EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,046 words- 0:00 – 1:00
Intro
- SYScott Young
I feel like people are just way too unambitious in general, and not in, like, the ambition like, "I wanna be better than other people" way, but they just don't think of big projects. They don't work on them. They don't, they don't have, like, you know, big dreams to do cool things, or if they are, it's usually to something, like, I don't know, it usually boils down to something like social status, like, "I wanna be the, you know, the person that does this that's better than other people." And I don't know. I feel like I don't know how you change that, but I do think that, uh, rewarding kind of a culture where you wanna do kind of ambitious, original things that, um, are kinda interesting and you don't know where they're gonna lead, I think that that's, having that in you is, is kinda rare, and I think that cultivating it is probably good for yourself and society.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(Instrumental music) Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Scott Young, who is the author of the book Ultralearning: Accelerate Your Career, Master
- 1:00 – 13:20
Einstein
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Hard Skills, and Outsmart Your Competition. So Scott, I'll ask you some practical s- questions in a second, but, uh, first, let's talk about Einstein and Newton. So they both had an annus mirabilis, a miracle year within which their, many of their important contributions were concentrated. W- what explains this phenomenon of miracle years?
- SYScott Young
Well, I, I don't know. I think whenever you look at the sort of outlier people, like, and Newton and Einstein are certainly one, um, y- you have to realize that most people never have a year where they accomplish anything like that. So I think it's just... E- e- it's j- I think it's a lot of it's selection effect, that you have a smart person who just happens to be working on the problem that will lead to a huge breakthrough. And so, I mean, it, we could've lived in a world where Newton spent a lot of time on alchemy and then discovered a way to turn lead into gold and then, like, that worked, but that's not the world that we live in. And so I think that, you know, his work on, uh, physics and the Principia and stuff like that was what led to the breakthrough. And I think Einstein's a little rare that he had kind of a couple key insights that led to physics. Like, I mean, he discovers or sort of proves through Brownian motion the existence of atoms. He disc- the photoelectric effect, which is the thing he actually won the Nobel for, not his relativity, which is what he's, you know... The, the thing he revolutionized physics for, uh, is not really even what he, uh, got the, uh, Nobel Prize for was the photoelectric effect, which, I mean, I guess it started quantum mechanics, so it's not really (laughs) , can't downplay it too much, but... Then special relativity and then he struggles with the math for, like, eight years to get general relativity. So I think Einstein's a, you know, he's a little bit of an exception in that he, he did have, like, multiple huge breakthroughs. And so when people are talking about, like, lists of geniuses or people who are important, sometimes that list gets populated by people who don't really deserve to be there. But Einstein is definitely, like, not... He's like an accurately relate- rated genius that, uh, ex- is seen as being extremely smart and important b- and actually is extremely smart (laughs) and important.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right. But as you mentioned, they were different problems, right? And unless there's, like, a deeper principle which I'm missing, I, I, I, I'm having trouble understanding why many, like, special relativity, photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... happened in the same year.
- SYScott Young
Yeah. I don't know. I think that, uh, for Albert Einstein's case, the fact that the kinds of problems he was working on, um, I think were also amenable to his sort of style of thinking. So, um, you know, I'm a big fan of the Isaacson biography of Einstein. I talked about it. I did a little kinda summary post on my blog, and you can see that Einstein is really one of the great intuitive physicists. Like, he's very much a spatial-visual person, and so, like, his thought experiments are really kind of the mechanism that he's using to generate these insights. And so, um, you know, putting the photoelectric effect aside for a second, you know, the special relativity is this kind of, all right, we, we have these weird experimental results that show that the speed of light doesn't vary depending on which direction you do it, which is weird because, you know, if you think about a wave and it's going through some medium, i- then if you're moving relative to medium, the speed should change, but it doesn't seem to do that. And so kind of, like, working through the geometric implications of that and then getting to this idea that, like, well, lengths will contract as you go faster. And th- these are all mind-bending, but they come from this kind of rigorously working out the intuitions of this, and you can see that as being somewhat different maybe than the more mathematical physicists who were, um, you know, very, very strong at some of this advanced math, and it was a little bit less of a kind of like, "Well, what's my physical intuition about this?" But more like, "Well, what is a way of representing this?" And, like, you know, I, I'm maybe getting a little bit s- outside of my comfort zone, but I'm imagining, like, people come up with matrix mechanics. This is just a little bit sort of like, "Oh, this is an interesting pattern, or this is one way you could do it that makes the math easier," and stuff. And, and I think even, you know, uh, Einstein, uh, I believe it was Minkowski who he worked with on, like, the tensor stuff because h- he kinda was, like, a little bit more limited there. Not that Einstein wasn't also a brilliant, uh, brilliant at math, but, um, it's definitely that's not what led to his huge breakthroughs was this kind of he had some intuition, and then he kind of worked to formalize it. Whereas for other people might be like, "Oh, this is an interesting mathematical pattern. I wonder whether or not it would work for this particular problem." So I, I think that it may just be that these types of problems were kinda uniquely suited to his sort of style of, of doing, um, physics. And I don't know. If you look into the different time periods, it may just be the case that, okay, there were a few insights that required someone with his kind of skill set to unlock them.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah. A- a- this also relates to an essay you wrote called The Narrow Path of Success, um, where you explain that you kind of have to be following the right track to be, be, uh, successful in many ways. Doesn't the example of Einstein confound that explanation? Because you have somebody who's a patent clerk, couldn't get an academic job. Many years after he did special relativity, he still couldn't get an academic job. Uh-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... is...
- SYScott Young
Yeah. Well-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Oh, sorry.
