Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Hi, Agnes.

Agnes:

So, when we finished our first season of this podcast, William, our technical wizard, offered us the possibility of finding out data about our audience, you know, which episodes are being downloaded, how popular they are, and you wanted to know. You wanted this information, and I didn’t, so that we could talk about curiosity. So why, why do you want to know, like how many people are listening to us? Why do you want to know that?

Robin:

So I think my default is I want to know most everything, and that would be adjusted by things that seem so unimportant. I wouldn’t want to fill my head up with things that would be distracting from other things I care about, on the one hand. So I don’t want to know about everything. So just like in a trial, like you let both sides present evidence, but you say make it relevant to the trial. And then, we have a limited number of rules of evidence, we say you’re not allowed to bring that kind of evidence in. But the default is that most everything should be brought up, at least if it’s relevant, unless that violates one of the particular exceptions. And so I would think of that in my life. In general, I want to know things unless they seem irrelevant to the things I care about. But there’s a limited number of things I might not want to know. So for example, if somebody is one to extort me or threatened me, and they say, “If you don’t send me a million dollars in Bitcoin, then I will kill your children.” I don’t want to know if they can do it. And I want them to think, “I don’t know if they can do it”, because then I can just dismiss it as hey, anybody could threaten me. I’m not going to give you a million dollars, just because you can threaten me, you know. You’d have, I’d have to know that you would actually go through with it, and then I might give you the million dollars. But I don’t want you to know that I would know that you could actually go through with it. That’s a case where I don’t want to know.

Agnes:

But I mean, in that case, wouldn’t… suppose you could know whether or not they would go through with it independently of them knowing whether you know.

Robin:

In that case, I’d want to know.

Agnes:

OK. So we haven’t really come up with an example you don’t want to know. We’ve come up with an example where you don’t want other people to know that you know something.

Robin:

But often, those things come together, so.

Agnes:

Fair enough. But let’s just isolate the question of cases where you don’t want to know. So I mean, you started with the example of the trial, and that’s a very funny example to give of rampant curiosity. Because in a trial, they’re actually very strict rules as to what can be said, what kind of information can be brought in. It has to be relevant, right? And so, you know, this, with respect to the example of our podcast, like the relevance was exactly what I was questioning to which inquiry is the– is our facts about how many people listen to our podcast relevant? What could we be in a trial? You’re inquiring into a particular questions, did he commit the crime or something? What question would you– could you be inquiring into such that that piece of information would be relevant to that inquiry?

Robin:

So we will make a number of choices with a podcast, we’ll decide what topics we do, and what, how often we do it, how long each one will be, and what style to give. Should we disagree more, disagree less? Be more practical, be more theoretical? Do we want to do this more or less? Do we want to quit? Seems like for many of those, we kind of want to know what our readers think, our listeners think. Or that is how… how interested are they, and which topics, which kind of people are they?

Agnes:

OK, so let… I want to divide now. I think we have two points of disagreement. The first is, should we care what they want? And my view is not really, not too much. And then the second is, is it really true that the reason one wants to know the answers to these questions is because one is gearing oneself for those practical pursuits? And I think the answer to that is also no. That is I think people just have curiosity about things like this. Like, you know, suppose that you couldn’t look at how many Twitter followers you had for like a year or something. And then at the end of the year, you could look at it, right? And there was no decision you’re going to make on the basis of knowing how many Twitter followers you have. But like, would you want to know, would you choose to look? Probably you would, because you’d be curious. Right? So we’re interested in that, in the kind of thing where people say, “I’m just curious.”

Robin:

So what we’re talking about here is motives for getting information. And in our book, Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, we do discuss motives for news, and we do agree with you that people seemed very interested in news they can’t use.

Agnes:

And facts, in general, that they can’t use, like this fact about our listeners.

Robin:

Well, so people try to justify this open curiosity by saying, well, you never can be very sure exactly what will be useful. So it’s often helpful to just broadly collect things that you’re not sure which. So for example, you might take a shop class. And in the shop class, you might learn a bunch of tools of shop class. And we might say, “Well, why do I need to learn that particular tool?” And so I might say, “Look, you’re going to be doing lots of things with shops in the future. You don’t know which particular projects you work on, just learn all the standard tools in the shop class.” And for collecting tools, that’s a general heuristic. You don’t decide for each one exactly what you’re going to use it for, you just collect a set of tools, and we do that intellectually, too. So for news, the question is, overall, how useful will be some category of things, not exactly which thing will be used for what?

Agnes:

I think it’s interesting, whether we can decide whether we model the acquisition of information as the collecting of a tool, or the satisfaction of a desire, right? And those are two different ways we might frame it. And initially, you were framing it as more the satisfaction of a desire that is, you say, I want to know stuff, right? That’s a desire that is satisfied when you know the thing, right? Or you’re done when you know that, right? If you want to know something, and then you know it…

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right. Case closed. And your viewers… look, in general, I want to know stuff, and so you have a kind of… it’s very much different from how you respond to “I want to eat stuff,” right? It’s like, you know, when we want to eat, when we want to buy stuff, but when generally doesn’t tend to indulge those desires in a kind of unlimited way, we exercise restraint with respect to most of our desires. And so you might think if curiosity is the name for the lack of restraint with respect to the desire to know, then at least, prima facie, if we were treating it like other desires, we would say curiosity is a bad thing, which historically, and logically from where the word comes from, it describes the vice and it was understood as a bad thing. But then if we have the second model, where it’s not that you want to know, like, it’s not like you want to learn how to use these various tools in shop class, it’s that you have various goals. And those goals are sort of loosely related to certain means, and you’re not sure in advance which means you’re going to need to satisfy your ends, and it’s the goals that you want to achieve, right? And the knowledge is potentially instrumentally useful with respect to that goal. So I think you’re going to have to choose which way you want to go here. Do you want it to be a desire or do you want it to be a tool?

Robin:

So for almost everything we talked about, we usually default to things being instrumental. And then rarer things are sort of ultimate ends, means versus ends. So in most practical discussions about starting the car, or route to get somewhere, or how many things to bring to a party, or whatever, most of our discussions are about means like… But sometimes we do have to talk about ends because it doesn’t make any sense to only have means, there should also be ends. And so a question in many areas is to what extent is something a means or an ends. But in addition, we have this larger framing of evolutionary psychology, which says that many of the things we treat mentally and subjectively as ends are in fact means to other things. That is, we like sex, but evolution made us like sex in order to produce– reproduction. And similarly, we might say, evolution gives us curiosity, say, a general desire to know things. And in our head at the moment, it’s “I want to know something.” But there might be a reason why we want to know things. Evolution created this general tendency to collect information relevant to important topics. But we want to know, well, what different ends could there be that evolution would have with respect to our collecting refresh info.

