Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hey, Robin.

Robin:

Today we're going to talk about who explanations need to persuade. And I realized that when I first learned game theory, one definition that one of my professors gave for game theory was the game theory are the theories of human behavior where people don't change their behavior when they believe the theories. They could be aware of the theories and aware that they applied to them, and that they still behave that way. So in that sense, game theory is a description of behavior that each person can fully embrace and they still behave according to the theory. So now, that's not to say I guess that they would be eager to believe the theory. Or that we would win many points by trying to persuade them of a theory, they maybe wouldn't like the theory, and wouldn't be willing to believe it. But that's at least one interesting framing on who you need to persuade. So I guess the implication there is there are other theories of behavior that are accurate theories, but only when people don't believe them when they're about, say, people's delusions or misunderstandings. And I guess if people have misunderstandings, then theories of those misunderstandings can describe their behavior. But they wouldn't behave the same if they believe the theory.

Agnes:

There's a phrase that I think it was Bernard, philosopher Bernard Williams used about a certain kind of utilitarianism that he called Government House utilitarianism, and what he meant was, like, the idea that a utilitarian who wants people to be Kantians, because they think that overall, you'll get the best results if people believe the false theory. So that would be that would be an example of, you know, if they found out the truth, they would then adopt the view that in fact, would lead them to act in the worst way.

Robin:

So then, Government House utilitarian is not part of game theory, according to that definition.

Agnes:

Hmm. So that's puzzling to me, I mean, like, is the idea that the claim about game theory, this is assuming– is this assuming that all the actors in the game are playing as well as – they are behaving as well as rationally as possible to start with?

Robin:

Well, we can have variations on game theories where people have trouble calculating things, and they can't exactly figure out the optimal thing. And then we can have game theories describing that, where there's a stochastic distribution over what they do, given the various mistakes they'll make. That's still part of game theory. But you could see that theory and see that it applied to you and still want to behave that way.

Agnes:

But like, wouldn't you if you say, understood, which sorts of mistakes you typically made, couldn't you perhaps take measures to avoid those mistakes?

Robin:

Perhaps, but it's actually pretty hard. Knowing in the abstract that you make mistakes is different than knowing which particular mistakes you're likely to make in any particular situation. So the abstract theory would just describe the distribution of mistakes, and not necessarily which mistake you were about to make.

Agnes:

But like, is it in prin– this is what I'm, what I'm not getting is like, is it in principle impossible that there could be a situation where people are inclined to make a particular sort of mistake, and they don't know that they're making it? And then, you know, if they learn that they would change their behavior?

Robin:

Yes. And that's possible, but that's then excluded from game theory. That's why this definition is that's not in part of game theory.

Agnes:

Yes. So that’s what I’m not getting, like, why is that intelligible line to draw?

Robin:

It's just interesting, that knowing about theories of them could change people's behaviors. So that's – like, the physical world doesn't act different when we have different theories of it. Mountains don't, the stars don't, rivers don’t. And so you might think this is an interesting distinctive feature of social science that you have these people who are the object of your theories and what they believe about your theory will affect their behavior. So then when you theorize you might change the world, because you might convince people of your theories and then they would act differently. And that adds an interesting complexity to Social and Human Sciences.

Agnes:

And that – it's at that point that we're no longer doing game theory, right?

Robin:

That is, well, so if you were, say, ignorant of game theory, and then you were behaving one way, and then I explained game theory to another way, and you behave another way, it could still be true that knowing game theory, you know, isn't changing your behavior once you know game theory. I don't tell you – if I tell you the game theory in a particular case or something, I won't change your behavior then but I might have changed it from some other contexts where you weren't even thinking about what you're doing. But I guess it's somewhat ambiguous there. What the reference case is for this not changing your behavior, you know, certainly if you're not paying any attention whatsoever to your behavior, then pretty much any reasonable theory of behavior would probably change it.

Agnes:

Also, there are kinds of theories that wouldn't change it even though there'll be nothing else interesting about the theory. Like the theory that included you're fated to behave exactly as you have behaved, or something like the fates are controlling you, well, then nothing else I say, you know, would change your behavior because you think it's not under your control. Right?

Robin:

Right. That would be a theory you couldn't compute very easily or you couldn't figure out what the theorist implies specifically about your behavior. You just know in the abstract, say that your behavior is consistent with physics.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Knowing that doesn't help you very much know what to do. But the reason why I suggested this particular topic is that in the past, you and I have had differences of stances or priorities in terms of when we have a theory about some people and this theory may not be very flattering of them, or may not be a theory they feel very inclined to embrace, my habit will be to continue to elaborate the theory and maybe talk to other people about it, not them. And your habit is more to think about how you could talk to them, and maybe focus on the kinds of theories that you would be able to get them to buy into. And this is a different stance, the two of us take toward our theorizing. And I thought it might be interesting for us to explore that here.

Agnes:

Yeah. So, and like, I guess, I think there's the facet of my view that often shows up in conversation with you is, you want to be able to say unflattering things, give unflattering descriptions that people would reject. But for me, this is part of a bigger claim, which is just that knowledge of the ethical world is practical knowledge. So it's supposed to give you guidance as to how to act. And so knowledge that doesn't give you any kind of guidance, where it would be equally true that that speech that simply flattered someone, right, so you say, “Oh, it's bad, because it's not flattering.” But I think it must be bad if it were flattering. Like the point at which you think you've understood it is the point at which you can use that to reorient yourself and to improve. And that's just what it means to know stuff in the practical space is to improve.

Robin:

Sure. But there's a difference between a theory that you will be willing to accept, and likely to accept, or find congenial to accept, and a theory that if you accepted it would help you behave. So you just described that second criteria. It should be something that if you believed it and act on it, would actually help you. That's a different criterion than whether you're willing to believe it.

Agnes:

Well, if I'm imagining myself giving the theory, it's only going to help the person if they're at least somewhat inclined to accept it. So getting them to accept it is just part of the game. It just as much as it orienting them in an improving manner. I haven't done something useful if I've produced something that I know they can't – for instance, if it's spoken in a language that they don't know, then I can be sure they won't accept it, and I haven't given them something useful.

