Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
22 published records
01 / belief
“I think there's a bunch of possible explanations. It can't just be youth because youth lasts 10 years not one year so it must have something to do with..”
02 / uncertainty
“For any individual is going to be based on where their life circumstances connect them into something either because he had an interest in Georgism for whatever reason. But if someone I don't know their dad runs a paper mill and they're connected to the family business in that way and realize they can plug themselves in a little bit more efficiently.”
03 / belief
“I think you should ask people who know a lot about Go and Chess and I'd be curious to hear their opinions on it because I imagine what they would say is, if you're going to be as good at Go as AlphaGo is you’re also not doing tree search, at least exclusively.”
04 / uncertainty
“” I don't know how it would look when people get them to be getting golds at the IMO but I imagine it's something that looks a little bit like how AlphaGo is trained, where you have it play with itself a whole bunch.”
05 / observation
“Tell me why I should be less amazed by it or maybe put it in a different context but the reason I would be very impressed is… With chess, obviously this is not all the chess programs are doing, but there's a level of research you can do to narrow down the possibilities. And more importantly, in the math example, it seems that with some of the examples you've listed on your channel, the ability to solve the problem is so dependent on coming up with the right abstraction to think about it, coming up with ways of thinking about it that are not evident in the problem itself or in any other problem in any other test, that seems different from just a chess game where you don't have to think about what is the largest structure of this chess game in the same way as you do with the IMO problem.”
06 / belief
“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.”
07 / belief
“All of the other students in the class were very confused and I think I remember like they would come to me and I would try to offer to help them and the substitute was going around the class in these circles and basically marking off a little star for how far down the homework people were just to get a sense are they progressing.”
08 / belief
“One of them, as I was emphasizing, I think you just lose touch with what it's like not to know stuff or what it's like to be a student and so maintaining that kind of connection so that I don't become duller and duller over time feels important.”
09 / belief
“Even the ones who we think of as like very, very pure mathematicians in the sense that a lot of their most famous results are pure math like Gauss, actually a lot his output was also centered on very practical problems, Maybe since then is when you start to get an era of something more like pure mathematicians.”
10 / belief
“You have one coconut or nine coconuts like you have a sense of that. But if you ask what number is halfway between one and nine, those groups will answer three whereas you or I or people in our world would probably answer five and because we think on this very linear scale.”
11 / belief
“I think that's a great note to leave it on Grant. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast and genuinely, you're one of the people I really, really admire but what you've done for the landscape of Math education is really remarkable.”
12 / belief
“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.”
13 / prediction
“I think we're maybe at a phase where there's room for that to become a much more fluid process such that rather than having these small little bits of friction like you've got to set up the environment, and you got to link it in the notebook, you've got to find the right libraries, that there's something that feels as fluid as when you are good at algebra and you're just at a whiteboard kind of noodling it out.”
14 / commitment
“Basically I had been toying around with just a personal programming project in my last year of college that was the beginnings of what is now the animation tool I work with.”
15 / commitment
“We've been thinking about this because we did it first in 2021 and then we plan to continue doing it annually.”
16 / evaluation
“I don't know if this answers your question, but I would reemphasize that what's probably most important to getting people to actually learn something is not the explanation or the quality of explanations available because since the printing press that has not been true.”
17 / preference
“You want explanations to be online but the word education derives from the same root as the word educe, to bring out, and I really like that as a bit of etymology because it reminds you that the job of an educator is not to like take their knowledge and shove it into the heads of someone else the job is to bring it out.”
18 / preference
“Whereas, if you do something that's almost unreasonably niche and also you're not expecting it to blow up it's like one you're not going to be disappointed, it's like outstanding when a thousand people view it as opposed to being disappointing and then two, you might be making something that is the best possible version of that content for the audience who watches it because no one else is making that for them because it's too narrow a target.”
19 / evaluation
“If I try to reflect on my own history with what I'm doing now I think I didn't appreciate early on how much potential energy I had simply from being a student in college where there's just a bunch of ways of thinking about things, or empathy with new learners, or just cool concepts right?”
20 / observation
“Your watching both of those gives a little link between them, or maybe you and a ton of other people watching both of them gives a little link between such that once I watch video A, B is potentially nominated in that phase because it's recognized that there's a lot of co-watching.”
21 / evaluation
“In so far as it doesn't have more of an impact or more of a reach it's maybe just because people don't know about it or don't have an easy means of accessing something that recommends to them like the really good innovations happening in the world of textual explanations in the way that youtube has this recommending engine that tries its hardest to get more of these things in front of people.”
22 / evaluation
“I'm pretty sure the abstract idea of a number is important for all of us but I don't think it's immediately obvious. It's more that it shapes the way we think, I'm not sure if it actually changes the way we live.”