Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…There's two different threads I want to go on. Maybe I'll just mention the other one. This is also related to the thing we're talking about a few minutes ago with LLMs. Swanson-Linking. Swanson was just somebody who read the medical literature and he was just familiar with a lot of esoteric results. Different things would come up and he would be able to figure out what different things are connected. For example, he noticed in one case that headaches are linked to some other symptom and that other symptom is linked to magnesium deficiency. Apparently a whole bunch of people's headaches were solved once they were given magnesium supplements and he noticed that connection. Again, this is the kind of sort of combinatorial thing that you wouldn't notice otherwise. But on this subject itself, there's this natural way in which you're able to get up to speed in all the things that are happening at Apple. Is it possible and maybe advantageous to do similar kinds of things in other fields? For example, instead of doing an explicit space repetition system when you're trying to absorb material from books, you just read a cluster of books and hopefully things would just come up that are relevant to get in again. Or is there a value in having explicit practice of setting up cards and so on? Yeah, again the answer is going to be it depends. Maybe the most familiar example of what you're talking about is immersion learning a new language. Immersion learning is like a great thing and it's going to be more interesting and more effective than doing space repetition practice. It's going to be integrative. It's going to be socially based. So there's a bunch of stuff about social learning that's relevant. A problem though is that say you decide you want to learn Swahili today and you go down to the local Swahili community center and you're like, “Cool, I'm going to immerse myself” Good luck. You can't even get started. So through this lens, explicit practice is a way to bootstrap yourself. All of the best pianists at sight reading that I knew in university played with churches. They were so good at sight reading because they had to show up every Sunday and they're playing a different thing. New hymn every Sunday. So this is immersion also. Over time, they're learning all these cadences and these things that are really common and whatever. But you can't show up and be the church pianist every Sunday in the first place if you don't already have some decent foundation. This is a bootstrapping argument. One role for explicit practice of this kind is to get yourself into a position where you can more naturalistically reinforce. But there are still going to be instances where naturalistic reinforcement isn't going to work. For example, the linking that you brought up, one issue for doctors is rare diagnosis. So if it's only going to be once every couple of years that you see a patient that's going to present with these symptoms, that's not going to be frequent enough to naturally reinforce your memory of that. You're going to need some out of band mechanism. And unfortunately, I think for many kinds of creative leaps and creative insights, that may be closer to the regime that we’re in. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Where in many fields, the things you're regularly doing is the thing you need to reinforce. It makes a lot of sense that if you're a researcher, the long tail of events that might come up is a thing, it might happen once every few months but the regularity is not a thing that matters, right? It's [unclear] on your work. Here's a question I actually have. When we were doing the quantum mechanics textbook, it was like three hours and afterwards, I was just exhausted. I was actually surprised that you went the entire three hours without interruption. Afterwards, I was packing up and you're like, “Hey, I'm about to actually go to my piano lesson.” I was so confused at how you had the stamina to keep going. Is the stamina just inherent in you? Or is that something you did to develop?…

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