Base Rates: Intro & Episode 1

If you were in a room with someone whom you admired, what would you ask them?

I’d ask Didier Drogba how it felt to be part of the positive force that stopped a civil war in his country. I’d ask Lionel Messi what he learned about mastering a skill on his path to the very top. I’d ask Roger Federer about the most important moments in his career, and how he shaped his mentality. I’d ask Lewis Hamilton what he did to channel his motivation into actions. I’d ask Kobe Bryant what mistakes rookies make that people don’t recognise.

This thought experiment showed me that the questions I find interesting tend to be a mix of experiential (how did doing X feel), philosophical (what is your outlook on Y), and reflectional (what did you learn about Z). It also showed me how much I looked up to athletes. I love having conversations with people, and I wanted to have more conversations of this kind with people around me and share them with the world.

The spirit of Base Rates is to find out how people work. I make no attempt to keep one person’s answers as the holy grail but aim instead to provide a spectrum of ideas that spark my curiosity and hopefully yours too. Moreover, I think it's informative to understand the worldview of someone who has achieved a goal you find inspiring.

With that, I’m excited to release the first episode with Professor David Abel, Senior Researcher at Google DeepMind. He was as kind, patient, and thoughtful during this episode as he was in class when teaching Reinforcement Learning at the University of Edinburgh, and I hope you like listening to it. You can read more about him and his work at his website.

You can also listen to the episode on RSS.com, or wherever you get your podcasts under "Base Rates".

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