Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 162 | Leidy Klotz on Our Resistance to Subtractive Change

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It's therefore interesting to see how our brains actually go about solving problems. Here's an interesting feature that you might not have guessed: when faced with an imperfect situation, our first move to improve it tends to involve adding new elements, rather than taking away. We are, in general, resistant to subtractive change. Leidy Klotz is an engineer and designer who has worked with psychologists and neuroscientists to study this phenomenon. We talk about how our relative blindness to subtractive possibilities manifests itself, and what lessons might be for design more generally. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Leidy Klotz received his Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering from Penn State University. He is currently Copenhaver Associate Professor of Engineering Systems and Environment and Architecture at the University of Virginia. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a school designer, and before that was a professional soccer player for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. His new book is Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. Web site University of Virginia web page Google Scholar publications "People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes," Adams, Converse, Hales and Klotz, 2021. Wikipedia Twitter

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I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And I wanted to start today's episode with a story. I was on the internet, and I noticed on Twitter a link to a very interesting paper in nature. It was sort of a psychology study, but an interdisciplinary group of people carrying it out. And the study was basically the following. They would give subjects a little grid on a computer, where there were some blank spaces and some colored in spaces, and they asked the subjects to alter the pattern of squares, to make the image they were looking at symmetric in some well-defined way.

So you could either add more squares to the image to make it look symmetric, or you could remove squares. You could click on squares and have them disappear to make it look symmetric. And the human brain, says the study, has this feature that it is much more eager to add extra squares than to remove them. This turns out to be a more general feature, the author's claim, that if we have some design problem or some puzzle in front of us, we instantly move to adding stuff.

Subtractive change, taking things away, is a little bit more alien to us. And so you can think about why that is the neuroscience of that, the evolution of why we evolved that way, and so forth. So I thought that would be a fun topic for the Minescape podcast, a little bit different, but interdisciplinary and interesting. So the lead author or the leader of the lab that performed the study was Lydie Klotz, looked him up on Google, right? And to my dismay, when you type in Lydie Klotz into Google, what appears is the name of a professional soccer player, not a professor of engineering at the

University of Virginia. So I'm like, ah, that's not what I'm looking for. And then I realized, further Googling, it is the same guy. Lydie Klotz was a professional soccer player, later got his PhD in architectural engineering and is now a professor at the University of Virginia and carries out these really interesting interdisciplinary studies involving neuroscientists and psychologists, design people, and engineering people. So he agreed to come on the podcast, and we had a lot of fun in this episode. And one of the reasons why it's fun is there are, like I said, these questions of cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, why did we evolve this way?

There's also questions of engineering and design, right? given this tendency of human beings to like to add things rather than to subtract, does that offer us new hints to maybe improve our design principles by looking a little bit more and subtracting things? And finally, it's almost a self-help, self-improvement kind of thing. You know, can you get through your life better if you take more seriously the option of getting rid of things? I know that Marie Kondo already patented this idea and Lyddy brings her up, but what is the science behind that?

You know, why do we feel happier getting rid of things rather than our usual tendency, which is to just add them on? Lydie does have a recent book on this called Subtract, the Untapped Science of Less, where you can learn about both the neuroscience, psychology, and what it means for design, engineering, and our everyday lives. So, fun conversation, both serious, but also fun in the sense of ranging over a lot of different cool ideas. With that, let's go. Lighty Klotz, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thanks, Sean. It's great to be here. I have to start, you know, I always try to come up with some useful way to start the conversation. And sometimes the person I'm talking to has already figured out the perfect way.

So you've written a book and in the book and elsewhere you tell this wonderful story of playing Legos with your son that basically reveals the whole point of what we're going to be talking about here today. So I can do no better than to ask you to relate the Lego story. All right. Great. My son will be happy. He's getting, yeah, he's getting his word out all around the world. So I was, he was three at the time. And as I just spent a lot of time playing Legos with him, and I'd always been interested in kind of how we design. I'm an engineer by training.

And I, you know, enjoy behavioral science too. And interested in the like the thought processes behind our design. So I was playing Legos with my son, you know, and we had this bridge. that we were trying to build basically. And the problem we had was that one of the columns was shorter than the other column. So the bridge wasn't level. And I went to fix this problem as any good, well-trained engineer would. I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column.

And by the time I had turned back around, my three-year-old had removed a block from the longer column. And so, again, I'd long been interested in this idea of kind of like minimalist design and, you know, how can we be more sustainable on our planet, but never really boiled it down to something that just like happened, literally that I could hold in my hand, this model of Legos. And what my son showed me in that moment ended up being pretty close to what the research revealed after tens of thousands of hours of studying the phenomenon is that,

yeah, as humans, our first instinct when we're trying to make something better is to think, okay, what can we add? And then oftentimes we move on and don't even consider subtracting. So number one, it must be intimidating to be a three-year-old designing Lego structures with your father, who is a professional engineering professor. But number two, so you... He's not intimidated at all. Not intimidated. All right. I would have been intimidated. But the other thing is, you know, you were already prime.

You said, you know, in some sense, you've been thinking about ways that we can build and engineer things in subtractive ways or, you know, more sustainable ways. And yet even you fell for the impulse to, you know, stick the extra thing in there. So do you think this is a completely natural human thing? I mean, that's what the research says after after doing it. And yeah, and that was, you know, myself, but also I took Ezra's, as was my son's name, I took his Lego replica around to people and I would give it to my graduate students and say, okay, solve this bridge and they would add. And then, you know, one of my co-authors on the paper we ended up producing about the research, Gabe Adams, I took it to her. And I mean, she's a genius. Plus, I had been having all these conversations with her about what I thought was the same idea. It was like taking away or minimalist design. And she added. And then when she, after she added, I told her what Ezra had done. And she said, oh, oh, oh. So what you're thinking is, why don't we subtract as a way to make things better? And that, that makes it. And that, that

things better ends up being really a key part of it because that was the, it seems like a simple distinction, but that's what makes it different from a whole bunch of other reasons why we don't subtract. Before we get into the details of the research that you actually did on this beyond working with Ezra, I mean, do you think that there, let's ask a nature versus nurture question. I mean, if your three-year-old is better at it than you are, does that tell us that it's culture that is inculcating this idea, we should add things rather than subtract them? Yeah, that's the one downside of the Ezra story is it kind of leads you to think that,

oh, this is a nature versus nurture thing. And we have absolutely no evidence that that's the case. And in fact, I would posit that Ezra's even worse than me at adding. It's just that he plays a ton of Legos, and this was the one chance where I stumbled across him subtracting. So we haven't explicitly studied it in kids, but we have in our experiments, you know, looked at the different, you know, segmented people by groups and things like that to see, oh, are, you know, younger people better? Is there any difference between male and female or, you know, other ways that might, like, indicate a difference that would suggest it was cultural as opposed to just kind of innate and haven't found any evidence of that. Again, I think that, but that is high on our list of

of kind of next step studies, it wouldn't surprise me if there was, you know, a slight variation. And as an educator, I'm really interested in, you know, what are we doing in our education that might be kind of, you know, propping up this bias or, you know, what could we do to kind of help people deal with it? But no, Ezra is not a master subtractor. Okay, yeah, I was going to say he's probably just a master Lego builder. That's a perfectly sensible response there. But before we get into the experiment, which is really what I want to get into, but let's, you know, let's pretend that we're following the scientific method we were taught in high school, right? And so we're supposed to formulate a hypothesis before doing the experiment.

