Agnes:

Hi Robin.

Robin:

Hi Agnes.

Agnes:

So earlier, we were talking not on the podcast, we were observing that we have somewhat different persona in our unrecorded conversations than our recorded ones. And in particular, well, this is my observation that you can disagree, that I’m more defferential to you I think in the recorded conversation than in real life and you’re a bit more didactic in recorded conversation than in real life. So, this is an experiment to try to make a recorded conversation that’s more like real life. And so I thought we could do that by actually just trying to go over a territory that we’ve already covered in our real-life conversation. It may or may not work. So, here’s how this conversation was started. I was telling you about an experience that I have when I was living in France where I would get into these situations where I had to ask for something and I – they wouldn’t go well and I wouldn’t get a thing I wanted like getting access to a library. And eventually, I learned that what I was supposed to do was allow them to turn me down a couple of times like three times before they would then say yes. And they had actually even been sort of offended that I would take no for an answer and walk away. I was supposed to keep asking. So this is like a social norm that this is over 20 years ago so maybe it has changed but at least that I encountered repeatedly and once I encountered it, it was like all my social interactions went way better because I knew that you just have to keep asking a couple of times after they turned you down. All right. And your reply was that this is the sort of thing that should be taught. Right? OK. And – it’s harder than I thought.

Robin:

Do you want to start over?

Agnes:

No. Let’s not start over. All right. Step 2. Step 2 was I brought up this book that I admittedly have not read but read about by Jason Brannon in which he in effect tries to explain some of these tacit rules or norms but not about living in France but about academia and academic success to his readers, graduate students who want to make it in academia. And I said, “It’s actually puzzling to me why someone would take the trouble to make these rules explicit, to tell someone how to succeed in academia when they were also explicitly acknowledging that they weren’t sure – in fact, even suggesting that they didn’t actually think the system was a good one. It’s sort of like how to succeed in a bad system or in a system that I’m not necessarily endorsing. Maybe not bad but I’m not looking at the question of whether the system is good or whether it should continue. I’m just telling you how to win in it. And I was saying, why would someone want to do that? Why would someone want to tell people how to win in a system that they don’t endorse? And your thought was that this is important, at least in part for egalitarian reasons. Right?

Robin:

In part, yes.

Agnes:

OK. So maybe let’s start there. Why do you think it’s important for egalitarian reasons to teach people how to succeed in a system that you otherwise might not endorse or you don’t think is going well.

Robin:

First, I’d say that all systems have like a whole range of good and bad elements. So there isn’t good or bad systems, there are just systems on a spectrum of good to bad. Almost any realistic system will have some bad and some good ones. And so your advice will be a mixture of things that promote the good things and the bad things in a system like that. But the scenario that I was concerned with was a scenario where lower-class people are taught in schools some norms about how they should behave in the work environments including academic environments. And then upper-class people are often taught the way things really work and they’re taught the actual strategies that will help them succeed. And this is one of the ways that upper classes perpetuate themselves is by knowing the actual rules of the game and explicitly teaching the lower-class people the wrong rules of the game as some general way to promote good behavior but in fact, put them at a disadvantage. So that seems to me objectionable because you’re setting up a game and you’re not only not telling people the rules of the game. You’re telling them the wrong rules of the game so that they would be at a disadvantage. That seems like – most people would find that pretty objectionable. And in fact, it will make the whole system more illegitimate as people become aware of it and that’s in general not a good thing unless you actually want illegitimacy because you actually want momentum to overthrow a system.

Agnes:

So I mean, it definitely seems bad when you put it – when you imply an intent to deceive. So like if I deliberately tell you things, false things, so as to manipulate you for my advantage, self-consciously do that, that seems immoral. But you’re not thinking that the people are doing it in that way, right? People aren’t aware that they are doing this.

Robin:

Well, some of them are. But most of them may not be. I’m not sure how much it actually matters but this is a common feature of sort of class-based systems where in fact, upper classes have advantages and they play to their advantages and they do things that promote those advantages, but each person may or may not be very conscious of their role in that system.

Agnes:

Right. So the thought is the system advantages some people over others. Now, I mean, suppose that you – so I suppose like the question – say, if we go back to Jason Brannon’s book because my question was why someone write such a book, a book that teaches you how to sort of more efficiently game a system that you yourself might not believe in. And so your answer was egalitarianism. So the thought would be if you had some reason to believe that the readership of your book would not like actually reproduce the bias, so like that would be important, right? So if for instance you thought that it would be more like upper class people who would have access to this book, you positively would want to silence the book and not have it come out, because it would actually make it worse on that view. Right? So your thought is, we are going to presuppose that the book is somehow going to transcend a lot of these class divisions and it sort of magically going to be equally accessible to everyone and so then it’s going to make academia more egalitarian. Is that right?

Robin:

It would be more widely accessible.

Agnes:

More widely accessible …

Robin:

It wouldn’t have to be perfectly equally accessible but if it was more widely accessible then that would help.

Agnes:

Right. But so I suppose you did like an empirical study on like who bought this book and stuff and you found that actually it was disproportionately the people who were like most advantaged who bought the book.

Robin:

Right. In which case, my objection goes away. I would have to retract the objection then.

Agnes:

Right. That is, you would no longer – if you were going to say, write such – you would no longer believe in writing such a book.

