[AdamReed]

Fei Fei Li is one of the top three or four heroes who built the intellectual foundation for the ongoing “Deep Learning” revolution in Augmented Intelligence. She is also the author of the most spiritually inspiring non-fiction book ever: her autobiography. It is the first-person story of a radiantly selfish life of reason, purpose, and self-esteem.

Li grew up in Chengdu, at the time

. . . the Chengdu of my childhood was an ode to Soviet-style central planning, built on a series of concentric, ring-shaped roads, serving as a kind of municipal scaffolding extending in every direction toward the countryside. Growth was vertical as well, with buildings of uniform design but ever-rising heights, reaching farther and farther into balmy skies blanketed in near-constant fog… Architecture stretching from horizon to horizon celebrated density in scale but banality in spirit; . . . accented with rhythmic predictability by the bold reds of propaganda posters . . . 

Hers is the story of an immigrant who loves America for the right cause: because it was founded, not on accidents of history and geography, but on pride in Human Reason:

. . . the story of the founding of the country reminded me of what I loved most about physics. Here was another unlikely band of thinkers coming together to contribute a radical idea to the world well before its time. And in the case of Benjamin Franklin, himself a practicing scientist, the comparison was more than merely metaphorical.

Perhaps most important, I began to appreciate how uncannily the spirit of documents like the Bill of Rights echoed the phrases I heard my mother whisper in the months leading up to my father’s departure in 1989. These ideals, I began to realize, were why we’d done all this.

I could write more, but I will avoid spoilers by stopping here.

/sb

[AdamReed]

Re: Adam Reed’s post 103998 of 12/16/23

In Financial Times, 12/15/2023:

https://www.ft.com/content/d5f91c27-3be8-454a-bea5-bb8ff2a85488

“You have to be lonely to be a good scientist, because science as a profession is braving the unknown. You have to be lonely. You have to be scared. You have to see no one around you,” says Li. “And you could be wrong, but at least you have a fighting chance of discovering something great.”

*sb

[AdamReed]

Re: Adam Reed’s post 147794 of 12/17/23

I suspect that the quote, as printed in Financial Times, is not quite on target, because Li is not a native user of English. Perhaps in Chinese, “alone,” “lonely,” and “as an independent individual” are all the same word. So here is how I read it:

“You have to think alone to be a good scientist, because science as a profession is braving the unknown. You have to be independent. You have to be scared. You have to see no one around you. And you could be wrong, but at least you have a fighting chance of discovering something great.”

/sb

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