From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How do you train yourself to be intellectually curious?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

Start my 1-month free trial

How do you train yourself to be intellectually curious?

“

(upbeat music) - [Interviewer] How do you train yourself to be intellectually curious? - I think the first thing is be around other people who are intellectually curious. If you're around great people who are willing to push interesting questions and just engage in topics, it's infectious. It's just like people just kind of ask really interesting things. I just remember this one time, where I was in grad school, and there's kind of a question of, as a black hole spins does it actually warp the fabric of space? And it seems like well, is that an interesting question or not? But the analogy we always use for space-time is a sheet of plastic. And it's like there's a dip there if there's mass, like if there's a bowling ball kind of analogy if there's a black hole. So what if that black hole's spinning and the ball is spinning? Wouldn't it torque space? And so this turns out to actually be a really deep, hard question. And I remember just sitting around with a bunch of people one time when this kind of came up, and this was quite a while ago, and now people have a good set of answers to this problem, but I was like, huh. That's a really deep question. But the same time, do we have to go to a bunch of people who are really smart? I don't know. My kids ask all sorts of questions where I'm like, ah, the answer is maybe. (laughs) And I'm going to tell you why it's a maybe, and they're just like, oh god, here he goes again. But the part there that's fascinating is you realize, superficially the answer's easy. But you go two layers deep, there's all sorts of interesting caveats. The best data scientists have the ability to traverse a huge array of things, which also turns out to be true for almost all scientists. One moment they're working on biology, the next moment they're working on Feynman You're just like, what? How is this person working on this spectrum? And you realize like, oh, because they're intellectually curious. And they can go after so many different things. The thing you have to foster in this space, how do you train yourself to be intellectually curious? And how do you bring a whole set of different skills to bear, to find solutions to a problem. (upbeat music)

Contents