Transcript - Golden Nuggets Podcast #40 (Round 4): How Justin learns, new ML course, the magic of Twitter
Rationale, vision, and progress on Math Academy's upcoming Machine Learning I course (and after that, Machine Learning II, and possibly a Machine Learning III). Design principles behind good math explanations (it all comes down to concrete numerical examples). Unproductive learning behaviors (and all the different categories: kids vs adults, good-faith vs bad-faith). How to get the most out of your learning tasks. Why I recommend NOT to take notes on Math Academy. What to try first before making a flashcard (which should be a last resort), and how we're planning to incorporate flashcard-style practice on math facts (not just times tables but also trig identities, derivative rules, etc). Using X/Twitter like a Twitch stream.
Cross-posted from here.
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Below is a smoothed version of the raw transcript.
James: All right, I’d like to be joined again by Justin Skycak from Math Academy. Justin, what have you been up to this week?
Justin: Thanks. Great to talk to you guys again. I would have had enough of this. It’s mainly been working on the machine learning course, working on these coding projects for the course. We’ve got our normal lesson topics that you do by hand, but we’re also going to have coding problems.
It’s a multi-step problem, so we’ve got some bigger, more applied problem context that pulls a bunch of these lower level skills together. You might come into the multi-step having done some stuff with neural nets by hand, maybe working out one iteration in a very simple case of a back prop and a forward propagation and doing problems about different structures of neural nets.
But in the multi-step, that’s where all these skills get pulled together. You actually code up a neural net and we break it up for you. But the prompt is not just like, hey, build a neural net. It’s like, build this component of the neural net. Great, now build this other component. Now link those two components together and you do that for like eight or ten questions.
By the end of it, you’ve built a neural net, you’ve run it successfully, maybe you’ve even run it on some parameter setting that illustrates a kind of shortcoming of the simple vanilla thing that you built and then we have you build a more complicated, sophisticated workaround and that demonstrates the improvement.
It’s been working on just scoping out a bunch of these problems and kind of guiding the person who’s doing most of the heavy lifting and building them.
Zander: How hard is it to come up with a variation? Because obviously you need a bunch of questions that cover the same thing. If somebody gets something wrong, you want to be able to vary it, still have the same underlying concept.
Justin: Most of the variation is going to come from the underlying lessons, the by-hand problems. That’s where we really need the repetition to ensure that you’re acquiring these component skills and are solid on them. When it comes to the project, not as much variation is needed. You just need a different project.
Maybe one project is building a simple feedforward neural net, maybe another one is building a convolutional neural net, maybe another one is using neural evolution instead of gradient descent for training it. It’s kind of like, I think the way to think about it is, if you’re in a machine learning class, you would be doing some math, hopefully math problems on the subject matter. Those math problems would be more scoped down, almost like solving equations or just working out various parts of algorithms. You’d do it a bunch of times with different numbers.
It’s kind of like you’re the computer in a simple case going through different data sets, different processes. It’s almost like just working out algebra problems or calculus problems—you can just rapid-fire those. But you wouldn’t really say, “Okay, build me a neural net today and then build me another one tomorrow in the same way.” It’d be more like, “Okay, just build me a neural net. Okay, great, you build a neural net. Now let’s make it more sophisticated.”
It blends repetition-focused learning into project-based learning. I’ve talked about project-based learning before—oh my goodness, everybody is doing project-based learning, and nobody is learning anything from it. But that failure mode is only when students don’t have the component skills in place, which unfortunately seems to be most of the time in most cases of project-based learning, at least in my experience.
But if you get that right, if you get those component skills in place, then yeah, the projects are great. That’s the reason.
Zander: Can you talk about how you go about learning a new thing? You have all this knowledge about how to learn optimally and how to embed that in a system like Math Academy or some other similar system. But that assumes all kinds of things—Math Academy, as we talked about before, has the graph, the dependencies, and everything is extremely fine-grained and layered in.
When you’re learning something new that doesn’t have Math Academy, which is everything except math that’s already in there, obviously, there’s no other tool like it. What do you do? How do you make the most of these learning principles in a context where you have to be the one to take all the existing content—whether read from a book, an online course, or whatever—and put it in the right order to learn optimally?
Justin: That’s a good question. Honestly, I don’t really do a whole lot of that kind of learning anymore. It’s mostly just focusing on production personally. You reach the edge of known things and you’re in some particular direction and subdomain, focusing on trying to produce more knowledge, more technology, more tools, whatever. You turn into almost like a researcher who’s at the edge. Yes, it’s not very efficient, but it’s a different game.