So what is the most rigorous way you can state the hypothesis? You know, when you have literally a set of Legos and you're either putting blocks in or taking them away, I see the difference between subtracting and adding. Is there a more general idea of what that means? What is the hypothesis we're trying to test here? Yeah, there is a more general idea and it spans across physical objects, ideas, and situations. So basically, when we're trying to change things, whether there are ideas, objects, or situations, from how they are to how we want them to be, are we likely to overlook subtraction, basically, or do we, yeah, do we think of adding before we think of subtracting? But I guess maybe this is an obvious answer, but is there, do we always know the difference

between adding and subtracting? Is it always clear what counts as adding and what counts as subtracting? Yeah, that's a good, yeah, that's amazing question. In the experiments, yes, I mean, in the real world, no. Right. I mean, it's impossible to tell if, you know, I'm, you know, where as I'm, taking an item off of my calendar. Am I really looking at that as a subtraction? Or am I looking at as like, you know, freeing up space to be able to add something? But in our experiments, we were able to,

and that's the beauty of experiments, you know, for example, my favorite experiment, we basically, well, we created this grid on a computer screen where people could add and subtract. And, you know, we did a couple of things. One, we told them explicitly what was adding and one was what was subtracting. And then after the fact asked them, like, did you add or did you subtract?

So we're confirming there that, yes, you know, this thing that we're counting as adding, they are thinking of as adding. So, yeah. So it's a good question, though, because, I mean, a lot of the examples I use in the book, like are more kind of real world design. So, and, you know, in real world design, I use Myelin designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And it's this cut into the mall in Washington, D.C. And it's this beautiful monumental architecture.

And you're like, well, you know, it looks, I can argue that it's subtractive compared to the Washington monument. But what was Maya Lynn really thinking? And I use it in the book because we have record of her thinking of it as a subtraction. But most things, we don't actually have what the person was thinking. Yeah. So you mentioned the grid. You mentioned the experiment.

I mean, you're an engineer by profession, but this is clearly some kind of psychology, cognitive science experiment. So you're giving your subjects a computer and a 10 by 10 grid with some white squares and green squares, and you're asking them to add or subtract. I mean, so what exactly were they asked to do? And is it clear that they're assuming that a white square is a nothingness, an absence, and emptiness, and a green square is a thing?

Is that how they're conceptualizing it? Right. Yes. So we, you know, I should deal with the I'm an engineer first because I am indeed an engineer and I've dabbled in behavioral science. Basically, one of the things that I like about behavioral science and one of the things that's happening with behavioral science is people are starting to apply it, right? And use it to make things better. You know, so like nudging and other ways to use behavioral science to make change. I mean, that's a very engineering way of looking at the world.

It's, you know, we've got this science. okay, now what can we do with it to try to make the world a better place or, you know, meet certain objectives? So I'd always been approaching it from that perspective and was able to kind of like take some, you know, really well-known nudges, for example, and apply them in engineering. And I could study that by myself. But these grids, you know, as you're listening to me talk, you're not just listening to an engineer. You're listening to the combined work of an engineer plus three behavioral science co-authors who worked with me on the paper and gave Adams, as I mentioned before, but also Ben Combers and Andy Hales, all three of them are trained in psychology and, you know, really helped us, you know, I wouldn't have been able to do this research without them.

And so the grids, the most convincing paradigm in my mind, we ended up with a number of different paradigms that we use showing people kind of adding more than they subtracted. But all of them were subject to this criticism that you can make about the Legos, right? And the Lego criticism would be, well, that's just because that's what we do with Legos, right? We've been taught to build with Legos. We've grown up building with Legos. This is like what we assume we're supposed to do with Legos. And then you could also argue, well, this only applies to Legos. And so we made this grid example thinking, okay, nobody's done these specific grid activities before.

And there's no kind of inherent value in the grids, right? there's no value to blocks on a computer screen. And we set these things up so that the grid pattern basically was broken into four quadrants. And what we did was put extraneous marks in one of the quadrants and then told people to make the pattern symmetrical from left to right and top to bottom. So we had different patterns, but in all of the patterns, there were a couple of basic options. One would be to subtract the extraneous marks by clicking on them. And the other would be to add marks to all three corners. So it, you know, and the other nice thing about this way of doing it is that it's, it's just better to subtract in this case.

I mean, the bridge example, you can make the argument that adding and subtracting either or doesn't matter. But in this case, we said, do it in the few as clicks possible. So subtracting was the right answer, not just one answer. And before people did the studies, we'd give them opportunity to practice and say, okay, you can add green blocks to the area or you can subtract, you could subtract these marks from the area. And we'd have them practice so that they knew how to do it and they were practice adding and subtracting. And then in that case, we asked them after the fact, you know, did you add or subtract as one of the checks afterwards? and they kind of responded that they were doing the thing that we thought they were doing. Does that make sense?

So they knew they had conceptualized the idea of subtracting blocks. You weren't tricking them by not even letting them think about that. No, no, yeah. Sustainability is a hot button topic, but it's more than recycling bottles and ditching plastic. It's about seeing choices through a wider lens that extends not just from paper and plastic, but all the way to kitty litter. That's why I love Sweet Scoop. They led the charge as the first renewable kitty litter,

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plans for what's going to happen, right? But I suppose that this is part of the point of the computer great is that there's no purpose whatsoever. It's just a design. Yeah, that's great. There's an awesome YouTube video that Nature made about our paper and the most liked comment is a version of what you've just said, which is, and so, but it also brings up a really important distinction here. I mean, our paper showed that all else being equal, people don't even think of subtraction. But the, the thing that So we ruled out the thing that you just described where, okay, there's some like inherent value to the stuff that's there or somebody thought about this, right? It's like, okay, somebody's smarter than me thought about building this bridge and who am I to take it away without, you know, kind of putting a whole bunch of thought into it. And that's really important for subtracting in the real world, but it happens after you've thought about it, right?

