure it out. How do annotations for this paper look like? What is
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it what's a successful annotation for paper like this? Yeah so sometimes you're for this paper
link |
sometimes adding some more context on on a specific part like sometimes they they mentioned
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for instance these instruments that were common in ancient Greece and ancient Rome for for building
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things. And and and so in some of those annotations I describe these instruments in more detail and
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how they worked because sometimes it can be hard to to visualize these.
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Then this paper I forget exactly when when this was published I believe maybe maybe the 70s.
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And then there was further research into this tunnel and more interesting other interesting
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aspects about it. I add those to that paper as well. There's historical context that I also go
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into there for instance the fact that as a as I said that effectively after the downfall of the
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Roman Empire no tunnels were built like this something that I that I go that I that I added
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to the paper as well. Yeah so so when other people look at the paper how do they usually consume the
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annotations? So they it's like is there a commenting feature is the I mean like this is a really
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enriching experience the way you read a paper. What what aspects do you do people usually talk
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about that they they value from this? So yeah so anybody can just go on there and and either add
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a new annotation or add a comment to an existing annotation and so you can start a kind of a thread
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within an existing annotation. And that's something that happens relative frequency and then
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because I was the original author of the initial annotation I get pinged and so oftentimes I'll go
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back and and and add on to to that thread. How'd you pick the paper? I mean first of all this whole
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process is really exciting. I'm gonna especially after this conversation I'm gonna make sure I
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participate much more actively on papers that I know a lot about and on paper I know nothing about.
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I should both of us annotate the paper. I would love to. I also I mean I realized that uh there's
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like it's an opportunity for people like me to publicly annotate a paper. Or do an AMA around
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the paper. Yeah exactly but yeah but like be um be in the conversation about a paper. It's like a
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place to have a conversation about an idea. You get the other way to do it that's much more ad hoc
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is on Twitter right? But this is more like formal and you don't have to be in the conversation
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on Twitter right? But this is more like formal and you could actually probably integrate the two.
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You have a conversation about the conversation. So the Twitter is the conversation about a
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conversation and the main conversation is in this space of annotations. There's an interesting effect
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that we we see sometimes with the annotations on our papers is that a lot of people especially if
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we the annotations are really well done people sometimes are afraid of adding more annotations
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because they see that as a kind of a finished work. Yes. And so they they don't want to pollute
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that or uh and especially if it's like a silly question. This is I don't think that's good. I
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think you know we should as much as possible try to lower the barrier for someone to jump in and
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ask questions. I think it only like most of the times it adds value but it's some feedback that
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we got from users and and readers. I'm not exactly sure how to to kind of fight that but um. Well I
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think I think if I serve as an inspiration in any way is by asking a lot of dumb questions and saying
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a bunch of dumb shit all the time and hopefully that inspires the rest of the other folks to do
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the same because that's the only way to knowledge I think is to be willing to ask the dumb questions.
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And there are papers that are like um you know we have a lot of papers on Fermat's where it's just
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one page or really short papers and you we have like the shortest paper ever published in a math
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journal like with like just a couple of words. Yeah. One of my favorite papers on the platform
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is actually a paper um written by Enrico Fermi. Yeah. And the title of the paper is my obs I think
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is my observations at Trinity. So basically Fermi was part of the Manhattan Project. So he was in
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New Mexico when they exploded the first atomic bomb and so he was a couple of miles away from
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the explosion and he was probably one of the first persons to calculate the energy of the explosion.
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And so the way he did that was he took a piece of paper and he tore down a piece of paper in in
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little pieces and when the bomb exploded the Trinity bomb was the name of the bomb like he
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waited for the blast to arrive at where he was and then he threw those pieces of paper in the air
link |
and he calculated the energy based on the displacement of the paper the pieces of paper
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and then he wrote a report which was classified until like a couple of years ago one page report
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like calculating the energy of the explosion. Oh that's so badass. And I we actually went there
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and kind of unpacked and like I think he just mentions basically the energy and we we actually
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went and one of the annotations is like explaining how he did that. I wonder how accurate he was.
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It was maybe I think like 20 or 25 percent off. Then there was another person that actually
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calculated the energy based on images after the explosion at the rate and the rate at which the
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like the mushroom of the explosion expanded and it's more accurate to calculate the energy based
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on that and I think it was like 20 20 percent off but it's it's really interesting because you know
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Fermi was known for all these being a master at these back of the envelope calculations always
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like the the Fermi problems are well known for for that and it's super interesting to see like
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that just one page report that was also actually classified and it's interesting because a couple
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months ago when the Beirut explosion happened there was a video circulating of these a bride
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that was doing a photo shoot when the explosion in Beirut happened and so you can see a video of
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her with the wedding dress and then the explosion happens in the blast arrives at where she was she
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was a couple of miles away from the last and you can see like the displacement of the dress as well
link |
and I actually looked and that video went viral on Twitter and I actually looked at that video
link |
and based I used the same techniques that Fermi used to calculate the energy of the explosion
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based on the displacement of the dress and you could actually see where where she was at the
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the distance from the explosion because there was a store behind her and you could look the name of
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the store and and so I calculated that it was the distance and then you can the based on the
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distance where she was from the the explosion and also on the the displacement of the dress
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like because you can when the blast happens like you can see the dress going back and then going
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back to the original position and like by just looking at like how much the the dress moved you
link |
can estimate the explode the energy of the explosion I assume you published this on Twitter
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was just a Twitter thread but it actually like a lot of people share that and it was picked up by
link |
a couple of news outlets but I was hoping it would be like a formal title and it would be an archive
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no no no it may be submitted just the Twitter thread but it was interesting because it was
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exactly the same method that Fermi used is there something else that jumps to mind like what is
link |
there something um I know like in terms of papers like I know the Bitcoin paper is super popular
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is there something interesting to be said about any of the white papers in the cryptocurrency space
link |
yeah the the the Bitcoin paper was the first paper that we put on for months and uh why that
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why that choice as the first paper it was a while ago and it was one of the papers that I read
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and then uh and then kind of explained it to to louise and or to other friends that do this
link |
journal club with us and um I did some research in cryptography uh as an undergrad and so it was a
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topic that I was interested in um but even for me that I I had that background but reading the
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Bitcoin paper it took me a few reads to really kind of wrap my head around it it's it's right
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it's it uses very spartan precise language in a way it's like you feel like you can't take any
link |
word out of it without something falling apart and uh and it's all there I think it's a beautiful
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paper and it's it's it's very well written of course but um you know we wanted to try to make
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it accessible so that anybody that maybe is an undergrad in computer science could go on there
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and then and and know that you have all the information in in that page that you're going
link |
to need to understand the mechanics of Bitcoin and so like I explain you know the basic
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public key cryptography that you need to to know in order to understand it like explain
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okay what are the properties of a hash function and how they are useful in this context
link |
um explain what a merkle tree is so a bunch of those basic concepts that maybe if you're reading
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it for a first time and you're an undergrad and you know you don't know those terms you're going
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to be you know discouraged because maybe okay now I have to go and google around until I understand
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these before I can make progress in the paper um and and this way it's all there you know so so
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there's a magic to also to the fact that over time more people went on there and and added further
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annotations so the the idea that the paper gets easier and more accessible over time but that's
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still you're still looking at the original content the way the the author intended it to be uh but
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there's just more context and the toughest bits have have more in depth explanations okay I think
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like there's a just so many interesting papers uh there like I remember reading the paper that was
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written by Freeman Dyson on the like the the first time that he explained he came up with
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the concept of the Dyson sphere and he he put that out like it's again it's a one page paper
link |
um and he what he explained was that eventually if a civilization develops and and grows there's
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going to be a point where when the resources on the planet are not are not enough for the energy
link |
requirements of that civilization so if you want to go the next step is you need to go to the next
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star and extract energy from that star and the way to do it is you need to build some sort of cap
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around the star that extracts the energy so he theorized this idea of the the Dyson sphere
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and he went on to kind of analyze how you would build that the stability of that sphere like
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if something happens if there's like a small oscillation with that fear collapse into the
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star or know what what would happen and even went on to kind of say that a good way for us to look
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for signs of intelligent life out there is to look for signals of these Dyson spheres and because you
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know according to the law of second law of thermodynamics like there's going to be some a
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lot of infrared radiation that is going to be emitted as a consequence of extracting energy
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from the star and we should be able to see those signals of like infrared if we look at the sky
