A collection of conversations from Airchat
Find Scaling Knowledge on other platforms
Content
(00:00) Intro
(00:58) Amazon Gentrification
(02:01) Freedom
(04:22) Innovation
(05:25) Consensus
(07:00) Numeracy Skills
(08:19) Mastery and Creativity Intersection
(09:20) Fun
(10:41) Curiosity
(13:48) Nassim Taleb and Deutsch
(18:20) Identity and Epistemology
(23:20) Evolution of Truth
(24:06) Naval on organized religion
(26:42) Curiosity
(26:42) Zone of Genius
(29:53) The great Scientists
(33:00) Nature vs. Nurture
(40:09) Outro
Transcript
Intro
This is the second part of the conversations that are exported from air chat. Eric chip is a new social app built by Naval Ravikant and Brian Norgard. This part covers topics may to epistemology knowledge economics politics. Decision-making. Evolution of truth. The great scientists' nature versus nurture and others
The first part of the series covers topics related to product simplicity, smart glasses, air parts, humane. E-bay 10x engineers and others. So if you're interested in that other part, I linked this first episode in description.
You should also be able to find it by searching for scaling knowledge, Airchat.
Note that some of these compensations might feel a bit out of context. So I added the links to the original conversations. To the podcast notes.
So free, free to check out these links. If you're interested in the full discussions. Or go to get air chat.com to sign up for the waitlist.
Amazon gentrification
The next two conversations happened in the freedom and truth group that it created. And they involve Aaron Naval and me. Aaron starts with commenting on my point about local bookstores, potentially being inferior to Amazon.
Aaron: the argument, Mars, for the Amazon thing that I like the best is that you don't blame Amazon. You blame all the people who have chosen to use it. And so it's, they're the bad ones. It's not Amazon that's bad. It's the people who have decided to shop at Amazon and not at the local bookstore.
So are you upset that Amazon has enabled people to voluntarily pick something that they prefer? That's just a completely untenable position.
Naval: Similarly, I think people pass the buck when they blame politicians. Really, you should blame the voters who elected the politicians. If that particular politician wasn't doing that thing, the voters would just replace them with a politician who was so the politician ultimately, in an effective democracy, is a mouthpiece for the voters.
On freedom
I'd love to think and talk more about freedom together. It is a concept that is very intertwined with wealth because in my head, if I have the freedom to travel the world with my supersonic jet, then there is an immense amount of freedom and it is only achievable through wealth. The opposite of freedom is coercion and regulation.
In every case, if you are regulating or coercing someone or something, you're taking away their freedom. Matt Ridley had a great line in his book, how Innovation Works, where he said that innovation is a child of freedom and the parent of prosperity. And if you notice, no matter how hard autocratic and coercive regimes try, they can never manage to innovate.
That's why I don't fear all the Chinese scientists because there's not a free regime. Free unfree regimes can copy free regimes, but they rarely create new knowledge. Or if they do, it's incredibly targeted. In military domains and sort of the kinds of places where certain government programs work. But if you really want to create wealth, if you really want to create prosperity, you need freedom.
You cannot coerce people into creating knowledge for you. It just doesn't work that way. This is also one reason why I'm not an A g I dor because anything that is smart enough to be an AGI will also realize that there are no limitation on resources in the universe. But there is a limitation on knowledge.
And the best way to get knowledge is to trade with the creatures that created it, namely us. And so if we manage to create an agi, The A g I will realize that we can also create other things as universal explainers, so it should want us to create knowledge. And what is the best way for us to create knowledge is to give us freedom.
Because the more free we are, the more we will innovate, the more prosperity there will be, and the more knowledge there will be created that we can then trade to the ai. Freedom and truth go hand in hand. It is only a free person who can seek the truth in nature and free markets. It is only a free person or a person who craze freedom, who can search for the truth inside themselves.
They're very tightly interrelated, and I'm glad you created a room with just this name.
Innovation
Moritz: The following chat happened in a group called tech policy by a Matt Ridley.
