Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It totally depends on temperament and personality. Two of the most interesting intellectual people, 20th century are John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel, who are both friends, fled Europe because of the Nazis and ended up in Princeton. Both extraordinary minds. Both did things of stunning originality. Von Neumann was completely at home in the world of Washington and could also go and deal with bureaucrats and navigate the corridors of the White House. He could give presentations to politicians and understood — Let’s have a pre meeting about this in order to make sure that so and so understands that. And so then the question is presented to the president in the right order so that this guy doesn’t say that before this person says that, etc. All the kind of political skills you need to actually get something done and avoid your meeting turning into a shit show. Kurt Gödel is like the exact opposite. If you’re going to put people on a graph, Kurt Girdle would be like the exact opposite end of that. Famously totally useless in every practical way, a menace to himself. So, yes you want people with great intellectual ability, but as you say, some of those people can be highly functional in a political environment and some of them are completely catastrophic. Yeah, but it seems like I don’t know how you train a John von Neumann, because then he also assisted the US in thinking about Cold War game theory and things like that. Whereas is it just easier to hire those people? Actually, maybe a different way to ask this question is, does the UK train these technical people who can synthesize across fields but it’s just that they’re trained in the UK, but they go to the private sector or emigrate? Or is it just that the UK doesn’t train them to the same extent as the US does? I think elite universities now definitely don’t train this sort of thing. The way that I think about it is this. It’s easy to imagine creating new courses for 17 to 23 year olds where they do a much broader mix of intellectual subjects, where they study a broader mix of intellectual subjects. They read some Thucydides but they also understand some basics about statistics and Tetlock type stuff. But also, instead of them just sort of going off on summer holidays and wasting time, they also go off and work at SpaceX or some kind of startup or with the military, or in a hospital ward, ER room. And they’re moving between these worlds of the theoretical and the intensely practical constantly. Now, that won’t be to everyone’s temperament. Some people have a temperament where they find that interesting and they’ll get a lot of value out of it. A lot of people won’t. So you have to think of it in multiple legs. So one thing is to create those courses and that will find you a set of people. But there’s another set of people, let’s say Tim Gowers, Field’s medalist and mathematician at Cambridge. He’s gone through one whole thing now. Are you going to send him off on some course? No. But could people like that be brought into government to help in all sorts of ways? Yes. If they spent time working in government on some practical problems, would they develop a much better understanding of how government actually works and therefore be able to come up with new insights about things? Of course they will. I don’t mean they all will, because some of them would be like, “Good, all right, and just be completely hopeless in that environment” and it would be unfair on everyone and them to involve them in it. But Tim Gowers would be a good example of someone who personally could cope with the environment and I think would bring great value to. I don’t think there’s just one thing. What we need is multiple experiments with different pathways. Some of it is bringing in older, established, elite talent and then mixing them up in the system. Some of it is training younger, elite talent differently. But there’s no magic bullet to it. You have to try a bunch of things at the same time. Some people will respond very well to an odd mix of theoretical intellectual pursuits and intensely practical things. And that is definitely something worth trying to train and definitely can be trained.…

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