Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…As an objective matter, that's true. John and I try to be very self-aware of the limits of our expertise, which are very proximate to us. I'm sure if something like that was necessary, that'd be. Look at Operation Warp Speed! They chose a super effective domain expert, Moncef Slaoui, to run that and it was monstrously successful, truly remarkable. I don't know who the Moncef Slaoui of the problem is, it would depend on the problem in question, but my recommendation would be: "Figure out who Moncef is and go hire Moncef." I think anybody who deemed me the Moncef of that thing is probably mistaken. I think you're being too humble. Staying on Fast Grants, now we have the retrospective of how effective the fast grants recipients were, compared to the other grants that were given out by, let's say, the NIH or NSF. To your knowledge, what has been the reaction of these institutions to the discrepancy between the speed and effectiveness of fast grants? Have they analyzed their protocols and what happened during COVID? Is there any retrospective there on their part? Not to my knowledge, but I don't want that to sound like an indictment. Maybe they've done a lot of reflection, and I just don't know about it. I don't think I would know about it, even if it had happened. So, I don't know. I don't know anything about the response at CDC or FDA or NIH or NSF or any of the relevant organizations or their international equivalents. So what I'm saying should be taken as not only not critical of them, but not even as a comment to them. I just don't know what they did. In general, organizations are not awesome at self-reflection. I assume as a default prior, that some of the dynamics we discussed at the beginning of this are rooted there. None of the people who started those organizations are there today. What exactly are the incentives of those leaders? It's not clear to me who would have the incentive to really take stock in a fully objective and self-critical way, to figure out what was done well and what was done poorly.…

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