Naval: I always liked Alan Kay's definition that technology is a set of things that don't quite work yet. So are we going to stop people from working on and fixing the set of things that don't quite work yet, because that's what it means to stop innovation.
Matt Ridley also put it, well, he said that innovation is a child of freedom and the parent of prosperity. Do we want prosperity? If so, we need innovation. Do we want innovation? Then we need freedom. What is regulation? It's breaks on innovation before it happens. It's breaks on freedom. It's restraints, it's anti rational, it's controls.
Moritz: Or Popper might say it's removing the means of error correction.
Naval: I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the innovation that seems to have happened in the tech industry in the last few years has been in crypto and in ai. These are purely software domains. These are domains of mathematics. These are the hardest things to outlaw and to regulate, although that's not gonna stop people from trying, but because it was the last domain that was unregulated, that's where you got the most innovation.
Consensus
Moritz: the following is a snippet from a discussion. About applying critical rationalism to. Management and startups. In the group called knowledge created by Arjun Kemani.
Naval: One of the related ideas from Deutche that might be useful in running a startup is the concept of going all in on a decision so you can test it properly. In the chapter, in politics, he talks about how I first pass the post system in the United States, is, good in that let's each side come completely and control, implement most of their policies and then see if they're right or wrong.
Whereas in a parliamentary system, everyone can kind of point the finger and say, well, we didn't actually do it right. You know, real communism hasn't been tried yet, and everything was a series of compromises. So I can never be proven wrong and therefore I can keep pushing my disastrous policies.
Now this assumes that. And electorate is well informed and looking rationally at the outcomes of the policies overall, and not just kind of voting in their own immediate self best interests, which might be much more parochial. But overall, this idea of letting a side have their way and then seeing if it works is probably better than sort of mixing everything together.
So if you have different groups fighting over what a product should look like, you should probably implement one vision as far as you practically can. Give it a proper test, see if it works or fails, and then kill that vision if it fails and go to the other vision. But mixing them together doesn't allow you to disambiguate approaches, and it just kind of shares blame and accountability, which then devolves to zero.
Numeracy Skills
Moritz: The following two snippets by Naval, both about skill acquisition.
The first one on the importance of numeracy skills, I believe also in the knowledge group by Anjun. And the second one is about creativity and holding. All the components of new creation in your head
Naval: I think that's enough of the story. One, you need numeracy skills to get through many, many more aspects of life. You don't need to go all the way to Aaron Schwartz, but you need to be numerate to be functional in business and computers and technology, and leverage in kind of all the modern skillsets that matter.
Secondly, there are a lot more less of the world than they're Aaron Schwartz of the world. Aaron Schwartz is much rarer, some Harvard professor going around talking about how important it is that information should be free, is much easier to find and replace than Aaron Swart, who has a technical skill and the vision to execute.
Hackers are so multiplied by the computers at their disposable, at their disposal that frankly, either you're program a computer these days or you're being programmed by a computer these days, and I know where I want my kids to land.
The creativity of holding it all in your head
Naval: Now, this is not about tcs, it's just sort of more about building in general. But if you don't understand code, if you don't understand engineering, if you don't understand manufacturing, if you don't understand constraints, then you're in a worse position to build products. Steve Jobs always say that the hard thing about the iPhone was not imagining what it was.
But also knowing what the technology would like you to build, what the factories would like you to mass produce, what price point to hit, how you could market it, how it appeared to the customer, et cetera, et cetera. So it was taking all of these different factors into account and converging onto one thing.
That was the beauty of it. And you know, frankly, it was done by him and Johnny. Ive in a very small team of designers, but mainly by him. It was much more of a one or two person show. Then I think it would be kind of fair to admit in modern society, you know, but obviously in some ways it's a 10,000 person show.
So it just depends on your perspective. But that, that creativity where you can hold it all in your head and say, yes, we can make this trade off, but we can't make that trade off. That's the hard part. And that just requires a le level of fluency across many disciplines. That I don't think is covered by specialization, division of labor.
