Meaning Lab: Podcast

[This conversation has been edited and condensed.]

One of the big questions I'm interested in that I'd like to hear your take on is what is humanism's theory of meaning?

It has very much to do with our social nature—our moral and personal and cultural and social connections to other people and to other living things as well. That would be the answer to two different questions. One is how do we find meaning in the world and the other is how do we find a foundation for moral life in the world. I think a humanist is inclined to answer both of those questions by pointing to our sort of bundle of connections with each other.

There's an idea which is found in various forms in southern Africa but in Nguni Bantu it's “Ubuntu.” It's become a word that’s quite well known outside that area because it was used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe one of the motivating ideas behind his work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of apartheid in South Africa. He defined Ubuntu as meaning that we're part of a bundle of life—that I am human through you. We are human through each other and we're all part of this web or bundle of life.

You find a similar idea in Confucian thought, in the Chinese tradition. You find it throughout the European tradition—that the source of meaning, the source of morality is that web, that bundle of life.

Another way of putting it, which would be a bit harsher, would be to say that we, as humans, sort of create our own meaning. When I look out at the universe on a dark night with stars—which I'm happy to say where I am at the moment we have some wonderful night skies—you feel this tremendous sense of awe and interest and fascination and desire to attempt to imagine just how vast that universe is and where we might fit into it—all those questions which for a person with a certain sort of religious faith would suggest some kind of divine presence in the universe that there's something looking back at us. I don't feel that sense of that anybody is looking at us from that vast, vast realm but I do feel a very strong sense of connection to it and that it's an incredible thing to be here and to be part of this however tiny and that we'll only have it while we're alive. For me as a humanist, the world is absolutely rich in meanings both in my connections with other people and in my connections with the rest of life on this planet and in my connections with the entire universe.

I mean, what more could you want than that?

Something that I want to touch on up front here is that in the introduction to your book, and then throughout all of the different thinkers that we meet, you come back to a lot of these great refrains of humanism. One of them you mentioned in Ubuntu, I am human through other humans.

But another one that I think resonates with a lot of people comes from Terrence: “I am human, nothing human is foreign to me.” This is something that I've been thinking about because, to me, this is one of those aphorisms that is so patently worth accepting that it almost seems like a self-evident aspect of the good life.

Yet there's a part of me that's starting to question it in a way that I didn't previously. The more I live and interact with different kinds of people, the more I start to feel like the best I can do is appreciate them and the way they live in an abstract sense. Their version of humanity, what it's like to be them, when you really get down to it, maybe actually is more foreign to me than I give it credit. Does that make sense to you? How does it square with the humanist thinking you survey in your book?

My guide in interpreting that has been Montaigne. That was a favorite quote of his. He had it painted in pride of position on the wall of his study, where he put a lot of his favorite quotes. He wrote in the Essays that each person bears the entire form of the human condition; therefore you can write about anyone, and it'll be a glimpse into the human condition. But on the other hand he also wrote—it's the closing sentence of the first version of his essays—that his ruling principle is diversity. He was endlessly fascinated by the diversity of human customs, human lives, human practices, human ideas, human individuals.

There's a bit in the book where I sort of reflect on those principles of seeing a kind of universality among humans, seeing a universal thing that we can all connect to— the principle of diversity, of acknowledging and respecting diversity—and it seems to me that they might be seen sometimes as opposites. But the key is that when you get a repressive regime, which gives no respect to one of those principles, it tends to also give no respect to the other one. It's like if you get a regime that has no respect for the diversity of people's views or practices or ideas or ways of thinking, very often they also are not accepting the principle that all people share some essential human quality that brings them together.

To me they work very well together, and it's a clue I think that that an attack on one tends to end up being an attack on the other.

Let me try and pick up on something that you said, and try to rephrase it in my own words. There's a distinction here between the aspirational version of that phrase (nothing human is foreign to me) versus the descriptive version of it. The descriptive version is saying “I personally right now understand all human things”—that's pretty tenuous and probably just flat-out wrong. Very few people would endorse that in a blatant way. And the humanist version of it is not that every human situation is something that I'm very happy to be in and find myself completely comfortable with, but more driven from a place of curiosity, love, and aspiration to connect with humanity in its various forms, some of which may be more familiar and comfortable to you, some of which may be ini tially more foreign, but something that you still seek to appreciate. Does that seem like a distillation of some of the important stuff that you put down in your explanation?

Definitely. I think that's a very good point.

Let's talk about some specific figures in your book, which is sort of a novel of 100 characters. A few of them have appeared in the cast of characters of your previous books, but I'm curious for this one: which thinker were you most surprised to learn about or find yourself connecting with their work on a deeper level than perhaps you had before or had expected to?

Yeah, great question because there was there were several I was really fascinated by who I didn't know a great deal about except names and a vague idea of what they did.

The first part of the book concerns the humanist scholars and literary practitioners of the humanities in Italy and other parts of Europe from the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. One of those people who absolutely fascinated me was Lorenzo Valla. He was primarily a translator. He had very good Latin, as most people in the educated sort of part of society did, and also very good Greek, and he taught the principles of eloquence.

Valla really wrote about a whole range of literary subjects, but he did these investigations into texts. The one that was most surprising and fascinating to me was he investigated the veracity of a document called the Donation of Constantine which supposedly had been written in the 4th century to record Emperor Constantine giving dominion over the whole of Western Europe—basically to the church, to the papacy. And he showed from analysis of the usage of Latin in it, that it couldn't possibly have been written in the fourth century, it must have been written much later, about 400 years later in the eighth century. So he did that using these intellectual tools of really looking closely at words and thinking about them historically. Some people thought that Latin was this eternal thing that never changed: that's why it was so marvelous and so wonderful. He pointed out that it had changed and that there were certain words that just couldn't have been used before a certain date. So it was a challenge to church authority.

It was a challenge to their reasons for claiming such dominion even in his own 15th century. He wasn't afraid of anything. He wasn't afraid to antagonize the church. He wasn't afraid to antagonize fellow scholars, he was always taking issue with them. He's a sort of good counterexample to the idea that humanists are always nice and cuddly because I don't think he was. He was really a model for using those intellectual tools to question authority and to point out the inconsistencies of the church.

Jumping way ahead in time there were other figures in the later parts of the book who again I didn't know very much about but who were quite a surprise to me. One of those in the 19th century was Matthew Arnold, who was a poet, but he also wrote a book called Culture and Anarchy. I think I've had it on my shelf since I was about 20 or something and had never really looked at because I always assumed it would be very very Victorian and stodgy and very conservative and stuffy. I mean, it is very Victorian actually in many ways but it's also a great read. He argues for the improving value of culture—how culture improves lives. He defines culture as the best that has been thought and said. He argues for widespread access to this kind of culture and believes that it'll bring what he calls sweetness and light into our lives.

I mean it all sounds pretty unfashionable by today's ideas but in fact what he's saying is that it's important that the best culture, the fullest, the richest cultural experiences should be available to everyone. He worked as an inspector of schools, so he was specifically thinking about education, including education of working-class children, disadvantaged children, and saying they shouldn't just be given something second rate that will sort of tide them over. They should have access to the best.

I want to touch on a theme: dead people. This is something I think that’s important to both of us. For instance, your books are populated almost exclusively with people who are long dead. I'm interested in how that plays out in what humanism is.

So on the one hand, you know that if you sort of gather up every the contributions of the majority of the people that you talk about in your book, they're men and women of letters. Most of them have something that they are doing in the here and now, but there's this big theme that they are invested in this massive conversation across the ages and looking at the best of culture or texts from a previous era, such as the thoughts of the ancients or someone who came 200 years before them. And part of me looks at that and thinks, well, that's where so much of humanism's meaning comes from. On the one hand, people like you and me find this so compelling: the idea of being able to commune with people like Montaigne and all of the great thinkers and scholars that you survey in your book. What a special thing to be able to sort of connect to that great conversation throughout the ages.

And then there's another part of me that looks at that and thinks, well, maybe if you were really serious about a humanism, instead of focusing on long dead individuals who will never answer your letters no matter how kindly you write them and how much eloquence you put into them instead be on the here and now of concrete needs of actual living human beings?

I don't know exactly how to express this, perhaps, but there is a certain devotion to the abstract notion of human beings. So I don't know if that entirely makes sense, but I'm wondering, does that sort of tension there strike you as a real thing?

I think you're sort of presenting a strange dichotomy, as if there's hose two things and somehow you've got to choose between one or the other. I think with almost all of the humanists in the book, reaching back into the past to read, to understand, to have this meeting with other minds in the past to—you know, I mean, that's what literature is. It is something that's been written. Even if it was written yesterday, it still was written before the present.

You see this theme of reaching back to make contact with these other minds everywhere in humanism. They say it again and again, beginning with Petrarch. specifically, it is the hope of reinventing, reworking, being enriched by this knowledge, being morally reborn by this wealth of wisdom from the past for the future.

It is the creative process of using all this material and all this cultural richness from these long dead people, and using it to build something for the future. I think really everybody in the book is emphatic about the application of this great cultural communication with the past for building a wiser future or building new human ways of thinking about culture and doing culture and building relationships with each other and doing the right thing—building better societies, all the rest of it. They're all really quite focused on the future.

Again I'm jumping forward in time here, but for example Bertrand Russell was incredibly erudite about the philosophers of the past. But he always spoke about the need for hope. He believed that to philosophize or to take part in political life or to be a human being at all should be more about hope for the future than fear. To me, there's a very direct line between this interest in all the people who have left records of their lives and reflections from the past and a desire to have an impact on the future—to use that to build a better future.

There's a quote by Robert Ingersoll that I use several times in the book. He was a 19th century free thinker, a sort of non-religious traveling preacher of the humanist and free thinking cause. He came up with what he himself called a creed:

Happiness is the only good,
the time to be happy is now,
the place to be happy is here,
and the way to be happy is to make others so.

So again, it's that connection with those around us.

One final question: What are three books that have most influenced the way you think?

One of the books that was very influential on me as a life writer, as a biographer, was The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons. He was a very eccentric writer and novelist.

What's interesting in the way that A.J.A. Symons tells his life story is that he makes the process of discovering what happened the highlight of the story. So he includes all the letters that he wrote to people and what people said. And of course one person will tell him something about Corvo and then a few pages later it'll come out that that that was a complete fabrication—not by the person telling it by Corvo himself, who was a sort of self-mythologizer. So it's fascinating for the reader because you're finding your way through this complexity of false starts and different views of things. It’s exactly what we were talking about diversity of stories and perspectives.

It's a completely engaging read. And definitely I think that that's how I try, in a less dramatic way, to do in writing: to capture what different people thought about things without trying to make it into a unified whole.

I was very influenced by a novel that I've read many, many times, and I still reread it and discover new things in it: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It is a fairly massive novel written over a period of many years. It describes a young man going up to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. The mountain air was supposed to be helpful and he goes to visit his cousin who's got TB for three weeks but he ends up staying for seven years and developing TB himself. A lot of it is just sort of composed of all the dialogues with the people that he meets up there of whom some are trying to convince him of various world views and they're all in contradiction with one another.

It's also a love story, and it's full of irony. There's this young person who is trying to understand the world around him, but a lot of the fascination of the novel is just in the density of the actual material. There's so many there's things in there that are about science, about atoms, about all kinds of different political ideas. There's a lot of humanist versus anti-humanist stuff in there because one of the characters is a kind of caricature of a flitty flighty high-minded humanist. And then there's a much more ominous figure who doesn't agree with any of that.

To finish with I'm a great admirer of Janet Malcolm, who wrote for the New Yorker and wrote books. In the Freud Archives was the first book of hers that I read, and it stands for all of her books. Really I think for me her style is a kind of model of clarity and constantly questioning both herself and everybody around her which I try to achieve in my own writing.

#107: How a really good travel writer approaches her experiences abroad—and at home (feat. Erika Fatland)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:48:05 GMT

The Person and the Situation is a book by social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, originally published in 1991. The argument made by Ross and Nisbett was that context matters. Human beings don’t behave in a vacuum, unaffected by the circumstances of society, history, and culture. The job of the social psychologist is to understand both the person and the situation. Without a proper appreciation of the larger context, it’s impossible to know what to make of any given observation about human behavior.

But a limitation of the project set out by Ross and Nisbett is that social psychology has always had a limited ability to study “situations.” It is, after all, psychology—not anthropology. Psychologists tend not to study humans in their natural situations; they try to recreate paired down versions of them in the lab. It’s not the same thing.

This is something Ross and Nisbett, I think, appreciated. Nisbett went on to publish a book called The Geography of Thought, about how people from the West think differently from people in Asia. But another way to approach this problem is not from the psychology side, at least not directly—to start not with the person, but the situation itself. This is what I like about really good travel writing.

The job of a travel writer is similar to the job of the anthropologist. It is to go to a place and get a feel for what people are up to there. Then to come back and report to the rest of us what it is you observed. But the problem with ethnographies by anthropologists is that they’re usually not that fun to read, obsessed as they are with kinship structures and long-standing epistemological debates within their field. Good travel writing has the same incisive edge as an informal ethnography—and has the benefit of being much more engaging. Good travel writing is an exploration of the person via the situation.

For my money, the best author doing this kind of travel writing today is Erika Fatland. Erika is the author of three travel books, including Sovietistan, about the post-Soviet states of central Asia; The Border, about the countries bordering Russia from North Korea and Mongolia to Finland and Norway; and High, about the countries of the Himalayas. She speaks six languages, including Russian, and is currently adding more. She also trained as a social anthropologist for her master’s degree, which probably goes a ways toward explaining where that incisive edge came from.

Erika’s approach to travel writing incorporates her own travel experiences with deep readings of a country’s historical, cultural, and economic circumstances. More than other travel writers I’ve read, she relies on her conversations with people she meets in the places she goes—usually finding at least one common tongue between them—and uses these interview as a foundation for her own observations. In this conversation, we talk about the point of travel, Erika’s formative experiences and how she became a travel writer, her approach to writing, how her relationship with Russia has changed through the years, and some of her favorite (and least favorite) countries she’s visited.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

I want to start off with a difficult question and see what you have to say about it. What, in your opinion, is the point of travel?

I think humans have always traveled. That’s why you will find human settlements all over the globe. So we are, from the very beginning, nomads. So I think it comes kind of naturally for us. I mean, you would never really see a dog or a horse or a giraffe, you know, just travelling just to visit the neighboring giraffes to see how they are doing. So this is something specifically human.

I think it comes from curiosity. For me at least. But very often I must admit the part of travel I enjoy the most is when I’m back home again and it’s all just distant memory. Because my life in Norway is very comfortable. I live in a very comfortable flat, I have a very comfortable office and so on. So travelling means leaving this comfort and venturing out into the unknown. And that is of course also the attraction.

What would you say was your first formative travel experience that really kind of put you on this track of really going further and deeper in travel?

I would say probably the most formative experience was when I went to France. So not to a very exotic place, not to a very far away place from Norway. But I’m from quite a small village in Norway with 2,000 inhabitants. And as a teenager, I was longing to get away from there. And I didn’t have many friends and well—it was a very small place. There was this exchange program that Norwegian pupils, high school students, could take three years to do the whole baccalaureate in French in France. And so I got admitted to the program in Lyon. And that meant leaving my village as a 16-year-old, having to learn a new language, having to adapt into a new, very different school system, and also having to manage all these kinds of practical problems. The gas went out, and we had to call the gas company and explain the problem in French and so on. I think this just made me feel very independent somehow. And I felt that, okay, having mastered this at the age of 16, well, now everything is possible. I can go anywhere.

I think this is crucial, I think more young people should do this. I’m kind of worried now that doing an exchange year is not that common that it used to be. And having a gap year before you start university seems like it’s not that common anymore. But I think it’s really important because it is so formative, and you’re so shapeable when you are young.

Speaking of the importance of transcending your comfort zone… When you are a young Norwegian teenager in a very small village, the set of places you can go to that takes you behind what you know is pretty much everywhere. But as you’ve traveled more and more, how do you deal with expanding that familiarity—does it still feel important to continue to expand your comfort zone in that way? And what does that look like for you?

Well, I am expanding my comfort zone or leaving my comfort zone all the time. But that is very linked to my profession, because now I have become a travel writer, which was never really my plan. My plan initially was to become a novelist and write remarkable novels that would change the history of literature. That hasn’t happened so far. But I am very happy writing travel books. As of now that is my profession and I really love it because it also forces me to travel in a specific way. I have to get out of my comfort zone on a daily basis because I have to engage with people, I have to talk with people, I have to go to places. I would never have just gone on a vacation, just to relax. But now I’m doing it for the purpose of the book, which is always my leading star. And that is not the most comfortable way of traveling, but it’s definitely the most interesting way of traveling.

Now for instance I’m working on a book about the Portuguese Empire and that has led me to visit places I would never have gone elsewhere—I promise you—and I wouldn’t really recommend anyone to go there, like Guinea-Bissau, one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. I did not really enjoy my stay there that much, I must admit. But now, having come back safely from Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Bissau is what I talked the most about, because it was most interesting.

On the bright side, unless you’re drug smuggling and if never picked up a bag in the jungle that you don’t know what is, you don’t have to worry about that.

You mentioned learning French, but you’re an accomplished language learner. You speak English, German, French, Italian, and Russian, in addition to your native Norwegian. And it also sounds like you’re in the process of picking up Portuguese and Arabic. But I wanna ask you about the Russian in particular. You mentioned before we started that Dostoevsky is one of the things that got you really into the language, his Crime and Punishment. So what did that initial connection with the country and the language look like for you and how have your feelings about that country changed over time?

Well, Russian is difficult. It’s not as difficult as Arabic, but it’s still very, very difficult. So to learn Russian just takes a lot of time and effort. Now my Russian is not perfect, but it’s functional. So I can travel in Russia and other Russian-speaking countries and make myself understood, and even more importantly understand what people are saying to me—which was my goal, and which has really come in handy.

My first encounter with Russia was when I still didn’t know any Russian. I was going to high school in in Finland, because after two years in France I felt kind of like: “I’ve stayed two years in France. I know French by now. I know the school system. I have to move on.” Then I spent the last year in Finland. And then you’re very close to Russia. So one weekend I joined a bus trip with one of the teachers filled with mostly pensioners and retired people. And we went to Saint Petersburg. But on the way we stopped in Vyborg. And Vyborg used to be part of Finland until the Second World War, up until the Winter War. And this was now—it’s more than 20 years ago—so that means that many of the people on the bus, those old people, some of them were born in Vyborg or they had family from Vyborg, so they could remember how this city had looked like. And it used to be the second biggest city of Finland and it used to be one of the most beautiful cities of Finland. Some of the passengers just burst into tears when they saw what had become of their birth city. Because somehow everything in Russia just falls apart. They are not very good at maintenance. So that was my first impression of Russia and then of course in Petersburg something quite different. It’s a very beautiful city.