Robin:

Like for that reason.

Agnes:

For that reason. So the idea is that the book is supposed to sort of undo …

Robin:

Now, there is another reason that we haven’t discussed before, which is just that when you are trying to convince people to change a system for the better, first, you have to convince them of the current nature of the system, the realistic pieces so that you can say, “Look at this piece, that’s bad. Let’s change it.” And often, people are in denial about the actual system they’re in. And so, a book like this could at least make it clear what the actual system is and how it’s working. So that you could then make …

Agnes:

Then it would have a different audience, right? So like as I understood it, the audience of the book was like graduate students who want to succeed in academia. But then the audience would be people in a position to make changes, though it could be – that would be the true audience at the back but there would be a kind of proxy or fellow audience which is like the young graduate student.

Robin:

And I think that in general when we try to propose system changes, we do tend to just try to reach a wide audience of people who might be interested in the changes. And then try to create sort of a wider support for change which then would eventually become concentrated in particular people who are especially able to change but it’s usually the people who are especially able to change aren’t interested in change unless there is much wider support for change.

Agnes:

Right. I mean – so in a way, there are sort of two opposite goals for the same book, which is interesting and puzzling in itself, right? One goal would be entrenching further the system that exists by making it more efficient. And the other goal would be revolution, a new system. And so, it’s a self-puzzling in one and the same book and have those – both of those goals.

Robin:

I actually think those are what you should most typically be trying to do, yes. So in many of my reform efforts, I am willing to make recommendations for small reforms, minor reforms, that will only make a small change and which would then improve whatever larger structures are existing and make people less eager to change them perhaps. And I also want to propose larger changes. So I don’t actually think that typically small improvements prevent larger improvements.

Agnes:

OK. But I feel like – I mean in a way, I feel like I’m not getting it, the kind of puzzlement and it’s very – it’s a very abstract form of puzzlement that I have about sort of – I guess I see this all over the internet too. It’s not just in this book, right? There’s this kind of generalized advice that people give where they’re giving someone advice and they don’t know who it’s attracted to, right? I mean it’s open. And it’s advice about in some sense, how to game the system, how not to be a fool, how to in some sense, get the advantage over others by knowing how things really work. There are people who are motivated to give that sort of advice and I find that motive very obscure. I would understand giving that sort of advice to your child or to your close friend like you want that person to succeed over other people for some specific reasons because you have some attachment to that person. That makes sense to me. But the idea that you want every – you have that as a general desire to make any random person succeed over other people, that to me is like just mysterious.

Robin:

Are you puzzled by people wanting to be lawyers and representing particular clients or wanting to be job agents and representing particular clients who might be looking for jobs or represent other particular students who might need tutoring or counseling? These are all cases in which people advice particular clients for those particular clients’ benefit but they are often paid and compensated. So if you think of the authors of these advice books as hoping for some form of compensation for their advice then they would seem to be in the class as these other sorts of advisers.

Agnes:

So I think that one way to think about say, a lawyer, especially a lawyer, maybe even something like a therapist or a mentor is someone who is on your side or your ally in some vague sense, right? They’re on your side and not on other people side. Now, why are they on your side? Well, in some cases, you’re paying them. In some cases like with teachers, like maybe you just took a lot of their classes. I mean they’re not paying – students never – we, mentor, they aren’t paying us, right? They are paying to attend the school but they’re not paying to be the ones we mentor as opposed to the other students. So it’s not always money. But in any case, there are some grounds why you have an allegiance to that person and you’re in some sense promoting them over other people. So as a lawyer, you are promoting your client. Even as a therapist in some way, I think you have a kind of allegiance with your patient or your client. And as a teacher, as a mentor, you’re giving your students advice how to succeed in the job market, etc. But I am there like you know who it is you are trying to benefit over others. And I am still puzzled by the idea of just trying to benefit in general, like OK, in the case of book, you could say, whoever is willing to buy my book, but that’s not selected out first. I mean it’s like …

Robin:

Most lawyers don’t select out their clients. They are mostly willing to serve whoever offers to pay them. They make some judgments perhaps about some exceptions. But mostly, that’s true for most agents if you were a literary agent. You would probably take on those clients at least if they are within your specialty. I think in general, we aren’t very picky about who we are willing to help as advisers and when we are paid advisers.

Agnes:

Well, if you think about the case of let’s say people giving this sort of advice just online, on Twitter, say, right? Giving out some piece of advice about how to succeed in the academic job market or how to – I don’t know. There’s always advice about how you should work on weekends or you shouldn’t work on weekends, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

This is how you get ahead of other people. People are very liberal with this sort of. They are not requiring people to pay them. I mean Jason Brannon wrote this book so he is I guess, people pay him if they read his book, if they buy the book. But it seems to me that there is a more – that this kind of sentiment of teaching other people how to game a system, that’s like a thing that people are inclined to do. And I guess I feel like even with lawyers and teachers, that’s not really what actually lawyers and teachers do. That may be some people part of what they do as part of their lawyerly advice, right? But in the Jason Brannon case, my understanding was like that’s sort of most of what he was doing and it’s a lot of what you see on Twitter. So, it’s sort of like – it’s one thing to say, “I want to benefit this person,” and then teaching him how to game the system is some small part of benefitting them, right? And it’s another thing to say, “No, I just want to teach you about how to game the system. That’s the only form of benefit I want to provide.” So those are the different sorts of motivations and it’s the second one. It’s kind of purism about I’ll teach anyone who wants to learn and what I will teach them is how to game the system, where I don’t know whether you’re on the side of the system or against it. I don’t know what to do.