Robin:

But it could still be a valid theory.

Agnes:

I don't think it could. So I think validity in the practical realm is practical. It is, does it have some kind of use? If it's useless, it's not valid.

Robin:

So many of us, including you and I, are intellectuals. We are professional intellectuals. And we are part of a large intellectual project whereby we all think about a lot of different topics and we try to pull together a unified view of everything through our combined efforts. And, you know, any one person might be able to use this combined view for practical purposes. And it would be, you know, useful for someone to summarize all the stuff in order to help a particular kind of person, make a particular kind of decision. But this exercise of collecting a unified integrated view of everything, that exercise seems to, you know, benefit from any relevant true things we can figure out about it, even if particular people wouldn't want to hear that. That is, we might just put together our best view of everything, and then look at who would be willing to listen to which parts of it and then craft practical advice for each person based on which parts they would be willing to accept. And that might not be able to draw on the entire structure we have put together but seems like we should first just try to put together the best shared structure we can about what's true about all the important things. And then as a separate matter focus on, for any one audience, what they would be able to benefit from.

Agnes:

So you often, like conjure up for me this category of intellectuals, which is supposed to include me and you and some other people but not everybody. And then you give me a bunch of rules for what these people do. And I rarely recognize myself in this category. And, like, I don't think I'm trying to produce a unified integrated view of everything. That's not a project I see myself as involved in, or it's too…

Robin:

You’re contributing to it, even if you're not focused on it, or it's not your highest priority. But we are all together doing that.

Agnes:

I think that I'm doing like more specific things in more specific contexts. Like I'm trying to teach some students something about Socrates, or right now I'm trying to figure something out, talking to you about whether, you know, whether practical knowledge really does have to be practical, as I would put it. And I think you're – I mean, I do agree that there is a kind of general human endeavor of trying to know, but at that point I'm not sure that there's like, some people who are – that anyone is excluded from it. That is, that there are like experts, who are experts at that level of generality of being intellectuals but not being, you know, specialists in something. That's just a category that I don't use. It's not how I think.

Robin:

I wonder if we could ask about some other class of things, whether we can distinguish the practical from the non-practical. So if you imagine walking into a department store. You know, maybe everything in there could be used by somebody, but maybe most of it couldn't be used by you. You know, but we still suggest that you go through the department store to find the things you want. We don't make a whole separate store just for you for the things that will only be useful for you.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

We share a larger set of things that some of which may be useful for no one, I guess, in a practical sense, they might enjoy them in some other aesthetic sense. So, you know, when we have categories of objects in the world, we have organized our sense of what kind of things there are out there. And we have ways to categorize them, we also put them in shared spaces, like a section of the department store or something. And seems to me like, we mainly first want to have just a set of sensible categories for things and places to put them and then not focus that so much on whether it's useful to you. We don't want to organize all the things in the department store that you will happen to find useful. So the question is whether this concept of practical is a sort of stable fundamental category that we would organize things in terms of, or whether it's more temporary and context dependent and local, such that you'll have to wait until some context to figure out what happens to be practical there. And so we shouldn't talk about whether knowledge in general is practical, we should talk about whether it's applicable in some situation to some particular person. The same piece of knowledge might be applicable by somebody else, one person not so applicable by someone else, and could be used for this project of putting together an integrated view of the world.

Agnes:

So like, I think a department store is very much organized in the manner of practical knowledge. Namely, it's organized by use, not for one person, but for people in general. And so there's stuff in the department store, there's stuff that would never be in a department store exactly, because it wasn't imaginably useful for anyone. And the categories, the way the department store is divided up, it'll be like, all the cooking stuff is in one spot, instead of having like everything that's red be in one spot. You know, or everything that weighs over a certain amount being in one spot. That is there are a lot of ways that we might see theoretically organize our knowledge of all the objects in the department store that we would never think of doing in a department store, because the department store is oriented towards practice. And when you're walking around the department store, you're not doing a theoretical investigation, you're not cataloging, what you're doing is looking for something you can use and looking in a way that is liable to land you on something you could use.

Robin:

So our scenario here on discussion is, you're imagining a particular audience. And I might have a claim about that particular audience. And it might happen that that particular audience is not very open to that claim. They find it not flattering, or not very congenial to their point of view. But other people might find that claim useful. And we might find it useful for this purpose of putting together an integrated view. So then whether it's practical depends on who we're talking about, then it's not about the thing itself being practical or not, it's about who will be able to use it, how.

Agnes:

I agree.

Robin:

And so, that's like the department store, right? So I'm saying, let's just collect an integrated view of everything we can understand that seems useful to anyone for any purpose. And then in any – in a particular context, let's figure out what one person might want to hear. But let that be the secondary, you know, afterthought to first figuring out a true integrated view of reality.

Agnes:

So I guess I don't think those two projects are so separate. That is, there are bits of reality that we only investigate. There's lots of reality we just aren't interested and don't investigate at all. And then there's bits of it, we investigate primarily because we're interested in change or improvement. And I think that you know, it is important that we like, be guided in our inquiries, to learn the things that could potentially be useful to us about those things, because that's the only reason we're doing it is because we want to find the useful things. And so, if we were making kitchen gadgets, and we forgot to pay attention to like, what size are humans, and we ended up making some like the size of like, you know, a grasshopper and the other the size of like the Empire State Building, and there were all these kitchen implements and we’ll be like, “Well, look, we're just going to collect them, and then later, we'll decide like which ones we want.” That wouldn't be – that's not the actual way to end up with useful knowledge.

