Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
tool / uses
“I use a tool called Beeminder, which charges me if I don't do certain things. This sounds kind of military, but it's certainly more authoritarian than this kind of freewheeling butterflies kind of gesture I was making a moment ago. And I use it to make sure that I do my memory practice.”
other / built
“Michael Nielsen and I made Quantum Country and when I was trying to think about what to do next, the most obvious or natural idea was “What if we just tried that with lots of other things?”
Claim ledger
27 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“Just as one example, in Quantum Country, which was a textbook that Michael Nielsen and I developed to explore some ideas around augmented reading experiences, we embedded a bunch of review questions every 1500 words or so in this text on quantum computation.”
02 / recommendation
“Michael Nielsen and I made Quantum Country and when I was trying to think about what to do next, the most obvious or natural idea was “What if we just tried that with lots of other things?”
03 / belief
“Maybe I happen to know that the magnitude and energy of an electron volt, that's something I can draw on because of the memory system stuff, but I also don't want that to be front and center in my mind all the time.”
04 / belief
“I mean, I learned some things. It was fine. It taught me a lot about where that particular format succeeds and fails in other venues.”
05 / belief
“You're asking about a world in which these great tools exist and someone's using one of these tools to try to do something they really care about. So another reason why it could be miserable that I think is pretty common is that you have some idea about, you're not going fast enough, or you're failing, or you're struggling, and the misery comes from resisting that.”
06 / belief
“I spent a lot of time thinking about it, managing the energy levels and structuring my day around it. So I think there is something where one often feels maybe lower stamina than one actually is because one misapprehends other's stamina.”
07 / belief
“I think the stat is that in 1900, 6% of teenagers graduated high school in the US.”
08 / belief
“In fact, von Neumann's productions seem to have probably very little to do with any kind of mass schooling that we would recognize. As far as the very top, I think that's difficult.”
09 / belief
“Not only to be honest, with what I think is interesting and important, but even to be honest about the results.”
10 / belief
“You're going to need some out of band mechanism. And unfortunately, I think for many kinds of creative leaps and creative insights, that may be closer to the regime that we’re in.”
11 / belief
“I think some kind of mass medium that is like that is waiting to be created, but that can be applied in many, many circumstances.”
12 / belief
“One of the things that I think is really interesting is that we have some disciplines like programming where there are a million books on courses about how to learn to program.”
13 / belief
“The process of building a subscriber base and crowdfunding a project takes a couple of years, at least in my experience.”
14 / commitment
“I will say I've been fortunate to have many high net worth individuals as sponsors, but each of them is providing a sponsorship of $100 a month on my Patreon.”
15 / belief
“I put it on Twitter and it was on the front page of Hacker News. I think you're right.”
16 / uncertainty
“By note? I don't know. For instance, my journal notes are not published. There's one of those every day so there's a lot of them.”
17 / belief
“The pool being bigger doesn't mean that the top 1% are getting more though. So I think that's undecided.”
18 / evaluation
“If I'm studying something in computer science, which is a domain that I know really well, I don't need those syllabi, not in the same way for most subjects, and I think that's mostly just because the amount of cognitive demand that's placed on me by the subject is just much lower than it is for other subjects.”
19 / uncertainty
“We're getting to a part of the cognitive science space that I'm less familiar with and also that I suspect we simply know less about.”
20 / evaluation
“One is that I would argue that one medium has taken off in an absolutely enormous way and that’s video.”
21 / evaluation
“I learned a ton of stuff about the internals of those systems. But because I already had such a rich understanding, both of Apple's platforms and of computer science and engineering in general, I had this really rich network for stuff to slot into.”
22 / prediction
“You're reading through the newspaper and you see that people have finally figured out how to do X and you're like, “Wait a minute, that means if I combine it with this other thing, like we'd be able to do Y!”
23 / evaluation
“He was never as extreme as that, but broadly looking for freedom on the child's part. And he makes this wonderful argument that because these kids don’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, certainly don’t have a fully developed kind of sense of self, to let them do whatever it is that their whim commands them to do in any given moment is actually not freedom, but rather is chaining them to whatever that impulse is.”
24 / prediction
“We can test it against these things. So for the case of the creative instinct, for instance, noticing the contradiction, noticing the connection, I imagine that we will have future notebooks that will do some of this noticing with us and that will decrease our need to be able to rely on our own sense of salience or something like that.”
25 / recommendation
“I think he'd probably respond to this by saying that — actually, in order to effectively compile things that you've learned into schemas that will match feature scenarios effectively, you need to be exposed repeatedly to those things, you need to use them, you need to do a variety of things that will basically show your brain that is relevant to apply these things in combination.”
26 / evaluation
“I think what makes programming feel like a video game is this sense of instantaneousness, this sense of direct contact with the environment.”
27 / recommendation
“I use a tool called Beeminder, which charges me if I don't do certain things. This sounds kind of military, but it's certainly more authoritarian than this kind of freewheeling butterflies kind of gesture I was making a moment ago. And I use it to make sure that I do my memory practice.”