Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That's my personal hope for this. I always like to look for sort of these cheap leverage hacks, These moments where you can do a relatively small thing and it creates a.. you kick a pebble and you get an avalanche. The theory is, and Grant shares this theory, if you can read one scroll, and we only have two scanned scrolls, there's hundreds of surviving scrolls, it’s relatively expensive to use to book a particle accelerator. So if you can scan one scroll, and you know it works, and you can generalize the technique out, and it's going to work on these other scrolls, then the money which is probably in the low millions, maybe only $1 million to scan the remaining scrolls, will just arrive. It’s just too sweet of a prize not for that not to happen. And the urgency and kind of return on excavating the rest of the villa, will be incredibly obvious too. Because if there are 1000s more papyrus scrolls in there, and we now have the techniques to read them, then there's golden that mud and it's got to be dug out. It's amazing how little money there is for archaeology. Literally for decades, no one's been digging there. That’s my hope. That this is the catalyst that works, somebody reads it, they get a lot of glory, we all get to feel great. And then the diggers arrive in Herculaneum and they get the rest. I wonder if the budget for archaeological movies and games like Uncharted or Indiana Jones is bigger than the actual budget to do real world archaeology. But I was talking to some of the people before this interview, and that's one thing they emphasized is your ability to find these leverage points. For example, with California YIMBY, I don't know the exact amount you seeded it with. But for that amount of money, and for an institution that is that new, it is one of the very few institutions that has had a significant amount of political influence, if you look at the state of YIMBY in California and nationally today. How do you identify these things? There's plenty of people who have money who get into history or get into whatever subject, very few do something about it. How do you figure out where? I'm a little bit mystified by why people don't do more things too. I don't know, maybe you can tell me why aren’t more people doing things? I think most rich people are boring and they should do more cool things. So I'm hoping that they do that now. I think part of it is I just fundamentally don't believe the world is efficient. So if I see an opportunity to do something, I don't have a reflexive reaction that says – Oh, that must not be a good idea if it were a good idea someone would already be doing it. Like someone must be taking care of housing policy in California, right? Or somebody must be taking care of this or that.So first, I don't have that filter that says the world's efficient don’t bother, someone's probably got it covered. And then the second thing is I have learned to trust my enthusiasm. It gets me in trouble too, but if I get really enthusiastic about something and that enthusiasm persists, I just indulge it. And so I just kind of let myself be impulsive. There's this great image that I found and tweeted which said – we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy. That's frequently what happens. The commitment to do it is impulsive and it's done out of enthusiasm and then you get into it and you're like – oh my god, this is really much harder than we expected. But then you're committed and you're stuck and you're going to have to get it done. I thought this project would be relatively straightforward. I’m going to take the data and put it up. But of course 99% of the work has already been done by Dr. Seales and his team at the University of Kentucky. I am a kind of carpetbagger. I've shown up at the end here and try to do a new piece of it.…

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