← All source episodes Machine Learning Street Talk / episode intelligence
The 3 Laws of Knowledge [César Hidalgo]
27 Dec 2025 18 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
evaluation 5belief 5prediction 3observation 2preference 2disagreement 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
18 published records
“And the idea of shipping the book directly to a consumer might look like a small incremental innovation. But in reality it was an architectural innovation, and when I do talks and I present this with slides, what I do is I show the picture of a Barnes and Noble, and then next to that I show a picture of an Amazon fulfillment center, which looks like kind of like this part of the airport that is you know sorting all of the different luggage, and that shows that no, that little idea of just shipping directly to consumer require a completely different organizational design, and the distance between the Barnes and Noble organization in this network that we were describing before in that model with the to the Amazon model was enormous in reality just because of that change.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Our current state depends on everything that went before. That's not really true because so much knowledge decays and gets lost.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Now, I think we tend to think about it as non physical because it is a thing that is not a thing, which is the same as temperature.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Like there there is this statistic I think in The United States, if you count Nobel Prize winners after the year 19 seventies, 70% of them, you know, were born outside of the country or or or they migrated at some point in their lives.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You know, so what I do in in that chapter is is built a little bit of a parallel because when it comes to economic development, I think the 2 dominant ideas are that it's about knowledge or it's about institutions.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“There are like these analogical jumps that that you can make when you perform creative actions. And I think the examples you gave just kind of pointed to that.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You had you're talking about Barnes and Noble over there in Seattle, and they they they went up against Jeff Bezos and they said, well, you know, Jeff, we've launched a website and and we think we can do what you do better than they do.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You had to have someone that had that experiential knowledge, you know, that had worked with the best, with Arkwright and Stratt, to come all the way to The US in an act of treason because it was a punishable act of treason to bring that technology to America to eventually be able to build that capability.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Instant photography was also laughed at at some point because it was worse, but then eventually that curve keeps on growing and it gets to like a plateau that goes even higher, and then a new technology comes along and moves into a plateau that is higher.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“They're getting, know, the 10 times bigger every few years and the the bullish people say, oh, we're on an exponential curve and it's just gonna keep going up. But I think that because there is so much groupthink and it's fundamentally the same technology and the same people and there's no fresh new ideas that in a sense it's converged and it's not disruptive anymore.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Now there is another distinction that is extremely important and that I used a story at the beginning of the book to illustrate, is that also especially among academics or people that are highly educated, we talk about knowledge as this sort of truths that have been validated by the scientific method and so forth.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Exactly. And and this is the reason why in my opinion LLMs are not intelligent because they don't have this coarse grained dynamic adaptation of their architecture.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“He's very smart, he looks at the cost of the last aircraft produced in a batch because aircrafts are producing batches, and he finds also that the number of man hours as a function of the number of aircrafts in the batch decreases as a power law.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“If I give you a hammer, I cannot use the hammer while you are using it because it's rival.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“We we know from experience, right, that when we have experience, we get better at things. And we have this this weird, I don't know whether it's an illusion that all we need to do is just write down our understanding into into a wiki document.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“Well, I I explain my situation, I get those answers, and then I have an accountant and when I meet with my accountant to discuss that, I'm much better informed and I can make better questions. So I think I'm becoming smarter through those conversations because I'm learning faster thanks to those interactions.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“No, I think experiential learning is important to transmit that tacit knowledge. And I think you have stories of people that have that intuition and that have been successful because they have developed careers following that intuition.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
“You cannot throw like you know a bunch of engineering manuals and cement into a gorge and expect to get a bridge because the books don't have knowledge, teams have knowledge, organizations have knowledge and all of that.”
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk