Making Sense with Sam Harris - #299 — Steps in the Right Direction

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Russ Roberts about decision-making and the nature of moral progress. They discuss the shortcomings of economics as a science, the power of books, the difference between "wild" and "tame" problems, Darwin’s embarrassing thoughts about the value of marriage, the utility of decision of analysis, incommensurate goods, free riding, counterfactuals, how the decisions we make change us, the difficulty of predicting future experience, changing moral norms, Effective Altruism, free speech, whether we are making moral progress, social media, truth vs comfort, problems with consequentialism, rule-based consequentialism, free will, meditation, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Russ Roberts. Russ is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He also hosts the award-winning weekly podcast Econ Talk, which I highly recommend.

And he's the author of five books, including How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, and most recently, Wild Problems, A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. And that is the topic of today's conversation. We discuss the shortcomings of economics as a science, the power of books, the difference between wild and tame problems,

Darwin's embarrassing attempt to rationally decide whether to get married, the utility of techniques like decision analysis, incommensurate goods, free-riding, counterfactuals, how the decisions we make change us, how bad we are at predicting future experience, changing moral norms, effective altruism, free speech, whether we are in fact making moral progress, social media, truth versus comfort, problems with consequentialism, versus comfort, problems with consequentialism, free will, meditation, and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this one. I hope you do as well. And now I bring you Russ Roberts. I am here with Russ Roberts. Russ, thanks for joining me. Great to be with you.

So I've been looking forward to this. You are a truly OG podcaster. You got into the game earlier than I did. You have a great podcast, Econ Talk, and you have a wonderful new book, Wild Problems, A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, which is a great audiobook, too. I think I consumed it all as audio on a few long walks, and it's especially good for that. You were a great company for those hours. So thank you for what you're doing, and perhaps you can summarize your intellectual and academic background that you're bringing to those projects. Oh, well, thanks for the kind words about the podcast and the book. I should warn my podcast listeners that the audio book is not read by me, which they have complained about, but in a friendly way.

I was disappointed, but it's actually, it's still good. So it's... Thank you. I'm glad to hear it. My journey is a little bit off the beaten track, but I think the more you talk to people, the more you find out that there is no beaten track. But I started off as an academic economist, trained at the University of Chicago, taught at Rochester, Stanford, UCLA, Washington University in St. Louis and George Mason,

worked for a number of think tanks, including the Hoover Institution that I'm still affiliated with. But somewhere in there, I got interested in communicating economics to a general audience. So I wrote a few novels that teach economics. I wrote a couple of rap videos, started a podcast, wrote an animated poem. And strangely enough, about a year and a half ago, I got asked to be the president of a college in Jerusalem, Shalem College, Israel's only liberal arts college with a core curriculum in philosophy, history, great books, great texts, and decide to move to Israel and be the president of a college. So it's an unusual journey. I used to be really

interested in economics. I'm still a little interested in it, but part of the reason I'm the president of this college is I got a lot more interested in philosophy, the life well lived, and education more generally, which is quite a hard thing to do well, it turns out. Yeah. So did you have a deep connection to Israel already? Had you spent a lot of time there, or was this truly a blind adventure? I'm Jewish. I've been to Israel

before I moved here, probably a dozen times, maybe more. I've always loved visiting. I never planned to live here. It was not a life for some Jews. It's a dream to move to Israel and become a citizen. It was not our plan, but we jumped anyway when this opportunity came along to be President of Shalom College. Did you have any Hebrew at that point?

A little bit. A little bit. Katsat. Now I have a little bit more. My wife is semi-fluent in a conversational way. I'm embarrassing, but trying to get better every day nice my college all of our courses almost everyone's taught in hebrew so that's even though i'd like to sit in on say the plato and aristotle class or homer or shakespeare i wouldn't get that

much out of them unfortunately maybe next year we'll. Right. So before we jump into the book, which raises a lot of topics that are kind of core to my interest, you just said a few things about your perhaps waning interest in economics and the difficulty of charting a path through education that retrospectively makes a ton of sense. Perhaps you can give me some of your thoughts on the limits of economics as a discipline. I think many of us who are lay consumers of its products tend to marvel at how unlike a science it often seems to be. And... Sam, don't tell anybody.

often seems to be. And... Sam, don't tell anybody. So give me the kitchen confidential version of economics, but perhaps also you can say something about how you view the enterprise of education at this point and its challenges. So economics is very mathematical as it's taught at the graduate level and it's taught as if it were a science. It's the science of human behavior in graduate economics and in undergraduate economics. I think that's the wrong word. It certainly is a formal way of thinking about human behavior, and the essence of that formal way of thinking is maximization. We're trying to get the most out of our money or our time.

