Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - Holiday Message 2021 | On Disciplines & Cocktails

Episode Date: December 20, 2021

As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts that wouldn't fit easily into a regular podcast. This year we're talking about academic disciplines and cocktails. What do they have in common, you may ask? Listen and find out! Support Mindscape on Patreon. Mindscape will be dark on Monday December 27, and will resume regular programming on Monday January 3. Here are the two books I mentioned in the podcast, and the one essay: The Aviary Cocktail Book Death & Co Modern Classic Cocktails Steven Weinberg, "Against Philosophy"

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Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and this is the 2021 edition of the holiday message here at Mindscape. The original idea of the holiday message was I wanted to take a couple weeks off near the holiday times to just, you know, clear the mind of podcast-oriented questions. And so I took one week off where in between Christmas and New Year's, that makes sense. And just before Christmas, I didn't quite have the energy to do it, but I thought I should reward. all the wonderful people who are listening here every week with at least some message to express my appreciation. That's the real job of the holiday message is to say thank you to all the many people who've tuned into Minescape, couldn't do it without you. Well, that's not true. I could do it without the

audience. It might be harder to get guests, but I could do something. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun, and I probably wouldn't do it if no one were listening. So you play a very important role hereby listening. And the original idea also with the holiday message was to maybe do a state of the podcast address, right, to talk about what we did over the last year, the different guests we had. I found that that was number one work, which I didn't want to do. And number two, it was hard to do because I talked to a lot of different people, a lot of different things. It seemed cheating in some way to try to boil it down to a few themes.

And I thought that even if I mentioned like some of my favorite podcast, others would get lost or insulted or whatever. They're all good. I love all my children equally. So what has actually happened over the years, over the couple of years, is that the holiday message has morphed into a kind of mini solo episode

where I just talk about something I'm interested in talking about. And so today, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to keep it mini. I always say this is going to be short and then things get longer because, I don't know, I like to hear the sound of my own voice, I suppose.

But the topic this year of the high holiday message is disciplines, that is to say, disciplines within academia, and also cocktails, like you drink at a bar. Now, you might be wondering, what do disciplines and cocktails have to do with each other? Only one way to find out. Let's go. Let me give a slightly deeper version of the thought process that went into choosing the topic for this year's holiday message. One of the things that did come up as a theme in the episodes over the year and also other discussions I've been having elsewhere is the idea of agency, agency in the sense that a person, an agent, has the ability, has some power in the world, right, some influence over the world,

some causal impact on what happens in the universe around them. And this happens at a level of sort of philosophy, where does agency come from? Do we have free will, things like that? It's certainly, is a crucial concept in complex systems research, where you do agent-based modeling. A big idea in complex systems research is that rather than doing thermodynamics or statistical mechanics and treating every atom as a simple system that bumps into every other atom, you treat the individual pieces making up your complex systems as themselves somewhat complex, right, agent-based modeling. You let the individual sub-pieces have their own agency. And of course, it's crucially important the idea of agency in politics today. If anything, as I've talked about

democracy and politics on the podcast and elsewhere, I've been more and more struck with how many of our current political problems come down to people not thinking that they have a voice, that they have any impact. You know, they can vote, but what difference does it make? The politicians are all the same. And it causes them to lash out in different ways. And it causes the common project of democracy to hit some roadblocks, some potholes along the way, as you might have noticed that we are actually meeting right now. So I've been thinking about this. Like what gives people a feeling of agency?

Is it true that we should try to get that feeling? Is it people too much agency? Whatever it is. So I'll occasionally like if something is not worthy of a whole deep thought. I'll just put it out there on Twitter to see what the responses are. So a couple months ago, I put out a tweet saying something like, if you want to understand a position, a position in science or politics or history or whatever, I said the first thing to do is to get it from the mouths of the people who actually hold that position. That is to say, rather than learning about an idea from its opponents, learn about the idea from its advocates, not, and take that as the final word, but at least understand,

why these people would believe this, right? That sounds like a sensible way to learn a potentially controversial position. First, try to understand why anyone in the world would believe this. And you're not going to get that without listening to the actual people. So you see where it's related a bit to agency, like listen to what the people are actually saying rather than trying to put words in their mouth. I thought this was an incredibly boring tweet that was almost, you know, a cliche and would be ignored. but a mini eruption came in the comments to that particular tweet.

People did not agree with me that you should learn ideas or come to understand them. Learn is not even the right word, but, you know, it's not like you're learning some new bit of science necessarily, but why do people hold this idea, listen to the people who hold it, right? That was my suggestion, and people didn't like that suggestion. Many people didn't like it. It's always hard to know on Twitter what people are actually thinking, because it's a very, very tiny minority of people who are special. speaking, and there's all sorts of biases that come into who comments, et cetera.

But it was clear that a lot of people basically said, well, what about the bad ideas? I don't want to learn the bad ideas from the people who actually hold those bad ideas. What about the Nazis and the racists? You're not telling me I should read what those people wrote to understand them. They're bad. And we know they're bad. We don't have to think any more about them. I didn't, you know, I don't generally go back and forth on Twitter.

