Peter Attia· MD
but you can't come up with alternate rule sets if you don't have the basic substrates the basic building blocks so I look at an undergraduate degree or even a high school degree and an undergraduate degree as developing the raw materials from which to then start re-sampling those raw materials which is the PHD into hopefully what is truly novel but many phds are truly novel but not terribly impactful for their field most phds in fact and most postdocs it's like your attempt to do it again to show I can do it twice that's basically it then you get your own laboratory and there are some Labs that survive very well by just kind of turning a crank and doing the same thing over and over again the the fundamental discoveries come from people really taking risk so I think in the social media space there are a couple of different issues here one is do people need to have a formal rigorous education in something I would say yes but we need to put air quotes around formal you look at a guy like Rick Rubin I don't know what Rick's undergraduate education was in but I doubt it was in music producing um but his formal rigorous education is in the real world of producing music right but again I think if we limit this to science it gets more complicated so in that case I think I would hope that the young person out there or even older person out there who really wants to get good at science and scientific thinking put themselves through the heart filter that is a formal rigorous education in that thing that the beauty of looking at things through the lens of biology or through the lens of Science and experimentation is that really it is Essence your goal is to falsify your own what you think are best right and then this gets to the complete other end of the spectrum so that the listener doesn't assume for a moment we're just sitting here being elitist saying you shouldn't be the ones talking about science if you don't have a background I'm going to bring it right back to Ben's comment to you when he had his Epiphany which is the medical profession doesn't know that much well exactly and I think that you know I can't speak for Ben but I do remember most of what he said um to me anyway and it's very clear that scientific literacy in the general public does not require a formal education in science if you I think it was Max delbrook that said assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence I think about that all the time I believe that people are curious and that if you give them the raw materials to understand what you're about to tell them they can understand pretty much everything I know there's the whole Feynman quote of you know if you can't explain it to a six-year-old then you don't really understand it that's true I also think that you can take adults or younger people and educate them you give them a minimum of nomenclature and you emphasize that the nomenclature isn't really the point right we call it prefrontal cortex we could have