The Stories Behind Kevin Kelly's Viral Life Advice
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- čas přidán 20. 05. 2024
- Author and Wired magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly goes in-depth on some of the most essential lessons he's learned in life, including setting deadlines, perfection, forgiveness, living a meaningful life, reasoning, and so much more.
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00:00 - Intro
01:30 - Quick background on Kelly's pithy advice
09:53 - AI and disruption
14:20 - Why deadlines are crucial to great work
21:20 - On forgiveness
23:56 - "Don't measure your life with someone else's ruler"
30:08 - Kelly's definition of success
34:56 - Why Kelly doesn't argue
37:50 - On irritating people
39:35 - On kindness
44:37 - Why you should attend funerals
48:57 - Kelly's thoughts on AI
54:46 - What are the signs of AI being weaponized?
59:43 - Are we at the AI inflection point?
01:01:02 - One of Shane's fears with AI
01:05:33 - Religion's role in society
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Like the mentor you’ve always dreamed of having, The Knowledge Project shares timely yet timeless lessons for work and life. Past guests include Naval Ravikant, Daniel Kahneman, Jim Collins, Angela Duckworth, Seth Godin, Melanie Mitchell, & Esther Perel.
Another good one. Thanks Shane!
When are you going to call Kunal Shah Back on your podcast? you said in your last podcast that we are going to do a podcast again and you forget your promise now which you did to your audience.
We are eagerly waiting
Plz Bring him again
I cannot tell you how good was the last podcast
And the other thing is that your channel will also get a lot of views
Just like your Last podcast with him got
Near 5lakh views
So its a win win situation for all
Hi Are you ignoring my comments since you haven't replied yet?
Or you haven't seen yet?
As someone who was the epitome and epicenter of _Wired's_ intended readership from day one (my 20% turn in the barrel of irritation was sometimes beyond-hideous colour contrasts) I can't with 100% confidence say whether Kevin is agreeing with my mature perceptions, or I'm agreeing with his, as he planted them in fanatical consciousness, long ago. Simpler just to say that we are, at some deep level, birds of a feather who have both experienced a unique time and place in a deep way.
It wasn't just the arrival of the Internet. Back in 1988 I bought a copy of Freeman Dyson's _Infinite in All Directions,_ and inhaled it in a single gulp, sitting out front on the stoop, on a stellar sunny afternoon. Quite possibly that book existed only because of the crazy success of _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ from 1985. At first, I found Feynman's book too narcissistic for my taste. As I learned more about Feynman later on, I began to realize that all that narcissism had a point-a rare feat indeed. I wasn't impressed by his unproductive rivalry with Murray Gell-Mann, either. It took a long time for me to finally conclude that Murray was the more insufferable of the towering mind-lords. Gell-Mann did some deep studies into linguistics. He ought to have known that when Feynman called his own avenue into the substructure of hadrons partons-quite _likely_ to finally converge with some final edition of quarks and gluons-that names aren't just about the thing, but sometimes just as much about the process of the thing. Feynman was prioritizing the evidence differently, and this methodology was called 'partons'. Whether he finally arrived at the same theory of quarks was largely beside the point; if so, chalk one up for consilience in the sidle-space. One of the major ways you figure out that you're not fooling yourself is to test your theory for path independence in its order of construction. Particle physics, like any other deep endeavour, suffers from an initial fog of war. Quite likely, in substantive ways, you barely notice the emerging congruence until after the dust settles.
Was Dyson finally less colourful than Feynman? I'm not so sure. Dyson worked with Edward Teller on the TRIGA reactor design (nuclear technology as a play-thing for undergraduates-what could possibly go wrong?) What could possibly go wrong is that anyone _other_ than Dyson designs it. Teller was a tyrant of the first magnitude. Dyson had to cleverly lie low until Teller exhausted his powder. And then he finally swooped in with the key idea, which he described as the "easy part" because some of the nuclear chemistry involved in making the idea actually work was formidable, and probably beyond Dyson's own attention span.
