My friend Sebastian, who went to Oxford, holds a blackbelt in jiu jitsu, and at whose casual request people fly in from all over the world to flâneur about Milan and discuss a five-volume work on the nature of uncertainty … recently interviewed Stephen Wolfram on the Fat Tony’s Podcast.
Stephen Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the company behind Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and the Wolfram programming language. In 2002, he published A New Kind of Science on the nature of computation and has since moved on to tackling the nature of everything.
… so you know this is going to be good.
Of course there are many things to take from the conversation, but perhaps the biggest thing I took was from one of the smaller moments. Stephen mentioned how being interviewed helps him solve problems. By explaining and arguing his ideas in different contexts, he is able to see them in new ways and make new connections.
[Interviews are] very useful to me. When I talk about topics that I’ve thought a bit about and then I’m sort of forced to formulate them in a way that I can give a good exposition … That’s a helpful thing for me that I would say helps unlock certain kinds of things where I would – if I were just thinking about them for myself – I wouldn’t figure them out. But if I’m thinking about them in context of this kind of expository situation, I find it sort of easier to figure them out.
That sounds amazing, and I’ve experienced the same things for subjects I teach. But the majority of people I interact with professionally are being paid to hear my ideas. That makes them a bit more amenable than they would otherwise be …
… and I’m still waiting on that invite from Lex Fridman, so iron to sharpen my iron hasn’t always been effortless to come by.
To address this, I’ve trained an AI on things you might know me for: my book, my blog articles, my coding projects, some Discord rants, … and a few things I haven’t shared online: art projects, short stories, and a book of poetry. I’ve asked this AI to challenge me on my ideas, and not just published ideas. The first few questions have been on safety, but there’s a random component. Occasionally, it will ask about creative projects or even something randomly sampled from the zeitgeist.
I will try to answer whatever it throws at me, as long as it doesn’t get offensive or offensively repetitive.