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but all these like from the introduction of the concept like the how to build the Dyson sphere
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the problems of like having a Dyson sphere how to detect how that could be used as a signal for
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intelligence life really that's all in the paper all in one like one page paper and it's like it's
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it's for me it's beautiful it's like where was this published i don't remember it's fascinating
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that papers like that could be yeah i mean the guts it takes to put that all together in a paper
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before you know that that kind of challenges our previous discussion that of paper i mean papers
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can be beautiful you can play with the format right it but there's a lot to unpack there that's
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like the the that's the the starting point but it's it's beautiful that you're able to put that
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in one page and then people can build on top of that and but the key ideas are there yeah exactly
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what about have you looked at any of the the big seminal papers throughout the history of
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science like you look at simple like einstein papers have any of those been annotated yeah
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yeah no we we have some more seminal papers that that people have heard about um you know we have
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the the DNA double elix paper on there we have the Higgs boson uh paper um yeah there's papers
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that they'll that we know that it's they're not going to be finding out about them because of us
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but it's papers that we think um should be more widely read and that folks would benefit from
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having some annotations there and so we also have a number of those a lot of like discovery papers
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for fundamental like particles and all that there's we have a lot of those on from us library
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um yeah we i would like to end we haven't annotated that one but i'd like to on the
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Riemann hypothesis that's a really interesting paper as well um and and but we haven't annotated
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that one but there's a lot of like more historical landmark papers um on the platform have you done
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uh Poincare conjecture with uh with Perlman that's too much that's too much that's too much
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too much for me but it's uh it's it's interesting that you know and going back to our discussion
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like the the Poincare paper was like published on archive and and it was not on a journal like
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the three papers and yeah what do you make of that i mean he's such a fascinating human being
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exactly i mentioned to you offline that i'm going to russia he's somebody i'm really uh to interview
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yeah i well i so i definitely will interview him i um and i believe i will i believe i can i just
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don't know how to i know where he lives so here okay my my uh my hope is my conjecture is that
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if i just show up to the house and look desperate enough uh that uh or threatening enough for some
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combination of both that like the only way to get rid of me is to just get the thing done that's the
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hope it's actually interesting that you mentioned that because i after i um so a couple of weeks ago
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i was searching for like stuff about Perlman Perlman online ended up on this twitter account
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of like this guy that claims to be Perlman Perlman's assistant and he's like he has been
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posting a bunch of pictures like next to Perlman you can see like Perlman in in a library and he's
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like next to him like taking a selfie or like Perlman walking on the street and like maybe you
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could reach out to his assistant then i'll send you i'll send you this twitter account so maybe
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you're onto something no but but going going back to like Perlman is super interesting because the
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fact that he published the the the the proofs on archive is what was also like a way for him to
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because he really didn't like the scientific publishing industry and the fact that you had to
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pay to get uh access to to articles and that was a form of like protest and that's why he published
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um those papers there i mean i i think Perlman is just a fascinating like character and for me
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it's this kind of ideal of a platonic ideal of what a mathematician should be you know it's it's
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someone that is you know it's just cares about deeply cares about mathematics you know it cares
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about fair attribution of of um disregards money and um and and like the fact that he published
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like on archive was is a good example of what about the Fields Medal that he turned down the
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Fields Medal what's what's yeah what do you make of that yeah i mean if you look at like the reasons
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why he rejected the Fields Medal so after so Perlman did a postdoc in the US and when he came
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back to Russia um do you know how good his English is i think it's very fairly good it's pretty good
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i think it's really good especially given lectures yeah but i haven't been able to listen to anything
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well certainly not listen but i haven't been able to get anybody because i know a lot of people have
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been to those lectures i'm not able to get a sense of like yeah but how strong is the accent what are
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we talking about here is this going to have to be in Russian it's going to have to be in English
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is fascinating but he writes the papers in English so true like there's there's but there's so many
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like it's such a fascinating character and um there are a couple of examples like him like at
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i think 28 or 29 he proved like a really famous uh conjecture called the soul conjecture i believe
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it was like in a very short four page proof of that was a really big breakthrough then he went
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to Princeton to give a lecture on that and after the lecture uh the the chair of the math department
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at Princeton a guy called Peter Sarnak went up to to Perelman was trying to recruit him
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trying to offer him a position at Princeton and he was and at some point he asked for Perelman's
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resume and Perelman responded saying just gave a lecture on like this really tough problem why do
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you need my resume like i'm not gonna send you like i just proved like my value uh but uh but
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going back to the Fields Medal like when when Perelman went to back to Russia he arrived at a
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time where the the salary of postdocs were so much off in regards to inflation that they were not
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making any money like the the people didn't even bother to pick up the checks at the end of the
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month because they were just like ridiculous but thankfully he had some money that he had
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uh gained while he was doing this postdoc so he just concentrated on like the Poincare the the
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Poincare conjecture problem which he when he when he took that um he took it after uh it was
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reframed by this uh mathematician called Richard Hamilton which posed the problem in a way that
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it turned into this super like math Olympiad problem with like perfect boundaries well defined
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and that was perfect for Perelman to attack and so he spent like seven years working on that and
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then in 2002 he started publishing those papers on archive and people started jumping on that
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reading those papers and there was like a lot of excitement around that a couple of years later
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there were two researchers i believe it was they were from Harvard that took Perelman's Perelman's
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work they sanded some of the edges and they republished that saying that you know based on
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Perelman's work they were able to figure out the the Poincare conjecture and then there was um
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at the time at the the international um conference of mathematics in 2000 2006 i believe that's when
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they were going to give out the Fields Medal there was a lot of debate like oh who's who's
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like we should get the credit for solving this big problem and for Perelman it like it it felt
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really sad that people were even considering that he was not the person that solved that
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and and the claims that those like researchers when they published after Perelman they were
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false claims that they were the ones they just sanded a couple of edges like Perelman did all
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the really hard work and so just just the fact that they doubted that Perelman had done that
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like was enough for him to say i'm not i'm not interested in this prize and that was one of the
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reasons why he rejected the Fields Medal then he also rejected the clay prize so the Poincare
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conjecture was one of the millennium prizes there was a million dollar prize associated with that
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problem and that has to add to do with the fact that for them to attribute that prize i think it
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had to be published on a journal yes the proof and again Perelman's principles of like interfered
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here and and he also just didn't care about the money he was like um clay i think was a businessman
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and he's like doesn't have to do anything with with mathematics i don't care about these like
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that's one of the reasons why he rejected it yeah there's it's hard to convert into words but
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at MIT i'm distinctly aware of the distinction between when i enter a room there's a certain
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kind of music to the way people talk when we're talking about ideas versus what that music sounds
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like when we're talking when it's like bickering in the space of like whether it's politics or
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funding or egos it's a different sound to it and i'm distinctly aware of the two and i kind of
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sort of to me personally happiness was just like swimming around the one that like is the political
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stuff or the money stuff and all that or egos and i think that's probably what problem is as well
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like the moment he senses there's any as what it feels metal like the moment you start to have any
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kind of drama around credit assignment all those kinds of things it's almost not that it's important
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who gets the credit it's like the drama in itself gets in the way of the exploration of the ideas
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or the fundamental thing that makes science so damn beautiful and and you can really see that
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is also a product of that russian school of like doing science and you can see that that um that
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people were you know during the cold war a lot of mathematicians they were not making any money they
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were doing math for the sake of math like for the intellectual pleasure of like solving a difficult
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problem yeah and you know even even if it was a flawed system and there were a lot of problems with
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with that there's these they were able to to actually achieve these and there were a lot of
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and perelman for me is the perfect product of that he just cared about like working on tough problems
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he didn't care about anything else it was just math you know pure math yeah there's a like for
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the broader audience i think another example of that is like professional sports versus olympics
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i've especially in russia i've seen that clear distinction where because the state manages
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so much of the olympic process in russia as people know with the steroids yes yes yes but outside
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of steroids thing uh is like the athlete can focus on the pure artistry of the sport like
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like not worry about the money not just in the way they talk about it the way they think about it the
