Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Hello, Agnes. What should we talk about?

Agnes:

So I would like to talk to you about a topic, a problem, of which I think you have less firsthand experience than anyone I know so you should have an interesting perspective on it.

Robin:

OK. That means I know almost nothing about how to solve it.

Agnes:

Correct. So, you know nothing from firsthand experience.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

OK. The problem is the tension between the goals of intellectual activity and the goals of social activity. So let me like sketch this for you. The place where this becomes really obvious to me is when I go give a talk somewhere. I give a talk. There’s a Q&A and there was a kind of lively engaged discussion of what I’ve just said and then after that there is like a dinner or a lunch or something where really only the most sophisticated and experienced and the people who are really dedicated to philosophy, those people are the ones who come to the meal afterwards, right? But at the meal, what you might think what would happen is like an intense just philosophical discussion. That’s not what happens. What happens is socializing of one form or another. And I actually made this prediction the last talk that I gave in the Q&A. I said, “After this talk, there’s going to be a dinner and then we’re not going to talk philosophy at the dinner.” And I thought maybe if I say that then people to be contrarian will try to do the opposite and then we would do it but it didn’t happen. So this is my – this is the general problem. It’s weird to me that people who devote their lives to intellectual inquiry and who in some cases are rarely around other people who are interested in it and have an unusual opportunity to talk about it, are only taking that opportunity in the structured environment of the Q&A and not in the more free form environment of the dinner. OK. What are your first thoughts?

Robin:

Well, so first of all, there’s just a job and non-job stuff, right? So I mean we very much frame our time allocation as job versus non-job just in general, not just in philosophy or academia, and people like to draw a relatively sharp distinction there. And even if they like their job, they also like to have non-job time and they’re often somewhat jealous or hesitant to allow too much job stuff to slip over into non-job stuff. They want to draw a line and hold it there as some sort of protester defense against the rapacious capitalists or whoever are trying to exploit them into working too much. So I think we just have a general norm in our society about drawing a line between job and non-job time and also a norm that we should have a substantial amount of non-job time even with people who share the same job. So that seems sufficient to explain what you just described if it were an ordinary job, that is for a typical or pretty standard job, there is job time and then people are working together on the job and then once you call it non-job time then people are usually relatively reluctant to get too much in job things although they will sometimes do gossiping about job people, but that’s a little different than jobbing, right? So it seems to me the main issue here is if you think of this as not a usual job, as a holy crusade, as a way of life, as a passion, a sort of thing you might want to fill lots of your life up with even if weren’t paid for it then what you’re describing becomes a little more puzzling. So the first question is how many of these people see this as more than just a job?

Agnes:

Well, so let me raise two things, so one of them is like I just want to like pull up a norm to counter your norm. It’s a totally different topic but this is when you could have invoked to explain the opposite phenomenon which is, intellectuals in general have a bit of a self-conception as having a calling as intellectuals and putting themselves forward as intellectuals like they want to seem intellectual, they want to seem to others like they are passionate about ideas and interested in ideas, and you might want to think they would want to play that, and off-times too, to come across as being intellectual. So that’s a contrary norm that you might have thought would have led to the opposite behavior. One thing about these dinners is I mean you don’t have to go, right? So you could go to dinner with your family instead. You could go to dinner with your friends. You are choosing to go to dinner with this group of people and it seems like it’s just an odd choice for who to go to dinner with if you want time off from philosophy.

Robin:

Well, let’s see. I think for a lot of people whose job isn’t intellectuals, they actually do spend a substantial part of their free social time trying to brand themselves as intellectuals. It’s quite common for people who would be a dentist or some other sorts of professional to, at a dinner party, play intellectual and discuss intellectual topics, quote intellectuals. That’s actually a pretty common thing for people whose job is not being intellectual. So you might then think, “Well, once your job is intellectual, you got the stamp of approval. You no longer need to prove that you’re an intellectual.” And so you don’t necessarily need to fill your extra social time with such things in the same way that somebody else who would just try to assert themselves as intellectual whose job isn’t that way and might be trying to do.

Agnes:

OK. So if the thing were really about branding yourself that way, and fair enough, that was – I was the one who made that point. But like I guess I just think in the most naïve way, it seems like a missed opportunity. It’s like if a bunch of artists who are really into doing collaborate art got together but they didn’t do collaborative art or something.

Robin:

So I have actually a relevant piece of data. I once read this book and I wrote a review on it. And I believe the book – it was about prestige but the name of the book wasn’t prestige. It was something about – it was basically about people who get hired for very prestigious jobs, law and management consulting and some sort of other management thing. I’m trying to remember. But the key idea was, it was a book about how exactly this prestige market worked. Pedigree was the name of the book. I found my post on it, How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, and it went into quite some detail about how these elite job places chose and hired their elite students. And these places very much wanted to have students who matched the job on the kind of degree they got, but it was also very important to ask them about their hobbies and other behaviors. I think law schools maybe was one of these. But anyway, behaviors and it was very much a bad sign if somebody’s hobbies overlapped too much with their professional aspirations. That was considered. So for example, a business student who did business as their major, if they on their free time were involved in starting a business perhaps or even just like a business club and they just really wanted to talk about business, that was considered a bad sign. That was just not OK. There was this …

Agnes:

Why?

Robin:

There was a sense that that – you weren’t a well-rounded person. You were more of a pretender. There’s a sense of which like you were trying to …

Agnes:

It seems like the opposite of a pretender. You are very committed.

Robin:

But what they wanted is elite, not people good at their jobs. Fundamentally, they were selecting for elites. They wanted to get people from an elite culture who acted the elite way. And in our culture, elites don’t do that. That’s not – actually, the phrase I have here is “excess interest in some particular set of ideas marks you as a boring tool”, “boring” because you aren’t able to talk about lots of other things that everybody else wants to talk about. And a “tool” because you don’t have your own agenda, you’re just a slave to this profession or topic area of yours. There is a widespread norm like this.