- SYScott Young
... I think when I'm talking about the, the s- sort of surprisingly narrow path to success, this is just sort of this kind of contrary to this idea that people have, and it's sort of this romantic idea that, like, in kind of high ambition fields, you can kind of just do whatever you want and then, like, someone will recognize you and then it'll work. And if you actually get data on, (laughs) on how these careers actually work, it's clear that's not how they work. So, uh, the kind of motivating example that caused me to write that post was re- reading, uh, Jason, uh, excuse me, Jason Brennan's book, uh, Good Work If You Can Get It, which is about kind of a very data-driven approach to analyzing how careers work in academia. And the picture he paints is stark. Like, there's-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- SYScott Young
... way more people going into academia than there are academic jobs, and the actual process of getting those jobs is quite rigid, and that the filters are quite rigid. And so I think, um, you know, Einstein, we're using him as a bit of a counter-example, but he kinda isn't because (laughs) , like, he- he had some sort of bad things on his resume, and he had a really hard time getting a physics job. So, the right way of looking at that is that Einstein struggled to get through this because he didn't have the right resume-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- SYScott Young
... and you're not Einstein. So, so that's sort of the thing that I would put, kind of put, and I think there are always these exceptions where someone had kind of, um, the wrong start to things and then had this, like, truly spectacular, you know, one in a million kind of result that brought them stardom. But you can't really count on that, right? And I think that's, uh, sort of the lesson here. And so, like, you know, we kind of romanticize the Einstein stories, but if you were just doing it from a, "Okay, well, what is the typical path for people and how do, you know, 80, 99% of people find success in this field?" That's what you should be betting on, you know? You shouldn't be going into a poker game, you know, "Well, if I get a royal flush, then I'll be really good." You need to bet it on, "Well, you know, given that I have probably an average hand, what's the way I should play?"
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
And so I do think if you are in the top .01%, then don't listen to me, 'cause you're smarter than me, right?
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- SYScott Young
Like, you know what you should be doing. But if you're like everyone else and you're trying to figure out what you should be doing best, I think, um, understanding the path to success in those fields and what is the typical path is so important, because generally, if you are outside of that path, you're gonna be facing strong headwinds. And so yeah, if you're a remarkable Nobel Prize winning genius, then maybe you will, you know, see some success. But if you are not, then you're kind of stacking the odds against you for no reason. And, you know, one of my favorite examples from that post is, uh, I talk about how in non-fiction book publishing, there is an established path, and that path is you first get an agent, uh, because getting an agent is easier than getting a book deal. And then you work on a proposal, which is partly what the book is gonna be and partly also kind of like a business plan to show that you've thought out why this book will actually sell enough to, uh, interest the publisher. And then you pitch it, and you get a book deal, and then you write it. And so the writing it is coming way, way late in this process. And what most people do is they write the book first and then they look around for people who will publish it, which is, like, screams amateur to publishers, and they don't like that. And so it's very difficult, even if your book is, like, pretty good, to get a book deal that way. There, there are exceptions, but it's difficult, right? And so, uh, this is sort of if you're serious about becoming a non-fiction author, the first step would be to try to get an agent (laughs) , right? Like, obviously if you're self-publishing, none of this applies. But if you're trying to go through a traditional publisher, you want to have a published book through an actual, you know, serious publisher, that's what you wanna do. And I remember I wrote this and, and someone was kind of, like, upset. Like, "Well, wh- well, why, why do I have to do that? Why do I have to do it this way?" And it's not that you have to do it that way, it's just that if you're not doing it that way, you're making it harder for yourself. So, I think it's always fine to do something weird and, you know, creative, but you should know that that's the strategy you're picking and that you're kind of making it hard for yourself in certain ways if you do it that way. And so I think, um, this sort of narrow path to success kind of ties into, uh, one of my kind of major points, um, not only in Ultralearning, but in my sort of philosophy in general, which is that people really ought to do more research about what, what is the sort of typical way that these kinds of things succeed before they embark in projects. Because even if you decide, "Well, I'm not gonna do it that way. I've got, like, kind of a- my own path that I think is gonna work better for whatever reason," like, you should know what the status quo is. You should know what that works. You shouldn't just like, "Oh, well, I didn't know that that's how people did this," or that's how you got success in this field. And that this research is not actually even that hard to do for most things.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
Like, it's not like it requires-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
... super secret knowledge. It's just most people don't know how to do it or they don't care to do it, or they don't wanna find out the answer-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... because maybe it's not something that they wanna hear.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right. Um, okay, so maybe we shouldn't be studying the exceptions that hard. Um, but let me just ask you one more question about, uh-
- SYScott Young
Sure.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... how Einstein's way of learning, uh, contrasts with Ur- Ultralearning. So, he seems to have lacked the sort of structure and discipline and organization a, a sort of Ultralearning project kind of requires, right? Um, i- is that evidence for a more, like, fun-based and excitement and, uh, curiosity based form of learning?
- SYScott Young
Well, I don't know whether that's true. Like, I mean, a- again, I'm going off the Isaacson biography here, but I mean-
- 13:20 – 18:00
Age
- DPDwarkesh Patel
what's the relationship between age and ultralearning? Is there a prime age, um, where you're at the peak of both your plasticity but also your, uh, maturity to be able to learn things very fast?
- SYScott Young
Well, there's kind of two questions here. So one of the questions is, are the kinds of, uh, principles and techniques that I talk about in Ultralearning age-specific? And I would say probably not. It seems to be the case that retrieval works better than review. I don't see a reason why that would change as you get older. Similarly, like, feedback is gonna be important whether you're 79 or 17. Like, they're not, I don't think that those things are gonna change. So, you could read Ultralearning and if you were to sort of like, "Okay, what practical steps should I take to learn X or Y?" I don't think that the advice would change too, too much. Now, the other point you're kind of making is Ultralearning as this kind of, like, can you be really successful at an ambitious learning project? How does that change when you age? And that certainly does change. So we know, for instance, that, like, fluid intelligence probably declines from like your early 20s. It, it kind of straight lines downward. Um, things like working memory and stuff also decline. I did an essay where I du- dove into some of the research on aging and learning, and that's a really interesting subfield. And I didn't, I did it after the book so I didn't include any of it in the book, but one of the things that's a key finding is that the frontal areas of the brain seem to be the parts that deteriorate faster as we age. And so, the two main things that tend to be harder as you get older is one, is the kind of frontal, the frontal areas. So think about this as kind of like your executive control of, like, dictating where you should focus your attention, um, being able to switch rules for things. So if it's like, I give you a puzzle where you have to apply a certain rule to a problem, but then I switch it suddenly and you have to apply a different rule, there's more perseverance. Like, people who are older have a harder time switching because this kind of like, oh, the habit that they want to override, they're having a harder time switching back and forth. And so, this does suggest, for instance, in areas of focus, that if you're older, you need to pay more attention to having an environment that's conducive to focus, because if you're 21, maybe you can have the television on in the background and just tune it out. But if you're maybe 75, you may just find it impossible to keep from being distracted because of that frontal area stuff. There's also stuff on, uh, on chunking, that there seems to be, um, difficulties with, like, the medial temporal lobe areas which are involved with, like, binding information, so that's a, that's a big part of the intuition chapter. I talk about chunking, where you're kind of assembling pieces of information together so that they can be, um, attached. And it seems like people that are older have more difficulty doing that, which would obviously impact learning. But it's also why, like, you know, someone who is older might recognize someone but they can't remember their name as easily because the name and the facial recognition just don't bind as strongly, as like, "Oh, it's, I recognize this person and their name is so-and-so and I know that they went to school here and this is how I know them."
