Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

Hi, Agnes. And hello, Laura.

Agnes:

Hi. So this is Laura Deming. She's agreed to join us today to talk about science. And I thought I would start off with a question. But Laura, I know you've got a bunch of questions. So after that, you should feel free to throw in your questions. So my question is, something that surprises me about Robin is that he doesn't believe in the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. And I'm curious about whether you believe in this distinction. So in the history of philosophy, Basically, here's a cartoonish story. There are these people we call pre-Socratic philosophers because they came before Socrates and maybe we wouldn't have even have cared about them if they didn't get taken up in some way in connection with the Socratic tradition. They were doing religion and natural science and philosophy all bundled into one. Socrates also, he's doing a kind of theorizing or thinking that is both practical and theoretical at the same time. But then Aristotle comes along and he's like, actually there's these two different things, theoretical reason and practical reason. And they're actually two different virtues of the part of your soul that does thinking. It has two different virtues. There's being good at deliberating and being a good practical person, being practically wise, knowing what to do. And there you're primarily concerned with like achieving the good both for yourself and for everybody else. And then there's theoretical reason which, so that's phronesis in Greek, and then there's theoretical reason which is Sophia, which is wisdom, where you're like interested, from Aristotle's point of view, primarily it's going to be in like the movements of the heavenly bodies, or God, or like the things that are the things that are unchanging, the things that we would say operate according to natural laws. Aristotle said nature is the way that it is always or for the most part. Okay, so that's like a distinction and most philosophers, I think, just accept that and they just think, yeah, there are these two different kinds of reasoning or thinking and you always kind of need to be clear which one you're doing. Are you trying to learn some truth or are you trying to achieve some good? So I'm just curious where you come down on that.

Laura:

And sorry, is there a disagreement between you two on whether this is a valid distinction? Yes, Robin thinks it is not.

Robin:

Well, let me just say my position might be that we can distinguish perhaps purposes of anything we use, including any set of tools, even though we might not use the tools that differently for the different purposes, depending on the purpose. And then we can certainly make a distinction between degrees of abstraction or generality, that is, you called practical reason might be focused on making very concrete specific decisions in a specific context and what you just call, you know, theoretical reasoning sounds more abstract in general, but I think there's certainly a continuum between the kinds of reasonings you do about more or less abstract things and more or less immediate things. I think there might be correlations there, but not a binary category distinction. I would think there's just more concrete specific contexts and things you're working on a more general abstract ones and. we use the same general set of reasoning tools in both cases, but the mix might vary depending on the level of abstraction. That's how I might state it.

Agnes:

Let me just jump in there with what Aristotle thinks about that. So he would agree with you about that, but he thinks that it's not an accident that the practice is associated with the concrete and theory is associated with the universal. That is, Aristotle thinks that when you're trying to achieve the good, Fundamentally, that kind of knowledge is knowledge of particulars and is going to be very, very highly context-specific. And that the part of you that wants to understand the way things work is the part of you that's attuned to universals and abstractions. So he's going to think that that distinction between particulars and universals actually corresponds to these two different forms of reasoning. And so excellence in the two forms of reasoning is a different kind of excellence.

Robin:

But does he accept there's a continuum between concrete and abstractions, that is, there's intermediate levels of abstraction and your mix of behavior will continuously vary as you move up and down that continuum, but there isn't a sharp threshold and there isn't like sharp levels at which you would do one thing versus another.

Agnes:

Like, I guess, I think, Let's say, take swimming and running, right? There are going to be some common motions to swimming and running. But you might just think, yeah, but they're very different activities. And those motions themselves are different when they're in those two different contexts. So if you want to ask, are there any common denominators, probably yes, in some way there are. But what it is for the thing to be done well is different in the two cases.

Robin:

So that does sound like more of a binary distinction with a sharp line.

Agnes:

I'm not sure that I know how to draw the binary distinction distinction, whether that itself is binary. So, okay. All right, let's let's let Laura talk.

Laura:

So I guess maybe like a thing. So, like, so many thoughts come to mind which is actually sad because I had so many questions about like kind of a mild attention to the topic that I was going to ask but now maybe we'll just spend less time talking about this one. So, um, I think, for one, just this is something that I've spent a lot of time, I guess like thinking about because it's quite actually practically relevant to what I do so like I work in both this business but I work in a business that relates to science and like I think to get something done, there's kind of this question of like, where you should spend your mental energy and actually I think it's a pretty subtle or like I've changed my mind a lot about that over time. I think it's relatively subtle. I think, too, maybe, Robin, to your point, there's this question of, like, is it useful to distinguish? Like, you know, what use is a binary distinction or a distinction of any kind? Like, it has to be useful for something. And so maybe it's sort of like, have I personally found, or like, in my personal experience, maybe I'm thinking, like, have I found personal utility for making a distinction between these two types of reasoning? I think that I definitely have. So maybe one example I'd give or kind of one, actually, I'm not sure if this is like, I guess it corresponds to how you differ between the two different groups. But one thing I've noticed between people who tend to do more one versus the other is like a difference in how they discount time. So sort of like, I would say somebody who is much more Sophia oriented, would be the people that I've met who are the most in that direction is kind of like, don't think ever about time, they're kind of like, I would like to find the most beautiful representation of this concept, no matter how long it would take me to get there. And so the people that I put in the opposite cap, I forget the word that you mentioned for it, I would say like care a lot about, pardon? Phronesis. Phronesis. So I would call them, yeah, I would call them maybe operators. So kind of like in my mind, it's like the operators versus like the thinkers and kind of my world. Like I'd say they care a lot about time. And in fact, they're constantly kind of calculating, you know, like what's the minimum I can learn about this such that I can then apply it to kind of get to the next step in my process. And kind of like everything is oriented around kind of that concept. or not everything necessarily, but so that, so I practically, I think I practically see that. And I, I've personally found that distinction to be very helpful. So, you know, to the extent that it is helpful to have these things, I think it's empirically for me, it has been. And then maybe to the other question of kind of, you know, like how to, how to think about these two different types of knowledge. So one thing I found is quite interesting is like, I work in this domain of like longevity, which is very fascinating because it's like, you're trying to, it's almost a possible task, which is to like, you know, change the longevity of an organism that has like on the root of 10 to the 27 atoms. And kind of, but like you're trying to pragmatically do the old businesses that, you know, generate revenue in the real world, or, you know, at least are financeable for the near term. And so it kind of, this is a very interesting combination of trying to solve an almost unsolvable problem that requires a high degree of Sophia, and then trying to do something very pragmatic. What I think I've come to over time is that if you, I think if you just try to accomplish this goal pragmatically, actually you fail. Like I, so personally, I've actually spent a lot of time in recent years investing in kind of like, not even pragmatically, but just because it felt like interesting to do, like, more the Sophia-oriented style of knowledge, and I think that actually led to, maybe this is just my wishful thinking, but, like, better, like, it's sort of, like, you could argue that this is all, like, an operator would try to go full Sophia, you know, and try to, like, see the beautiful things and then be able to come back to their, like, pragmatic style, but like, I think it actually does require some kind of different values minds. I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but sort of, I think there's just like subtle way that you can move between the two states, but like, you can't actually fully do it just from a, just because you want to from one of the states to the other, but maybe I can get some points about aspiration and your other work, which I know we'll have time to cover today.

