Luís and João Batalha: Fermat’s Library and the Art of Studying Papers
音乐与艺术技术与编程AI 与机器学习数学心理与人性
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"think I think if I serve as an inspiration in any way is by asking a lot of dumb questions and saying"
我想如果我能以任何方式提供灵感的话就是问很多愚蠢的问题并说
— Luís and João Batalha （1:26:17.680）
"the same because that's the only way to knowledge I think is to be willing to ask the dumb questions."
同样的，因为我认为这是获得知识的唯一途径，就是愿意问愚蠢的问题。
— Luís and João Batalha （1:26:31.200）
"add more context to it. And then over time, papers can become easier and easier to understand and can"
为其添加更多上下文。然后随着时间的推移，论文会变得越来越容易理解并且可以
— Luís and João Batalha （17:56.560）
"you understand that is in fact truly revolutionary. You've also, you talked about just following your"
你知道这实际上是真正的革命性的。您也谈到过遵循您的
— Luís and João Batalha （1:06:42.000）
"for signs of intelligent life out there is to look for signals of these Dyson spheres and because you"
要寻找智慧生命的迹象，就要寻找这些戴森球的信号，因为你
— Luís and João Batalha （1:33:53.040）
🎙️ 完整对话（1708 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Luis and João Botala, brothers and cofounders of Fermat's
以下是与 Fermat 联合创始人 Luis 和 João Botala 兄弟的对话
Lex Fridman (00:06.320)
Library, which is an incredible platform for annotating papers. As they write on the Fermat's
Library，这是一个令人难以置信的论文注释平台。正如他们在费马方程上所写的那样
Lex Fridman (00:12.800)
Library website, just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional
图书馆网站，正如皮埃尔·德·费马在页边空白处潦草写下他著名的最后定理一样，专业
Lex Fridman (00:19.200)
scientists, academics, and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures, ideas, and write
科学家、学者和公民科学家可以注释方程、数字、想法并编写
Lex Fridman (00:25.200)
in the margins. Fermat's Library is also a really good Twitter account to follow. I highly recommend
在边缘。费马图书馆也是一个非常值得关注的 Twitter 帐户。我强烈推荐
Luís and João Batalha (00:31.600)
it. They post little visual factoids and explorations that reveal the beauty of mathematics.
它。他们发布了一些视觉事实和探索，揭示了数学之美。
Luís and João Batalha (00:38.480)
I love it. Quick mention of our sponsors. Skiff, SimplySafe, Indeed, NetSuite, and Four Sigmatic.
我喜欢它。快速提及我们的赞助商。 Skiff、SimplySafe、Indeed、NetSuite 和 Four Sigmatic。
Luís and João Batalha (00:47.840)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a few words
在说明中查看它们以支持此播客。作为旁注，让我说几句话
Luís and João Batalha (00:52.800)
about the dissemination of scientific ideas. I believe that all scientific articles should be
关于科学思想的传播。我认为所有的科学文章都应该
Luís and João Batalha (00:59.280)
freely accessible to the public. They currently are not. In one analysis I saw, more than 70%
向公众免费开放。目前他们还没有。在我看到的一项分析中，超过 70%
Luís and João Batalha (01:05.840)
of published research articles are behind a paywall. In case you don't know, the funders of
已发表的研究文章需要付费。如果你不知道，资助者
Luís and João Batalha (01:11.040)
the research, whether that's government or industry, aren't the ones putting up the paywall. The journals
无论是政府还是工业界的研究，都不是付费墙。期刊
Luís and João Batalha (01:18.240)
are the ones putting up the paywall, while using unpaid labor from researchers for the peer review
是那些设置付费墙，同时使用研究人员的无偿劳动进行同行评审的人
Luís and João Batalha (01:24.080)
process. Where is all that money from the paywall going? In this digital age, the costs here should
过程。付费专区的钱都去哪儿了？在这个数字时代，这里的成本应该
Luís and João Batalha (01:31.360)
be minimal. This cost can easily be covered through donation, advertisement, or public funding of
尽量小。这笔费用可以很容易地通过捐赠、广告或公共资助来支付。
Luís and João Batalha (01:37.600)
science. The benefit versus the cost of all papers being free to read is obvious, and the fact that
科学。所有论文免费阅读的好处与成本是显而易见的，而且事实是
Luís and João Batalha (01:43.120)
they're not free goes against everything science should stand for, which is the free dissemination
它们不自由违背了科学应该代表的一切，即自由传播
Luís and João Batalha (01:48.640)
of ideas that educate and inspire. Science cannot be a gated institution. The more people can freely
具有教育和启发作用的想法。科学不能是一个有门禁的机构。越多的人可以自由
Luís and João Batalha (01:56.560)
learn and collaborate on ideas, the more problems we can solve in the world together, and the faster
学习并就想法进行协作，我们可以共同解决世界上的问题越多，速度就越快
Luís and João Batalha (02:02.160)
we can drive old ideas out and bring new, better ideas in. Science is beautiful and powerful, and
我们可以淘汰旧观念，引入新的、更好的观念。科学是美丽而强大的，
Luís and João Batalha (02:10.320)
its dissemination in this digital age should be free. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's
Luís and João Batalha (02:17.680)
my conversation with Luis and Joao Batala. Luis, you suggested an interesting idea. Imagine if most
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papers had a backstory section, the same way that they have an abstract. So knowing more about how
Luís and João Batalha (02:34.800)
the authors ended up working on a paper can be extremely insightful. And then you went on to give
Luís and João Batalha (02:40.240)
a backstory for the Feynman QED paper. This is all in a tweet, by the way. We're doing tweet analysis
Luís and João Batalha (02:45.200)
today. How much of the human backstory do you think is important in understanding the idea itself
Luís and João Batalha (02:51.600)
that's presented in the paper or in general? I think this gives way more context to the work of
Luís and João Batalha (02:57.760)
scientists. I think people, a lot of people have this almost kind of romantic misconception that
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the way a lot of scientists work is almost as the sum of eureka moments where all of a sudden they
Luís and João Batalha (03:09.600)
sit down and start writing two papers in a row, and the papers are usually isolated. And when you
Luís and João Batalha (03:15.200)
actually look at it, the papers are chapters of a way more complex story. And the Feynman QED paper
Luís and João Batalha (03:23.760)
is a good example. So Feynman was actually going through a pretty dark phase before writing that
Luís and João Batalha (03:29.040)
paper. He lost enthusiasm with physics and doing physics problems. And there was one time when he
Luís and João Batalha (03:35.680)
was in the cafeteria of Cornell, and he saw a guy that was throwing plates in the air. And he noticed
Luís and João Batalha (03:41.840)
that when the plate was in the air, there were two movements there. The plate was wobbling, but he
Luís and João Batalha (03:47.200)
also noticed that the Cornell symbol was rotating. And he was able to figure out the equations of
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motions of those plates. And that led him to kind of think a little bit about electron orbits in
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relativity, which led to the paper about quantum electrodynamics. So that kind of reignited his
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interest in physics and ended up publishing the paper that led to his Nobel Prize, basically.
Lex Fridman (04:18.560)
And I think there are a lot of really interesting backstories about papers that readers never get to
Luís and João Batalha (04:24.560)
know. For instance, we did a couple of months ago an AMA around a paper, a pretty famous paper,
Luís and João Batalha (04:33.120)
the GAMS paper with Ian Goodfellow. And so we did an AMA where everyone could ask questions about
Luís and João Batalha (04:38.960)
the paper, and Ian was responding to those questions. And he was also telling the story of
Lex Fridman (04:44.640)
how he got the idea for that paper in a bar. So that was also an interesting backstory. I also
Luís and João Batalha (04:50.720)
read a book by Cedric Villani. Cedric Villani is this mathematician, a Fields Medalist. And in his
Luís and João Batalha (04:59.040)
book, he tries to explain how he got from a PhD student to the Fields Medal. And he tries to be
Luís and João Batalha (05:05.760)
as descriptive as possible, every single step, how he got to the Fields Medal. And it's interesting
Luís and João Batalha (05:11.360)
also to see just the amount of random interactions and discussions with other researchers, sometimes
Luís and João Batalha (05:16.800)
over coffee, and how it led to like fundamental breakthroughs and some of his most important
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papers. So I think it's super interesting to have that context of the backstory.
Luís and João Batalha (05:25.920)
Well, the Ian Goodfellow story is kind of interesting, and perhaps that's true for
Luís and João Batalha (05:29.600)
Feynman as well. I don't know if it's romanticizing the thing, but it seems like just a few little
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insights and a little bit of work does most of the leap required. Do you have a sense that for a lot
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of the stuff you've looked at, just looking back through history, it wasn't necessarily the grind
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of like Andrew Wiles or the Fermat's Last Theorem, for example. It was more like a brilliant moment
Luís and João Batalha (05:55.760)
of insight. In fact, Ian Goodfellow has a kind of sadness to him almost, in that at that time in
Luís and João Batalha (06:02.640)
machine learning, like at that time, especially for GANs, you could code something up really
Luís and João Batalha (06:10.480)
quickly in a single machine and almost do the invention, go from idea to experimental validation
Luís and João Batalha (06:18.000)
in like a single night, a single person could do it. And now there's kind of a sadness that a lot
Luís and João Batalha (06:22.800)
of the breakthroughs you might have in machine learning kind of require large scale experiments.
Lex Fridman (06:27.440)
So it was almost like the early days. So I wonder how many low hanging fruit there are
Luís and João Batalha (06:35.040)
in science and mathematics and even engineering where it's like you could do that little experiment
Luís and João Batalha (06:41.920)
quickly, like you have an insight in a bar. Why is it always a bar? But you have an insight at a bar
Lex Fridman (06:46.560)
and then just implement and the world changes. It's a good point. I think it also depends a lot
Luís and João Batalha (06:53.600)
on the maturity of the field. When you look at a field like mathematics, like it's a pretty mature
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field, a field like machine learning, it's growing pretty fast. And it's actually pretty
Luís and João Batalha (07:07.040)
interesting. I looked up like the number of new papers on archive with the keyword machine learning
Lex Fridman (07:14.880)
and like 50% of those papers have been published in the last 12 months. So you can see just the
Luís and João Batalha (07:20.960)
5.0, 50%. So you can see the magnitude of growth in that field. And so I think like as fields
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mature, like those types of moments, I think naturally are less frequent. It's just a consequence
Luís and João Batalha (07:37.280)
of that. The other point that is interesting about the backstory is that it can really make it
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more memorable in a way. And by making it more memorable, it kind of sediments the knowledge
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more in your mind. I remember also reading the sort of the backstory to Dijkstra's shortest path
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algorithm. He came up with it essentially while he was sitting down at a coffee shop in Amsterdam.
Lex Fridman (08:03.440)
And he came up with that algorithm over 20 minutes. And one interesting aspect is he didn't have any
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pen or paper at the time. And so he had to do it all in his mind. And so there's only so much
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complexity that he can handle if you're just thinking about it in your mind. And that like
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when you think about the simplicity of Dijkstra's shortest path finding algorithm, it's knowing that
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backstory helps sediment that algorithm in your mind so that you don't forget about it as easily.
Luís and João Batalha (08:30.080)
It might be from you that I saw a meme about Dijkstra. It's like he's trying to solve it and
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he comes up with some kind of random path. And then it's like my parents aren't home. And then
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he does. He figures out the algorithm for the shortest path. He tried through words to convey
Luís and João Batalha (08:53.840)
memes, but it's hilarious. I don't know if it's in post that we construct stories that romanticize
Luís and João Batalha (08:59.840)
it. Apparently with Newton, there was no apple. Especially when you're working on problems that
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have a physical manifestation or a visual manifestation, it feels like the world
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could be an inspiration to you. So it doesn't have to be completely on paper. Like you could
Luís and João Batalha (09:19.520)
be sitting at a bar and all of a sudden see something and a pattern will spark another
Luís and João Batalha (09:25.360)
pattern and you can visualize it and rethink a problem in a particular way. Of course, you can
Luís and João Batalha (09:31.200)
also load the math that you have on paper and always carry that with you. So when you show up to
Luís and João Batalha (09:35.440)
the bar, some little inspiration could be the thing that changes it. Is there any other people
Lex Fridman (09:41.360)
almost on the human side, whether it's physics with Feynman,
Luís and João Batalha (09:45.920)
Dirac, Einstein, or computer science, Turing, anybody else? Any backstories that you remember
Luís and João Batalha (09:51.680)
that jump out? Because I'm also referring to not necessarily these stories where something magical
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happens, but these are personalities. They have big egos. Some of them are super friendly. Some of
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them are like self obsessed. Some of them have anger issues. Some of them, how do I describe
Luís and João Batalha (10:11.360)
Feynman? But he appears to have a appreciation of the beautiful in all its forms. He has a wit
Lex Fridman (10:19.040)
and a cleverness and a humor about him. So does that come into play in terms of the construction
Luís and João Batalha (10:24.400)
of the science? Well, I think you brought up Newton. Newton is a good example also to think
Luís and João Batalha (10:29.600)
about his backstory because there's a certain backstory of Newton that people always talk about,
Lex Fridman (10:35.200)
but then there's a whole another aspect of him that is also a big part of the person that he was,
Lex Fridman (10:41.120)
but he was really into alchemy and that he spent a lot of time thinking about that and writing
Luís and João Batalha (10:48.000)
about it and he took it very seriously. He was really into Bible interpretation, trying to
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predict things based on the Bible. And so there's also a whole backstory then and of course you need
Luís and João Batalha (10:58.080)
to look at it in the context and the time that when Newton lived, but it adds to his personality
Lex Fridman (11:06.320)
and it's important to also understand those aspects that maybe people are not as proud to
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teach to little kids, but it's important. It was part of who he was and maybe without those,
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who knows what he would have done otherwise. Well, the cool thing about alchemy,
Luís and João Batalha (11:24.320)
I don't know how it was viewed at the time, but it almost like to me symbolizes
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dreaming of the impossible. Like most of the breakthrough ideas kind of seem impossible
Luís and João Batalha (11:36.320)
until they're actually done. It's like achieving human flight. It's not completely obvious to me
Luís and João Batalha (11:40.960)
that alchemy is impossible or putting myself in the mindset of the time. And perhaps even still,
Luís and João Batalha (11:49.200)
everything that some of the most incredible breakthroughs would seem impossible.
Lex Fridman (11:56.560)
And I wonder the value of believing, almost like focusing and dreaming of the impossible,
Luís and João Batalha (12:04.880)
such that it actually is possible in your mind and that in itself manifests
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whether the accomplishing that goal or making progress in some unexpected direction.
Lex Fridman (12:14.720)
So alchemy almost symbolizes that for me. I distinctly remember having the same thought
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of thinking, when I learned about atoms and that they have protons and electrons,
Luís and João Batalha (12:24.000)
I was like, okay, to make gold, you just take whatever has an atomic weight below it and then
Lex Fridman (12:28.320)
shove another proton in there and then you have a bunch of gold. So like, why don't people do that?
Luís and João Batalha (12:33.440)
It seemed like conceptually is like, this sounds feasible. You might be able to do it,
Luís and João Batalha (12:37.840)
you might be able to do it. And you can actually, it's just very, very expensive.
Luís and João Batalha (12:41.760)
Yeah, exactly. So in a sense we do have alchemy and maybe even back then it wasn't as crazy that
Luís and João Batalha (12:48.560)
he was so into it, but people just don't like to talk about that as much. But Newton in general
Luís and João Batalha (12:54.720)
was a very interesting fellow. Anybody else come to mind? In terms of people that inspire you,
Lex Fridman (13:01.760)
in terms of people that you just are happy that they have once or still exist on this earth?
Luís and João Batalha (13:08.720)
I think, I mean, Freeman Dyson for me.
Luís and João Batalha (13:12.080)
Yeah, Freeman Dyson was, I've had a chance to actually exchange a couple of emails with him.
Luís and João Batalha (13:17.840)
It was probably one of the most humble scientists that I've ever met. And that had a big impact
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on me. We were trying, we're actually trying to convince him to annotate a paper on Fermat's
Luís and João Batalha (13:29.600)
library. And I sent him an email asking him if he could annotate a paper. And his response was
Luís and João Batalha (13:37.120)
something like, I have very limited knowledge. I just know a couple of things about certain fields.
Luís and João Batalha (13:42.400)
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to do that. That was his first response. And this was someone that
Luís and João Batalha (13:48.880)
should have won an Obel prize and worked on a bunch of different fields, did some really,
Luís and João Batalha (13:53.360)
really great work. And then just the interactions that I had with him, every time I asked him a
Luís and João Batalha (13:59.520)
couple of questions about his papers, and he always responded saying, I'm not here to answer
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your questions. I just want to open more questions. And so that had a big impact on me. It was like
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just an example of an extremely humble, yet accomplished scientist. And Feynman was also
Luís and João Batalha (14:21.920)
a big, big inspiration in the sense that he was able to be, again, extremely talented and scientist,
Lex Fridman (14:29.280)
but at the same time, socially, he was able to, he was also really smart from a social perspective.
Lex Fridman (14:35.520)
And he was able to interact with people. He was also a really good teacher and was also to did
Luís and João Batalha (14:43.040)
awesome work in terms of explaining physics to the masses and motivating and getting people
Luís and João Batalha (14:49.760)
interested in physics. And that for me was, was also a big inspiration.
Luís and João Batalha (14:54.640)
Yeah. I liked the childlike curiosity of some of those folks that you mentioned,
Luís and João Batalha (14:57.920)
Feynman. I've, Daniel Kahneman, I got a chance to meet and interact with some of these truly
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special scientists. What makes them special is that even in older age, there's still like,
Luís and João Batalha (15:10.880)
there's still that fire of childlike curiosity that burns. And some of that is like not taking
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yourself so seriously that you think you've figured it all out, but almost like thinking that
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you don't know much of it. And that's like step one in having a great conversation or collaboration
Luís and João Batalha (15:31.680)
or exploring a scientific question. And it's cool how the very thing that probably earned people
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the Nobel prize or, or work that's seminal in some way is the very thing that still burns even after
Lex Fridman (15:45.440)
they've won the prize. It's cool to see. And they're rare humans, it seems.
Lex Fridman (15:50.000)
And to that point, I remember like the last email that I sent to Freeman Dyson was like in his last
Luís and João Batalha (15:54.560)
birthday, he was really into number theory and primes. So what I did is I took like a photo of
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him picture, and then I turned that into like a giant prime number. So I converted the picture
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into a bunch of one and eights. And then I moved some numbers around until it was a prime. And
Luís and João Batalha (16:13.040)
then I sent him that. Oh, so the, the visual, like it's still look like the picture, it's made up of
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a prime. That's tricky to do. It's hard to do. It looks harder than it actually is. So the way you
Luís and João Batalha (16:24.400)
do it is like you convert the darker regions into eights and the lighter regions in ones.
Lex Fridman (16:30.160)
And then there's... And then just keep flipping numbers until... But there's like some primality
Luís and João Batalha (16:35.760)
tests that are cheaper from a computational standpoint. But what it gives you is like
Luís and João Batalha (16:41.520)
it excludes numbers that are not prime. Then you end up with a set of numbers that you don't know
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if they are prime or not. And then you run the full primality test on that. So you just have to
Luís and João Batalha (16:50.880)
keep iterating on that. And it was, it's funny because when you got the picture, it was like,
Lex Fridman (16:55.280)
how did you do that? It was super curious too. And then we got into the details. And again,
Luís and João Batalha (17:00.240)
this was, it was already 90, I think 92 or something. And that curiosity was still there.
Lex Fridman (17:06.000)
So you can really see that in some of these scientists.
Lex Fridman (17:10.080)
So could we talk about Fermat's library?
Luís and João Batalha (17:12.880)
Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman (17:13.920)
What is it? What's the main goal? What's the dream?
Luís and João Batalha (17:18.640)
It is a platform for annotating papers in its essence, right? And so academic papers can be
Luís and João Batalha (17:24.160)
one of the densest forms of content out there and generally pretty hard to understand at times. And
Luís and João Batalha (17:31.200)
the idea is that you can make them more accessible and easier to understand by adding these rich
Luís and João Batalha (17:36.400)
annotations to the site, right? And so we can just imagine a PDF view on your browser, and then you
Luís and João Batalha (17:41.200)
have annotations on each side. And then when you click on them, a sidebar expands and then you have
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annotations that support LaTeX and Markdown. And so the idea is that you can, say, explain a
Luís and João Batalha (17:51.760)
tougher part of a paper where there's a step that is not completely obvious. And then you can
Luís and João Batalha (17:56.560)
add more context to it. And then over time, papers can become easier and easier to understand and can
Luís and João Batalha (18:04.560)
evolve in a way. But it really came from myself, Luis, and two other friends. We've had this
Luís and João Batalha (18:11.920)
long running habit of kind of running a journal club amongst us. We come from different backgrounds,
Luís and João Batalha (18:17.040)
right? I studied CS, we studied physics. And so we'd read papers and present them to the
Luís and João Batalha (18:21.600)
each other. And then we tried to bring some of that online. And that's when we decided to
Luís and João Batalha (18:30.320)
build Fermat's library. And then over time, it kind of grew into something with a broader goal.
