Michael Nielsen: metascience, how to improve science, open science | Podcast

Michael Nielsen is a scientist at the Astera Institute. He helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He is a leading thinker on the topic of meta science and how to improve science, in particular, the social processes of science. His latest co-authored work is  ‘A Vision of metascience: An engine of improvement for the social processes of Science’ co-authored with Kanjun Qiu (open source book link). His website notebook is here, with further links to his books including on quantum, memory systems, deep learning, open science and the future of matter. 

I ask: What is the most important question in science or meta science we should be seeking to understand at the moment ?

We discuss his vision for what a metascience ecosystem could be; what progress could be and ideas for improving the the culture of science and social processes.

We imagine what an alien might think about our social processes and discuss failure audits, high variance funding and whether organisations really fund ‘high risk’ projects if not that many fail, and how we might measure this.

We discuss how these ideas might not work and be wrong; the difficulty of (the lack of) language for new forming fields; how an interdisciplinary institute might work. 

The possible importance of serendipity and agglomeration effects; what to do about attracting outsiders, and funding unusual ideas. 

We touch on the stories of Einstein, Katalin Kariko (mRNA) and Doug Prasher (molecular biologist turned van driver) and what they might tell us.

We discuss how metascience can be treated as a research field and also as an entrepreneurial discipline.

“...."How good a use of the money actually is? Would it be better to repurpose that money into more conventional types of thing or not?" It's difficult to know exactly how to do that kind of evaluation, but hopefully, meta-scientists in the future will in fact think very hard and very carefully about how to do those kinds of evaluation. So that's the meta-scientist research discipline.

As an entrepreneurial discipline, somebody actually needs to go and build these things. For working scientists it's often remarkably difficult to do that because it doesn't look like a conventional activity. This isn't sort of science as normally construed. Something that I found really shocking-- you may be familiar with and hopefully many listeners maybe familiar with, the replication crisis in social psychology. So this was, I guess most famously in 2015, there was a paper published in which 100 well-known experiments in social psychology were replicated. I think it was 36% of the significant findings were found to replicate and typically the effect size was about roughly halved.

So this was not a great look for social psychology as a discipline and raised a lot of questions about what was going on. That story I just told is quite well-known. What is much less well-known is that in fact going back many decades, people had been making essentially the same set of sort of methodological criticisms. Talking about the file drawer effect, talking about p-hacking, talking about all these kinds of things which can lead to exactly this kind of failure. And there are some very good papers written in-- I think the earliest I know is from the early sixties. Certainly in the 1970s and 1980s you see these kinds of papers. They point out the problems, they point out the solutions. “Why did nothing happen?” "Well, because there's no entrepreneurial discipline which actually allows you to build out the institutions which need to be built out if anything is actually to change."

We discuss how decentralisation may help. How new institutions may help. The challenges funders face in wanting to wait until ideas become clearer.

We discuss the opportunity that developing nations such as Indonesia might have.

We chat about rationality and critical rationality.

Michael gives some insights into how AI art might be used and how we might never master certain languages, like the languages of early computing.

We end on some thoughts Michael might give his younger self:

The one thing I wish I'd understood much earlier is the extent to which there's kind of an asymmetry in what you see, which is you're always tempted not to make a jump because you see very clearly what you're giving up and you don't see very clearly what it is you're going to gain. So almost all of the interesting opportunities on the other side of that are opaque to you now. You have a very limited kind of a vision into them. You can get around it a little bit by chatting with people who maybe are doing something similar, but it's so much more limited. And yet I know when reasoning about it, I want to treat them like my views of the two are somehow parallel but they're just not.

Available wherever you get podcasts. Video above or on YouTube and transcript below.

PODCAST INFO

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• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

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Transcript: Michael Nielsen and Ben Yeoh (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Michael Nielsen. Michael is a scientist at the Astera Institute. He helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He is a leading thinker on the topic of meta-science and how to improve science, in particular, the social processes of science. His latest co-authored work is, “A Vision of Meta-science: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science.” Michael, welcome.

Michael

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Ben.

Ben (00:33):

So first question, big question of science. What do you think is the most important question we should be seeking to understand around science or meta-science today?

Michael (00:45):

Okay. Science and meta-science are such large subjects that it's impossible to give a really comprehensive answer to that. I'll just stick with the sort of science itself. I think there's this really interesting transition that's happening in science at the moment where for the longest time, the way we made new objects in the world, in some sense it was sort of by inspired tinkering. And we’re now over the last 20, 30 years kind of going through a transition where we actually have a theory of the world that's pretty darn good. And we're starting to use that theory to inform how we build up new objects. It's a little unclear. What I mean by that is sort of atom by atom we are starting to do assembly.

We're not doing it ad hoc. We're actually able to design things from first principles. I think this is a really large change in technology. Over the next hundred or 200 years, we're going to figure out how to do this kind of first principles design whereas before it was always there were some external objects lying around in the world. Maybe you discover copper or iron in the Iron Age and you make use of it but there's no principled underlying theory. So I think that's actually a very exciting thing which is underlying a lot of changes in science over the last 20 or 30 years and I expect it will be a really large force over the next, in fact, probably centuries.

Ben (02:28):

You sketch with Kanjun a really dizzying vision of what a science ecosystem could be. And I understand your point is there's a lot of variety that we could be expected to see in a really healthy ecosystem. Then right in the start of your essay or book, I think you have this interesting provocation around what would an alien think when presumably an alien would understand the laws of gravity, understands the laws of physics. Although maybe if they've time traveled maybe there'd be something else on gravity. But you make the point that actually around the thinking of the social progress around science, there might be some elements that an alien finds the same. Maybe something like a controlled trial. You would've thought that design would also stick in an alien culture and some things that an alien might find really very different. So when you talk about some of these first principle building blocks, are you thinking of the principles that an alien would hold to be true? And in which case, which of those principles do you think we've discovered already?

Michael (03:33):

Yeah. Scientists certainly often obsess quite a bit about things like their citations and their number of publications and their h-index and all these other kinds of things. And it's pretty difficult to imagine that an alien scientist or an alien society would've rediscovered those. They don't seem like platonic elements of the world just out there waiting to be discovered. Although it also seems likely to me that alien societies might have some pretty strange constructs of their own that we would also laugh at. In terms of what's actually fixed, I would frame that question as a question about fundamental meta-scientific principles. Are there particular ways in which it's good to organize the social processes of science to enable discovery? So an example might be for example, in the 16th century, Francis Bacon had a certain number of interesting ideas, but a couple-- One was that there should be extremely limited deference to authority.

At the time of course, there was still a great deal of deference to the church, to the state, to Aristotle, to the other great thinkers of antiquity. And Bacon said, "No, that's not right. Really, we should get away from that. In fact, nature is the final." And anybody, if you do an experiment and it contradicts what Aristotle says it's so much the worst for Aristotle. You don't simply defer just because the great man of 2000 whatever, 1500 years earlier said so. There's a whole bunch of notions there. But this notion of deference to nature rather than to authority and freedom of inquiry, those are examples of meta-scientific principles that I think it's reasonably likely that in fact other alien civilizations, to use your framing, might well have discovered things which are quite similar to that as kind of being best practices how to organize the process of science.

Ben (05:43):

And how well do you think we understand how we've made progress in science? Because there's kind of essays out there saying, "Well, we don't really understand that much about how much progress we've made. It's all been a little bit haphazard." But then some people say, "Well, no, actually we do have some of these progresses and what we think." Do you think we've understood very well the processes that we've made? Or do you think it's barely touched and just been completely haphazard and we don't really quite know what we've been doing?

Michael (06:15):

We said they have lots of rules of thumb. Economists will tell you that total factor productivity is somehow strongly related to the practice of science. People try and write papers relating to patents, to productivity growth and things like this. It's hard certainly trained as a theoretical physicist not to feel like we're still in the pre Aristotelian phase of this. These are very gross kinds of ways of thinking that they just seem very coarse. We don't have anything like a detailed theory of how to design institutions to support discovery. But people are making little bits and pieces of progress which is fun. I think of it as kind of... I mean, it's a proto field. It's a proto field now with a long history. You can find people proposing doing this sort of a very explicitly kind of investigation going back a century or so. And then you have people like Bacon or in fact many others in the 16th and 17th century who in some sense were doing what I would call meta-science.

Ben (07:31):

So still the early days which is very exciting. So how should we go about improving the culture of science or these social processes? Perhaps one way of asking that-- because that's the whole big part of your book, is you pick up on one idea on high variance. So things that people support or donor variants. So maybe I thought I would ask you in the least that section, what do you think is the best idea in that and what do you think is the worst idea? What's the one that you would just not do and maybe else should do?

Michael (08:06):

So certainly the processes which we use now in universities and more broadly in the research culture, a lot of those seem pretty arbitrary and ad hoc. If you think about the NIH panel system or things like this, in many cases those kinds of systems weren't designed after a lot of careful reflection and thought. They were just done in a very ad hoc contingent manner by people who rush to get things done which is terrific. But then when you don't have any process for actually upgrading those systems later on, you can get really stuck in quite a rut. So I certainly think that I'm far from being alone in this. A lot of people I think have considerable problems with the notion of essentially committee based peer review of proposals for scientific projects.

You have five or 10 or sometimes more of your peers sitting in judgment of your proposal and you get these kind of averaging effects where the thing that is pretty acceptable to everybody is the thing that can get funded. And the idea that maybe is radically polarizing it's very, very difficult to get funded. So some people love it, some people hate it. That will tend to die under that kind of process. And that process wasn't designed to be the best. It's just something that made quite a bit of sense early on as something to try out. But it's now a little bit frozen. I've heard so many people refer to it as the gold standard. I don't know in what sense it's the gold standard. Maybe the sense in which it’s the thing more people complain about than anything else.

Ben (10:03):

Right. Okay. So that high variance would perhaps weigh against it. All right, I'm going to spit out a few of these and then we can maybe talk about why they don't happen or maybe which one is the worst or best on that. So use high variance on that. So I was very interested, failure audit, 10 year insurance, an institute for traveling scientists, long/ short prizes (prizes in general), having an anti-portfolio and an interdisciplinary institute. So out of that, maybe I'm just going to pick one first and then you can dwell on whether those you really hate or really like one of those ideas is. I'm really interested in why science hasn't really got a failure audit much built into it because a lot of other industries have it. Some it's even mandated somewhat either by regulations and law that you have to go and look. If your bridge failed, you'd look and examine why exactly that happened.

And actually even in one of my domains investing you're always looking at your investing mistakes; what worked and what didn't, particularly what didn't. And yet at least on the funding part where you haven't-- So like your high variance part, did they go looking back and, “Well, committees all gave this an average score and we put it through. Was that a failure or not?” So that does raise the question of why something like a failure audit hasn't happened. You talk about some of the institutional bottlenecks maybe for that. So how good an idea do you think this is? Why hasn't it happened and what should we do?

Michael (11:33):

Just to fill in some background. We propose a large number of different ideas more just as kind of grist for the mill than anything else in this long essay with my collaborator, Kanjun Qiu. One of those ideas-- it's just a paragraph, is the idea of a failure audit. It's that, for example, if a funder claims that it's serious about high risk, high reward research, then they should actually evaluate what fraction of their projects fail. And if the failure rate is not high enough there should be some kind of restructuring. Maybe the program officer gets fired, maybe the director's job is under threat, some kind of consequences if they really claim to be serious about this kind of high risk model. Whether that's a good idea or not is another question, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that they are.

So just a couple of points about that. One of many motivating factors for this was just reading a report from the European Research Council where they're doing an analysis or a retrospective on what they funded. So throughout this report, they talk very assertively about how they're engaged in such high risk work. But they also claim at the same time that 79% of the projects-- I think it's 79%, it's about 80% of the projects that they fund are extremely successful. So this is not quite a definition-- I don't know what definition of risk they're using. But when 80% of the things that you try work not just well, but really well, but you're also trying to claim that you are really engaging in highly risky behavior-- Well, there seems to me anyway like there's some kind of a mismatch. I can't speak to why they do this but it does seem a little bit confusing. This is certainly a common thing when I talk to individuals, many funders. They will talk a lot about wanting to encourage a lot of risk, but they're not assessing in any sensible way the extent to which they actually are buyers of such risk. And when that's the case, there's no real feedback mechanism which is actually encouraging them to move towards the behavior which they claim to want. So this is just sort of a simple-- There are many variations of this idea which one could try, but the idea is to have some kind of mechanism for doing that kind of alignment between people's stated intentions and the actual outcomes.

Now, when I've talked to people and individual funders about this, about trying some sort of variation of it, they're often fascinated by the idea. I've talked for hours to people at some funders about it but they won't do it. And I think for really quite a natural reason which is, yeah, they're nervous about having consequences in this kind of a way. It's the most natural thing in the world to want to avoid those consequences. Of course, I don't like having my nose rubbed in my failures either. But it does leave this gap between what they think they're doing or what they say they're doing and what they're actually doing.

Ben (15:01):

Maybe we need to pay them more to offset that but with consequences. So you don't think it is because they actually want to see success and they're not interested in high risk? You think they are interested in high risk but they just don't particularly want to be audited on it?

Michael (15:20):

At the individual level I'm quite certain many are interested in high risk. There is of course this issue around, “What exactly does one mean by this?” So you talk to individuals about what specifically they're looking for, and it turns out that what they're looking for is actually quite different than what one other scientists in their potential pool of fundees thinks is high risk. So also having that kind of mismatch creates something of a communication problem. So I live in San Francisco in Silicon Valley and I have some friends who work in the startup and technology land. It's interesting there to talk about risk seeking behavior on the part of the venture capitalists. Certainly I've chatted with friends and acquaintances who've been pitching some idea for a startup company and they eventually realize that what they're pitching is not ambitious enough to get the attention of the top VCs. So there it's a case of what-- Basically, the good they're selling is not ambitious enough for the VCs. In the case of many of the funders, they're saying they want a purchase risk but they're only buying safety because eventually the scientists just start offering safe kind of proposals.

Ben (16:50):

That's what's happening. There's something slightly akin within investing world, one of my primary domains. If you claim you are a value investor and you actually define value, then when you're audited at the end of the year your own end investors will ask you, "How did you make your money?" Hopefully you made some. But if you didn't make it doing value and you bought--In investing you can buy growth and all sorts of other things, well, they say actually you failed. “You might have made us money so you might have had successful projects, but you didn't do what you said. And we can audit and we check you.” And actually, you check it in very many different domains. So this goes back to your VC example. VCs are expected to take these hundred x, a thousand x return type of businesses. Typically, a café business is not going to do that even though you might have an okay return. So you wouldn't expect to see a café business in a typical VC portfolio. And if you're pitching it, you're not really likely to that because it doesn't match what they're looking for. But there is an audit on that. It's both a success and a failure audit. So I thought it was really interesting that it didn't seem that science funding really had that.

Michael (18:00):

Not to my knowledge. I don't think I've ever talked to a funder that said that they really do a pointy version of this. Many of them do retrospectives. That's quite common. But they tend to be very soft in terms of the consequences. Actually, for an interesting reason which is those documents are both evaluations for the funder in terms of how they're looking at themselves and you can view them potentially as self-improvement documents, but they also tend to be marketing documents as well. In particular, it may be a document which is being used to communicate with government and with the wider public. Then there's a very interesting situation where to the extent it's a marketing document. They're trying to use it in fact to raise money or to ensure the continued supply of money. That's obviously a difficult spot to be really brutally honest with yourself about your own failures. Sort of absent really strong controls to ensure that you are honest in that way.

Ben (19:04):

I guess it's hard to put into that language of risk and you need something maybe simple. Like the person proposing the project has got to say, "Well, I honestly believe there's only a 4% chance of this project working." And you assess, "Well, I funded 10 projects at 4% chance which actually means all of them should probably fail. At the end then if I got one out that was really lucky." But it's quite hard probably for the originator of the project to honestly say, "Well, this is only a 4% chance of working” or something like that. Interesting I do a lot of analysis of early stage drug development, and we actually know before you enter phase one, you are talking roundabout 1% chance give or take a little bit within the error. So you kind of know what the average is when you go into that funding without having to say that. So if you get one in a hundred right you're doing about average on that. But we have a language of risk that you use which I don't see when I look at a lot of projects. And maybe that's because it's hard to do. But I guess the originator of the project or the funders should probably put a percentage chance and if they funded something they should say, "Well, I honestly thought this had a 10% chance of working."

Michael (20:12):

So I mean, in the conversation we're having we are putting a lot of emphasis on risk and working and failure. I guess I just want to emphasize-- That's a particular-- You could have a particular set of VCs around that. Those VCs may or may not be right. We're sort of for the sake of the conversation assuming that they are.

Ben (20:31):

Yeah, this might be completely wrong.

Michael (20:33):

It might be wrong. But once you have doubled down or decided that you want to pursue a particular thesis, having mechanisms in place to ensure it's not just words but something that's actually being done is obviously a valuable thing to have. The one really large funder that seems to do this quite well... I don't know of a really formal estimate that's been done of the failure rate of DARPA's programs. But people pretty close to the agency have estimated rates of sort of 80 and 85% failure which is truly remarkable given the scale at which they operate. And yet, I think most people at least view DARPA as having been really quite an outstanding success.

Ben (21:25):

And that's one of the things I'd emphasize on reading your essay is that you just put out so many ideas, some of which you think might not be any good at all or might not be correct. But the whole point being is that there seem to be so many ideas out there which we haven't really tested at all. And you make the point that actually that might be really the early days of it. So I might just touch on a couple more ideas and then move on to exploring this thing as ideas of funder as a detector. But I was very interested in your interdisciplinary institute because I sense a lot of universities or research thinks think of themselves as interdisciplinary or they have things and maybe some universities have that different type of scientist meeting. But the vision you gave of something which was truly interdisciplinary, I didn't see out there in the world. And when I read that I thought, "Well, that is actually surprising that there's a lot of talk as well about how great it is to be interdisciplinary and how much you learn from far domains and near domains and mixing of people in agglomeration effects." But to your point-- and you say this with a lot of these things, it hasn't really been done in the real world. Maybe assess the idea. Do you think interdisciplinary institute's actually a good idea? And what would you do if you thought it was a good idea?

Michael (22:42):

So again, this is just another-- It's sort of an amusing idea. It's simply to point out that in fact programmatically, you can try and engineer serendipity. If you've got 30 pairs of disciplines and you simply hire three people at the intersection of all 30 choose two, whatever that is. I think it's the-- I can't remember. It's about 450 odd-- sort of intersections to work at the intersection of any pair of those disciplines. Most of those researchers are going to fail. A few of them though will be doing something that is not supported anywhere else in the world and that happens to actually have a lot of latent value and they may pay for all the rest. So again, it's really sort of a mechanism design point of view where you say, "Let's take seriously the idea that maybe actually we have a systematic problem with funding interdisciplinary work. Let's simply see how to do it in a scalable way, design the mechanism to achieve that end." And then there's a question, sort of a meta-scientific question which is, "Is the value created actually sufficient to justify the upfront investment?" We don't know the answer to that question. You probably I think need to do a lot of work to make a prediction about it, but it's at least plausible as kind of an interesting way of going.

Ben (24:06):

And you could test some aspect about it.

Michael (24:09):

You could certainly do it at a low level relatively easily. The standard way in which a lot of interdisciplinary work is done, it's by people who are pitching their particular interdisciplinary work. I was involved in quantum computing beginning in the early 1990s. At that point it was very much a field that was seen as interdisciplinary. It was at the intersection of computer science and physics, didn't really have a natural home in either place. And so a certain number of quantum computing people would go to universities and sort of pitch at us essentially an interdisciplinary kind of a project. So that's kind of a bottom up approach. This thing we've been talking about is much more top down where you're just sort of saying, "Let's seek to create it at the intersection of every possible pair of disciplines." It might be that the bottom up approach is better to sort of look for things which are bubbling up. Again, that's something that actually needs to be tested. If you wanted to do something which was a little-- didn't involve quite as many resources as funding 450 at the intersection of 450 disciplines, you could simply sample from that set, for example and you'd get some interesting information.

Ben (25:19):

Yeah. Actually it would probably be pretty interesting even with fewer numbers of pairs.

Michael (25:22):

Even with 10 or 20 pairs. Just randomly chosen. You think about, actually... A good example, much of the modern deep learning revolution has of course been enabled by GPUs. GPUs were created—basically, my understanding is for video games. Just because modern displays had gotten such high resolution they needed dedicated chips to drive them. They're also very good at just doing linear algebra in general. And so circa sort of-- the latter part of the [inaudible 25:58] or whatever we call that decade, there was a relatively small number of people who were both familiar with AI or familiar with neural networks and also had some experience of GPU programming. And those people had an interesting competitive advantage in getting into neural nets. I just don't think that the intersection of video game programming and artificial intelligence is something that you could have predicted was going to be a good spot to be at the intersection of.

Ben (26:29):

Yeah. Hard to get that right; top down. And maybe that brings me onto one of your last ones, at least in this section, which was the anti-portfolio. You gave some quite interesting examples in the essay. For instance, one of the key scientists behind mRNA pretty much didn't get funded within the public university system a little bit. And then the university kind of celebrated it and said, "Well, actually you should definitely have funded her more." And then these other near misses or complete misses that we can see. Sometimes scientists now being a taxi driver rather than being in science. I had this overwhelming sense of, "Oh my gosh. How much have we missed out?" So I'm not sure if the anti-portfolio would really help with that, but I thought it was quite an interesting idea borrowed maybe from investing in VC about, "Well, these were the mistakes that we could have invested in and we didn't."

But then the next step being, "Well, why did we miss those and why didn't we invest further?" Because some of it, like in mRNA, they could have controlled it because everyone thought, "We're not really ever going to get a drug out of this.” So very low chance, let's not really fund it. But to your first point if you are funding high risk, this is exactly what we probably should state. “Government public, something other funded for a while because it is so low chance of success.” And the people in the field were telling you, “But if we make this work it's going to have a really high impact.” I just thought it was really interesting how you sketch that out and we missed it. Do you think that's a system--? Because you can always have individual misses and you make this point. But the way you sketch it out, it seems to me that it does seem to be more of a systems problem. How certain are you of that and what do you think we should be doing about it?