Robin:

So I want to push against this binary distinction.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

So again, there are not just perfect systems and terrible systems. All real systems are somewhere in the middle and they are complicated. So it’s more straight-forward to figure out how to win than to figure out which strategies to win are socially beneficial or socially harmful in terms of on the net. And that’s one of the things we try to teach and learn as economist is how to distinguish which local behaviors will be beneficial to the world and which local behaviors will be harmful to the world. And we accept usually that when people realize that behaviors are harmful to the world are to their personal benefit, they will probably often continue with them. And if we can identify those particular behaviors then we have a choice to make as advisers to the extent, do we want to help them out with that if it’s going to hurt the world? Of course, a wide range of behaviors that they will do will sort of be pretty neutral and not obviously very helpful to the world or very hurtful. But we could still want to have a rule in the world. So first of all, when I say, “Oh, I need to eat and I need a job,” and this is a job, people are willing to pay me to help in the financial sense, in the Twitter sense or whatever, people gain attention and respect from being able to say useful things to other people so even if those useful things aren’t helping the entire world. So I’ll suggest that we can understand why people would give advice especially when it’s just not clear. So even in academia, I would say we could struggle to look at advice for academics and identify which of the advice is actually helping the world the most and which is hurting.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean maybe it’s somehow – maybe my puzzle is really about what you might call socially harmful advice where that advice is being given in a kind of large scale, sort of indiscriminately. That that – I mean I’m actually even puzzled by it being given on an individual level, if that’s the sort of most of what you are doing. But it’s like what kind of love do you have for the generic person or something such that you would give the socially harmful advice where you think you’re harming the group but your advice in some sense is directed in the open way at the group, right? So you’re both on the side of and against the group, and that’s sort of what I meant by saying that it’s somehow both in favor of and against the system, and there’s something paradoxical about it.

Robin:

So you could think of yourself as part of many nested groups and then see yourself as more focused on favoring the groups closer to the smaller groups within this nesting and then maybe not so much at the world as a whole. So for example, if you advise your military about how to win wars, well, that may not help the world if your country isn’t any better nation to rule the world than any other nation, right? So military advice is a classic sort of thing that people are wary of. So many said, “How could you work for a military contractor? How could you dare work on weapons?” That’s exactly this intuition. Well, there is no overall social benefit to weapons, they may say. There is just private benefit to one nation having better weapons compared to the others.

Agnes:

Yeah. I think I would be exactly as puzzled about someone like going on Twitter and just telling the nations of the world how to have better and stronger weapons? What are you up to?

Robin:

But if you told to your people …

Agnes:

Your people, then I understand. But that’s – so that’s what I mean is like as I said, I understand someone giving their own student a certain kind of job market advice. I at least I understand that a little bit better. As I say, even there, it doesn’t quite describe my experience. But the idea of just giving everyone this kind of socially harmful advice, it just doesn’t make sense to me as a like psychological makeup or something.

Robin:

I mean most – everyone doesn’t speak to everyone. They speak to whoever will listen to them and that is correlated with various kinds of associations. I mean people say, speak in a language and that language be people who share that language and those aren’t random people in the world. They will speak to people who have read them before and like what they’ve said before. They will speak to people maybe in their discipline, not another disciplines, etc. Right?

Agnes:

Or maybe it really is just to whoever will listen to me. It’s like for being willing …

Robin:

Whoever will listen to me are my allies.

Agnes:

Yes. Whoever will be – if you are willing to listen to me then I want you to benefit because I want to raise the profile of whoever it is who will listen to me. And so, I’ll give out generic advice. That’s pretty cynical but …

Robin:

To me, the more interesting way to frame this question would be, say, you could identify ways in which the world is in a bad equilibrium such as with war, and then you could try to think about ways to get out of that bad equilibrium. You might think one of the ways to get out of the bad equilibrium is to sort of refuse to do things associated with a bad equilibrium. So you might – so the people have said, “Well, if nobody would go to war then wars would end.” So all we just have to do is get everybody in the world to be a pacifist and then wars will end. And their strategy for ending war is each person being a pacifist. And we might ask ourselves, how effective do we think that strategy could be and what other strategies are available? So that’s how I would put your reaction here. I see you as basically saying, “Well, this isn’t very helpful at avoiding this bad equilibrium.”

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

But we have to put that up against, “OK, what would be more helpful?” and maybe redirect people’s efforts toward something that will be more helpful. Maybe Jason Brannon didn’t quite see the different book he could have written that would have been more helpful and maybe we could help point that out to him. But that seems to be the more productive conversation here to have. What would be – what would help more?

Agnes:

Good. I mean so we had – actually, we talked about another example along these lines which is like book blurbs so I’m sometimes asked to write a blurb for a book. And at the moment at least, until someone convinces me out of it, I have a principle that I just don’t write any blurbs for any books because I don’t think someone should read a book because I said it was good. My tastes are pretty like all over the place and I don’t think it’s actually a good basis for them to read the book that I liked the book. So I think I would just be giving them bad advice by putting a blurb on to the book. And then – yeah, go ahead.