Agnes:

The one thing, the thing about time is very friendly to the way Aristotle thinks, because what he says is that the kind of pleasure you get in the intellectual life, that that activity is completed every moment. So it's like, unlike actions, which are only complete when they're done. So if you're like engaging in intellectual contemplation, which is how Aristotle thinks of the theoretical life. That's itself weird and interesting. But then, in effect, you're not going to care about time because it's like you're looking at a beautiful thing and you're not trying to look at it as fast as possible, right? And you're trying to get it over with. But anything in the practical, Aristotle thinks, it's going to have some external end that you're trying to achieve. And it's always better to achieve it faster. So that difference in relation to time, that's totally something that he picks up on as well. I think the longevity example is really interesting because it is this thing at the borderline of the practical and the theoretical. And what you seem to be suggesting, actually, is that the kind of opacity the kind of wall between the two that does look like it would come from something like a binary distinction, or they're really being different and separated, that that is itself fruitful and productive. You get lost in the theoretical, and it's not constrained at every moment by the practical import of your thinking. You're not always saying, how much of a gain in human life am I getting from this unit of thinking that I'm adding to the, That the ability to get lost, the ability to divide in this binary way itself has a kind of practical use to say on the practical side.

Robin:

So we're considering this one distinction here between practical and theoretical reasoning, and we have one maybe candidate way to to disperse it is in terms of levels of abstraction, how concrete context specific it is anchored to particular goals versus general and abstract. I'm not sure we agree that that's the best way to characterize it, but at least it's a candidate we have on the table. I'd like us to ask whether a different distinction maps onto it well or not, because there's this other distinction I think we initially were interested in talking about together, which is the distinction between academic slash scientific claims and methods versus all the rest. That is many academics and scientists will basically say the conclusions that come out of our process journal articles or panel discussions or whatever, they have authority, they can be trusted, and everything else is by comparison just completely worthless. Unless you can have a scientific or academically acceptable method to draw a conclusion, then for the purposes of serious discussion, you just shouldn't even mention it, just shouldn't even show up in the conversation. Only serious, you know, academic scientific, you know, discussion content is worthy of respect, which is many people kind of make that statement in some ways. And they say, you should only ever talk about anything else if you can't do it this academic formal scientific way. And that, It's just like, you know, conversations almost worthless, it's all intuitive, it's all subjective, and they denigrate it pretty strong. And then that's a problem because like many of us who have learned to say the scientific academic formal methods way also realize that in many contexts we feel inclined to do the other things and we feel like we draw some strong conclusions from them and we're justified in doing so so. In conclusion, what is there a relationship between this distinction between, you know, academic authorized claims and analysis and everything else and the theoretical versus practical distinction? Are those the same distinction? Are they different ones? Oh, is there a relation there?

Agnes:

I don't think they're the same. I think that it may be that the practical is like a subset of what you're calling the non-academic, but it would only be a subset because I think you can have casual conversations about intellectual matters and that wouldn't be practical. But I guess, okay, I've heard this complaint come from you before, Robin, and I kind of am not feeling it in the sense that I don't hear people all the time denigrating conversations. It's not a thing that I see everywhere. And here's the thing I wonder. Say you can learn all sorts of stuff. from, like, you can learn stuff from this conversation, right? Not just from an academic journal. Awesome. You get, like, an extra benefit. But there's some people who are telling you you can't. OK, you can ignore those people. But they're not going to take what you did seriously unless you put it in an academic journal. Well, then put it in an academic journal once you've learned it. So I guess I'm just not sure I see what the big problem is here.

Robin:

Well, so, I mean, I thought this is why I might ask Laura, because Laura is very well trained in academic. know styles and methods that is you're in a you're in a stem sort of discipline with with accepted methods that are appropriate in your discipline so there's a sense in which like if you have a conversation you draw some conclusions but there isn't an easy way to translate into the formal methods that a particular academic discipline will accept then there is no way to publish it there that is it doesn't it will never count as published because it doesn't fit into the methods acceptable in that discipline so So then the question Laura is, to what extent do you distinguish between you know science academia following proper methods as a method of finding things out versus other ways of finding things out and what's the relationship between the two.

Laura:

Okay, well, I guess I would clarify, like, I just to kind of be, I operate in the field of longevity, but like, professionally, I'm an operator. So the reason that I think a lot of these topics is like, I'm kind of sitting on the opposite side of the fence from you guys as an operator, but so obsessed with like, I personally love science so much. I'm always like, you know, in my heart, like on that side, but like, coming at this from an operator side, I think like, um, Well, maybe like I don't understand this like classification of like all of science is one activity, because it seems to me at least, you know, from the outside, there's like a very quite different things going on a friend once described it as like the mystics versus kind of like the professionals were sort of like people who go off and they're kind of like, just having visions of, you know, shapes and like this is somehow related to their work and like they are incoherent and how they describe their work and like, stuff comes from that that is like, you know, objectively later seem to be interesting in academia. And there's people who are more professionals. And so I would agree that science has methods for metabolizing discoveries, but I definitely wouldn't agree that all scientific activity or being a scientist, at least maybe from the outside, is described by this method of processing the discovery. At least part of it is coming up with a discovery or something.

Robin:

So, I mean, a stamp. I did philosophy of science once a long time ago. So, there are all these attempts to sort of draw this line above the pure good stuff versus the other, you know, suspect stuff, and one sort of standard way is to say, you can have your inspiration however you like, that's fine. given your inspiration, then you go do the hard formal stuff that we will respect. And if that turns out great, but if not, we don't care about your inspiration. So, and from that point of view, the inspiration is non-scientific and maybe a good input, but just like if you had a good lunch and that helped you work harder today too, that won't count as like part of the line of what the pure great science stuff is. It's some outside thing that helped it. So, but the question is, is there this line? Is there an interesting line to draw between science and non-science, the content of science or scientific methods or scientific conclusions, and the others? And then, if so, there's a good line. What is the relationship between these two categories?

Agnes:

You know, it's a good example that's somehow popping into my head because of the way Laura was talking about inspiration is the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. Because when he was, you know, he first wrote, I think, to Hardy. And he's like, hey, I discovered all these things. And he just had these mathematical intuitions. And they were like incredible intuitions about mathematical truths that nobody had seen before. And then Hardy was like, OK, you need to provide proofs. This isn't real math unless you do a proof. And he's like, why do we need to do a proof? It's true. And Hardy's like, yeah, that's just not math unless you can prove it. And then Ramanjan did learn, and he eventually put himself through this rigmarole of this is how you guys do it. But so I could hear your thing as like, look, why couldn't you just have these mathematical intuitions? Why did he have to do proofs in the method that mathematicians have agreed upon?

