The Border Collie with Grant Sanderson

00:00

And I want to open with a story about two dogs.

So we've got a border collie and a pug. They were both adopted about the same time as puppies. On their way to their new home, the border collie turns to the pug and says, “I'm just so excited. I'm just so excited for the whole life that we're going to live. We're going to get to run around, we're going to get to chase things, we're going to get to catch things, and we're going to get to shake them around.”

00:21

And the pug says, “My man, you're living in the past. The only reason you have the instinct to do all of that is because our ancestors needed to, to be able to eat. They needed to chase things, to hunt things in order to be able to eat. But don't you understand? These owners that we have, they're going to give us all the food that we want. You're never going to need to hunt.”

00:41

The border collie just kind of shrugs it off. And throughout their life, every time they go to the park, the border collie is running around as fast as he can. He's chasing things. He's grabbing Frisbees.

The pug is just living his best life. He's just curled up in the lap of the owners, just enjoying the sunshine, realizing he doesn't have to do any of that. And they look like this. Every day they go to the park, every day they do the same thing, on and on until their old age.

01:03

Both dogs are cuddled up and lying next to each other. And the pug looks over to the border collie and says, “So I was right.”

And the collie says, “What do you mean?”

The pug says, “Never once in your life did you actually need to run around to chase something. You were always sharpening your teeth, you were always keeping yourself fit, you were always keeping yourself sharp out there in the park. But never once did you actually need to do that. Every day we had food at home. Every day we had what we needed from our owners.”

01:29

And the collie said, “No, no, no, don't you understand? I was not running because that's what I needed to do to live. I was living to run. That's what it feels like to me to just live my best life.”

01:39

Why am I telling you this?

I think we live in a very interesting time where it used to be the case, in order to build something, you had to understand it at a certain level. You had to really understand the principles of what was going on in the code.

And if it's not true today, it's just increasingly true over the next couple years: those two are very decoupled. It's no longer the case that you need to understand it at that level in order to build things.

02:02

And from an abundance standpoint, that's kind of amazing. Because it means if you want to add something into the world, if you want to create something and put it out and add value to people's lives, no longer are you rate-limited by your own understanding of some quite technically complicated things.

The only rate-limiter is your own appreciation for what actually adds value to other people's lives. And maybe your token budget.

02:26

But the flip side of this is that, from an educational standpoint, it's a real shame, I think. Because it used to be the case, one of the best ways to learn new stuff was to figure out the project to build around it.

And of course this is true at some level of understanding how code works and understanding specific syntax or specific libraries. But I think the real benefit was that it extended beyond that.

02:48

A lot of the things that you might be learning were not just a matter of the particular library you had to engage with. It was a set of more general principles.

I think everyone in this room probably knows that when you learn how to code, it reshapes your patterns of thinking even when you're not actively coding.

03:05

And from my point, I think there's a lot of friends that I have who—let's just take math, because I love math—they didn't really relate well with it in school. I actually can think of a couple specific people where the education system just didn't work for them. They didn't engage with math. But they loved to build things.

03:22

And they later on in life came to really appreciate certain individual facets of math because they came up in the things that they were building.

Maybe they wanted to make a video game, and computer graphics really benefits from understanding trigonometry, from understanding linear algebra. Maybe they wanted to get into machine learning, where you have to be very fluent in linear algebra and the language of matrices.

And so that ended up being this avenue towards something outside of that, because they wanted to build a thing, and the rate-limiter for building was that understanding.