Nostr Web Client

But Batman wasn’t a Mossad agent so you’re right

For a more serious critique: Lex attempts to portray the persona of public intellectual. The problem is that he’s not knowledgeable enough to pull it off.

You can be a lay person interviewing experts. In that case, you ask questions but don’t express much of an opinion, because it would be uninformed. Joe Rogan does a good job at this.

OR you can be an expert interviewing other experts. In this case, the dialog is more of a back-and-forth, with both people seeking a mutual understanding of the subject matter. Stephan Livera does this for Bitcoin and Austrian Economics well.

It’s OK to flip back and forth as the subject matter changes during the course of the discussion.

The problem with Lex is that he’s ignorant of his ignorance, and confidently so. He tries to have an opinion on content he doesn’t understand, so his arguments are tired and tedious.

If he had a better understanding of the limits of his own knowledge, then he might be endurable.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Sasha 1y ago

Wow tough crowd lol I appreciate the perspectives I can’t say I’m a huge fan just for a lack of time spent since my favorite podcast is my own 😂 I incorporate more comedy than Lex, and I think that’s where he lacks and Joe Rogan flexes

jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

What’s your podcast?

Sasha 1y ago

I dont broadcast testing it with friends and fam first it’s going well but would have to do a big career change and not sure I’m ready to take the risk yet

tolot 1y ago

I agree on the fact that he *seems* to be ignorant about his ignorance, even though I don't really think he is. My perception is that he eccessively tries to reduce what the counterparty said to a domain he is more knowledgeable about. With Tech stuff that is usually somehow fine, because he is a machine learning engineer...quite frankly he knows a lot about that spectrum of tech. When talking about other matters he probably has to work a bit more on the "investigative side" rather than the "conclusion" side.

Overall I find him a good podcaster: first of all he is NOT very opinionated, which means that he has the opportunity to let the truth emerge rather than simply fancying some theories of one or the other side. He goes in deep in the background, writings, experience of the other person, he does his homeworks and tries to connect the dots. This is not something I find usually in most of the other shows.

jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

> With Tech stuff that is usually somehow fine, because he is a machine learning engineer...quite frankly he knows a lot about that spectrum of tech.

Send me a link where he talks about this. I’m skeptical. Trying to remain open to the possibility that he could know what he’s talking about within a sufficiently narrow domain such as ML. So far I’ve seen little evidence of competence from him.

(Disclaimer: I work in this field professionally.)

tolot 1y ago

I mean...you can just google on Google Scholar and you'll find tens of papers authored by him.

Here for example is a query with basic filtering with his name: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=wZH_N7cAAAAJ&hl=en

Moreover, in this website you can find direct links also to lessons he did when he was instructor at MIT (that are hosted on the Deep Learning material repository of MIT).

Here is the link: https://deeplearning.mit.edu/

I honestly can't point to precise timestamps, I clearly recall the interview with Van Rossum (inventor of Python) as a good one, the one with the creator of Mojo. the interviews with Musk clearly show that he knows the stuff.

I'm not in the position to judge his writings, his lectures and his skills in deep because I'm not a PhD in Computer Vision, so I stand only on some of his stuff about RL that I've seen as a testimony of his competence. Surely there are a lot of KPIs to address competence but I'm not aware of them...I know that Google Scholar indexes quite broadly citations, so his 2957 citations could be a proxy but not so precise.

Sasha 1y ago

Define ML engineer? Lol… does that mean you know python?

He’s cool just not funny enough for my taste. It’s just preference, I don’t take life serious enough at times, so he’s serving a need for representing “serious” people

tolot 1y ago

The fella is a Phd in Computer Vision at MIT, which means that it's reasonable to assume that he knows pretty well the field of Computer Vision, which is a subset of the broader universe of Machine Learning.

Leaving aside my assumptions for a moment, the guy happens to have tens of peer reviewed papers and articles ranging from deep reinforcement learning to AI explainability. I never said that he knows to press buttons in a pythonic way (even though I assume he definitely can).

Preferences are a different matter, I respect yours.

I jumped in there only to point out my view about his work and how he approaches his interviews.

Since I was asked to report where and if the guy is competent on the matter of ML, I simply provided some references.

jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

Appreciate the refs, will check out eventually.

My “Lex is an idiot” standpoint predominantly rests on his commentary when speaking with Bitcoiners—Alex Gladstein in particular. I haven’t listened to Lex speak to anyone else, except Eric Weinstein.

Bitcoin is a one question IQ test that AFAIK, Lex has consistently failed. (Eric Weinstein also fails this test)

Des Imoto マキシ 1y ago

Of course, there are three results of the #Bitcoin IQ test. 1. A. People who get it and are good people 1 B. People who get and are evil people (idiot) and 2. Stupid

tolot 1y ago

Eventually he'll get it. I'll take a look at that interview. Frankly, I try to avoid watching stuff about bitcoin from the normie world...it usually is heavily biased by the lack of actual study of the matter.