Michael (28:12):

So one of the most famous stories that you learn as a young scientist is that of Albert Einstein stuck in the Swiss patent office, unable to get an academic job. It's totally sort of a funny story. In this one year, 1905, he did plausibly four or five things that are Nobel Prize worthy which is pretty good for a guy who couldn't get an academic position, including I should say, he reconceived the notions of space, time, energy and mass which is not bad for sort of a side hustle. The thing that is omitted from this story is anything about what changed in the university system as a result. Did people say, "Oh, maybe we made a bit of a mistake here? Maybe this guy should have been able to get a good job." Of course, after having done that he quickly was made a professor and had a long academic career after that. But as far as I know, there was no postmortem done sort of systematically to say, "Why did we miss this person? Why was he actually not offered jobs before that?" That's sort of a spectacular example. You mentioned this example, Katalin Kariko, the scientist or one of the key scientists behind mRNA who in fact lost her job or was demoted, I guess, by the University of Pennsylvania. Had basically a lot of problems in getting to the point where she could pursue that work. Repeatedly turned down for NIH grants.

The University of Pennsylvania and the NIH will now happily take a lot of credit for her work. But as far as I know, they haven't done a serious postmortem internally. I mean, these are very spectacular, sort of very relatable examples. But if you've worked in science, actually you will know a lot of examples which are like this. But there is no then systematic reform. There is no way of conducting a postmortem which actually leads to systemic changes. So of course, it's fine. Any system at all is going to miss some people. The question that I think needs to be asked is, "How do you change in response? Do you just accept that that's the price?" Maybe that's the right response to the Kariko example but maybe it's not. Doug Prasher, the scientist who discovered green fluorescent protein which later won the Nobel Prize-- At the time of the Nobel was awarded for that work. He was working as a shuttle bus driver at a car dealership which is fine work but probably not the best use of his talents. There are many such stories and just no way for them then to feed back to cause systemic change. That's the issue, not that mistakes are made.

Ben (31:20):

Yeah. And I worry that although science is a discipline where outsiders with good ideas can be proved by the science, that it's not as strong as we would believe. And you have all of these data, whether it's minorities or outside, or your CV doesn't come from a prestigious university or your idea is just way out the mainstream where it just doesn't seem to shed light. So I'm not exactly sure but I do sense that might be a problem. Then it's interesting because you go on to make this analogy of the funder as a kind of detector system where they're looking for dark intelligence matter out there. And that that as a model is like, "Well, if it's out there, maybe there could be more ways of finding that type of dark matter and intelligence." When I was thinking about that I was reflecting that in some ways you're also incentivizing more dark matter intelligence to form in ways which won't work in the current systems that we have. How useful is that analogy in thinking about, "Well, are they really just looking for stuff which is out there and if we change some of this system, we could find it more as to your point is that that dark matter like it is in the universe just to be so much wider than we can currently invest."

Michael (32:40):

Okay. Let me just give it a really practical example. So a friend of mine, Adam Marblestone, has this notion of what he calls a focused research organization. A focused resource research organization is basically, think sort of tens of millions of dollars, an independent organization which is typically going to-- It has one very specific goal and it will create a particular type of a tool or a particular type of a data set. So for example, the cultivarian is an example of a focused research organization. And what the cultivarian is trying to do is it's trying to develop synthetic biology for non-model organisms. So a lot of the work that's done in synthetic biology at the moment it's typically done using e-coli as the particular organism which is modified.

So we have great tools for doing it in e-coli, but we don't have great tools for doing synthetic biology in a lot of other organisms. And so what they're trying to do in the cultivarian is they have a very specific list of tools that they want to create so that they can be used in certain other types of organism. So this is a very specific kind of-- It's a crossover between engineering and science. In many ways, this is something that is extremely likely to succeed because they just have kind of a checklist. "We need to do it here, here, here, here, and here. Here are some of the bottlenecks. Here's what the outputs are going to be. We're going to exist for a certain fixed period of time. It's going to cost--" I have no idea how much that's going to cost, but let's say 30 million dollars or something like that.

This is just a type of scientific problem that has been certainly been solved in the past but it's always been solved in a very bespoke fashion. So something like the Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, LIGO; the gravitational wave detector, these are all examples of projects where you had a very specific outcome very clearly in mind. You had a very specific process which was intended to get you to that goal. You just needed a large enough organization, the right set of resources to do it. But those were funded in a bespoke fashion. They weren't funded... Basically, people had to go off and sort of make an individual case. The clever thing about the focused research organizations is they're trying to do it in a scalable way. They're creating this container, convergent research, which seeks out people who have ideas for things which fit this general template.

And it just turns out-- What they tell me, they talk to a large number of scientists about this and most of the scientists don't immediately necessarily have anything to say. They're not used to this kind of container. There's no funding vehicle for it previously. And so if they've had an idea which would be a good match for the focused research organization, they don't necessarily-- It's not something they've developed in the past because there was no avenue for taking it further. It was a form of intellectual dark matter, this kind of very nascent thing and you got on with doing other things. You got your NIH R01 one grant or whatever was available and you did that kind of work. So it's interesting what they're essentially doing with the focused research organizations is building a kind of a detector to search out this intellectual dark matter.

Hopefully people have many, very nascent in most cases, ideas for focused research organizations that might actually be just a much better use of their talents than doing more conventional projects. So that's just kind of to sketch a very specific example of a person who identified a particular type of knowledge that at the moment, most funders just have-- They have nothing they can do with that. They're not set up to do it at all, but they founded this template and now they're systematically searching it out. I like to think of it as-- It's almost an antenna for eliciting this kind of information. Most people of course say, "Oh, I don't have any ideas like that." But a few people say, "Oh, actually I have this very half-baked idea." And then they may go off for three months or six months, think about it a lot more, and then actually come back with a really solid proposal. It's very early days for the focused research organization. I think the first two were funded last year. So we'll know whether it's a good model in five or 10 years. But certainly I think it's very interesting as an example of expanding the range of things which funders look to fund.

Ben (37:22):

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in the essay you make two points around meta-science as a field. First of that it should be treated as a research field. And I could see that related to philosophy of science, history of science and things that this particular element of meta-science could definitely be seen as a research field. And then your other point is that it should be seen as an entrepreneurial discipline. So you actually have to trial out things, scale it, try these new social processes out. I'm interested in both, but on that entrepreneurial part, it seems that that's particularly challenging to say, "Well, we've got this new field and now we've got to try a lot of other things and then scale it out which we see on the experimental level. But we are seeing this at the meta level.” Do you think this is the only way that we should pursue it? How strong do you feel is this entrepreneurial field and what is it about it which means that you think, "Okay, this is what we've got to do. We've got to trial these small things. There's loads of ideas out there we don't know and then we scale and do it." That's kind of what entrepreneurs do and therefore I'm saying it's an entrepreneurial field. Have I got that right in terms of what you're saying and arguing on that?

Michael (38:35):

Well, there's certainly at least two components-- Actually, I would say three. We might come back to the third. One is just studying the processes people use and how well do they work? How can they be improved? What's not working at all, these kinds of things? So taking an evaluative approach, I mentioned, for example, the focused research organizations before. At some point in the future it's going to take a little while. It's going to be very good to do an evaluation of those and to start to think about questions like, "How good a use of the money actually is? Would it be better to repurpose that money into more conventional types of thing or not?" It's difficult to know exactly how to do that kind of evaluation, but hopefully, meta-scientists in the future will in fact think very hard and very carefully about how to do those kinds of evaluation. So that's the meta-scientist research discipline.

As an entrepreneurial discipline, somebody actually needs to go and build these things. For working scientists it's often remarkably difficult to do that because it doesn't look like a conventional activity. This isn't sort of science as normally construed. Something that I found really shocking-- you may be familiar with and hopefully many listeners maybe familiar with, the replication crisis in social psychology. So this was, I guess most famously in 2015, there was a paper published in which 100 well-known experiments in social psychology were replicated. I think it was 36% of the significant findings were found to replicate and typically the effect size was about roughly halved.

So this was not a great look for social psychology as a discipline and raised a lot of questions about what was going on. That story I just told is quite well-known. What is much less well-known is that in fact going back many decades, people had been making essentially the same set of sort of methodological criticisms. Talking about the file drawer effect, talking about p-hacking, talking about all these kinds of things which can lead to exactly this kind of failure. And there are some very good papers written in-- I think the earliest I know is from the early sixties. Certainly in the 1970s and 1980s you see these kinds of papers. They point out the problems, they point out the solutions. “Why did nothing happen?” "Well, because there's no entrepreneurial discipline which actually allows you to build out the institutions which need to be built out if anything is actually to change."

So it's just academics doing what academics do; studying a problem, figuring out what needs to happen maybe. But then they don't actually have the kind of infrastructure which is necessary to go and really make the changes. Turns out there's just a lot of institution building. And fortunately, that has happened in the modern era but it required a tremendous amount of energy and foresight and intelligence and also, I should say, actually funding from some unusual sources. A lot of the money for this work actually came from the Arnold Foundation run by the Hedge Fund operator, John Arnold.

Ben (42:18):

It didn't came from this different source of funding which I think is interesting. It struck me that these institution builders may well be not desktop scientists but they might well be meta-scientists. But actually the disciplines are potentially a little bit different for institution building. Actually, you see that in some other perhaps slow to change or slower to change industries. So for instance, lawyers have potentially run themselves by lawyers but now they're slowly evolving. They realize that actually, "You know what? If you're really good at law does not necessarily mean you're good at running your own organization." And they started to get in people who might be better at that. Accountants are the same. They might be very good at accounts. Is that the same as running an organization, small or large? And it struck me that science is having this similar problem that actually there's even more in law than in accounting about what you should do. It should maybe be attracting not those who've necessarily studied physics, but could have studied anything or interested in this to help build those institutions. And that's the kind of entrepreneurial part. Do you think that can happen just understanding some of science to build those organizations like a whole different discipline? Or do you think it's got to come from scientists themselves?

Michael (43:33):

I think just looking at examples where this has happened successfully in the past, there are a certain number of people who largely come from outside of science who have contributed successfully. But with that said, most of the examples begins with a scientist who is very close to the particular problems, understands them well, feels them very acutely, has an existing network and begins to develop solutions from there. Often when they do it, a classic is that they need to leave their home institution. Sometimes they need to leave science entirely. You’re often beginning to seek very unconventional sources of funds. Actually, I should say the default thing that happens under those circumstances is it just fails because there is no sort of support mechanism. It's done in this very strange, very bespoke fashion.

Brian Nosek who was the person behind some of this work on the replication crisis, he started the Center for Open Science sort of as an entrepreneurial kind of an organization to build out a lot of the required infrastructure. He took a leave of absence from his university position. And partially, just because the kinds of person who they needed to hire, there was just a person that is quite difficult to hire conventionally in an academic environment. So that's an example where it was done successfully. But when I talk to people who have ideas like this, they don't have any model for how to do this successfully.

