Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I gotta add one anecdote. So, I know many of the guys in Bezos’ eating club, we also tick because we're very similar in vintage, a lot of them were late. So I know all these guys, I know all these Bezos stories. The funny thing is the guy you're talking about (guy who solved the physics problem in his mind), whose name I believe is Asana, is a Sri Lankan guy. He went to grad school at Caltech. At one point, we met up at Caltech when I was visiting, and he was in grad school. I met this guy and talked to him about Bezos. We had other friends in common so we weren't focused on Bezos, but yeah, I met this guy in that anecdote that you just mentioned. That's good to know. Because that is relevant to my question. My friend and I have continually debated the importance of intelligence at the peak of entrepreneurial or engineering ability. And he uses that anecdote to say, “Oh, look, Bezos was not smart enough to be a theoretical physicist. So, therefore, intelligence is not that important. Beyond a confident, not incredibly high point. And afterward, Bezos was creative or blah, blah, blah. He was hard working. ” I don't know; my perception of the story was, “Okay, he's not intelligent enough to be a theoretical physicist. He's below five standard deviations or four standard deviations above the mean; clearly, just studying physics at Princeton is itself a testament that it's probably at least two or three standard deviations about, well, at least three.” What was the perception of those people you talked to at Princeton, about Jeff Bezos? Is it that he just was super hardworking or creative? Or is intelligence super high, just not high enough to be a theoretical physicist? Yeah, this is a great topic that many people are interested in. And even among my close friends. In school, we all talk about this stuff. You have to distinguish between the very abstract intelligence—which is helpful in physics and math, or maybe computer science, versus a more generalist intelligence. Those are correlated, but they're not the same thing. So, I would say Bezos is probably very off-scale for ability to work hard, take risks, function under pressure, focus, and generalist intelligence. Since these traits are at least somewhat uncorrelated, if you're top 10%, in each of these five, simultaneously, already pretty rare individual because plenty of the physics guys who did better than Bezos in the physics classes could not lead a company, they could not put together a presentation that would convince a venture capitalist to invest. So it's a different skill set that we're talking about. The idea that there's a unit dimensional measure of cognitive abilities is not that useful. I'm probably guilty. People say, "Wait, Steve Hsu just said that, but he's the guy most responsible for promulgating this perspective. But it's only because it's the simplest thing to talk about. If you compress it to one general factor, it's just easier to talk about—it doesn't mean that the other components are not meaningful. We just got done talking about verbal vs. spatial vs. some more generalized mathematical talent. So obviously, it's a high dimensional, not that high dimensional, it's at least a multi-dimensional space of abilities that we're talking about. Now, the point about Bezos, which is nontrivial, though, which is directly relevant to the life experiences of physicists who leave physics and do other stuff, is that very often in an engineering setting, or a startup setting, people say “You don't know shit about that! What are you talking about?” But the reality is people who do perform on a technical problem that the startup has to solve—in Bezos his case, it was often optimization of some supply chain thing or optimization of some sorting process or reducing the error rate. The people in the company uniformly say that when Bezos comes in the room, he will give us good feedback on the solution to this ops problem that could be better than what we said, or at least he finds the problems with what we said, or if we did an excellent job on it, he gets it right away, which is some executives might not get it right away. So my point is that people with these super high raw G abilities generally can be helpful in these technological environments. Even if they don't have a lot of background, they can still come in and be helpful. And sometimes they can solve problems that the people who are well trained in the area are having trouble with. That is fair. But it's not fair to say there's just some unit dimensional measure of intelligence. This guy always beats this guy, this guy always beats this guys–it doesn't work that way.…

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