Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you're reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.

I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.

It's actually kind of weird that we can comprehend the law of gravity, or that we can understand quantum mechanics, enough at least to make computers.

Maybe we'll understand more about how the universe came to be, and what forces drove it in the early days and which forces drive it now.

There are many things that we still don't understand about the universe, right? Einstein struggled to bring quantum mechanics and gravity together and never succeeded, and that's a problem that to this day is not well understood. Well, maybe to comprehend some of these things, we need to augment our intelligence. If we do, who knows?

If you think backwards from a big problem, and you talk to all these other people who have skills and who think forward from their skills, it's very easy to form collaborations because everyone is incentivized to work together.

We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.