So what we found is that people don't even think about it. But then after you do think about it as an option, then you could have this deliberative process where it's like, okay, I thought of this option, but I'm not choosing it because for any number of reasons. And one of those, one very good reason would be I'm not going to subtract because somebody has put more thought into adding this thing and who am I to take it away. So you've ruled out that hypothesis that even if that's clearly not going on, people are still more reluctant to subtract.

And, and, you know, I think there were several paradigms that we used. I mean, we had a grid example. We had miniature golf. The, maybe another, describing another way that we used the grids might help explain how we, how we ruled this out. You know, so first and foremost, the grids don't have any inherent value, right? There is clearly just a random pattern. And so it's hard to think that somebody would look at that and say, oh, the person

who arranged this random pattern thought it was really important and therefore we're not going to take away. But also evidence that people weren't even thinking about this option, but recognized it as superior after they thought of it. We had them do repetitions on the grids, so give them a number of grid patterns, a series. And this is similar to what was happening with Ezra. It's like, okay, you did this a bunch of times. And, you know, if on the third or fourth time, they did it, they did recognize subtraction and did actually stumble upon it and choose it. And then you'd ask him afterwards, well, what's the best option? And they're like, well, obviously the subtractive one, it was fewer clicks. And so, you know, what that shows is that

it wasn't that they were choosing against it for some reason, whether that be they don't like taking things away because of loss aversion or whether they don't like taking things away because they feel like somebody's thought about this, that rules that out pretty clearly when the people don't choose it when they don't think of it, but then do choose it when it's brought to mind in some way. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense.

And the other thing that I thought was very clever in your experimental design was that you also tested them when they were being distracted by some other task at the same time. And if I remember the effect was even stronger, is that right? Exactly. So, I mean, the theory there would be that if this is something that's like a heuristic or like just in a way of thinking, you know, we're more likely to, you know, go to those default mental settings when we're under load, when we're under cognitive load. And we don't have much time to think. And so this is funny too because, you know, we knew that that was a way that we could test it.

And here we are, you know, four people who've been thinking about subtraction for a long time. And all we could think about was how do we add cognitive load? How do we add cognitive load? Well, we could also manipulate this by removing some cognitive load. But anyway, in one of the ways you add cognitive load is having numbers scrolling across the bottom of the grid experiment, for example, while people are doing the study. And you say, okay, every time a five comes by, press F on your keyboard. And so you can do both of those things at the same time, but you're a little bit distracted. And when people were more distracted, they were even more likely to go to that adding default, to not think of subtracting.

So that was evidence that it's like, okay, this is some kind of mental shortcut that we're using. Because, you know, when we add this cognitive load, we're even more likely to use it. It's also a very, you know, kind of speaks to a more problematic thing as you get out of. into the real world, right? Because as we add ideas and concepts and thoughts, what's that doing? That's adding cognitive load, which is making us even less likely to take away. And so it's kind of this reinforcing loop that works against subtraction. Yeah, I mean, so it does seem that you've got a lot of evidence that we favor the idea of adding new things in problem solving in general rather than taking them away. Is there anything we can say about how the brain

works that makes that happen, either the level of neurons and so forth or at least at the level of sort of other psychological strategies that we use to get through the day? Not at the level of neurons. I mean, I think the best thing that we can say is that when we, the adding is the first thing that comes to mind, basically, that this is a heuristic that we're using for whatever reason. I mean, it may have been very helpful in the past. And it kind of lines up with query theory, if you're familiar with that. I mean, it is what it sounds like, basically like we consider options in an order

and the order that we consider options matter, right? And so the way this becomes harmful is we consider adding first and then we've satisfied. We're like, okay, I've solved my problem by adding and you move on without even considering subtraction. So the best kind of why we have or the best what's going on is that like we're considering adding first when we are encountered with these, when we encounter these situations that we want to try to make better by changing them in some way. Could you actually elaborate on the notion of satisfying, which is a terrible, terrible word that I'm coming across more and more often, but it's certainly a very useful concept in how we

make decisions? Yeah, I mean, so Herbert Simon coined this term. I mean, I love Herbert Simon as a scholar. I mean, he's kind of a precursor to Conneman and Tversky, basically. You know, he was his big contribution, one of his big contributions. He actually made it a lot in a lot of areas. But one that he won a Nobel Prize for was showing that, you know, people aren't rational in this specific way and that they satisfy. I mean, you just don't have infinite time to optimize every situation, right?

So when I'm buying, you know, tomato sauce at the supermarket, I'm not sitting there saying, you know, doing this complex optimization problem between like price, sodium content and, I don't know, taste. I'm just like, okay, this one is less than $5. It doesn't have a ton of salt. And, you know, so I satisfy this and move on and am able to spend more thought on like what kind of pasta I want to buy. And we do this all the time and it makes perfect sense. You can't spend all your time on trivial decisions. But it is a terrible word, satisfying. And I had to use it over and over in the book because Simon coined it.

And I remember my neuroscientist neighbor who was a reader of the book. He's like, this is horrible jargon. Can you get rid of it? And I was like, you know, I tried to get rid of most of the jargon. But this is like it means something. I can't just, we need to re-coign it. But yeah, so satisfying is. this portmanteau of, you know, satisfactory and suffice.

And, you know, it's since been shown in all kinds of decision processes, and it just, you know, makes sense of something that we would do. And this tendency to satisfy is combined with adding first can lead us to not, you know, kind of optimize if subtraction was an option. And I guess the last thing I would add on satisficing is, you know, what's really great about Simon. And even, you know, Conneman and Tversky, I mean, they always point out that there's a, often a helpful reason for these biases, right?

These deviations for rationality. Like, as a general thing, they're there for, they've evolved for a reason. And they're mostly helpful, but there can also be situations in which they become harmful. So satisfying mostly good, but in a case where, you know, the right answer is not the first thing that comes to mind. then satisfacing is going to be problematic. I think it's actually an underappreciated fact of life, how finite we are in our ability to think of all the possible ways to do things. Maybe Herbert Simon knew about this very well,

and I'm just not familiar enough with his work. But I talked to Stephen Wolfe from recently on the podcast, and he emphasizes what he calls the computational boundedness of finite structures, such as ourselves. I talked to Carl Fristin with his free energy principle, and we try to be good Bayesian updators, but really we sort of approximate it in some nice way. And so the idea, I think the idea that you're adding here that I'm not sure I ever thought of or stumbled across is that we have like a list of strategies that will implicitly apply to different problems. And it's an ordered list. And it's not random.