Ben (45:17):

Yeah. I was talking to innovation historian Anton Howes and he has this idea that back in history, you essentially get people who were disgruntled but couldn't let it go. And from that you have all of these type of things which happened. He's got a lot of historic examples whereas more individual inventor scientists forming these things, but scaled in slightly different does seem to apply to today. And you think about homes for other types of thinkers. I think of the Santa Fe on complexity. There was no home for these, I guess you call them slightly maverick scientists and thinkers, although maybe not today. But they couldn't find homes in their home institutions and so homes had to be built for that.

The other thread of work I see through the essay and from your previous work which I feel is quite important although it doesn't necessarily touch on this exactly, is on decentralization and also open science. Entrepreneurial stuff seems to work better decentralized. We can talk about how much you can do top down versus bottom up like we said on kind of pairing disciplines. And then this idea of open science-- Even going back in history, how much you could build on what was public knowledge versus whether it was shared or whether you kept it as patents. But this idea that if you are thinking of just the glory of science as opposed to any profit motive, then building on other people's knowledge or knowledge out there might be quite useful for speeding up that which is a kind of open science idea. How important do you think are those two threads to expanding the field of meta-science, particularly entrepreneurial? Or are they really separate threads which may or may not happen and don't have to intersect with how meta-science is?

Michael (47:00):

I think that they are sort of separate. The point about decentralization, it's really just this point that you want change to be able to come from anywhere. So in particular, you don't want gatekeepers who are able to inhibit change. The ideas of science, we have a pretty good balance there. There's certainly a large number of Noble prizes are awarded to people who actually a long time ago when they were doing the original work, they were the outsider. They were the grad student or whatever. And maybe the famous expert was saying, "No, this can't be done." Certainly there are examples where science is not so receptive to outside ideas but overall, has a really remarkable track record of accepting that kind of thing. An example actually given in the essay which I rather like is the determination of the structure. The DNA molecule done by Watson, Crick, Franklin and arguably her student, Goslin as well.

They were very much kind of scrappy outsiders. They were at well-known institutions but they were almost completely unknowns. The other person who was in this race at the time was Linus Pauling who was the most famous chemist in the world. He was a Nobel Prize winner. I don't know whether he'd won his second Nobel Prize by that point, but he certainly had won. And it wasn't any Nobel Prize, it was a truly spectacular piece of work. Pauling actually announced that he'd found the structure first before them but he was wrong. The remarkable thing is Pauling accepted this immediately. They pointed out-- I think it was Watson pointed it out to him the error that he'd made and then showed Pauling the structure that they'd found, and Pauling just looked at it and realized that he'd goofed.

And this kind of situation where nobody with a good idea can sort of essentially emerge almost immediately victorious over the incumbent is obviously a very healthy thing. It's possible in science at the level of ideas, it is much harder at the level of institutions. If you have a much better idea for how the NIH should be dispersing its funding, good luck. I mean, the only way you can be taken seriously is if you are already at power. If you're sort of at that level-- If you're at the level of the director of the NIH or you have a Nobel Prize or something like that, sure, you can get taken seriously, maybe, but you're not going to do it as a grad student like Watson or Crick or somebody like that. So that ability to do decentralized upgrades in the social processes, the institutions of science is something which we just have no mechanism for at the moment. And I think that's the reason for much of what I see as sclerosis.

Ben (50:10):

And so your solution is new institutions, or can you do it new arms of old institutions?

Michael (50:16):

A few things. I mean, there are some patterns that work decentralized already. I won't talk about them now. One thing that would help a tremendous amount is a much more serious discipline of meta-science which is able to do evaluations which are dispositive. So I mentioned before this example of the replication crisis in social psychology. That is an example where you had an outsider who was actually really able to change an entire discipline because the strength of the evidence was so good. But it was also rather a peculiar situation where sort of the key paper-- arguably the key paper that they wrote, 270 authors replicated a hundred papers over multiple years of work. So it wasn't just get a data source, write some Python scripts, generate a few nice graphs.

This was a very serious kind of a project where they had said what level of evidence would be so overwhelmingly convincing that in fact even people who hated this conclusion would be forced to accept it or would be forced to... I think really it's change your mind; that's the relevant question. So even somebody who is initially hostile would change their mind. At the moment we just don't have very strong techniques for doing that. This is an example of where it was done, but what you would like is many more such examples and in particular, just a lot of people to work on developing techniques which are strong enough to do that. I think there are a few people who are doing that. Pierre Azoulay, an economist at MIT has I think also done some very strong work where it starts. I don't think it quite meets this bar, but it's getting close to the point where the evidence is so strong for certain processes that you might actually start to think, "Oh, I was wrong before in what I believed was the right way to do things." So that's kind of the bar. We introduce this term, decisive meta-scientific result, meaning a result which is so compelling that it would actually cause somebody initially skeptical to change their mind.

Ben (52:46):

Skeptics changing their mind. That's a good hurdle to cross. So I'm going to see if I can pin you down then on a meta-science question or idea. What would be the one thing that you would bet on most or most want to change in meta-science or some experiment to run do you think would be most valuable? Or you could also do the work like high variance. We could do, what do you think is the best idea in meta-science and what do you think is the worst idea in meta-science? And maybe we should go from the worst because then we'll be... Anyway, best and worst?

Michael (53:17):

Going to the bottom of the barrel you can always go further down. I'm certainly very fond of the idea of people thinking much more explicitly about increasing the rate at which new fields are founded. Actually, some funders do a certain amount of this work. They think explicitly in terms of trying to support fields in their relatively early days, but never that early. Something funny happens at the beginning of new fields very often. It's often very hard for people to get support for their work. I was involved in quantum computing in the relatively early days. I started working on it in 1992 just doing things like, “What journal do you publish in?” Surprisingly hard question. If you submit it to a lot of journals that you might think were relevant they'll just say, "I'm sorry, what is this?"

So it requires some editors to actually be a little bit friendly. If you try and arrange something like a scientific meeting actually people are like, "What is this?" So there's all these sort of very interesting barriers. But at the same time if you look at the papers which are being published retrospectively, they're enormously important; not all of them, but many of those papers are incredibly important. So there's kind of this very interesting mismatch where the work that is being done is often of incredibly high value relative to the resources that are being put into it. But also the barriers are much higher than much more conventional work. And I've used the example of quantum computing because I saw that very firsthand. But in fact, reading histories and talking to people seems to be quite a common feature across many fields.

There's often a lot of really very important low hanging fruit in the early days and yet pioneers surprisingly often it's very difficult for them to obtain even very extremely minimal resources. So certainly I think there's a lot of room for funders to think about this question of how can we accelerate the rate at which new fields are being produced? One of the things that they can do is to try-- To think about the question much more seriously, "What are the very early signals which currently we're not able to detect at all?" If you have a really good story, a really compelling kind of an account of how this is all going to play out and so on, that's actually a sign that maybe you're a little bit later on in the whole process. Very few fields start that way. Alan Turing inventing computing in the 1930s. He certainly didn't anticipate video games or something like this. He was actually trying to solve a logic problem. So many fields are born in very strange, almost entirely illegible ways. And this is one of the reasons why funders have trouble funding a lot of that work very often. But it's also an opportunity for them. So that's something I would love to see done.

Ben (56:41):

I could definitely see new fields. I've seen it tiny bit afar from science but actually more in the arts when you're talking about new ways of working or work. The interesting thing what I've seen in the very early days, I would say call it something where it's about a quarter baked-- So working on something else is their main thing and they've got this quarter baked idea and typically, almost everyone in the world or in that room won't understand what the person's talking about. It's quarter baked, so they don't even have the language to describe it. Quantum computing is quite a good example. You have to invent the terms and the language which are derived from other things but its own unique thing. Yet what I see, at least in art world-- And I think tangentially I see it in some science as well, is this quarterback idea is part obsessive.

You still have to do other things because you've got to do other things, but it nags at you or it nags at the person and it doesn't go away at the back of their mind. And then somehow the successful ones I see is they get a piece of usually chance funding or time or something and they work it into enough of a language that someone else can then potentially get it and go-- And someone with status or something saying, "You know what? This is worth a bet on. I can barely understand it, but I think I understand enough of it to know that it's true as opposed to completely wacky." You see that in art easier and I guess the stakes are lower in art. Then if it develops, it develops into it a language. You see this in language of art. They develop the whole other language and go, "Okay, that is a compelling vision," which in its very early days everyone thought was crazy or couldn't even understand and maybe wasn’t art. You could see it sometimes too early for its time. So I give a lot of credence to this quarter baked or fifth baked idea thing where they're trying to express something and in a language that you can't quite understand. But I can completely see it from a funder, if they can't understand it, well, how are you going to fund it? Except that that's maybe the signal that they're really obsessed about it. You can't understand it, but someone may be something and they're trying to invent something new about it. There seems to be tentative signs around it, still very low probability at success, but you have got these kind of meta-science which I think could be explored.

Michael (58:58):

I think the difficulty there, the challenge of a funder is the natural tendency is to want to wait to see whether or not things will become clearer. But of course they don't necessarily become clearer because if the person is not being supported at all, well, the demands of everyday life just mean that they will do other things mostly. So that's really quite a significant barrier. To your point about sponsors, so the English physicist, David Deutsch, wrote what is arguably the first really serious paper-- one of the first serious papers about quantum computing. In 1985, was communicated to the journal by Roger Penrose who has since won the Nobel Prize. My understanding is that actually Penrose was very skeptical of the paper, but sort of in a friendly fashion enough to be willing to have an opinion.

And really, certainly the community of physicists had almost no opinion at all for 15 years. It was just certainly in the late nineties that the most common conversation I would have with other physicists about quantum computing was, "Is this physics at all?" There was no interest. It was just, "Is this physics at all?" Got that question from many people who now work full-time on quantum computing. But I think it's really to Penrose's credit and to your point, it's an example of how having this kind of friendly, maybe somewhat skeptical but also ultimately supportive kind of sponsor can be very helpful.

Ben (01:00:42):

Great. There are two other things in the essay which you sort of look at askance which I'm quite interested in. One is essentially science in non-European, non-American type of institutions. I guess India, China, Russia, maybe to some degree, which you only fleetingly talk about but I was quite intrigued by. Do you think there's any particular learnings from that? There's a whole other type of, I guess sibling ecosystem. Anything we can learn from that or do you think it will go on a different track and should it go on a different track rather than converge?

Michael (01:01:19):

Well, you will know from the essay certainly we hope that it will go on a different track or at least there won't just be mindless duplication of the existing-- There's obviously a large research ecosystem in the United States, in the UK, in Europe and many other countries. But for countries who have a lot of scale in terms of population and whose economies are growing very rapidly, obviously China and India are the two most obvious examples. But you also have places like Brazil.

Well, there are many other places; Indonesia which match this kind of description. They have a really interesting opportunity. Historically because their economies have been relatively small, small relative to their population at least, they have tended not to put that much of their GDP into developing a research ecosystem. Now they're at a point where in fact they are very rapidly developing that research ecosystem. And the question is, "Do they do the same kinds of things? Do they duplicate the NIH? Do they duplicate UKRI or do they try and do something more adventurous?" I certainly hope that they'll take the opportunity that they have to study these systems, hopefully identify what they think are some shortcomings and then maybe make some big bets about doing things in somewhat different ways.

