Robin:

We thought we would talk about potential today.

Agnes:

The preference for potential over actual achievement, right?

Robin:

Exactly. So there's a, I think, 2012 paper. that I blogged in 2015 or something when I heard about it, that measured this difference across a number of different contexts, including ads and evaluations of people, and they varied just the difference between having achieved something and having the potential to achieve something or estimated to achieve something. And then across the right range of contacts, they found that people were more interested in and more eager to meet and interact with people who had potential to do something than had actually done it, which is surprising, of course.

Agnes:

And it might not just be about wanting to meet people. It might be broader than that.

Robin:

A connection with them of some sort, right.

Agnes:

No, it might be broader than that. Okay. If you imagine there's a piece of technology, like Twitter or something, right? And it has achieved something. Take ChatGPT, right? It achieves amazing things, but I think a lot of people's excitement about it is about its potential. And the people that are most excited about it, they're constantly thinking, yeah, but think about what it's going to be able to do. They're actually more excited about that than what it currently can do often. So I think it's not only people, it's broader.

Robin:

Makes sense. So, I mean, we should elaborate why we would be surprised by this. So the simple idea would be if you were just going to directly use something, then the fact that it was able to do something would be more of a reassurance. And the fact that it had a potential would be less reassuring if you were just looking at the direct. So if you wanted to hire somebody who, I don't know, could build a new missile or something, If you had somebody who had already made a missile, that might be more useful than somebody who had the potential to make a missile. Or if you wanted someone who could win a Super Bowl, say, somebody who had already won a Super Bowl might sound more valuable than somebody who had the potential to win a Super Bowl. That would be the reason why this would be surprising.

Agnes:

Right. So in a case where you know what it is that you want, Then it looks like what you are excited about is someone or something that can help you achieve what you want. But if you don't know exactly what you want, and you're hoping to get something better than what you can currently specify yourself as wanting, then the potential person is more exciting.

Robin:

So what we're probably going to do in the next few minutes is go through various possible theories to explain this. And so you've just named one.

Agnes:

I'll just take an example, actually, before we get into theories. The example that really struck me was when I wrote my first book, which is about aspiration, the way that I wrote that book was I wrote the book, and then I sent it to a publisher, and I'm like, here's a book I wrote. Do you want to publish it? And this is an academic book, and they were like, well, let's send it to reviewers. They sent it to reviewers. Reviewers liked that they published it. And then as I was working towards a trade book, I wanted to do the same thing, but I'm like, well, I found out for a trade book you need an agent, so I got an agent. And I was like, well, she's like, well, you need to write a proposal and we need to shop it around. And I said, I have a different idea. How about I just write the book? And then when I've written it, we can just ask people, do you want to publish this book? And she's like, no, no, no. Nobody will ever, ever publish it if you do that. You have to sell them the idea of a book. You have to sell them a potential book. Nobody wants to buy an actual book. That is, no publisher wants to buy an actual book. A publisher wants to buy a potential book, the dream of a book, the idea of a book. That's what you can sell. And to me, that was that was very surprising. But that's yeah, that's like a place where this phenomenon has showed up in my life.

Robin:

So let me just give one more example from an interview with somebody who wrote the paper. They said there's two job applicants that were the same, except there's a test they were said to have done well on. One of the tests was an assessment of leadership potential, and the other was an assessment of leadership achievement. So they're just swapping those two terms and leaving everything else the same. And then people were more interested in hiring the person rating the candidate higher if they had scored well on the potential.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

All right. So, so one theory that you just introduced is this idea that you might not know exactly what you want. But that's still somewhat puzzling because you might think whatever it is you don't want, I mean, this having achieved something might be more indicative of other positive things. So only if somehow the potential rating was somehow broader or had a wider potential than an achievement, I guess.

Agnes:

But it does.

Robin:

It's not obvious. So if you're looking at someone who has potential for, you know, winning an Olympic medal or something, and somebody has won an Olympic medal, it's not clear that the potential to win an Olympic medal shows very many other kinds of abilities that actually winning the medal does.

Agnes:

I mean, that's a bit of a weird case because it's like, do you hire people for this or whatever? But if you think about the book case, right, the actual book is a more concrete object than the potential book, which could be any number of any variety of books. And similarly with leadership, If someone has that actual leadership, then you know, okay, they could do leadership in these particular areas, but if they have leadership potential, I mean, they could lead you anywhere, maybe. It does seem to me that the potential is going to be vaguer and more open-ended.

Robin:

But it doesn't necessarily indicate a broader potential. It's just more uncertain, really.

Agnes:

Yes, but more uncertain is broader. Yeah, and you have to actually study your beliefs and your faith.

Robin:

Okay, let's distinguish two dimensions, right? So there's a bunch of different ways you could achieve, and then on each axis of achievement, there's how far you get. And so literally, if you pick one axis or you rate somebody on have they achieved it or do they have the potential for it, So having the potential for that particular thing doesn't necessarily mean have more potential for other things. I would, in fact, guess that if you had achieved A, you would have more potential for B, C, D, and E than if you only have the potential for A. That makes sense.

Agnes:

But I think we just actually think about and frame the potential differently from the actual. So with the actual, we think about a single axis. With the potential, we don't think about it that way. We think about the many.

Robin:

So that's a sort of cognitive error theory.

Agnes:

I'm not sure it's an error. I mean, it's a difference between the two cases. Something I think worth rowing in is that, and it's certainly true in the editorial case, and it's probably true in more cases, is that often with the potential, you think you can shape it. So the editor, if I give him a book idea, he gets to have input.