Agnes:

I like all of them.

Robin:

Exactly. And so that’s the topic of Elephant in the Brain. And so the usual story about collecting information is exactly that it could be useful. And I think it’s correct, as you’re pointing out, that if you look at how much people are collecting here, it can’t all be useful. And in some sense, it’s like a packrat, even like me in my office here. Some people just collect stuff, and you ask them, “Why do you have that?” And they say, “Because it sometimes might be useful.” And you go, “Come on, when was the last time you looked at any of this stuff?” And then they have to admit, maybe it wasn’t because it might be useful that they’re collecting, I think that’s exactly the thing we should be asking about lots of kind of curiosity, what are the different kinds of ends that evolution could have in mind for us even if in our mind, it’s just curiosity?

Agnes:

Pause for a second. I mean you don’t have to pause that. It just pause, we can just delete this part, but I just need my notebook. I can’t, like, I’m going to try to function without a notebook and my brain just not…

Robin:

Should we have a pen, or you have a pen?

Agnes:

I think I have one. No, I actually need one. Thank you. Oh my God, this is the worst pen I’ve ever picked a pen. OK, that’s a little better. Hold on. I need to also put my phone on… so it stops doing this. OK, so I think that… your thought is, we tell ourselves, we want the information for its own sake. In fact, we are storing it away for some end, and we don’t know what that end is. I mean, it’s interesting, because when you presented yourself, right, why do you want to know how many people listen to the podcast? You gave both of these answers, you first gave the “I just want to know.” And then later, you gave the “It might be useful,” right? So let’s say just about this piece of information, it, like… so he can decide whether it’s the packrat thing or the good one is… do you think that you’re, you’ve evolved to want this information for good ends or for bad ends?

Robin:

Oh, we just have to walk through it to figure out. I don’t know right off the bat. So certainly, it’s true that people want to know what other people think of them. That’s just a very common thing. So you could say, we’re talking and other people out there listening, and I want to know what they think of us. And that fits into a much larger framework of wanting to know how you are perceived in the social world. And so that seems useful if it’s cheap, of course. So that seems justified in the sense that people might be overly focused on what other people think or hear about them. And they often overestimate how much people care about them and are thinking about them. But still, when people do think about you, it might be nice to know what they think.

Agnes:

So, I mean, it’s interesting, because if we go back to the blackmail case, right, that’s a kind of, there’s a kind of pathological interaction that you’re worried about, and so you don’t want the information to flow back and forth. And you might say, I’m sort of worried about the same… a pathological that– interaction that can arise, if we learn like what topics people want to hear us talk about, what style people want us to adopt, right? Then in effect, we’ll become flatter or something, and it’s a kind of blackmail.

Robin:

Yes. OK, yes.

Agnes:

So like, yes, it can be nice to know what other people think about you, but then that can also become a mood of shaping yourself into the sort of thing that they want to receive.

Robin:

That’s absolutely correct. And there’s even a yet further level is that we usually like to pretend we don’t care that much what other people think. So, you know, whenever we, like, people often get negative news about what other people think of them, or criticism, say, or people disconnecting from them, they often say, “Oh, I didn’t care what they thought. I didn’t care about them. I don’t need them. That’s not important.” And it’s a way of sort of, you know, declaring that you can’t be so influenced by what other people think.

Agnes:

I wonder which of the two of us was more pretending that. And is it me by saying, I don’t want to know, or is it you by saying you do want to know? It’s not obvious to me.

Robin:

It’s not obvious at all. No. So a related thing I think is that in our larger world, we have a substantial problem that people take listening to advice as submission and accepting someone’s higher status or prestige. And as a result, we are often reluctant to listen to advice. We go out of our way to act as if we’re not hearing advice, and not to be seen as acting on it exactly. So for example, a CEO or someone in charge, may be happy to take advice privately, but advice given to them publicly, they will be wary of following because it might seem like they are submitting to or accepting the leadership predominance of this other person who publicly gave them advice. And so because of that, we just may not be listening to advice as much. And this could be a main explanation for the fact that we disagree. So I have a whole research agenda on the rationality of disagreement. And basically, it looks like people disagree more than they should. And one explanation for why people seem to disagree more than they should is that they are reluctant to be seen as listening to other people, and therefore, taking their advice, and therefore, being submissive.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, sometimes, I’m really glad that kids don’t listen to their parents’ advice. Because it’s like, if the parents had their way, they were just sort of molded the children in sort of the reverse image of their own fears or something, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So like, and people really enjoy giving advice, I think. It makes them feel like they know something to give advice.

Robin:

And my theory says it makes them look dominant.

Agnes:

Right. And so I mean, sort of, given all of that, like, how is it that… You’re saying the way we know that people don’t take advice enough is just that there’s this in effect, bad reason to avoid taking advice, namely, the appearance of subordination. The problem is that given that there are bad reasons to give advice, namely dominance, it may be that people are taking advice at about the right rate, right? Because…

Robin:

Well, I would just say the larger thing we know is just people disagree too much. And if they were listening to each other optimally, they wouldn’t disagree, at least in the ways we see them disagree, and therefore, we have to explain why they are not listening. And so that would be listening to good and bad sources, et cetera, all this sort of information. But if other people’s advice is bad, you wouldn’t listen to that particular advice. But that doesn’t mean you actually still disagree.

Agnes:

So I think that we don’t really control our minds, but we have an illusion of control in our minds. That is, we tend to think of a mind, we do, I think, to a large extent, control at least, the gross movements of our bodies. So like, I can stand up, I can go over, right? And I think that we infer from that, something like, just as I control my mind, I control my body. Augustine has a wonderful passage where he’s like, “My mind commands and the body immediately obeys.” But the mind commands itself, even though the mind is the mind, and it doesn’t obey. Right?

Robin:

Yup.