Robin:

Let's take an example of the sort of claim that I might have been trying to investigate in this, you know, more abstract, general way that you would say is less practical, because someone might find it hard to accept. So in my book, The Elephant in the Brain, I guess one of the hardest chapters for many to accept would be the chapter on medicine, wherein we say, the function of medicine is less to make you healthy, and more to let you show that you care about others and others show they care about you. And you might perhaps object that that's a hard view to get a person to accept about themselves. And therefore it's less practical. Am I correct in summarizing that?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

OK. And then, I might say, but this view about people and their motives in medicine could be useful for the purpose of figuring out whether we should subsidize or tax medicine, for various aspects of public policy about medicine, and, in fact, that's the primary use we recommend of the book. That is, it's primarily recommended for policymakers and social scientists to have a better view of how the world works and the motives people have for main actions, and not so much for individual self-improvement. In fact, we warn people that our book is not designed for self-improvement and that may not go well, people may well, you know, find it harder to improve themselves than they would have hoped. So is this other purpose OK?

Agnes:

I don't think your book really is oriented towards that group of people, even if you say it is. That is, I'd be surprised if you just took all the responses to the book and all the effect of the book, probably a tiny fraction of those is policymakers and whatever. And like most of them is individual people reading and reflecting about their lives. So it could just be like, you pitched the book badly and you wrote it badly, if you wanted it to go to that audience, because it didn't go to that audience. It went to a different audience. And I'm evaluating it with reference to its actual audience, not its with reference to its spoken audience. And maybe its actual audience was really the audience that you had in mind, even if you said the other audience, right? So like, because you really wrote it for the audience that it got, I think. It's very naturally read. It's sort of like, it's sort of like make sense that you had to say this book isn't for self-improvement, because everything about it screams this book is for self-improvement.

Robin:

Well, if there are multiple uses, potentially, of a fact or truth about the world, there are different kinds of people who could get different practical advantage from it. If you first just think about what's true, and then think about who might get an advantage from it, you might well make a mistake of making the format and style and marketing of it mistarget your group, but isn't it still a valid thing to be doing to produce truths that are practically useful by someone? And many readers seem to like this book. So…

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

So doesn't that suggest some of them are getting something out of it, even if you say it's impractical?

Agnes:

So first of all, like, I don't think it really does give you guidance as a public policy person. And the reason why it doesn't is because it's just not at all clear. Like if people mostly are using medicine to show that they care, it's not at all clear whether that means we should have less medicine, more medicine, like, there's no clear implication of that. So like I don't actually think it gives people guidance in those decisions. And the, I guess the thing I wanted to say about the – let's say we could define – think of something like trolling, right? So as we could define trolling someone as a certain kind of trolling as saying something with sort of the aim of provoking someone where, like, you might restrict yourself to truthful trolling, right? So you might say, “I'm only going to tell you truths, but I'm going to tell you, the ones that I know will sort of bother you, but in ways that are not productive and won't help you improve, or really, there's nothing you can do anything about. There's nothing you can do about them.” And like if we want to say, you know, could that be in any way objectionable, truthful trolling? Like, it seems, at least to me, in principle, like there could be some kind of objection to that. And there could be an objection to it even if the person wasn't doing that intentionally.

Robin:

I would say that the vast majority of public policy and social science analysis of human behavior is that a distance from drawing strong, confident conclusions about public policies. That is, we are in a shared enterprise, where we have broken the domain up into many specific topics and areas. And one of those areas is final policy conclusions drawn from our consensus about other things, but people often also just specialize in elaborating and making more details on other things. So the, I think true claim is that most health policy analysis has been based on the assumption of a different motive regarding medicine. And if that motive is wrong, that suggests that most of that analysis is wrong. And our replacing an incorrect assumption and pointing it out with a more correct assumption about the basic nature of the entire area of human behavior there seems like it's pretty presumptively useful for producing policy. Unless you think we're never ever going to know about anything about useful policy in this areas, it would seem like having a decent grounding in the basic facts of this area would be substantially relevant for policy. It doesn't require a direct connection between each fact and a particular final policy for that to be true.

Agnes:

I'm not sure it's any more relevant at the group level than at the individual level. That is individually if you know you're using medicine to show that you care, but you – if there's no conclusion that's supposed to be drawn about that from an individual about how they should behave, then, you know, a policymaker now learns, “OK, here's this motive that nobody will admit, and nobody to whom I'm proposing my policies like, we all know that the people who are taking the medicine won't admit it. Here's this other motive. All of our policies are based on a false assumption.” It's just still not clear like, to me, it's not any more clear what follows from that, than what will follow at the individual level. The individual also thinks has the false assumption that they want medicine for more health.

Robin:

Remember the distinction between willingness to believe and usefulness if you did believe. So, I would say, I do believe the theory of my book. And so given that I believe that I do think it has practical personal implications. And I'm happy to elaborate those. That is, the key message is that, overall, medicine is not very useful for health but it is useful to reassure people that you care about them, and they care about you. And so when I'm in a situation where health is at risk, I realize this fact, and so I'm less concerned with making sure all possible medical treatment happens because I realized that that's actually not very effective. But I realized that I should make sure that the people involved feel cared for. That they’ve noticed that other people are concerned about them, and that other people are willing to pay costs to make sure that they are taken care of. I focus then on this motive of showing that you care, as my more primary focus in my interaction with medicine. Now sometimes you'll have cases where the evidence for effectiveness is relatively strong. And then I can focus more on the effectiveness of medicine. But in most cases, in fact, the evidence is relatively weak about effectiveness. But still the desire to make sure you get the sort of care that cared-for people get is strong. And I still acknowledge that and make sure that happens.

Agnes:

But so like, just take all of the medical decisions you've made, ever since you've started having this view. Medical decisions about yourself and your loved ones, like by what like percentile do they deviate from someone who didn't have all those – that theorizing? Like what percent less medicine have you consumed?

Robin:

Well, the timing here would be about when I realized that medicine wasn't very effective. That's a different timing than when I had an explanation for it.

Agnes:

OK. We can start with when you had the explanation.

Robin:

No, but I'm saying is, having the explanation wouldn't change my behavior, it would be knowing the fact that medicine wasn't very effective that would be initially expected to change my behavior about how much medicine I consume.

