- Lessons from Peter Thiel.
- Don’t divide attention
- When hiring, value “skill acquisition potential”, as opposed to pre-existing skill
- “Being the winner means being in the 99.99-percentile. A winner at the top takes nearly everything, and only a pittance goes to the others — so being 99.99-percentile is worth an order of magnitude or two more than being just 98-percentile. If it’s 1am and you’ve already got something that is very good, this is why it’s worth spending the next couple of hours to make it amazing.”
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- “Use small details as indicators to point to the larger truth — and be alert when they point to conclusions you don’t like.” Judge the quality of a restaurant by the quality of its toilet paper. If it got the cheapest toilet paper, you can be sure it got the cheapest out of many other things.
- Reflections on Palantir
- Excellent article on what makes Palantir a great company with a good work ethos.
- I found the distinction between Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) and and (PD) engineers super interesting. FDE do fast and dirty development, PD do the clean work but much slower. “The PD engineers then ‘productize’ what the FDEs build, and – more generally – build software that provides leverage for the FDEs to do their work better and faster.2”
- “The critical case against Palantir seemed to be something like “you shouldn’t work on [morally gray] things, because sometimes this involves making morally bad decisions”. An example was immigration enforcement during 2016-2020, aspects of which many people were uncomfortable with. But it seems to me that ignoring [morally gray] entirely, and just disengaging with it, is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in [morally gray stuff] need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce the law, and - in my experience - even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their own home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all of these things. But do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely, and let them sort themselves out?”
- How to program in Computational and Neural Systems Began - John Hopfield
- An extraordinary essay about the origins of the Computational and Neural Systems program, which is the main inspiration for the Masters program I completed in “Neural Systems and Computation”. It’s so humbling and source of pride to realize that this wave of work has impacted my own life - as many of the students of Hopfield’s legacy were my own professors.
- It’s fascinating to see the amount of effort that was needed to open this line of work, teaching and research at Caltech. Today, it’s most obvious that this field is relevant - but even at Caltech, it was met with a great deal of skepticism when it was first suggested. Fascinating to see how much Hopfield had to push…
- The last quote is nothing short of extraordinary: *“Moving the intellectual focus of a university is somewhat like moving a graveyard. In both case, you should expect little help from the inhabitants.”
- The Hardware Lottery
- “The Anna Karenina principle: “A deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavour to failure”. Despite our preference to believe algorithms succeed or fail in isolation, history tells us that most computer science breakthroughs follow the Anna Karenina principle. Successful breakthroughs are often distinguished from failures by benefiting from multiple criteria aligning serendipitously.”
- “Being too early is the same as being wrong”
- “While specialization makes deep neural networks more efficient, it also makes it far more costly to stray from accepted building blocks. It prompts the question of how much researchers will implicitly overfit to ideas that operationalize well on available hardware rather than take a risk on ideas that are not currently feasible. What are the failure we still don’t have the hardware and software to see as a success? “
- I’ll also remember the idea that a likely reason why symbolic approaches to AI were so successful is the ease through which these were running on the available hardware at the time, as well as a community with well documented and functioning programming languages (PROLOG and LISP). Success of a technology always relies on availability, and suitability to other previously available technologies.
- How To Understand Things
- The Parables of Agassiz and from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” are wonderful - “The point of both of these parables: nothing beats direct experience. Get the data yourself. You develop some basis in reality by getting some first-hand data, and reasoning up from there, versus starting with somebody else’s lossy compression of a messy, evolving phenomenon and then wondering why events keep surprising you.”
- “The photographer Robert Capa advised beginning photographers: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”. It is also good advice for understanding things. When in doubt, go closer.”
- Invictus
- I watched Invictus on the plane out of Cape Town to Zurich - and what a way to experience the movie. I will remember three things about this movie:
- Nelson Mandela, and the South African people have chosen peace and forgiveness. They have fought for it, when it was not the easy choice to make. How easy would it have been for them to take revenge on the Afrikaners - we would have a very different nation today, that would still be divided. Today, people of all origins stand together, and seat together at the same table. Of course, the disparities are still significant - there remains discrimination, and so much more to fix. But South Africa has chosen peace, has chosen forgiveness, courage and humility - and these are still preserved today.
- The different communities of South Africa do not have to mix - and they indeed do not. They only have to respect one another. They are different cultures, communities, and this is exactly the strength of this country. While one may see a country where communities do not mingle, I chose to see a country where communities peacefully cohabit and work together to build a greater life - and that is incredibly powerful.
