Modern Wisdom - #585 - Adam Mastroianni - Are Smart People Actually Happier?

Episode Date: February 4, 2023

Adam Mastroianni is a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School and a writer whose research focuses on how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds. Does being smart make you happy? Does being dumb make you miserable? Why did the guy who created eugenics also get published in Nature for a revolutionary way to cut a cake? Adam is one of my favourite writers so today I get to ask him all these things. Expect to learn why super smart people can be so stupid, Adam's issue with the productivity approach of eating frogs, whether you can learn arithmetic by smell, why humans misjudge what other people want to talk about, why we forget so many of the things that we've learned, how come it's trendy to call the general public stupid and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Follow Adam's Substack - https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/ Check out Adam's website - https://www.adammastroianni.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Adam Masteryani. He's a post-doctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School and a writer. His research focuses on how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds. Does being smart make you happy? Does being dumb make you miserable? Why did the guy who created eugenics also get published in nature for a revolutionary way to cut a cake? Adam is one of my favourite writers, so today I get to ask him all of these things.

Expect to learn why super smart people can be so stupid. Adam's issue with the productivity approach of eating frogs, whether you can learn arithmetic by smell, why humans misjudge what other people want to talk about, why we forget so many of the things we've learned, how come it's trendy to call the general public stupid, and much more? Don't forget, if you are listening, you should have also got a copy of the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 of my favourite, most interesting and impactful books that will change your life as well, and you can get a list of them for free right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. It'll also add you to my three-minute Monday newsletter,

which is where those little blue squares that keep on angering everybody on Instagram come from. So you can get to see them before everyone else and you get the free reading list chriswillx.com slash books. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Adam Masteryani. Dude, I love your subs, you're subs, that was one of my favorite finds throughout all of last year, it's absolutely phenomenal. I appreciate that, it's a very kind of you to say. Congratulations, man. What's your background? Who are you?

What do you do? I'm trained as a psychologist in social psychology, so the kind of psychology that I can't help people directly, but I can certainly write papers about them. So that's what I got my PhD in a couple years ago. Right now, I'm like finishing up a job where I teach negotiation to business students. But mainly what I do is write that sub-stack. You made the decision to go full-time or more serious partway through last year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, I got tired of writing papers that nobody reads where you basically have to lie to get them published and I thought why not just write what really happened in my studies

or what's really going on in my head on the internet and I thought maybe nobody would listen and then people started listening and then they started shouting at me and that's started listening. And then they started shouting at me. And that's another story. What was that thing that you pirated? You pirated a study, did it yourself, and just published it, and said sort of stuck a middle finger up at the usual journal submission process. Yeah, I was running these studies with a friend of mine on basically what happens when you ask people how things could be different?

And they write out their answers, and we're like, okay, if it was different in that way, how much better or worse would it be? And they would tell us. And so we had eight studies, investigating this question of this bias in human imagination. And we were trying to write it up for a scientific journal. And we felt like we couldn't do it without lying.

Things like, we forgot why we ran study eight. This happens sometimes. You're working on a bunch of projects. You look back and like, wait, why did we do that? The results are interesting, but now I can't reconstruct how we got to the point where we ran study eight. And I was like, Ethan, my co-author, I was like, what should we do? And we were like, what if we just told the truth and just wrote it ourselves and put it

on the internet? And so we're like, hey guys, here's study eight. We don't remember why we ran it. If you can figure it out, why don't you write to us? And people really did, which is the best part. So yeah, so we just wrote it honestly and put it on the internet, which is the way I intend to do science going forward.

And you got shouted at by people on the internet twice. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So not so much for that. People seem to be cool with that. Although some people are like, science is very serious and there shouldn't be jokes. And I'm like, man, who killed your fun? But then I wrote an article about peer review, which is this process that scientific papers are supposed to undergo before they're published. And basically, why

it's a failed experiment. And I had someone in the comments being like, Adam, do you still work at this dorm I used to work at and when I was in graduate school, like I have serious doubts about your ability to mentor undergraduates. Like this is very serious. I'm a Harvard alum, which is where that dorm was that I worked.

And this person was a Ted your professor at Boston University. I was like, man, so people got nothing better to do than yell at red of people on the internet. Fortunately, she was a little on the I don't work there anymore. You got a huge of cynical meta cognitive poly waffle. Yeah, yeah. Does that describe you think that describes your approach accurately? Yes, it describes it to a point. Yeah, some people just get really mad, especially when you criticize the ladders basically that they've climbed up. And when you go, hey, it seems like these systems don't actually do the things that people claim that they

do. They go, yes, they do. And also you're a big meaning. Well, I mean, if you've spent most of your career playing the rules of a game and somebody else comes and says, as if we ever considered whether we could just change these rules, because they kind of seem a little bit dumb, quite rightly, people are going to seem pretty threatened, but the bottom line is it doesn't seem like a particularly effective way to play the game, at least given the outcomes that they are purported to be trying to get. to play the game, at least given the outcomes that they are purported to be trying to get. Yeah, exactly. That if it's so good for papers to undergo this process that we call peer review, then you should be able to like tell the difference between the papers that do

or the papers that don't. You should be able to see like, oh yeah, reviewers actually catch big errors and they don't. You should hear lots of stories that like, yeah, man, this guy tried to submit a paper to a journal and the reviewers caught on that he was faking his data. Now, I got fired. You never hear a story like that. Those stories always begin with, yeah, this guy published 60 papers, 60 peer-reviewed papers and journals, and then someone was like, wait, should we check the data? And then they did. And it turned out it was all bait up. And then the guy got fired. And so, it even assisted that works like that, but it takes 15,000 person years of labor every year to make it go.

Maybe that's a system that like, I don't know, maybe we should try to think about other things. I'm not even saying everybody should do what I did. This is what works for me. Like I like writing papers in my own voice and giving them direct to people. Some people like this system. Great, they should do it,

but they shouldn't force other people at gunpoint to do it as well. Why aren't smart people happier? I think that's because our definition of intelligence and the way that we test it, carves off one part of what a human mind can do, and then basically claims that is everything that a human mind can do.

So when you take an intelligence test, you're basically taking a standardized test, a bunch of multiple choice questions. And it turns out that like your ability to take those questions actually does matter. So a lot of people want to pretend that like, oh, we're not measuring anything that we really do. Like this is related to some of your life outcomes, your ability to get and to hold certain jobs.

But what it turns out to not be related to it is no correlation with how satisfied you say you are with your life, which is of course a key problem that people are trying to solve. And so it suggests that your ability to do those anagrams and solve these logic problems and do reading comprehension questions is unrelated to your ability to make choices in your life that when you look back, you go, oh, those are the right choices.

I feel good about those choices that I made. And I think a great example of this is there are people who score extremely high on IQ tests who make extremely stupid decisions. I mean, every year, you're about professors who are like, oh, man, they couldn't keep their hands themselves and they sexually harassed a bunch of people. And now they're fired.

That just seems like that, I mean, an immoral thing to do, but also a really dumb thing to do. And so you think if these people can ace these tests, that they would also be able to not make very stupid, obvious mistakes. Wasn't so that's why I think there was some guy that you looked at who was adamant that banks weren't giving him bank account because he was white. And then Bobby Fisher, this sort of chess prodigy, just started going on about the Jews again, you know, you you can argue over the veracity of their argument The point is if you're a

super genius Investment advisor to somebody or the number one chess prodigy in the world Don't talk about the Jews in if you want to keep your job and you surprised Yeah, yeah, if you're a guy who can you know score a 150 on an IQ test But you live in a basement and all you do it is yell about how unfortunate you are all day It just seems to be like actually you are not very smart in an important way like you can take good multiple choice questions But something is God wrong into your life and you've been unable to unravel that And that's what happened to that one guy who's who sometimes goes as like the smartest man in the world It just seems like the smartest man in the world should be able to like get a bank loan.

