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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Demis Hasabis has a really interesting and unusual CV for a nobel laureate [1], he started his career in AI game programming (he worked e.g. on Popoulous II, Syndicate, Theme Park for Bullfrog, and later for Lionhead Studios on Black & White) before doing a PhD in neuroscience, becoming an entrepreneur and starting DeepMind. I would say this is a refreshing and highly uncommon pick for a nobel prize, really cool to see that you don't have to be a university professor anymore to do this kind of impactful research.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis

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I'm always interested in hearing about these people who go and get a PhD in an unrelated field to their original studies, often years after leaving university and working in an industry. Here it says Hasabis did an undergraduate degree in a computer science program, and them spent a decade working on computer games at studios, and then somehow just rocked up to a university and asked to do a PhD in neuroscience.

I feel if I tried to do that in the US- (where I got a masters degree in engineering, spent a 15 yrs as an aerospace engineer,)- tried to go back and ask to do a PhD in, say, Physics - I'd be promptly told to go fuck myself (or, fuck myself but then enroll in a new undergrad or maaaybe graduate program only after re-taking GRE's. Straight PhD? Never heard it work like that.)

Aerospace engineering masters -> Physics PhD doesn't sound like a big leap to me. I don't think that's accurate.

I think PhD's are generally different enough in Europe vs the US that this might be less surprising upon further research

I have known a several people who made the jump from Computer Science to Biology at graduate school. Usually, it's either via genomics or neuroscience (as in Hassabis' case), where there is a large need for people who can do data crunching or computational modelling.

Why do you think that? It’s not my experience. At the grad school level they’ll take anyone who can do the work and is interested. Outside experience, even in unrelated fields, is often a plus. Grad students just out of undergrad have no idea how the world works.

That may be more true in a super crowded and hot area, like AI now where reputable profs get dozens of PhD applicants per position, who all have already published relevant works in the field at top venues during their masters.

In more chill fields where the waters are relatively calm, this may be less of an issue.

But let's also consider the fact that Hassabis did his undergrad at the University of Cambridge, likely with excellent results. He wasn't just some random programmer.

you assume likely with excellent results. perhaps his results weren't excellent?

likely because hassabis was a child prodigy. Was a chess master at 13. Lead Cambridge chess team. its not surmise to assume that demis had impeccable school record

Demis was a legend at Cambridge. I was in CS a few years below him. He would have had very strong recommendations from professors.

I made the jump from mostly-math undergrad to materials science PhD (close to chemistry/physics, if you don't know the field). I was welcomed with open arms.

If you've got any math-heavy STEM graduate degree, you can likely jump into a physics PhD. You might need to take some senior-level undergraduate courses to catch up, but the transition is quite doable. At some point, your overall intelligence, enthusiasm, and work ethic matter more than your specific background.

There is a lot of variation in how PhD studies work. In some places, you are just a faceless candidate applying to a department, which discourages you from contacting the faculty before you are admitted. In other places, you must convince a professor to supervise and fund you before you are even allowed to apply. Some universities require you (or your supervisor) pay tuition fees for a number of years before you can graduate, while others don't care what you do, as long as you can produce a thesis that meets their standards.

You can jump from social sciences to STEM. Your formal admission can wait for a year or two after you actually started. Or you can move to another university and get a PhD in a few months, because the administrative requirements in the original one were too unreasonable. These things happen, because universities are independent organizations that like doing things their own way.

PhD is a thankless, low paid position with insane hours and zero guaranteed return. Outside of a few elite programs and universities getting into PhD program is fairly easy - they take anyone qualified.

> tried to go back and ask to do a PhD in, say, Physics - I'd be promptly told to go fuck myself

Only if you need money.

If you pay the tuition they'll receive you with open arms.

I've seen this for a guy is his mid to late 30s.

As everything in the states, it's completely pay to play and largely pay to win.

doesn't beat that patent clerk guy

whose father was one of the leading local industrialists

(installing the first electric lighting for the 1885 Munich Oktoberfest)

It’s fascinating how the affluent backgrounds of many famous scientists and entrepreneurs are downplayed. Eg Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, etc

Bill Gates, but (according to the Isaacson book) not Elon Musk

I'm now curious which of Gates, Musk and Bezos families were wealthier when they started their respective careers...

I suspect Bezos, then Gates, then Musk, but it could be any order.

I would be very happy to be able to multiply my parents'/family's money by whatever factor Bezos, Gates or Musk have multiplied theirs.

The multiplier would be significantly different.

Think the Wright Brothers first aeroplane vs a rocket ship.

There were at least hundreds of thousands if not millions who had easier starts them Jeff Besos.

