Michael Nielsen
Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.
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What they believe
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Poincare missed special relativity because he knew too much: the leading physicists of the day were prisoners of their own expertise.
his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.
youtube.comSaid 7 Apr 2026This on korrents
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Their words
So how do people come to believe? Tanya M. Luhrmann has written a beautiful book exploring this question, "How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others".
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Lovedrcmnd.app
How Buildings LearnTheir words
One of my favourite examples is this image of Stewart Brand inside the shipping container where he wrote his marvellous book "How Buildings Learn":
7 April
From one piece Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us 15 beliefs · youtube.com
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Their words
we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.
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if somebody, you know, is standing behind the dessert table and is replenishing, restocking the desserts and keeps kind of you know, adding adding new ones in, it may turn out that you know, a little bit later a much better desserts appear.
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And this looks to me like, oh, we're down at sort of the bottom of the tech tree. We've barely gotten started there.
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Ideas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.
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People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.
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So certainly one thing that a lot of them seem to be bottlenecked on is now having interesting ideas and in particular having interesting design ideas.
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And so you sort of you've you've pursued very similar ideas. It's been very successful in one case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think I mean a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do. And you actually need to do both.
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Their words
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
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And I think the like the third and the most interesting possibility is no, that like they're they're a new type of object in some in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as as explanations, but where in the past we haven't had the ability to really do anything with them.
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if you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years, uh evolution just starts to look like a nonstarter.
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and in some sense Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was uh to to to biology.
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the point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the the previous processes and and and heuristics don't apply. Right? Like that's almost sort of definitionally what causes the bottlenecks.
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And like, this idea that people have that that that Newton was um sort of the the first modern scientist is is somehow wrong. He I mean, it's there's some truth to it, but he really had this very different way um of of looking at the world that was part sort of superstitious um and part modern. It was a funny hybrid.
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And so, you have what seem like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas.
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his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.
13 July 2025
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DominionTheir words
A nice example: Tom Holland's book "Dominion" about the way the Gospels' valorization of kindness-toward-the-other transformed how people thought of success and the good life.
20 May 2025
1 December 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Transparent SocietyTheir words
David Brin has written an insightful book about "The Transparent Society".
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Likedrcmnd.app
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityTheir words
A good introduction to the topic may be found in Toby Ord's book "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity" (2020).
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Likedrcmnd.app
What Technology WantsTheir words
This viewpoint has been explored by many; a nice exploration is Kevin Kelly's book "What Technology Wants".
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Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 26 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Poincare missed special relativity because he knew too much: the leading physicists of the day were prisoners of their own expertise.
his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
What made the new astronomy compelling was neither accuracy nor simplicity but that one set of ideas explained three disconnected phenomena at once.
And so, you have what seem like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
The idea that Newton was the first modern scientist is wrong: he was a transitional hybrid, part superstitious and part modern.
And like, this idea that people have that that that Newton was um sort of the the first modern scientist is is somehow wrong. He I mean, it's there's some truth to it, but he really had this very different way um of of looking at the world that was part sort of superstitious um and part modern. It was a funny hybrid.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
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Science always bottlenecks precisely where the heuristics that worked before stop applying, which is definitionally what makes something a bottleneck.
the point is that where we always get bottlenecked is where the the previous processes and and and heuristics don't apply. Right? Like that's almost sort of definitionally what causes the bottlenecks.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Darwin's genius was not having the idea of selection, which animal breeders already had, but seeing how central it was to the whole of biology.
and in some sense Darwin's genius wasn't in having that idea. It was understanding just how central it was uh to to to biology.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Evolution was not a thinkable theory before deep time: without hundreds of millions of years it simply looks like a nonstarter.
if you don't have at least sort of tens or hundreds of millions of years, uh evolution just starts to look like a nonstarter.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
A trained model is a new kind of object that should be taken seriously as an explanation, once we work out the operations to perform on it.
And I think the like the third and the most interesting possibility is no, that like they're they're a new type of object in some in some sense. They should be taken very seriously as as explanations, but where in the past we haven't had the ability to really do anything with them.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
A theory gets abandoned when the old explanation becomes visibly insufficient: special relativity made Newtonian gravity's action at a distance impossible, and that was the forcing function.
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Anomalies cannot be sorted in advance: the same move that found Neptune failed completely for Mercury, so a field has to pursue both answers at once.
And so you sort of you've you've pursued very similar ideas. It's been very successful in one case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think I mean a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do. And you actually need to do both.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
AI has moved the programmer's bottleneck from writing code to having good design ideas, and there is no verification loop for a design idea.
So certainly one thing that a lot of them seem to be bottlenecked on is now having interesting ideas and in particular having interesting design ideas.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
A theory of everything would not finish physics: Turing and Church laid down computation's theory of everything in the 1930s and we have spent ninety years exploring the consequences.
People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Very deep principles lie hidden inside theories we already have: public key cryptography was already implicit in the 1930s theory of computation.
Ideas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
We are near the bottom of the tech tree, not the top; even the list of phases of matter keeps growing and we are starting to design new ones.
And this looks to me like, oh, we're down at sort of the bottom of the tech tree. We've barely gotten started there.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Diminishing returns in science is a snapshot illusion: somebody keeps restocking the table, and new fields make progress easy again.
if somebody, you know, is standing behind the dessert table and is replenishing, restocking the desserts and keeps kind of you know, adding adding new ones in, it may turn out that you know, a little bit later a much better desserts appear.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Biology has already handed us an alien library: hundreds of millions of protein machines we do not understand and can only study one at a time.
we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Comparative advantage stops governing once the power imbalance is large enough: groups then switch into seeking to dominate instead of trading.
and part of it is just power, I think. Like, once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, um, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Most of the tech tree will never be explored by anyone at all, which is exactly why the choice of which direction to explore matters so much.
Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Technological determinism is only believable low down the tech tree; higher up we already choose which paths not to take.
I'm willing to buy it sort of low enough down when, you know, progress is relatively simple, um, but but higher up you start to get to shape the way in which you you do the exploration and it's interesting, you know, people we are starting to shape it in in in interesting ways.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Diminishing returns in research are not intrinsic to the world: they are what you get when the institutions around research stop changing.
If you're not changing it, if there's some kind of stagnation there, if you're not changing those external sort of circumstances, yes, like you may start to get sort of diminishing returns again. But that doesn't mean there's anything intrinsic about the situation.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Quantum computing arrived in the 1980s not because anyone got smarter but because cheap personal computers and the ability to trap single ions happened to mature at the same moment.
So you kind of got these two separate things that just for historically contingent reasons had both sort of matured around sort of let's say 1980 or so.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
No single person can understand a result like the Higgs boson in depth, and that is what a paper with a thousand authors actually means.
and I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas but they don't understand sort of everything in in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these, you know, papers with with well over a thousand authors.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Creative work splits into routine work you should get fast at and high-variance work you must be willing to spend a long time on, and almost everyone is good at only one of the two.
there's sort of there's two types of work that tends to be involved in any kind of creative project. There's routine stuff and there you just want to avoid procrastination. You just want to like, you know, how do I get good at this or how do I outsource it and how do I do it as rapidly as possible? Um and just avoid you know, like getting into a situation where you're prolonging it. Um, and then there's high variance stuff where you actually you need to be willing to to you know take a lot of time.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Ask anyone whether they would have worked the same way with a million dollars at stake and the answer is invariably no: they tried, but they did not really try.
if a million dollars had been at stake, like would you have put the same effort in? And the answer is no. Um sort of invariably. Um like they've tried, but they haven't really tried.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
Being stuck is not an obstacle to understanding something; it is probably the most important part of the whole process.
I mean funnily enough I mean spending time stuck is incredibly important. Um and and I sort of you know, I that used to just be annoying. Now it seems like oh, this is actually um uh uh maybe even the most important part of the whole process.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
You learn almost nothing from writing you finished in a couple of days; the pieces that took months are the ones you still remember years later.
I've written sometimes 10,000 word essays in you know, a couple of days and I've written them in you know, 3 months or 6 months. Uh I I feel like I did I I didn't learn very much from the ones that that that only took a couple of days.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
For a certain kind of mind there is a seductiveness in learning a system that gets mistaken for understanding.
for a certain type of mind, there is a seductiveness in in just just learning systems and confusing that with with with understanding.
Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us Said 7 Apr 2026
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 6 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Loved How Buildings Learn
One of my favourite examples is this image of Stewart Brand inside the shipping container where he wrote his marvellous book "How Buildings Learn":
michaelnotebook.com 8 May 2026
Loved How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others
So how do people come to believe? Tanya M. Luhrmann has written a beautiful book exploring this question, "How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others".
michaelnotebook.com 8 May 2026
What others say about How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others →
Liked Dominion
A nice example: Tom Holland's book "Dominion" about the way the Gospels' valorization of kindness-toward-the-other transformed how people thought of success and the good life.
michaelnotebook.com 13 Jul 2025
Show 3 more
Liked What Technology Wants
This viewpoint has been explored by many; a nice exploration is Kevin Kelly's book "What Technology Wants".
michaelnotebook.com 1 Dec 2024
Liked The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
A good introduction to the topic may be found in Toby Ord's book "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity" (2020).
michaelnotebook.com 1 Dec 2024
What others say about The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity →
Liked The Transparent Society
David Brin has written an insightful book about "The Transparent Society".
michaelnotebook.com 1 Dec 2024
Where they publish
Site Michael Nielsen's notebook His current notebook: essays and working notes.
Where his writing lives now; michaelnielsen.org, the address korrents cites, no longer serves the essays.
Link verified 20 Sept 2026.
x.com @michael_nielsen Their X account.
Recent
Link verified 23 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
GitHub @mnielsen Their code.
Recent
- nnadl_site — Web site for book on "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" 20 May 2025
- neural-networks-and-deep-learning — Code samples for my book "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" 2 Jun 2024
- tiddlylisp — A toy Lisp interpreter and simple eval function 3 Jun 2023
Show 14 more
- notes-on-writing — Notes on writing 22 Feb 2022
- cognitivemedium — Repo for cognitivemedium.com 23 Jul 2021
- VSM — Toy Python program illustrating the vector space model of documents 4 Jan 2020
- The-Fermionic-canonical-commutation-relations-and-the-Jordan-Wigner-transform 6 Feb 2018
- rmnist — Some examples trained on very reduced versions of the MNIST training set 27 Nov 2017
- magic_paper — Experiments in an explorable visual medium for mathematics 3 Nov 2017
- mini_qa — Toy question answering program. Aimed at "Who ....?" questions, e.g., "Who invented the C programming language?" 8 Jan 2017
- Pregel — Toy single-machine implementation of the Pregel graph-based framework 5 Jan 2017
- notes — Rough working notes on a variety of subjects 3 Dec 2015
- experiments 16 Jun 2014
- nnlsv — Paper by @colah and @mnielsen on visualizing the behaviour of large numbers of neural nets 29 Dec 2013
- notes-on-neural-networks — Rough working notes on neural networks 12 Dec 2013
- digital-money — My notes on digital money 6 Nov 2013
- notes-on-collective-intelligence 5 Jun 2013
Link verified 23 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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