Patrick Collison: uncertainty

Transcript context

…So what practically does that look like to hone your craft in any of these disciplines that take a long time? You've spoken and tweeted about some of the problems with modern universities. Is that still the de facto path if you want to be the great biologist at Arc or something? In many domains, I don't know. For example I have no facility with or experience with doing things in hardware, which is not a small domain. If you wanted to become a super skilled practitioner there, what's the best career path? I don't know. Maybe it's to drop out and join SpaceX or something. I'm not necessarily endorsing pursuing the most establishment and credential oriented path. People should try to find the gradient of maximal learning in whatever it is they care most about. The question then is what that is. For biology, not that I'm a biologist, but it is very clear that in order to do really good work, there are a lot of "bench" skills one has to acquire and there is a lot of actual specific knowledge. Any kind of life wasn't designed with neat fundamental principles the way that maybe physics was. A lot of it is obviously evolved and contingent and messy and complicated and all the rest. So there is a lot of specific factual stuff to learn. For those two reasons, there are very few successful pure autodidacts in biology. In virtually every case that I'm aware of, at some point, you have to get direct experience in and with a top lab, where you're seeing how people actually do it in practice. This also ties back to what we were discussing previously: your question about the founders and what they learn from each other and so on. There's an interesting book, Apprentice to Genius, that follows three generations of scientists. So someone who mentored somebody else, who in turn mentored another scientist. And they're all extremely successful. The book is this description of what they all did, but also this reflection on: "What is it that was transferred?". For example, one of the most important and subtle questions in science is problem selection. How do you choose what to work on? No one tells you what to do. And you do have to answer this question multiple times. With a company, in some sense, you have to decide it once, and then it's an iterative process from there. Whereas in science, you're frequently pursuing completely new problems. You need to choose something that's sufficiently important and hard, so that it would be important if you succeeded, but it also mustn't be so complex that progress becomes unachievable. This is what mentees learn from their mentors according to the book. Another thing the book talks about is learning about high standards and what they actually are. When I talk to people in other domains, I hear very frequently, that when they worked with X person or Y organization or in Z environment, they learned what great actually is. And that just permanently changed their sense for what their own standard for their work ought to be. So one version of what people in their 20s should do is get some ideas for domains you're interested in, but then figure out where can you learn the highest standards, where are the highest standards embodied, and where can you go and experience that first hand. Before we get back to Stripe and Arc Institute, I want to touch on the Parker study for a second. There's a view that says: "If we improve the NIH 10% or whatever percent, are we really making a dent in the fact that ideas are getting harder to find over time? And how much of a difference do institutions make anyways? Is it just about a number of researchers and how many people in society you can put into research? It's not like Singapore can get a much more effective scientific institution that lets it compete with America in science by following this approach. What's wrong with that intuition?…

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