Agnes:

OK. So maybe the thought is that being well-rounded, having interests outside of your job and having specifically elite interests that those are going to mark you as some kind of like a leader and also mark you as a social success, someone who is good at social context and is a potential leadership material. Is that the idea?

Robin:

I think they’re just going for a kind of person who is like us basically. There’s just a kind of person who is in these roles and they are trying to pick other people like them.

Agnes:

So like if these people happen to not be elites but like nerds or whatever then they would be like selecting for that just because they want people who are similar to them. So it has nothing to do with elites per se. It’s just people like others to be similar to themselves?

Robin:

And in these communities, they’re part of a whole network of people who are all trying to pick out that same group of elites together. So that would be – if you and I play racket ball and we wanted to hire someone who play racket ball to be in our thing, we wouldn’t expect to be a part of a large world of people who all like racket ball, right? So this is a much larger world where not only are people like themselves but they expect that that will go well for the organization, that is, it will help them place people in their organization to others and they will gain respect and those sorts of things.

Agnes:

Good. And I mean I guess that does go back to me to like socializing. That is – and obviously, the demand on success in socializing is going to be relative to a community, right? And so relative to this community, if you have these narrow interests in just the business stuff, you will be poor at socializing and you will fail at your job because part of your job involves this socializing that’s just built into it, right? That’s the idea.

Robin:

Well, I think – I mean you would be well-associated with these sorts of people, which is different than socializing with anybody.

Agnes:

And that’s the way it is. I mean the job includes these sorts of people, right? So that’s just …

Robin:

It could include other people. So …

Agnes:

It could – we could live in a different world but this is the world they are hiring you in.

Robin:

So here’s – two related points. One is just an anecdote. I would not name a name but I have a colleague who is an economist and told me that “he”, that would not reveal very much, went on interviews at places about – visiting places to talk to people and they were considering him for jobs. And he heard back from the grapevine that they just didn’t like the fact that as soon as he met somebody off the plane, he started talking ideas. That was just his thing. And that bugged other people. They just didn’t like that. That was just too much. He was not following the proper script to talk about other things. Another point is this idea of whether nerds are bad at socializing. So I’ve been part of relatively nerdy work groups like software engineers and other kinds of engineers. And often, they put somebody who is not such an engineer in charge of them under the story that this person is better at doing social stuff even if they don’t know the tech stuff. And the claim is, it goes something like, they read people better or they connect to people better or something like that. But they often don’t connect very well to the nerds under them, and the nerds under them are perfectly fine at connecting to each other. They just don’t connect to the management class which is the sort of people this manager is supposed to connect to. And this basic question of, some people say the nerds are bad at socializing so they are poorly able to coordinate. But it seems to me they are actually able to coordinate with each other. The nerds are perfectly capable of forming work groups and then compromising and working out their relative roles and making sure they do – they can do all that social stuff with each other. The problem they have is with other sorts of people who don’t share their similar sorts of interest.

Agnes:

I’ll just say that’s not my experience with nerds. That is, perhaps they are good at coordinating when there is a task and they specifically only have to coordinate on that task and they know they don’t need their lives to be in contact in any other way. But if I’m just thinking about the nerds I know and their social environments, they often involve a lot of non-nerds buffering, and that it doesn’t seem true to me. Like two people who kind of have very specific modes of socializing that they’re kind of set in. If you try to make those people to get along, they are not like especially likely to get along.

Robin:

So if we go back to the academic nerds like my friend who I was describing is an academic nerd because he wants to talk ideas as soon as he gets off the plane. And in some sense, you are an academic nerd to the extent you are trying to get these dinner groups to talk about ideas, right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

They are trying to do the general social thing and you are trying to talk about more specific ideas. So you and my friend are these nerds. So now the question becomes, for the purpose of advancing the general intellectual project, are we most effective talking about ideas whenever we can or is there some other effectiveness and use, for the intellectual project not just our personal lives, of doing all these other sort of socializing?

Agnes:

Right. And I’m not – my question is just about the tension between these two things, not like which one should win or something, at least that’s – it’s just striking to me to notice that the tension exists even among the most intellectual people. And by the way, you’re classifying me as a nerd. I’m not sure I identify as a nerd. I think I experience this phenomenon as a problem, that is, I dislike it and it makes me dislike a lot of dinners. But I don’t quite have the ability to just do the other thing. That is, I am pulled by these forces, these social forces, where I feel like OK, now we need to change the topic because the topic needs to wander quite a lot if we are having a social conversation. I experience those forces and I yield to them, and I think that that’s why people like me and they find me easy to get along with and probably those same hiring committees that didn’t want to hire that guy would want to hire me because I would understand what they wanted and I would do it. So I guess maybe I’m more of an in-between kind of case. That’s why I said I think you have no personal experience of this because I think you just do not experience the social forces at all. You are just like – but even you, like if you – like right now we are doing a podcast and so we – here’s a good way to think about it. Right now, we are under a little bit of pressure. For instance, we are under pressure to stay on topic, right? We have a topic, the social versus the intellectual, and we are supposed to discuss that topic and we are not supposed to veer off into personal anecdotes, which as you know me, I do quite a lot of when I’m not constrained by the norms of the podcast, right? We need to sort of try to make progress on this question and we are under the stress of having to do that by the artificial environment that we’ve created, the podcast. And I feel like that’s a lot like the Q&A after a talk. And that what happens in the dinner is like all of those pressures are sort of released and that maybe like the intellectual goals that we have, maybe they just need for many of us just quite a lot of structure in order for us to be able to pursue them, because they are like stressful and they create a psychological tension. I was raising this issue with somebody over lunch today, this exact problem and he was saying, “Well, look, imagine if at this lunch, which was a lunch after a talk where exactly this thing happened,” he was like, “imagine when I ask the speaker a question after his talk, he gave me an answer and then I push back a little but then it had to end. It was a Q&A. It was the next person’s turn to talk. But imagine at a lunch if I just would not let it go and we just get more and more heated and we just angrier and angrier at each other and now we’re going to have to sit here for the next hour and have lunch or dinner.” So it’s also the case not only do these frameworks provide stresses but they also provide in some sense certain kinds of security. We each know we would not have to talk about this for more than an hour, right? At an hour, we will be cut off and that’s like a kind of reassurance that we have, right? And so maybe somehow the unconstrained environment of the dinner, it’s just like too scary.