We're trying to get the most out of our money or our time. I think one of the misconceptions people have about economics is they assume it's only about the stock market or GDP or unemployment or interest rates. It is about many other things. It is about how we spend our time. It is about the power of leisure. And it's about the fact that if I choose one thing, I can't choose something else. So in many ways, economics is the study of choice, choice under constraints. I don't have an infinite amount of money. I don't have an infinite amount of time. And in particular, economists are interested in both individual choices and then how choices aggregate in what are called markets. It's a funny word because we think of a market as like a farmer's market or a stock market. But when economists talk about markets, they mean the complex dance between buyers and sellers in, say, housing or restaurants and the prices that emerge from that process. And understanding those things and thinking about them thoughtfully is a tremendous craft, and it's very valuable, and it's very useful. But economists are kind of imperialists. One of my professors, George Stigler, said, there's only one social science, and we are its practitioners.

Not the most humble view. I'm a big fan of George, but he was a very funny man in our profession. But what he meant by that was, the other social sciences don't really have any models. They're just sort of, they have some theories, but they're not rigorous. Whereas economists, they can predict, they can do sociology, they can do anthropology, they can do psychology. And I was trained that way. And it's a powerful toolkit for thinking about human behavior, but it has shortcomings. There are many things it's not very good at looking at. And as I've gotten older, I've started to think that those things that it's not very good at looking at. And as I've gotten older, I've started to think that those things that it's not very good at looking at are the things that most of us care the most about.

Our sense of belonging, the tribes we're in, the kinfolk we have, the sense of dignity that we crave, the feeling that we matter, that we're important, that people pay attention to us. These are the things that, with respect, these are the things that we're important, that people pay attention to us. These are the things that, with respect, these are the things that we care about. These are the things that bring deep satisfaction, not just happiness or fun or pleasure. When an economist talks about pleasure, they mean everything. They mean the ice cream cone. They mean a good job well done. They mean a great vacation. The problem is that calculus of adding up pleasures and taking away pains,

which is a fundamental utilitarian calculus, I think has limitations when applied to the things I was talking about earlier, family, love, belonging, transcendence, the things that we care about deeply. I don't think the tools of maximization fit very well in there. I think we need other tools, other ways of thinking about it. So as I got older, I got less interested in what economists' tools tell us, and more interested in the parts of the world and our lives that economics has less to say about. I discovered Adam Smith's other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is a book about ethical behavior, the life well lived, why we do decent things to one another rather than merely be selfish and grasping. He says in there that the pursuit of money and wealth is a fool's game and will tarnish

your soul. So those kinds of more philosophical thoughts became more interesting to me. The other thing that I think is related, which I think you're hinting at when you asked about education, is that, you know, most education as it's practiced in the United States and around the world is the passing on of information and knowledge. And we live in a world where we have tremendous access to information and knowledge via Wikipedia, via YouTube, via podcasts. And what I think education should be about is the kindling of the fire that is the human mind. That's Plutarch's line, but he didn't say it in English. The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. I think most education around the world, high school, college, and even

sometimes in graduate school, there's a lot of filling of vessels and not much kindling of a fire. And I've gotten interested in the question of how do you allow someone to explore a great text? You can read a great book on your own, and you read it in the company of other people, and with a great teacher to guide you, you're changed, you're transformed when it's done correctly. And that process, which is sadly missing in most undergraduate education, I think, around the world, is magic. magic. And when you've experienced it, most of us never did as an undergraduate, but when you do experience it, it's not just sharing ideas with other people, it's sharing ideas in a thoughtful way under the guidance of another great mind, the teacher. And that gives you superpowers, superpowers of how to read, how to think, how to talk with other people respectfully.

I think it's the essence of what I think of as real education. It's what we try to do here at Shillam College. We don't always succeed, but that's the gold standard. Yeah, and I often think about reading a great book as a conversation, even though it is in one direction. As you point out, if you're having a larger conversation with a great teacher and your own colleagues about the book, it definitely enriches the experience. But yeah, that's the wonderful thing about books. We have some very smart and in many cases wise persons side of a conversation that they have taken, in many cases, years to prepare. So we're getting the best of their thoughts and we're getting them across the centuries. It's really amazing. I mean, what an amazing technology a book is. How strange, though, that even though it's

one-sided, when you read it 10 years later, the second time, they're saying something different. A really great book is a conversation in that sense. And Agnes Callard, the philosopher, said to me, when I had her on EconTalk, she said, great teaching is teaching you how to talk to dead people. And that's the magic of a book. It's extraordinary. And there are a lot of really talented dead people worth a book. It's extraordinary. And there are a lot of really talented dead people worth talking to.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about your book. Again, the title is Wild Problems. And you distinguish wild problems from tame ones. Maybe that's a good place to start. What are wild problems and what are tame ones? tame ones, maybe that's a good place to start. What are wild problems and what are tame ones? Tame ones are ones that we can find solutions to using data and algorithm evidence. What movie do I want to watch Saturday night? You get a pretty good idea of what might be interesting to me from

recommendations that I would get online. If I want to get from Boston to Chicago and be traffic as much as possible, Waze or Google Maps will help me get there. I want to get to the moon. It's a tame problem. It's not an easy problem, but we know how to do it. It's a certain set of steps. There's a recipe. life, recipes are the way to go. An algorithm is the way to go. And we're spoiled. We have lots of those techniques for many of the challenges we face in life. We have websites to give us recommendations. We have the wisdom of crowds to help us with recommendations even more richly. And we'd like most of life to be that way. And most of life is, actually. It's a remarkable time to be alive with the tools that we have for those kind of problems. The problem is there's a handful of problems in our lives that aren't like that, where data and evidence are of very little value. And the standard decision-making tools, I argue, are not helpful, in fact, can mislead us. These are problems where we don't have a lot of data, either because things aren't measurable,

or the people who have access to the experience can't share it easily. It's hard to put those things into words. Or after I make a decision one way or the other, I'm going to be a different person. I'm going to be changed. And so it's even a question of whether rationality is well-defined. So these kind of problems are whether to get married, who to marry, whether to have children, how many, where to live,

what kind of career to pursue. Now, in some of these problems, you can get some information. You can get some information about the average salary in a field, for example. It may or may not apply to you. You can certainly ask people if they're happy if they're married or happy if they have children. But I think those are very thin, unbelievably thin and sterile ways of thinking about these kind of choices. And as I suggest in the subtitle, these are the decisions that define us. They turn out to tell us both who we are and who we can be. And I think for many of these decisions, trying to make a cost-benefit analysis, which is the economist's central element of the economist's

toolkit, is, I think, the wrong way to go. The most important pieces of that cost-benefit analysis are hard to measure, can't be entered thoughtfully, and we're often deceived by the ease with which we can quantify certain things, and that often pushes us to ignore others. I make the analogy of the person coming home from the party, can't find their keys, they've lost them. Someone comes to help out. Finally, the person helping says, are you sure this is where you lost them?

