Status, Sacred, and Neglected Truths with Robin Hanson
Economist Robin Hanson argues our brains systematically deceive us on high-stakes beliefs like status and relationships. He predicts global fertility decline will stall innovation unless high-fertility subcultures like the Amish reverse the trend, and explains how modern signaling games around parenting and careers compound the problem.
Chapters
Hey, Upstream listeners. This week, we're resurfacing a 2023 episode of Upstream with Robin Hanson. It's a wide-ranging conversation on elites versus experts, status, truth-seeking, the sacred, and more. If you'd like to share any feedback on the episode, or if there's anything from the Turpentine Network you'd like to see more of on Upstream, feel free to leave a comment. Please enjoy the episode ahead.
And Robin, thanks for joining the podcast.
Great to be here. What are we going to talk about?
Well, let's start by a quick introduction for people who are not as familiar. You've done cutting-edge work in prediction markets, you know, with your idea of Futarchy. You've written a book called Age of M that people should check out. You've written a book with Kevin Simler. about prestige, uh, elephants in the brain. And you've been a student of status and how that impacts people's decisions in very specific fields, uh, from education, medicine, to a dozen others. And you've done a lot more. But when you look back at the kind of the thread that ties those interests together, or the threads that you keep pulling, how do you make sense of your compulsion? How do you make sense of what's, uh, what gravitates your attention?
Well, there's the view from the inside, what I tell myself I'm doing. And then I guess there's the view from the outside where I just look at it and try to make sense of it. The view from the inside is that I'm looking for neglected important things and being opportunistic about that and taking the freedom that tenure gives that most people don't use to just go look at whatever seems to be important and neglected to me. That's the view from the inside. I guess the view from the outside is somewhat like that. I am, I'm weird. I, uh, I guess I tend to be willing to consider more topics that other people just think is outside the Overton window, just silly, or, you know, and then I look at many of those and agree on most of them are silly, but I pick some of them and say, no, that's not so silly, and willing to go into that. So.
And do you think there's kind of an intellectual arbitrage there of like, hey, because people aren't exploring these, these spaces, or they won't even consider this as a possibility, The intellectual world clumps enormously.
I mean, there's this vast space of things that are important, and people just love to be near each other. If a bunch of other people are talking about something, people want to go right there and talk about the same thing. So there's all this empty space between what everybody's talking about that's nearly as important and interesting. And there's all these ways in which people just won't consider a topic if it seems silly. So I'm a contrarian, many people say, but The way I think I'm contrarian is more willing to consider topics. But I think that when I consider a topic, the conclusions I draw aren't going to be that far away from somebody else who also considers it. The difference is more is, do you even consider the topic?
Some people have faced enormous consequences for exploring topics. I could be wrong, but it feels like you've only just had a couple slaps on the wrist or so. I don't mean only, but like relative to some other people who've lost their economic livelihoods or something. In that you seem to be thriving. You did write in one post that you faced consequences. I'm curious if you think, or if you feel confident that it was worth it.
I don't think I was capable of having a map of danger territory to stay away from that I could have executed well. I mean, I get other people have a better sense of what to stay away from. I just don't. The sort of things that people have complained about me for are just a tiny fraction of my Things that I think about, they're not really that important. They're just things I happen to have said something about and then everybody went crazy.
And I think a person who's faced this in a very extreme way is Charles Murray, right? Like one section of the, of, you know, one book of his massive oeuvre of content, that, that's the thing he's most known for basically.
But honestly, like when I say neglected important things, controversial does not overlap that very well. Most controversial things are not neglected.
Yeah.
So, I'm not actually trying to do controversial things. I think there's usually plenty of people talking about controversial things. I'm looking for the things that people are not talking about.
Yeah. Is this a segue into what got you so excited about Sacred? Because it feels like in the last couple of years, you've really gone down the rabbit hole.
I've spent about a year on that and I just had a sense at a certain point, oh, that's important and neglected.
Yeah.
And I realized that it basically was in my way.
How was it in your way?
Well, there's all these institutional ideas of ways I'd like to change the world to change. And often I just puzzle over why don't people like them? Why are people resistant? What's in the way exactly? And I realized, oh, well, one of the things people say is you're messing with the sacred. And I thought, maybe I am. Let's figure that out. What is that thing? I realized I had just dismissed it and not taken it seriously and went, no, it's a real thing. It seems like there's a phenomenon there. Let's figure out what that is so then I can understand in what ways it's in my way and maybe compromise with it. So I think I did actually make substantial progress in making sense of it. And now I have a better sense of why it's in my way.
Let's unpack that. Maybe share a couple of the biggest learnings, how you built your mental model around secret, or what do you understand now about How and why it's in your way that you didn't appreciate beforehand.
I have a simple standard method for most topics that I recommend to everybody, and it's not that complicated, but apparently it's not that popular either. So I'm not sort of puzzled by that. But my simple standard method is, say I take this topic of sacred, I just go collect a bunch of empirical correlates, call them stylized facts or something, just a bunch of things people say tend to go along with the sacred. patterns of sacred things. And I just collected a long list of those. I think it was 60 items long or something in the end. And that's my data. And then the game is to then collect some theories, like what could explain this, and then match theories to data. That is, ask which theories, which small set of theoretical assumptions could explain as many of these facts as possible. And that's a simple way to analyze most any topic. And it takes you a long way as you focus on the main important things and you focus on what theories could explain things. And that's the question, what could explain that? So looking at theories of the sacred, I realized that one of the founders of the field of sociology, Émile Durkheim, had a book on religion and his story with the essence of religion was the sacred. And then his story, what the sacred was, was essentially a way for people to coordinate, to see the same thing together, to bind together. So instead of you and I and a bunch of people saying, I'm with you forever, we're going to be a team, yay us, we look at the sacred tree and we say, I see why the sacred tree is sacred. And you, you look at it and you see it. I see that you see the tree too, and we both see it together. And now I'm bound to you in a way stronger than if I had just said, you and me are together. If you and me are together, but then you betray me, you and me aren't together anymore. I mean, hell with that. We're dumping it, right? But if you're the only other person who sees the sacred tree, and it's really important to me to see this thing, and you're the only— one of the only people out there who gets it, I'm still bound to you even if you betray me. And so it's a way in which humans could bind together. I grouped these, these, you know, I call them correlates of the sacred. 68. I grouped them into 7 categories. And this basic theory of the sacred being a thing that binds people together actually explains 3 of these 7 things together. It actually works. So I say, good, that we've made some progress there. Yes, I accept this theory of the sacred that is substantial. You know, it's for binding people together. But then there were these other 4, and they weren't directly, obviously implied by that. And so my challenge was, how do I make sense of these other 4 correlates of the sacred? The first 3 correlates of the sacred are that sacred things are things we value highly. We tend to show that we value them. We try to go out of our way to let other people see that we value them, and that we are united by this. seeing it the same. So that's explained by the fundamental idea of seeing the same. But then the other 4 correlates, as the sections are, uh, one, sacred things tend to be set apart, distinguished from non-sacred things. And then we idealize sacred things, we simplify them and make them cleaner and nicer than they really are. We're supposed to feel the sacred, not so much analyze it and think it, calculate it. It's supposed to be an emotional Touchstone. And finally, touching the sacred in a concrete way tends to make concrete things sacred. So, like, a love letter is sacred as a representation of love. A flag is sacred as a representation of a nation, things like that. So, these other 4 correlates of the sacred, the question is how to make sense of those. And, I had known about a psychology theory called construal level theory. And then it occurred to me that that can explain these other 4. So construal level theory says that everything we see is thought of differently in our heads depending on whether it's far away or up close. So things far away in time, space, social distance, hypotheticality, planning abstraction— things far away we see as far away in other ways, whatever far away. And then things up close we tend to see as up close in other ways. And far away things we tend to think very abstractly about and in small amounts of detail. And basically, if you have a visual field, you see a few big things up close and lots of little things far away. And the things close have a lot of detail, and you reason about them with their detail. But the far away things are abstractly described, and you reason about them very quickly, crudely, based on a few abstract descriptors. So that's near versus far. And once you realize that we have this near versus far habit, you can see that it's an obstacle to seeing something the same way. So in our society, we tend to see medicine as sacred. And if you're sick and I'm not, there's a problem that you will see your medicine and your illness up close, and I will see it far away. And the fact that we tend to see things different when they're up close and far will be an obstacle to us seeing it the same, which is the key idea of the sacred to bind together by seeing something the same. So, the hypothesis is that usually we see close things in near mode and far things in far mode, but for sacred things, we instead switch to seeing things as if they were far away even when they're up close. We see things in far mode even when they're close. So, our habit with medicine— is to see it as if from afar, even when up close. That means we are actually not as careful about medicine, and we don't calculate and analyze it as much, and we're somewhat sloppy, but we see it the same. And therefore we can bind together by agreeing about medicine. That is, you in your particular medical treatment, you don't look at the details of your treatment, you step back and see it abstractly as if from afar. And that takes away the stress of looking at the particular fears you have, but it also comforts you and then lets you see it as if somebody else sees it.
