Dwarkesh Patel: commitment

Transcript context

…What he's saying is true, to some extent, whether or not that extent is sufficient is going to depend a great deal on the situation and on what you need. If your aspiration actually depends on having a deep, detailed understanding of the material, then the imprint on your worldview or on your automatic responses made by the book may not be sufficient. On the other hand, if what you want is to absorb a lot of different ways of looking at the world, knowing the details of these isn't necessarily important. Maybe you just want to know that Confucius emphasizes community and society as a moral patient in contrast to the individualism of a bunch of humanist philosophers. And if that's kind of the level that you feel like you need to make decisions in that domain then I think that's fine. Very practically speaking, it's funny that he uses the word compile, because one of the prominent theories of cognition, that is how we come to know and learn things, is this theory called ACT-R by John Anderson. A key part of it is this process that he calls knowledge compilation. This is the process by which we take individual facts and turn them into higher level patterns that we can generalize and apply in more contexts. And I think that's what Paul is gesturing at. By reading a book which contains a story or a case study you learn to generalize to some extent and you apply it in other contexts when it seems relevant. The reason why I bring up Anderson's theory is just that he has a bunch of specific claims about what's necessary for knowledge compilation to happen and what you'll be able to do as a consequence of certain degrees of knowledge compilation. I think he'd probably respond to this by saying that — actually, in order to effectively compile things that you've learned into schemas that will match feature scenarios effectively, you need to be exposed repeatedly to those things, you need to use them, you need to do a variety of things that will basically show your brain that is relevant to apply these things in combination. And simply reading probably won't do that. But if you read and you have a lot of conversations and you're in a context where it's demanding and it's drawing on what you read, then you may naturally do that kind of compilation step. I've actually been thinking about this in preparation of talking with you. I've had the pleasure of talking to a lot of interesting people across a lot of different fields. When I look back on some of my old conversations, I notice that I actually had a lot more context at the time I interviewed them and had done all the prep than I can remember now. Sometimes I'll listen back to a conversation and I won't even remember the content in the conversation. And I remember thinking after the conversation, I knew so much more about this field than was compressed into this one hour interview, right? I had to prep other things that might come up. And afterwards I'm like, “I don't even remember the things that were in this one hour.” But then the other part of me thinks, “Well, I'm getting better at doing the podcast”, that might imply that I've picked up something. But it is a shame that I didn't have some sort of rigorous practice throughout the time of retaining the material that I was keeping. Well, yeah, I expect the main [unclear] in which you're getting better, is actually not really about any of the details of those materials. I think it's about your practices as an interviewer, the way that you generate questions, you probably have a bunch of patterns, whether you know it or not. You read a thing that a person has written in hopes of generating good questions about it. And even though you maybe don't have this habit for textbooks yet, of constantly demanding things of the textbook, you have started to develop this for essays or blog posts that interesting people you're interviewing have read. And to point to this Anderson theory, in the course of repeatedly doing that, you've made parts of it automatic, so that you don't need to do it consciously, you can focus more on the material, you can probably take on more difficult material, or actually understand material at a higher level than you could have before, because less of yourself is engaged in this question of how do I make the questions from the material?…

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