But that was my first brutal impression and that kind of continued because Russia is a very brutal place. It’s not a very pleasant place and people are not necessarily very nice to you, especially if they have some kind of uniform and some kind of power. Then they tend to be quite bullish. And that was a shock to me. And when I came back to Russia the second time, that was some years later, and I was doing a summer course in Russian, just outside of St. Petersburg. I decided to go all in because I was studying social anthropology after all. I decided to do my field work in Russia. I felt I had to go all in.

I was supposed to live with a family, but the language school placed me with an old babushka in one of those grey Khrushchev apartments. And they all look the same, so I got lost every day, just trying to keep in every door until I found the building that was mine. And that was like a second cultural shock. I had spent the spring in Guatemala studying Spanish. Guatemala is very far from Norway. Saint Petersburg is like a two-hour flight from Oslo, and still this was a huge cultural shock. And there was a heat wave in Saint Petersburg that summer. My hostess would walk around naked in the apartment and encourage me to do the same. She was a terrible cook. I’m pretty sure she had tuberculosis, and she was watching Putin on the news constantly. That’s what she did. And then it kind of dawned upon me like, why Russia? Why Russia? Why not Italy or some pleasant place? But I think that is the attraction with Russia. It’s not a pleasant place, but it’s like a constant riddle. There is something you don’t understand. And that said, people can be very friendly too, as long as they’re not wearing a uniform.

Of course, now after the full-scale invasion started last year, my relationship with Russia has changed a lot, and I think so has everyone else’s. I think Russia is becoming a very dark place; it’s becoming a very nationalistic place. They have always had these tendencies, but now it is becoming mainstream and that perspective is very rapidly dominating. When I started learning Russian, Russia was a hybrid authoritarian regime, and now it’s a full-scale dictatorship with no room for criticism. So it is becoming a very dark and gloomy place. I’m still fascinated and I haven’t been back now for five years. And I do hope I can go back one day and write a book about Russia, but I don’t want it to be a book just about Putin and politics. I want it to be a book about Russia. And Russia is so much more than just politics and Putin and Moscowans and Petersburg. There are, for instance, 193 different ethnic groups living inside of Russia.

I’m not a big optimist when it comes to the future of Russia, because what I see lacking in Russia is that after the Second World War. In Germany, they dealt with the past and they dealt with it quite harshly. And that has never happened in Russia. They have this kind of victim mentality. They never really dealt with the Soviet past. They never dealt with Stalinism and the gulags. And they just see themselves as victims. And that just doesn’t make sense. It’s the biggest country in the world. It’s still an empire. And they see themselves as victims. But I think that’s what justifies the war, the ongoing imperial war in Ukraine.

Speaking of culture shock and places with a dark side: I want to ask you about your experience traveling as a woman, particularly traveling alone and oftentimes in countries that may have different sort of norms than your native Norway or other places in the world. How does your experience as a woman shape your experience as a traveler and the accounts that you bring back as a writer?

I’ve written an essay about this once [in Norwegian] and I’m trying to remember the title. In English it would be something like “a travelling alien,” because that is how I perceive many places. They just seem as very strange. People often look at me and think: “A woman travelling by herself, her poor husband sitting by himself for weeks and months in Norway, no children. What is this creature?” So they’re just seeing something very strange.

But that said, I think it’s a huge advantage to be a female travel writer, because in many places, especially in the very traditional places, Muslim places like Pakistan, many of the places I visited in Pakistan would be inaccessible to a male writer. They would not be allowed to enter the village. They would not be allowed to enter the family home. In many places my male guide and interpreter had to be left outside in some male guest house where he was drinking tea with other men. And I was left inside. Of course I can talk with the men, the men will talk with anyone. But I can also talk with the women. In many places would never be allowed to talk to a male stranger. So I think it’s a huge advantage. I can access both worlds.

And somehow, the most common question I get when I give talks is, is it not very dangerous to travel the world alone as a woman? Somehow people seem to think it is a disadvantage and that it’s very dangerous to travel alone as a woman. And of course... There are some risks that men would not have. But mostly people are kind, mostly people are helpful. Of course you have to use your common sense. I would never ever go to a bar and have too much to drink so that I could not take care of myself. But I wouldn’t do that in Oslo either. So you have to use your common sense, but I think the advantages are much, much bigger than the disadvantages.

You mentioned that Guinea-Bissau has made a special impact on you in your recent travels. I have a vague idea that it’s in West Africa, but beyond that, I can’t say that I know much about it. What stood out to you about that place and your experience there?

Okay, so now I’m in this limbo because I’m working on this book about the Portuguese Empire, and I have now finished almost all of the travel research. I’ve been traveling for more than a year, more or less constantly. It was a huge empire, going down the African coast and continuing in Asia to India, but also to places that it lost quite quickly to the Dutch, like Malacca, some islands in Indonesia, and even Japan (the Portuguese were the first Europeans to trade with Japan). So it was a huge empire—and let’s not forget Brazil.

Guinea-Bissau was one of the colonies that Portugal stubbornly kept until 1975. And it’s a very small country, one and a half million inhabitants, and it is an extremely underdeveloped country. If you look at the statistics, they do very well in all the statistics you don’t want to be on the top list—like childhood mortality, etc. Their main source of income is cashew nuts and drug smuggling because it’s a huge hub somehow from South America through Guinea-Bissau and then somehow to Europe. I have not figured out how this works but it’s a huge source of income for Guinea-Bissau.

On the bright side, unless you’re drug smuggling and if never picked up a bag in the jungle that you don’t know what is, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s a very safe country, because there are no tourists there, so they don’t have any crime related to tourists. And there are very few rich people, so they don’t really have any crime related to rich people either. They have one paved street in the capital, and that’s the only paved street in the entire country.

Usually when you travel, you can pay yourself out of discomfort. You can hire a car and a driver and hence avoid public transport. Not in Guinea-Bissau, because there are almost no private cars. So you are stuck with these German minibuses that still drive the dusty roads of Guinea-Bissau.

They have some beautiful islands. They look like Bahamas, just outside of the coast, but they have no boats. So it’s a very difficult country to travel around in. And also, on one of those remote islands, if you read the guidebook it will say that it’s a matriarchy. I wouldn’t say so because it was when I started asking people, the men had the last word. But it’s been some of those islands that have developed some very strange rituals. Like one that we visited, they didn’t have electricity, not because they couldn’t have it, but because they didn’t want to have it—because they wanted to stay traditional. On one island we visited, they had this rite of passage. If you wanted to become a full man—I mean you could get married, you could have children, as usual. But before reaching the final stage, around 40, that’s when the men would tend to do this last passage. Because if you wanted to have your own house, move out from your own family’s house, and have your own house with your own family, you had to pass this final milestone. And that consisted of going into the jungle, on this quite small island, and living isolated by yourself, not seeing other people—leaving, if you had kids and wife, leaving them behind, saying goodbye forever, and stay there in the jungle, isolated… for eight years!

And then you just ask yourself, how did this come into being? What happened? I don’t have the answer.

I’ll ask you one final question here. What are three books that have most influenced the way?

Definitely Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, because that book made me want to learn Russian and learning Russian has transformed my life. My plan learning Russian was to read Crime and Punishment in Russian and I am currently part way through. It’s a lifelong project. Another book would be The Empire by Kapuscinski, because it shows what travel literature, if you want to call it that, can be. It’s a very... what’s the word? I don’t find the word, but just read the book and you will see for yourself. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book. And then... Thirdly—when you make this list, it’s kind of unfair, because there are so many books that would be on my top three—but if I would have to choose a last one, I would go to the children’s author Astrid Lindgren and her book about the Brothers Lionheart, which I read as a child. It’s a beautiful and sad story that shows you how you can travel in your imagination to different worlds, quite literally.

Erika, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.

It’s been a pleasure.

#101: Finding meaning in the maybe (feat. John Kaag)

If you enjoyed this conversation, you might also like my interview with John Kaag. John is a philosopher in the classical style of one who believes that ideas should teach us how to live well. His writing also have an important travel component, particularly his book Hiking with Nietzsche, which explores the writings of the philosopher in the place where it was written. You can find that episode here:

Meaning Lab

Listen now (79 min) | For many of us, life is a process of minimizing uncertainty. We spend our days trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. Find the right career path, the right partner, buy a house, or at least find a sense of long-term settledness. Raise a family and put our kids on track to get into the right college, so they can start the process over again find…

Listen now

3 years ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Cody Kommers

#106: Rituals matter more than you think (feat. Dimitris Xygalatas)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 10:58:29 GMT

Denis Dutton was a philosopher of art and media. He was born in the US but moved to New Zealand when he was 40, where he became interested in Oceanic Art. This interest led him to spend time in the village of Yentchenmangua on Papua New Guinea. Over the course of his ethnographic work, he began to get to know the locals.

One day, Dutton noticed that his friends in the village seemed down. He asked why. They explained that the tourist numbers had dropped, and they were trying to figure out ways to get more people to visit. Dutton was asked if he had any ideas.

He sort of shrugged, then off the cuff suggested fire-walking. The villagers had no idea what that was. Dutton explained. They asked him if he would teach them.

Dutton had never done a fire-walk of his own before, but he understood the principle from his friends in New Zealand. Coal is a poor conductor of heat. So, in theory, one can scuttle across a bed of hot coals without getting burned if one moves with sufficient haste. The never day he gave it a shot. And it worked. The villagers soon adopted it as their own local ritual, even taking measures to jealously guard it from neighboring tribes.

Dutton later asked them, “So what if some anthropologist visits your village in the future, inquiring about the origin of the fire-walking ritual? What are you going to say?” One of them responded: “We’ll say that we’ve always done it this way. Our fathers did it, and their fathers before them, and ultimately our ancestors learned how to do it from a white god.”

This story is from Ritual, the recent book by Dimitris Xygalatas. And I think it illustrates something crucial about the way we’re used to thinking about rituals—that they’re a kind of cultural excess: there for arbitrary reasons, not serving any specific purpose. Aren’t all rituals like the one the villagers got from Dutton? At some point, someone just made them up, right? Rituals can seem antiquated, and us more-informed moderns are better off leaving them in the rearview mirror.

But Dimitris’s work shows this isn’t the case. Rituals are useful for at least three separate reasons. In this conversation, we cover how research—including Dimitris’s own—shows that rituals reduce anxiety, are crucial for social cohesion, and are an important source of meaning.

Unlike most behavior, rituals aren’t a means to an end. They aren’t about achieving a goal or desired outcome. We do them for their own sake—because that’s how things are done, how our forebears did them. And it is precisely this lack of immediate utility that makes them integral to meaning and identity. They separate our way of doing things from everyone else’s. And, as Dimitris argues, we’re probably worse off in the modern world for our willingness to shave off the trappings of life’s rituals in our relentless pursuit of increased efficiency.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

So to start off with: What is a ritual? Why do they matter?

If you ask 100 anthropologists, you might get 100 different definitions of ritual. As far as I’m concerned, a key aspect of ritual is that it’s either gold-demoted [that is, we don’t know why someone does it after it’s already happened] or it is causally-opaque. And what that means is that when people perform their rituals, even the most meaningful rituals, when you ask them why, very often they don’t have a ready explanation for you. They’ll say, “oh, well, we just do them.”*

But even when they do offer some reason for doing those rituals—let’s say we perform this ritual for healing purposes—there is no causal connection between the actions undertaken and the purported outcome. So if I try to heal somebody by chanting, we don’t see any physical causality between the movements of my mouth and what’s going on in that person’s body. So that is a key characteristic of ritual.

An additional characteristic is that rituals create special spaces and special events. They sort of create the domain of the sacred. And this is what differentiates ritual, for example, from habits. So habits might be the flip side of a ritual. I take my coffee every morning, I brush my teeth twice a day, and some say this is my morning ritual when I brush my teeth. But I would say no, because this has a specific purpose to clean your teeth, and the actions you undertake are connected to that outcome. But if you were to just wave your toothbrush in the air with the belief that it will cleanse your teeth, or no belief at all, now that would be a ritual.

At first glance, rituals by definition seem utterly pointless. But the fact that they are found in every human society we’ve ever known, and the fact that so many people around the world find them deeply meaningful, I would dare say all people find them deeply meaningful. Even if they don’t realize it, if they think of religious rituals. But then when we get into other things like your wedding or your birthday celebration or a funeral you attend, all of us find meaning in ritual. So this for me was the big puzzle.

When you say the word “ritual,” sometimes it feels, I don’t know, maybe “antiquated” is not quite the right term—but something a primitive society would engage in. But us modern urbanites, you know, we sort of moved beyond that. We do things because they have real effects. How do you think about what it means to perform a ritual in daily life in the modern world? And perhaps what are some of the examples of rituals that you study that your average person would connect with?

I think it would be tempting but misguided to think that we no longer have as many rituals as people used to have because we live in an era of technological progress and secularization.

The misconception stems from the fact that because ritual has been such a successful mental and social tool for religion—to the extent that we come to think of those two things as synonymous, but they’re not. Ritual predates religion and it extends far beyond religion. And I would argue that our lives today are just as ritualized as they’ve ever been. We have to be careful with our definitions here—but based on my definition, ritual is everywhere.

In the modern world, we engage in handshakes, and we raise our glasses to attend birthday parties, and we have college graduations, and in many parts of the world we have military parades, and in our militaries we have marching and the raising of the flag and so on and so forth. There are countless examples if we look at how people behave in sports stadiums or in political rallies or at rock concerts or in their everyday life our lives are in ritual, from birth to death.

So the way I see it, there’s a human need for ritual. Rituals provide comfort for us, they help us soothe our anxieties, they help us connect with other people, and this need is a constant. What changes are the forms. And in fact, what you see is that the more organized religion retreats in the West perhaps today, the more people seek it in other domains, and they come up with other kinds of rituals—perhaps of the kind that you find in Burning Man or other festivals or in the area of sports or other organized institutions, even the workspace.

“Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.”

Let’s get into the mechanism here. What is it that makes ritual meaningful? What is going on there that takes this ostensibly useless activity and gives it this really fundamental sense of how we create meaning in our lives?

This is a complicated answer, because the reason rituals are so successful is that they’re able to trigger a whole host of psychological mechanisms.

One of the ways in which rituals do things for us is that they help us soothe anxiety. And this is a very old idea that anthropologists have proposed over a century ago. For a very long time, this was simply either taken for granted or at least it went untested. But now we have evidence for it. We know, for example, from studies—including my own studies—that when we put people in a room and we stress them out, their behaviors become more ritualistic; they become more repetitive. And then when we look at what happens when they perform these behaviors, even in a decontextualized setting, when we have them engage in repetitive movements, we see that anxiety levels drop. We can see this both in their minds (their anxiety levels as being lower, they feel less stressed) and in their bodies. Their electrodermal activity decreases, their heart rate variability increases, and so on and so forth, their cortisol levels drop.

We also see it in real life rituals. We’ve done studies in Mauritius where we measured people’s stress levels as they performed rituals in a religious temple, a Hindu temple, compared to a control group, and we see that after performing those rituals, they have lower anxiety levels, both psychological and biological.

How do the rituals do that? What is the mechanism?

We have proposed that this is related to the way our brain works and the way our brain constantly seeks patterns in the world. Our brain makes predictions all of the time. Before I finish a sentence, you have a certain prediction in your mind about what my next sentence is going to be. When we drive, we make predictions about where every other car in our own car will be in a few seconds from now and so on and so forth. It’s a very efficient cognitive architecture that I think will inevitably evolve given evolutionary potential. That’s where advanced intelligence will move towards. And if we ever have true artificial intelligence, it would have to work in the same way. A byproduct of this architecture is that when we don’t have the capacity, when our environment does not allow us to make successful predictions, we get very stressed. The thing we experience as stress, perhaps more than anything else, is uncertainty. And this is why you see that those domains of life that have high stakes and high uncertainty are full of virtualization. If you go to a casino, you will see that gamblers are notorious for their superstitions rituals. If you go to a sports stadium you see the same. If you go to a war zone again you see the same. And ritual provides structure, it is predictability. When I do a ritual, because I’ve always done it the same way. I know exactly what will happen—when and how it will happen.

This gives you a sense of control of the situation. And of course this control may be illusory, but it doesn’t matter. We know that it works. We know that it helps you reduce your anxiety. So this is one piece of the puzzle. Ritualization comes naturally to us and it feels good.

Another related mechanisms is what we call “effort justification.” This idea refers to a whole host of different related theories, but they all make the same observation that our brain makes inferences about the value of things. And one of the cues it uses to make those inferences is how costly they are.

I spent some time living with a group of people called the Anastenaria in northern Greece, and they performed fire-walking rituals. What I realized there was that the meaning for their participation in those rituals was produced through participation itself. What I mean by this is when I asked the youngsters “Why do you do this ritual?” most of them will just look at me and they say they would say things like “I felt this urge to do it” or “That’s what people do around here.” When you invest so much effort into an activity, it automatically feels more meaningful. This is a fair assumption to make. Some of the best things in life come at a cost, right? You get what you pay for—in building things and so on and so forth. So our brain automatically infers value from effort. And this is why some of the things that seemingly don’t have any inherent value, things like running marathons or climbing Mount Everest or performing very painful rituals or investing a lot of time week after week after week, thousands of hours—let’s say memorizing the Torah or attending church—those things too create meaning for us.

The first time anybody goes to a temple for the vast majority of individuals as children, it’s because their parents take them. It’s not because they had some kind of an epiphany. But do this long enough and it begins to become very meaningful.

One last thing I will stress here is the ability of ritual to forge social connections. So that’s very important to us. It creates a sense of collective identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of bonding. How does it do that? Again, through multiple mechanisms.

One of those is related to what we call “phenotypic matching.” Other animals do this as well, but we also do it a lot. We make assumptions about human connections and kinship based on a variety of cues. One of those cues is similarity. We know that phenotype and genotype are closely track one another, for the most part. So people who look more like me, the more they look like me the more likely they are to be related to me. And rituals are very good at doing this. They align people’s appearances. Perhaps we wear the same clothes, the same makeup. They align people’s movements. We all march together. We chant together. They align people’s emotional responses. We have evidence from various rituals that when people perform collective rituals, even their heart rates begin to synchronize. So they feel like one. And by doing all of those things, people feel closer to each other. It is no accident that in so many ritual contexts, participants call each other their brethren. And we talk about things like fraternities and sororities and all those things invariably have in common are ritualized behaviors. So they have a rituals recruit a host of different mechanisms to provide meaningful experiences for people.