Laura:

Okay, so maybe sort of sort of leading us back to the original question, one, I kind of laid back the utility so sort of like I'm trying to map this on to like if I'm trying to make a decision like and like a practical sense and my like, like, how would this be related and sort of maybe the question of like what's the more rare commodity or kind of like like what don't you have normally? And I think, so when it comes back to this question of like Sophia versus kind of like doing some things for the good, I think one common frustration is that like there are many people who actually want to build companies or like work on things for the good actually, like that's kind of an overabundant sort of thing in the field. Like that plus confidence is I think harder to screen for, but like that's quite common. And I think kind of a problem is that like, though, if you if you just have somebody who's in that framework, and they don't have the inspiration, then it's quite hard for them to figure out what to do to sort of like, it's like, there's just this missing element of like that. I think something that feels limiting about like the the good motivation, or like, because you're just thinking about the good all the time, you're not actually thinking about like, random other things that would help you get to the good. And so therefore, like, you'll kind of miss out on the core thing that's actually required to make that breaking point. And so maybe a reason, Robin, that I'm interested in the kind of inspiration part, although maybe, you know, it's not core to what science is, the social movement that gave rise to what we have today, but the reason I'm thinking a lot of inspiration personally is because that seems to me to be like a more rare commodity that's kind of harder to access. And so that's where distinction is interesting, is because like, if you make the distinction, you can then kind of actively ask the question of like, how do you get more inspiration?

Robin:

So if you make a product from your company, and it's a drug of some sort, perhaps, the FDA will ask you for evidence that it's safe and effective. And at that point, they only want scientific evidence. All of your inspiration and your analogies and intuitions, etc. That doesn't count. So that's a specific context in which this distinction is very directly relevant for you, right?

Laura:

Right. But I think we actually agree now, perhaps, that there is a distinction that is useful and relevant. And I was just making the case that it's also useful in the sense of finding and trying to explicitly point out that there should be more ways to create inspiration earlier in the process. But I think we now appear to both agree that this distinction does have utility.

Agnes:

I want to give Laura a chance to ask a question and then we can both, I have follow-ups from the previous question, so I'm sure we have some follow-ups, but I know, yeah.

Laura:

Um, so I guess one thing I've been really curious about, and maybe this is like too personal to discuss or something, but like in terms of like a sort of personal motivation, um, but it's kind of like, to what extent, like the feeling of meaning, especially in regards to like, um, seeking knowledge is like a valid feeling to follow and to what extent it's sort of interesting one to give a concrete kind of, um, context for this. I think like, it's been really interesting as I get older, how much like the feeling of meaning, especially with different things in life becomes decoupled from like an internal thought of whether they're good to do or not. So maybe you feel like it's really important to move across the country because you love someone a lot. But then you think about it and you're like, wow, that maybe is not quite a good idea for all these other reasons. And you try to decouple that feeling of meaning, which is quite intense, from the actual actions themselves. And so I think taking it to the feeling of knowledge, that's actually the only feeling of meaning, perhaps, maybe apart from family left, that I kind of like clinging to is kind of like, but this one is valid. And the arguments I've often given to support it are things like, well, you know, if you're not really sure what to do, you should probably try to figure out what to do, which involves the pursuit of knowledge, presumably. And so like, that's a good reason to pick this, you know, there's some maybe like a way to argue that it's like a good thing to think about. So I'm not sure this is a topic that you guys have already like thought about ad nauseum and sort of like is for some reason somehow decided but just like that's one that I was personally quite interested in discussing just because it feels like actually personally relevant.

Agnes:

I want to pose a version of this question to Robin about one of his blog posts, because I feel like it's an avenue for exploring this question. I don't know, a year or two ago, you had this one blog post about what would life be like in many dimensions? I think you were reading Flatland or whatever, and you were just like, what would it be like if we had a thousand dimensions or something? And I remember talking to you about it. You're like, I feel a bit guilty for thinking about this because it's not relevant to anything, but you're just interested in it. And so that would be sort of an example of something that captures you, but then you can't see a practical upshot. Anyway, I thought you could use that to talk about this.

Robin:

I guess this is about the scope of rationality in a sense. So if you feel inclined to do something, you know that your subconscious had a bunch of processes that incline you in this direction. And then the question is, to what extent do you want to sort of check on that or maybe cross check it against some more abstract conscious analysis? That is, often we don't just do everything on our intuition. We often want to think some things through. And so then the question is, what's the scope of things we can effectively think through? Which things are productive to think through and which things not? So obviously, temporary small cost things that can't be bothered to think it through, because it's just not worth the bother. You might as well just go with your intuition. But the bigger a part it becomes of your life, the more you might be tempted, OK, for this, I should try to think it through. And often, like, we just make checklists of positive and negatives, we try to weigh it, and I think we just should be really aware that most of our subconscious process that went into this intuition we had about something isn't consciously accessible to us, and our conscious checking on it isn't going to be able to get to most of that. So what we're mostly going to do is maybe be able to catch some mistakes, like we have a list of mistakes that our subconscious often makes maybe, and like, we're gonna go do a check. Did I make any of these easily checked mistakes? We find one of those, we go, aha, maybe let's back off on this intuition, because I don't have the money for it, or it would be impossible, or require I live 300 years, right? You just, there could be some an intuition, and then when you reason about it, you just notice, yeah, that doesn't work, right? But probably your intuitions are mostly not gonna be making one of those mistakes. And so you're mostly not going to be able to do that much maybe consciously to overturn what your intuition tells you. Now, if you have to justify to somebody else, I think when we have colleagues to justify to, or referees of a paper or whatever, then I think that's where this issue of science or formal reasoning comes more. We more are required to only say the things we can support explicitly and justify, and the other parts of our intuition, like they told us which things to try to say and defend, but we can't really say them directly. So in this context, I might say, among the most precious things you ever have. And the closest to magic really in our world is a motivation. And don't throw those away very easily. You don't get strong motivations that often. And they're precious things and they can really drive your whole life and things. So when you find one, find a way to live with it and save it. just do not be in the habit of easily throwing away motivations. I mean, there's power that runs everything. So I might check it against a few things, like say, you know, he looks handsome, let me leave my husband. And then you might think, well, let's think about all the things that go wrong if I leave my husband and maybe check on it or something, right? But okay, if the checks pass, I think you kind of just often need to follow the motivation.

Agnes:

Do you think that that's a dimension along which people vary though? Some people just might be more motivated than others. And some of us might not.

Robin:

They're just constantly filling up with motivations they need to throw away, I guess.