Lex Fridman (18:40.480)
And really, what we're trying to do is trying to help move science in the right direction.
Luís and João Batalha (18:46.160)
That's really the ultimate goal and where we want to take it now.
Luís and João Batalha (18:52.880)
Well, so there's a lot to be said. So first of all, for people who haven't seen it,
Luís and João Batalha (18:58.160)
the interface is exceptionally well done. Execution is really important here.
Lex Fridman (19:02.960)
Absolutely.
Luís and João Batalha (19:03.760)
The other thing is just to mention for a large number of people, apparently, which is new to me,
Luís and João Batalha (19:10.000)
don't know what LaTeX is. So it's spelled like LaTeX. So be careful googling it if you haven't
Luís and João Batalha (19:16.640)
before. It's a, sorry, I don't even know the correct terminology.
Lex Fridman (19:21.600)
Type setting language?
Luís and João Batalha (19:22.320)
It's a type setting language where you're basically program, writing a program that
Lex Fridman (19:28.400)
then generates something that looks, from a typography perspective, beautiful.
Luís and João Batalha (19:34.160)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (19:34.880)
And so a lot of academics use it to write papers. I think there's like a bunch of communities that
Luís and João Batalha (19:41.600)
use it to write papers. I would say it's mathematics, physics, computer science.
Lex Fridman (19:47.120)
Yeah.
Luís and João Batalha (19:47.520)
That's, yeah, that's the main.
Luís and João Batalha (19:49.440)
Because I'm collaborating currently on a paper with two neuroscientists from Stanford.
Lex Fridman (19:54.400)
And they don't know LaTeX.
Lex Fridman (19:55.440)
So I'm using Microsoft Word and Mendeley, and like all of those kinds of things. And I'm being
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:00.880)
we've been saying, all of that, while being true, it's also true that the constraints and the
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:11.680)
formalism of a paper works well. It like forces you, constraints forces you to narrow down your
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:18.560)
thing and literally put it on paper. But, you know, make concrete. And that's why, I mean,
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:29.120)
it's not broken. It just could be better. And that's the main idea. I think there's something
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:34.400)
about writing, whether it's a blog post or Twitter thread or a paper, that's really nice to
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:42.000)
concretize a particular little idea that can then be referenced by other ideas, then it can be built
Luís and João Batalha (1:00:51.040)
on top of with other ideas. So let me ask, you've read quite a few papers. You've annotated quite a
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:01.440)
few papers. Let's talk about the process itself. How do you advise people read papers? Or maybe
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:08.640)
you want to broaden it beyond just papers, but just read concrete pieces of information to
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:14.080)
understand the insights that labeled in. I would say for paper specifically, I would bring back
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:20.160)
kind of what Louise was talking about, is that it's important to keep in mind that papers are
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:24.960)
not optimized for ease of understanding. And so, right, there's all sorts of restrictions and size
Lex Fridman (1:01:32.960)
and format and language that they can use. And so it's important to keep that in mind. And so that
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:38.880)
if you're struggling to read a paper, that might not mean that the underlying material is actually
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:45.200)
that hard. And so that's definitely something that, especially for us, that we read papers and
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:53.120)
most of the time the papers are completely outside of our comfort zone, I guess. And so it would be
Luís and João Batalha (1:01:59.440)
completely new areas to us. So I always try to keep that in mind. So there's usually a certain
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:05.280)
kind of structure, like abstract introductions, methodology, depending on the community and so on.
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:12.480)
Is there something about the process of how to read it, whether you want to skim it to try to
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:19.280)
find the parts that are easy to understand or not, reading it multiple times? Is there any kind of
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:26.160)
hacks that you can comment on? I remember like Feynman had this kind of hack when he was reading
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:32.000)
papers, where you would basically, I think I believe you would read the conclusion of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:39.360)
paper. And we would try to just see if he would be able to figure out how to get to the conclusion
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:47.040)
in like a couple of minutes by himself. And he would read a lot of papers that way. And I think
Luís and João Batalha (1:02:54.640)
Fermi also did that almost. And Fermi was known for doing a lot of back of the envelope calculation.
Lex Fridman (1:02:59.760)
So he was a master at doing that. And in terms of like, especially when reading a paper, I think
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:08.240)
a lot of times people might feel discouraged about the first time you read it. You know,
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:14.160)
it's very hard to grasp or you don't understand a huge fraction of the paper. And I think it's
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:20.160)
having read a lot of papers in my life, I think I'm in peace with like the fact that you might
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:25.920)
spend hours where you're just reading a paper and jumping from paper to paper, reading citations.
Lex Fridman (1:03:31.280)
And like your level of understanding sometimes of the paper is very close to 0%. And all of a
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:38.560)
sudden, you know, everything kind of makes sense in your mind. And then, you know, you have this
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:45.040)
quantum jump where all of a sudden you understand the big picture of the paper. And this is an
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:54.000)
exercise that I have to do when reading papers and especially like more complex papers, like,
Luís and João Batalha (1:03:58.400)
okay, you don't understand because you're just going through the process and just keep going.
Lex Fridman (1:04:02.160)
And like, it might feel super chaotic, especially if you're jumping from reference to reference.
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:07.360)
You know, you might end up with like 20 tabs open and you're reading a ton of other papers,
Lex Fridman (1:04:12.000)
but it's just trusting that process that at the end, like you'll find light. And I think for me,
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:18.240)
that's a good framework when reading a paper. It's hard because, you know, you might end up spending
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:24.960)
a lot of time and it looks like you're lost, but that's the process to actually, you know,
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:32.080)
understand what they're talking about in the paper.
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:34.640)
Yeah, I think that process, I enjoy, I've found a lot of value in the process, especially for
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:40.320)
things outside my field of reading a lot of related work sections and kind of going down
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:47.520)
that path of getting a big context of the field. Because what's, especially when they're well
Luís and João Batalha (1:04:52.320)
written, there's opinions injected into the really related work. Like what work is important,
Lex Fridman (1:04:57.840)
what is not. And if you read multiple related work sections that cite or don't cite each other,
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:03.600)
like the papers, you get a sense of where the field, where the tensions of the field are,
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:09.760)
where the field is striving. And that helps you put into context, like whether the work is radical,
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:16.560)
whether it's overselling itself, whether it's underselling itself, all those things. And added
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:23.280)
on top of that, I find that often the related work section is the most kind of accessible and
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:31.200)
readable part of a paper because it's kind of, it's brief to the point, it's like summarizing,
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:38.160)
it's almost like a Wikipedia style article. The introduction is supposed to be a compelling story
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:43.840)
or whatever, but it's often like overselling, there's like an agenda in the introduction.
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:49.920)
The related work usually has the least amount of agenda except for the few like elements where
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:54.960)
you're trying to talk shit about previous work where you're trying to sell that you're doing
Luís and João Batalha (1:05:58.880)
much better. But other than that, when you're just painting where the field came from or where the
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:05.040)
field stands, that's really valuable. And also again, just to agree with Fionn in the conclusion,
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:11.360)
I get a lot of value from the breadth first search, kind of read the conclusion, then read
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:17.840)
the related work, and then go through the references in the related work, read the conclusion,
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:24.000)
read the related work, and just go down the tree until you like hit dead ends or run out of coffee.
Lex Fridman (1:06:30.720)
And then through that process, you go back up the tree and now you can see the results in their
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:35.760)
proper context, unless of course the paper is truly revolutionary, which even that process will help
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:42.000)
you understand that is in fact truly revolutionary. You've also, you talked about just following your
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:50.960)
Twitter thread in depth first search. You talked about that you read the book on Grisha Perlman,
Luís and João Batalha (1:06:59.040)
Grigori Perlman, and then you had a really nice Twitter thread on it and you were taking notes
Lex Fridman (1:07:07.120)
throughout. So at a high level, is there suggestions you can give on how to take good notes?
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:13.440)
Whether it's we're talking about annotations or just for yourself to try to put on paper ideas
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:20.400)
as you progress through the work in order to then like understand the work better.
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:24.560)
For me, I always try not to underestimate how much you can forget within six months after
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:31.280)
you've read something. I thought you were going to say five minutes, but yeah, six months is good.
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:34.880)
Yeah, or even shorter. And so that's something that I always try to keep in mind. And it's often,
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:42.240)
I mean, every once in a while I'll read back a paper that I annotated on Fermat and I'll read
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:49.440)
through my own annotations and I've completely forgotten what I had written. But it's interesting
Luís and João Batalha (1:07:59.120)
because in a way, after you just understood something, you're kind of the best possible
Luís and João Batalha (1:08:03.920)
teacher that can teach your future self. After you've forgotten it, you're kind of your own best
Lex Fridman (1:08:12.720)
possible teacher at that moment. And so it can be great to try to capture that.
Luís and João Batalha (1:08:19.520)
It's brilliant. It just made me kind of realize it's really nice to put yourself in the position
Luís and João Batalha (1:08:27.280)
of teaching an older version of yourself that returns to this paper, almost like thinking literally.
Luís and João Batalha (1:08:33.520)
That's under explored, but it's super powerful because you were the person that you can,
Lex Fridman (1:08:38.560)
if you look at the scale from one not knowing anything about the topic and 10,
Luís and João Batalha (1:08:44.000)
you are the one that progressed from one to 10 and you know which steps you struggled with.
Lex Fridman (1:08:48.320)
So you're really the best person to help yourself make that transition from one to 10.
Lex Fridman (1:08:53.680)
And a lot of the times, I really believe that the framework that we have to expose ourselves to
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:02.480)
be talking to us when we were an expert, when we were taking that class and we knew everything
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:07.680)
about quantum mechanics. And then six months later, you don't remember half of the things.
Lex Fridman (1:09:12.160)
How could we make it easier to have those conversations between you and your past
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:19.120)
expert self? I think there might be, it's an under explored idea. I think notes on paper
Lex Fridman (1:09:26.640)
are probably not the best way. I'm not sure if it's a combination of video,
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:31.360)
audio, where it's like you have a guided framework that you follow to extract information from
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:36.720)
yourself so that you can later kind of revisit to make it easier to remember. But that's,
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:44.160)
I think it's an interesting idea worth exploring that I haven't seen a lot of people kind of
Lex Fridman (1:09:50.560)
trying to distill that problem.
Luís and João Batalha (1:09:53.920)
Yeah, I'm creating the kind of tools. I find if I record, it sounds weird, but I'll take notes,
Lex Fridman (1:09:59.680)
but if I record audio, like little clips of thoughts, like rants, that's really effective
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:09.440)
at capturing something that notes can't. Because when I replay them, for some reason,
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:15.600)
it loads my brain back into where I was when I was reading that in a way that notes don't. Like
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:22.160)
when I read notes, I'll often be like, what? What was I thinking there? But when I listened
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:29.040)
to the audio, it brings you right back to that place. And maybe with video, with visual, that
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:35.440)
might be even more powerful.
Lex Fridman (1:10:36.880)
I think so.
Lex Fridman (1:10:38.320)
And I think just the process of verbalizing it, that alone kind of makes you have to structure
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:45.680)
your thought and put it in a way that somebody else could come and understand it. And just
Luís and João Batalha (1:10:51.280)
the process of that is useful to organize your thoughts and yeah, just that alone.
Lex Fridman (1:10:58.400)
Does the Fermat's Library Journal Club have a video component or no?
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:03.680)
Not natively. We sometimes will include videos, but it's always embedded.
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:07.920)
Do people build videos on top of it to explain the paper? Because you're doing all the hard work
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:12.720)
of understanding deeply the paper.
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:16.400)
We haven't seen that happening too much. But we were actually playing around with the idea of
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:22.560)
creating some sort of podcast version where we try to distill the paper on an audio format that
Lex Fridman (1:11:29.040)
not maybe you can have access to.
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:30.320)
Might be tricky.
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:31.280)
Might be trickier, but there are definitely people that could be interested in the paper
Lex Fridman (1:11:35.120)
and that topic, but are not willing to read it. But they might listen to a 30 minute episode
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:40.080)
on that paper. You could reach more people and you might even bring the authors to the
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:44.720)
conversation, but it's tricky. And especially for like more technical papers. We've thought
Lex Fridman (1:11:49.520)
about doing that, but we haven't converged. I'm not sure if you have any tips.
Luís and João Batalha (1:11:55.920)
Well, I'm going to take that as a small project to take one of the Fermat's almost like
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:01.360)
half advertisement and half as a challenge for myself to take one of the annotated papers and
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:05.840)
use it as a basis for creating a quick video. I've seen like, hopefully I'm saying the name
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:14.160)
correctly, but machine learning street talk. I think that's the name of the show that I
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:20.720)
recommend highly. That's the right name. But they do exactly that, which is multiple hour
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:26.320)
breakdown of a paper with video component. Sometimes with authors, people love it.
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:32.240)
It's very effective.
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:33.520)
There's also, I've seen, I haven't seen the entire, in its entirety, but I've seen like the
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:39.440)
founder of comma.ai, George. I've seen him like just taking a paper and then, you know,
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:46.320)
distilling the paper and coding it, coding it sometimes during 10 hours. And he was able to,
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:53.440)
you know, get a lot of people interested in that and viewing him.
Luís and João Batalha (1:12:57.120)
I'm a huge fan of that. Like, George is a personality. I think a lot of people like
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:03.280)
listen to this podcast for the same reason. It's not necessarily the contents. They like to listen
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:08.880)
to like a silly Russian who has a childlike brain and mumbles and all those like struggle with
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:16.560)
ideas, right? And George is a madman who people just enjoy. Like, how is he going to struggle
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:22.160)
in implementing this particular paper? How is he going to struggle with this idea? It's fun to
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:26.320)
watch and that actually pulls you in. The personality is important there.
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:29.600)
True. But there's, you know, I agree with you, but there also, it's visible, like it's,
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:34.720)
there's an extraordinary ability that is there. Like, he's talented and you need to have,
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:40.080)
there's a craft and this guy definitely has talent and he's doing something that is not easy.
Lex Fridman (1:13:45.120)
And I think that also draws the attention of people.
Lex Fridman (1:13:47.520)
Oh yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:13:48.160)
And like the other day we were actually, we ran into this YouTube channel of this guy that was
Luís and João Batalha (1:13:53.600)
restoring art, right? And it was basically just a video of him, like the production is really like
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:03.120)
really well done. And it's just him taking really old pieces of art, like, and then paintings and
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:09.760)
then restoring them. But he's really good at that. And he describes that process. And that draws
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:14.880)
attention, draws the attention of people, regardless of your craft, be it like annotating a
Lex Fridman (1:14:20.480)
paper or like restoring it.
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:22.320)
Procurement, excellence. Yeah. Like George is incredibly good at programming.
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:26.400)
Like quick, like, you know, those competitive programmers, like Topcoder and all those kinds of
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:34.720)
stuff, he has the same kind of element where the brain just jumps around really quickly.
Lex Fridman (1:14:38.800)
And that's, yeah, just like, it's motivating, but you're right in watching people who are good at
Lex Fridman (1:14:48.640)
what they do. It's motivating. Even if the thing you're trying to do is not what they're doing,
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:52.720)
it's contagious when they're really good at it. And the same kind of analysis with the paper,
Luís and João Batalha (1:14:57.280)
I think, not just like the final result, but the process of struggling with it. That's really
Luís and João Batalha (1:15:03.280)
interesting. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think Twitch proved that, like, you know, that there's
Luís and João Batalha (1:15:07.760)
really a market for that, for watching people do things that they're really good at. And you'll
Luís and João Batalha (1:15:14.560)
just watch it. You will enjoy that. That might even spike your interest in that specific topic.
Lex Fridman (1:15:20.480)
And yeah, and people will enjoy watching sometimes hours on end of great craftsmans.
Lex Fridman (1:15:27.280)
Do you mind if we talk about some of the papers? Do any papers come to mind
Lex Fridman (1:15:31.520)
that have been annotated on Fermat's library?
Luís and João Batalha (1:15:34.640)
The papers that we annotated can be about completely random topics, but that's part of
Lex Fridman (1:15:39.040)
what we enjoy as well. It forces you to explore these topics that otherwise maybe you'd never
Luís and João Batalha (1:15:43.440)
run into. And so the ones that come to mind are, to me, are fairly random. But one that I really
Luís and João Batalha (1:15:51.760)
enjoyed learning more about is a paper written by a mathematician, actually, Thomas Postol,
Lex Fridman (1:16:00.080)
and about a tunnel in a Greek island off the coast of Turkey. So it's very random.
Luís and João Batalha (1:16:10.240)
Yeah. Okay, so what's interesting about this tunnel? So this tunnel was built in the sixth
Luís and João Batalha (1:16:18.000)
century BC. And it was built in the island of Samos, which is, as I said, off the coast of Turkey.
Lex Fridman (1:16:27.360)
And they had the city on one side, and they had a mountain, and then they had a bunch of
Luís and João Batalha (1:16:33.760)
springs on the other side, and they wanted to bring water into the city. Building an aqueduct
Luís and João Batalha (1:16:40.000)
would be pretty hard because of the way the mountain was shaped. And it would also, if they
Luís and João Batalha (1:16:44.880)
were under a siege, they could just easily destroy that aqueduct, and then the water wouldn't have
Luís and João Batalha (1:16:51.360)
any water supply. The city wouldn't have any water supply. And so they decided to build a tunnel,
Lex Fridman (1:16:57.680)
and they decided to try to do it quickly. And so they started digging from both ends
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:06.720)
at the same time through the mountain. And so when you start thinking about this,
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:12.480)
it's a fairly difficult problem. And this is like sixth century BC, so you had very limited access
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:20.560)
to the mathematical tools that you had at the time, were very limited. And so what this paper
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:25.360)
is about is about the story of how they built it and about the fact that for about 2000 years,
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:32.320)
kind of the accepted explanation of how they built it was actually wrong. And so this tunnel
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:38.960)
has been famous for a while. There are a number of historians that talked about it since ancient
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:43.360)
Egypt. And the method that they described for building it was just wrong. And so these researchers
Luís and João Batalha (1:17:54.480)
went there and were able to figure that out. And so basically, kind of the way that they thought
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:00.960)
they had built it was basically, if you can imagine looking at the mountain from the top,
Lex Fridman (1:18:06.080)
and you have the mountain and then you have both entrances. And so what they thought,
Lex Fridman (1:18:11.760)
and this is what the ancient historians described, is that they effectively tried to draw a right
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:19.600)
angle triangle with the two entrances at each end of the hypotenuse. And the way they did it is like
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:27.280)
they would go around the mountain and kind of walking in a grid fashion. And then you can figure
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:32.640)
out the two sides of the triangle. And then after you have that triangle, you can effectively draw
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:40.480)
two smaller triangles at each entrance that are proportional to that big triangle. And then you
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:47.360)
kind of have arrows pointing in each way. And then you know at least that you have a line going
Luís and João Batalha (1:18:54.560)
through the mountain that connects both entrances. The issue with that is like once you go to this
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:01.920)
mountain and you start thinking of doing this, you realize that especially given that the tools that
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:06.960)
they had at the time, that your error margin would be too small. You wouldn't be able to do it.
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:14.960)
Just the fact of trying to build this triangle in that fashion, the error would accumulate and you
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:20.880)
would end up missing. You'd start building these tunnels and they would miss each other. So the task
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:24.960)
ultimately is to figure out like really perfectly as close as possible the direction you should be
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:30.320)
digging. First of all that it's possible to have a straight line through and then what that the
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:35.680)
direction would be. And then you are trying to infer that by constructing a right triangle
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:42.000)
by doing. I'm not exactly sure about how to do that rigorously like by tracing the mountain,
Luís and João Batalha (1:19:49.280)
by walking along the mountain. You said grids? Yeah you kind of walk as if you were in a grid
Lex Fridman (1:19:55.040)
and so you just walk in right angles. But then you have to walk really precisely then. Exactly.