Robin:

Do you think that that strategy of yours is doing much to end the book blurb equilibrium or is it just a principle stand, “I have a principle about not saying things I don’t believe,” for example or saying things – pretending to be more useful than I am. And you’re just invoking your principles and acting on them?

Agnes:

Good. And so like it’s definitely the case that I’m not doing it because I believe it has likely causal role in ending the book blurb equilibrium. So if you just look into my psychology, that’s what you’ll find. You’ll find, no, it’s a principle. It’s a moral principle. That’s how it looks to me from the inside. But if you think about like the problem of what it’s like to be in a bad equilibrium, like what it’s like is that sort of all the incentives pushed you in the direction from moving the equi – there’s like this Star Trek episode, OK? I haven’t seen it in so long that I just only remember it very vaguely. But like OK, here’s my big memory of it, is that Spock is like in some kind of capsule thingy and he’s way off in space and he has every reason to believe that there is nothing he can do that will like get him located by the rest of the team and he sends out like a signal of some kind and sort of unbeknownst to him, they did have a way of detecting the signals so he was saved. And they asked him, “Why did you send out that signal? Like you shouldn’t have thought that it could be received by us.” And he is like, “Well, when there’s nothing rational to do, you have to do something irrational.” [Laughs] That’s how I remember it. I might be missing some.

Robin:

Just try something. OK.

Agnes:

Yeah. And it’s not just try something. It’s specifically like try some – like as he put it, it’s something irrational. So you might think that what’s happening, this is not how the person represents it themselves. When you think what’s happening is like you have this bad equilibrium, how are they going to change? They’re not going to change by people figuring out how to change them and then instituting those things if it’s really a very stable equilibrium. Maybe the way they change is like a bunch of people do something and it doesn’t make any sense and eventually, now people are doing stuff that doesn’t make sense makes it possible for people to make a change. But from inside the heads of these people, what they’re doing shouldn’t make any sense.

Robin:

Probably the things you might do to get out of that equilibrium don’t make sense from the point of view of just trying to win at the current equilibrium.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

That doesn’t mean that any random thing you might do is going to be particularly effective at that. So you make those distinctions. So I do think we would want to just ask what does change the equilibrium and what are the plausible routes to changes and then ask which of these various behaviors would support that. That seems to be the right way to think about the question. So for example, if you say war, how are we going to end war? Having enough people refuse to work for military contractors or refuse to be drafted in war, doesn’t seem to me very plausibly the way directly that wars would end. But presumably, first thing we need to do is get a lot of people to say and notice that a lot of people are unhappy with this equilibrium. So we need to create a common perception that in fact there’s a problem, a problem that we would like to solve. So maybe just refusing to go in the military or refusing to work with contractor could add to that perception that there is a problem.

Agnes:

Especially if you told other people about it like me …

Robin:

Which is why you are doing it.

Agnes:

…telling other people that I’m in this – against the book blurb.

Robin:

Right. OK. Exactly. So …

Agnes:

It’s better than just doing it.

Robin:

… opting on book blurbs could be a way to highlight to people, “Hey, this is a bad equilibrium. We need to do something.” But once enough people are aware that there’s a problem, then it’s less clear that more people doing that really helps very much although they might need to maintain the message but then somebody needs to make the next step. So for book blurb say, we might want to say, “Well, what would be a better way for people to find out about the quality of a book?” We could institute some better system, maybe some website where people are say, Goodreads or something and they’re reading things and we have a better weighting of the ratings that would be then – something that could go on books effectively. Maybe there’s some way of putting electronic tag on the cover of a book that’s obviously it’s carrying Goodreads ratings or something. Then that would be a new system and then the people who refused to write book blurbs or to have book blurbs on their own books, see, not everyone write it for somebody else, they would be the people most pushing to try this new system. And the perception that a lot of people are unhappy would be part of the momentum that got people to try this new system and it could help it grow in scale until it could be a replacement. And so – but you want to have those other things be part of the process. So for example, I think enough people are aware that war is bad at the moment. That refusing to work for a military contractor doesn’t really help much with this message. We are all pretty aware. Yeah, we’d like an alternative to war. Now, the next challenge is to have a concrete alternative offer that we could then lend our support to. But it’s completely right that any world where people don’t even realize that there’s a problem that merely just opting out of that existing system in some visible way could help tell everybody there is a problem.

Agnes:

And I think it’s a really interesting question to ask, how can we measure how aware we are of a problem so as to know that we are aware enough of it? Like a problem like racism or war or book blurb, a smaller – admittedly smaller problem, right? What is the sufficient level of awareness? Because it seems like – so it seems like one way you might think about these things is that there’s a division of labor. There is the people whose job it is to stand there screaming and then there are the people whose job it is to find a positive solution. Right? And you are like saying, “Well, instead of just screaming about this, you could try to find a positive solution.” I’m like, “Well, maybe I’m one of the screaming ones and you’re one of the ones that find the positive solution. And I got to keep screaming and you’ve got to do the productive thing. And don’t think that what I’m doing is getting in the way of what you’re doing. What I’m doing is paving the way for what you are doing. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to convert me into your job because I’m doing my job.” Now, your thought is, “Well, maybe your job is being done by enough people already.” Right? And then the question is, well, OK, how do we know? OK. We are all against war, but maybe the people who are employing military contractors are maybe the people who are not as much aware of like in a kind of visceral or direct way but like we shouldn’t be having someone to war. Maybe those are just exactly the right of people to be part of testing too as you might if you refuse to work for them. It’s hard for me to …