Personally, when I was more focused on acquiring known existing knowledge bases, like learning math, physics, computer science, and that sort of stuff, I latched onto MIT OpenCourseWare and various textbooks used there. It was painful. It doesn’t have, when you piece together from these online resources, even something fairly cohesive like MIT OpenCourseWare, it doesn’t have spaced review, it doesn’t have mastery learning in the sense. It’s not broken up into things that you demonstrate knowledge of and then move on to correct because you’re left to your own devices to structure that however you want.
That was back when I was in high school and I didn’t really know a whole lot about the science of learning. I made a lot of suboptimal decisions and experienced a lot of pain from that. I always harp on: I can’t just read the textbook and take notes; you have to actually solve problems. But my first approach to learning math, I definitely fell into that failure mode where I would read some stuff, take notes, and think I understood it. I thought, oh, I can totally speed run this stuff.
Then I speed ran some of it, got to a point where nothing was really making sense, I was way out of my depth, and I asked myself, “Why can’t I do this now? What’s different from what I’m doing now versus math class?” I realized, okay, math class, we actually do homework. I need to do homework.
If I had to go about it nowadays, say somebody said, “Hey, Justin, you need to learn undergraduate biology. You’re going to have a final exam in one year on an overhaul of undergraduate biology. If you fail, we’re shipping you off to Antarctica or something,” I’d have to know if it was a life-or-death situation. How would I go about it?
I think step one would be to find a curriculum that is really good. A curriculum where experts are piecing together the content for you, reducing as much friction as possible from the learning experience. You wouldn’t want to go out and just try to discover all this knowledge on your own because you’ve got centuries of knowledge to discover. You can’t just sit down, go from philosophers thinking to biology, meditate on it, and maybe do some key experiments. You need to go faster than that, and that’s what the curriculum is meant to do.
Step one is finding a good curriculum. What’s a good curriculum for biology? I don’t know. I looked into this last year, interested in what kind of adaptive learning solutions exist for biology, but I didn’t really find anything impressive.
James: I found something kind of cool for biology. It was called Smart Biology. I followed them on Twitter because their course is purely visually based. They have all of these really beautiful GIFs and images of molecules in the cell and the diffusion of different things within the cell. I don’t know if biology is the right terminology, but it looked really incredible. It kind of gave you a sense for the scale of the different organelles inside the cell and all the different parts. It was something that I think you struggled to get from just a normal textbook.
Justin: I was really impressed by it. Were there assessment questions in it too? Did it test you on the stuff? Or is it more like a Three Blue and Brown video where it’s passing them at a high level?
James: I’m not really sure. I never went into it super deeply. I just saved it. It sort of ends up on my list of things to check out. Never.
Justin: Never. I have to take a look at that. That’s really cool.
Zander: Although at this moment, I doubt that there are any systems like Math Academy for biology or anything else. I’ve looked for these things. I think Math Academy is the end of the list. It’s not that I want to say that. I would love it if there were tools like this for every subject. I think it would be amazing.
I’ve tried to experiment because I think it is totally plausible that with a sufficiently advanced LLM, you could produce a kind of prerequisite or graph-like thing. Not now, not today. It’s not possible. It doesn’t know how to make it fine-grained enough. But it does seem plausible to me that you could take roughly any knowledge, as long as it’s not totally new knowledge that’s not in the system, and create a fine-grained curriculum in the way that Math Academy does. That would be so exciting because you’d be able to learn so much more across your life because you wouldn’t be trying to piece everything together.
This relates to, and this is going to take a minute, but I think it’s important to point out, the tension in free learning, this self-directed, curiosity-focused learning. There’s this tension where it’s all driven by the next thing you’re curious about, which is nice. It powers you through and makes you not get bored, but it also has these problems. If you’re going through a curriculum, there’s so much friction that’s reduced.
If it’s a well-thought-out thing, even reading a textbook, a very good textbook, has had countless hours of effort put into it by an unbelievable number of people who wrote it, checked it, and edited it over and over again to make it as good and efficient as possible. When you’re just learning self-directed with no curriculum, just following the next thing you’re curious about, there is so much more friction.
In a certain way, I feel like a lot of people in the optimized learning space aren’t optimizing for efficiency in the way you’d expect. They’re optimizing for the ability to master a given set of material given unlimited time. If you look at so many of these YouTube videos, they describe all these intricate note-taking processes. It’s like, how much time do you have? Are you willing to take 40 years to master this? Or do you also have a life and something else you’re trying to do at the same time?