Robin:

So that's a second explanation here.

Agnes:

It would be a reason why thinking of it along many, many axes in a vague way might not be so wrong.

Robin:

Well, I mean, breadth of ability is just different from potential to shape it. I think those are just two separate factors. I don't even know if they correlate, but it is a relevant factor. If you want to shape something, Uh, that might matter, right? So for example, if you, you know, want to hire a manager and you want him to become a, uh, you know, acolyte of yours and, and, uh, somebody who supports you and, and does your sort of style of management, you might want someone who is shapeable rather than someone who's already been a good manager while you assume they they're full of themselves and they, they know what they're doing and they're not going to be very amenable to sort of becoming like you. So when I was a grad student, I returned to grad school and was an older grad student. And so I went and visited a professor at Stanford near where I was to talk about related things. And he went out of his way to say that most professors are a bit wary of older students because they're harder to shape. The standard story is that most young students, they're kind of, you know, not that reliable in the sense they're still very young and they want to date and they get caught up in hobbies and things like that. And older students were known for being very serious and getting to work because, you know, they'd been out of school for a long time and they'd been working and, you know, this was their big chance and they were definitely going to focus on, you know, getting some work done. but that they were less pliable. That is, they would less become a copy of you. And many professors wanted to make a student who was a copy of them, who would, you know, promote all their work and do their sorts of things. And older students were just less likely to do that.

Agnes:

And that's like a cynical framing, but a less cynical framing is like, I've noticed that when I give a talk, I am more excited about speaking to the younger students, the younger people in the group than the older people. And that's because I just cannot influence the old people. Like they decided how they're gonna interpret these texts, what they meant, what's important, like 20 years ago. And that door is closed in their mind. And I can experience, I can experience how closed that door is. And so it's like not very exciting for me to talk to them. The point is not that I want to like impress my view on the mold of these young minds and have them all become copies of me. They might, you know, give interesting pushback or whatever as well, but they're just more like alive to the conversation. Whereas I feel like the old people hold the conversation at a really far distance from themselves because they've settled these things long ago.

Robin:

Right. So the authors of this paper we're responding to, and I guess we'll put a link on the page where we have this podcast, are aware that many people think that this might be an age effect. And so they go out of their way to control for age in some of these vignettes to see that it's not just that we like younger people as more flexible. We also think holding the age constant, we prefer the person with the potential.

Agnes:

Right. It could be the other way around. I mean, this could probably explain why we hear about age.

Robin:

Sure. So you've offered two explanations. One is that potential seems broader and the other is that potential seems more shapeable. So let me offer two explanations. So first, you might think that potential comes cheaper in two ways. So if you're hiring this, you know, manager or whatever, you might think the one who has demonstrated achievement will be more expensive And someone who just has potential will be cheaper. And so you're trying to sort of get in cheap, just like you want to buy a stock before it rises. If you're speculating on investments or something. You don't want to buy a stock when it's high and everybody agrees it's high. It's, you know, you're not going to get the gain on its rise. You're, you're hoping to gain on the rise by having an early association with someone. And then as they rise, you gain from that rise. So you can gain directly in salary here. I get an employee cheaper, but you could also just gain in associations. That is, it might be that if you have an associations with somebody before they become famous. That association may be stronger or you can lobby them more strongly on something, or they trust you more or something. Cause there are many stories about celebrities surrounding themselves with the people they knew before they were became celebrities. Cause those are the people they trust. So, so that's one explanation is just you're hoping to get a cheaper price or more, more benefits out of the same association later by knowing them early. Another theory is that potential implicitly comes with more social support. So, you know, I developed this idea of prediction markets, and in part, one of the scenarios I had always thought about for prediction markets is, you know, what if somebody is a contrarian and there's a consensus opinion, but they disagree and they pursue their alternative opinion and later they're proved right. I noticed that in their current world, they don't tend to get much for later being proved right. And I thought, well, with prediction markets, they could get more of a reward for going against the consensus of being proved right. But I think part of the reason that in our world they don't get rewarded that much is that we actually, the fact that somebody was contrarian and was proved right still shows they were a contrarian. and probably indicates that they don't have as many good connections and associations as the people who were in the majority agreeing with the majority earlier on. And so also with this potential case, someone who many people say has the potential to achieve something that might indicate that, well, they're well connected. They, the usual authorities say they have potential and that's going to ensure you're not just about what they'll do, but that they have the support of the usual authorities and community. Whereas somebody who has achieved something, they might've achieved that in defiance of the usual authorities, in which case they might have high ability, but still you might be wary of how other people treat them and what connections they have and what social support they have from the usual authorities. So we have four theories on the table now.

Agnes:

Yeah. So I think that actually your first theory about cheaper is related to my shapeable theory in that like it's both that the potential person is more, you're able to mold them and influence them and also they're then going to carry your, that association is going to have this kind of potentially transformative effect for you. It's like you influence them in the sense that because you knew them back when, Um, they, you know, esteem you and want to hold on to you and all of that. Like that's, it's a way of influencing them. Uh, you're, you're able to connect to them.

Robin:

Right. It's influencing their judgments about who they trust and influencing their connections, not just their features.