I don't use Twitter as a medium of discourse and conversation because it's really ill-suited for that. But if I had, I would have said yes, especially for the bad ideas, because it's the bad ideas. It's the ideas that make our skin crawl and seem a little bit horrifying to us that it takes the most work to understand why anyone would ever hold them, right? If an idea is attractive and basically good sounding, then we can more or less work out. why someone would hold that idea. Whereas if an idea is kind of horrible to us, if we want to understand why anyone would ever hold that, we need to talk to them and, you know, or read what they've written, try to think, get a view into their mind and think about why they would have come to such a conclusion. But it's clear that it's not just a few people, but quite a large number of people who think that there's something wrong about being exposed to

radically different ideas from the horse's mouth. Like maybe it will poison you or maybe like we already know ahead of time. We don't need to understand that, et cetera. I don't feel that way. So that was the first idea for a holiday message to talk about agency and the importance of talking to people with very, very different ideas than we have. And this morphed as I thought about it. I said, well, you know, maybe this is just a specific case of the more general example that

we should engage with people who are intellectually from elsewhere. where, right? People who come from very different points of view, not just politically or whatever, but academically as well. You know, people who like many worlds should talk to people who like pilot wave theories or epistemic models of quantum mechanics and so on. String theory should talk to quantum gravity people. This is something I also believe. I'm a big believer in interdisciplinary engagement and cross-platform and cross-positional talk so that you can better understand why in the world, these other people would have these crazy ideas. You can't figure it out for yourself. You cannot just reason your way a priori into understanding why these people have these clearly problematic ideas, right? Whether it's innocent as in different versions of quantum mechanics or something perhaps more darker in politics or social circles. So I started thinking about that, interdisciplinary engagement in academia. And of course, the one that I care about is the relationship between physics and philosophy, right? Those are the two areas that I actually think about at a research level myself, certainly the most, and maybe even you could say that those are the only ones that I've been successful at.

And they have, guess what? A problematic relationship, physics and philosophy. I completely coincidentally, while thinking about this, came across Stephen Weinberg's article, his piece, which I think first appeared in the New York Review of Books. but anyway was reprinted in dreams of a final theory. He has a piece called Against Philosophy. You got to love Weinberg, who we lost this year. He passed away a giant of physics. But even though I disagreed him about some things,

including his views on philosophy, he at least sat down and thought about it. You know, we don't need to name names. There's plenty of scientists out there today who will just know zero about philosophy and poo-poo it just to get some cheap laughs. Weimberg wasn't like that. You know, he would say why he thought that philosophy was not worth taking too seriously as a physicist, but he would say it after having thought about it very carefully. You know, Weinberg was one of the people who I recruited to come to our moving naturalism forward conference. And he was, you know, he was willing to do it. You know, he wanted to talk to the philosophers who were there. But at the end of the day, his position was, no, physicists should not be involved with all this philosophy stuff. And I disagree with that.

So that is something that I care a lot about getting it correctly, getting it right. You know, one way of putting my position is you can't not do philosophy. That's a double negative. But you're always doing philosophy, okay? But you can do it badly. And as soon as you hear scientists explain why philosophy is not important, you're instantly witnessing them do philosophy badly. They will make philosophical claims that have not been thought through or have been thought through hundreds of years ago and we figured out what to say about them and they just don't know. So it's a problematic relationship.

And, you know, there's obvious reasons why there are differences in style as well as in substance between physics and philosophy. I mean, there's a bad caricature that some people seem to think is real that says that physics or science more broadly is based on data. and hypotheses, and we put out ideas and we let them be knocked down by experiments, whereas philosophers just sit in their armchairs and think, and that's an outmoded way of thinking that we should have given up on 500 years ago. I'm not even going to respond to that, because that's just goofiness. That's just not knowing what is going on. Plenty of physicists, mostly sit in their armchairs, including myself, plenty of philosophers engage with data in interesting ways. But more importantly,

I think that there is a stylistic difference, not just this substantive difference. You know, philosophers dig very deeply into individual questions. They're very, very patient. The joke that I made in my first trade book from eternity to hear is that physicists are always really baffled about why philosophers can spend so much time thinking about the meanings of words, whereas philosophers are baffled about how physicists can continually use words without knowing what they mean. And I think it's a joke because when you put it that way, both positions seem kind of reasonable, right? Like, who cares about the meanings of the words? But then again, how can you communicate if you don't agree on what those meanings are?

On that side of the divide, the philosophers will be very, very patient about really nitpicking, about the definitions of every word and going deeply into it. They want to get everything crystal clear, right? Like no fuzzy bits that are, we'll clean up later. And for better, for worse, that means they can get hung up. You know, you can have philosophers talking about questions that we're hot topics thousands of years ago and they still think is a hot topic now. And that can be very frustrating to the scientists.

Because scientists, physicists, or whoever, their strategy is to dig just deeply enough, right? I mean, obviously physicists do have to dig deeply when they're doing their work, but not too deeply. If you've ever, if you're a physicist or you've been a graduate student in physics or whatever, not only quantum mechanics, but statistical mechanics, and most especially quantum field theory, these are areas of physics that are everywhere, right, that are used all the time every day. There's a lot of questions one can ask in these areas that don't have clear, clean answers within modern physics. And the response of physicists is just to move on, get on with their lives, say, eh, it works, it fits the data, right?

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize for understanding how to renormalize quantum electrodynamics, and he never thought it really worked. He thought it was kind of cheating. And I think that a lot of modern physicists post-Kenn Wilson, etc., would say we understand why it worked, and that's better. But, you know, they did fine in the 1950s with this patchwork of things that just, you know, kind of worked, right? What more do you want?

