Life is too short to hear 3 hours of conversation Between the successful average human Mark Zuckerberg and the hilariously neutral Joe Rogan, so I took a different tack: scrolling through extremely long transcripts quickly, picking nuggets more or less at random. Here’s what Zuckerberg has to say about various things.
(These citations have been very lightly edited for clarity.)
Zuckerberg on symmetry
Part of the reason is that, in some ways, I think, some of these experiences are more realistic than having a Zoom call, and yes, you can actually see the person’s face. Because I mean, the way our memory works is, like, very special. correct? So, you know, when I leave here today, I’m going to remember that you’re across from me and there’s a symmetry, right, like, you’re across from me. So that means I’m on the opposite side of you. We have a common memory of space and place.
I guess it doesn’t work very well because of the headphones, but generally, you know, if I, if you say it’s coming from that direction, spatial audio and some kind of directionally building a spatial model of things is how we make memories. So you use something like Zoom and it totally blows it up. Because now every meeting of yours looks the same, right? There is no symmetry, right? So if you’re in my top left corner, my box, square, that doesn’t mean I’m in the same place as yours. So we don’t actually have any shared sense of space.
While I appreciate Zuckerberg’s attempt to make an aesthetic (in a broader sense) argument for the sympathetic nature of shared memory formation, I feel that the interactions he describes are actually highly asymmetrical In real life, Zoom actually creates a kind of supersymmetry contained in flat-panel displays that doesn’t reflect the difference we feel. If you and I were in the same room, what we saw and heard from each other was really different, and we probably remembered it very differently.
It’s true that a shared VR environment creates a more shared sense of space for participants, but I question whether such an environment is better for memory than a video call. Of course, the environments available in Meta’s VR platform are pretty generic.
Image Source: Yuan
Zuckerberg on artistic progress
So in a future world where you know a lot of things that might be material today, I mean, maybe these, this art and sculpture and what you have here. Maybe in the future, they’re not physical, maybe they’re just holograms because you can easily change them. Maybe over time the ratio of physical to digital content we interact with changes and becomes more balanced, or something like that.
And if historically it’s all physical with little information or digital overlay on it…I think it might be healthier for us. Instead of consuming all this extra context through this little portal that we carry around on our phones, you’re just kind of looking at this and you’re missing the whole context. I think it can be overridden, you know, there are people who are able to pop through it and interact with them.
Zuckerberg believes the problem with art today is that there aren’t enough virtual environments directly overlaid on it, and holographic docents give you a virtual tour of the work. Now, of course, anything that gets people more involved in art could be good, but you have to wonder if the solution is really the augmented reality headset that’s handed to you when you walk into the Louvre. Why go there or anywhere in person? I guess his entire company is trying to answer that question.
Zuckerberg on the evolution of social media
The Holy Grail is building something that can create a sense of human presence. correct? It’s like I’ve been building social software for the last nearly 20 years of my life, you know, let you know that no matter how much limited computing power you have, you can share something about your experience. It started out mostly with words, yes, when I was in college we all got these smartphones and cameras, so it became a lot of photos. Now that the mobile web is good enough, it’s starting to have more video. For me, this immersive experience was the obvious next step.
The progression from text to image to video does suggest that the next step will be something more “immersive”, but that doesn’t take into account that all three formats work flawlessly on phone-type devices and the uniqueness between them The fact of the difference is essentially the bitrate.it is Quantitative progress, Zuckerberg proposes that we are at the basic qualitative Change, a way to deal with everything people already value about the texts, images, and videos they come into contact with (because people have been with them for thousands of years), and replace an expensive, intrusive, and very unfamiliar new method. I don’t think it follows.
Zuckerberg wakes up
You wake up in the morning. Look at my phone and get about a million messages…that’s usually not great, right? I mean, people keep the good stuff and tell me personally, right? But it’s like, well, I need to pay attention to what’s going on in the world that day, so it’s almost like, every day you wake up and you’re like, get punched in the stomach and it’s like, okay, okay, Hold.
I saw this quote specifically mentioned before, so it caught my attention. This is certainly relevant, even if most of us don’t run a company that has weathered a PR crisis after a PR crisis. What I want to know is how he wakes up every morning feeling like he’s been punched, A) when he’s rich and can do anything, but B) when he runs a company that reaches out to so many people and provides Somehow when there are so many opportunities for improvement. Year after year, Facebook and other social platforms amplify and generate controversy and extremism. You wake up every day to see its fruits, and your response is to reset yourself, not the system you created.
To be fair, that’s probably what he had in mind when he was “surfing or thwarting” a “reset” on his family ranch Kauai. Frustration here means smoking, but he could mean the sport.
Zuckerberg on angry platform
One of the decisions we basically make is that if someone reacts with anger, we don’t actually even count whether to show it to other people.
When I made this decision internally, a group of teams were like, well, you know, there’s a lot of mistakes in the world and people should be outraged about that. That could be… that’s fair enough. But I’m not here to design a service that makes people angry.
Facebook is driving and profiting from anger and outrage on a scale unprecedented in the history of the world. I think the horse has left the barn here, and Zuckerberg is outside carefully oiling the locked pins.
Zuckerberg talks brain debugging
Then, over time, you can use AI technology to extrapolate from what you see in high resolution of the tissue you remove from your body, and even with optical and physical issues, it now works fine and you can The limitations of what you can see in the body with a microscope You can use all this data generated in artificial intelligence to effectively see different cell interactions like no one has ever seen synapses, you know, neurons, like Fire, as it was in the brain’s synapses before, like in a living organism.
But I kind of think about my engineering, and my take on it is, if you don’t like stepping through code, how are you going to debug the system or help with it, yes, it’s like one line at a time, watching everything that’s going on. If you want to really understand what’s going on in the brain, you need to see it, right?
This view is one of many valid but non-overlapping authorities when it comes to understanding the brain. Obviously, psychologists and behaviorists focus on higher-level phenomena and don’t really care how many different types of neurons are involved. Others see action potentials and immediately interpret them as code because they are binary in nature (though they end up forming an analog system). It is a foregone conclusion that Zuckerberg will support this view.
The idea that the operation of the brain is a form of code and that it must be made understandable in order to be “debugged” is not necessarily detrimental, although it (like most mental models) is fundamentally reductive. But if, like many in the tech industry, people prematurely assert that they have figured out the system, it has the potential to cause harm. Some of the worst treatments for intelligence, consciousness, and perception and intellectual approaches to miscarriage come from people with little information but a big agenda.
Zuckerberg face
I mean…obviously, the Senate testimony wasn’t exactly the setting to highlight the humanity of the subject. I have no idea. If you’re on it for six or seven hours, you’ll make some meme-worthy faces.
Fair enough, but we’ve been watching and he’s been making that face almost all the time.