For example, in creativity, you wouldn't tell Picasso where to put a bu brush stroke, right? That would be ludicrous. Better. He put a mistaken brush stroke in his style than you put the correct brush stroke in your style on Picasso's painting.
Fun
Moritz: The following is an excerpt from the vault. I posted in the group. What's funny where we analyzed how fun is being created and how jokes work. And, The group was created by Aaron.
Naval: Another form of lazy humor is what Jerry Seinfeld warned about. He basically said at one point that, Hey, I don't curse in my humor. I keep it clean, and that's because I'm an artist. It makes it harder. I don't know if you use those words, but that was a sentiment, and I like that the same way I find that people who are actually eloquent don't need to curse.
If you're cursing to make a point, it's because you probably didn't have a better way to say it.
Anyway, I'm not here to critique humor. Comedians are the truthtellers of our times, and all of us at our best have some wi in comedy to them. Any great dinner party, any great conversation has a lot of laughter in it.
Cultured societies situations, we are not allowed to crack a joke, are some of the most insufferable and painful places to be.
Curiosity
Moritz: The following three discussions also happened in the group called knowledge.
The first section is about curiosity. Then we talk about Nassim Taleb's work. And how it can be compared to the impact of devadasi.
And third, we discuss identity knowledge and the downside of identifying with a certain philosophy.
Naval: In terms of learning, yes, absolutely. Curiosity is a far, far, far better motivator than rote education instilled upon you. And because nature herself has no lanes, following your own natural curiosity across whatever boundary it may lead you is more likely to lead to something fruitful and unexplored than trying to be directed in your learning.
The directed paths are too obvious and well-trodden. Also, they just don't connect into nature the way that nature interconnects herself.
Not just keep scratching, professor David Deutsche's back here. But I have found that the greatest improvement in learning for me has been improving my epistemology because now it allows me to reject what is true or what is false closer upfront before I invest too much time into it. The downside is I read much fewer books because now I can just spot how many of them just start on bad foundations, but it is saving me a lot of time in brain space.
I am a little wary of the pure learning for only curiosity and for talking about it. I e when someone becomes a philosopher a little too young, it's good to mix that with real world expertise. Schopenhauer used to talk about how. You want to learn the specific before the general, because a young man who graduates from college and who has his head filled with all kinds of general concepts is sort of that overeducated idiot.
He doesn't know where to apply these things, and everything is abstract, and enough of these maxims taken together can cancel to zero. Whereas if he has applied them in the particular and learned them in the specific, then he has some sense of what rule applies where. So it's sort of better to go through life, have the experience, build things and then kind of learn the rules and learn where to fit those rules.
Or to summarize in Nassim Taleb's, pithy way, if you want to be a philosopher king, become a king first.
Moritz: So I don't think that this exists or there being the result of that being that you become a philosopher that only can operate within philosophy. I think when you completely follow your curiosity, it inadvertently leads you to real world problems that you're then curious, curious to solve. So, For example, when a child becomes interested in how fusion works, they might turn out to build a fusion reactor or, or at least design a working fusion reactor or when for the Collison brothers became interested in sort of building a a game or payment system than that also had a positive outcome.
Naval: Yeah, don't read too much into my comment. I, I guess I'm more just keying off of certain people on the internet out there seem to think now that it's a good thing to become a philosopher at an extremely young age without having made contact with enough reality. There was a follower of mine who proudly declared that he had dropped out of his physics program to become a business philosopher, and I tried pretty hard to talk him out of it, but it seems too late and that just seems to me sort of a life that's premature and backwards.
On Nassim Taleb
Moritz: And now the discussion about Nassim Taleb.
Naval: Now in terms of his works being popular, I got a lot of value out of them. I mean, he introduced me to the concepts of ity. He takes non-linearity complexity and chaos theory seriously. He introduced me essentially through his work to Gregory Chapton and Mandel brought I also got big value out of how he portrays skin of the game as a filter rather than as an incentive mechanism.
I think the concept of antifragility is, A good one, even though it's hard to find it in practice, in in the real world. I think he does a very good job of splitting out linearities from non-linearities in different domains. I think he does a good job of expressing the Kelly criterion in ways that ordinary people can understand.
