Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Don’t feel pressure from the crowd. I’m completely immune to that. In the same sense, I don’t have respect for authority, I have respect for what an individual is accomplishing or have respect for mental firepower or so, but it’s not that I meet somebody and get drawn and unable to speak or when a large group of people has a certain idea that is different from mine, I don’t necessarily feel in intimidated, which has often been a problem for me in my life because I lack instincts that other people develop at a very young age and that help with their self-preservation in a social environment. So I had to learn a lot of things the hard way. Yeah. So is there a practical advice you can give on how to think paradigmatically, how to think independently or because you’ve said I had no choice, but I think to a degree you have a choice because you said you want to be productive and I’m thinking independently is productive if what you’re curious about is understanding the world, especially when the problems are very new and open. And so it seems like this is a active process. Who can choose to do that? We can practice it. Well, it’s a very basic question. When you read a theory that you find convincing or interesting, how do you know? Very interesting to figure out what are the sources of that other person, not which authority can they refer to that is then taking off the burden of being truthful, but how did this authority in turn know what is the epistemic chain to observables? What are the first principles from which the whole thing is derived? And when I was young, I was not blessed with a lot of people around myself who knew how to make proofs from first principles, and I think mathematicians do this quite naturally, but most of the great mathematicians do not become mathematicians in school, but they tend to be self-taught because school teachers tend not to be mathematicians. They tend not to be people who derive things from first principles. So when you ask your school teacher, why does two plus two equal four, does your school teacher give you the right answer? It’s a simple game. And there are many simple games that you could play and most of those games that you could just take different rules would not lead to an interesting arithmetic. And so it’s just an exploration, but you can try what happens if you take different axioms and here is how you build axioms and derive addition from them, and a built addition is some basically syntactic sugar in it. I wish that somebody would have opened me this vista and explained to me how I can build a language in my own mind and from which I can derive what I’m seeing and how I can make geometry and counting and all the number games that we are playing in our life, and on the other hand, I felt that I learned a lot of this while I was programming as a child. When you start out with a computer like a Commodore 64 which doesn’t have a lot of functionality, it’s relatively easy to see how a bunch of relatively simple circuits are just basically performing hashes between bit patterns and how you can build the entirety of mathematics and computation on top of this and all the representational languages that you need.…

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