The good thing about being a science. or being a physicist, is that since you are working in an area where you can, ideally, propose a theory and have it tested by data on a relatively short time scale, nature helps you, right? If you're asking why science tends to make more progress seemingly than philosophy does, it's because science cheats by having nature corrected when it makes mistakes. That's a very, very good way of making enormously fast progress. And, you know, for example, these days, when we have something like the standard model

of particle physics that is completely compatible with the data, progress slows down in physics because the data are not helping us as much as they could. Anyway, so this is, that is just to say that it does make sense why there are differences between physicists and philosophers, but there's also an overlap. You know, so often this question

of physics versus philosophy is phrased as, what good is philosophy for physics, right? Why does, do I as a physicist need to pay attention to philosophy? Now, that's a completely wrong way of putting it. I mean, who says that the usefulness of any other field is what it can do for your field? That's not necessarily the right way to do it. We should ask what good is philosophy for its own sake, not just what it can do for physics. We could equally well ask, what can physics do for philosophy?

And my view is that in both cases, what can philosophy do for physics and what can physics do for philosophy, there is a small but crucial overlap. Most physics can get by perfectly well without any input whatsoever from philosophy. Most philosophy can get by perfectly well without any input whatsoever from physics. But it's pretty darn clear to me that there are specific questions within physics that are also within philosophy. In fact, I do think that there's sort of a systematic mistake here that people are making, but when we think about questions that physicists care about, you know, many of them are, like I said, no philosophy whatsoever. If you want to figure out the phase diagram of some new material, philosophy is not going to be helpful. But in exactly the areas of physics that I care about, in cosmology and quantum gravity and fundamental physics, there are questions that philosophers understand at least as well, if not better, than physicists. do, questions about what does naturalness mean? How do you reason anthropically in large universes?

What is the nature of the arrow of time and causality and locality? What are the issues and potential solutions to problems of the foundations of quantum mechanics or statistical mechanics? These are areas where philosophers have thought deeply about them and physicists tend to gloss over them because that's what philosophers do. They think deeply. Now, they're not that great at coming up with solutions because they're philosophers. They're not scientists, right? It's not their job to come up with solutions. The philosophers are really, really good at diagnosing the problems.

They're much better than the physicists are. Physicists are good at ignoring problems when they're not absolutely necessary for them to be confronted. But philosophers know that these problems are there and they, you know, try to categorize what all the different possible approaches are, et cetera. And what would really be great is if physicists and philosophers really work. worked together at these intersection regions, right? And the truth is that they don't.

There's a little bit of overlap. You know, there's some good counter examples to this wild generalization I'm pushing right here, especially in quantum mechanics. That's the one area of physics slash philosophy overlap where there are really both physicists and philosophers who talk about it. But it's not as if every physicist who does quantum mechanics has any idea of what the philosophers are talking about. And they could.

You know, I recently saw a paper that surveyed the opinions of physicists on the foundations of quantum mechanics. And it's just embarrassing how little factually physicists know about the different approaches, whether it's Copenhagen or hidden variables or many worlds or whatever. There's just very, very basic mistakes that physicists make because they don't know what's going on. Some of them know they don't know what's going on. Like there's a substantial number of things.

people who say, I don't know, but there were too many people who thought they knew and was wrong. And philosophers likewise, philosophers have their own workshops, conferences, what have you, and don't always talk to physicists. And so, as a result of that, the questions that are within the domain of foundations of physics, like I mentioned, naturalness, anthropics, et cetera, are not necessarily the ones that philosophers are training their keen minds upon, because they don't move. move around as quickly as the physicists do, jumping from topic to topic. So, you know, they'll have their favorite problems,

and they'll think of them for a very long time. There's plenty of room for improvement in the interaction between physicists and philosophers. And probably, this is a paradigm, right, for interactions of all sorts, of, you know, different kinds of things between economics and history and literature and what have you. So that was where I was.

literally 24 hours ago, as I'm recording this message, I thought, okay, I'll do a little holiday message, talk about that for a few minutes. And then I came home. I remember I was in Boston. I spent the semester at Harvard, at visiting the philosophy department. It was a good visit, by the way, in case you're wondering. But it wasn't perfect because we're in the middle of the pandemic, and I had things to do. So it was a little bit of piecemeal, the extent to which I could interact with people. You need to, like, set up an appointment, right? Rather than just bumping into people in the hallways. Most people were staying at home for most of the time,

which makes perfect sense to me, and I do not begrudge them that. And it looks like maybe it'll be even worse next semester. I don't know. So maybe it was good that I did it this semester. But anyway, I came home, and I was exhausted. So because, you know, you had to pack up, it's a whole big thing. Now I'm home in Los Angeles with the wife, the kittens.

It's all good. But chilling a little bit, right? You know, trying to relax. And for reasons that are not perfectly clear to me, We now own two very beautifully illustrated books that are about making cocktails. We didn't have these books when I left for Boston four months ago, and now we have them. One, I actually do know because I ordered it from the aviary in Chicago. Now, I've never been to the aviary, but it is the sort of cocktail bar spinoff of Alinia,

which is my favorite restaurant in the world, which I've been to several times in Chicago. I love a lineage to death. Very inventive, top-notch, modern gastronomy. And I love going there whenever I can. So the idea of a cocktail version of that is fascinating to me. And I haven't been to Chicago for obvious reasons for a little while. But I thought I could at least buy the book, see what they're doing. That was fun. And then there's also a book by this bar in New York called Death and Company, which I think is a great name. But it's really just a cocktail book. And I don't know why we have it. It's possible I ordered it. It's possible Jennifer.

ordered it. It's possible as a gift from a friend. We just can't remember. We get a lot of books. Between Jennifer writing for Ars Technica and me having a podcast, et cetera, people send us books. I don't think that anyone in the cocktail world has us on their mailing list, but maybe they could add it to it after this. Anyway, so I'm enjoying, like, leaving through these books. It's a bad thing to do to read cocktail books in the morning because you're inspired to want a cocktail, and that's not a good thing to have, first thing in the morning. But it's been a lot of fun. Just sort of leafing through, it's exactly what my brain needed.