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way they define excellence versus like in the perhaps a bit of a capitalist system in united
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states with american football with baseball basketball so much of the discussion is about
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money now of course at the end of the day it's about excellence and artistry and all that but
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when the culture is so richly grounded in discussions of money and
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uh sort of this capitalistic like uh merch and uh businesses and all those kinds of things
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it changes the nature of the activity and it's in a way that's hard again to describe in words but
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when it's purely about the activity itself it's almost like you quiet down all the noise
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enough to hear the signal enough to hear the beauty like whenever you're talking about the
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like whenever you're talking about the money that's when the marketing people come and the
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business people the non creatives come and they fill the room and there's and they create drama
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and they know how to create the drama and the noise as opposed to the people who are truly
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excellent at what they do the the person in their arena right like when you remove all the money
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and you just let that thing shine that's when true excellence can and can come out and that was
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one of the few things that worked with the communist system in the Soviet Union to me at
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least as somebody who loves sport and loves mathematics and uh science that worked well
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removing the money from the picture uh you know not that I'm um not that I'm saying poverty is
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good for science there's some level in which not worrying about money is good for science it's a
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weird I'm not exactly sure what to make of that because capitalism works really damn well yeah but
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it's um it's tricky how to find that balance one field's medalist that is interesting to look at
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and I think you mentioned it earlier but it's Cédric Villani which is might be the only uh
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field's medalist that is also a politician now but so it's this it's this brilliant French
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mathematician that won the field's medal and and after that he decided that one of the ways that
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he could have could have uh you know the biggest leverage kind of is in pushing science in the
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direction that he thinks science should go would be to to try to go into politics and so that's
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what he did and and uh and he has ran I'm not sure if he has won any election but I think he's running
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I think he's running for mayor for mayor of Paris or something like that but it's this brilliant
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mathematician that uh that uh before winning the field's medal had only been just a brilliant
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mathematician but but after that he decided to go into politics to to try to to have an impact and
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try to change some of the things that he he would complain about um before so so there's that
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component as well yeah and I've always thought mathematics and science should be like like James
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Bond would in my eyes I think be sexier if he did math like we should as a society put
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excellence in mathematics at the same level as being able to kill a man with your bare hands
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like those are both useful features like that's admirable it's like oh like that makes you like
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that makes the person interesting like being extremely well read about history or philosophy
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being good at mathematics being able to kill a man with bare hands these are all the same in my book
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so I think all are useful for action stars uh and I think the society will benefit for uh for giving
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more value to that like one of the things that bothers me about American culture is the I don't
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know the right words to use but like the nerdiness associated with science like like in I I don't
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think nerd is a good word in in American culture because uh it's seen as like weakness there's like
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images that come with that and it's fine you could you could be all kinds of shapes and colors and
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personalities but like to me uh having sophisticated knowledge in science being good at math
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doesn't mean you're weak in fact it could be the very opposite and so it's it's an
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interesting thing because it was very much differently viewed in the uh in the Soviet Union
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so I know for sure as an existence proof that uh it doesn't have to be that way but it um
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I also feel like we lack a lot of role models in terms if you ask people are mentioned to mention
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one mathematician that they know that is alive today I think a lot of people would struggle
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to answer that question um and I also think I love Neil deGrasse Tyson okay but there is uh
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having more role models is good like different kinds of personalities he he has kind of fun and
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and it's very it's uh like Bill Nye the science guy I don't know if you guys know him so like that
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spectrum that yeah but there there's not like Feynman is no longer there uh those kinds of
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personality Carl Sagan even Carl Sagan yeah like a seriousness that's like not playful like not
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apologetical yeah exactly not apologetic about being knowledgeable like like in fact like the
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kind of energy where you feel uh self conscious about not having thought about some of these
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questions right just like when I see James Bond I feel bad about that I don't have never killed a
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man like I need to make sure I fix that that's the way I feel the same way I want to feel like
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that way well Carl Sagan talks I I feel like I need to have that same kind of seriousness about
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science like if I don't know something I want to I want to know well what about Terrence Tao
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he's kind of a superstar what are your thoughts about him true it's probably one of the most
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famous mathematicians alive today and probably one of I mean regardless of like is of course
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he won a field the Fields Medal is really smart and talented mathematician um it's also like a
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big inspiration for us um at least for some of the work that we do with Fermat's library
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so Terrence Tao is is known for having you know a big blog and he's pretty open about
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um like his research and he also he tries to make his work as public as possible um through his blog
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posts um in fact there's a really interesting um problem that got solved a couple of years ago
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so Tao was working with uh on a problem on an Erdos problem actually so Paul Erdos was this
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mathematician from Hungary and he was known for like um the Erdos for a lot of things but one of
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the things that he was also known was for the Erdos problem so he was always like um creating
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these problems and usually associating prizes with those problems and a lot of those problems
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are still open like and and there will be some of them will be open for like maybe
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a couple hundred years and I think that's actually an interesting hack for him to collaborate with
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future mathematicians you know his his name will keep coming up and you know for future generations
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but so Tao was working on one of these problems called the Erdos discrepancy and he published a
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blog post on like uh about that problem about that problem and he reached like a dead end and then um
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all of a sudden there was this guy from from Germany that wrote like a comment on his blog post
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saying okay like some of the that so this problem is like a Sudoku like flavor and some of the
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machinery that we're using to solve Sudoku could be used here and that was actually the key to
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solve the Erdos discrepancy problem so the there was a comment on his blog and I think that that
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that for me is an example of like how to do again going back to collaborative science online um and
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the power that it has but Tao is also like pretty public about like some of the struggles and of
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of being a a mathematician like and and even he wrote about some of the unintended consequences
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of having extraordinary ability in a field and he used himself as an example when he was growing up
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he was extremely talented in in mathematics from a young age like Tao was a person he won an
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uh medal in like one of the IMOs at the age I think was a gold medal at the age of 10 or something
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like that and so he mentioned that when he was growing up like and especially in college when he
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was in a class that he enjoyed it didn't it just came very natural for him and he didn't have to
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work hard to just ace the class and when he found that the class was boring like it didn't work and
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he barely passed barely passed even some I think in college he almost failed two classes and and
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he was talking about that and how he brought those studying habits or like uh in existence of studying
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habits when he went to Princeton Princeton for his PhD and in Princeton when he you know started kind
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of um delving into more complex problems and classes he struggled a lot because he didn't have
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that uh those those habits like he wasn't taking notes and he was he wasn't studying hard when he
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when he faced problems and he almost failed out of his his PhD uh he almost failed his PhD exam
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and um it it talks about like having this conversation with with his advisor and the
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advisor pointing out like you're not this is not working you you might have to get out of the
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program and like how that was a kind of a turning point for him and um he was like you know he was
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um and like it was super important in his career so I think Tao is also like this figure that apart
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from being just an exceptional mathematician he's also pretty open about you know what what it takes
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to to to be a mathematician and some of the struggles of this type of careers and and I think
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it's that's super important in many ways he's a contributor to open science and open humanity
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so he's being an open human true by communicating uh Scott Aaronson is another in computer science
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world who's a very different style very different style but there's something about a blog that
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is authentic and real and just gives us a window into the into the mind and soul of of of these
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brilliant folks so it's it's definitely a gift let me ask you about Fermat's library on twitter
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which uh I mean I don't know how to describe it people should definitely just follow Fermat's
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library on twitter I keep following and unfollowing from his library because because uh it's so
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it it gives when I follow it um leads me on down rabbit holes often that um that um that are very
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fruitful but but anyway so the the posts you do with the on twitter are just these beautiful
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are things that reveal some beautiful aspect of mathematics um is there um is there something you
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could say about the approach there yeah and um maybe maybe broadly what you find beautiful about
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mathematics and then more specifically how you convert that into a rigorous process of revealing
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that in tweet form that's a good point I think there's something about math that you know a lot
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you know a lot of the mathematical content and you know papers or like little proofs um you know
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has in a way sort of an infinite half life what I mean by that is that if you look at like Euclid's
