From: O >
To: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacation@grnail.corn>
Cc: "Ma . Min
Subject: Re:
Date: Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:33:29 +0000
I know some of them - not Eric Baum. I liked his criticism of engineering as creating static and nonevolutionary design.
I'll try and apply that to my work in scientific innovation: code and evolve, simple publication results are static. He has
a nice framing - robust programming - that computational science as a whole might benefit from, going beyond his
CAD apps. There is a similar Idea to his notion of modularization in the study of scientific progress called black boxes -
the components we build future results on (another aspect to my research is the consequence of the Internet making
these opaque component boxes transparent).
I don't know Peter Thiel (funder of singularity institute) personally, but found him interesting at one point a few years
ago since he comes from the same Ayn Rand and Stanford background as I do. I saw him speak on the singularity at
Google about a year or so ago and didn't think he knew what he was talking about and lost interest. In fact, I'm not
sure those Singularity guys are being precise or scientific about what they're doing, generally speaking. Might not be
an issue for you but makes it less interesting for me. Wouldn't mind chatting with Norvig and maybe a few others
though, and I know Michael Nielsen personally and like him.
Brockman asked me about them a few weeks ago and he questioned the lack of Involvement by women. I agree that's
weird. I told him Thiel was gay and he was surprised at his own prescience!
A good friend of mine went to the singularity summit a couple weeks ago. I'll ask him about It.
On 9/5/09 7:54 PM, "Jeffrey Epstein" <jeevacation@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm going to search this domain for more people
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