I want to talk more about effort justification. Another way of putting that is that rituals derive their meaningfulness from friction. It’s the fact that they don’t accomplish anything of themselves. They’re not instrumental. They’re not actually the thing that is getting you whatever the further reward or end that you want is.

What I like about that thesis is that it’s at odds, in many ways, with the way we typically think about meaning. I think a lot of us intuitively believe that there is such thing as “intrinsic meaning.” This was actually something I was talking about with Paul Bloom in one of my recent episodes. When we talk about things that we find meaningful, a lot of the time it’s this small list of having kids, rewarding careers—these things that have very clear goal orientation where it’s clear why you’re doing them. And instead, you’re kind of saying, “Hey, look, here’s something that by its very nature is inane in a way.” And yet this is this crucial thing that we are taking to construct our meaningful engagement with the world. Does that sound like a fair characterization of your position?

Yeah, and in fact, when you think about it, some of the things that both are the most meaningful to us and are also the very things that make us human, that really distinguish us from other animals, are precisely those kinds of things that have no inherent, no intrinsic meaning. There are things like art and music and dancing and ritual and group membership. There are things like sports fandom. It’s all of those things. Those things are important in a ritual context precisely because those actions are arbitrary and have no inherent meaning. It allows them to take whatever meaning we wish.

Whatever the ideology of the group is, these rituals are a very good way of reinforcing that ideology. Whatever the group itself is, those arbitrary actions allow us to distinguish this group from what other people do. Because there’s an infinite array of things we could be doing in the context of a ritual. If I want to clean my hands as a utilitarian action, there are only a few ways of doing this. I can use water and soap or an antiseptic and so on and so forth. But if I conduct a purification ritual, then I can do any number of things. I can use blue paint, or I can use ashes, or I can use blood, or I can use dirt or water, and so on and so forth, or just symbolic gestures. And that means that we can choose an action that will be specific and unique to our own group. And that makes it special for us. It creates those associations with the most salient part of our identity, our group membership.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of efficiency. A lot of times in modern life, what we’re striving for is increased efficiency. And when I hear theories like yours describing, “okay, let’s look at this specific instance and try and understand how we make meaning from it,” it seems like a core component of what we’re doing when we find something meaningful is that we’re identifying something inefficient about it. And it’s almost through a kind of cognitive dissonance of saying, “well, I’m not doing this because it’s the most direct way to achieve a goal. Otherwise, I would do this other thing.”

It seems to me like that impulse to streamline and to make life of an increasingly efficient nature actually takes away from a lot of the fabric of meaning that you’re describing in things like ritual, social connection, the ability of ritual to create, as you said earlier on, space, all those sort of things. Does that sound right to you?

Well, one way to respond to this would be to flip it on its head and to say that in fact just because ritual don’t have direct utility does not mean that they’re less efficient. In fact sometimes they might be seen as mental shortcuts. So imagine a situation—let’s take two examples, the individual level and the collective level.

At the individual level, imagine that you’re very stressed. You’re facing a major threat, perhaps you’re concerned about illness, there are things you can do to reduce your stress. You can start working on the psychological processes, perhaps you can talk to someone, you can go out for a walk, there’s any number of things you can try to do. But if a ritual works, that might be the easiest way of dealing with this. If what is familiar already works, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s an arbitrary action as long as it works for you.

In the collective context, now think of a group that is facing very high stakes. So we know from historical evidence that groups that face higher stakes—for example, the tribes that are under constant threat of warfare—they have more painful initiation rituals. Now the problem that this group needs to solve is the problem of cooperation and trust. When you’re going out to war or hunting or any kind of high-stake activity, you want to have a very cohesive team made up of very trustworthy individuals who are really committed to this, to their group membership. Now the best way to find out, perhaps the best utilitarian way, is to go to war and who is a good, who is brave and who will defect and run away. But there’s also another way of doing this. Some high intensity initiation rituals precisely simulate those conditions in a safe space. So what they do is that they get people to pay a high price in advance and that functions as a test of their loyalty, as a test of their commitment.. If I’m willing to go through hell week and suffer for an entire week, then I’m truly committed. If I’m willing to endure a brutal beating in order to join a gang or a fraternity, then I’m truly committed to this.

And since you mentioned Paul Bloom, I’ll get to an example that he gave in his previous book. He says that he described this election for a fraternity president, and there were three candidates. So the first candidate steps up in front of the fraternity and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do X, Y, and Z. And the second candidate steps up and says, if I’m elected, I’ll do A, B, and C. And the third one steps up, takes a piece of paper with the fraternity’s insignia, and staples it to his chest.

Now this is an act that has no direct function and is completely arbitrary, but by doing this—there was no better signal of loyalty and commitment and willingness and desire to be the leader of that group. And he was elected. So that’s the kind of thing that rituals do. The more direct way might also be in the long run more effortful. So you could put in years of work or you could go out to war and then we can test your bravery. But there are ways of taking shortcuts and in this sense, perhaps rituals are not as wasteful as they seem.

So what should we do with this information? Is the implication here that we would all be slightly better off in particular on the come up with new rituals? Is that the takeaway for you on the pragmatic front from having studied all this?

Yes, I think the main takeaway from this is that the things that might appear to be irrational, if they seem to work for so many people, then they’re worth investigating, exploring, and of course adopting and incorporating into our lives. It’s no accident that every human society has had rituals. Now for many of us, our lives are radically different than those of our ancestors. We’re more mobile. We have fluid social networks, so we’re not bound by tradition as much as our ancestors were. And this can sometimes create a gap in meaning. And we see levels of depression and suicide, there are spiking around the world—anxiety levels. So these kinds of practices, if they’ve worked for so long, I think it’s worth considering the possibility that they might work for us as well. In fact, as a researcher, I know that they do.

I do see myself as a very rational person. I don’t have any supernatural commitments. But I tend to see ritual as, as I said at the beginning—I see it as both predating religion and extending far beyond religion. It is not about something supernatural. If you’re willing to concede that things like art and music are deeply meaningful, too, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t concede that the rituals too are also deeply meaningful and are also not just useful but they’re a core part of leading a good and a meaningful life.

#105: What can psychology tell us about meaning? (feat. Paul Bloom)

Cody Kommers — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 10:22:50 GMT

Recently, I’ve been workshopping an idea. Basically, I don’t believe there is such thing as an activity that is intrinsically meaningful.

Sure, there are activities which people consistently endorse as meaningful pursuits: having kids, productive careers, learning a language, that sort of thing. And while there is an empirical fact about what sort of activities members of our culture consider meaningful, this is not because these activities are meaningful in some fundamental way. Rather, what this empirical fact captures is that there is a limited set of readily available cultural stories about where meaning comes from. We tend to say that’s where we, personally, derive meaning from, because that’s the default story about meaning our culture prescribes. In fact, anything that can be construed as meaningful—if you tell the story right.

Most recently I argued this point in a piece called meaning is post-hoc, where my claim was that we can’t predict ahead of time what will be meaningful and what won’t. This is because stories are always told retrospectively—and meaning depends entirely on the stories we tell. In particular, I’m skeptical of the traditional psychological narrative about meaning (“here is the set of activities people tend to derive meaning from”) because whenever academics describe someone who is engaged in canonically meaningful activities, it sounds an awful lot like an abstract version of what a university professor does. I think that really underestimates the diversity of how people conceive of meaning and how devoted they are to finding it. Anthropology and sociology are full of examples along the lines of “Here’s some society that we think of as very different from elite western society and yet here they are spending all this time developing sophisticated theories about their place in the world.” One of my personal favorites is The Dignity of Working Men by Michèle Lamont. In short, I believe—at least at present—that there are no intrinsically meaningful activities because you can look back on any activity and come up with a way of construing it as meaningful.

In this conversation, I had the privilege of honing this idea against one of the sharpest minds in the field. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Toronto, previously based at Yale. Between these institutions and his online course, he has taught introductory psychology to millions of bright young students. This course laid the foundation for his latest book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind.

Paul has thought a lot about the problem of meaning, both in this book and in his previous book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. We approach the topic via entry points from his latest book (particularly Freud), and eventually I get around to pitching him my latest ideas. By no means do I immediately bring him around to my view. A lot of what we disagree on, I think, depends on what goes beyond the purview of psychology and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to know where the draw those lines.

A conversation with Paul is always enlightening, and at least from my own perspective I think this conversation strikes a nice balance between drawing out some of the highlights of Paul’s broad base of thinking with some of the problems I’ve most directly been grappling with in my own thought.

Paul’s latest book is Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. It’s available now.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

Your new book, Psych is adapted from your intro to psychology course. There’s a lot in there that will be familiar to students of the field, but something that I thought was both completely novel and completely brilliant was your theory about how to use the Stroop task to uncover spies, inspired by watching the TV show “the Americans.” Can you can you say a little bit about how that works?

Yeah, I’m very pleased about that. It’s probably my only contribution to espionage. So the idea of the Stroop task is about the involuntary nature of consciousness. You have to look at a bunch of colors, and then just say what color they are. So red, yellow, blue, green—that’s fine. Now the colors are in the shape of words. If the word is in the same color—yellow in yellow, red in red—that’s easy. But now you have the word red, but it’s in blue. So now you have to read this list of words (for example the word green but’s colored in yellow) and say the words when its meaning is at odds with the color its written in. The Stroop effect is that your knowledge of English makes this harder, as there’s an involuntary lag in your response while you’re processing the tension between what’s written and its meaning.
My idea was you take people who you believe are Russian spies (this is from the TV show “The Americans”). They deny being Russian, and say “We don’t know Russian at all,” in their perfect American accents. Yeah, okay, fine. And then you give them a version of the Stroop task: colored versions of Russian words. Now, I don’t speak any Russian. So if I was to read them, I’d go boom, red. Or boom, yellow. Whatever. But because they’re Russian, when the color is at odds with the color word in Russian, this should be hard for the Russian speakers. They can’t not read the words, and it slows them down. And then when you look at their slowing down time, you can figure out whether they’re spies.

That’s so good. I love that.

The whole book is worth it just for the espionage.

Going back to psychology more generally, I want to talk about Freud. Many people will have this vague sense that that Freud introduced or elaborated on the concept of the unconscious in the way that we think of it now. This is something you talk about in the book. Can you go into that—in terms of what you think people misunderstand or don’t know about what he did?

Yeah, so I think if you ask people name a psychologist, they named Jordan Peterson. But after that, they would name Sigmund Freud. One survey named Freud as the most popular psychologist ever. But within the field he is reviled.
You know, people come to universities, like University of Toronto, or Yale University, and ask “Where’s my course on Freud? I want to learn about Freud.” And there’s nothing like that. Sure, Freud is studied in universities, but he’s in the English Department. He’s in the humanities, maybe even philosophy. But he is considered an embarrassment in psychology.
And he’s considered an embarrassment in psychology, in large part, because just about everything he said is insane. It’s not even, like, false. It’s crazy ideas like the enormous formative power on every child’s life of walking in on his parents and seeing them having sex. That’s a big thing for Freud. Also, penis envy. The power of dreams to reveal the secrets of the mind. Incredible unconscious dynamics where the secrets of life spill out of these amazing fantastical stories about various mental illnesses. So, you know, I think that that a lot of psychologists shy away from him because he got so many things wrong.
But there are two reasons why I devote a chapter to him early on in my book. One is that he’s a figure of immense importance. In everyday life, you can’t understand what people say or what they think about the mind if you don’t know Freud. So it’s like an atheist—even an atheist has to read the Bible. An atheist has to know what people are talking about when they reference the Bible. And even if you think Freud is nonsense, other people believe in talking about people being repressed, or in anal-retentive personalities. They talk about the super ego, and it’s worth knowing what they mean.
So you might want to know Freud for his influence, but I think it’s more than that. I think Freud got some important things wrong. In fact, he got everything unimportant, specific thing wrong. But I also think Freud got some important things right. What he got right was the importance of the unconscious: the idea that so many of our beliefs and desires, so much of what motivates us to do what we do, go on under the surface. And this insight gets rediscovered again and again. It gets rediscovered by neuroscientists who talk about confabulation—where you jolt a patient in their head, and then they laugh because you jolted them. Then you ask “Why are you laughing?” and they believe it’s because you said something funny. They make up a story. This sort of post-hoc explanation also comes up for moral psychology, say when Jon Haidt talks about moral dumbfounding, where someone has a moral gut feeling that something is wrong, though they can’t tell you why. Now, all of that is indebted to Freud. Freud was the one who brought the unconscious to the field’s consciousness

I know there are people who say they have their life story, a life narrative. But I often wonder whether it gets really overstated.

I actually think there’s another aspect that’s important here. So most of what you talked about was in terms of Freud’s contribution to the content of psychology. He was the one who appreciated just how much work the unconscious was doing in our minds. But the second contribution—which I would argue was equally important—was one of methodology. This is the idea of interpretation. Basically, Freud pioneered the idea that if you made observations about the right kind of behavior—a dream, a slip of the tongue, that sort of thing—then you could essentially read that behavior in the same way you’d read a novel. Instead of using scientific experimentation to understand what it is, you use interpretative methods to figure out what it means. You can also map these two different methodological approaches onto CP Snow’s two cultures. Scientists experiment; Humanists interpret.

Freud was really the first one to take seriously the idea that we could learn something important about mind and behavior by applying interpretation. And in my reading, one of the great tragedies of 20th century psychology is that no one ever really found a way to make this work. Psychology became an exclusively experimental science. Which is good for rigor. But I think it dramatically overestimates the scope of what scientific studies can give insight to. Contemporary psychology is essentially Behaviorism 2.0—where what we’re doing looks a lot like what someone like BF Skinner was doing and almost nothing like what Freud was doing; we just try to do it without the philosophical baggage.

Personally, I think it’s led to dramatically impoverished theories of meaning. At any rate, this is why Freud today is more influential in literature and anthropology departments, because they’re the ones who are happy to draw on the kind of interpretative methods he employed—while the psychologists just sort of sit there and roll their eyes at him.

That’s interesting. I find what you’re saying to be pretty accurate. But what’s interesting is that you think it’s a bad thing—what happened. So a different way of viewing it is that you’re exactly right: the interpretive style of Freud went off to the literary scholars, and in a different way to journalists. So you know, journalists, they’re interviewing somebody, they are reporting on a scene—and they’re trying to explain what happened. And maybe they try to explain some different levels, one may be an overt attempt at explaining what people are thinking and so on. But there’s no experiment. There’s no data in any in any interesting sense. There’s nothing to be replicated. And I think a world without somebody to give this empirical perspective that can be replicated is a really impoverished world. A world without journalists be a really impoverished world, too.
But I guess I’m not as convinced as you that psychologists need to employ these tools. I’m not as convinced that what Freud was doing should be part of a scientific toolkit. Experiments are crucial because when it comes to our own observations and our own memory, no story is true. No good story happened the way somebody reported it.

So let’s take some of the principles we’ve been talking about with meaning and stories and Freud, and examine some of your claims not only from your new book Psych, but also The Sweet Spot, on the pleasures of suffering in the search for meaning. One claim you consistently make is this idea that I think a lot of people would endorse: we humans are storytellers. It’s pretty uncontroversial that we care about stories. And these stories provide a fundamental structure for human life and society.

But I think what I take issue with is that it gives us a little bit too much credit. We’re storytellers, but not necessarily good ones. Everyone can connect with a good story, but not everyone can tell one. And I think this applies to the stories we tell about ourselves and our own life, as well—not just that not everyone can write a novel. When we look at the stories of our own life, we get stuck in the same plot devices, we rely on the same narrative tricks over and over again. And maybe we even suffer from a lack of imagination. So how does that square with your thinking?

I don’t remember everything I’ve said about storytelling in the past, so I’ll just take in from the banal claim that humans are natural storytellers. We live the lives of our stories: the stories tell us what matters and what doesn’t, and so on. And, of course, there’s a deep truth to this. If something significant happened to you, and I asked you about it, you tell it to me often, that’s a story and have a beginning, a middle and an end that is imposed upon you because you’re a good communicator—because that’s how you hold things in your mind. And I know there are people who say they have their life story, a life narrative. But I often wonder whether it gets really overstated.
So first thing, there are a lot of differences that people have in their everyday conscious experience. I’ve been reading more and more about this. Some people have powerful visual imagery, some people have not. Some people have a voice in their head. Others don’t, surprisingly. One other difference is life stories and narrative. And I think some people are natural storytellers. And I think this is probably common in highly literate environments. But I think some people aren’t. I forget the philosopher, but someone write an article saying: “My life isn’t a story. I don’t have a story about my life. I don’t have a narrative story about my life. It’s not a story of redemption. It’s not a story of I try, then I succeed or I reached a peak and I fell. It’s not. It’s not you know, Icarus. It’s not Achilles. It’s just no other story. It’s one damn thing after another.” And I think that sometimes we get the narrative that people are storytellers, because we put them in situation and badgered them to tell stories. And then they obligingly do. You know, suppose my day was just my day—it was “I did this” and “I did this other thing.” And then my wife says, “So how was your day?” Well, to be an obliging communicator, normal person, I gotta do better than that. I started off grey, and then this, and you’d tell a story. But the stories are products of social demands. They’re not there to start with. And I wonder all this stuff about stories and narratives—is this a little bit overblown?

Maybe. But perhaps we can get at stories by way of your theory of meaning. First off, you make it pretty clear that any claims you make on this front are pretty lightly held. And you’re not super committed to the assertion that psychology has its theories of meaning on lock. Fair enough.

But one thing you’re pretty clear on in The Sweet Spot is that some activities are more meaningful than others. The kind of simplest example you give is of one person who spends her days working on important projects and spending time with her family and another person who spends her days smoking weed and tweeting nonsense. You take this as a fairly airtight instance of someone who is engaged in meaningful activity versus someone who is not. Specifically, you cite philosophers who think that one has to consider their life in some explicit way, by examining it from a remove, as being wrong. In other words, some activities are more intrinsically meaningful than others. I don’t know if I believe that. Can you say a little bit about how you think about meaningfulness, starting from this sort of case?

