Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Thanks for listening to this conversation with Demis Hassabis. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me answer some questions and try to articulate some things I’ve been thinking about. If you’d like to submit questions including in audio and video form, go to lexfridman.com/ama. I got a lot of amazing questions, thoughts and requests from folks. I’ll keep trying to pick some randomly and comment on it at the end of every episode. I got a note on May 21st this year that said, “Hi, Lex. 20 years ago today, David Foster Wallace delivered his famous This is Water speech at Kenyon College. What do you think of this speech? Well, first, I think this is probably one of the greatest and most unique commencement speeches ever given, but of course, I have many favorites, including the one by Steve Jobs. And David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers and one of my favorite humans. There’s a tragic honesty to his work, and it always felt as if he was engaging in a constant battle with his own mind, and the writing, his writing were kind of his notes from the front lines of that battle. Now onto the speech, let me quote some parts. There’s of course the parable of the fish and the water that goes, there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” In the speech, David Foster Wallace goes on to say, “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence of course, this is just the banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you in this dry and lovely morning.” I have several takeaways from this parable and the speech that follows. First, I think we must question everything, and in particular, the most basic assumptions about our reality, our life, and the very nature of existence, and that this project is a deeply personal one. In some fundamental sense, nobody can really help you in this process of discovery. The call to action here, I think, from David Foster Wallace as he puts it, is to ” To be just a little less arrogant, to have just a little more critical awareness about myself and my certainties because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is it turns out totally wrong and deluded.” All right, back to me. Lex speaking. Second takeaway is that the central spiritual battles of our life are not fought on a mountain top somewhere at a meditation retreat, but it’s fought in the mundane moments of daily life. ex speaking. Second takeaway is that the central spiritual battles of our life are not fought on a mountain top somewhere at a meditation retreat, but it’s fought in the mundane moments of daily life. Third takeaway is that we too easily give away our time and attention to the multitude of distractions that the world feeds us, the insatiable black holes of attention. David Foster Wallace’s call to action in this case is to be deeply aware of the beauty in each moment and to find meaning in the mundane. I often quote David Foster Wallace in his advice that the key to life is to be unborable, and I think this is exactly right. Every moment, every object, every experience when looked at closely enough contains within it infinite richness to explore. And since Demis Hassabis of this very podcast episode and I are such fans of Richard Feynman, allow me to also quote Mr. Feynman on this topic as well. “I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension at one centimeter, there’s also beauty at the smaller dimensions.” “Their inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower evolved in order to attract the insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that the insects can see the color. It adds a question. Does this aesthetic sense also exist in lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions, which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds.” All right, back to David Foster Wallace’s speech. He has a great story in there that I particularly enjoy. It goes, there are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing and it was 50 below. So I tried it. I fell in my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘Oh God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard and I’m going to die if you don’t help me.” couldn’t see a thing and it was 50 below. So I tried it. I fell in my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘Oh God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard and I’m going to die if you don’t help me.” And now back in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled, “Well, then you must believe now?” he says, “After all, there you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man. All that happened was a couple of Eskimos happened to be wandering by and showed me the way back to the camp.” All this, I think, teaches us that everything is a matter of perspective and that wisdom may arrive if we have the humility to keep shifting and expanding our perspective on the world. Thank you for allowing me to talk a bit about David Foster Wallace. He’s one of my favorite writers and he’s a beautiful soul. If I may, one more thing I wanted to briefly comment on. I find myself to be in this strange position of getting attacked online often from all sides, including being lied about sometimes through selective misrepresentation, but often through downright lies. I don’t know how else to put it. This all breaks my heart, frankly, but I’ve come to understand that it’s the way of the internet and the cost of the path I’ve chosen. There’s been days when it’s been rough on me mentally. It’s not fun being lied about, especially when it’s about things that are usually for a long time have been a source of happiness and joy for me. But again, that’s life. I’ll continue exploring the world of people and ideas with empathy and rigor, wearing my heart on my sleeve as much as I can. For me, that’s the only way to live. Anyway, a common attack on me is about my time at MIT and Drexel, two great universities I love and have tremendous respect for. Since a bunch of lies have accumulated online about me on these topics, to a sad and at times hilarious degree, I thought I would once more state the obvious facts about my bio for the small number of you who may care. TLDR, two things. First, as I say often, including in a recent podcast episode that somehow was listened to by many millions of people, I proudly went to Drexel University for my bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees. Second, I am a research scientist at MIT and have been there in a paid research position for the last 10 years. Allow me to elaborate a bit more on these two things now, but please skip if this is not at all interesting. So like I said, a common attack on me is that I have no real affiliation with MIT. The accusation, I guess, is that I’m falsely claiming an MIT affiliation because I taught a lecture there once. Nope, that accusation against me is a complete lie. I have been at MIT for over 10 years in a paid research position from 2015 to today. To be extra clear, I’m a research scientist at MIT working in LIDS, the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems in the College of Computing. For now, since I’m still at MIT, you can see me in the directory and on the various lab pages.…

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