Robin:

Well, I think the dinner is a differently constrained environment. It’s not unconstrained. But maybe it’s different constraints are more conducive to some other kind of behavior. So at the largest level I think we should just say, there is a set of different kinds of behavior you can engage in and there is a set of different kinds of context in which you might engage in these different behavior. And we were just raising the question of the relative matching between the behavior and the context but that seems more secondary importance to me than the overall mix of the different kinds of behavior and what sort of pressures might push for that different mix. So, that is – we can think of some of the tasks that we might do together in talking as more job-oriented, more technical, more specific to a job on the one hand, right? And then we think other tasks could just be having fun in a leisure sense that has no other purpose than merely enjoying a social connection with people or something. And we could think in the middle are some kinds of social tasks that are less tied to particular things we are doing on the job together and more about our various social connections in this network of people doing jobs and the various kinds of alliances we have and the kinds of ways that we might need to build or repair or maintain various sorts of social connections in order to continue to do the specific tasks, as well as just to have a – be a person with a life, right? So in addition for a job, just as a person, you want to have a network of social connections such that you can use them for all your other purposes in your life, not just your job purposes. But that is to me, like, the main spectrum of interest here. And then we might ask, these intermediate tasks where we are doing social things, we are maintaining social connections, we are getting to know people socially in a general sense, we are deciding who likes who and who is with who, reassuring people that we respect them, the hard part is to then ask how much of that is necessary for the technical achievement of the fundamental profession we are in, say, versus that if even if it weren’t necessary, we would still be doing it because there’s just going to be these social games by which people win or lose, that is, even if you’re good at your job, if you’re not good at the social game, you might lose out because there’s the social game of deciding who is in or out and who gets to do what. And so that sort of could describe – I mean so the social stuff could be productive in helping us do our jobs better or it could be somewhat parasitic, in the sense that any world that allow social things that social parasites will arise and they will take some of the energy and time in order to manage their social games, or as a way which the outside world is parasitic. That is because you want friends and lovers and recommendations for your kid’s schools, you want to have a lot of social connections and so whenever you have the opportunity, you build up social connections in order to help the other things you are trying to do. So that seems to be the hardest thing to think about, how – for what purposes are these social games useful?

Agnes:

Yeah. So I mean there are sort of two ways to understand why we are playing the social games instead of engaging the intellectual activity. One is these social games have value and the other is that the intellectual activity has disvalue. And I was putting forward the second thesis, that is that intellectual activity is scary and dangerous except under certain very regulated circumstances. It’s like experimenting with viruses or whatever. We don’t want to just do it willy-nilly. Bad things could happen. But, you’re right, that the other side of it is like there’s a positive good that we are achieving potentially. And then you’re asking how good is it? I will say the following of my experience of philosophy socializing. To me this is – the following is a shocking fact. If two philosophers are meeting for the first time, they are meeting at a conference talking in the hallway at a dinner, whatever. And then they walk away from that meeting. I feel like pretty much always, 99% of the time, each person is like, “That was a nice guy. Oh, I like her. I want to be friends with her.” It’s like this incredible success rate, like a hundred percent conversion rate or something where everybody likes everybody else. And you might have thought, well, people are different and some people are mean and some people are annoying and people would walk away with sort of very different impressions of each other. But I think we are just super good at this game. So as soon as we play it, everyone wins every time almost. I mean not everyone. Not every last person but like the vast majority of people. And so, it’s almost like, what is even the used of it? We can deter – it’s a foregone conclusion. I feel like I go give a talk somewhere, it’s a foregone conclusion people are going to like me. They always like me. Everyone always likes everyone else. And yet, we still do it. And that’s what makes me think it’s not so much to create these allegiances that probably don’t have much of a function since there’s so cheaply created anyway. It maybe is because we are avoiding the other thing.

Robin:

I mean I think the people you actually got friends with at these conferences, that’s different than people who didn’t meet and never talked to, that you are creating a social connection there. That’s different from the connections you have with people you never talk to. I think that’s just literally true.

Agnes:

But see, they’re so easy to create that I am skeptical that they have much value.

Robin:

Well, easy but time-consuming. That is, each one of these things took a substantial amount of time.

Agnes:

They’re not – it’s not even that substantial. I mean this maybe one meal. It might be one conversation in a hallway.

Robin:

So let me tell – I mean we are doing personal anecdotes here even if we are not supposed to.

Agnes:

You’re always allowed to do personal anecdotes Robin, because you almost never do.

Robin:

So when I moved to Silicon Valley long ago in 1984 and started socializing with people there, I started socializing with the very nerdy group of people. This was a revelation to me, because I previously had never been around those people sort of as compatible with me as these people were because they really just love to talk ideas the whole time. And my wife would come along to these parties and she would find them unpleasant because these people were not putting the effort into being pleasantly social. They were just talking ideas. And in fact, some of them didn’t wash very well or didn’t wear – didn’t wear nice clothes or things like that. And I find it very charming because we were all just focused on ideas and we were not focusing on these other things. But she noticed the contrast between a sort of ordinary social world that she would expect and be comfortable in it, and this social world which was doing none of the social things and just talking ideas. So the two things to notice here is, in this world, one of them is – lots of people talk to each other. They didn’t all like each other. There were lots of pairs of people who would have these intellectual discussions and not like each other. Right? So that’s one of the risks of just talking about ideas intensely, and as you might come to disagree not make the smooth social connection. But the other is that it was quite possible for these people to just talk about ideas for a long time. That’s perfectly feasible and they enjoyed it. So it seems to me it’s less about – for many sorts of people, it’s quite feasible and comfortable and enjoyable to talk ideas just for the entire time for a certain sort of nerds. But they will in fact less succeed in making everybody their friend.