And they're not thinking about physics or philosophy or moving or COVID or anything like that. Just, you know, reading some recipes about cocktails. I personally love cocktails. It's a big source of enjoyment for me, although I cannot drink too many of them. You know, I know that alcohol is a whole problematic, difficult subject in many different ways. I'm sure that many of you don't drink alcohol. alcohol at all. Some of you drink a lot of it. Okay, I'm in between. I do like both wine and cocktails, not really a beer person, but in the right circumstances, that would be fine also.

Different people, of course, react differently to drinking. And so let me just say a couple words, just so it's on the table there. I'm the kind of person, and Jennifer also is, who could have a couple drinks, and then that's it. Like, we don't want any more than that. Probably Jennifer's at a level of two drinks over the course of an evening. Maybe I'm at three. But it's really not just that we have the restraint to then stop. You know, once we have a certain amount of alcohol in our system, we do not want to imbibe anymore. And that's a good thing. And there's actually sort of two different thresholds that people have. And there is interesting research on the genetics of this, because in some cases you can pinpoint mutations in the DNA that are responsible for these two

different things. So one thing is how quickly you get inebriated, right? Like how many drinks does it take before you're intoxicated? The second one is once you've had a couple, what is your response? And some people shut down and like that, that's enough. Other people want to keep going. There are things out there called alcoholics. There's a famous soliloquy by Leo on the West Wing. If you, if you're a West Wing fan, where he explains he's an alcoholic and it's a plot point on the show, because that was considered bad. And he says, the problem is, I don't want to drink. I want 10 drinks.

To a non-alcoholic like me, that's just crazy. I can't even imagine having that many drinks. And there is a genetic lottery, as Catherine Page Hardin would have explained to us, that it comes into this, because I actually have plenty of alcoholics in my family. You know, my grandfather would literally have a little glass of brandy that he would put on the nightstand by his bed before going to bed so that in the morning he would get a quick drink

and never not be buzzed during the day. It's very, very different than me. Let's just put it that way, okay? So I'm not drinking too much. I mean, by some people's standards, I drink a lot, by other people's not that much, but I love the idea of cocktails,

and I love the artistry of it and the craft of it. The crucial distinction we're drawing here is between a cocktail, which is a mixture of different ingredients, versus just a drink of some particular spirit, right? A shot of whiskey or a sniffer of brandy or coniac or something like that.

Those are also great. There's a place and time for having a shot of scotch, okay? But a cocktail is a little bit more artistry. You know, you have to pick and choose ingredients and you have to blend them in the correct way. And of course, like any good craft, the people who are truly into it will get very, very into it, right? they will get very, very detailed.

And the writers are these two books, the one from the aviary, the other from Death and Company, they're into it. So, you know, what kind of ice you use and whether or not you should stir it or shake it in a metal carafe or a glass one, you know, all of these things. They matter a lot, okay? The quality of the water, it all matters a lot. And I'm not nearly at that level of caring, but I am at the level of appreciating the care. You know, it's not just about cocktail.

That's why I'm happy to talk about cocktails here, even though many of you are not into cocktails at all. There's a bigger picture. There's a bigger point to this, which is that all sorts of different crafts can be appreciated for their artistry, even if we don't actually appreciate the outcome. Maybe you don't like oboe music. You know, I don't mind oboe music, but I'm not exactly a fan of it. David Pollitzer, my colleague at Caltech, loves the band jazz. literally just loves the banjo, writes papers,

writes physics papers about the acoustics of banjos. He's played banjo with Steve Martin, who's another banjo lover. I don't love the banjo, but I think it's wonderful and charming that he loves the banjo that much, okay? That's what's going on here.

It's about the love. It's about the care and the precision and the sort of experimentation with different possibilities that trying to find some sweet spot that makes the perfect cocktail, the perfect banjo ditty, etc. And this does deserve, you know, it probably deserves a whole podcast by itself because it gets wrapped up in the idea of fitness landscapes.

I love fitness landscapes. Originally the idea from biology, of course. I talk about this in the big picture. I'm not sure if we talked about fitness landscapes in great detail, but they come up in the podcast conversations that have game theory involved in them, like with Kalin O'Connor and Herb Gintus and so forth. The idea of a fitness landscape is, if you have a, again, comes from originally biology, evolutionary biology. So you have a population of different kind of species, different kind of individuals within a species. And they do evolution, right? So they sexually reproduce, share their DNA, there's mutations.