Agnes:

And a lot of crazy ones. Yeah, actually. I really do think that. Maybe. Often, I have to kind of calm down on my motivations to get anywhere, because I'm going in 1,000 directions at once. So it may be that that advice is going to be relative to the individual. OK, I wanted to actually tie this question back to the first question. Predictably, I'm still fixated on my question. And on this stuff about what is the meaning that you get from theoretical work? Because I have a little bit of the suspicion that you have maybe. But my suspicion comes from struggling to understand what the nature of that meaning is sometimes when I'm engaged in a purely theoretical activity. It's actually rare that I'm doing something purely theoretical, because I'm working on the platonic dialogues, and it's all interrelated. But sometimes, there's one time I got really fixated on this math problem in a particular dialogue. I spent two months on this math problem, totally obsessing over it, and then feeling kind of guilty about it. And I think that the guilt comes from this worry that the positive thing I'm getting out of it is aesthetic. that it's an aesthetic, it's beautiful. So it would be like if I watched a movie or if I looked at a painting or listened to music, that's fine. Those are good things to do. I don't deny those being good things to do, but how much of my time do I want to devote to them? Maybe this whole intellectual thing that I'm doing is actually a way that I'm dressing up for myself a certain kind of aesthetics as being productive or something like that. And I'm not saying I believe this, but I worry about the question of what is the kind of meaning that you're getting? Because if the meaning that you're getting out of theoretical work isn't some good that you're achieving, which it won't be on the Aristotelian view or something else, then it looks like what's it going to be? What is the joy of contemplating the truth other than some kind of aesthetic response? And then I worry about the legitimacy of that.

Laura:

Yeah, I actually, yeah, there's a, so I share a similar concern for a very different thing, which is, I actually written a piece of this, where sort of like, I think there's, when I think about things theoretically, I just feel better than when I do anything else. It's like the best feeling in the world. But at some, and so I used to just be like, well, this is just some sign that this is like some magical thing that like I should follow. But then at some point I realized like that feeling wasn't actually correlated to like the, like the quality of the work necessarily. It usually meant that there was like an interesting idea somewhere around there. Like it wasn't like I, there are friends that are far more skilled than me at the same things that I was trying to think about that like just seemed like they didn't really have much of an emotional connection to the work. They were just kind of like, you know, thinking about it, like making progress. And so it was sort of the scary thing of like, oh, this feeling, um, you know, is great, but also it doesn't necessarily seem to be correlated, even, even efficacy at doing the work that it's related to. Um, and so that was kind of an interesting, um, yeah, so it's just sort of similar, maybe a bit of a different concern, but similar concern about like, oh, this seems like, uh, yeah, um, And then maybe I think I'd add also is like talking to friends often who are like, oh, there's no meaning or like everyone makes up their own meaning. I'll make this argument that like, no, but like, again, you know, like the, the, if you don't know what meaning is, we probably haven't solved philosophy yet. Or I mean, you know better than I, and so probably should like, you know, try and just keep thinking about it until we're quite sure we know what the answer is. And can we all agree or something, or maybe we'll never agree. And so therefore, the pursuit of knowledge will be involved in that. So that's a way to argue for that as a thing to do if you're not really sure. But I think the problem there is I'm just saying that because I feel like I want this to be true. It's not because that's how I decided that I thought it was true.

Agnes:

And I think that basically is true, but that procedure is going to be selective about what sorts of knowledge you pursue. So you're going to want to be pursuing things that are close to the possibility of revealing meaning to you. And I think it's, to me anyway, it's not I wouldn't have first gone for longevity as, because it's like longevity is something that's good on the condition that life is good, right? Conditionally on life being good, you want to have more life. But it's not going to tell you why the life is good to figure out how to achieve more of that thing. And so I think that there's, yeah, there's a question about whether even if that justification worked, it would justify the sorts of inquiry that one wants to pursue. Famously, Socrates in the Phaedo talks about how when he was young, he did all this natural science, but then he realized it wasn't getting him anywhere in terms of figuring out the meaning of life. And so he dumped it and went in for ethics.

Robin:

I often reflect on this topic and it's something I think Agnes I have talked about on, basically, you can think about intellectual thinking as just selfish, you're doing selfish reasons might be like a sense of mastery or you get fame and attention, or perhaps an aesthetic appreciation. And those seem selfish because, well, the main benefit is to you and maybe not so much to other people and maybe other people are paying for this and you want to be altruistic and help the world and then there's other kinds of thinking you can do that would more help other people like figuring out the truth and spreading that or maybe truth on important topics like say longevity. And so I naturally feel this tension of on the one hand just stuff that's fun and immediately appealing to me and then on the other hand reflecting saying yeah but where should I be pushing myself, what's the thing that's high value. And I think Agnes less sees the last part of that in terms of like going for high value but I have a strong criticism of both academics in the sense that if you say, okay, why are you doing research and what's the point of it really can't say that much about larger consequences they just repeat a few words or just they seem to be justified yet well other people done this in the past so it's okay if I do it. And I'm really struck by how most academics just don't have a story about why their thing is especially important. And thankfully, you do. I presume you can have a story about why longevity is important, because we might actually do it, and then it would be a huge deal, right? But I presume you're somewhat puzzled, perhaps, by other people just not caring about how important topics are, and maybe just making the distinction between aesthetic and truth, but not really caring which truths are more important. Like, I guess I could say.

Laura:

Oh, good. Maybe make a distinction. When I think about what you're saying Robin, I would make a distinction internally between like things that are important and practically important. So he's getting back to the original kind of distinction and things that are important and kind of like are deeply theoretically important. So like, For example, it's like longevity might seem to be quite practically important as well as medicine. But let's say somebody is working on the mathematical question, like they could work on like a trivial one where it's sort of like they just got there because that's their academic path made it really think about the important questions. Or they could feel that like it's so beautiful and aesthetically just, you know, delightful that it is important. And so they've really thought about whether it's important or not, but it's like important. the sense of just being in a when I take it back to Hamming's question, which I think you're referencing, I think he might have meant like the latter, not necessarily the former, like, I don't know if he was calling on academics to evaluate their work in the context of practical uses, I think it was more like it was a big deal kind of thing.

Agnes:

Right, so like, Online, something that I see a lot of is everybody telling everybody else what everybody should do, constantly. It's a constant flow of advice, and here's what you need to do, and here's where you need to do this. We need to pay more attention to this, and more attention to this. That's something everyone seems to think that they're able to do is direct everybody else. And I think people are not very good at that. And the stuff they have to contribute along that front is not very useful. And I would think the same thing about academics telling everybody what we need more of. So if an academic is basically saying, well, look, here's the most important issue, I'm like, ah, probably you're not great at judging that. Because what have you done? You spent your whole life studying this one little thing, Socrates or something like me, right? What do I know about everything else? I can tell you about Socrates. And I can also tell you why it's important. Like, I have my own sense of why it's important that I can articulate to you. But comparing it to everything else and saying, like, here's what we need to pay more attention to, I would just need to know everything else. And I just don't think I know that. So I can't make an informed statement about what everyone needs. I could just make the kind of statement that everybody makes online.

