Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…e who stole this stole the plans for how to make it or who had information on exactly how their system would react if the bomb worked basically took as long to figure out how to make it as the US did. So with a physical object, just the process used to make it is not necessarily super legible and it tends to be a little bit hidden. I was gonna say that perhaps that is not as true for software, but I actually realized that I don't actually know and it's very plausible to me that you could have some piece of software that was written, and then it'd just be utterly inscrutable as to how it came together and how you could maybe duplicate a similar piece of software. Is that like a category error? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there are a lot of examples where if you don't have the context on why they were built a certain way, you wouldn't understand what was going on. If you've heard of the fast inverse square root, that's exactly what I was thinking of. Yeah, yeah.…

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