No, I don't think it is, but this is where the light's best. And I think it's under the streetlight. No, I don't think it is, but this is where the light's best. And I think it's under the street light. And I think a lot of times we're seduced by where the light is best, and often the know, the questions about measurement and aggregating utility. You know, I know you have concerns about the limits of utilitarianism or consequentialism, as I usually refer to it. And, you know, I share some of those, or at least I acknowledge the veracity of some of those concerns. But I think there might be some daylight between us philosophically there. And all of this has implications for other things you and I have both talked about in other contexts like effective altruism, which is in vogue at the moment. But before we get down to something like bedrock, let's stay at a level above that and just kind of around the pragmatics of just how people make decisions, how they can make decisions, what is worth thinking about, and how, as you point out, so much of our recipes for a good life don't really prove that useful when you're trying to weigh up the pros and cons

of a major decision that defines us. And as an example, in your book, you spend a lot of time looking at Darwin's certainly comical, but in the end, somewhat silly checklist for deciding the pros and cons of marriage. Perhaps you can describe what Darwin was up to there, and we can use that as a jumping off point. Sure. So Darwin was 29 years old. He'd taken his trip on the Beagle, and he was thinking about settling down. So he wasn't sure it was a good idea, and being a rational person, he made a list of the pros and cons of marriage. It's a really embarrassing list. For starters, at one point he says a wife would be better than a dog anyway to come home to.

A very low bar. One can be thankful he wasn't test piloting this on Twitter, because we would not have had the origin of species. Exactly, he'd be done. It's a low bar even in the 19th century. So that part, there's a little bit of it that's embarrassing. When you look over the list, and it's a little bit disorganized, I reorganized it a bit in the book. When you look at it, the negatives of marriage are both more numerous and more serious. The positives are things like someone to come home to, maybe companionship. The negatives are things like stuck with their relatives, socializing with them, the expenses of childbearing and childrearing, the tragedies of losing children to illness,

won't have time to do your science, won't make an impact on the world. It seems like a no-brainer. When you look at the list, if someone brought this list to you and said, what do you think? You'd say, well, obvious choice, don't get married. You risk not becoming one of the greatest scientists of all time in return for what he calls female chit-chat, He calls female chit-chat, another less than honorable summary. So despite that, he then scribbles a, we have his journal, so we have this in his own hand. At the end, he writes this stream of consciousness narrative about how horrible it would be to be returning it alone to his dingy apartment at night. All of his rational pro-con list falls apart. He just finally says, I'm going to marry, marry, marry, exclamation point after

each one, QED. That, you know, quadrisemistratum, that was to be proved. It's over. It's like a math proof. Got to get married. And there's a puzzle there. Why would the decision that he clearly favors in the sober light of day, which is to not marry because it's going to be likely not worth it to him. And by the way't get married, but Darwin does. And I think it's about six months later, he marries his cousin, which is amusing because it means that the relatives he was worried about are his own relatives. So anyway. Why? What was he thinking? You know, the standard answer would be, well, he just made an emotional decision. He went with his gut. I don't think that's what's going on. When you look at his list, and it would be true of anybody making such a list, and actually I opened the book with a conversation with a friend who was trying to decide whether to have a child, and he and his wife made a list of the pros and cons, and he told me after they

made the list, they couldn't decide. There were so many pros and so many cons that were so seemingly evenly weighted. And certainly Darwin and my friend, I would suggest, don't know much about marriage or childbearing, childrearing, childraising. Certainly in the case of marriage, there's nothing in Darwin's list about love, sharing a journey through life together, the ups and downs of that emotional experience. He didn't have any access to it. How could he know about those things? Now, he could read novels. I don't know if he's a big reader of novels, but his married friends, if he had any, which he probably did, he could see them socializing. But most people who are married can't explain the specialness of staying with somebody for decades. And by the way, it's

not all rosy, of course. Certainly, you can't appreciate the upside, but there's also sometimes a very bad downside. All of that is veiled from most of us before we make a decision about whether to get married or not, or whether to have children, or whether to move to Israel, or whether to become a chemist rather than a lawyer or a poet. And so how do you think about that? I mean, how do you, when you confront that, and I think what Darwin confronted was, I see myself, I have always seen myself as a married person, as a father. And so he took a leap. He married, he had many children. Tragically, some of them died, but he had a very good marriage most of the time. Towards the end, he had some issues with religion and his wife. His wife was

very religious. But for most of their life, they had a blessed marriage, a wonderful marriage. And ironically, one of his favorite things, she did what, I don't know if I mentioned this, it was where they might have to leave London. What if she doesn't like London? She didn't like London. They had to move to the countryside. Turned out he liked it. He liked coming home or spending time with her at night. She would read to him. So many of the things that make marriage and a shared life with another person special, he didn't know about, but something in him knew that it was worth making a leap over, even though it didn't appear to be a good choice.