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:00.800)
You have to use tools to measure this and the terrain is probably a mess. So this makes more
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:07.360)
sense in 2D and 3D gets even weirder. So okay gotcha. But so this method was described by like
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:14.480)
an ancient Egyptian historian. I think hero of Alexandria. And then for about like yeah for
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:20.720)
about 2000 years that's how we thought that they had built this tunnel. And then these
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:28.720)
researchers went there and found out that actually they must have had to use other methods. And then
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:35.600)
in this paper they describe these other methods and of course they can't know for sure. But
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:41.040)
there's they present a bunch of plausible alternatives. The one that for me was is the
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:46.880)
most plausible is that what they probably must have done is to use something that is similar to
Luís and João Batalha (1:20:52.720)
an iron sight on a rifle. The way you can line up your rifle with a target off in the distance
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:00.240)
by having an iron sight. And they must have done something similar to that
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:08.160)
effectively with three sticks. And that way they were able to line up sticks along the side of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:16.560)
mountain that were all on the same height. And so that then you could get to the other side
Lex Fridman (1:21:22.480)
and you could and then you could draw that line. So this for me is the most plausible
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:27.840)
way that they might have done that. But then they described this in detail and other possible
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:34.400)
approaches in this paper. So this is a mathematician doing this? Yeah this is a mathematician that did
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:40.320)
this. Which I suppose is the right mindset instead of skills required to solve an ancient problem
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:46.880)
right? Yeah. Yeah. There's mathematicians and engineers a lot of things. Because they didn't
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:52.320)
have computers or drones or lidar back then or whatever technology you would use modern day for
Luís and João Batalha (1:21:58.240)
the civil engineering. Yeah. Another fascinating thing is that like you know after effectively
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:04.640)
after the the downfall of the Roman civilization people didn't build tunnels for about a thousand
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:09.600)
years. We go a thousand years without tunnels and then like only in like in late middle ages that
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:15.360)
we start doing them again. But here is the tunnel like sixth century BC like incredibly limited
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:20.640)
mathematics and they and they build it in this way. And it was a mystery for a long time exactly
Lex Fridman (1:22:28.960)
how they did it. And then these mathematicians went there and basically with no archaeology
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:35.040)
kind of background were able to figure it out. How do annotations for this paper look like? What is
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:40.400)
it what's a successful annotation for paper like this? Yeah so sometimes you're for this paper
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:46.640)
sometimes adding some more context on on a specific part like sometimes they they mentioned
Luís and João Batalha (1:22:54.160)
for instance these instruments that were common in ancient Greece and ancient Rome for for building
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:02.000)
things. And and and so in some of those annotations I describe these instruments in more detail and
Lex Fridman (1:23:08.240)
how they worked because sometimes it can be hard to to visualize these.
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:12.960)
Then this paper I forget exactly when when this was published I believe maybe maybe the 70s.
Lex Fridman (1:23:21.760)
And then there was further research into this tunnel and more interesting other interesting
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:26.240)
aspects about it. I add those to that paper as well. There's historical context that I also go
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:32.720)
into there for instance the fact that as a as I said that effectively after the downfall of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:39.280)
Roman Empire no tunnels were built like this something that I that I go that I that I added
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:43.360)
to the paper as well. Yeah so so when other people look at the paper how do they usually consume the
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:49.360)
annotations? So they it's like is there a commenting feature is the I mean like this is a really
Luís and João Batalha (1:23:55.920)
enriching experience the way you read a paper. What what aspects do you do people usually talk
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:02.000)
about that they they value from this? So yeah so anybody can just go on there and and either add
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:09.120)
a new annotation or add a comment to an existing annotation and so you can start a kind of a thread
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:15.840)
within an existing annotation. And that's something that happens relative frequency and then
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:21.680)
because I was the original author of the initial annotation I get pinged and so oftentimes I'll go
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:27.440)
back and and and add on to to that thread. How'd you pick the paper? I mean first of all this whole
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:33.840)
process is really exciting. I'm gonna especially after this conversation I'm gonna make sure I
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:38.880)
participate much more actively on papers that I know a lot about and on paper I know nothing about.
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:44.960)
I should both of us annotate the paper. I would love to. I also I mean I realized that uh there's
Luís and João Batalha (1:24:52.880)
like it's an opportunity for people like me to publicly annotate a paper. Or do an AMA around
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:02.640)
the paper. Yeah exactly but yeah but like be um be in the conversation about a paper. It's like a
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:09.760)
place to have a conversation about an idea. You get the other way to do it that's much more ad hoc
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:15.200)
is on Twitter right? But this is more like formal and you don't have to be in the conversation
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:19.760)
on Twitter right? But this is more like formal and you could actually probably integrate the two.
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:24.880)
You have a conversation about the conversation. So the Twitter is the conversation about a
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:29.360)
conversation and the main conversation is in this space of annotations. There's an interesting effect
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:34.720)
that we we see sometimes with the annotations on our papers is that a lot of people especially if
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:39.440)
we the annotations are really well done people sometimes are afraid of adding more annotations
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:46.960)
because they see that as a kind of a finished work. Yes. And so they they don't want to pollute
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:51.440)
that or uh and especially if it's like a silly question. This is I don't think that's good. I
Luís and João Batalha (1:25:57.280)
think you know we should as much as possible try to lower the barrier for someone to jump in and
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:02.400)
ask questions. I think it only like most of the times it adds value but it's some feedback that
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:07.600)
we got from users and and readers. I'm not exactly sure how to to kind of fight that but um. Well I
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:17.680)
think I think if I serve as an inspiration in any way is by asking a lot of dumb questions and saying
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:26.080)
a bunch of dumb shit all the time and hopefully that inspires the rest of the other folks to do
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:31.200)
the same because that's the only way to knowledge I think is to be willing to ask the dumb questions.
Lex Fridman (1:26:37.440)
And there are papers that are like um you know we have a lot of papers on Fermat's where it's just
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:42.160)
one page or really short papers and you we have like the shortest paper ever published in a math
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:48.400)
journal like with like just a couple of words. Yeah. One of my favorite papers on the platform
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:53.200)
is actually a paper um written by Enrico Fermi. Yeah. And the title of the paper is my obs I think
Luís and João Batalha (1:26:59.520)
is my observations at Trinity. So basically Fermi was part of the Manhattan Project. So he was in
Luís and João Batalha (1:27:06.240)
New Mexico when they exploded the first atomic bomb and so he was a couple of miles away from
Luís and João Batalha (1:27:13.120)
the explosion and he was probably one of the first persons to calculate the energy of the explosion.
Lex Fridman (1:27:18.960)
And so the way he did that was he took a piece of paper and he tore down a piece of paper in in
Luís and João Batalha (1:27:25.040)
little pieces and when the bomb exploded the Trinity bomb was the name of the bomb like he
Luís and João Batalha (1:27:30.560)
waited for the blast to arrive at where he was and then he threw those pieces of paper in the air
Lex Fridman (1:27:37.440)
and he calculated the energy based on the displacement of the paper the pieces of paper
Lex Fridman (1:27:42.800)
and then he wrote a report which was classified until like a couple of years ago one page report
Luís and João Batalha (1:27:47.920)
like calculating the energy of the explosion. Oh that's so badass. And I we actually went there
Lex Fridman (1:27:53.600)
and kind of unpacked and like I think he just mentions basically the energy and we we actually
Luís and João Batalha (1:27:58.960)
went and one of the annotations is like explaining how he did that. I wonder how accurate he was.
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:05.040)
It was maybe I think like 20 or 25 percent off. Then there was another person that actually
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:10.880)
calculated the energy based on images after the explosion at the rate and the rate at which the
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:18.800)
like the mushroom of the explosion expanded and it's more accurate to calculate the energy based
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:23.440)
on that and I think it was like 20 20 percent off but it's it's really interesting because you know
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:29.200)
Fermi was known for all these being a master at these back of the envelope calculations always
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:34.240)
like the the Fermi problems are well known for for that and it's super interesting to see like
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:40.480)
that just one page report that was also actually classified and it's interesting because a couple
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:45.760)
months ago when the Beirut explosion happened there was a video circulating of these a bride
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:52.640)
that was doing a photo shoot when the explosion in Beirut happened and so you can see a video of
Luís and João Batalha (1:28:57.760)
her with the wedding dress and then the explosion happens in the blast arrives at where she was she
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:02.160)
was a couple of miles away from the last and you can see like the displacement of the dress as well
Lex Fridman (1:29:09.200)
and I actually looked and that video went viral on Twitter and I actually looked at that video
Lex Fridman (1:29:13.280)
and based I used the same techniques that Fermi used to calculate the energy of the explosion
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:18.880)
based on the displacement of the dress and you could actually see where where she was at the
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:23.520)
the distance from the explosion because there was a store behind her and you could look the name of
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:27.520)
the store and and so I calculated that it was the distance and then you can the based on the
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:32.720)
distance where she was from the the explosion and also on the the displacement of the dress
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:37.600)
like because you can when the blast happens like you can see the dress going back and then going
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:43.520)
back to the original position and like by just looking at like how much the the dress moved you
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:49.360)
can estimate the explode the energy of the explosion I assume you published this on Twitter
Luís and João Batalha (1:29:54.960)
was just a Twitter thread but it actually like a lot of people share that and it was picked up by
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:00.720)
a couple of news outlets but I was hoping it would be like a formal title and it would be an archive
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:07.120)
no no no it may be submitted just the Twitter thread but it was interesting because it was
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:11.440)
exactly the same method that Fermi used is there something else that jumps to mind like what is
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:17.920)
there something um I know like in terms of papers like I know the Bitcoin paper is super popular
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:24.000)
is there something interesting to be said about any of the white papers in the cryptocurrency space
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:29.680)
yeah the the the Bitcoin paper was the first paper that we put on for months and uh why that
Lex Fridman (1:30:36.560)
why that choice as the first paper it was a while ago and it was one of the papers that I read
Lex Fridman (1:30:42.720)
and then uh and then kind of explained it to to louise and or to other friends that do this
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:48.400)
journal club with us and um I did some research in cryptography uh as an undergrad and so it was a
Luís and João Batalha (1:30:56.000)
topic that I was interested in um but even for me that I I had that background but reading the
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:02.880)
Bitcoin paper it took me a few reads to really kind of wrap my head around it it's it's right
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:08.720)
it's it uses very spartan precise language in a way it's like you feel like you can't take any
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:14.400)
word out of it without something falling apart and uh and it's all there I think it's a beautiful
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:20.800)
paper and it's it's it's very well written of course but um you know we wanted to try to make
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:28.400)
it accessible so that anybody that maybe is an undergrad in computer science could go on there
Lex Fridman (1:31:33.840)
and then and and know that you have all the information in in that page that you're going
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:39.840)
to need to understand the mechanics of Bitcoin and so like I explain you know the basic
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:47.120)
public key cryptography that you need to to know in order to understand it like explain
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:52.080)
okay what are the properties of a hash function and how they are useful in this context
Luís and João Batalha (1:31:57.040)
um explain what a merkle tree is so a bunch of those basic concepts that maybe if you're reading
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:02.560)
it for a first time and you're an undergrad and you know you don't know those terms you're going
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:06.080)
to be you know discouraged because maybe okay now I have to go and google around until I understand
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:10.800)
these before I can make progress in the paper um and and this way it's all there you know so so
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:16.640)
there's a magic to also to the fact that over time more people went on there and and added further
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:23.840)
annotations so the the idea that the paper gets easier and more accessible over time but that's
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:29.280)
still you're still looking at the original content the way the the author intended it to be uh but
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:36.000)
there's just more context and the toughest bits have have more in depth explanations okay I think
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:43.680)
like there's a just so many interesting papers uh there like I remember reading the paper that was
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:50.640)
written by Freeman Dyson on the like the the first time that he explained he came up with
Luís and João Batalha (1:32:56.720)
the concept of the Dyson sphere and he he put that out like it's again it's a one page paper
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:02.720)
um and he what he explained was that eventually if a civilization develops and and grows there's
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:10.240)
going to be a point where when the resources on the planet are not are not enough for the energy
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:16.880)
requirements of that civilization so if you want to go the next step is you need to go to the next
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:22.160)
star and extract energy from that star and the way to do it is you need to build some sort of cap
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:28.480)
around the star that extracts the energy so he theorized this idea of the the Dyson sphere
Lex Fridman (1:33:35.280)
and he went on to kind of analyze how you would build that the stability of that sphere like
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:40.640)
if something happens if there's like a small oscillation with that fear collapse into the
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:45.680)
star or know what what would happen and even went on to kind of say that a good way for us to look
Luís and João Batalha (1:33:53.040)
for signs of intelligent life out there is to look for signals of these Dyson spheres and because you
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:00.240)
know according to the law of second law of thermodynamics like there's going to be some a
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:04.160)
lot of infrared radiation that is going to be emitted as a consequence of extracting energy
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:08.320)
from the star and we should be able to see those signals of like infrared if we look at the sky
Lex Fridman (1:34:14.960)
but all these like from the introduction of the concept like the how to build the Dyson sphere
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:20.080)
the problems of like having a Dyson sphere how to detect how that could be used as a signal for
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:24.800)
intelligence life really that's all in the paper all in one like one page paper and it's like it's
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:29.600)
it's for me it's beautiful it's like where was this published i don't remember it's fascinating
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:35.040)
that papers like that could be yeah i mean the guts it takes to put that all together in a paper
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:41.760)
before you know that that kind of challenges our previous discussion that of paper i mean papers
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:46.880)
can be beautiful you can play with the format right it but there's a lot to unpack there that's
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:52.480)
like the the that's the the starting point but it's it's beautiful that you're able to put that
Luís and João Batalha (1:34:57.440)
in one page and then people can build on top of that and but the key ideas are there yeah exactly
Lex Fridman (1:35:04.640)
what about have you looked at any of the the big seminal papers throughout the history of
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:09.360)
science like you look at simple like einstein papers have any of those been annotated yeah
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:16.000)
yeah no we we have some more seminal papers that that people have heard about um you know we have
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:22.320)
the the DNA double elix paper on there we have the Higgs boson uh paper um yeah there's papers
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:33.200)
that they'll that we know that it's they're not going to be finding out about them because of us
Lex Fridman (1:35:39.360)
but it's papers that we think um should be more widely read and that folks would benefit from
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:45.120)
having some annotations there and so we also have a number of those a lot of like discovery papers
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:50.640)
for fundamental like particles and all that there's we have a lot of those on from us library
Luís and João Batalha (1:35:56.400)
um yeah we i would like to end we haven't annotated that one but i'd like to on the
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:00.560)
Riemann hypothesis that's a really interesting paper as well um and and but we haven't annotated
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:06.880)
that one but there's a lot of like more historical landmark papers um on the platform have you done
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:13.520)
uh Poincare conjecture with uh with Perlman that's too much that's too much that's too much
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:19.680)
too much for me but it's uh it's it's interesting that you know and going back to our discussion
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:25.040)
like the the Poincare paper was like published on archive and and it was not on a journal like
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:30.000)
the three papers and yeah what do you make of that i mean he's such a fascinating human being
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:34.640)
exactly i mentioned to you offline that i'm going to russia he's somebody i'm really uh to interview
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:40.320)
yeah i well i so i definitely will interview him i um and i believe i will i believe i can i just
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:48.800)
don't know how to i know where he lives so here okay my my uh my hope is my conjecture is that
Luís and João Batalha (1:36:57.520)
if i just show up to the house and look desperate enough uh that uh or threatening enough for some
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:03.280)
combination of both that like the only way to get rid of me is to just get the thing done that's the
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:08.720)
hope it's actually interesting that you mentioned that because i after i um so a couple of weeks ago
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:14.080)
i was searching for like stuff about Perlman Perlman online ended up on this twitter account
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:19.760)
of like this guy that claims to be Perlman Perlman's assistant and he's like he has been
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:26.000)
posting a bunch of pictures like next to Perlman you can see like Perlman in in a library and he's
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:30.640)
like next to him like taking a selfie or like Perlman walking on the street and like maybe you
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:36.080)
could reach out to his assistant then i'll send you i'll send you this twitter account so maybe
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:42.640)
you're onto something no but but going going back to like Perlman is super interesting because the
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:47.120)
fact that he published the the the the proofs on archive is what was also like a way for him to
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:53.040)
because he really didn't like the scientific publishing industry and the fact that you had to
Luís and João Batalha (1:37:58.160)
pay to get uh access to to articles and that was a form of like protest and that's why he published
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:06.000)
um those papers there i mean i i think Perlman is just a fascinating like character and for me
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:11.680)
it's this kind of ideal of a platonic ideal of what a mathematician should be you know it's it's
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:18.240)
someone that is you know it's just cares about deeply cares about mathematics you know it cares
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:23.200)
about fair attribution of of um disregards money and um and and like the fact that he published
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:31.040)
like on archive was is a good example of what about the Fields Medal that he turned down the
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:35.920)
Fields Medal what's what's yeah what do you make of that yeah i mean if you look at like the reasons
Lex Fridman (1:38:42.000)
why he rejected the Fields Medal so after so Perlman did a postdoc in the US and when he came
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:47.840)
back to Russia um do you know how good his English is i think it's very fairly good it's pretty good
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:53.840)
i think it's really good especially given lectures yeah but i haven't been able to listen to anything
Luís and João Batalha (1:38:59.760)
well certainly not listen but i haven't been able to get anybody because i know a lot of people have
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:03.920)
been to those lectures i'm not able to get a sense of like yeah but how strong is the accent what are
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:10.480)
we talking about here is this going to have to be in Russian it's going to have to be in English
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:13.840)
is fascinating but he writes the papers in English so true like there's there's but there's so many
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:18.480)
like it's such a fascinating character and um there are a couple of examples like him like at
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:23.840)
i think 28 or 29 he proved like a really famous uh conjecture called the soul conjecture i believe
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:29.280)
it was like in a very short four page proof of that was a really big breakthrough then he went
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:34.000)
to Princeton to give a lecture on that and after the lecture uh the the chair of the math department
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:40.720)
at Princeton a guy called Peter Sarnak went up to to Perelman was trying to recruit him
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:46.640)
trying to offer him a position at Princeton and he was and at some point he asked for Perelman's
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:52.640)
resume and Perelman responded saying just gave a lecture on like this really tough problem why do
Luís and João Batalha (1:39:59.600)
you need my resume like i'm not gonna send you like i just proved like my value uh but uh but
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:06.160)
going back to the Fields Medal like when when Perelman went to back to Russia he arrived at a
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:12.560)
time where the the salary of postdocs were so much off in regards to inflation that they were not
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:20.800)
making any money like the the people didn't even bother to pick up the checks at the end of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:25.920)
month because they were just like ridiculous but thankfully he had some money that he had
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:30.640)
uh gained while he was doing this postdoc so he just concentrated on like the Poincare the the
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:36.320)
Poincare conjecture problem which he when he when he took that um he took it after uh it was
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:42.560)
reframed by this uh mathematician called Richard Hamilton which posed the problem in a way that
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:48.320)
it turned into this super like math Olympiad problem with like perfect boundaries well defined
Lex Fridman (1:40:54.320)
and that was perfect for Perelman to attack and so he spent like seven years working on that and
Luís and João Batalha (1:40:59.360)
then in 2002 he started publishing those papers on archive and people started jumping on that
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:06.720)
reading those papers and there was like a lot of excitement around that a couple of years later
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:12.480)
there were two researchers i believe it was they were from Harvard that took Perelman's Perelman's
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:18.320)
work they sanded some of the edges and they republished that saying that you know based on
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:25.200)
Perelman's work they were able to figure out the the Poincare conjecture and then there was um
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:31.920)
at the time at the the international um conference of mathematics in 2000 2006 i believe that's when
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:39.280)
they were going to give out the Fields Medal there was a lot of debate like oh who's who's
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:44.960)
like we should get the credit for solving this big problem and for Perelman it like it it felt
Luís and João Batalha (1:41:52.720)
really sad that people were even considering that he was not the person that solved that