They can actually probably to some extent have their cake and eat it too. Nothing says that they can't spend 70% of their research budget in a way that looks relatively similar to the UK or to the United States but then also actually have a big chunk which is spent in very unconventional ways. Sort of just a way of saying, "Well, maybe we can actually do this much, much, much better." As far as I know this is not happening. I don't know of any large scale initiative to do it. It is a little bit encouraging. Certainly a lot of the innovation you do see actually comes from small countries that have just decided, “Let's try a little bit of a random experiment. We're not going to beat the United States on scale. Maybe we can do it in some other way.” Some of the foundations in Denmark do very interesting experiments. The New Zealand Health Research Council did, I think the world's first large scale experiment with randomized funding or lotteries that you just sort of give some of the money to an applicant at random. That kind of innovation I think is fairly natural in places which are already somewhat peripheral. But I certainly hope that India and China will do some experiments in that way. They have this opportunity.

Ben (01:04:13):

And I think these mid-size countries-- So Denmark's already well on its way. Singapore maybe. But places like South Korea, I think about their social housing as an example. They didn't bother with wired phones. There's a joke that those are stock phones and they went immediately to mobile. So skipped all of that infrastructure because it was of a generation that they didn't need anymore. I kind of simplify the story. And I wonder whether there might be in those countries which are already there, and like you say, there's a variety. The other one on the-- Again, which you saw askance was you mentioned Hume’s is-ought because you mentioned that all of this meta-science does not tell society or anyone what should be studied. Whether that should be climate, physics, quantum computing, how the economy is run or anything like that. Do you have a sense about what should we and where we are on the balance? Do you have any projects where you think, "Well, this is really important science questions?" Do you think the mechanisms that science decides on it is any good at the moment? What should we be exploring on this? Or is this something which is just that much far away from meta-science which it should leave well alone and just stick with trying to develop its own field?

Michael (01:05:34):

So I guess my-- This is partially a personality thing. I certainly have very strong opinions about the way the world ought to be but I also feel that's not my own personal comparative advantage sort of professionally. It's more sort of a personal thing. Something to chat about with friends and to have some opinions about as a civic actor. So a very concrete example, in the United States for somewhat arbitrary historic reasons, some of the big funders-- There's the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which does biomedical research typically with a human focus. There's the National Science Foundation which does basic research. There's DARPA which is doing defense oriented stuff. There's the Department of Energy, does a lot of high energy physics. Those organizations, the way in which their budget changes is determined in fact largely at the political level.

So the NIH, for example, has actually grown consistently at a rate-- It's roughly 1% above if you look sort of over a long enough time period. 1% per annum faster than the NSF. And I think this is most likely really a reflection of politics and political constituencies. People, taxpayers, perhaps understandably rather more interested in research which seems like it might be connected with improving their health than with the more speculative kind of basic research which the NSF tends to fund. That might be a bad choice and there are certainly some sort of 'is' questions which can be asked. For example, you might ask the question, "What fraction of human health span extension or change has actually been due to discoveries made at the NSF versus discoveries made at the NIH?"

It's quite plausible that that's a reasonable kind of a research question or might be turned into one with a lot more thought than I've just put into it. And you can imagine trying to sort of disaggregate that in a variety of ways. That might then feed into some sort of decisions at the political or the values level but I'm not going to try and wade into that. I think you want to develop good techniques which can be used to answer that kind of question. But then it's an entirely separate question and to some extent, I want it to remain separate. How one reasons about it after the fact, you might decide that it's tremendously important that you have a very strong defense research establishment in which case you would be strongly in favor of increasing DARPA's budget perhaps. But perhaps you're not, and that's not a question that can be settled by studying the way the world is. It's a question where you need to bring some of your own values. But to the extent that you can decouple those two things, I think actually both really strongly benefit. Both sides of that benefit.

Ben (01:08:47):

Well, maybe delving into that just a little bit more. This movement of effective altruists or EA do have some strong sense of this. There's an interesting part of the EA movement which is actually very concerned with progress and actually on new institutions which is a kind of interesting overlap. You had really interesting initial reflections in a blog on EA which EA by its nature also they solicit criticism so thought about that. You had a conversation with some EA's and they're obviously worried about existential risk, pandemics by security and how you can think about utility and doing good. After all of that, and you've gone through that, has it changed the way you think rather than going through all of that which was kind of on the record already. Have you changed your mind at all around some of your thinking around EA and how they think about that? Or have you arrived at roughly the same place still with an open mind but it's kind of like, "Well, they have the way of thinking which is good?”

Michael (01:09:50):

Actually, I'm not sure I'm quite understanding the question, Ben. Can you...?

Ben (01:09:54):

Yeah. I guess, having had all of these conversations around effective altruism and what they're thinking, do you think that is a good way of thinking around the world and has your view changed since your blog and conversation on EA?

Michael (01:10:04):

Okay. So I think the connection you are drawing to your previous question, like in some sense they have a set of values which they're using to drive, their giving in a whole lot of ways.

Ben (01:10:15):

And essentially they've decided this is how things ought and is to be. So that's one world view. I'm a little bit too old. EA was not invented when I was at university so I've also come to and it's like, "Oh, I find that quite intriguing. It's not my way." And obviously you've done some work on it. So I was just kind of intrigued partly because that's the connection. Yes, they have a way and also you've done some thinking and it might have changed. So it was kind of like, "Is that EA way of doing it? How much does that resonate in part?" It's a way of thinking about the world where they have-- And it's a new movement as well as opposed to utilitarians were there before and you had the various things. But I find it's interesting because it's a new movement about how to think of the world and at least some of them have quite strong views as to how to do this, maximizing good or maximizing utility.

Michael (01:11:04):

Yeah. It's a really interesting question. They are using their values to drive their giving. I suppose you can break your question down into two pieces. One of which is, "Are they just mistaken about certain facts about the way the world is?" And actually, I probably think they are. But then there's also the question of, “How do I align with them on values?" And just so happens that for personal reasons I don't particularly align with them on values. I like many EA's a great deal. I have some close EA friends but it's not for me. There's a big long personal conversation about why that's the case. You could talk about why that's the case.

I don't know that it's necessarily so interesting why do I have the particular set of values I have? Well, that's of interest to my close friends and family and probably not to too many other people. The question that you might find more interesting is, “How do I think they're mistaken about the way the world is?” Certainly I think EA is actually practiced when they're oriented towards research. I think they don't appreciate nearly enough the value of illegible work, very early stage work. So most of the things which they seem to be strongly oriented to support, they're very big, very legible goals. The most common one is the people-- Well, the one that people perhaps talk the most about and think the most about is AI safety.

It's a big scary monster which is very easy to describe. To sort of think about it, it is a big goal. But historically, a lot of the most significant work on progress has not been legible in advance. I mentioned Turing before as an example solving a logic problem. Didn't realize that it was going to become maybe the most important industry of the 20th and 21st century. He wasn't working towards a big goal. And this is such a common pattern across research. I tend to think that systematically the EA organizations undervalue that. When I talk to EA friends they're perfectly aware of this. I don't really understand why they're not more indexed on it though.

Ben (01:14:05):

Yes, it's hard to... I guess there's a corporate truism that what you can't measure doesn't get managed. But then there's an aphorism above that which is this idea that if you only try and do the things that you can measure, this is not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted, actually, you go even more wrong because of those things.

Michael (01:14:36):

I love this book, "Seeing like a State" by James Scott where he talks about the way in which or what he called the high modernists have often caused problems when they're in governance because they will adopt some goal as being good for the locals in some part of the country which they're governing. But they're ignorant of so much local knowledge which is actually important for the functioning of the systems. And so with complete good intentions, sometimes they actually make things go very backwards. I think it's sort of the government version of this. Figure out what you could measure, use it to manage it, and then sometimes be very surprised when in fact it's a disaster.

Ben (01:15:22):

Some of the disasters in international aid can be well traced back to those routes. I guess I partly ask because I see EA's are building new institutions and new organizations and some of them will be quirky and that's probably a good thing.

Michael (01:15:38):

That I'm totally in favor of. Actually sort of...

Ben (01:15:42):

But it's also separate. It kind of doesn't matter in that sense that they may have got the version of the world wrong because they're a new organization doing things in a new way and therefore will hopefully discover something around the dark intelligent matter even if it was not the thing that we may or may not have thought was there.

Michael (01:15:59):

Yeah. I think some interesting question about scale, what fraction of all philanthropic giving do you want to be EA? The interesting thing to my mind anyways, there's not really a natural regulator for that. Nothing sets the scale, or at least there's nothing really strongly sets the scale there. It's a question just of to what extent do these ideas become fashionable? So yeah, maybe it ends up as actually 50% of all philanthropic giving. Maybe it ends up as 5% of all philanthropic giving. I don't know what it is at the moment. I think it's maybe on the order of 1% or something so it's actually pretty tiny. So you might say, "Well, okay, if it's tiny it's fine for it to grow.” But if there's nothing obviously stopping the growth-- and there will certainly be many internal drivers; lots of people whose careers and self-image has now bound up with it that doesn't seem so great. Of course, I mean this is the story of so many things which don't have a natural mechanism limiting their scale.

Ben (01:17:15):

Yeah. And when you don't have the tradeoff audit-- You see this today in terms of like, "Well, how much should we be working on climate versus deep poverty versus pandemics?" No necessarily natural capital working on any of those so really tricky.

Michael (01:17:32):

Whenever it's politics which is deciding it there's a natural sort of oligarchy tends to form where... You would think that if you had two pretty promising approaches to solving some problem and one of them had let's say 90% of the funding and the other one had 10%, and if you did a serious evaluation and conclude the 90% funded one was only slightly more likely to be successful, you'd get a rebalancing. But actually that's often not what happens. What really matters is politics. And many more of the people on the 90% funded one are actually in a position where they're able to influence future flows of capital. So actually it gets even more lopsided. It's kind of a, I think a crazy-- It's just a natural way in which oligarchy is formed and that pattern you see absolutely everywhere. But it's such a problem in philanthropic funding, this kind of rich get richer effect.

Ben (01:18:38):

Great. Okay. Well, wrap up with a couple of questions and then your current projects and advice. So maybe just a couple of quick underrated, overrated things then. So rogue AI risk, AI safety, do you think underrated or overrated?

Michael (01:18:53):

I have no idea.

Ben (01:18:55):

No idea. We'll pass. Okay. Critical rationality or rationality as a movement?

Michael (01:19:03):

Well, I think those two things are used to mean very different things actually.

Ben (01:19:07):

Okay. Yeah. That's probably true.

Michael (01:19:08):

Critical rationality I tend to associate with Karl Popper and with David Deutsche and with a few others. Rationality sort of in many of its modern incarnations is a slightly different branch of the tree.

Ben (01:19:20):

Perspective, value, probability and that type of thing.

Michael (01:19:21):

Yeah, exactly. And EA actually for that matter which is a different group of people completely. Just having clarified the terms, what was the...

Ben (01:19:32):

Let's go through critical rationality because we covered...

Michael (01:19:34):

I think probably underrated.

Ben (01:19:37):

Yeah. Maybe that's part of a...

Michael (01:19:39):

It's funny I can't read Popper-- That's not quite true. I just don't respond to him. But I still think underrated.