Agnes:

Right. So in my heart of hearts, I think it’s absolutely possible for everyone, everyone, to talk ideas for a long time and enjoy it. I just think that for different people, there are different social circumstances that are going to facilitate that activity and it may be for instance that like with your group of nerds, the thing that facilitated it was being around other people who were very similar to them in terms of being nerds and not caring about whether or not they had showered and things like that. But it’s just surprising to me like you would think that of all the people, the ones for whom it would be easiest, who would most naturally fall into an intellectual conversation when socializing would be like professional intellectuals who are maybe even working on the same material like have tons of stuff intellectually in common. And …

Robin:

Let’s talk about the difference between the most passionate hobbyist of X and the professionals of X. These are often not that strongly overlapping groups of people.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So, can take anything, like rocket ships or something or aliens even, just take any topic and then look among the ordinary people who are just the most passionate about it, who love the subject the most, who talk about it the most, who are just most eager to go to events about it, et cetera. Look at that group of people. And now, compare it to the group of people who are just paid to do that sort of thing. These groups of people overlap to some degree, that here’s the risk of correlation of people who are paid to do something are somewhat more passionate about it. But it’s not that strong a correlation. Often, you will see the people who are paid to do something, they are not actually that passionate about it and they don’t actually want to spend their free time doing it. They’re good and they found a spot in it. And then there are these people who are just really passionate and love to talk about it who are just ineffective in various ways. They couldn’t make it a career, or maybe they’re just not as capable a person in many ways. These are just different kinds of people.

Agnes:

Right. And so maybe if you go went back in time but you now, you’re the person you are now, but you go back and you have a chance to go to one of those dinner parties or whatever that you used to go to in Silicon Valley, maybe you would just find the discussion like hopelessly naïve like you’ve gone way past this and you – I mean I guess perhaps that’s like perhaps what you’re describing as literally amateurs. The word “amateur”, it means “lover”. It means someone who loves something, right? And so maybe part of it is that the professionals want to be careful and they don’t want to make stupid mistakes and they want to approach their activity in a professional way, holding themselves to certain standards. And the enthusiasts, those are the ones having late night philosophy discussions about the meaning of life that maybe most professional philosophers would look down their noses at as like having no precision and respectability to it. So maybe that’s part of it is that having a fun conversation about something is in tension with the activity of holding the pursuit of that topic to intellectual standards. That would be depressing but …

Robin:

I don’t think it’s quite the holding it to standards but it is related. So, I’ve often said as my summary of the world, there are two kinds of people I’m interested in. There are the people who just are really interested in something and interested enough to pursue it and be passionate about it. And then there are some people willing to be careful about something. And that I find the intersection between these two to be sadly very small. And those are the kind of people I’m interested.

Agnes:

Wait. Wait. Wait. You’re only interested in people who like the intersections so you’re interested in one kind of person.

Robin:

The intersection of these two classes.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So, there are these two classes and there’s an intersection. And I’m primarily interested in this intersection.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

But even though both classes are large, the intersection is quite small.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Surprisingly small. And that’s a way I’ve summarized, like, who I’m looking for when I’m trying to interact with people. So in some sense, I think it is because the kind of show you put on or the kind of persona you become are somewhat in conflict for these two distinctive types of people. So academia around us is full of careful people, people who are methodical and careful and make sure they know things, are reluctant to say more than they know. And I think in substantial part because of that, they’re reluctant to show much enthusiasm.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Or energy. They are reluctant to be just really excited about something and overflow with energy about it and really want to be into it. And on the other hand, there are these people who are really enthusiasts. They are excited and energetic and they want to talk about it a lot and they want to go to people. But I think they are also reluctant to be careful. That is, care seems in that world like a hesitancy, a lack of full devotion to the topic. Whereas in the other world, the enthusiasm looks like sloppiness and bias and the two kinds of personas are somewhat in conflict. It is somewhat hard to project, I mean what I tried to do but many don’t believe me, I’m trying to project a persona of I love this stuff as this is really important and I’m going to be really careful and methodical and if it looks wrong, I’m going to reject it. I’m going to be quite willing to reject the stuff I’m feeling enthusiastic about if it doesn’t meet the standards. And I’m really enthused about the prospect of looking in a space of things for stuff that might meet the standards.

Agnes:

I think that’s super helpful, the thing you just said because it sort of suggests that there’s just a deep – actually really a deep chasm that is causing this phenomenon that I’m experiencing of the tension between the intellectual and the social. Like it’s partly that the tension between being interested and being careful. And maybe people feel like say, when they are socializing, the main thing they want to be is interested and they want to be able to be – so they want to – they have to find topics where they don’t have to be careful. And those are often going to be things like gossiping, like that’s a big part of what people do, gossiping, who is being hired where, who is misbehaving about what, right?

Robin:

Movies, politics.

Agnes:

Yeah, movies, politics. Right. Well, those are things where you can show a lot of enthusiasm and you don’t need to give a really – especially like movies, you don’t need to be really careful. Everyone is entitled to their opinions so you can have enthusiastic opinion while having done no research on this question and not being able to define any of your terms. And so people are just finding it difficult to hit that inner intersection and maybe it’s particularly difficult to coordinate over that intersection with a group of people, right? Because like I guess, I’ve been to enough – I’ve been to and also been the recipient of enough Q&As to say a lot of Q&As are super interesting. Like they are genuinely engaged, there’s genuine investment and there’s also care. There’s both of those things.

Robin:

That’s highly structured, right? You’re going to think it’s highly structured.

Agnes:

It’s highly structured, right. But what the high structure gets you then is like an ability for the group to coordinate around finding this intersection between the interesting and the careful.

Robin:

And so I’ve noticed – I’ve seen times when a speaker will just do Q&A with no prior talk. And that is a bit sloppier.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So the combination of enthusiasm and precision is substantially lacking if you just start doing an ask me anything, say. Right?

