Grant Sanderson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It might be useful to speculate on how an undergrad or somebody who is a young math whiz might even begin to contemplate — here's where I can have an edge. I'm actually remembering a former podcast guest Lars Doucet, he was a game designer and he started learning about Georgism which is this idea that you should tax land and only land. And so he got really interested in not only writing about those ideas but also with — well, if you're going to tax land you have to figure out what the value of land is. How do you figure out the value of land? There's all these algorithms of how you do this optimally based on neighboring land and how to average across land. And there's a lot of intricacies there. He now has a startup where he just contracts with cities to implement these algorithms to help them assess the value of their land which makes property taxes much more feasible. That's another example where the motivation was more philosophical but his specialty as a technical person helped him make a contribution there. I think that's perfect. Probably the true answer is that you're not going to give a universal thing. For any individual is going to be based on where their life circumstances connect them into something either because he had an interest in Georgism for whatever reason. But if someone I don't know their dad runs a paper mill and they're connected to the family business in that way and realize they can plug themselves in a little bit more efficiently. You're going to have this wide diversity of the ways that people are applying themselves that does not take the form of general advice given from some podcast somewhere but instead takes the form of simply inviting people to think critically about the question rather than following the momentum of what being good at school implies about your future. We were talking about this before the interview started but we have a much better grasp on reality based on our mathematical tools. I'm not talking about anything advanced. Literally being able to count in the decimal system that even the Romans didn't have. How likely do you think it is that something that significant would be enjoyed by our descendants in hundreds of thousands of years or do you think that that kind of basic numeracy level stuff those kinds of thinking tools are basically all gone?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.