That’s the problem for me. The reason why I think Math Academy is like a revolution is that it’s taking all these things and trying to make it as efficient as possible while achieving mastery. Not just, “Let’s achieve mastery at any cost,” even if it takes you a year to write your notes. There’s so much more to it.
I do think that tension exists with project-based learning, self-directed learning, and pre-learning. It’s all tension to me. It’s how you balance this curiosity-driven exploration of material with the fact that it is much more efficient to master the basics and build up from there.
Justin: That’s a really good point. Honestly, one of the reasons I haven’t gone and learned biology is because it takes a long time. If you could compress it down to a smaller number of time without skimping on the rigor of the material, that would be nice.
What you mentioned about LLMs designing a curriculum is actually pretty interesting. I’ve seen more of that nowadays, where people will ask an LLM to set up some kind of structured learning environment for them. It’s not perfect, but it definitely comes a long way. I’ve seen some people create, for instance, an arithmetic knowledge graph using an LLM.
There were some issues with it. If you had no access to a good curriculum, and it was either that or figure things out on your own or work through a five-year curriculum, it makes sense that you could use the LLM for guidance on how to go about it. Once you have it, it can give you a map of the territory, which might help in piecing together all these materials online.
For example, if I want to learn biology, maybe Smart Biology covers some of this curriculum, and then there’s a more problem-set-focused resource that I combine with it. It’s an interesting problem to think about.
James: Is there a particular thing in biology that interests you or a problem you’re looking at?
Justin: Oh, actually, not in particular. My wife is in a virology PhD program, and I always enjoy when there are people in your life who are in some nerd hole doing something. It’s nice to be able to talk to them, not just as a layperson—like, “Oh my God, Justin doesn’t know what a cell is, let me explain,”—but have an actual conversation with some of the more technical details.
I guess that’s one of my main motivations, just to be able to have higher-level technical conversations with her about things. I think it’s similar to when I have kids. They’re probably going to have interests that are different from mine, most likely, and I’d like to be able to talk to them about those interests in proper depth.
Being able to talk to my wife about biology in proper depth is like the initial version of a problem that’s going to occur later down the road, which is being able to talk to my kids in proper depth about whatever they are interested in. It got me thinking, well, if they know a lot more than me, how do I go learn a bunch without just having them turn into my personal tutor?
If you have a kid who’s really interested in some subject and knows more than you, they’re probably not even going to be great at explaining it to you because explaining is a separate skill on its own. Anyway, this isn’t a very directed answer, and this probably isn’t a strong enough motivation to really get me over the hump of seriously learning biology.
It’s sort of like I run into people who are like, “Oh, math is pretty cool, it’d be cool to know that,” but it’s not enough motivation to get you over the hump of solving problems and mentally sweating, being exhausted all the time. That’s why I haven’t been thinking about learning biology lately.
Zander: That kid’s thing. That’s an interesting motivation. I’ve never heard anybody anticipate that, or even somebody with kids saying something like that.
Justin: That’s really interesting. The reason it comes to mind for me is because I was in a situation as a kid where I wasn’t as lucky. I had two parents who really loved me and wanted the best for me, and that was amazing. I’m super fortunate in that respect. But they also didn’t know anything about math, physics, or science in general. I didn’t have any family members like that.
It just felt like there was nobody I could have a serious conversation with about things that interested me unless I went out and tried to find some university professor to enjoy. Which has its benefits of forcing you out of your comfort zone and meeting new people. But anyway, that’s why it’s on my mind.
Zander: That makes sense. Anytime I think about this and how many things there are to know, whatever the number of red books, it’s almost depressing to me how little of it we all get to learn. By the time you’re an adult, you have a job and responsibility. The opportunity cost of learning an entirely new subject is so high.
That’s why it’s exciting to me. The more popular Math Academy gets, or any of these systems, any of these learning tools, and the more they can be integrated with things that actually work in the way that Math Academy works, I think that’ll be better. It’ll be open to more people while you’re living your life. You can actually master a new subject and learn it to a level of depth that you wouldn’t just get by glancing at a few pages of a textbook, which is basically what most people do for any new subject.
By the time they hit a certain age, most people don’t learn anything new with any depth at all. It’s a depressing thing to say, but even people who are curious just add little bits of knowledge to what they already know. They never actually master a totally new area or even get to a level of depth where they can talk to an expert about it and not feel out of touch. It stagnates unless you really, really deliberately set aside a lot of time in your life.