So there's slow variations in the actual genomes of the actual individuals over time. Some specific instantiations of the genome will have slight advantage. when it comes to surviving and reproducing. That's what fitness means. Fitness is just ultimately the ability to pass down your genes to the next generation. So you need to both survive long enough to have offspring and then be both motivated

and able to make those offspring, okay? And the interesting thing about the fitness landscape, so the idea is that a species will evolve to go upward and upward on the fitness landscape over time until they hit some local maximum. It's funny because biologists think that high values of a landscape is where you want to live. Physicists who think of potential energy,

think that low values of a landscape is where you want to live, but the very similar concept. Anyway, the thing about the fitness landscape that's always fascinated me is the fact that the peaks of it can be isolated from each other. It's not a smooth monotonic function. It's not like you can take two very different species who are individually successful and find a species halfway in between that is also successful.

successful, right? The specific things about a genome that works if it's one kind of configuration wouldn't work if it's slightly different, but if it's very different, you're in another peak of the fitness landscape, and you can also be successful. Likewise, with cocktails or with novels or pieces of music or food dishes that you're making, there's a fitness landscape, right? You can easily imagine different ingredients working together and half of those ingredients with half of the ingredients from another dish being a terrible disaster. A certain kind of arrangement for a string quartet would not help at all if you added some of those ideas to a heavy metal song. Okay. So the sort of jaggedness of the fitness landscape is a fascinating fact to me. I would love to

know more about the general theory behind why fitness landscapes are jagged. In the context, context of cocktails, it's that, you know, certain ingredients work well with each other. And this is the whole point of cocktails and why they're interesting. I don't know if I, yeah, so a cocktail, I was going to say, I don't know if I defined it, but a cocktail is just a mixture of different ingredients, different spirits and some other liquid ingredients, right? juices or whatever, maybe sodas, garnishes, you can have things like that, and, of course, ice. So you want to have the right ingredients, balancing each other. The balance is crucially important. And so the only time I wrote about

cocktails, I wrote a blog post that was complaining about the idea that is prevalent in certain circles that the best martini is the driest martini. Okay. So what does that mean for those of you are not cocktail drinkers out there? A typical martini is mostly gin, some dry vermouth, and then maybe a garnish, maybe a dash of bitters or something like that. But mostly it's, you know, gin plus dry vermouth. There's also, of course, vodka martinis, which are vodka plus drive vermouth in the same sort of combination. And even though the vermouth is dry, sorry this is a counterintuitive lingo, but even though

the vermouth itself is dry, the less vermouth you have, the drier the martini. Okay. So when you will hear in different movies or TV shows or whatever, people trying to out-machos each other in the dryness of the martini. So like just a drop of vermouth or wash the vermouth in the glass and then dump it out before putting the gin in or wave the bottle over your glass of gin, okay? Wave the vermouth bottle or, you know, just pour the gin in and then nod in the direction of your bottle of vermouth. So it's like a kind of silly competition to be as dry as possible. But that's dopey. That's not right. That's not a good direction. That's not a good

in which to improve your cocktails because then you're just drinking gin or vodka, which is even worse. I mean, vodka is fine, but vodka is more or less flavorless. A shot of vodka can be good because it's in some context where you're, I don't know, eating dark bread in the Russian steps or something like that and fermented fish and a shot of vodka, okay? and then the very, very delicate differences between different kinds of vodka and the mouth feel, etc., can matter. But if you're just pouring cold vodka into a martini glass and calling that a martini, what's the point?

That's not a cocktail at all. It's not even very flavorful. Gin is basically vodka plus botanicals, mostly juniper, but other sort of botanicals. That's why different kinds of gin are truly different from each other, because every gin has its proprietary mix of botanicals that lend some flavor, some herbaceousness or floral notes, to the underlying vodka,

some neutral grain spirit, aka vodka, roughly speaking. So I wrote this blog post to say, look, drink whatever you want. I don't care what you drink. You know, whatever brings you pleasure is great. But there's no superiority in making a martini that has only gin or only vodka in it.

That's just saying you like gin and you like vodka. That's fine. But the elegance, the beauty, the point of a good cocktail is the balance of the different ingredients. It's not just that you have different ingredients. They play well with each other in a particular way. Okay. In fact, let me read to you. So just so this podcast episode is useful to you in some way, you will come away from it with recipes for cocktails.

So let me read to you the Martini and Manhattan recipe. from the Death & Co cocktail book. So you don't want any recipes from the aviary cocktail book. They involve high-pressure machines and crazy dry ice concoctions. They're a little bit crazy, but it's an aesthetic accomplishment. But the Death & Coctail book, you can actually make these drinks. So the martini is two and a half ounces of London dry gin, three-quarters ounces, Dolan dry vermouth, one dash of orange bitters, and you garnish with a twist.

Okay. So the point there is two and a half ounces of London dry gin, three quarters ounces of dry remove, about a three to one ratio. Not a hundred to one, as the crazy out there extremists would have you believe. The Manhattan, meanwhile, follows the same template. There's a major spirit. There's a minor spirit to sort of play off against it and then maybe a drop or two of something else. So the Manhattan recipe is two and a half ounces of rye. three quarters of an ounce of sweet vermouth, which is the red vermouth, for those of you buying in stores, two dashes of bitters, and garnish with a branded cherry. So what struck me here is two things. Number one, the proportions are the same

in the martini and the Manhattan. They're very different drinks, completely non-overlapping ingredients, in fact, but two and a half ounces, three-quarters ounces, and a dash or two. If you squint a little bit, you could almost perceive a power law in these proportions. It's almost like, you know, a certain amount and then three

times of that and then three times as much as that, right? Start with the bidders, work your way up to the gin and the rye. Some people will also, by the way, use bourbon rather than rye in their Manhattans, just like people sometimes use vodka rather than gin and the martinis. Whatever you like. The point is that there's a certain amount of complexity and interest here in the Manhattan and the martini. This is one of the reasons why they are classic cocktails. Over many generations, people have tried many different combinations of the different ingredients, and they've settled more or less in the good bars.

