Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin. So I think today we’re going to somehow turn a difference in our learning styles into our conversation. I’m not sure how that’s going to work as a topic, but so I guess I identify as more of a “heterodidact”. That's a word I just made up to contrast with autodidact. An autodidact is somebody who can teach themselves stuff. So you’re like that. So how do you do that?

Robin:

I guess I just tried. So, if you have strong teachers, and teachers who pay close attention to you, and are willing to give you a lot of attention, time and advice, then you can be taught as you were in terms of being brought into a community and trained by someone who sort of corrects you as you make mistakes and engages you to show you how to do things. And if you don’t have someone like that, then you have to make it all up.

Agnes:

That seems like a poor causal story. Because when you say if I don’t have someone like that, like my first year of college, I went to every office hour of every professor that I had.

Robin:

Yeah. That’s very unusual.

Agnes:

Yeah. So I was going to make someone be willing to give me attention by just like constantly putting myself in their face. So it’s more like – the way I see it is more like, well, if you somehow have this magical ability to teach yourself stuff, which I still don’t get how it works, then I guess you just go off and do that. But if you’re like me, you’re sort of desperate and you do whatever it takes to make people give you attention. But it’s not like – it’s not like somehow easy to get people to give you attention. You got to like work hard for it.

Robin:

So maybe you’re right that we each have a different personality that fits with how we do this. I remember in junior high school, I had an English teacher, who, instead of having me be in the class with the other English students, chose to send me off to the library every day during his English class.

Agnes:

Are you serious?

Robin:

Really. And he said, "Just write." And at the end of every day, he would give me some comments on what I had written. And that was the entirety of my English class. And that worked very well for me.

Agnes:

That just seems like the saddest thing in the whole world. So you were just sitting there by yourself in the library?

Robin:

Yes, in a little cubicle, actually a separate little cubicle where I couldn’t even see anybody from inside the cubicle. And my task was to just write.

Agnes:

And you didn’t do any books, like, you didn’t…

Robin:

Right. No, no, I was just, just think and write.

Agnes:

Just whatever is on the top of your head.

Robin:

Exactly. And that worked very well for me.

Agnes:

But you were happy about that, you were fine with that.

Robin:

Yes. Right. Because apparently, they could see that I was not working very well in English class.

Agnes:

What were you doing in the class?

Robin:

I don’t remember. But you know, they judged that I was just not fitting with the rest of the class curriculum, and that I would just do better by sitting and writing. And then this teacher might I believe was right.

Agnes:

And like, you didn’t just – you didn’t… how is it that you didn’t get bored and lonely, like you had a continuous stream of thoughts to just put onto paper without any need for…

Robin:

Well, it was the learning to do that mapping from the thoughts in your head onto paper. And of course, initially, it was hard. But that was the practice, like what – all you’re doing is sitting there with the paper in front of you. You have no other excuses or distractions. You have to start to write something. And then you learn to have something in your head and put it on paper and to go back and forth. That takes a learning. And I learned that way. And also, I guess often later – later on, I would be interested in things that I wasn’t given a class for. And I would just read about them. Certainly, like all through school, like sometimes would assign you a report, right, on a topic and then you were supposed to write it. Nobody would talk to you about how to write the report or what to go look at. You’re supposed to go to the library, find things and then write them down. And so, I think for most of us, through most school, we don’t actually get that much instruction. But we do get substantial instruction near the specific assignments we're given. But if we want to do something different than the specific assignments we’re given, you do have to make it up on your own. You do have to choose yourself…

Agnes:

Nobody ever does anything other than the specific assignments given in school. I never heard of such a thing. So, like if you want to, nobody wants to do that.

Robin:

Well, I did.

Agnes:

I mean, even you, the teacher had to tell you to go do it, right?

Robin:

Well, but I did read about many things that weren’t in my classes.

Agnes:

And how did you – you said well you’d be interested in things and read about them, like… so that order is surprising, right, because for me I was never interested in anything I think before I would read about it. So how do you… how did you get interested?

Robin:

Well, for example, the library had shelves of new books or something, and I could go to the library and look at the shelves of new books. And then the title of a book might seem interesting to me. We had an encyclopedia at home where I could browse the entries, magazines would come, I could read magazine articles, I might get more interested and go further.

Agnes:

OK, good. And so books are kind of a borderline case between the heterodidact and the autodidact, right? The example you gave of sitting in the room by yourself and just writing your thoughts is like, that’s pure autodidacticism. But like I too, I read all the books in my junior high library, I just went through in alphabetical order and read them all. And…

Robin:

So the difference… so I have this blog post called “Chase your reading” And my recommendation is that it’s more productive to read with a goal in mind. So, if you’re supposed to write a – I once wrote a report on bureaucracy in high school. And so I wasn’t just reading various books and saying, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” I had a topic, and then I’m looking for books on that topic. And then I might have a thesis I’m thinking about, about bureaucracy. And then I’m asking, “Does each book serve that purpose of illuminating that thesis?” So that’s chasing your reading, that’s reading with a goal in mind. There was a time when I was really interested in finance, and wondering if there was a magical way to make lots of money in finance and so I had some hypotheses about magical ways to make money in finance. And I was – that was my focus of reading. So I read… I picked up finance books, read them, and I was asking myself, “OK, what does this book say about that question?”

Agnes:

So is there a magical way to make money?

Robin:

No.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

I mean, there are ways to make more money, but they’re not magical in that they’re sort of well known, but now I understand them. But still, I do think chasing your reading is more productive in the sense that if you read something with a goal in mind, you have a question and you say, “Does this answer my question? Will this answer my question? Is this even on the topic of my question?” Then you’re holding the reading to a higher standard. Often people just read something and absorb whatever it says. They’re just being carried along like it was a movie.