Which I think the people do every day. They don't have to be a genius to do it. You just gotta like have some good credit and like explain what you want for it. But like this guy can't do it. Does that mean that smart people are more miserable or is there no correlation between intelligence and happiness? Yeah, no correlation. So this has been found across study that did some of this analysis

myself. It seems like there's either no correlation or a very tiny one that can easily go in either direction. So it's also not that like, oh, like having all this brain power makes you less happy, it just seems to be that there are these problems in life that are different from the ones that we test when we test people's intelligence. What are the wrong theories that smart people have about what's going to make them happy in life? I think it is, oh, I'll just get like this really prestigious job and I'll just make lots of money and then like question mark, question mark, question mark, I'll be content and feel good about myself. And I mean, all you need to do is look around and like actually get to know some of the people who have accomplished those things. And quite often they feel like, oh, well, no, there's this other

thing I just need to do. And like, then I'll be happy. And most of the, I mean, the people are like the best predictor that we have of happiness is the quality of your social relationships. And it turns out that like, yeah, those can sometimes suffer if the thing that you are maximizing is the title of your job or the size of your bank account. I wonder whether smart people get captured or caught up in those sorts of games more readily than people who are less smart.

Perhaps they have more opportunities and doorways that are open to them or something like that. Yeah, it's easy to see the game being played and get really good at playing the game because if you're good at asing these tests, you're probably good at game playing. And then mistake playing the game for living a meaningful and satisfying life.

That you can spend your whole life doing it and just feel like, oh, but if I could just do better at the game, if I could just acquire more monopoly money, then like at some point I start feeling good. And the thing about monopoly money is it's fake. There is no amount that you could have before you feel good. There's a quote from a friend who I really reflected on a lot last year. And I realized that we trade the thing that we want, which is time for the thing which is supposed to get it money.

We also trade the thing which we want, which is happiness for the thing which is supposed to get it success. We give up time to make money so that we can finally have more time when we have enough money. We give up happiness to achieve success so that we can finally have more happiness when we achieve enough success. Like, it's so, it was that Japanese fisherman proverb thing about the American businessman that goes to the Japanese fisherman and says you could make a fish market and build this big business up and then eventually you just be able to fish on the lake all day. And it does feel a lot of

the time, especially now, man, my background is in the productivity world, at least when I started this show. And coming out of that, it does make me think that so much overoptimization has led people to get themselves into a situation where this treadmill, this ever speeding up treadmill of success, to beget happiness, which doesn't because the sacrifice of happiness is in the achievement of the success for the happiness. It's very self-defeating. Yeah. It's weird that it is so hard, that it is so self-defeating in that way. You would think that it's all be very obvious, just like, I know the things that make me feel good and I should just do more of those things and not make me feel good in the most basic way.

I mean, some of those things, but make me feel good in that deep, meaningful way that I like. But instead, we have extremely strong theories about what will do that for us. That somehow it seems very hard to disconfirm. I'm just a little bit more, and then I'll have it. I mean, I feel this in my own life, that it can be hard to actually tell what you like doing if you have a very strong theory about what you should like doing. So, when I was writing those scientific papers, I was like, yeah, no, I like this. Like, this is good. And before I start doing it, I just need to like,

drink a lot of caffeine, hit a pomodoro time, or like, turn off my phone, like, turn off the internet, and then like, make myself do it for 25 minutes, and only then can I take a break. And I was like, wait, but why would I have to do all these things for a thing that I supposedly like doing? The things I like doing, I just do them. And I don't want want to stop and I don't need to be managing to doing them. And so there's something I think very weird and unexplained here about how very strong theories of happiness can mislead you into spending a lot of time making yourself unhappy. That's a really interesting point very profound point I think actually where much of what we take pleasure from, it's very difficult to separate out in the liquid. How much of this is self-generated, stuff that I love and enjoy.

And how much of this is social norms, biological predisposition, path of least resistance, way that I've dealt with past trauma, pick your filter that you're making your behavior a curve through, filling my sense of insufficiency for today, compensating for my sense of insufficiency that lags over from yesterday, whatever it might be. Yeah, so many things that we do are are compensatory in that regard. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's weird how you could spend a lot of time like hanging out with friends that you don't really like, like working hard to be promoted at a job that you don't really enjoy. And I think it really takes paying very close attention to your experiences to be like, what do I actually feel like when I'm doing these

things? And if it's not good, like why am I fighting so hard to continue to do them? I used to have this conversation a lot when I was like a resident advisor in an undergrad in graduate schools, I talked to students a lot about like what they like to do. And an often it was really hard for them because they had gotten to like these elite educational institutions in part by tamping down on the part of themselves that like, enjoyed doing things for the sake of doing them. And it's being really good at like convincing themselves that they enjoyed doing the things that got them rewards and got them admission into Princeton and Harvard and places like that.

And it was really sad to watch it because it's like they had lost the ability to like, feel true pleasure And we're just like I enjoy doing the things that like increase my CV. I'm like man You don't and like you're that's gonna collapse it on itself eventually What is a smarter way for smart people to become happy then? I think it is paying that close attention to Like when I feel that sense, that thing that I like to feel, it's not just purely the pleasure of like, you know, I took a lick of ice cream.

It is the pleasure of, I feel fulfilled, I feel meaningful. Like what is it you're doing when you're doing that? Because everybody feels it at some point. And maybe in those times you haven't given yourself the permission to feel that way, because the thing that you're doing isn't something that's for a citizen, not for you think it doesn't pay enough. I have a friend of mine who literally what he would love to do is campground maintenance. This guy wants to dig ditches, hang hammocks like he wants to mend fences.

And he knows he likes doing it and like he likes to work on his house and instead like he's a computer engineer because like that pays more. He doesn't really like doing it. I just wanna take it beside of me like dude, this is a job that people have. Like you can make money, like you not as much money, but just think of all the hours of your life

you're going to spend doing the thing that you don't like to like dig ditches in your own time. Like you can dig ditches during the day. I'm a hobby dig ditcher ditch ditch digger. Yeah, I have a friend friend who's got an unbelievably successful YouTube channel millions and millions of subscribers huge business off the back of it. And he spends all of his time in a really nice apartment out in California with a bunch of his other friends filming Filming, dungeons and dragons, role play, you know

the board game thing, but one of them is a storyteller and it's sort of narrated. And this isn't, I don't even know if it's on the internet. I think that they just, they, he's got a good amount of disposable income, I guess, but that's what he's chosen to spend his time doing. You know, you're ascended through the troposphere of all of the different problems you need to in terms of resource acquisition, and then at the age of 33, retired to be a professional Dungeons and Dragons master or whatever it is that he does. Yeah, good for him. But yeah, a lot of people put in all those years and don't get to, don't get that retirement

at the end, or it comes much later. Yes. Yeah. Speaking of the world of productivity, it's like I say, a world that was very familiar with for a long time and so on. What is your issue with eating frogs? Yeah, so I wrote this post about this idea, like there's this productivity system called like eat that frog or whatever.

