Transcript
Introduction
"There is value in rethinking Claude Shannon, but not in the way we'd imagine. Consider him not only as a distant forefather of the digital era but as one of the great creative generalist of the 20th century, not solely as someone who laid the foundation of the information age but as someone who trained a powerful intellect on topics of deep interest and continue to do so beyond the point of short-term practicality. What can we learn from that Claude Shannon? For one thing, Shannon's body of work is a useful corrective to our era of unprecedented specialization. His work is wide ranging in the best sense and perhaps more than any 20th Century intellect of comparable stature, he resists easy categorization.
Was he a mathematician? Yes. Was he an engineer? Yes. Was he a juggler, unicyclist, machinist, futurist, and gambler? Yes. Shannon never acknowledged the contradictions in his fields of interest. He simply went wherever his curiosity led him. So it was entirely consistent for him to jump from information theory to artificial intelligence, to chess, to juggling, to gambling. It simply didn't occur to him that investing his talents in a single field made any sense at all. There were links from field to field, of course, and it goes without saying that Shannon understood the bridges between his work and information theory and his work on robotics and investing and computer chess. Few have had a better intuitive sense of how the information revolution would fundamentally alter our world in all its aspects. But that sense led Shannon to choose exploration rather than specialization. This indifference to seeming contradictions extended to the way he lived his life. He had the options of worldwide fame, yet he preferred to remain largely anonymous."
"He wrote pathbreaking papers, then unsatisfied with their present state, postponed them indefinitely in favor of more pressing curiosities. He made himself wealthy by studying markets and the potential start-ups, yet he lived with conspicuous modesty. He reached the heights of the ivory tower with all the laurels and professional chairs to prove it, but felt no shame playing games built for children and writing poems on juggling. He was passionately curious, but also at times unapologetically lazy. He was among the most productive, honored minds of his era, and yet he gave the appearance that he would chuck it all overboard for the chance to tinker in his gadget room."
Okay, so that's an excerpt from the book. And probably the best few paragraph summary I found of the life of Claude Shannon, but that comes from the book that I read this week and the one I'm going to talk to you about today, which is a Mind At Play, how Claude Shannon invented the information age, and it was written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. So let me go ahead and jump into the book. I don't want to waste any more time. I want to connect this book to the ones -- the series have been doing, going back to Founders #88, which started with the Warren Buffett Shareholder Letters, right? So last week -- or 2 weeks ago, I talked about Ed Thorp. The week before that, I talked about Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp working together. So anything I've covered in the past podcast, I'm going to try not to cover here, okay? But I do want to link this one where when this book came out because his book -- this is different than -- usually, I do fairly older books. This is a relatively new book. I think it was published in 2017.