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elements it's as valid today as it was when it was created like 2000 years ago and that's not true
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for a lot of other scientific fields um and so in regards to twitter I think there's also a very
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it's a very under under explored platform from a learning perspective I think if you look at
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content on twitter it's very easy to consume it's very easy to read um and especially when you're
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trying to explain something you know we humans get a dopamine hit if we learn something new
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and that's a very very powerful feeling and that's why you know people go to classes when
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you have a really good professor you know it's looking for those dopamine hits and
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and and that's something that we try to explore when we're producing content on twitter imagine
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if we could if you would on a line to a restaurant you could go go to your phone to learn something
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new instead of social going to a you know social network and to just and so and I think it's very
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hard to to sometimes to kind of provide that feeling because you need to sometimes digest
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content and and put it um in a way you know that it feeds 280 characters um and and it requires a
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lot of sometimes time to do that uh even though it's easy to consume it's hard to make but once
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you are able to to provide that eureka moment to people like that's very powerful they get that
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dopamine hit and like you create this feedback cycle and people come back for for more and in
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twitter compared to like you know an online course for a book you have a zero percent dropout so
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people will read the content the content so that it's it's like it's part of the creators like the
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person that is creating the content if you're able to actually get that feedback cycle it's
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super super powerful yeah but some of the stuff is like like how the heck do you find that and
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and i don't know why it's so appealing it uh like uh this is from uh what is it
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a couple days ago i'll just read out the number 23456789 is the largest prime number with
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consecutive increasing digits i mean that is so cool that's like some weird like glimpse
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into some deep universal truth even though it's just a number i mean that's like so arbitrary
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like why why is it so pleasant that that's a thing but it is in some way it's almost like
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it is a little glimpse at some much bigger like um and and i think like especially if we're talking
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about science there's something unique about you go and with a lot of the tweets you go sometimes
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from a state of not knowing something to knowing something and that is very particular to science
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math physics and that again is extra extremely addictive and that's that's how i i i i feel about
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that and um that's why i think people engage so much with with our tweets and go into rabbit holes
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and then they you know we start with prime numbers and all of a sudden you are spending hours reading
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number theory things and you go into wikipedia and you lose a lot of time there but uh well the
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variety is really interesting too there's human things there's uh there's physics things there's
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like numeric things like i just mentioned but there's also more rigorous mathematical things
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there's stuff that's tied to the history of math and the proofs and there's visual there's
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animations uh there are looping animations that are incredible that reveal something
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there's uh andrew wiles on being smart this is just me now like ignoring you guys is just going
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through yeah we're a bit like math drug dealers we're just trying to get you hooked we're trying
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to give you that hit and trying to get you hooked yes some people are brighter than others but i
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really believe that most people can really get to to quite a good level of mathematics if they're
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prepared to deal with these psychological issues of how to handle the situation of being stuck
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yeah there's some truth to that that's truth i feel that's like really it's some truth in terms
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of research and also about startups you're stuck a lot of the time before you you get to a
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breakthrough and and it's difficult to endure that process of like being stuck and because you're not
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trained to to be in that position um i feel uh yeah that's yeah most people are broken by the
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stuckness or like their district like uh i i've i've been very cognizant of the fact that
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more and more social media becomes a thing like distractions become a thing that that moment of
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being stuck is uh your mind wants to to go do stuff that's unrelated to being stuck and you
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should be stuck i'm referring to small stucknesses like you're like trying to design something and
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it's a dead end basically little dead ends dead ends of programming dead ends and trying to think
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through something and then your mind wants to like like like uh this is the problem this like
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work life balance culture is like take a break like as if taking a break will solve everything
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sometimes it solves quite a bit but like sometimes you need to sit in the stuckness and suffer a
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little bit and then take a break but you you definitely need to be this and like most people
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quit from that psychological battle being stuck so success is people who who who uh persevere
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through that yeah yeah and and in the creative process that's also true i was the other day i
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was i think was reading about is this um what is his name ed sheeran like the musician yeah was
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talking a little bit about the creative process and using was using this analogy of a faucet like
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where you when you turn on a faucet is as like the dirty water coming out in the beginning and you
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just have to you know keep trusting that at some point your clean clean clear water will come out
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but you have to endure that process like in the beginning it's going to be dirty water and and and
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just you know embrace that yeah actually this uh the entirety of my youtube channel and this
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podcast have been following that philosophy of dirty water like i've been you know i do believe
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that like you have to get all the crap out of your system first and uh sometimes it it's it's all
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sometimes it's all crappy work i tend to be very self critical but i do think that quantity leads
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to quality for some people it does for my the way my mind works is like just keep putting stuff out
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there keep creating and uh the quality will come as opposed to sitting there waiting not doing
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anything until the thing seems perfect because the perfect may never come but just just on like on
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on on our twitter like profile i really and sometimes when you look on some of those tweets
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they might seem like pretty kind of um you know why is this interesting it's like so raw uh like
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it's just a number but i really believe that especially with math or physics it is possible
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to get everyone to love math or physics even if you think you hate it it's it's not a function of
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the student or the person that is on the other side i think is just purely a function of like
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how you explain uh hidden beauty that they hadn't realized before it's not easy but i think it's
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like a lot of the times it's on like on the creator's side to to be able to like show that
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beauty to the other person i think some of that is native to to humans we just have that curiosity
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and you look at small toddlers and babies and like them trying to figure things out and there's
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just something that is born with us that we we we want for that understanding of the world
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we want for that understanding we want to figure out the world around us and and so yeah it shouldn't
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be like uh whether or not people are going are going to to enjoy it like i i i also really
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believe that everybody has that capacity to fall in love with with math and physics you mentioned
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startup what do you think it takes to build a successful startup yeah that it's what what
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luis was saying that um you need to in to be able to endure being stuck and and i think the best way
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to put it is that startups don't have a linear reward function right you oftentimes don't get
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rewarded for effort and and and most of our lives we go through these processes that do
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give you those small rewards for effort right in school you study hard generally you'll get a good
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grade and then you good you get like good grades ever or you get grades every semester and so you're
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slowly getting rewarded and pushed in the right direction for for startups and startups are not
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the only thing that is like this but for startups it's you know you can put in a ton of effort into
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something that and then get no reward for it right it's it's like like sisyphus boulder where you're
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pushing that boulder up the mountain and and and you get to the top and then it just rolls all the
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way back down and and so that's something that i think a lot of people are not equipped to deal
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with and can be incredibly demoralizing especially if that happens more than than a few times and so
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but i think it's absolutely essential to to power through it because um by the nature of startups
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it's oftentimes you know you're dealing with with with non obvious ideas and things that
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there might be contrarian and so you're gonna you're gonna run into into that a lot you're
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gonna do things that are not gonna work out and you need to be prepared to deal with that but
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but if we're not coming out of college you're you're just not equipped i'm not sure if there's
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a way to train people to deal with those nonlinear reward functions but it's definitely i think one
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of the most difficult things to you know about doing a startup and also happens in research
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sometimes you know we're talking about the default state is being stuck you just you know you don't
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like you try things you get zero results you close doors you constantly closing doors until you you
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know find something and um yeah that is a big thing what about sort of this point when you're
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stuck there's a kind of decision whether if you have a vision to persist through with this direction
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that you've been going along or what a lot of startups do or businesses is pivot how do you
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decide whether like to give up on a particular flavor of the way you've imagined the design
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and to like adjust it or completely like alter it i think that's a core question for startups that
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i've asked myself exactly and like i i've never been able to come up with a great framework to
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make those decisions um i think that's really at the core of uh yeah out of a lot of the the
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toughest questions that that people that's that started a company you have to deal with um i think
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maybe the best framework that i i have was able to figure out like when you run out of ideas
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you just you know you're exploring something is not working you try it in a different angle uh
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you know we try a different business model when you run out of ideas like you don't have any more