Agnes:

OK. So I think that… I’m just trying to get back to curiosity and to why we might be wary of it, which is that like, our mind has desires to know things, right? And we don’t control what desires pop up there to know. And we don’t necessarily have faith that everything that it wants to know is a thing that it would be good for us or that would be good to know. And if we just, if we define for the moment curious– we haven’t defined it really. So you know, it’s kind of, curiosity is kind of the indiscriminate desire to know, so to speak, just because curiosity is often prefaced with just, right, “I’m just curious.” The desire to know where in effect, if there isn’t any end to which this information would be put, you don’t know what it is, right, that one ought to be suspicious of that. Because the mind is… you know, you shouldn’t trust that if it’s going in some direction, you pushed it or moved it in that direction.

Robin:

So I think the reasons to be suspicious of curiosity don’t have that much to do with whether you control your curiosity, but have to do with pathologies of gossip, and just excess news. Those are the concrete things I could point to. So as we indicated before, it does look like most people just pay too much attention to the news. And so, like my colleague, Bryan Caplan, pointed out long ago, which I very much agree with him is that for our purposes of learning about the world, you might as well just wait once a week, once a month, once a year, learn about summaries, what did happen. There’s no particular reason to know about it as it’s happening, because the summaries you’ll get as it happened, just aren’t going to be as informed and thoughtful as the summaries while after things happen. But we seem to be really anxious to follow things as they happen in a way that isn’t very informative in the long run. So we do seem to pay attention to kinds of news that aren’t the most useful kinds of news that is just whatever everybody else is talking about, we want to talk about, even if it’s not actually that interesting, and we don’t wait long enough to summarize things. So it does look like we’re just paying too much attention to the news with respect to the information purpose, at least. So that’s a reason to be suspicious. And then I think the larger thing that people are talking about for curiosity is just about gossip. The usual context in which we would tell someone that you’re being overly curious is when they are especially curious about somebody else’s business that they supposedly have no business having business about. And that is the usual context of which curiosity is criticized. And so we have a standard story about gossip, how it can be problematic. And that’s the usual story in which we say, you know, some things are your business and some things aren’t your business. And why get so into somebody else’s business if it’s not your business?

Agnes:

Yeah. So I am very skeptical of that story and of this fiction that there’s your business and other people’s business. Like, that’s just I think, a made up thing that people bring in when they don’t like people and certain things about them. And so I don’t want my skepticism about curiosity to rest on this idea that there’s stuff that’s someone’s business are not their business.

Robin:

So I haven’t given you the reason that is I haven’t explained the pathology.

Agnes:

OK, go.

Robin:

So that is the reason to be skeptical with gossip, it’s because of certain gossip pathologies that we are aware of. And so the best way to make that clear, I think, is the contrast between mobs judging people and the law judging people. That is, I think, the main reason we introduced law was as a corrective to problems with gossip. So I’d say the key thing that happens with gossip is that, you know, somebody does or says something, and then rumors about it spread. And then each person when they’re talking to the next person in the network of spreading the rumors, they say something, and then they say it with a stance about how you should have an attitude toward it, disapprove, approve, et cetera. And your biggest incentive in that interaction, when you’re listening is to agree with the person speaking. The person speaking knows you, you care about them, you’re talking to them. This other person you’re talking about is farther away, and your incentive is to just immediately agree with their framing and perspective of this problem. And so what happens is then some initial framing happens of this, and then that spreads around. And people each have the incentive to sort of act overconfident with respect to that in order to please the person they’re talking to. And so the thing the law does to fix that is it has this idea that there will be a judge or a jury, and they are not to come to a judgment until they’ve heard all the evidence. And that is a big solution to this gossip problem, and that usually, with gossip, where each supposed to come to a quick judgment based on just knowing a little bit about the situation, and then that spreads. And if everybody seems to agree, then we all do something. But with law, the idea is there. There could be other things that each of us hasn’t heard in the gossip network, and the single judge or jury will hear a lot more, and they will wait to the side until after they’ve heard it. And so the law is fixing this problem with gossip. But of course, another way to fix a problem with gossip is just to tell people not to gossip, which, of course, many societies have tried to disapprove of certain kinds of gossip, and you know, not very successfully, but it’s a common norm.

Agnes:

So I want to distinguish a kind of practical role that, let’s say, let’s call this like trivial or incidental information or hunger for trivial or incidental information, a practical order that could play. For instance, as you just described it could play a role in mobs punishing someone or something, and then a kind of just wanting to know the thing, right? So let’s, first, the practical role. So if we go to news, for instance, like, OK, some people want to know the news in the “just wanting to know,” way, right, where like, they just always want to know what’s happening to feel up to date or something, right? But I think a lot of people, especially a lot of like public intellectual type people, I think they always want to be making sure that they’re fighting like next week’s war, right, like, not last week, and not this week, but they’re like, they’re trying to push the edge of where we’re going. So they want to be influential, right? And so the desire to know the news is not so much a desire to have like an accurate understanding of where things stand, which I think you’re right would maybe be best achieved with periodic check ins, but a desire to be a kind of player, right? And so, you know, that will be on the practical side, right. Now, similarly, on the, with like the gossip, right? So there’s news and there’s gossip, and then there’s the practical and the theoretical in both areas. And with the gossip, so I think a great example of the kind of purely theoretical gossip in Plato’s Republic in Book Four, he tells the story of Leontius, which is this guy, who was riding by and he saw some corpses, and he was really tempted to look. He wanted to look at the corpses, but he also thought it was shameful to look at the corpses. And then finally, he turns and he yells at his eyes. And he says, “Have your fill, you wretches!” Like, to his eyes, he’s like disgusted by because they want to like soak up this information about the corpses, right? So there’s a case where, what Leontius is saying is that I have this shameful informational desire, right? I want to, I’m trying to take in information that is bad for me to be taking in. Not because I’m going to punish anyone or do anything with it, right? That’s just the theoretical side. OK. So we have news and then we have sort of salacious information. And then in both cases, we have both a kind of practical and a kind of theoretical prediction in relation to it. And I guess the theoretical one would correspond to the thing that we were talking about as being an end, right? Whereas, the practical will be the information is being put to some use. Do you think that there’s any case to be made, like, where do you think the real dangers lie in each of those cases?

Robin:

Well, first, I just want to mention the concept of rubbernecking, which is exactly….

Agnes:

Yeah, it’s exactly rubbernecking. Leontius is the original rubbernecker.

Robin:

Right, so all the cars are stalled next to an accident, and everybody says if only those other people up there would not rubberneck, and they would just go through, then we could all go through faster. So that’s a case where we’re all hurt by this curiosity. And we might say, what’s the point of this curiosity? It’s a waste.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. I mean, that’s a perfect image of what is wrong with curiosity.

Robin:

What can go wrong actually.