And I get many examples in the book of people from the world of science, math, very analytical areas, where these kind of decisions, they make what appears to be an irrational decision. And I would suggest it's not irrational, and neither are they making a decision with their gut. What they're doing is they're recognizing, as I think we all can and should and sometimes do, that these decisions are about more than just how happy will I be day-to-day with another person or with a child or living in a different place or in a different kind of career. Those are not the only things we care about. Those day-to-day concerns, which I call narrow utilitarianism,

they're not irrelevant. They matter. They're what economists tend to focus on. They are only, though, part of the story. The rest of the story is the overarching narrative of our identity, our sense of self, of who we are and the virtues of those identities, and who we could become, not just who we are now. You know, in the economist model, you have a set of preferences, and you try to get the most out of them. The idea that you might want to change your preferences, that they might be unattractive or immoral is rarely, it's not hardly ever considered. But in real life, we should consider those things. We should consider who we want to be, who we want to become.

And those choices we're talking about set us on those paths. And so it's about more than just the day-to-day pleasure or pain. I argue in the book, I don't know if you're married, Sam. I don't know if you have children. Yeah, we have both. I'm married. I have have children. I'm married. I have four children. It is very possible that the number of days as a parent that are positive are smaller than the number of days as a parent that are

negative. There are a lot of bad days. Things go wrong with your kids. They have challenges. They have trauma. You can't help them. They are not just like you. give you heartache but they also give you joy and they are amazing and they give you a taste of what it's like for your own parents they connect you to your own parents in ways that are unimaginable they create a future for you you couldn't have otherwise they're not it's not for everyone it might not even be a good idea for everyone it's certainly not but it's not just about the number of good days versus the number of bad days. There's so much more at stake there. And I think people realize that. Okay. Well, as much as I wanted to hover above it, I'm feeling the gravity of the issues you

have with consequentialism pulling us inward. So there was a lot in there. Before we truly slip over the event horizon, maybe I just want to ask you about a tool. I think this is properly in the economics toolkit. I learned it in the engineering economic systems department when I was an undergraduate at Stanford. Actually, you say you taught at Stanford. What years were you there? I was there 85 to 87. Okay. And then a lot of summers visiting. Interesting. That's exactly when I was there.

That's when I was a freshman in 85. Taking economics? So I took it. Did you know Ron Howard? It's funny you mention Ron Howard. I had a story from my book that didn't get into the book, but he has some very, very... I heard a story about him from one of his students that I almost put in the book. I could share it if you want. Yeah, I'd love to hear it. certainty. And that's the power of an algorithm, an equation, an app. It tells us what to do, and then I'll make the best decision. We have such a craving for that. Uncertainty makes us

uneasy. And somebody told me a story about Ron Howard that I thought was really extraordinary, which was, I heard the story from the student. I contacted Professor Howard, and he gave me his version. And what I'm going to give you now is some, might be one or the other or a mix, but the point is the same in both of them, which is that on his exams, with each question that you answered, you had to assign a probability that you were right. And the higher the probability that you assigned to a question that you got right, the more points you got. And the higher the probability that you assigned to a question that you got right, the more points you got. And the higher the probability that you assigned to a question you got wrong, you'd lose points. And he told people, he said, don't put 100% certainty next to any answer. Because if you put 100% that you're 100%

certain and it's wrong, you will get a score of negative infinity. And negative infinity cannot be outweighed by your score on the final. If your midterm's a negative infinity, you fail the class. So that was the story. So he gives the exam, and some people, I don't know how many, put 100% on a question that they got wrong. And their lives were, who knows what happened to them. I don't know how much he actually enforced it. He did tell me that at some places where he taught, they didn't allow it. They found it cruel to give students, confront them with this decision. It hardly seems cruel to me. And what's powerful about it, of course, is that this student who told me the story, had had the class 20, 30, 40 years ago,