That's a great overview. And so in what ways was this idea of sacred holding you back? And I'm curious because you've also explored ideas of how to get around or proposals of making other things sacred like money or other kinds of things.
Well, so many of the things I want to do do involve money. And one of the things people said was money is profane and you shouldn't mess with sacred. Now, for example, even medicine. Medicine is sacred. And so if I propose a way to use money to get more effective medicine, then people say, oh, that's not good. You're messing with the sacred thing. Now, obviously people do use money to pay for medicine, but there's a norm that like it should be paid for by the government outside of our view. And when we're with a doctor, they should just— You know, give us their advice and we should just trust them and we shouldn't think there's money incentives involved. I want there to be money incentives involved so that they actually do a good job. But people say, oh, money incentives, that's bad because money is profane. So then what do I do? Well, I have an idea for what to do, but I'm not that sure it'll work. But my idea is sacred money. I'd say money doesn't have to be profane. The reason why money is usually seen as profane is because you could spend it on profane things. And so if your doctor gets money from you and then goes and spends it on something profane, maybe they've profaned the medicine with it. But if we could create a kind of money that was sacred, then maybe we could use that sacred money to do sacred medicine and give people sacred incentives. So the simple concept was You have profane money and then there's a way to convert it into sacred money. And then the reverse conversion gets harder. That is, sacred money is committed to sacred causes. So say with a hospital, the hospital could be approved as a sacred venture. And so if you have sacred money, you're allowed to spend it at the hospital. And then the hospital is allowed to use that sacred money to pay its employees, say a janitor. or a surgeon in sacred money. And then because they're providing sacred services to the hospital, they could convert that back into regular money to use for their other purposes. But it's because the sacred purpose of the hospital has been approved, uh, for use of sacred money. And now people could invest in sacred ventures, and then maybe if they win, they get more sacred money. And now we could have capitalists who are taking risks and investing and then getting more sacred money, but they would What they could do with the sacred money would be limited in the sense they could invest in more sacred ventures or maybe donate it to a church or other things we approve as sacred. We would be limiting what you can do, but now we might get approval that as many people might say, oh yeah, it's okay to use sacred money for medicine. And so it's okay to use it to incentivize medicine, say, to give medical providers a stronger incentive to do a good job if the incentive is in terms of sacred money. That's not proven, a speculative idea, but it's where I went trying to figure out what to do with this insight that we have a strong urge to treat things as sacred and it's not going to go away and it's an obstacle to some things. And how can we get around that?
Zooming out, this also relates to your book, Elephant in the Brain. My mental model of you is having done a lot of the work to understand what would make these systems, whether it's medicine or education or others, these things work better. And then realizing that you came up with roadblocks. One of them was sacred. I think another one was, this particular round prediction markets, was just this maybe underappreciation for status or prestige and how much people care about it and in what ways they care about it and prioritize it over the greater good or even their own good sometimes. Is that accurate, or how would you characterize that?
Well, I certainly understand that there are a lot of status processes that are important in the world, but trying to see why they're an obstacle, I came up with this framework that we have this ideal structure that we want our systems to satisfy. And the ideal structure is that the masses recognize elites who oversee experts. people want, you know, proposals for change to fit this form. There needs to be some elites involved, and then they need to be the ones overseeing experts. And in some sense, many of our institutions do fit this structure. And you can see why people want the structure for innovation too. So I think people are not open to innovation proposals from just anybody on any sorts of criteria. In fact, They basically want innovation proposals to come from elites, and they're willing only seriously consider proposals that come from elites. And then they have to be, of course, recognized elites, recognized by the masses as elites, legitimately elites. And then those people are allowed to offer suggestions for change. They don't have to be expert in the particular topics they're offering suggestions of, and we're not really willing to listen to just mere experts. making suggestions for change. So this is what I realized— my role in the world is not well suited to this thing I'm trying to do. I might be able to claim to be an expert, but I can't really claim to be an elite, and people aren't really willing to listen to me make a proposal because I'm at best an expert. So I have to convince elites to endorse proposals for change, and I think that's an obstacle for innovation all over the world. And I think it makes sense of a lot of business practice in terms of where innovations come from and who initiates them and how and what sort of things you need to have to get an innovation to be tried.
Fascinating. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
Hey listeners, it's Erik. If you're looking for more expert-level conversations, but specifically about top negotiation strategies, then I have the perfect podcast recommendation for you. DealCraft: Insights from Great Negotiators, hosted by Jim Sebanias, Harvard Business School professor and renowned negotiation expert. DealCraft features interviews with the world's greatest dealmakers and diplomats, from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman, on their most challenging negotiations, from which Jim draws lessons for listeners. Not to mention that The Guardian recently called DealCraft a best podcast pick. New episodes release weekly, and I'd recommend starting with their first episode, which reveals how legendary entertainment attorney John Branca was able to successfully negotiate for Michael Jackson's ownership of his master recordings and the Beatles catalog. Almost unprecedented feats at the time, so don't miss out. Follow DealCraft: Insights from Great Negotiators on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Venture capital is widely seen as one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world. Go look at the S&P 500. Nearly every major tech company on that list was once funded by venture capital firms, producing billions of dollars in profit in the process. The hard truth, however, is that the biggest venture funds are almost entirely funded by institutional investors. institutional investors like endowments and sovereign wealth funds. So unless you knew a guy who knew a guy, you and 99.9% of individual investors did not get to participate in the pre-IPO growth of any of those blue-chip companies. And it's happening again. Look at the biggest names in AI, for instance. Almost all of them are still private, just out of reach of your portfolio. The Fundrise Innovation Fund is finally changing that. It's a more than $125 million fund. It holds some of the most exciting pre-IPO tech companies in the world, and it's designed specifically for individual investors. This time, you can get in early at fundrise.com/upstream. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the Innovation Fund's prospectus at fundrise.com/innovation. This is a paid advertisement.
Walter Mead, a professor, wrote about that. His distinction is plebeians, wonks, and plutocrats. And so I'm curious if— is elite a type of wonk, like a Steven Pinker type, or is it a type of plutocrat, like a famous entrepreneur or something like that?
Well, wonks— if you're picking between wonks and plutocrats, then yeah, the plutocrats are more the elites and the wonks are more the experts. But that maps in that description, and the plebs would be the masses.
Who are the elites? Is Steven Pinker not an elite in your model?
My model is about what's in people's heads. So in people's heads, there are people who learn specific things about construction or medicine or law or whatever. And then if you know a lot about a particular area like that, that qualifies you to be an expert in that area, and that qualifies you to make expert judgments in that area. But that doesn't qualify you directly to be an elite. So elites are people who don't necessarily know a lot about specific things, but are just generally impressive overall, and then more qualified for leadership or management roles, or sort of, you know, roles in which we would listen to someone and follow their lead, a leadership role. So we expect those people to be relatively— there's a bunch of things that contribute. Being smart, pretty, articulate, well-connected, a whole bunch of standard things, celebrity, et cetera, a whole bunch of things weigh in on that. And elites often get together and have meetings of elites. And so, you could just see this in the world. There are meetings of elites and then there are meetings of experts and they're just different meetings and they do different things. For example, at a conference, often a speaker is an expert, but a panel Yeah.