Robin:

It seems to me like radical, you know, uncertainty sort of thing which I tend to be skeptical about that is I think when you need to make choices. There are just like big variations and the consequences your choices and you should just make your best guesses even if. will have a lot of noise in it. So for example, if you had different ideas for starting a business, I might say, well, you should do a filter and say, well, which one potentially could get more revenue? Which one could be big businesses versus small businesses? Which ones could have a big effect on the world? You can and should do that when you're thinking of business ideas, not just say, no one could possibly know which business ideas are any good, so I might as well just pick the first one that came to mind.

Agnes:

But I mean, I guess I don't, I wouldn't expect, suppose somebody, you know, comes up with, okay, I'm remodeling my kitchen, remodeling. What I mean by that is I am covering it with stickers and my kids are really into it. And they're like, you know, you could start a business where you go and go and remodel people's house by covering with stickers. And maybe, suppose I did that, okay, and started this business. I don't think that I'd be able to say, look, I figured out that what the world really needs is more sticker kitchens. I found a cool thing that I can do, and then I can contribute, and then I think people would like, but I haven't like done some kind of math of like, what is the total set of needs that people have, and determine that what the world needs now is more sticker kitchens. And I suspect that most, people who start businesses, it's not because they do that kind of calculation and they can't explain why this is the exact thing that the world needs more of. It's gonna look more local, like they're good at something and they find some niche that they can fit into. But Laura actually knows much more about starting businesses probably than either of us. So maybe she could speak to that.

Laura:

What I'm curious about actually is like our distinction that we've been discussing this whole time like really a distinction between like either like whether it's better to be selfish or to be or like between being selfish and being altruistic or kind of like between like the idea of assault like having an idea of stuff which is like very individual versus like connected to community like is that kind of the core distinction between these two modes of action.

Robin:

for starting a business and you both would want to start a business you thought was fun and she might find the sticker business fun but then if you ask for investment from other people or customers they're going to want to do a quick you to have done and if they're not they're going to do a quick survey of like okay how plausibly how many customers there could be for this how often would they buy it how much would they pay I mean you just need to You know, you can't have enormous certainty about that, but it seems like you should always do that first quick cut analysis of, even if you have an idea for an academic paper or something, the question is like, who might publish this? What sort of, you know, audience would it have? Is it in fashion? How easy is it to do? You should just always do a quick cut analysis of these things.

Agnes:

If you ask people about those questions, they'll be able to answer them.

Robin:

Right. And so that's all the more telling, right? People in academics, they can do the very selfish calculations quick and dirty. Okay. What journal might take this and how long would it take and how much money will it take? Like, but if we say, okay, and how will it matter for the world? All of a sudden they're in the, who could possibly know? So I should not even pay any attention to it as if like, they really just don't care about the consequences of the world. They just care about their personal consequences. And that's what the thing they focus on.

Laura:

Do you think it's that they don't care or that they aren't competent at kind of making that evaluation?

Robin:

Because they haven't tried. I mean, if they tried more often, they would be more confident.

Agnes:

People are trying, like on Twitter, they're really trying to like tell the world how to be a better place. I mean, they put a lot of energy into it. I think they suck at it.

Robin:

You're focused on people telling other people. I'm talking about people just asking themselves. So I ask a person about your research and say, why are you doing this? What's your story about how this helps the world? And they don't have a story there usually. It's not about me telling them what to do with them telling me. It's about how they even ask themselves.

Agnes:

But I just think it's very hard to know what's going to help the world.

Robin:

And yet they know what journals might take it or how long it would take or how many assistants they need. I mean, you know, there's apparently a bunch of other things they can figure out.

Agnes:

I mean, let's ask this, okay, I want to ask Robin this question. So presumably when you, you know, you're kind of old now. So when you were young, you made some of these determinations, right? About what's going to help the world. And you were making predictions about what could help the world. And my question is, to what extent were your predictions correct about which contributions of yours would help the world?

Robin:

I mean, I think on average, they were right. Yes. That is, I often, in my history, moved from a field when I said, OK, the things we can do here just don't seem that impactful compared to the things I could do somewhere else. And I went to somewhere else. And I think, on average, in fact, it was true that you could do more than somewhere else. There was more bigger ways that that research could have consequences. And like, for example, I bet she did things before she did longevity. And at some point, she switched to longevity. I'll bet, in part, based on idea, you know what? Longevity could have some big impacts.

Agnes:

Okay, I'm curious, Laura. So how actually did this go? Is that the correct story?

Laura:

So I said it's actually incorrect. So yeah, I like multiple interesting things there. But one thing I just say overall is I think maybe what we're talking about is the skill of seeing past social norms to problems. Like, it's like, if a problem is important, presumably, like, it'll have like sufficient resources, unless there's some like difference between how many resources should be allocated to it and like how many resources are allocated to it. and maybe the most common cause of that could be I'm not exactly sure but seems related to like social like sort of social norms like being aware that the problem is important to sort of like maybe Robin there's a skill kind of like which I think might be embedded in like the rationalist community quite a bit of like kind of seeing past or like like priding oneself on seeing past like what most people in society think is important to like what problems are underworked on like I don't think anyone would argue that like maybe like you should have an initial person working in cancer. I mean, like, maybe you should, but like, it doesn't maybe seem to be as, like, sort of individually important to do that, if you have the skill, then to go work on a field that has no people working on it, but that could benefit a lot from a person working on it. And I would say, personally, I backed into longevity when I was, like, eight years old or something, and I, like, worked on it and, like, constantly tried to, like, convince myself out of it. for like, you know, multiple decades. And I think the only reason I'm still in the field is because I can't convince myself it's not a good idea, but I'd say I accidentally ended up at the data point outside the distribution because of like circumstances of birth. And I just hadn't been able to convince myself that like that, that like is an incorrect place to be, if that makes sense. But I would say I definitely didn't come to it from like a perspective of like, this is like, I didn't, I didn't know what social norm, I didn't know that it was not a social norm to work. Like, I just kind of assumed it was an interesting, obviously important subject, like as a kid when I knew nothing about the world. So I'd say like, yeah, the process of, yeah, I don't know if that's really good. that was like a rational process.

Robin:

When you thought about moving away and you looked at another place to go instead, did you then look at that and say what's the potential, you know, how good could that go, what's the potential for that, and say that doesn't look as big as longevity, like longevity looks like it has a bigger potential than that, so I guess I'll stay here.

Laura:

Yeah, but I think that comes back to this question of like, so like, sort of, When one makes an evaluation like what question is one asking and I think maybe like Robin I put you in a small group of people, and then we'll do kind of like think a lot or maybe it's not so I actually don't want to think a lot about like. people trick themselves or kind of like how people see past social norms. I think it is a field that is characterized, its inefficiencies are characterized by social norms that are like, to which most people like are kind of just unthinking or something. And so like from having started outside that it was quite like, I think it was, it was kind of easier to reason about or think about because I spent most of my life talking to people and being like, why isn't this an interesting question to you? And then being like very confused by the answers. But from inside, I think it would have been hard to reason to that point of view from the inside. So I'm not saying that people don't, aren't people doing this, I actually agree, Robin, that this is something that people can do. But in my particular example, I don't think it's, I think it'd be harder to have done that.