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cards just switch and yeah it's not perfect because you also it's you have a lot of stories
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of startups is like people kept pushing and then you know that paid off and then you have uh
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philosophies is like fail fast and pivot fast um so it's you know it's hard to you know balance
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these two worlds and understand what is the best framework and i mean if you look at for miles
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library you're maybe you can correct me but it feels like you're an operating in a space
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where there's a lot of things that are broken and or could be significantly improved so it
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feels like there's a lot of possibilities for pivoting or like how do you revolutionize science
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how do you revolutionize the aggregation the the annotation the commenting the community around
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information of knowledge structured knowledge i mean that's kind of what like stack overflow
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and stack exchange has struggled with to come up with a solution and they've come up i think with
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an interesting set of solutions that are also i think flawed in some ways but they're much much
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better than the alternatives but there's a lot of other possibilities if we just look at papers as
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we talked about there's so many possible revolutions and they're a lot of money to be
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potentially made those revolutions plus coupled with that the benefit to humanity and so like
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you're sitting there like i don't know how many people are legitimately from a business perspective
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playing with these ideas it feels like there's a lot of ideas here true it varies are you right
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now grinding in a particular direction like is there a video like a five year vision that you're
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thinking in your mind for us it's more like a 20 year vision in the sense that uh we we've
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consciously tried to make the decision of so we so we run formats as it's a side project and it's
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separate in the sense like it's not what we're working on full time and uh but our thesis there
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is that we actually think that it's that's a good thing at least for for this stage of formats
link |
library um and also because some of these projects you just if you're coming from a start from a
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startup framework you probably try to try to fit every single idea into something that can change
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the world within three to five years and there's just some problems that take longer than that
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right and so you know we're talking about archive and i'm very doubtful that you could grow like
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archive into what it is today like within two or three years no matter how much money you throw at
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it there's just some things that can take longer but you need to be able to power through the the
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that the time that it takes um but if you look at it as okay this is a company this is a startup
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we have to grow fast we have to raise money then uh then sometimes you might forego those ideas
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because of that um because they don't very well fit into the the typical startup framework and
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so for us formats it's something that we're okay with growing with having it grow slowly and and
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maybe taking many years and and and that's why we think it's it's not a bad thing that it is a side
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project because it makes it much more um acceptable in a way and that to to be able to be okay with
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that that said i think what happens is if you keep pushing new little features new little ideas
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i feel like there's like certain ideas will just become viral like and then you just won't be able
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to help yourself but it'll revolutionize things it feels like there needs to be not needs to be
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but there's um opportunity for viral ideas to change science absolutely and maybe we don't know
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what those are yet it might be a very small kind of thing maybe you don't even know if should this
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be a for profit company doing these it's the wikipedia question yeah um is that there are a lot
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of questions like really fundamental questions about this space um that we've we've talked about
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i mean you take wikipedia and you try to run it as a startup and by now we'd have a paywall you'd be
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paying 9.99 a month to to read more than 20 articles i mean that's that's one view yeah the
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other the ad driven model so they rejected the ad driven model i don't know if we could i mean this
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is a difficult question you know if archive was supported by ads i don't know if that's bad for
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archive if for mass library was supported by ads i don't know i don't i'm not it's not trivial to
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me i'm unlike i think a lot of people uh i'm not against advertisements i think ads when done
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well are really good i think the problem with facebook and all the social networks are the way
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the lack of transparency around the way they use data and uh the lack of control the users have
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over their data not the fact that data is being collected and used to sell advertisements it's a
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lack of transparency lack of control if you if you do a good job with that i feel like it's really
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nice way to make stuff free yeah it's like stack overflow right i mean i think they've done a okay
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a good job with that uh even though as we said like they're capturing very little of the value
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that they're putting out there right but but it makes it a sustainable company and and they're
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providing a lot of it's a fantastic and very productive community let me ask a a ridiculous
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tangent of a question please you wrote a paper on uh on game of thrones battle of winterfell just
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as a side little i i'm sorry i noticed i'm sure you've done a lot of ridiculous stuff like this i
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just noticed that particular one by ridiculous i mean ridiculously awesome can you describe the uh
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the approach in this work which i believe is a legitimate publication so going back to the
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original like uh when we were talking about the backstory of of papers and the importance of that
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you know there was a when the last season of the the show was airing uh this was a during a company
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lunch we there was in in the last season there's the there's a really big battle against the the
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forces of evil and the you know the forces of good and it's called the battle of winterfell
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and um in this battle there are like these two armies and there's a very particular thing that
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they have to take into account is that in the army of dead like if someone dies in the army of
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the living uh like that person is gonna you know be a reborn as a soldier in the army of the dead
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yes and so that was a an important thing to take into account and the initial conditions as you
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specify it's about a hundred thousand on each side exactly so i was able i was able to like based on
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some images or like on previous episodes to figure out what was the size of the armies and so what i
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want what we wanted to what we were theorizing was like how many soldiers does like a soldier
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on the army of the living has to kill in order for them to be able to destroy the army of the dead
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without like losing because every time one of the good soldiers dies gonna turn into like the other
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side and so it's so i we we were theorizing that and and i wrote wrote a couple of differential
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equations and i was able to figure out that based on the size of the armies i think i think was the
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ratio had to be like 1.7 so it had to kill like 1.7 soldiers like the army of the dead in order
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for them to win the battle well yeah that's that's science it is it's it's the most powerful
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and this is also somehow a pitch for uh like a hiring pitch in a sense like this is the kind of
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yeah important science you do exactly well turned out to be you know as as for people that have
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watched these shows is like they know that every time you try to predict something that is going
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to happen it's going to you're going to fail miserably and that's what happened so it was not
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not at all important for the show but yeah we ended up like putting that out and there was a
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lot of people that share that i think was some like elements of the of the show the cast of the
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show that actually retweeted that and shared that that first one was fun i would love if this kind
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of calculation happened uh like during the making of the show or you know i love it like in um
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for example i i now know uh alex garland the director of ex machina and i love it he doesn't
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seem to be some not many people seem to do this but i love it when directors and people who wrote
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the story really think through the technical details like whether it's knowing like how things
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even if it's science fiction if you were to try to do this how would you do this uh like
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stephen wolfram and his son were um were collaborating with the movie arrival in
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designing the alien language how you communicate with aliens like how would you really have
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uh a math based language that uh that could span the alien and uh being and the human being so i
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i love it when they have that kind of rigor the martian was also big on that like the book and
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the movie was all about like can we actually you know is this plausible can this happen it was all
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about that and that can really bring you in like the sometimes those small details uh i mean the
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i mean the the guy that wrote the martian book is another book uh that is also filled with those
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like things that when you realize that okay these are grounded in in science can just really bring
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you in yeah like the like the he has a book about a colony on the colony on the moon and he goes
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about like all the details that would you know be required about setting up a colony in the moon
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and like things that he wouldn't think about like the the fact that um they would you know it's
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hard to bring like uh air to the moon say so they wouldn't like how do you make that breathable that
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environment breathable you need to bring oxygen but like you you you probably wouldn't be bring
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nitrogen so what you do is like instead of having a an atmosphere that is 100 oxygen you like
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decrease the pressure so that you have the same ratio of oxygen on earth but like lowering the
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pressure here and so like things like water boils at the lower temperature so people would would
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have coffee and the coffee would be colder like there was a problem in this uh environment in
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the moon so like and these are like small things in the book but i studied physics so like when i
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read these like that throws me into like uh tangents and i start researching that and it's
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like i really like to read books and watch movies when they go to that level of detail uh about
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science yeah i think interstellar was one where they also consulted heavily with with a number of
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yeah i think even resulted in a couple of papers a couple of papers about like the black hole
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um visualizations and um yeah but there isn't and there's even more examples of interesting science
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around like these fantasy we were reading at some point like these guys that were trying to figure
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out if if the tolkien's middle earth if it was uh round if it was like a sphere yeah it's like a