Lex Fridman (1:41:57.840)
and and the claims that those like researchers when they published after Perelman they were
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:03.520)
false claims that they were the ones they just sanded a couple of edges like Perelman did all
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:07.520)
the really hard work and so just just the fact that they doubted that Perelman had done that
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:14.320)
like was enough for him to say i'm not i'm not interested in this prize and that was one of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:19.280)
reasons why he rejected the Fields Medal then he also rejected the clay prize so the Poincare
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:25.920)
conjecture was one of the millennium prizes there was a million dollar prize associated with that
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:30.560)
problem and that has to add to do with the fact that for them to attribute that prize i think it
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:35.920)
had to be published on a journal yes the proof and again Perelman's principles of like interfered
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:43.520)
here and and he also just didn't care about the money he was like um clay i think was a businessman
Lex Fridman (1:42:48.800)
and he's like doesn't have to do anything with with mathematics i don't care about these like
Luís and João Batalha (1:42:54.000)
that's one of the reasons why he rejected it yeah there's it's hard to convert into words but
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:00.080)
at MIT i'm distinctly aware of the distinction between when i enter a room there's a certain
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:07.680)
kind of music to the way people talk when we're talking about ideas versus what that music sounds
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:15.520)
like when we're talking when it's like bickering in the space of like whether it's politics or
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:24.640)
funding or egos it's a different sound to it and i'm distinctly aware of the two and i kind of
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:35.280)
sort of to me personally happiness was just like swimming around the one that like is the political
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:42.800)
stuff or the money stuff and all that or egos and i think that's probably what problem is as well
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:51.120)
like the moment he senses there's any as what it feels metal like the moment you start to have any
Luís and João Batalha (1:43:57.120)
kind of drama around credit assignment all those kinds of things it's almost not that it's important
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:03.280)
who gets the credit it's like the drama in itself gets in the way of the exploration of the ideas
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:08.320)
or the fundamental thing that makes science so damn beautiful and and you can really see that
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:13.680)
is also a product of that russian school of like doing science and you can see that that um that
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:21.120)
people were you know during the cold war a lot of mathematicians they were not making any money they
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:26.640)
were doing math for the sake of math like for the intellectual pleasure of like solving a difficult
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:33.280)
problem yeah and you know even even if it was a flawed system and there were a lot of problems with
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:38.080)
with that there's these they were able to to actually achieve these and there were a lot of
Lex Fridman (1:44:43.840)
and perelman for me is the perfect product of that he just cared about like working on tough problems
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:49.840)
he didn't care about anything else it was just math you know pure math yeah there's a like for
Luís and João Batalha (1:44:56.480)
the broader audience i think another example of that is like professional sports versus olympics
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:02.160)
i've especially in russia i've seen that clear distinction where because the state manages
Lex Fridman (1:45:10.480)
so much of the olympic process in russia as people know with the steroids yes yes yes but outside
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:16.560)
of steroids thing uh is like the athlete can focus on the pure artistry of the sport like
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:26.400)
like not worry about the money not just in the way they talk about it the way they think about it the
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:31.040)
way they define excellence versus like in the perhaps a bit of a capitalist system in united
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:38.400)
states with american football with baseball basketball so much of the discussion is about
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:46.640)
money now of course at the end of the day it's about excellence and artistry and all that but
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:53.040)
when the culture is so richly grounded in discussions of money and
Luís and João Batalha (1:45:58.080)
uh sort of this capitalistic like uh merch and uh businesses and all those kinds of things
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:04.880)
it changes the nature of the activity and it's in a way that's hard again to describe in words but
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:11.120)
when it's purely about the activity itself it's almost like you quiet down all the noise
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:18.960)
enough to hear the signal enough to hear the beauty like whenever you're talking about the
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:23.680)
like whenever you're talking about the money that's when the marketing people come and the
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:28.640)
business people the non creatives come and they fill the room and there's and they create drama
Lex Fridman (1:46:32.880)
and they know how to create the drama and the noise as opposed to the people who are truly
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:36.880)
excellent at what they do the the person in their arena right like when you remove all the money
Lex Fridman (1:46:44.480)
and you just let that thing shine that's when true excellence can and can come out and that was
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:51.600)
one of the few things that worked with the communist system in the Soviet Union to me at
Luís and João Batalha (1:46:56.480)
least as somebody who loves sport and loves mathematics and uh science that worked well
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:03.840)
removing the money from the picture uh you know not that I'm um not that I'm saying poverty is
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:11.920)
good for science there's some level in which not worrying about money is good for science it's a
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:18.960)
weird I'm not exactly sure what to make of that because capitalism works really damn well yeah but
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:25.200)
it's um it's tricky how to find that balance one field's medalist that is interesting to look at
Lex Fridman (1:47:32.240)
and I think you mentioned it earlier but it's Cédric Villani which is might be the only uh
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:38.080)
field's medalist that is also a politician now but so it's this it's this brilliant French
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:43.840)
mathematician that won the field's medal and and after that he decided that one of the ways that
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:51.920)
he could have could have uh you know the biggest leverage kind of is in pushing science in the
Luís and João Batalha (1:47:58.000)
direction that he thinks science should go would be to to try to go into politics and so that's
Lex Fridman (1:48:04.480)
what he did and and uh and he has ran I'm not sure if he has won any election but I think he's running
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:11.360)
I think he's running for mayor for mayor of Paris or something like that but it's this brilliant
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:15.440)
mathematician that uh that uh before winning the field's medal had only been just a brilliant
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:22.240)
mathematician but but after that he decided to go into politics to to try to to have an impact and
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:27.520)
try to change some of the things that he he would complain about um before so so there's that
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:33.440)
component as well yeah and I've always thought mathematics and science should be like like James
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:40.400)
Bond would in my eyes I think be sexier if he did math like we should as a society put
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:49.040)
excellence in mathematics at the same level as being able to kill a man with your bare hands
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:53.840)
like those are both useful features like that's admirable it's like oh like that makes you like
Luís and João Batalha (1:48:59.840)
that makes the person interesting like being extremely well read about history or philosophy
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:05.520)
being good at mathematics being able to kill a man with bare hands these are all the same in my book
Lex Fridman (1:49:10.720)
so I think all are useful for action stars uh and I think the society will benefit for uh for giving
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:16.640)
more value to that like one of the things that bothers me about American culture is the I don't
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:24.880)
know the right words to use but like the nerdiness associated with science like like in I I don't
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:32.320)
think nerd is a good word in in American culture because uh it's seen as like weakness there's like
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:40.400)
images that come with that and it's fine you could you could be all kinds of shapes and colors and
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:47.280)
personalities but like to me uh having sophisticated knowledge in science being good at math
Luís and João Batalha (1:49:56.160)
doesn't mean you're weak in fact it could be the very opposite and so it's it's an
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:01.840)
interesting thing because it was very much differently viewed in the uh in the Soviet Union
Lex Fridman (1:50:07.600)
so I know for sure as an existence proof that uh it doesn't have to be that way but it um
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:15.440)
I also feel like we lack a lot of role models in terms if you ask people are mentioned to mention
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:22.000)
one mathematician that they know that is alive today I think a lot of people would struggle
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:26.400)
to answer that question um and I also think I love Neil deGrasse Tyson okay but there is uh
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:38.080)
having more role models is good like different kinds of personalities he he has kind of fun and
Lex Fridman (1:50:44.000)
and it's very it's uh like Bill Nye the science guy I don't know if you guys know him so like that
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:49.760)
spectrum that yeah but there there's not like Feynman is no longer there uh those kinds of
Luís and João Batalha (1:50:56.880)
personality Carl Sagan even Carl Sagan yeah like a seriousness that's like not playful like not
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:05.120)
apologetical yeah exactly not apologetic about being knowledgeable like like in fact like the
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:12.800)
kind of energy where you feel uh self conscious about not having thought about some of these
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:21.920)
questions right just like when I see James Bond I feel bad about that I don't have never killed a
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:28.400)
man like I need to make sure I fix that that's the way I feel the same way I want to feel like
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:33.280)
that way well Carl Sagan talks I I feel like I need to have that same kind of seriousness about
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:38.320)
science like if I don't know something I want to I want to know well what about Terrence Tao
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:44.160)
he's kind of a superstar what are your thoughts about him true it's probably one of the most
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:48.720)
famous mathematicians alive today and probably one of I mean regardless of like is of course
Luís and João Batalha (1:51:54.400)
he won a field the Fields Medal is really smart and talented mathematician um it's also like a
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:02.640)
big inspiration for us um at least for some of the work that we do with Fermat's library
Lex Fridman (1:52:10.160)
so Terrence Tao is is known for having you know a big blog and he's pretty open about
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:15.920)
um like his research and he also he tries to make his work as public as possible um through his blog
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:23.760)
posts um in fact there's a really interesting um problem that got solved a couple of years ago
Lex Fridman (1:52:30.400)
so Tao was working with uh on a problem on an Erdos problem actually so Paul Erdos was this
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:37.840)
mathematician from Hungary and he was known for like um the Erdos for a lot of things but one of
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:44.800)
the things that he was also known was for the Erdos problem so he was always like um creating
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:49.680)
these problems and usually associating prizes with those problems and a lot of those problems
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:54.000)
are still open like and and there will be some of them will be open for like maybe
Luís and João Batalha (1:52:58.080)
a couple hundred years and I think that's actually an interesting hack for him to collaborate with
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:02.720)
future mathematicians you know his his name will keep coming up and you know for future generations
Lex Fridman (1:53:08.880)
but so Tao was working on one of these problems called the Erdos discrepancy and he published a
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:14.240)
blog post on like uh about that problem about that problem and he reached like a dead end and then um
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:21.600)
all of a sudden there was this guy from from Germany that wrote like a comment on his blog post
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:26.640)
saying okay like some of the that so this problem is like a Sudoku like flavor and some of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:32.800)
machinery that we're using to solve Sudoku could be used here and that was actually the key to
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:38.400)
solve the Erdos discrepancy problem so the there was a comment on his blog and I think that that
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:43.440)
that for me is an example of like how to do again going back to collaborative science online um and
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:50.480)
the power that it has but Tao is also like pretty public about like some of the struggles and of
Luís and João Batalha (1:53:57.760)
of being a a mathematician like and and even he wrote about some of the unintended consequences
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:04.320)
of having extraordinary ability in a field and he used himself as an example when he was growing up
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:10.880)
he was extremely talented in in mathematics from a young age like Tao was a person he won an
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:17.440)
uh medal in like one of the IMOs at the age I think was a gold medal at the age of 10 or something
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:22.480)
like that and so he mentioned that when he was growing up like and especially in college when he
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:28.560)
was in a class that he enjoyed it didn't it just came very natural for him and he didn't have to
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:34.080)
work hard to just ace the class and when he found that the class was boring like it didn't work and
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:40.160)
he barely passed barely passed even some I think in college he almost failed two classes and and
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:47.760)
he was talking about that and how he brought those studying habits or like uh in existence of studying
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:53.280)
habits when he went to Princeton Princeton for his PhD and in Princeton when he you know started kind
Luís and João Batalha (1:54:58.880)
of um delving into more complex problems and classes he struggled a lot because he didn't have
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:05.920)
that uh those those habits like he wasn't taking notes and he was he wasn't studying hard when he
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:11.440)
when he faced problems and he almost failed out of his his PhD uh he almost failed his PhD exam
Lex Fridman (1:55:18.080)
and um it it talks about like having this conversation with with his advisor and the
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:23.280)
advisor pointing out like you're not this is not working you you might have to get out of the
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:28.160)
program and like how that was a kind of a turning point for him and um he was like you know he was
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:35.680)
um and like it was super important in his career so I think Tao is also like this figure that apart
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:41.200)
from being just an exceptional mathematician he's also pretty open about you know what what it takes
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:46.080)
to to to be a mathematician and some of the struggles of this type of careers and and I think
Luís and João Batalha (1:55:50.880)
it's that's super important in many ways he's a contributor to open science and open humanity
Lex Fridman (1:55:56.880)
so he's being an open human true by communicating uh Scott Aaronson is another in computer science
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:03.200)
world who's a very different style very different style but there's something about a blog that
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:09.280)
is authentic and real and just gives us a window into the into the mind and soul of of of these
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:15.760)
brilliant folks so it's it's definitely a gift let me ask you about Fermat's library on twitter
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:22.000)
which uh I mean I don't know how to describe it people should definitely just follow Fermat's
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:27.200)
library on twitter I keep following and unfollowing from his library because because uh it's so
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:35.920)
it it gives when I follow it um leads me on down rabbit holes often that um that um that are very
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:46.080)
fruitful but but anyway so the the posts you do with the on twitter are just these beautiful
Luís and João Batalha (1:56:53.360)
are things that reveal some beautiful aspect of mathematics um is there um is there something you
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:00.960)
could say about the approach there yeah and um maybe maybe broadly what you find beautiful about
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:10.080)
mathematics and then more specifically how you convert that into a rigorous process of revealing
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:17.120)
that in tweet form that's a good point I think there's something about math that you know a lot
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:22.560)
you know a lot of the mathematical content and you know papers or like little proofs um you know
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:29.360)
has in a way sort of an infinite half life what I mean by that is that if you look at like Euclid's
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:36.000)
elements it's as valid today as it was when it was created like 2000 years ago and that's not true
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:42.720)
for a lot of other scientific fields um and so in regards to twitter I think there's also a very
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:51.920)
it's a very under under explored platform from a learning perspective I think if you look at
Luís and João Batalha (1:57:58.960)
content on twitter it's very easy to consume it's very easy to read um and especially when you're
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:07.600)
trying to explain something you know we humans get a dopamine hit if we learn something new
Lex Fridman (1:58:14.000)
and that's a very very powerful feeling and that's why you know people go to classes when
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:20.000)
you have a really good professor you know it's looking for those dopamine hits and
Lex Fridman (1:58:25.840)
and and that's something that we try to explore when we're producing content on twitter imagine
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:31.280)
if we could if you would on a line to a restaurant you could go go to your phone to learn something
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:36.960)
new instead of social going to a you know social network and to just and so and I think it's very
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:44.640)
hard to to sometimes to kind of provide that feeling because you need to sometimes digest
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:51.680)
content and and put it um in a way you know that it feeds 280 characters um and and it requires a
Luís and João Batalha (1:58:58.960)
lot of sometimes time to do that uh even though it's easy to consume it's hard to make but once
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:04.880)
you are able to to provide that eureka moment to people like that's very powerful they get that
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:10.960)
dopamine hit and like you create this feedback cycle and people come back for for more and in
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:16.320)
twitter compared to like you know an online course for a book you have a zero percent dropout so
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:21.200)
people will read the content the content so that it's it's like it's part of the creators like the
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:27.440)
person that is creating the content if you're able to actually get that feedback cycle it's
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:32.160)
super super powerful yeah but some of the stuff is like like how the heck do you find that and
Lex Fridman (1:59:38.080)
and i don't know why it's so appealing it uh like uh this is from uh what is it
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:45.760)
a couple days ago i'll just read out the number 23456789 is the largest prime number with
Luís and João Batalha (1:59:53.120)
consecutive increasing digits i mean that is so cool that's like some weird like glimpse
Luís and João Batalha (20:04.640)
very zen like about the whole process, but it's fascinating. It's a little heartbreaking actually,
Luís and João Batalha (20:11.680)
because it actually, it's funny to say, but, and we'll talk about open science, actually,
Luís and João Batalha (20:18.480)
the bigger mission behind Fermat's library is like,
Luís and João Batalha (20:20.800)
really opening up the world of science to everybody. Is these silly two facts of like
Luís and João Batalha (20:28.480)
one community uses LaTeX and another uses Word, is actually a barrier between them.
Luís and João Batalha (20:35.840)
That's like, it's like boring and practical in a sense, but it makes it very difficult to collaborate.
Luís and João Batalha (20:41.360)
Just on that, like, I think there are some people that should have received like a Nobel
Luís and João Batalha (20:46.000)
Prize, but will never get it. And I think one of those is like Donald Knuth, because of tech
Lex Fridman (20:51.120)
and LaTeX. And then, because it had a huge impact in terms of like just making it easier for
Luís and João Batalha (20:57.680)
researchers to put their content out there, like making it uniform as much as possible.
Lex Fridman (21:02.880)
Oh, you mean like a Nobel Peace Prize?
Luís and João Batalha (21:05.040)
Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.
Luís and João Batalha (21:12.240)
Maybe a Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so.
Luís and João Batalha (21:17.120)
I mean, he at a very young age, got the Turing Award for his work in algorithms and so on. So
Luís and João Batalha (21:21.840)
like an incredibly, I think it's in, it might be even the sixties, but I think it's the seventies.
Lex Fridman (21:27.760)
So when he was really young and then he went on to do like incredible work with his book
Lex Fridman (21:33.360)
and yeah, with tech that people don't know.
Lex Fridman (21:36.400)
And going back just on the reason why we ended up, because I think this is interesting. The reason
Lex Fridman (21:41.760)
why we ended up using the name Fermat's Library, this was because of Fermat's Last Theorem. And
Luís and João Batalha (21:47.760)
Fermat's Last Theorem is actually a funny story. So Pierre de Fermat, he was like a lawyer and he
Luís and João Batalha (21:54.400)
wrote like on a book that he had a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, which, but that didn't
Luís and João Batalha (22:01.760)
fit the margin of that book. And so Fermat's Last Theorem basically states that there's no solution.
Luís and João Batalha (22:08.720)
If you have integers a, b and c, there's no solution to a to the power of n plus b to the
Luís and João Batalha (22:14.480)
power of n equals to c to the power of n, if n is bigger than two. So there's no solutions.
Lex Fridman (22:21.920)
And he said that, and that problem remained open for almost 300 years, I believe. And a lot of the
Luís and João Batalha (22:30.560)
most famous mathematicians tried to tackle that problem. No one was able to figure that out until
Luís and João Batalha (22:35.680)
Andrew Wiles, I think was in the 90s, was able to publish the solution, which was, I believe, almost
Luís and João Batalha (22:42.160)
300 pages long. And so it's kind of an anecdote that, you know, there's a lot of knowledge and
Luís and João Batalha (22:50.000)
insights that can be trapped in the margins. And there's a lot of potential energy that you can
Luís and João Batalha (22:55.760)
release if you actually spend some time trying to digest that. And that was the origin story for
Luís and João Batalha (23:03.920)
for the name. Yes, you can share the contents of the margins with the world that could inspire
Luís and João Batalha (23:09.840)
a solution or a communication that then leads to a solution. And if you think about papers,
Luís and João Batalha (23:15.680)
like papers are, as Joan was saying, probably one of the densest pieces of text that any human can
Luís and João Batalha (23:21.600)
read. And you have these researchers, like some of the brightest minds in these fields, working on
Luís and João Batalha (23:27.200)
like new discoveries and publishing these work on journals that are imposing them restrictions in
Luís and João Batalha (23:32.480)
terms of the number of pages that they can have to explain a new scientific breakthrough. So at the
Luís and João Batalha (23:38.160)
end of the day, papers are not optimized for clarity and for a proper explanation of that
Luís and João Batalha (23:45.840)
content because there are so many restrictions. So there's, as I mentioned, there's a lot of
Luís and João Batalha (23:50.320)
potential energy that can be freed if you actually try to digest a lot of the contents of papers.
Lex Fridman (23:57.040)
Trey Lockerbie Can you explain some of the other things? So margins, librarian, journal club?
Luís and João Batalha (24:02.240)
Ofer Yusuf So journal club is what a lot of people know us for, where we every week,
Luís and João Batalha (24:06.880)
we release an annotated paper and in all sorts of different fields, but physics, CS, math,
Luís and João Batalha (24:12.480)
margins is kind of the same software that we use to run the journal club and to
Luís and João Batalha (24:16.960)
host the annotations. But we've made that available for free to anybody that wants to use it. And so
Luís and João Batalha (24:22.240)
folks use it at universities and for running journal clubs. And so we've just made that freely
Luís and João Batalha (24:29.280)
available. And then librarian is a browser extension that we developed that is sort of an
Luís and João Batalha (24:34.400)
overlay on top of archive. So it's about bringing some of the same functionality around comments,
Luís and João Batalha (24:40.720)
plus adding some extra niceties to archive, like being able to very easily extract the references
Luís and João Batalha (24:48.320)
of a paper that you're looking at or being able to extract the bib deck in order to cite that
Luís and João Batalha (24:52.560)
paper yourself. So it's an overlay on top of archive. The idea is that you can have that
Luís and João Batalha (24:57.280)
commenting interface without having to leave archive. Trey Lockerbie It's kind of incredible.
Luís and João Batalha (25:01.760)
I didn't know about it. And once I learned of it, it's like, holy shit. Why isn't it more popular,
Luís and João Batalha (25:10.240)
given how popular archive is? Like everybody should be using it. Archive sucks in terms of
Lex Fridman (25:14.880)
its interface. Let me rephrase that. It's limited in terms of its interface.
Luís and João Batalha (25:19.920)
Archive is a pretty incredible project. And it is, in a way, the growth has been completely
Luís and João Batalha (25:29.120)
linear over time. If you look at the number of papers published on archive, it's pretty much
Luís and João Batalha (25:34.560)
a straight line for the past 20 years. Especially if you're coming from a startup background and
Luís and João Batalha (25:40.400)
then you were trying to do archive, you'd probably try all sorts of growth acts and try to then maybe
Luís and João Batalha (25:47.200)
have paid features and things like that. And that would kind of maybe ruin it. And so there's a
Lex Fridman (25:53.120)
subtle balance there. And I don't know what aspects you can change about it.
Luís and João Batalha (25:57.760)
For some tools in science, it just takes time for them to grow. Archive has just turned 30,
Luís and João Batalha (26:04.400)
I believe. And for people that don't know, archive is these kind of online repositories
Luís and João Batalha (26:09.120)
where people put preprints, which are versions of the papers, before they actually make it to journals.