Agnes:

I mean, you might be unwilling to change your behavior until you had an explanation or something like that just, yeah, but in any case.

Robin:

But basically, this has been over 20 years now.

Agnes:

OK, right.

Robin:

OK.

Agnes:

So how – so what percent less medicine have you consumed over the past 20 years than your counterpart who did not realize any of this?

Robin:

I think, you know, 30% to 50%?

Agnes:

Really? OK. OK, that's pretty substantial.

Robin:

So again, it is practical advice to someone who believes it. It's harder to persuade someone to believe it as the person themselves involved. But as policymakers thinking about other people, I think it's more possible to persuade them. And that's one of the reasons for focusing on social scientists and policymakers as the audience because they're easier person to persuade. But nevertheless, I do think many individuals are persuadable and have been persuaded.

Agnes:

But the social scientists… well, so it's another claim if you think people are persuadable, then I'm fine. Right? We were arguing what if they're not?

Robin:

A fraction of them. So if you were writing an essay on this, say, for some public venue, you might well guess that 90% of people wouldn't be persuaded by this and therefore, choose other topics of your essay or other claims in your essay. But if in fact 10% of people can be persuaded, that is a you know, people who are helped by it. So it might depend on whether this is a center of your writing or analysis, or it's a peripheral aspect.

Agnes:

Right. So, like, I mean with the policymakers, the policymakers know that most people aren't going to be persuaded of this, right? So they have to make policies that are going to be in accordance with most people's false beliefs about why they want medicine.

Robin:

Well, not quite. That is, most people, when they hear policymakers making recommendations about policy, they don't actually know that much about the rationale for those recommendations. There are some sort of obvious sort of straightforward things that the policy might achieve or not achieve, that's different than knowing the reasons that the policymakers have for making those suggestions. So, one of the things I've said is that, traditionally, in social science, especially in economics, we usually have the framing of our problem as how to design institutions or mechanisms so that more people will get more of what they want. And that problem is usually substantially hard, but we usually think about markets or incentive contracts and others, voting and other sorts of mechanisms then. And we analyze them in terms of whether people will get more of the things that they usually say they want. And this new set of analysis suggests that our institution or mechanism design problem is harder than we thought. The new problem is that we need to find a new mechanism or institutions such that people can continue to pretend to want the things they've been pretending to want, but also give them more of what they really want. So an example might be in education, most schools, schooling pretends to be teaching you more material. And we have known for many decades, some standard ways that people could learn more material in classes, but people don't think that's quite as fun. And schools have just not adopted those methods. So spaced repetition, for example, is one method that just very consistently produces more learning. We can understand that if we say, “Well, most people, at some level, realize school isn't about learning more material, it's about showing off their conscientiousness and conformity and intelligence.” And schools do achieve that. And so then we might say, “Well, if we want to have a reform that actually people will be interested in in education, we need to find a way to let them continue to pretend they want to learn the material, there has to be some material they're learning. But we need to give them a better ability to show off their intelligence or their conscientiousness or their conformity. And then there'll be more actually interested in that proposal.” And I think that's roughly right. But it's a harder design problem. But now we have a better chance of getting people to actually respond to our proposals. So we have a long history, to emphasize, of assuming that people are right about what they say they want, designing institutions that actually more effectively give them more of what they say they want, and having people just not be interested.

Agnes:

So your thought is that like, like in the education case, look, people don't actually want to learn. And so we may have to continue to have the facade of learning material, but what we should be working with as policymakers is how to better help them do signaling. And so in healthcare, people don't really want to become healthy. And so we shouldn't improve our medical system, or get more medical knowledge, or try to learn to live longer, because people don't actually want those things, we just should just create the appearance of those things, while giving them better and better opportunities to show that they care. That's what a healthcare policy person should do?

Robin:

Well, there's two constraints to keep in mind, both can stay relevant. One is what do the customers here want? What will they respond to such that if you offer them something new, they would be eager to get it? And then the other is what are our priorities as the policymakers? So those are allowed…

Agnes:

We’re allowed to have our own priorities?

Robin:

Yes, you're allowed to have your own priorities.

Agnes:

So wait, can they be actually having people learn stuff and real education?

Robin:

They could. Sure, yes.

Agnes:

But in that case, you didn't give that as like a driver.

Robin:

Well, the problem is, like, if you don't have some independent power to force them to take your changes, if you can just offer changes, then you will need to find ways to give them the things they want.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Which are to better show off and let’s say other abilities. So…

Agnes:

Right. But same with healthcare, people don't actually want health so you can't give that to them because they won't accept it.

Robin:

Well, depends on how many other options they have. So, that is, you could offer a package that included both more actual health and more abilities to show that they care and then they might go for that type of…

Agnes:

So you mean we do that with education and try to offer that package, you're treating these two cases isometrically. So why do you…

Robin:

No, I'm fine with that, too. I'm just saying, you won't be able to get people to adopt to your, “they learn more” change unless you also package it with a, “they can show off more” change. You have to combine those two things together if you want to get both, they learn more and they approve and buy into the change.

Agnes:

Right. So how is it that you've been able in your own life to cut down 30% to 50% on health care and yet, still, like, for instance, presumably the people around you have been horrified and have been, you know, bereft of these opportunities to show that they care and encouraging you to get this health care that you've been taking half or a third– or you know, only two-thirds of what a normal person would take? And, like, how did they show that they cared and then how do you show that you cared if you encourage your loved ones to consume less healthcare? Because hold on, before you answer, I just want to, like, in general, it's not that easy to show people that you care, like if you just say to someone I care, that doesn't show that you care, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

In general, it's kind of expansive to show that you care. And in particular, it's important to show people that you care at certain times, like when they're sick and stuff. And so like presumably like if it were easy to do so doing something less costly than medicine, then we would do it. So anyway, I'm wondering what are your tricks for showing that you care without health care?