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flat based on the map based on the map and some of the references in the in the books and so uh
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yeah we actually i think we tweeted about that you can yeah we did based on the distance between the
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cities you can actually prove that that could be like a map of a sphere or like a spheroid
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and and you can actually calculate the radius of that planet uh that's fascinating i mean yeah
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that's fascinating but there's something about like calculating the number like exactly the
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calculation you did for the battle winterfell is um something fascinating about that because
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that's not like being that's very mathematical versus like grounded in physics and that's really
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interesting i mean that's like injecting mathematics into fantasy there's there's something um i see
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what you're saying about that and and that for me that's why i think it's also when you look at
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things like like Fermat's last theorem like problems that are very kind of self contained
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and simple to study i think like that's the same with that paper it's very easy to understand the
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boundaries of the problem you know um and and that for me that's why those and that's why math is so
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appealing and those like problems are also so appealing to the general public it's not that
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they look simple or that people think that they are easy to like solve but i feel that a lot of
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the times they are almost intellectually democratic because everyone understands the starting point
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you know you look at Fermat's last theorem everyone understands like is this is the the
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universe of the problem and the same maybe with that paper everyone understands okay these are
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the starting conditions and um and and yeah that the fact that it becomes intellectually democratic
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and i think that's a huge motivation for people and that's why so so many people gravitate towards
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these like Riemann hypotheses or Fermat's last theorem or that simple paper which is like just
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one page it was very simple and i just talked to somebody i don't know if you know who he is
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Jocko Willink who was uh this person who among many things loves military tactics so he would
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probably either publish a follow on paper maybe you guys should collaborate but he would see the
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fundamental the basic assumptions that you started that paper with is flawed because you know there's
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like dragons too right there's like like you have to integrate tactics because not it's not it's not
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a homogeneous system it's not i don't take into account the dragons and like and he would say
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tactics fundamentally change the dynamics of the system and so like that's what happened
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so uh yeah so at least from a scientific perspective he was right but he never published
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so there you go uh let me ask the most important question you guys are from
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um portugal both yeah portugal uh so who is the greatest soccer player footballer of all time
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yeah i think we're a little bit biased on this topic but i i mean i don't know i i have i have
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a huge i have a you know tremendous respect for for what um here we go this is the political
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you can convince you i i i mean i have tremendous respect for what ronaldo has achieved in his
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career and and i think soccer is one of those sports where i think you can get to maybe be one
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of the best players in the world we if you just have like natural talent and even if you don't put
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a lot of hard work and discipline into soccer you can be one of the best players in the world
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and i think ronaldo is kind of like of course he's naturally talented but he also ronaldo should say
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the the football from exactly from portugal um and and not uh not the brazilian in this case
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and so um and ronaldo put like came from nothing he is known from being probably one of the hardest
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working athletes in the game and and i see that sometimes a lot of these discussions about the
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best player a lot of people tend to gravitate towards like um you know this person is naturally
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talented and the other person has to work hard and so and so as if it was bad if he had to work
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hard to to be good at something and i think that you know the the i think so many people fall into
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that trap and the reason why so many people fall into that trap is because if you're saying that
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someone is good and achieved a lot of success by working hard as opposed to achieving success
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because he has some sort of god given natural talent that you can't explain why the person was
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born with that what does it tell you about you it tells you that maybe if you work hard on a lot of
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fields you could have could accomplish a lot of great things and i think that's hard to digest
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for a lot of people and and in that way ronaldo's inspiring that i think so you find hard work
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inspiring but he's he's way too good looking that's that's the yeah i don't like him no i
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like the part of the hard work and like of him being like one of the hardest working athletes
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in in soccer so he is to you the greatest of all time is he up there is he would be number
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okay do you agree with this thing well i definitely disagree i mean i i like him very much he works
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hard i admire i admire you know um what like he's incredible uh goal scorer right um but i
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i so first of all leo messi and there was some confusion because i've kept saying maradona is
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my favorite player but i i think i think leo has surpassed them so uh um it's messy then maradona
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then pelé for me but the the reason is is um there's certain aesthetic definitions of beauty
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that i admire whether it came by hard work or through god given talent or through anything and
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it doesn't it doesn't really matter to me there's certain aesthetic like genius when i when i see it
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to me and uh especially it doesn't have to be consistent it is in the case of messi in case
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in the ronaldo but just even moments of genius which is where maradona really shines it i even
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if that doesn't translate into like results and goals being scored right right and that's the
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challenge like they did that uh because that's where people that tell me that leo messi's never
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even on strong teams have led his the national team people as far as the world cup right as
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really important and to me no it's the moment like winning to me was never important what's
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more important is the moments of genius and but you're you're talking to the human story and
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yeah christiano ronaldo definitely has a beautiful human story yeah and i think you can't
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i for me it's hard to decouple those two um i don't i don't just look at you know the the
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list of achievements but i like how he got there and how he keeps pushing the boundaries at like
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almost 40 yeah and how that sets up an example like maybe 10 years ago i wouldn't have ever imagined
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that like one of the top players in the world could be a top player at like 37 or but so and
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there's an interesting tent the human story is really important but like if you look at ronaldo
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he's like he's somebody like kids could aspire to be but at the same time i also like maradona who
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like is a is a tragic figure in many ways is like the you know the drugs the the temper
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all of those things that's beautiful too like i don't necessarily think to me first the flaws
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are beautiful too in in athletes i don't think you need to be perfect i agree uh from a personality
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perspective those flaws are also beautiful so but yeah there is something about hard work and
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uh there's also something about the being an underdog and being able to carry a team
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uh that's that's an argument for maradona i don't know if you can make that argument for
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messi and ronaldo either because they've all played on superstar teams for most of their lives
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um so i don't know how it you know it's it's difficult to know how they would do um when they
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had to work like did what maradona had to do to carry a team on his shoulders true and pelle did
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as well and depending on the the context yeah maybe you could argue that with the portuguese
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national team but then we have a good team uh yeah but maybe what maradona did with you know
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lap naples and and a couple other teams it's it's incredible it speaks to the beauty of the game that
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you know we're talking about all these different players that have or especially you know if you're
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if you're comparing messi and ronaldo that have such different you know styles of play and also
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even their bodies are so different and and and but these two very different players can be at the top
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of the game and that's not that's the there are not a lot of other sports where you where you have
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that you know like you have kind of a mental image of a basketball player and like the the top
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basketball players kind of fit that mental image and they look a certain way and um but for soccer
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there's some there's the it's it's not so much like that and and that's i think that's that's
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beautiful uh but that really adds something to the sport well do you play soccer yourself
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have you played that in your your life what do you find beautiful about the game yeah i mean it's one
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of the i'd say it's the biggest sport in portugal and so growing up we played a lot did you see the
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paper from deep mind i didn't look at it where they're like uh doing some uh analysis on soccer
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strategy interesting i i saved that paper uh i haven't read it yet um it's actually i i when i
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was in college i actually did some research on on applying um machine learning and statistics in
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sports and in our case in our case we're doing it for basketball um but uh what they're effectively
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trying to do was have you ever watched moneyball like so they're trying to do something similar
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right taking that in this case basketball taking a statistical approach to to to basketball um
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the interesting thing there is that baseball is much more about having these discrete events that
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happen kind of in similar conditions and so it's easier to take a statistical approach to it whereas
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basketball it's a much more dynamic game uh it's harder to measure um it's hard to to replicate
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these conditions and so you you have to think about it in a slightly different way and so we
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were doing work on that and working like with the celtics to analyze the the data that they had like
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they had these cameras in the in the arena they were tracking the players and so you so they had
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a ton of data but they didn't really know what to do with it and so we we were doing work on that
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and and and soccer is maybe even a step further it's it's right it's a game where you don't have
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as many in basketball you have a lot of field goals and so you can measure success uh soccer
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it's it's right it's more of a process almost where it's like you have a goal like or two in
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in a game in terms of metrics i wonder if there's a way and i've actually have thought about this