And sort of if we have some goal of satisfying, then whichever strategy gets us there first is the one we'll use, even if it's not the best one. Is that a fair way to say it? Yeah, that's a fair way to say it. And Eric Johnson has done more work than anybody in this area. And Elki Weber, so there are Elkies at Princeton, Eric's at Columbia. Eric has a book coming out called The Elements of Choice that is all about this, a popular book that's all about this. And but yeah, you summarized it exactly correctly and it is incredibly important. I would add too that, I mean, my guess is that this kind of overconfidence in our own like numerical abilities or, you know, our, you know, optimization of things is especially prevalent among researchers, right? I mean, that's going to be a blind spot.

Yeah. Yeah. To us and engineers too, right? It's like we've been doing these calculations our whole life and getting the right answer. and we kind of think that that applies to every situation that we encounter in life, which, you know, is not the case. Right. The other bit of jargon that maybe comes from Kahneman Tversky that you use is loss aversion. We, for whatever reason, we are more hurt by losing a little than we are made happier by gaining a little bit.

I'm not sure I'm explaining it correctly. So maybe, but maybe this has some relationship with subtraction versus addition. Yeah, perfect explanation. And there is a relationship. It's there are nature, well, it gets back to that kind of clarification that Gabe made and gets back to Ezra's bridge, actually. It's like to make things better. What we are interested in is taking things away to make things better. And in that case, less is not a loss.

You know, what Kahneman and Tversky were looking at was like these cases where you lose something, where it is harmful in some way and you overweigh that relative to gaining something. And so that's a very good reason we might, a danger as it relates to subtracting, I think, is when we subtract something, if we interpret it mistakenly as a loss and focus on the things that have been kind of taken away,

then we can, it can fall into this kind of thinking and waiting that we do related to loss aversion where if you if you kind of mentally categorize this thing as a loss, you're going to be more emotionally damaged by losing it when in fact the subtraction was actually to make things better. And we'll go from Simon and Connman and Tversky to Marie Kondo here. So she's the decluttering guru, right? And she tells us to take stuff away.

But what does she do? You know, the whole focus is on the clean room that you're going to have, the tidy space. It's not about the physical things that you're taking away because, you know, it is a barrier to taking away if you're sitting there thinking, oh, well, I really liked this, you know, my t-shirt that I never wore. And I'm going to feel bad when I lose that t-shirt. And sure, you're going to feel a little bad when you lose that t-shirt. But overall, you're going to feel really good when you have this, you know, streamlined room. And so what she does is kind of steers us around loss aversion by, you know,

keeping us focused on the gain that we're going to have by subtracting, the good thing that we're going to have by subtracting. And I think we can, you know, you can take that and think about how you would apply it in all kinds of subtractions, whether it's, you know, physical stuff or whether it's your, you know, your to-do list or the ideas that are in your head. head. I mean, you know, taking things away, sure, you know, there is some emotional attachment to the thing that you're taking away. But the bigger picture goal is this kind of end state that is, in fact, better. It's not a loss. It's always a little bit dangerous, I think, to try to apply evolutionary

explanations to some of these psychological features. But maybe it's worth trying in this case anyway. I mean, is there a story we can tell, ideally a testable story, but at least some kind of story about why we would have evolved or developed maybe. I guess the distinction being, maybe it's not through adaptation, but maybe just some reason why the brain chose to prioritize our strategies to put subtraction way after addition. Yeah, it's dangerous, but it's fun to think about these things.

And I mean, so chapter two of the book is kind of, I thought of as like evolutionary explanations for this, and then chapter three of the book is kind of more like cultural evolution. I'll start with the biological ones and then you can tell me if you want me to go into the cultural ones. But obviously the biology, this desire to acquire stuff, right? I mean, that's something that, you know, getting food allows us to pass down our genes. And there's a Stephanie Preston does a lot of research on this. She's at University of Michigan and other psychologists, and I cite her in the book a lot.

but she's looked at acquisitiveness why people like get and keep things. And she basically shows that this acquisitiveness, she has this brilliant study that she does on a computer screen where people are like shopping and they keep all this useless stuff. And then they are told to like constrain their items to the shopping cart and they're unable to do it. Like unable to get rid of this completely useless thing. And I mean, she shows that that basic behavior is continuous with, you know, hoarding. But it's also tied to just pack rats, for example.

I mean, pack rats, they, when you take away their supply of stuff, they immediately start stockpiling it. And when you first think of that, you're like, well, of course, they, you know, that's what we do when our pantries get empty. But pack rats aren't thinking and planning animals, right? They're doing this entirely on instinct. And so there's that. The other kind of, surprisingly for me, again, being, you know, kind of coming at this from the outside, was how biological this desire to display competence is to basically show that we can interact with our world. And so the classic example is Bowerbirds building nests.

And so the male Bowerbird builds the ceremonial nests and the female Bowerbirds are going around, looking at the nests and deciding who they want to mate with based on the nests. And then after they mate, the female Bowerbird goes and builds another nest and raises the young in that nest. So the whole point of this ceremonial nest is just to show that the male Bowerbird was capable of like interacting with the world. And to the extent that like, you know, adding Legos or adding two-dos or just showing you're busy can kind of display this competence, that's also kind of a biological tie-in that would

lead us to add. But to be fair, the last thing I'll say about biology is that, you know, if you talk about this just beautiful, if you're using it as a metaphor, adaptation, and what's the other selection, right? I mean, so nature's moving forward by adding, not moving forward, nature is evolving by adding and subtracting. And so as a metaphor, That is actually pretty helpful in thinking about, oh, there's multiple ways that we can kind of evolve. And one is by adding to what's there and one is by subtracting from what's there. I don't think we necessarily need to go to Bowerbirds. I think there's plenty of human beings who clearly want to show off their ability to acquire and own things.

I'm just making it to see on Instagram. Who needs to do it? I'm just making an excuse for those people. Yeah, that it's a biological excuse. But the cultural, you'll be interested in the cultural one because this is not something that I think gets enough. Yeah. It was surprisingly clear among the anthropologist set and historians that at the dawn of civilization, right? So when we're going from kind of hunter-gatherer to farming, there was this thing that was always there.