Agnes:

Yeah, that just more describes me, the carried along way. See, the problem for me is you like have these questions that somehow are born as, like fully grown in your mind, like Athena being born from the mind of Zeus just full with her armor on.

Robin:

Well, the questions get refined as I learned more, so I’ve discard and replace with more precise, better, more appropriate questions.

Agnes:

I have often just get questions from books, like I’m reading a book, and it’s sort of making me wander down a bunch of paths. And then suddenly, I find myself asking a question that I wouldn’t have otherwise asked. And that’s like a big part of why I read books. So I do want to be carried along. I want to be carried along somewhere where I wouldn’t gotten there myself.

Robin:

OK. But say you find a book and you read it, and it has a question. Could you be motivated enough to say, “I’m now going to go study that question. I’m now going to find other books that might be addressing that question and see – because this book raised the question, it didn’t answer it for me. So now I’m going to go try to answer it.”

Agnes:

I mean, I think that the thing you’re describing sounds like you flip a switch, right? It’s like the question was this potential switch, and the book flipped it. And now, I can go off and do this, like other thing. But for me, it would be more like, “No, I’m just going to go read a bunch of other books, and think about a bunch of stuff.” And eventually, it sort of slowly starts to congeal into something that the question gets articulated better. And…

Robin:

But I know that now, for example, you wrote something recently on privacy, and you told me that you went out looking for papers on privacy.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

Right. And so by now, you certainly acquired this goal-directed reading style.

Agnes:

Yes, I think that that is right. You know, part of it is that academia forces you to acquire it, because quite often if you’re writing for an academic venue, there’s a literature that you have to have read in order to have the right to have an opinion on that. Right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And so there’s just a methodology that is dictated to you by, in effect, your professors.

Robin:

But you didn’t use that methodology before it was dictated to you.

Agnes:

Correct.

Robin:

So, let me tell you another personal story. I think this was also in junior high. I’m not entirely sure when it was, but I think it was. It was when I was first learned sine and cosine. OK, so we had a TV at home and we had disputes about who should watch TV when. And my dad had created some interesting auction system. I can’t remember exactly what it was by which we would bid for who could watch the TV when.

Agnes:

I think we’re getting the back story of how Robin became Robin. OK.

Robin:

OK. And so there was a price series of the price is going up and down over the time that we have been bidding for this. And so I seeing sines and cosines says, I wonder if I could explain this price series with sines and cosines. And so I tried to like make some sines and cosines that fit the data and like, then take the difference, then find another sine or cosine. And I did basically what the famous Copernicus would do with the orbits, right, to add epicycles, to try to fit the data. So I basically fit the data with some epicycles there to try to explain these fluctuating prices. Now, there wasn’t any deep insight that came from that other than the practice of a data series and fitting it with models. And I don’t recall, anyone ever suggesting that to me. Although perhaps the lecture in the math class did say, “Well, you can fit data with sines and cosines.” And perhaps that was all I needed was to start on this project, which took a fair bit of work because I was just a junior high school student with paper and pencil, fitting the time series to a set of sines and cosines.

Agnes:

So I’ll tell you a story that’s like the corresponding story of how a clueless person goes about things like this. When I got to grad school and now mind you, I mean grad school, OK, professional school, in classics and I would write papers. And like the very first paper that I wrote, I wrote it in like many colors and it had like, I illustrated the edges of it. It was about a Horace poem that had like a deer in it. So I like had deer and you know, things I drew on it. And the teacher gave it back to me and they were like, “This is very cute, but it’s – you completely cannot do this in graduate school.” And like, I remember my next paper, not my next one, but at some one later, they’re like, “You have to type your papers, you can’t handwrite them and you can’t write, you can’t like, have pictures on them.” And you know, then I had one that had a soundtrack like I made a cassette tape with music, it was about the Aeneid and the paper was about the Aeneid. And it was about dreams in the Aeneid. And so I collected a set of songs that I thought would be about the length of time that it would take the professor to read the paper, and I thought they should listen to the tape while reading the paper. OK, so these were my natural instincts as to how you do research in academia, right, which corresponded in no way to what you were actually supposed to do. What you’re actually supposed to do is like, go read a bunch of papers on the Aeneid. And then they’re supposed to inform your ultimate view on the Aeneid, not like a whole bunch of, you know, I don’t know Space Boy Dream that song was I remember on there.

Robin:

So it sounds like more of an artist in that sense. You were constructing a multimedia display of ways to think about something.

Agnes:

I don’t think it's exactly artist, except that there’s an overlap between artists and clueless people in the sense that, like, suppose you just – from your own instincts, there would just be a very great variety of ways that one might do something. And to most people, it will just be obvious that most of those are like crazy and stupid and you shouldn’t do them, right? Those just don’t get weeded out as quickly for me. So like, it just sort of seemed reasonable to have the soundtrack to paper or have you know, because like, these are things that could possibly go along with. And I do think that artists in general are people who are sort of sensitive to those, like alternative ways of experiencing their environment or something. So there was like overlap, but I’m not very artistic, in the sense that I don’t actually have any talents for drawing or painting or music or literature like writing poetry. I tried to do all that stuff and I wasn’t good at it, right? So it’s not that I’m artistic. But it’s more like, I really need someone to come in there and be like, “No, don’t do this, do this.” If someone doesn’t do that, if you – if I’m left to my own devices, I’m just like a ball bouncing off the wall in 87 different directions.

Robin:

So I’ll give you another personal story.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

When I – so, my favorite class in high school was physics. Because my physics teacher inspired me with this grand vision of what it is to be a physicist, the grand idea of understanding the universe with just a few equations, and really being rigorous about testing yourself with experiments and I really bought it that…

Agnes:

OK. So you did have a teacher that inspired you. So there you go. OK.