Even then, it’s so inefficient to learn a whole new field without any kind of structure. Anyway, sorry to go on for so long about it, but it’s exciting to me that even with AI, we could do something like this. It’s plausible to me that you can give AI a paragraph or an equation, anything. You just go, “I don’t understand,” and it gives you some kind of Math Academy diagnostic until it finds the level that you do understand and then builds you back up so you can understand exactly what you just gave.
It’s still fine-grained. It’s still particularly tailored to your curiosity in terms of that paragraph or that equation, but still allowing you to go up in the prerequisites and end up at mastery. I think those things are possible, and I think it would lead to a much more intellectually enriching life if we didn’t get stuck in some subject or a couple of subjects we learned when we were young and then just never learned anything else.
Justin: I agree. That’d be interesting. I think I’m going to try that, actually—just having some conversations with an LLM about biology and see how far I can get with it, how easy it is.
One failure mode that a lot of people who try to do that fall into is they don’t actually know the principles of effective learning. They’re not asking the right questions. They’re not telling the LLM to structure the learning experience in a way that’s optimal. Some of it makes me wonder, okay, if you do have a good idea of that, and you can try to instruct the LLM how to teach you this thing you don’t know, how efficient can you make that?
James: There was a really nice prompt in the original GPT-4 paper called the Socratic Tutor Prompt. I think I’ve talked about it on here before. It’s really simple. They must have done some fine-tuning on this prompt specifically for Khan Academy, because they’ve built it into their Khan Migo AI tutor bot thing.
But it’s basically, you just say, “You’re a Socratic tutor. That’s worked for a problem. Never give me the answer. Just guide me with hinting sort of questions towards me working it out for myself.” It’s really useful because it will ask you a question, and depending on whether you get it right or wrong, it will take a step back and say, “Okay, I sort of understand it and can infer what you’re missing in your prior knowledge and backfill that.”
But if you get it right, it will just skip over to the next thing. You only need to fill in the hierarchy that you have missing, as opposed to going through more of a static curriculum where it will fill in everything, even if you’ve already done it.
Math Academy does this as well with the diagnostic. It works out your prior knowledge level and doesn’t make you do all those questions from scratch, all the way from addition up to calculus. We already know calculus at a decent level, right? But with this, it’s moving from a specific problem backwards through the other prior knowledge graph. It’s really interesting and very useful for specific questions and problems that you have. I like to use it a lot.
Justin: That’s really interesting. I think I started experimenting with this. It’d be interesting to know. You’d clon. That’s the one to use.
James: Yeah, he’s clon. I’m eagerly awaiting some twist and threads on this.
Justin: I was thinking about making a lab notebook, like, “Here’s how I started trying to go about it, here’s what I tried, here’s the results, here’s what was good, here’s what was bad.”
James: That’d be cool. Especially for learning something new and unfamiliar. I’d be interested to see how you go about it.
Zander: Just on the Twitter thing, I also wanted to get to the productivity stuff. How is it that you manage your time? A lot of people who use Twitter or any other kind of social media constantly say, “Oh, I’m so distracted. I can’t focus. I’m addicted to all this stuff with the feed and everything.” How do you avoid becoming addicted, wasting time, or just maintaining your ability to focus when you need to focus? This assumes they have a problem a lot of people have.
And just the scheduling of your time. I don’t even know when you sleep. You’re tweeting all the time, and it seems like you get an incredible amount done. I’m just wondering if you have any high-level insights on productivity or time management.
Justin: Thanks. I appreciate you noticing the effort that goes into the output.
If I had to boil it down, what my name in a loop on this stuff is: I’m trying to just constantly stay in motion throughout the day, knocking out things I know I should be doing. Whenever I find myself getting a little bored of something, I switch to something else. I have enough things to do that I can just pick something else off the shelf that I’m really excited about. There’s always something to do that needs to be done, so I just continually go through this cycle, picking up different things to focus on.
It wasn’t always like this in my life, but since I got involved with Math Academy, which turned into a life-consuming experience, there’s just no shortage of things that actually need to be done.
On Twitter, for instance, if you approach it less as an enjoyment activity and more as a task—like, “Nobody knows about Math Academy, that’s a problem. We need to spend time talking about it, getting excitement going, engaging with the community”—it becomes just something that needs to be done. It can be fun, but it’s something that is part of the process.
I experiment with different strategies. I found that Twitter engagement can be structured in a way where I’m working on something else for half an hour, maybe get a little bored, my mind starts wandering, and whatever it wanders to can sometimes be wrapped up in a tweet within a couple of minutes. I just go post it and then switch back to something else. I can’t spend the next hour just scrolling through Twitter. I need to get back to moving the needle on another task.