Agnes:

I just have a question about that, just about longevity and social norms. Do you think that, so I'm not, I'm not sure I know what phenomenon you're referring to, but I'm sort of guessing, is, and I, like, Is it that we all have to accommodate ourselves to death somehow over the course of our childhoods and people kind of talk themselves into it? Like, it's okay, I'm gonna die. That's how it's supposed to go. And then you're having to raise the question of longevity. It's like telling people maybe you could have this amazing thing that they convinced themselves they couldn't have in order to get by, but you plunge yourself into this at a young enough age where you hadn't yet sort of talked yourself into the death thing. Like, is that the situation? Or if not, what? How does the anti-conformist aspect of longevity research show up?

Laura:

I think there's a couple of things. I mean, I could spend like, I don't know, like 100 hours talking about like the number of different factors that go into like the aversive reaction to thinking about the question. But the fact is, there's a large aversive reaction to thinking about it at all, like, just except for responsible people. And even then, like, there's a lot of any anybody's thinking about just thinking about it from a perspective that's not fully or having anything like actually, but it's like a very hard topic to think about. directly. And then so that's one thing. And the other thing is like, until recently, there wasn't a reason to because technologically, we didn't really have the like, it wasn't a question of do we can we do anything about this or not, there just wasn't an option. And so I think the reason that it's an interesting question now, or that I'm so fascinated by the field of sort of like technology is forcing us to think about this process metabolize the social change. But like, you're kind of right at the beginning of that. um but yeah but and so once it becomes like if there were long-term drugs available to humans that like had large increases in life we would all be thinking about it because we had to but right now it's kind of we're like right on the cusp we're like thinking about it maybe you invest more in the field but like it's not something you have to do if you don't want to well let me try to answer and you can tell me if i'm wrong laura but agnes the story as i've been told which had always made sense is that

Robin:

especially in medicine, there's a strong norm that medicine is for fixing problems, fixing ways we break or go wrong. But then the purpose is always to bring us back to the normal functioning natural state and then improving for us from that state when there isn't a problem is much more taboo. That is, we don't see, we're fearful of and disapproving of the idea of taking some healthy person where everything is fine and then trying to make them better. then we're mainly just supposed to fix them when they go wrong, fix the things that go wrong and bring them back to the healthiest day. So longevity is often framed as let's not just stop the ways we die, but let's make us better and make us more likely to live longer. And because of that, it hits this taboo. Oh, you're not supposed to be improving. You're supposed to be fixing the problems.

Agnes:

And why isn't sports taboo? Isn't all of like professional sports or people trying to improve their bodies above the

Robin:

Well, they're supposed to be bringing them up to the full potential, but for example, people who use drugs or other artificial means to make them better, that's very disapproved in sports. That is, the whole point is, no, you're only supposed to take your natural capabilities and then practice them and reach their full potential, but you're not supposed to artificially change you in order to win at sports.

Laura:

Yeah, I think I actually disagree with that quite strongly or up in a sense that like, I so I'm sorry, I don't want to like spend like a month long thing about like, you know, findings and like the study of like, what formers are too long dead or something, which is I just like, think about it a lot. But I think one thing I would say is I think the transhumanist thing is a very common reason people will give for not thinking about it, or kind of like, that's it. But like, I'd say like, there's, there's like, almost like my observation empirically is that like, there's people just don't want to think about it. And there's a lot of reasons that you can use not thinking about it, but they aren't actually like they're not kind of, they're more like utility, they're more been used for something that they're not like the core motivator. And like, I don't understand psychology well enough to like, I have a lot of thoughts about, or I think that core motivator is really interesting, but also like, I wouldn't feel comfortable like proclaiming about psychology or something to like, you know, folks who are actually working in academic discipline.

Robin:

Okay. So you're saying this theory I just outlined is plausible and excuse people could point to, but it isn't the real reason. And you don't know what the real reason is.

Laura:

Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm very sympathetic to it. Like, I think I, it is like one of the most common reasons people get for not being interested in this most technology, right. So like it changes something and we don't want, we don't want things to change, but I think just like, I mean, like spent like a long time talking to people. I think that it's, it's not the real, it's really not the real, it's like, it's like a reason that you give it's like, you know, like, when you believe something and you're not really sure why, but you need to say something. It's a useful reason, but it's really not the core reason, I think.

Agnes:

I want to go back to this selfish versus selfless thing, because I think this is interesting, this question about... you know, is it permissible to have selfish motives as a scientist? Maybe one way to put the question, right? So Robin is critical of scientists who cannot explain how their research is going to improve the world. Let's say all they can say about it is, I know I can get it published in a journal that will promote my career, and I find it really fascinating. Let's say they can say those two things. Those are both forms of selfishness, right? So there's different kinds of selfishness. You could selfishly, I don't know, want money and acclaim and you can selfishly want like the pleasures of learning. And I guess I do think a little bit that the theoretical, that love of Sophia is an inherently selfish love in a way that practical pronesis is inherently altruistic. So if you want to achieve the good, it's always going to be the good for other people. It's really interesting if you think about all these practical people, all these operators that you're talking about, right? We want to make the world a better place. It's always like for other people, it's not just for themselves. So there's a natural altruism, I think, built into the practical and a natural selfishness with the theoretical. And I wonder, is that a problem? Robin thinks it's a problem, so maybe one way to put the question to Robin would be, as a consumer, I might buy things just because I think it's good for me, not because I think the world would be a better place if I buy. you know, all these stickers to put in my apartment. And as a businessman, I might just start the business that I think will make money and will be like, you know, enjoyable for me or whatever, but not the one that's going to make the world the best place. So lots and lots of people are not placed under the constraint of you have to make the world a better place. Why are you inclined to put scientists under this constraint? And I'm interested to hear Laura's take on this too.

Robin:

So, in the world, we have a number of spheres, which are labeled and called on to be exemplars of admirable activity and things that be supported so like there are people out there just doing stuff selfishly and they're allowed to do that and it's okay but then there are other things that people do that say, ah, there it is, the peak of human activity. And then they want us to praise it, they want us to support it with donations, with tax deductions, and we do in fact give such support for areas of, you know, music, and academics, and museums, and art, and a number of areas where we all basically support those things out of some story that they are better than the other things, and they're good for us all. And people who do those things, it's somewhat surprising when you ask them, okay, what is this thing you're doing for all of us? How about you in particular tell me about how it's going to be good? And they go, I don't care about that. I'm just doing this thing for me. And you go, but the story, you know, for example, you look at universities and graduation ceremonies and the speeches given by university presidents, and they're going on and on about how this is all great for the world. Or when, you know, people ask for more budget for the NSF, in front of Congress, et cetera, or ask for more donations to various things. They go on and on about how this is all a great thing that benefits us all. And then you might think they might get the participants on board with this story. And they have each of them tell them why their particular contribution is adding up to the story. And they just don't. That's, to me, the surprising thing. We don't seem to care if the individuals have much of a story about how they're helping. We just, as long as the large-scale representative of this area, they tell us this vague story, we go, OK, fine.