Robin:

That was a teacher that inspired me. I then went into physics in college, and I came back maybe to visit him a year later. And I told him how inspired I was and what I was doing, and he was kind of rude and not at all supportive. But nevertheless, he inspired me. And so I went into physics – I first went into engineering in college, but then I switched back to physics because engineering seemed too cookbook because I really want to understand things because this model of understanding had been laid out for me. And then I had an inspiring first lecturer in physics who also stood up the grand trying to understand the universe thing. And the first two years of physics go through a set of topics, a standard set of topics, and I sort of did the homework and went through those things and try to understand things. And then the second – the last two years of an undergraduate physics degree, at least at my school, went over all the same topics again, but with more math. And I was very unhappy with that, because we weren’t actually understanding the concepts any better any more deeply, we were just learning more math to do the same concepts. And I wanted to understand the concepts because I had this concept of, the whole point is to think deeply and understand the concepts behind physics and to sort of, to learn the nature of the universe, right. So, I chose, without asking anybody’s permission, or advice, to simply change how I was learning, a self-taught choice. I just decided to stop doing the homework in my classes, and spend the time playing with the equations. Just rearranging them, plugging things…

Agnes:

These are the math equations.

Robin:

The math equations of physics. These are the physics equations. I played with the equations in physics, and made up my own problems, in essence, by playing with the equations and trying to solve them different ways and trying to see what they meant. And so I just got zeros on my homeworks, and then I aced all the exams. Basically, all the professors could see that I was sort of the best in the class on the exams, or near the best, and I got zeros on homework. And I came to sort of deeply understand these equations by playing with them. But – so, I was self-directed and like, my thing was, what do these equations mean really like? And then I could ask various questions about like, in various limits, what would they produce, and various possible combinations, what would be the answer. I would just play with them to understand them. And that was my self-taught choice. But it was based on this idea that I could generate goals. That is, the thing I wanted to understand at any one point was like, what does this equation mean?

Agnes:

Right. But it’s also based on the idea that you knew ways of varying your engagement with the equations that were relevant. Like you didn’t try writing them in different colors or something that I might have.

Robin:

For example, yes.

Agnes:

You would immediately understand that that was not a way to introduce complexity that would lead to more understanding. So like, it does seem like you have kind of like – because I think that for me, what it really is, I put myself in the hands of my teachers, and I say, “Tell me what assignments to do. Tell me, you know…” I would often ask for more like ask to do more, but like, I still need them to tell me what’s the more stuff I should do. Because if I tried to decide for myself what the more stuff is that I should do, I’ll just pick bad stuff that doesn’t actually lead to me learning anything.

Robin:

So I don’t know that I was initially good, but I do think I practiced. So just like with, say the writing, right? In a typical English class, they might tell you what to write next about, and they might even tell you, it should be this many paragraphs. They remind you what the introduction paragraph should be like, and that the concluding paragraph should be like, right? And then in my writing, if I just say, “Go write for the hour.” then I have to make all these choices like, what to write about, how long should it be, how much should I introduce. And I’m sure I wasn’t very good at that but there is something to just trying and getting feedback.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, so then the question is just about the feedback, the nature of the feedback, right? Like, obviously, a lot of what I did, I had to do physically by myself in some space, right? If… it’s not like my teachers are always sitting there next to me. Though even there I have – well, I’m going to digress… I’m going to give you a digression of like how I learned Greek. I studied Greek and Latin at this place called the Latin Greek Institute in New York City. And it’s very intensive. It was like a 10-week summer course for both languages. And the way that you would translate is like, so you’d learn all the grammar in like the first five weeks. And then you would, in the second five weeks of the course, you would get into groups, since you get into groups and just translate in a group. So there’d be like passage assigned, right? We’d go round in a circle, each of us translate a sentence. And I love that, like, I love the group, group work element of it. And I got to Chicago after my summer learning Greek, and I sat down in my first Greek class, and we had the first class and then the teacher says, “OK, for next class, translate this much of Plato.” And everyone…

Robin:

By yourself.

Agnes:

And everyone was leaving the room. That – he just said trans… he just said that, right? Everyone was leaving the room and I said, “Wait, what about the groups?” And everyone looked at me, and I suddenly realized that wasn’t a thing. And it wasn’t a thing anyone did anywhere else, right?

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

But like a couple people in the class just felt bad for me. And they were like, “We’ll do a group if you like.” And so I formed a group and that’s how I did it. And after that point, every translation class I took I would just like, “Who wants to be in my group, my translation group, so we can do this as a group?” In grad school, when I was preparing for exams, that’s how I like became close to my best friend, and we would translate together like Latin intensively, we could do, she was much better than me, so it was very nice of her to be willing to be in a group with me. But that’s like, you know, most people would just sit and translate by themselves. And like…

Robin:

OK. So this, it occurs to me that this explains part of the variance here, which is in many classes, there’ll be groups of people say, in physics classes who work out physics problems together. And of course, they will try to sort into students have roughly the same ability, because they don’t want to let somebody do all the work and one person is doing all the work and other people just free writing.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And if you’re just much better than all the rest, you don’t want to be in a group with all this lower people explaining to them, you just want to do it yourself.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And that was me.

Agnes:

Right. Right. So…

Robin:

So, if you’re not around people at your level, then you’re going to have to do it yourself. And so maybe you were lucky enough to be around people at your level.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, often with translation, they were typically better than me. So it was great for me.

Robin:

But you’re always you were close enough that they were willing to associate with you and include you.

