Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…at's very, very hard to do in a video and in fact even if you can kind of get at it by asking intriguing questions for the most part the video is there to answer something once someone has a question. The teacher's job, or the educator's job, should be to provide the environment such that you're bringing out from your students as much as you can through inspiration through projects through little bits of mentorship and encouragement along the way that requires you know eye contact and being there in person and being the true figure in their life rather than just an abstract voice behind a screen. Then should we think of educators more as motivational speakers? As in the actual job of getting the content in your head is maybe for the textbooks or for Youtube but why we have college classes or high school classes is that we have somebody who approximates Tony Robbins to get you to do the thing. That would be a subset of it but there's more than just motivational speech that goes into it. There's um facilitation of projects or even coming up with what the projects are or recognizing what a student is interested in so that you can try to tailor a question to their specific set of interests or you can maybe act as the curator. Where, “Hey, there's a lot of online explanations for what a Poisson distribution is. Which of these is the right one that I could serve?” and based on knowing you as a particular student what might resonate. You might be in a better position to do that. All of that goes beyond being a Tony Robbins saying, “Be the best person that you can be.” and all of that. One thing I might say is that anytime that I'll chat with mathematicians and try to get a sense for how they got into it and what got them started, so often they start by saying there was this one teacher and that teacher did something very small — like they pulled them aside and just said, “Hey. You're really good at this. Have you considered studying more?” or they give them an interesting problem. And the thing that takes at most 30 minutes of the teacher's time, maybe even 30 seconds, has these completely monumental rippling effects for the life of the student they were talking to that then sets them on this whole different trajectory. Two examples of this come to mind. One is this woman who was saying she had this moment when she got pulled aside by the teacher and he just said, “Hey, I think you're really good at math. You should consider being a math major.” which had been completely outside of her purview at that time. That changed the way she thought about it. And then later she said she learned that he did that for a large number of people. He just pulled them and was like, “Hey, you're really good at math.” So that's a level of impact that you can have as a figure in their lives in a way that you can't over screen. Another one which was very funny. I was asking this guy why he went into the specific field that he did. It was a seemingly arbitrary thing in my mind but I guess all pure math seems to be. He said that in his first year of grad school he was sitting in this seminar and at the end of the seminar the professor, who was this old professor who he had never met him before, they didn't have any kind of connection. He seeks this guy out and comes up and he says, “You. I have a problem for you. A good research problem that I think I think might be a good place for you to start in the next couple months” and this guy was like “Oh, okay” and he gets this research problem and he spends some months thinking about it and he comes back and then it later came to light that the professor mistook him for someone else that was someone he was supposed to be mentoring.…

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