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in the past never coming up with any good solution if there's a way to definitively say whether it's
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messy or not they're the greatest of all time like like honestly sort of measure interesting
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like convert the game of soccer into metrics like you said baseball but like those moments
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of genius like past like um you know if it's just about goals or passes that led to goals
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yeah that feels like it doesn't capture the genius of the play yeah they'll be like you know like
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like you kind of do you have more metrics for instance in chess right and you can try to
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understand how hard of a move that was you know there's like bobby fisher has this move that like
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that it's i think it's called the move of the century where uh you have to go so deep into the
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tree to understand that that was the right move and you can quantify how hard it was uh so it'd
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be interesting to try to think of those type of metrics but say yeah for soccer and computer
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vision unlocks some of that for us that's that's one possibility i have a cool idea a computer
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vision product legs that you could build for soccer let's go i'm taking notes if you could
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detect the ball and like imagine that um it seems like totally doable right now but like if you could
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detect when the ball enters one of the goals and like just had like um you know a crowd cheering
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for you when you're playing soccer with your friends every time you score a goal or you had
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like the the champions league song going on yeah and like having that like you go play soccer with
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your friends just turn that on and there's like a computer vision like program analyzing the ball
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detects the ball every time there's a goal like if you miss like there's a you know the fans are
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reacting to that and then it should be pretty simple by now it's like i think there's an
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opportunity yeah just throwing that i'm gonna go all out but by the way i did uh i've never
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released i was thinking of just putting on github but i did write exactly that which is the trackers
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for the players uh for the for the bodies of the player is this is the hard part actually
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uh the detection of player bodies and the ball is not hard what's hard is very like robust tracking
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through time of each of those so like so i wrote a track of this pretty damn good this is this is
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that is that open source you open so i know i've never released it because interesting because i
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felt like i need to i would this is the perfection thing because i knew it was going to be like
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it's gonna pull me in and and it wasn't really that done and so i've never actually been part
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of a github project where it's like really active development and i didn't want to make it i knew
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there's a nonzero probability that it will become my life for like a half a year that uh could just
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how much i love soccer and all those kinds of things and and ultimately it will be all for just
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the the joy of analyzing the game which i'm all for i remember you also like one of in one of the
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episodes you mentioned that you did also a lot of high tracking analysis on like joe rogan's that
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was the that was the research side of my life interesting yeah and you have that library right
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you you kind of downloaded all the episodes yep allegedly i and of course i didn't if you're a
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lawyer i'm listening to this no it is yeah i i was listening to the episode where you mentioned
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that and i was actually there was something that i and i might ask you for for access to that to
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like allegedly that library uh but i was doing some not not regarding like eye tracking but i was
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playing around with um analyzing the distribution of silences on uh one of the joe rogan episodes
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so like i did that for the elon uh conversation where it's like you just take all the silences
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like after joe asked the question and elon responded and you plot that distribution and
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like and see how how how that looks like yeah i think there's a huge opportunity especially
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long form podcasts to do that kind of analysis bigger than joe exactly but it has to be a fairly
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unedited podcast so that you don't get the silence so one of the benefits i have like doing this
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podcast is like the what we're recording today is there's individual audio being recorded makes it
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so like i have the raw information it's when it's published it's all combined together and individual
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video feeds so even when you're listening which i usually don't i only show one video stream
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i i'll know i can track your blinks and so on um but yeah but ultimately the hope is you don't
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need that raw data because if you don't need the raw data for whatever analysis you're doing
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you can then do a huge number of parts because there's so it's quickly growing now the number
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especially comedians there's uh quite a few comedians with with long form podcasts and
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they have a lot of facial expressions they have a lot of fun and all those kinds of things and
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it's it's prone for analysis and it's there's so many interesting things that that that idea
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actually sparked because i was watching a um a q a by by steve jobs and i think it was at mit and
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then like people's like he did a talk there and then the q a started and people starting asking
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questions that i was i was working while listening to it and like someone asked the question and he
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goes like on a 20 second silence before answering the question i like i had to check if the if the
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video hadn't paused or or something and and i was thinking about like like if that is a feature of
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a person like how long on average you take to respond to a question and if it's like oh that's
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that has to do with the like how thoughtful you are and if that changes over time oh but it also
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could be this really fascinating metric because it also could be it's certainly a feature of a
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person but it's also a function of the question like if you normalize to the person you can
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probably infer a bunch of stuff about the question so it's a nice flag like it's a really strong
link |
signal the length of that silence but relative to the usual silence they have so one the silence is
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a measure of how thoughtful they are and two the particular silence is a measure how thoughtful
link |
the question was thoughtful the question was it's really interesting i mean yeah yeah i just
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analyzed elon's uh episode but i think there's like room for exploration there i feel like the
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average they could do for comedians would be like i mean the time would be so small because you're
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trained to like i would i would think you're reacting to hecklers you're reacting to all
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sorts of things you have to be like so quick maybe right yeah but some of the greatest comedians are
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very good at sitting in the silence i mean there there's louis ck they play with that because you
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have a rhythm and like um dave chappelle a comedian who did a joe show recently he has uh
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especially when he's just having a conversation he does long pauses it's kind of cool because it
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uh it it's one of the ways to have people hang in your word is to play with the pauses to play
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with the silences and the emphasis and like mid sentence there's a bunch of different things that
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uh it'd be interesting to really really analyze but still soccer to me is uh that that one's
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fascinating just i just want a conclusive definitive statement about because like there's so
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many soccer highlights of both messi and ronaldo i just feel like the raw data is there
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um because you don't have that with pelé and mardona just yeah true but here's a huge amount
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of high dev data then the the annoying the difficult thing and this is really hard for
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tracking and this is actually where i kind of gave up because i didn't really give much effort
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but i gave up to the the way that highlights or usually football match filmed is they switch
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to camera so they'll they'll do a different switch perspective so you have to it's a really
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interesting computer vision problem when the perspective is switched you still have a lot of
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overlap about the players but the perspective is sufficiently different that you have to like
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recompute everything so i there there's two ways to solve this so one is doing it the full way where
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you're constantly doing the slam problem you you're doing a 3d reconstruction the whole time
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and projecting into that 3d world but you could also there could be some hacks that i wonder like
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some trick where you can hop like when the perspective shifts do a high probability
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from one object to another but i i thought especially in exciting moments when when when
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you're passing players like you're doing a single ball dribble across players and you switch
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perspective which is when they often do when you're making a run on goal if you switch your
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perspective it's it feels like that's going to be really tricky to get right uh that's
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automatically but in that case for instance i feel like if somebody released that data set
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or it's like you just have all like these this data set a massive data set of all these games
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from from say ronaldo and messy like and just you just add that in like whatever csv format and some
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some publicly available data set like that i feel like people would just there there would be so
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many cool things that you could do with it and you just set it free and then like the world would
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like do its thing and then like interesting things would come out of it by the way i have this data
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set so the two the two things i've did of this scale uh is soccer so his body pose and ball
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tracking for soccer and then um i try it's pupil tracking and blink tracking for it was joe rogan
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and a few other podcasts that i did so those are the two data sets i have did you analyze any of
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your podcasts no i i think i really started doing this podcast after after doing that work and it's
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difficult to maybe i'd be afraid of what i find i'm already annoyed with my own voice and video
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like editing it uh but perhaps that's the honest thing to do because uh one useful thing i about
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doing computer vision about myself is like i know what i was thinking at the time so you can start
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to like connect the particular the behavioral peculiarities of like the way you blink the way
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you squint the way you close your eyes like talking about details there's it's like for example i just
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closed my eyes is that a blink or no like figuring that out in terms of timing in terms of the link
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dynamics it's tricky it's very doable i i think there's universal laws about what is a blink and
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what is a closed eye and all those things plus makeup and eyelashes i actually um have annoyingly
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long eyelashes so i remember when i was doing a lot of this work i i would cut off my eyelashes
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which when like especially it was funny like female colleagues were like what the fuck are
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you doing like those no keep the eyelashes but because it got in the way made the computer
