Curt Jaimungal's Presentation at Polymath

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      "text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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      "text": " Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates."
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      "text": " Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount."
    },
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      "text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull? Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plants."
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      "text": " I was asked to give a presentation for an event called Polymath by a new incubator, Ecolopto. This wasn't a recorded event, but someone in the audience did film it with their cell phone."
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      "text": " and I have permission to release this here. Forgive the audio as there were over a hundred people at this event and there was a large buffet section on this side of people unrelated to the event. I want to talk about what's fundamental. But first, I want to talk about a problem that I've been thinking about for some time and is relevant to this crowd. We have this event here called Polymath, but then where are all the polymaths?"
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      "text": " Where are the Da Vinci's and the Benjamin Franklin's and the Wybnesses of our time? What is preventing this synchronic integration of previously dissimilar fields? Who am I? My name is Kurt Giamongo and I have this podcast here called Theories of Everything."
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      "text": " It's a channel where I interview some of the brightest minds, some of the most well-researched people, top of their field, and I speak to them for four hours long, and I go into these in-depth podcasts. You can search it on your phone. And I've noticed a few problems. So number one, the state of current scientific research. It's one of incremental progress where, as a student, you're disincentivized from large ideas. So there's this lack of paradigm shifts."
    },
    {
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      "text": " Another issue is that even when you're no longer this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed student and now you're a tenured professor, you have this reliance on this big daddy grant agency and you better want what the grant agency wants or convince yourself that you want what they want."
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      "text": " Another issue is that we have this fragmentation and siloing, so over-specialization of people in fields that are neighbors to one another, can't understand one another. And in my bailiwick of theoretical physics, we have this"
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      "text": " This parroting of technical jargon, which is thrown at you like a beguiling nematode. You just acquire more and more Greek letters and that describes freedom to your theory. You don't even say, oh, let me change this by a little bit. Just say, let me change that by an epsilon. Let me add a delta here."
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      "text": " And then what happens again, this is an archetype. There's reality and you go straight or you go to the right to go to straight theory. That's what's happening. That's where all the physics students are going. Except this guy. So, problem number two is that we lack a unified framework."
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      "text": " We lack a, in physics the unified framework is called the theory of everything. It means how do you take the quote unquote theory of the large gravity and then merge it with the theory of the small. We don't have this and that's why we don't know what's going on inside a black hole or the singularity or before the Big Bang. Can you say before the Big Bang if that's when time started? These questions we don't have answers to because we lack a unified framework in physics. What is a unified framework of biology?"
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      "text": " People don't even ask questions like that. What's a unified framework of philosophy, or of chemistry, or of architecture, or of all of these combined?"
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      "text": " And because we lack that, we lack a way of comparing people or their theories. The top-cited neuroscientist in the world is Carl Friston. He has a theory called the free energy principle. What does it mean to compare him to the top-cited linguist of all time? What does that even look like? Apples and oranges, people would say."
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      "text": " That's a compound. Okay, so we like to think that it's all these different perspectives because we're these hippie, pro-social, liberal people that don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. So no, no, you have some elements of the truth. You're not wrong, you're partially wrong, you're touching the same elephant. Yeah, okay, this is just... This is just an over-trodden metaphor that..."
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      "text": " People replicate when you want to sound profound, but it's fright and positive. So maybe some people are actually facing a wall. Maybe some people are just, they're unfortunate, you don't want to replicate that. Also, you should be on the inside of the elephant, because we're in the inside of the universe. You should be in the spleen of the elephant. There's no boundary to the elephant as well, because it's the universe. There's many problems here."
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      "text": " So instead what happens is we form our own bespoke Veltan Shalom. So you think, okay, I like what I see from this person and I like what this person has to say. Don't like that. And you form your own little plate to the buffet table like you think you choose. Or alternatively, you can take a psychedelic and then you can just go to the psychical kaleidoscopic void and emerge enlightened self-assuredly. Which is an oxymoron."
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      "text": " So I think what we require is an umbrella review. At first what I was thinking is a meta-analysis, but a meta-analysis isn't a whole summary of a field, it's a summary of a sub-field, of a sub-field, and it's a snapshot at a particular time. A meta-meta-analysis is something called an umbrella review. And if you look this up on Wikipedia, it's two paragraphs. They're just two, to me this is one of the most mixed topics of our time, two paragraphs."