I think he does a good job of defending common sense wisdom and, you know, kind of calling out Macroeconomists as a generally as a branch of politics. And he makes it all accessible and he pokes fun of just the right people along the way, just the right ways. And I think he popularized the concept of the black swan, which right there made him famous. Right?
So, Now it's like a meme. It's a it's a shelling point for conversation. So I've gotten big value out of t's books when I get value outta them today. Now that I've read the underlying authors probably not, but the sequence was important. TB introduced me to those concepts and then allowed me to dig in further.
Another great concept that he pushed early on his localism. Which is the idea that, and it's not, not many of these are his, his original ideas. Some of them are especially the deeply mathematical ones, but many of them are not. But the concept of localism where you, you know, you're a communist within your family.
You're a socialist with your friends. You're a you know, you're a democrat at the city level and you're a Republican at the state level, and you're libertarian at the federal level. So that kind of Scalable politics or politics as a function of scale was an interesting concept. So overall, I've gotten a lot of T's books and I would not want someone who's listening to this conversation to avoid Tela because I think he's an extremely useful introduction into many of these concepts.
Oh, the minority rule, another great one. Amazing rule. In fact, as far as I know, he might have come up with that one. And if so, that alone should put him in the pantheon of fame.
As to why s is not as popular as him first, we're changing that second Deutsche's philosophy is an integrated hole rather than a series of points and anecdotes. So it's harder to absorb. It requires rewiring your entire entire worldview. Third Deutsche's philosophy goes to the core of expertise and knowledge and and so forth.
So it really does require you to throw over. What you may have been taught in academics. And it's not gonna be well received by academia and by journalists because it kind of throw overthrows them as the experts. And then finally, I don't think Deutsch writes for the layman. I think he writes for very, very intelligent, discerning people who will take the time to slowly turn over the thoughts on the pages.
And so that's why people like Brett Hall have essentially made a living, not a good living, but a living out of just explaining David's thoughts cuz someone needs to do that. So I just don't think Deutsche is very accessible. He also mixes in things like quantum physics and the theory of computation, which are not exactly things that most people understand or are interested in.
So, you know, it's up to the next layer of people to take Deutsche's ideas, adapt them to the real world, and get out there and talk about them.
I would consider a mistake to not read t's books, and in fact, I would read every single one of them and I will probably reread them again. But at the same time, I would probably get my basic epistemology from the beginning of infinity and the fabric of reality, because I think the popular Deutch view.
Is a more cohesive, better explanation and better whole for epistemology and sort of making sense of the world than almost anything else out there. I just wish I had had it earlier in life, so then I could have compared that as my base theory against new theories that arose as opposed to taking other theories as the base theories and then having to overwrite them, with the fabric of reality and the beginning of infinity later in life.
Identity and Knowledge
Moritz: And now the part about identity. Again, note that. These chits were not. Necessarily. Hosted in a chain. But I sort of rearranged them. And handpicked some of this chits. For this composition.
And now the part about identity. And labels. Again, note that. DCE. Voice recordings were not necessarily posted in one consecutive order but i hand picked them and rearranged them for this recording
Naval: I think in some domains it's more acceptable than others because the motivations are very different. In the case of religion, it's because you're allying yourself with another group. You're cooperating towards a goal, and so you set aside your differences and you agree. These are set of things we believe in, and we will excommunicate the blasphemers and we will enforce the rules because we're all trying to work together towards a common goal so we can go out and accomplish things.
And it's interesting that where it's even brought up, Critical rational as a label to be used when you want to unite towards a common goal of convincing other critical rationalists. So again, when you're working towards a collective goal, then you create an identity. So you can create an identity group, but if what you're interested in truth seeking is figuring out the correct answer.
Then you are going to be an individualist. Because groups seek consensus, individuals can seek truth, and so it does not make sense to label yourself if you're seeking the truth. The fundamental truth, speak Seeker is completely unlabeled inside or outside, completely unconditioned and simply has a set of.