Ben (01:19:51):

I found Popper and actually Deutsche quite hard. I think I get it, but I'm not sure I do get it. And I speak other to people who I think they think they get it. I'm not sure they get it, but maybe that's where it is. So I probably think mildly underrated too but I'm very uncertain because maybe I just completely don't understand. One on this-- although this could be quite a long answer you can just give a short one if you'd like. Memory systems? Obviously you've done a huge amount of work on that. Maybe I'll just split them because you've got the kind of your card based repetition space systems and then you've got memory palaces. I get the overall sense that you probably think memory is more important than people think. So the overall underrated. That's my impression from you. But I'm not entirely sure because you've written a lot on it. So is that your view and what should we know about memory systems?

Michael (01:20:48):

So certainly underrated. It's a combination of I guess technology and science that really points out how people with very minimal effort... Actually, it feels like one of those products that is promising you the world with no effort. You know, "Lose 25 pounds in three weeks while eating hamburgers only."

Ben (01:21:16):

Just by saying this mantra three times.

Michael (01:21:18):

Yeah, exactly. It turns out though that with memory systems actually you can have a much, much better long-term memory for relatively minimal investment and it's just due to some quirks about the way the human brain works which have been known to psychologists for more than a century. There are thousands of papers about it. People have now built systems. They're a little bit aversive in some ways. They're like bicycles. It takes some work to get good at using them and most people just give up because they don't see the effect. If you stick with it and master them, actually they can be very useful if you are doing the kind of work that benefits from a really good long term memory. Not everybody is, but for the people who are, I think they're absolutely wonderful.

Ben (01:22:06):

Yeah. I think for me personally, the space repetition type ones I find are a little bit more useful because I think they can do more interactions with other forms of whatever you are learning. Whereas the memory palace ones are great for long lists of things but are actually less practically useful. They can be. So you've got a long list of history places, you've got your history exam, well why not learn them that and you'll learn them perfectly? But less practically relevant although not always. Whereas I actually think the space repetition ones amongst with other ways you can actually form new-- Well, maybe new to myself ideas, but newer ideas just due to that. But that's a personal thing. So last couple of questions then. What are some of the current projects or things that you're working on or what you're most excited about?

Michael (01:22:59):

So I'm on vacation at the moment which is part of the reason why I'm here.

Ben (01:23:02):

Very exciting.

Michael (01:23:03):

Little break in London. I don't know what I'll do next. We'll see. I've just finished this book that took way longer than I thought. I am just enjoying goofing around; reading about religion, trying to understand religion better, trying to understand art better and trying to understand a little bit about the latest technical progress in AI. So maybe a project related to one of those, but I don't know. And then there's some follow up things from the meta-science work that I will almost certainly do. But I just want to clear my head a bit before making a decision.

Ben (01:23:35):

Sure. Well, if you're looking at art, is this particularly visual art and do you have a view on where, I guess AI art will be? I would say that I'm less worried about what some people worry about AI art because my view art has-- I don't know what percentages, but there's this term in philosophy of art of the beholder share. And so this is the fact that art is valuable because someone receives it. So it's not just obviously you've got paint and creation and then it's all great. I see this very much in my theater practice. Essentially, theater is not really theater unless it has an audience. And actually that's true of quite a lot of art. I think people-- because it's new and because we're going to generate so much stuff and because of where it's come from, I have not quite seen that part. That's my own personal view. A lot of people have the other side. But if you're thinking about it, do you have a view or a thought there?

Michael (01:24:33):

I have many, probably far too many. What's a particularly interesting thing? Okay. So maybe one concern and one observation. The concern is just essentially capturing of the commons. So if people-- Where it used to be that anybody could buy a set of paints and just start to paint, if you actually need technology which is the IP of somebody, yeah, they've inserted themselves as an intermediation layer and historically that's... It always causes some problems. There's always some tradeoffs. I don't know how that will turn out. Most of the conversation which I hear about it is by people who have some sort of motivated reason either to be very, very keen on this possibly because they may own some of it, or to be very, very anti because they're worried that they will be put out of a job by it.

I don't think either of those things necessarily-- It leads to interesting perspectives but doesn't necessarily lead to a particularly clear perspective unless those people are really unusually honest. So a lot of the conversation I hear about that just seems, "I'm a VC and wow, I'd love to own some of this" is kind of the subtext very often. But yeah, you don't get actually very interesting thoughts from that or not a lot of clear thoughts. The interesting observation, I do just enjoy seeing what some of the artists who are working with this are doing. Like when they're able-- I admire so much people like Matisse or Cezanne or Picasso who were able to discover new ways of seeing. Picasso, probably particularly to some extent, Rembrandt, that's sort of a slightly different thing that he was doing.

And I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of genius with the new AI art systems. That would be very exciting. It's very tempting if you look at the way the systems work to think, “Well, they're not really going to be creating new ways of seeing in the same kind of way." You don't get that sort of-- Once you begin to understand cubism, it's really remarkable. You get what they were trying to do and you realize that you've expanded the way you can see the world. Somebody discovered that and it's just incredible. I guess I'm sort of just cautiously optimistic that maybe the same thing will happen with AI art. Brian Eno, the musician and composer has this really interesting observation that it took hundreds of years for us to figure out what possibilities are latent inside the grand piano.

And today, an instrument as rich as the grand piano is being invented every day and nobody will ever master it. That is kind of sad in some sense; to have all these kind of latent possibilities which will never be explored. So that's also a potential outcome maybe from the AI art systems. Maybe it turns out that actually the system is changing sufficiently rapidly that nobody ever masters it. Certainly, I think you see this with software systems at the moment. The rate of change in something like JavaScript frameworks or whatever is so rapid that nobody ever gets really good. A friend who's a dancer and a programmer committed to me that she finds it irritating when people have been programming for five years and they think they're really, really good. They're a senior software engineer at Google or meta or whatever. She's been dancing for 28 years and feels like she's just getting the hang of it. There is something to be said for that kind of deep art and if the AI systems are changing sufficiently rapidly, it might be that nobody ever masters them. That would be a little bit sad. That's a very long answer.

Ben (01:28:50):

Yeah. That's a really interesting observation. I hadn't known that. I guess I can take the other side and say it's quite nice that there's always going to be opportunity. But I think of the other observation then is like we'll never even master the programming language of sea. There will be no real Picasso of sea or something about that which was so elegant and beautiful or something. We're beyond and past it and it might not have even been-- I don't know whether the current languages are better. Is English really that much better of Latin? But you've got heights of Latin expression which we've had and we'll have in English which we might never get in these programming languages which have been around for a short time. I hadn't thought about it like that but that could well be true.

Michael (01:29:35):

Somebody who was at Google pretty early on-- So one of the people who famously helped build Google's early systems, Jeff Dean-- I guess they knew Dean at that time and commented just unselfconsciously that he poured out code. I just thought that was such a lovely way of describing somebody. Sort of a real master is pouring out code.

Ben (01:30:02):

Yeah. Maybe this settles back I think this act of creativity; arts, humanities is much closer to where we are on science coding software than I think it seems like first glance when you speak to actual scientists and particularly that messy layer before you make it legible and put it into an equation. All of that thinking before that seems to me to have much more in common with what dancers do, with what artists do, with what performance do than you might have thought. So I do think that ties around and I think that might even be true in what we discover on the meta layer when we think about those. That act of imagination that you need for something which isn't quite discovered yet, that part of whatever makes us human on that is still quite mysterious and seems to dwell in this creative part or blob or however we do it. In any case then, last question. Do you have any advice or thoughts for people? Maybe young people thinking about their careers or what they might want to do or maybe someone who's wanting to do the leap into a new organization or something within meta-science or open science? Do you have any advice or thoughts about what you would do, what you would tell them?

Michael (01:31:21):

I'm certainly interested... They say that the advice you give others is the advice you'd wish you'd given your younger self. That's probably true. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail has this lovely equation that advice equals limited life experience plus overgeneralization. That's certainly true. The one thing I wish I'd understood much earlier is the extent to which there's kind of an asymmetry in what you see, which is you're always tempted not to make a jump because you see very clearly what you're giving up and you don't see very clearly what it is you're going to gain. So almost all of the interesting opportunities on the other side of that are opaque to you now. You have a very limited kind of a vision into them. You can get around it a little bit by chatting with people who maybe are doing something similar, but it's so much more limited. And yet I know when reasoning about it, I want to treat them like my views of the two are somehow parallel but they're just not.

Ben (01:32:31):

Yeah. Well, I guess that might suggest maybe one needs to try out more things to actually know.

Michael (01:32:39):

That does I think is probably generically... It's generically true. One way in which it's not is it depends on what kind of a safety net you have. Some people have, and I am certainly one of those, have pretty reasonable safety nets and so that enables me to try new things. But the great majority of people in the world do not. And so they're I think, justifiably extremely cautious. But then people also the size of the safety net they think they need does tend to expand as well. If your safety net includes driving a Mercedes and having a et cetera, actually you can probably do a little bit better than that. A friend of mine who's a science fiction writer-- Science fiction writers do not make much money. Even famous science fiction writers do not make much money for the most part. He was trying to decide, "Was it fair on his daughter that he had chosen to be a science fiction writer?"

Because it meant that she probably wouldn't-- He couldn't afford to send her to the best high schools and things like that. Maybe she might get a scholarship or something like that. There were certainly some opportunities. He said that he was on a-- I think it was just a little boat somewhere off Northwestern Australia with a collection of his science fiction buddies who are just an incredible group of people. And he said he realized there that she might not necessarily get quite as-- She might miss some opportunities but she would also have opportunities like that, that she just would not have if he had chosen a more conventional and solely higher paying line work. So I think of that also as kind of a living that kind of a life is a safety net of its own. It's certainly something that you're providing for you and your family and your friends. I don't know whether that's clear or not. Hopefully it's clear.

Ben (01:34:58):

I would interpret that saying there's these immeasurable, these uncountable elements which are actually very valuable. And if you only measure it in dollars, then you might miss actually some of the vast positiveness or wealth or safety net that...

Michael (01:35:18):

Yeah. She was getting an expanded conception of the world, I guess, in some really interesting way. And I could see it would be valuable. You can't eat that, unfortunately. That's the flip side. But you actually don't need to make that much money to be able to eat.

Ben (01:35:35):

Great. Well, on that note, thank you very much.

Michael (01:35:38):

Thanks so much, Ben. This was fun.

Saloni Dattani: improving science, important questions in science, open science, reforming peer review | Podcast

Saloni Dattani is a founding editor at Works in Progress, a researcher at Our World in Data and a commissioning editor at Stripe Press. She has recently been profiled by Vox as part of the Future Perfect 50. Saloni is an excellent thinker on progress and science with recent articles for Wired (on making science better) and Guardian (on challenge trials). Her substack is here and twitter here.

Saloni tells me what are the most important questions in science that we should be working on.

We discuss making science better and thinking around challenge trials, making science more open source, reforming peer review and thinking around experimental clinical trial design.

We talk about vaccines, why Saloni might have room for optimism and what risks and opportunities around science she is thinking about.