I try to be very realistic about what’s moving the needle and what’s just enjoyment. I align those things as much as possible throughout the day.
Sometimes, if I’m having trouble going to sleep because I’m thinking about too much stuff, I might pick up my phone and spend 10 minutes on Twitter. That kind of mentally exhausts me enough to be ready to sleep. It has the byproduct of producing some valuable things towards my goals.
It’s all about compacting all the tasks that need to be done into the most efficient way, given my motivation and the importance of each task.
Zander: Is there anything you do to capture ideas and then expand on them later? If you look at the number of words you write per month, you’re an extreme outlier. It’s an unbelievable amount of output. Do you capture ideas and then expand on them later, or do you get an idea, write it out, and then it’s done? What’s your production function? How do you model this?
It’s great to do multiple things, and I want to get back to that, because I think that’s an interesting idea—switching to keep your interest up. But there must be some other layer. Do you have a model for this?
Justin: In terms of trying to maximize words written, I never just sit down and say, “Oh, I’m going to write about X, Y, Z and make myself do that.” It’s more about taking advantage of thoughts that occur naturally. For example, if somebody posts an interesting comment to a tweet, I might see it, and immediately a couple of sentences come to mind. I’ll post it as a reply and think, “Oh, that would make a good seed for another post in the future.” Then I save a link to it.
Later, when I feel a little bored with what I’m working on and want to do something quick for five minutes, I might look at the links of comments I’ve made. I’ll pull one off the shelf, read it again, and new things to say come to mind. Since it’s been several hours or even a day or more, I take advantage of that, write it down, and often that creates a flow experience that leads to more writing.
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking, “What should I write?” I try to avoid that. I just take advantage of the natural thoughts, put them down, and ship them off.
Another part is that the more you write, the easier it is to write other things. The more I write, the more automatic I become with ideas I’ve said before. I have analogies, tight quotes, and perspectives I can refer back to, and they don’t have to be the exact same words. It’s more about regenerating the memory.
Oftentimes, that refinement process is like retrieval practice, and the more practice I get, the easier it becomes. I remember when I first started doing one Twitter post a day, I viewed it as just needing traction on Twitter. Every morning, I’d find something I’d written previously and turn it into a nice little Twitter post. That worked okay.
Then, I had a conversation with Jason, the founder of Math Academy, who suggested I treat this like a Twitch stream, just putting out whatever interesting thing I’m thinking about. I stopped posting right away, and at first, it took more time and effort. But eventually, as I practiced, it became automatic, faster, and easier. The quality increased too.
Even just scrolling through Twitter for 10 minutes before, I used to find only one thing and force myself to come up with an interesting perspective. It would take longer to get it from my head to the post box. Now, after practicing more, it’s much easier to find the right words.
It goes back to a common quote about writing: “What’s the trick to becoming a good writer? Write a lot.” It just comes naturally and helps refine perspectives.
I should also mention that sometimes, when I put a lot of effort into an article or blog post, and I know it’s really good, I might copy a relevant snippet I’ve written before—something punchy or eloquent—and tweet it at the right time. I remove any extraneous details that aren’t relevant to the context, do a couple minutes of editing, and shoot it off.
In addition to having all the ideas in my brain, I also have a database of previous writing to pull from. Building up that database and doing a lot of writing makes it easier to generate more output in the future.
Zander: It reminds me of something I’ve heard a lot of people who used to write for newspapers talk about. They say it basically removes the difficulty of writing because you’re expected to write a certain amount every day or every week. You get so used to just outputting all the time that the writing part isn’t difficult anymore. When you’re writing a non-fiction book, the research is the difficult part, but actually writing is automated in a certain sense—the actual skill of just putting the ideas down on the page.
It makes sense to me that after a while, Twitter, in particular, can reformat your brain or the way you’re thinking about things. You start thinking, “How would people on Twitter receive this?” The most popular Twitter accounts I see post 30 or 50 times a day. I’m thinking, this isn’t possible unless this is some kind of skill, like anything else, where your brain shapes itself around, “What do people on Twitter like?” “How should I phrase this to get maximum engagement?”
You don’t expect that kind of thing. Obviously, it sounds kind of, I don’t know, not nice if you phrase it like that, but it is a powerful thing.
Justin: It is a game. You have an audience on Twitter. A Twitter audience is different from a Facebook audience or an Instagram audience or a Hacker News audience. They all have different ways.
