Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Some recognition is necessary and important, but yeah, it’s also important to not let these things take over your life and only be concerned about getting the next big award or whatever. So again, you see these people try to only solve really big math problems and not work on things that are less sexy, if you wish, but actually still interesting and instructive. As you say, the way the human mind works, we understand things better when they’re attached to humans, and also if they’re attached to a small number of humans. The way our human mind is wired, we can comprehend the relationships between 10 or 20 people. But once you get beyond like 100 people, there’s a limit, I think there’s a name for it, beyond which it just becomes the other. And so you have to simplify the [inaudible 02:49:21] 99.9% of humanity becomes the other. Often these models are incorrect, and this causes all kinds of problems. So yeah, to humanize a subject, if you identify a small number of people and say these are representative people of a subject, role models, for example, that has some role, but it can also be too much of it can be harmful because I’ll be the first to say that my own career path is not that of a typical mathematician. The very accelerated education, I skipped a lot of classes. I think I always had very fortunate mentoring opportunities, and I think I was at the right place at the right time. Just because someone doesn’t have my trajectory, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be good mathematicians. They would be, but in a very different style, and we need people of a different style. And sometimes too much focus is given on the person who does the last step to complete a project in mathematics or elsewhere that’s really taken centuries or decades with lots and lots of, building on lots of previous work. But that’s a story that’s difficult to tell if you’re not an expert. It’s easier to just say one person did this one thing. It makes for a much simpler history. I think on the whole, it is a hugely positive thing. To talk about Steve Jobs as a representative of Apple, when I personally know and of course everybody knows the incredible design, the incredible engineering teams, just the individual humans on those teams. They’re not a team. They’re individual humans on a team, and there’s a lot of brilliance there, but it’s just a nice shorthand, like π, Steve Jobs, π. Yeah, as a starting point, as a first approximation that’s how you-…

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