Basically, the thing you want to do the least to do that first, which that in itself is not crazy, whatever. We've all had to do stuff that we don't wanna do. If you do it immediately, you know, you cut down all the time that you spend dreading doing it. I think that's the problem. I think the problem is feeling like there is something noble and natural in spending a lot of time eating frogs

or eating a lot of them. Anything that comes from this theory that we have about the way that we are naturally, which is that people feel like, oh, deep down I'm actually a lazy piece of garbage. Like, if left to my own devices, I will sit motionless and watch Netflix and play video. I will do all of these things that are not actually good. And only by whipping my unconscious self, like my natural self into shape, will I become this person who does the things that are productive and good.

I think that actually comes from a lifetime of having to force yourself to do those things, and then convince yourself that is the good self. I think that's wrong. I think actually our unconscious selves are pretty smart. I think they tend to be pretty well attuned to things that are valuable. And it only feels like our natural

inclinations are toward laziness because our unconscious self only alerts our conscious self like when there's some kind of issue, like when something needs to be done. And so I have this metaphor in the piece of like if you hire an intern and tell it intern like, hey, just go do the tasks and then just like come to me if you ever have a problem.

Whenever they, if you just ignore them when they're doing the tasks, but pay attention to them when they have the problem, you will assume that like, man, this intern doesn't do anything, they just come to me all the time. Not paying attention to all the stuff that intern is doing when you're not looking.

And that is what your unconscious self is doing. And so I think you can get this totally wrong theory about what you would do when you were left to do whatever you want to do, based on like the wrong impression of how your unconscious self works. Why do you think it is that we have this Puritan self-flagulation, like secret, autorotic thing going on? Part of it, I think, not to be too conspiratorial, but I think this works really well for the people

who are trying to squeeze labor out of us. On board for this, I'm absolutely on board for hating yourself and feeling like the only way to subvert feelings of insufficiency are to contribute to a capitalist machine. I'm on board with this conspiracy. Yeah, so if your boss could convince you that like yeah the things that you like to do are actually like lazy and bad like It's bad to play video games. It's bad to read books. It's good to do spreadsheets and emails and like only when you're doing those is when you are your true self So you must sublimate and subjugate you're like natural self I

Think it's part of where it comes from And so I think we learn of our time to like not give ourselves permission to actually value and enjoy those things. And a lot of it too is like, you have to do some of that to survive. You know, you have to work jobs that pay you money so that you can do the other things.

But it's easy to get confused and be like, oh, no, actually working the job and paying the money is the good thing. And having the fun part is like the bad thing. Like that's like sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar. That's like having a little, that's a little indulgence for us. Like no, that's also life.

That's also good. Like you're not supposed to have that you've broken disgusting creature. Get yourself back to the desk. Tie yourself up there. Come on. Do it until your fingertips bleed, you bitch. I read that the ancient Greek word for work was originally translated as not at leisure. So in ancient Greece, they saw leisure as the set point and work as the aberration.

I must have said this five times, maybe more on the podcast. Then when it did a bit of digging, it turns out it's not true. So a really, really great, just perfect example of something I would have loved to use as a metaphor. And now I can't. But I can continue, I think it still is very nice thinking about the way that over time, humans have changed their perspective of work. And I mean, it's only been, you know, you can go back 200 years to see a very different sort of approach to work and what it meant, that it was a contribution mostly for survival. It was as you were connected with your work in a more existential way, as opposed to this kind of like dopamine hamster wheel thing that it's just for, it's for show as opposed

to maybe for the honor of your family or the pride in your name or the value of your cow when you go to market. I don't know. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something is even if not factually true or emotionally true. So like that, like Greek story. But, but no, I think this is true that like, if, if your job can convince you that like, this is actually the way that you express yourself. And like, this isn't just for money, like, this is who you are, then like, you give them a very powerful tool

of controlling your behavior that it, that like, you allow them to convince you that like, no, what you really like to do, like when you are your true conscious and good self, like what you really like to do is like be on time and you like to go to meetings. And like you like to make projects come in under deadline. And yeah, I think it'd be much easier if you showed up and it's like, this is the thing you do for money. That is our relationship that we have.

Like you're not here to like attain self-actualization. We do hope that you will leave on time and go do the other things that like this job allows you to do. I think a lot of people get stuck doing the thing that is next to the thing that they want to do. Confuse this to why it doesn't make them feel good like the thing that they really like. What do you mean next to the thing? So like if you really like doing graphic design, like if you really like painting, you can get convinced that like, no, what you actually like doing is making logos. And you can be like, man, why doesn't this like feel good? It's because like, it's not the thing.

It's like slightly to the left or to the right of the thing that you really want to do. And you might be better off doing something totally different. So, you're not confused about like, why this thing that like kind of looks like the thing that you really want to do. And you might be better off doing something totally different. So you're not confused about like, why this thing that kind of looks like the thing that I want to do doesn't feel good. Yeah, so it's bleeding over. There's a concept from Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art

where he calls those shadow careers. He says the number of people that he met in LA who were failed actors or always wanted to become an actor, but ended up becoming an agent because it was tangential enough to the industry that it made them feel like they were maybe in the thing, but it wasn't the thing and they were just going to have this existential yearning for the rest of time. Yeah. I don't have data to back this up.

I just have a deep gut sense, which is honestly like both sides just have anyway have anyway. But at this feeling that, like, if you actually can't do exactly the thing that you want to do, you might be better off doing something that is so different that you don't get confused as to what is your labor and what is your pleasure. Oh, dude. Turning a love into a labor is one of the quickest ways to be able to destroy it.

I've seen so many of my friends that love to train, become a PT, launch an online course, teach people how to launch online courses. And then before you know it, they're a million miles away from being a PT. The thing that they enjoyed was exercise. And now what they do is teach people online who want to teach people to build a business online, to coach people in the real world. So even if that story of the lady that started the bakery and wanted to build it into a business,

and then five years later she hasn't baked a cake. And God knows how long it doesn't know anything that's going on, but she's a great business executive with a very successful bakery. It's, yeah, we really do sort of overcomplicate things. The number, is this because of the amount of degrees of freedom that we have in a, that we've been afforded in the modern world, do you think?

Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it. Part of it, too, is being expected to live a certain life. You know, I mean, my friend who wants to dig ditches and hang hammocks, like, people expect him to do a thing, you know, he has a college degree. You look kind of bad if you don't do the thing that rises to the level that you're supposed to be educated for. When in fact, the whole point of acquiring those additional opportunities is to use them to make your life better.

This is the mistake of spending your whole life increasing your bank account and then you die and you're like, ah, good. I died with a large bank account. I won. It's like, man, the money was for making your life better. Same too, like the degrees are for making your life better. The success is for making your life better. Not for like increasing the success meter or more.

Talk to me about San Francisco. This is a guy who lived in the 1800s, the second half of the 1800s, who was kind of one of the first modern psychologists. He did a ton of stuff. He invented like nature versus nurture is a phrase that he coined, invented what we now know as correlation, weather maps, the scientific, the scientificly correctly of cutting a cake was also him, arithmetic by smelly. There's like this whole list, the first map of Namidia,

super interesting guy also had some beliefs that I think now we would find a little distasteful. But I got to reading his autobiography and it was just extremely entertaining. And so I wrote a review and a post about it. Oh, also the biggest thing he invented was eugenics. I shouldn't have left it off the... I was proud to get Chapman. Yeah.

So I wrote this post, getting it like, okay, what was this guy's life like? And how did he get to this point where he made progress in all these different fields and invented this thing that he didn't see that, only about a hundred years later, people would recoil and horror at what he thought would be a quote, permanent success

when he established like the chair of eugenics at University College of London. And just trying to get at like, why is it so hard to see into the future morally? You know, he saw it into the future in statistics and biology, in meteorology, but not in morality. And so I was trying to get to the bottom of that.