Principles and logic that is always fallible that they follow to get to the correct answer. So it just depends what you're trying to do. If you're trying to find the truth, then you do not want any labels or identities if you are trying to convince other people to go along or if you're allying with them, because cooperating groups have way more powerful than just the sum of the individuals and tend to dominate the course of human history.
At least until technological leverage came along, then you're going to want to all that together against a common identity and label. So I think it is the motivation that drives the labeling, and at least for me, I would rather go for truth.
A good example of why a true seeker should avoid labels is that now scientific and science is also a label. Believe in science as a rallying cry. And if you don't believe in X, y, Z, then you don't believe in science, and you can see how stupid that is. But science has become an identity, and you can be beaten up for being scientific or non-scientific, according to their authoritarian view of industrialized science and so-called experts in white lab codes.
So I don't think you wanna adopt any labels whatsoever. Although it can be very useful when you're trying to mount a collective response against under a collective, so there is kind of this warfare element that said these days, I think an individual who is authentic and unlabeled can have a huge effect just by speaking the truth.
Technology gives leverage in terms of communication, in terms of code and other ways that allows the truth to spread more freely, just like admittedly does, allow fear to spread more freely, freely too. But I don't think we're gonna win over the masses here. What we do is we win over the intelligent free thinkers and then they went over the masses.
Moritz: I'm not sure if I completely understand the claim that groups seek consensus. Individuals seek truth since. I, I can also think of groups that try to seek truth together, such as a small group of scientists trying to invent the next best epistemology or a group of people on a, um, voice chat platform that try to find out the truth.
Could you elaborate? What do you mean with group here? Is it sort of a society or government based group, or is it any kind of group?
Naval: Any group gets together based on a common set of goals and beliefs. If the group cannot agree upon their goals and how to get there, then the group separates and goes and creates another group. So a group without consensus is very short-lived. Therefore, groups are always consensus building. You can see this in any meeting where you sit in, where people have to give and take, give and take.
Even in this conversation, for all of us to stay together in this room, we have to have some degree of consensus. If we don't. Some of us will leave or just disengaged. So a group can never seek truth to the same level that an individual can. A group has to, has an Overton window, even within each specific group, what they can and can't say.
Whereas an individual can think anything, say anything, and confront any truth. So obviously this is not like a hundred percent rule in every single case, but in general, if you want to see the truth of a matter, eventually you have to hold it privately in your mind and turn it over and come to your own truth.
Whereas with a consensus, Uh, with a group, it's unlikely that you're going to find the absolute truth, especially in areas where it's difficult to talk about or think through.
Naval: And just as we discussed earlier, that it is a mistake to tie your IDE ideas to your identity which makes it hard to revise those ideas later. The same way, don't tie someone else's ideas to their identity, because then it makes it hard to absorb good ideas from them if you don't like their identity.
Evolution of Truth
Moritz: and now. A conversation about the evolution of truth. Buying Naval, Aaron and loopulesasa. I was posted in the, who is afraid of AGI group chat.
loopulesasa: A small tangent I have about changing one's mind. So an argument from a purely medic evolution perspective, similar in nature. Usually it's something that we observe on the internet. People are very hard to change their own minds because we have a lot of ideas and concepts and thoughts inside our minds.
loopulesasa: And the reason, one reason, one explanation for that is that the ideas that we carry with us in our minds, the selfish memes, in a way have resisted that many times. So we only have stubborn ideas in our head. Wanted to say that also for the discussion, but that's just the parenthesis.
Naval: Brought up this idea before in a different form. Basically, the idea is that some. Ideas are so mimetic that they spread virally or they're so stubborn that they stay in your head regardless of whether they're true or not. And, I think there is some truth to that, but not a lot. And the reason is because these things will over time get weeded out by ideas that do have higher truth content.
Because higher truth content means better adaptability, better survival, better fitness. And so people who adopt the ideas that have higher truth content are more likely to survive and propagate those ideas. So, although in the short term there are mimetic advantages to spreading quickly and to staying embedded in the long term, it's very hard to separate those out from truth content because low truth content, but high mimesis means you do eventually get weeded out.