…there are two points that I have that I think about when it comes to optimism. The first is that we already have lots of tools that can make the world better that just aren't being used as much as they could be. Global health is a really good example of that. So we have lots of vaccines and treatments that have huge benefits to people who take them, but much of the world doesn't take them yet. One example is influenza vaccines which have varying efficacy, but they're usually quite effective and yet most countries don't routinely give them out to people even though they could massively reduce the burden of hospitalizations and respiratory disease and so on. There are many other examples of treatments like that where we already have these things but they're just not implemented widely. That gives you some optimism but also makes me a bit cynical about why we aren't even using what we have.

Then the second part is more about the frontier and having new technology developed. I think on that it's kind of difficult to predict how much progress is possible on those areas, but it's also useful to see how things have changed over time. So genome sequencing is one example where the cost of sequencing is dropped from millions of dollars in the early two thousands to now just a few hundred. What that means is that we can collect much more data than we could in the past. We can understand things that we couldn't before. Sequencing is hugely important for understanding how our cells work but also how viruses and bacteria work.

It just means that we have much more scope to make progress on treatments and vaccines than we did in the past. So that's something that I'm hopeful about. So there's various technology that drives the ability of researchers to make advances in these fields. But I also kind of avoid taking any stance on whether I'm an optimist or not. I think it's helpful to just see how things are, see how things have been, and treat everything as potentially different from other examples and just look at the facts of what's happening in that particular area. Sometimes there's room for optimism and sometimes there isn't…

Borrowing from Tyler Cowen, I ask: 

How ambitious are you ?

Which of your beliefs are you least rational about?”  (Or what is she most irrational about?)

What is something esoteric you do ?

We play over rated / under rated on:

• Substack

• Misinformation

• Doing a PhD

• Women in Science

• Vaccines and Drugs

We end on Saloni’s current projects and advice.

Podcast available wherever you get podcasts, or below.  Transcript follows.

PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Transcript: Saloni Dattani and Ben Yeoh (only lightly edited)

Ben

Hey everybody. I'm super excited to be speaking to Saloni Dattani. Saloni is a founding editor at Works in Progress, a researcher at Our World in Data, and a commissioning editor at Stripe Press. She's an excellent thinker on progress and science and has recently been profiled by Vox as part of the Future Perfect 50. Saloni, welcome.

Saloni

Hello. Thank you for inviting me onto your podcast.

Ben (00:29):

You're most welcome. So to start off, what do you think are the most important questions in science or meta science that we should be working on today?

Saloni (00:39):

That's a really good question. I think the most important questions are thinking about what scientific publishing is going to look like in the future. So currently, a lot of academic research gets published in journals, and journals are very connected to what they used to be like before the internet. So they're published in a static format, they don't get updated very easily, their citations are kind of difficult to follow, and it's also hard to put together research with comments from other experts and criticism. All of that means that things are happening quite slowly in a lot of academic fields. And I think what we're seeing now is that people are trying to think of other ways of publishing. So for example, publishing on GitHub or on forums, and you can often see comments between different experts on the same topic. It's a huge change, but I still feel like it's just the beginning of what could be done. I think how to develop that further in a way that allows people to contribute to science but also has some kind of moderation or some ability to filter out the good and the bad will be really important.

Ben (02:15):

I had Alec Stapp on the podcast who made a similar kind of idea for think tanks or policy pieces in general; that you put out a white paper and it's a very old school way of doing it. And policy makers as well haven't adapted for the internet age. I guess you had the recent article out in Wire talking about how to make science better. I feel this comes under maybe one of your items of make science more open source. What do you think about expanding on that idea and maybe we can talk about three or four of your other ones as well. But I guess this is the making science open source. Is it just building on things we have like GitHub and things like that? Or do you think there should be some other system or something we should develop to help that open source ecosystem?

Saloni (03:04):

Yeah. So I think GitHub is a really good starting point. So what GitHub does is it allows you to share your data and your code for whatever analysis you've done. It means other people can comment on those. They can also branch out so they can kind of reuse your code and change it slightly to adapt it to whatever they're doing. It's a really cool way to publish science because it means that people can contribute from anywhere around the world. That's something that was done during Covid. So a lot of research groups published their data on GitHub and then had hundreds or thousands of people from across the world commenting and pointing out that like, "This country had missing data for these three weeks and something's gone wrong." Or they've contributed in a way that helps people automatically update their data sets.

That's a very good way to publish science, I think. But it also doesn't really work for a lot of fields; a lot of fields that don't have analyses that are written in computer scripts. It also doesn't fit some of the things that we want. So it doesn't make it easy for people to add a kind of review, comments from other experts. It doesn't allow you to connect different research pieces together. So I think there's a lot of scope for new tools and platforms to be created and I want to see how that happens. Then the second part is I also think that there are lots of new tools that could be created in terms of making sure that people aren't plagiarizing or fabricating their data or manipulating their images and things like that. And that has just started to be developed. So I think some kinds of platforms that allow you to check for errors and things like that could also be much bigger in the future.

Ben (05:09):

I guess that rolls round into your idea on reforming peer review. That's some way you could do that check and balance. Like if the image is too perfect which is often something that people done. I'm sure AI or some sort of computational manner can pick that up more easily. But is there anything more to your idea of reforming peer review which isn't just about the system?

Saloni (05:33):

So in terms of the system, do you just mean what gets checked or...?

Ben (05:39):

Yeah. I guess the system of journals which you're kind of indicating is not fit for purpose and then you've got new things like GitHub. I guess is there anything around the particular peer review idea which you're kind of thinking about? You highlighted some of the problems like checking for errors or false data and things like that. I think in your article you make the point that if you ask-- Papers always claim that you can ask for the data, but if you actually go and ask the academics, “Do you have your data?” then a lot of the time they've lost it or they didn't really have it or it's moved on system. It's not even necessarily in bad faith, they just didn't keep it right. So there's kind of these crossing checks and balances which aren't really great, I guess in terms of thinking about peer review.

Saloni (06:24):

Yeah. I mean, that is such a strange issue. I just find it so strange that email is the way that we are supposed to get people's data instead of it just being stored in some repository where anyone can access it. But in terms of how else we can reform peer review, I think one great idea that is starting to get traction is this idea of having some kind of centralized platform where you submit your research to this central platform which connects to various reviewers. They comment on the paper, help you improve it, and then it gets published in a journal. I recently just today saw that that is happening with registered reports. So registered reports are this type of academic paper where you submit your methods and your introduction or hypothesis for what you want to find, people comment on it and make sure that the whole analysis is done correctly. And then you start actually analyzing or collecting your data, and then you publish the results no matter what they show. So that kind of avoids the issue of publication bias where people decide not to publish certain things because they didn't like the results or they change the analysis after they've found the results or so on.

So that's something that I've just seen today has been developed by Chris Chambers who is a meta scientist, who's one of the editors at Cortex, this neuroscience journal. So what they plan to do is have people submit their papers to the central system where reviewers review the paper and then after that it gets sent to a different neuroscience journal. That seems like a great way to do it. Not just because you are kind of avoiding the publication bias issue, but also because it means you only have to submit your paper to a journal once and then it just gets connected to the journals. Whereas currently it's the journals themselves who are trying to find reviewers and doing it very badly because each of them don't have that many connections. They can't really track how much time people have to review papers. It's just a very strange system. So having the central platform which is connected to loads of different researchers would be a huge benefit.

Ben (09:05):

That seems to me dividing up the labor in the journal side of the system. But you also seem to have some ideas about dividing up labor within the research ecosystem itself. Would you like to touch upon that and how that occurred to you in terms of like, well actually if you could divide up labor and research that might be also more effective for science?

Saloni (09:27):

Yeah, definitely. For me, it's quite a personal experience where I realized that I really enjoy some parts of this scientific endeavor. I like reading past research. I like summarizing it. I like writing manuscripts. I don't really like coding so much and I don't really like going out and presenting my work and finding people to collaborate with. What I've found is that other people really enjoy those things and don't enjoy writing or reading very much, and other people are really good at running lab experiments. It's very strange because each of these skills take so long to develop. You have this deep learning curve when you're starting out on the process, but you also have to spend a lot of time to maintain those skills and keep them up with the latest developments in the field. And it just doesn't seem very efficient to be trying to do that for every single role that's part of the scientific industry.

So what I think is that if we allow people to have much more focus on the things that they're interested in or the things that they're skilled at, it just means everything becomes more efficient and also improve its quality. So I can spend time on the things that I'm very good at and team up with someone else who can manage the data or runs scripts for me and that's something that they enjoy as well. It's very similar to the origin or one of these ideas from Adam Smith's story of the pin factory where people are specializing in different parts of manufacturing a pin. You increase the production of pins enormously just by putting these different pieces together instead of having one person do everything. So I think that kind of approach to science would allow much more science to be done at a higher quality, at a higher speed. And also it would mean that we could open up the scientific process to people not just in academia, but also like software engineers, data people, writers and so on.

Ben (11:57):

Yeah. It's really obvious to me when I was at university that you had some lecturers who just weren't very good at lecturing or teaching or they didn't want to, but they were brilliant scientists. Their papers were brilliant. It always seemed like, "Well, why do you have to do the teaching?" And vice versa; some people teaching maybe didn't want to do as much lab work. And we have these, I guess they're not so much fledgling fields anymore, but I guess they sort of are like science communication or even climate change science communication. It's obvious to me they are separate disciplines. You can do that really well. You don't have to be an atmospheric scientist to be able to put together complex systems work. Actually, you get to Adam Smith's point, comparative advantage over that. So I do think that's quite interesting.

And a lot of other industries obviously do that. Would that flow into your ideas of also streamlining experiments? You can get people doing their little bit and then perhaps improving on that bit. I guess the other bit you talk about is collecting routine data which seems a little bit different. But it does occur to me that the kind of people or organizations collecting some of that data may not be what you would traditionally have thought of as a science organization, right? There could be some public body or even a private body. There is some very interesting data set. They should just collect it or maybe be paid to collect it somehow and then that's a resource that people can use.

Saloni (13:23):

Yeah. So streamlining is this idea that you have lots of experiments running in a parallel way. So the aspects of experiments that are routine or shared can be managed by a different group in the same way that you have specialization within a field. One of the examples that I give there is the recovery trial in the UK. So what happened there was this was a very large randomized control trial that had around 20 different treatments. Patients in the NHS were connected to this trial and could volunteer for it. And as the pandemic went on, they would be randomized to different treatments but within the same trial. So you wouldn't need to set up the whole organization, you wouldn't need to recruit patients for each one separately.

You would analyze their data in the same way, look at the same outcomes, and it would mean that you could make better comparisons between them, but it would also save a lot of time and costs and effort in setting these things up. So the difficulty there is actually setting it up in the right way and making sure that you're not having this badly organized thing that affects every experiment. But I think there's a lot of scope for that to be done well if there are people who are able to learn from experience and do these-- Running a trial is very difficult. Operating a trial in practice is very difficult and I'm sure there's people who have been doing that for a very long time. It just makes much more sense to give them the ability to run the practical aspects of it while the smaller research groups are able to specify what specifically needs to be done in their part of the trial.