Robin:

Well, so there's my showing that I care about other people and then showing they care about me. So right, I was talking in my 30% to 50% figure about my own care, in which case that's about other people's showing they care about me.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

So, first of all, I think that when people express concerns about your health, you should listen, take it seriously, and seem appreciative of their concern. Then if they suggest you do a particular thing, like maybe getting a doctor checkup, or you know, appointment, fine, get a checkup, get an appointment, have them somebody say something. But when you reach the point of a potentially expensive treatment whose effectiveness is uncertain, that's the point to cut back on the medical spending. I think if you have a heart to heart discussion about it, and are engaging their concern, and you make sure you listen to them about this, and you do other things that they might suggest, you know, more exercise or change your diet or sleeping patterns. I mean, most people will, in order to show that they care about you and care about your health, they will offer many other things to do besides go to the doctor and get some surgery, and be responsive to those other things. You don't just have to go get the surgery some doctor recommends in order to let people show they care about you.

Agnes:

OK, you may not want to answer this question on the podcast when I ask it and you can just say pass. But what are the examples of expensive medical spending that you have forgone? Like, are there concrete examples where you got to a certain point and you're like, “That's too expensive? I won't take that procedure.”

Robin:

I'm not sure I've reached expensive things yet.

Agnes:

And you had to do a lot to get down 30% to 50%. And now you're telling me that's your formula, you would still go to the doctor, but you would just stop at the – so I'm asking where did that…

Robin:

Well, so I mean, sometimes these things are like series of many visits about a thing, right? You can just cut it off earlier and do less.

Agnes:

OK. But so you don't – you haven't tried to cut down your loved one’s medical expenses, medical care by 30% to 50%. So you're still showing that you care for them, you’re just giving them opportunities to do that for you.

Robin:

Again, in order for me to show that I care about other people.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

I can also not just focus on the medicine but focus on all the other aspects of their health.

Agnes:

Like telling them to exercise more. That’s not going to go over well.

Robin:

It could actually. That's the whole point, right? The whole point is that other people want to know that you care about them. They want to know that you're concerned about their health, and that you're willing to put in substantial effort and pay costs to do so. And so, to the extent they say you would be willing to accommodate their new exercise program by doing some other chore while they were exercising, for example, or going out and shopping with them for some exercise equipment, or reconsidering a diet perhaps you share with them and what kind of places you go to lunch if they're your colleague, or what kind of dinners you have at your home. The point is, there are many ways you could pay costs in order to accommodate someone else's health efforts that don't involve expensive medicine.

Agnes:

OK. But so like, all this has been a giant digression because if you say to me, the things that are written in my book are practical. And I've only wrote them in order to improve the lives of people, it's just that they're only going to improve the lives of maybe 5% to 10% of my readers. And, you know, that's the way it is, then I'm like, “OK, fine. You know, maybe it didn't work for me, it can work for some other people.” There's a question about what percent is high enough? But then you're thinking about it the way I'm thinking about it, namely, it's designed not to teach people anything, not to add our store of knowledge, but to improve lives, it just then improves like maybe only a small percentage of the lives of the people who encounter it. That would say that that's practical. It's just like not super effective as a practical thing, but it's not totally ineffective either.

Robin:

But I also am serious about this idea of a collective effort to accumulate a more accurate view of the world. Each particular thing you learn may have some relatively direct implications for practical action. But there's a synergy effect of all the things we learned together, that fit together and give us a new view of the world that just has more benefit in terms of learning a whole new view of things.

Agnes:

So say you have a kid, right? And you know, when you're talking to your kid, you often tell them the truths, I mean, you try to speak truly to your kid, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And, you know, what you're trying to do when you talk to your kid is teach them a lot of things about the world that they can use in order both to know stuff and to become a better person. But like, suppose that you relentlessly were telling them like about their hidden motives, about all their defects, about all their flaws. And in particular, you focused on ones where there was nothing they could ever do about it, right? Someone might just say, “Well, that's kind of mean, like to your kid.” And you're like, “Well, look, it's part of their total package of information, and it's up to them to do what they want with it.” You know, you still might think, “Yeah, but that's not – it's just not actually likely to help them do anything. And I don't see why humanity as a whole is that different from the kid.”

Robin:

So imagine you have a friend or spouse even who insists on telling not only your children, but you all the time, how to change a tire, how to change oil, how to recalibrate the electricity in the house, how to readjust the air conditioner, how to oil the legs on your chairs. They go on and on with all sorts of advice that would be practical for someone else who might do that stuff, but not you. You don't recalibrate air conditioning, or the stove, or any of those other things. And so you might say, “Why should anybody learn about any of those things?” Because it isn't useful to you, because you've decided you don't want to do any of those things.

Agnes:

Right. That seems reasonable. But what I'm saying in that case is I don't want to do any of those things. And I would be annoyed if someone kept trying to tell me them.

Robin:

Right. But why couldn't they tell somebody else? Why couldn't they write a book on those things where somebody who wanted to learn about those things could read that and learn all those things?

Agnes:

Sure. I feel like, I somehow feel like we're not getting to the bottom of the issue here. Because it seems to me that, like what I, you know, what I felt in reading your book was like, like, I thought it was a good book. Like, you know, this makes me sound like I hate it, but I didn't hate it. But I felt somehow that it just didn't get to the bottom of things. That there was a kind of missed opportunity. That there was something like, like subtly too superficial in saying, you know, oh, we just – we want to show – we want to show that we care. We're not interested in health. Or, we're trying to show off our – when we have conversations, we're trying to show off our toolkit of skills. Where I feel like it's not that my– I have some requirement that the person who gives me a theory of medicine or conversation tells me something nice that will please me. I don't think that that's right. But I guess I think that I want the critical thing that I hear to be kind of… so, you know how sometimes like you make a mistake, and you're just – but you don't know where you went wrong, right? And it drives you crazy. You're like, you make an arithmetic mistake or whatever, right? And then at some point, you see exactly where you went wrong and you're like, “Oh, OK, I see how I screwed that up.” And there's like this click like, I get it. That's what I don't get in reading your book. So it's like it feels like from a million miles away and it doesn't click into place for me like, “Oh, this is what I'm doing when I'm having conversations. This is how I'm screwing up when I'm having conversations.” I mean, I think I'm capable of recognizing that I’m screwing up in doing things. But your way of describing me screwing up is like me looking at someone else screwing up. It never feels like me looking at me screwing up.