Agnes:

Yes. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Because we have like – I run the undergrad program here in the Philosophy Department and we have these events where you can ask me and the Director of Undergrad Studies and the Assistant Director Undergrad. So you can ask us things like what does it take to be a philosophy major, how do you get into grad school, those sorts of questions. But we changed it to ask us anything. We changed it from what is the major about, to ask us anything. And we get way more people showing up. They love the ask me anything format it turns out. So that does generate a lot of enthusiasm but it means the conversation bounces all over the place and we don’t focus on, OK, let’s go through all the requirements for the different flavors of the philosophy major, et cetera. So yeah, that’s true. I mean sometimes you have a text that was assigned in advanced and people are supposed – I think that’s the best of all combinations is the text is assigned in advanced. People read it in advanced. And then you have the Q&A. The problem is just like what percentage of the audience have actually read it. As a speaker, you never really know. I try to ask and like behind the scenes so people would not get offended but – because sometimes actually quite few of them have read it and then you have to explain it a little bit.

Robin:

So you’ve classified me as an autodidact in some ways.

Agnes:

I think you classified yourself that way, but yes.

Robin:

Right? And so we could ask, what fraction of people without such a structure could just start talking to someone and be both enthusiastic and careful? I mean I feel like I know how to do those things without a prep but I don’t need an intro. If I have just a person I’m talking to, I know how like if they are saying something vague to stop them and ask for a precision or to try to find a more precise question. But it could be that takes a degree of confidence and experience that most people don’t have or feel would go wrong too often. You might – so the story here as you’re presenting it is that we need these prepared contexts in which we can have a prepared style of interaction and then some of those will be more focused on being careful and some will be more focused on being enthusiastic. And we don’t have very good prepared contexts to getting an intersection of those, although maybe a Q&A is the closest we have. But some people might be just able to, without a prepared context with an appropriate other partner, just pick a topic they’re both interested in and then start getting into it in a careful way.

Agnes:

I would predict autodidacts would be terrible at that because the whole thing of the autodidact is that they’re not relying on, and therefore not learning how to rely on and make use of other people to learn stuff. And that’s probably why they can get enthusiastic about ideas irrespective of the social context but they’re probably also like not actually going to be good at holding that kind of conversation. And if it’s autodidacts, that’s not going to make it any better.

Robin:

Maybe we need a third category and then I’m not sure which category I’m in. One category is someone who just sits by themselves and thinks and comes up with things and just doesn’t interact with other people very much at all. The opposite category might be people who grow up in very particular structured social contexts where they learn how to interact in that context they grow up in, prepared for them. Say, a university classroom lecture, discussion, or something. And then there could be a third group of people who, pair-wise, meet each other and are just – do that a lot and then learn through practice to talk to each other usefully without having been trained in that in some shared structured context. They would just reinvent their interaction norms.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean I guess I just feel like the gravitational pull of socializing between those people would be so strong. It’s sort of like …

Robin:

Not if they’re nerdy.

Agnes:

OK. OK.

Robin:

If they’re nerdy enough, they would then …

Agnes:

If they are nerdy enough, I think they’ll just go separate ways honestly. That’s the thing about the autodidact nerds is that nothing binds them together and if that stuff does bind them together, it pulls in the direction of socializing.

Robin:

But I’m telling you, there’s a world I’ve seen different. I’m telling you, this is the world I’ve come from.

Agnes:

You mean like there are worlds of intense conversations that go on where people seek up those people like whenever they can.

Robin:

There are worlds where people are able to productively talk about ideas both carefully and passionately. That they didn’t inherit that world from some prepared world they all shared and were trained in and they aren’t just separate people thinking by themselves. There is such a world of these interacting nerds. That’s a world I come from so I know it.

Agnes:

OK. I will just tell you that I know a lot of nerds who spend a lot of time by themselves so …

Robin:

It could be.

Agnes:

… that’s – I’ll just give you that as my data point. And so it may be that every once in a while some of them find each other. I mean as I said, I’m not skeptical that they can work together on a specific work topic.

Robin:

So here’s a basic fact about the world, which is, once upon a time, rare people were mostly loners. And as the world finds more and more ways for rare people to find each other, they become more social. So this is a story about the internet and a story about many modern things which is, in a small town if you were the lone person who is intellectual, you are mostly a loner. You were reading stuff by yourself and talking to yourself. There’s hardly anybody else in the town at that sort of inclination. But if you, in a modern world, go to an intellectual town like I don’t know, Boston or someplace where there’s a lot of concentration of intellectuals then they suddenly become much more social as being around each other. And this is just a thing that has happened for many kinds of communities over the last century, is that unusual kinds of people who used to be relative loners found each other and then created communities where they were no longer loners. They were very social because they were around other people like themselves. And one of those things was: tech in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was a prototypical place where tech people came together and were much more social there once they found a lot of other tech people like themselves. That story has played out in many other topic areas too, where again, people who were loners in the world they were in, because they were very rare and couldn’t meet other people like themselves became much more social when they found a way in a big city or a big online world to find other people like themselves. And so people who were initially seen as intrinsically loners or asocial, in some sense they were that because of their unusual features making it hard to match with other people around them.

Agnes:

I’ll just tell you that, like, this kind of myth of like the pure of heart intellectual nerd who had just this passion and interest and all they have to do is find the other people who are as pure of heart as them and then they can like pursue their intellectual inquiry together, just strikes me as extremely false from my experience. And I know a lot of nerds and I know a lot of nerds in academia. And like I guess part of it is that, I think the parameter do you have social skills and then the parameter do you have intellectual interests are pretty separate. So you could have high social skills and have really deep passionate intellectual interests and you could have low social skills and not have much of intellectual interests. These are just two separate things.

