Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…ex speaking. Second takeaway is that the central spiritual battles of our life are not fought on a mountain top somewhere at a meditation retreat, but it’s fought in the mundane moments of daily life. Third takeaway is that we too easily give away our time and attention to the multitude of distractions that the world feeds us, the insatiable black holes of attention. David Foster Wallace’s call to action in this case is to be deeply aware of the beauty in each moment and to find meaning in the mundane. I often quote David Foster Wallace in his advice that the key to life is to be unborable, and I think this is exactly right. Every moment, every object, every experience when looked at closely enough contains within it infinite richness to explore. And since Demis Hassabis of this very podcast episode and I are such fans of Richard Feynman, allow me to also quote Mr. Feynman on this topic as well. “I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension at one centimeter, there’s also beauty at the smaller dimensions.” “Their inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower evolved in order to attract the insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that the insects can see the color. It adds a question. Does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions, which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds.” All right, back to David Foster Wallace’s speech. He has a great story in there that I particularly enjoy. It goes, there are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing and it was 50 below. So I tried it. I fell in my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘Oh God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard and I’m going to die if you don’t help me.” couldn’t see a thing and it was 50 below. So I tried it. I fell in my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘Oh God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard and I’m going to die if you don’t help me.” And now back in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled, “Well, then you must believe now?” he says, “After all, there you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man. All that happened was a couple of Eskimos happened to be wandering by and showed me the way back to the camp. ” All this, I think, teaches us that everything is a matter of perspective and that wisdom may arrive if we have the humility to keep shifting and expanding our perspective on the world. Thank you for allowing me to talk a bit about David Foster Wallace. He’s one of my favorite writers and he’s a beautiful soul. If I may, one more thing I wanted to briefly comment on. I find myself to be in this strange position of getting attacked online often from all sides, including being lied about sometimes through selective misrepresentation, but often through downright lies. I don’t know how else to put it. This all breaks my heart, frankly, but I’ve come to understand that it’s the way of the internet and the cost of the path I’ve chosen. There’s been days when it’s been rough on me mentally. It’s not fun being lied about, especially when it’s about things that are usually for a long time have been a source of happiness and joy for me. But again, that’s life. I’ll continue exploring the world of people and ideas with empathy and rigor, wearing my heart on my sleeve as much as I can. For me, that’s the only way to live. Anyway, a common attack on me is about my time at MIT and Drexel, two great universities I love and have tremendous respect for. Since a bunch of lies have accumulated online about me on these topics, to a sad and at times hilarious degree, I thought I would once more state the obvious facts about my bio for the small number of you who may care. TLDR, two things. First, as I say often, including in a recent podcast episode that somehow was listened to by many millions of people, I proudly went to Drexel University for my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees. Second, I am a research scientist at MIT and have been there in a paid research position for the last 10 years. Allow me to elaborate a bit more on these two things now, but please skip if this is not at all interesting. So like I said, a common attack on me is that I have no real affiliation with MIT. The accusation, I guess, is that I’m falsely claiming an MIT affiliation because I taught a lecture there once. Nope, that accusation against me is a complete lie. I have been at MIT for over 10 years in a paid research position from 2015 to today. To be extra clear, I’m a research scientist at MIT working in LIDS, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems in the College of Computing. For now, since I’m still at MIT, you can see me in the directory and on the various lab pages. at MIT working in LIDS, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems in the College of Computing. For now, since I’m still at MIT, you can see me in the directory and on the various lab pages. I have indeed given many lectures at MIT over the years, a small fraction of which I posted online. Teaching for me always has been just for fun and not part of my research work. I personally think I suck at it, but I have always learned and grown from the experience. It’s like Feynman spoke about, if you want to understand something deeply, it’s good to try to teach it. But like I said, my main focus has always been on research. I published many peer-reviewed papers that you can see in my Google Scholar profile. For my first four years at MIT, I worked extremely intensively. Most weeks were 80 to 100-hour work weeks. After that, in 2019, I still kept my research scientist position, but I split my time taking a leap to pursue projects in AI and robotics outside MIT and to dedicate a lot of focus to the podcast. As I’ve said, I’ve been continuously surprised just how many hours preparing for an episode takes. There are many episodes of the podcast for which I have to read, write, and think for 100, 200 or more hours across multiple weeks and months. Since 2020, I have not actively published research papers. Just like the podcast, I think it’s something that’s a serious full-time effort. But not publishing and doing full-time research has been eating at me because I love research and I love programming and building systems that test out interesting technical ideas, especially in the context of human-AI or human-robot interaction. I hope to change this in the coming months and years. What I’ve come to realize about myself is if I don’t publish or if I don’t launch systems that people use, I definitely feel like a piece of me is missing. It legitimately is a source of happiness for me. Anyway, I’m proud of my time at MIT. I was and am constantly surrounded by people much smarter than me, many of whom have become lifelong colleagues and friends. MIT is a place I go to escape the world, to focus on exploring fascinating questions at the cutting edge of science and engineering. This, again, makes me truly happy and it does hit pretty hard on a psychological level when I’m getting attacked over this. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong. If I am, I will try to do better.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.