Robin:

So the protest voice or action, I think often the biggest risk is that it’s not willing to compromise. And almost all real solutions will require a compromise. So for example, you might say, “The problem of global nuclear war is reduced by better monitoring of foreign nuclear weapons of launches or production processes and better communication channels like the red phone. And so, when people in the military, working our solutions to reduce the chance of war, other people have this absolute purest thing. Yeah, but you’re working for a military. You’re working for a military contractor. You are a military specialist. You are bad. And because they only see zero or war as the options and if you just scream and say, “We want no war,” then you are shutting down the people who could make the world better even if not best. So there’s this old thing, “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good.”

Agnes:

Or the perfect be the enemy of the game, I think.

Robin:

You got that, yes.

Agnes:

It’s not a quote. Because the best might not be perfect.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

So like OK, but I think in a way what you have to do is ask yourself whether what you are asking of the protester is a reasonable demand given so to speak, the job profile of the protest. If we understand the protester, it’s occupying a Spock-like role. What I mean there is Spock in that Star Trek. Imagine that it’s like this perfectly rational guy, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And then he has got to see this occasion to be irrational. So the thought is like they’re in a bad equilibrium and they’re going to take so to speak the irrational action of just screaming, right? And a bit part of what they’re doing is just telling you, “We got to get out of this equilibrium.” But they have to even try to make – like there are a lot of ways even of screaming that just feed into the equilibrium. I mean really stable equilibria are going to incorporate the screaming too.

Robin:

Exactly.

Agnes:

Right? And so, they are all like – essentially what their job description is, is being wrench in the works, right? And then you’re like, “Hey, you guys are not compromising. You’re not allowing us to go for a locally pretty good option.” And this person could say to you, “Well, I’m the wrench in the works. Of course, I’m not compromising. You wanted someone to do this job, the anti-equilibrium job and I’m trying to do it and you’re not going to flip me over to being a compromised when it’s convenient for you.”

Robin:

I would say they’re doing the wrong job then.

Agnes:

You think they should be doing this job.

Robin:

The job should be to make people aware that the equilibrium they are in is not the best and to be aware of alternative equilibrium that might be feasible nearby that one could get to and then to push people to consider moving to those. And so, it’s counterproductive if you instead claim that there’s this other equilibrium that’s much, much better, much further away which requires a very different sort of protest. If you focus people’s attention on this passivism, the end of war entirely, and you say that’s the only goal and everything else is compromisingly rejected then you actually get in the way of actual improvements. And I would say a similar thing might be true with say, with socialism. People say, look, there are things they don’t like about the current capitalist world and instead of making modest incremental improvements, they just want a complete new world. But what’s this new world they want? Well, they are not very clear exactly on what it is but they want it to be a lot of worker participation and production processes and management. But existing places where they could have worker participation aren’t good enough because now they need to do overthrow everything. And if overthrowing everything actually wouldn’t be very helpful or useful then focusing people’s attention on that is counterproductive. And I could go through many examples I think of ways in which people complain about something but in a harmful way by focusing people’s attention on an unrealistic, unachievable goal that wouldn’t actually be better instead of looking at the actual range of options near what’s happening and pushing people over there.

Agnes:

Right. So I think the way to think about such people is to think about people as looking at let’s say, increasingly distant sets of equilibria from where one sits, right? So there is so to speak the Jason Brannon position which is you’re right in the current moment and you’re just like, “Let’s just make this more efficient.” Right? So you’re focused on the current equilibrium and I’m just winning at that game. And then there’s like you’re looking just the slight – what are the tiniest modifications that we can make to the current system so that we end up in our like approximate equilibrium that we can actually make this change? Well, improve slightly. Most of the bad things will still be there, right? So that’s like a second person, right? We can call them like Jason Brannon’s star, right? They are slightly …

Robin:

We should take Brannon out of this.

Agnes:

OK. So they are slightly …

Robin:

Small incremental improvements, larger improvements …

Agnes:

Larger improvements, right?

Robin:

And then radical huge improvement.

Agnes:

And then there’s like mental. Well, let’s even keep going. So there’s going to be a whole range of people, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And then there are going to be people at the very extreme, right? So these people are like – are the most so to speak anti-equilibrium, anti the current equilibrium. They are the radicals. They think we need something that’s very far from the world that we live in. And they are going to be screaming a lot and they’re going to be unproductive because in effect, everything they could do that would be productive would be counterproductive for their goal which is to get out of the current equilibrium just like if you were like just one step removed from the current equilibrium. There are stuff that would refuse to do that the person right at the center, who we are not going to call Jason Brannon anymore. It’s unfair but whatever, who is very – who is just trying to win at the status quo, that person is like, “Hey, why do you think it’s counterproductive thing?” And it’s like, well, they are trying to shift over to a new equilibrium. So, why shouldn’t there just be like a range of people focused on a range of equilibria and some of them should be focused out really for.

