Scott Young - Ultralearning

**Scott Young** (0:00)
I feel like people are just way too unambitious in general, and not in the ambition, I want to be better than other people way, but they just don't think of big projects, they don't work on them, they don't have big dreams to do cool things, or if they are, it's usually just something like, I don't know, it just boils down to something like social status, like I want to be the person that does this that's better than other people. And I don't know, I feel like, I don't know how you change that, but I do think that rewarding kind of a culture where you want to do kind of ambitious, original things that are kind of interesting and you don't know where they're going to lead, I think that that's having that in you is kind of rare. And I think that cultivating it is probably good for yourself and society.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:47)
Bye.
Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Scott Young, who is the author of the book, Ultralearning. Accelerate your career, master hard skills, and outsmart your competition. So Scott, I'll ask you some practical questions in a second, but first let's talk about Einstein and Newton. So they both had an annus marvellus, a miracle year within which many of their important contributions were concentrated. What explains this phenomenon of miracle years?

**Scott Young** (1:18)
Well, I don't know, I think whenever you look at these sort of outlier people, like Newton and Einstein are certainly one, you have to realize that most people never have a year where they accomplish anything like that. So I think it's a lot of its selection effect, that you have a smart person who just happens to be working on the problem that will lead to a huge breakthrough. And so, I mean, we could have lived in a world where Newton spent a lot of time on alchemy and then discovered the way to turn lead into gold, and then like that worked, but that's not the world that we live in. And so, I think that his work on physics and the Principia and stuff like that was what led to the breakthrough. And I think Einstein's a little rare that he had kind of a couple key insights that led to physics. Like, I mean, he discovers or sort of proves through Brownian motion, the existence of atoms, the photoelectric effect, which is the thing he actually won the Nobel for, not his relativity, which is what he's...
The thing he revolutionized physics for is not really even what he got the Nobel Prize for, was the photoelectric effect, which, I mean, I guess it started quantum mechanics, so it's not really... Can't downplay it too much, but then special relativity, and then he struggles with the math for like eight years to get general relativity. So I think Einstein's a... He's a little bit of an exception in that he did have like multiple huge breakthroughs. And so when people are talking about like lists of geniuses or people who are important, sometimes that list gets populated by people who don't really deserve to be there, but Einstein is definitely like not... He's like an accurately rated genius that is seen as being extremely smart and important and actually is extremely smart and important.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:58)
But as you mentioned, they were different problems, right? And unless there's like a deeper principle, which I'm missing, I am having trouble understanding why many, like special relativity, photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion happened in the same year.

**Scott Young** (3:11)
Yeah, I don't know. I think that for Albert Einstein's case, the fact that the kinds of problems he was working on, I think were also amenable to his sort of style of thinking. So, you know, I'm a big fan of the Isaacson biography of Einstein. I talked about it. I did a little kind of summary post on my blog, and you can see that Einstein is really one of the great intuitive physicists. Like, he's very much a spatial visual person, and so, like, his thought experiments are really kind of the mechanism that he's using to generate these insights.
And so, you know, putting the photoelectric effect aside for a second, you know, the special relativity is this kind of, all right, we have these weird experimental results that show that the speed of light doesn't vary depending on which direction you do it, which is weird because, you know, if you think about a wave and it's going through some medium, then if you're moving relative to the medium, the speed should change, but it doesn't seem to do that. And so kind of like working through the geometric implications of that and then getting to this idea that like, well, links will contract as you go faster. And these are all mind bending, but they come from this kind of rigorously working out the intuitions of this. And you can see that as being somewhat different maybe than the more mathematical physicists who were, you know, very, very strong at some of this advanced math. And it was a little bit less of a kind of like, well, what's my physical intuition about this? But more like, well, what is a way of representing this? And like, you know, I may be getting a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but I'm imagining like people come up with matrix mechanics. This is just a little bit sort of like, oh, this is an interesting pattern. Oh, this is one way you could do it that makes the math easier and stuff. And I think even, you know, Einstein, I believe it was Minkowski who he worked with on like the tensor stuff because he kind of was like a little bit more limited there. Not that Einstein wasn't also brilliant at math, but it's definitely that's not what led to his huge breakthroughs was this kind of, he had some intuition and then he kind of worked to formalize it. Whereas for other people might be like, oh, this is an interesting mathematical pattern. I wonder whether or not it would work for this particular problem.