TOK Friends

In this other world that I call “the river,” the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right. It doesn’t matter who you are; it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way.

And that’s very against the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the “indigo blob” because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media rooting for Democrats. Different parts of The New York Times have both those functions.

I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain.

You have the C.E.O. of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s a good gamble to take.

On the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, among young people in particular.

They’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex — a different type of risk tolerance.

They are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. Free speech is kind of a pro-risk take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course.

On the other hand, you have various booms and busts in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting

What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk.

it just seems to me we are in a world now where institutions are less trusted.

some people respond to that by saying, OK, I make my own rules now, and this is great and I have lots of agency.

some respond by withdrawing into an online world or clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility or just by becoming more risk averse.

you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting. One of them is Peter Thiel. What did you learn spending time with him?

There’s a good book by Max Chafkin about Peter Thiel called “The Contrarian,” which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative more than libertarian and probably quite religious.

I mean, the amounts of wealth and success and power that Silicon Valley has — I do think some people pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways, or been blessed in some ways, or maybe the nerdy version of it, think they’re living in a simulation of some kind.

Peter Thiel is a sort of template of the V.C. mind, which is oriented toward being right in important and counterintuitive ways three out of 20 times and doesn’t care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times. You want big payouts, not a high betting average.

The two things that you hear from every V.C. — one is the importance of the longer time horizons. You’re making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years.

No. 2, even more important, is the asymmetric ability to bet on the upside. They are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page or Sergey Brin walked through their door, and they didn’t give them funding and then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x. And so if you can only lose 1x your money, but you can make 1,000x if you have a successful company, then that changes your mind-set about everything. You want to avoid false negatives. You want to avoid missed opportunities.

There’s a bias in the world you’re describing — an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. I see this a lot in Silicon Valley. I would call it faux Bayesian reasoning, where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like you know what you’re talking abou

SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value, which is very appealing to the kinds of people you’re describing. But it can become a costume of sloppy thinking. I’m curious how you think about it.

There’s two things here. One is there is a jargon, where there’re just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies. It’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models.

Look, in some ways, these V.C.s are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people. So why do they succeed despite that?

I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, No. 1, and being willing to make these positive expected value, high-risk, but very high upside bets and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, right? Those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes, half of them, right?

I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling but in other things, too. You talk about pain tolerance, you talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips

You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics, too. There is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.

Human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high stress moments. Your body will know when you’re playing a $100, $200 game where it really matters. You will just know

You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects.

But actually your body’s providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally because it’s very related to being in the zone, like Michael Jordan used to talk about — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not

How much is that learnable, and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence that some people have and some people don’t?

I think it’s actually quite learnable

you can tone it up or tone it down. I mean, it’s terrifying the first time it happens, but when you start to recognize it and you make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit and take your time and try to execute the basics

It’s not as much about trying to be a hero. It’s about trying to execute the basics. Because if everyone is losing their [expletive], if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you’re ahead of 95 percent of the people.

is gut instinct overrated or underrated? It depends on how much experience you have. The best poker players can have uncannily good instincts based on reading physical tells, just the kind of vibe someone gives off.

I played a lot of poker in writing this book, and you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has a strong hand. And you can test it because you can say, I know that I’m supposed to fold this hand here, it’s a little bit too weak to call against a bluff, but I just have a sense that he’s bluffing. And lo and behold, you’re right, more often than you think.

One of the key themes in "Wise Animals" is the idea that technology is far from neutral. Chatfield argues that the way innovation has progressed was not the only possible path and that we must keep an open mind about the possibilities

A clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder can occur when those symptoms become fixed and persistent — they do not come and go. In addition, the disorder causes distress or interferes with relationships, work or other domains.

the higher the levels of narcissism, the more people became “desperate, deluded, paranoid, angry, abusive and isolated.”

This makes it harder for the narcissist to “charm and impress others,” she said, which then makes it difficult for that person to elicit admiration.

Agentic narcissism is what most people think of when they imagine a narcissist. Those who score highly in this dimension are focused on status, power and success.“They see themselves as superior to others, crave admiration and have an inflated sense of self-importance,” Dr. Orth said. “They are typically very confident, assertive and want to be in leadership positions.”

Neurotic narcissism is characterized by hypersensitivity. Those who score highly in this dimension “constantly need validation and are very sensitive to criticism and rejection,” Dr. Orth said. “They often experience significant shame, anxiety, emotional instability, insecurity and self-doubt.”

