“I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”

Thu, 16 May 2024 01:54:58 GMT

During the last two weeks I was struggling with the problem of how to work the Feynman quote into my talk on AI. When you make a deck it's strictly verboten to have a large amount of text on one slide. People just tune out when they see all those letters from one end of the screen to another. Also, you can't reduce the font because nobody would see the text anyway. Finally, you can't just tell the audience to read while you stand idly in front them. It's bad form.

So I struggled and struggled and struggled. Till the very last day, I kept the entire two-paragraph text on one slide. The quote is great and it's a shame that we have to give it to people on one slide, instead of telling them to go fucking read the real thing. I even came up with half-assed excuse, thinking to say that every presentation should have at least one difficult slide – this one would be my chance. Meh. All of it felt lame. And I thought about removing the quote altogether. Almost did.

In the end, right before the presentation, I made the tough decision to reduce the text to one sentence typed in a very large font. And I added to the slide the book cover, "Surely, you are joking Mr. Feynman." During the presentation, I briefly narrated Feynman's story, read the quote and told them to go fucking read the book.

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Sat, 04 May 2024 00:58:51 GMT

And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”

-- Feynman.

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timelets

“I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”