Just to list some more of his achievements that you put in the article, tries to learn arithmetic by smell succeeds. How do you do that? You succeeded. He trained himself to associate numbers with smells and then put the smells together. And I mean, this is purely his claim

that he felt the association of like the, so you know, you associate like that once smell a three and other smell with two, you put the smells together and you feel five. Wow. This is a paper in nature, like the premiere, well now the premiere, um, scientific journal. Worships of puppets to see if he can convince himself it has godlike powers, succeeds. Yeah.

This too is just a story that he was like, you know, some people get obsessed with like, you know, cult figures or whatever, like, could I understand what it's like to do that? And he's like, yeah, so I found this puppet and I just started like worshiping it. And he's like, yeah, I really came to feel like, like it did have those powers. Tries to consciously control all of his automatic bodily processes, nearly suffocates. Yeah, yeah, because he was like, oh, I will think every time I breathe. I feel like this guy is sort of a dude who like never stop being six. Like, these are the things that you do.

Like, the world's almost tamped down on your imagination and you're just like, whoa, my body does stuff. Like, can I make it do stuff? Yeah. What's, hang on, what animal magnetism? Here's the animal magnetism is all the rage. Learns it in secret It's illegal magnetizes 80 people. What is this? Yeah, this is basically like a version of hypnotism And like putting people in a trance and getting them to do stuff

Which was yeah, he went to Vienna at the time and like yeah, it was illegal to do this uh And he doing it to 80 people is the blood of a silver gray rabbit with the blood of a lot of the rabbit to see if it can still breed, it can. Tells himself that everyone is spying on him to see if he can make himself insane, succeeds, makes a walking stick with a hidden high-pitched whistle

inside it, takes it to the zoo and whistles at all the animals, most don't care, but the lions hate it. Yeah. Oh, they die, man. Yeah, that's what science was like. And, you know, for the, you know, the stuff that I disagree with them, something that I like about him is that he has the spirit of experimentation. Um, they're like, even if you are, you know, the most established scientists in the world,

like nobody does stuff like that anymore. And it's not because we have all those things figured out. Uh, like, I think there are still, like, kind wacky do things that you could do to learn about the world that people just kind of don't do because they look too silly or like, oh, you can never write a paper about that. Like, you can't do a ripetick by smell. Another thing he did early on, he was like a trainee in basically a surgery, like a doctor's office. And he just decided like, I'm going to take a little bit of every medicine alphabetically and so he just goes down the list. I do like it's this thing called a croton oil and he has such bad diarrhea that he never does it ever again and he stops his alphabetical experiment.

But this is a dude who was willing to screw around and find out. Put his body on the line. Yo screw around and find out. Put his body on the line. Yeah, for science. For science. For science. I respect that. Yeah. Wow.

Okay, so rolling the clock forward, he then develops eugenics, which as soon as you start to think about nature versus nurture, you realize that there are certain things that you can perhaps breed into or out of humans. Why is it the case that somebody who is incredibly smart and is able to come up with a concept isn't able to foresee the potential ethical implications of it? Is this a unique byproduct of eugenics itself? Is eugenics particularly ethically murky or is there something else more broad going on?

I think it's basically that he never really had an opportunity to speak as equals with someone who would be on the losing side of a society based on eugenics. So I mean, you know, for all his scientific experimentation, he's mainly talking to other gentleman of science, who are all you're born into wealthiest states. Like the reason they can do this Victorian science is basically because they inherited enough money that they never had to work. And so they can screw around all day whistling up the lions at the zoo. But if you had to talk to somebody who is maybe bored into less wealth, who, and you go like, oh, they don't seem very fit because they didn't inherit

all this wealth, you might have to realize like, oh, maybe there's more than just genes that determines your outcomes, and maybe there's something wrong about subsidizing rich successful people to marry each other and preventing poor, less successful people from marrying each other. I think basically just no one is around to call them on it. And to be fair, it's not just hint. Like decades go by before anybody, as far as I can tell, really writes something mainstream, questioning the ethics of eugenics.

At first, it was all about, well, we don't think it'll actually work. I mean, that was the main thing that he was arguing with people because he's kind of the first person to say that human traits can be inherited. And so a bunch of people are like, no, they can't, or like, oh, you could never, like like getting certain people to marry would never do anything. And so this was purely a scientific question of the people who are doing science before someone enters the conversation who's

like, hey guys, this seems like maybe a little bad. He was Darwin's cousin. Yeah. Okay. Like second cousin. Yeah. But like, yeah, they're connected if you go back a few generations. Yeah. I mean this Victorian era say what you want man this Victorian era I've read a ton of books about Darwin seems so cool. They've got these weird rivalries This this particular guy that they would both hate to see at other conventions and everyone would know about the the rivalry between them It's so fun. I really I don't know if there has been a dramatized version of Darwin's life. I don't know how exciting it would be

to see a bunch of stuffy stiff-of-aliped British guys just saying mean words at each other across a smoke-filled room. But I would watch it, and I think that it's pretty interesting. I do wonder, yeah, it's very interesting to work out why someone, how someone could be so smart as to come up with it and to not see it moving forward. I also remember something in your article about

three generations of Inbus seals is enough and it was a landmark case in the US, I think. Yeah, this is a case about four sterilization by the state or basically they decided that's fine because I mean, the reason he goes like, if you have enough stupid people in a row according to the metrics of the state, like, well, you've lost your right to continue reproducing. And this is the very unfortunate place that we get led to when we're like, okay, these intelligence tests are everything that a mind can do. And like, we should interfere in how people reproduce with one another,

one another to like make us better off, which are the unfortunate parts of this legacy. It can't all be, you know, a slain alliance. Is there a precedent in the US for forced sterilization that still exists on the books? Um, I don't know whether it's still law or not, but I do know as recently as the 2010s, there were cases in California of women, you know, always unclear when you're in prison, like to what extent are you being told, versus a pressure or whatever, but into getting tubal ligations, which is basically sterilized. Um, and so like, this is going on pretty recently.

Um, and, uh, And I looked at some polling, so another thing I study a lot is changes in public opinion over time. I haven't seen recent polling on people's opinions on things like forest aerozation, but even in the 90s, people were saying, like, oh, no, that kind of thing, like, sounds fine. I mean, I want to go to the record, like, I don't think it's fine. I don't think the state should be sterilizing people. We should put that power in the heads of the state. It just, yeah. But yeah, that kind of stuff is fairly recent. What do you think humans misjudge when it comes to working out what other people want to

talk about in conversation? So I have some studies where one of the things that people were asked to judge was when do the other person want to go. So I bring people into the lab to talk as long as they want to and I asked them like, was they a point at which you wanted to go like tell me when that was, what about for the other person? And what I find is people are really bad at knowing when the other person wanted to leave. So when they guess, they're off by about half of the length of the conversation.

So if we talk for 20 minutes, and I try to guess when you wanna go, I'm off by about 10 minutes in either direction. People tend to underestimate me a little bit how much the other person wanted to talk. So it's not like we always think, oh, a lot of these people wanna talk to me. In fact, we're like a little bit underconfident.

But what this leads to is that conversations generally don't end when people want them to, which is what that paper is about. So, when we ask people, like, okay, your conversation went on 25 minutes or 20 minutes, when did you want it to end? People tell us, the difference between when I wanted it to end and when it ended was again about half of the length of the conversation. So they want to go somewhere between 10 minutes or continue on for another 10 minutes.

And part of it is because they don't know when the other person wants to go. And the other part is, people very rarely want to speak for the same amount of time. because they don't know when the other person wants to go. And the other part is people very rarely want to speak for the same amount of time. I imagine this comes up a lot in your line of work. Yeah, it does. Some episodes seem to really be rounded out quite nicely around about the hour mark.