Agnes:

Exactly, that's what I meant to say. Right, so it's another kind of influence in a way. And it's like, you're not gonna have that kind of influence if you meet a celebrity for lunch or something, and they're already a celebrity, you're just another person they're meeting for lunch that they're gonna forget you right away. If you met them for lunch back when they were struggling, then you are able to influence their opinion of you and of your importance. So I think it is about, it's about the shapeability and influence and moldability in some way of the person

Robin:

and relation.

Agnes:

And the relation of the relation. That's right. And I think that. Yeah, I mean, so here's like, you know, I've noticed that. It used to be the case, this isn't really as true anymore because of just how bad the job market has gotten, but like when I was on the philosophy job market, I was told like, don't go on the job market until you're real, don't just like, if there's a couple of jobs you might be interested in, don't just apply for those jobs, but then wait to go all out the next year because by the next year, everybody will know that it's your second year and that you were rejected once. and that's gonna be a mark against you. Similarly, don't apply to an MA program, because if you go to an MA program and you apply to a PhD program from there, then it's like, well, you probably applied to PhD programs the first time around and you were rejected. So there's this kind of sense that the potential person hasn't yet been rejected. They're fresh meat in that way, and I think we're very averse to people who have been rejected.

Robin:

So there's a related thing in economics that I heard, which is that, you know, there are many journals that are, some are ranked very high and some are ranked middling and some are low. And there's this advice that you should, at least if you have a shot at some top journal publications, to never apply or publish elsewhere. That is, if you have, you know, four top publications and four middling publications, that'll look worse for you than if you just have four top publications.

Agnes:

Because the middling ones would be rejects from the top ones.

Robin:

Yes, and they say indicate that you are willing to do middling level work.

Agnes:

Right, right, right. So there's a way in which it's just the potential person, it's like they're in the Garden of Eden and they haven't sinned yet. They're sort of pure. And you can give them the benefit of the doubt that they would never apply to those middling journals. You can still have that illusion about them or something like that. And so somehow the, the evidence of any kind of failing carries a lot of weight. Even though, of course, an actual successful person, like any actual successful person is going to have certain kinds of failings. But we don't have those don't have to be in view yet in the potential person. We can have the illusion of there being perfect, just like the potential book that I'm going to write. We can have this illusion of it's being the perfect book, the exact book my editor most wanted to be written. You can have that illusion about it. And that might be related to the ways in which, like, If I, if I write something online and there's a hundred comments on it and like five of them are negative, those are going to be the ones that I attend to and that I remember. And so similarly with the actual person, there's going to be some negativity and we're going to attend to that. Whereas there might well be just no negativity for the potential person.

Robin:

So this phenomena, I think, helps us understand a bit better the central role of, say, educational ranking in society more than you might have thought. So, you know, the story I'd always heard is something like, you know, the people who get accepted to the best schools or something, they get an in faster at better places, and then they get more opportunities. And if you're ranked lower, maybe you won't get a place where you could shine. and you won't get chances to shine. And so you will lose out because you never really got a chance. But this suggests that there's a bigger effect than just that, that even if you do get as much a chance to shine in your later career as the person who went to the top school, it still might be that people preferred the person who had the potential early, rather than the person who eventually achieves the same thing.

Agnes:

Yes, though I think it's complex because there is a bit of a, depending on the context that you're in, actually, there's a bit of almost like an ethos of, oh, the person who goes to the state school has their own kind of purity. Like, they're untainted by the Ivy League. There's definitely gonna be contexts where that's actually gonna be a plus. I think that's rare.

Robin:

In the world I've seen, that's pretty rare.

Agnes:

Your colleague, Tyler, just did a conversation with an economics educator, and a big part of the conversation is how she went to the University of Kentucky or whatever, and the advantages that gave her, instead of going to an Ivy League school, There's definitely a romanticism about that, and about not being part of the Ivy League machine. Tyler was channeling that, and was channeling it for his audience, so there's an audience for that. So I think it definitely exists. There's just a lot of ... Anytime there's some elite structure, there's just a lot of backlash to that, and that's just- Right.

Robin:

a tendency to celebrate the people who were contrarians and then who were proved right anyway, at least verbally, but I still think they seem to lose overall.

Agnes:

Well, you wouldn't think that. But I think they often win. I mean, I think they sometimes lose. And it's sort of hard to know, because we don't hear about a lot of the cases, right? But when people win, OK, when people do win, they're always insisting on their contrarianness. That is, the winner has always begun themselves as contrarian. So contrarian is a very popular facade to put forward. It's a little hard to know. I think you're probably right, if we took the space of all, if we took all the contrarians, we counted them all, and we look at how many actually end up winning, it's not gonna be many. But if you look at the people who succeed, they tend to present themselves as the beat.

Robin:

I was more conditioning on, you're a contrarian, and then you're proved right, compared to other people who might be proved right, but they weren't taking a very contrarian position. They were just proved right about the usual thing everybody already agreed with.

Agnes:

Yeah, I guess I'm not sure it should count more. I mean, for one thing, you may have been proved wrong about a lot of other things. I think, in fact, when people are later proved right, they make a huge deal out of it, but they don't tell you about all the times they were proved wrong about stuff, so they're just going to emphasize the ones where they were proved right. So prediction run gets to be better because you can have a total- Exactly. But, you know, you might have just taken a whole bunch of contrarian positions instead of taking a whole bunch of conventional positions. Do you get more credit because the contrarian ones are right? Like, I don't see why you should.