Luís and João Batalha (26:15.440)
A R X I V, for people who don't know. And it's actually a really vibrant place to publish your
Luís and João Batalha (26:23.120)
papers in the aforementioned communities of mathematics, physics, and computer science.
Luís and João Batalha (26:29.360)
It started with mathematics and physics, and then over the last 30 years, it evolved. And now,
Luís and João Batalha (26:34.800)
actually computer science now, it's a more popular category than physics and math on archive.
Lex Fridman (26:40.640)
And there's also, which I don't know very much about, like a biology, medical version of that.
Luís and João Batalha (26:46.160)
Bioarchive. Yeah, bioarchive. It's interesting because if you look at these platforms for
Luís and João Batalha (26:54.160)
preprints, they actually play a super important role. Because if you look at a category like math,
Luís and João Batalha (27:01.360)
for some papers in math, it might take close to three years after you click upload paper on the
Luís and João Batalha (27:08.880)
journal website, and the paper gets published on the website of the journal. So this is literally
Luís and João Batalha (27:14.240)
the longest upload period on the internet. And during those three years, their content is just
Luís and João Batalha (27:24.720)
locked. And so that's why it's so important for people to have websites that are open to
Luís and João Batalha (27:29.920)
people to have websites like archive so that you can share that before it goes to the journal
Luís and João Batalha (27:35.200)
with the rest of the world. There was actually on archive that Perelman published the three
Luís and João Batalha (27:40.640)
papers that led to the proof of the Poincare conjecture. And then you have other fields like
Luís and João Batalha (27:46.640)
machine learning, for instance, where the field is evolving at such a high rate that people don't
Luís and João Batalha (27:52.320)
even wait before the papers go to journals before they start working on top of those papers. So they
Luís and João Batalha (27:57.520)
publish them on archive, then other people see them, they start working on that. And archive did
Luís and João Batalha (28:02.240)
a really good job at building that core platform to host papers. But I think there's a really,
Luís and João Batalha (28:07.840)
really big opportunity in building more features on top of that platform, apart from just hosting
Luís and João Batalha (28:13.040)
papers. So collaboration, annotations, and having other things apart from papers like code
Lex Fridman (28:20.880)
and other things. Because, for instance, in the field like machine learning,
Luís and João Batalha (28:24.960)
there's a really big, as I mentioned, people start working on top of preprints, and they are
Luís and João Batalha (28:29.920)
assuming that preprint is correct. But you really need a way, for instance, to maybe, it's not peer
Luís and João Batalha (28:38.000)
review, but distinguish what is good work from bad work on archive. How do you do that? So like
Luís and João Batalha (28:44.320)
a commenting interface like librarian, it's useful for that so that you can distinguish that in a
Luís and João Batalha (28:50.960)
field that is growing so fast as machine learning. And then you have platforms that focus, for
Luís and João Batalha (28:56.400)
instance, on just biology. BioArchive is a good example. BioArchive is also super interesting
Luís and João Batalha (29:02.960)
because there's actually an interesting experiment that was run in the 60s. So in the 60s, the NIH
Luís and João Batalha (29:12.400)
supported this experiment called the Information Exchange Group, which at the time was a way for
Luís and João Batalha (29:19.680)
researchers to share biology preprints via mail or using libraries. And that project in the 1960s
Luís and João Batalha (29:27.280)
got canceled six years after it started. And it was due to intense pressure from the journals
Luís and João Batalha (29:32.880)
to kill that project because they were fearing competition from the preprints for the journal
Luís and João Batalha (29:41.360)
industry. Crick was one of the famous scientists that opposed to the Information Exchange Group.
Lex Fridman (29:50.400)
And it's interesting because right now, if you analyze the number of biology papers that appear
Luís and João Batalha (29:55.920)
first as preprints, it's only 2% of the papers. And this was almost 50 years after that first
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:00.800)
into some deep universal truth even though it's just a number i mean that's like so arbitrary
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:07.440)
like why why is it so pleasant that that's a thing but it is in some way it's almost like
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:12.880)
it is a little glimpse at some much bigger like um and and i think like especially if we're talking
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:19.920)
about science there's something unique about you go and with a lot of the tweets you go sometimes
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:25.440)
from a state of not knowing something to knowing something and that is very particular to science
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:30.960)
math physics and that again is extra extremely addictive and that's that's how i i i i feel about
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:37.200)
that and um that's why i think people engage so much with with our tweets and go into rabbit holes
Lex Fridman (2:00:43.920)
and then they you know we start with prime numbers and all of a sudden you are spending hours reading
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:49.200)
number theory things and you go into wikipedia and you lose a lot of time there but uh well the
Luís and João Batalha (2:00:56.000)
variety is really interesting too there's human things there's uh there's physics things there's
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:01.680)
like numeric things like i just mentioned but there's also more rigorous mathematical things
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:08.240)
there's stuff that's tied to the history of math and the proofs and there's visual there's
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:12.720)
animations uh there are looping animations that are incredible that reveal something
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:17.600)
there's uh andrew wiles on being smart this is just me now like ignoring you guys is just going
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:24.960)
through yeah we're a bit like math drug dealers we're just trying to get you hooked we're trying
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:29.840)
to give you that hit and trying to get you hooked yes some people are brighter than others but i
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:35.120)
really believe that most people can really get to to quite a good level of mathematics if they're
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:40.320)
prepared to deal with these psychological issues of how to handle the situation of being stuck
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:45.440)
yeah there's some truth to that that's truth i feel that's like really it's some truth in terms
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:51.600)
of research and also about startups you're stuck a lot of the time before you you get to a
Luís and João Batalha (2:01:57.120)
breakthrough and and it's difficult to endure that process of like being stuck and because you're not
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:02.320)
trained to to be in that position um i feel uh yeah that's yeah most people are broken by the
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:09.040)
stuckness or like their district like uh i i've i've been very cognizant of the fact that
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:17.760)
more and more social media becomes a thing like distractions become a thing that that moment of
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:24.960)
being stuck is uh your mind wants to to go do stuff that's unrelated to being stuck and you
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:32.400)
should be stuck i'm referring to small stucknesses like you're like trying to design something and
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:39.040)
it's a dead end basically little dead ends dead ends of programming dead ends and trying to think
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:44.000)
through something and then your mind wants to like like like uh this is the problem this like
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:51.440)
work life balance culture is like take a break like as if taking a break will solve everything
Luís and João Batalha (2:02:58.640)
sometimes it solves quite a bit but like sometimes you need to sit in the stuckness and suffer a
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:02.560)
little bit and then take a break but you you definitely need to be this and like most people
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:08.880)
quit from that psychological battle being stuck so success is people who who who uh persevere
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:17.680)
through that yeah yeah and and in the creative process that's also true i was the other day i
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:22.880)
was i think was reading about is this um what is his name ed sheeran like the musician yeah was
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:28.400)
talking a little bit about the creative process and using was using this analogy of a faucet like
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:33.120)
where you when you turn on a faucet is as like the dirty water coming out in the beginning and you
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:38.800)
just have to you know keep trusting that at some point your clean clean clear water will come out
Lex Fridman (2:03:45.120)
but you have to endure that process like in the beginning it's going to be dirty water and and and
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:50.000)
just you know embrace that yeah actually this uh the entirety of my youtube channel and this
Luís and João Batalha (2:03:56.400)
podcast have been following that philosophy of dirty water like i've been you know i do believe
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:02.640)
that like you have to get all the crap out of your system first and uh sometimes it it's it's all
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:08.560)
sometimes it's all crappy work i tend to be very self critical but i do think that quantity leads
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:14.880)
to quality for some people it does for my the way my mind works is like just keep putting stuff out
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:20.240)
there keep creating and uh the quality will come as opposed to sitting there waiting not doing
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:28.880)
anything until the thing seems perfect because the perfect may never come but just just on like on
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:35.600)
on on our twitter like profile i really and sometimes when you look on some of those tweets
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:40.480)
they might seem like pretty kind of um you know why is this interesting it's like so raw uh like
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:47.360)
it's just a number but i really believe that especially with math or physics it is possible
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:53.680)
to get everyone to love math or physics even if you think you hate it it's it's not a function of
Luís and João Batalha (2:04:59.600)
the student or the person that is on the other side i think is just purely a function of like
Lex Fridman (2:05:04.240)
how you explain uh hidden beauty that they hadn't realized before it's not easy but i think it's
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:11.040)
like a lot of the times it's on like on the creator's side to to be able to like show that
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:16.880)
beauty to the other person i think some of that is native to to humans we just have that curiosity
Lex Fridman (2:05:22.800)
and you look at small toddlers and babies and like them trying to figure things out and there's
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:28.000)
just something that is born with us that we we we want for that understanding of the world
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:32.880)
we want for that understanding we want to figure out the world around us and and so yeah it shouldn't
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:38.480)
be like uh whether or not people are going are going to to enjoy it like i i i also really
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:45.680)
believe that everybody has that capacity to fall in love with with math and physics you mentioned
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:51.680)
startup what do you think it takes to build a successful startup yeah that it's what what
Luís and João Batalha (2:05:58.960)
luis was saying that um you need to in to be able to endure being stuck and and i think the best way
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:06.080)
to put it is that startups don't have a linear reward function right you oftentimes don't get
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:14.000)
rewarded for effort and and and most of our lives we go through these processes that do
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:22.640)
give you those small rewards for effort right in school you study hard generally you'll get a good
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:27.200)
grade and then you good you get like good grades ever or you get grades every semester and so you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:33.040)
slowly getting rewarded and pushed in the right direction for for startups and startups are not
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:40.400)
the only thing that is like this but for startups it's you know you can put in a ton of effort into
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:45.280)
something that and then get no reward for it right it's it's like like sisyphus boulder where you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:51.200)
pushing that boulder up the mountain and and and you get to the top and then it just rolls all the
Luís and João Batalha (2:06:57.360)
way back down and and so that's something that i think a lot of people are not equipped to deal
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:02.480)
with and can be incredibly demoralizing especially if that happens more than than a few times and so
Lex Fridman (2:07:10.560)
but i think it's absolutely essential to to power through it because um by the nature of startups
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:16.800)
it's oftentimes you know you're dealing with with with non obvious ideas and things that
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:23.040)
there might be contrarian and so you're gonna you're gonna run into into that a lot you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:28.720)
gonna do things that are not gonna work out and you need to be prepared to deal with that but
Lex Fridman (2:07:34.400)
but if we're not coming out of college you're you're just not equipped i'm not sure if there's
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:38.800)
a way to train people to deal with those nonlinear reward functions but it's definitely i think one
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:45.360)
of the most difficult things to you know about doing a startup and also happens in research
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:51.440)
sometimes you know we're talking about the default state is being stuck you just you know you don't
Luís and João Batalha (2:07:56.480)
like you try things you get zero results you close doors you constantly closing doors until you you
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:02.080)
know find something and um yeah that is a big thing what about sort of this point when you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:08.000)
stuck there's a kind of decision whether if you have a vision to persist through with this direction
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:15.520)
that you've been going along or what a lot of startups do or businesses is pivot how do you
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:21.680)
decide whether like to give up on a particular flavor of the way you've imagined the design
Lex Fridman (2:08:29.920)
and to like adjust it or completely like alter it i think that's a core question for startups that
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:38.560)
i've asked myself exactly and like i i've never been able to come up with a great framework to
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:44.160)
make those decisions um i think that's really at the core of uh yeah out of a lot of the the
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:51.120)
toughest questions that that people that's that started a company you have to deal with um i think
Luís and João Batalha (2:08:57.840)
maybe the best framework that i i have was able to figure out like when you run out of ideas
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:04.080)
you just you know you're exploring something is not working you try it in a different angle uh
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:09.360)
you know we try a different business model when you run out of ideas like you don't have any more
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:14.320)
cards just switch and yeah it's not perfect because you also it's you have a lot of stories
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:22.560)
of startups is like people kept pushing and then you know that paid off and then you have uh
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:29.520)
philosophies is like fail fast and pivot fast um so it's you know it's hard to you know balance
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:36.720)
these two worlds and understand what is the best framework and i mean if you look at for miles
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:42.000)
library you're maybe you can correct me but it feels like you're an operating in a space
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:48.080)
where there's a lot of things that are broken and or could be significantly improved so it
Luís and João Batalha (2:09:53.840)
feels like there's a lot of possibilities for pivoting or like how do you revolutionize science
Lex Fridman (2:10:00.240)
how do you revolutionize the aggregation the the annotation the commenting the community around
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:08.240)
information of knowledge structured knowledge i mean that's kind of what like stack overflow
Lex Fridman (2:10:13.520)
and stack exchange has struggled with to come up with a solution and they've come up i think with
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:19.200)
an interesting set of solutions that are also i think flawed in some ways but they're much much
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:23.680)
better than the alternatives but there's a lot of other possibilities if we just look at papers as
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:29.280)
we talked about there's so many possible revolutions and they're a lot of money to be
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:33.440)
potentially made those revolutions plus coupled with that the benefit to humanity and so like
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:39.760)
you're sitting there like i don't know how many people are legitimately from a business perspective
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:45.440)
playing with these ideas it feels like there's a lot of ideas here true it varies are you right
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:50.880)
now grinding in a particular direction like is there a video like a five year vision that you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:10:55.680)
thinking in your mind for us it's more like a 20 year vision in the sense that uh we we've
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:03.040)
consciously tried to make the decision of so we so we run formats as it's a side project and it's
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:10.880)
separate in the sense like it's not what we're working on full time and uh but our thesis there
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:18.720)
is that we actually think that it's that's a good thing at least for for this stage of formats
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:24.880)
library um and also because some of these projects you just if you're coming from a start from a
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:32.480)
startup framework you probably try to try to fit every single idea into something that can change
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:40.240)
the world within three to five years and there's just some problems that take longer than that
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:45.360)
right and so you know we're talking about archive and i'm very doubtful that you could grow like
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:51.200)
archive into what it is today like within two or three years no matter how much money you throw at
Luís and João Batalha (2:11:56.480)
it there's just some things that can take longer but you need to be able to power through the the
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:02.880)
that the time that it takes um but if you look at it as okay this is a company this is a startup
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:08.080)
we have to grow fast we have to raise money then uh then sometimes you might forego those ideas
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:14.080)
because of that um because they don't very well fit into the the typical startup framework and
Lex Fridman (2:12:22.080)
so for us formats it's something that we're okay with growing with having it grow slowly and and
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:27.840)
maybe taking many years and and and that's why we think it's it's not a bad thing that it is a side
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:34.240)
project because it makes it much more um acceptable in a way and that to to be able to be okay with
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:41.600)
that that said i think what happens is if you keep pushing new little features new little ideas
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:48.400)
i feel like there's like certain ideas will just become viral like and then you just won't be able
Luís and João Batalha (2:12:54.880)
to help yourself but it'll revolutionize things it feels like there needs to be not needs to be
Lex Fridman (2:13:00.320)
but there's um opportunity for viral ideas to change science absolutely and maybe we don't know
Lex Fridman (2:13:08.720)
what those are yet it might be a very small kind of thing maybe you don't even know if should this
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:13.440)
be a for profit company doing these it's the wikipedia question yeah um is that there are a lot
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:19.840)
of questions like really fundamental questions about this space um that we've we've talked about
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:24.880)
i mean you take wikipedia and you try to run it as a startup and by now we'd have a paywall you'd be
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:29.280)
paying 9.99 a month to to read more than 20 articles i mean that's that's one view yeah the
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:34.800)
other the ad driven model so they rejected the ad driven model i don't know if we could i mean this
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:41.920)
is a difficult question you know if archive was supported by ads i don't know if that's bad for
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:48.960)
archive if for mass library was supported by ads i don't know i don't i'm not it's not trivial to
Luís and João Batalha (2:13:55.440)
me i'm unlike i think a lot of people uh i'm not against advertisements i think ads when done
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:02.640)
well are really good i think the problem with facebook and all the social networks are the way
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:07.200)
the lack of transparency around the way they use data and uh the lack of control the users have
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:12.880)
over their data not the fact that data is being collected and used to sell advertisements it's a
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:18.240)
lack of transparency lack of control if you if you do a good job with that i feel like it's really
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:23.040)
nice way to make stuff free yeah it's like stack overflow right i mean i think they've done a okay
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:29.200)
a good job with that uh even though as we said like they're capturing very little of the value
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:33.920)
that they're putting out there right but but it makes it a sustainable company and and they're
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:39.920)
providing a lot of it's a fantastic and very productive community let me ask a a ridiculous
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:46.960)
tangent of a question please you wrote a paper on uh on game of thrones battle of winterfell just
Luís and João Batalha (2:14:53.520)
as a side little i i'm sorry i noticed i'm sure you've done a lot of ridiculous stuff like this i
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:02.080)
just noticed that particular one by ridiculous i mean ridiculously awesome can you describe the uh
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:08.240)
the approach in this work which i believe is a legitimate publication so going back to the
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:14.000)
original like uh when we were talking about the backstory of of papers and the importance of that
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:18.720)
you know there was a when the last season of the the show was airing uh this was a during a company
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:25.760)
lunch we there was in in the last season there's the there's a really big battle against the the
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:32.880)
forces of evil and the you know the forces of good and it's called the battle of winterfell
Lex Fridman (2:15:39.920)
and um in this battle there are like these two armies and there's a very particular thing that
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:46.160)
they have to take into account is that in the army of dead like if someone dies in the army of
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:51.360)
the living uh like that person is gonna you know be a reborn as a soldier in the army of the dead
Luís and João Batalha (2:15:59.200)
yes and so that was a an important thing to take into account and the initial conditions as you
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:04.000)
specify it's about a hundred thousand on each side exactly so i was able i was able to like based on
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:08.800)
some images or like on previous episodes to figure out what was the size of the armies and so what i
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:13.200)
want what we wanted to what we were theorizing was like how many soldiers does like a soldier
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:19.760)
on the army of the living has to kill in order for them to be able to destroy the army of the dead
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:26.880)
without like losing because every time one of the good soldiers dies gonna turn into like the other
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:33.280)
side and so it's so i we we were theorizing that and and i wrote wrote a couple of differential
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:39.120)
equations and i was able to figure out that based on the size of the armies i think i think was the
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:43.840)
ratio had to be like 1.7 so it had to kill like 1.7 soldiers like the army of the dead in order
Luís and João Batalha (2:16:50.560)
for them to win the battle well yeah that's that's science it is it's it's the most powerful
Lex Fridman (2:16:58.160)
and this is also somehow a pitch for uh like a hiring pitch in a sense like this is the kind of
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:05.680)
yeah important science you do exactly well turned out to be you know as as for people that have
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:11.840)
watched these shows is like they know that every time you try to predict something that is going
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:16.240)
to happen it's going to you're going to fail miserably and that's what happened so it was not
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:20.240)
not at all important for the show but yeah we ended up like putting that out and there was a
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:26.160)
lot of people that share that i think was some like elements of the of the show the cast of the
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:30.480)
show that actually retweeted that and shared that that first one was fun i would love if this kind
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:35.760)
of calculation happened uh like during the making of the show or you know i love it like in um
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:44.720)
for example i i now know uh alex garland the director of ex machina and i love it he doesn't
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:51.040)
seem to be some not many people seem to do this but i love it when directors and people who wrote
Luís and João Batalha (2:17:58.400)
the story really think through the technical details like whether it's knowing like how things
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:04.960)
even if it's science fiction if you were to try to do this how would you do this uh like
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:10.160)
stephen wolfram and his son were um were collaborating with the movie arrival in
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:16.320)
designing the alien language how you communicate with aliens like how would you really have
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:21.840)
uh a math based language that uh that could span the alien and uh being and the human being so i
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:31.200)
i love it when they have that kind of rigor the martian was also big on that like the book and
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:35.120)
the movie was all about like can we actually you know is this plausible can this happen it was all
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:41.280)
about that and that can really bring you in like the sometimes those small details uh i mean the
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:46.960)
i mean the the guy that wrote the martian book is another book uh that is also filled with those
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:52.320)
