Ep113 “What’s Special About Inventors?” - Readwise Highlights

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  • Invention starts not just in the raw data, but it’s the decision to look beyond that. So without the neural architecture that allowed for of human creativity, we would be doing the same thing that we did millions of years ago, just like every other species were surrounded with (View Highlight)
  • Pablos has just written a book called Deep Future, which comes out next week, and his take in the book is that invention is humanity’s most important creative force, but it’s also the one we’ve neglected the most. Inventors are often misunderstood and underfunded because there’s often not a good system to support them. (View Highlight)
  • he figured out that these milk maids who were milking cows contracted cow pox, which is not as life threatening, not really as big of a deal disease, but then. Speaker 4 (08:33): They never got smallpox. (View Highlight)
  • the basis of creativity is your brain goes through the world, absorbs all everything in your world and your culture, your moment history, and then what it’s doing is remixing. It’s bending, breaking, blending, putting these things together in new ways. (View Highlight)
  • what would you do with a battery that never needs to be charged (View Highlight)
  • if you give a gadget like that to a hacker, then the question is different. The question is what can I make this do? And (18:55): hackers will flip it over and take out all the screws and break it into a lot of little pieces, but then figure out what you can build from the rubble, and that’s that discovery process. That’s where you get all of your new technologies. Nobody ever invented a new technology by reading the directions. (View Highlight)
  • a big part of really making scientific progress is to assume that some fraction of everything you’ve learned, all the models you’ve learned before you is incorrect, some fraction and and and there’s a different way of doing the whole thing. (View Highlight)
  • You create something. The world didn’t have it before you created something. And even if it’s just a skateboard trick, that’s creativity. (View Highlight)
  • The Internet, I think is the most important event we’ve ever had as a species, in large part because it allows the instant and global dissemination of information. (View Highlight)
  • as far as scientific discovery, because you know, nobody had written anything down before you. But now now we have the compound interest of the entry the way you describe. Speaker 1 (28:01): Yeah, exactly, and we have the compound interest of all the inventions that have come before. Speaker 2 (28:05): So now invention is going faster than ever. (View Highlight)
  • when you look at the big problem in the world food, water, waste, sanitation, construction, energy, (30:06): and manufacturing, those are not things you’re going to improve with software. I mean, you could improve them a little bit one or two percent, you’re not going to reinvent them. (View Highlight)
  • we have all the medals you could need for hundreds of years in this country, all those rarest medals. (View Highlight)
  • You beam power to the poles or to the middle of Africa. You don’t need storage, you don’t need transmission lines, and so it’s just clean energy that goes everywhere. (View Highlight)
  • Ep113 “What’s special about inventors?” (with Pablos Holman) (View Highlight)
  • Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman (View Highlight)