Is Tyler Cowen an elite?
My colleague Tyler Cowen is much more of an elite than I am. He's more on the border, but like, because he comes from Harvard, he's well-spoken, uh, he has lots of elite connections, you know, those are the things that make someone an elite. Whereas I am more of an expert in the sense that, and of course people write in an elite and an expert styles. One of the comedies of the academic world is when somebody wins a Nobel Prize, that's the moment they decide to write op-eds. And you might think, you, you've become the pinnacle of this scientific system. Why are you suddenly descending to write op-eds after getting a Nobel Prize? Well, the story is now they think they might be a candidate for elite.
Fascinating.
So they then start to try to be in an elite mode and, you know, pontificate on panels and write op-eds and doing the sort of thing elites do. Uh, rather than experts do. Because in some sense, often elites will somewhat pretend to be experts. Like a journalist who's an elite will write a book on a subject X and then talk about X as if they were an expert on X. But if, if a real expert challenges them, they'll push back and, you know, I'm just saying the best I know because I researched the book, right? But in our world, people are much more eager to move from expert to elite and vice versa. Yeah, there's relatively few elites who are envious of experts and trying to become an expert. Lots of experts who are envious of elites and trying to become elites.
When you think about your prototypical elites, are you thinking— do you have like Ezra Klein in mind? Or do you have like Fauci in mind? Or like, who are examples of elites? Just to make this more concrete?
Think of Davos.
Got it.
Right. Or, you know, elite talk shows and who would be guests. Or elite conferences and who would be, you know, panel members. They're people who tend to talk in a sort of— they're not speaking in specific expert language. They're trying to talk in a more general language, and they tend to talk to other elites, you know, together. So in the pandemic, the very early part of the pandemic, we had our usual experts on pandemics, public health experts, and they had their usual opinion immediately about how to handle pandemics. And then what happened is the elites around the world started talking about the pandemic. Davos people and people on Twitter and all these panels, and they all just started talking with each other about pandemics. And they didn't have to be experts on this to be in those conversations. And they took each other very seriously as elites in that conversation about the pandemic. And it took them a couple of weeks to decide together around the whole world, no, we're not doing it the way the public health experts say. We're going to do it this other way. And then the public health experts caved immediately. They just said, oh, okay, right, you guys are the elites and we're going to do it your way. It was really quite striking how, you know, it wasn't mainly public health experts who were in that conversation. It was elites of all sorts all around the world, and they talked together around the world and came to a uniform agreement collectively around the whole world Elites are really— it's one of the skills of elites is they are able to do that, is to come to a consensus and agree on it and push it. And it's just striking how the experts completely caved. They did not say, but we're the public health experts, how dare you defy our judgment? They just said, yes, sir.
There is a wave of people like Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, kind of anti-elite candidates or elite defectors perhaps, who are presenting a world where a small set of elites have a certain view about how things should be run that is at odds with the majority, and yet they are pushing through their sort of agenda, quote unquote, I'm putting air quotes, and that that is a global thing. Is that, is that accurate or overstated? Or like, what is your—
Well, so there are often these populist movements wherein people who call themselves populists you know, take objection to people they call elites. And sometimes we even have revolutions of these forms, and they're pretty much all one set of elites against another. These are internal elite battles wherein one set of the elites sort of claims to be more credibly connected to the public, to the masses, than the other. So in some sense, one part of the elites says to the other part of elites, you guys should not be recognized by the masses. And they go to the masses and say, those people, you are recognizing them and us as elites. You shouldn't recognize them. You should just recognize us. We are the true elites and they are not. And there are, you know, lots of battles within elites who form coalitions trying to push other people out of the elites and push them out of the category of legitimate elites. So of course, in some sense, that's what woke is all about. It's a mechanism by which some elites can cancel and get rid of other elites and clean the field for more room for them.
Going back to status for a second, and by the way, Balaji has called those sort of cancellations almost like status pump and dumps where people sort of care about an issue for a small period of time, and once it's over, they don't care about that issue anymore, or they're for the opposite of that issue. At a different time, it's kind of like who, whom. I'm curious, after all your kind of research into status and prestige, what were the biggest learnings for you? Or like, what mental model did you construct about the world in terms of like understanding that better so you could understand the world better and like mentally model people's behavior better or predict it?
So initially, like most economists, I was intuitively skeptical of the whole thing. Because it is positing something that's somewhat at a distance from what we can immediately observe. When we're positing status effects, we're positing this parameter in people's heads about other people, and it's not directly revealed in any particular action. It's revealed in the sum total of their actions about other people. And so that seems a little speculative, right? But taking it seriously, I decided, no, it's real. It's there. It's clear. It's clearly there. It's obvious. And then over time, I just integrated into my perception of our motives. And by now it seems just really obvious and almost not worth mentioning. One big element of status is some sort of relative status effect where people want to be high in their status ranking. And so it's not enough just to be rich or something. You need to be richer than other people. But I think most people get that eventually. I read this book called Pedigree, and I wrote a review of it. And one of the surprising things there that, um, I reflected on was that this was a book about elite law firms and management consulting firms and firms like that picking, deciding who are the elites who are going to join them and what criteria they used. And one interesting criteria they had was that They didn't like what they called tools. And these are people whose hobby was too close to their career. So they didn't like the business major who was in the business club. It was important in this world that you have some hobby that was distinct from your career. And that made you qualified more as an elite, you see. They didn't actually that much care if you— what you had actually done in the world or whether you true that you knew anything or that you had been confident, but, but this was one of the important things about an elite was that you had this feature. So, you know, there's certainly a big element of status I think people don't quite realize is the endorsement of other people with status and the desire to just affiliate with people with status. So, uh, since I guess you're in business more, I, I might just say a lot of people invest in managed funds, which on average lose money compared to index funds. Right? And the question is, why? Why do they keep doing that? And I think one of the key ideas is that people want to claim a connection to the prestigious people running these managed funds and get status by association with them. And that's why they need to seem to be in a trusting relationship where they trust the other person, and by implication, perhaps the other person trusts them. And people crave connections with prestigious people, which appear to be trusting connections to them, and they're willing to lose a fair bit of money for that. It's in some sense also why they feel like they're just going to trust their doctor and not question their doctor's judgment, is their doctor tends to be a prestigious person and they want to get that prestige by that trusting relationship between them and their doctor. I think if you just thought of people having status, you wouldn't quite think those through, those details that people don't just want to be handsome and smart and be thought of that well. They want to be thought of as having a good trusting connection with other people who are high status. And it's often those connections that are giving much of the status and prestige to people. Uh, so, you know, these people working for these prestigious firms, they're going to be prestigious by working for them once they're hired, but, and then the firm's going to be prestigious by association with the people they have working there. And then they're prestigious by association with the schools that those people went to. The schools are prestigious by association with the firms that their graduates go to. And there's a lot of this network of connection creating the prestige.
Quick tangent. Do you believe in the efficient market hypothesis?