Agnes:

But if you think back to the thing Laura said at the very beginning about how the most productive thing in some ways for her to somehow get lost in certain kinds of questions, where she's not asking herself the question, how is this making the world a better place? Then maybe all this is less surprising. So artists typically do not say any, like, I did an event with a filmmaker, and he's like, look, I'm just doing what I like. I'm just making the movies that I love that I think are beautiful. And he does it in a certain way where he has financial independence so he can do that. And lots of artists I've talked to talk in that way. They're like, I'm just doing the thing I love that I think is beautiful. Whether or not anyone takes anything from it, that's up to them. And the people who take something from it love that. That's what they want. So selfishness, it's just not always bad. Sometimes we admire it. Sometimes we exalt it and think that it's beautiful. Like I find, you know, I find just stories about Ramanujan, who was this mathematician obsessed with, you know, with really the beauty of math. It's out to be a beautiful story, even though he wasn't trying to make the world a better place for anybody. So it may be that like lots of intellectuals are in fact making the world a better place, but not by trying to do so. And that just may be characteristic of theoretical activity that it's selfishness is not an ugly kind of selfishness.

Robin:

But interestingly, that goes along with asking other people to not be selfish in order to pitch in and help devote resources to this area.

Agnes:

But it's not the artists usually have to do it, or the academics. It's the administrator, whatever. We give that job to other people. OK, I'm sorry. Laura, I want to hear your thoughts about this. selfishness.

Laura:

Oh, no, I, that's actually in concordance with what I was going to say, which is, I actually, I feel like I managed this on multiple levels. One is an organization's like, I'll often be like, if there's somebody, like, it's like, you want to actually protect the person who's like coming up with the good ideas from like, like, you don't want them to be thinking about, like, I don't know, the greater good, like, it's actually, I don't, I don't know if our brains work that way, that like, you come up with your creativity, and you're back propagating from like, you know, some overall goal. Also, personally, I feel like I often manage like, parts of my brain, maybe similarly, obviously, you're seeing the beginning of like, there's all these different parts of the brain, like, I'll try and make sure that if I have a good idea, it's as decoupled as possible. It's maybe meta-motivated by, oh, I want to solve this goal, but it's not touching thinking about a goal, because that feels quite bad, actually. That's something that I've had to actually work on quite specifically. In order to be good at my job, I've had to actually think quite a bit about trying to separate those two motivations internally, which maybe that just means that is motivated still by doing it or something.

Robin:

So I spent a lot of a year thinking about the sacred and I did a night owls with Agnes talking about it. And I'm tempted to explain this in terms of one of the norms of the sacred is that the sacred is supposed to be separated from the profane so concretely to imagine like we could say. Look, as long as you're motivated by art and doing art, that's great, but why don't we just shift you a bit in the direction of more useful art? So instead of just painting on walls, why don't you, you know, decorate couches and decorate ceilings? And, you know, we could have this attitude toward artists. Hey, you know, it can't hurt your motivation that much just to slant your efforts a little more in the direction of what will be useful to us as long as you're being arty, like be arty about something that could help us. And there's a norm against that, I think. There's a sense of which, oh no, we would be polluting the pure, art, the sacred art, by allowing any small degree of practical motivation to be influencing the choices, even if that would be helpful to us. No, we want the practical people who decorate couches to be people who have some artistic ability, but we're not going to call them artists. We're not going to give them the respect of people who put paintings on the wall, because those are pure sacred things that have no obvious practical application, and that's what assures us that they are sacred.

Agnes:

Yeah, that seems right to me. But it also just seems, I'm happy to endorse these practices as kind of important practices of like attention or something, right? So, like, I don't know, imagine if you use your kids as billboards to advertise products and you got paid for it, right? Those are called t-shirts. Exactly, right. But you're paid. Your kids are like, no, you got to wear the clothing. I'm getting paid for you to wear this Coca-Cola. Using your kids as product placement. There's something distasteful about that. Even in a movie, when there's a product placement, we're like, distasteful. And I think our repugnance, a little bit repugnant reaction to those things, I agree with you. It's a feeling that this is polluted. It's not sacred. But I think that whole set of norms of keeping things separated a little bit Part of what that allows us to do is to attend to what is important in a situation and really focus in on that. It's a motivational issue. Like the thing Laura was saying about how you have to shield and protect this impulse, because, you know, if you start thinking too much about how to do the good while you're trying to figure out what's true, your thought about the truth is going to get corrupted. And what you will find is not the truth.

Robin:

You have this somewhat contrary practice. So like I've talked to artists before in my life, and they are passionate about how we should be subsidizing the arts. And then they will give all sorts of practical reasons why we should be subsidizing the arts. It gives hand-eye coordination. It makes us more aesthetically appreciative. It gives us more cultural contacts with foreigners. It promotes world peace, they say, right? And academics are doing all the same thing about academic research, right? They aren't just saying, oh, this is a pure, sacred thing that people can express. They are giving all these reasons why we're going to get lots of practical benefits from doing so. And that seems somewhat at odds with the micro story. At each person, oh, there's no practical issues here at all. It's just whatever seems to be the most aesthetically budgement. And then this larger claim, and that tends to reliably produce great economic benefits, so we should subsidize it all. Can those both be true?

Agnes:

No, I agree with you. I think that these people are just terrible at marketing and they're just screwing it up. So I do lots of marketing for philosophy. I'm constantly trying to get people interested and engaged in philosophy. And I never tell them it's going to improve their critical thinking skills. What I do is give them a question and be like, isn't this fascinating and get them interested in it. And they are interested. And then we're doing philosophy and that's how I market it. And that's how they should be marketing art. And that's how we should be marketing the humanities and telling people abstract stories about how this is going to improve your life in some way that is unrelated to the pleasures that you will take in that very activity. It's just, it's just empty words.

Robin:

I'm pretty clear, Laura is marketing her business to investors in terms of potential customers will get more than an abstract appreciation of the theory of her work right she's offering concrete products that might benefit their life.

Agnes:

But that's a direct.