like things that when you realize that okay these are grounded in in science can just really bring
Luís and João Batalha (2:18:58.720)
you in yeah like the like the he has a book about a colony on the colony on the moon and he goes
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:04.720)
about like all the details that would you know be required about setting up a colony in the moon
Lex Fridman (2:19:09.280)
and like things that he wouldn't think about like the the fact that um they would you know it's
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:14.960)
hard to bring like uh air to the moon say so they wouldn't like how do you make that breathable that
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:21.360)
environment breathable you need to bring oxygen but like you you you probably wouldn't be bring
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:26.800)
nitrogen so what you do is like instead of having a an atmosphere that is 100 oxygen you like
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:34.240)
decrease the pressure so that you have the same ratio of oxygen on earth but like lowering the
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:39.760)
pressure here and so like things like water boils at the lower temperature so people would would
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:45.840)
have coffee and the coffee would be colder like there was a problem in this uh environment in
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:50.880)
the moon so like and these are like small things in the book but i studied physics so like when i
Luís and João Batalha (2:19:57.360)
read these like that throws me into like uh tangents and i start researching that and it's
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:04.080)
like i really like to read books and watch movies when they go to that level of detail uh about
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:11.520)
science yeah i think interstellar was one where they also consulted heavily with with a number of
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:15.760)
yeah i think even resulted in a couple of papers a couple of papers about like the black hole
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:20.560)
um visualizations and um yeah but there isn't and there's even more examples of interesting science
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:27.360)
around like these fantasy we were reading at some point like these guys that were trying to figure
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:33.680)
out if if the tolkien's middle earth if it was uh round if it was like a sphere yeah it's like a
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:42.480)
flat based on the map based on the map and some of the references in the in the books and so uh
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:50.240)
yeah we actually i think we tweeted about that you can yeah we did based on the distance between the
Luís and João Batalha (2:20:54.480)
cities you can actually prove that that could be like a map of a sphere or like a spheroid
Lex Fridman (2:21:00.320)
and and you can actually calculate the radius of that planet uh that's fascinating i mean yeah
Luís and João Batalha (2:21:09.680)
that's fascinating but there's something about like calculating the number like exactly the
Luís and João Batalha (2:21:16.880)
calculation you did for the battle winterfell is um something fascinating about that because
Luís and João Batalha (2:21:23.120)
that's not like being that's very mathematical versus like grounded in physics and that's really
Luís and João Batalha (2:21:30.640)
interesting i mean that's like injecting mathematics into fantasy there's there's something um i see
Lex Fridman (2:21:38.400)
what you're saying about that and and that for me that's why i think it's also when you look at
Luís and João Batalha (2:21:42.640)
things like like Fermat's last theorem like problems that are very kind of self contained
Lex Fridman (2:21:49.440)
and simple to study i think like that's the same with that paper it's very easy to understand the
Luís and João Batalha (2:21:54.160)
boundaries of the problem you know um and and that for me that's why those and that's why math is so
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:01.760)
appealing and those like problems are also so appealing to the general public it's not that
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:06.480)
they look simple or that people think that they are easy to like solve but i feel that a lot of
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:12.320)
the times they are almost intellectually democratic because everyone understands the starting point
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:18.240)
you know you look at Fermat's last theorem everyone understands like is this is the the
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:23.360)
universe of the problem and the same maybe with that paper everyone understands okay these are
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:27.440)
the starting conditions and um and and yeah that the fact that it becomes intellectually democratic
Lex Fridman (2:22:34.320)
and i think that's a huge motivation for people and that's why so so many people gravitate towards
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:39.760)
these like Riemann hypotheses or Fermat's last theorem or that simple paper which is like just
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:44.080)
one page it was very simple and i just talked to somebody i don't know if you know who he is
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:48.960)
Jocko Willink who was uh this person who among many things loves military tactics so he would
Luís and João Batalha (2:22:58.160)
probably either publish a follow on paper maybe you guys should collaborate but he would see the
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:04.080)
fundamental the basic assumptions that you started that paper with is flawed because you know there's
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:09.200)
like dragons too right there's like like you have to integrate tactics because not it's not it's not
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:15.280)
a homogeneous system it's not i don't take into account the dragons and like and he would say
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:20.400)
tactics fundamentally change the dynamics of the system and so like that's what happened
Lex Fridman (2:23:27.600)
so uh yeah so at least from a scientific perspective he was right but he never published
Lex Fridman (2:23:32.320)
so there you go uh let me ask the most important question you guys are from
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:36.480)
um portugal both yeah portugal uh so who is the greatest soccer player footballer of all time
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:45.520)
yeah i think we're a little bit biased on this topic but i i mean i don't know i i have i have
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:52.480)
a huge i have a you know tremendous respect for for what um here we go this is the political
Luís and João Batalha (2:23:59.840)
you can convince you i i i mean i have tremendous respect for what ronaldo has achieved in his
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:05.280)
career and and i think soccer is one of those sports where i think you can get to maybe be one
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:10.080)
of the best players in the world we if you just have like natural talent and even if you don't put
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:16.800)
a lot of hard work and discipline into soccer you can be one of the best players in the world
Lex Fridman (2:24:22.400)
and i think ronaldo is kind of like of course he's naturally talented but he also ronaldo should say
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:27.600)
the the football from exactly from portugal um and and not uh not the brazilian in this case
Lex Fridman (2:24:33.680)
and so um and ronaldo put like came from nothing he is known from being probably one of the hardest
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:39.600)
working athletes in the game and and i see that sometimes a lot of these discussions about the
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:44.560)
best player a lot of people tend to gravitate towards like um you know this person is naturally
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:51.040)
talented and the other person has to work hard and so and so as if it was bad if he had to work
Luís and João Batalha (2:24:58.240)
hard to to be good at something and i think that you know the the i think so many people fall into
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:04.960)
that trap and the reason why so many people fall into that trap is because if you're saying that
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:10.400)
someone is good and achieved a lot of success by working hard as opposed to achieving success
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:17.040)
because he has some sort of god given natural talent that you can't explain why the person was
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:22.320)
born with that what does it tell you about you it tells you that maybe if you work hard on a lot of
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:28.560)
fields you could have could accomplish a lot of great things and i think that's hard to digest
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:33.200)
for a lot of people and and in that way ronaldo's inspiring that i think so you find hard work
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:39.520)
inspiring but he's he's way too good looking that's that's the yeah i don't like him no i
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:45.440)
like the part of the hard work and like of him being like one of the hardest working athletes
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:50.240)
in in soccer so he is to you the greatest of all time is he up there is he would be number
Luís and João Batalha (2:25:56.000)
okay do you agree with this thing well i definitely disagree i mean i i like him very much he works
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:03.920)
hard i admire i admire you know um what like he's incredible uh goal scorer right um but i
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:15.280)
i so first of all leo messi and there was some confusion because i've kept saying maradona is
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:22.000)
my favorite player but i i think i think leo has surpassed them so uh um it's messy then maradona
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:30.560)
then pelé for me but the the reason is is um there's certain aesthetic definitions of beauty
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:39.280)
that i admire whether it came by hard work or through god given talent or through anything and
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:45.840)
it doesn't it doesn't really matter to me there's certain aesthetic like genius when i when i see it
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:51.680)
to me and uh especially it doesn't have to be consistent it is in the case of messi in case
Luís and João Batalha (2:26:57.520)
in the ronaldo but just even moments of genius which is where maradona really shines it i even
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:04.880)
if that doesn't translate into like results and goals being scored right right and that's the
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:09.840)
challenge like they did that uh because that's where people that tell me that leo messi's never
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:18.480)
even on strong teams have led his the national team people as far as the world cup right as
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:24.320)
really important and to me no it's the moment like winning to me was never important what's
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:30.720)
more important is the moments of genius and but you're you're talking to the human story and
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:40.000)
yeah christiano ronaldo definitely has a beautiful human story yeah and i think you can't
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:44.080)
i for me it's hard to decouple those two um i don't i don't just look at you know the the
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:49.920)
list of achievements but i like how he got there and how he keeps pushing the boundaries at like
Luís and João Batalha (2:27:54.960)
almost 40 yeah and how that sets up an example like maybe 10 years ago i wouldn't have ever imagined
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:00.960)
that like one of the top players in the world could be a top player at like 37 or but so and
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:06.240)
there's an interesting tent the human story is really important but like if you look at ronaldo
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:11.760)
he's like he's somebody like kids could aspire to be but at the same time i also like maradona who
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:18.480)
like is a is a tragic figure in many ways is like the you know the drugs the the temper
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:26.240)
all of those things that's beautiful too like i don't necessarily think to me first the flaws
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:31.920)
are beautiful too in in athletes i don't think you need to be perfect i agree uh from a personality
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:39.680)
perspective those flaws are also beautiful so but yeah there is something about hard work and
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:47.360)
uh there's also something about the being an underdog and being able to carry a team
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:53.760)
uh that's that's an argument for maradona i don't know if you can make that argument for
Luís and João Batalha (2:28:57.600)
messi and ronaldo either because they've all played on superstar teams for most of their lives
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:04.000)
um so i don't know how it you know it's it's difficult to know how they would do um when they
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:12.480)
had to work like did what maradona had to do to carry a team on his shoulders true and pelle did
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:19.200)
as well and depending on the the context yeah maybe you could argue that with the portuguese
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:24.080)
national team but then we have a good team uh yeah but maybe what maradona did with you know
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:30.080)
lap naples and and a couple other teams it's it's incredible it speaks to the beauty of the game that
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:35.200)
you know we're talking about all these different players that have or especially you know if you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:39.600)
if you're comparing messi and ronaldo that have such different you know styles of play and also
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:45.040)
even their bodies are so different and and and but these two very different players can be at the top
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:52.960)
of the game and that's not that's the there are not a lot of other sports where you where you have
Luís and João Batalha (2:29:58.800)
that you know like you have kind of a mental image of a basketball player and like the the top
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:04.880)
basketball players kind of fit that mental image and they look a certain way and um but for soccer
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:11.280)
there's some there's the it's it's not so much like that and and that's i think that's that's
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:17.520)
beautiful uh but that really adds something to the sport well do you play soccer yourself
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:23.520)
have you played that in your your life what do you find beautiful about the game yeah i mean it's one
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:27.840)
of the i'd say it's the biggest sport in portugal and so growing up we played a lot did you see the
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:33.360)
paper from deep mind i didn't look at it where they're like uh doing some uh analysis on soccer
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:39.920)
strategy interesting i i saved that paper uh i haven't read it yet um it's actually i i when i
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:46.560)
was in college i actually did some research on on applying um machine learning and statistics in
Luís and João Batalha (2:30:54.400)
sports and in our case in our case we're doing it for basketball um but uh what they're effectively
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:02.640)
trying to do was have you ever watched moneyball like so they're trying to do something similar
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:08.480)
right taking that in this case basketball taking a statistical approach to to to basketball um
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:15.280)
the interesting thing there is that baseball is much more about having these discrete events that
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:20.320)
happen kind of in similar conditions and so it's easier to take a statistical approach to it whereas
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:25.520)
basketball it's a much more dynamic game uh it's harder to measure um it's hard to to replicate
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:33.200)
these conditions and so you you have to think about it in a slightly different way and so we
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:39.040)
were doing work on that and working like with the celtics to analyze the the data that they had like
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:44.800)
they had these cameras in the in the arena they were tracking the players and so you so they had
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:49.200)
a ton of data but they didn't really know what to do with it and so we we were doing work on that
Lex Fridman (2:31:54.000)
and and and soccer is maybe even a step further it's it's right it's a game where you don't have
Luís and João Batalha (2:31:59.360)
as many in basketball you have a lot of field goals and so you can measure success uh soccer
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:05.440)
it's it's right it's more of a process almost where it's like you have a goal like or two in
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:11.360)
in a game in terms of metrics i wonder if there's a way and i've actually have thought about this
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:15.520)
in the past never coming up with any good solution if there's a way to definitively say whether it's
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:20.480)
messy or not they're the greatest of all time like like honestly sort of measure interesting
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:25.600)
like convert the game of soccer into metrics like you said baseball but like those moments
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:30.400)
of genius like past like um you know if it's just about goals or passes that led to goals
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:36.960)
yeah that feels like it doesn't capture the genius of the play yeah they'll be like you know like
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:43.360)
like you kind of do you have more metrics for instance in chess right and you can try to
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:48.080)
understand how hard of a move that was you know there's like bobby fisher has this move that like
Luís and João Batalha (2:32:54.800)
that it's i think it's called the move of the century where uh you have to go so deep into the
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:00.800)
tree to understand that that was the right move and you can quantify how hard it was uh so it'd
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:05.760)
be interesting to try to think of those type of metrics but say yeah for soccer and computer
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:09.520)
vision unlocks some of that for us that's that's one possibility i have a cool idea a computer
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:14.160)
vision product legs that you could build for soccer let's go i'm taking notes if you could
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:20.400)
detect the ball and like imagine that um it seems like totally doable right now but like if you could
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:27.360)
detect when the ball enters one of the goals and like just had like um you know a crowd cheering
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:33.680)
for you when you're playing soccer with your friends every time you score a goal or you had
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:37.280)
like the the champions league song going on yeah and like having that like you go play soccer with
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:42.560)
your friends just turn that on and there's like a computer vision like program analyzing the ball
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:46.960)
detects the ball every time there's a goal like if you miss like there's a you know the fans are
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:50.880)
reacting to that and then it should be pretty simple by now it's like i think there's an
Luís and João Batalha (2:33:55.520)
opportunity yeah just throwing that i'm gonna go all out but by the way i did uh i've never
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:01.680)
released i was thinking of just putting on github but i did write exactly that which is the trackers
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:05.840)
for the players uh for the for the bodies of the player is this is the hard part actually
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:10.640)
uh the detection of player bodies and the ball is not hard what's hard is very like robust tracking
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:18.640)
through time of each of those so like so i wrote a track of this pretty damn good this is this is
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:25.280)
that is that open source you open so i know i've never released it because interesting because i
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:29.200)
felt like i need to i would this is the perfection thing because i knew it was going to be like
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:36.480)
it's gonna pull me in and and it wasn't really that done and so i've never actually been part
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:42.160)
of a github project where it's like really active development and i didn't want to make it i knew
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:47.600)
there's a nonzero probability that it will become my life for like a half a year that uh could just
Lex Fridman (2:34:52.640)
how much i love soccer and all those kinds of things and and ultimately it will be all for just
Luís and João Batalha (2:34:58.000)
the the joy of analyzing the game which i'm all for i remember you also like one of in one of the
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:03.920)
episodes you mentioned that you did also a lot of high tracking analysis on like joe rogan's that
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:08.240)
was the that was the research side of my life interesting yeah and you have that library right
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:12.800)
you you kind of downloaded all the episodes yep allegedly i and of course i didn't if you're a
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:18.160)
lawyer i'm listening to this no it is yeah i i was listening to the episode where you mentioned
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:21.920)
that and i was actually there was something that i and i might ask you for for access to that to
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:27.120)
like allegedly that library uh but i was doing some not not regarding like eye tracking but i was
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:33.760)
playing around with um analyzing the distribution of silences on uh one of the joe rogan episodes
Lex Fridman (2:35:40.400)
so like i did that for the elon uh conversation where it's like you just take all the silences
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:47.200)
like after joe asked the question and elon responded and you plot that distribution and
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:52.240)
like and see how how how that looks like yeah i think there's a huge opportunity especially
Luís and João Batalha (2:35:57.760)
long form podcasts to do that kind of analysis bigger than joe exactly but it has to be a fairly
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:04.720)
unedited podcast so that you don't get the silence so one of the benefits i have like doing this
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:10.240)
podcast is like the what we're recording today is there's individual audio being recorded makes it
Lex Fridman (2:36:17.040)
so like i have the raw information it's when it's published it's all combined together and individual
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:22.000)
video feeds so even when you're listening which i usually don't i only show one video stream
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:27.600)
i i'll know i can track your blinks and so on um but yeah but ultimately the hope is you don't
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:35.040)
need that raw data because if you don't need the raw data for whatever analysis you're doing
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:39.520)
you can then do a huge number of parts because there's so it's quickly growing now the number
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:44.080)
especially comedians there's uh quite a few comedians with with long form podcasts and
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:51.200)
they have a lot of facial expressions they have a lot of fun and all those kinds of things and
Luís and João Batalha (2:36:54.960)
it's it's prone for analysis and it's there's so many interesting things that that that idea
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:01.200)
actually sparked because i was watching a um a q a by by steve jobs and i think it was at mit and
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:08.000)
then like people's like he did a talk there and then the q a started and people starting asking
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:13.520)
questions that i was i was working while listening to it and like someone asked the question and he
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:18.400)
goes like on a 20 second silence before answering the question i like i had to check if the if the
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:24.080)
video hadn't paused or or something and and i was thinking about like like if that is a feature of
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:30.560)
a person like how long on average you take to respond to a question and if it's like oh that's
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:36.400)
that has to do with the like how thoughtful you are and if that changes over time oh but it also
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:41.680)
could be this really fascinating metric because it also could be it's certainly a feature of a
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:46.640)
person but it's also a function of the question like if you normalize to the person you can
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:52.000)
probably infer a bunch of stuff about the question so it's a nice flag like it's a really strong
Luís and João Batalha (2:37:56.880)
signal the length of that silence but relative to the usual silence they have so one the silence is
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:03.120)
a measure of how thoughtful they are and two the particular silence is a measure how thoughtful
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:08.640)
the question was thoughtful the question was it's really interesting i mean yeah yeah i just
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:13.040)
analyzed elon's uh episode but i think there's like room for exploration there i feel like the
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:19.760)
average they could do for comedians would be like i mean the time would be so small because you're
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:24.160)
trained to like i would i would think you're reacting to hecklers you're reacting to all
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:28.240)
sorts of things you have to be like so quick maybe right yeah but some of the greatest comedians are
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:33.680)
very good at sitting in the silence i mean there there's louis ck they play with that because you
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:40.240)
have a rhythm and like um dave chappelle a comedian who did a joe show recently he has uh
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:50.160)
especially when he's just having a conversation he does long pauses it's kind of cool because it
Luís and João Batalha (2:38:55.840)
uh it it's one of the ways to have people hang in your word is to play with the pauses to play
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:03.120)
with the silences and the emphasis and like mid sentence there's a bunch of different things that
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:09.120)
uh it'd be interesting to really really analyze but still soccer to me is uh that that one's
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:15.120)
fascinating just i just want a conclusive definitive statement about because like there's so
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:20.880)
many soccer highlights of both messi and ronaldo i just feel like the raw data is there
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:29.840)
um because you don't have that with pelé and mardona just yeah true but here's a huge amount
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:38.000)
of high dev data then the the annoying the difficult thing and this is really hard for
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:43.040)
tracking and this is actually where i kind of gave up because i didn't really give much effort
Lex Fridman (2:39:48.480)
but i gave up to the the way that highlights or usually football match filmed is they switch
Luís and João Batalha (2:39:56.640)
to camera so they'll they'll do a different switch perspective so you have to it's a really
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:02.320)
interesting computer vision problem when the perspective is switched you still have a lot of
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:06.000)
overlap about the players but the perspective is sufficiently different that you have to like
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:10.720)
recompute everything so i there there's two ways to solve this so one is doing it the full way where