On average, and again, I'm the common denominator here, so it's probably me. One 10 to 115 for me is really, really nice. And it's just finishing on a nice peak and it's maybe just not any drop off a tiny bit. And you go, bang, there it is. But then there's other times when I can sit down with somebody and I go, all right, this is, I'm not even half,

not even getting going. And you've hit the hour number. So there is so much of a very interesting interplay, rhythmically, energeticallyically in the way that you speak to other people. So that's in terms of duration, what about in terms of content, what are people mistake about what others want to talk about?

Yeah, there's some other research on this that people just are bad at knowing, whether people wanna keep talking about this topic or wanna move on to some other topic. So it's not in some particular direction that they want to talk about football, but I thought they want to talk about basketball. It's more like, I really don't know what they want to talk about. Some other research suggests that people underestimate the extent to which others want to have

deep conversations with them. We get stuck having shallow conversations that house the weather and oh, that's a nice shirt you're wearing. Thinking that, oh, the other person doesn't want to talk to me about like the problems that they're having in their life right now or the things that they're afraid of or the things they're really excited about because like, oh, I don't know, that's just kind of scary and uncomfortable.

When in fact, like, no, people actually more willing than you think they are to have those kind of conversations because I mean, when we all stand around being like, oh, man, doesn't small talk bad. Like we mean it. Like we will really do what to actually have deeper, deeper conversations with the people. I learned I was reminded in your article about that series of 36 questions. It's a sending scale of intensity that experiment is used to get people to be friends. What's that?

Yeah, this is the fast friends paradigm. There's a big New York Times article about it. It was basically adapting those questions to be more for friendship. So the way that that works is what we call like increasing reciprocal self-disclosure. Just basically the idea of like, I tell you a little bit more about me. I like open the door a little bit.

You tell me a little more about you. You open your door a little bit. And we go little by little until we lower our guards and doors are open and now we're willing to chat with you. Just go so our chronic flatulence together. Yeah, exactly. It does some bad parts recently. Yeah, and you can get there just 36 questions. One of my friends, George sent me a question the other day,

which I put in my newsletter, and I thought was absolutely fantastic in the other first person that I've spoken to since he sent it to me. Question was, what is currently overlooked or ignored by the media, but will be studied in future by historians? What do you think, anything come to mind?

Yeah, I would say the professionalization of science that we have this idea that like, professionalization always good, like making people professional, that sounds good. And we don't realize that professionalizing something actually makes a certain set of trade-offs. And basically you lower the ceiling in order to raise the floor. So by professionalizing something, you reign people in

and so you prevent the very best from doing exactly what they do in order to prevent the very worst from doing what they do. In some domains, it makes total sense. I want my doctor to be professionalized because I don't really care about the very best doctor. I mainly want a doctor who's good enough and isn't going to harm me. Because sometimes they put me under anesthesia

And I don't know what they're doing right and it's really hard for me to judge like which are the good ones in which are the bad ones I don't feel the way about scientists I think science is what I think of as a strong link problem where like we progress at the rate that we make our most important Discoveries and do our most important work and so I don't want to trade the best stuff in order to get rid of the worst stuff I think the worst stuff basically doesn't matter It just fills journals nobody ever looks at it ever again And so I don't want to trade the best stuff in order to get rid of the worst stuff. I think the worst stuff basically doesn't matter. It just fills journals, nobody ever looks at it ever again. And it's like very weird that we live in this period

where science is super professionalized. And we're mainly focused on like, how do we stop like these random bad studies from coming out that no one's ever gonna look at again? If you think about Golden's time, like there wasn't a standardization. Like I mean, the dude was wandering around like swapping blood from one rabbit to another and nobody was like stopping it from doing it. What was that? What was that thing

where wasn't he chuted by his sister who had some bad spine problem so she had to lie on a plank of wood? This guy had the weirdest life ever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, this isn't to mention like all the travels that he did in Southern Africa where, or all the travels he did all over the world, we're constantly running into quarantine because there's pandemics going on. And so reading this, like I read that mainly, a year and a half ago, when there's a lot more that's going on

and being like, whoa, like so little has, or like we're back at this moment, where at a lot of it too is like this theatrical element of like, I showed him at this place and like because I was kind of prominent, I was invited to like, dine with the mayor of the town. But then the newspapers were like, mayor of town breaks quarantine to talk to, like, man, this is all just, wow. You can say it big. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Wow. You look at some stuff to do with why we forget so many of the topics and bits and pieces

that we learn. What's the 30,000 foot view on that for someone that's not being indoctrinated? Yeah. Well, this is just the idea. You spend a lot of time in school learning a lot of stuff and then like pretty quickly You remember almost none of that stuff So like what's it kind of what's that all for like what do we do it here? And I mean there's the question of like okay, well what are the like educators intend to do?

But I think there's a different question of like what is the mind doing? Which is I think not holding on very tightly to any individual fact, but getting some abstract sense of the way that things are, which I call a vibe, basically, and these things actually stick for a long time, maybe forever. And so the important things that you're learning in class aren't necessarily like what Mesopotamia was or like, how many, like the US representatives there are. It is a sense of like, oh, history is interesting, or like history is complicated, or history is very long, or like there are many ways that humans can organize themselves into different

societies. And like the way that things are now is not the way that they've always been, and they can be other ways. And these are like the kind of like deep truths that no one ever really tells you specifically, but like you are learning them by sitting there. You can get other vibes too. Like, education is stupid, and it's just a matter of satisfying the wins of the teacher.

Or like, it's cool, like this sucks. I want to be anywhere else. Like, these are vibes too. And I think these are actually the more important things that we get when we are in education, rather than like all the PowerPoint, bullet point stuff that we are going to forget as like all the PowerPoint, bullet point stuff that we're going to forget as soon as the test is done.

And so, I mean, I am partly an educator. And so I think a lot about like, what is the thing that people are getting, like when I speak, like when I write? Like the important stuff isn't like this thing buried in this paragraph. Like it is basically an approach to life. Like it is a, it is a philosophy that's kind of hard to put in any one place, but that you get this emergent property from spending a lot of time in it. What would be a more direct way for people to learn vibes? I think kind of the thing is like you can't get there direct like that's the whole point.

It is like you can't hack the vibes. I think you can do a better job as an educator of thinking about like what vibes am I giving? And thinking about like, oh, the most important thing isn't that they remember what ancient sumer is. It is that they like remember that like human history is very long and complicated and like, sometimes people do really good things and sometimes people do really bad things

were capable of all sorts of things. None of those things are gonna be like the lesson of the day. Like they're gonna be the thing that like kind that sticks on your mind's ribs when you leave. So yeah, I kind of think it can't be sped up. It can only be appreciated. It's a little bit like what we were saying earlier on to do with a lot of people have to go through the success in order to be able to say that success isn't the thing that was going to make them happy. That's a lesson that can't really be expedited in advance. And I wonder whether, I don't know, maybe it is just the case that you need to sit down and bang your head off the wall about the four principles of whatever is appropriate accounting.

I remember, dude, I remember in first year of uni and I lived in this set of halls of residence that was two and a half miles away from the university. So we had to get a bus to night out, we had to get a bus to lectures. And it was the morning of this exam, and my housemate, who was a big stiff idiot, but was a lovely guy, hadn't had any revision. And he said, what do you think is coming up on the exam? And so I think it's going to be the four principles of accounting or something like that. I can remember the conversation I had with him.