They've settled on something like this three-to-one ratio for these particular drinks. Other drinks will have two-to-one ratios, et cetera. It is rare to find a classic cocktail that has equal proportions in different kinds of spirits. The Nogroney is a classic counter-example. The Nogroni is the one drink. A ngroni is one part gin, one part Campari or apparel, and one part sweet vermouth. It works very, very well, but it's the exception. It is not the rule.

Most good cocktails have a base spirit, and then you complexify it a little bit by adding these others in greater or lesser amounts. That's the fun, the artistry, the science, and the aesthetics of making the cocktails. And the aesthetics are very, very important here. One of the things about both of these books is that they're richly, sumptuously illustrated and just looking at the pictures of both the bar and the cocktails when they're well made, the different shapes of the glasses. Is it pretentious or precious? You know, maybe. I don't care. I like it. It's beautiful. And I need more beauty rather than less in my life. So while thinking about this, contemplating it while going, geez, this is 10 a.m. I can't actually

make myself a martini. So I will contemplate the aesthetics of it from an abstract sense. I said, you know, the holiday message for the blog, sorry, for the podcast, the holiday message shouldn't necessarily be some ponderous, weighty idea, like interdisciplinary collaboration or something like that. Maybe the holiday message should just be kind of fun and lighthearted. Maybe they should just talk about cocktails. And I thought about it, and I'm like, you know, I just don't know enough about cocktails. probably it would be alienating for a bunch of people. Like maybe you'll listen to me babble about it for 10 minutes,

but talking for an hour about cocktails might be too much for a lot of people. Like even the wine tasting, I think more people probably like wine than cocktails, but the wine tasting episode we did, even though it was extremely good and successful, it was not as popular as, you know, category theory episodes or loop quantum gravity episodes. So I get that and, you know, give the people what they want. Maybe someday we'll do a mixology. based episode. But I thought that I didn't know enough to talk about it in an intelligent way. Like, I have my preferences, but I'm not a professional mixologist. I don't have one nearby.

So I thought that, you know, okay, maybe that would not be as attractive as the idea first appeared to be. But then I thought, and maybe this was because I had managed to intoxicate myself even without having a cocktail, I thought, maybe I can do both. Maybe I can mix up, as it were, the idea of the interdisciplinary collaborations in academia with the idea of cocktails. After all, in some sense, it's about balance and about interaction, right? I mean, this is why you don't want to have a martini that is all gin, because gin is fine, but it's just gin. It's not interesting and it's not boundary pushing.

It's not trying to do something, right? It's not having different elements in communication with each other, talking to each other, bouncing ideas, pushing in different ways, right? That's what makes a great cocktail when there's a little bit of sweetness, a little bit of bitter, a little bit of smoothness, a little bit of edginess there. That's what makes the most successful cocktails. As any mixologist will tell you, it's about balancing different kinds of ingredients. You don't want to mix together things that taste the same, right?

Having said that, there are some very provocative recipes in the Death & Co cocktail book that mix mescal with tequila, which are often thought of as two different versions of each other, but are subtly different, and they have also different cocktails mixing different kinds of rum together. So anyway, every rule has its exception. But the point being, there is some family resemblance, maybe, arguably, between the idea of disciplines in academia talking to each other and the different ingredients in a cocktail talking to each other. Maybe physics needs philosophy, like gin needs vermouth, to make. make a good cocktail, not because you want to be mostly vermouth or all vermouth, but it adds

that little twist that really makes it special, something not just run-of-the-mill. And I think that's, you know, that not becoming run-of-the-mill, I think that's the important thing here. Going back to the idea of disciplines and physics and philosophy, so forget about physics and philosophy, particularly. Think about disciplines within academia more broadly. The real issue about disciplines is that they become too inwardly focused. You know, Herb Gintes on the podcast with him, he made this point very, very loudly and very effectively.

It's part of what makes academia successful, what the modern university system successful, but it also holds it back in certain ways. If you think about a department at a university, whether it's physics or economics or so. sociology or whatever, how do they work? How do these departments work? And for various reasons, historical reasons, and mostly for good reasons, departments are governed by their own faculty. The administration of a university plays an important role, but a lot of times that role is, you know, fundraising, recruiting new students, and things like that. Usually the provosts and deans and presidents will have some say over how much a new department can help. hire, but to a very large extent, who they actually hire is in the hands of the existing faculty

members in the department. Caltech's president literally told me, like, I'm the president, I know perfectly well not to tell the faculty who to hire, not to tell the departments who to hire. And that's because, you know, this is a, it's for many reasons. Part of it is academic freedom, right? You don't want to be governed from the top. The reason why the modern intellectual academic project is successful is because it bubbles up from the bottom. And you want to be able to judge for yourself as a department. What are the areas you need to grow in? What are the good areas? What are the areas that are a waste of time or a fad or whatever? You think you know that better than the president or the dean or the provost does. And for the most part, universities say okay. That's right. We'll tell

you how many slots you get. You can roughly speaking decide how to fill them. So that works to some extent. It works really, really well at that focusing in on the different discipline. A physics department will be pretty darn good at hiring new physicists. Biology department will be pretty good at hiring new biologists, etc. Where it fails is when the physics department wants to hire a biophysicist. Or even worse, when neither the physics department nor the biology department wants to hire a biophysicist. because they want to both hire their own people, right?

