Michael Nielsen: belief

Transcript context

…I think Dean Keith Simonton has this famous equal odds rule where he says the probability that any given thing you release—any paper, book, whatever—will be extremely important for a given person through their lifetime is not that different. What really determines in what era they are the most productive is how much they’re publishing. Any given thing has equal odds of being extremely important. I think some of the most successful creatives or scientists, they’re just doing a lot. Shakespeare was just publishing a lot. Of course, then there are counterexamples. Gödel published almost nothing. But broadly speaking, you need a very good reason to not do that. It’s funny, I’ve met a lot of people over the years who are clearly brilliant, and they’re just obsessed that they are going to work on the great project that makes them famous, and they never do anything. That seems connected. It’s a type of aversiveness. I think very often they just don’t want public judgment. Something that I would love to see… There’s an awful lot of biographies and memoirs and histories of people who achieve a lot. I wish there was a very large number of biographies of people who are fantastically talented who just missed. I’ve known people who won gold medals at IMOs and things like that, who then tried to become mathematicians and failed. What happened? What was the reason? I suspect in many cases that’s actually more informative than anything else. You have this essay that I was reading before this interview about how you think about what the work you’re doing is. And “writer” doesn’t seem like the right label. As you say, was Charles Darwin a writer? What exactly is that label? I’m a podcaster. In a way, obviously our work is very different, but I also think a lot about what this work is and how I get better at it. In particular, how can I make sure there’s some compounding between the different people I talk to on the podcast? I worry that instead of this compounding, I build up some understanding that’s somewhat superficial about a topic, and then it depreciates. I move down to the next topic, and it depreciates. There are a lot of podcasters in the world who will interview way more experts than I have, and I don’t think they’re much the wiser or more knowledgeable as a result. So it’s clearly possible to mess this up. I wonder if you have thoughts or takes or advice on how one actually learns in a deeper way from this kind of work.…

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