Agnes:

Right. Right. So I mean, I – maybe it’s just like the heterodidacts like me, are going to be just worse at everything. And by being worse at stuff, then there’s more other people who are also bad at that thing for you to do it with.

Robin:

In your group, the other people in the group who are better than you, they were also learning in a group. So…

Agnes:

That’s true.

Robin:

It isn’t a feature of being worse than other people that would make you be learning together.

Agnes:

Right. You can’t be the standout. Let’s put it that way.

Robin:

Right. So the point would be if there are enough people near your level, then you can form a group and you can work with other people at your level.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

If you’re way out at the high end or the low end, then you’re on your own. And presumably, that’s especially a problem for people at the low end. Because people don’t want them in the group, because they’re much worse. But – and they don’t get any help.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I guess – like maybe this is just a function of like, I’ve always been lucky in my environments, because you know, I went to Berkeley, that’s a good school. I went to UChicago undergrad, and then Berkeley is good school. And now I’m at UChicago again so I’ve always been in good schools. But like, even now, like when I’m doing night owls, and I have to prepare on a topic that I don’t know, well, which is often because I’m having people come from, you know, someone might be coming to talk to me about economics or something, right. And I don’t know anything about that. The way that I will want to learn it is like by getting together a group of students who will read papers with me and talk to me about it. And I mean, I should know more than them because I’m like a professor and they are students, but I don’t find it's like some big problem where I often I don’t know much more than them about the topic that we’re talking about, I guess. And I don’t often encounter the problem of “Oh, some of us are pulling, doing extra work, and the others are dragging us behind.” As a matter of practice, it just doesn’t happen. I wonder why.

Robin:

So, this reminds me of a bigger question than just our personal learning styles that I often ponder and worry about. There’s this famous saying, by a famous mathematical computer theorist – I’m trying to – I can’t quite remember his name. His, you know, when people would visit, and he would ask them about the work, he would ask them in the following way. He would say, “What is the most important question in your field?” And the next question is, “Why aren't you working on it?” And you know, it’s highlighting the striking, seemingly obvious strategy of trying to pick the most important things and working on them. And the reason why it's striking is that very few people do that. That is, very few academics have an answer to those. That is, most academics, if you asked them, “Why are you working what you’re working on?” They will tell the story of like, somebody else showed it to them and they follow down that path.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

They don’t take an overall view of the field and judge relative importance and then choose to work on something because it’s relatively important compared to the other things. That’s very rare. That’s the sort of thing makes complete sense to me, but not to most people, most researchers. And it seems related to the stance that I might take, which is to actually have all the questions available to me and choose which ones to work on and choose how far to go and decide when that’s not working, and then give up on it and go work on something else at a broader level. So another personal part of me is I’ve kept changing fields, when I learned a lot about a field and then from the view of one field, saw another field and said, “That looks more important.”

Agnes:

Yeah. So…

Robin:

And then switched.

Agnes:

I think that like one danger you might be worried about with your approach is a lot of times I find anyway that when I ask a question – so I have a philosophical question that I think is the most important question. Like I have a candid, I was asked recently for World Philosophy Day to nominate a question. There’s a specific question. And I would neither say that I’m working on it, nor that I’m not working on it exactly, right?

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

I’ve written about it a little bit.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

I always thinking about it, right. But it’s not like I’d dropped everything and just focus in on it. Now, here’s why. When there are some questions, and you ask yourself the question, especially if you’re doing this by yourself, so you’re asking yourself the question, I find the answer you arrive at tends to look a lot like sort of all the assumptions you put into the question, right? So…

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

And in some sense, the more you do that, the more you tend to – there tends to be a pattern right, in like, you look at the work of other people. I look at your work, right? And it’s like, all of it is very, like Robin Hanson-esque, right? And there’s like a style and a pattern, and there’s a kind of answer you’re going to arrive at to every problem.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

And like, at the end, I’m like, “Well, of course, it had to be status or whatever.” And it’s, I mean, you know, in a way, it’s like, well, look, you – there’s certain things that you think of as fundamental like, in explanation, like evolution and stuff so that’s how it’s going to come out. But the point is you might be pretty self-skeptical with respect to your ability to pick out what the basic or most important terms are, what the most interesting questions are. And you might be like in a constant sort of hunt, or something. You’re hunting around like an animal, sniffing around like, did– have I got this right? Like, am I right about what the most important questions are? Am I right about what the basic framework is?

Robin:

There are two things to distinguish here. One is do I ask the question, "What is the most important thing?" And do I like willing to switch to that most important thing? And the second issue is, do I make that judgment by myself?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So you’ve been talking about that second part, but the norm would be about the first part. So you could easily imagine someone not trusting their own judgment about what the most important thing is, per se. But asking the question is like going reading like, let’s see what other people say the most important questions, and then comparing them and try and ask which argument is the most persuasive. You don’t have to rely on your own judgment in order to ask the question and pursue the question, What’s the most important thing? But again, people don’t usually even take that broad scope. Right? That would be the key observation.

Agnes:

Right. So what I’m saying is that, like, maybe partly why you are not seeing that they actually do is that they do it in a weird way. They do it obscurely or indirectly. And it's kind of like… like, sometimes in order to do something, you kind of have to try not to do it.

Robin:

Like have fun?

Agnes:

Yeah, actually, having fun is a great example, right? But like, you know, I’m reading, like, the books that have, in some sense, sent me off in the most interesting directions, I think it was important that I went into the reading of those books pretty unsure what direction they might set me in, right, and not intending to be set off in some specific direction, right? So I think that a lot of people, maybe not most people, right, maybe not most academics, but a lot of people still are hunting around for what is the most important topic in question. But that doesn’t mean they’re saying to themselves the words, “What is the most important topic or question?” And it just might be that even saying that, even if you do consult other people, you’re ending up doing a lot of what you might call looking in the mirror, rather than looking at the other person. Like there’s a question how do you actually take in what the other person is saying? Or how do you actually take it what’s in the book, right? As opposed to kind of relentlessly sifting using a sifting device that you fashioned in advance, right, that reflects all of your preconceptions about how to think about the problem.

