Shawn Ryan

We definitely feel like there's totally a vibe of like judging things.

But like that kind of ethos lends itself to not wanting to just straight up say, this is a valuable thing that you should do because if it was so straightforward to do it, it wouldn't be an interesting question.

And it's like, that's dumb.

Because like anything that's worth doing, like you'd think it'd be worth telling someone else to do, right?

And so I think that we just got to get over that in our heads a bit and realize like,

That just because in the past you could only give faculty lines to people who like happen to have a great idea, that there isn't value because the whole enterprise isn't – it's physics, it's not math.

It's like there's some cohesive structure to this thing.

Like how do we optimize for that?

And I think it's fun because I think tech can disrupt that a little bit in a way that isn't going to necessarily, you know, hopefully not –

Hopefully not in a way where it's completely just erasing it.

I think that there's a lot of value to that expertise and how do we harness that to do something really cool with it instead of it being this thing where someone who's not an expert just thinks it looks like it's doing the right thing.

Yeah, so I mean for me it's always grass is always greener on the other side in the sense of like you get you feel siloed and like it's not like like no one's siloing you but yourself in some sense because like I guess for me my my the one thing that I wish I'd it was like well it would be easier for me if it wasn't is like I really like extrinsic motivation sometimes too much so like when I'm computing I can be happy but I like if other people care about what I'm computing.

And sometimes they don't because they each care about their own thing.

And I don't think you're a better person or not for having less extrinsic motivation.

But it's hard to navigate.

If every person just cares about their own thing, and you're like, how do I do something this person cares about?

I want to jump into their thing.

But then they see it as a waste of their time to necessarily transfer that knowledge or something because they have their own grad students.

They have to do the research.

So it's hard to move around in a funny way just because everybody's doing their own little math.