Sholto Douglas: belief

Transcript context

…I guess the only thing I would add to this, or to the headstrong context, is this line: “the system is not your friend.” It's not necessarily actively against you or your sworn enemy. It's just not looking out for you. So that's where a lot of the proactiveness comes in. There are no adults in the room and you have to come to some decision for what you want your life to look like and execute on it. And hopefully you can then update later, if you're too headstrong in the wrong way. But I think you almost have to just charge at certain things to get much of anything done, to not be swept up in the tide of whatever the expectations are. There's one final thing I want to add. We talked a lot about agency and this kind of stuff. But I think surprisingly enough, one of the most important things is just caring an unbelievable amount. When you care an unbelievable amount, you check all the details and you have this understanding of what could have gone wrong. It just matters more than you think. People end up not caring or not caring enough. There’s this LeBron quote where he talks about how before he started in the league he was worried that everyone being incredibly good. He gets there and then he realizes that actually, once people hit financial stability, they relax a bit and he realizes, “oh, this is going to be easy. ” I don't think that's quite true because I think in AI research most people actually care quite deeply. But there's caring about your problem and there's also just caring about the entire stack and everything that goes up and down, going explicitly and fixing things that aren't your responsibility to fix because overall it makes the stack better. You were mentioning going in on weekends and on Christmas break and the only people in the office are Jeff Dean and Sergey Brin or something and you just get to pair program with them. I don't want to pick on your company in particular, but people at any big company have gotten there because they've gone through a very selective process. They had to compete in high school. They had to compete in college. But it almost seems like they get there and then they take it easy when in fact it's the time to put the pedal to the metal. Go in and pair program with Sergey Brin on the weekends or whatever, you know what I mean?…

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