Robin:

So I guess we're slipping into talking about status, which is something I wanted to talk about in other episodes anyway, so we could talk about it a little bit here. But this is an issue of status and prestige in the sense that we all do love status and prestige and we want it for ourselves and we respect it and others. But we also like to talk an egalitarian game. And we like to talk as if we, you know, we're more equal and that we all, everybody was being listened to and everybody's being included and everybody has a chance. And I think that's a way in which we're a bit in conflict. Uh, and we actually, I think do in fact, want to be high status in the usual ways. And in fact, choose to prefer to associate with people who are higher status, even though we want to also celebrate egalitarian choices and norms.

Agnes:

So I have, I'm going to make an observation, but then I think we should go back to our topic because this is a digression, which is I feel like I had an epiphany over the past few weeks about like the way that I think about it is two different status clouds that hang over interactions. And so one kind of status cloud, and I see it much more in humanities contexts, is imposter syndrome. So people, it's not that they want to be higher status than they are. It's that they're really scared that they don't deserve the status that they have. They have anxiety over whether they are really whatever they are. Do I deserve to be a professor? Do I deserve even to be a graduate student? Like things where they're not even on high status. Right? First-year graduate students, it's not like you're somehow super high status, but first-year graduate students have a lot of this worry, do I deserve to be where I am? Is my status somehow fake? And then there's, and it's in those contexts that you'll see a lot of egalitarian talk. Because it's like people are just reassuring one another, oh, everyone's nervous like you, everyone feels these fears, you know, of course you deserve to be where you are. So it's one kind of status cloud, and that involves a lot of reassurance. And then the second kind that I more often feel that I'm under when I talk to you is people who think they deserve more status than they have. So you're not anxious about whether you deserve the status you have, but you think you should have more than you do. And I think that's more of a thing in tech circles and non-humanity circles. And that's like, we want status and prestige. We want opportunities to show off. We're competitive. We want recognition. We think the world should recognize us more than we do. Whether you're in the one cloud or the other is not correlated with how much status you have. Because I see Elon Musk as someone who's deeply in the second cloud.

Robin:

I think it is correlated with a potential tie.

Agnes:

my sentence, that he deserves a lot more status than he has, even though he's got a ton of status. So, right, so those are the two worlds. Do you deserve the status that you have, or do you actually deserve more status than you have?

Robin:

And I don't think that's a digression. I mean, I think the people who are assigned, you know, the potential rating are the first group you talked about, and the people who don't get the potential rating but later achieve are the second group you talked about. And so these are the two groups here that we're looking at.

Agnes:

The potential people have to the status that they've been. I guess it makes sense, right? Because I picked first year graduate students.

Robin:

Right. People assigned potential. Well, at least they're the top school. You're a top school. So somebody at a different school won't be so much rated for their potential.

Agnes:

Still, you had to get into graduate school and you had to be like, oh, now I'm a graduate student. Now I'm on the way. Do I deserve to be being on the way to becoming a professor? So, regardless what school you're at, I think there's going to be some of that. But yeah, maybe there's more of it at a higher ranked school. I mean, my school's not that high ranked. We're maybe just scraping the bottom of the top 20 here.

Robin:

Let me suggest there's also a correlation between ways that status is measured in the sense that potential people are more rated by endorsements of other people who have status. And the other people are more rated by concrete achievements than they can point to. And there's also a conflict there, right? I mean, there's just a difference in style. So the second group, people who have status on the basis of their concrete achievements, even though they weren't rated with potential, in part that was because they didn't have contacts and endorsements. And their status isn't coming so much through the contacts and endorsements. It's coming more from the concrete things they did. Whereas the people with potential, the main reason initially they were rated as having potential is often the contacts and endorsements that they had. And then later on, they have a stake in continuing the contacts and endorsement mechanism of choosing people. Whereas the other people more want to say, no, you know, we're old enough that you should be looking at what we've actually done. and that there's a conflict between those two groups in terms of how we should be picking people.

Agnes:

There's a couple of distinctions that cut across each other, right? So I was thinking, well, there's kind of humanities versus tech, and I see the anxiety over the status that you have as more of a humanities thing, and the resentment over the status you don't have as more of a tech thing. They're both in both places, but just more so. But then there's also the, are you at the beginning or at the end of your trajectory, right? So I gave like the first year graduate student versus Elon Musk, so we got like the very far extremes of the two possibilities. So those are both relevant, but they cut across each other.

Robin:

So if we think of STEM, there's a lot of people in academia who rise through the academic ranks and mainly initially have potential and endorsement. And those aren't the people you're thinking of in tech. Tech people you see are people who more took a big risk. And then the ones you hear about are the ones whose startups succeeded. And so that's not, most people who have high STEM status, are people who, you know, grew up through the standard hierarchies like you would have philosophy and then have a tenured position at some prestigious university or something. That's not the people you hear about in tech though.

Agnes:

Right, okay, fair. And so I didn't say STEM, I said tech. And so maybe if it was the STEM people in my university, maybe I would have something similar. But I think there's more of the anxiety.

Robin:

We could look at other areas, like if you think about literature, say J.K. Rowling, right? Apparently she was mostly a nobody until she managed to successfully publish her first book in her 60s after rejecting by 20 publishers or something. And compare that to someone who's a literature professor somewhere who then has all these endorsements and all these connections. And then you're going to see a different attitude there too about how you pick people and which things should count. And many literature professors are quite sensitive about the fact that they've never published a book that many people bought.

Agnes:

Right, so how do we distinguish? I mean, in some way, an achievement is an endorsement, right? If I make a product and a lot of people buy it, that's an endorsement, at least if there's not some big consumer recall or something, turns out my product was terrible.