So, you know, they talk about writing had to be there and then like kind of organized social structures. Back then it was often religion. And then they talked about monumental architecture always being there. I was like, I'm a civil engineer. I love big structures. But I thought, well, this is like a pretty lofty place for big structures to be like one of the things that has to be there for something to be considered a civilization. But the theory there is that, you know, by building the body of the civilization, that's what helped build the culture of civilization. So, you know, these early settlements, you've got 25 hunter gatherers roaming around in a band can only do so much. But then if they want to build some kind of ceremonial thing, similar to the Bowerbird nest or similar to, you know, some of these pyramids or other temples, things like that, then all of a sudden the people have to coordinate, right? And so the theory is that this desire to build is actually what brings people together to kind of scratch that edge. So there's that kind of cultural thing, too, to the extent that we've all evolved from those civilizations, right?

I mean, those are the civilizations that spread around and then became us, whether you're Western, Eastern, Interdependent, independent, whatever. When you give to charity, how much impact will your donation actually have? question can be hard if not impossible to know. Most charities can't tell you how your money will be used or how much good it will accomplish. If you want to help people living in poverty and want to make the biggest difference possible, I recommend you check out Givewell. Givewell has spent more than a decade researching charitable organizations and only recommends highest impact evidence-based charities. Over 50,000 donors have used Givewell to donate over $750 million. Rigorous evidence suggests these donations will save over 75,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more.

And Give Well is free. Give Well wants to empower as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about their donations. They publish all of their research on their site for free, no sign up required. If you've never donated to Give Well's recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of August or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org, pick podcast and Sean Carroll's Mindscape check out. Make sure they know that you heard about Givewell from Mindscape to get your donation matched. Well, you're sparking all sorts of things that came up in previous podcast episodes, so I hope

you'll forgive me for mentioning them. But I would have press on that a little bit. We already talked about sort of the cultural aspects. Could it be different in different countries? You know, I did have Joe Henrik on the podcast, and he was emphasizing how we Westerners are a little bit different than everybody else. And I noticed that in your book, you quote, Lao Tse, right? And I recently had Edward Slingerland on the podcast to talk about ancient Chinese philosophies, Taoism and Confucianism and so forth, and how a big goal that is common to most of those is trying not to try, sort of like living in the moment, going with the flow, etc. But maybe that's just aspirational. Maybe it's not the natural thing, the natural way that people

behave. Can you say anything about if we had done all of your studies? in China or in Africa or whatever, do you think you would have gotten the same answers? Well, what I can say is that we did do studies in Japan and Germany and the variation between the U.S. culture, like the U.S. population, the U.S. samples, and those samples was less than the variation within the U.S. sample. So that's what we found.

I do it's you know high on our list of things to study next you know what the variation is across cultures because I do think that there would be some variation. I don't think you know the evidence that we have suggests that it wouldn't turn off this bias. But you know certainly you could think that you know different people would be different and better or worse at it. I think I mean the you know the the Latsu quote that gets attributed to him. many ways, to gain knowledge, add things every day, to gain wisdom, subtract things every day, which is, I mean, a beautiful quote and ties in nicely to how we do this in our ideas and the benefits when we actually subtract ideas. The kind of do-nothing approach I see is a third option. I mean, because like this, you know, subtracting is not not trying. It's a very active, like, hey,

I want to change this thing. It's a very kind of, if you're talking about it in terms of independent versus interdependent cultures, I mean, that's Hazel Marcus's kind of way of categorizing them. And so the independent cultures are more like the westerner way of like, hey, I'm in control of my own destiny. I can change the world and make it how I want it to be. And the interdependent is every, you know, yin and yang, everything's going back to the way that it used to be. or everything's going back to this kind of equilibrium. And I think subtracting is a kind of a very independent thing to do.

It's an action that you're taking to try to change things. So in that way, it's kind of different from this, you know, sit back and let's just see what happens approach that, you know, is part of some of these philosophies. Certainly your other guests know way more about this than I do, but I'm just trying to offer what I know about it from thinking about it through this very specific. lens of what it means for our ability to add and subtract. I think that's why it's a really interesting question for future research because I think there's reasons to think that there's reasons that it might go both ways, for example, where like the, allow me to explain this. So the one theory might be that if you're an interdependent culture, so these are the ones

that are affiliated more with Eastern cultures, although, of course, it's never so simple as that. You're better at seeing the big picture, right? And you need to, if you're taking the big picture back to our grids on the computer screen, right? People who can see the big picture might be able to see, okay, here's something that can be subtracted from it. If you're just looking at the blocks in isolation, you're less likely to see that a single subtraction could improve the big thing.

And that could be one reason or one theory why maybe these interdependent cultures would be better at seeing this as an option. But at the same time, I just also made a case before where independent cultures are more likely to think about maybe how do we change things from how they are to how we want them to be, which that would suggest maybe they would be better at this.

So, yeah, that's what we know about culture. It's certainly a lot to learn there still. And I mean, I don't know. I think the, for me, the punchline about cultures is like so, you know, what can you do about it, right? Again, it's a very engineering way of thinking about it. And I think it's really useful to understand why these things evolve differently in different cultures. But, you know, giving people the recommendation that you should have been born in some culture that was better at thinking about subtracting. It's not very practical advice. Not very actionable, yeah.

So, I mean, I have been, you know, pressing you on all these questions about biology and evolution that I know, and psychology that I know are not what you're mostly trained to do. Let me give you at least the opportunity to elaborate on something you said over emails while we were discussing this. You hinted at this entropy-based discussion that you wanted to put in the book, but your editor wouldn't let you. So you've come to the right podcast to give an entropy-based,

explanation of anything at all. So is this, what was the entropy-based discussion? Was it a purported explanation for why we like to add things rather than subtract? Yeah, and I think the reason I put it in the email is I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. And I think the editor rightfully subtracted it out of the book. I mean, I didn't have any evidence for it. And I feel actually less well-trained to talk about entropy than I do about like loss aversion, for example. Not that they're on the same level as a scientific concept. But anyway, the shortest logical entropy explanation that I could think of is one reason that we might have these, develop these thinking heuristics over time is that we're just surrounded

by a world that it reminds us of them or advantages them, right? It's an advantage to do them. So if, you know, over time, it's been really good to... to add, you know, when we added more shelter that allowed us to pass down our genes more, we added more food that allowed us to pass down our genes more, or, you know, help that culture thrive. We, you know, the more times we do it, the more likely we are to continue doing it. And then, in addition, the more we're surrounded by these examples of adding, right? So you're walking around a city all around you are things that people have added.