Robin:

But these parameters aren’t constant. They can change with time and context. That would be the key point. So like imagine someone who is say, homosexual in a small town where they don’t – maybe they only ever meet one other homosexual. Then, they’re going to keep that a secret say, and they’re going to be these very secretive loner types who are bound together by this unusual thing. But if in a big city, there is gay bars or something, then they can become very social and become a different sort of person because …

Agnes:

Sure. But they might also – that person might have just socialized with people on another issue if they were in the small town as well. They might not have been a loner. They might have been very friendly and socialize with other people who like certain kinds of books that they like instead of socializing …

Robin:

Right. Exactly. But about the thing they were weird, they would be less social. They would be more social about the things that they were – they had in common with people. So I think that is a very common feature.

Agnes:

OK. Fair enough. I guess I’m just saying that I know enough people who are intellectuals. They genuinely have intellectual interests and they also have social skills and yet, they still don’t when they are together, like, engage in intellectual activity unless they have some kind of framework for it. That for me is the norm of what I see in the world and it’s true of the nerds and the non-nerds. It’s just true of everyone.

Robin:

I’m telling you that I came from a different world.

Agnes:

Right. But we already discussed the difference. So one thing is maybe those people were amateurs and they were having like in some context, they were having technical discussions where they had a specific topic that they had to do. And in another context, they were kind of like having free-flowing late night meaning of life whatever types of what could the future be like conversations where if you went back in time to these conversations, you might not find them very engaging.

Robin:

But it might have been amateur, but it might not have been too. That is, that could just be a parameter that varies. So in this world of people that I was involved with, again, from 1984 to ’93 while I was in Silicon Valley, there were people there who, looking back, in fact, were the world’s experts on some things.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And those conversations they were having passionately in those parties with each other were in fact the world’s best conversations on those subjects. They weren’t just amateurs. They were the best.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

OK? But it was happening in that same sort of world of people who were socializing together passionately talking to each other and being careful. All those things were happening together.

Agnes:

So all of those people today have computers so you could be Zooming with them every day. How many of them do you talk to per day of these ideal conversationalists?

Robin:

Well, so for myself, it was a world of a certain set of topics they were all interested in talking about together. And that, when I was in that same world, interested in those same topics, I was talking with them a lot but then I made this big switch to become an economist. I left Silicon Valley. I left the world of tech. And in 1993, started grad school in Caltech in social science and so I moved to a different world. So that’s some context there.

Agnes:

I’ve yet to find the topic you’re not interested in so I’m skeptical of this analysis. What are the topics that you would be unwilling to discuss with them?

Robin:

I mean, I was just at a social event a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to go to another one in a couple of weeks back in Silicon Valley with tech people so I have a sense of the kinds of things they are interested and the kind of things they are not and like where the border goes so …

Agnes:

And you still go to these things. So all of these people …

Robin:

Right. But they have a limited set of topics. There’s a limited degree of overlap of topics they like and the topics I’m interested, but enough that we have productive conversations.

Agnes:

Right. But like I guess – I mean if this Mecca exists, I would expect you to be reaping its rewards on a regular basis. Like on a daily basis in fact especially given how easy it is to do so. And yet, you speak of this as though were sometime in your distant past in which you encountered the perfect intellectual environment that gives you this rare thing of the interested and the careful.

Robin:

My story here is the idea that people with unusual interests, if they are randomly sorted among each other, they don’t find other people to talk to pretty easily. But sometimes we can make a special conglomeration of them where people come together around a set of topics that is similar enough and then they can have a burst of this sort of social interaction which is both passionate and careful, when they are close enough in topics and enthusiasm and basically communication distance.

Agnes:

But like the thing I’m telling you is like this is what is – OK, being really passionately interested in Aristotle’s theory of perception and sense perception and his theory of how illusions and dreams work, that’s pretty niche. It’s a pretty unusual interest. And I was just with a group of people who are all really interested in that. And then there was a failure to discuss that. But what I’m – I mean you could say, “Oh, they weren’t the real, the pure of heart like the nerds who are really interested.” But I can see people are interested in this question. It’s just that they are not able to talk about it.

Robin:

I wouldn’t say that they are not interested. I wouldn’t say the nerds are pure of heart. I would just say – I mean it’s a simple sort of standard story, the nerds just are not less willing to play the social game because they are just not as good at it and so they look better playing the nerdy discussion game than they do playing the social game because they just are bad at the social game. And so, they do the other thing. I don’t think they’re more altruistic per se. I just think nerds when we try to play the social game, everybody sees that we are not very good and we sort of move to the background in quiet and watch everybody else play because when we try to stick our hands in it and move, people go, “You don’t know what you’re doing. Back off.”

Agnes:

So I’m surprised that nerds don’t just develop social games that they’re good at. In fact, this is true. They do this. So nerds play games, right?

Robin:

Yes, board games.

Agnes:

Like board games, card games, dungeons and dragons.

Robin:

Right. I think that’s part of the great attraction of those things for nerds is that it’s a kind of a social game that they can play better.

Agnes:

Right. So maybe an interesting question would be like if you had a bunch of these nerds and then there were like a game nearby that they could easily play where they shift into the playing of it would be almost no work.

Robin:

So for example …

Agnes:

Will they continue the intellectual conversation or would they start playing the game?

Robin:

I mean my friend, Bryan Caplan, as you know, has this every year gaming convention at his home. He calls Caplan-Con. And at this gaming convention, intellectual conversations are common as is game playing and so people are in fact switching between the two. They are sitting around the kitchen table doing or in the hallways doing intellectual conversations or they’re going to play a game. And the people with these two preferences are mixing up there together and you might think this works out well because if it was only the intellectual conversations then maybe they would have conflicts or maybe they would find it too threatening or maybe they would not be able to make it last or sound stupid or whatever. But they’ve got these two options for activities and now, they can do the safe game thing or when they feel in the mood or conversation looks appealing, they can try to join into the conversation. And in some sense, that’s a way – I mean many other kind of parties are a mix of intellectual and social conversations.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robin:

I’ve seen parties where in the same room, there are 10 different conversations and 3 of them are intellectual and 7 of them are social. And then people also have that option to play the social game or join one of the intellectual conversations and it’s sort of low – less threatening because walking into the room doesn’t commits you to join the intellectual ones. And if you don’t like one or it’s not to your style or you feel threatened by it, you can just slip over to one of the other ones.

