Max Bennett: evaluation

Transcript context

…What's really interesting about about this book, Max, is, you know, obviously, I've I've read loads and loads of books in in the space, and there's, you know, people like Hinton and Hawkins and Di Macio and Friston and, I mean, god, you know, you you even like Sutton. And what's interesting is it's a bit like the blind men and the elephant. So they've all got a completely different story to tell, and I think the magic that you have pulled off with this book is somehow you've woven it together into a coherent story. Like, what what do you think about that? Well, first, I'm very appreciative of of the kind words. Yeah. I think I came from a very unique perspective just because I was this complete outsider. And I think, you know, and I didn't come to it with the objective of writing an academic book at all. I came to it from the objective of I was just learning on my own, and I just started building this corpus of notes, because I was so independently curious. And I kind of stumbled on this idea really for myself of how do I make sense of all of these disparate opinions and really this complete lack of information about how the brain actually works and I had my own set of, I think, biases coming from sort of the technology entrepreneurial world where we tend to think about things as ordered modifications when you think about product strategies or how to roll things out. We like to think about things as what's step 1, then what's step 2, what's step 3. So I think I did have sort of a cognitive bias to when presented with an incredible amount of complexity to try and make sense of it in a similar type of way. But yeah, I think as an outsider, I felt very free to sort of explore and cross the boundaries between fields. I mean, look at the book as a merging of 3 fields. 1 is comparative psychology, so trying to understand what are the different intellectual capacities of different species. Evolutionary neuroscience, so what do we know about the past brains of humans and the ordered set of modifications of how brains came to be. And then AI, which is how do we ground sort of the highfalutin conceptual discussions about how the brain works in what works in practice, I think, a really important grounding principle because it helps really hold us accountable towards the principles that we think work. If we can't implement them in AI systems, it makes it should make us question if we actually have the ideas right. So so, yeah, I think being an outsider in some ways, you know, comes with disadvantages. But there are some advantages also, which is you're kind of free to borrow from a variety of different fields and think freshly about things. Yes. I mean, if you can point to any particular ideas that you found really, really difficult to reconcile, what would those be?…

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