Something that somebody took away. Like in my book, I used the example of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. Amazing subtraction created this beautiful waterfront. I visited that waterfront as a civil engineer and didn't know until five years after I had visited that there used to be a highway there. So the reminder of subtraction is gone. And so we walk around in this world where there's all these constant reminders of adding. And to the extent that entropy, as I understand it, is this kind of like kind of where constant adding of complexity, then maybe it's not just the kind of human-built world where we're seeing all these reminders of adding, but it's the whole natural world where we're seeing all these reminders of adding, which could then lead us to think that this is, you know, just give us more reminders that this is a way of making change. Does that make sense?

and yeah, poke holes in it and, you know, actually, I think my, the concept does make sense to me. I'm not sure if entropy is the right word to attach to it. And again,

I don't have any more evidence for the concept than you do. But if I'm, if I would, were to sort of say it back, um, there's an idea that I actually broached this idea in a solo podcast. I did a while ago about the meaning of life. Uh,

the idea being that there's sort of, there's sort of a, natural way things would go if we didn't do anything, right? Like if we didn't influence the world in any way at all. And that's, it can be fine. But the idea of a life that is meaningful is sort of one that has worked to improve or make the world better in a way that it wouldn't have if you just let everything play out as it naturally would have.

So in some sense, the value that we bring to and get from our lives is, in here, in the difference between what happens because we're here and what would have happened if we weren't here. And so it seems very plausible to me, as you just said, that the most obvious signs of those kinds of meaningful changes in the structure of the world are adding things to it, right? I mean, probably there are other meaningful ways you can subtract things to it, but if you're just looking for why is it more obvious to add things, that does seem to fit into that sort of way of thinking. Yeah. Is that, that's a very independent way of. Oh, yeah. Thinking about meaning, right? Yeah. I mean, that's totally how I am. I mean, I think to the like when you're, you know, donors leaving

their $100 million to a university for a building, right? It's like, this is the thing that lives on after you. And it's a very visible artifact of your positive influence on the world. So yeah, that's a, that's interesting. But yeah, that's the closest. No one has ever left a lot of money to a university to tear down a building,

I don't think. It wouldn't have to be as much money. You'd only have to give about 10% and you could make... Well, and that is an entropic explanation. It's easier to tear the building down than to build the building because you're increasing entropy

when you're tearing the building down in a very manifest way. So that's why I'm not sure exactly how the entropy fits into the story. Like in some sense, it's the struggle, against entropy that we recognize as achieving something. Are you built something that wouldn't have just happened in the natural state of things?

I see. Okay. Yeah, so maybe I'm glad I didn't write it in the book. But it does bring me to the next big subject here that I want to talk about, just sort of to move on beyond the psychological explanations for why we think this way, to the ramifications of this way of thinking for what you do in the world of engineering and design and sustainability and so forth. I mean, there's some, you know, in the world of all the things that can happen or we can build or that we can do, there's far too many options to

possibly contemplate. And the implication of your work is we more naturally contemplating, adding things, and putting things on. But the point you're making is, when you have a complicated system, it can very often, maybe equally often, be the case that you can improve things by subtracting and that's something we are not as immediately noticing. Right. And this is what drew me to behavioral science in the first place. There's this great quote that you'll appreciate about it's that behavioral science or complexity science becomes like a gateway into behavioral science or vice versa. But anyway, as a person who was interested in the built environment and then interested in sustainability, both kind of social,

sustainability with equity and things like that, but also just, you know, just I'll talk about it in terms of climate change. That makes it a little more tangible. And the challenge is not, well, obviously we need new technologies and things that can help with climate change. But for the most part, we know how to do this better. We know how to make net zero energy buildings. The challenge is like how do we how do we get this into practice? And that's what got me to behavioral science in the first place. Like, yeah, there's, you know, of course keep advancing the technology, but what about the technology in our brains as designers and also as people kind of using the designs that would help here? And this bias that we've been talking about, this heuristic that

we, you know, kind of just go right to adding, it seems very aligned with, you know, the problems of sustainability. If you think about the one way that these problems get framed as like planetary tipping points, right? In the article in, I think it was in science, not nature, but the article in science talking about where we are with these planetary tipping points. And a number of them were like past them. We're past the point of. And it's so then the option is so obviously, well, we need to subtract. We need to like get back down below. But, you know, we're still approaching these problems with this mindset of like, okay, what can we add to the situation? Again, that's zooming, you know, going back down a level, like thinking about it in terms of climate change. I mean,

recently we've been thinking a lot more and putting into practice ways of, you know, kind of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, whether trees or what have you. But for a really long time, I mean, we've, scientists have known that climate change is a thing and most of our efforts have been at reducing our adding, right? Slowing our rate of adding CO2 to the atmosphere. And it's only when we've exceed, like we're literally, you know, scientists are saying it's safe to have 350 parts per million. We're up over 420 parts per million.

And so part of the solution clearly needs to be to subtract some of the CO2. And yet, you know, we've really been delayed in thinking about that as part of the solution. And you mentioned subtracting in complex systems in climate. And CO2 in particular is an example of how subtracting can, you know, all else being equal, maybe even be a better option. You know, so of course we need to think about all the ways that we can address climate change. And I'm not, you know, advocating for a single response because that's not what we need. We need to be exploring everything. But if you're, you know, some of these geoengineering proposals, it's like, okay, we're going to put mirrors up into space and reflect.

the sun's rays. And so it's like, or, you know, fill the oceans with iron. And again, I'm not qualified to evaluate any one of these things as a good or bad. But what is sure about those options is that we're adding more stuff to this really complex system that we screwed up without even trying to screw up in the first place, right? And so, yes, adding these things might help with climate change, but they are also adding more kind of tension and more interrelationships that are unpredictable and that we, you know, we aren't really sure what's going to happen. Whereas if you take out the CO2, yeah, that's still

an unpredictable thing. It's, you know, we're intervening in this really complex system. But we do know what a world looks like with less CO2. It was like the world, you know, when we had less CO2. So it's a more kind of, we have a little more idea of what that, how that system would behave than we do when we like continuously add things to a system. And the, you know, tying that same concept into back to behavioral science and, you know, so climate, obviously, that's a big physical system. There's this another eminent, kind of the founding father of social psychology called Kurt Lewin. And he was like Herbert Simon

and he was very applied in the way he studied things. Lewin was from Poland. He moved to Germany. He had to come to the United States because Hitler was rising to power in Germany. And his whole approach to social science was like, how do we use this to make the world a better place? How do we use this to solve social problems?

And so he would look at these systems and try to understand, you know, behavior from the system's perspective. His advance was like, this isn't just about, you know, Sean or Lydie and the thoughts that are in their head. It's also a lot about like what's going on around them that's causing them to behave in a certain way. And so he thought of behavior as like forces and a field, which are things that he's borrowing from physics, right? So there are forces that are acting on you. And there can be forces that are working towards the behavior that you want. and there can be forces that are working against the behavior that you want.