Robin:

So when you're looking for a mistake, I think you typically have at least two levels of representation of what you're thinking about, both of which you consider valid, and it's about the mapping between those two levels. So there's a more detailed level in which there are each line of the proof. And then there may be there's the overall level of when the proof is correct. And what you want when you see at the overall level that the proof is incorrect, you want to go down to this detail level and find the particular place where that is. And that is a perfectly reasonable thing to desire when you have two levels of description, both of which are reliable, that you maintain together, and you learn something at a more abstract level that you'd like to map it down to a more specific level. That's a completely reasonable thing to want in the case where you have those two levels. Unfortunately, we don't always have those two levels. We are often in situations where we're struggling even to have one level that works. And I'd say that the topic of our book is a bunch of areas where we're just really kind of wrong at the high level about the basics of it. And we just don't have a more fine-grained level that's reliable that you could use to edit that because we're probably also just pretty wrong at lower levels, too. So we just have to slowly find a way to build up our representations to have a better abstract level and a better fine level. And yes, there'll be future work to find out a more concrete level that we can edit and rely on. But we aren't there yet. And the way to get there is to slowly make progress. And the first place to make progress is at that abstract level. If you asked me, you know how to get to Maine in First Street? Because that's where the bank is. And I say, “No, you're in the wrong city. The bank isn't at Maine in First Street.” Then that should be your first priority. Say, “What? I'm in the wrong city. I'm not in the city, I think in?” Then you need to like reconsider: how is it that you thought you were in a different city in order to, you have some grip on reality. Then when you figure out what city you're in, then you can work about how to get to Maine in First Street.

Agnes:

Like, here's like the spirit that your book infuses in me. Like I'm asking myself, “Does Robin really spend 30% to 50% less on health care than other people? I wonder if we really studied him and we compared him. Like, of course, he'd tell himself that, right? You have all these reasons to believe that he does that. When I tried to push him and ask him for examples. He's not like doing a great job there.” And you know, I bet that like the people who are convinced like the 5% are like, “Yeah, you're right.” I bet they all say they spend less money in health care. But suppose we studied them, right? And suppose we studied all you true believers, and we found you spend about as much as the rest of us. And like, then should we be sort of like, extremely disheartened that in effect, we are so bad at getting a grip on reality that in a way is what your book is about. We cannot get a grip on reality in all these different places, like why think we're going to get a grip on reality in implementing the book? Why I think that the policymakers will get a grip on reality? Like, why think we have any hope of a righting this totally toppled over ship?

Robin:

It sounds like you'd be saying when I tell you you're in the wrong city, you say, “I don't care. I give up on being able to figure out what's city I am in.”

Agnes:

No, I don't think that's right because if you tell me I'm in the wrong city, I still in the back of my head, have the idea of a map. If you tell me I'm in the wrong city, and also, I'm on a different planet. And also, like, you know, everyone that I've ever known has been an actor in a play and right, at a certain point, I'm like, “OK, I give up, right? You tell me enough stuff. If what you say is, “Look, you're in the wrong city.” And then I'll be like, “Wait, show me how I went wrong. Why did I end up thinking… Oh, I get it, there's another city of the same name and I flew to that city instead.” That's the point at which will like click into place and I'll say, OK. That's something your books not doing for me.

Robin:

The key story here is that we are all just much more wrong than we realized about a lot of big things in our lives. And that fact, if true, suggests we're also wrong about a lot of little things. We're just big and wrong all over the place. And the first step to dealing with that situation is to tell you that you are wrong about big things. And so the most straightforward way to do that is to try to name the ways that you're wrong in the most concise and general way that we can and point you to evidence to convince you of that. It's not the end of the story. It's the first stop that says, you know, “You're not going to be able to fix all this until you have the foggiest idea that you have a problem.” So here it is. So it's like the alcoholic with an intervention, right? All the friends get together and sit around and say, “You have an alcoholics problem, right?” And this is the point at which they need to accept that, OK, at least all my friends seem to think I have a problem. That's not the end of the story. You're not fixed at that point. Right? That's supposedly the beginning of the story of trying to figure out how you could deal with your alcoholic’s problem. So that's what we're making that first move here. We're sitting you all down and saying, “You're wrong a lot about these really big things.”

Agnes:

But like, when you say, the next step is figuring out how to deal with your problem. I mean, this is – that was my point about, like, my skepticism about whether you really spend 30% or 50% less, is that I think it's likely that any attempt I make to deal with this problem will be infected by the fact that I am susceptible to this problem and I'm susceptible to telling myself stories that aren't the case. And so for instance, I'll tell myself, I'm dealing with it and I'm telling myself, I'm spending 30% to 50% less when I'm not actually doing it. That's how I'll deal with it. I'll deal with it by not dealing with it. It should be my prediction about myself.

Robin:

And if that's your response to your alcoholic’s intervention, then of course, you're not going to fix your problem.

Agnes:

But that's not how alcoholic’s interventions work. That is, I don't think this is right. I mean, I don't think just saying, you know, you… I think that at least in many different kinds of interventions, what people try to do is make that person's problem intelligible to them. They don't just say, “You have a problem.” They try to get that person to see the problem, to shed a new light on it, so that they have an aha moment, or it clicks into place and they say, “Now, I get it.” And what I'm saying is like, you stop before that point. You stop before the point where I get it. And so I don't even have the amount of confidence where I'm confident that I'm getting it, like that is it can be that my very feeling of like, “Oh, there seems to be a problem here. Why don't – how do I know that, that that my…” like this, I felt very much when reading your book. There's a strong temptation to flatter yourself by thinking that you can see through things that other people can't see through. And I think, “Ah, that's one of the dangers of this book, is that it encourages you to do that. But it fans the fire of The Elephant in the Brain by inducing in the reader some kind of feeling of superiority.” Like why not think, we're actually making the problem worse by introducing a new form of self-deception, where you think you're better than other people and more writing and where in fact, you're not. It could actually be making it worse.