Agnes:

It’s rubberneck– right, what can go wrong is rubbernecking. It’s that we think of… I mean, if you compare the hoarder in the office, like when you have too much stuff in your office, and it’s taking up space, and you can’t even move in your office, because you have all this stuff. To the person who’s collecting all the facts, you might think, well, yeah, but it’s not like your… it’s not reasonable to think that your brain, like that the capacity of your brain is really the issue in terms of all these facts, and you’ll just forget the old ones anyway, so you can just throw the new ones in. But the rubbernecking case really gives you a kind of almost like a kind of visual access to the idea of what it’s like when your attention is taken up by something, right, that that’s not cost-free for your fortune to be taken up by something. And so, curiosity is indulging in the ways in which the world takes up your attention, right? And what we’re asking is like, is it OK to give that free rein or ought one to try to, in some way, constrain it in the way that we constrain our other desires? So.

Robin:

Being a public intellectual of sorts, I think this is a very important basic question, which is, should I focus on what I think is fundamentally interesting and where I have the biggest insights? Or, to what extent should I adapt my conversation and attention to the topic of the week? So it’s…

Agnes:

Right. Right, right, also relevant to our podcast, right, do we want to accommodate our audience.

Robin:

Exactly, exactly.

Agnes:

Yeah,. OK, go ahead.

Robin:

And so, there’s a saying in the think tank world that there’s no point in issuing a report or a white paper on a topic that hasn’t been in the news in the last two weeks, because just nobody will pay attention to it. So they have to make sure their reports are related to the topic everyone’s talking about. And you might think that’s a waste that is, you know, what, they have to anticipate which things will be the in topic, when. And they have to sort of be very flexible about what they think about in order to suddenly turn on a dime to talk about whatever’s in the news lately. And that doesn’t seem terribly useful in terms of using all their expertise, because it could take a long time to think through a topic and come up with your recommendations, and then your white paper on the topic. So from that point of view, it looks like a bit of a waste that we are, like all supposed to talk about the same thing at the same time. So we might want to say, are there contrary benefits maybe? So you might think, well, if we could all focus on the same thing at the same time, maybe we could settle it. For example, maybe if we all talk about different things at the same time, then we would never really know if everybody agreed enough to make a decision. So maybe there’s a benefit to that. But for a lot of these things, it’s not clear that everybody really needs to be involved. But it does look like as you indicated, there’s sort of a status prestige thing going on here of, if you’re not talking about the thing everybody else is talking about, you’re just not somebody. If you’re talking about one of these side topics that people aren’t talking about, well, you’re one of those you know, experts, assistant types who are good in the background, but you’re not one of the big main people. Because the main people are talking about the main thing.

Agnes:

OK, but I feel now that we’re drifting into a different topic that you, that you gravitationally get pulled into a status, but I think it’s slightly different from curiosity. Because, like this thing of like, are we all talking about the same thing? Like, is there a kind of intellectual coordination on topics, right? Like, you might think, well, there’s lots of different occasions in which there’s a kind of coordination where everyone is doing the same thing, like, Thanksgiving Day Parade, or Christmas, or whatever. Not everyone, right? But like I’ve always enjoyed… I’m not a Christian, but I’ve always enjoyed the fact that I like Christmas. There’s like Christmas music and Christmas stuff on TV, and like, everyone’s doing the same thing. I think that’s kind of nice. But it seems very different from curiosity, right, which is the kind of the kind of letting go of the mind to be, you know, to be kind of batted about by the forces of attention.

Robin:

OK. But this feature of the conversation having a topic and everybody changes the topic together, I don’t think that’s so much about curiosity. I do think that’s more about status. So think about clothing, fashion, or there’s some other kind of fashion, right? Why do you want to follow the clothing fashion? Well, the main thing is that the people who follow it first are seen as especially knowledgeable and influential, and well connected because they learn about the fashion first. And I recall anthropology of you know, primitive “tribes,” they are often extremely interested in news. They, not particularly news they can use, but you know, the top people in the tribe are often putting a lot of time and energy into making sure that they learn about things first. And so that they can go to other people and tell them about them. And this is one of the ways they get status in this world is be the people who give other people the news first. And so they might travel a long way, or make sure people who are coming in come to see them first, it’s important that they get the news first, and they tell other people first.

Agnes:

So maybe what’s happening there is that there is a kind of confluence of two factors. Like, one of them is we know that people are curious, right? So we know in terms of like if I want to get your attention, and I want to be sure that you’re going to pay attention to me that you’re going to treat me as somebody worth listening to, et cetera, I want to give you some things that you’re going to want to have, right. And so, in effect, I’m a comment– if I’m telling you news by making sure I get the news first and then give it to you, I’m accommodating your curiosity, I’m kind of a flatterer almost, right? In the ways that we would be doing if we would be looking to our audience to figure out what they want us to say, we’re like, let’s say the things that they want us to say, and then they’ll want to listen to us, right? And so this kind of both the kind of status and the coordination of conversations comes as a result of a collective accommodation to curiosity, right?

Robin:

I’m a little more suspicious of these collective stories. I’m more going to look at the local incentives. But I definitely see a strong effect in small local networks and say, in a firm or a university, that people who know about things before other people are sure to go tell other people and they kind of proudly say, “Look, I know about this before you do. I know about this before other people. I’m somebody, I’m connected. I’m the sort of person you want to talk to, and you want to have in your groups because look at the things I know, before other people.”

Agnes:

Right. But, like, so I’m looking at a deer outside the window, which is why I’m like not being totally paying attention to you. And the deer just distracted me. I don’t know if you can see, it’s like there. Yeah.

Robin:

Yeah, I see it.

Agnes:

OK. Sorry, listeners at home, you can’t see the deer, but it’s there. And you know, now, like my attention was just distracted by this deer. And I, so I was paying less attention to you. And so, if we say, well, the person who has the news and who’s saying, “I’m better than you because I have this first,” part of what the reason they’re able to do that is because the other person is distractible, i.e., cares about getting the news, right?

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

So, like if you knew it was Bryan, and you’re like, “Hey Bryan, I just find out the newest thing happened.” Bryan be like, “I don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” And you have now know less leverage or dominance over Bryan. Right? So he has, in fact, made himself immune to this, through this stance in sort of the way that I’m trying to make myself immune by not finding out the information about who’s listening to podcast, right. So I do think that it’s the kind of status system that establishes relations of dominance in this way is piggybacking on curiosity.