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
And, and all of that kind of stuff. And so, it, there might be some benefit of being more explicit in how you kind of put information together so that you can bind it more easily. Um, for instance, there's studies that show that, like, if you're making flash cards, for instance, and you have to do more manipulation to like show how the parts connect with the flash cards. Um, so like, in this particular example, I'm, I'm, I'm working off of memory here. Um, they were talking about, like, learning Chinese words. And so there's the characters and the pronunciation, and there's two characters and two pronunciation, and if you put them side by side, what you have to do is take like the first part of one and link it with the first part of the other, and the second part of one and link it with the other. And it turns out this makes it somewhat harder to remember than if they're on top of each other and there's just a, an easy, easy visual link. And so you could think of maybe if you're older and you're struggling more with, um, these kinds of issues, uh, organizing your material better, making the connections between things you have to learn more explicit, uh, having that kind of pre-processing work might be a little bit better. But I think those are also things that would benefit people who just struggle with learning more. So if you have kind of, uh, if you feel like you're more distractible, if you feel like you struggle to understand concepts, I mean those are also things that would apply. So, that would be my connection between age and, and learning. But I think, you know, the, the broader, um, thing that I think matters is just that when you're, when you're learning something, using the correct strategy is mostly gonna be the same, so I don't think it's the case that there's some strategy that works for really smart people and some strategy that works for people who don't. The, the same things probably work, it's just, it's gonna be easier if you're, um, more intelligent or you're younger or you have those advantages.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Sure, yeah. Although
- 18:00 – 24:40
Transfer
- DPDwarkesh Patel
the principle of transfer seems to be injured by, uh, your explanation that your capacity to look beyond superficial differences and recognize deeper principles is harmed by age. Right? Or, to connect different concepts.
- SYScott Young
Um, yeah, I don't know whether it's the case that you're, like... So there's two issues there. So the, the issue of being able to look at what the deeper principle is, I think is s-... part of this problem that, um, you need a lot of exposure to a- a field and to the knowledge in the field in order to build up this kind of repertoire of patterns, so that when you see it, you can actually see what the principles are. (laughs) And so that's one of those sort of things that, like, there's... Um, I forget the name of the study, but it was like one of those classic s- uh, cog sci studies where they took physics novices and experts and showed-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... how they look at problems, and the novices focus on stupid stuff like, oh, this involves a pulley or an- an inclined ramp, whereas the experts are like, "Oh, this is a conservation of energy problem." And so the kind of naive way is thinking, "Oh, well, it would be nice, we should just tell people how to recognize whether it's a conservation of energy problem." But the problem is that the conservation of energy aspect of it is a- is a kind of abstract property of the problem, and so the- whether it involves a pulley is an obvious aspect. And so what you need to be able to do is look at all those obvious aspects and then figure out what the abstract or a higher thing is. And it seems like you probably do this through chunking, so you probably learn all these smaller patterns and you build it up so that when you see it, it just all comes together and you can see what the situation is. And, um, so I do think it's probably the case that if you're learning something that has a lot of abstraction, um, really spending time to kind of familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the more basic pieces allow those things to kind of lock together faster. And so, you know, I- I- the vignette I chose for that one was Feynman just because he had spent so much time kind of playing around with math, and he just had so much familiarity that he was like this encyclopedia of, like, weird math trivia. So, you know, like just random stuff comes up and he can come up with the answer because he has all these (laughs) patterns that are stored in memory.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right. Uh, so th- that was a part of the book that, um, I was thinking about a lot, because there- there was that part of intuition where- which explains that, you know, your memories in area one can influence and help your knowledge in area two. But then the chapter on directness talks about the failures of transfer learning, and so I was just trying to put those two things together.
- SYScott Young
Yeah. I mean, I think... So (sighs) if- if we're kind of visualizing it a little bit here, the- the principle of intuition is sort of recognizing that- that because of this sort of hierarchical structure of chunking, you have this kind of building up layers of abstraction on top of each other. And what the- the thing on transfer is showing is that when you go from one domain to another, the- the problem with- the problem with the transfer idea is that (laughs) when we talk about learning skills, we tend to use fairly general labels for things. So we say kind of like, "Well, I'm gonna get good at X," and X is just this sort of broad category of skills. And what is sort of missing from that is that to actually perform those skills quite well, you have to do something very, very precise. And so it seems to be a general feature of the brain that it learns things quite specifically and that is how it works. It's not just, like, a defect, but, like, that's- that's why we're smart is because we can make very fine-grained discriminations between things. And so you can get transfer if you're thinking about it in terms of like, "Well, I understand domain one well enough that I can see abstract pattern here, and I understand domain well- two well enough that I can understand abstract pattern here, and I can see that these are the same abstract pattern and I can make that linkage." But the problem is that if you haven't chunked the first domain enough to get up to that pattern and you're trying to talk about the next, they don't match because superficially they're quite different, right? So this is like this issue where, yes, if you understand physics problems well enough that you can see that this conservation of energy is this principle that holds, and then you start learning a new domain and you realize, "Oh, this is actually like conservation of energy."
