Nick@nickcammarata
i'm grateful for two people who shaped my life in almost completely non-overlapping ways.
when i joined chris olah's team at openai i didn't have a clear worldview, a research direction, or any real sense of what i wanted to do. my career had wound semi-randomly with no center. I also knew little about ai, and had to learn on the job how a convnet worked, an embarrassing process since my job was to research them. but he made it a much easier process, pedagogically and emotionally. taking me was a big act of faith, and i tried to pay it back by learning as quickly as i could. he gave me my life's work.
chris taught me the personal. that it's worth building enormous scaffolding just to see something clearly — spending hours, building custom visualizations, going through revision after revision of "i used to think about it this way, but this other way is more natural" — and you can throw most of it away once you arrive at a clean few-sentence explanation that seems like it took five minutes. that when you have understood something, you have way more freedom than you think in how you explain it. he basically threw out all the conventions of publishing on several occasions and only did whatever actually made sense, which often meant way more effort than the normal thing. the two parts of research are understanding something clearly and explaining it well, and he gave me a model for both qualitatively better than anything I’d seen before. as well as a large arsenal of random helpful life things. that you can get a lot out of combining high-error gaussians for a complex decision, and the process itself is revealing, like a higher-effort version of flipping a coin just to notice which side you want it to land on. putting numbers in places you ordinarily wouldn't (eg micromarriages) is often similarly revealing. and also the joy of writing, spending a sometimes absurd amount of time brooding over a single sentence. writing is much more like a puzzle than i'd previously conceived, and you can feel when the puzzle is solved. and if you can’t solve the sentence, maybe your understanding is wrong.
and maybe most importantly: that you can be both deeply moral and deeply independent-minded. i'd been around a lot of conformist relatively non-creative moral people and a lot of unkind creative contrarians driven largely by egoic competition. i genuinely didn't know you could have the best of both until i saw it up close.
shinzen young taught me the impersonal. i've barely even met him. i spent probably thousands of hours with his teachings, understanding almost none of it the first time. he had this line about trading one day now for his whole life before, and enough people throughout history have said roughly similar things that i thought it was worth a few years to find out if he was crazy.
he wasn't. what he taught eventually dissolved most of who i thought i was, and my worst day of the average month now is better than the best day of my life before I came across him, not because of anything specific about my life, but because of how the physics of experience works, and what I’m not doing.
his most important teaching was almost accidental: complete disregard for the personal story. someone comes to him with deep sadness and starts telling their story and he just looks at them and says yeah, sounds like a feeling in your chest, just deconstruct that. no interest in the narrative, or even particularly that it's sadness. modern therapy wants you to go deeper into your stories, everyone has their favorite ten tools for trauma healing and I thought I’d seen them all, until I came across “oh a feeling, whatever”. shinzen taught that your stories are contractions within something much larger, a process much more beautiful than a single life that you can learn with practice to directly experience every moment of the day.
his style from my perspective was dropping hundreds of little specific puzzles, again likely unintentionally: how to get beaten up in a way that's totally enjoyable because you're placing your sense of self in the other person, specific equations for how pleasure works, descriptions of where sensory experience "comes from." not enough understood to even cache, so i had to do my own explorations, come to my own equations and compare them to his, until most of it kind of all clicked more or less at once. most dharma teachers have the vibe of humming yourself into a relaxation, nothing too confusing, but honestly not much at all to even be confused about. shinzen gave me things to actually be confused about. also, he gave realistic estimates for how much practice is required. like oh fixing that one thing might take a few hundred hours of dedicated practice, but it’s totally worth it. most teachers understate both how much practice it takes and how much upside there is. shinzen was honest about both.
we eventually spent a few hours together and it was fine and slightly boring, which felt exactly right. what he gave me was never personal. it was about figuring out what's been going on since time and space began.
grateful for chris for the personal view of the world, and shinzen for the impersonal.
