David Burke - Quantum Country interview - 2019-06-25

“Fallen warrior” user

Synthesis and highlights

David’s actually in our target audience, probably. His theory of mind is relatively more sophisticated. Working quickly at the moment, so see bolded quotes in raw notes below for more.

Prep notes

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• card quartiles: 3 / 4 / 6 / 7 / 7
• studying reliably, 11 sessions, stopped a few weeks ago

Raw notes

• Why?
  • Works for Galois as a “principal scientist”
  • “CS research services”, gov’t
  • “trustworthiness and critical systems”
  • “seems like a fascinating subject”
  • trend-oriented, vocational
  • Forgot how he found it
• “I have a few books on QC I’ve looked at in spare time, but what I liked about this the most was the attitude in which you’d put it together, which I found sometimes almost funny.”
  • “It’s OK if you cheat” … again
  • tiring to project technical competence all the time
  • “it was short circuiting that”
  • bobby Fischer? teaches chess
  • implicit learning
  • “this is the closest I’ve come to engaging with some material and feeling that way” “it should feel more or less painless”
• “I should be ready for a question…” … John Preskill
  • saw the name and expected a question
  • “that’s sort of idiosyncratic”
• first set of questions
  • “they’re playing really fair”
  • as opposed to normal books, which may have expert fallacy
  • “I had very much a sense of agency and capability that made it much easy to … oh I’m just going to keep going … if they’re just going to remind me of things I learned in a fairly painless way…”
  • likes that it happened early “I should be reasonably successful … you can’t go that far wrong”
  • “it was confidence-building”
  • vs. a show-off academic text
  • “it felt welcoming”
  • “I wonder how long this is?”
  • it was longer than I thought
  • wishes there were a marker
• was interrupted by something he had to do as opposed to running out of steam
  • wasn’t trudging through
• goals
  • has colleague doing verification of quantum circuits
  • “this is going to … I honestly think that Galois will (partially as a result of this)… “
    • I’ve sent an email around to colleagues … we oughta consider putting together a reading group
  • had a visiting seminarian trying to explain “canonical matrices”
  • “Wow, I actually followed that for 45 or 50 minutes because the matrices looked familiar”
  • “… following things via rote learning means you have hooks to hang xxx on”
  • “you run into concepts over and over again; someone has packaged this up into a notation; I’ve seen this many times; I’ve conceptually reduced this to a chunk that I know. So I see that going through something like this gives me familiarity with the chunks of material that will enable me to … larger and deeper concepts when I’m … later”
    • can use shorthand with chunks
    • “It affords interactions at a more effective level of abstraction”
  • “if you’ve known them and seen them and you’re old friends with them, it makes a big difference when you’re trying to read papers later”
• feeling retention gain
  • “I was expecting “… elaborative encoding
  • worried about syntactic memorization
  • “the helpful graph at the end about length of retention” … “I loved all of that”
• why’d you stop?
  • “I had two paper deadlines”
  • “When i would check my phone and see that it was time for a review, I was actually excited!”
  • backing off…
  • maybe don’t back off!
  • “we miss you!”
  • if the second essay had been up he’d have read it
• “This is a fantastic service. It is by far the best way that I could imagine being introduced to this material.”
  • after the third essay … might even feel up for reading Mike & Ike!
  • “It’s been a huge benefit to me personally and I think to our organization”