and it says, I've never forgotten that because it taught me that you should never be 100% certain about anything. And that is, I believe, a very, very deep lesson in life and very, very useful to be aware that some uncertainty cannot be resolved. Certainly, you're not, shouldn't be 100% sure of anything. And so that's my Ron Howard story. But I never knew him when I was at Stanford. Oh, yeah, it was too bad. He's really, I have lost touch with him mostly, although I did interview him for my book, Lying, maybe, I don't know, six or seven years ago. But yeah, he had a great effect on me ethically more than anything else because he taught this course that he called the Ethical Analyst. I think it was a graduate seminar but it was just an investigation, just a conversation among 10 or 12 of us for a quarter about whether or not

it's ever ethical to lie, right? And you very quickly push past the Anne Frank scenario, and then you're talking about white lies, really, for the rest of the course. And, you know, I and it really seemed virtually everyone else in that class came out of the black box of that course, you know, really changed with respect to the ethics of lying. And I wrote a short book titled Line that was really my version of what I learned when I was 18 in that class. But he also taught and really pioneered this area of, I don't know what it's considered now, if it's operations research or I don't know where you find it on the shelf, but it's called decision analysis. And it's a technique of integrating all the information one has about a decision and all of one's probabilistic intuitions in a systematic way so that you can make what purports to be a more rational decision than just doing what Darwin did with the pros over here and the cons over there, and you sort of stare at your piece of parchment, in his case, for a while, and then you throw up your hands and you make a gut decision,

integrating everything you've been ruminating over. So what Howard purported to be able to do, and the experience of using the tool, I almost never do it, but back in the day when I was studying it and trying to apply it to my life, it did seem better than just the pros and cons. It seemed like it allowed you to systematize your intuitions. to systematize your intuitions. And especially, he demonstrated this a lot in class, that we're far better at making probabilistic judgments than we think we are. You know, like if you ask a class of undergraduates,

you know, how many McDonald's franchises are there on earth at the moment? And you get a, I mean, certainly you see something like the wisdom of the crowd if you aggregate those guesses, but most people are pretty good. I mean, they're not orders of magnitude off. And it's true for probabilistic judgments about things that are going to happen in the future. And you can get better at doing that. So I guess this is a long way. And I actually don't remember whether Ron did that on any of the tests I took for him, but that's a very wrong thing to have done with infinite negative outcome. But it was an experience of feeling like we could, in some perfect world,

get better at aggregating our complete state of information. And thinking about this from the other side, as a counterpoint to what you just suggested. I mean, what else do we have to go on but the totality of information we have and think we have about what's likely to happen on the basis of taking one path or another? And couldn't we, at the end of the day, also build into our forward-looking model of what's likely to happen, the probability that we'll be changed by the decision itself. And this is a topic I want to explore with you. As you point out, certain decisions change us. What's so silly about Darwin's list is that he's so completely blind to this prospect and really this certainty that once you're married,

things are going to seem different. You're not able in this list to value things the way you will value them once you have this wife you love. Anyway, I gave you a lot there, but what do you think about decision analysis or some other as yet uninvented tool for leveraging our rationality more than we do at present? I think about emails I get, ads that pop up on my webpages about, try this. This is the path to being more productive. This is the path to being more fit. This is the path to being more fit. The seven-minute workout. You ever click on the seven-minute workout, Sam? Yeah, yeah. You ever look at it?

I've seen, that was popularized by the New York Times. Yeah, I tried it for a while. Separated my shoulder doing one of the dips on my piano bench. It was a mistake. But the bigger mistake was thinking, you know, wouldn't it be awesome if there were a seven-minute workout and I wouldn thinking, you know, wouldn't it be awesome if there were seven-minute workout and I wouldn't have to really like work? And studies show that the seven minutes are enough, I'm sure, somewhere. There might even be peer-reviewed. There's data and evidence that shows that it's true. So there's a lot of things to say to what you said. I'm not sure I remember everything I want to comment on, but I'd start with the fact that our brains don't always process things so well. And we often look for the easy way