Robin:

Well, we're thinking about status endorsement. So status or only works high status people can create your status by endorsing you status-wise. Just ordinary people endorsing you, that's not the same kind of process.

Agnes:

I see, so there's maybe two different kinds of endorsement. There's the populist endorsement of, you know, some, not massively hate Twitter, but whoever makes Twitter, then the people, everyone flooding to it is an endorsement of that product.

Robin:

Somebody applying to grad school in your department who showed you how many Twitter followers they have, that's just not going to get you into their department. But if their professor at their undergraduate school writes them a letter of recommendation, that'll count for you, right? So clearly for that kind of status potential, popularity doesn't count much.

Agnes:

Right, right. So the achievement is more like popularity and the status is more like, the endorsement is more like popularity with the right group of people.

Robin:

Right, or basically the claim that there's potential. So in some sense, that's what a letter of recommendation is. It's a high status person saying you have a potential to become high status.

Agnes:

Right, so it's not, the endorsements by high-status people aren't just endorsements, they're not just this is good, this is potentially good.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Yeah. That's true, that's true. Though, if you think of a tenure file, the tenure file is not evaluated on potential, right? You're evaluating it on did it actually achieve something, and that is being evaluated by the high-status people in the field.

Robin:

Although even there, people don't tend to want to use downloads of the paper or even number of citations in doing tenure file evaluations. They mainly want high status people to sort of directly say, this looks good.

Agnes:

Right, but Mike, what the point is, what those people are saying or not, this is potentially something else. They're saying this is good.

Robin:

Actually, no. I've heard a number of tenure cases, and often they are speaking to potential. That is, in fact, a substantial part of, they say, this person has done this good work, and we expect it to continue, and we think great things about where this person will go.

Agnes:

fair. Yeah. So so I want to I want to speak to like a deeper thing that I think is an issue in this kind of potential which is that I think that there's a kind of energy and excitement of being around young people or being around the future. There's a way in which the young people are the future, right? And you're tied to the future and the good things that they're going to do remind you that there are still good things that are going to happen. It's like this, if you wake up in the morning and you're in a bad mood, and you're grumpy, and you don't even want to get out of bed, and everything seems terrible, and you think to yourself of some good thing that's going to happen that day or later that week or even in a month or whatever, that might get you out of bed. You might be like, yeah, but if you think of a good thing that happened like the day before or the week before, that's not going to get you out of bed, right? And so there's this feeling of like, Good things only matter if they're in the future. And there's a big philosophical paradox about this. It's called the thank goodness that's over problem. Why should the dental pain be worse if it's in the future than if it's in the past? It is. There's just a way that we operate with indexicals where, you know, the fact that it's here versus there in the future, like, from a space-time worm point of view, they're not different, but from a, you know, human being, like, going through that, they are different. And so the fact that the good thing is in the future is just makes it more attractive and appealing to us in a way.

Robin:

So you and I were talking to a historian recently, and I was saying how interesting it is to study the future because you could do something about the future. So I think part of the energy in things yet to come is the idea that you could in fact influence them. And so your passion and energy is relevant, but many scholars are put off by the future and they like the solidity of an actual past they can grab hold of and it feels more real to them.

Agnes:

No, I think they really care and are invested in the future, but that takes the form of these young people. That is, I think if you want to know what does it mean for a person to care about the future, it is for them to care about the next generation of whatever it is they do. That's the future made concrete. So they have a couple different requirements. It needs to be future oriented, but it also needs to be concrete enough that there are real people involved and people don't feel like The people that are going to be born in the future are real. Yeah, they will be, but they're not now. And so it's both of those are- We agree there is this- I'll just add one thing, which is, this just reminded me of when I was little and my mom, my grandparents lived in Hungary and we would go visit them. And one time my mom did a surprise visit where she didn't tell her mom that we were coming. And she's like, she wanted to be surprised. And we showed up there and her mom was really happy. And she's like, never do that again. And my mom was like, why not? Wasn't it? And she's like, look, like a lot of the joy I get from your visits is anticipating that they're coming. And you deprive me of like two months that I would have been enjoying this future prospect where it's almost better for us to be about to come than for us to be there. Okay.

Robin:

So, I mean, there's these two separate effects, I think. There's a youth effect and there is a potential versus achievement effect. So, they were careful to separate those in this paper we're looking at. And so, think of somebody who is in a stable career and looks like they're just going to stay there for a long time versus someone who seems to change careers often. Now you might think we would see more potential and exciting possibilities in the person who is changing careers, but in fact, they tend to be more pariahs. We actually tend to distance ourselves more from the people who change even fields of work or whole career areas. So that's a bit of a puzzle here. So there are old people you see who are young in the sense that they're likely to do a lot of very different things in the near future. And so there's potential there, but often that's not so encouraging to the people around them. There's a way in which people want stability from people, even if that's at the expense of potential.

Agnes:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, maybe they want, like, to have a grip on your trajectory. So, you know, if you're just gonna, like, I don't know, you're gonna, like, be in academia for a while, then you're gonna start a company, then you're gonna go into government. You know, you're just doing all these different things. I don't have a sense of, like, the value that you represent to me.

Robin:

So that seems to be the opposite of this breadth potential point you made initially. We often like people with a narrow potential. They have a high potential, but we still feel that we can predict where it'll go. And somebody whose potential is less directed, less constrained, maybe we're less interested in that kind of potential.