Robin:

So let’s make a concrete physical metaphor. So imagine we are a tribe wandering from our previous camp to another camp far away because this is – we are foragers from 100,000 years ago. And we all want to be together on a path but the path we are going on, we can see it isn’t the optimal path and we’d like to get some other people on a different path. And so, you could imagine a small variation on that path. Let’s just walk on the left side of the stream instead of the right side of the stream. Or you can imagine when they have to go over that hill or farther away.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And in those cases, I might say, “Well, we just need to go to the south around this whole mountain range. Let us not even try to go over the mountain range.” And that’s just a really big change, right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

And so, if we are just a very, vivid, clear image of the whole landscape then it would be a coordination issue. It would be about can we get enough of us to switch? Because we all want to go together and protect ourselves from predators and we don’t want to each go separately. So we need other people to come with us. But if some of us say, go over to the other side of the river and say, “Come over. Cross the river here instead further down what you are planning then it will be because this side of the river is easier to walk on. We are coordinating that way. And then somebody says, “No, we need to go all the way around the mountain,” then they might think, “Well, if enough of us can just go head off to mountain, everybody else will realize, well they need to be with us and so they want to do that.” And so in the case where we can all see the landscape clearly, the main issue would be coordination like how big a group do we think we can get to go on each particular deviation? But in actual social changes, I’d say the landscape is not at all clear. And so, people pushing for these huge changes usually don’t understand the basic nature of what they are trying to do, and those things just are not feasible. There is no path around this. The mountains go all the way. There is no path – there is no point where the mountains end. If you keep going south to try to go around them, it would not work because there is no path there. That’s more of the key issue. And so, the closer people are to existing practice, the more well-informed their reformed ideas will be about the actual landscape and the actual problems. And the farther away you go, the more risks they have of just being deluded about what’s possible and what’s doable. And this is where I feel somewhat stuck in the sense that because I have spent my lifetime studying many of these things, I think I do have ideas for big changes that would actually work and we’ve discussed some of those before. And so, I’m really excited to say, “Look, I could show you if you listen like why this really big change should actually work and would let us have all these huge gains but you have to either listen to my arguments and have enough expertise to understand them or trust me or whoever is endorsing me that this could actually work,” and maybe that’s just not possible. Maybe there’s nobody who – maybe not enough people could be convinced of my arguments or whoever would endorse me to make it possible. But as long as I legitimize radical changes, the radical changes we are actually going to go for are going to be these crazy one that would work and I’m causing a problem by even telling people to consider radical options.

Agnes:

Right. So if we are – I mean I think you’re right that by and large, people – the people who are – have their eye on the radical change are going to have a much weaker grip on the landscape, right? So as you go further away from where you are, your map more and more becomes more like fantasy than an actual map of a place. And so if you imagine people imagining an ideal world, going back like say, Plato’s Republic or something, and like what he thought an ideal world would look like. And then we don’t – in a whole bunch of different ways, we think, “That’s not really an ideal world.” And yet, like …

Robin:

Or even a feasible world.

Agnes:

Right. And also not feasible. Some things about it turned out to be though like there is a kind of – there’s division of labor as a big part of the …

Robin:

Right. Yeah.

Agnes:

…society and the republic and gender equality of a certain kind on the grounds of division of labor. So there are some aspects of it where he was saying stuff that would have been perceived as radical and crazy at the time but were sort of dictated by a kind of utopianism that was like in large part fantasy but still freed them up to have some interesting thoughts, right? But still, let’s just grant that as you move away from that center point, the map becomes more and more just kind of fantasy. Then I think that now, there’s a question, OK, but do we want people who are fantasizing in those ways? Is that useful for our society? And I think that it might be. Like that is – there is – if you imagine that the – your knowledge and how informed you are even about just a slightly – a slight variation in the equilibrium, it’s going to be less than if you just stay at the current like status quo. You can understand how the status quo works really well. Even a slight, there’s going to be stuff where you can’t predict it. So there’s going to be a trade-off between how much you know, like how much your knowledge can allow you to predict what’s going to happen, and sort of how much change you’re going to allow into your story. If you want a huge amount of change, it’s going to be go along with like just really having no clue what you’re doing. As long as the idealistic people don’t actually think anyone is going to listen to them and don’t think they are going to immediately have any – that much of an effect, I’m not sure it’s so bad. That’s often a criticism that is made of these idealistic people is like they don’t – in some instance, they don’t even want people to create their world. And it’s like, but that might be the advantage of it.

Robin:

So in general, when there are just many different roles and we have to grant that somebody should fill each role then the real complain would have to be about the percentage of people at each role.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So I’m happy to admit there ought to be some people who just have wild fantastic visions of very dramatically different things even if they are not very reliable. The thing I lament is that – the thing I think is most useful hardly ever happened. So what we actually need is once you envisioned sort of a different world that you want, what you need to do is start with small-scale trials of your new world and to get people to actually try the small-scale versions and when you do those small-scale trial works then you a slightly larger trial and see if that works and you increasingly do more and more realistic, more and more consequential trials until eventually if you continue to have success then you could do the big thing you wanted to do. And so, I see a lot of people who are very eager to just talk about how they want the big, grand change but they are not very eager and willing to participate in small-scale trials and certainly not to initiate them. And that would be the thing we most missed or to actually make big change. We need to just try lots of things on small scales. See what works and then get people excited about the ones that work in order to copy them and diffuse the innovation through copying o better trials.