Robin:

So we’re again in an interesting situation where Agnes, the great champion of Socratic reasoning, is not too thrilled or eager for explicit reasoning. And well, you know, touts the virtues of implicit unconscious calculations that can’t be articulated very well. So again, the presenting problems if you ask most academics, “What is the most important question in your area? And why?” They just can’t answer it. That is they are just not even prepared for the question. They haven’t thought about it. And whatever reasons they make up or give are pretty bad, and never – and in addition, of course, they aren’t usually working on it. So right there, you could say, well, implicitly, subconsciously, they’ve addressed the question, and that's good enough for them. They don’t need to have a conscious argument or reasons to give. But that does sound a bit odd from someone who celebrates Socratic reasoning.

Agnes:

I want to push back on that and say like, to me, that’s more of a cellphone (?) than anything else to say you ask a bunch of academics, “What’s the most important question in your field?” and you get nothing out of them? It’s like you’re obviously not very good at having conversations. Because like, if you just stop at that, right, and you just – you do not try any harder, you might be like, “OK, name some questions in your field. Let’s think about why these are each interesting.” Like you could pursue this, you could find it with them. They’re the ideal person with whom you could inquire into, what are the most important questions in your field? But what you’re expecting is that they’ve already done this investigation, right? They’ve already done it explicitly. And you just want the product of it, right? You just want like, what’s the upshot of where you came. But like, maybe they never did do the explicit investigation.

Robin:

And that’s exactly the complaint.

Agnes:

But what I’m saying is – so let’s say there are two kinds of inquiries, right? There’s the kind of inquiry that we’re doing right now, which is very explicit, right? We’re having a conversation where, and I think I can say I can pursue a question like, what’s the most important question in my field? I could pursue that with you in a totally direct way. That’s because I have your input, right? But suppose that a lot of the time, like, when I was thinking about privacy, right, I was having to do that by myself. And I hate doing this by myself. And I mean, that’s like, maybe another difference is like, I just don’t like being by myself a lot of the time, like, I find it like lonely and miserable. And so part of it is like, what’s going to, you know, what’s it going to take to get other people to be in there with me? Right? But I’m doing this for myself, right? And what do I do? Like, did I have a specific theory when I started? No, I mean I started reading a bunch of famous stuff. And I started reading philosophers, of course, because that’s what I know on privacy. And I’m like, “Ha, there’s just not much actual that’s here.” I’m surprised by sort of how incoherent it was. And I started reading some stuff in the law. And I don’t – there, I don’t have a very explicit question. Right. And I haven’t framed it like, well, I’m only going to read this law review article, if it speaks to some specific question. And the reason is because that is kind of a solo enterprise, even though I’m reading right, there’s something I think I have so much control, like reading something you have so much control over it, right? You can skim a page, you can – I don’t have as much control over you. And so the degree to which you can be explicit in pursuing an inquiry, I think, is actually a function of how social is inquiry. So I absolutely believe in being explicit in Socratic conversation. But most of the people don’t get to have those most of the time. So they can’t be explicit, being explicit when you’re by yourself, that is, what’s the recipe for a mirror.

Robin:

So, if someone had worked in one field, and then switched fields, because…

Agnes:

I did.

Robin:

…the first field seemed less important, then they would have a memory of the thoughts of why it was less important.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

That it would have been explicit at some point in their memory. So if people had a history of switching topics many times on the basis of the previous topic seeming less important than the new topic, then that would be accessible in their memory about, when you ask them about why are you working on this topic? So the fact that they don’t have that suggests they are not consciously thinking about changing topics in terms of how important it is.

Agnes:

It seems to me like you’re more interested in testing people as to like, whether they’re true intellectuals, than actually finding out what the important questions are, or what topics are important? Because I think that somebody who switched fields, probably is going to be able to tell you why they think the one field is more important than the other, but they might not have it right off the bat. And you’re right, they might not have consciously articulated it to themselves. But from the fact that they didn’t consciously articulate it, it doesn’t follow that they didn’t switch for that reason. And it doesn’t follow that you couldn’t get that out of them through an explicit conversation, it just might be that this is the first time ever in which somebody was willing to have an explicit conversation with them about it.

Robin:

You’re giving them a lot of benefit of the doubt here. That’s…

Agnes:

What’s the advantage of not giving them the benefit of the doubt other than being able to complain about them?

Robin:

We’re trying to have an accurate assessment of the world of academia. So I would say, an accurate assessment in academia is that, in fact, it doesn't prioritize much. Basically, people just fall into various communities. And they are reinforced and reaffirmed by other people studying in the same community. And that’s as long as there’s a kind of job you could get and the funder who will pay money for it. If you fall into a literature and find that you can contribute, then that’s usually what people are satisfied to do. Most academics fall into a particular thing they’re doing and feel lucky to have found a place that they can be, of course, most candidates in academia get weeded out and don’t get to pursue it.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean I think that much of the time, intellectual inquiry is like, exhausting, boring and lonely. And so finding a way to do it like a community, a context, a set of rewards, all of that. That’s just a big part of how we enable it in the first place. And there could be like two approaches, right? So we could have your approach, like there’s a very special intellectual elite of people who are just innately pure in their motivations, and innately self-directed, talented, etc, right? But that’s just a very, very small group of people. And if you want to do like the hunt for those people or to expose how few of us are those people, that’s fine. Like, that’s – maybe most of us are not like that. But then there’s this question, you know, suppose academia is going to be bigger than that set of people, academia should certainly be a home for those people.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And I know such people besides you so you’re not the only one, right? But it’s definitely not most academics who are autodidacts in that way. But most students are not that way. Most students are not autodidact. So it’s a good thing some of us teachers understand what it’s like to really be a student and to need other people and teachers, right? So I think it’s good to have teachers who are not autodidacts as well. And so then the question is, "How do you, like create a welcoming context for intellectual activity, given that most people, even most academics find it mostly boring, exhausting, and lonely?" And that’s sort of what academia is. I’m not saying it does a super job, but like, yeah, finding a niche within which you can inquire something about something is going to be important to that.