Robin:

Of course, just the way many other status things do. So the person who looks prettiest in the dress at the party is higher status because they look pretty, right? So pretty, this is a nice thing.

Agnes:

Right, right. But, so this one I’m trying to say that like that, like, I think you’re right, that we can get status relations that are built up out of a response to curiosity. But our question isn’t about those, but it’s about curiosity. And maybe your point is, well, yeah, but one of the reasons why curiosity is bad is that it lends itself to these bad status hierarchies, though you might ask, “Well, suppose we remove curiosity, would then something else become the basis of it? And it might, right? The question is like, what is the problem with curiosity itself? Let me frame it like this. If I look online, OK, one of the words that I find most regularly associated with something good and rarely used ironically or negatively, is curiosity. Right? People adver– on Twitter, people advertise themselves as curious, people always seeking to be in touch with curious people, right? So this is one of the things you can say, it’s sort of like, there’s actually a bit of a challenge in terms of presenting your persona quite generally, and that you want to present your persona positively to people, but you also want to look humble. And so what do you say about yourself if you’re like, I’m very smart, and interesting? People are going to be wary of you because, oh, you think you’re so great. But if you say I’m dumb and boring, then they’re also not going to want, right? And so there’s this question of like, what hits the sweet spot of positive things you can say about yourself that people will still like you for having said them? And curiosity is like this perfect thing, so you’ll find it all over the place, right?

Robin:

Right, I agree.

Agnes:

So there is almost a kind of, it has a kind of mythical positive status, where we view it as like a fundamental good thing about a person. And I’m pretty sure you’ve used it in this way to describe yourself, right, as one of your main virtues is curiosity. So how do you account for it having this mythical positive status if in fact, what it is the kind of indiscriminate giving of attention to things that might not be worth it that allow us to be in effect pulled into these bad power relations.

Robin:

I think you’re absolutely right that curiosity along with say, creativity, or romance are just things that our society celebrates, that many ancient societies did not.

Agnes:

Notice, you can’t use either of those other two to advertise yourself, though, so.

Robin:

Right, because that, so in some sense, you’re claiming more ability perhaps with the others. And curiosity, in some sense, you’re not claiming great ability, although it’s perhaps implied. So I agree that we just have these things that everybody is supposed to say is good. And that right, there is a reason to be suspicious about them that maybe they can’t be quite as good as they claim. And maybe we’re covering over many negative aspects of them. So we have many sort of low motives for curiosity in addition to high motives for curiosity, but curiosity is something we all are going to give default to the high motive for even if it’s not.

Agnes:

But why? I mean, why are we so charitable in our interpretation? Like we wouldn’t say the same about ambition, right? You give ambition, obviously, you can advertise it by yourself so clearly, but curiosity is.

Robin:

I mean, one of the main distinguishing features of modern culture is our celebration of innovation. Because innovation is such a distinguishing feature of the modern era, compared to previous eras. Previous eras had innovation but at a low enough rate that people didn’t so much notice it in their individual lives. We noticed the world is changing a lot today, we celebrate innovation as a cause of that, and we celebrate things that we see as connected Innovation, such as creativity and curiosity.

Agnes:

I don’t think I could use innovative the same way in my Twitter bio. I could call myself curious, people would like me. If I said I’m a big innovator, I’m so innovative, that did not go over as well.

Robin:

And that’s interesting, because, in fact, we have celebrated sort of things related to innovation, but not so much innovation directly itself. But if you ask, if you look at the stories we tell about why curiosity and creativity are good, they are because it’s innovative. But in some sense, innovative is less of a feature of yourself to celebrate. So we all know innovation is kind of random. We try lots of things and sometimes they’re successful. And so someone who actually innovates is sometimes less impressive than somebody who has the features that we tend to think on average to produce more innovation. So if we think creativity produces innovation, or curiosity produces innovation, but innovation itself is pretty random, then we might end up celebrating. Or intelligence, for example, we think intelligence produces innovation as well. And we’re better… and do you think those are impressive features of people? People are more impressive and admirable when they are more intelligent, more creative, more curious. And part of our era celebrating those things is because we give them credit for innovation.

Agnes:

I think I’m allowed to say that… I’m not allowed to say that I’m intelligent either or innovative, or ambitious, or that I have produced lots of great innovations, or achievements. So I think there’s something distinctive about curiosity, where, and it goes along with the way in which it’s often prefaced with the word just, where the person who announces themselves as curious also projects a certain kind of non-threateningness. And I think that’s really important. So like, you don’t have to be… if I say to you, I’m curious, you somehow don’t have to be afraid of me, you don’t have to be nervous around me, and I’m not exactly sure why. But I think that’s really important, too, that I think. Yeah.

Robin:

So this is related to a simple story of management, I would give, which is in the modern era, managers present themselves as scientific decision makers. They’ve got a spreadsheet and they’re filling in the cells, and doing the calculation. And that’s what business schools set them up. So business schools are full of ways for a business person to calculate better decisions for their business. And so managers present themselves to the world and each other as decision makers as calculators. And in some sense, that’s just really not true. I mean, they do make decisions, they do calculate, but that’s not the main thing they do. The main thing managers are politicians. They form alliances, they have to create… you know, the impression that they are powerful people and supported by powerful people. And one of the main things that managers do is manage these coalitions. And so for example, when they have a project, the scientific decision maker projection that they make says, “Oh, I would be really interested in information that would tell you more about which, whether this is a good idea for a project, and how I should change it.” Their projection of this information collector decision maker commits them to this image that “Oh, I want more information.” But if what actually happens is projects happens because coalitions come together. And as we can support this together, then they’re really not that interested in information about whether the project is a good idea, because it takes a while to put together its coalition, and they’re not willing to give it up quickly. And so this is, in fact, what I see in the organizations world, because I’ve gone into organizations trying to offer better information mechanisms, and people think momentarily that that’s what they want, until they realize they don’t. And so this is just a feature of a lot of organizations and things that is, if we say, what am I doing? If I’m saying, “I’m a politician. I’m managing my coalition.” That doesn’t sound so good, that’s sort of violating some norms. One of the safest things you can say you’re doing anywhere is “I’m collecting information.” “I’m analyzing information.” Who could be against that?