- Peace is never reached through violence, or worse, revenge. It is always found through finding common grounds between the parties, and reinforcing these grounds. I pray that Israel and Palestine will find the strength and courage to see their common grounds, and one day decide that the past must be forgotten, and the only way to peace was to look forward. Perhaps one day, both Palestinians and Israelis will play Football with one another. Perhaps they can play music together. But they must work together on something beyond their identity - to create a new one, a new sense of purpose that is not founded on the very principle of opposition. I shed a few tears, and it felt good.
- Why We Stopped Making Einsteins A few thoughts:
- While I agree that the level of education and erudition of the elite has gone down as a direct consequence of the changes in education system (university entrance exams, lack of tutoring etc..), I don’t think I agree with the fact that we don’t have as many geniuses as before.
- I believe that the expression of genius has changed. What used to be a trait that could only be expressed in Sciences, Music or Literature is now a trait that can be expressed in many many more fields. Taking an almost silly example - the great YouTubers of today are geniuses in their own way - they have cracked a field and are having an output that is miles away better than that of their counterparts. Same goes for the great entrepreneurs of today, or even sportspeople of the day. Can you name a single sportsperson from pre-19th century?
- Regarding the lack of « leading intellectuals » today, I think this is more a product of the shrinking level of global education rather than the shrinking level of elite education. People who consume media, art, literature etc.. today are significantly less educated than the ones who did so centuries ago - therefore their appetite for complexity and depth is not nearly as important as the « consumers » of the last century. As a result, the leading artistic figures produce dull music, dull literature etc… there is more (in terms of proportion) demand for easy media/art than complex one, so naturally the leading figures are not nearly as great as the ones from the previous centuries. It doesn’t mean that there are no Beethoven or Tolstoy alive today. In fact, I even believe there are more active ones today than in the previous century.
- Regarding science, being a researcher myself, I’m in constant awe of the amount of genius I encounter every day while reading papers and hearing of the latest progress. It does come in a different form than it did several centuries ago, with more output often being the fruit of group labour rather than individual, but there was never a more exciting time to be in science than today.
- Finally, I want to make the point that genius takes a lot of time to be noticed and acknowledged as such. « The dead is always greater than his alive version ». Allow time to see through the geniuses of today - their work will (hopefully) will stand the test of time and emerge as such in a few decades.
- Conclave
- A great movie. My favorite quotes of the movie:
- There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others… Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. If there was only certainty, and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore, no need for faith. Let us pray that god gives us a pope who doubts.
- The men who are dangerous are the ones who do want it.
- The ending was just great. Very strange to imagine someone not fully male being in charge of papacy - but also fascinating.
- La Grande Bellezza
- It’s funny how it took me a little while to understand this movie was the masterpiece it is. It started with the most random depiction of sunny Rome, with completely unrelated little pictures taking place in parallel. And then, it looked like we would get a satirical/comedy about the life of the Roman “borgese” pseudo-intellectuals. In some way, this is what it is, but it’s also so much more - and I am not even sure how to describe what this was.
- Finisce sempre così con la morte prima però c’è stata la vita nascosta sotto il bla bla bla bla bla è tutto sedimentato sotto il chiacchiericcio e il rumore il silenzio e il sentimento l’emozione e la paura gli sparuti incostanti sprazzi di bellezza e poi lo squallore disgraziato e l’uomo miserabile tutto sepolto dalla coperta dell’imbarazzo dello stare al mondo bla bla bla bla altrove c’è l’altrove io non mi occupo dell’altrove dunque, che questo romanzo abbia inizio in fondo è solo un trucco sì, è solo un trucco
- Underrated ways to change the world
- “A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy”. Here are some good ways that are not directly involved getting filthy rich and powerful or giving up everything you own and scrubbing the toilets in an orphanage.
- Be the second bravest person, and at least talk about stuff that is wrong.
- Switchboarding: “I think of this as switchboarding, trying to get the right information to the right person.” Butterfly effect will then do its magic.
- “Crack Your Knucles”: You often have more power to investigate/do something than a person who’s paid for doing it. Because you have freedom over how you want to conduct it, and they don’t.
- “Culture is everything”: Create cultures around, just by consistently showing up at the right places and acting like what you want to project. Cultures can change the world.
- Build you RUNK: “Ronald’s Universal Number Kounter”, and how the entirety of modern interenet may rely on it. Build things that are simple but work, and most importantly, are reliable.