And things like stubbornness to adopt new ideas is essentially trying to resist this mimesis that other ideas are attacking you with. So I think of mimesis and stubbornness as secondary components. Truth, component truth content is a higher component.
And I know that organized religion is a popular whipping boy, and I don't mean to fully defend it, but there is survival value to organized religion. If you think of organized religion as basically just, oh, a belief in, you know, monkey god in the sky, then yeah, it does seem ludicrous. But if you look at it as a cultural operating system for humans to work together, Where I can reliably signal that I'm an honest and hardworking and sacrificing person, cuz I go to church every Sunday and I take care of the poor, then that is a valuable part of a community to be in.
So you sort of pay lip service to it and you play along and you have to play along to be part of this group. And this allows you to cooperate and gang up against other monkeys who don't do this and to have beneficial trade and survival and trust and so forth. So, you know, as long as it has a fitness component to it, and by truth I don't mean.
Like existential truth. I don't mean rational truth, I just mean truth, as in it helps you survive and it maps to the constraints of the real world. Then as long as it is truth content, then it will override anything that is purely mimetic or purely stubborn.
Aaron: Two things in defensive organized religion. One is that it is way, way, way better than no reason at all, right? It is way, way, way, way, way better than what the monkeys are using. And number two, there is a lot of non explicit knowledge in organized religion, right? It gets attacked according to what's written down in the sacred texts and the rituals.
But it rarely gets, it was very hard to attack or address the embedded knowledge. That's hard to put into words. But it must be there because it's awful useful, as you say.
Zone of Genius
Moritz: The staff section starts with a discussion by Ronan and about. In Ronan's room called what does creativity. About zone of genius. And then goes on to the room great scientists which i created about the great scientists and nature of this nurture with neval Brett hall tom howard and Sahil Lavinga
ronen: The actual kind of meta skill here, in effect, there's a creative meme that is, let me look at this new tool and think, what is the highest, conceptual leverage use of it? What's a thing I could do very quickly that leverages what this thing is great at, in a way that will hopefully be engaging in some way.
And so you're leaning very heavily on the thing and what it's good at and there's almost no relationship between time and energy and the result. Cuz all of what we as well, we associate with something taking a lot of time or a lot of hard work is in effect the craft side of a creation. And so if you start with a tool, That has mastered craft X and work backwards from craft X, you can make something Naval with very minimal time and effort.
And this also, by the way, applies to collaborations cuz the tool's just a collaborator. You can meet a person and try to bend them into making something that you brought to the table wanting to execute. Or you can look at what craft they've already mastered. And just very quickly create a slight change to what they're doing that doesn't require a lot more energy, time, or effort, but creates hopefully something cool and new as a result.
Naval: Yes, related. When I work with people, what I try to look for is a zone of genius and only have them operate within that. I don't like to try and drag them out of their zone of genius and try to do something that they're not enthusiastic about. With our engineers, I often ask, are you excited about this?
And if they're excited about it, and if they're self-aware, then they already know where their zone of genius intersects with the needs of the company. And so ideally, each engineer or designer ends up working on the thing where they're most excited, and that is an accurate indicator of where their genius and capabilities and energy level lie.
I'll give two related examples. One is Matt Macari, who's an executive coach to the Stars and coached me for a while. He had this immediate concept. He basically just said, Hey, you're unhappy because you're not in your zone of genius, so we gotta get you in your zone of genius and we gotta hire around you to fill the gaps.
And the moment he said it, it clicked. It didn't take a lot more than that. The other is what David Deutsch calls the fun criterion. And I think the fun criterion is if something is fun to you, then it's probably at the edge of your knowledge where you're learning. But you're still capable. And so you're exercising and practicing your craft, but it's not boring because you're not doing it for the end of time, but you're literally stretching your limits and abilities, but at the point where it's still fun.
So David, who is one of the most accomplished physicists computational thinkers and epistemologist of our time he incredible scientist. He basically just says, Hey. Do what is fun to you, and that will be a better guide than almost anything else. So I think these concepts of zone of genius and fun criterion really intersect to make magic.