So it's as if you had a bar where there's a set of bartenders who only serve scotch and another set of bartenders who only serve gin and another set who only serve tequila, etc. Those bartenders who only serve scotch would get really good at choosing scotch. And it's actually not a perfect analogy here because the disciplines are really good at answering the questions that they choose to focus on. You know, I don't know what your opinion is, but in my opinion, modern academic university research

is really good at the research it chooses to be really good at doing. And likewise, in the bar, if you only served cognac, you get really good at serving cognac, et cetera. But you're missing out on a whole set of more complex interactions and experiences.

The cocktails, the mixtures of different voices, talking to each other in different timbers and different volumes. And a university has trouble with that. The same system that makes it very, very successful at digging into the disciplines, makes it very, very bad at being truly interdisciplinary. And a lot of people will give lip service to being interdisciplinary, but lip service is not good enough. It's hard being truly interdisciplinary.

As Herb Ginty said on the podcast, you know, the different disciplines not only have different subject matters, sometimes they even have the same subject matter, but they have different styles, different paradigms, different ways of asking questions, different valuations of which questions are interesting and which are not. Okay, it makes interdisciplinary conversation and communication very, very hard. Remember, Jeffrey West, one of the first guests we had here on the podcast, a very successful complexity scientist at Santa Fe Institute. he was raised as a more or less traditional particle theorist, did super symmetric phenomenology. He decided he wanted to move into complex systems, in particular biological systems.

He got interested in these allometric scaling laws. Why is it that the metabolic rate and the weight of different kinds of animals, different kinds of individuals, scales with each other in certain ways, especially quarter power laws? Why is that true, was the question. So he said, I got to take. talk to some biologists, I guess. But the point is, it took time.

You know, he tells the story of for weeks and months, they would just get together and talk, the biologists and the physicists. They weren't giving each other instructions. They didn't even decide ahead of time, here is the result we want to get, or here's the problem we're going to be working on. It's just, let's listen to each other. Let's hear what each other thinks are the interesting problems. let's get to know our, the common knowledge we have inside our discipline that is not common outside.

What are the assumptions we make? What are the things that we think are important and not important? You can only learn that by talking to people, going back to the original point of the tweet that I made back then. And you have to decide ahead of time that that's going to be a profitable thing to do. And it's just so easy to not decide that. You know, like when you get your PhD, typically, you've been very, very well trained in your very, very narrow specialty. And it's work to be trained in that specialty. It took you years, right?

And now you're good enough, once you've been trained with the PhD, you're good enough in that specialty to write papers in that specialty and get a job and do research. To now, at this late stage, learn another discipline. it's going to be just as much work. And you don't have to do it because you can just do the work you're already doing. And this is why most people, most professors, despite the fact that they're smart people, best of intentions, good-natured,

always originally driven by some kind of intellectual curiosity, why most professors kind of do small variations on the thing they started doing when they first entered academia. It's the path of least resistance, and it's successful. You do learn things. You do dig deeply. into particular ways of knowing, as it were. But I would argue that there's a downside to this.

And one of the downside is precisely because not just the substance of what you know is different from discipline to discipline, but your normative orientations, that is to say, how you judge different things is different. Like I said, the problems you think are interesting, the methodologies you think are legitimate, just the vocabulary you use from discipline to discipline can be very, very different. And what this means is that you can be, you know, by nature, intellectually curious and smart. And by the fact that you have been trained and honed within your discipline, you can become dismissive of other disciplines. Because they don't sound like yours.

You've been trained that a certain kind of thing is right and good and virtuous, and those people are talking about something else. And it becomes very, very easy to just dismiss them. Rather than to listen, to dig in, to understand what they're saying, you just say, eh, I want scotch. They're trying to give me tequila. I'm not going to listen to those people. They're a waste of time.

It's remarkable how much of academic discourse or academic thinking, let's put it that way, is arguably anti-intellectual. It's pro their own little kind of intellectual endeavor. but you become poisoned against the broader intellectual process because you're so specialized in your own little area. And I would argue that almost every discipline, almost every area has something of value in it, whether it's string theory, deconstruction, Austrian economics, whatever area of specialization you have in academia. most, for the most part, there's something worthwhile in there. Even if there are other things that are not worthwhile, even if you think that the people in those areas are largely off the beaten track, not doing useful work,

there's a whole bunch of smart people who have, of their own free will, decided that this is the area they want to dig into. And they're not evil. They're not motivated by greed or whatever. You know, being a professor, even the best paid professors could be paid. could be paid more doing other things, right? Likewise for fame and fortune. They got into this because they think it's interesting and it teaches them something about the world. And so it goes back to the idea that we should listen to people's own reasons for believing whatever it is they believe. We should take seriously the idea that every discipline has something of value and we can't

really judge it until we give it a chance to work its way into our hearts and our brain so that we understand why anyone would ever think that has value. And that's hard. That is hard to do. And so people don't do it generally. It's much easier just make fun of disciplines that you're not in, whatever those disciplines may be. I've certainly heard philosophers make fun of physics. Let's put it that way. And again, the whole setup, the whole scheme, generally works pretty well. Progress is made in the individual directions in which people are moving. the problem, the failure mode is when a discipline becomes insufficiently self-critical or insufficiently engaged with external reality, when it becomes too inward-looking, when it starts judging its own successes on criteria that only it understands, right? And this can happen. And I'm not going to pick out any particular disciplines.