And he said that the good way to change, if you want to change behavior, there's one good way and one bad way. He said the bad way was to add incentives or add forces that are kind of working in the direction that you want it to go. And the good way is to remove the forces that are working against you. And it's the same as climate. If you remove the forces that are working against you, you're relieving tension in the system, which is better than if you add an incentive it's like yes you're helping yourself get to the make yourself more likely to get to the behavior that you want but you're you're also increasing the tension should you not achieve that behavior that you want so I think about this in terms of

back to Ezra my son when when we're trying to get him to not watch the iPad after dinner I can say oh well if you don't watch the iPad you can have a cookie and that might work I've added an incentive. It's making him more likely to do the behavior. He might happily eat the cookie and not have the iPad. Or, but it can also backfire where he's like, okay, now he still wants to watch the iPad. And he's super frustrated because he's not getting a cookie. Yeah.

And the kind of removing the barrier is, you know, putting the iPad out of sight or telling him that it ran out of batteries, right? And then it's not even an option. And you've kind of. So anyway, the. This is where, you know, both in the example of this big physical system with climate and also in the example of like a social system where you're trying to change individual behavior, where taking away, removing can be sometimes even a better option than adding. And again, it's not, you know, I'm agnostic on adding versus subtracting. I don't think we should only subtract, of course. But it's like this is where this tendency that we found to overlook subtraction is really problematic when these,

are maybe the better options. If you happen to be listening to this, Ezra, don't worry. These are just thought experiments. We would never tell you that the iPad has run out of battery if it hadn't really done that. Yeah, thanks for covering that. The example of climate is interesting, but it's also a little bit different. I mean, obviously, the climate is a very complex system. But in some sense, it's almost too cheap of an example because we kind of know,

what we're doing wrong. We're putting too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and subtracting them would be good. But there are other examples. You talk about traffic flows, for example, where it's just much less obvious what to do. And even without trying to, people remove a highway from a busy city traffic flow pattern. And the traffic improves, even though you have taken away an option. And And maybe that has to do with how we think and satisfaction or whatever it's called. But, you know, I'm looking for the lessons that we might have when dealing with complex systems like traffic flows, the economy, the internet, or whatever, where is there some theme that we tend to add things, but maybe we should think of the beneficial effects of subtracting them away? Let me tell the traffic story and the science behind that. And I think you'll listen and those will be smart enough to distill the theme.

So there's this, my editor, speaking of editors, there's this thing called Braz's paradox in math. And it's the finding that, you know, the best example is highways, but it also applies to these other complex systems that you talked about, like networks, where you take away a part of the system and the system performs better. And that's considered a paradox. And the fact that that's considered a paradox is perfect evidence of the fact that we don't think of subtracting as a way to make things better, right? Because the reason it's called a paradox, and I'm holding up quotes, is like, because it's so unthinkable that taking away could actually make something better. And the reason that it works, a reason that it happens, so you think of a highway and you take out a highway from the middle of the city, well, how could that possibly help traffic capacity? And it's because, you know, it does actually tie back to satiscing where people, the system wasn't operating at a optimal equilibrium in the first place, right? It's just people had, you know, found their way to get about the city.

And it settled into this equilibrium that was basically working for people. And when you take out the part of the highway, it's basically like shaking the whole thing up and it settles back down into some other equilibrium. And this other equilibrium, because you weren't at optimal to begin with, this other equilibrium could be worse. You know, traffic could get worse or it could be better. And it's happened a lot that traffic ends up being better. And people just find different ways to get around the city. And these highway removal projects that are done for, you know, removing the highway on the Embarcadero in San Francisco was not to make traffic better. It was to open up that waterfront.

And people just assumed it was going to make traffic worse. And that was an acceptable cost. And then the fact that it doesn't make traffic worse becomes this pleasant surprise. But that's happened a lot. I mean, in highway removal, there's a famous one in Seoul, Korea, where it happened. And it's, you know, happens more and more. And now it's not unexpected that the highway removal actually improves this. You know, removing a component of the system actually improves the systems.

overall performance. There's an awesome quote that tying back into the Brace Paradox thing, there's this guy Kurt Kafka, who is a fascinating scientist. He was kind of one of the earlier gestalt psychologists. And these were these scholars in Germany who were basically taking a complex systems approach to human behavior. And Kafka was married to, he was married four times to two different, to the same two women. So figure that up. But he's the originator of this quote. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts that like sports announcers use.

But that's not the actual quote. The quote he said was the whole is something else than the sum of its parts. And he's actually because it, and he's, and he gets so mad when people would misquote him. And there's another great quote where he's like, this is not a principle of addition. So he's fighting the same kind of tendency to think that adding is the only way that, you know, the hole is greater. No, the whole is something else than the sum of its parts. Well, but that brings us up to sort of where I wanted to wind things up with the down-to-earth human side of this kind of stuff. Like there's one thing when we're designing a traffic flow pattern for a city, but most of us don't do that.

Maybe you do that. I'm not quite sure, but most of us just try to get through our lives. And you already mentioned Marie Kondo and her strategy of removing things that do not spark joy. I can kind of predict what you're going to say, but to what extent can we human beings improve things in our everyday lives just by at least contemplating, subtracting things rather than adding them? I think immensely. And I know that some of these biases, you know, Kahneman will talk about his biases. you know, just knowing about him doesn't help you be any better at them. But a lot of his biases are related to, you know, thinking about something, but then not choosing it.

And certainly he's got a whole catalog so they're not all just that. But what we're talking about here is the situation where we don't even think of something. So to the extent that you can help yourself think of this option that you're not otherwise considering and then just put it through all the same filters that you're already using, I think it just opens up a whole new world of, of opportunities. And I mean, that's what I hope to do with the book is, you know, kind of show people this thing that's happening, show them ways that people overcome it and hopefully rearrange your mental furniture just a slight bit so that you consider this option that we've otherwise neglected. So I think it, I mean, I think it can make your life a little bit better. And, and I don't think it's impossible to do. I mean, I think just by listening to this podcast, you're going to have a, you know,

find yourself seeing more of these options. And then when you, you know, then the trick I think is to kind of help give yourself reminders of how these subtractions have made your life better, right? Because we talk about the subtracting from the waterfront and now the highway is not visible as evidence of this thing that you did. And it's the same if you like stop doing something on your calendar, right? So if you take away this activity that you'd been doing weekly for the last 10 years of your life, pretty soon it's out of sight and out of mind and you don't have this reminder that you subtracted and you have this to thank for subtracting to thank for this beautiful free time. And so, you know, somehow reminding ourselves that subtracting is to thank for this. So the calendar example, I know one of Ben,

one of the other co-authors, his wife, she will use, when she takes something away, she will like leave a block on her calendar of like this time brought to you by such and such a subtraction. And so here's this visible evidence of this way that she, you know, achieved change in a, and it serves as a reminder to subtract on future things. But so that, that's my hope is that, you know, it can't be bad to be thinking of more of our options, especially an option as basic as this one. As long as they don't subtract their podcast listening from their weekly calendar, that would be, that would be terrible. We don't want anyone to do that. Don't take that advice. But But it is an arena where this kind of...

