“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.
“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”
You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)
This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.
But let’s talk persuasion.
My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.
We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.
For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”
Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.
You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.
Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.
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