What I’m trying to do here is unpack the intuitive notion of meaning that people possess. So I’m not sure of what meaning really is in a definitional sense, but I think we have a gut sense. And I certainly do believe that some activities are more meaningful than others.
There are really two things here: it’s worthwhile making a distinction between meaningful experiences and meaningful pursuits. So meaningful experiences, to be very brief, can be high intensity and can be something you didn’t work for. Being present at the birth of your child could be a meaningful experience. Even even if you weren’t the one who put much physical effort into it. Being mutilated, or being in a serious accident can be meaningful.
And so I’m more interested in meaningful pursuits. So why are some pursuits meaning to us and not not others? Why is climbing Mount Everest and going to war and raising children meaningful? But, you know, me walking around my desk 10 times, it’s not meaningful.
I think there’s a reason why some pursuits are thought of as meaningful in our society, like having children or going to war. I think for one thing, these are often the same things found meaningful in other societies, including preliterate societies. My understanding is that it’s not random. You’re not going to go somewhere and ask someone what’s the most meaningful thing they’ve ever done in their life, and they said, “I hopped on one foot for five minutes.” That’s not going to happen. It’s going to be big things. So I think this speaks to how to make something meaningful. It seems like this is a flat out empirical question.
For this, you’re making claims about people in general—you say that if you go to most Americans, and we figure out some way to ask the question, “Do you have a life story?” I don’t know. But it’s a different claim from “Can you think of one?” I’m skeptical of the idea that you are walking around with a story of your life that has certain story-like elements, such as a direction, a theme, or plot twists—you know, redemption and failure. People like Dan McAdams have done these studies and asked people about it. But I always worry about how much it’s the case that people walk into an experiment without a life story and then walk out of a full one. Sort of like therapy. You know, the therapist after year ten says, “I have recovered from you the full dynamic of your life, the story that made you you.” And whether it’s true or not, what more typically happened was they worked with the client to create it.
So to put your claim in an experiment, we find a good way of asking people: “Do you have a life story?” You predict that a large proportion of people would say yes, maybe 80% to 90%. I predict not as many. I predict 20% to 30%.
I also treat the question of meaning as very separate from the question of life-story, which I think is a bit different. I’m very careful in my books to say, I’m not gonna ask the question, “What’s the meaning of a life?” I don’t think lives have meaning. So I’m talking about meanings in terms of the meaning of a purposeful activity. So I thought you and I were talking about a different issue, and it was very, very interesting issue, which is do people sort of have a story of their life? And it seems to me that you went from a very strong and interesting claim—which is, yes, they do; most people are walking around with it—to a claim, which is maybe not boring, but is much weaker. Which is, if you ask people, they could come up with one. I don’t doubt that people aren’t dumb.

That’s a good distinction. And I do what to stick firmly with that stronger claim. I even want to go beyond what we’re talking about and say that there’s actually another additional thing that’s worth considering here: which is that I think the way that we tell the stories of our lives can be better or worse. Not necessarily in the sense of less or more accurate, but they can be more or less useful.

And so this is something that’s come up in own life recently, with one of my close personal relationships. Something, you know, ostensibly very negative happened to her. And one of the things we’ve been talking about is, What is the way you’re going to tell the story of how this happened? And I think this is very sympathetic to The Sweet Spot, about suffering and how it relates meaning overall. How are you going to tell the story of this? And I don’t think there’s one right answer; I think there’s a sort of pluralistic way to evaluate how good that story is. But I think we underestimate the extent to which we can alter the stories that we tell about ourselves, the way through which they’re flexible, the way in which we can say, well, you know, there actually was this turning point, and it may not have been reaching into a doughnut box, or you know, or whatever. But we can take any superficial contents, and with the right techniques—anything can be used to create a fundamentally better story and a more constructive one, one that has higher utility in your own life, and for understanding what you’re doing now have done in the past and try and do in the future. And I think that’s a very important aspect that has to do with the way we construct meaning via stories and all of that sort of stuff, which may not necessarily be the core of the studies that you’re citing, but it’s nonetheless very important for the psychological understanding of the way meaning works. Does that make any sense?

It’s interesting, I have mixed feelings about it. I mean, in some way, this is kind of what a lot of my books have been about this—this insight by Shakespeare, there’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so—that you could you could take an experience and construed in different ways. And so I liked that idea. And I think the story is one tells about an event affects how you process it, how you remember it, what you take from it, and so on. But my book Sweet Spot is about chosen suffering, and I say chosen suffering is great. It’s part of meaningful pursuit as part of pleasure is part of all sorts of things. But I’m very careful to talk about unchosen suffering and say unchosen suffering is a different animal. Your house burns down, your child dies, you get a terrible illness, you get assaulted—that’s just bad stuff that happens to you. But someone might say, Look, you have power of how to construe it. And you could construe this event that would otherwise be terrible, as an opportunity for growth for transcendence. And there’s a language called Post Traumatic Growth, where it is good things transform into a story of redemption of recovery. And I will be crazy to doubt that would ever happen. But I don’t think you should expect that to happen.
I say a lot of unintuitive things in my in my books. But this isn’t one of those times: it’s very intuitive and obvious what’s going on here, which is bad stuff is often just bad stuff—and it’s bad for you best not to get into a car accident, best not to get cancer. I don’t think I’m the person who can tell cancer victims what to do. So if they want to try to transform their cancer into a good story, all the more power to them. But I would also never tell somebody who told their story like: I went and got cancer, and that sucked. And I got better. But I lost a year in my life and I still have health problems that cost me a lot of money. What a bad thing that happened to me? Yeah, it was. To me, that’s a pretty realistic story you got there. Do you disagree with any of that?

No, not right off the bat. I think people have a right to their to telling the story that the way they want to, which I think is in line with what you’re saying about the cancer survivor. And I don’t have any significant disputes with that. I do think that I would still say we underestimate our ability to rewrite those stories and the power of rewriting those stories. And so I wouldn’t say that’s, you know, my first thing that I’m going to is reply tweet to the cancer survivor who’s saying, “Hey, I survived cancer and it sucked. That’s my story.” That’s not that’s not the context in which I’m gonna bust out this insight. But I do maintain that the mechanism of meaning-making is very important because it opens up the space of possibilities of how we can tell a story, how flexible those are, and what that can do for us.

Maybe you’re right, but this seems like an empirical question. And it’s an important empirical question. There’s probably data on it already. If I told you about somebody who broke his arm, and then we were speculating as to whether the arm is going to be stronger than it would be six months later, we’d probably both shrug and say, “Hmm, I wonder what happens when these things happen? I bet there’s a study. I wonder what the doctors say?” That it’s not a matter of opinion. So I would say there’s two different questions. The question of what happens to a particular individual could be a novelist question, a journalist question. And it’ll be fascinating to what happens and how that works. But the question of whether or not having a child die—and what it does to you later on—seems to be the sort of thing that you take one thousand people whose children died and see how they are later on.

Final question, Paul: what are what are three books that have most influenced the way you think?

Flow by Csikszentmihalyi. I think I read it when I was in my 30s, and it talked about the satisfaction you have from being engaged in activities. It describes the lives of people in flow—jazz musicians, rock climbers, and so on—and it made me want to live a life of flow. And I have not lived a life of flow, but I’ve lived life with more flow than I would have had if I hadn’t read that book.
And then Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It was a really moving book for me about his Holocaust narrative about what it took to survive in the camps. And there by the way, just to give a concession to you, is that it’s a book with no empirical studies here. It is just his observations, his introspective analysis of what it was like to be himself, and his interpretation of the lives of others. But I think there’s something of real, real value there.
And I didn’t know what to do with the third book. I read a lot of novels. I think the novel that affected me the most when I was a kid were the kind of novels that kids tend to read. I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager, for example Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. And that sort of thing which involves, you know, scientists and engineers and explorers going out into space. And I think to some extent that sort of thing has shaped my moral view—so that, you know, no matter what he does, I’ll always retain a soft spot for Elon Musk for wanting to fly to the moon and stuff like that. I have this outsized respect for scientists and for courageous people. And so these books have shaped me in that way.

Those are great choices, Paul. Thanks for coming on the show.

Tons of fun! Have me back.

#2: Paul Bloom on Picking the Perfect Title

This was my second interview with Paul Bloom. Paul was generous enough to be my second-ever podcast guest. Here’s the original interview:

Meaning Lab

Listen now (61 min) | This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts…

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6 years ago · Cody Kommers

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#104: Palentine's Day (feat. Robin Dunbar)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:54:03 GMT

We pay a lot of attention to our romantic relationships. Whether it’s selecting a mate or maintaining one’s relationship with them. Apps make millions of dollars promising to streamline this process. Hundreds of books are published every year telling us how to do it better. And don’t get me wrong: long-term romantic partnerships are hard, no doubt. But that difficulty is not lost on us. Multiple industries are designed around giving us tools to help overcome it. It’s something we spend a lot of effort on trying to do better.

But what about friendship? We also know it’s important, sure. But we don’t give friendships the same treatment as our romantic relationships. There are no holidays meant to carve out time to express appreciation toward our friends. A few books are written each year about Platonic friendship, but far fewer than those about romantic relationships. And yet friendship is one of the most important aspects of our lives. In some ways, it’s even more important than the handful of long-term romantic partners we’ll have in our lifetime.

This, at least, is the claim made in a recent book by my guest today, Robin Dunbar. Robin is a legendary figure within social and evolutionary psychology. He is perhaps best known for the idea of Dunbar’s number: the number of stable, close relationships an individual can maintain is reliably right around 150. But from the broadest level, the major question of Robin’s work asks, “What do our circles of friendships look like? What should they look like?”

The way that I’ve come to think about the core of Robin’s research is that we all face the same fundamental problem: limited resources. Specifically, limited time. Each of us has to choose how we’re going to allocate our limited time to work, family, hobbies, exercise, friendships, and all the other activities and pursuits which we’d like to do. Often when our temporal resources become scarce, the first thing to get cut are our friendships. Friendships don’t come with urgent deadlines. We know our friends—our true ones at least—will forgive us if we don’t see them as often as we’d like. After all, we’ve both got a lot going on. What all this adds up to is that the disintegration of friendships over the course of adult life feels all but inevitable.

And yet—most of what is known scientifically about friendships is not generally discussed. For example, you have probably heard of Dunbar’s 150 figure. But that’s not the only important number. There are layers here. Essentially, Dunbar’s research shows there are concentric circles of friendships, beginning with your five most intimate friendships, then fifteen close friends, fifty good friends, 150 general friends, then 500 acquaintances, 1500 known names, and 5000 known faces. There’s a mountain of evidence showing that these numbers are consistent across cultures—even with the advent of social media.

You know Dunbar’s number? Meet Dunbar’s Concentric Circles.

In other words, there’s a connection between the quantity of friends we have at any given level and the quality of relationship we should have with them. Maintaining this balancing act has huge consequences for us across all aspects of our well-being.

Personally, I believe the acquisition and maintaining of friendships is one of the greatest challenges of adult life. It’s especially difficult in a post-pandemic world, where we’re less tied down to living in a single place and more free to work in other locations. The cost of this flexibility is increased loneliness. We find ourselves adrift from the usual social rhythms of life which we humans are used to. But unfortunately, the problem of solid friendships is one we spend almost no time trying to solve.

Robin’s book is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. It’s out now.

[This interview has been edited and condensed. Full conversation available via the podcast.]

In the beginning of your book, you present your thesis on why friendship matters. A lot of the evidence you marshal has to do with some pretty convincing studies. Could you say a little bit about what those studies show, and present that argument for why friendship matters so much?

One of the big surprises of the last 15, maybe 20, years has been the absolute deluge of studies—some of them short-term cross-sectional, many of them long-term studies— showing that the single best predictor of your mental health and well-being, your physical health and well-being, and even how long you live into the future is determined by one factor and one factor alone. And that’s the number and quality of close friendships you have.

So typically, this number would be about five people. In collaboration with a bunch of people in Denmark, we did a big study across 13 European countries. We looked at the likelihood that somebody would develop symptoms of depression in the future, and asked what factors predicted that development. What seemed to preserve you from falling prey to depression in the future was having about five close friends and family. So if you had fewer than that, you’re more likely to develop symptoms of depression. And if you have more than that, you are more likely to develop symptoms of depression.

But there was an alternative. And that was volunteering in a social context, or helping out in a charity shop, or being involved with helping running the scouts, or helping with flowers at your local church, or being involved with a political party—any of those kinds of things that were essentially social activities. So if you had about three of those that was as good as having about five friends, and they were kind of interchangeable. But you couldn’t add them together. You couldn’t have five friends and three voluntary activities, and hope to live forever—because you wouldn’t.

And the reason is very simple. It’s the reason why having more than about five or six friends isn’t really very good for you. It’s that you spread yourself too thinly among these people involved in the social environments. So having a smaller number where you can really get to know the people and be engaged with them—that’s what’s beneficial. If you try and spread yourself too thinly, you don’t create relationships of the quality that’s necessary to buffer you against things like depression.

One of your core ideas has to do with what you call the seven pillars of friendship. These are: having the same language, growing up in the same location, having the same educational and career experiences, having the same hobbies and interests, having the same worldview, the same sense of humor, and the same musical tastes. It’s clear how these can play out in face-to-face interactions. But what does this mean for remote friendships—the kind of modern friendships we try to maintain digitally across distance?

Okay, so the evidence is both good and bad. Because there’s no such thing as Nirvana in the world, everything has a benefit and a drawback. The upside is that, from our work, it seems that different media of interaction—ranging from face-to-face, Zoom video calls, telephone, texts, or emails—are kind of substitutable in terms of how many friendships they allow you to maintain. Because we see exactly the same layers, with exactly the same frequencies of contact, in data from all of these environments, suggesting that they all work pretty much in the same way, and are subject to the same limitations.

In other words, just because you use Facebook doesn’t create the opportunity to have 1000s of friends—true friends. In your social network, yes, you can be connected to 1000s of people on Facebook. But you’re connected to 1000s of people in the everyday world. Some of them we call them friends and family. Some of them we call acquaintances. Some of them we call just people we know—we don’t know much about them, but they’re part of our social environment. For people who have a very large number of friends on Facebook, a lot of those are in that category.

But it seems that there’s still something missing in terms of our satisfaction of relationships in those kinds of environments—like Facebook or Zoom—compared to those we have face-to-face. And that seems to be primarily because what’s missing is touch. And we use touch constantly with our close friends and family, perhaps out to the 50-person layer of our social network. We don’t go around hugging strangers usually, or anything like that. We’re very circumspect in who we do it with. But for those, whom we regard as good friends, intimate friends, we do an awful lot of very casual—what’s generally referred to now as soft taps and hugs, strokes, pats on the knee, perhaps around the shoulder, all these kinds of things goes on constantly if you just watch people in an informal social environment. And that seems to be very important in creating this sense of relationship quality.

I sometimes say, if you want to know how somebody really feels about you, then see the way they touch you—stroke, pat, hug, whatever. This gives you a better sense of what they mean, or what you mean to them, than 1000 words that they might say to you. And that’s because words are slippery things. We’re very good at saying what we don’t mean and making it sound extremely plausible. But it’s very difficult to lie in the way you touch somebody, perhaps because it’s so, so intimate. So there are those kind of drawbacks, which clearly Zoom and Facebook and anything else you can think of are never quite going to overcome. I just don’t see how they can do it.

You recently co-authored a paper in Nature Human Behaviour on social isolation and the brain in the pandemic era. Certainly, there was something anomalous with social life during the COVID years. But with the post-pandemic switch to remote work and outsourcing more and more of one’s social interactions to online—all the drawbacks, such as lack of touch—what do you think the role of loneliness is in modern life? And how does that play out for us today?

John Cacioppo, the late neuroscientist, pointed out that the feeling of loneliness act as an alarm bell. The alarm means you’re not meeting enough people: get out and do something, or go find a friend. It’s not very good for you to experience loneliness, because it exposes you to the risk of increasing downward spiral of depression. And that has knock-on consequences for physical illnesses, as well as mental health and well-being. So it really is kind of the signal or reminder to for you to try and do something to restore your social environment.

The problem is, of course, that’s not easy to do. We’ve suffered from a pandemic of loneliness, particularly in the 20-somethings age cohort, for the better part of 30 years now. It’s really surfaced in the big cities in terms of people having their first job after leaving university. Your whole life up to that point has basically been cocooned in a ready-made social environment at school. You had a bunch of people who would make perfectly decent friends. You’re used to having potential friends on demand all the time. You go to university and live in student halls or something like that—it’s kind of bumpy to begin with, while you just get your feet under the table. But very quickly, you build up friendship circles, because they’re there 24/7 and you’re seeing a lot of them.

Then suddenly you graduate. You get a job in London, New York, or Los Angeles—wherever. And you don’t even know where to go to meet people. All the people at work who are the only people you meet regularly already have their sexual lives sewn up. Some of them have families, and they want to get back at five o’clock. Even the ones that don’t have families, they’ve already got their friends and circles and the things they do on an evening with them.

So we’ve had this tendency for the newcomers in businesses or government departments or whatever to be thrown in completely at the deep end with nowhere to go, and it’s caused this pandemic of loneliness. It’s not good for employees. And it’s not good for employers. Everybody’s been looking at this going, “We’ve got a problem. What are we going to do?”

One solution is to make the work environment a social environment, which is what they used to be. Until perhaps 50 years ago, when new management practices came in, most big companies had their own social clubs, their tennis clubs, theatre clubs, football clubs, where people hung out after work. And that created this sense of belonging, and a sense of community. And of course, when you came new to that company, or, or business or whatever, you were thrown straight into this social environment where it was safe, everybody knew everybody else, everybody was on the same page. They all shared a lot of their seven pillars of friendship in common simply by being employees in that same environment. And it was a good place to make friends. Some Silicon Valley companies have done that in an encouraging way. But it’s not the norm. We can’t let it continue, this widespread loneliness. Because it’s not good for business. And it’s not good for individuals.

I’d like to ask you about the difference between a strong romantic relationship and a strong friendship relationship. What does a romantic relationship require that friendship does not?

Not a lot. In terms of emotional content, they seem to be very similar. Obviously, romantic relationships tend to have a sexual component to them—which is, by and large, absent in Platonic friendships.

But there are important gender differences here, particularly with our closest friends. What you find is that women, in particular, commonly have a” best friend forever,” who’s another woman, as well as the romantic partner. Occasionally, about 15% of the time, there’ll be another male—a male rather than a female—but most of them typically have a best friend who is a female. The opposite is the case for guys. They will tend to have a male best friend, sometimes a female best friend. But the quality of those relationships is very, very different to the quality of best friends that you find with female “best friends forever.” They’re much more casual, and they tend to have been around a lot longer. They tend to date back to kind of high school or college period. If you look at people in their mid 40s, they’ll say, “Yes, I’ve known him since we were at school together, that’s my best friend.”