Agnes:

So I think there's different kinds of breadth. So I gave this example where it's like you're in academia, and then you're running a company, and then you're running for government. And whereas I think even within academia, people who have certain kinds of breadth are celebrated, like intellectual breadth where they can pull a bunch of things together, that is celebrated.

Robin:

But my point was that that breadth should then give you potential credit. You should have the energy of potential with respect to them. But do we? I mean, we can admire their breadth, but does that fact that they have that range of possibilities make us have the excitement about the potential?

Agnes:

Maybe, I think if we're like, we know that they have a bunch of, we have to kind of know that they are still planning to do new stuff. But people are, like I just finished a book, and lots of people are asking me about my next book. And they're kind of more excited about my next non-existent book. They want to hear, what direction am I going? Right, they're interested in my potential, not the actual book that's done. And so, but like, you know, maybe I'm still whatever, I'm still young enough where they can still predict that I would do something like that. But at a certain point, they'll just, I mean, I think the age, I see that, you know, like use the potential are different, but there's a correlation. And so people are using age to make guesses about whether you have potential. And if there was an old person, but it was very, very clear they were still very productive and they were still going to do more stuff and they had breath, I think that they might get the potential bump or whatever.

Robin:

So I still, the last theory I gave, I still think is relevant here in the idea that a young person with potential is this package of a person with ability and a future and a set of social supports around them who've endorsed them to have this potential and therefore the plausible path ahead of them where they will get good positions and good opportunities. and good partners, and that that's an especially attractive package. It's less, it's not just about them as a person and what they'll do, but that they are connected and tied in to a, you know, a conveyor belt even that, uh,

Agnes:

I think that if you came across a person who was very promising, like intellectually and sort of personally, they had a good ethos or whatever, but they didn't have a lot of supports, that would in a way be even more exciting.

Robin:

Well, if you could bring them in and you do this for us.

Agnes:

We even have a word for this in grad admissions, a diamond in the rough, where it's like if somebody went to a really low-ranked school, we're excited about that. That's better. Because we can be the ones who discover them and maybe the other schools didn't and so maybe we can get them. So I think that we like, but that's just to say that the other explanation, then the other explanation kicks in, namely we have more influence.

Robin:

At a cheaper price.

Agnes:

Right, exactly.

Robin:

So I think we could call this the potential of potential. that there's an especially strong attraction, not just of someone with potential, but with the potential of potential. Someone with potential is widely acknowledged to have potential, but someone with the potential of potential might not be so widely acknowledged, and then you could convert them to someone who has potential and is widely acknowledged to have such, and you could be gaining on that transition there.

Agnes:

Right, right, right, right. We like discovering people.

Robin:

That's more the stock price idea of you're trying to get things at a low price before the price rises.

Agnes:

Yeah, right. Okay, good. But I guess I do just think that the thank goodness that's over element is there, is at the kind of the deepest level, is that somehow good things that are in the future are in many contexts more appealing to us than good things that are in the present, even if the one in the present is more of a sure deal and the one in the future is less so. It's an opposite effect, because we also have the like, you know, people be thinking too short term and taking the, you know, avoiding going to the dentist because it'll hurt, but it'll hurt way more if you, right? So both effects exist. But we do have this kind of estimation of, yeah.

Robin:

So I think this can help us understand fashion a little better. So the idea of fashion is that there are current fashions and then there will be future fashions, but we're not that sure what the future fashions will be. And then there's these various candidate origins for the future fashions. And we can sort of bet on one of the future fashions by becoming more associated with it. And that's the way that even if you're older, you can sort of generate potential. You're sort of generating uncertainty. Fashion generates uncertainty. It means that there'll be this, you know, volatility of who is, who ends up high and who ends up low. And in a world with a lot of fast changing fashion, even older people can have a lot of potential to be the origin of a new fashion. That is, if the thing they start ends up becoming popular, now you can sort of get in on early. And even if they're 45, but still by the time they're 60, their fashion will have peaked and you will have gotten in early, but they're not young.

Agnes:

Right. And maybe if you're old, like, you know, you heard how I was disparaging old people at the beginning of this conversation where I'm like, ah, the old people in the audience, what do I care about them? I can't change their minds. And so those old people know that, right, about how people are going to think of them. And so they have to be thinking to themselves, well, given that I can't influence other people by way of them directing their speeches. I mean, how am I going to influence them? And then this might be a very likely route, which is finding the young people and having them remember that you were the one who discovered them or whatever.

Robin:

Right. So that's with respect to young people, but I was just pointing out there's a separate effect of these old people. They could play the fashion game and be the origin of a new fashion, and that means they can be the center of potential.

Agnes:

But isn't being the origin of a new fashion the same thing as operating via the young people?

Robin:

I mean, fashions don't have to be, you know, embodied in young people. I mean, old people could just be fashions.

Agnes:

I see. I see. Right. So, for example, if you're, like, very excited about shout GPT.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Mostly excited about what it's going to do in the future, what the next version is going to be.

Robin:

Right, so you kind of jumped on the AI bandwagon before other people did.

Agnes:

Right, right, right, right. I see a lot more people being like, look, it can pass this test, it can pass this test, where those tests are things where the person themselves didn't need help passing it, right? They didn't know how to pass, so they weren't using it to pass the test. They just kind of knew about other things that it can do. But as opposed to showing like, here's a good thing that it did already where it was useful to me. It taught me something or whatever. There's a lot more of the, it passes the test or the, what's the next version gonna do? So that that is, that would be an old person's way of staying new is jumping on that bandwagon early. So it's just that there are other band magazines and Jumbom besides People. People is one of the band magazines.