Robin:

If we say, not everyone needs to pay attention to which topics are important. Maybe people should go along, because there’s a coordination element, right? So if we need some degree of working on similar things, then we can’t just have everybody decide what to work on independently, because then they won’t be working on the same things. So, clearly, we can tolerate a substantial degree of people who are going along. But then there should be other people who are not just going along, who are asking what are the important topics so that these communities can move over and put their effort on the more important topics. So, the test of that division of labor would be when people do explicitly think about what’s important, and explicitly make arguments about which things are important and present those arguments to colleagues. To what extent do people working in a field where a bunch of other people working for, listen and are willing to change what they’re doing? Or do they just say, “We don’t need you, we’ve got a field, we’re just going to keep doing it.” And that’s more what I see. That is most academics, once they have some – they have a journal, they have a department, they have a job slot, they’ve got a funder, they’re not very interested in arguments about why their field is less important than some other thing they could be working on.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess like, one sort of meta question I have here is like, how important is this question? Like this question that we found ourselves and was gravitationally pulled into of like, you know, producing an accurate assessment of academia, as you say, and like articulating this complaint about how most academics are not willing to acknowledge that their field or their specialization is not as important as some other one they might be working on. Like, I guess, I’m not sure of the importance of that question. And so I’m pulled in a different direction, which is like, suppose you meet an academic, right? And it’s like, what way can you profitably engage with them? And like I was, I would think, like, I think that I would probably be able to get a lot out of someone about which questions in their field are important and why those questions are important if I talk to them. But if I were testing them to figure out had they already done that explicit reasoning, and landed where they are, as a product of that reason, I wouldn’t get a lot less out of them. So like, I’m not sure I mean, I’m not sure that this mode of thinking actually leads one rely – your mode, I mean, leads one reliably, to topics of importance. It leads you over and over again, into certain complaints, right? You’re gravitationally pulled into making certain complaints that I don’t know that even though that the most important complaints. And…

Robin:

I mean, again, I’m standing up as the defender of explicit reason and analysis, and you’re more standing up as a defender of implicit choice, you know, the implicit processes that produce choices. And this dispute happens in a wider range of contexts. So for example, in economic policy, or politics or institutional design, you know, most of the world just sort of stumbles into the institutions they’re in and doesn’t think very much about why those institutions exist, or whether they’d be better than alternatives. And some of us want to introduce explicit reasoning about institutional choices and policies. And then we often get pushback from people saying, “Well, you know, who can trust your airy fairy ivory tower analysis, we’ve got our on the ground experience, and this is what feels right to us. And so go away.” Right? And there are, I mean, this is, in some sense, the intellectuals versus the non-intellectuals debate forever. Intellectuals use explicit reasoning to analyze a wide range of topics, from politics, to sex, to death, etc. And most people use the more implicit, intuitive choice strategy. And they often say, "I’m not interested in your explicit analysis." And then it’s kind of especially interesting when it’s the intellectuals who do that.

Agnes:

But I absolutely think you should engage in explicit reasoning about which topics are important with all these people who you think don’t have answers. And what I’m telling you is they actually do have answers, and you fail to get it from them, because you haven’t used explicit reasoning. Explicit reasoning is conversation, right? What you – what you’re saying is, yeah, but they should have used explicit reasoning to arrive at their sense of what’s important. And I would like to blame them for that. And like, there, I think, well, maybe they didn’t have any opportunities. Maybe they were like you, and nobody wanted to talk about them about the question of what’s most important, so they never had a chance to do that. And then you’re like, “Well, what I wanted them to do is a different thing.” Not your conversational explicit reasoning, but you just sit by themselves in a room and reason out what’s more than – what’s most important or use other data, whatever, right? And what I’m saying to you is there, that’s a specific form – so let's call that solo explicit reasoning. OK? Right, even though they’re using sources and data, and whatever, what I’m saying is, it’s not – they’re doing those things in a way where they have a lot of control and management over it. Like, if you’re reading a book, you know, as you say, "Take charge of your books." what was your – the phrase that you…

Robin:

Chase your reading.

Agnes:

Chase your reading, right? Don’t let your reading drag you around. You’re the one in-charge, right? So if they do the “I’m the one in-charge” kind of thinking when they’re reasoning about what’s important, what I’m saying is that’s looking in a mirror. And so you’re just not very likely to come out with anything substantially new. I think you can come out with new things through series of conversations with people exposing your ideas to others, but they may not have had so many opportunities to do that.

Robin:

So you’re focused on my experience in a conversation with someone and I’m trying to focus on the overall pattern of the world. And so, being a tiny part of the world who can only talk to a tiny fraction of the world at any one time, I feel entitled to look at what the world is doing and talk about it and draw inferences about it. Even knowing that if I were to join in conversations with anyone part of the world, I could have substantial influence through the choice of my conversation style, and the interactions that I would make. And I’m completely willing to grant that given a particular person who’s willing to talk to me, I could pull them into a conversation about what’s important and we could have a productive conversation.