In contrast to these kind of best friends, Platonic friends tend to be much more recent. Best friends are more stable than both Platonic friendships and romantic partners—which tend to have a lot more turnover. So female best friendships and romantic partners, they’re very fragile in that sense. They’re based on deep trust, and therefore you tolerate infringements of that trust. Until it happens once too often, you’ve had enough and then that’s it. And then you have catastrophic breakdown. Whereas in general, other kinds of friends and men’s best friends tend to just drift apart.

One final question. What are three books that have most influenced the way you think?

Actually, I’m going to point in a slightly different direction in terms of what influenced me and offer up the following three.

One is a Victorian spoof. Not too many people know about it. It’s called Flatland. And it was written by a couple of guy masquerading under the pseudonym “A Square.” It is a kind of spoof on hierarchies in society. So it imagine the world consists of different kinds of dimensions. So you’re a two dimensional person, and you enter into this world where one dimensional people are dots and three dimensional people are cubes—and you’re trying to negotiate this strange social world. It’s a reminder that your particular viewpoint or your particular culture is not necessarily the ultimate good thing. You should take other cultures at face value and enjoy them, get to know them and understand them—in the sense of how the square would have to understand the cube world or the one dimensional world.

As a second book, I’m going to pick T.S. Eliot’s poetry. I actually studied Eliot in high school for my high school final exams (A Levels as we call them here). I think he’s just the most amazing poet who ever came our way. In many ways: mentally complex, and extremely well read, and immensely deep.

As the last choice, I’m actually going to pick something I’m sure nobody’s ever heard of. It’s the Irish writer Brendan Behan’s semi-autobiographical book called Hold Your Hour and Have Another. It just has that Irish flow and fun—that sense of fun and “life is a gas,” as the as the saying goes. It’s just wonderfully well-written little vignettes on his experiences in life. Great guy: he died very young, at the age of 41. Same age actually as the other greatest poet ever, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, who I might otherwise have included, because his sense of observation is absolutely extraordinary. T.S. Eliot is more internal and intellectualizing and looking at himself. Dylan Thomas’s observations on the foibles of other people is just unbelievable in his way with words. It’s just beautiful. It’s absolutely fantastic stuff. So you get four for the price of one.

Robin Dunbar, thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.

You’re very welcome. It’s been great fun.

#103: Tired, scared, and busy: why can't we all just get along? (feat. Mónica Guzmán)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:01:48 GMT

One of the central themes of this show is the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves. But in focusing on the egocentric stakes of storytelling, one of the things we overlook—I certainly do—is the importance of the stories we tell about others.

We make sense of life in the terms of our own experience. We conceptualize the world in a way that corresponds to what we’ve seen and what we understand. This allows us to tell our own story in a pretty nuanced way. But it limits us in the kind of stories we can tell about others—particularly others who, for political or cultural or social reasons, might be very different from us. We put other people into a box: and not the box that would best fit them, but rather one of the ones we have lying around which we’ve previously used to make sense of our own world.

This is a topic I’ve thought about a lot in my writing, my previous choice of podcast guests, and in my academic research—but what I love about my guest today is that she, more than anyone else I know, has actually lived it. Mónica Guzmán is a journalist and Director of Storytelling at Braver Angels, America’s largest grassroots organization dedicated to political depolarization. Her new book is I Never Thought of It That Way, in which she explores her own experience trying to connect people across political and social divides.

In this conversation, Mónica and I cover so much: from the importance of stories in movies and TV, to our relationships with our families, to Mónica’s specific tactics for understanding others. But one of the things that stood out to me is this great line she gives later in the conversation about modern life being “tired, scared, and busy.” It reminded me of the famous characterization of pre-modern life by Thomas Hobbes: nasty, brutish, and short.

I think it speaks to something, it’s so easy to forget: Each of us is living out our own complicated human experience. There is no one who has everything figured out, no one who has reached the point of quiescence. It’s easy to see other people—particularly those with different beliefs from our own—as emblematic of some nefarious other way of life. But, when it comes down to it, there’s no simple way through existence. Everyone is dealing with their own struggle. We’re better off as human beings the more we can come to appreciate the process of that struggle, rather than judge its results.

Mónica’s book is I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. It’s out now.

Let me start off with a question that you cited in the book and in some other conversations I've heard you have as one of your favorite questions, and that's “why you?” And in particular, why have you become so devoted to understanding others? And why is your instinct to be curious and not necessarily defensive in the face of encountering ideas that are oppositional to your own?

Yeah, I guess the first thing I'll say is that I'm not some kind of Zen master of this. I have been caught being quite conflict driven in a bad way, and I still am. And so this is not something I've sort of figured out for all time or anything like that.
But writing this book and all the work it took did get me to reflect on “why me?”—exactly that. And there's several threads.
One is the movies. I grew up going to a lot of movies. My parents would take us to the movies once a week as kids, which we thought was normal… but was not normal. And there's something about fiction where you see the hero, you see the villain. But a good movie, really just a decent one of minimal quality, should get you to understand characters’ motivations. If you don't understand why people do what they do, the movie doesn't make any sense and you're not entertained or enlightened. So I watched a lot of movies, and whether they were good or bad, everybody had their reasons.
In the book I talk a good bit about that because something from fairly early on put that in me that in real life I don't get the benefit of watching everyone's movie. And that's why I don't understand them—not because they don't have reasons for doing what they do and believing what they believe.
Another thing is the thread that brought me to journalism is just this general fascination with people. For a long time, I have found people to be the deepest, richest mysteries. I think it's kind of beautiful—and we don't often think about it—that people who've been together a long time or married a long time never run out of things to say to each other. You would think an entire lifetime would dry the well, but that's not how it works. It's just every moment there's a fractal kind of relationship. You zoom in and there's always more and more and more and more and more. So we're just bottomless. And that's really cool. It means that understanding each other can be really difficult, but also really illuminating.
And then as far as the topic of the book in particular, which is curiosity across the political divide, the biggest reason that I wrote the book was my parents. I lean Liberal. I've always voted Democrat and my parents, as soon as they became citizens in the year 2000, went straight Republican and haven't looked back since. So that has been really interesting and has led to a lot of very loud arguments over the years. But it became personal to me when I was here in Seattle: I would hear people say things about Trump voters that I thought were not just wrong but really dehumanizing. And it's because I had parents that I absolutely loved and understood in mind that it just didn't seem acceptable. And I wanted to dig deep to try to figure out why because it's not the easiest thing to defend in some communities.

There's a real danger here of me taking you up on that first point about the movies and we just talk for the next hour plus about that.

Why is that dangerous? Why don't we just do it? I love movies.

I love that point so much. There’s one thing that I've been thinking about, and I just want to share with you on this front. I think I have always felt this way, and I suspect you feel pretty much exactly the same way—that there's so much power in these really nuanced renderings of stories of complicated people, whether that's in the movies or in novels or whatever. And one of the things I love about living in this year, this kind of era, is that the ability to go deep on those stories in television is completely incredible.

This was something I was thinking about recently. Like last week my partner and I watched, we binge-watched a bunch of seasons of the show Billions. And if you haven't heard of it, it's, like, okay, so there's this lawyer (a defense attorney that's played by Paul Giamatti) and then there's this kind of Ray Dalio-esque hedge fund dude and they're like, okay, yeah, they're going to make a bunch of money, and going to take down each other. And typically what happens in a TV show is that there is moral ambiguity with respect to: okay, here is the bad person. I'm going to show them doing bad person things and we're going to judge them for it and maybe we like them even though they're a bad person. But here's the thing. One of the beautiful things about this show is that everyone is just trying to do what they think is right. And in trying to do that, there are these really severe conflicts, but there's nothing singular that you can point to and say, oh my gosh, well, that was clearly a moral infraction. We should really be angry about the fact that it shows them doing that. And I think stories like that are so powerful in a way that speaks right to your point.

Absolutely. You've made me think of—so I studied film as my minor in college and the way I got into newspapers and journalism to begin with was being a film critic for my college paper. And movies just give you such a fun glimpse into human nature. If the stories make sense, it's because they resonate with us because we recognize something in the world about them.
And I was just thinking about that cliche thing. In every superhero movie where there's a villain, there's a scene where the villain gets to explain himself. Or I was just watching Wednesday on Netflix and you see, like, the villain get to explain—and I won't say the gender because that gives too much away, and everyone should see that show. And even in those scenes, right, they're diabolical, they're evil, but they always have a reason. And there's this funny thing that happens to the viewer in those scenes where as a viewer, you're understanding why they did it, and you go, oh, my gosh, that makes sense. Even though it's terrible, that makes sense. I know why Lex Luther has this world domination thing. Right? I know why they all think they know better, why Thanos wanted to snap away half of existence. Right? And it's this weird moral thing that happens in your heart. Even like Austin Powers makes fun of those moments where the villain explains himself and then gives the hero the way to save the day and things like that. But but you know, even with villains, they have their reasons. It has to make sense.

“Meaning is in people, not in words. Language is a tool for communicating our meaning.”

Absolutely. And I think part of what I think is really worth highlighting about that is that from the outside, if you just were to say, “hey, here's the plot summary: There's this dude Thanos, he's going to snap his fingers and everyone like, half the universe is going to disappear,” right? That is, from the outside, an objectively bad thing. And maybe we don't need to do the Thanos example exactly. I don't know if that plays out in what I'm about to say, but I think there is this thing that when we see someone do something we don't like, we assume that they're doing it to accomplish the things that we don't like. Where in reality, they're often motivated by their own set of values, which we may not have considered. And furthermore, they may not, even when you start to look at their situation, have an option that would allow them to play out in the way that we would want it to.

I'm a big fan of books by Jonathan Franzen, and he does these really large studies of these novels about American families and everything. And one of the things that strikes me about reading his books is that, like, everyone is kind of fucked in their own way. Like, there's something that's not working well for them. But when you sit down and look at, like, what are the actual choices they can make? There is no choice they can make to unfuck their situation, so to speak. And from the outside, we would just assume that there is. And so I think there's a whole constellation of ideas in this. This is what stories allow us to really understand the nuance of in ways that nonfiction and everyday life and that sort of stuff can’t. We're either too abstract or we're too close to it personally. That's why I love stories, as they're told in really great novels and TV and movies right now.

Yeah. And there's research that shows that when we share stories to illustrate why we believe what we believe, it is more persuasive—not to get people to look at things the way we do, but to get them to understand how we look at it differently. I find that research so interesting. And it's the same exact thing that happens in these TV shows that have become like movies but exponentially more powerful because they take that much more time with characters and stories and layers and things, and that just gives us even more nuance and more depth to question our assumptions.
So often there's tropes and stereotypes we can apply at the beginning when meeting characters for the first time. And then good shows, I think, uncover that for us and show us that there's angles on these characters that we didn't recognize. A lot of times characters keep secrets from each other because of shame or guilt. But as the viewer, we have the privilege of seeing inside their hearts and their minds, right? And we watch them be stupid with each other because for some reason they can't connect. They can't see each other for who they are.
And that's really my hope, ultimately, is when I think of my vision: it's to build a more curious world. And what's a more curious world? It's a world that sees itself. Because a lot of times we just don't want to see, for whatever reason, we don't want to show, for whatever reason—we don't trust each other. We don't trust the contexts in which we attempt to share where we come from. So we don't, or we misrepresent ourselves, or we misrepresent others, or we attack—or we oh, gosh, it's a mess. Right? It's a mess. But but we tell a lot of the same stories over and over again because it is something that I think the human spirit needs. We need these stories, and we need this way of connecting to each other. Even if we make up the stories, we recognize something in it that's true. And I find movies and fiction to be so powerful on that front. For us to imagine situations we have not been in and actually be able to feel what that character might be feeling is an extraordinary gift.

“And what we end up doing is we feel like what we're doing is we're approaching an invalid idea. Instead of what we're doing being we're approaching a valid person. I think it's important to begin there.”

I want to go back and ask you a little bit more about your parents. This was a part of your book and your story that I found really fascinating, because it really echoed a lot of my own experience. I also was raised in a Republican household, and until I went to college in LA, pretty much everyone I knew was a Republican, especially my parents, and pretty much everyone in my social circle was a born-again Christian. I didn't really have a reason to question that worldview, so I just sort of went along with it.

And then you know the story from here: I spent my twenties in the bastions of liberal civilization and all that sort of stuff, and my views changed and everything. But I retained this really deep sympathy for that initial worldview that I grew up with. And I felt like, in a way, this has been a kind of advantage over my friends who were raised in a liberal environment—is that I feel like I have this really deep-seated appreciation for why someone would hold conservative beliefs or a Christian worldview.

And a lot of my peers back home, maybe their views also changed, but they didn't really retain that sympathy. There's a lot of feelings of kind of being betrayed, or lied to even, in a way that they don't seem to be able to forgive yet. And bringing it back to your book, you cite lots of stories of people who are not able to overcome this ideological conflict with their family. So from that particular lens, what is it about your particular experience with your parents beyond just having those differences that allowed you to seek that desire for understanding? Why are you able to disagree and get along with your family so well when so many others aren't?

I mean, it's difficult to answer that question declaratively or in any kind of final way. So I consider it very much an open question, something I'm still exploring. It was something that drove a lot of the book's research and reflection: just how come it works for us? It doesn't make sense. It's really hard. It ought to be really hard.
And it is really hard. I like to make that clear too—that again, it's not like we're Zen masters of this. We yell all the time about this stuff, and it can get mean. But I think part of what's happened is over time we've built up a lot of trust so that even when we do sort of insult or get pretty close to the bone, it still doesn't get that dangerous in terms of our relationship.
So there's a lot to that that I didn't address in this book because it's more about how you build deep relationships, right? And how loving or supportive those relationships feel. So I think that that is a factor. Some relationships feel thin or thinner or like all along it has been not to bring up really challenging things and so the muscles haven't been worked on that as well.
But another thing is that with family there's expectations. So when we encounter strangers and we start talking, you know—there there's a sense of safety because they can't disappoint us all that much. We don't have a certain associational relationship with them. But I think with family members, sometimes we carry it with us. That how could my mother believe X? How could my sister do Y? How could someone who is close to me and therefore I somehow need to speak for do these things? And so I think also expectations are a piece of it where we it's hard to just get past that. How could you? How could you? How could you? But you can turn the how could you to how could you? Wait, let me let me turn that from a judgment to an actual question of curiosity. There is a reason, and it's not that there are bad people. So what is the reason?
And so that was what happened with my parents and myself. “Wait a minute. How could you? This flies in the face of things I understand about you, so explain it to me.” I write in the book about one night that me and my dad got into a great conversation and we happened to go to this kind of jazz show because we both love music. And before the big show started, we just ended up in a really deep conversation where I was just: “explain your views on written immigration to me.” But I didn't actually say, “Explain your opinion on immigration.” We didn't talk about immigration hardly at all. It was more like, tell me your story, dad. Like, take me for a walk through what it was like in Mexico and then to move your family to the United States. How did you grow up into this? And he told me these wonderful things that, in my mind, just fleshed out that story, that nuanced story of who he is and the how could you not support a much more free flowing immigration policy? And now I know the answer, and it wasn't because I just shouted that question at him over and over again.

I think what I want to ask you about are some of the themes that you've described either in the book or in other conversations that I've heard that really resonated with me and just kind of have you explain a little bit more about what they mean. And I'll ask some followup questions about that.

But one of the things that story kind of reminds me of is this quote that I have from you about how trying to change people is a way of saying you don't accept them. And it sounds a lot like the principle that you're using, especially in engaging with your father in that example: “Let's hear you out, and let's worry about changing things later on.” So can you say a little bit about what that means?

Yeah, it brings me back to another point that I'm still deeply kind of processing, which is my conviction that listening is about showing people they matter. I don't believe people can truly hear unless they feel heard, which puts us in a chicken and egg situation. When we get together with someone who disagrees with us and neither of us feels heard, somebody has to be the first one to basically—in their gesture, their words, their posture, their tone—communicate: “I accept you. So tell me about yourself. I am interested, I am curious. Tell me your story. Flesh out this or that piece of things.”
More often than not, when it comes to these political issues, we come in with so much heat. We've already made lots of judgments about people who could possibly believe this or that. And what we end up doing is we feel like what we're doing is we're approaching an invalid idea. Instead of what we're doing being we're approaching a valid person. I think it's important to begin there. Whatever the idea, you are approaching a valid person. Everybody is a valid person and in my view, everybody matters. So begin there. Their ideas are different. Their ideas are unsavory, their ideas are confounding, their ideas are horrible to you—but they are still a person and we have to contend with that.
So yeah, there is a level of acceptance when you begin a conversation or a disagreement or a debate, basically by attacking, attacking, attacking the idea, it feels like you're attacking the person. It feels like you're not accepting the person. Then all the person will want to do is defend themselves and pretty soon you're not even really exploring your perspectives candidly anyway. They aren't, and you aren't. And you end up just thinking, what's the weapon I can hurl at them? What's the talking point I've seen work on social media? Let me throw that at them and see if it blows them up.
But what will never happen is that you're going to throw one of these memes and they're going to go, oh my God, you're right. No, not after that kind of hostility. We have pride, we have dignity. That's not how we behave with each other. If you do want persuasion to work, which it can, you have to keep dignity, you know, and you have to show them that they matter.
And being curious about them is one of the greatest ways to do that and to keep that posture. So that's where persuasion is most effective. Right? When people feel like you get them and you begin to speak each other's language, you know their values a little bit, they know yours. Now you can deliver insights to each other that might actually impact how you think about things. So you mentioned this notion that everyone is a valid person. Even if you don't think they have valid ideas, they themselves are valid.

“But they're wrong because the conversation about what is true is not the only conversation you can have. You can have the conversation about what is meaningful.”

And that reminds me of another point that I hear you make, which is that and this is quoting you, “meaning is in people, not words”. And also your concepts about shifting from what's true to what's meaningful and asking people what are your concerns and sort of reframing things as opposed to this ideological conflict over the nature of verifiable reality and all that sort of stuff. You're saying, tell me what matters to you. And I feel like that's really in line with that framing of let's not talk about which ideas are valid off the bat. Let's start with a respect for the validity of each other's experience and then work from there.