Robin:

Another example is movies. I think much of the marketing of movies is centered around this, you can't be sure this won't be really popular. Don't you want to have seen it before other people? Do you want to be listening to other people tell you how it's such a great movie or do you want to be one of the first people to have seen it so it's the potential of the movie? As opposed to like, I like to go through historical records and find the most popular movies ever and watch those, but hey, that doesn't give me much potential excitement.

Agnes:

Right. Except like, you know, I don't know.

Robin:

I could rediscover them and tell everybody, hey, this is a neglected gem.

Agnes:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like you can just, you know, find what's underrated in the past and then you can be the missionary of that. And I don't know, it seems like people are, the business of rediscovering old movies is like a big business. So that's a plausible way.

Robin:

I guess there's rediscovering old intellectuals and philosophy is one of the things.

Agnes:

That's right, that's a huge thing. We're constantly discovering new early modern women philosophers.

Robin:

And then you, there's the potential of being the person who first discovered them or first called attention to them. Even if you're 50 years old, you could still have that potential and people can be excited about your potential there.

Agnes:

When I was in high school, I thought I discovered Immanuel Kant, because I would talk about him to people, and people in high school hadn't heard of him. And so I got to college, and people were like, what do you want to study? And I was like, well, I want to be a physics major, but I also am going to study this guy. His name was Immanuel Kant. He was a philosopher, and he was German, and here are some of his ideas. And they were like, yeah, we've heard of Kant. you know, kind of like witheringly, like, have you read the Critique of Pure Reason, which I'd only read like the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. It's like this little short book. And he wrote all these huge books that I didn't even know he'd written. So but I was just really proud that I was going to be the one to, you know, share Kant with the world. It was it was not to be.

Robin:

So as a classicist to some degree, is this taste for potential something that was just as strong in the ancient world?

Agnes:

They were super into like teenage boys. I mean, also as being sexy, but also as like potential leaders and almost like sucking up to them because like they're the future.

Robin:

Actual present leaders. Sorry, something just cut you off. Restate the thing you just said. They were even more excited than interacting with their present leaders.

Agnes:

Yes. To some degree, yes. But it was also occurring to me that even the book that I just wrote, which is about Socrates, is a little bit me doing that. I love being in that position. I'm like, I'm going to introduce you to a guy called Socrates. I have to kind of do quite a bit of a song and dance to justify that move, because people have heard of him, but I'm like, no, you haven't really heard of him.

Robin:

A new angle on him or a new way to see him.

Agnes:

Exactly. I think I can introduce you to him. That's a thing that appeals to us to do. So clearly to me, since I'm doing it.

Robin:

So I guess this is a reason why stuff changes. In the discussion of fashion, there's this question of whether fashion is wasteful because some kinds of changes are innovations that last and accumulate, but then other kinds of changes just seem to go around in a cycle or something. And then critique says, well, you can gain some reputation and fame for being the beginning of a new fashion, but that's at the expense of somebody whose fame is declining when yours rises. And there isn't an overall social benefit if you're just the hemlines go up, the headlines go down, hair gets long, hair gets short. The question is, what is the social value of fashion? And that's relevant here. The question is, this extra excitement we have for the youth, to what extent is that productive because we'll actually make a better generation of youth? Or to what extent is it a bit of a waste because we have to keep pretending things are different when we're just cycling in the same space?

Agnes:

I mean, you do want people to feel invested in educating the youth, right? And to feel like enthusiasm to be talking to them. And so whoever the youth are, I mean, every single time you want them to be invested in it. So maybe it's not so inefficient as the Hemlines case.

Robin:

Well, here's a related issue. In a world where people just did things and were rated on what they actually did, you might think that abilities were well calibrated to tasks. You know, if people who write a famous, you know, a really great novel are famous for the novel or people who prove a theorem are famous for that, whatever it is, then, you know, we'll at least see a good connection between the skills people are trying to acquire and the actual skills that are needed. But if you create this whole world of potential, where people are rated on doing things that other people see as having potential for later being rated as someone who is rated high by such people, there's more of this concern that just gets detached from the things that are actually useful. And I think that is a criticism of academia and schools to some degree.

Agnes:

I just suddenly had a realization, which is that so much of your work is really about your desire to bring about the world where people are rated on what they actually do, like pay for results and- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Robin:

This topic matters to me.

Agnes:

Right, like you don't like this whole potential thing.

Robin:

Well, when it gets, it has risks.

Agnes:

Wait, no, it has a downside. So I want to bring out the, that's why I think my final line of explanation is important to keep in mind because I often feel like in these discussions, the thing that you're missing from the story is a certain, side or facet of motivation, like something like the difference between wanting to jump out of bed and just kind of dragging yourself out of bed. And there's just the kind of excitement and enthusiasm and energy that people have around potential. Yes, youth, but I think because the youth codes for potential and that that's connected to just the idea of a future of a positive future where you should get that because you're a futurist that like if we stopped caring about the future or I mean this hasn't always been true that is there's many cultures where people just thought Things are not going to be different in the future. Things are just going to go around like this. This is how things are. It's how they've always been. It's how they're going to keep going. In a lot of the ancient world, that's how they thought about things. They didn't think there were going to be big technological innovations. They didn't think human life was going to fundamentally change. I have to admit, they didn't seem unmotivated. They did stuff, even though they didn't see this open future. They didn't have futurists in this world. There were no futurists. A futurist should, above all people, be able to appreciate the special motivational oomph that you get when you think about the good as coming in the future as opposed to happening now.