Agnes:

Right. It’s so… see, to me, what’s so interesting about it is that I think you’re saying, you’re in effect, saying, “ I’m not trying to dominate you.” And you’re also saying, “I don’t know why I want to know this.” So you’re presenting yourself as almost like a little bit helpless, like, I’m just drawn in to know this thing. So there’s a kind of, let’s say that curiosity reflects a weakness of our minds, right? We’re liable to be distracted. We are wanting to know whatever is new for no good reason. And, but by presenting that with just two other people, we actually make ourselves attractive to them, right? And there are other weaknesses that are like that. I think you might think of empathy of being very empathetic, and being very inclined to suffer when you see other suffer as a kind of weakness. I think it’s not even seen that way anymore, but it is. I think empathy is like curiosity and that it is extremely acceptable to present yourself that way. It’s almost to the point of it’s now being self-praised. And so it’s like this weakness that you want to actually project to other people, because it’s actually a weakness, it’s a way of selling yourself.

Robin:

So imagine in an organization, you know, there’s… Jones is asking about Smith, right, to somebody, a colleague and saying, “Did Smith decide whether to do this project or not?” Right? And in the politics world, it could be about, well, it’s Smith’s is a rival, and I want to undercut him. I want to know which angle to use depending on what choice they made here. But if I’m trying to deny that, I might be like saying, I’m doing some analysis. But somebody can come back and saying, “Why do you want to know that?” Right? So if I’m presenting myself as a scientific decision maker, I’m vulnerable to people checking that theory based on the details of what particular things I’m trying to find out. It might not match these parts of the spreadsheet I’m supposed to be calculating. And so then a defense is, “Oh, I’m just curious.” See, curiosity becomes this defense that, like, makes people unable to see what your actual reasons for one particular information were, because it’s just this diffuse unspecific thing. And so it’s a best defense, when people are trying to probe this excuse you’ve been giving is that you’re just there to collect information. That’s all.

Agnes:

Right, good. So it is also a way to avoid revealing your motives for wanting to know something.

Robin:

Particular things. Yes.

Agnes:

Good. But, so I think, like, just going back to curiosity more broadly, like, if I try to think about, like, what is the thing that bugs me about curiosity? I think of it as like an attitude towards knowledge where you have like an itch, right? And you want to scratch that itch, and it’s like, oh. It’s like that year that you spend, not knowing how many Twitter followers you have. You have this itch and then you find out, and now you’ve scratched it. And, but then what do you have once you scratch the itch? Well, nothing. I mean, it just gone, right? And so there’s like a… you know, people talk about sort of, kind of consumption in this way, too. Like, buying stuff can be a way of relieving some kind of itch, you have to buy something. But it’s not that you want the thing you’ll get, it’s that you want to relieve the itch of stufflessness or something, right?

Robin:

So we could make analogies to say travel or consuming various kinds of media and art. That is, if you say, “Why do you travel so much?” People will give this sort of information rationale. “Oh, I’m going to see other cultures.” “I’m going to learn how other people think.” “I’m going to see a wider world,” right? It’s a classic rationale for travel. And if you say, “OK, now that you saw those things, what are you going to do with that? What have you ever done with all the previous trips you’ve taken?” And people can’t say very much. If you say you went to the art museum, you saw sculptures, you saw paintings, “Why did you do that?” “Well, I was curious. I was interested.” And now, we say 20 years later, “So you’ve been going to the museums for 20 years. Now, what do you have?” And you say, “Well, I’m cultured now. And then I say, “OK, what do you get out of being cultured? What’s the point of that?” And people don’t necessarily have much of an answer. They, many people are just collecting all of these experiences and pieces of information and its principle that they get. And they don’t have a particular reason and they really can’t point to much, but they seem impressive in culture. We respect those people. People are liked and desired more who travelled more, who have seen more art, who have known more movies.

Agnes:

I’m also very skeptical of travel, so we could maybe do another episode on travel. But I mean, I think one thing that’s interesting here is just the very model of collecting, right? So it’s like, I’m not even sure you’ve collected these things. And now that I think about it more, it’s like, at first, I’m like, well, it’s better than the packrat. Because the packrat stuff takes up space, whereas the curious person, the stuff will just go out, right? You can’t overstuff your brain, but…

Robin:

But you have them.

Agnes:

Yeah, but then you actually haven’t collected anything at all, right? So it’s like every day you check the news, and every day, you satisfy the itch to know what happened, but it doesn’t pile up anywhere. It just goes, it’s just like a river, you know. It’s like the Heraclitean thing, where you just step into the news river every day, and it’s slightly different every day. And…

Robin:

The most striking fact is they don’t collect it into larger patterns, right?

Agnes:

Well, and people do. I mean, they do like take pictures. I think that’s a big part of why people want to take pictures, because the picture sort of, in some way, underwrites this illusion that you are collecting something in the travel experience, right? Like, I have it, right? Even if you could get, and you want it to be the case that you did the act of collecting it, right. So people don’t want to buy the postcard of the painting, they want to take the photo over the painting. Because then they have grabbed it in a sense, right? So there’s this illusion that we can collect stuff, right? But in fact, we’re not collecting anything at all, where I see trap. I mean, one way to think of travel is a kind of escape, it’s a kind of escape, right? And maybe curiosity is also an escape. There’s something that we were doing before… there’s something that you and I were doing in conversation before I got distracted by that deer, right, where, like, it’s sort of like a not doing, it’s an escape from the constraints and the difficulty in the projects that you are engaged in, so to speak, in your real life. And a bit of curiosity is like a little bit of vacation.

Robin:

So I think one way to criticize collecting is to see if people ever use the stuff they collect, right? Or even organize it. So, for example, you know, I watch lots of movies. I collect movies over time. I want to make sure I’ve seen all the best movies, right? But a test of whether I’m actually accumulating thing might be to ask me like, OK, what patterns have you noticed in movies, for example, right? Are the best movies romances or dramas? Are foreign movies better than local movies? Do modern movies have shorter sentences in dialogue? Right? And if you ask them, have you seen a lot of movies and you ask questions like this, and they have no answers, they’ve never even thought about those questions, you might think, well, like, that would be the sort of thing you do with information. You’d organize it, and collect it, and look for patterns in it. I mean, in terms of science, or academics, right? When we collect a dataset, we don’t just collect the datasets and make a bigger one. We try to look for patterns and structures in it. The point of a dataset is to do things with it. So we might ask that about the data people are collecting. We could say, “You’ve been watching the news for 30 years. OK. So now, when there’s a big crisis news, how long do you think it roughly last?” “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that.” I mean, like, if you’re not looking for patterns in all this stuff, what’s the point?