Different people will have different ideas about this, but I want to pick out the general phenomenon. if you don't engage with very, very different points of view, you can get stale. You can pick up a certain set of things that you valorize as successes, and people within your field are very good at those things. And it becomes harder for you to say, yes, but are those the values that we should care about the most? right? And it's understandable. Again, I'm not like trying to say bad things about people. It's understandable why you would think this because if you're an expert in some area, it's really hard to trust the opinions of non-experts about your area.

And I'm not talking now about, you know, epidemiology or virology or other hot topics. I'm talking like thinking about quantum mechanics, right? someone says, oh, there's a measurement problem in quantum mechanics, and you're an expert in quantum mechanics and they're not. Are you going to listen to them? Economics, right? You're a macroeconomist, and someone says, oh, macroeconomics is built on a flimsy chain of reasoning or whatever. Why would you ever care what they think? It's very, very hard to take seriously criticisms from people who are not inside the discipline.

And I think that this philosophy that I'm trying to promulgate here, this extends to bigger pictures. I'm in academia, so I feel it in that context. But clearly, as I started saying, this extends to political and social issues, the idea of listening to each other. It can be hard. People don't want to do it. Why should I listen to the wrong people? That doesn't sound like a good idea. But let me point out that it's kind of crucial to the success of the Democratic project, right?

Part of the idea of democracy is that no one has the right answers fundamentally. Like if there was a particular identifiable subgroup of people who had all the right answers, then just put them in charge. That's what Plato wanted to do, right, with the philosopher kings. Democracy comes from a different angle. Democracy says, you know, different people have different interests, different things they want to be the case. Maybe they have different expertise and different knowledge bases. Remember the podcast interview I did with Henry Farrell, where he talked about democracy as a problem-solving mechanism.

And it goes back to the fitness landscape idea. Problems can be hard to solve, and very often it is good when you're trying to solve problems to have a diversity of approaches tackling the problem. If there's a localized peak in the fitness landscape and you have a problem-solving technique that never points you in the direction of that localized peak, you're less likely to succeed than a group of people who are being more ecumenical. So I think that there is not just, something to be done academically,

increasing our generation of knowledge within the intellectual machinery that we have in our society by having more interdisciplinary work. I think it's also a model for our conversations more generally. It's not, you know, you can always be too extreme about this.

You know, as I like to say on the podcast, or when I talk about people I invite on the podcast, I want to invite diverse people. I want to invite people not only whom, I agree with, but I don't want to invite people who are a waste of time. I want to invite people who, even if I disagree with them, I think that it's worth listening to them. And my personal judgment about what is worth listening to might not be yours. Yeah, that's why there's more than one podcast out there. But I do think that the general philosophy of listening to different kinds of

points of view opens you up to insights and solutions to problems that you wouldn't otherwise have. just like opening yourself up to mixing different spirits together leads to the possibility of a better cocktail. Look, I know just as well as you do, this is not the world's best analogy, okay? But it's the holiday message. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be lighthearted.

And I wanted to have something substantive in there and also be lighthearted. So that served the purpose a little bit. think of the discussion of being interdisciplinary within academia as the base spirit, as the gin in the martini or the rye in the Manhattan, and think about the talking about cocktails, et cetera, as the complementary spirit. I don't know if there's a word for that. There probably is.

Like I said, I'm not an expert in mixology. So there probably is a specific technical word for whatever that secondary spirit is that adds some extra color, extra nuance to the whole conundice to the whole. as a whole. Besides, cocktails are fun, and talking to people is hard, talking to people you disagree with. Sometimes it's not worth talking to them. You never know. Some people are the Farine Bronca of opinions. Other people get along a lot of times, but it's worth the effort, you know? As much as Stephen Weinberg was a brilliant guy, I do wish that he appreciated a little bit more that for certain questions within physics, there's something to be gleaned.

from the points of view that philosophers have to offer, and likewise, for certain questions in philosophy, there's something to be gleaned from what physicists have to offer. There's something to be gleaned between biologists and economists and linguists and the whole bit, computer scientists. It's hard to do, and I think that as a system, we don't create mechanisms by which it can happen. We have a system that is really, really good at the disciplines,

not so focused on letting interdisciplinary work go. That's not a cocktail bar that I want to go to. I want one that has fun combinations of different things that surprise me and lead me to places that I've never been before. Maybe that's what I'll do right now. Who knows? Anyway, as the point of the holiday message, thank you so much for listening to the Mindscape podcast.

This has been going on. You know, it's been a more regular thing than I thought when I started, what, two and a half years ago? Mindscape. I thought, you know, I said, we'll start trying to do it once a week, but I probably won't succeed in doing that. And here we are. We're succeeding. I have a whole bunch of podcasts in the can that are really, really good, pretty diverse, actually, always trying to become a better podcaster, better questions, better guests and things like that, better audio quality. I know the audio quality comes and goes. I do care about it. I do try to make it good,

but there's a fundamental constraint that if I do a remote podcast, then I don't control the room that the other person is in. Even if I get them a microphone, if they're in an echoy room, it can be very, very hard to get good audio quality. Just letting you know that I feel your pain when the audio quality is not up to snuff. I do try to make it good. And it's been great for me.

You know, it's been its work. It's a certain amount of effort, especially when I have to, like, understand the point of view of someone talking about some esoteric topic. but that's the biggest single reason I do it, so that I can be exposed to these different ideas. You know, maybe every faculty member should be forced to have a podcast

in which they interview people outside their own domain of intellectual expertise, because that would lead them to appreciate what other people have to offer. And, you know, that's a pretty good holiday message right there. Thanks for listening. Here's hoping your 2022 is challenging and rewarding in the best possible ways.