Thanks, I was more asking from your perspective.

I’m a working research biologist, and I’m genuinely curious how he became so well known among the hackernews slice of the public. He seems to have hit on some very effective combination of research interests and public communication strategy.

I suspected it was the Lex Fridman podcast appearances, but I wasn’t sure if that was how most people became aware of him.

I think it helps Levin is saying something very different. He’s also much more readable for a computer science crowd since his organizing principles are computation adjacent at least, though he, thankfully, isn’t a computational functionalist in the traditional sense.