Agnes:

Yeah. So I think that maybe some part of the explanation of that is that the function of these people at the edges is I think in large part is almost like a kind of value place holder. There are some things we are going to care about in the future. We don’t care about them yet. We don’t even know how to care about them yet, right? Like Plato bring in like gender equality. He doesn’t quite care about gender equality. That’s not quite the right way to think about it but you could sort of thing of the Republic female guardians things, almost like a place holder, right? So there are things we don’t know how to care about yet and we might learn how to care about them in the future. And there are these people who are sort of almost like representing the possibility of caring one of those things but often in quite a confused way. Now, if instead you replaced these people with sort of scientists like yourself where it’s like, well, look, let’s take a totally determinant set of things that we already care about and just find a better way to bring those things about, then you’re not – you’re just like not idealistic enough in the sense of people don’t want the big changes to be things that give them the things that they already want. They want the big changes to be things that give them the things they don’t yet know that they want.

Robin:

So, you’re positing that a lot of idealistic fervor in advocating radical change is driven by a desire to change their values not just to change the arrangement of the world to achieve the values they have now.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

I’m skeptical of that as being the dominant mode. That is, when people say they don’t want war, pacifists, I don’t think are trying to change values as the main thing. They are appealing to our shared values to not die in wars. I agree that once upon a time in the past, cultures so much valorized and celebrated war that it was an effort to get people to realize you could have other values to the civilization to celebrate. So that they could imagine being in a war with relatively low war and having that be satisfactory. But our world is well-past that. I think most people today are plenty OK with the world that never happened to have war. We find other ways to celebrate ourselves, to find valor, to find glory. And so, the main obstacle to war – reducing war today isn’t the glory with which we celebrate war. But it’s the actual arrangement in which we sometimes fall into war. And in that way same for capitalism say, I would think. In fact, it isn’t some wrong values that are causing the problems of capitalism that people are complaining about. It is the actual complicated details. So for example, many people think bosses shouldn’t be bosses. That nobody should boss anybody else and therefore, they refused to become a boss and they boycott the idea of being a boss, which means they are not actually exploring better ways to be bosses. If you think bosses are just intrinsically a thing that’s always going to be there then what we need to do is find better ways to be bosses, not ending the existence of bosses. And so of course, boycotting bossing is not helping.

Agnes:

So I mean it’s interesting because those two examples are sort of related like – that is, war is an attempt at physical domination and to boss people are like they don’t like bosses because bosses dominate their employees. Of course, boycotting is just – it’s sort of an attempt at domination in a different way, which is having a group of people together and then we can dominate through numbers. And I do really think that like human beings are trying to figure out and we are still trying to figure out like it’s an active research agenda how not to dominate one another. That’s – we are still working on that project. And you’re right that we have made some very significant progress in that like we don’t positively glorify war in the sense of like military action of one group on another anywhere close to as much as we used to like at least in our country. I don’t really know how it is in other countries. So maybe there are countries where they still do glorify at some degree. But I think you’re right, in no country that I’ve ever visited and spoken to people have I noted the kind of glorification that I see in like ancient texts. So that seems right. So – and probably like how do those changes happen? At least some people have to just like be doing certain kinds of boycotting maybe for a very long time. There isn’t no one person. And then also, economic situations have to sort of rearrange as to make it a little bit more like profitable to not have the words, right? Other ways to negotiate. But there might be still some sort of like – almost like a hold out to being like, wait, we haven’t solved this problem yet. We haven’t learned how to not value domination. We are still working on that one. And we still have like value learning to do so as to figure out how to not – because a lot of people do value bossing other people and they do deeply want that and they see it as good and they see it as glorious, right? And that’s a deep – there’s a deep thing in our nature that the wanting to fight wars spoke to. So why not think like yeah, that is something we are still striving to learn and we haven’t learned it yet?

Robin:

So again, it’s about the percentages. I’m going to grant that all possible roles should be filled with some percentage of people. But I might complain the percentages are misallocated. So I think basically most everybody in our world wants to be sort of the activist preacher and there’s plenty of volunteers for the activist preacher role and a lot fewer people volunteering for the other necessary roles. This is an observation people made about like activist movements lately that in fact, lots of people want to sort of be the voice of the preacher, the ones who sort of rallies everybody on some high values. And then all the other needed roles tend to be not filled, and that’s a common observation about activism and community organizations today.

Agnes:

So – I mean it’s – supposed this is a change like supposed more people want to be activist today than at earlier times. Wouldn’t that suggest that like well, maybe we are a time that’s especially right for a kind of big equilibrium shift and that’s what’s pulling all these people in so creating in effect, the market for activism, right? And that’s why people want to be activists. They are responding to that incentive. I mean wouldn’t – I mean if there was such a change, wouldn’t you want to explain it that way?

Robin:

Well, if I thought there was an efficient market for activism. But I in fact think that the market for activism is inefficient. It doesn’t give people individual incentives to do the thing that’s collectively in their best interest.

Agnes:

I mean there’s also a question about how we measure this, right? It’s like there are certain spaces you can go to where you’ll find a lot of activism. If you go to Twitter, if you go to The New York Times, opinion page, but like I don’t feel assured that in many other spaces there is so much activism.