Those with antagonistic narcissism often view others as rivals. They tend to be competitive, hostile toward others and willing to put them down to feel superior, Dr. Orth said. They also lack empathy and are exploitative.

It is “the core of pathological narcissism,” Dr. Malkin said. “These are bullies.”

It’s unclear why narcissism would reduce over time, but Sara Konrath, the director of the Interdisciplinary Program for Empathy and Altruism Research at Indiana University, has found in her own research that empathy increases as we grow older.

“Unfortunately, managing a difficult relationship is the best someone intimately involved with most narcissists can hope for,” said Elinor Greenberg, the author of “Borderline, Narcissistic and Schizoid Adaptations: The Pursuit of Love, Admiration and Safety.”

The human problem-solvers — 609 high school students from 108 countries — won 58 gold medals, 123 silver and 145 bronze. The A.I. performed at the level of a silver medalist, solving four out of six problems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-worthy performance on an Olympiad’s problems.

Nonetheless, Dr. Kohli described the result as a “phase transition” — a transformative change — “in the use of A.I. in mathematics and the ability of A.I. systems to do mathematics.”

Dr. Gowers added in an email: “I was definitely impressed.” The lab had discussed its Olympiad ambitions with him a couple of weeks beforehand, so “my expectations were quite high,” he said. “But the program met them, and in one or two instances significantly surpassed them.” The program found the “magic keys” that unlocked the problems, he said.

Haojia Shi, a student from China, ranked No. 1 and was the only competitor to earn a perfect score — 42 points for six problems; each problem is worth seven points for a full solution. The U.S. team won first place with 192 points; China placed second with 190.

The Google system earned its 28 points for fully solving four problems — two in algebra, one in geometry and one in number theory. (It flopped at two combinatorics problems.) The system was allowed unlimited time; for some problems it took up to three days. The students were allotted only 4.5 hours per exam.

“The fact that we’ve reached this threshold, where it’s even possible to tackle these problems at all, is what represents a step-change in the history of mathematics,” he added. “And hopefully it’s not just a step-change in the I.M.O., but also represents the point at which we went from computers only being able to prove very, very simple things toward computers being able to prove things that humans can’t.”

“Mathematics requires this interesting combination of abstract, precise and creative reasoning,” Dr. Davies said. In part, he noted, this repertoire of abilities is what makes math a good litmus test for the ultimate goal: reaching so-called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a system with capabilities ranging from emerging to competent to virtuoso to superhuman

In January, a Google DeepMind system named AlphaGeometry solved a sampling of Olympiad geometry problems at nearly the level of a human gold medalist. “AlphaGeometry 2 has now surpassed the gold medalists in solving I.M.O. problems,” Thang Luong, the principal investigator, said in an email.

Dr. Hubert’s team developed a new model that is comparable but more generalized. Named AlphaProof, it is designed to engage with a broad range of mathematical subjects. All told, AlphaGeometry and AlphaProof made use of a number of different A.I. technologies.

One approach was an informal reasoning system, expressed in natural language. This system leveraged Gemini, Google’s large language model. It used the English corpus of published problems and proofs and the like as training data.

The informal system excels at identifying patterns and suggesting what comes next; it is creative and talks about ideas in an understandable way. Of course, large language models are inclined to make things up — which may (or may not) fly for poetry and definitely not for math. But in this context, the L.L.M. seems to have displayed restraint; it wasn’t immune to hallucination, but the frequency was reduced.

Another approach was a formal reasoning system, based on logic and expressed in code. It used theorem prover and proof-assistant software called Lean, which guarantees that if the system says a proof is correct, then it is indeed correct. “We can exactly check that the proof is correct or not,” Dr. Hubert said. “Every step is guaranteed to be logically sound.”

Another crucial component was a reinforcement learning algorithm in the AlphaGo and AlphaZero lineage. This type of A.I. learns by itself and can scale indefinitely, said Dr. Silver, who is Google DeepMind’s vice-president of reinforcement learning. Since the algorithm doesn’t require a human teacher, it can “learn and keep learning and keep learning until ultimately it can solve the hardest problems that humans can solve,” he said. “And then maybe even one day go beyond those.”

Dr. Hubert added, “The system can rediscover knowledge for itself.” That’s what happened with AlphaZero: It started with zero knowledge, Dr. Hubert said, “and by just playing games, and seeing who wins and who loses, it could rediscover all the knowledge of chess. It took us less than a day to rediscover all the knowledge of chess, and about a week to rediscover all the knowledge of Go. So we thought, Let’s apply this to mathematics.”