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vision a lot more difficult but super interesting topics yeah but speaking about the one uh still
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on the topic of the data sets for sports there's one um one paper that and i actually annotated
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on format and and uh it's it was published in 90s 90s i believe 90s or 80s i forget but it would
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they you the researcher was effectively looking at the hot end phenomena in basketball right so
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whether like the fact that you just made a field goal um if you know if on your next attempt if
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you're more likely to make it or not um and it was super interesting because they i mean he polled
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like i think 100 undergrads and i think from stanford and cornell and asking people like do
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you you think that's that you have a higher likelihood of making your free throw if you just
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just made one and i think it's like 68 68 percent said yes they believe that and then he looked
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at the data and this was back in as i said like a few decades ago and so i think he had the data
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set of about uh he looked at it specifically for free throws and he had a data set of about 5,000
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free throws and um and effectively what he found was that specifically in the case of free throws
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he didn't for the aggregate data he didn't find um that he couldn't really spot that correlation
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that hot end correlation so if you made the first one you weren't more likely to to make the second
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one what he did find was that they were just better at the second one because you just got
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like maybe a tiny practice and you just attempted once and then and then you're going to be better
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at the next one and then i i then i went and there's a data set on kaggle that has like 600,000
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free throws and i reran the the same computations and and and confirmed like you can see a very
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clear pattern that they're just better at their second free throw um that's interesting because
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i think there's similarly that kind of analysis is so awesome because i think with tennis they
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have like uh like a fault like when you serve they have analysis of like are you most likely
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to miss the second serve if you missed the first obviously um yeah i think that's the case so that
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integrates that's so cool when psychology is converted into metrics in that way and in sports
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sports it's especially cool because it's such a constrained system that you can really study
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human psychology because it's repeated it's constrained so many things are controlled which
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is something you rarely have in in the wild psychological experiments so it's cool uh plus
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everyone loves it like sports is really cool to analyze people actually care about the results
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yeah um i still think well like i uh i and i will definitely publish uh this work on messy
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versus ronaldo and i'd love to read it objective fully objective to peer review
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um yeah this is very true this is not past period
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um let me ask sort of um an advice question to uh to young folks you've explored a lot of
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fascinating ideas in your life you built a startup worked on physics worked on computer science
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what advice would you give to young people today in high school maybe early college about life
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about career about science and mathematics i remember like uh i read like i remember reading
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that um punk area was once asked by a um a french journal about his advice for young people and what
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was his teaching philosophy and he said that like one of the most important things that parents
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should teach their kids is how to be enthusiastic um in regards to like the mysteries of the world
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and that he said like striking that balance was actually one of the most important things between
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like in education you know you want to have your kids be enthusiastic about the mysteries of the
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world but you also don't want to traumatize them like if you really force them into something
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and i think like especially if you're young i think you should be curious and i think you should
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explore that curiosity to the fullest to the point where you even become almost as an expert
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on that topic and now and you might start with something that it's small like you might start
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with you know you're interested in numbers and how to factor numbers into primes and then all of a
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sudden you go and and you're like lost in number theory and you discover cryptography and then all
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of a sudden you're buying bitcoin and i and i think you should do this um you should really try
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to fulfill this curiosity and you should live in a society that allows you to fulfill this curiosity
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which is also important and i think you should do this not to get to some sort of status or fame or
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money but i think this is the way this iterative process i think this is the way to find happiness
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and and i think this is also allows you to find the meaning for your life i think it's all about
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like being curious and being able to fulfill that curiosity and that path to fulfilling that your
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curiosity yeah the the start small let the fire build this kind of interesting way to think about
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it and you never know where you're going to end up it's it's like for us is just a really good
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example we started like by doing this as an internal like thing that we did in the company
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and then we started putting out there and now a lot of people follow it and know about it and so
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and you still don't know where from our library is going to end up actually true exactly so um
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yeah i think that would be my piece of advice with very limited experience of course but yeah yeah i
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agree i agree uh i mean is there something in from particular joao from the computer science
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versus physics perspective uh do do you regret not doing physics do you regret not doing computer
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science which one is the the wiser the better human being this is messy versus ronaldo um
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those are very i i don't know if you would agree but they're kind of different disciplines true
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yeah very much so um i actually i actually uh i was i had that question in my mind i i took
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physics classes as an undergrad or like besides what i had to take and um it's definitely something
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that i considered at some point um and and that i i i do feel like later in life that might be
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something that i'm not sure if regret is is the right word but it's it's kind of something that
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i can imagine in an alternative universe what would have happened if i if i got into physics
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um i try to think that like well depends on what your path ends up being but that it's it's not
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super important right like exactly what you decide to major on like i think there's there's um
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um i think tim urban like the blogger had a good visualization of this where it's like
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you know like he he he has a picture where you have all sorts of paths that you could pursue in
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your life and then maybe you're in the middle of it and so there's maybe some paths that are not
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accessible to you but like the the tree that is still in front of you gives you a lot of optionality
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and so um there's two lessons to learn from that like we have a huge number of options now
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and probably you're just one to reflect like to try to uh derive wisdom from the one little path
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you've taken so far may be flawed because there's all these other paths you could have taken yeah so
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it's like uh so one it's inspiring that you can take any path now and two it's like you you the
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path you've taken so far is just one of many possible ones but it does seem that like physics
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and computer science both open a lot of doors and a lot of different doors it's very interesting it
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is i i like in this case like and especially in in our case because i could see the difference i
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studied i i went to college in europe and joel went to college here in the u.s so i could see
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the difference and like in the european system is um more rigid in the sense that when you decide
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to study physics you don't have a lot especially in the early years you don't have a lot of um
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you can't choose to take like a class from like computer science course or something like that
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don't have a lot of freedom to explore in that sense in university as opposed to here in the
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u.s where you have more freedom and i think um i think that's important i think that's what
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constitutes you know a good kind of educational system is one that gravitates towards the interests
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of a student as as you progress but i think in order for you to do that you need to explore
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different areas and i i felt like if i had a chance to take say more computer science class
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when i was in college i would have probably have taken those classes but um yeah but i ended up
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like focusing maybe too like too much in physics and uh i think here at least my perception is
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that you can explore more more fields but there is a kind of it's funny but physics can be difficult
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so i don't see too many computer science people than exploring into physics it's only like the one
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the not the one but one of the beneficial things of physics it feels like it uh what was it rutherford
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that said like like basically that physics is the hard thing and everything is easy uh so like
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there's a certain sense once you've figured out some basic like physics that it's not that you
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need the tools of physics to understand the other disciplines it's that you're empowered by having
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done difficult shit i mean the ultimate i think is probably mathematics there yeah true uh so maybe
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just doing difficult things and proving to yourself that you can do difficult things whatever those
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are that's net positive i believe net positive yeah and i think like i i before i started company
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i had like i i worked in the financial sector for a bit and like i think having a physics background
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i was i felt i was not afraid of like learning like finance things and i think like when you
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come from those backgrounds you are generally not afraid of stepping into other fields and learning
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about those because um yeah i feel we've learned a lot of difficult things and um yeah that's an
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added benefit i believe this was uh an incredible conversation louise joao we started with uh who
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do we start with fineman ended up with messi and ronaldo so this is like the perfect conversation
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it's really an honor that you guys would waste all this time with me today it was really fun
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thanks for talking so much for having us yeah thank you so much thanks for listening to this
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conversation with louise and joao batala and thank you to skiff simply safe and thank you
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for watching this podcast simply safe indeed net sweet and for sigmatic check them out in the
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description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from richard fineman
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nobody ever figures out what life is all about and it doesn't matter explore the world nearly
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everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough thank you for listening i hope
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to see you next time