Robbie Tilleard

GM, EMEA @ Lorikeet | Tech laborer. Think too much about work | Behavioral Science too

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

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[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Wondering when @lennysan is going to release his buying guide for toddlers…

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@finmoorhouse Had a lot of fun making these a while ago

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Modern Marco Ricci #11

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Me every day

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@nathanbenaich @raais Could be cool to get Kalbir Sohi to speak about how HMG is thinking about adopting AI at scale: https://t.co/Kkuybgo1gX

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

My current favourite prompt for writing better one pages is - unironically - "write it like a civil service memo"

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

2000s era management consultant paranoia-based training on reading emails 4 times before sending and ensuring all footnotes and numbers are 100% correct have actually made them for the AI era

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@lukeharries Are we … back?

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Wonder if @AnthropicAI’s Mythos is so powerful it’s able to know that 21 April, 2026 is a Tuesday and not a Wednesday

Then we’ll know they’re cooking

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@mattyglesias Get closer

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Hey @grok how can I execute the ultimate hedge and go long on the Amish

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@matiii Love how the enterprise and dev motion work together - great work

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

99.5% active on AI tools in the whole org is OK

100% of whole org hitting rate limits and admin having to re-up credits is AI native

[Geoff Charles @geoffintech]

https://t.co/CaKyQS1Fl4

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@nathanbenaich Wait where?

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@mkobach Ask people who’ve interviewed with @thenanyu

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@soundboy Highgate patriot

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@scmallaby Once you live near Hampstead Heath, can you live anywhere else?

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Enjoying @dwarkesh_sp working his way through Australia’s (often expat) public intellectuals

Surely @PeterSinger must be next given his influence on effective altruism and its importance in the AI community!

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Really enjoyed chatting with @michael_nielsen about how we recognize scientific progress.

It's especially relevant for closing the RL verification loop for scientific discovery.

But it's also a surprisingly mysterious and elusive question when you look at the history of human science.

We approach this question stories like Einstein (who claimed that he hadn't even heard of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which is supposed to have motivated special relativity, until after he had come up with the theory), Darwin (why did it take till 1859 to lay out an idea whose essence every farmer since antiquity must have observed?), Prout (how do you recognize that isotopes exist if you cannot chemically separate them?), and many others.

The verification loop on scientific ideas is often extremely long and weirdly hostile. Ancient Athenians dismissed Aristarchus's heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC because it would imply that the stars should shift in the sky as the Earth orbits the sun. The first successful measurement of stellar parallax was in 1838. That's a 2,000-year verification loop.

But clearly human science is able to make progress faster than raw experimental falsification/verification would imply, and in cases where experiments are very ambiguous. How?

Michael has some very deep and provocative hypotheses about the nature of progress. One I found especially thought-provoking is that aliens will likely have a VERY different science + tech stack than us. Which contradicts the common sense picture of a linear tech tree that I was assuming. And has some interesting implications about how future civilizations might trade and cooperate with each other.

So many other interesting ideas. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

0:00:00 – How scientific progress outpaces its verification loops
0:17:51 – Newton was the last of the magicians
0:23:26 – Why wasn’t natural selection obvious much earlier?
0:29:52 – Could gradient descent have discovered general relativity?
0:50:54 – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us
1:15:26 – Are there infinitely many deep scientific principles left to discover?
1:26:25 – What drew Michael to quantum computing so early?
1:35:29 – Does science need a new way to assign credit?
1:43:57 – Prolificness versus depth
1:49:17 – What it takes to actually internalize what you learn

Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

Most great PMs would ask a series of questions to hunt down user motivation and importance. They may have some initial conviction but willing to follow data / users alongside overall Linear principles.

Whilst it’s not hard to get Claude and others to do this, they don’t out of the box…

The best designers and eng tend to ask the best questions (often better than PMs) so agree :)

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@gabhubert @spolu @Wing_VC Great work @gabhubert and Dust team

[Robbie Tilleard @rtilleard]

@steveruizok I see what you snuck in there