I've thought extensively about how to meet people like this because they're my favorite kind of people.
What I've noticed is that I never meet them through institutionalized programs or institutionalized searches. Any formal attempt to bring people like these together seems to fall short.
I believe that's because the incentives that such programs offer tend to not appeal too much to this kind of independent thinker and attract the wrong kind of person. These programs offer money, visibility, fame, and status from being accepted and being able to put it on your CV. These incentives attract people interested in money, status, and fame, which are rarely the people who are interesting independent thinkers. Those programs attract talkers. At the same time, the independent thinkers do their work because they're deeply interested in a topic, not because of money or how other people perceive them. So the incentives of the program are less interesting to them and they are less likely to apply. If they do join, they find themselves surrounded by talkers. They find that most participants have very few original ideas and are mostly there for status, money, and the ability to profit from the actual original thinkers. Also, very few original, brilliant thinkers exist, so it's hard to bring together large groups of them.
That said, here is what I've found can work to meet original thinkers:
Whenever you see someone doing something interesting, reach out. Be proactive. Send them words of appreciation. Maybe share some thoughtful observations or any ideas that could contribute to their projects. Just try to be a good human and help. It will not always turn into friendship, and that's okay, but sometimes it will.
Do something interesting yourself. Have interesting ideas. Work on interesting projects. Independent thinkers surround themselves with people who have interesting thoughts. If you're not interesting, why would they hang out with you?
If you work on some of these projects with other people, you'll meet other amazing people. For example, I've met great people from maintaining a large open-source project with other people.
Great people will reach out to you if you do interesting things. They come to you. Not every new connection has to come from you searching. But you do need to put effort into staying in touch. Otherwise, it will fizzle out.
With regards to the call for interesting thoughts, IMHO there are a lot of profound ideas from decades past under the cybernetics banner, which are not getting the attention they deserve in AI. For example, most chatter of "physical AI" over-indexes on robotics; there is a lot of interesting stuff to be done in understanding the flow of information through the system, and how we could do much better, perhaps with co-design. How is it that biology takes mediocre sensors (eyes and ears) built on sloppy wetware and turns them into exquisite perceptual tools?
Siva I think about this all the time. Our biology (and natural biology in general) is so fascinating in how it's evolved and what it is capable of. Nature has created some incredible things.
This note, and your stated investment purpose on your website, rang more true for me than you can possibly imagine. Back in the early 1980s as a young sprout working as a baby systems programmer within IT for a software development company called Candle Corporation, I became obsessed with the compact elegance of certain types of assembly programming, language instructions within the IBM 370. Ancient stuff. The indirect address addressing scheme within the architecture, and the sheer elegance of register instructions to do very useful work compactly occupied me in a time when the rest of the world was moving to minis and micro computing.
Your note gave me that shock of realization that what I was obsessed with was the beauty of an architecture. I resisted higher order languages for a long time because of the amount of overhead and bloat which led to careless RAM consumption, poor memory management, and bloat. This is of course evidenced compromised design architectures of Intel processors and operating systems like Windows, which I dislike to this day.
For a number of reasons, I gravitated towards reliability engineering, testing, and design processes, before I got recruited to go to the dark side of product management :-)
There are certain problems I have thought about for decades, but I’ve moved away from the process of building objects to sociotechnical challenges of people and systems, and pivoted to the academic community.
I will most advisedly share your work with my engineering and business students. There are a few who are obsessed about intractable problems and take the path of beauty because it’s the only path that makes sense.
I've thought extensively about how to meet people like this because they're my favorite kind of people.
What I've noticed is that I never meet them through institutionalized programs or institutionalized searches. Any formal attempt to bring people like these together seems to fall short.
I believe that's because the incentives that such programs offer tend to not appeal too much to this kind of independent thinker and attract the wrong kind of person. These programs offer money, visibility, fame, and status from being accepted and being able to put it on your CV. These incentives attract people interested in money, status, and fame, which are rarely the people who are interesting independent thinkers. Those programs attract talkers. At the same time, the independent thinkers do their work because they're deeply interested in a topic, not because of money or how other people perceive them. So the incentives of the program are less interesting to them and they are less likely to apply. If they do join, they find themselves surrounded by talkers. They find that most participants have very few original ideas and are mostly there for status, money, and the ability to profit from the actual original thinkers. Also, very few original, brilliant thinkers exist, so it's hard to bring together large groups of them.
That said, here is what I've found can work to meet original thinkers:
Whenever you see someone doing something interesting, reach out. Be proactive. Send them words of appreciation. Maybe share some thoughtful observations or any ideas that could contribute to their projects. Just try to be a good human and help. It will not always turn into friendship, and that's okay, but sometimes it will.
Do something interesting yourself. Have interesting ideas. Work on interesting projects. Independent thinkers surround themselves with people who have interesting thoughts. If you're not interesting, why would they hang out with you?
If you work on some of these projects with other people, you'll meet other amazing people. For example, I've met great people from maintaining a large open-source project with other people.
Great people will reach out to you if you do interesting things. They come to you. Not every new connection has to come from you searching. But you do need to put effort into staying in touch. Otherwise, it will fizzle out.
Thx
This reminded me of a classic from almost a century ago, which I couldn't resist sharing: https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/library/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf
With regards to the call for interesting thoughts, IMHO there are a lot of profound ideas from decades past under the cybernetics banner, which are not getting the attention they deserve in AI. For example, most chatter of "physical AI" over-indexes on robotics; there is a lot of interesting stuff to be done in understanding the flow of information through the system, and how we could do much better, perhaps with co-design. How is it that biology takes mediocre sensors (eyes and ears) built on sloppy wetware and turns them into exquisite perceptual tools?
Siva I think about this all the time. Our biology (and natural biology in general) is so fascinating in how it's evolved and what it is capable of. Nature has created some incredible things.
Thanks for sharing will check it out
This note, and your stated investment purpose on your website, rang more true for me than you can possibly imagine. Back in the early 1980s as a young sprout working as a baby systems programmer within IT for a software development company called Candle Corporation, I became obsessed with the compact elegance of certain types of assembly programming, language instructions within the IBM 370. Ancient stuff. The indirect address addressing scheme within the architecture, and the sheer elegance of register instructions to do very useful work compactly occupied me in a time when the rest of the world was moving to minis and micro computing.
Your note gave me that shock of realization that what I was obsessed with was the beauty of an architecture. I resisted higher order languages for a long time because of the amount of overhead and bloat which led to careless RAM consumption, poor memory management, and bloat. This is of course evidenced compromised design architectures of Intel processors and operating systems like Windows, which I dislike to this day.
For a number of reasons, I gravitated towards reliability engineering, testing, and design processes, before I got recruited to go to the dark side of product management :-)
There are certain problems I have thought about for decades, but I’ve moved away from the process of building objects to sociotechnical challenges of people and systems, and pivoted to the academic community.
I will most advisedly share your work with my engineering and business students. There are a few who are obsessed about intractable problems and take the path of beauty because it’s the only path that makes sense.
Thank you so much for sharing the note. Also I’m happy to speak with the students and help them any way I can.
Such an interesting and stimulating article, loved it! Thank you Oana
Thank you
Loved this post so much -- and also please hit me up the next time you come to the city!
thanks Friend, will do
This is beautifully written; thank you for sharing.
I am glad you like it, thank you
Great, I love how you're thinking about this.
Here's an idea https://github.com/guilt/TinyToT I'm publishing today and I'm happy to look for other people doing interesting things like this.
Thanks will look
I found your article on reddit, I would love to connect!