Dr. Gowers doesn’t worry — too much — about the long-term consequences. “It is possible to imagine a state of affairs where mathematicians are basically left with nothing to do,” he said. “That would be the case if computers became better, and far faster, at everything that mathematicians currently do.”

“There still seems to be quite a long way to go before computers will be able to do research-level mathematics,” he added. “It’s a fairly safe bet that if Google DeepMind can solve at least some hard I.M.O. problems, then a useful research tool can’t be all that far away.”

A really adept tool might make mathematics accessible to more people, speed up the research process, nudge mathematicians outside the box. Eventually it might even pose novel ideas that resonate.

During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day

The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images

That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour.

We’ve created a world with 300 exabytes (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-made information. If each of those pieces of information were written on a 3-by-5-inch index card and then spread out side by side, just one person’s share—your share of this information—would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds,

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated (by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and, independently, by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky) at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time.

While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.

What does this bandwidth restriction—this information speed limit—mean in terms of our interactions with others? In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time

We’re surrounded on this planet by billions of other humans, but we can understand only two at a time at the most! It’s no wonder that the world is filled with so much misunderstanding.

With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life. Part of the reason is that our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on.

These neurons are collectively the “attentional filter.” They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness. This is why most of the perceptual detritus of our daily lives doesn’t registe

The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements. In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevant things

When our protohuman ancestors left the cover of the trees to seek new sources of food, they simultaneously opened up a vast range of new possibilities for nourishment and exposed themselves to a wide range of new predators. Being alert and vigilant to threatening sounds and visual cues is what allowed them to survive; this meant allowing an increasing amount of information through the attentional filter.

Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%

Humans are, by most biological measures, the most successful species our planet has seen. We have managed to survive in nearly every climate our planet has offered (so far), and the rate of our population expansion exceeds that of any other known organism

Our success owes in large part to our cognitive capacity, the ability of our brains to flexibly handle information. But our brains evolved in a much simpler world with far less information coming at us. Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed.

Successful people—or those who can afford it—employ layers of other people whose job it is to narrow their own attentional filters.

Some of the worst leadership decisions of our time can be traced to escalation of commitment. Many people lost their lives because American presidents pursued a futile war in Vietnam — and continued searching for weapons of mass destruction that weren’t in Iraq.

Escalation of commitment helps to explain why leaders are often so reluctant to loosen their grip on power. Losing a high-status position can make them feel as if they’re losing their place in the world. It leaves them with bruised egos and wounded pride.

we use our big brains not to make rational decisions, but rather to rationalize the decisions we’ve already made

Escalation is likely when people are directly responsible for and publicly attached to a decision, when it has been a long journey and the end is in sight, and when they have reasons to be confident that they can succeed.

President Biden’s current situation checks all those boxes

the people closest to a leader are precisely the ones who are most susceptible to confirmation bias. They’re too personally invested in his success and too likely to dismiss warning signs.

What Mr. Biden needs is not a support network but a challenge network — people who have the will to put the country’s interests ahead of his and the skill to coldly assess his chances.

Writing, especially the kind of writing that I do, brings together narrative, science, sometimes history, and an appreciation for the person who might be at the center of the narrative.

The greatest influence on me was Oliver Sacks, because he could capture people as people, and he always integrated serious science into his pieces.

The two subjects that were most prominent for him, as I once wrote for you, were identity and adaptation: Who is this person, despite their illness? How does that illness interface with their behavior and their decisions, how do people perceive them from the outside, and how do they try to find meaning and adapt to what looks like a disability, but sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gives them hidden strength?

I’ve gone from witnessing the depths of disability and death, like with AIDS: I saw some of the first people with AIDS in California, in 1982 or so. The average lifespan was six months. They were mostly young gay men, and it was devastating, the infections they got, the cancers they got. Now, with all the new drugs that have been developed, someone who gets HIV is projected to have a normal lifespan. From six months to fifty years: it’s miraculous

that’s part of what keeps you going: the belief that things can advance in a meaningful way.

Are there any major or interesting medical stories that the public doesn’t know enough about? 

The idea of genetic treatments. Often when people hear the words “genetics” or “DNA” or “RNA,” they shut down. The challenge is how to make it accessible.

There’s a wonderful line in the Talmud that says, “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.” There might be only a few hundred people in the whole country who have a particular genetic disorder. I

a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.

her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote

A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence

Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.