Robin:

I’ll make a stronger claim so that you can refute it perhaps, which is that people’s primary motive in a lot of political discussions or activism or sort of reform sort of discussions is to project their values. They want to say, “I am a person with these values. And if you are someone who shares my values then we can be teammates.” And that’s the main thing they are trying to do. And in fact, once they achieved that, they don’t pay that much attention to doing the other things that would actually help them achieve these further goals that they say they are trying to achieve. They are overwhelmingly focused on projecting values, reading the values of other people, and aligning with people who share their values. That’s the whole – that’s pretty much mainly what they are doing. And so, they neglect. For example, politicians, when people vote for politicians, they mainly try to look to see whether they share their values. They don’t care whether those values are going to be actionable. So for example, people want the President to share their values on education even if in our country, the President doesn’t do much about education. And when you have say, senators, who we say, are really good behind the scenes in making deals and putting together coalitions, their voters don’t actually care much about that and they don’t reward them for it. They mainly reward them for the values they share. And this is a common feature that I see across activism movies and other sorts of things. They are really into projecting values and communicating their values and they get really quickly fuzzy and lose interest in the details. But the details are most everything in terms of making things actually work and change.

Agnes:

Right. So when we were talking before about the pacifist, the person who is making a statement by not working as a military contractor or may making the statement by not writing the blurbs on books, we said that that’s not going to be very effective unless the person does more stuff. Here’s the more stuff you would expect them to do in order for that to be effective. First of all, you would want them to project it, right? So you would want them to publish or make public this thing so that everybody knows. It wouldn’t do anything if just privately you different from the blurb or the army or whatever.

Robin:

You would be a public pacifist.

Agnes:

You want to be – you need to be public. You need to project your values. So that’s step one. And notice what it is a step-up. It’s a step-up, a sign that they actually care about the causal efficacy rather than just the principle, right? The step two I suppose would be, did you look for allies? That is you find other people who are also projecting that same thing because one person defecting from the blurb is not enough.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So I mean the fact that people are going through exactly the steps that you would project they would go through if they wanted to disturb the equilibrium, namely, taking in some sense irrational action of defecting but then publishing it and then seeking to find others who publish the same defection. Isn’t that just exact – isn’t that what it looks like to try to shift the equilibrium?

Robin:

You listed two steps but there’s a dozen more after that. And you didn’t list them and my complaint is they don’t do the rest of those of steps.

Agnes:

I mean the difficulty is that all the steps that come next are going to involved as you would say compromise. Another way to put it would be something like a convergence on a proximate equilibrium that like doesn’t get you everything that you want. Right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So maybe one issue here is that if you tank this process and you get the group of people that have bonded together over this so to speak anti-equilibrium stance, there’s actually diversity in that group as to which of the many equilibria – better equilibria they would settle on. And maybe it’s hard for them to converge on anything but the most distant one. And so, they have trouble working together.

Robin:

But why not consider my hypothesis that the main thing they care about is showing and sharing values and that the rest of this is an excuse? They are not actually trying very hard to do the rest of the reform. So you’re imagining that there’s this social outcome they are trying to achieve and that all of these behaviors or strategies to achieve that social outcome. But if we suggest that this is not an efficient market, we might say, what would be in each individual’s interest in their social context? I would say it seems pretty obvious that the main thing people are rewarded for socially in the activism world is the people they connect to and who associate with them on the basis of this shared cause. And they are achieving that. Activists who are not effective at changing the world are effective at getting the people around them to perceive them as people who have certain values and to associate with them on that basis.

Agnes:

I think there’s a very, very deep like sort of disagreement that we have as to when an explanation has come to an end. And for me, it’s like – this is now an explanation behavior, either the individual or group scale. For me, the explanation – for me, when it has come to an end is when you have seen the good in it. And for you, I think it has come to an end when you’ve seen the bad in it. And so …

Robin:

When I see the selfish gains that evolution would have produced, that is, if I’ve seen fundamentally what’s going as evolution has created creatures who achieve evolution then of helping to reproduce their genes then whenever I see behaviors that can explain to those terms, that is more of an end to me because that’s the fundamental process I see. I see achieving the good as something that happens sometimes and sometimes not, depending on how well we can coordinate to achieve the good. But that’s not the fundamental explanation of the world. That is, the world isn’t the fundamental process that achieves the good. The world is fundamentally a set of competing organisms that evolved to win their local evolutionary competitions.

Agnes:

So I mean that theory itself substantiates the disagreement, I would just have a different read on evolution as I did in our previous podcast on evolution namely. There are these motivations that we have that we’ve upcycled into other sorts of motivations imperfectly and incompletely but we are continually working on the process of so to speak turning our base desires more and more into actual values.

Robin:

And the whole topic today has been here about the processes by which we try to coordinate to achieve better end. And it’s how imperfect that is and how difficult it is. And so certainly, when we ask how is it that we failed to achieve the good by coordinating, we shouldn’t be positing some fundamental good process that makes us achieve the good as the reason why we’re failing to achieve the good. Surely, it must be the bad. That’s the reason why we failed to achieve the good.

Agnes:

I guess I tend to think, no, even the reason why we failed to achieve the good, it’s going to be something like incomplete awareness or understanding of the good. That is, ignorance of the good. You can call that the bad but it’s just the absence of something. It’s the failure to understand something.

Robin:

I think I agree with that but I think this is a good time to break for this conversation.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Thank you, Agnes.