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:21.360)
you're constantly doing the slam problem you you're doing a 3d reconstruction the whole time
Lex Fridman (2:40:25.840)
and projecting into that 3d world but you could also there could be some hacks that i wonder like
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:32.320)
some trick where you can hop like when the perspective shifts do a high probability
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:39.440)
from one object to another but i i thought especially in exciting moments when when when
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:47.040)
you're passing players like you're doing a single ball dribble across players and you switch
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:53.280)
perspective which is when they often do when you're making a run on goal if you switch your
Luís and João Batalha (2:40:57.040)
perspective it's it feels like that's going to be really tricky to get right uh that's
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:02.480)
automatically but in that case for instance i feel like if somebody released that data set
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:06.640)
or it's like you just have all like these this data set a massive data set of all these games
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:12.880)
from from say ronaldo and messy like and just you just add that in like whatever csv format and some
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:19.040)
some publicly available data set like that i feel like people would just there there would be so
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:24.400)
many cool things that you could do with it and you just set it free and then like the world would
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:28.720)
like do its thing and then like interesting things would come out of it by the way i have this data
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:34.080)
set so the two the two things i've did of this scale uh is soccer so his body pose and ball
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:40.720)
tracking for soccer and then um i try it's pupil tracking and blink tracking for it was joe rogan
Lex Fridman (2:41:48.560)
and a few other podcasts that i did so those are the two data sets i have did you analyze any of
Luís and João Batalha (2:41:53.600)
your podcasts no i i think i really started doing this podcast after after doing that work and it's
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:03.120)
difficult to maybe i'd be afraid of what i find i'm already annoyed with my own voice and video
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:12.800)
like editing it uh but perhaps that's the honest thing to do because uh one useful thing i about
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:18.640)
doing computer vision about myself is like i know what i was thinking at the time so you can start
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:24.320)
to like connect the particular the behavioral peculiarities of like the way you blink the way
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:32.000)
you squint the way you close your eyes like talking about details there's it's like for example i just
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:39.760)
closed my eyes is that a blink or no like figuring that out in terms of timing in terms of the link
Luís and João Batalha (2:42:46.560)
dynamics it's tricky it's very doable i i think there's universal laws about what is a blink and
Lex Fridman (2:42:53.920)
what is a closed eye and all those things plus makeup and eyelashes i actually um have annoyingly
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:00.560)
long eyelashes so i remember when i was doing a lot of this work i i would cut off my eyelashes
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:06.080)
which when like especially it was funny like female colleagues were like what the fuck are
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:11.280)
you doing like those no keep the eyelashes but because it got in the way made the computer
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:16.160)
vision a lot more difficult but super interesting topics yeah but speaking about the one uh still
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:23.680)
on the topic of the data sets for sports there's one um one paper that and i actually annotated
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:28.960)
on format and and uh it's it was published in 90s 90s i believe 90s or 80s i forget but it would
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:37.280)
they you the researcher was effectively looking at the hot end phenomena in basketball right so
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:45.520)
whether like the fact that you just made a field goal um if you know if on your next attempt if
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:52.400)
you're more likely to make it or not um and it was super interesting because they i mean he polled
Luís and João Batalha (2:43:59.120)
like i think 100 undergrads and i think from stanford and cornell and asking people like do
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:04.480)
you you think that's that you have a higher likelihood of making your free throw if you just
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:09.680)
just made one and i think it's like 68 68 percent said yes they believe that and then he looked
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:16.880)
at the data and this was back in as i said like a few decades ago and so i think he had the data
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:22.640)
set of about uh he looked at it specifically for free throws and he had a data set of about 5,000
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:28.800)
free throws and um and effectively what he found was that specifically in the case of free throws
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:37.280)
he didn't for the aggregate data he didn't find um that he couldn't really spot that correlation
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:44.160)
that hot end correlation so if you made the first one you weren't more likely to to make the second
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:50.320)
one what he did find was that they were just better at the second one because you just got
Luís and João Batalha (2:44:55.040)
like maybe a tiny practice and you just attempted once and then and then you're going to be better
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:00.080)
at the next one and then i i then i went and there's a data set on kaggle that has like 600,000
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:06.400)
free throws and i reran the the same computations and and and confirmed like you can see a very
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:13.120)
clear pattern that they're just better at their second free throw um that's interesting because
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:18.880)
i think there's similarly that kind of analysis is so awesome because i think with tennis they
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:23.840)
have like uh like a fault like when you serve they have analysis of like are you most likely
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:29.120)
to miss the second serve if you missed the first obviously um yeah i think that's the case so that
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:34.640)
integrates that's so cool when psychology is converted into metrics in that way and in sports
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:40.960)
sports it's especially cool because it's such a constrained system that you can really study
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:46.640)
human psychology because it's repeated it's constrained so many things are controlled which
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:51.760)
is something you rarely have in in the wild psychological experiments so it's cool uh plus
Luís and João Batalha (2:45:59.040)
everyone loves it like sports is really cool to analyze people actually care about the results
Luís and João Batalha (2:46:04.000)
yeah um i still think well like i uh i and i will definitely publish uh this work on messy
Lex Fridman (2:46:11.520)
versus ronaldo and i'd love to read it objective fully objective to peer review
Luís and João Batalha (2:46:18.400)
um yeah this is very true this is not past period
Luís and João Batalha (2:46:22.800)
um let me ask sort of um an advice question to uh to young folks you've explored a lot of
Luís and João Batalha (2:46:30.400)
fascinating ideas in your life you built a startup worked on physics worked on computer science
Lex Fridman (2:46:37.360)
what advice would you give to young people today in high school maybe early college about life
Luís and João Batalha (2:46:43.440)
about career about science and mathematics i remember like uh i read like i remember reading
Luís and João Batalha (2:46:52.320)
that um punk area was once asked by a um a french journal about his advice for young people and what
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:00.560)
was his teaching philosophy and he said that like one of the most important things that parents
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:05.600)
should teach their kids is how to be enthusiastic um in regards to like the mysteries of the world
Lex Fridman (2:47:12.560)
and that he said like striking that balance was actually one of the most important things between
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:17.040)
like in education you know you want to have your kids be enthusiastic about the mysteries of the
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:21.680)
world but you also don't want to traumatize them like if you really force them into something
Lex Fridman (2:47:25.520)
and i think like especially if you're young i think you should be curious and i think you should
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:35.360)
explore that curiosity to the fullest to the point where you even become almost as an expert
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:41.360)
on that topic and now and you might start with something that it's small like you might start
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:47.120)
with you know you're interested in numbers and how to factor numbers into primes and then all of a
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:51.920)
sudden you go and and you're like lost in number theory and you discover cryptography and then all
Luís and João Batalha (2:47:57.760)
of a sudden you're buying bitcoin and i and i think you should do this um you should really try
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:03.680)
to fulfill this curiosity and you should live in a society that allows you to fulfill this curiosity
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:08.720)
which is also important and i think you should do this not to get to some sort of status or fame or
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:14.400)
money but i think this is the way this iterative process i think this is the way to find happiness
Lex Fridman (2:48:20.800)
and and i think this is also allows you to find the meaning for your life i think it's all about
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:26.960)
like being curious and being able to fulfill that curiosity and that path to fulfilling that your
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:33.360)
curiosity yeah the the start small let the fire build this kind of interesting way to think about
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:39.120)
it and you never know where you're going to end up it's it's like for us is just a really good
Luís and João Batalha (2:48:44.960)
example we started like by doing this as an internal like thing that we did in the company
Lex Fridman (2:48:50.720)
and then we started putting out there and now a lot of people follow it and know about it and so
Lex Fridman (2:48:56.160)
and you still don't know where from our library is going to end up actually true exactly so um
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:01.760)
yeah i think that would be my piece of advice with very limited experience of course but yeah yeah i
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:07.760)
agree i agree uh i mean is there something in from particular joao from the computer science
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:14.640)
versus physics perspective uh do do you regret not doing physics do you regret not doing computer
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:20.560)
science which one is the the wiser the better human being this is messy versus ronaldo um
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:27.120)
those are very i i don't know if you would agree but they're kind of different disciplines true
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:33.600)
yeah very much so um i actually i actually uh i was i had that question in my mind i i took
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:42.080)
physics classes as an undergrad or like besides what i had to take and um it's definitely something
Luís and João Batalha (2:49:50.080)
that i considered at some point um and and that i i i do feel like later in life that might be
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:01.200)
something that i'm not sure if regret is is the right word but it's it's kind of something that
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:07.200)
i can imagine in an alternative universe what would have happened if i if i got into physics
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:13.440)
um i try to think that like well depends on what your path ends up being but that it's it's not
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:22.560)
super important right like exactly what you decide to major on like i think there's there's um
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:29.120)
um i think tim urban like the blogger had a good visualization of this where it's like
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:34.640)
you know like he he he has a picture where you have all sorts of paths that you could pursue in
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:39.520)
your life and then maybe you're in the middle of it and so there's maybe some paths that are not
Luís and João Batalha (2:50:43.680)
accessible to you but like the the tree that is still in front of you gives you a lot of optionality
Lex Fridman (2:50:48.560)
and so um there's two lessons to learn from that like we have a huge number of options now
Lex Fridman (2:50:53.440)
and probably you're just one to reflect like to try to uh derive wisdom from the one little path
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:02.320)
you've taken so far may be flawed because there's all these other paths you could have taken yeah so
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:07.360)
it's like uh so one it's inspiring that you can take any path now and two it's like you you the
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:13.520)
path you've taken so far is just one of many possible ones but it does seem that like physics
Lex Fridman (2:51:20.240)
and computer science both open a lot of doors and a lot of different doors it's very interesting it
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:26.000)
is i i like in this case like and especially in in our case because i could see the difference i
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:31.600)
studied i i went to college in europe and joel went to college here in the u.s so i could see
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:37.440)
the difference and like in the european system is um more rigid in the sense that when you decide
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:43.200)
to study physics you don't have a lot especially in the early years you don't have a lot of um
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:47.600)
you can't choose to take like a class from like computer science course or something like that
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:52.000)
don't have a lot of freedom to explore in that sense in university as opposed to here in the
Luís and João Batalha (2:51:56.000)
u.s where you have more freedom and i think um i think that's important i think that's what
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:02.000)
constitutes you know a good kind of educational system is one that gravitates towards the interests
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:07.760)
of a student as as you progress but i think in order for you to do that you need to explore
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:13.200)
different areas and i i felt like if i had a chance to take say more computer science class
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:18.320)
when i was in college i would have probably have taken those classes but um yeah but i ended up
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:23.440)
like focusing maybe too like too much in physics and uh i think here at least my perception is
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:28.880)
that you can explore more more fields but there is a kind of it's funny but physics can be difficult
Lex Fridman (2:52:36.560)
so i don't see too many computer science people than exploring into physics it's only like the one
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:42.000)
the not the one but one of the beneficial things of physics it feels like it uh what was it rutherford
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:51.200)
that said like like basically that physics is the hard thing and everything is easy uh so like
Luís and João Batalha (2:52:58.000)
there's a certain sense once you've figured out some basic like physics that it's not that you
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:02.880)
need the tools of physics to understand the other disciplines it's that you're empowered by having
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:08.400)
done difficult shit i mean the ultimate i think is probably mathematics there yeah true uh so maybe
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:15.120)
just doing difficult things and proving to yourself that you can do difficult things whatever those
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:20.000)
are that's net positive i believe net positive yeah and i think like i i before i started company
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:25.600)
i had like i i worked in the financial sector for a bit and like i think having a physics background
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:32.320)
i was i felt i was not afraid of like learning like finance things and i think like when you
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:37.520)
come from those backgrounds you are generally not afraid of stepping into other fields and learning
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:42.720)
about those because um yeah i feel we've learned a lot of difficult things and um yeah that's an
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:49.360)
added benefit i believe this was uh an incredible conversation louise joao we started with uh who
Luís and João Batalha (2:53:58.000)
do we start with fineman ended up with messi and ronaldo so this is like the perfect conversation
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:02.960)
it's really an honor that you guys would waste all this time with me today it was really fun
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:07.200)
thanks for talking so much for having us yeah thank you so much thanks for listening to this
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:11.920)
conversation with louise and joao batala and thank you to skiff simply safe and thank you
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:17.920)
for watching this podcast simply safe indeed net sweet and for sigmatic check them out in the
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:24.400)
description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from richard fineman
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:30.160)
nobody ever figures out what life is all about and it doesn't matter explore the world nearly
Luís and João Batalha (2:54:37.200)
everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough thank you for listening i hope
Lex Fridman (2:54:43.040)
to see you next time
Luís and João Batalha (30:03.520)
experiment. So you can see that pressure from the journals to cancel that initial version of a
Luís and João Batalha (30:08.960)
preprint repo had a tremendous impact on the number of papers that are showing up in biology
Luís and João Batalha (30:15.840)
as preprints. So it delayed a lot that revolution. But now platforms like BioArchive are doing that
Luís and João Batalha (30:24.000)
work. But there's still a lot of room for growth there. And I think it's super important because
Luís and João Batalha (30:28.240)
those are the papers that are open that everyone can read. Okay. But if we just look at the entire
Luís and João Batalha (30:33.520)
process of science as a big system, can we just talk about how it can be revolutionized? So you
Luís and João Batalha (30:40.720)
have an idea, depending on the field, you want to make that idea concrete, you want to run a few
Luís and João Batalha (30:46.960)
experiments in computer science, there might be some code, there'd be a data set for, you know,
Luís and João Batalha (30:53.920)
some of the more sort of biology, psychology, you might be collecting the data set that's called,
Luís and João Batalha (31:02.240)
you know, a study, right? So that's part of that, that's part of the methodology.
Lex Fridman (31:08.480)
And so you are putting all that into a paper form. And then you have some results. And then you
Luís and João Batalha (31:16.640)
submit that to a place for review through the peer review process. And there's a process where,
Lex Fridman (31:23.760)
how would you summarize the peer review process? But it's really just like a handful of people look
Luís and João Batalha (31:28.960)
over your paper and comment. And based on that, decide whether your paper is good or not. So
Luís and João Batalha (31:34.640)
there's a whole broken nature to it. At the same time, I love the peer review process when I buy
Luís and João Batalha (31:40.480)
stuff on Amazon, like for like the commenting system, whatever that is. So, okay. So there's
Luís and João Batalha (31:48.480)
a bunch of possibilities for revolutions there. And then there's the other side, which is the
Luís and João Batalha (31:53.120)
collaborative aspect of the science, which is people annotating, people commenting, sort of the
Luís and João Batalha (31:58.720)
low effort collaboration, which is a comment. Sometimes, as you've talked about, a comment can
Luís and João Batalha (32:04.400)
change everything. But, you know, or a higher effort collaboration, like more like maybe
Luís and João Batalha (32:10.320)
annotations, or even like contributing to the paper, you can think of like, collaborative
Luís and João Batalha (32:17.280)
updating of the paper over time. So there's all these possibilities for doing things better than
Luís and João Batalha (32:24.800)
they've been done. Can we talk about some ideas in this space? Some ideas that you're working on,
Luís and João Batalha (32:31.040)
some ideas that you're not yet working on, but should be revolutionized? Because it does seem
Luís and João Batalha (32:37.120)
that archive and like open review, for example, are like the craigslist of science. Like,
Luís and João Batalha (32:45.360)
like, yeah, okay. I'm very grateful that we have it. But it just feels like, it's like 10 to 20
Luís and João Batalha (32:53.040)
years. Like, it doesn't feel like that's a feature. The simplicity of it is a feature. It feels like
Luís and João Batalha (32:58.240)
it's a, it's a bug. But then again, the pushback there is Wikipedia has the same kind of simplicity
Luís and João Batalha (33:07.200)
to it. And it seems to work exceptionally well in the crowdsourcing aspect of it. So I'm sorry,
Luís and João Batalha (33:14.320)
there's a bunch of stuff going on on the table. Let's just pick random things that we can talk
Luís and João Batalha (33:19.360)
about. Wikipedia, you know, for me, it's the cosmological constant of the internet. It's,
Luís and João Batalha (33:24.640)
I think we are lucky to live in the parallel universe where Wikipedia exists. Yes. Because
Luís and João Batalha (33:29.280)
if someone had pitched me Wikipedia, like a publicly edited encyclopedia, like a couple of
Luís and João Batalha (33:35.360)
years ago, like it would be, I don't know how many people would have said that that would have
Luís and João Batalha (33:40.640)
survived. I mean, it makes almost no sense. It's like having a Google doc that everybody on the
Luís and João Batalha (33:45.520)
internet can edit. And like, that will be like the most reliable source for knowledge. And I don't
Luís and João Batalha (33:51.120)
know how many, but hundreds of thousands of topics. Yeah. It's insane. It's insane. And like you have,
Lex Fridman (33:58.240)
and then you have users, like there's one single user that edited one third of the articles on
Luís and João Batalha (34:03.920)
Wikipedia. So we have these really, really big power users. There are a substantial part of like
Lex Fridman (34:10.400)
what makes Wikipedia successful. And so like, no one would have ever imagined that that could
Luís and João Batalha (34:18.400)
happen. And so that's one thing. I completely agree with what you just said. I also...
Luís and João Batalha (34:24.400)
Sorry to interrupt briefly. Maybe let's inject that into the discussion of everything else.
Luís and João Batalha (34:29.920)
I also believe, I've seen that with Stack Overflow, that one individual or a small collection of
Luís and João Batalha (34:35.280)
individuals contribute or revolutionized most of the community. Like if you create a really
Luís and João Batalha (34:42.000)
powerful system for archive or like open review and made it really easy and compelling and exciting
Luís and João Batalha (34:50.960)
for one person who is like a 10x contributor to do their thing, that's going to change everything.
Luís and João Batalha (34:57.840)
It seems like that was the mechanism that changed everything for Wikipedia. And that's the mechanism
Luís and João Batalha (35:02.240)
that changed everything for Stack Overflow. Is gamifying or making it exciting or just making
Luís and João Batalha (35:07.600)
it fun or pleasant or fulfilling in some way for those people who are insane enough to like answer
Luís and João Batalha (35:15.280)
thousands of questions or write thousands of factoids and like research them and check them,
Luís and João Batalha (35:21.920)
all those kinds of things, or read thousands of papers.
Luís and João Batalha (35:25.040)
Yeah. No, Stack Overflow is another great example of that. And it's just, and those are both to
Luís and João Batalha (35:31.360)
do incredibly productive communities that generate a ton of value and capture almost none of it.
Luís and João Batalha (35:38.720)
Right. And it's in a way, it's almost like, it's very counterintuitive that these communities would
Luís and João Batalha (35:49.840)
exist and thrive. And it's really hard to, there aren't that many communities like that.
Lex Fridman (35:57.760)
Right. So how do we do that for science? Do you have ideas there?
Luís and João Batalha (36:01.280)
Like what are the biggest problems that you see? You're working on some of them.
Luís and João Batalha (36:05.440)
Like just on that, there are a couple of really interesting experiments that people are running.
Luís and João Batalha (36:09.120)
An example would be like the Polymath projects. So this is a kind of a social experiment that was
Lex Fridman (36:16.400)
created by Tim Gowers, Fields Medalist. And his idea was to try to prove that,
Luís and João Batalha (36:22.320)
is it possible to do mathematics in a massively collaborative way on the internet? So he decided
Luís and João Batalha (36:29.440)
to pick a couple of problems and test that. And they found out that it actually is possible for
Luís and João Batalha (36:36.640)
specific types of problems, namely problems that you're able to break down in little pieces and
Luís and João Batalha (36:42.400)
go step by step. You might need, as with open source, you might need people that are just kind
Luís and João Batalha (36:48.240)
of reorganizing the house every once in a while. And then people throw a bunch of ideas and then
Luís and João Batalha (36:55.200)
you make some progress, then you reorganize, you reframe the problem and you go step by step.
Lex Fridman (36:59.520)
But they were actually able to prove that it is possible to collaborate online and do progress
Luís and João Batalha (37:07.520)
in terms of mathematics. And so I'm confident that there are other avenues that could be
Lex Fridman (37:13.280)
explored here. Can we talk about peer review, for example?
Luís and João Batalha (37:16.720)
Absolutely. I think in terms of the peer review, I think it's important to look at the bigger
Luís and João Batalha (37:23.360)
picture here of what the scientific publishing ecosystem looks like. Because for me, there are
Luís and João Batalha (37:32.480)
a lot of things that are wrong about that entire process. So if you look at what publishing means
Luís and João Batalha (37:39.440)
in a traditional journal, you have journals that pay authors for their articles, and then they might
Luís and João Batalha (37:48.240)
pay reviewers to review those articles. And finally, they pay people or distributors to
Luís and João Batalha (37:56.400)
distribute the content. In the scientific publishing world, you have scientists that are
Luís and João Batalha (38:02.320)
usually backed by government grants. They are giving away their work for free in the form of
Luís and João Batalha (38:07.040)
papers. And then you have other scientists that are reviewing their work. This process is known
Luís and João Batalha (38:13.680)
as the peer review process, again for free. And then finally, we have government backed
Luís and João Batalha (38:21.120)
universities and libraries that are buying back all that work so that other scientists can read.
Lex Fridman (38:29.440)
So this is, for me, it's bizarre. You have the government that is funding the research,
Luís and João Batalha (38:33.520)
it's paying the salaries of the scientists, it's paying the salaries of the reviewers,
Lex Fridman (38:37.280)
and it's buying back all that product of their work again. And I think the problem with this
Luís and João Batalha (38:43.840)
system and it's why it's so difficult to break this suboptimal equilibrium is because of the way
Luís and João Batalha (38:52.480)
academia works right now and the way you can progress in your academic life. And so in a lot
Luís and João Batalha (38:59.840)
of fields, the competition in academia is really insane. So you have hundreds of PhD students,
Luís and João Batalha (39:06.640)
they are trying to get to a professor position and it's hyper competitive. And the only way for
Luís and João Batalha (39:15.040)
you to get there is if you publish papers, ideally in journals with a high impact factor.
Luís and João Batalha (39:23.680)
In computer science, it's often conferences are also very prestigious or actually more
Luís and João Batalha (39:28.160)
prestigious than journals now. So that's the one discipline where, I mean, that has to do
Luís and João Batalha (39:33.680)
with the thing we've discussed in terms of how quickly the field turns around. But like NeurIPS,
Luís and João Batalha (39:40.800)
CVPR, those conferences are more prestigious, or at the very least as prestigious as the journals.
Lex Fridman (39:47.920)
But it doesn't matter. The process is what it is.