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
You get it up to that level of abstraction, then yes, you can do that transfer.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
But the problem is that most people don't have this sort of like richly abstract, sort of principal based reasoning about things, and so they just see all these superficial details and they have nothing to do with each other. And if the superficial details of one don't have to do with the superficial details of another, there's zero transfer there because they don't look alike at all.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
And so I think, um, you know, one of the books that I read that was sort of a major source of the research on transfer was, um, I think it was called Transfer of Cognitive Skill, and I'm blanking on the author's name right now, but it's mentioned in my, um... I think it's Haskel maybe, i- is mentio- mentioned in, uh, in Ultralearning. And sort of that's his point later in the book is that his idea about how we overcome this transfer problem is that we teach more theory, because ideally-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
... if we have this sort of richer, more abstract ideas about things, then we are getting it to a level where it can transfer above these superficialities. I'm a little bit more skeptical of that because I feel like, well, that's kind of what universities do is teach theory and it doesn't seem to work very well.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
So you're kind of suggesting what we're already doing.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
But I think the point that I want to make in the directives chapter is presumably you're reading this book and there's something you want to be good at, right? And so if you want to be good at it, then make sure that those, like, specific skills, the micro-skills that need to be in place are the ones that you actually need in the real situation because if there's mismatch, your performance is going to go down considerably. And there's lots of real world situations where, you know, just having a theoretical insight is not enough, you need to actually perform all of these small sub-skills, and if you don't have the sub-skills, your performance is zero, and so if you're doing some training that doesn't work on the sub-skills you need, you're not actually going to be able to perform. So I'm talking about it very abstractly, but like language learning is the example I use there that if you only learn how to recognize sentences, so you can't actually recall them, then that's useless for you when you're speaking because (laughs) you're not- you're not recognizing sentences, you- what you're doing is actually speaking. And so I'm very critical of Duolingo there because a lot of the exercises they do are not recall, they're- they're just- they're just, you know, doing multiple choice-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... from a word bank, but actually speaking involves recall, it also involves pronunciation, it also involves working around words you don't understand and- and these kinds of things. And so I think the more you analyze skills you're trying to learn, you realize, "Oh, this is why this thing doesn't work, because the actual thing that I need to do in the performance situation is
- 24:40 – 34:00
Compounding
- SYScott Young
not what I've been training."
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Hmm. Uh, this makes me wonder if this explains why very widely read people and very broadly knowledgeable people don't seem that much smarter than just generally widely read people. I had Tyler Cowen on the podcast and I asked him-
- SYScott Young
Mm-hmm.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... did he learn more between, i- in the last 10 years than he did between the ages of say 15 and 25? And he said, obviously, 15 to 25. And I asked him, "If you take the concept of compounding growth of knowledge seriously, shouldn't you expect to be learning more in the last 10 years?" And, you know, he said it's diminishing re- um, returns when it comes to learning. But I, I wonder if just the fact that the compounding just doesn't work because there's a lack of transfer once you know enough, right?
- SYScott Young
Well, I don't think that, I don't think compounding works, uh, generally. Like, I think compounding is this very seductive idea where you, you just get more and more returns but really, the areas where there is true non-stop exponential growth are, like, vanishingly rare. And they're vanishingly rare because when they apply, they, like, totally transform the situation you're dealing with. So, like, startup growth is an example of compounding return and it's where, like, one guy in his basement can rule the world after, like, (laughs) after 10 years of, of grinding or, or 20 years of grinding. So, like, that's a situation that's fa- you know, vanishingly rare. Most things have kind of regions of exponential growth and then regions of diminishing returns. I would say that, you know, classic Cowen economics thinking is that you tend to think in terms of diminishing returns, so that diminishing returns tends to be the kind of default way of viewing things, that you get most of your growth in the beginning. But I think it's certainly about, like, truths about the world. Um, there are some basic mental models or concepts which are very fundamental and once you understand them, you kind of, you get, like, the 80/20, you get quite a bit of understanding. And then you're getting to, like, the esoterica of academia and now suddenly they're, like, debating the finer points of some BS problem that doesn't really matter.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
And when, yeah, spending a lot of time studying that may be necessary to advance the field but, like, clearly from a utilitarian standpoint of like where are you gonna get the most benefit from your learning, it was in that first phase, and so maybe that's the kind of thesis in ultra learning too is that, um, you know, ha- having kind of like, okay, I can capture the 60% of the value of, like, or utility of this field in a relatively short period of time because if I do kind of plan my learning out very effectively, I can kind of capture it. And I don't, I don't want to say that that's always the case and certainly for professional careers you often need to be in the top, like, 1% of a skill for it to matter at all so I, I do think there's differences. But, you know, definitely there's the case that if you wanted to become good enough as a programmer to do a lot of your own programming for personal tasks but maybe you're not, like, what you do is programming full time, you could easily do that in a year. Like, that's, that's something a person could easily do in a year. Whereas the way people often think about it is, "Well I have to go to school for four years and then maybe work in an office for... So I have to do it for, like, a decade to be good at it." And, and similarly with language learning. Like, yeah, if you want to be able to lecture in a language or speak so fluently that, like, your entire life is lived in that language then, yeah, it's, it's gonna take you probably a decade. But you get to a level where, like, traveling in the country is pretty frictionless after maybe a couple of months and I think that's the kind of interesting zone of like, oh, I could get, like, decent at these skills in a, in a relatively short period of time, how does that change my calculus about what kinds of skills I pursue or, or what kinds of things I invest in in terms of, of projects?
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Hmm. Uh, does this diminishing returns apply to, uh, co- consecutive ultra learning projects as well? I think you implied in the book that there's a cumulated advantage of doing one ultra learning project and then you have the meta-skills and confidence-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... to go from one to another, but they're not a compound of the S-curves.
- SYScott Young
Uh, well so they're probably S-curves. They're probably S-curves.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Gotcha.
