Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…It’s something I stress about a lot. Sometimes I feel I’m too slow. It’s funny though, the Darwin example is really interesting. Prolific at what? God knows how many letters he wrote. It must have been an enormous number. So he was certainly very active. There’s two types of work that tend to be involved in any kind of creative project. There’s routine stuff, and there you just want to avoid procrastination. You just want to ask, “How do I get good at this?” or “How do I outsource it?” and “How do I do it as rapidly as possible?” and just avoid getting into a situation where you’re prolonging it. Then there’s high-variance stuff where you actually need to be willing to take a lot of time. You need to be willing to go to different places and talk to different people, where in any given instance, most of it is just not going to be an input. Somehow balancing those two things… I think a lot of people are very good at doing one or the other, but it’s almost like a personality trait which one you prefer. People tend to end up doing a lot of one and not enough of the other. So I certainly try and balance those two things. Einstein is such an interesting example. 1905 is just this extraordinary year. You can delete special relativity entirely, and it’s an extraordinary year. You can delete special relativity, and you can delete the photoelectric effect for which he won the Nobel Prize, and it’s still an extraordinary year, plausibly a multi-Nobel-Prize-winning year. So what’s he doing? Maybe the answer is just that he’s smarter than the rest of us. There’s a lot of luck as well. Certainly for myself anyway, trying to identify those things that are routine that I should get good at, and then just try to do them as quickly as possible. I think that’s yielded a certain amount of returns. But also being willing to bet a little bit more on myself on the variance side has also been very, very helpful. That’s really hard, because intrinsically you’re putting yourself in situations where you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. If you’re very driven to be productive, and actually mostly it’s not working over there, you think, “Let’s reduce this.” It doesn’t feel right. When I worked in San Francisco, a practice I used to have each day was instead of taking the 15-minute walk to work, I would take the more beautiful 30-minute walk. Partially just because it was beautiful, but partially also as just a reminder that there are real benefits to not being efficient. But it’s not an answer to your question. Really, I think all I’m saying is I struggle a lot with the question. I think Dean Keith Simonton has this famous equal odds rule where he says the probability that any given thing you release—any paper, book, whatever—will be extremely important for a given person through their lifetime is not that different. What really determines in what era they are the most productive is how much they’re publishing. Any given thing has equal odds of being extremely important. I think some of the most successful creatives or scientists, they’re just doing a lot. Shakespeare was just publishing a lot. Of course, then there are counterexamples. Gödel published almost nothing. But broadly speaking, you need a very good reason to not do that. It’s funny, I’ve met a lot of people over the years who are clearly brilliant, and they’re just obsessed that they are going to work on the great project that makes them famous, and they never do anything. That seems connected. It’s a type of aversiveness. I think very often they just don’t want public judgment. Something that I would love to see… There’s an awful lot of biographies and memoirs and histories of people who achieve a lot. I wish there was a very large number of biographies of people who are fantastically talented who just missed. I’ve known people who won gold medals at IMOs and things like that, who then tried to become mathematicians and failed. What happened? What was the reason? I suspect in many cases that’s actually more informative than anything else.…

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