With Feynman or Gell-Mann in the mix, Teller would have only got hotter and hotter, until they didn't even need a reactor pile to have a reactor meltdown. Victory, Dyson. When he wasn't unifying QED on long bus rides across the American midwest, he must have been listening to Johnny Cash: know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run. On that basic life lesson Gell-Mann and Feynman could neither have scored better than 1/4. Feynman was the Val Kilmer type from _Tombstone,_ who wins a gun spinning confrontation with a silver whiskey mug. There are moments when that's what you want. But like Kilmer, as both the character and in real life, it was sometimes Feynman's only gear.
I also knew by then that Tesla (the man) was both underrated and overrated. Tesla said some of the dimmest things ever about Einstein's extension of Maxwell. Tesla seemed unable to comprehend why Einstein had noticed any problems in the first place. His "genius" simply did not extend in that direction. Tesla indeed had genius, but it was quirky and unaware of its own boundaries.
Long ago, there used to be this cheesy game show called _Dream of a Lifetime._ Might have been a Canadian production. I could rarely identify with the dreams. My "dream" would run more in the direction of corralling Dyson, Terrance Tao, John von Neumann, John Horton Conway, and Douglas Hofstadter into a room together to discuss was Ramanujan was actually smoking (we have to ignore than von Neumann died tragically young, and that Terrance is of a different era). Everyone but Conway would have looked around the table and concluded "there's a _possibility_ here that I'm merely average in this assembly". (Add Turing to the group, and it would be _more_ than a possibility.) I think the dynamics might have actually worked, though. Freeman and John had a deep appreciation for each other. They would have exchanged subtle glances and made sport out of tag-teaming Conway when he started to take over proceedings; Douglas and Terrence would have had some quiet, yet productive side exchanges while they enjoyed the fireworks.
How long would it have taken the penny to drop for Conway to realize he was included not for his insight, but for his example. Of the five, he was most likely to be smoking some version of the same thing. (Hofstadter tried to connect with Conway for precisely this reason, but as usual, Conway misplaced or neglected the correspondence.) It's a critical issue in the 2020s what Ramanujan was actually smoking. Our new improved AI overlords are either already on a collision path with what Ramanujan was smoking (hypertrophic mimetic generativity) or they are not, because Ramanujan had deeper, as yet unappreciated tricks up his hand-woven sleeve.
At least at an armchair level, those guys are my peeps, and always have been. (If you don't recognize Conway from Gardner's column on recreational mathematics in _Scientific American_ throughout the 1970s, excuse yourself from the room.) And then _Wired_ comes along, and these are my peeps, too-but this time, my engineering peeps, more the Danny Hillis crowd, of brash yet deeply pragmatic people who actually build things. I was destined to find this second group eventually, but as it happened, I found these people entirely as refracted through the _Wired_ lens, as constituted by Kevin Kelly.
And now Kevin has his fingerprint on my formative psyche in a way I'll never fully disentangle. Is he agreeing with me, or am I agreeing with him, because part of my "I" was his in the first place?
So there it is. I own Kevin some kind of deeply mysterious debt of gratitude, for what it's worth.
I see that I neglected to mention a "thin" connection between Teller and von Neumann. Teller used to ring von Neumann-but as infrequently as humanly possible.
Ring.
von: Hello, John here.
Ed: It's me.
von: Me, who? Oh, it's you Ed. Long time, no see.
Ed: Why don't you drop over sometime for coffee?
von: Stuck again? So soon. I'll be there tomorrow.
Ed: [silence]
von: Hmm. You must be _very_ stuck. There's nothing you hate more in life than not being the smartest man in the room.
Ed: [silence] [click]
von: [into the disconnected telephone line] My oh my, _this_ one will be a good one.
I was 50% in the prodigy camp. By age eight, I knew I was enamored by computational technology, and I knew I had all the right set of aptitudes. Bear in mind this was 1972. I'm only half a generation younger than Kevin Kelly.
But I wasn't into this for personal enrichment, like so many others during the Gold Rush era. And it's only now in my late 50s that I'm finally figuring out the other half.
For the first 50 years of my cognitive life, my motto was pretty much: If at first you succeed, get a question worth having. Success was primarily a metric I used to sense when I was under-challenged. Wicked problems you will _never_ answer are a dime a dozen. A question worth having is one you can finally answer, but at first it seems _almost_ entirely impossible.