- SYScott Young
They're probably a case that, like, you're, if... So one of the main points that I try to make is that I think that there is this kind of compounding confidence curve and especially at the beginning which is sort of where I'm focused on which is that if you've never done sort of aggressive self-directed learning projects before and you try to do this and I mean you're reasonably smart, smart, you have the kind of background, um, sticktuitiveness to like actually get a project done and this kind of thing which is, is, is not a small assumption but I mean I'm kind of assuming you have enough self-efficacy to like, "Okay, I'm gonna sit and work on this for three months," and then you actually do it-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... and it's not like a week later and you're like, "Ah, I just threw that book in the garbage, that was too boring." But if you're actually able to get through it and follow up on it and actually kind of do those things that I'm talking about in the book, then you can often get to this sort of like, "Oh, oh, wow, I didn't know that I could do that." Like, this is a lot of the people that I, I interviewed and I talked to who, who kind of went through this in the book, like, Tristan de Montebello was just this great example. I mean his, his outcome was pretty extreme but his was kind of like he was a, you know, kind of reasonably competent, smart guy but he'd never tried to do things this way before and then he does them and he gets this huge result and he's like, "Oh, this is, like, crazy. I could think of all these other types of projects that I could tackle now if I, if I was really serious about them." And so I think there's this sort of improvement not only in your confidence but in your overall strategy. You know, if you've learned a couple languages then learning more languages just becomes like this routine activity. I mean it still takes you the same amount of time to get to like that level of mastery but the way people feel and talk about like, "Ugh, I really want to learn Spanish but I haven't made any progress in like five years," like, they don't deal with that, right? Like, "Okay, yeah, I'm gonna work on Spanish and I know I'll be able to get to a level where I'm having a conversation after, you know, a few months," just because that's just how it works, right? And so I think that there is this benefit of getting this compounding. Now i- if we're talking about like do just the people who become smarter just become this like eclipse level and it's like that, you know, I don't know, the Johnny Depp movie where he becomes like the, he becomes the universe computer.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- SYScott Young
Like, no, obviously not. Like, there's obviously some kind of, okay, now you've learned and mastered sort of the edge of what we know about like-... performance from memory, and so now you're doing little tweaks, you know? You're... It's a little bit like, I would say, athletics is similar, that if you've never gone running before, and then someone first sh- says, "Hey, there's this thing called jogging, and if you put your shoes on and you kind of run for a bit," like, you could probably get quite a bit better for a while. Like, e- e- there's quite a bit of gains, but then once you're at the level where you're, okay, you're regularly competing in, you know, marathons, you've run the Boston Marathon, well, now you're kind of shaving seconds off your time. So th- there's probably an S-curve there. I think the argument I'd like to make is that, like, most people are before the gains.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- SYScott Young
They're the people who've, like, "I've maybe jogged a couple times in my life," but they've never taken it seriously, so... I think that for the intended audience, I think this book is, is... that- that's true, but I think, again, whenever we talk about compound growth, we just have to keep in mind that, like, an unending compound growth is a very, very scary thing in the world 'cause it just implies that, you know, one person, uh, controls the entire universe or is smarter than every other person on, on Earth. Like, it... they, they tend to diminish at some point.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Y- you know what's interesting? I had Robin Hanson on the podcast, and he had, he's written a series of blog posts-
- SYScott Young
Hm.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... um, about the long view, which is that, th- we do have, you couldn't just invest-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... in the stock market and like a mil- you know, a thousand years down the line, you'll be, like, the richest person in the world by a big factor. And he asked, like, "Why is it not the case that some organization says, 'It doesn't matter if we die, we're just gonna put, like, a couple million dollars in this fund and we're gonna control the universe in a few thousand years?"' Um, e- he just had-
- SYScott Young
Well, yeah, I mean, the, the classic, uh, reason for that is that that's one of those sort of engineering fallacies where it's sort of like, well, yeah, but obviously once an organization started to have that kind of power, not only would you have corruption from the inside so that like, the human agents that are controlling the agency would start diverting the resources and breaking the company's mission, but everyone from the outside would start to kind of dominate. Like-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah, yeah.
- SYScott Young
... you don't just dominate the world without also having an army and also having, like, wide popular appeal and, like, doing this kind of thing, and so, I mean, I could see some scenario where that happens where you're creating an organization that's like, like a new church or something where it, like, becomes the mass religion and then controls the universe. But there's no kind of secular, like, no, no kind of political ambitions organization that manages to concentrate so much wealth for, you know, thousands of years and people are like, "Oh, yeah, well, we'll just, uh, honor that contract." (laughs) So-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... I, I do really think that, uh, you know, not, no disrespect to Robin Hanson because I think he's a brilliant thinker, but, um, I, I, I really admire him because he's the one who kind of like points out these sort of, "Well, why don't people just do this?"
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- 34:00 – 40:50
Depth vs context
- DPDwarkesh Patel
of questions about like, how does this work on a deep level, right?
- SYScott Young
Hm, okay.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
And I'm wondering whether you should... Is there value in, first of all, getting the whole context, like kind of building a rough map? Or should you, as you're learning, kind of question each piece of knowledge as you're accumulating it?
- SYScott Young
Um, so I think the way I view sort of projects and, and learning projects in general is that they all kind of have to start with this, what is, what does success look like? What is the outcome that I'm trying to generate from this learning project because analyzing things like this abstractly are hard because if you're optimizing for a different goal, the answer might be different, right? So, uh, (laughs) you know, just even to take the language learning as an example, um, I found for the goals that I had that trying to figure out, let's say, the etymology of words or spending a lot of time figuring out where words come from and what it is, it quickly hits a point where you can be wasting a lot of time. So it quickly hits a point where, okay, yes, but actually what I need to do is just memorize more words. I don't need to like, really dive, dive deep on that. That being said, that's not a general principle. Like, there's other subjects where I find that like, the tendency is to not do enough depth, like, to not really go into it and understand things. And so in my mind, that's just because the specific constraints of learning a language tend to suggest this is the right strategy, that that's the optimal strategy. Whereas, you know, learning physics for instance, I think that the problem is just that most people don't get nearly enough depth, right? Like, that they just understand the concepts too superficially. They're not see- they're seeing the pulleys, they're not seeing the conservation of energy. And so when you're asking about like, what's the right way to approach a subject, I think it's really hard to do that in a goal-free setting. Like, it's really hard to say, "Well, I want to learn physics the best way possible." I don't think there's really an answer to that. I think there's an answer to, "Well, I want to be able to pass these types of exams in my university classes the best way possible," or, "I want to create groundbreaking, you know, physics research," or, "I want to be able to discuss physics intelligently to other physicists," or, "I want to..." Like, there's all these different kinds of goals where it would be like, okay, this suggests a different way of like, building around this. And there are more robust strategies, so like a strategy that works better if you have multiple goals. So if, if you not only want to pass your class but you also want to be able to invent things and like, you have this sort of wider set of goals that you're considering, I do think that there are strategies that are more robust. So like, if I'm learning Chinese for instance, and my only goal is to look really good for 10 minutes of like, an audio thing that I can prepare, then obviously this strategy is to script it and to rigorously practice and have someone te- like, ch- is to actually not learn Chinese at all. But that's not a very robust plan. So like, if I'm doing, like, I would never do a project that way 'cause to me it's like, well, that's not really what you want to do, even if that was one of the outcomes that you wanted to have. But I think that, you know, if you're learning Chinese and you, your goal is, "Well, I want to be able to talk to people," versus, "I want to be able to read Confucius," well, now you're talking about completely different strategies about going about it in my mind. Like, I don't think the, you know, even if there's some overlap, like, the, the thing that you do to be able to read ancient Chinese texts and the thing that you do to be able to like, you know, chat with people on WeChat or something are totally different goals. And so...... one of my main kind of points that I like to make is that, like, you can't even really begin to think about optimizing unless you're, say, like, optimizing for what? (laughs) And learning tends to, I think learners tend to kind of discount that just because they are sort of like, "Well, I want to know X," or, "I want to learn this topic." And, uh, sometimes those assumptions about that tend to be the problem.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Out of curiosity, take the example you gave of trying to be a groundbreaking researcher. Say you're Cal Newport and you're trying to-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... make a new proof, what is, what is a strategy you use to learn at the cutting edge? I'm just curious.
