Michael Nielsen: observation

Transcript context

…It’s hard to find someone. I haven’t tried super hard, but isn’t it going to be tough to find somebody who could do that for every single kind of discipline? Maybe I should just hire different ones for different topics. Maybe. There’s something about, what problem are you solving for each episode? As far as I can tell, that’s the only way I really understand anything. I get interested in something. At first, I don’t even have a problem, but there’s just some sense that there’s some contribution to make here, and gradually you hone in, and there’s a problem. Funnily enough, spending time stuck is incredibly important. That used to just be annoying. Now it seems like it’s maybe even the most important part of the whole process. That hard-won nature of it means that I internalize it afterwards. I’ve written 10,000-word essays in a couple of days, and I’ve written them in three months or six months. I feel like I didn’t learn very much from the ones that only took a couple of days. Whereas some of the ones that took three months, 15 years later, I’ll still remember. Can you describe outside of physics how you learn, of the ones that took three months?…

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