Robin:

That critique that you just expressed could be applied to anytime anyone ever points out any problems.

Agnes:

Absolutely.

Robin:

OK. I could say, “There's a pothole on Main Street, and it needs to be filled.” And you might tell me, “Ah, but once we feel like we know there's a pothole there, we will feel overconfident that the problem will be solved, so we won't do anything. And so there's no point in even telling people there's a pothole on Main Street.” I mean, we could just make up a story about any problem and the fact that telling someone about the problem will just make it ineffective that we will ever solve the problem.

Agnes:

No, but I'm not making a general claim that it's – this is always true. I'm making a claim that this worry is a worry for the kind of problem that you are pointing out.

Robin:

But I don't see why this problem is more susceptible to that than any other problem. Why is this the kind of problem that knowing about it would have the opposite effect of making the problem worse and all the other problems are not like that.

Agnes:

I think that maybe it's because of how wrong you're saying we are. Like if you say there's a pothole, that's just one pothole, the rest of the street is OK. What if it's just nothing but pothole?

Robin:

OK. What if we told people that all of Main Street was a pothole after – say there was a big rain, an unusually large flood and in fact, Main Street is now one big long pothole, do you really think telling people about that is going to be counterproductive?

Agnes:

I mean, no, I don't think so about that case. Because I think well, OK, but there's other places I can go, there's other places I can walk. And what I wonder about with your book is, is there anywhere I can safely walk? Is there anything that pothole left, including in my thinking about this very book, including in my following the reasoning of the book. And so, when other people like, you know, in the past when I read about self-deception and you know, problems of reasoning and thinking. Like, if I can get to the point, there's something destabilizing about knowing you did something wrong, but not knowing exactly how you went wrong, like knowing I'm, you know, I ended up in the wrong city, I'm in Detroit and I shouldn't be there or whatever, right? There's something destabilizing about that, where I don't know what to do next. And I don't know how to solve the problem. And the first thing I want to do is make sure I can trust my mind that I'm not going crazy by tracing out how this could have happened. In the absence of that, in fact, in the absence of any hope of doing that, it's not that I think you know that you've done something worse. It's just like, I don't, I don't think you know you haven't.

Robin:

So, for comparison, my dear colleague, Bryan Caplan, wrote a book on The Case Against Education.

Agnes:

I know I did an event with him about it.

Robin:

And his whole book is focused on what is in effect, one of our chapters, the one of 10 areas on education.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Now, you could be complaining that our book has too broad a coverage. That is, since we show 10 different areas of life where we question your motives, then you don't feel like you have any place you can stand. But what about Bryan's book? Was that the right level of scope showing you just education and that you were not very honest about your motives in education? Is that a small enough thing such that you think you have another place to stand and now you can improve yourself there? Is it the fact that we put 10 things in one book, that was our problem instead of 10 separate books?

Agnes:

I think that I have… I'm not saying don't have any problem with Bryan's book. We have different – we have different discussion of that. I think Bryan's book, there's like the conceit that there's some special people, those people actually care about learning. They're like how you think everybody is, for instance, Bryan is one of those special people. And so education is wasted on most of the riffraff because they don't have the pure motives, and they can't learn or care about it. But there is this kind of retreat to like, there's the possible person who could be well-intentioned and well-motivated and could actually care, they're going to teach themselves so they're not going to need school. But the point is that kind of retreat to there's like, a place of sanity somewhere in there, even if it's not going to apply to most people, does actually avoid this criticism. So I would say Bryan avoids this criticism in a different way. It's implausible to me that there are these special pure of heart people. But it does get you around this problem. I don't think your book has that feature.

Robin:

So maybe, then we failed to communicate our book well enough, but I would say that any complicated area of life has many relevant motives. And that's true about school and medicine and politics. And so we can't be talking about what is the one motive in any one area, we have to at best be talking about what is the most common strongest motive. And so we do say, part of your motive to be involved in medicine is health. And part of your motive to go to school is to learn the material. That is, you know, when you deceive people, like when a child says that “the dog ate my homework”, they use an excuse like that, because in fact, sometimes dogs do eat homework. The child doesn't say “the dragon ate my homework”, nobody's going to believe that excuse. So in general, when we make excuses for things we usually hide behind things that do happen sometimes, they just aren't as common as we are pretending in any one case. So that's what we mean by hidden motives. We don't mean that the stated motives never apply and have no relevance. What we mean is we are pretending they're more important than they actually are. And so, our coverage of medicine and politics and conversation, et cetera is intended in that sense to allow for a fraction of the time in people where their motives are, as they describe, just to point out that they are over emphasizing those for a reason.

Agnes:

Right. And my – I guess, I think that the discrepancies that you're pointing out, really are interesting and important. Like the, you know, if you really thought conversation was an information exchange, why would people prefer to speak rather than listen? And, you know, a thousand things like that. That this thing that you tweeted about recently about why is it that people would prefer not to do more medical research, and think about ways they could avoid dying, rather than dying? Right? That is like, it seems like they, you know, don't put as much effort into preventing themselves from dying, as you might expect. And I guess I think those puzzles really are, it's maybe it's like I – this is why I'm saying I feel like it's a missed opportunity. Those puzzles indicate that we are in some way deeply confused about what we want. That is, we think we want something that we want something quite different. But the place where you land, in terms of what we actually want is like, not something we could affirm. And so I find it like, that can…

Robin:

That's not something that you want to affirm. That's different than it being something you could affirm. That was the key distinction I was trying to make at the beginning of the talk.

Agnes:

Right. So, I think that the, like, the problem with the, you know, want to versus could affirm is that it needs to have the – in order to be able to affirm it, I would… sorry, in order to be able to take the correction I would have to…

Robin:

You’d have to admit to yourself that you mainly care about showing that you care, say in medicine and other people showing they care about you, that's a much larger motive than you had realized. And you'd have to accept that.

