The Hero License

Niels Bohr developed the modern understanding of the atom, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. His father, Christian Bohr, discovered the Bohr effect in hematology. His brother, Harald Bohr, was both a great mathematician in his own right, and one of Denmark’s top football players; he led the team to a silver medal in the Olympics, and “when he defended his doctoral thesis the audience was reported as having more football fans than mathematicians”. Niels’ son Aage Bohr won another Nobel Prize in Physics, his other son Ernest Bohr was another Olympic athlete, and his grandson Tomas Bohr was another physics professor.

Eliezer Yudkowsky sometimes talks about the idea of a Hero License - ie, most people don’t accomplish great things, because they don’t try to accomplish great things, because they don’t think of themselves as the kind of person who could accomplish great things. I don’t run for President, partly because I rationally conclude I won’t win, but partly because I’m not cool enough to be President and I know it. Presidents are some different species with whiter teeth and better smiles than me, and I couldn’t set out to become one any more than I could set out to become a dolphin.

My parents are both immigrants from Iraq and made their way to the states in the seventies. And that was really, a big part of my identity growing up was knowing in the wake of war after war, sanctions and 9/11—

The serendipity of my existence and my birth in the Bay Area and not Baghdad. And that really drove a lot of my early ambitions and is a driving force for me in terms of thinking about my north star of impact and also why I work as hard as I do just realising the chance that I have and that I can’t, uh, I can’t lose it.

In other words, each brain grows most where it’s already strongest. As Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University, memorably described it, “Added connections are therefore more like new buds on a branch rather than new branches.” Through this lens, learning looks a lot like building, little by little, on the unique patterns already there within you.