Andrej Karpathy

It's about booting up a brain.

And I think physics uniquely boots up the brain the best because some of the things that they get you to do in your brain during physics is extremely valuable later.

The idea of building models and abstractions and understanding that there's a first order of approximation that describes most of the system, but then there's a second order, third order, first order terms that may or may not be present.

And the idea that you're observing like a very noisy system, but actually there's like these fundamental frequencies that you can abstract away.

Like when a physicist walks into the class and they say, assume there's a spherical cow and dot, dot, dot.

And everyone laughs at that, but actually it's brilliant.

It's brilliant thinking.

That's very generalizable across the industry because, yeah, cows can be approximated as a sphere, I guess, in a bunch of ways.

There's a really good book, for example, Scale.

It's basically from a physicist talking about biology.

And maybe this is also a book I would recommend reading.

But you can actually get a lot of really interesting approximations and chart scaling laws of animals.

And you can look at their heartbeats and things like that, and they actually line up with the size of the animal and things like that.

You can talk about an animal as a volume, and you can actually derive a lot of...

You can talk about the heat dissipation of that because your heat dissipation grows as the surface area, which is growing a square, but your heat creation or generation is growing as a cube.

And so I just feel like physicists have all the right cognitive tools to approach problem solving in the world.

So I think because of that training, I always try to find the first order terms or the second order terms of everything.

When I'm observing a system or a thing, I have a tangle of a web of ideas or knowledge in my world, in my mind.

And I'm trying to find what is the thing that actually matters?

What is the first order component?