Dwarkesh Patel: observation

Transcript context

…It’s an incredibly complicated and rich question. It seems like the question is, how do you make it a higher-growth context? How do you make it a more demanding context? You can do that in relatively small ways that might yield compounding returns, or you can do something that is more radical. Maybe it means starting a parallel project in which you do something that is actually quite a bit different. There is something really interesting about how being very demanding can simply change your response to something. Something that I would sometimes do with students and sometimes with myself, it was really aimed more at myself, was they would say some week, “I’m going to try and do this work over the coming week.” Then the next week would come by and they hadn’t solved the problem. If a million dollars had been at stake, would you have put the same effort in? And the answer is no, invariably. They’ve tried, but they haven’t really tried. I think that’s a very familiar feeling for all of us. You could do a lot more if you had just the right demanding taskmaster standing by you and saying, “Look, you’re barely operating here.” I do wonder a little bit about what’s the demanding taskmaster? What can they ask you that is going to make your preparation way more intense? The most helpful thing honestly is… For some subjects it is very clear how I prep. I’m doing an upcoming episode on chip design with the founder of a company that does chip design, and he wrote a textbook on it. Yesterday I went over to his office, and we brainstormed five roofline analyses I can do. If I understand that, I have some good understanding. The problem is with almost every other field, there’s not this curriculum. When I interviewed Ilya three, four years ago, it was: implement the transformer, and if you implement it, you have some nugget of understanding you have clamped down. With other fields, it’s just that I vaguely understand this. It’s not clamped. There’s no forcing function of “do this exercise, and if you do it, you will understand.” Really what you’re saying is you can do a good job at podcasting without actually attaining this kind of understanding, and that’s the problem from your point of view. You want to change your job description so that you are internalizing these chunks and just getting this kind of integration each time. It seems to me that what that means is you actually want to change the structure of the work output at some level. There’s this terrible idea that lots of people have that they should be in flow all of the time. And as far as I can tell, high performers just don’t believe this at all. They’re in flow some of the time. You certainly see this with athletes. When they’re actually out there playing basketball or tennis, ideally they are in flow much of the time. But when they’re training they’re not. They’re stuck a lot of the time, or they’re doing things badly. I suppose I wonder what that looks like for you.…

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