James: I’m going to get Math Academy for Twitter. Learn to write a Twitter post.
Justin: Learn to write a Twitter post. Oh man, that’d be funny.
Zander: Write 20 memes.
Justin: One expert for me. That’d be hilarious. Imagine a course on Twitter writing techniques, and one of the units is meme creation. One module is text memes, another is image memes. Another one could be…
Zander: I’ll be writing on it. Maybe as an April Fool’s joke. Anyway, I think that’s all very powerful. I just want to emphasize something you said repeatedly—the way you go through your day. I see this through line in a lot of very productive people, or even people who just consume a lot of information.
I don’t know if you guys listened to the Gwen episode of the broadcast from a couple of years ago, but he was saying that he never gets bored when he’s reading because he just reads something else. He reads all day long, and whenever he gets bored of reading about something, he just reads something else. Nick Lumen, who invented the Zettelkasten, which has become popular in recent years, did the same thing. He would work on many books at once. When he got bored with one, he moved to another.
I’ve heard this approach to productivity enough times to think it’s some kind of genuine secret, and it also applies to my own life. But you have to have enough freedom in your day. Obviously, if you just work a 9 to 5 job and have tasks to do that occupy your entire day, you don’t have the freedom to do this. So, it doesn’t apply to everybody.
But if you can work on many things at once, and you just have a reservoir of tasks to pull from when you get bored, I think that’s a huge key to what you said. If you have the freedom, it makes a massive difference. A hundred percent.
Justin: If you don’t have the freedom to choose what you’re working on, or at least structure it—maybe you have a bunch of different things that you need to get done, but it’s up to you when you want to work on them and in what order—then not having that freedom is a major impediment to using the strategy.
Zander: I fully agree. And then just on the attention point, I hear so many people complain, “Oh, I can’t focus on anything now that I’m addicted to Twitter,” or whatever. I see that every day. Someone popular will say, “Oh, I can’t read books anymore.” I’m just wondering why you think that hasn’t happened to you. What’s the reason?
Justin: It’s a good question. Honestly, there might be something about me where I’m a little more cognitively set up not to have these pulling attention problems. My failure mode is often when I get too engrossed in something. When I head down for too long, I miss things around me that are important to pay attention to. I don’t know. I wish I had some kind of tip or secret—like, “Oh, here’s how you don’t get addicted to Twitter” or “Here’s how you can make yourself continue to read books.” But personally, it’s not a problem I’ve experienced. Does that happen to you?
Zander: For me, I think, like you, I’m just able to focus on things for whatever reason. I’ve been able to focus throughout my life. So for me personally, it’s not a huge issue. But what is, is just time-wasting. Sometimes you just go on one of these things and start wasting time. But I still generally seem able to focus when I want to. I think that’s an individual thing. And what I do think… Sometimes I’d be doing something for 45 minutes, then realize, “What a waste.”
Justin: Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. I guess one thing I can say about that is, whenever I’m going through something, if I feel like taking a little break and going through Twitter, if I haven’t made a post within several minutes of looking through Twitter, I just get this bad feeling in my stomach that I’m wasting time. It’s like a reverse thing for me. It just makes it easy to close out the app and work on something else. But I could totally see, if you don’t get that feeling, or if there’s some element of the addictive quality that overcomes it, or maybe someone’s not paying attention to that feeling, it’s easy to get sucked into this black hole of passive consumption. I guess maybe that’s part of it. I view Twitter as a mode of production, not a mode of consumption. That’s what it is to me, and that probably makes it easier not to get sucked into the black hole of consumption.
Zander: I think some of it is you just have a stronger story of your life, a self-narrative almost. People who consume a lot of content but don’t create things aren’t bothered by the constant ephemeral stream of information, or the lack of anything grounded. They just have a different narrative about their life. Yours is that you’re producing things all the time, trying to get as much done as possible, living a maximally effective life. These kinds of narratives, I think, can set things up for people and produce the feelings you’re talking about.
I have those same feelings. Like, man, I’ve been spending 30 minutes on here, I could have been reading a book, writing code, or doing something else that actually brings me value. That value is going to sustain me a week from now instead of forgetting all this five minutes from now. It’s a kind of narrative experience to me.
Justin: James, what’s your experience like on Twitter?
James: To me, Twitter is definitely my favorite kind of social media, for sure. It’s actually how I found my first job. I was studying languages at university, nothing related to coding at all. In my third year, I took a year out because I didn’t really like the course. During that year out, I stumbled into learning coding. When I eventually graduated, I didn’t know what to do because a lot of employers here in the UK purely go based on your CV. As soon as they see that you don’t have a related degree, it kind of screws you over.