This is one of those things where there's a reasonable concept and then people try to define it in some extreme way that, okay, it doesn't work if you define it so crazy extreme. It's like free will or something. I mean, there's, there's a concept of free will that we all get intuitively, and of course it's true. But if you define free will to be some very extreme thing, they say, okay, fine, that, that free will doesn't exist. So the same for efficient markets. Obviously, it's very hard to find errors in prices in markets. That's the thing we should all easily agree on. And everybody should be warned that if you think you found it easy, you probably didn't, right? There's the old, you know, the old story. is true about the poker table. You sit down at a poker table, you look around for the fool. You don't see them, it's you. Walk away, right? So same in the market. Uh, yes, um, you really need to have a good sense of who the fools are in the market, because if you don't find the fools in the market that you can identify that you're trading against, the fool is you, and you should not make the trade. But if you try to define this in an extreme way of saying there's never any profit opportunities for anybody in the market, well, that's crazy wrong. Of course there are. They're just really hard to find. So the price is bid way up. You have to put a lot of money in to find those errors, and then you need a lot of capital to profit from them, which is why hedge funds exist. And hedge funds do make money on average relative to no trades when you ignore their management fees. It's only when you include the management fees that they do worse on average, but ignoring the management fees, they're definitely winning. And they're winning from the people on the other side of their trades, which are usually fools like you. So don't be that fool.
Well, the reason I ask is because I want to ask, are reputation markets efficient?
Well, reputation markets are a metaphorical description. I mean, people have reputations, but there's not really a market where you could trade them. There's a social process that produces reputations.
And is that accurate or efficient? How should we think about that?
Well, it's not completely uninformed, right? Um, certainly, but there is substantial noise in it exactly because you can't arbitrage it. That is, if you know someone who's underrated by the reputation market, you usually can't easily hire them or something, uh, to fix that, invest and buy them up. Or somebody who's overrated, you usually can't short them so easily. So it's like, say, real estate or something where If something's mispriced in the real estate, it's hard to do much about it, right? If you see a real estate that's underpriced, even then it might not be in your interest to buy that because it might not be the sort of profit property that works well in your portfolio. But a piece of real estate that's overpriced is especially hard for you to do much about. Don't buy it, right? So the usual efficient market hypothesis concept is because of certain sorts of arbitrage actions are possible, that's what disciplines the price and keeps it making hard-to-find errors. When those arbitrage opportunities are not available, then errors can persist. People can see an error and know about it and can't do much about it. And so similarly, you might say, you know, is journalism efficient? You know, do people ever say mistaken things in journalistic articles? And yes, they do, because if you read and see a mistake, there's not that much you can do about it to fix it. And therefore fixing the world. One of the things we should think about is how can we make arbitrage more possible about reputations and about journalism, et cetera. And that's a key mechanism to think about. Let's fix those things that way.
And so you can think of gossip as a form of market making or something, or it is the process by which reputations are formed. You're saying is, or implying, provide bounties for better reputation arbitrage.
So I think we understand, say, why law exists as a response to failures in gossip. And I think that will give you a sense of where gossip goes wrong. So, uh, like for example, we see in cancellation, um, pump and dumps, as you said. What typically happens in gossip is somebody comes to you and passes on gossip to you about somebody else. And the person who's talking to you, you have a much stronger connection to them with this somebody else. So they want you to agree with them, and your immediate inclination is to agree with them because you care about them liking you much more than whoever it is they're talking about. And to show loyalty to this person who comes to you with a piece of gossip, you typically just immediately agree with them, and you don't look very carefully at the evidence for whatever this accusation is, because it wouldn't make much sense. That is, you risk alienating this person who's coming to you. asking you for agreement with them for this other person you don't know much about, and it would cost you a bunch of time and trouble. So there's— that's not a win. So that explains why gossip networks tend to have a rush to judgment. And the legal solution is to put somebody in charge of the judgment and tell them the one rule: listen to all the evidence before you decide. That's the key rule that overcomes the problem with gossip. Because the— you as a gossip recipient don't have this incentive to listen to all the evidence, to go around and ask lots of people before you have a judgment. You have an incentive to— somebody says somebody did this thing, and you just— you're instead of saying, oh really, that sounds terrible, and then go off and pass that on to somebody else, and then their incentive is to agree with you, and then you get to be part of the gossip network. But you know, you're not really paying close attention. That's, that's the problem with gossip. So it shows you how, like, gossip is not that reliable because of that sort of incentive, right?
Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
Have you heard of this alternative investing company, alts.co? The idea behind it is simple. There are a million syndicates out there that co-invest in startups or real estate. But what about alternative investments? Where do you go if you want to invest in, say, Hollywood film financing deals, or A dozen barrels of tequila, or pro sports teams. There's a world of alternative investments out there, and boy, these guys are all over it. Their community Altea is a place for forward-thinking investors to invest in unique, vetted deals, meet captivating people, and enjoy once-in-a-lifetime travel experiences. Apply to join Altea. Who knows where things might lead? Travel, meet unique people, invest in asset classes that are a bit out of your usual lane. This is what. Altea gives you unique, slightly uncomfortable, but incredibly rewarding experiences, which not only help your portfolio, but stretch your mind and allow you to see the world differently. Check these guys out at alts.co/upstream. That's alts.co/upstream. alts.co/upstream. Hey everyone, Erik here. In this environment, founders need to become profitable faster and do more with smaller teams. Especially when it comes to engineering. That's why Sean Lanahan started Squad, a specialized global talent firm for top engineers that will seamlessly integrate with your org. Squad offers rigorously vetted top 1% talent that will actually work hard for you every day. Their engineers work in your time zone, follow your processes, and use your tools. Squad has frontend engineers excelling in TypeScript and React and Next.js ready to onboard to your team today. For backend, Squad engineers are experts at Node.js, Python, Java, and a range of other languages and frameworks. While it may cost more than the freelancer on Upwork billing you for 40 hours but working only 2, Squad offers premium quality at a fraction of the typical cost, without the headache of assessing for skills and culture fit. Squad takes care of sourcing, legal compliance, and local HR for global talent. Increase your velocity without amping up burn.
Visit choosequad.com I do have a radical proposal based on betting markets for fixing academia. That is, if you say, what's wrong with academia? We can say a list of a lot of things wrong. Then you say, how are you going to fix it exactly? It's really hard to come up with fixes because you could fix academia regarding very specific things academia is doing for particular clients. By giving incentives about those. But a lot of academics are talking about pretty abstract things, uh, far away from immediate experience, and that'll take a long time to be judged. And so question is, how can you give them a better incentive, uh, to do that well in terms of who they hire and who they publish and, and all those other sorts of things? My suggestion is that the thing academics all agree that they're trying to do is to do things that, that would— should be thought well of by people in distant future looking back on what they did. That is, we're all as academics supposed to be appealing to the judge of history about, you know, our contributions to our particular fields. That's the standard we say that we should be judged by. My idea is to set that up explicitly. That is, assign historians, like a group of historians, the task of taking some group of academics from a century before And ranking them on who should have been listened to more. Just look in detail of who said what, when, about what, and using everything they know, say who should have been listened to more among this group, making your ranking that way. And then just show that it's possible for historians to reliably do that. That is, have different ones doing it different ways and show that there's a correlation in the ranking. And then, you know, show that it's possible to assign it. And then basically create futures markets today in that evaluation a century from now. And just commit to basically having a chance at least that we might do that exercise of having historians later evaluate people now. So now for every academic, we can get their relative ranking estimated by the predict— a prediction market on what historians will say about the relative ranking. And then my recommendation is use that estimate as the main estimate for deciding who to hire and publish and all the other things that we do inside academia. If people are making choices where they take somebody lower in that ranking and doing— giving them a higher honor than somebody who's higher on that ranking, we want to look and say, what are you doing? Justify why you're disagreeing with these markets when you could go trade in these markets and fix the prices that way. So that would be my attempt to fix academia with more direct reputation markets that could be arbitraged, right? That is, every academic would have this number Their rank as estimated by these markets, uh, in this distant future, historian evaluation. And if you thought somebody was overranked, you could sell their asset. If you thought they were underranked, you could buy their asset. We could each arbitrage mistakes in the estimation of these markets.
Why wouldn't a lot of people adopt this?