Exactly. Yeah. Meaning is in people, not words is a very profound statement for me and it comes from a lot of places and I'm already seeing the scenes in my mind. Sometimes I wish I could be like data from Star Trek to Next Generation and just kind of download—we just link up by cable and you see what I mean. Right? But that's actually the point: Meaning is in people, not in words. Language is a tool for communicating our meaning.
And so it's particularly tragic when we use language as a weapon to tell other people that they're bad. And we do this a lot when language becomes a battleground and a reason to say you're stupid because you just called this this and you did this here and you don't know what you're talking about. But what's the game we're playing? Is the game we're playing trying to get an A plus in a certain type of jargon? Or is the game we're playing trying to understand each other? Because if that's the game, then everyone's doing their best to try to articulate and communicate what's in their hearts. But if we judge everybody by their language, then think about who you are prioritizing. Right? You're prioritizing the savvy speaker, the intellectual, and you're not necessarily prioritizing the ordinary person, but everyone is a valid person. Everyone has had experience in life. Everyone is an expert on their own life.
So I just look at it very differently, that sometimes it's on the listener to try to understand the language in which the other person can fully speak their meaning instead of holding the other person to some kind of linguistic litmus test. So I find that really important. And in my journalism, I have found it really, really important. Some of the projects that I've done have been about trying to make sure that people who aren't usually put on stage or given a voice have a way of expressing their stories. And people, some people are not born communicators, so we help them. I want to help them do that because I think we can learn from each other and we shouldn't put these kinds of things in our way. So that's it. Languages has to be a medium through which we communicate meaning, but not the end of it. Not the place where we judge whether someone's meaning is good or complete it's in the person themselves. So find other ways to get to it.
And then you had brought up another point, another quote or another piece that was tied to that: The concept of what is true versus what is meaningful. And that's inspired deeply by my friend Buster Benson and the book he wrote, Why Are We Yelling? which is a great book. And I think that basically what happens is that we often want to have the conversation about what is true. When we are having disagreements, it seems like the only conversation to have, the only one that's relevant or good or possible. But we get really stuck on that conversation really easily when we're so divided.
People talk about having different facts, different realities. And so then what do you do? You just insist on your reality, and then we'll watch the other person reject it over and over again. People think that they have to stop talking, and that there's no place to go from there. But they're wrong because the conversation about what is true is not the only conversation you can have. You can have the conversation about what is meaningful. So step back from facts and agreed upon interpretations of certain events and turn to the person that valid person and try to understand what's meaningful to them. What concerns you about abortion or immigration? What do you hope to see happen in the conversation about guns? What personal experiences come to mind when you think about your position on this? And then you get a human picture and you get an original picture of this person's actual self instead of them borrowing talking points to try to survive your attacks. That's not what we want. And the best thing about it is the conversation about what is meaningful is the only conversation that builds trust. And I think that's the thing that's dried up. We talk about restoring truth. You can't do it without restoring trust.

There's another idea that I want to bring in here. It's a slightly different point, but one that I think is kind of helpful to put in juxtaposition to what you're talking about here. And it has to do with a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, particularly in politically charged arguments, there is this sort of feeling that what we're litigating is this high stakes ideological value of what's right and what's wrong. And the stakes are so high and oftentimes what's helpful—and maybe just talking about things where people are conflicting ideas in general, not just politics—is holding one's ideas lightly.

And this makes me think of something that I used to really consider a lot when I was younger, particularly in college. And it's about how I used to think of trying on opinions like trying on clothes. If you don't put it on and walk around in it for a bit, how are you going to know if it fits or not? And so I really love this idea because it sort of takes aim at the assumption that we can think our way through the implications of every idea and for any idea that you hold or any sort of larger position that you take. It's going to interact with other beliefs that you hold and different kinds of experiences that you're going to have and that sort of stuff.

And I think if you're going to adopt a given belief as a core part of who you are and something that's foundational and unimpeachable and that sort of stuff, then there should be a rule that you first need to spend two weeks going through life holding the opposite point of view. And then once you've done that great. You're totally allowed to believe the other thing for the rest of your life. But the thing is, I suspect that if you go through life really trying on the other belief and sincerely trying to see the world through that lens, it might really temper your certainty about that initial position.

Yeah, I absolutely love that. It reminds me a mentor of mine in journalism, Tom Rosenstein, who's just fabulous. He told me about an editor at an alternative weekly who was talking to a reporter. And the reporter said, I want to do more advocacy journalism. I want to write more of an advocacy piece on this particular issue. But the editors basically said, yeah, you can do that. But first I want you to deeply understand as generously as you can all the points of view in this issue. That's when you're kind of green lit to just argue for the just kind of have the one and speak from that lens. And he talks about that as an ideal in journalism when there's a storytelling institution that carries such weight and power in helping us all understand each other.
I think it's a great goal that those folks should go through an exercise that's similar to what you're talking about, generously open your mind and fully explore why good people believe different things. And a lot of people get stuck on the good people part. They believe that only bad people can believe certain things. But that's something to really stop and challenge when you have that kind of assumption. So I love that. I think that that's very wise, very difficult to do, and for sure not something we can do with everything.
I also love what you said about challenging the assumption that we can think our way through any idea that just in a couple of minutes I can just completely destroy this other point of view in my head and then I don't need to think about it anymore. But like you said, when you wear an idea, when you put it on and you look at the world through it, you'll see maybe some of the good in it that you didn't see before. You'll understand what it adds to a life to look at the world that way. There could be all kinds of things you discover.
And I love what you said about we so often think this all comes down to reason and rationality and logic, because again, we're kind of a technophilic society. Everything should be countable and logic-y and that's it. It's like you add it up and you subtract it. And math has one final answer and if it has a lot, then you haven't done your work. But that's not humanity. Never has been, never will be. We're not going to calculate and quantify everything. It's not going to happen. Some things you do just there's a sense, there's an intangible to everything. People are very frustrated, I think, by the fact that you can't turn all this into some formula. They prefer it when we think we can.

So far we've mostly been talking about these kind of mechanisms for understanding, I guess you could say, whereas a lot of what it comes down to in the situations that we're talking about is not necessarily your strategy for understanding others—and that is important, there's no doubt about that—but it has to do with your motivation for understanding others. And that's why I think curiosity is so central to all of the arguments that you find yourself making and that sort of stuff because it has to start with this desire to overcome whatever kind of ideological obstacles are there.

And so I want to kind of frame this in terms of problems of contact and geography and all this sort of stuff. So you're talking about if you, Monica, write a piece of journalism and it's making an argument for a liberal policy or something like that, what are the chances that that is going to make it onto the desk of a Republican who is in a place to really deeply and sympathetically consider that? And the answer is that increasingly in our society for both technological and kind of logistical reasons of how people are self segregating into different ideological factions, the answer is not very often. And so there has to be an ever increasingly large motivation to want to overcome whatever that boundary is and then our toolkit of understanding and sort of conversational strategies really comes into play.

So how do you think about the problem of building up that motivational impetus to want to overcome whatever geographical or other kinds of boundaries are in between us and people who we don't necessarily agree with?

You named a lot in that. It often is geographic blue zip codes are getting blue or red zip codes are getting redder. Sometimes it's about opportunity, not motive. It's difficult to spontaneously run into someone and then discover that they disagree with you in some key way and then build from there. So there's a sense of helplessness, I think people feel, where they go, well, how can I even do this? How do I even begin? And I think it helps to see things differently because I think that some of these narratives we tell ourselves about how we're divided have closed too many doors.
So for example, I talk about how we're so divided, we're blinded. And it's not just one side looking at the other. A lot of the most captivating emails I've gotten from readers of the book, both on the left and right, talk about how they feel that they can't give their true opinions to people on their own side. So even when we think we're surrounded by people who agree with us, of course we're not. There's plenty of places you disagree. It's just that there's this expectation that you shouldn't and so it's it's equally important, I would say, to make sure that you can see the nuance even within a side. So yeah, even if you are surrounded, if you're blue surrounded by blue, red surrounded by red—trust me, there are interesting conversations to be had and you can crack open assumptions that you have about what you believe and find some fascinating stories.
This happens particularly often with guns and abortion, I've noticed, where people go “I just assumed you thought so and so because you and I vote the same way or whatever” and people are like “no, here's what happened to me, here's how I think about it differently.” So that's one.
The other is that while it is true that we are sorted into like minded groups in extraordinary ways that are hard to overcome, it's also true that one person has never had more access to more different perspectives in the history of the world. The internet is motivated, it's built to give people what they want—the attention economy, get eyeballs to stick on someplace or whatnot. But with the right strategy you can turn that on its head. I find this to be effective with certain communities that are really kind of just articulate with each other. So for example, on subreddits on Reddit, there's some wonderful communities that you can go in and just kind of read how a certain community of belief talks to itself and it's really cool, it's really revealing, right? A lot of times we want to go into those communities and just raise hell because we disagree but we can do something very different which is listen. So even on the internet, where it was much harder to have these kinds of interactions, there's a lot of difference that you can run into. So that's also important.
But I guess the bigger point is that it is so much about approach and a place like the internet still the internet is a non-place that makes us into non-people. It is difficult to be in that place of “I'm approaching a valid person” when that person has a little cartoon character for an avatar and behaves like a jerk. How you see the person there, all you can do is your id and your ego are just constantly being pummeled in your mind.
And here's the other piece of helplessness people feel: they think that that one conversation they could have with that relative or that coworker isn't enough—that it won't move the needle. But what I say is it's absolutely required. It may be insufficient, but we're not going to change without that. Because as you said, people have divided and split off into so many of these silos. The trust isn't being built anymore in between those places. So the only place where we can have high trust is where there are preexisting relationships. So when you do go to Thanksgiving or you do go to your holiday dinners or you do hang out with your family that you usually don't see who thinks very differently from you, it's true that there actually could be a lot of power. And if you just establish enough trust to help each other empathize in a different way with the opposite point of view, it's extraordinary how that travels.
So at Braver Angels—which is the nonprofit I work at—it's the largest cross-partisan nonprofit working to depolarize America. I see this over and over again where just a handful of reds and blues will get together in a workshop and in a structured setting, they'll be able to see each other's points of view in a more curious way. And it really kind of makes them go, Whoa. What that means is that the next time that they read an article that dehumanizes the other side, or the next time that they're tempted to just make a rash judgment, they'll remember that experience that they had and they'll pause. So it does extend beyond that one conversation and it also shows that that's how bad things have gotten, right? Where we're so certain of these assumptions we have of each other that one counter example will go a long way.

… to hear the full conversation, you can pick up in the audio version around 39’.

Monica’s three books that have most influenced her:

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Midnight in Paris (the movie)

#101: Finding meaning in the maybe (feat. John Kaag)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 13:01:03 GMT

For many of us, life is a process of minimizing uncertainty. We spend our days trying to eliminate uncertainty from our lives. Find the right career path, the right partner, buy a house, or at least find a sense of long-term settledness. Raise a family and put our kids on track to get into the right college, so they can start the process over again finding the right career, the right partner, and so on. The implicit idea in this is that there’s a point in life where we reach quiescence, where all the big problems are figured out. But here’s the thing. Life doesn’t work like that.

Life is not a problem to solve. It cannot be terminally fixed. Something can always go wrong. There’s always the next thing. And so if you’re living your life, even tacitly, under the assumption that it’s possible to reach this point, you are operating according to the wrong model of the world.

These are themes that I’ve long been grappling with in my own life, and they’re resonant in the work of my guest today, the author and philosopher John Kaag. Kaag is a professor of philosophy at U Mass Lowell, but he has that rare quality of someone who makes his living as academic philosopher: he lives his life as a classical philosopher. To him, ideas aren’t just for arguing about it. If you’re getting them right, they should tell you something—hopefully something important—about living.

He’s a student of the work of William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henry David Thoreau. His books include American Philosophy: a love story, Hiking with Nietzsche, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life. A theme that runs through the work of these thinkers, and by extension John’s own, is how uncertainty is crucial to meaning-making. In a way, once something has become certain in our own life, it gets taken for granted. I think if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can readily identify this effect: whether in a complacent relationship, or in the pursuit of material comfort, or whatever it may be. Once it’s all shored up, it no longer seems something so worth striving after that you can build your life around it. It’s sort of like artificial intelligence. Whatever milestone AI successfully achieves, Gary Marcus will tell you that, well, that’s not what AI really is.

I think there’s important in the idea that uncertainty is something to embrace, not just because it’s a fundamental and inescapable part of life. But because it can also itself be a source of great meaning. If that’s something you’re interested in being more closely in tune with, I think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are John’s picks:

Walden
by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
One American Transcendentalist’s attempt to wring meaning from everyday life.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
Nietzsche’s keystone… novel? meditation? confession? about an individual who is struggling to become who he is.
Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl (1946)
The most recommended book on this show. The classics are classic for a reason.
Existential Psychotherapy (Honorable mention)
by Irvin Yalom (1980)
The 700 page version of Man’s Search for Meaning. (Never heard of it myself, but it looks really good!)

Books by John:

2020: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
2018: Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are
2016: American Philosophy: A Love Story

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

#100: I interviewed 90+ scientists about their career. These are the 12 biggest lessons I learned.

Cody Kommers — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:00:11 GMT

The month before I began my PhD, in October 2019, I sat down with an idea. The concept was to reach out to people I admired—mostly academics and authors—and ask them about the decisions they made when they were in my position. What did they do when they were grad students that set them up for success later on? Sure, I wanted to know about their success, in some sort of career-prestige sense. But I also wanted to understand how they thought about what it means to make a substantive contribution to their field, whatever that may have looked like to them. I envisioned it as a podcast, which I called Cognitive Revolution.

I produced about 90 episodes of Cognitive Revolution. Toward the end, I began to feel like I’d learned what I wanted to from that line of questioning. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with a podcast that represented the dimension of growth I would pursue in my next phase. But eventually I came up with Meaning Lab: a cognitive science perspective on the mechanisms of meaning in work, life, and relationships. I’ve done about ten Meaning Lab episodes now. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.

But to mark my 100th podcast episode, I wanted to do a retrospective on what I learned interviewing scientists about the “personal side of their intellectual journey”—as I framed the tagline of the show. I got to talk to so many of my heroes. I got to talk to people who were great scientists, but not well known outside of their immediate discipline. I got to talk to people who were both accomplished scholars and well-known to a broader audience. I tried to talk to different people from different backgrounds, and to explore stories told by everyone from established tenured professors who came from academic families, to first gen college students from an array of backgrounds who more or less stumbled into research and found they were good at it. People were incredibly generous with their time. And I’m honored to have had the pleasure to talk with them and learn from their experience.

Overall, what stands out to me is that there’s no one path to success. Not in academia. Not in writing. Not in making a living from ideas. Not in, as far as I can tell, any aspect of life. For everyone I talked to who said doing X worked for them, there was another person who said they got to where they are by doing not-X. Sure, there were trends and consistencies—and I try to get at some of them in the lessons below. But the overarching point is that you have to figure out what works for you. You can’t take a strategy from a successful person you look up to and apply it blindly. You’re a unique individual with your own strengths and weaknesses. Your success as a scholar depends, in large part, on learning to use them to your advantage.

Another point was how just about every single person I talked to—especially the big-name scholars who seem to have everything all figured out—admitted to feelings of uncertainty early on in their career. The vast, vast majority went through significant patches of their journey where they weren’t sure if they were going to make it. But they stuck with it, and eventually they got to the other side. Personally, I identify with these kind of doubts more than I do the concept of “imposter syndrome.” To be honest, I don’t really care if I belong right now, right here, in this room. Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Whatever. I’m more concerned about whether what I’m doing is going to end up being worthwhile in the long run. Am I continuing to grow and get better? I can survive being bad at something now, if I know I’ll be good at it later on. It meant a lot to know that when I’m feeling that burden of doubt, pretty much everyone I look up to felt some version of it when they were in my shoes.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to come on my show. I learned something from every one of you. What follows are some of my favorite clips from scientists I talked to. It doesn’t include segments from some of my favorite conversations in general—mostly with people who were authors than scientists. And instead of short, snappy sound bites, I opted for longer clips, so you could hear a bit more of the context and story behind the lesson. I hope you find something in here to help you on your own journey, whatever that may look like. If you’re anything like me, I think you will.

Here are my 12 lessons I learned from interviewing 90+ scientists about the personal side of their intellectual journey:

12. There’s no one right way to be productive; do what works for you. (from Paul Bloom)

11. Sometimes your biggest setbacks become your most significant accomplishments. (from Chantel Prat)

10. Being a good grad student is not the same thing as being a good professor. (from Nancy Kanwisher)

9. Everyone has a CV of failures; but they only show you the one with the successes.(from Bradley Voytek)

8. Write for an audience of smart, interested undergrads; anyone older than that is too set in their ways to truly be shaped by your work... Oh, and write from an outline.(from Michael Tomasello)

7. Listening is one of the most undervalued skills in academia (and probably beyond); if you can master that, it’ll take you far. (from Susan Goldin-Meadow)

6. Even the most successful scholars were uncertain early on. (from Steven Pinker)

5. Some of the most influential papers of all time were rejected in their first submission—rework and resubmit. (from Mark Granovetter)

4. For some researchers the best part of their career will be their PhD and postdoc (because they want to get their hands dirty with the work); for some, they just need to survive that phase until they get a faculty job (because what they really want to do is run a lab). (from Weiji Ma)

3. You don’t need a grand plan; make the best decision you can at every juncture, and you’ll get somewhere worth going. (from Linda B. Smith)

2. You can be a traditional academic... or you can be an entrepreneur of knowledge.(from Wade Davis)

1. Someone says you can’t do it? Fuck ‘em. There’s no one path to success. (from Mahzarin Banaji)

#99: There's a Reason You Can't Make Yourself Act like Everyone Else: You're Unique (feat. Chantel Prat)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 16:00:53 GMT

For many of us, there are moments of realization we’ve had where we can’t look at our lives, or what we do in them, the same way ever again. I’ve had many. As a cognitive scientist, one of those moments came from the realization that cognitive science—and psychology, and neuroscience—don’t tell us anything about individual human lives. They tell us about humans on average. The problem is that no one lives a life on average; they live a specific one.

We often hear about studies making claims like this is how people misjudge political opponents or this is how people respond to the suffering of others. Framed this way, it sounds like the scientists got people to line up, presented them with the task at hand, and they all more or less reacted to it in the way described by the headline. But that’s not the case. Not even close.

Those “findings” are statistical averages. Either the participants did what’s being described a little bit—not so much that you’d notice it in the individual but you can find the slight trend among many people. Or a handful of the participants did what’s being described enough to drown out the effect of whatever everyone else is doing. Think of it this way: If I say people, on average, are going north, then one way to support that finding is to have 50% of people go northeast and 50% of people go northwest. On average, that’s what people are doing: going north. But it’s not representative of the behavior of any single individual.