Subtract all your other... Yeah, subtract all your other podcasts, of course. Sorry, other podcasts. But, you know, the information that we're inundated with is clearly a fertile arena for imagining subtracting things, right? Our Twitter feeds, our emails every day, our screen time, and so forth. It's kind of obvious in some sense that there's two. much of it there and the choice to be made is what to pay attention to. And, you know, part of that

choice is what not to pay attention to, right? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and this is an area that we're working on this has been really helpful for me. I mean, I used to run on a treadmill while watching the news, while listening to a podcast. And there was no time, running used to be the time where I would, you know, kind of synthesize stuff and digest the stuff that I had taken in. and the rest of the time. And again, it's add and subtract here. You can't just not take information in, but thinking deliberately about, okay, what do I want to take in?

When do I not want to be taking in information so that I can be thinking about stuff that I know that I may no longer want to be, may no longer want to believe. I mean, I think that, you know, as a scholar subtracting, as a person who writes books and does research, subtracting in our ideas is the most powerful form. of subtracting. It's like what do we what do we no longer believe that we used to believe? And that's a

really powerful thing for self-improvement, but also for scientific revolutions, right? I mean, so many of these scientific revolutions required forgetting, or not forgetting, but stop thinking the old way of doing things. I don't know. Are you, do you remember this like kind of trend towards misconceptions as an educator? So it's like, okay, students come in with, with common misconceptions about physics and, you know, physics, industry, and it's a worthy thought, right? It's like, okay, we're going to identify the things that people are coming to us, you know, thinking that are incorrect so that we can kind of start from a clean slate. And there was this whole, like, theme of educational research in that area identifying these common misconceptions, how to break them down and subtract them. And then eventually that we just gave up on that because it wasn't how people actually did things.

It was so hard to subtract these misconceptions that we just said, okay, we need to figure out a way to kind of adapt what students are bringing in and kind of like allow them to, you know, massage these misconceptions a little bit and then attach the new knowledge onto that. So it's really hard to do in our ideas, but also really, really powerful when we are able to do it. Well, I think isn't it even worse? Like, my impression is that when you talk to people about misconceptions and you dwell on them trying to remove them, they end up coming away with even stronger versions of the misconceptions than they came in with because you spent all your time talking about them. That's true. Yeah, you're right. The most helpful thing I found about trying to help with this problem was using analogies. And it seems like a really unscientific thing.

But, you know, like there's all these record. Nancy Nersetian studies this. It's like the history of scientific revolutions, but also like a Thomas Koonian approach, but looking at the thoughts that were going on inside the revolutionaries' heads. And it was surprising how many of them used analogies. And the reason analogy helps is because you're basically taking the new idea and attaching it to something else that's already in the person's head. And then when you do that, those two things added together can kind of overpower the misconception. But if you just come at it with the new idea

and there's no analogy to tie it to, it doesn't overpower the misconception. But anyway, you're exactly right, though, and I hadn't thought of it, that, you know, the more you kind of dwell on it, it's like, yeah, you're kind of drawing attention to the one thing that if you just kind of smooth it over and just focused on the right ideas you might do better. And maybe that's why the learning scholars stopped dwelling on. Well, I don't recall if you actually mentioned this example in your book when you talk about scientific progress. Albert Einstein and Special Relativity is the perfect example of what you're talking about.

I'm not sure if... No, you're going to have to explain it to me. You thought of this particular example. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating story. And I'm not a super good historian about this stuff. But we give Albert Einstein credit for the theory of relativity. There was the special theory of relativity in 1905. Speed of light is the maximum speed, and there's no preferred reference frames, et cetera.

And then the general theory of relativity 10 years later, where he says space time is curved. And clearly general relativity was his baby. Like that came out of the brain of Albert Einstein, and he gets all the credit and deserves all the credit. But special relativity, which was the first one, was really much more of a team effort. There were a lot of people who thought along those lines around that time. And what he really did was put the final finishing touches on it with this very dramatic conceptual move of saying, everyone is talking about the ether, right? This idea of something that spreads throughout all space and defines the standard of rest with respect to things move and so forth.

and they went to incredibly elaborate machinations to make sure that the standard of rest of the ether could be completely unobservable. There's no way of noticing it. And really, all Einstein did was say, okay, then we don't need the ether. Just get rid of it. And we can have all the success that we have.

And people, you know, it took a little while. And people said, yeah, actually, that's right. It was a largely subtractive move that made everything much simpler. that's awesome yeah no if i had that example i would have used it in the book but i didn't unfortunately yeah that's the downside of doing these awesome conversations after writing the book is you come up with things that oh man i wish i included that that's brilliant it's yeah no i know it's very tough although there could be a sequel and you know i'm sure i presume that i here's the last question you're a writer now

you got a book uh out there that people can buy called subtract um how much were you conscious while writing of the fact that I'm telling people to subtract things, I better make sure to subtract things from my writing and from my book. It was horrible. It was like, yeah, I mean, because I'm quoting from strunken white in there, right? I meant needless words. Yeah. And it's, you know, as you know, as a writer yourself, I mean, it's hard.

And, you know, I think that I did a, you know, 90% job in terms of, like, grading what I could do in terms of getting rid of extraneous stuff. but I'm sure people can go through the book and find stories that they wish weren't in there or words that they wish weren't in there. So I was very conscious of it. I also talk about editors in the book. So one of the things is it's hard to subtract

from your own stuff, right? So this tendency that you mentioned at the start where it's like, okay, when we, you know, it's one thing when you're subtracting a bridge that someone else did, but when it's your own bridge, that becomes even harder. And so that's where the editor can come in and be helpful.

And so I think that there's about 40,000 words that didn't see the light of day that I wrote. And probably still some more. But I was very conscious of it. You know, once you go out telling people how to behave, you're going to be open to that criticism all the time. But look, all we can do is try to be better. That's the lesson for all of us.

So Lighty Klotz, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. This was fun. Yes. Thank you, Sean. I had a lot of fun too. You're confused about your credit score. One site has one number and another site, something completely. What? That can't be right.

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