Well, first of all, we, as we talked about before, no elites have suggested it. You need to be a qualified elite to suggest such a thing. And I'm not such a person and probably neither are you. Seriously, a place like academia is so prestigious that we simply won't consider proposals for change about something so prestigious unless it's from somebody sufficiently prestigious. And not just prestigious as an expert, but also as an elite, because we're doing something management-like here. This isn't just a technical thing. We are, we are trying to change an overall social structure that allocates prestige. And for that, we want a qualified elite to be making suggestions and putting their energy behind it. Maybe such an elite listens to this podcast.
How many qualified elites are there?
Well, I think it's a spectrum. That is, in some sense, even you or I are very low-level elites, but we just don't count very high for this qualification. I think basically everybody is to some degree an expert and some degree an elite and some degree a mass. But, you know, it's not the qualifications for being a mass are pretty low. So everybody qualifies for that easily. If you think about it, experts are people who know particular things. So it's the qualification, the tech, did they study that? Can they answer questions about it? Do they pass tests about it? Do they, you know, make competent choices and better tests? That's the qualification for an expert. And that's not the qualification for an elite. Elites are qualified on the basis of their connections and their being articulate and being friendly and making good cooperative relationships with other people and negotiating well and being handsome and tall and pretty and all those things. Those all count in general for elites.
In your consideration about how you could have the biggest impact with your ideas, have you tried or considered trying, hey, should I just max out, be the most elite I can be, which is different than kind of this expert track?
Like for the Nobel Prize winners? It's really hard after a lifetime of the expert strategy to suddenly switch to trying to be the elite. Most of these Nobel Prize winners fail on their op-ed strategy. They do not become accepted as elites, honestly. It takes a lifetime of investment to become a qualified elite. And I think I'm too late to get very far there. And of course, there's also a matter of just what other skills you have. I mean, the more— if I was handsome, charismatic, had well-connected family, uh, you know, was, was smooth and, you know, that sort of thing, then I might well be more of an elite. But I mean, so among academics who are more elites, clearly, you know, department heads, university administration, uh, people, committee heads, journal editors, you know, funding agency heads. I mean, those are in fact relative elites among academics. And so those are the people who have a shot at further eliteness. That is, if you were going to try to be a congressman or something, it would make sense then to be a university president beforehand or something rather than just a professor, right?
It's really interesting. There's a few dynamics here that I find interesting. One is this idea of, you know, the sort of prompt, like, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Or there's another version, like, applied here, which is like, If we know so much about elites and social status, why aren't we, you know, more elite? Because the people who are more elite than us don't think at all about this kind of stuff, or might not think at all about this kind of stuff.
Trying to be an elite and trying to be accepted as elite is actually an extremely ancient human behavior that we have deeply embedded, you know, cognitive routines for. It's not something you have to consciously learn that much. I mean, in any one society, you have to learn specific things specific to it about them. But the general idea of just trying to be an elite is just something people do very naturally. You know, maybe expertise is a little more recent than eliteness. And it's also a sort of thing that we have, um, just a lot of initial capability, and you either have it or you don't. In some sense, there's ways in which you don't get it. Now, one key feature of human status is the difference between prestige and dominance. When we talk, say somebody's high status, we often don't distinguish those 2, which is quite suspicious because we really care a lot about that difference. And we disapprove of dominance and we approve of prestige in the abstract. But what often happens is somebody who has dominance, we then accept their dominance by pretending it's prestige. And pretending it's prestige is what allows us to submit to the dominance because we're not supposed to submit to dominance, but we are allowed to admire And copy prestige. Because humans have this aversion to dominance, it raises this very puzzling question: why does anybody ever obey a boss? Because a boss looks pretty overtly like a dominant person. And in fact, in fiction and in culture, people generally disapprove of other people's bosses. The general idea of bosses is disapproved, and the idea that you would submit to a boss is disapproved. And just most people can get a lot of sympathy just dissing bosses, right? It's really easy to do in culture, right? But then the question is, how is it that all these people are actually obeying their boss? How does that happen? And I think the key strategy is, well, by being prestigious. They give you the excuse to obey them because they're prestigious. So in fact, one of the main ways we select bosses is through prestige markers. So bosses are in many ways elites compared to being experts, exactly because of this main function that We are willing to defer to elites because they're prestigious in ways we're not willing to defer to other people who would then be dominating us. So that helps you understand why eliteness is this sort of general prestige, general impressiveness. It's because one of the main functions of elites is to let you honestly and acceptably defer to them and accept their leadership. And the main thing that lets you accept leadership for humans is prestige. So they need to have lots of prestige of all sorts. That's the key thing, which is why they need to be handsome and articulate and all the other things. But also they need the usual prestigious generosity of ordinary humans. They need to talk like they care about the community and that they are generous and that they are looking at the big issues, etc. That's also important to the elite persona. In a way that it's not for experts. Experts don't have to pretend to care about the country and the world and being generous, but elites do exactly because elites are trying to be prestigious.
It's fascinating. It also makes me think that like, it feels like, you know, Taleb once had a line that says like, anything meant solely to increase your status rarely increases your status. Or this idea of status is a game that the more you think about it, you lose. It's like, it's low status to be seen as trying to increase your status, and which, which therefore implies like even acknowledging that status exists feels like it's a low status, like this thing we're doing right now.
Exactly. Right. So you're supposed to pretend that you're not even thinking about yourself or your status in the things you do as elites. You just care about the subject and the country and the, and articulating the important things. And so yes, the elite persona is oblivious in a certain sense to their own eliteness and their desire for it. And in some sense, experts are allowed more to be ambitious in wanting to be experts, and elites are not supposed to be so ambitious. Which of course, you know, say if you look at presidential candidates or something, the idea that none of those people are even thinking about the benefits they might get from being president is kind of silly, but that's the persona they have to project.
It is funny. I feel like I have a little bit of Robin Hanson in me, or at least the part of Robin Hanson that is curious about how the world works, even when it's uncool. Like, it's a little ugly. Yeah, it's ugly or it's uncool or it's unflattering. It's almost like, you know, the idea of memetic— of course you do, you know, meme, the thing that spreads. It's like anti-meme. It's like a truth that resists Right.
That's true. So, I mean, the thing that you and I probably assumed initially is we saw ourselves as curious people and that we wanted to know the truth, right?
Yep.
And whatever the truth was, we wanted to know. And that was wrong. That is, there are truths that we didn't want to know. We weren't willing to admit that to ourselves. But when you come across some of the truths that you didn't want to know, you find out, oh, That was ugly. I didn't want to know that. But now you're committed to this whole curiosity thing and you're kind of stuck. There's going to be some stuff you learn that you didn't want to know. So I'm not going to promise you that all these things are pretty and that you'll want to know them all. I could then talk to you about which sort of people will want to know more about these things. So, I mean, the first thing to say is, look, evolution designed you as a first approximation not to know about these things. That was its first guess for you, right? So if you're in the situation evolution guessed, it's right. Don't know. It's not worth your knowing these things if in fact evolution made a good guess about what situation you're in and what your payoffs are. And to a large extent, the modern world isn't that different from what evolution was working with to make these guesses. So that suggests most people maybe are better off not knowing, but not necessarily everyone. The key distinctions are, okay, what would make it worth your while to know these things, even if they're ugly? So obviously the reason you don't know these things is because that makes it easier for you to sincerely lie about your motives and your plans and your beliefs about things. If you aren't aware, you can just be very sincere and honest in being wrong about many things. And knowing these things makes it harder to be sincerely wrong those ways. You'll have to either admit it or sort of lie. Knowingly. But some people are in situations where it's especially important that they just understand themselves and the motives of people around them, like salespeople or managers. Those people, they just need that for their job. So for them, it makes more sense to learn even if it's ugly. And then social scientists or policymakers, if it's their job to understand the world in order to suggest policies for it, they kind of on the hook to like know how it actually works rather than The stories we tell ourselves about how it works. I mean, that's not actually going to help you figure out actual better policy. So it seems like it's their job to know these things. And then my last category is nerds. That is, there are some people for whom when you let your intuition machine just tell you what to do and how to do it, it doesn't work very well. Your, your, your machine does just as bad. And you're not socially smooth. And when you do, when your intuition tells you what to do, it just doesn't work. And so other people, usually they go through the social world doing what their intuitions tell them. It usually works fine. And then in their mind, their theory about what's going on is just wrong, but it doesn't matter because their machine works great. If your machine doesn't work, then you maybe need to consciously think about things.