Laura:

There's something I actually think about constantly. And in a sense, like I've wanted to write about or like talk about, just like you're as a founder, you're constantly like every second of my day should be devoted. And it's not actually a healthy mindset nowadays, but sort of like devoted to the good, to promoting the interests of like, you know, my stakeholders are kind of like, you really, it's kind of just like drilled into you culturally. And yet, like, I think what a lot of people are finding is that that doesn't lead to the, like, it's just like, if you do, if you act that way, which is like the way you're supposed to act, like, Like you obviously want to like reach your fiduciary responsibilities like that. There's some hard things that you have to be very conscientious about, but like actually, you know, like many times where you're like taking a day, like a Thursday to go out of the office and like play tennis. And then like, you know, it's a creative thing, like is at a certain point in a company, like most, and people like struggle so much. It's like, oh, this feels so bad. Like I'm a bad person. But then like you, and period people around your friends are all like doing this thing that like makes their company function better. And it's kind of like, we just like, it's just really funny. But I'm not like I think if I worry about a lot more like should I spent every second of my day, being this good person who's always optimizing for this like one value function.

Robin:

So there's this phenomena agonist I've talked about several times of the kinds of things you can't pursue. like it's hard to plan to have fun today. You can plan to do something else and have fun as a side effect. And then there's a question of how many things in the world are like that. So that's what these people who Agnes says are marketing badly are basically appealing to. They say, intellectual progress is one of those things. You get it by not trying to do it. You give us money, you guys are trying to do it. But the people you're giving money to, they can't be trying to do it. For them, it only works if they're not trying to do it. And then the question is like, okay, how common is this thing? I mean, it definitely is true there for fun. But is it true for large swaths of the economy that we throw money at that part, but the people involved can't be trying to do it? Otherwise, it doesn't work.

Laura:

Well, I guess the question is, why would you care about the intentions of the machine that you're optimizing? So if you tell your computer, hey, you want to write something on your computer, do you care that the computer cares that it has some goal that it's trying to fulfill? Or do you care that empirically, when you open up your computer and type something, it does what you want it to do? Why should we care? If a system is working, why should we care about the agency of the components of it?

Robin:

Well, I mean, an operating system will typically have ways it decides which processes run in terms of their priority. And you'd like to know that there was a priority system there such that the higher priority processes would get run more reliably. If there wasn't such an operating system, you might be concerned about what will happen to that. So I might think the science system, there should be somebody who's asking what the important things are doing. and allocating things to that. Each part doesn't necessarily have to do that, but somebody ought to be doing that, and so it gets worried when you go talk to 20 people and none of them do it, and nobody knows anybody who does it, and nobody thinks it's even the sort of thing anybody should be doing. Then it starts to sound like nobody's doing it.

Agnes:

I'm just always shocked Robin by, for like a libertarian economist who would believe in, you know, not believe in planned economies and believe in like spontaneous order and all of that. How often you're invoking, like, there's gotta be somebody in charge. Why does it have to be?

Robin:

This isn't about somebody in charge, it's about like somebody is attending to the key issue. So, say in a hospital, if nobody even tracked who died or who didn't die and collected some statistics on how often patients die and which sections of the hospital they were in and which treatments there are, I'm going, you're a hospital. You're supposed to be not killing patients. Somebody should be tracking this here. I'm not saying it's the guy at the top should centralize it. I'm just saying it should be happening somewhere.

Agnes:

Okay, we are gonna have to stop in two minutes, but I wanted to see if Laura had like a, or two or more, not exactly. I'm just, that's an hour. And we try not to go too far over to put too many demands on our listeners. Here's like a final question you wanna ask or raise.

Laura:

I believe the 12th part of my read is like, what's the meaning of life? That's a terrible question to ask, I guess. I don't know, probably just, I have like 10 questions, but I don't know if I have one question that is the most. Maybe I do want to take it quickly back to this question of, like, can you objectively argue that, like, the pursuit of knowledge, if you could pick any pursuit, is the correct pursuit to, like, tie meaning to if you can, or just, like, the good one to do? And, like, is there, like, a good argument against that or something?

Robin:

Clearly, we don't want everybody doing it, do we? So it can't be the sort of thing everybody should be doing all the time. I mean, if it's the sort of thing somebody should be doing sometime, that should be particular to that person in time, right?

Agnes:

I think it depends what kind of knowledge. So if you're talking about theoretical knowledge, then I think, yeah, that's not going to be for everybody. And in fact, theoretical knowledge in and of itself is subdivided, and no one's going to be pursuing the whole of it at any given time. And that's what I call, I use the word science for that. But if you're talking about practical knowledge, where part of that is about the meaning of life and about you know, understanding what is of value and why you should pursue it and all of that. I think everyone's supposed to try to get that. I don't think we do division of labor with that one. And I think, but so really the question about the value of knowledge, for me, it's a very different question, depending on whether you're asking about the theoretical or practical. And I think you're fundamentally asking about the theoretical. And I think that there, I mean, I think Robin's right that there's a social value to the knowledge, right? And so that's one kind of value that it's going to have if you can. And then the other kind of value will be selfish. It'll be the pleasure, I think, the beauty of it, the joy of knowing. And I suppose, I mean, if the question is, is there some reason to think that that's better than other kinds of aesthetic pleasures? Like say you were an artist or something, you'd say you could be either an artist or a scientist and you could take these pleasures aesthetic pleasure, either in knowing or in creating art, for me, it's just not obvious. There's not some obvious answer to which of those two things you should do. And so if you were looking for like an argument that says, no, there's a supremacy of the knowledge one, in the case of theoretical knowledge, I guess I don't think that's true. I don't see a reason to think it.

Robin:

The following seems obvious to me. which is early in life, you just try a bunch of different things, and you hear people talking about a bunch of different things. And then for each thing you try that you've heard people talking about, you get some sense of mastery, some sense of how it feels, and you're ready to rank these things. And then at some point, you pick one. You say, This one, people praise it a lot. I seem to be good at it. I seem to like it. And you might pick it tentatively, but most people don't change those choices. That is, they tend to be lifetime choices and they are just done in the face of huge ignorance. That is, you know, you could do lifetimes of analysis and maybe not be that much more informed about which was actually the best choice for you. So it's often like similar picking a spouse or something. You meet so many people and you pick one and then you stick with them for a while. And I think we should be tolerant of the fact that I mean, maybe it's just good enough to have a thing and feel good about it locally when you did it. And I think you should check it against a few larger checklists of like, okay, who cares? What's the point of this? Is there some value in it? But still, if you've checked it and it's okay on those checklists and you just like it, it should just be okay to just pick it. and then stick with that choice. That's sort of essential to life is we have a lot of options early on and then we become someone who threw away most of the options to pick a few things. And then we become the people who pick those things. And that's who we are as a later adult in life. We are no longer have as many options, but now we have in some sense, this meaning of not just a thing we liked and picked, but like a lifetime of being the person who pursued that thing and getting into it and becoming more shaped by it. That sounds like meaning enough because you're not going to be able to get much more than that anyway. So I think I should be forgiving and accepting of people that, yeah, that's what they're going to be. As long as they at least at some point considered alternatives and considered a reasonable range of issues about which things to pick, that it's okay to pick something.

Agnes:

Okay, that seems like a good place to end. Thank you so much, Laura. Thank you for talking to us.

Robin:

Thanks for being here, Laura.

Laura:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Note: transcript generated by audiotranscriber.ai.