Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, bring it on Twitter. This is embedded in our working world. For a researcher, when you need to write papers regularly and you're writing those background sections, you're repeatedly explaining the history of a particular line of research and citing the appropriate sources. That is a kind of spaced repetition. When you have students and you're mentoring them in conversation “Oh, in this kind of situation, you really need to remember to do x”. That is a kind of spaced repetition. All this is kind of accidental. The doctors have rounds - even when they're not seeing patients regularly, they're still exposed to other patients. There's often a structure in this where while the patient is being presented, you're supposed to be trying to think of what to ask. “What would my differential be?” Before you hear it, there's covert retrieval happening. It's everywhere in our world. It's spaced, and it's repeated. The thing that differentiates the formal practice that I've been exploring is that it focuses on material that you wouldn't normally have repeated either because you're too early with it to have a consistent practice, or because it's just not firmly tethered enough in anything in your life. This is a question from Ian Vanagas. “What is the optimal amount of effort that should go into a personal website?” I think he might have noticed the amount of CSS that exists on andymatuschak. org, which is very beautiful. I don't like it. But this is what everybody says about their website, right? It's three years old, that means I want to redesign it, but I will not allow myself to because it feels like a distraction. What's the right amount of effort? There's no general answer to that question. Of course, that's going to be my answer but what can I say about it? What's the job of the website? What's it trying to do? Many people, especially engineers, do themselves a disservice by fretting over their websites unnecessarily, building vast technical infrastructure when really what they want is a place to post markdown files. They're better off getting a ghost installation. The main thing to think about is what is it that you want to put out in the world? What is the ideal form of that thing? And to try to find some way of organizing and expressing that. We have these common patterns, like a blog or a portfolio. Often people end up forcing themselves into these patterns. People will end up using blogging software to make something that's durable. Very interesting personal websites often come from people who are thinking about that question – the shape of the thing that they want to put out into the world and making something that speaks to it. Often, once you understand the shape of making the thing, it's not that effortful. My website was not an enormous project for me, probably should have been a slightly larger one, given that my income depends on people coming through it.…

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