I can remember thinking, wow, I actually did even my laxed asical version of revision makes me feel like super smart compared to you. And I remember that one of them is prudence. Can't remember any of the others. I don't really even know what prudence means when it comes to accounting. I mean, you're accounting for the figures. What are you being prudent about?

The figures either there or it's not. I have no idea how it wraps in. And this is what? 16 years ago now, probably 15 or 16 years ago. And I have no idea about the rest of it. But I do remember what it feels like to have a sense of guilt around your lack of preparation and realize that there is way deeper to fall because there is always somebody who is less prepared than you. Yeah.

Yeah. And like if your professor had stood up and said like there's, like there's always someone lower than you, like that too would go the way of prudence. It wouldn't make any sense. Yes, yes, interesting. You had to experience that. I mean, to your point, like I did a master's degree at Oxford, which I remember none of any of the stupid pointless lectures that they had.

What, like the thing that I remember from there is living in this terrible apartment and I was one day in the basement kitchen, like eating wheat of bicks in the morning and it was like toward the end of the year, so they were bringing people into like, look at the apartment. And so the students came down the stairs

and like, I'm there in like my t-shirt, like my boxers or whatever, eating my cereal. And one of them looks around at this kitchen that's like, not well lit, it's dank, it's bad. And it's like, I can never live here, I'd kill myself. And then they left. And like, what was the symbolic lesson that you took away from that?

Um, I was like, I think it's like, man, you could be at what some people consider the best university of the world and people can walk into the intimate parts of your life and say that if they experience those things, they would kill themselves. So like, think about whether all this legible stuff matters a lot or whether I want to be living in such a way that when people walk into the room, they go, oh, I'd like to do that too. Wow. So what it ties into really nicely and is a concept I learned from Tim Ferris called The Good Shit Sticks and you talk about this as well, that the stuff that really resonates

with you that lights a fire inside of you that feels existentially important in some way. You don't need to have an Anky Space Repetition Ebing House for getting curved hack for this. You're going to, you're going to be unable to stop thinking about it. That's how important it's going to be to you. And you know, as somebody that has crushing volumes of high pressure content on a daily basis, that's absolutely the best way to do it for me. Now that could be a cope, right? Because if I had a better personal knowledge management system with an externalized second brain and my notes were all organized I would definitely be able to recall more, but certainly if you're not someone who is geared in that sort of a way and if you are

You'll already know you'll already be the kind of person that's probably got a perfectly Designed notion database with all of your lessons tagged properly and whatever, whatever. And this isn't right if you're a med student. I understand that you actually need to know what all of the terms mean. Like that's why Andrew was created for those sorts of people. But for the most part, if it's just your curious individual that wants to pick up stuff, I wouldn't stress yourself over, oh god, I'm so stupid. I can't remember things. I can't recall things. My recall, dude, for so long, especially toward the end of my 20s, probably because I partied a lot during my 20s. I think I was

suffering with some sort of acute brain atrophy, was so embarrassing. I used to hate it because I'd look up to these mammoth titans of recall in the world of philosophy or personal development or productivity, and they'd just be being, being, being, all of these studies would come off and it would sound so perfect and flowy. And it just took a good bit of time for me to realize you need crushing volumes of content in order to be able to retain even a modicum

of something that can hold half a conversation with somebody. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think there's this general tendency toward thinking you can optimize your life in such ways that like, I just need to write systems and like then I'll remember the right stuff, which like there are things in the margins that like, yeah, I don't know, you should like a calendar is helpful, like some kind of way of dealing with email is helpful. But like take that philosophy too far, and this is a piece that I've been working on.

Like you end up being the person who like, you've optimized everything and you're miserable. Like, there are things that you just can't optimize because they're like mysterious or you have to experience them. But like, I think about when people like go through a terrible breakup and you're like, you know, you will,

like, don't worry, you'll feel better. Like, there isn't really like a series of things that you can do to like make the feeling better happen faster. Like, you just feel better. There isn't really a series of things that you can do to make the feeling better happen faster. You just got to live the day and then the day after. And then it happens as if by magic, but it eventually does happen. There is no way of speeding it up. And the more you try to speed it up, the more you slow it down. And so this tendency toward optimization, I think, is helpful when kind of corral, rather than the feeling of your life.

Thinking about this new venture that you've been going through for the last couple of years, writing your sub-stack, what are you doing? You're sitting down, you know that you need to write something because it's been however many days and you've got a deadline that you've set yourself totally arbitrarily. What are you doing that you found is an effective way to get past writer's block and creative sort of blocks? Yeah, I do a few things. One is, whenever I feel stuck, I can get the sentence right, I can't get this point right. I ask myself, what is the most honest thing that I want to

say right now? If I faced no consequences for what I was going to say, what would I say? And often I find the reason that I can't write this is because I'm like, I feel like I shouldn't say it or I shouldn't say it this way. So sometimes it'll come out. Sometimes it'll be like, oh, I actually don't know enough about this yet. That is what, because what I would say is I don't know or like, nah, I'm kind of like glossing over some stuff here. And so then I go back in and research more. Another thing is it is like I try to give myself too much time, but like these things take time to bake. And it's like you can't bake cookies faster by like cranking them up to 4,000 degrees and like

cooking them in a second. I mean, there are like machines that are meant to do that, right? But like, you can't do that in your oven. Like they just take the time to bake that it takes. And I feel the same way when I'm like baking an idea for experimental history that like, if I try to speed it up, I'm just gonna burn it. And like, it's gonna taste bad. I'm not gonna like it. And so I have to give myself the amount of time

that it takes. And if I'm not done in time, then I'm just not done in time. Because I'd rather give people something that I'd like to read than like an email that I think they should receive. If I try to complete it too quickly, then I'm going to burn the idea and it's not going to taste good. I really, really like that. I really like it.

And yeah, it's a very strange, especially for me, right, because podcasting is a medium. I always have a sparring partner, except for maybe one episode in 30, I do on my own. But for the most part, it's me and somebody else. So my motivations externalized, my preparations externalized, I get to read all the stuff that you do. I have to generate, I have to generate nothing, right? Apart from half-naked takes, about stuff from 15 years ago that I can't even remember on a bus to you.

So it's a very different sort of medium, but I have started writing more and more frequently at the moment. And it is one hell of a battle at times to sit down and to get things out. And I do, um, for the guys that are full-time writers that are cranking out thousands and thousands of words a week. I mean, you know, Brandon Sanderson, if you heard of him. No. So he's a fantasy author. There's a really cool post on Reddit, which any sentence that begins with, there's a

really cool post on Reddit is followed up by a sentence, which is nothing cool at all. But yeah, really cool post on Reddit. And it explains the number of words or pages per year that this guy outputs, compared with the other most prolific page writers within the fantasy genre, fantasy being known as a genre which can be a bit verbose, right? It can be padded out quite nicely. I remember once in the name of the win by Patrick Rothfuss, he spends like two full chapters explaining this kid's walk to work where he goes to play his like loot or something. And he's describing in like intense detail the type of cobblestones he walks over. Anyway,

this guy is five times as prolific as the next biggest fantasy author in terms of output. And he's got secret series that he just hasn't ever got around to releasing and then he'll just pull the pin and they just appear on Amazon. they're all really, really good at least most of the ones I've listened to. So yeah, when I look at people like that and realize how challenging and incompetent I find sitting down to write, yeah, it does feel like a very different sort of, very different world. Yeah, and I think part of this figure is like, okay, what's the niche that you're good at? Like, some people are crankers and they just like, they're like a fire hose of content. And like, that's good. Like, I want to be, I don't know, what's it, rather than a fire

hose of content, like a bunch of water balloons. Like, I want them to go off. I don't want me to be like, oh, man, I'm soaked, but in a good way, I guess. And then like, I'll see you in two weeks. I'll throw another one at you. I want what I write to be something that people look forward to rather than like, oh, it's always the hum in the background. Like, I'm never going to out buzzfeed, buzzfeed. I'm never going to be better than cable news at like filling time. Like my comparative advantage is like baking things until they are to me, like perfectly

baked or as close as I can get and then putting them out into the world Yes, it's I mean it it's a good measure of How excited people are to read your stuff or to watch your listen or whatever which is how many people open the email Yeah, how many how many people when you send out that newsletter or whatever it is on the Monday morning how many people actually open it? And yeah, that's a really nice heuristic. You just want people to be excited about your work. You don't want people to feel obliged to read it. Oh, I'd better read Adam's next piece of work. My boss is going to shout at me if I don't. And you don't need to be laborious. Yeah, that's a very, very nice heuristic. And I love the idea of allowing something to bake until it's done because if you do rush it, it's just not going to taste as good.