Agnes:

I think there’s a different point there could you could have. Because, so for instance, I, there’s usually, like at any given time, there’s usually a novel that I’m reading, say, all right? I’m, in general, not so into movies, but usually novel that I’m reading. And, like, right now, I’m reading a novel that’s about laziness. It’s about this guy who just kind of doesn’t want to do anything. It’s called, the Oblomov. And I am, I don’t know that when I… what will happen in 10 years. I don’t know how much of the information from this novel will have filtered into some kind of pattern. So like, if you were to test me in that way, I’m not confident you would say she has done information collecting. However, if you were to talk to me now, today, you would find me making reference to this novel a lot. It is, in effect, shaped like it’s like a lens through which I’m viewing the world and different things are showing up to me as salient. Oh, it’s kind of like when you first have a baby, you know, suddenly you see babies everywhere, right?

Robin:

Right. Sure.

Agnes:

So suddenly, I see like the problem of laziness everywhere. And so it could be, for instance, that we are walking through our lives, noticing, like, noticing relatively little of the very significant stuff that we could be noticing. And some of the work of these cultural artifacts is to attune us to those things. So, but now I’m making a case for curiosity, kind of.

Robin:

So I once had a friend who is a singer, a good singer, and I asked why she does what she does, and she gave me reasons. And, but then she was saying that what she does should be subsidized, right? We should pay a lot more for singing than we do. And the reason she gave was it’ll produce world peace. And this is actually a common argument I’ve heard from an artist, which is just that the more people are exposed to art, the more cooperative and peaceful they become, and therefore the world gets better. And I just think of it as an example of an overreach for an explanation. I mean, this seems pretty motivated to want somebody to subsidize your career, and to claim it produced world peace. I would be pretty skeptical of that. But I give the example to highlight that whenever we’re explaining any behavior, we have sort of a range of kind of explanations to offer. And we should consider sort of the typical kinds of explanations, and their relation to each other. So I think the safest explanation is to focus on an individual and ask, why might it be in their individual interest to do that thing? Then I might want to think about, well, why might it not help them right now, but maybe help them later, or help some other people around them later? Maybe we can sort of imagine social processes would encourage people to do things that help their associates, or help themselves later. And then other explanations might be somehow it helps the whole country or the world overall the history. And I’m just going to be more skeptical about those latter explanations, because they require some coordination to what happens. You know, it’s just more obvious that people might do things that are directly in their personal interest right now, because they’ll notice that, and then they get feedback. And the world just fails to coordinate on doing lots of things that are perhaps good for the whole world. And so, I and many other economists will first look for the local explanations of what’s in a local interest and then ask ourselves, well, when we put that behavior together, does it create coordination failures, a way that we’re all worse off? And then, you know, are we somehow finding ways to combat that? And do some of these behaviors help us combat that? So certainly, we do coordinate on some things. So for example, for curiosity, we could say, as I perhaps suggested earlier, the modern world gains from curiosity because it promotes innovation. And therefore, the modern world has coordinated to celebrate curiosity as a way to promote innovation. That’s a story you could give. And that’s a world coordinating story about why we are promoting curiosity. And according to my standards before, I’m going to be somewhat skeptical of that, compared to what individual benefits people are getting out of their curiosity. I can hide their motives about which kind of information they’re collecting.

Agnes:

I mean, I’m skeptical of it, just because it actually doesn’t make sense to me that curiosity would promote innovation. In order to innovate, you have to really shut down your curiosity about most things in order to pursue something, right?

Robin:

Focus on one thing.

Agnes:

So it’s like, yeah, at some early stage, you got to be curious, right? But what’s interesting about curiosity is that we present it as being kind of thoroughgoingly good as just like almost like a way of life, right? You present yourself this way, I think on your on your web page, where you want… you won’t be like, I’m a curious person. Like, I just, I keep at it. Like that toddler approach of like, oh, new interesting things. I just keep going with that, you know. I never kind of knuckle down into the innovation shut out everything else mode. That’s something we’re proud of, right?

Robin:

Well, I mean, I’d actually say, curiosity is important for innovation, because innovation has two parts, invention and diffusion. And in fact, diffusion is the overwhelmingly important part.

Agnes:

And does that require curiosity?

Robin:

Yes. Because to diffuse, other people have to… you have to notice what is happening elsewhere and how they’re doing things different. To diffuse innovation, a practice has to move from one place to another, and that requires the new place to be open and looking for new ways of doing things that they might copy from elsewhere. So you…

Agnes:

All right, because they require curiosity, if you’re the innovator, or something, that part of it doesn’t require a curiosity on your part. It just requires that there be curiosity out there.

Robin:

Well, again, the inventor versus the diffuser. The diffuser, the guy who adopts the new practice from somewhere else has to be curious about what’s happening elsewhere. So a new kind of wheat, for example, spreads across farms. And it requires each farmer to be looking around saying what kind of wheat are other people using? Have you heard about a new kind of wheat? Oh, those people over there using this new kind of wheat, it seems to be going well for them? Maybe I should try it here.

Agnes:

So, I mean, if we think about like, what are the alternatives to a kind of curiosity approach to knowing? Right, that is cases where we would, we would not say, “I’m just curious,” to say. It’s not the case that I’m just curious. I actually want to know or something, you know, whatever. It seems to me, like, one kind of case, like in the case of, I don’t know, reading novels, or watching movies, I mean, I don’t think it’s fundamentally the desire, it’s not curiosity that you’re satisfying there. It’s enter– you’re being entertained, right? And in fact, you’re not… I mean, you’re finding out what’s happening in some fictional world. But like, the idea of curiosity is you’re finding out what’s actually happening, right? So that’s, so entertainment, to me, seems different from curiosity.

Robin:

But when we ask people to explain entertainment, and to say why are people entertained by these things, curiosity is often one of the main explanations given. So when we ask about fiction, what’s the point of fiction? People talk about the sort of real structures of life and morality that are embodied in fiction and that we learn from fiction, basically, at least what other people are thinking about the relation of actions to consequences, and the moral framing of them.