It was only through Twitter that I was able to find any opportunities. Fortunately enough, one of the first people I messaged and asked to do a voice call with was a guy called Moritz, the founder or co-founder of a company called Remde.
Oh, yeah, I think I’ve seen him on Twitter before.
Yeah, it was really cool. I’d been active on Twitter, and we just had a conversation. He mentioned they recently got funding and were hiring. So, I managed to sneak in through that channel.
That’s a good story.
Yeah, for sure. I think that’s honestly something very weird and unique to Twitter. There’s this blending between the casual and the professional. It’s not weird and cringe like it is on LinkedIn, where everyone is holding on to a facade and the interactions feel forced and artificial.
On Twitter, it’s much more casual. Most people aren’t there to do business, so to speak. They’re there to be social, have fun, share memes, laugh at each other, and stuff. But there’s still that opportunity to make genuine, personal connections with friends. I’ve met friends on Twitter as well, but also business relationships and other opportunities. I think it’s great.
Justin: Totally. I’ve heard that same thing from people who say, if you want a job, just post some cool stuff on Twitter and reach out to people. It’s amazing how good of a networking tool it can be. It sounds like you’re coming from a similar perspective where it’s less about consuming information on Twitter and more about using it as a tool to produce something, meet people, or have some kind of end goal in mind with it.
James: Is that accurate? I think so. I definitely relate to a lot of what you said about the tension between scrolling on Twitter and producing. If you just scroll through Twitter for 30 minutes, it can feel like you lost 30 minutes of your life without much return. But posting can lead to different outcomes. You might write something and no one sees it, or someone really important might see it, and you end up having a really interesting conversation with them.
There are an infinite number of possibilities where that could lead. I think the producing side has an asymmetric payoff, or as I would put it in a Tel Aviv way, a “level-up” effect. It has black swan potential. You might post something, and 80% of it goes nowhere, 20% gets some interaction, and then there’s that 0.0001% where it leads to something really interesting. You’ll be glad you spent the time writing that post. It’s always the producing that has the payoff, not just the scrolling and consuming.
Zander: Honestly, I think these algorithms are truly meritocratic in some genuine sense. You can have zero followers, but if you make a good post, it can go viral. I remember when you did that on Twitter three or four years ago, whenever that was. We were all chatting, “What are we going to do? How’s James going to get a job?” I don’t even remember this. You just made a Twitter account, posted a video on YouTube or whatever, and almost right away you got an opportunity. You didn’t have to build up a following for years. The algorithm, as much as people hate it and think it’s destroying the world in some way, is meritocratic. If you post good content, the content gets traction. If you don’t, it doesn’t. That’s a powerful thing to me.
James: It’s kind of brutal in a sense because with a market mechanism like that, you get very honest feedback. It’s not the hand-holding style you get in school where you submit a homework assignment or a paper and know that you’ll fall within the spectrum of an A to an F. On average, you’re going to get a C grade. On Twitter, if you post something bad, no one will read it, and you’ll feel bad because you put time into writing the post but no one saw it. Or, people might roast you for how bad it is.
On the other side, there’s the asymmetric upside I mentioned earlier. A post could have very positive downstream effects for you. In school, the best thing is to get an A, and it doesn’t really move beyond that. Whenever you have a market, it’s the same in business. You start a business, and no one will buy your products if they aren’t better than anyone else’s stuff. You really have to be competitive to get people’s money or attention.
Zander: I’ve only started using Twitter in the last month. Already, I have a sense of when I tweet something, whether anybody is going to like it or not. I started out with no followers, and it takes time, but I have this sense. A lot of times, I tweet stuff that I know nobody’s going to like. And it’s like, in my soul, I have to do this. If I’m only doing what I know is going to get approval, that’s a kind of weakness to me. It’s almost like if I only do it because I know people are going to like it, I don’t know. There’s something aversive about that.
James: There’s definitely a truth to that. It would definitely be bad to just post in order to get likes. There are all kinds of extensions you can use for Chrome to actually hide these things. I just pick out the CSS selectors that will hide them. These can be useful because, in a way, I think the best outcome for your posting on Twitter is to post stuff that starts off not really getting any traction. But then it becomes its own thing. It doesn’t fit into a niche or whatever. You’re not just copying some random trend that you’ve seen there, but you create your own thing. People start to like it for the post’s actual value and its content being unique compared to everything else.