Another way to think about this is to ask who really takes the experience of individuals seriously: and the answer (the one I give, anyway) is novelists. Those are the people who are asking questions about what would happen if we follow the consequences of one particular person’s decisions really closely over the course of some significant portion of their life. Think about all the detail that’s included in even the simplest novel. In any given instance, a psychology or neuroscience experiment can only examine the smallest sliver of that.

As a consequence, we’ve been taught to think of the brain, the mind, behavior, intelligence—all these things—as a kind of monolith. There’s the Platonic mind with an IQ of 500, and one day artificial intelligence will realize that kind of perfection. But in the meantime we’re stuck here living our lives as imperfect approximations of that ideal. As it turns out, that’s just not the case.

And one of the ways we know that’s not the case is through the neuroscientific work of people like my guest today, Chantel Prat. Chantel is a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She was one of the first guests I had on this podcast, and it remains one of my favorite episodes I’ve ever done. In that conversation, we talk about Chantel’s incredibly powerful story—with an unplanned pregnancy in grad school that changed her life for the better. The occasion for this episode is that she recently published a book, based on the work of her and her peers, called The Neuroscience of You.

In it, she makes a really important argument. We’ve been taught to think of there being one canonical brain, one wiring diagram, one set of processes known as the human mind. But there’s not. Just like there’s not one human genome. While in aggregate we can look at commonalities across our species, each of us has a unique genetic fingerprint. The brain works in the same way.

The big implication here is that all too often we look at our own behavior and wonder why we’re not more like someone else—why we can’t be as good, or as focused, or as kind, or as competent. It’s easy to overlook the simplest answer: we’re just different. Chantel’s work shows us that these differences are fundamental. Not in a way that’s unbridgeable and keeps us apart, but in a way that shows we have to appreciate others—and ourselves—for the specific things that make us us.

Chantel’s book is The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain Is Different and How to Understand Yours. It’s out now.

#98: A Cognitive Scientist Tries to Convince Me the Mind is Flat; I Don't Think He Succeeds (feat. Nick Chater)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 27 Dec 2022 16:00:54 GMT

My guest today is Nick Chater, a Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. Nick is an influential cognitive scientist with a wide-range of interests, which these days often tend toward public policy. But in 2018, he published a book, trying to draw some culminating insights from the disparate pieces of his own work in cognitive science as well as the field more broadly. He came to the conclusion that we have dramatically misunderstood important aspects about what the overall picture of the mind looks like. He called the book The Mind Is Flat.

And by ‘we’ Nick means essentially... everyone. His argument is that the notion of the unconscious we’ve grown accustomed to over the last century or so is fundamentally flawed. We attribute all sorts of hidden ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires’ and other psychological motivations to the murky depths of the subconscious mind. But according to Chater, they aren’t really there. They’re fictions. There is no such thing as a ‘desire’ you don’t know about. According to Chater, what you see of the mind is what you get.

It’s a strange argument. Particularly because pretty much every modern theory in psychology and cognitive science presupposes there is some sort of cognitive infrastructure supporting beliefs, goals, and intentions below the surface of conscious thought. So what evidence does he have there are no such things as hidden beliefs? It’s a good question. But another way to frame it is: what evidence do we have that makes us so confident that are minds are a kind of mental iceberg of which we can only see the very tip?

That’s not to say that there’s no structure to the mind. But we’ve never seen a belief — how can we be so sure of what one would look like? I think there’s a certain story about the depths of the unconscious mind that we’ve started to take for granted. I think it’s worth taking some time to rethink that.

Nick’s alternative is that the mind is continuously improvising, deploying behavior to maintain consistency with an on-going narrative. Instead of simple psychological causes (“She believed x and wanted y, so she did z”), we are acting in a way to stay ‘in-character’ within our own story. We are like fiction authors, not constructing behavior based on firm psychological truths, but rather seeking consistency, continuinity, and growth in the arc of our character’s development. According to Nick, to say that the rest of us are acting based on some engimatic psychological depths is no more true than to say a fictional character is doing so. The story is all there is.

Here’s Nick’s alternative model, in his own words:

An improvising mind, unmoored from stable beliefs and desires, might seem to be a recipe for mental chaos. I shall argue that the opposite is true: the very task of our improvising mind is to make our thoughts and behaviour as coherent as possible — to stay ‘in character’ as well as we are able. To do so, our brains must strive continually to think and act in the current moment in a way that aligns as well as possible with our prior thoughts and actions. We are like judges deciding each new legal case by refering to, and reinterpreting, an ever-growing body of previous cases. So the secret of our minds lies not in supposed hidden depths, but in our remarkable ability to creatively improvise our present, on the theme of our past.

Nick introduces the concept of a mental tradition as the infrastructure of the mind. We get into it a little later on in our conversation. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what he means by the term; but I like it. It takes a well-worn concept (“habit”) and articulates it with a fresh conceptual edge. At one point, I press Nick and ask him point blank whether he thinks habits exist. He says he doesn’t. I couldn’t tell you the exact difference between a habit and a mental tradition. But Nick’s position, as I’ve understood it, is that typically we believe we act according to ‘preferences’. I like coffee, so I get it first thing in the morning. No, he says. In fact, you’re acting according to a mental tradition.

In preparation for this conversation, I found myself thinking through Nick’s improvising metaphor with my own understanding of the concept — through my training as a jazz musician. If you were to ask an improvising musician about why they chose to play a specific note, they’d be able to construct a story, supported by music theory, about why that note works in the way it does. But that’s just a post-hoc story. It doesn’t describe in any meaningful sense for why that particular note was produced in the first place, as opposed to any other note which could have a music theoretical justification.

Yet that’s not to say there’s no depth. The underlying harmony does cause the note to come about in a very real sense. The musician is responding to structure. They’re not acting alone. They’re collaborating with the structure: the structure of the music, as well as the other musicians. That strikes me as a kind of depth, and one that has not just significance in the metaphor itself but also in our concept of the structure of the mind.

So what are the stakes here? Suppose this theory is true, as Nick presents it, what might the implications be? Here’s one idea:

If there are no psychological depths to be found, the only psychological "truths" are the stories we tell about ourselves and others. They are "true" by virtue of the fact that we’re telling them, in the same way there are truths about Anna Karenina simply because that’s how Tolstoy told the story. There’s something liberating about this. We’re no longer committed to defending the ‘why’ of our actions, at least from the perspective of a single motivating psychological variable. This is often what we reach for when trying to hold others to account. That may be necessary in the courtroom. But I think it’s the source of a lot of tension in our interpersonal relationships — the need to specify what caused someone to behave in a certain way. Rather, we get to look at through a different lens. We get to say okay, this is what I’ve done. How does it fit into the overall story? The theory actually gives us an explanation for why the question "why did you do that?" can be the source of so much emotional violence in a relationship. There is really no answer. Therefore any answer is necessarily wrong and inadequate. And any expectation of an adequate answer is inevitably let down.

At any rate, this argument by Nick makes me think of something said in a recent episode with Sam Gershman. The point of a model is not to be right. The point is to articulate the space of possibilities. I do think Nick is right that psychology—with the exception of 20th century Behaviorism—has for a long time taken for granted that there are some sort of depths to the mind. His argument is useful because it attempts to paint a clear and compelling version of the alternative. Whether or not he’s onto something, I’ll leave up to you.

But I think part of the exercise of thinking through his position is about gaining a better understanding of what we take for granted in the conventional ways we talk about our own mental lives. Perhaps the mind isn’t exactly flat, as Nick says, but I think it’s say to safe that we’re inclined to ascribe more depth to our minds than is merited—telling more than we can know, as Richard Nisbett called it.

#97: Is the Biggest Fish in the Pond Happy? (feat. W. David Marx)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:00:51 GMT

One of my favorite psychology papers of all time is called “Telling More than We Can Know” by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson. The argument of the paper is that humans don’t actually know why they do what they do. But they’re more than happy to give you an explanation nonetheless.

This the reason why we need a science of human behavior. If we could all just intuit the correct answers automatically, there’d be no need for researchers to figure them out. This provides a kind of template for how psychological research works: I got the human do something, and now I’m going to tell you why they did it.

And cognitive science in particular is traditionally obsessed with explaining “why” in terms of one main concept: rationality. The human did the thing because it’s a reasonable thing to do, once you take into account all the right information. And if the story is not so straightforward, then the deviation from rationality cries out for explanation. It is an account of human behavior that prioritizes practical function: we have the mental apparatus we have because it helps us succeed in the situations we’re most likely to find ourselves.

While this may be a useful explanation for behavior in the laboratory, things get more complicated once you start observing humans in the wild. What about all the stuff that isn’t explainable by mere rational utility?

Why, for instance, do I prefer some clothes over others? Why do I have a little piece of leather on my keychain when it neither holds keys nor opens doors? Why did I listen to the Men in Blazers soccer podcast religiously for two years, then suddenly forsake it entirely? Why do I insist, simply our of principle, on never drinking French wine?

In other words: what’s the “why” behind culture?

This question is the impetus for the recent book by my guest today, W David Marx. David has lived in Japan for 19 years. His first book was Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. For most of his career he has followed and written about Japanese culture and its influence on the West. His latest book, Status and Culture, is his effort to explain the mechanisms of cultural change: why we do what we do, when we don’t need to do it.

He calls this the “Grand Mystery of Culture”: Why do humans collectively prefer certain practices, and then, years later, move on to alternatives for no practical reason?

This is where status comes in. David argues that it’s the conceptual glue that holds together the parts of human behavior that aren’t explained by rationality. How exactly it does that is the subject of our conversation.

But the thing about status is that you can always have more of it. If, as David argues, we’re all constantly chasing after status in one way or another, when does it stop? Is anyone ever satisfied with their status? Is the biggest fish in the pond happy? Or does she just want to find a bigger pond? Does status ever give us a sense of purpose or meaning? Or is it just empty calories? We get into a lot of this throughout the conversation. Yet, for me, reading David’s book raised as many questions as it answered.

Status and Culture is an entry in the genre of Epic Theory. It seeks to explain everything. Doing so requires that one leaves out quite a bit, especially when the book weighs in at a svelte 275 pages of full text. But there’s something about David’s book which makes me really love it: It is an academic book that isn’t written by an academic.

Reading it, one gets the feeling that the reader is hearing from someone who has actually been out there in the world and lived a little bit. David reads. (A lot.) But it doesn’t feel like he spends his days cooped up in a library. When he talks about culture, you know you’re hearing from someone who has participated in it—not just theorized about it. He’s not trying to explain why those other people over there are into one fashion trend and not another; he’s trying to explain the fashion trends which he’s seen in his own social circles.

Ultimately, perhaps David, like all of us, is guilty of telling more than he can know. Do the mechanics of status really explain all of culture? I don’t know. Maybe it is all about status. Maybe it’s not. But I’ll keep that little piece of leather on my keychain, just in case.

David’s new book is Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. It’s out now.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are David’s picks:

One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict
by Russell Hardin (1995)
Little known but mind blowing; the theory also explains fashions really well.
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
by Harold Bloom (1973)
Art as a process of being influenced by and attempting to influence. A classic.
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
by Jean Baudrillard (1972)
Incisive investigation into the reason why things are valued. The denser French theory precursor to David’s Status and Culture.

Books by David:

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

#96: How Words Get Their Meaning (feat. Gary Lupyan)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 16:00:08 GMT

Language—who can use it, and how well—has been in the news recently. If you haven’t heard, a recent AI language model was released for public use. It’s a chatbot from the company OpenAI called ChatGPT. And its capabilities are, to use a technical term, astounding.

It can draft essays at an advanced undergraduate level on just about any topic. It can write a scene for a movie script along any premise you specify. It can plan a set of meals for you this week, provide the recipes, compile a shopping list, and tell you how what you’re eating will affect your overall health and fitness goals. And in terms of grammar and sentence construction, it makes no mistakes. Literally none. This isn’t your grandmother’s chatbot.

This episode is not about how ChatGPT works; it is about our current understanding of how language works. With advances in AI allowing us to create more sophisticated programs for using language, that understanding may change in the near future. But even with all the recent advances, the underlying logic behind how these kinds of programs work and what they can teach us about human language goes back decades in research on cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It seems like there’s something about ChatGPT that understands the words it’s using. The truth is we don’t know yet. It’s too soon to tell.

What we do know is that we humans understand the words we use, and why we’re capable of doing that is one of the great and fantastic puzzles of our species. My guest today, Gary Lupyan, is one of my favorite sources of insights about that puzzle. Gary is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He studies language, particularly semantics, from a cognitive science perspective.

This conversation is about Gary’s point of view on language, words, and how we use them to both construct an understanding of the world and convey it to those around us. It’s not necessarily about endorsing a big sweeping theory. But to put together some of the pieces of what we know, what we don’t know, and what we may have misunderstood about language.

For example, take the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the idea that language determines thought—that if you were to speak a language other than the one(s) already you do, it could potentially lead to an entirely different way of seeing the world. And really, the big picture of Sapir-Whorf has been settled. The truth, honestly, is not that exciting. Language does determine thought—but only a little, and not in any ways that can’t be worked around. As Gary describes it, language is a system of categories. The language we speak can orient us toward different delineations of those categories with the world. But no language prevents us from seeing or comprehending any category outright. What’s really fascinating here is not the broadest aspects of the overarching theory, but the implications for specific cases. There are versions of this that we touch on a lot throughout this conversation.

But in terms of grand theories, a general theme emerged in our conversation of describing ideas about language on a spectrum: from Chomsky to Tomasello. Noam Chomsky you’ve probably heard of. He’s one of the most prolific scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a founding father of cognitive science, and to a large degree single-handedly determined the trajectory of linguistics for a period of almost thirty years. His most famous construction is "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It’s a totally legitimate English sentence, but one that expresses an illegitimate concept. It is representative of Chomsky’s focus on structure: he didn’t care about whether or not anyone had ever used that sentence; he just cared that it was possible to do so.

Michael Tomasello, on the other hand, takes a usage-based approach to language. Mike has been a guest on this show and is another cognitive scientist who has had a big impact on my own thinking. He believes the way to make sense of language is as a tool, one that allows us to communicate with the other members of our species. Structure is important. But how language is used in real-life social settings is more important. Spoiler alert: both Gary and I are much more sympathetic to Tomasello’s characterization of language than we are to Chomsky’s. Nonetheless, both theoretical approaches offer important insights about language and the way we humans use it.

The way I approached this conversation was essentially to ask Gary the biggest questions I could come up with about language: What’s it for? How do words get their meanings? What was protolanguage like? What parts of language are determined by critical periods? Then just see where he takes it from there.

Overall, this conversation was really a joy to have. We cover a lot of my favorite topics in cognitive science. Language is something I can get really worked up about, and it was fun to be able to talk about it with someone who is so much more knowledgeable than I am. For anyone who has ever used words or had words used on them, I think you’ll find something to enjoy in this conversation.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Gary’s picks:

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology
by Valentino Braitenberg (1984)
A cult classic: the perfect book for thinking about thinking.
Consciousness Explained
by Daniel Dennett (1991)
It’s not about getting all the details right; it’s about inspiring further thinking.
4 3 2 1: A Novel
by Paul Auster (2017)
The most ambitious effort by a novelist at the top of his game. For students of the epic conceptual masterpiece.

Honorable mention: My favorite book on Language, by Michael Tomasello, if you’re interested in the technical details of what we talked about:

Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

#95: The Value Landscape of Games—and How Companies Exploit It (feat. Adrian Hon)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:00:55 GMT

Right now, over the course of the next couple weeks, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion people will tune in to the same event.

This event is not a geopolitical one. Governmental regimes will not be decided based on its outcome. It is not an economic one. The winner will be financially compensated, but not in any way that will meaningfully affect the people of that country. National boundaries will not be redrawn as a result of this conflict. Ultimately, it comes down to twenty-two men, a ball, and who can put it put it in the opponents net the most times. It is the World Cup.

I don’t say this as someone who thinks the World Cup isn’t important. I think it’s fantastically important, and I count down to it every four years starting approximately three days after the final match. But many people believe that because it’s a game, because it doesn’t have overt real-world implications, that the World Cup doesn’t matter. Some people believe that because it’s a certain kind of game—one in which Europeans are usually dominant, not Americans—that it doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. And the reason it matters is that there’s no other event in the world that quite so many people from quite so many walks of life get worked up about. An election, a TV show, the publication of a book, a Nobel Prize—none of these things can compete with the sheer volume of interest generated by the World Cup. It may be a fiction. But it is one that a large proportion of the planet has bought into.

I think this dynamic is useful to pay attention to because this is also the way games work more generally. The points aren’t real in any sense but the number on the scoreboard. Yet people live and die by whether their team’s number is bigger than their opponent’s. They dedicate a large portion of their leisure time to following the accumulation of these points. Arguably, these kind of games are what humanity, in aggregate, cares about most.

This makes for a paradox of sorts. Even though they don’t have meaningful stakes outside the arena, games are designed to elicit concentrated doses of meaningful engagement. When you’re into a game, nothing feels like it matters quite as much as the outcome of that match. A defensible definition of a “game” is an event or set of actions which is fundamentally meaningless to which we have assigned meaning.

More specifically, this is the process of gamification, and the downsides of gamification is the topic of a recent book by my guest today. Adrian Hon is a game developer, and CEO of gaming company Six to Start. Adrian’s best known game is Zombies, Run! an app which incites runners to move faster by overlaying a plot of apocalyptic escape on their movements in the real-world. It has been downloaded over ten million times. Adrian’s an expert on the power of gamification, and his book is all about taking a skeptical look at how gamification has infiltrated our lives.

At the heart of Adrian’s observations is a tension. I think of it as the double-edged sword of gamification. By assigning points to vocab learning, or tracking the number of steps you’ve taken every day, gamification is able to take trivial, mundane actions, which we want to engage in but don’t find particularly appealing, and imbue them with meaning. This in turns gives us the motivation to accomplish those actions at a more efficient rate than we otherwise would.

Where this goes wrong is when the game itself—the points system, the badges, the leaderboard—becomes more meaningful than the original reason for wanting to perform this action. When we care more about the fictional story in a way that starts taking away from the real things we actually care about, that’s when gamification becomes a problem.

The thrust of Adrian’s book is that more and more companies are using the powerful techniques of gamification to get us to engage in their products far longer and in different ways than we might initially intend to. In other words, it’s commonplace for products and apps to be designed to exploit the most vulnerable aspects of our psychology. The psychological dynamics of games are increasingly becoming a part of our every day life, and we need people like Adrian Hon to help us get a handle on how they work.