Agnes:

Oh, right, absolutely. So that’s sort of my point in saying that there are different... We can say wanting to know, right? Because that always translate into curiosity. Curiosity is a particular kind of wanting to know, the kind where prefacing it with the word just would make sense. Right? And so if I say, you know, if I want to know, like if my child is doing OK, I wouldn’t say I’m just curious, right? If I want to know how to solve an important geopolitical problem, I wouldn’t say I’m just curious. If I want to understand humanity, and to learn like how others think and how to move through the world in relation to them, I would not say, I’m just curious. I would say something like, no, I actually want to know those things. It’s important to me to know them, and I’m in some way invested in knowing them, right? So there’s a way in which curiosity somehow the desire to know gets unweighted by further practical projects or interests. And that’s how I was, that’s how I was describing it in terms of like the itch, right? It’s like there’s this itch and you scratch it, and then you’re done, right? Versus, no, like I want to know because it has some kind of meaning or mattering to me such that, when I do know, the knowing of it is the having of something that’s valuable. And that’s different from a case of curiosity.

Robin:

So, with respect to advertising, we have the distinction between push and pull. And with respect to say, search for customers, we have the push and pull. So most people finding about our products is a mixture of firms pushing the information out, and customers pulling the information to them. And most cases are a mixture of these two. And when I was thinking about what you were saying, I was trying to imagine where do I, would I put the word curiosity in most of my behavior? And I actually think recently, it’s browsing YouTube. Because that’s where I notice sort of my moving back and forth between having an idea in my head, oh, I’m going to look for this. I’m going to look for like all the different people ever sang this song and see how they compare, right? And once I’ve formed that in my mind, I’m looking for that. And so it’s less a curiosity. I mean, it’s personally a curiosity. But now, I chose, I pulled. I said, this is the thing I want, right. But then there’s other modes where, look, browsing the list of other things for this goal, I see another thing, and I go, oh, that could be interesting. And I just click on that, because it mentioned a thing that I… and sort of vaguely curious about, but I didn’t have a specific goal for clicking on that. And so in that case, I’m being more curious. And so the distinction seems to be that when I’m looking at things, there’s a mixed initiative. Sometimes I have a very particular search. So sometimes I search for articles, for example, on a topic. I have a blog post and I’m going to write about that, and I think, oh, I’m going to write about this. Let’s go look for articles about that. And then I typed in some words to Google, and now, I get a list of articles that mentioned the topic, and I read some of them. And so in that mind, I’m directing the search, I’m picking the topic, and I’m looking at those things. Whereas other times, I just happen to notice something and I go, oh, that could be interesting. And now, I call that more curiosity. Why? Because it’s less at my initiative, and more in the response to cues that come to me. But I am responding to cues, I’m not just universally interested in everything. There is no generic curiosity, you know. I respond to cues for particular… So the guy who walked past the dead bodies, right? He’s not curious about everything, he’s curious about dead bodies. I mean, that’s a cue that that stands out to him and draws his attention, right? And so I think that, you know, are using the word curiosity is sort of just hiding the fact that we have all these things that we pick up off and cues that draw our attention, and maybe we don’t want to call attention to those particular cues, and we just want to say that we’re curious.

Agnes:

Good, right. So I think that you’re right that the curiosity case is more like the, you know, being pulled or something, or it’s… right, it’s not that your initiative. And so the idea is there’s a set of things that you’re interested in, where you didn’t decide that they were things that you should be interested in, right? Like, Leontius, dead body case, right?

Robin:

Dead bodies?

Agnes:

But you still are, right? And so you’re passively subject and your attention is passively subject to being drawn in right to collect information about something, about a topic that you don’t think you you’re not going to write a blog post about it, et cetera. Right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And you might think there are advantages to having that sort of openness, just be part of your life and it would be bad to be utterly in curious, and to be so well regimenting your mind that you’re incapable of being distracted ever. But there’s downside.

Robin:

So let me throw in the word impulsive.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Right. So in some sense, curiosity’s information impulsiveness.

Agnes:

Yes, absolutely.

Robin:

So think of yourself in the grocery store. You have the list of things you plan to get and then they put these things at the front next to the cash register that you might impulsively buy. Say, a candy bar. And you’re reacting to the scene. So for example, Facebook seems to think that I will want to click on ads with lots of skin showed by women. Because that little tiny picture there often shows pictures like that. Right? And so, I could be impulsive in that way, right? And so the dead body is an impulsive reaction, right? So we might think of it as because it’s not your initiative, it’s not. So one of the things you buy at the store that are not your initiative, well, that’s the store’s initiative, that’s called impulse buying. And so, the rest is impulse listening or impulse information.

Agnes:

Right. Good. I agree with that. I think curiosity is informational impulsiveness. And we should start to see curiosity as being exactly as good as we see other forms of impulsiveness, namely, I’m a whole somewhat dangerous, though we wouldn’t want people never to have any impulses or something like that. Instead of seeing it as just some kind of virtue, which is how… we would never, other context, we wouldn’t call impulsiveness a virtue, right?

Robin:

Well, so it’s our way of celebrating information by celebrating the impulsiveness of it.

Agnes:

I mean, celebrating, we’re celebrating a particular way of responding to information, right? That is, it’s like you could celebrate food by talking over reading, or something.

Robin:

So we celebrate impulsive charity. So interestingly, I’m associated indirectly with a large community called, Effective Altruism. And their criticism of usual charity is that it’s too impulsive. And they’re right, in the sense that most people don’t think very carefully about their charity or help. And they do often respond directly to sort of visual clues in front of them, and people like that and praise that. So that, you know, in fact, our theory, as we described in the Elephant in the Brain is that if you’re one of my associates, one of the things I hope to get from you is that someday, if I were in dire straits, and you could see I were in need, you would help me. And so what I want to see in you is that reaction of seeing someone directly around you in need and helping them. So if I see that you go calculate the best thing to do for the world and you help somebody in Africa, or something in 50 years, that doesn’t reassure me much that you’ll ever helped me. And so your impulsiveness about helping reassures me that if I were in need, you would help me. And sometimes in romance, we celebrate impulsiveness. Somebody who’s very calculating about who they want and how they help seems a little too suspiciously calculating. And we often want somebody to be just reacting directly emotionally to a romantic partner without too much calculation, and we celebrate impulsiveness there, too. So there are these interesting contexts where we celebrate impulsiveness, but not at the grocery store.

Agnes:

So I’m going to say one thing, and then we should stop. So yeah, I’ll give you the last word after this. But one thing that I think is interesting is that if you think of effective altruists as people who are criticizing impulsive charity, I actually think there’s a correlation between that and the praising of curiosity. That is, they’re the same people who praise impulsiveness when it comes to information,

Robin:

Of course. Absolutely. I think we agree.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Reader… listeners may not be satisfied with that, but we agree anyway, because we’re not here to satisfy our listeners, are we?