
Interview with Scott Aaronson about philosophy and quantum computing [video] - furcyd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX5t8EivCaM
======
plesiv
Lex Fridman's "AI Podcast" has quickly grown to have one of the best list of
guests on any show ever [1] - extremely impressive!

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuK...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4)

~~~
nabla9
His quest list is awesome. Stephen Kotkin interview was really good.

His problem is the clear lack of preparation in several interviews. He gets
thrown off and loses track just when the interview gets interesting. The
momentum dies because he has no good followup questions and no idea where to
go form there.

Instead of playing ignorant for the sake of the conversation like good host
does, it seems that he tries genuinely to learn stuff during the interview.
His backup strategy is to direct interview into the same set of overly generic
questions where the quest has nothing interesting to say. It's kind of
irritating.

If you compare Lex Friedman to Sean Carrol (they have had same quests in their
program) its' clear that Carrol is better prepared and better host.

[https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/)

~~~
calny
Lex is on HN and from a prior thread [1], seems very thoughtful and receptive
to constructive feedback. While I've only recently started watching his
interviews, I think that reflects one of his main strengths as an interviewer
--it seems he thinks both broadly and deeply about AI, physics, and a wide
range of interesting topics, which is no small feat. Of course, I'm in awe of
his guest list too--kudos to him for building this series. Though I've only
seen a few so far, I do sort of share the feeling that the questions can tend
toward too general, at least at the outset of the interviews. Like a slow-
starting book, this sometimes makes it difficult for me to get hooked right
away. But I think this reflects my personal preferences, and many others may
prefer his style. In any case, I imagine it takes a tremendous amount of work
to run something like this, and there are some great exchanges with world-
class guests. It's amazing that everyone has access to interview series like
this. On that note, thanks for the tip about Sean Carroll's podcast, I'll
check it out.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22047661)

~~~
nabla9
There is nothing wrong being broad and philosophical.

The problem is when he repeatedly pushes it to quests that have nothing to say
about the matter or are clearly not interested discussing the subject. You get
back only platitudes. He does well every time he adjusts to the guests frame
of mind and stops doing his own thing.

------
_Microft
In case you did not know yet: there are transcripts for some of videos on
Youtube.

The transcript is time-stamped, the video will jump to the correct position
when clicking a sentence and it loads completely at once, so you can use the
in-browser search on it.

Open the three-dot-menu below the video content and open the transcript from
there.

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rassibassi
Nice video lecture series by scot

[https://video.ethz.ch/speakers/bernays/2019/7b11b50e-f813-4d...](https://video.ethz.ch/speakers/bernays/2019/7b11b50e-f813-4d26-95e0-616cc350708c.html)

------
retsibsi
RSS link for the audio version:
[https://lexfridman.com/category/ai/feed/](https://lexfridman.com/category/ai/feed/)

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frequentnapper
slightly related to this, I read somewhere recently that deep reinforcement
learning doesn't really work. Has there been any progress on that front since?

~~~
sgt101
Well - all I can say is that it works for me!

More seriously, I think that it can be challenging to define the "game" or
simulation that a DRL system (or any RL) system depends on. Clearly for things
like go the game is preset, for the real world, perhaps less so. People have
used it vs physical systems like robot hands though.

Also, one of the charms of DRL is the cheating that the agents discover, for
example catapulting each other over barriers or blocking doors. But in real
world scenarios scams that break the rules of the game (imposed by law or
physics) are useless, so you have to rewrite your simulators to remove them,
and start again.

~~~
ramraj07
What applications do you use DRL for ?

~~~
sgt101
Training a chatbot; we thought of a wrinkle that would let us use DRL to
improve performance over pure data trained ones. It was hard to get it going,
but once we figured out the code it did add vs pure supervised.

------
dang
We changed the URL from
[https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4616](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4616),
which points to this.

