Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…was constrictive criticism. I was like, “That’s awesome.” Uh, that’s a great typo. Well, it’s very true. I mean, that second, the bifurcation of the mind is beautifully put. I do think some of the most interesting people I’ve met are… sometimes fall short on the normie side, on the practical, “How do I… having the emotional intelligence of how do I communicate this with people that have a very different worldview, that are more conservative and more conventional and more kind of fit into the norm.” You have to be able to have the skill to fit in. And then you have to, again, beautifully put, be able to shut that off when you go on your own and think. And having two skills is very important. I think a lot of radical thinkers think that they’re sacrificing something by learning the skill of fitting in, but I think if you want to have impact, if you want ideas to resonate and actually lead to, um … First of all, be able to build great teams- … that help bring your ideas to life. And second of all, for your ideas to have impact, and to scale, and to resonate with a large number of people, you have to have that skill. And those are, those are very different. Those are very different. Let me ask a ridiculous question. You already spoke about it, but what to you is one of the most beautiful ideas that you’ve encountered in your various explorations? Maybe not just beautiful, but one that makes you happy to be a scientist, to be able to be a… …Curious human exploring ideas. I mean, I must say that, you know, I sometimes think about these ingressions from this space as a kind of steganography, you know? So steganography is when you hide data and messages within the bits of another pattern that don’t matter, right? And the rule of steganography is you can’t mess up the main thing, you know? So if it’s a picture of a cat or whatever, you’ve got to keep the cat. But if there are bits that don’t matter, you can kind of stick stuff. So I feel like all these ingressions are a kind of universal steganography, that there’s this, like, these patterns seep into everything, everywhere they can. And they’re kind of shy, meaning that they’re very subtle, not invisible. If you work hard, you can catch them. They’re not invisible, but they’re hard to see. And the fact that, I think they also affect “machines,” as much as they certainly affect living organisms, I think is incredibly, incredibly beautiful. And I personally am happy to be part of that same spectrum, and the fact that that magic is sort of applicable to everything. A lot of people find that extremely disturbing, and that’s some of the hate mail I get is like, “Yeah, we were with you, you know, on the majesty of life thing, until you got to the fact that machines get it too.” And now, like, terrible, right? You’re, you know, kind of devaluing the majesty of life. And I don’t know. The idea that we’re now catching these patterns and we’re able to do meaningful research on the interfaces and all that is just, to me, absolutely beautiful. And that it’s all one spectrum, I think to me is amazing. I’m enriched by it.…

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