Dwarkesh Patel

So the origin of species comes out basically two centuries after the Principia.

And conceptually, it seems like Darwin's theory is simpler, right?

There's a contemporaneous biologist to Darwin who reads The Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley, and he says, how stupid not to have thought of that.

And nobody ever says that about friendship, yeah.

They're chiding themselves for not having beaten Newton to gravity.

And so there's a question of, well, why did it take longer?

It seems like a big part of the reason is that the evidence for natural selection is cumulative and retrospective, whereas Newton can just like...

here's my equations, let me see the moon's orbital period and its distance.

And if it lines up, then we've made progress.

And so Lucretius actually had the idea, this idea that species adapted their environment in the first century BC, but nobody ever really talks about it until Darwin, because Lucretius can't run some experiment and people are forced to pay attention.

And so I wonder if we'll, in retrospect, end up seeing much more progress in domains which are

have this kind of tight data loop where you can verify them quite easily, even though they're conceptually much more difficult.

One takeaway I had from reading and watching your stuff on the Cosmic Distance Ladder, by the way, I highly, highly, highly recommend people watch your series with Thule and Brown on the Cosmic Distance Ladder.

But one takeaway was that the deductive overhang

in many fields could be so much bigger than people realize, where if you just had the right insight about how to study a problem, you might be surprised at how much more you could learn about the world.

And I wonder if you think that's sort of a product of astronomy at the particular times in history that you're studying, or is just that based on the data that is incident on the earth right now, we could actually divine a lot more than we happen to know.

Okay, speaking of clever ideas, one of my listeners, Sean, solved the puzzle that Jane Street made for my audience and posted a great walkthrough on X. For context, Jane Street trained a ResNet and then shuffled all 96 layers and then challenged people to put them back in the right order using only the model's outputs and training data.

You can't brute force this.

There's more possible orderings than atoms in the universe.

So Sean broke the problem into two different parts.