Agnes:

I was once in a high table at All Souls College in Oxford and I was talking to the person next to me and at certain point, I don’t know what happened, there was like the ringing of the glass or whatever and then the thought was you were supposed to turn and talk. If you talk – whoever you’re talking – you’re supposed to start talking to the person on your left and then you turn to the person on your right. And I was in the middle of a conversation with the person on the left and I was like, “Yeah, I’m not doing this.” And they are like, “No, no, no. You have to do it. You have to turn and now start talking to the other person. That’s how it works.”

Robin:

Rules, yeah.

Agnes:

And I guess like to me that – you can have intellectual conversations even at these dinners or whatever but they just don’t last very long. Some topic gets brought up, a little bit is talked about, and then you move on. And I mean I’d be surprised if it were different at the gaming one like yeah, there will be some intellectual conversations, people are kind of moving in and out but there isn’t something like a sustained inquiry. So that’s the thing …

Robin:

So maybe that’s the question we should be talking about here. Maybe what we should say is, ordinarily, people are able to do intellectual conversations and they often do them but they do them small little versions, go a little into the depth, and then they stop. So I more want to ask, what’s different about the people who take a topic and go into much more depth for much longer? How are they distinguished from the other people?

Agnes:

Yeah, and …

Robin:

Or how do these environments like a Q&A allow that more sustained pursuit?

Agnes:

Yeah. So like as you were gathering from me, I’m skeptical of the solution that says, “Well, there’s the two kinds of people, the special ones who can do the sustained pursuit and then ordinary people.” But yeah, I think the environment – having an environment – I mean the thing is – the thing about a Q&A is that in a way, it isn’t that sustained, because it’s different questions. And some of those people will follow up but you can actually move on to a different question.

Robin:

So here’s a version that actually works pretty well that I hadn’t thought very much about. But OK, I have seen parties and social gatherings where someone holds court. You know what this means. There’s some celebrity of some sorts in the group and they are at the center of a group of attention and they are pontificating on their favorite things. They may respond to questions of other people but they are the center of attention and they are getting the lion’s share of the discussion.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And if they pontificate on something intellectual, why then the group around them sustains that attention on an intellectual subject for a while and even the larger rest of the room maybe pulled in that direction as well. And that can be a lot like a speaker giving a talk.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

Right? In some sense, you might think it’s the anchor on the person and their sustained orientation to an intellection topic, and their prestige in the group, that can then sustain that for a larger group around then.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean that seems right. The often …

Robin:

And sometimes you’ve even been known the whole court, right?

Agnes:

Yes. I certainly am. I’m like when I can turn any dinner into a class, I will do so within the bounds of social acceptability. But I think – so I think there’s a reason why that works. I mean there’s a number of reasons but one of the ones that strikes me is that part of what you need for an intellectual inquiry is you need someone to have their eye on what matters.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That there’s something that’s driving it and so you’re not just saying fun things that come into your head but you’re trying to go somewhere. Like I’m trying to understand something about is there really a deep tension between social and intellectual?

Robin:

So the kind of people I’m imagining who hold court are also people known for having some theses that they push a lot. When they are holding court, they are often arguing for their theses.

Agnes:

That’s what you do when you hold court. I actually am not sure that that’s what I do.

Robin:

But you and I know some people who are famous and who are center of attention but they are not inclined to hold court. And I think they don’t then create the same sort of sustained arena around them.

Agnes:

Yes. Right. Right. I think that that’s right. So maybe you have to – I mean maybe you are right. Maybe it is a matter of having a thesis that you are arguing for. Maybe that is what I’m doing actually now that I think about it.

Robin:

Certainly what a speaker does for a talk and that sustains it.

Agnes:

Right. Right. Right. Sometimes what – so I found …

Robin:

It could be a question too like you might concur with a question rather than a thesis but it’s still a focus – a concise focus.

Agnes:

I think pretty often, a thing that I find myself doing is insisting that something is a paradox where the people – the rest of the people at the table are like, “No, that’s not a paradox.” And I’m trying to make them be confused about it. So it’s not quite holding …

Robin:

That’s a thesis.

Agnes:

… on thesis but I mean it is sort of a thesis.

Robin:

A paradox is a thesis, yeah.

Agnes:

It’s that I’m trying to induce confusion or to induce a certain kind of puzzlement, right? But the point is …

Robin:

And it creates a sustained attention because you’re sustaining attention to it and you aren’t letting them turn away from it.

Agnes:

Yeah. Right. Right.

Robin:

And that means you can go into depth.

Agnes:

And so I feel like a big part of what I’m now thinking of is like a big part of the sort of difficulty here is that in a social situation, there is this problem of the coordination of attention. It’s like, “What are we all supposed to be paying attention to?” Now, if I’m in charge of that and I can be like, “Everyone, here’s what we are going to pay attention to, this is the question we are going to be looking into,” that’s basically just me teaching a class and I’m very comfortable in that environment. But usually at a dinner like after a talk, even if I was the speaker, I’m not allowed to do that. And so there is this question, how will the attention of the group coordinate itself around a topic and will stick? Will it stick to one topic? And typically, it wouldn’t. It will just waver between topics.

Robin:

So it seems to me that when you are trying to get a group to stick to a topic, what people often do is they have to have a thesis, but the thesis can neither be too obviously right or too obviously wrong. A thesis that will grab the attention of a community will often be a thesis that has to be asserted by someone with status in the group, somebody who it’s worth say, disagreeing with and who seems to be overstating their case.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And I think people often do this on purpose. They exaggerate a claim to just the right degree so that they are tempting people to respond and rebut them. They are putting out some tempting meat for other people to go after like you’re trying to temp an animal to come after some meat to come out of that woods or something basically. I think I see people with that sort of like a standard MO or a style of enticing a group of people to talk to something as somebody prestigious throws out an apparently too strong a claim and then tries to defend it a bit. And then other people go, “That can’t be right. I’m going to take this guy down. I’m going to show him he is wrong.” Because they think they see a way to rebut this and often, the person who did this knowingly said something a little exaggerated that they can sort of pull back from a bit. But this is the way to get people to talk about it.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean that is a kind of an art form of being able to produce those slight exaggerations. Because the person who can do that can then direct the whole attention of a group. It’s really a gift to be able to do that because even if you are like annoyed that the person is exaggerating, the alternative situation is one where then the group breaks up into like 7 boring conversations about nothing. Right? So that person has like done this great service to everyone by like getting everyone to coordinate around showing that they are wrong in this exaggerated claim and then they might be – and I’m often that person of like making the exaggerated claim and then sometimes to my surprise, I’m like, “Actually, I believe this. This is …”

Robin:

[Laughs] But you didn’t know when you started it.