Lex Fridman (39:51.840)
So for people that don't know, the impact factor of a journal is basically the average number of
Luís and João Batalha (39:56.160)
citations that a paper would get if it gets published on that journal. But so you can really
Luís and João Batalha (40:02.960)
think that the problem with the impact factor is that it's a way to turn papers into accounting
Luís and João Batalha (40:11.040)
units. And let me unpack this because the impact factor is almost like a nobility title. Because
Luís and João Batalha (40:19.680)
papers are born with impact even before anyone reads them. So the researchers, they don't have
Luís and João Batalha (40:25.200)
the incentive to care about if this paper is going to have a long term impact on the world.
Lex Fridman (40:32.240)
What they care, their goal, their end goal is the paper to get published so that they get that
Luís and João Batalha (40:37.520)
value upfront. So for me, that is one of the problems of that. And that really creates a
Luís and João Batalha (40:43.760)
tyranny of metrics. Because at the end of the day, if you are a dean, what you want to hire is
Luís and João Batalha (40:49.440)
people, researchers that publish papers on journals with high impact factors because that will
Luís and João Batalha (40:55.360)
increase the ranking of your university and will allow you to charge more for tuition,
Lex Fridman (40:59.920)
so on and so forth. And that, especially when you are in super competitive areas,
Luís and João Batalha (41:07.600)
that people will try to gamify that system and misconduct starts showing up. There's a really
Luís and João Batalha (41:14.880)
interesting book on this topic called Gaming the Metrics. It's a book by a researcher called Mario
Luís and João Batalha (41:21.600)
Biagioli. It goes a lot into how the impact factor and metrics affect science negatively.
Lex Fridman (41:29.280)
And it's interesting to think, especially in terms of citations, if you look at the early work of
Luís and João Batalha (41:34.800)
looking at citations, there was a lot of work that was done by a guy called Eugene Garfield.
Lex Fridman (41:39.680)
And this guy, the early work in terms of citation, they wanted to use citations from a descriptive
Luís and João Batalha (41:46.800)
point of view. So what they wanted to create was a map. And that map would create a visual
Luís and João Batalha (41:52.960)
representation of influence. So citations would be links between papers. And ideally, what they
Luís and João Batalha (42:00.000)
would show, they would represent is that you read someone else's paper and it had an impact on your
Luís and João Batalha (42:05.760)
research. They weren't supposed to be counted. I think this inspired Larry and Sergey's work for
Luís and João Batalha (42:12.240)
Google. Exactly. I think they even mentioned that. But what happens is, as you start counting
Luís and João Batalha (42:16.640)
citations, you create a market. And the work of Eugene Garfield was a big inspiration for Larry
Lex Fridman (42:25.360)
and Sergey and for the PageRank algorithm that led to the creation of Google. And they even
Luís and João Batalha (42:31.440)
recognized that. And if you think about it, it's like the same way there's a gigantic market for
Luís and João Batalha (42:37.360)
search engine optimization, SEO, where people try to optimize the PageRank and how a web page will
Luís and João Batalha (42:46.080)
rank on Google. The same will happen for papers. People will try to optimize the impact factors
Lex Fridman (42:52.800)
and the citations that they get. And that creates a really big problem. And it's super interesting
Luís and João Batalha (42:58.800)
to actually analyze them. If you look at the distribution of the impact factors of journals,
Luís and João Batalha (43:05.280)
you have like Nature. Nature, I believe, is in the low 40s. And then you have, I believe, Science
Luís and João Batalha (43:11.600)
is high 30s. And then you have a really good set of good journals that will fall between 10 and 30.
Lex Fridman (43:20.240)
And then you have a gigantic tale of journals that have impact factor below 2. And you can really
Luís and João Batalha (43:26.880)
see two economies here. You see the universities that are maybe less prestigious, less known,
Luís and João Batalha (43:35.840)
where the faculty are pressured to just publish papers regardless of the journal. What I want to
Luís and João Batalha (43:41.040)
do is increase the ranking of my university. And so they end up publishing as many papers as they
Luís and João Batalha (43:47.120)
can in journals with low impact factor. And unfortunately, this represents a lot of the
Luís and João Batalha (43:53.440)
global south. And then you have the luxury good economy. And there are also problems here in
Luís and João Batalha (44:02.320)
the luxury good economy. So if you look at the journal like Nature, so with impact factor in
Luís and João Batalha (44:07.760)
the low 40s, there's no way that you're going to be able to sustain that level of impact factor
Luís and João Batalha (44:14.800)
by just grabbing the attention of scientists. What I mean by that is for the journals,
Luís and João Batalha (44:22.080)
the articles that get published in Nature, they need to be New York Times grade. So they need to
Luís and João Batalha (44:29.280)
make it to the big media. They need to be captured by the big media. And because that's the only way
Luís and João Batalha (44:34.960)
for you to capture enough attention to sustain that level of citations. And that, of course,
Luís and João Batalha (44:40.960)
creates problems because people then will try to, again, gamify the system and have like titles or
Luís and João Batalha (44:47.440)
abstracts or that are bigger, make claims that are bigger than what is actually can be, you know,
Luís and João Batalha (44:55.760)
sustained by the data or the content of the paper. And you'll have clickbait titles or clickbait
Luís and João Batalha (45:01.520)
abstracts. And again, this is all a consequence of science or metrics. And this is a very dangerous
Luís and João Batalha (45:10.320)
cycle that I think it's very hard to break, but it's happening in academia in a lot of fields
Luís and João Batalha (45:16.240)
right now. Is it fundamentally the existence of metrics or the metrics just need to be
Luís and João Batalha (45:21.120)
significantly improved? Because like I said, the metrics used for Amazon for purchasing,
Luís and João Batalha (45:29.200)
I don't know, computer parts is pretty damn good in terms of selecting which are the good ones,
Luís and João Batalha (45:34.400)
which are not. In that same way, if we had Amazon type of review system in the space of ideas,
Luís and João Batalha (45:42.880)
in the space of science, it feels like that those metrics would be a little bit better.
Luís and João Batalha (45:47.280)
Sort of when it's significantly more open to the crowdsource nature of the internet,
Luís and João Batalha (45:55.600)
of the scientific internet, meaning as opposed to, like my biggest problem with peer review
Luís and João Batalha (46:02.400)
has always been that it's like five, six, seven people, usually even less. And it's often,
Luís and João Batalha (46:09.760)
nobody's incentivized to do a good job in the whole process. Meaning it's anonymous in a way
Luís and João Batalha (46:17.440)
that doesn't incentivize, like doesn't gamify or incentivize great work. And also it doesn't
Luís and João Batalha (46:26.960)
necessarily have to be anonymous. Like there has to be, the entire system is, doesn't encourage
Luís and João Batalha (46:36.400)
actual sort of rigorous review. For example, like open review does kind of incentivize that kind of
Luís and João Batalha (46:45.040)
process of collaborative review, but it's also imperfect. But it just feels like the thing that
Luís and João Batalha (46:50.960)
Amazon has, which is like thousands of people contributing their reviews to a product,
Luís and João Batalha (46:58.080)
it feels like that could be applied to science where the same kind of thing you're doing with
Luís and João Batalha (47:04.640)
Fermat's library, but doing at a scale that's much larger. It feels like that should be possible
Luís and João Batalha (47:11.920)
given the number of grad students, given the number of general public that's getting,
Luís and João Batalha (47:17.440)
for example, I personally, as a person who got an education in mathematics and computer science,
Luís and João Batalha (47:24.320)
like I can be a quote unquote, like reviewer on a lot bigger set of things than is my exact
Luís and João Batalha (47:36.160)
expertise. If I'm one of thousands of reviewers, if I'm the only reviewer, one of five,
Luís and João Batalha (47:43.200)
then I better be like an expert in the thing. But if I, and I've learned this with COVID,
Luís and João Batalha (47:48.880)
which is like, you can just use your basic skills as a data analyst to contribute to
Luís and João Batalha (47:55.520)
the review process and a particular little aspect of a paper and be able to comment, be able to
Luís and João Batalha (48:00.640)
sort of draw in some references that challenge the ideas presented or to enrich the ideas that
Luís and João Batalha (48:07.200)
are presented. It just feels like crowdsourcing the review process would be able to allow you to have
Luís and João Batalha (48:16.240)
metrics in terms of how good a paper is that are much better representative of its actual impact
Luís and João Batalha (48:22.640)
in the world, of its actual value to the world, as opposed to some kind of arbitrary, gamified
Luís and João Batalha (48:30.800)
version of its impact. I agree with that. I think there's definitely the possibility,
Luís and João Batalha (48:36.880)
at least for a more resilient system than what we have today. And I think that's kind of what
Luís and João Batalha (48:41.600)
you're describing, Alex. I mean, to an extent, we kind of have like a little bit of a Heisenberg
Luís and João Batalha (48:48.560)
uncertainty principle. When you pick a metric, as soon as you do it, then maybe it works as a good
Luís and João Batalha (48:52.960)
heuristic for a short amount of time, but soon enough, people would start gamifying. But then
Luís and João Batalha (48:58.960)
you can definitely have metrics that are more resilient to gamification and they'll work as a
Luís and João Batalha (49:03.760)
better heuristic to try to push you in the best direction. But I guess down the line,
Luís and João Batalha (49:10.320)
the underlying problem you're saying is there's a shortage of positions in academia. That's a big
Luís and João Batalha (49:15.840)
problem for me. Yeah. And that, and so they're going to be constantly gamifying the metrics.
Luís and João Batalha (49:21.120)
It's a bit of a zero sum game. It's a very competitive field. And that's what usually
Luís and João Batalha (49:26.640)
happens in very competitive fields. Yeah. Yeah. But I think some of the peer review problems,
Luís and João Batalha (49:33.040)
like scale helps, I think. And it's interesting to look at what you're mentioning, breaking it
Luís and João Batalha (49:37.600)
down, maybe in like smaller parts and having more people jumping in. But this is definitely
Luís and João Batalha (49:45.280)
a problem. And the peer review problem, as I mentioned, is correlated with the problem of
Luís and João Batalha (49:50.400)
academic career progression. And it's all intertwined. And that's why I think it's so hard
Luís and João Batalha (49:55.840)
to break it. There are a couple of really interesting things that are being done right
Luís and João Batalha (50:01.360)
now. There are a couple of, for instance, journals that are overlay journals on top of
Luís and João Batalha (50:06.080)
platforms like archive and bio archive that want to remove like the more traditional journals from
Luís and João Batalha (50:12.000)
the equation. So essentially a journal is just a collection of links to papers. And what they're
Luís and João Batalha (50:19.280)
trying to do is like removing that middleman and trying to make the review process a little bit
Luís and João Batalha (50:24.800)
more transparent and not charging universities. There are a couple of more famous ones. There's
Luís and João Batalha (50:33.840)
one discrete analysis in mathematics. There's one called the quantum journal, which we're actually
Luís and João Batalha (50:39.120)
working with them. We have a partnership with them for the papers that get published in quantum
Luís and João Batalha (50:43.760)
journal. They also get the annotations on formats and they're doing pretty well. They've been able
Luís and João Batalha (50:48.640)
to grow substantially. The problem there is getting to critical mass. So it's again, convincing the
Luís and João Batalha (50:53.520)
researchers and especially the young researchers that need that impact factor, need those
Luís and João Batalha (50:59.440)
publications to have citations to not publish on the traditional journal and go on an open journal
Lex Fridman (51:05.760)
and publish their work there. There, I think there are a couple of really high profile scientists of
Luís and João Batalha (51:11.120)
people like Tim Gowers. They are trying to incentivize like famous scientists that already
Luís and João Batalha (51:16.400)
have tenure and that don't need that to publish that to increase the reputation of those journals.
Lex Fridman (51:22.240)
So that other maybe younger scientists can start publishing on those as well. And so that you can
Lex Fridman (51:27.280)
try to break that vicious cycle of the more traditional journals.
Luís and João Batalha (51:32.960)
I mean, another possible way to break this cycle is to like raise public awareness and just by
Luís and João Batalha (51:39.520)
force, like ban paid journals. Like what exactly are they contributing to the world? Like basically
Luís and João Batalha (51:47.680)
making it illegal to forget the fact that it's mostly federally funded. So that's that's
Luís and João Batalha (51:55.280)
a super ugly picture too. But like, why should knowledge be so expensive? Like where everyone
Luís and João Batalha (52:03.760)
is working for the public good. And then there's these gatekeepers that, you know, most people
Luís and João Batalha (52:10.080)
can't read most papers without having to pay money. And that's, that doesn't make any sense.
Luís and João Batalha (52:17.600)
That's like that, that should be illegal.
Lex Fridman (52:20.000)
I mean, that's what you're saying is exactly right. I mean, for instance,
Luís and João Batalha (52:23.280)
right, I went to school here in the US, we studied in Europe, and you would sit like you'd
Luís and João Batalha (52:28.880)
ask me all the time to download papers and send it to him because he just couldn't get it. And like
Luís and João Batalha (52:32.640)
papers that he needed for his research. And so,
Lex Fridman (52:35.120)
But he's a student, like he's a grad student.
Luís and João Batalha (52:37.920)
He was a grad student. But that, you know, I'm even referring to just regular people.
Lex Fridman (52:42.000)
Oh, yeah. Okay. That too. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (52:44.240)
And I think during 2020, because of COVID, a lot of journals put down the
Luís and João Batalha (52:50.800)
walls for certain kind of coronavirus related papers. But like, that just gave me an indication
Luís and João Batalha (52:56.800)
that like, this should be done for everything. It's absurd. Like people should be outraged
Lex Fridman (53:03.200)
that there's these gates. Because, so the moment you dissolve the journals,
Luís and João Batalha (53:09.920)
then there will be an opportunity for startups to build stuff on top of archive. It'd be an
Luís and João Batalha (53:16.400)
opportunity for like, for my library to step up to scale up to something much even larger.
Luís and João Batalha (53:22.480)
I mean, that was the original dream of Google, which I've always admired, which is make the
Luís and João Batalha (53:28.240)
world's information accessible. Actually, it's interesting that Google hasn't, maybe you guys
Luís and João Batalha (53:33.200)
can correct me, but they put together Google Scholar, which is incredible. But they, and they've
Luís and João Batalha (53:39.120)
did the scanning of books, but they haven't really tried to make science accessible in the following
Lex Fridman (53:47.040)
way. Like, besides doing Google Scholar, they haven't like delved into the papers, right?
Luís and João Batalha (53:54.400)
Which is especially curious given what Luis was saying, right? That it's kind of in their genesis.
Luís and João Batalha (53:59.120)
There's this, you know, research that was very connected with how papers reference each other
Lex Fridman (54:04.000)
and like building a network out of that. Interestingly enough, like Google, I think there was a,
Luís and João Batalha (54:09.360)
there was not intended, Google Plus was like the Google social network that got cancelled, was used
Luís and João Batalha (54:14.320)
by a lot of researchers. Yes, it was. Which I think was just a, you know, side, kind of a side effect.
Lex Fridman (54:19.600)
But then a lot of people ended up migrating to Twitter, but it was not on purpose. But yeah,
Luís and João Batalha (54:23.360)
I agree with you. Like they haven't gone past Google Scholar and I don't know why. Well, that said,
Luís and João Batalha (54:29.360)
Google Scholar is incredible. For people who are not familiar, it's one of the best aggregation of
Luís and João Batalha (54:35.680)
all the scientific work that's out there and especially the network that connects to all of
Luís and João Batalha (54:39.920)
them. What sites, what. And also trying to aggregate all of the versions of the papers that are
Luís and João Batalha (54:45.120)
available there and trying to merge them in a way that one particular work, even though it's available
Luís and João Batalha (54:50.560)
in a bunch of places, counts as, you know, like a central hub of what that work is, according to
Luís and João Batalha (54:56.720)
multiple versions. But that almost seems like a fun pet project of a couple of engineers within
Luís and João Batalha (55:03.280)
within Google, as opposed to a serious effort to make the world science accessible. But going back
Luís and João Batalha (55:09.520)
to just the journals, when you're talking about that, Lex, I believe that in that front, I think
Luís and João Batalha (55:16.000)
we might be past the event horizon. So I think the model, the business model for the journals,
Luís and João Batalha (55:23.200)
you know, doesn't make sense. They're a middle layer that is not adding a lot of value. And you
Luís and João Batalha (55:27.280)
see a lot of motions, whereas like in Europe, a lot of the papers that are funded by the European
Luís and João Batalha (55:35.600)
Union, they will have to be open to the public. And I think there's a lot of... Bill Gates too,
Luís and João Batalha (55:41.920)
like what the Gates Foundation funds, like the demand that it's accessible to everybody.
Lex Fridman (55:49.520)
So I think it's a question of time before that wall kind of falls. And that is going to open a
Luís and João Batalha (55:55.200)
lot of possibilities. Because, you know, imagine if you had like the layer of that gigantic layer
Luís and João Batalha (56:02.160)
of papers all available online, you know, that unlocks a lot of potential as a platform for
Luís and João Batalha (56:08.880)
people to build things on top of that. But to what you're saying, it is weird, like you can literally
Luís and João Batalha (56:13.920)
go and listen to any song that was ever made on your phone, right? You open Spotify and you might
Luís and João Batalha (56:20.800)
not even pay for it. You might be on the free version and you can listen to any song that was
Luís and João Batalha (56:24.960)
ever made, pretty much. But there's like, you don't have access to a huge percentage of academic
Luís and João Batalha (56:33.120)
papers, which is just like this fundamental knowledge that we're all funding. But you as an
Luís and João Batalha (56:37.840)
individual don't have access to it. And some of it, you know, you don't have access to, you know,
Luís and João Batalha (56:42.320)
don't have access to it. And somehow, you know, like the problem for music got solved. But for
Luís and João Batalha (56:48.320)
papers, it's still like... It's just not yet. It could be ad supported, all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (56:53.200)
And then hopefully, that would change the way we do science. This is the most exciting thing for me
Luís and João Batalha (56:58.480)
is, especially once I started like making videos and this silly podcast thing, I started to realize
Luís and João Batalha (57:04.800)
like that if you want to do science, one of the most effective ways is to do like couple the
Luís and João Batalha (57:13.120)
paper with a set of YouTube videos, like explaining it. That also seems like there's a lot of room for
Luís and João Batalha (57:21.360)
disruption there. What is the paper 2.0 going to look like? I think like LaTeX and the PDF,
Luís and João Batalha (57:28.000)
seems like if you... It's interesting. If you look at the first paper that got published in Nature,
Lex Fridman (57:33.280)
and if you look at the paper that got published in Nature today, if you look at the two side by
Luís and João Batalha (57:37.360)
side, they are fundamentally the same. And even though like the paper that gets published today,
Luís and João Batalha (57:42.880)
you know, you get... Even code, like right now, people put like code, like on a PDF.
Lex Fridman (57:51.040)
And there are so many things that are related to papers today, you know, you have data,
Luís and João Batalha (57:56.240)
you have code, you might need videos to better explain the concepts. So, I think for me,
Luís and João Batalha (58:03.680)
it's natural that there's going to be also an evolution there, that papers are not going to be
Luís and João Batalha (58:07.600)
just the static PDFs or LaTeX, there's going to be a next interface. So, in academia, a lot of
Luís and João Batalha (58:15.680)
things that are judged, you're judged by is often quantity, not quality. I wonder if there's an
Luís and João Batalha (58:22.160)
opportunity to have like... I tend to judge people by the best work they've ever done as opposed to...
Luís and João Batalha (58:28.960)
I wonder if there's a possibility for that to encourage sort of focusing on the quality,
Lex Fridman (58:34.800)
and not necessarily in paper form, but maybe a subset of a paper, subset of idea, almost even a
Lex Fridman (58:39.840)
blog post or an experiment. Like, why does it have to be published in a journal to be legitimate?
Lex Fridman (58:46.800)
And it's interesting that you mentioned that I also think like, yeah, it's why is that the only
Luís and João Batalha (58:53.200)
format? Why can't a blog post or... We were even experimenting with these a few months ago,
Luís and João Batalha (59:01.200)
or can you actually like publish something or like a new scientific breakthrough or
Lex Fridman (59:10.320)
something that you've discovered in the form of like a set of tweets,
Luís and João Batalha (59:13.280)
a Twitter thread. Why can't that be possible? And we were experimenting with that idea.
Luís and João Batalha (59:20.960)
We even, yeah, we ran a couple of... Like some people submitted a couple of those,
Luís and João Batalha (59:26.560)
like I think the limit was three or four tweets. Maybe it's a new way to look at a proof or
Luís and João Batalha (59:31.920)
something, but I think it just serves to show that there should be other ways to publish
Luís and João Batalha (59:37.120)
like scientific discoveries that don't fit the paper format. Well, but so even with the Twitter
Luís and João Batalha (59:43.520)
thread, it would be nice to have some mechanism of formalizing it and making it into an NFT.
Luís and João Batalha (59:52.000)
Like a concrete thing that you can reference as a link that's unique. Because, I mean, everything
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