The Great Scientists
Moritz: I'd love to discuss the great scientists how did they became great scientists? What is the process to become a great scientist and sort of how did they accumulate the knowledge to be able to make incredible insights that created immense progress for humanity? Some of them that come to mind are John von Neumann, Einstein, Claude Shannon, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch.
Naval: well, first you're bringing up the nature versus nurture question. How much of it is this raw genetic, natural intelligence, and then how much of it is direction? I think this is probably where I would diver from Brett. I, I think a lot of it is genetic. I think a lot of it is just like they're. Wired to be highly intellectual and to think in broad strokes.
So, I think you have to kind of take the nature component out and it's a big part of it. So let's set that aside for a moment, and you can argue about what percentage that is. But let's focus on nurture. And I know what Brett's gonna say is gonna say, we're all universal explainers, so everyone's capable of every thought, which is true, but some people's brains just work differently than others.
There are genetic differences. I would say the great scientists, are generally, it's hard to speak in absolutes, but are generally tinkerers. They're incredibly curious. They're broad, multidisciplinary thinkers. They don't think in narrow lanes. They like to play with things. They have a highly visual sense.
They have a deep curiosity. They have a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world. They are incredibly focused on truth, even at the cost of social approval, and they just wanna figure things out, and they wanna figure things out the way they are. And from a very young age, they get consumed in both the natural world as well as abstractions that explain the natural world.
So it's a, it's a whole combination of these factors, and I'm sure it really helps to be surrounded by other bright people at kind of the right age, either in a university or peer setting. I don't know if there's a single simple formula to it, but sure, it's worth teasing apart. Many probably had great tutors, or one-on-one instruction in the key things that they care about or were self-taught, but I don't think there's any single formula, just like there isn't any single formula to greatness.
But, these are the components I believe. The point you bring up that they are focused on truth at the cost of social approval is interesting because eventually they will earn tremendous rewards of social approval if they're somewhat cart or sort of not fitting the current paradigm insight. Turns out to be true to a point.
Many of them don't earn the social approval until decades later or until well after they're dead. Remember, the scientists were burned at the stake. Remember the hand washing guy who was ridiculed and mocked in his lifetime in, not acknowledged?
Tom: I agree on the genetic part. I've seen far too many brilliant people come from a.
Very diverse backgrounds and situations to think that, nurture is what causes brilliance.
Nature vs. Nurture
Sahil Lavingia: I think for people like Fineman, the answer is a hundred percent nature to the power of a hundred percent nurture. They're exceptional successes in every way. They have super high IQ in the genetic sense. They're, they have, you know, the right amount of disagreeableness, the right amount of neuroticism, the right amount of almost everything.
Given by the fact that they are one in 7 billion. I think nature versus nurture is a little bit of a siop because it frames it as a zero sum game where success in life or happiness or whatever you define, is really, I think, closer to nature, to the power of nurture, where each one can go between zero and a hundred, and the result is the product of those, those two inputs.
Brett: And if it's neither, if it's neither a hundred percent nature or a hundred percent nurture, or any combination of nature and nurture, after all, if it's nature, then it's in the genes over which a person has no control. And if it's nurture, it is forces from outside the person by definition over which they have no control.
It's impinging upon their mind that their mind is the third fact that their mind is the creative entity. The mind is. Not nurture and not nature. It is from within. It is creativity, genuine creativity of things that didn't exist in the universe prior to being created. We are creative entities, and so this is why I say nature versus nurture is the wrong framing.
It's not either, and it's no combination thereof. It's a third thing, and I think this is one of the mysteries of what it means to be human, why people are completely and utterly off axis as compared to all other organisms that we know about
Sahil: I agree with Brett, that the mind, the pure creativity of a person is probably the most determinant factor in.
Deciding if they can make a scientific contribution, if they can solve problems, and if they can create a new insight. However, it seems unable that the great scientists also have a extremely high iq, raw intelligence with I think, domain contributing ability here being, working memory.
