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This is the story of how reading “The Selfish Gene” when I was around 15 changed my career decades later. It’s a terrific book. But beyond its substance, it changed my view of what science can be. It showed me that there are simple but profound ideas waiting to be discovered. I’d thought of the frontier of science as necessarily esoteric, but the book proved otherwise. Richard Dawkins’s writing also showed me that it’s possible to explain novel and profound ideas in a way that even a child (me) could understand them. When I grew up and became a researcher, I never stopped thinking about this. I began to gravitate toward the simplest questions within my areas of expertise, rather than the hardest, contrary to the norm in science. And I taught myself how to communicate my ideas to as broad an audience as possible. Unfortunately, the peer review process heavily penalizes this approach, because the value system prioritizes abstruseness, when ideally it should be the opposite. But no matter — I found that simpler ideas, when they do get published, are much more widely read, which made it all worthwhile. Besides, pushing to make ideas as simple and as simply communicated as possible often made them *better ideas*, more robust and widely applicable than initially anticipated. Aspirations should be balanced with an awareness of one’s limitations. Not everyone can be as successful as Dawkins; I realized that I couldn’t count on my ideas being so powerful that they would spread on their own (fittingly, the term “meme” was coined in The Selfish Gene!) So I’ve tried to put as much effort into spreading ideas as I do into generating and explaining them. That’s a topic I’ve written about here before and probably will again.
Princeton CS prof and Director @PrincetonCITP. Coauthor of "AI Snake Oil" and "AI as Normal Technology". https://t.co/ZwebetjZ4n Views mine.
Amtrak had a lot of fanfare around its fancy new trains that can go 160 mph, but it turns out that the limiting factor is the super-outdated track infrastructure, so the actual speed hasn't changed much, averaging 65 mph. Whenever I hear about an amazing new productivity improvement due to AI, I ask myself: is this the equivalent of the trains or the track? In almost every single case it turns out to be the trains. In most real-world systems, upgrading the "track" won't happen overnight due to a technical breakthrough. The bottlenecks are political, economic, and sociological.
Princeton CS prof and Director @PrincetonCITP. Coauthor of "AI Snake Oil" and "AI as Normal Technology". https://t.co/ZwebetjZ4n Views mine.
RT @PKirgis: In our most recent evaluations at @halevals, we found Claude Opus 4.5 solves CORE-Bench. How? Opus 4.5 solves CORE-Bench bec…
Princeton CS prof and Director @PrincetonCITP. Coauthor of "AI Snake Oil" and "AI as Normal Technology". https://t.co/ZwebetjZ4n Views mine.
RT @squarehaunting: Imagine being at a university like Harvard or Oxford and using AI to think and write. The whole world is unpaywalled to…
Princeton CS prof and Director @PrincetonCITP. Coauthor of "AI Snake Oil" and "AI as Normal Technology". https://t.co/ZwebetjZ4n Views mine.
Update: I asked it what my username is and answered correctly (after looking at 19 webpages?!) and now I can't reproduce the bug even in a fresh session. Oh well. You know what they say, everyone can be @emollick for 15 minutes.
Princeton CS prof and Director @PrincetonCITP. Coauthor of "AI Snake Oil" and "AI as Normal Technology". https://t.co/ZwebetjZ4n Views mine.
I've never had a reason to really try Grok so I've missed out on all the insanity. It turns out that @grok thinks I'm @emollick. I'm flattered to be confused with Ethan, but also... what? How does a bug like this even arise?!
Update: I asked it what my username is and answered correctly (after looking at 19 webpages?!) and now I can't reproduce the bug even in a fresh session. Oh well. You know what they say, everyone can be @emollick for 15 minutes.