An FYI that does not address the substance of Eliezer’s post:
This woman was telling you the Norse creation myth, which is definitely one of the stranger ones I’ve heard: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/creation.html. As a story, it lacks the rudimentary narrative cohesiveness most of us expect, having been exposed since childhood to the Christian “first there was light” story, which proceeds in a rather more linear manner. On the other hand, Norse myth is the basis of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, whereas the Christian myth has been responsible mainly for lots of paintings of Adam and Eve looking coyly at each other.
Scott wrote “Seriously, I constantly meet people who ask me questions like: ‘could quantum algorithms have implications for biomechanical systems?’ Or ‘could neural nets provide insight to the P versus NP problem?’ And I struggle to get across to them what you’ve articulated so clearly here: that part of being a successful researcher is figuring out what isn’t related to what else.”
But another part is looking at things from a different perspective—sometimes, a researcher might ask herself a question such as: “What would it be like if biomechanical systems were governed by quantum algorithms?” Not because she thinks these things really must be related, but because anything that provides a new angle has the potential to spark a creative solution or insight.