Sahil Lavingia: I think the mind, the third thing is the emergent phenomenon created by where.
Nature and nurture meets. So I think we're probably pretty close on that though. I think being creative creativity, my feeling is it's a little bit like math where the act of multiplying two numbers isn't creative, but the end output might look creative. I think humans have a unique ability to reason, but I don't think that humans have a unique ability to be creative.
I think a beaver that creates a dam is creating a unique structure that's probably never, ever been created before. But cannot reason about it. Ask questions about what it is, why they're doing it. I think the, the really, the, the why question is the big thing that humans can, can, can do. So perhaps the nature part is the ability to ask why maybe high iq, high working memory means you can just more accurately get to the why for more things in front of you.
And then nurture is sort of luck, you know, everything outside of that. Perhaps that is too vague to be a useful explanation.
Naval: Brett, I really like this idea that it's not nature versus nurture. That creativity is a third and unexplained force, and that jives well with other new things that I've been learning.
So thank you for that viewpoint. That said, anyone who's had children will tell you that children come outta the womb. Partially baked. They have distinct personalities. They have certain clock speeds, they have certain inclinations, levels of perceptiveness and ability to pick up things that vary from child to child and is quite stark and easy to spot.
So there's definitely a genetic component, but. When you're dealing with hardware, hardware is limited. Hardware operates in Sian distribution space. Whereas when you're dealing with software, you can have almost infinite levels of creativity. So the mind itself on top is probably the far more powerful factor.
For example, if you're a very high horsepower person, but you fall into, let's say, anti rational memes or Marxism early on, you'll have bad ideas. Whereas Civic Street, and you'll use your high intellect and high clock speed to justify those bad id. Ideas. On the other hand, if you figure out epistemology truth seeking and reasoning early on, you'll probably compound good ideas.
And because idea space is so large, the genetic clock speed will kind of be overwhelmed by the quality of your ideas and how they compound on each other. So thanks for bringing this framework to light where there's a third component besides nature and nurture, I think it's worth further study.
Brett: I completely agree with the notion of people coming out of the womb, partially baked.
Anyone who endorses the, well, anyone who has tried to understand David Deutsche's notion of the universality of the human mind will also know that he endorses and I, I completely agree with him that there are such things as inborn ideas. And these can differ between people in a trivial sense. You know, we're going to have genetic differences between people, which code for a different number of rods and cones in the eye.
So when we look out into the world, your reds might be brighter than my reds. My blues might be more vivid than your blues, and that's just fore sight. We're going to have. Genetic coding differing between people, perhaps even between identical twins, that code for a subtly different number of, you know, sensitivities to chili powder and things like that.
And so all of the genetic differences are absolutely baked into the genetics. Now, what effect does that go on to have with the contents of a human mind and then by proxy? What effect does that have on things like interest and therefore what people are calling iq? We don't know. And it's very difficult to test these things, and until we have a proper mapping of the human genome, and you can point to these genes and you can say, aha, there it is in the genes that codes for this thing, which codes for that thing, which ultimately leads to.
More or less interest in chemistry, geology, physics, as opposed to art and poetry and filmmaking. Well then it's very difficult other than conjecturing these ideas, which are fun to do. So, but I just like to make it more optimistic and, and sort of, Hedge with kids, especially, we're talking about kids or people thinking about being great scientists, perhaps that, you know, you're not genetically determined if you, if you would like to be a good physicist, but you feel like you just don't have the mathematical capacity.
Well remember people like Michael Faraday who weren't particularly good at mathematics, but you can persevere and I've known physicists who didn't start out physicists. They started out in some other area in Thailand and became great scientists.
Outro
Moritz: That is it for the second. Part of this air chat export to serious. Again, there's a part one, which is more focused on topics related to product, business, simplicity, design. So make sure you check that out. If you're interested in these topics.
Lastly, if you found this episode. Interesting, I'd appreciate you sharing it with a friend. And also you might consider subscribing to this podcast scaling knowledge, which is about topics ranging from AI epistemology startups. And the growth of knowledge.
Share this post