Adrian’s new book is You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. It’s out now.

And if you still aren’t convinced that games matter, just look at the World Cup. Qatar spent 220 billion dollars (they could’ve bought Twitter five times over!) to host it. Why? Not because they’re going to recoup that money. Because it puts them right in the crosshairs of the world’s attention. From Ecuador, to Japan, to Germany, to Cameroon, to Serbia, to Brazil, to even a large part of the United States—everyone will be watching. And when that many people buy into the stakes of a game, there’s bound to be real-world consequences.

At the end of each episode, I ask my guest about three books that have most influenced their thinking. Here are Adrian’s picks:

Life: A User’s Manual
by Georges Perec (1978)
Astonishingly good: a lesson in how to use rules to produce interesting art.
Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East
by Amanda Podany (2022)
A look at the past not from the “big” events, but from the lives of everyday people. Stories reconstructed from ancient cuneiform texts.
The Futurological Congress
by Stanislaw Lem (1971)
The funniest of the sci-fi writers; this book is the most insightful look at what virtual reality will ultimately look like—which is to say, crazy.

Books by Adrian:

(I hope you find something good for your next read. If you happen to find it through the above links, I get a referral fee. Thanks!)

#94: Anxiety and the Hard Work of Being Human (feat. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary)

Cody Kommers — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 16:00:00 GMT

Anxiety. It is the only emotion my body believes is truly necessary for me to experience at three o’clock in the morning. To be sure I’d rather be sleeping. Usually how I respond to this experience is by listening to audiobooks or podcasts until I fall back asleep. I may get through more audiobooks that way, but it’s hard for me to look at that and imagine anxiety as anything other than a burden. I’ve recently been rethinking that relationship with anxiety.

And in particular, one book has helped me start to change some of my beliefs about how anxiety works and what a healthy relationship to it might look like. That book is called Future Tense by my guest today, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary.

Tracy is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College, where she directs the Emotion Regulation Lab. She’s spent the last couple decades as a psychologist studying anxiety, particularly in clinical populations and children. In her book, Tracy argues that though anxiety is unpleasant it actually plays a crucial role in our daily lives.

What exactly is the benefit of anxiety? Well, here’s how I’d put it:

The majority of our emotional lives is concerned with the present moment. Our brains are designed to get what we want right now, not to delay gratification until some unknown future date. The tension here is that while our emotions tend to orient us toward the moment, so much of our progress as individuals—as a civilization—depends on doing hard work now so our future selves or generations can enjoy its benefits.

Anxiety is the emotional bridge between our present selves and our future outcomes.

It is the emotion that makes us care about what rewards or punishments will receive in the future and motivates us to take action now, in order to put ourselves in the best position for success later on. Without that emotional bridge, it’s a lot easier to disregard what’s going to happen in the future. Anxiety is the only part of our present selves that has a true emotional investment in how our future selves will feel.

With this in mind, the appropriate relationship to have with anxiety is not to eliminate it, but to channel it. Anxiety can be incredibly motivating. And at a certain level, it’s healthy.

Throughout this conversation, we talk about the give and take of anxiety—but we also talk about how this fits into a larger conversation about how we’re so often taught in modern life that what we should do is eliminate bad things. We should take the presence of bad things as a negative signal. We should be able to remove inefficiency, unhappiness, and all sorts of negative outcomes and emotions from our lives. (In my essay on Heart of Darkness, I call refer to this as “Being loyal to the nightmare of your choosing.”)

But this is based on false model, an inaccurate story about how life works and what it means to be human. This is the story of anxiety that we cover in this conversation. Engaging with it and not running from it is part of the larger story of what Tracy called the “hard work of being human.”

Tracy’s book is “Future Tense: Why anxiety is good for you, even though it feels bad.” It is out now.

#93: Debate is a Battle of Beliefs — But Does It Have The Power To Change Them? (feat. Bo Seo)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 15:00:00 GMT

My episode last week featured a conversation with author David McCraney about what it takes to change someone’s mind on a big, important topic like religion, or abortion, or guns. And the overriding conclusion of McRaney’s research on the topic was that facts alone don’t change minds. From emotions and feelings to social dynamics, beliefs are embedded in a complex web of factors that rationality alone can do little to unwind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.

My guest this week is a two time world champion of debate. He’s coached debate for Harvard, as well as the Australian national team, and he’s currently a law student at Harvard. His name is Bo Seo, and his new book is called Good Arguments.

In the book, Bo tells the story of his own trajectory through the debate world and what he’s learned about the structure of successful debate along the way. And I wanted to talk to Bo about this because debate is a kind of idealized battle of beliefs. One side gives their perspective. The other side makes the opposing case. Whichever side’s argument is more convincing is declared the winner. And it’s this kind of idealized form of debate that many of us, Bo included, envision as this core principle of a working democracy. You let two opposing sides each present the best version of their case. Then the rest of us get to decide which one to believe. But it feels less and less like these kind of good arguments are happening in our society. Sometimes they don’t even feel possible anymore.

So in this conversation, I wanted to explore the mechanisms of formal debate. Why does competitive debate work the way it does? What happens if you change the formula? What might we be overlooking by trying to over-generalize the competitive debate format to the rest of society? And is debate the right model to use if our ultimate goal is changing minds? These questions are all especially worth asking to contrast with the decidedly non-debate models of mind-changing David McCraney and I had discussed last week.

#92: People Don't Often Change Their Minds on Big Topics. Why? (feat. David McRaney)

Listen now (79 min) | I often say that the second best thing to happen to me was deciding to become a Christian. And the first best thing was deciding not to be a Christian. I didn’t exactly grow up Christian, but I became a believer around age 12. I went to Christian school. Overall I took my religious beliefs really seriously. And to me, they felt like my own. A core part …

4 years ago · Cody Kommers

Bo’s book, Good Arguments, is out. Now you can find him on Twitter @HelloBoSeo or on his website helloboseo.com. If you enjoy this episode and want to stay up to date with the rest of my work, please consider subscribing to my Substack newsletter at againsthabit.com.

#92: People Don't Often Change Their Minds on Big Topics. Why? (feat. David McRaney)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 15:00:00 GMT

I often say that the second best thing to happen to me was deciding to become a Christian. And the first best thing was deciding not to be a Christian.

I didn’t exactly grow up Christian, but I became a believer around age 12. I went to Christian school. Overall I took my religious beliefs really seriously. And to me, they felt like my own. A core part of my identity as a Christian was that I was explicit about my beliefs. I didn’t inherit them from my parents, nor did they feel like I was required to put them on for public appearances, like some sort of mandatory uniform.

Since my school was religious, Christian doctrine was taught in the classroom. These students were all more or less believers as well, even if they were the mandatory uniform kind. We even had a teacher who taught us that evolution was not “just a theory” as one sometimes hears the Creationist argument framed, but a totally ludicrous idea that makes little rational sense when subjected to true unindoctrinated scrutiny.

Then in college, I started to modify some beliefs, all of which traditionally are not held by Christians, but all of which I felt were compatible with a biblical world view.

The first was evolution. This one was easy. Even if you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, if God hasn’t created the sun in the moon yet, then who’s to say that a day is only 24 hours long? These seven days of creation in Genesis could have taken place over billions of years, guided by the hand of God. So evolution was fairly easy to add into my worldview.

The second was determinism. This one is also pretty easily squared with Christianity, maybe even a more conservative interpretation of the Bible. In theology, the debate is often presented as Calvinism versus Arminianism. Calvinists believe in predestination. God, being all-knowing, knows ahead of time, who is going to heaven and who isn’t. He’s God. He can’t not know. The Arminianists, by contrast, believe in free will. God, being all loving, can’t create some people just to send them to hell and therefore shields his otherwise all-knowingness from whether or not a person’s heart will turn toward him. Arminianism sounds nice, but… come on. Calvinism is clearly the more defensible theological position. So when I came to believe that free will is an illusion, it didn’t pose any issue to my faith.

The third and most difficult to square was physicalism. This is the philosophical position that all physical events have physical causes. In other words, there’s nothing in the physical universe that needs some outside force to explain it. In particular, there is no immaterial soul that explains the essence of human behavior.

Whenever I told Christians about this belief, they were usually taken aback. But what about resurrection? How would that work without an immaterial soul — if we were all just atoms, cells, and chemistry? To which I would usually reply that the logistics of resurrection were indeed mysterious under physicalist assumptions, but it was no less mysterious than dualistic assumptions. Just less familiar. For instance, how does an immaterial soul for which there is no evidence of interaction with the human brain and is not necessary for a complete explanation of human behavior, contain the essence of a person in any meaningful way? How for that matter would such a soul migrate from our own physical universe into some alternate universe of heaven, or hell, while still retaining some resemblance to the essence of its original host? It may have been a nonstandard belief, but I didn’t view it as one that created new problems, just reframed old ones.

And so for a while, I held onto these three additional beliefs, as well as my belief in the core tenets of biblical Christianity about Jesus being our savior. The change in beliefs themselves was not enough for me to disregard Christianity as a whole. There was another piece that was necessary.

I’d always been a part of Christian groups, and throughout high school that association was pretty strong. But in college, the Christian group I joined never quite seemed to click for me. I spent a lot of time with the people in the group. I even lived on an apartment floor where everyone was a member of this group, but I always felt like I was on the outside. In fact, on a one on one level, I felt much more connected to my friends who weren’t believers.

The main exception was my girlfriend at the time who was herself close to everyone in that inner circle. Then one day she broke up with me. The reason cited was insufficient Jesus-mindedness, which really offended me at the time, because I considered myself very Jesus-minded. But it was my first major breakup and it hit me really hard. I found it difficult to let go. On two separate occasions I asked her to take me back (and I doubt her version of the story employs the verb ‘ask’ in quite the same manner). But eventually it became clear we were not getting back together.

That was January 21st, 2013. I remember that date because it was the day I decided I would no longer be a Christian.

I officially disbelieved in the Jesus narrative that I’d held as a defining core belief for so many years. At the time I figured that even if I was going to be a Christian in the long run, I’d be a more effective one knowing what it was truly like to live life as an unbeliever. Either way, it was time to take these new philosophical perspectives I had adopted as my central beliefs, rather than the teachings of the Bible.

The thing that stands out to me about that story looking back was that it wasn’t the intellectual change that ultimately flipped my religious belief. It was the social change. Most people I grew up with who remained Christian — their friends are all Christian, their parents and siblings are Christian. There’s a huge social cost to altering that belief. But after my breakup, I found myself no longer having to face that social cost. I had removed the social barriers, and I could make the decision based on my own intellectual conclusions. From this experience, I learned that, in general, people don’t form their beliefs for intellectual reasons. They form them for social reasons.

And that is one of the central themes of the latest book from my guest today, David McRaney. It is called How Minds Change. In it, David looks at the cutting scientific edge in the field of psychology as it relates to belief change. He follows some stories of belief change much more dramatic than my own. For example, ex members of the Westboro Baptist church and formerly prominent conspiracy theorists.

The book was a ton of fun to read and I highly recommend checking it out. Even as someone who reads quite a bit of non-fiction on cognitive and social psychology, there was a lot in there that I hadn’t encountered before and a handful of reframings which really put old subjects into new light for me.

#91: How Technology Shapes Our Tastes — in Music and More (feat. Nick Seaver)

Cody Kommers — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, my colleague Adam Mastroianni published an essay on what he called "cultural oligopoly." An increasingly smaller number of artists create an increasingly larger percentage of what we watch, read, and listen to. Mastroianni presents data showing that through the year 2000 only about twenty-five percent of a single year's highest grossing movies were spinoffs, franchises, or sequels. Now it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 75%. He has similar data for hit TV shows, books, and music. Why is this happening?

My guest today is Nick Seaver, who is a cultural anthropologist at Tufts University. And for the last decade or so, Nick has studied the social processes underlying the creation of music recommender systems, which form the algorithmic basis for companies like Spotify and Pandora. I've admired Nick's work for a long time. And as an anthropologist, he is interested not necessarily in the nitty gritty details of how these algorithms are constructed, but rather in who is constructing them and what these people believe they are doing when they make decisions about how the algorithms ought to work.

The core of Nick's work centers around taste, and how these companies and their algorithms subtly shape not only what we consume, but what we like. When Nick started this line of work in the early 2010s, it really wasn't clear how big of an impact these recommender systems would have on our society. Now, his expertise gives an evermore incisive look at the central themes of many large societal conversations around the content we consume and our everyday digital existence. But I came into this conversation with Mastroianni's question at the top of my mind, and I think Nick's research can give a crucial insight, at least into one piece of the puzzle.

One of Nick's papers relates an ethnographic study of music recommender system engineers. In the interest of protecting the identity of his informants, he gives the company a fictional name, but it bears conspicuous resemblance to Spotify. As a naive observer, one might think that the way these engineers think about their audience is in terms of demography: this kind of person likes this kind of music. If they can figure out the kind of person you are, they can recommend music that you'll probably like. But that turns out not to be the dimension of largest variance.

Instead, Nick introduces the concept of “avidity.” Essentially, how much effort is a listener willing to put in to find new music? This turns out to be the first distinction that these engineers make between listeners. And it forms a pyramid. On the bottom you have what one of his informants called the “musically indifferent.” This makes up the majority of listeners. Their ideal listening experience is “lean-back.” They want to press play, then leave the whole thing alone. It is a passive listening experience — no skipping songs, no wondering what other tracks might be on the album. From there, it goes from “casual” and “engaged” listeners to the top of the pyramid, which is “musical savant.” These are “lean-in” listeners who are taking an active role in discovering new and different kinds of music.

“The challenge,” Nick writes, “is that all of these listeners wanted different things out of a recommender system.” Quoting one of his informants, codename Peter, he says: “in any of these four sectors, it's a different ball game in how you want to engage them.” As Nick summarizes it: “what worked for one group might fail for another.”

Nick continues here: "as Peter explained to me, lean-back listeners represented the bulk of the potential market for music recommendation in spite of their relatively low status in the pyramid. There were more of them. They were more in need of the kind of assistance recommenders could offer and successfully capturing them could make 'the big bucks' for a company."

Nick relates the slightly more forthcoming perspective of another engineer, codename Oliver: "it's hard to recommend shitty music to people who want shitty music," he said, expressing the burden of a music recommendation developer caught between two competing evaluative schemes: his own idea about what makes good music and what he recognizes as the proper criteria for evaluating a recommender system.

In the course of our conversation, Nick and I cover not only his studies of music recommender systems, but also his more recent studies taking an anthropological approach to attention.

We tend to think of attention as this highly individualized process. For example, of gazing into the screen of your phone or turning your head to identify the source of an unexpected noise. But attention is also a social and cultural process. We attend collectively to certain stories, certain memes, certain ideas. What exactly the connection is between these two forms of attention is not obvious. And Nick's current line of work is an attempt to draw it out.

But the larger theme here is that music recommender systems are one battle in the larger war for our collective attention. What Spotify, Netflix, and Twitter all have in common is that their success is proportional to the extent to which they can dominate our attention. This is known in Silicon Valley as the idea of "persuasive technology." And one way to begin to understand the origins of cultural oligopolies starts with Nick's observation about avidity. The vast majority of listeners or viewers tend to go with the default option with which they're presented. Another way of putting it is that their preferred mode is habitual autopilot.

While recommender systems make up just one part of this content ecosystem. This principle remains stable across its many different layers. The more we go with our habitual default options, the more control these platforms have over us. The more we rely on these companies to define our tastes for us, the more homogenous our tastes will become.

Nick's forthcoming book is “Computing Taste.” It comes out in December 2022. Keep an eye out for it.

#90: Stephen Kosslyn on How We Conceptualize the World

Cody Kommers — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 03:00:09 GMT

This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Stephen Kosslyn is a foundational figure in the field of cognitive science. It is only fitting that he is the final guest in my Cognitive Revolution interview series, before I transition into a new line of content which I’m calling “Against Habit.” I remember in my introduction to my introduction to cognitive science course—which helped set me on the track I’m on today—learning about the mental imagery debate between Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn. Kosslyn argued that the mental images we can conjure in our minds are indeed pictorial. Pylyshyn argued they merely felt that way; in fact, they’re closer to linguistic descriptions. It was fun to talk to Professor Kosslyn about his experience in cognitive science, how he’s used his cognitive scientific experience to do more applied work in recent years, and how cognitive scientists should think about novels and fictional rendering of human behavior. Stephen is currently president of Active Learning Sciences, Inc. and has served as chief academic officer for cutting edge educational institutions such as Foundry College and Minerva Schools. He was previously the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James and Dean of Social Science at Harvard University.

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

#28: Steven Pinker on Career Uncertainty

Listen now (72 min) | This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts…

6 years ago · Cody Kommers

I’d love to know what you thought of this episode! Just reply to this email or send a note directly to my inbox. Feel free to tweet me @CodyKommers. You can also leave a rating for the show on iTunes (or another platform). This is super helpful, as high ratings are one of the biggest factors platforms look at in their recommender system algorithms. The better the ratings, the more they present the show to new potential listeners.

#89: Tom Griffiths on Formalizing the Mind

Cody Kommers — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 07:32:11 GMT

Tom Griffiths is Professor Psychology and Computation Science at Princeton University, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. Tom uses algorithms from AI to inform his work as a psychologist—testing the ways in which hims align with or deviate from the standards set by the AI models. He’s a central figure in this field, and in this episode we go deep on how it first occurred to Tom to use computers to study the mind—as well as where this work has taken him over the years. Tom recently released a podcast series through Audible, co-hosted with Brian Christian, called Algorithms at Work. I finished it recently and can confidently say it’s one of the best podcast series I’ll listen to all year!

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

#80: Sam Gershman on the Structure of Cognitive Revolutions

Listen now (76 min) | This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts…

4 years ago · Cody Kommers

#88: Leyla Isik on Combining the Rigorous with the Realistic

Cody Kommers — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 16:07:24 GMT

Leyla Isik is Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She did her PhD at MIT with Nancy Kanwisher and Tommy Poggio. Leyla’s research uses state-of-the-art techniques in neuroimaging and computational modeling to study how people interpret real scenes. For instance, her studies have scanned the people of participants as they watch scenes from the TV show Sherlock. This is a crucial frontier of neuroscientific research, as it takes our most incisive tools for understanding the brain and liberates them from the confines of contrived experiments. Leyla and her research lab well-positioned to introduce fundamental insights about brain and behavior in the coming decades.

Like this episode? Here’s another one to check out:

#57: Nancy Kanwisher on Finding Your Niche

Listen now (68 min) | This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts…

5 years ago · Cody Kommers