Agnes:

Or I was trying it out. I was like testing it. I’m like, “Let me see if I can defend this.” And then I can defend it better than I thought I could and I’m like, “Yeah, this is my view now.”

Robin:

It just has to seem weak or it doesn’t have to actually be weak, right? You have to have a claim that seems vulnerable like somebody could have an effective response.

Agnes:

Right. But you also have to have it like where they don’t just feel bat and switched, where you make a crazy claim and then it’s like, all I meant by it was this trivial claim and then there is like ugh!

Robin:

Yeah, even though that’s not going to work. So we have to be able to sort of – if you do a retreat, you have to sort of cover the retreat well enough or make it less obvious that you did a retreat. I think it’s not just the claim. Often, it’s just the emotional tone with which you make a claim. So that this works in politics often or if you will make some sort of an indignant implication, the thing you said isn’t actually very strong but you implied somebody else is just wrong and that can also temp people who feels like you’re maybe implying something wrong about them or their group or something that they come up to defend themselves.

Agnes:

So one way we carved up the social versus intellectual earlier was interested versus careful where the idea is like in the social realm we want to be interested then the intellectual we might be careful. Another way that I now am thinking about carving it up is sort of adversarial because cooperative. That is, in an intellectual realm, we have kind of adversarial attitudes. We say that we are wrong. We say, here’s why you’re wrong. The basic interaction is someone saying something and another person is saying they’re wrong. That’s the basic – the building block of intellectual interactions. But in social interactions, people are supposed to be cooperative and nice and, “Oh, here’s another reason why you’re right,” or whatever. That seems the difference when you carve it up.

Robin:

That brings up this standard gender distinction of different academic professions. So like philosophy and physics and some other more tech areas are known for having more direct confrontation. Whereas some other areas like sociology are known that like if somebody gives a talk and everybody says nice things and they go out in the hallway and they trash it to each other privately but they wouldn’t challenge it in the talk. Whereas in say physics or philosophy or some other – or econ, you’re much – it’s actually expected to challenge. If you’re too nice in your Q&A, that just seems like you’re shilling for them or something, right? So you’re almost supposed to come up with something a bit hostile or a bit challenging to say. And I think we’ve discussed that there’s a stereotype that women, when they are trying to socialize or trying to connect can find a common connection, whereas men, are trying to have a little fight. They are trying to do a little combat and see who comes out looking better. And that correlates with these different styles of these different intellectual areas. So I mean presumably, everybody has both, but when professional combat or social cooperative, that doesn’t actually map on to many other disciplines where the professional thing is also very cooperative, at least in front of each other.

Agnes:

Right. At least in front of each other. I mean I think women can be very adversarial about one another …

Robin:

Yeah, but not just directly to each other.

Agnes:

... a lot of academic confrontations are not face to face, right? They are going to be in writing. They are going to be responding. And so, there’s going to be plenty of opportunity for third person critique and …

Robin:

I think you’re right though. I think everybody is keeping track of a parameter with respect to everybody they interact with. It’s like how often were they having a confrontational versus cooperative relationship with me? You can tolerate a 20% of confrontational time as long as the other 80% is cooperative. And so I think maybe academics for whom their professional interactions are confrontational then they just need this other socializing time where they fill up the other percentage. Where they can decide that we are overall were colleagues and like each other because overall we just had enough cooperative time.

Agnes:

Yeah, that’s interesting. So I wonder if – it will be interesting to study different academic disciplines and to see whether in the dinners after the talk there’s more of that intellectual activity when it’s like whatever sociology or something but contrast with say, philosophy or economics which are more adversarial. Is it that we need to have some bonding time or something? I guess I also just think though that like even it’s true – so I was putting out this other way of carving it up, which is the adversarial versus cooperative. But I think that it’s also just true that inquiring with someone requires a fair amount of sort of getting on the same page with them like even if you’re pushing them and you’re trying to show that they’re wrong …

Robin:

So I remember this anecdote about sort of when US Military people would go to the Middle East and try to train military people in the Middle East, apparently one thing they found is that if people they were training had more than one level in terms of their rank, it wouldn’t work because the lower-ranked people would never do anything to make it appear that upper-ranked people were less than always perfect. They just couldn’t tolerate that. And so, you always have to just train people all at the same rank because otherwise they would just never – an upper-ranked person would never tolerate any situation where a lower-ranked person and somehow knew an answer that they didn’t or was better at something. They just couldn’t tolerate that. And so that’s a more extreme example of how social things just won’t tolerate being honest in certain way. So you might think that look, arguing and inquiring will require that even if our ranks are different, at some point I will – my rank is higher but I’m going to admit you are right and I was wrong or things like that. And that’s going to require a fair bit of trust and comfort with each other to be able to do that.

Agnes:

Right. And that’s where it sort of seems like these things start to become interconnected in ways as opposed to pulling in opposite directions. So that’s confusing that we are ending in aporia. That’s the term in the Socratic dialogues for when people are at a loss or don’t know their way out or whatever because I feel like we’ve just come around in a circle. But I’m going to give – we’re overtime already. I’m going to give you the last word.

Robin:

I will just say this was fun.

Agnes:

OK. Great.

Robin:

All right. Take care.

Agnes:

Bye.