Agnes:

No, but it's not just that, I think it's like the thing that will get me to accept it is just this aha feeling of recognition. And nothing but that will ever get me to really accept it. I can say that I accept it under the pressure of your book so as to not look like a fool. But I don't think that that thing, I don't believe that it's really accepting it. That's what I'm saying. I think really accepting it, just like it – I even think if somebody told you, you're in the wrong city, it would only be when you could trace out how you could possibly have ended up in the wrong city that you would really accept it. And so, I think you would only really accept this explanation if we could supply you with a reorientation.

Robin:

So we're almost out of time. But I started out in physics and there are areas in physics where we can use the math to figure out what the answers are. But we just find it hard to have intuitions about. Say, basic quantum mechanics, so we have some intuitions about how billiard balls and a world of billiard balls works. And then in quantum mechanics, we just have these math equations that are quite accurate and powerful. But we can't have a vivid mental picture of them so much, we have to sort of create a mental picture of the math. And that's the best mental picture we can get. And that's what it's like to sort of learn about something strange that your mind wasn't designed to intuit. And that may be true of you as well. Your mind may not have been designed to intuit and have a vivid mental picture of these things that you were designed not to see. But like with quantum mechanics, if you trusted the abstraction enough, if you trusted enough the abstract math that had told you that it's really there, you could use that abstraction to figure out things. And in some sense, that's what I'm asking you to do here. I'm giving you the abstract reasons to believe these things. And I'm asking you to rely on that abstraction to make choices, even if you can't vividly intuitively see it. And maybe that's not possible for many people, just like many people just refuse to deal with quantum mechanics.

Agnes:

I mean, so one possibility that you seem to be assuming is the case, is just that the thing is, you're persistently assuming that the thing that I'm asking for doesn't exist. And…

Robin:

Or asking you to consider that possibility.

Agnes:

Sure. Right. And I guess I think that that is possible. And you know, that may be the situation that we're in with quantum mechanics is that we have a bunch of equations and we don't really understand anything by means of those equations so that we can manipulate things and even maybe produce technology and stuff by continuing to manipulate symbols. And that may be good enough for some people. For me, I wouldn't feel like I knew anything as a result of that, until I had an interpretation of it. But in any case, but maybe there just is nothing. And I mean, that's possible. And so like, in a way, what I'm saying is like, there's this much better thing that I can imagine that you could have given us that you didn't give us in your book. And it's conceptually possible that you could have given it to us. But it may be that actually, there is no such thing there, that is there is no deeper explanation to be found. I am sort of open to that possibility. I guess I'm just…

Robin:

I'm open too it possibly existing too. But it seems to me, the way to find it, if it does exist, is to practice using the abstraction, practice applying the abstraction to concrete cases, and see if you can fill in a more vivid, detailed picture of it that way. That the way to create an intuitive vivid image of some alternative reality is to inhabit it as best you can. And initially, that may be via abstractions. That, in fact, is the thesis of your book I believe, about aspiration. You have a thing that you grasp abstractly and not very vividly. And you struggle to find a more vivid internalization of it. And what you have to do is repeatedly expose yourself to the abstract versions, in search of ways to make it more concrete for yourself.

Agnes:

That's true. But another feature of my book is that you have to be kind of relentless in focusing on the good of it, and seeing the good of it, and insisting to yourself to see the good of it, even when you can't quite see the good of it. You have to try harder to see the good of it. And so I feel like what your book is…

Robin:

You could do that here, too, yes, you could do that thing.

Agnes:

…giving up on trying to see the good of it. You're not trying to see the good of these things. You're just like, let's – well look, turns out, we care about the wrong stuff. So let's you know…

Robin:

No, but remember, when I said, “How do I change my attitude toward medicine?” I say, “I focus on showing that I care and let other people show that they care about me.” Those are good things. They are different good thing.

Agnes:

So when you change your attitude towards education by like focusing more on signaling and like…

Robin:

Yes, yes. Focusing more on the value you get by being able to show what kind of a person you are through education.

Agnes:

I don't think you’ve focused that much on that.

Robin:

Seeing its value, to understanding its value, intuiting its value, and helping to think about other ways you could achieve that. So for example, my simple suggestion for how we can have a better kind of school is that school is mostly about words on paper. And some kind of people are good in conversation. And our schools at the moment don't show those people as better. They aren't very good at distinguishing those people, because most of our teaching and evaluation of students is on paper, or, you know, outside of the context of an actual active back and forth conversation. So Socrates might not be rated very well in modern schools, being good in conversation but not maybe so good at writing an essay explaining something. So if we could create a kind of school, wherein the focus was on conversational interaction, and pretending to learn the material about such thing, but actually just doing it, and showing that you're good at it, then some people who were in fact good at that would like to go to that school. And they would find meaning in that school. And that would be a new addition and improvement to school. I can see the value of that by seeing that that is a valuable thing. I see that as valuable. And I think it's a shame that people who are good at that can't emphasize that and then show it to the world that they are good at that.

Agnes:

Yeah. But when I said you can't see it, I wasn't meaning you can't, when you look over at someone else, see, that would be a good thing. What I'm saying is that I've interacted with you in a bunch of intellectual contexts, including watching you teach a class and you, you know, completely as far as I can tell, avoid this thing of pretending to learn, showing your status, you just don't do any of that stuff. You're completely failing in the means of education. You don't do it in conversation. You don't try to do it, like you don’t try to do it more and more. You just ignore all this stuff, which is like the main value of education.

Robin:

I don’t talk about it explicitly, but I think I am achieving, that is I achieve it in myself and in my students. I help them show off through often conversational interactions in class. I show them how to do that by example. And I elicit that from them and then I tried to correct and adjust their attempts in order to produce impressive, admirable inquiries.

Agnes:

I guess that's not what it seems to me. Maybe we just have to disagree on that one.

Robin:

In any case, it's been nice talking.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

All right. For now, goodbye.