out or the thing that we already have decided, but we tell ourselves a story, you know, the narrative fallacy, and we will find data to convince us that we made the right decision. And we'll ignore the data that's on the other side. And I think being aware of that's very powerful. Having said that, use data when you can. I'm not anti-data. I'm not anti-proconlist. It's a good idea. It's just that the point of Darwin's story is that if you are not careful, you will leave out some of the most important things. If you have a really good decision-making process and you remember those things and you seek counsel, which is always a good idea. Ask a friend who you trust and who can be honest with you to help you think about what should be thought about. That's very powerful. It's not unimportant. And then perhaps to even think about how you ought

to weigh the different things. But I think the other part that I'd comment on is that the idea that I can imagine what my life will be like in the future as a married person or as a parent or as a resident of a different place or in a different kind of career, that's an illusion. That's not like, well, I'll do the best I can. No, it's an illusion. You can't get very good at it. And here's the other hard point. The things that will come to mind are often the things that are more tangible, and the intangible things are going to be hard to remember. That's one good reason why you should seek counsel. Certainly, a good friend can help you think of those intangible things.

But at the root of part of the critique that I'm trying to make in the book, which has a critique of economics under the surface, is pointing out that many pleasures are not commensurate. And to think that I can tot them up, I can just pile them up and then subtract away the pains, ignores the fact that there are certain issues where that's not the right calculus. You know, this really rears its head in ethical decisions or decisions of commitment, right? How should I treat my spouse? Should I treat my wife when I'm thinking about my obligations? Should I think, well, what can I get away with to be as happy as possible? It's tempting, right? And it's a natural impulse. We're hardwired, very much hardwired to look for ways to take advantage of

our spouses, our friends, to do what helps us and not have to make sacrifices, to free ride on their efforts. And what works in the other direction? Well, loyalty, love, commitment, honor, ethics, religion, there's a bunch of things. But for many of us, those things are weak. And so would you argue that, you know, the best marriage for you, not for the two of you, but for you, is to see how much you can get away with in terms of the daily responsibilities of carpooling and dishes and cooking and cleaning and filling out the taxes? And, you know, maybe your wife won't notice. I mean, we all understand that's despicable. It's not an honorable path, but there's nothing attractive about it. And we'd argue that that's

wrong. It's just wrong. But why is it wrong? I mean, it seems like, isn't that what we do through most of our life? We look for advantages. We look for a chance to get ahead. We look for what makes me as happy as possible. But we have to also understand that sometimes that's just wrong and shouldn't do those things. But they're hard to do. So how do you, should you do a cost-benefit analysis and then, you know, on your deathbed realize you've been a horrible person, even though you're really happy? I think that's horrifying. I think most of us recoil at the thought of that.

So I don't think, I think the standard decision-making analysis, if you're not careful, leaves out ethical considerations, shared experiences that are often complicated. It leaves out the incommensurability of certain pleasures over others. You can't just add them up. And for me, part of my goal in this book is to help people recognize there's no right decision. There's no best decision. I think this is really hard for people when it comes to marriage. You know, who to marry, not whether to marry, but who to marry.

You know, I want to find the best possible spouse, like a car. I want to find the car that's best for me. So I get on, fill out a little questionnaire. How many children do you have? Do you like to drive fast? And I found out the best car for me is a two-seater. That's not what a spouse is. It's a different kind of decision. For figuring out which car is going to give you the most pleasure, sure. If it doesn't have a backseat, you understand what you're giving up. If it's a minivan,

you understand what you're giving up. But when it's a spouse, a particular person, a woman of that one, what are you giving up? You could find a nicer one. You could find a smarter one. You could find a prettier one. You could find a more exciting one. You know, you name it. So is it always a mistake?

How should you think about that? It's not easy to think about what the rational decision to make in that context. So I'm not saying, oh, then flip a coin or do whatever you do. Just choose randomly. close your eyes. But don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to make a rational decision in these kind of areas like you do with what kind of car to buy. Well, maybe this is a good place to invoke Herb Simon's concept of satisficing, because that gets at what we do instead of arriving at some pinnacle of rationality. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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