Yeah.
In order to not screw up so badly because Your intuition's just usually gonna go really badly.
It's funny.
I mean, my self-narrative on myself is that I'm a relatively well-adjusted person who's done well in my career. But if I was a bit more ruthless, or a bit more focused, could have done even better. I just am a curious person, and have been curious about things that have nothing to do with my self-advancement. And sometimes, even like a little bit at the, at the cost of that, um, in maybe subtle ways. But there's something— I still pursue it anyways. There's something elegant about it. There's something— I'm just curious about it, right? Um, and, and, and, and I, you know, check that in certain ways.
I mean, most people aren't that eager to associate with people who are ruthless. So I mean, the ruthless thing is a pretty risky strategy. You have to be pretty confident you can hide it. And if you're not so confident you can hide it, it's probably not worth doing. It's probably better off you're trying to be cooperative because you won't be able to pull off the exceptions.
Tyler Cowen seems very good at being curious, but doing so in a way that doesn't turn off people.
Curiosity is a private, personal stance to the world. Being curious in a way that doesn't turn off people has to be at a performative public curiosity, that's typically going to be because you're very selective about what you're curious about and the way you're curious about it, which Tyler is. Uh, he's good at that. But basically, if you are not so selective, then you're going to take more risks about being curious about things that will cause problems. But of course, even then, if you just don't talk about it, you might be safe.
So the risk is, of course, that you're curious and then you talk about it naively Yeah, one example of that is Richard Dawkins had a tweet where he was like, hey, if you can be transgender, why can't you be transracial? It was just like an earnest inquiry. Yeah, and just got slaughtered. Yeah, it's an example, I guess, of crossing a sacred or crossing a taboo, even though it's like, it's a reasonable inquiry.
I recently asked some academic colleagues who I won't name, uh, basically they were talking about their hopes for the future and what roles they were hoping to have in the world. And none of them mentioned wanting to figure something out. And I realized that's actually pretty rare for people to have as their self-concept of what they're trying to do in the world is figure certain things out. And that's surprising from my point of view in the sense that that's kind of the brand of intellectual. You're supposed to be someone who's figuring things out. And of course they do spend time figuring things out, but it's not how they frame themselves.
How do they frame themselves?
Well, people are saying, well, I want to be a journal editor, or I want to, you know, become more prominent here, or I want to start this project, or be, you know, be a grant giver who gives out money. I mean, you know, there's lots of things people— they might even want to be famous for a thing, or to publicize a thing more, right? And those are all understandable motives for intellectuals, but The question is how many of them see themselves as primarily, I'm trying to figure certain things out. That's my mission in life. Here's things I'm trying to figure out. So since you talk to many people, I might suggest as you try to ask how many of these people you talk to would frame their primary goal in life as figuring certain things out as opposed to these other sorts of career goals. I'm guessing it's also going to be small.
Yeah, I suspect very few. I feel like you're a person who's like that. I feel like Agnes Callard, your podcast co-host who's also been on the show is like that. And I'm curious what makes people like that is, you know, what some people might say is like, are they, you know, I don't know if this term is derogatory, but like on the spectrum or something, like do they care less about what people think of them? Or like what script are they not running as strongly that allows them to avoid the trap?
I'm exactly the wrong person to ask that question. I'm too close to it. But it It does seem like a certain sort of naivete, a certain sort of sense of which, you know, the world branded intellectuals a certain way, and then we accepted that branding, and then we identified with that, and then we didn't let go, just held on to that branding in the space of other things we learned about opportunities and incentives and all the things the world offers, which other people more wisely apparently adapt. That is, you know, many things in the world The world lies to you about things, and you learn about the lies, and then you change your mind about a bunch of stuff. Right? Once you know there is no Santa, then your Christmas strategy changes. Right? And maybe as an adult, you give up on expecting presents because there is no Santa. Right? But some people, you can imagine, would just stick with the Santa theory, reject all the other stories people tell them about being no Santa, and they're just gonna treat Christmas like there's a Santa. the rest of their life. So that's in some sense like how Agnes and I and others might be doing. We just accepted this ideal that intellectuals are people trying to figure things out, and we're just going to stick with that.
It's interesting to think about fields where the delta between actual expertise and then recognition of that expertise is much smaller. So maybe in artistic fields or athletic fields, or in certain fields, there isn't always, it seems, this dichotomy between the people who actually know the stuff and then the people who are famous for, you know, or represent the stuff. The idea of like a writer's writer, comedian's comedian, it sort of gets at that idea of like, you know, the people that the people in the field respect, how to shrink that gap. Because ideally, and I feel like there's some true— it's not like all the elites are just beautiful people, right? Like sometimes they're true nerds. They're not attractive people. They just— their expertise is just so legible that you can't— and so much maybe beyond other people, you can't defy it or something. But I feel like there is this search for who actually knows the stuff.
I mean, the question is, what do we want from these celebrities? So like, you know, you could take an athlete, I guess, and some athletes are just really good, and it's really obvious that they're really good. And then in some sense, they qualify if they're really good enough as elites, in part based on just being so very good. But then, you know, once they go into elite circles, there's going to be a judgment about can they do the other things. They, you know, it's not enough just to be a good athlete to be considered an elite. For example, you know, even, you know, can they talk plausibly, smoothly? Are they gracious? Are they friendly? Can they negotiate? And if they don't pass those tests, then they will be relegated to the expert and they won't be considered an elite. But we still might celebrate them as the epitome of an athlete, say, and, you know, more than many elites, right? But they still might not be seen as an elite. They still might be seen as the epitome of an athlete. But there's a sense in which They become sacred. That is, you know, there's an ordinary athlete and then there's the very best. And we do have this way we want to treat the very best of some kinds of sacred things as sacred themselves. That's one of the ways in which a concrete thing gets sacred, by its association with the abstract.
It doesn't feel to me that writing this, or that talking about this topic, gets me any points. Like, I don't know why I do it. There's something Interesting about it.
Well, I mean, the payoff is when we connect it to something specific. And so in the abstract, I mean, there's a sense in which, say, if you say everybody makes mistakes, everybody's dishonest, everybody is immoral, and in the abstract everybody can admit that. But as soon as you like to admit to some specific immoral thing, it's a whole different world, right? So that is when we identify in the abstract that we might be mistaken about things or not believe things because they're, you know, easier to believe the falsehood. People can agree with it in the abstract. But if you pick a particular thing and you say, we are lying to ourselves about the effectiveness of medicine because we want to show that we care, now you've got a thing that matters a lot. And now people will be much more resistant to that. And, but now you should take more credit for saying it. That is because you found a way this abstract thing matters. So I would take this sort of thing as the basis for then making that next step. Okay, what are the specific things that you or someone else isn't facing up to? And find a way to say that and deal with the consequences. That's where this thing is setting you up to. But are you ready to make that next step?
And so say more about what the next step would be.
So, for example, in Elephant in the Brain, we have this first third of the book where we talk in the abstract about people might have mistaken motives. But in the last 2/3, we have 10 chapters, each of which we tell you about a specific area of life and how you're wrong about your motives there.
Yeah.
Specific, you know, then you— we're gonna get a lot more pushback. A lot more people are gonna go, what, me? No, not me, right? And then almost everybody's gonna disagree with one of those chapters because everybody had, you know, people vary in what's sacred to them. But for their sacred thing, they're gonna not— they're gonna push back and not agree that that's their motive is as low as we present, but that's the payoff here. So, whatever your specialty is, you know, it could be about podcasts, it could be about business or whatever it is that—
Investing. Yeah.
