Mastery and Autonomy – Kompetenz und Autonomie
Mastery and Autonomy (German version below) After a rather long article on my experiences at the Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, I wanted to make a shorter comment on something from the AI space that has been bugging me lately. I recently watched an episode of Jon Olivers Last Week Tonight where Mikey Shulman, Co-founder and CEO of AI music maker Suno was quoted saying: “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of the people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” And of course, it’s easy to just laugh at a statement like this. It just sounds ridiculous, why wouldn’t people enjoy making music? I mean, let’s face it: If…
An astounding lack of vision
My take on the 74th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Chemistry. The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. A name that carries some depth, that elicits the raising of an eyebrow. You? There? Really. Huh. Well, I was lucky enough to be selected by the Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung for this honor. But I don’t want to dwell on the selection process, complicated and convoluted and probably unfair that it is. I want to highlight the expectations I had: Nobel Laureates and some of the most talented and highly achieving young scientists in the world. What a meeting that must be! What inspiring thoughts they all might share, what insightful questions they all might ask. And me in the middle, how can I possibly keep pace? Now, in retrospect, I can say: There was some of that. I met some great people and had some great discussions – for example with Derek from Veritasium, someone…
The start of a Blog
Let’s embark together! (German version below) I would like to tell you why I am writing this blog, what I want to achieve with it. But first of all, a general info: Some of these blog entries will be in German, some in English, most of them hopefully in both languages. I translate everything myself and do not use AI for this, so there will likely be small differences in language to keep the reading flow high. So, why a blog? Here, I will share ideas, thoughts and perspectives on what is going on in the world of chemistry. I will also likely comment on political subjects. But foremost, I will speak about one of my favorite subjects: Experiential Education. I’ll try to define it quickly here: Planning a venture that has the risk of failure and reflecting upon the experience. This takes us out of the comfort zone –…