- SYScott Young
Well, again, I think that one of the key things there would be to specialize, because, uh, and you see this at, like, top level researchers. Why they specialize is because it's much easier to, like, your benefit of getting a breakthrough is going to be, well, there's gonna be some ideas that are closely related to what I'm doing, and I need to have them at, like, an extremely high level of fluency. And there's a drop-off curve of, like, the value of ideas the further go- away it goes. And so if you have a really, really high level of specialization in a field, then you probably are kinda at the cutting edge for techniques and stuff, and so you can find problems to work on. Now, that's a little bit of a different issue from, okay, I wanna be an Albert Einstein or something like this. That, I think, is, is, uh, part of it, I think, is just luck. You have to be in a fertile territory. But I think you also are kind of looking for, well, because everyone else is specializing-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... then I have to do something competitively unique. So, I mean, this is also another consideration as well. Like, you have the whole kind of, we're talking about this like everyone else in the world doesn't exist, but the fact that everyone in the world is also kind of pursuing some sort of strategy can sometimes mean that doing something that's sort of objectively suboptimal but is kind of, uh, n- nobody does that, I think gives an advantage. I think even my own life is an example of that, that like, um, you know, obviously it's better if you can actually go to MIT and get an MIT degree, and get the alumni network, and all this kind of stuff. But the fact that nobody was doing the MIT challenge gave me kind of a claim to fame. Like, if only one person is doing it, that makes me kind of more unique. So, the value to my career has probably been higher than getting an MIT degree. But I mean, if every single person was doing the MIT challenge and there was hundreds of thousands of people doing it, well then, okay, maybe the, the, the difference changes. So I think there is a sort of strategic role in, in how you learn things. But again, I think one of the things I talk about in the book is sort of, all right, given the kind of goal that I'm optimizing for, how do successful people do it? And so again, you go to academia and you say, like, "How do I make, um, how do I make things that inch forward the field?" Well, you have to specialize. You have to figure out, okay, what's a problem that I will understand the best in the world? And then I can find ways that I can make improvements over it. And that's how our whole academic system is organized, and there's sort of no surprise for that. That may not be the thing that we want as a society. Maybe we want these sort of weird cross-pollinating insights that no one saw coming out of left field. But I think, um, as just a pure strategy on your own of just doing it, you're definitely gonna get into situations where, okay, well, I learned these two things and there's no obvious overlap, and so I've mastered two, like it's been kind of useless, right? (laughs) So, uh, there, it's, it's hard to pick those two things. It's hard to figure out, okay, what are the, like, insights that when I, when I breed these two ideas together, I get like a super idea and not just some, like, garbage idea that's, like, actually much worse than what
- 40:50 – 1:00:50
MIT challenge
- SYScott Young
people are currently doing.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs) Um, the MIT challenge, is that an example of the failed simulation effect? I'm gonna let you explain what that is, but-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... is it that because it's a rare thing to do, um, that it just, it seems much more impressive? It's hard to, like, simulate in your mind?
- SYScott Young
Yeah, so the failed simulation effect comes from a good friend, Cal Newport. And the failed simulation effect was from his book, How to Become a High School Superstar. And the idea was that the impressiveness to which we assign things is not based on how much work that thing requires, but on how hard it is for us to imagine doing that. So his example is that, like, if you're in, like, 14 different clubs and you're, like, the president of the debate team and you're on Mathletes and you did a bunch of AP courses and this kind of stuff, that's objectively a ton of work. Like, it's, it's, like, to be, you know, the high school valedictorian and do all those things, it's, it's a lot of work. But we can imagine ourselves as being
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- SYScott Young
... a grind doing all of that. Whereas when we see someone, let's say, like, you know, one of the examples he gives is a, a mutual friend of ours, Maneesh Sethi, who, who published a book for programming for teens, like, through an actual publisher that sold fairly well when he was in high school. And, like, that's the kind of thing, like, I can't imagine doing that. Like, I don't know how- how does a, how does a, you know, grade 11 kid do that, right? And so that makes him seem much more impressive, even if, uh, you know, the amount of work is like strictly less than the amount of work that it takes for someone else to do. Now, I think the MIT challenge is a little bit of that example, um, because it's clearly something that, like, the reason people found it impressive is that when they imagine doing it, they can't imagine doing it themselves (laughs) , and maybe I get the benefit of that. I don't know whether there's the technique that Cal talks about, where you're kind of like... He, he sort of talks about how you kind of make these sort of inroads into a field, and then you find new opportunities, and so the, the issue is just that there's all this kind of serendipity that pushes you forward to an outcome that people wouldn't have expected. Um, I'm not sure whether that's true with the MIT challenge. I mean, I can explain how I did it, and it's not, like, someone else could attempt it. There isn't a lot of, like, well, I just happened to find the right guy at MIT who gave me access to the... It wasn't like that. I just did it. But I think that, um, at, at least in the sort of idea of, like, why do people find it interesting, certainly because of that. I think I also benefit from the fact that...... uh, if I had done like just some middle of the road university's computer science curriculum, people would be like ho-hum about it. But I mean, most of the work is just doing the curriculum. It's not the fact that it's MIT. Like, I only picked MIT 'cause they post their material online for free. Like if, you know, the University of, I don't know, like Wisconsin's computer science program uploaded their material, I coulda used theirs too, and, and people would have been less impressed. I think I'm really kind of sneakily leveraging the fact that people associate MIT with being super, super smart, and that's because of how stringent their application process is, and that's the very thing I didn't do when I (laughs) when I did-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- SYScott Young
... this project. So, I definitely, you know, looking back on it, like I, I definitely am proud of the project. But to me, it's kind of funny that like that's the thing that people fixate on, 'cause, um, you know, I also really liked the language learning project, but it definitely, uh, I think the MIT challenge is the one that captivates people for some reason.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right. Yeah, I'm studying computer science at UT and-
- SYScott Young
Mm-hmm.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... our curriculum is, uh, there's like classes where the programming assignments, they're hard to code up, so they-
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... literally just copy them off of the Stanford, uh, programming assignments. Like-
- SYScott Young
Mm-hmm.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
... if you're the kind of student, and of course I'm not, if you're the kind of student who wants to copy answers off the internet, uh, you would just look up like Stanford CS whatever, whatever, and that's, you'd find it there. Um, yeah, so i- i- it's interesting how that works.
