David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, he's been on some fairly mainstream podcasts at this point. Anyway, not only are his parents hyper intelligent, and of course, Vitalik is, his parents are computer scientists in the mid 90s. This is a great time to be a computer scientist. Even though they get divorced, it's very amicable. They agree, his parents, to basically live their lives together but separately. Their number one priority is giving Vitalik every opportunity they can. The first and maybe most important of these things is when Vitalik was five, they decided to leave Russia and emigrate to Canada. They settled in Toronto. Vitalik gets put into the gifted program in Toronto's public schools, which is funny. He didn't speak English at all until he arrived in Canada. It takes him a few years to really get comfortable speaking English, but he's clearly a genius at math, computers, and taking after his parents. He's also really good at writing, though, and writing English. This was crazy. When he's seven years old, I don't know if this is a school project or just something Vitalik did for fun. He writes a 30-page document in English in Microsoft Word called the Encyclopedia of Bunnies. He's really interested in bunnies. He structures it like a scientific paper. He's got graphs, charts, and he lists all the chemical elements that make up a bunny. Is it a typesetting attack? I can just imagine this being an overly academic thing for a child.…

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