Robin:

But before we were making the distinction, say, between worlds where people get rated highly early for their potential and then have a lot of social supports and then move up through ranks, continuing with that social support, even if they don't actually achieve their potential, and then other worlds, like say tech, where it's more about just proving yourself by doing something, I think those people are pretty motivated and they also are motivated by a future. It's just a different path to the future. Each thing they're doing is, could this be the thing that wins big and makes me famous and makes me a big thing in the future? As opposed to the other world, people are saying, there's these associates around me and I need to please them because if I please them, then I will be rated highly in potential and And, you know, I need to do the things they're doing and fit into what they're doing so that I will be rated highly in potential. And that's the energy of the people who have high potential ratings is they typically are focused on not the actual thing itself that we might all value, but the proxies, the markers of grades or whatever, you know, letters of recommendations, et cetera, that the world of potential and give them. And honestly, I think that's less motivating. I am less motivated by trying to climb a ladder and get letters of recommendations.

Agnes:

People are very motivated by that. I think the tech thing is usually about proving to some VCs that you're some kind of material for something else. If I was a person trying to do a startup or whatever, here's rationally what I should think. I'm taking a risk, and of the people like me, you know, one in a hundred or one in a thousand will make it big. It's mostly random. Or it's not entirely random, but like within a certain group, it's random. And I may be the one who draws the lucky straw or not. That way of thinking about things is very demotivating. And I bet that that's not how people think about it. They're like, no, I believe in myself. And I have this inner thing. I have this potential. And there's some people in my world, maybe some VCs or whatever, some people in my world, maybe some important people in my world, who are like, yes, you have the thing in you. And the way that we get the one out of a hundred to win is to make them think that's not what's happening, that they spun the roulette wheel and won. And none of those people in tech who succeed who are like, you know, spun the roulette wheel and won, they don't see it that way. They're like, no, I had this inner drive or whatever. And some people recognize it from the beginning. So I don't think there is another narrative. Everyone has that narrative.

Robin:

I wasn't claiming that the difference was the narrative. I was claiming the difference was what are the proximate signals that are being used to decide who has potential and whether you have potential. In one world, the proximate signals are people in an established hierarchy who then, you know, approve of you and that you, you know, get an A in their class or get a letter of commendation from them. And the other world is where you do concrete things and then some of those impress people and some people hear about them and then you rise in people's eyes by doing those particular things.

Agnes:

I think they're just kind of similar. They're different in the fine points, but in the second world, you have to impress people. And in the first world, you have to do stuff to impress people. And in both cases, there's people and you're impressing them.

Robin:

But the stuff you do is different. That was my point. That is, in one world, the stuff you do is closer to the stuff we all want done, that we care about. In the other world, it's more a ingrown world where they just decide on their own metrics and get to perpetuate it because they're the people who decide.

Agnes:

Right. That's, it's probably right that it's closer. The more it gets, the more that other world gets kind of institutionalized, and they're like, you know, tournaments of success with judges, which now all exists, and lots of techniques growing for picking the next people or whatever, that world then starts to imitate the academic world. So there's a kind of, Chinese can have at the beginning that it's already doesn't have that much of.

Robin:

But there's still a difference. I mean, like one way we could distinguish is say, you know, in China, for many centuries, they had the civil service exam that people spent, you know, years preparing for about Chinese poetry and stuff. And then if you won that, you could become an administrator. In many other parts of the world, you become an administrator by starting out administrating and working your way up, showing your ability to administrate. Right. And so that's the difference between, you know, judging people on something close to the thing that you care about versus judging them on this, you know, other thing that at least, you know, you can make everybody have the same standing with respect to, and you have a system about it and, you know, everybody shows up on the day and they do the exam on the same day and you control for things.

Agnes:

There is that weird world, but I don't think it's that so similar to academia. That's its own weird thing. And, like, I guess if I had to say, like, in which world is it academia or tech? Is there a kind of cult of potential and of the newest thing and the newest young person who hasn't even been to school, but maybe they, like, did something in their backyard or whatever, and then we can dream about what they're going to do next. It's more tech than academia. That has that. So I just think both these worlds have this. They both kind of prefer potential over actual achievement. In tech, it may be a little bit more connected to what's going to make me money and what reminds me of the young me or something. And in academia, it's more like, what do me and my colleagues agree on? I think they have their own forms of corruption, but they both valorize and project fantasies of the youngest people.

Robin:

I've just been focused on the distinction between a world where the thing you compete on is somewhat detached from the thing that the world, the wider world actually cares about. versus things that are better grounded in that world. So a world where you just start out writing and you rise by writing more things that get published is a different world than a world where you rise through a literature program and get professors of literature to approve of your essays on literature, et cetera. That's just less, farther away from the world we might care about, i.e., how well do you write? Similarly, you know, there's, like I said, the civil service exam or something. So that's just the distinction I care about, but it's not the only distinction here. And I agree that in all these worlds, there's definitely the difference between achievement and potential, and there's a valorization celebration of potential. And, and, uh, that's just a fact about the world that we've been talking about for an hour now. And I, yes, we don't have more to say.

Agnes:

Well, it's been an hour. We always have more to say.

Robin:

But should we stop? Okay. So we talk again.