The mental exercise is to compare two identical Jeff Bezos' (identify his attributes), one has the background/funds they did, one doesn't.

Of course, that's not possible, so then you do the same with other highly intelligent and skilled tech professionals. I'd argue that without the funding and other resources, those skilled pro's won't get anywhere. But with it, some would do incredibly well. It's not common in a global sense, but we see it every single day.

Comparing Bezos to thousands/millions of randomised others is pointless.

Then you may say, oh but Amazon is unique. Yes, but then there are other factors at play. Like the luck (skill? funding?) to take advantage of a unique moment in time at the start of the web. That moment isn't available eveI mean, try to start an Amazon today ... etc

I think the question is not whether Bezos, or Gates, were helped by a reasonably wealthy family. The question is- was that wealth helpful because it allowed them to fully develop their own potential; or they have no merit at all and anybody with that wealth would have done the same?

I think those who point out the privileged start of these entrepreneurs are suggesting the second, and yet that makes no sense (millions had the same privilege and didn't get anywhere close).

Disagree. I'm not suggesting the person in question does not have potential or merit and that anyone can do it. It's just that the wealth of a family can pour rocket fuel on that person to enable them to reach their potential.

Yes, that's debatable in each case, everyone has a different story. But it's very likely.

You do get the counterfactual, the plucky upstart who came from nothing. But I'd wager big that that's much rarer and more difficult.

If you gave the $300,000 Bezos got from his father to 10,000 random Americans in 1994, none of them would have created a company the equivalent of Amazon's scale.

How many of those 10k would have the same background? We can pretend Bezos' dad raised him in a "normal" middle class background then randomly dropped 300K on him, or we can acknowledge he is the business equivalent of an Olympic athlete.

Bezos? Abandoned by his dad who was literally an alcoholic clown and raised by his mom and her 2nd husband Bezos?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Jorgensen

So $300K in 1994 is about $640K. That's nice but about 80th percentile of net worth. It's nice his parents believed in him. How many of your parents would do that for you? I'm sure at 1 in 5 of them have that kind of money because of the distribution here. So the difference here is He was smart, he got lucky, and your parents don't believe in you enough on this front.

But compare and contrast Bezos and Musk. Bezos's mid-life crisis is leaving his wife to run around on his yacht banging models. Musk's mid-life crisis is trying to destroy democracy so he and his mom won't have to pay US taxes. Neither one is a role model, but I don't even get the point of the latter.

Which brings us back to AlphaFold. The AlphaFold team did something amazing. But also, they had a backer that believed in them. David Baker, for better or worse, didn't achieve what they did and he'd been at it for decades. It's amazing what good backing can achieve.

I assumed the parent post was talking about his adopted father. The man who raised and dropped $250k on Bezos was Miguel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Bezos

Miguel worked at Exxon for 32 years as an engineer and a manager. It's not like he was the CEO or anything close to that. There would literally be hundreds of thousands of people in a similar position to him across the world.

Also worth noting that Jeff Bezos was(and I think still is) the youngest person who ever became a senior VP at DE Shaw. That is a position earned by merit alone.

I think you are agreeing with the poster you are responding to, right? Bezos is the equivalent of an Olympic athlete: a combination of innate talent as well as opportunity.

More or less. Money provides an environment where high achievement becomes possible, it isn't just start up funds.

10k random Americans, sure.

10k random Americans with backgrounds in software and a business idea? Not so clear.

You also seem very certain that Amazon's scale is a good thing, overall, which I remain unconvinced of.

> You also seem very certain that Amazon's scale is a good thing, overall, which I remain unconvinced of.

What do you find unconvincing about roughly 30 billion in net income and free cashflow in 2023?

That's one metric, that only reflects Amazon's function as an income generator.

I view businesses through other metrics as well, including their impact on society in a variety of different ways. From some of those perspectives, it is not clear to me that Amazon (where I was the 2nd employee) is a net benefit.

This Amazon the company specifically or online shopping in general? E.g. if Amazon hadn't been made and some other online retailer had dominated (or even if there had been many!)

Both.

That may be true, but I don't think that's really the crux of the argument. This article talks about how Amazon was initially funded by Bezos' family members: https://luxurylaunches.com/celebrities/jeff-bezos-parents-in.... The bigger point is that relatively very few parents (like a couple percent maybe?) would be in a position to give their kid $250k to start a new venture, and it's not that surprising that the most financially successful people in the world needed both: intrinsic talent and drive, and a huge amount of support from their birth circumstances.