And also, when it comes to the stuff that we do ourselves, it is for the most part the deadlines are arbitrary. I think it's important to create some constraints, so you're just going to park instance, lure yourself into a one article lifetime, which is, you know, maybe not totally great. However, most of the deadlines, especially the things that we learn from school, probably don't port across that well, especially when the difference between your work being really, really nicely done and being unnecessarily rushed could be a lot. That being said, I think that this is a mature, creator problem rather than immature creator problem. When you're more on the immature side, you just need to iterate, right? Until you've done whatever

200 repetitions that the thing that you're trying to do, I just get it out. You know, if it is it, is it, is it 95%? Is it 65%? It kind of doesn't matter. No one's reading it anyway. So yeah, I think early on focus more on the sort of explore and then on the backend, you can learn to bake a bit better. Yeah, yeah, part of that same mindset comes from, so I teach and perform in proff comedy as well.

And like, yeah, what you do early on in classes, is like you do a lot of terrible scenes, like nobody sees them until later. But then later you get the sense of like, or I always have the sense anyway, that like, why would people come and sit and watch something that I'm making up in front of them? Like, it better be worth their time,

because like, they could be at home, like eating pringles and watching like, any movie humankind is ever made, like any TV, it's all at their fingertips. There's a lot of good stuff that you could do. So why should they come here? And I do actually think there's good answers to that question.

There is something that can happen in a room that cannot happen in your living room. There's a moment that we can create when we're on stage. And actually, it's much better being there when it's good than rewatching Breaking Bad. And I feel the same way about writing that, yeah, why would people read my stuff rather than, you know, you could read anything that any humans ever created? I'm like, well, it's because like, only I could write this thing because it's like, it

required me to have all these experiences. There was no way of speeding up the production of this article. Like, I had to live for 31 years and like, think the thoughts have put it out. And I do think like, this is better than other stuff that you can read. And like, I'm just foolish enough to think that. is like thinking the thoughts and put it out. And I do think like this is better than other stuff that you can read. And like I'm just foolish enough to think that. That's the problem. And this is a piece of advice I gave in a TEDx talk two and a bit years ago now.

If you try to be your version of somebody else, if you mimic or copy too much from some other creator, the very best that you can hope for is being the second best best them in the world. If I want to be Joe Rogan, at best, I can be the second best Joe Rogan on the planet, which is not necessarily that bad of a position given how successfully he's been,

but it's no one near as good as being the first best you. And you can actually be the second best you to somebody else if you're not careful. Like you can mitigate and dilute down the essence of the work that you do because you're trying to adhere to some arbitrary set of rules that you've decided you need to follow. On a similar point, talking about why the general public is so stupid seems to be very trendy and this is something that I've noticed. Super, super trendy to discuss about

how society's going down the toilet and everybody is just an idiot. Why do you think that is so popular? Yeah, part of it is, you know, it makes you look smart when you call it people stupid. Like there's been some psychology research on this, at least the people think that this is the case. Another thing, so I didn't write that in that piece, but part of my dissertation work

was on people's perceptions that people are less good than they used to be, like less kind, less honest, less nice. And then actually I went and tried to find any evidence that this has been changing over time. And there's no obvious like objective measure of people's goodness. And I mean, like every day interpersonal things, I don't mean like, did you murder somebody yesterday? But all these surveys like, how often do you encounter instability at work? Like, did people treat you

with respect all day yesterday? Like, did you do this nice thing? How about that nice thing? All these things are flat over time. For as long as we've measured them, the people think that they go down, down, down, all these different ones. And I think that comes from two phenomena. One is, when you look out on the world, when you read the news, it's mainly about people being bad and dumb. Like that's what makes headlines,

is like this person killed that person, and like this person embezzled some money. And so every day you look out on the world and it looks bad if you look at it that way. But there's a phenomenon in the memory literature called the fading affect bias, which is basically the badness of bad stuff. Fates faster than the goodness of good stuff And you can run this study on yourself that like, you know, if you remember things that happened to you when you're 18

Like the bad things now probably don't feel so bad unless they were like really terrible and the good things like still feel pretty good So something like oh, I got turned down for prom like now It's like oh man, it doesn't have funny like being a teenager, right? And the good stuff that like oh man, I had a really great prom, like it still feels kind of good. And this is true on average for how people's memories work over time. And so if you put that together with the fact that like every day, it looks like people in general are bad, but there's this memory bias where like it kind of seems like there was less bad in the past. You can get this illusion of a decline and you can get it for things

like morality, you can get it for competence and intelligence, but it's all a looserie because like these things are actually really hard to measure over time and anyone who's like I definitely know how it's changed is like fooling themselves. What is the reason for this asymmetry between how sane we feel we are and how insane everybody else feels? I had this discussion last night. It always keeps on coming up. This weird imbalance between what we see ourselves and what we see of everyone else. And often I think we believe that we see the world in a sane way and everybody else is very, very odd.

Yes, there's this thing called naive realism, which is just the idea that like my eyes are little port holes out of which I see the world and I'm just seeing it how it is. Like there's no interpretive step after the information gets to my brain and up to my consciousness. That's just what it is. When in fact there's all kinds of interpretive steps. Even basic sensory perceptive stuff that the world that you see isn't actually the world

that's out there, your eyes and your visual cortex make it useful for you. That also happens with higher level stuff. The idea is that you hear, when you hear them, you're like, oh, no, bad idea, oh, no, good idea. Like, all that's pre-processing. That's done under the hood. Like, you didn't consciously arrive at that decision, but it feels like that's just the way that it is. So when you look at other people who perceive the world in a different way, it just seems like they're mistaken. And when you're like, oh, no, actually, it's this way. And they're like, no, it's not. You're like, oh, you're dumb. Because like, it's just obviously this way. The world is. And if you

disagree, like, you just must be like, something's wrong in your head. So I think that is part of it. Another part of why we feel this way about people, we don't know very well. Like, when you're closer to someone, you can give them more leeway. They're like, I know why you see the world differently from me because I know you all these complicated differences and experience. This is why we cut our friends a lot of slack. But when you don't know someone, you're just like, yeah, you're just a dumb person. And this phenomenon of psychological distance, like the closer you are to something, the more detail in which you perceive it.

And the more detail that you perceive someone, I think the more slack you give them. But if someone's just kind of like this blur to you, this blob, then you're like, no, there's no complication to people in general. They're not a bunch of, you know, flawed humans doing the best they can. They're a bunch of like idiots and evil people. And when you get closer and closer,

like when those people come to your friends, like, no, actually not this one, but all the other ones are. So there's the illusion that keeps getting pushed back. I wonder what I can see how that might be adaptive for us to have that, that the people that you're closest to, you need to kick off at the least frequently.