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    {
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      "text": " Kanye West beefing with Taylor Swift has more paragraphs than this. And it also says in medical research, it's just fascinating that this isn't a topic in philosophy or in physics, it's just relegated to this."
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      "text": " Now, because of all these problems, which is locally inefficient, maybe even insufficient. So, there's hope, though. Because of the boundaries of these fields, there's insights, and there's low-hanging fruit, even within subdivisions inside a field, and the boundaries within there. So, for instance, in math, there's something called category theory."
    },
    {
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      "text": " It's supposedly the most abstract of all math and subsumes all the other fields, but actually it's just a way to translate between fields. Okay, so a project I'm working on is using this, using category theory to solve some of the previous problems of umbrella reviews and relations, at least to what can be rigorously defined. This is another project of mine I'll talk about at another point, maybe out there. I saw Eggpoint. Yeah, we'll talk about those later. So, okay, the idea is that"
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      "text": " People don't like to be labeled. Don't label me, bro. You hear that? But actually, you don't mind being labeled. You just don't want to be prematurely and falsely labeled. You don't mind if you're dynamically labeled or more correctly labeled. So something you can do is, without your preconceived notions, give it to a computer and say, you generate to me some labels and you give me a schema. That's effectively what unsupervised learning is. It's literally called unlabeled data."
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      "text": " But there's another problem. So this is a metaphysical problem that I think about of arrogance. How do we avoid the arrogance that characterized the Tower of Babel? So this looks like a joke, but it's a deep, deep, deep problem."
    },
    {
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      "text": " And I think there's three ways out of this. One is, instead of simplifying, people will say, why don't you tell me your theory will in the language of a five-year-old. Yeah, but so much is lost in the sim of simplification. Rather what we require is a rosetta stump, a translation between different fields."
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    {
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      "text": " Another issue is we're thinking about, well, where does science go? And not many people think about this. They tend to think that science is this static scientific method of insanity. This is false, by the way, but this is what's taught to you as science. I think about, well, where is science moving toward? I call it abeach gnosis. Abeach means the knowledge of the East and the knowledge of the West is gnosis. And I'll end with something else that needs to be thought about."
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    {
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      "text": " The whole enterprise has to have values in it. So what's fundamental to a polymath? Well, we think it's what's fundamental to a regular person. Maybe it's the particles that comprise it or the laws of physics. Or maybe it's computation. Some people think that. Or it's consciousness. Or it's math at the fundament. Or some people think, hey, maybe it's love. Caring and attention. That's interesting. That comes from Heidegger. Heidegger thought attention came before consciousness."
    },
    {
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      "text": " So I've been thinking, maybe instead of fundamentalities, it's best to think in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, like a mathematician's axioms. And a necessary condition, it seems to be something aspirational, something hopeful."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 668.439,
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      "text": " So look, like you came here hoping that this is going to be worth it for you. You hope that when you do science that you're doing something truthful, and you hope that that truth is tied to something nourishing. You hope that when you love someone that they love you back, you hope that the hurt inside is"
    },
    {
      "end_time": 695.043,
      "index": 29,
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      "text": " We'll diminish over time. And you hope that maybe there's something more to this whole place. It's not just when we die, that's it. Or if you believe that, then you hope that hopefully this is sufficient, what we have here. There's this phrase, there's this phrase in our culture, there's such cynicism. You're without hope, or hope is for the weak. I think hope is for the strong. It's so hard to be hopeful."
    },
    {
      "end_time": 714.48,
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      "start_time": 695.623,
      "text": " And Leonardo da Vinci and Leibniz and Benjamin Franklin, they all were. It's a hopeless, it's literally a hopeless place to be without hope. Finally talked about this in a quote that's not talked about much, which is,"
    },
    {
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      "text": " Different words. He said, logic is not all. One needs heart to follow an idea. If people are going to go back to religion, what are they going to go back to? Meaning that we're modern people. What are we going to go to the Catholic Church or this mosque or this temple that doesn't appeal to me? But yet we need this. How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars, logic and heart, of Western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?"
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      "text": " Thank you."
    }
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