- SYScott Young
Well, that's another thing too that came in my favor, is that, uh, MIT's computer science program is very math and theory based, which means that it's intellectually more difficult. So it's like harder to understand the MIT curriculum. Like, you know, when they're doing analyses, they just assume everyone knows calculus, whereas in university, sometimes they'll go easy on you. Like they won't make you do the calculus. Whereas they make you do the calculus in every MIT class.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- SYScott Young
Like you take the intro microeconomics class, like when I did it in my school, they never made you do the calculus. They were always like, "Well, you find the intersection on this graph or something like this." Whereas at MIT it's like, "Okay, so now we take this integral of this and, and find the, you know, the Laplacian of it." Like they just do that in MIT because they assume everyone has a very strong kind of math background. However, the way that works into your advantage is that like in a lot of other university CS programs, they have these really long tedious programming assignments. Whereas MIT like, they really hit the sweet spot of like this is difficult-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
... but not a long amount of work. So, when I did the project initially it was, "Well I'm only going to do the final exams." Like that was the idea. Just final exams, nothing else. And that was sort of my justification for like, could you do it in a year because, well you have to learn it and you have to do a hard final exam, but you don't have to do all this other like busy work that you have to do in school.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
You don't have to do every single problem set or essays or, you know, group projects and stuff. And I was getting some flak in the beginning, like it was like the first week or two about like, "Well why not do programming assignments?" But it just turns out that you can add the programming assignments to that challenge and it doesn't materially change the amount of work. Like I probably-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Hm.
- SYScott Young
... only added like an extra week or two to my schedule to also do the programming assignments. Just because, you know, you do the programming assignments and they're very tight at MIT, whereas, you know, people were questioning me 'cause they, they went to different CS programs and they're like, "Well I spent months working on this programming style. There's no way you could do it." And I said like, "Well that's not how MIT does their course." They're like, "It's all like proof by induction and you're doing things, like it's all like drawing graphs on pencil and paper." So, I mean, from a practical point of view, do you want to do the heavy programming assignments to become a real programmer? Yeah, probably. But I think if your goal was could I get the kind of high theory sort of conceptual education of MIT, then I think it works. And, and to be honest, because I'm not a practicing programmer, right, I just program for fun, the conceptual stuff is really where all the value was for me. Like, knowing how to design websites is not super valuable for me, but understanding how like information works in general actually translates really well when you're understanding like cognitive science and stuff. So-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Huh.
- SYScott Young
... um, I'm actually glad that I did it that way, but I mean, my preferences are probably different from people who are like, "Well, you study CS so you could get a computer science job so you could be a programmer, so you can, you know, do that." And, and that was just a different situation for me.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Can you, can you explain that? How does comp, uh, the knowledge about computa- you know, how to encode and transmit computational information, how does that relate to the research you do or the research you read in cognitive science?
- SYScott Young
Oh, I mean like cognitive science is like, e- e- explicitly overlaps with computer science. I mean, cognitive science as a discipline is usually philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and computer science, right? Like, artificial intelligence and stuff. And so when you're reading papers that are talking about, like I remember one paper I was reading which, don't ask me to cite it 'cause I, (laughs) I've lost the link now, but there was a guy talking about a computational model for how chunking works. And I mean, if I didn't have a background in understanding computer science, this would be a very difficult paper to read because he's talking about how, well you make these nodes and then you make these links and that's how you-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- 1:00:50 – 1:10:00
Focus
- DPDwarkesh Patel
- SYScott Young
Mm-hmm.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
You say in the book, uh... Oh shoot. Hold on one second. You say in the book that "I'm agnostic about whether focus can be trained as an ability in general." Um, now unless I- I'm misunderstanding this out of context these- this seems to contradict Cal Newport's book on Deep Work. Am I- am I missing something?
- SYScott Young
Well I mean, uh, and I mean, Cal and I are good friends and we co-instruct a course on focus so there's a certain sense where we are, um, in agreement on the trainability of focus. Where I'm maybe- maybe I would disagree with Cal somewhat is that I think Cal views it from a capacity point of view so it's like he's using the kind of muscle metaphor for focus and, you know, all the research I've done on transfer really suggests that...... that's not the right way of thinking about the brain, is this muscle metaphor. Like, for instance, doing brain training games that improve working memory-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
... don't help your working memory for things that aren't brain training games. So, it's kind of one of those things that if you did a muscle analogy and said, "Well, I'm going to improve my working memory," you're kidding yourself, because that's not how it works.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
And you can improve your working memory for probably pretty specific things, like chunking is an example of that, or by, you know, developing quite specific strategies. So, the question when we're talking about focus is, what kind of thing are we talking about here? So, if we're talking about the capacity for you to focus, like a kind of a cognitive ability, I think it's doubtful that you could, um, robustly improve that particular faculty just by doing specific training. You could probably improve it in specific ways, but they're going to be, again, specific. So, you could improve your ability to, like, focus in on maybe, like, certain types of problems, uh, because you've built up a kind of, like, sort of s- quite specific cognitive strategies for doing that. Now that being said, well, why, why even talk about focus at all if, if I don't think it can be improved? Because I think that when we talk about focus casually, we're not just talking about a kind of cognitive faculty. We're also talking about, well, what are all the habits and routines and strategies and affective processes that influence focus? So, the reason most people can't focus isn't because their brain is incapable of focusing, it's because their phone's buzzing, or because they're like, "Ugh, this is boring, and I'm getting distracted, and I don't, like, enjoy what I'm learning, or I don't find it interesting or..." Like, so people lump a lot of things together. So, if I were to be writing, like, a scientific paper, and I was trying to, like, you know, making a bet on whether a scientific paper would find that there's, like, focused training programs improve the ability to focus in the way that cognitive psychologists typically measure, I'd be a little bit pessimistic about it just because they're probably measuring it in this tightly controlled experimental setting. If I were talking about, are there ways that we could robustly reduce procrastination, recr- reduce distraction, reduce the ability to, like, get frustrated and give up, or, like, want to, you know, waste your time on something else? Then yeah, I think that's totally trainable. I think that that's something that you probably could improve on. And so again, Cal Newport tends to take more of a facultative approach with some of these things, and I'm more skeptical of that. But I think for the average person, what is the message? And I think the message is, you ought to focus more, and I think there's probably aspects that a, a, a normal person properly ascribes to being the ability to focus that you could improve.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Oh, this is very interesting. Um, but, but when Cal Newport says in Deep Work, eh, that y- you know, your- the other things you do in your w- day, after you're done with work, you know, your phone, your TV, that those diminish your faculty to focus on your actual work, is this model wrong then?
