A BEAUTIFUL
MIND
device more instantaneous, personalized and melded with our
mind than a smartphone, one that
would elevate conversations by
allowing user to more easily research and surface facts during a
discussion. No more messy speculation or faulty memories.
“We’ve stopped thinking. We’ve
really stopped thinking,” he says.
“We don’t look at problems logically, we look at them emotionally.
We look at them through the guts.
We look at them as if we’re doing
a high school problem, like what is
beautiful, what makes me recognized among my peers. We don’t
go and think about things. We as
a society don’t wish to engage in
rational thought.”
Thrun blames the sorry state
of our minds on an education
system that raises students “like
robots” and trains them to “follow rules.” Thrun’s pedagogy, at
Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and
now Udacity, leans heavily on
learning by doing. He advises that
I take up snowboarding so I can
understand the laws of motion by
living them rather than memorizing them in a classroom.
Thrun also believes that connectivity is fundamental to learning. It’s through interactions with
HUFFINGTON
8.19.12
“We as a society
don’t wish
to engage in
rational
thought.”
as many good minds as possible
that good ideas take hold.
Conversations with people
like Dean Kamen, Elon Musk and
Google’s co-founders are crucial to
Thrun’s problem solving process.
He listens, debates and tests ideas
out on people to see how they react. Being around Page and Brin
makes Thrun feel “stupid,” like “a
schoolboy,” and he says he can’t
get enough of it.
“For me these are the high
points of my life: When I go in
and somebody just shows me how
dumb I am and how little I know.
That’s what I live for. Just to learn
something new,” he says.
On a recent afternoon, Thrun is
at Udacity’s headquarters in Palo
Alto, just blocks from Stanford’s
campus, rallying the troops. He has
called an all-hands meeting and
the company’s 30-odd employees,