Like, what are some of the hidden motives or delusions, you know, things we pretend ain't so in investing or business or podcasting? That would be what I'd recommend that you start thinking about. And I'm happy to take any one of them, right? Take any phenomenon. My first thing would be, let's collect the puzzles. Let's collect the weird things that don't quite make sense, and that's our data. And then we'll try to come up with some theories to explain that data, and then maybe we'll find some uncomfortable truths about what's going on.
That's really interesting. But even let me zoom out first and ask you, like, how often are truth and social cohesion in tension? Which is to say, like, part of the question I'm asking myself is, like, If I stopped being curious about certain things, would I have richer relationships because of it? If it's that clear, maybe I would actually be— could convince myself. Or is it possible for a curious person to, like, you know, be less curious about— or be selectively curious? You kind of get what I'm trying to get at here a little bit.
The basic fact is your brain only is set up to delude you about a limited number of things. And these are especially important things. There's this vast universe of things out there that your brain doesn't care about lying about because it really doesn't care about. So you're actually pretty safe in a vast world of detail that nobody cares about, you know, figuring out what's true because it doesn't really threaten any of your preconceptions or precious sacred things. It's when you get close to things that are important that you'll find your mind lying to you. So that means, again, it's not a numbers thing. Like, it's a really very small fraction of all the things that you're wrong about, but in terms of weighted importance, they are some of the most important things to you. So it's when you want to face your most important questions, your most important assumptions, your most important claims, that you should most expect your brain delighting. So, I once went to a CIA conference or something once, or that's what it was told to me anyway, about people talking about information things. And one interesting thing I heard was about double agents. And the key idea of a double agent is they sit in your organization until the optimal time to be triggered. And so, that means usually they're completely reliable and trustworthy because they're just pretending to be like everybody else as an agent. And so there's not a problem. It's when the most important events come up that the double agent will be triggered and the reliability will be compromised. And that's like how it is in your head. See, on all these little things, your mind is just completely reliable and trustworthy because it doesn't matter and it can't be bothered to go mess with them, and it's just gonna— do its best job on lots and lots of little things. But when you get to the most important things, this reliability you saw and assumed would continue, it just drops away. And all of a sudden, your head is not so trustworthy and it's not telling you the truth exactly because the double agent is finally triggered. And now you have to be a lot more careful.
To take a specific example, let's say relationships, questions of partnership relationship. Do you think people would be better off trusting their intuition more or trusting a panel of their best friends or, you know, closest people what they should do?
Well, remember, you know, your intuitions about lying to yourself are based on an evolutionary context, which assumes that you're like the past, but in relationships, you probably are. That is, evolution decided that it wasn't in your interest to be that honest about relationships when the people in your relationship will hear your opinions and react to them, you're better off having a certain sort of deluded romanticism about some things because that's actually better off for you on average. That's why you have it. So you should first ask, are you sure you want to know? So our book, The Elephant in the Brain, some people take as self-help and they want to devote themselves to the challenge of eradicating all their delusions. And I just don't think that's going to work. Your subconscious brain was built for, you know, eons of evolution. You are outgunned completely by your mind. You are not going to overcome all these things inside your head that are much faster, and they get to see more than you, and they get to lie to you. I think you should ask, maybe I can see a few things clearly. If I put enough effort, I could push away the clouds and and see a few things clearly, and that's going to be my limited capacity for honesty. Where do I want to spend that budget? What are the few things I want to see? And just accept that you're not going to see the rest so clearly because you weren't built to, and it's just too much trouble to overcome. I might recommend that you say, well, what is it that the world relies on you to tell them? If the world isn't relying on your opinions about your relationships, then that's not really a priority, in my opinion, for you. You should try to be honest about the thing where honesty will most help you help the world. Is that in business or whatever that is? Try maybe to see those things clearly. This whole project of like just being total honesty about everything, I just— I mean, maybe in the future when technology changes, then we'll have more control over our heads. That's more of a prospect. But today that just seems hopeless.
Shifting topics a little bit, what is cringe? Like, what explains what is cringe?
Well, it's a marker that a norm has been violated. That is, there's certain sorts of things you're supposed to do and say and things you're supposed to avoid. And cringe is suggesting that, oops, you stepped in it, that you're getting too close to something you're not supposed to do or say. You are close to looking bad, to you know revealing selfishness or revealing an illicit opinion or whatever it is. It's not impressive. Cringes is unimpressive. We don't aspire to be cringy. That's apparently really easy to be cringy. We would rather not, right? So it's it's a relatively unimpressive, you know failure to be smooth.
It's ironic that it just goes back to this anti-meme, memetic idea, which is like to make something explicit is often— it comes across as taking the beauty away, taking the magic away from it, basically.
I mean, that's a central issue in the conclusion of our book, The Elephant in the Brain. That is, we say, look, you're wrong about all these things. And there's this basic question, well, why are we wrong about these things? Why don't we just know the right answer? And most of the things we actually are are reasonable things to be. And our story is that the actual motives we have are just too easily accused of norm violation. They're closer to it. The motives we pretend to have are just easier to protect ourselves from such accusations. And so we go with the safe protections. And then you might think, how is it that we could be so wrong about something so important and our lives would just, you know, not completely fall apart and collapse? And it's because your conscious thought about these things are not actually determining very many of these choices. That's the important thing to notice is most of the big choices you make in your life, you're making intuitively, not through your conscious reasoning and calculation. And, that intuitive process is taking all these things into account in ways that your conscious mind can't because it's not allowed to think certain things. But, that's scary from the point of view of if you were hoping to consciously plan your life, you realize you're not in charge.
Yeah, it's— there's just, there's a whole thing, like suite of things where it's like you should learn it and then unlearn it or something because it's just cooler, smoother not to. I guess this goes back to my piece a little bit where I quote Don Hoffman about this idea that the people who are getting the furthest are often deceiving others in some way, and the only way they could truly deceive others is if they deceive themselves.
But again, this happens to things that are very important to you. So honestly, you know, the general solution here, I would think, is just to, to study things far away from you. And then if I study you far away from me and you study me far away from me, then the last step is just whatever you come up with, I'll just believe. And then we can both see each other clearly and see ourselves clearly. If We will just accept what somebody from farther away comes to conclude on average about us. Now, just like with the sacred, they're not going to see it as close, so they're going to miss some detail. They're going to get it wrong, but at least they'll get it roughly right on average. My recommendation is not to try to do all this introspection and to fix yourself and see all your own internal truths. Look at the rest of the world. Look at other people. Figure them out. As best you can, and then just assume you're not that different from them. That's the hard last step, but it's, it's a simple last step because you'll see a lot of ugliness in other people and in the rest of the world. A lot of hypocrisy, a lot of self-deception, a lot of silly, you know, lies. You'll see a lot of that when you look at other people and elsewhere in the world. And the last step is, that's you too.
Are you bearish on therapy as a way of personal insight?
The literature on therapy says that people tend to be better off regardless of the kind of therapy they take. So, it doesn't seem to matter what kind of therapy it is. It just seems to matter that somebody's there to talk to you and listen and have a connection with. It seems from the data, I got to believe that helps. It helps when you have a problem. That is, Generically, therapy is triggered when somebody feels like they have a problem. You don't feel like you have a problem, usually not going into therapy, right? So I got to believe that on average, if you feel like you have a problem, then it's probably a good idea to get somebody listening to you, talking to you, paying attention, taking you seriously, and talking to them about it. If you don't feel you have a problem, I'm not sure you should go out of your way to seek it.