- SYScott Young
No, I- again, and I think it's-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Is it? Am, am I free to do whatever I want through the rest of the day?
- SYScott Young
I think it's- I think the way it's stated is probably too crude to like, "Well, what's the model that, that he has in mind there?" So, and again, I think, like, as a practical consequence, yeah, maybe. I, I don't know the research so much on that. Um, I think it is potentially possible at least to have, like, tons and tons of focus in your working hours, and then just be, like, in this buzz on Twitter all day. Uh, I'm a little bit less pessimistic than Cal is that like, "Well, that's gonna destroy your brain," in a kind of way. I, I don't know that that's true. But, what I will say is that what I think is going (laughs) on is that from a motivational perspective, Twitter is like the variable reinforcement schedule, it's the Skinner box that, like, gives you the rewards intermittently, and so you're willing to press it, like, constantly and perpetually all the time. And so if you're choosing between Twitter and reading this hard book, then like, the motivational gradient is gonna be to go on Twitter all the time.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
Right? And so, when we're talking about focus there, is that a cognitive capacity, or is that just, like, your affective ability to, like, choose this harder thing? (laughs) And so, if Cal's talking about focus in that way, which I think he is, then I kind of agree with him that if you don't- if you're not on Twitter, if you don't have these variable ratio reinforcement schedules that are constantly like, "Ooh, it would be more fun to be on YouTube right now. Ooh, it would be more fun to check my phone right now," like if you don't have those things constantly as active primed habits in your, in your behavioral repertoire, it is easier to focus on reading a hard book. And I think that's why you could get better at reading a book. But as the ability to like- like for instance, I'm, I'm skeptical of, uh, people who say, "Well, I meditate for an hour a day, and so therefore I'm gonna have enhanced focus capacity." 'Cause to me, that sounds like the brain training thing which we know to be false. But, if we're talking about, "Well, I'm removing a lot of these distracting options from my kind of, like, list of habitual responses to things, will that allow me to sustain endurance and persistence on harder activities?" I think that's probably true. So-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- SYScott Young
... that's my take.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Is w- is the way to think about the analogy here that, you know, you have c- certain forms of exercise like cross-training that don't seem to be highly correlated with other, uh, physical activities or performance on other physical activities, but then you have s- or y- you can take, take whatever example you want there.
- SYScott Young
Yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
But there, there's some things like, uh, weightlifting which seem to be strongly correlated with your ability to play football or soccer or whatever. Are there-
- SYScott Young
Well, yeah.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Is meditation ... I- if there's a distinction there? I don't, I, I don't know if there is, but if there is one, can an activity like meditation be in the productive sector?
- SYScott Young
Well, I think meditation can be good, um, but I think it's important to know what meditation is for. And I feel like the- a lot of the research on meditation is quite poor.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Yeah.
- SYScott Young
Um, I say this as a non-researcher, so I'm certainly gonna get in shit for it, because like-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
(laughs)
- SYScott Young
... people are, people are like- the problem with meditation, ha-, is that the people who like meditation, and I mean I've been on multiple meditation retreats, I've done meditation daily for periods of months, so I'm not like just some guy who didn't get it, and like, I, I understand why people meditate. But the problem is a little bit that like y- it is very tied in with essentially religion, it's, uh, Buddhism, and so I think that that can sometimes ... You know, I don't like attacking anyone's-... spiritual beliefs, and there is a really strong philosophical component to meditation-
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Right.
- SYScott Young
... and to what the right way to live life is and stuff. And so, I don't wanna say like, "Oh, you shouldn't meditate," or like, um, "People who meditate, that's bad." I think it's more, sometimes you need to question the very specific claims as stated. And so one of the specific claims is that because I meditate for an hour every day, I'm going to be much more focused, and I don't know whether that's true. Uh, maybe it is. If it is, it's definitely not the mental model I have of how the mind works. But I think that when we're talking about, "Does Twitter destroy your ability to concentrate?" I think that the mechanism for a statement like that to potentially be true is that Twitter is super appealing, it is super enticing, and if it is one of the kind of default habitual responses you have at any moment, it- you have to put in a lot of energy resisting that, right? Uh, like if you think about like in an era before television, people could regularly, like, sit and listen to long radio programs.
- DPDwarkesh Patel
Mm-hmm.
- SYScott Young
You know what I mean? Like as a regular, like, sit around the table and listen to rad- we don't do that anymore. And why? I think probably because visual media is maybe a little bit more compelling. And similarly, you know, when novels were the only kind of form of entertainment, people would like binge-read novels, who maybe now would be like binge-watching reality TV or- or- or on Facebook or something. And so, as technology has developed, we've developed inh- increasingly enticing options, and so the more you engage in those habitually, I- I think the more it is hard to reduce that- uh, that impulse. Like if you eat junk food all the time, it's going to be hard in a particular moment to be like, "I'm gonna eat this kale salad-"
Episode duration: 1:38:57
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