Finally what I understand about my early fascination with computational technology is that it usefully boosts the consilience signal on all things ecological. At this juncture, one could observe that ecology is the natural habitat of wicked problems, only I wouldn't repeat the term "dime a dozen"-I might be physically crushed by the heaping pile of dimes. Today only (like every other day): wicked problems, ten to a termite. I've heard it reported that there are termite mounds taller than I am, and I'm pretty tall.
In deep ecology, the hard problem worth having is to find _any_ problem at all where you can meaningfully move a rock.
When you're little, you get a sore tooth. And then you poke it, and it hurts even more, but nothing happens. Never mind, you keep poking it, because it's not going to _stop_ hurting until something actually happens. And then one day, it actually moves! So little, you're barely sure you felt it. Three agonizing days later, you've got yourself a distinct, but minuscule wobble. That's where I tend to thrive. Surrounded by rocks, all seemingly entirely immobile, convinced that someday, somewhere one of those rocks is going to wobble just the tiniest bit. I feel my kindred spirits when I watch CZcams videos of free climbers staring at a sheer granite rock face, wondering whether there's anywhere at all they might usefully jam a fingertip or a toe.
One day not that long ago I said to myself, you know, maybe I should simply reinvent and repurpose the whole of cybernetics from the glory days of the mid-20th-century to better address the culture wars of the 2010s and 2020s (sometimes styled as "the meaning crisis"), providing a far less nihilistic alternative to the postmodern track from Hegel to Marx to Heidegger and all the rest. And then the rock moved a fraction of a millimeter.
Oh, dear!
Now what?
Fifty years later, I finally found my other 50%, and it's a humdinger.
I did write that to laugh at myself, but it contains a real grain of truth. Just today I spun out a new elevator pitch: _I'm deeply invested in the (mostly cognitive) ecology of collective action under distributed regulation._
Once upon a time, cybernetics was big into regulation, or control theory as it came to be called. Lately we stuffed it into a black box, and called it AI.
Those pithy, abstract phrases all mean twenty different things to me. Don't get me started, unless you've got all year ...
I will say that the most problematic phrase is "deeply invested".
Yes, exactly.
Now what?
RIP everyone everywhere.
In disasters, the body is destroyed, but the soul is released and with us forever.
This will pass folks for all of us. Stay strong and ready to defend yourselves alway, if the need arrives.
Listen to Marcus Aurelius for your mental help. Stoicism rocks. All of them.
Celibacy rocks ladies. Close your legs, mouth and sleep on your back alone. Never shack. I married at 27 and 31, and was a virgin. I never shacked, and I married. First hubby was 8 years older and the second husband was 22 years older, and he died at 67 of a heart attack.
We had one daughter, that I raised from conception at age 37.
I worked for my income , and my life never depended on a man. I had plenty platonic friends all over the world, and I was raised to have morals. I thank my great grandparents, who raised me
to care for my body, and do not be a whore, or have a baby out of wedlock.
I am not rich, but I have helped individuals and families in my 81 years here. Please adopt families and put them in a studio apartment away from the disasters around the world. Tents will not do. Stop being GREEDY and STINGY!!!
Forgiveness is complicated. You have to be ready to forgive. Sometimes that takes work. Sometimes that takes _years_ of work, in some deep place of the soul. Sometimes people aren't finally worthy of forgiveness. I feel that way of some situations I've been in that I later concluded were simply a dead end. Let dead ends be bygones, and save your forgiveness for those who are worthy. I can't define that precisely, but I can quote Gandhi on the British after Indian emancipation: "We have come a long way together with the British. When they leave we want to see them off as friends." I went a long way in my own life with some people where the relationship finally had a rough end; bridges were burned, but those times remain a part of you, all the same. Perhaps forgiveness is hurt, minus the blame. You feel hurt because you cared, and then it didn't work out. You need to process that in a real way. But finally, bitterness doesn't help matters. It only serves to alienate you from your own formative experience. Forgiveness of others is a form of self-love. It's not a cheap form of self-love, and it's not usually a quick form of self-love. But worth sticking it out, in my experience.
First one , here ✌️
49:00 When Freud described projection, the projector hadn't been invented yet. We shall witness our collective human avatar turd-polished into a giant scold.