You need to not find a problem with every single thing that they say, whereas if it's somebody else, maybe from, let's say, a different family within your tribe or from even a different tribe, you can afford to judge them much more quickly because the risk of not doing so would be quite grave. If this is the smoking gun that this person's malevolent narcissist, you want to be able to figure it out pretty quickly.

But if you have this broader sample of behavior, maybe you can give them a little bit more room. Yeah, you can't think hard about everything. You can't go through a deliberative process about everything that comes to mind. You have to be very selective about that. It makes sense that the people closest to you get the most detail about them, because we have to deal with them the most. The people farthest from you get blurrier and blurrier. It works the same thing the way in your visual field, the things that you point your eyes directly at have the most detail. It's hard to tell, but the further and further thing the way in your visual field. Like, the things that you point your eyes directly at have the most detail.

And it's hard to tell, but the further and further out you get in your visual field, like, eventually your color vision goes away, like, all of that is just abstract. None of it feels that way. You have to look at like visual illusions that make this clear. But it's the same thing. Like, you, like, the whole, the whole part of your visual field cannot be the point that's most in focus. Like, you have to be selective.

What's the thing the same thing works on mine? Correspondence bias. the whole part of your visual field cannot be the point that's most in focus. Like you have to be selective. What's the same thing works in mind? Correspondence bias. This is the idea that other people's behavior flows from their personality rather than their situation. So you see somebody who's ticked off and you go, it's because they're a mad person, not because they're in a mad situation or a situation that made them angry. And there's this other part of the Alvinga Flum did, this actor observer bias, that we do

this more for other people than for us, because you perceive yourself in the most detail. So I know all this stuff about like my mitigating circumstances and why I do what I do. And I go, oh, well, I was pushed this way and that way. I'm like, that's why I did it. It's not because it flowed from my, like the person that I essence. Yes, exactly. And so I told this story in this post

of like the first time I got to New York where I'm walking through La Guarde, I'm like looking for a taxi, it's Ed O'Veughan comes up and she's like, hey, D.D. to taxi, I'm like, I sure do. Like, thanks, kind New Yorker. Like, people were wrong about people in this town. Look at all these friendly people

anticipating my needs and she's like, come with me. And we walk outside, but then we walk across the street into a parking garage and I'm like, this doesn't, this isn't where I expected the taxi to be. And then we get to an unmarked car. I'm like, usually, taxis are yellow. And she's like, get in. I'm like, oh, I feel like I'm in a bad situation. But I don't want to be in polite. I came all this way and I did say that I would go with her. And she's like, okay, you can sit in the passenger seat. I'm like, all right. And so I had this plan that like, if she tries to kidnap me, I'll just grab the wheel and I'll steer us into a building and then she'll be days because she's middle-aged and I'm 18 and I'll dash from the car and I'll give my luggage out of the back of the

little runaway. And like all this, that story might maybe sound like I'm a stupid person, but each of those things felt like, I'm in this kind of weird situation. Like I don't want to harm this person. Like I don't want to be mean. And like each individual's decision that I make doesn't seem that stupid. But yeah, but because I'm in that situation, I know everything that went into it.

That similar to, is it the fundamental attribution error? Or it might even be the same thing by a different name. Different word for the same thing. Yeah. Yes. I thought so. There was a period in the world of product about four to six years ago, guy called Shane Parish blog called FS.Blog Phanam Street. And he wrote a book of great mental models to think by and it did very, very well and he's a super, super smart guy and he's been on the show.

The rationalist movement as well that Scott Alexander and Eliad Zayukowski were a big part of LesRong.com then turned into Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex X10 all this stuff which you'll be familiar with. There was a period in my life and I think most people's lives that have come up through that corner of the internet, where I thought, if I just know the name of every cognitive bias, if I've just brute forced myself to wrote, memorize every single one of the cognitive bias list on Wikipedia, I will transcend humanity, become an awakened being. Why is it not the case? I think it is the same problem of trying to optimize

your life in ways that can't actually be optimized. So like, if you go back to, you know, you go through a terrible breakup and you're like, oh, actually, I'm doing bad, affective forecasting. Like, I think that my emotions will continue longer than they actually do. And now I ascend into the realm of the person who isn't affected by my, it's like knowing how the thing works doesn't mean you can just open it up and change it. Like my mind's like, they don't have a hood that you can pop open and like fix the carburetor.

So some of these things like, yeah, it does help. Like, okay, I know what sunk cost fallacy is and now I know better to spot it And like I don't do it as much anymore But some of these things like there isn't a way around it And in fact like thinking that you can get around it that keeps you stuck in it longer because now you're thinking like why haven't my bad feelings gone away I miss predict how long they're going to Yeah, and so I think when you look at these at rational, which like I'm very adjacent to that part of the internet, I think like look around like do they seem happy?

Like they, they seem like very stressed out and anxious all the time because they're trying to think correctly. Well, I suppose the other thing that you layer on top and this is one of the curses of knowledge, is that you actually can layer on shame if you're not careful because now not only did you succumb to your fundamental attribution error or whatever you multiplied by zero accidentally, but now you have to shame around the fact that you do this bias before you did it, and you still did it, so now you feel like, like a self-imposed idiot, as opposed to just an idiot

that circumstance, circumstantial. Yeah, why can't I make my brain work right? Like, I'm thinking all the right thoughts. Like, why don't they work? Yes, yeah. Dude, it's a real, I feel that's another thing that people just need to go through. You know, if you're 20 and listening to this and thinking, I'm going to check out FSTOP blog. Please do.

It's a fantastic repository of all of these different cognitive biases. Enjoy the next three years of learning them and creating Anki notecards to be able to try and do your Ebbinghouse for getting curve. And then when you're 26 or 27, you can say, God, I'm glad that I went through that. I don't remember any of it.

And but you will remember the vibe. You'll remember the fact that we are less rational than we think we are. We do not know how rational we can be and cognitive biases are not fixed by learning cognitive biases. Yeah. I wonder what's that for us right now? Like, I think it's all the time. I think this all the time you I think it's all the time.

You've stepped into, you've hit one of my traps, which is what am I going to look back on in five years time and think you knew this 10 years ago. Why weren't you stopping doing this five years ago? Yeah, I sometimes think that like, there's really only seven things to learn in life, but you can only remember one at a time. And just life is the process of forgetting one and remembering another.

And I wish I could tell you what they were, but I could only remember why. Yeah, God. I mean, if you ever look back at the things where you say, what would you, what do you wish that you 10 years ago would have known? That's pretty good advice for how you behaving right now. When I write that out for myself, I think, yeah, that's pretty good advice for how you're behaving right now. When I write that out for myself, I think, yeah, right now, Chris needs to listen to this as well.

That's not advice for him forever ago, because we were cursed or blessed to repeat the same patterns over and over again. And I suppose you're filtered, restricted by, I know that this is a problem, but am I going to act on it? Am I nervous about acting on it? Do I feel stupid? Because does this feel comfortable to me somehow? Does this type of trauma or difficulty somehow feel familiar in a way that's actually going to keep me stuck in it even more? Yeah, it's, it's very, very interesting looking at the progress of personal knowledge development over time dude

Adam I really really love your work. Everyone needs to go and check out your sub stack Where should they go? Where can they follow you and harass you on the internet? Experimentalhistory.substac.com And you can shout at me there and I will hear you dude. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was great fun.