Agnes:

Through explicit reasoning, which I’m in favor of, in a way.

Robin:

Right. But nevertheless, I could look at the whole world out there and what they are doing outside of my participating in conversation with them. And I can comment and notice the patterns of their behavior and draw conclusions from that.

Agnes:

I think that’s right. But the thing I’m pointing you to is that especially when it’s a question of value, what is more important, right? That’s a value question. Which questions are more valid into…

Robin:

It includes value considerations, and includes many others.

Agnes:

OK. But like, you know, I mean, I would say it’s a canonical way of talking about value is important, which things are most valuable to know? So what I’m saying is that when it comes to questions like that, looking at the world can be code for looking in the mirror. In the sense that a lot of the most important decisions, valuational decisions have already been made for you in your psyche, right, in advance, and you’re just projecting them out onto some data. And now you’re like, “Here is the important data, right?” But the choice of that data was already dictated by the set of values that you have not exposed to inquiry, correction, bias, reshaping. And to expose that stuff to correction, I think there are two ways to do it. One of them is explicit conversation, explicit reasoning with other people. It can be with a series of people. And the other is letting yourself be chased around by the books or something, whatever the opposite thing is, have the dog dragged by its tail, so that you land somewhere new. But look, if you start out very confident in your basic valuational outlook, OK, and you think you have a sense of what makes something important and you don’t need to inquire into that further, fine, then you can be driven by that. But most people don’t have that. So that may be part of what it is to be an autodidact, is you’re just born with an innate sense of which questions, what it takes for a question to be important. That’s great. But for those of us who aren’t, we can’t simply ask that question.

Robin:

I’m confused. So I thought I was saying that the world of intellectuals spends too little effort asking which questions are important. And that’s an important thing to do. That is people sort of fall into a particular community and they – wherever there's funding or activity, they just do things there. And they don’t do much overall prioritizing of which communities should shrink and which should grow. And which new territory should be explored based on a larger scale analysis of what’s important. That’s my claim. And that seems to me roughly fit the pattern. And it seems to suggest a big overall failing that we could just be spending way too much effort in the less important areas. This claim has little to do with my personal style. Other than its, you know, the question is raised by the fact that I more often asked that sort of question, because I more take charge of my research areas. But independently admire your style. There’s this question, are we asking enough what’s important?

Agnes:

Right. And, like there’s just a question about we and how you would figure out whether people were asking it.

Robin:

So I think this is a recurring debate we have, and maybe we could go into it at some more particular thing, which is, for all decisions, both values and facts are relevant. I tend to think that people are gravitating toward value discussions, because they want to express and promote or project their values to other people. But that typically, values are just the minority contribution to analyzing decisions. That is most decisions hang much more in facts than they do on values. And I think that’s also true even about academic choices of which areas to research. So that, yes, values are part of it, but they’re a minor part of it. And so I could more complain about the lack of the non-value analysis of what’s important. Even though you might say value questions are intractable, and maybe some disagreements have found out the value differences.

Agnes:

OK. So maybe you got to help me like, let’s take a particular case, right. Say, I want to know, my husband wrote his dissertation on Book VI of Aristotle’s physics, which is Aristotle’s discussion of continuity. It’s a vexed text. It's has not been studied as much as the rest of Aristotle but that’s an understatement, it’s studied very little relative to. And it’s because it’s not clear that the text is totally coherent, at least according to him, it’s not. It was written in different periods. So, he's trying to answer some of Zeno’s paradoxes and trying to explain how various kinds of continuity, continuity over time, continuity – spatial continuity, continuity of a change are related to one another. That’s what Book VI is about. So now, like, how do I study just fact wise, whether or not – suppose we were going to go back in time and talk to him before he wrote the dissertation and be like, “Should he be studying this or not?” What are the factual questions that would go into making that decision?

Robin:

So at the highest level, we could say, what’s the point of studying Aristotle? And then we might have a literature discussion of why have anybody studying that stuff. And then if there are some tentative answers to that, like particular concepts, or points of view that the ancients had that we would like to sort of understand better because maybe it’s interesting to see a very different perspective on them, then we might ask, "Well, of the important, like perspectives the ancients had that we think we want to understand better, to what extent would understanding this particular text illuminate those?" That is you’d want to be drawing a chain of causation, a chain of connections to some ultimate goal, and the particular things that you might be doing. And at least have a plausible story about why the particular thing you’re doing might plausibly go to the next item in the chain. If you can’t identify any sort of things that you might learn by studying a particular Aristotle texts about Aristotle, or about how the ancients thought that could be of interest to us today, then you have failed to offer a plausible argument for why it’s important.

Agnes:

So, most of the things that Aristotle's scholars study are of interest to us today, only insofar as we are interested in Aristotle, that is they’re of interest to a very small group of people, namely the group of people who are interested in Aristotle. And so when you say could it be of interest to us, it depends on who "us" is.

Robin:

And that’s exactly the failure mode. That is – the point is there are all these different academic fields and we say, “Why is your field important?” We say, “Well, we like it because it’s our field. So you know, go away.”

