Charan Ranganath: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, actually just for me, you’re making me realize now it’s not just those kinds of stories, but even things like periods of depression or really low points, to me at least it feels like a motivating thing that the darker it gets, the better the story will be if you emerge on the other side. That to me feels like a motivating thing. So maybe if people listening to this and they’re going through some shit, as we said, one thing that could be a source of light is that it’ll be a hell of a good story when it’s all over, when you emerge on the other side. Let me ask you about decisions. You already talked about it a little bit, but when we face the world and we’re making different decisions, how much does our memory come into play? Is it the kind of narratives that we’ve constructed about the world that are used to make predictions that’s fundamentally part of the decision-making? Absolutely. Yeah. So let’s say after this, you and I decided we’re going to go for a beer. How do you choose where to go? You’re probably going to be like, “Oh yeah, this new bar opened up near me. I had a great time there. They had a great beer selection.” Or you might say, “Oh, we went to this place and it was totally crowded and they were playing this horrible EDM or whatever.” And so right there, valuable source of information. And then you have these things like where you do this counterfactual stuff, “Well, I did this previously.” But what if I had gone somewhere else and said, “Maybe I’ll go to this other place because I didn’t try it the previous time”? So there’s all that kind of reasoning that goes into it too. I think even if you think about the big decisions in life. It’s like you and I were talking before we started recording about how I got into memory research and you got into AI and it’s like we all have these personal reasons that guide us in these particular directions. And some of it’s the environment and random factors in life, and some of it is memories of things that we want to overcome or things that we build on in a positive way. But either way, they define us. And probably the earlier in life the memories happen, the more defining, the more defining power they have in terms of determining who we become.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.