The way I like to put it is that both of the following are true:

1. Bezos is uniquely talented and driven, and his success depended on that

2. Bezos' success also depended on him having an uncommon level of access to capital at a young age.

The reason I like to say "both of these are true" is that so often today I see "sides" that try to argue that only one is true, e.g. libertarian-leaning folks (especially in the US) arguing that everything is a pure meritocracy, and on the other side that these phenomenally successful people just inherited their situation (e.g. "Elon Musk is only successful because his dad owned an emerald mine")

Because having some degree of runway is almost always necessary but never sufficient. Thousands of Americans receive similar amounts of money from their parents in the form of inheritance of the family home and other major assets. Only one took windfall of that size and created Amazon.

The "necessary, but not sufficient" is unintuitive to most people. Billionaires who come from working class families are almost unheard of, but probably more than half the self made (for a definition, something like multiplied familial investments by at least 100x maybe?) billionaires come from upper middle class families.

I wonder if they are actually more likely to come from upper middle class (where parents are highly paid professionals) than the proper idle rich or even CEOs and company founders...

Yes... Like Taylor Swift

To my mind, Joe Rogan is the most recent embodiment of the American dream which is why I think he is so popular

> To my mind, Joe Rogan is the most recent embodiment of the American dream

Look how that turned out...

Maybe the dream is more like a nightmare.

There’s another side to this: if you accept the idea of “nature” — genes capable of carrying “talent” (in some sense) — it should be common for children of talented people to be talented.

Of course, talent doesn’t always mean prosperity. But in a society modeled on meritocracy, it often will.

hypothesis : it's not per se affluence. it's the culture of the family and social circle. A dollop of $ to have some free time and maybe buy some books would help and might be necessary.

imagine a family where youngster is encouraged to work on intellectual problems. where you aren't made fun of for touching nerdy things. or for doing puzzles. where the social circle endorses learning. these things more important than $ in a first world economy. (if third world, yes give me some money please for a book or even just food. and hopefully with time, an internet connected device then the cream will rise they can just watch feynman on YouTube...)

that said, it's "better" than it used to be. hundreds of years ago most interesting science, etc. was done by the royal class. not because they are smarter (I assume). But they had free time. And, social encouragement perhaps too.

bill gates and zuck dropped out of Harvard right? it's not per se Harvard, at least not the graduating bit? being surrounded by other smart people is helpful -- and or people who encourage intellectual endeavors.

> hundreds of years ago most interesting science, etc. was done by the royal class

Not really true. Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Mendel, Faraday, Tesla... Not from royals, nor from high nobility. Many great scientists were born to merchant families, of a level that wasn't even all too rare.

About Warren Buffett, I was surprised to see his name here. Wiki tells me that his father, Howard Buffett, was:

    > four-term Republican United States Representative for the state of Nebraska

To me, that doesn't sound super impressive. Also:

    > After failing to secure a job in the family grocery business, he started a small stock brokerage firm.

Ok, that sounds less impressive. Further:

    > During his first term, when congressional salary was raised from $10,000

Oh wait. That is real money. 10k USD in 1943 is 180k today. Surely upper middle class by any measure.

The patent clerk guy was almost done with his PhD when he became a patent clerk. Not quite comparable.

Uh. Demis finished his PhD...

Are we talking about Einstein? If I remember correctly, according to Walter Isaacson, Einstein managed to get so many good papers out not despite, but because he was not working for an university. It gave him more freedom to reject existing ideas. Also the years I can find on Wikipedia do not seem to support your claim. He started as a clerk in 1903, and had his miracle year and submitted his PhD dissertation in 1905.

From what I've read, he explicitly sought a position that would give him time to work on his physics ideas. Whether he would or not would have achieved the same working for a university is merely his opinion. In particular, it was not the case that he was working for one, and found it to be incompatible with his research vision, and left academia to become a patent clerk.

He began his work on the PhD prior to 1903.

Nobody defeats the patent clerk guy. I love to cite this article that argues he could credibly have been awarded anywhere from 5 to 7 Nobel prizes. https://www.quora.com/How-many-Nobel-prizes-should-Einstein-...

Didn't know he worked on Black & White. Black & White was really ahead of it's time for 2001, it did a much better job of having NPC simulations in groups based on how you played as a god.

don't forget that he was IM 2300 rated chess player at 13 yo

Maybe Ken Rogoff should get the Economics prize :)

Yep. I distinctly remember reading an interview in the German GameStar magazine in '99 or something with him where he talks about his early work with Bullfrog. Over the years I read his name from time to time as he moved towards research. Pretty amazing career.

Yes but he could have been one... He really took to AI and reignited the fire that melted the AI winter.

Syndicate - wow. That brings back memories!

I could never get it working on DosBox (some timing issue). Haven't tried in over a decade, though. Should see if I can get it working.

The infinite polygons are Nobel worth..

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