Agnes:

But I want to hear what the problem is with that. Like it is of interest to a certain group of people and that group keeps growing like in the sense that new undergrads come and they’re like, “Wow! Aristotle is fascinating, I want to learn about them.” Right? And then those people eventually become Aristotle scholars and then teach the other undergrads and then, you know, and then there are some people who just learn a little bit or whatever. And so there does seem to be a kind of population that is interested in this. They find it interesting. They are able to convey their interest to some other people, and to get those people interested to some of the time but not everyone, there’s lots of people who just leaves cold, leave some cold. So…

Robin:

But if every sort of group of fandom, like people who like Harry Potter.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

For example, had an introductory class, they could offer people in college, a similar group of people might find them interested in that and want to study that. Right? So the fact that the Aristotle people already exist, and already have classes they teach is a big advantage over these numerous other counterfactual groups that people could be studying instead.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, maybe there one day will be – there probably are people who study Harry Potter, and there probably one day will be like, if so… so, you know, it might take a while for a community where…

Robin:

So the existence of an existing group who is funded and is studying something, you know, should not be like taken as overwhelming evidence that that should continue to happen. Right? Because that’s just the failure mode of people to stick with what they’ve been doing, regardless of how important it is, right? So there should be some outside standards.

Agnes:

But they’re not just thinking they’re also getting new people excited and interested in it. Because it is, in fact, interesting, if you have some basis for appreciating the interest, right? But it’s not necessarily going to be – the interest isn’t necessarily going to be able to be conveyed to someone who has zero knowledge or awareness of Aristotle or… right? I mean, you might say the same thing about certain forms of art and stuff, right? Like, it’s like, in order for you – if you’re like, “Well, look, I’m not going to go look at that painting unless you tell me what I’m going to get out of it. I’m not looking at it until you tell me what I’m going to get out of it.” And that’s my general rule about paintings. And I say, "Well, it’s you know, it’s kind of hard to convey in words, like, there has to be a little bit of you just looking at the painting." I think the same thing is true with Aristotle, it’s hard to convey, like I can convey what’s interesting about Aristotle, I tend to do it in a class on Aristotle. That’s how I do it, by reading some Aristotle and exploring how it’s interesting. But the idea that we have to extract something from it, that is fully independent of anything that – of anything like knowledge about Aristotle or whatever. There is some stuff in it like about that with Aristotle. There are some of Aristotle you can do that with but most of it, you can’t do that with. And I don’t see why there shouldn’t be modes of study that immerse themselves in the deep and interesting things that requires certain entry costs to participate and that we’re not all going to get into all of them.

Robin:

So many fields of academic research have much more direct and compelling rationales for why to do them.

Agnes:

They might get more money too. Carousel Research they may get a ton of money. So…

Robin:

Well, so we – on the one hand, at least there are some that have clear, strong arguments or why they’re important. And we could at least grant that those should get...

Agnes:

So give me one of the clear, strong ones that…

Robin:

Say, quantum computers. So I have a friend, Scott Aaronson, who does quantum computing research, he’s at University of Texas. And the point is that we are on the verge of making quantum computers, and they study how to use quantum computers and what kind of things quantum computers can do that ordinary computers can’t. And so there’s an enormous potential practical application of figuring out how to use and what the uses of quantum computers are. So if you ask Scott, why is your research important? He has that very straightforward answer. And that’s the kind of answer that’s actually available for most everything I’ve ever studied.

Agnes:

So what I would say is, like, you know, that’s a practical application, right? Where in effect you can say there’s nothing interesting about – there doesn’t need to be anything interesting about this because my goal isn’t knowing anything, necessarily.

Robin:

But…

Agnes:

Well, hold on. Let me finish.

Robin:

That’s interesting to me.

Agnes:

My goal is something that where that the endpoint of that isn’t itself knowing but like moving some things from one place to another, or maybe enjoyment or whatever. But I think the – and I’m open-minded about universities, there can be people whose job is mainly is to make tools, but I think it’s the job of some of us just to know things because knowing things is valuable, like it’s a good thing to know things. And we’re able to share the interest of that with people who want to learn it, right? Though maybe not with people who are determined not to learn anything, who are determined not to look at the painting, so to speak, you’re like, if you demand that I share it with that person, maybe I can’t. But it’s not the same thing as saying you can’t share it. And so like, they’re just, it just might be like, there’s just lots and lots and lots of interesting questions. And people are absorbed in them, and they’re not so absorbed in the project of ranking them, which doesn’t – I mean it doesn’t seem necessary for scholars to be so absorbed in the project of ranking the interesting questions, as long as you found an interesting question to devote your life to, why isn’t that like, why isn’t that success?

Robin:

Because interesting, this might be socially generated. That is, we might interesting is might not be some absolute independent, prior existing feature of the universe. It might be that we become interested via social process that makes us interested in the things that other people actually are doing and that have social rewards around them. But…

Agnes:

Do you think that what happens to you when you’re choosing the most interesting questions, you’re just being driven by this social processes?

Robin:

It’s one of these processes that I am concerned about influencing my judgment, which is why I’m trying to correct for or to defuse it.

Agnes:

So I guess, you know, maybe one, like one difference that we have is like, how do you correct or defuse those sorts of things? And like, Can you do it just by being very resolute or something are very abstract or whatever? And like, I think the main way you do it is by letting other people help you. Because…

Robin:

That’s where social construction happens.

Agnes:

Yeah, so I think – I mean, that’s fair. And I think that like, I think that that’s why my favorite way of letting other people help me is to try to refute them, like what I’m doing with you, right?

Robin:

Social construction works through refutation as well.

Agnes:

I mean, you know, sure, you can – in a way, you can say anything that happens through social interaction, works in social construction. But if what I’m doing – if there’s an explicit conversation, and what I’m doing is trying to explore all the ways, like intellectually in which the person I’m talking to could be wrong, and they’re doing the same thing to me. That’s the best I’ve got for seeing around my own blind spots. I don’t have any better trick than that.

Robin:

We have many tricks. And I don’t know if you know of all of them. But we…

Agnes:

I know you’ve named a lot of them. I don't know that you’ve named ways of getting around them.

Robin:

So we are in danger of moving on to new topics.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

So, let’s stop for now.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

It’s been great talking, Agnes.

Agnes:

Yeah.