When you look at your remaining decades of work. Is your sort of story, hey, I'm just going to keep pursuing my curiosities and try to figure things out? And/or is there also some version of like, I have a North Star, I'm trying to get this implement done? Or—
So several trade-offs. So one trade-off that just always bothers me is the trade-off between figuring out new things and then polishing and marketing old things. It bothers me because I'd rather find new things, but I get the argument that maybe my old things won't be as valuable if I don't polish and market them. So I'm sort of stuck there, and that's just hard to make that choice. I think I am successfully achieving the polymath strategy, which is a strategy where you just learn more and more things and look for connections between them. And that's a strategy that you can just calculate will increase with productivity as the number of things you know increases. So now you might have some sort of rate at which you can think, which will decline, but this increase in the number of things you know will counter that. So this strategy should peak later in life. Just know more and more things and intersect them, find connections. So I think I'm successfully achieving that. And I think my productivity doesn't obviously even peak. On that criteria because I seem to have found a number of pretty important connections lately. So the, the main load star is I did start out life trying to solve this key question of how to fix our institutions. And I decided the core problem was information aggregation. And I asked how to fix information aggregation. And I thought I came up with a decent solution. And then For decades after that, I realized I can't get anybody to listen or to try things because I'm not one of those elites. And that's very frustrating. And I've come up with a bunch of other ideas I think are very promising, but I kind of realize maybe the world isn't set up for someone like me to just describe ideas and give a coherent argument, and that's just not enough to get people to try things. So then there's the tension, should I give up somewhat on that strategy and just do all the other opportunistic finding connections and finding insights in them strategy that's working and that I'm improving on? Or should I do more to save this lifelong dream, which I guess I tweeted this morning and I called it my lifelong unrequited love? I want to to do this thing, but it doesn't want me. That's my tension.
How do you think you're going to reconcile that or try?
Well, the default strategy is just like write up my ideas and package them in a form that can sit on a shelf till somebody maybe someday is in the mood to consider them, some elite willing to, looking for a thing to do, and then maybe they'll take them on then. I've recently changed my opinion on the future, which changes my opinion on some of these strategies. That is, I've long been a futurist projecting past growth into the future, expecting growth to continue at a rapid rate and even accelerate. And I've done analyses based on that for, you know, my book, The Age of M, and other sorts of futurism. And I'm a cryonics customer who Uh, you know, hopes for that to happen relatively soon because of increasing technology. And then lately, I think I've come to the conclusion that falling fertility will create a substantially long pause when technological innovation comes to a halt for a century or two, after which it may revive. Hopefully would revive, but that changes how I think about with my effect, my, you know, cryonics and the Age of M. If Age of M doesn't appear in the next 50 years or so, it won't appear for another few centuries. You know, the question is, will this world of falling fertility that becomes a falling economy where innovation comes to a halt, will that world be interested in the sort of innovation ideas I have or not? And try to think about how that works. So basically, I think the way fertility will revive will be some very strong religious insular subcultures that have high fertility that eventually just regrow. Those cultures will be especially hostile to some kinds of technology and innovation. And so the hard question is how to then think about what kinds of innovation to promote now, because either they need to happen in the next 50 years or so, or they need to be the sort of things that a somewhat fundamentalist religious insular culture would be willing to try. So, I haven't thought through what that is.
Fascinating. And you came to this realization relatively recently?
In the last few weeks, right.
Share more about that, how that happened and what that means going forward for you.
Well, there's 2 steps, which one, I mean, I had thought about before, I just hadn't thought enough. One is just to say, look, this falling fertility is not a random that's just going to fluctuate away. It's a very consistent trend. We understand why, and therefore it's just going to keep going for a long time. And it's— I went through a long list of possible ways it could be reversed, and I did some polls, and basically the insular culture is the one that makes sense that could actually do it, and the others seem pretty speculative. And they obviously, like, AI could show up in the next 50 years, maybe. You know, vast life extension and fertility extension could show up, maybe, but probably not. And so fertility is going to fall, keep falling. And so the population is going to reach a peak and fall. And then I hadn't realized, but there's an economic analysis that suggests pretty strongly that when population falls, innovation will come to a halt. That is, innovation is basically proportional to the amount of current activity relative to the integral of all past activity. In an exponentially expanding period, that's actually quite a lot. In an exponentially declining world, it's very little. And so the rate of innovation would just fall to being very little. That's bad. And then when you realize the main scenario by which this fertility fall will be reversed would be some very insular, somewhat religious subculture. Like the Mennonites or the Amish or the Orthodox Jews or Hutterites. Those subcultures, when you look at them, they are really very resistant to many kinds of innovation. They really protect themselves against many kinds of social influences. They, in general, religious people don't promote innovation as much. That's just general fact in the world. But these groups are really wary of innovation of various sorts. So And they will suffer less for that in a world where innovation hardly happens. So, and then they will grow and be growing. And then when they finally reach the point where innovation is possible again, they may be out of the habit and be hard to restart.
And do you think this is just inevitable or is there anything that could change this fertility sort of spiral?
Well, like I said, AI maybe, or some huge biotech revolution where that just extends not only lifespan but also fertility and healthy period. But that seems quite unlikely. In principle, the world could just get together and decide to change its culture, but that just doesn't really happen much. And we've got, we've got 250 years of history of this fertility decline as a pretty understandable, consistent process. You know, yes, if the world got together and decided to really change some things, it's possible, but I just don't think that's very likely. So the likely scenario that I got to go with is then these insular subcultures just defying world culture, keeping their own different values, and slowly growing. Like, like the Amish have increased a factor of 3 in population in the last 30 years. Now, you know, this is a tiny fraction of the world population, but that's a— and they've done this for centuries, and many of these others have done this for centuries. But it does look like a thing that if nothing else happens, that'll happen. So then the question is, what else could happen sooner? And it's hard to say nothing, but like, I certainly have to put some substantial weight on the thing that's pretty much guaranteed to work, that's pretty solidly shown that it could work. And when you're looking at a very steady long-term trend, that seems hard to buck.
High-level thought about it, it felt like, yeah, you know, more women making more money, which is great, um, but they're out-earning men and they tend to— on median— and they tend to not date down or marry down. It feels like median men need to start out-earning women, or women need to date down economically, or polyamory, polygyny needs to—
like, you know, one man for multiple So my latest post was called Escalating Signals Cuts Fertility, is that we have a bunch of signaling games that are all pushing in the direction of cutting fertility. So we need to not just cut one of these signaling games, but several to fight back. So one of them is just the escalation in standards for parenting. We've greatly increased what we think is responsible parenting and a lot more effort than it used to be. And that's going in the wrong direction. It's hard. And that's cutting into fertility. We don't really have as many kids when each kid is a lot more work. And then we're also escalating, you know, career training signals, especially school, where we just spend a lot more time preparing for school, and that also cuts into fertility. And then we've also increased the status of and promote people taking a long time to pick their mates. Like, we did— we look down on people who, who pick their lifetime mates in high school or, you know, young college. We, we think they should spend their whole 30s picking their mates. And And finally only pick it when they're late 20s or 30s. And that also is at odds with fertility. And then that's just 3, and we've got a whole bunch of other things that are in the way. And so there's just a lot of social changes that would have to happen. And the problem is most of these are about values such that people don't want to change these things. Most people don't want to lower our standards for parenting. Right? Even though logically they know we would have higher fertility if they did, they feel morally committed to the higher standards they have. They think it's somewhat abusive. They think— they say it's abusive how those old parents used to not pay that much attention to their kids. And they even think it's abusive for people not to realize their full potential in school and to stop schooling earlier in life, or for someone to marry at the age of 18. That's abusive, apparently. People will say that that's, you know, cutting out their potential. So the more moralistic people get about all these things, the more they're going to entrench, you know, basically. And the problem is, like, these small subcultures that are growing fast, there's going to be a problem when they get bigger and then the larger culture just disapproves of how they do things. And it's still larger than them and can squash them if it chooses. I mean, they may, they may, they may put a nip that in the bud when the Amish reach, I don't know, 30 million people. They may say, hey, you guys need to follow the rules that the rest of us follow. You guys can't have this different subculture.
I'm excited you're down this rabbit hole, and we'll have to check back at some point when you have a grand unified theory or maybe another book.
Well, it's been nice talking to you.
Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation, Robin.
Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution.
If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co.
More from Erik
Palantir CEO Alex Karp & Rep. Ritchie Torres on Innovation & The West | Hill and Valley Forum 2024