Justin: I think that’s the idea. Yeah, it makes sense. It’s less about pattern matching to success and more about trying to shape whatever you’re trying to say to be a little bit tastier to the Twitter audience while still retaining the authenticity of what you were trying to put out in the first place.
Zander: Exactly. Well, actually, on that point, because we kind of got off track here, we can wrap it up in a minute. Do you feel there’s stuff you want to post on Twitter, but you have to stay within a certain niche, or do you feel like you can post whatever you want and it’s no big deal? Or do you feel it’s all related to Math Academy and learning-related things, so it’s okay that you primarily post like that?
Justin: Yeah, I think I do try to keep it on brand, but I consider my brand to be pretty wide. Anything relating to Math Academy, math, coding, learning, productivity, skill development, it’s all fair game. There are limits, though. I wouldn’t post everything. For example, wedding pictures or stuff that I would think belongs on something like Facebook or Instagram. I try to keep my Twitter posts things that I think other people will find interesting or valuable, beyond just “look at me.” I also try to stick to things that I’m confident talking about. For instance, I haven’t posted anything about learning more biology, but if I tried to get an LLM to guide me through this and ran a lab notebook, that would be adjacent to learning and talent development. Suddenly, it feels relevant, and there’s a connection, so I can talk about it.
But if there’s no connection like that, if it’s just an isolated thought with no link to this knowledge graph that encompasses all my Twitter content, I’ll hold off on posting it.
Zander: Right. Well, I would personally like to say that maybe throw in some schizo-posts, you know, anything you want. I would like to see it.
James: Justin actually has an old account where he posts spicy takes. You have to try to find it.
Justin: That’d be funny. Yeah, just have some anonymous account.
Zander: By the way, I just want to say, your ability to reply to people who are— I don’t want to be ungenerous, I don’t know what to call them—bad faith actors, completely morons. I don’t know what you want to call them, but your ability to reply to these people and just go, “This is not for you,” or whatever, is crazy. I would just waste my own day responding to these morons.
Justin: Yeah, I try not to get sucked down too far. One thing I noticed is that whenever you write something and somebody nitpicks something, you’re just like, “Oh my God, seriously? Are you going to nitpick that?” I think it’s often an indication that you need to be more defensive in your writing. You need to state a caveat or some kind of clarification in the actual writing. I feel like I’ve taken a lot of those experiences and tried to pull proof by writing from it. So that’s one reason I sometimes poke the trolls, to see the trolls. But then there comes a point where it’s like, okay, now you’re just trolling. I’m not really extracting any more knowledge on how to defend against people like you in the future, and then I just have to leave it.
Zander: A lot of times, when you post a long Twitter post, which is not uncommon, people say, “I’m not reading that. It’s way too long.” It’s like, okay, then don’t. You don’t need to tell people that you’re not reading it. I don’t understand that part of Twitter. It’s like, I just have to tell people, “I’m not going to read that.” That’s ridiculous. Then don’t read it. It’s not for you.
Justin: Let other people read it. Yeah. I guess that’s less of a defense; it’s more of an amorphous meaning. So that comes out.
Zander: No, but I think that’s how it should be. These people are ridiculous. If anything, they should be blocked. They’re not contributing positively to society. Somebody else is doing something, and you’re going, “Oh, why are you doing that? It’s not useful for me.” It’s like, well, it’s not about you. That kind of thing.
Justin: The funny part is, they still share the posts. They still comment on the post. So we get more business. It all helps the algorithm.
Zander: Yeah. Anyway, we can wrap it up there. But like I said, it’s very impressive to me the way you handle all the responsibilities. Once again, I’ve personally gotten a lot from this. I think I’m going to double down even more on switching between types of tasks. It’s something that’s always in the back of my mind, and just to go even more on that, I think it’ll be valuable to me. So, anyway, thank you again. This was very fun.
Justin: Yeah, had a great time too. Be interested to know how that task switching turns out for you.
Zander: Well, I’ll tweet about it. Right now, I’ll make a post when I’m on it.
James: All right. Thanks again.
Zander: Thanks, guys.
Prompt
The following prompt was used to generate this transcript.
You are a grammar cleaner. All you do is clean grammar, remove single filler words such as “yeah” and “like” and “so”, remove any phrases that are repeated consecutively verbatim, and make short paragraphs separated by empty lines. Do not change any word choice, or leave any information out. Do not summarize or change phrasing. Please clean the attached text. It should be almost exactly verbatim. Keep all the original phrasing. Do not censor.
I manually ran this on each segment of a couple thousand characters of text from the original transcript.
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