Ben (15:25):

I reflect that actually I currently think that the classic standard so-called RCT sort of double blind placebo controlled trial is a little bit overrated. Obviously it's extremely good, but it means that people haven't thought about these other ways of doing trials. Trials which can change over time and these more up to date statistical methods. So I was wondering whether you think experimental design has actually maybe moved ahead a little bit further but we don't do enough. One very classical element of this, and I think you've written about it as well, is on the so-called challenge trial particularly for type of infectious type things where there was a reasonable amount of pushback for certain bioethical point of view. But if you looked at it in total population utility and other things, there was a lot of people saying, "Well, we would potentially save a lot of lives or get a lot of other information quicker."

And there was perhaps a little bit. But again, it hasn't really developed as I thought it might. So I'd be interested in whether you think experimental design might be, whether we should perhaps look at challenge trials or other parts of design more? I guess we had a recent Nobel Prize winner in terms of discontinuity designs and other sort of designs as well which has obviously really helped the field. And I kind of feel there is just so much there but it hasn't filtered down. I'm sort of quite a far way observer of it then. So I’d be interested in your view; challenge trials and general experimental design.

Saloni (16:58):

Yeah. I would say I'm a huge fan of randomized control trials just because they're very helpful when you don't know how the mechanism of something works. Usually when you have a study where you're trying to just use data that's already observed, you're not running an experiment or manipulating something that requires you to have some understanding of what the confounders are or how people might select into receiving the treatment and so on. What a randomized control trial lets you do is kind of avoid a lot of those questions and just using the process of randomly allocating someone to the placebo or treatment how that affects their outcomes. But at the same time, randomized control trials are not very old. The first one was run in the 1940s and with time they've had various developments along the way.

So a lot of the procedures that we consider part of the traditional randomized control trials have only been developed in the last 20 years or so. So for example, for clinical trials they're now all registered online. So the methods and the things that will be measured are declared before the trial is run. That didn't happen in the past. And also blinding, for example, is relatively new. So I expect that these things will continue to advance and change in the future. And so with this example of what's called a platform trial where you can allocate people to different drugs at different times, that's also quite new. I think it's just another part of the evolution of these journals and it's a cool thing to see how they develop.

In terms of challenge trials, I think challenge trials are a bit tricky. Sometimes they're very useful and sometimes they're not. So with a usual randomized control trial, what you do is you give people a vaccine or a placebo for example, and then you just kind of wait until they get infected on their own by the infectious disease, by the pathogen and you see how those rates vary between the two groups who were randomly given the vaccine or not. That can often take a really long time. So because you're just waiting and watching for them to get infected, if the disease is rare or if it doesn't cause symptoms in many people, you might miss a lot of the people who get infected. In contrast with that, what a challenge trial does is you deliberately give people the pathogen and you can then see the effects of the vaccine if there is an effect in a very short amount of time because you're controlling when you give it to them, you're controlling the doses that you're giving and the routes, and you're monitoring them in a much more controlled environment.

So the main benefits of challenge trials are that they can be much faster. They can involve much fewer participants like sometimes a hundred versus thousands in a usual trial. It just means that you get this data much quicker. But the problems are that you have to actually be able to develop the pathogen in the lab and be able to give it to each of these participants. And that can be hard. So you might not be able to culture the pathogen in the lab. You might not be able to give it to them in the same way that they would receive it in the outside world. You also have to figure out the right dosing. So if you give people too much of the pathogen then they might just get infected regardless of whether they got the vaccine or placebo, even if the vaccine is usually helpful in an outside setting.

So those kinds of questions are difficult and they make challenge trials currently not as useful as they could be. But at the same time, they're very helpful for some diseases. So I've recently written about how they're going to be the best way to test vaccines for Zika virus disease because the disease is now in this trough and there just aren't that many cases worldwide and we don't know when the next wave will come. So if we want to prepare for that, we have to try out these new methods at least making sure that people are informed about what the risks are and willing to take those risks and also kept in this safe environment where they can easily be treated if anything happens.

Ben (21:56):

So they have a role; there are downsides, but there are upsides too. So in specific circumstances maybe we should be looking more closely at them. You've written a really great piece on depression I think on World in Data. So I was interested in your view as to maybe what's most misunderstood about depression? I guess there are various types. And whether maybe overall depression drugs are overrated or underrated, or I'm sure you're going to talk about the nuance that actually it probably depends. But I'd be interested in your research on looking at the overall depression field and what you think.

Saloni (22:32):

Yeah. Good question. So I think what's most underrated about depression is that it's not that recognizable. Sometimes we have this image sometimes of someone who's just sad and no matter what they do they're unhappy. They just don't react positively to anything. The main quality that we associate with depression is just sadness. It can be a lot more than that. It can be different from that. It can involve just lots of tiredness and anxiety, feeling very guilty about themselves or feeling thoughts of death and so on. Sometimes it can involve people who are sad overall but can react positively to good news. It can last several months and sometimes people don't realize that they're depressed because they don't have those classic symptoms of just pure sadness.

I think those symptoms are one of the least understood, the least known parts of the condition. So it's not the case that just because it involves other symptoms that it's like a very loose criteria. To get a diagnosis of depression you need to have these symptoms almost every day for two weeks at least. It involves two main symptoms. So either sadness or a loss of interest in your usual activities along with at least five other symptoms. So that can be quite a high threshold, but it's also not that uncommon for people to have it.

Ben (24:28):

And those five other symptoms you can almost draw from them from quite a large pool. Reading your work it was kind of like, "Wow, there's these hundred other of symptoms that might be slightly large.” But the mix of the five can be almost any sort of mix which is why you might miss it. You've obviously got the sadness and loss of interest. But you often miss it because it's like, "Well, it could be these five or it could be a combination of these five and they all kind of make sense.” I hadn't understood that kind of complexity or broadness of it. And then the fact that depression drugs, your sort of first line of treatment, a lot of them kind of work for some people and then they often stop working and you sort of recycle through them. So I think in general they're probably quite useful for a whole bunch of people but obviously they don't work for everyone. I didn't know if you had any thoughts on looking at the use of the drugs.

Saloni (25:19):

Yeah. What's difficult with that is it's actually not easy to tell whether they've worked at an individual level. If you think about maybe your own experience of being happy or sad during different weeks, you have various changes. So some days you'll feel happier, some days you'll feel worse, and these things also continue over weeks or months. And because there's so much variation within each person, even if a treatment is reducing your symptoms by 30% or whatever that means-- Even if it is reducing your symptoms by 30%, you still might be having some really bad days at the end of a trial, for example. So that's why we need to look at these kind of group differences. So the difference between the whole group who's taking the antidepressants and the whole group who's taking the placebo.

And when we do that, we usually do see a sort of moderate effects of antidepressants where it tends to reduce the probability that people will still have a diagnosable depression at the end by about 30% or so. I would say that is underrated by some and overrated by others. So clearly it could be a lot better than that. But that's still a big effect considering these are just small pills and we don't really have a great understanding of how depression even works. Despite that, we have seen many studies confirm that these treatments actually do work. They work around as well as behavioral therapy or talking therapies and so on. I think they're quite useful especially for people who don't have the time to go out and get therapy or are just in these desperate situations where they need something to work quickly. So I think they have an important use but they're also quite misunderstood. I think it’s also a mistake to necessarily think that because one person doesn't feel much better at the end of it that it didn't work for them even. But also there is variation between how different people experience them.

Ben (27:46):

It's the challenge of the kind of individual dynamic versus the population statistics. I was speaking to David Spiegelhalter who looks a lot of stats and he makes the same one. Classically there's alcohol and also statins, big population things. You can see a population effect but you might not see it on the individual effect. In fact, the individual might have a preference to go the other way but not hopeful on the population stats. I hadn’t understood it's a sort of well understood statistical, almost paradox. So thinking maybe on a higher level about optimism and opportunities and then maybe also risks. When I read your work, one of the things I like about it is it's-- I guess I would say cautiously optimistic. There's a lot of things you sort of say like, "Well, yes, there's a lot of things wrong and we could do things better, but we could do things better." And I like that.

So I was wondering what you were maybe most optimistic about or things generally that you see in the world. Obviously there's the improving science part, but do you have room for optimism? And then we can flip on the other side of other kind of risks that you think are underrated that maybe we had to watch out for and mitigate it. But I'm kind of interested in your optimism side because I see that as a very nice thread through your work. Actually, it probably goes through some of the World in Data work and Works in Progress work in general. But this feeling that we can do better and we perhaps are doing better.

Saloni (29:14):

I guess there are two points that I have that I think about when it comes to optimism. The first is that we already have lots of tools that can make the world better that just aren't being used as much as they could be. Global health is a really good example of that. So we have lots of vaccines and treatments that have huge benefits to people who take them, but much of the world doesn't take them yet. One example is influenza vaccines which have varying efficacy, but they're usually quite effective and yet most countries don't routinely give them out to people even though they could massively reduce the burden of hospitalizations and respiratory disease and so on. There are many other examples of treatments like that where we already have these things but they're just not implemented widely. That gives you some optimism but also makes me a bit cynical about why we aren't even using what we have.

Then the second part is more about the frontier and having new technology developed. I think on that it's kind of difficult to predict how much progress is possible on those areas, but it's also useful to see how things have changed over time. So genome sequencing is one example where the cost of sequencing is dropped from millions of dollars in the early two thousands to now just a few hundred. What that means is that we can collect much more data than we could in the past. We can understand things that we couldn't before. Sequencing is hugely important for understanding how our cells work but also how viruses and bacteria work.

It just means that we have much more scope to make progress on treatments and vaccines than we did in the past. So that's something that I'm hopeful about. So there's various technology that drives the ability of researchers to make advances in these fields. But I also kind of avoid taking any stance on whether I'm an optimist or not. I think it's helpful to just see how things are, see how things have been, and treat everything as potentially different from other examples and just look at the facts of what's happening in that particular area. Sometimes there's room for optimism and sometimes there isn't.

Ben (32:03):

So neither a techno optimist nor a doomster. I would add on the genome sequencing which I think is a big thing and then I would pair it with essentially what DeepMind and others have now done on protein folding and AI and computational biology. And I just see like when I speak to computational biologists versus 10 years ago, they kind of think this is magic. It’s equivalent to magic that you see; not quite, but it's a definite step change. Are you worried about anything on the risk side? I guess you've got some people thinking about broad existential risks; so manmade pandemics, nuclear war, those type of things. Or I guess sort of rogue AI or there’s more sort of mundane risks like antibiotic resistance, climate, war currently. I guess you sort of said it was in a balance. Maybe there's something around science. Is there anything you think is particularly underrated or is on your radar screen that you kind of worry about somewhat?

Saloni (33:09):

Pandemics are a big one. So the risks of pandemics come from various different places. There's the risk that a disease emerges in the first place and then the risk that it turns into a large epidemic and then turns into a pandemic. Just because we have so much more travel and globalization means that these things can spread much faster than they could in the past. And also because of how we use land, how we farm animals, how we sort of reuse land for various purposes means that we're encountering animals and plants and various pathogens that we wouldn't have in the past. So that's a kind of growing risk. 

There's also the risk of biosafety from labs, and I think one thing that's very underrated is bio risks from industrial use. So if we have these much larger factories that are using cultured products or whatever biomaterials that has quite a large risk of turning into a big safety issue much more than small research labs. So that's something that I worry about but I also think we have better tools than we could in the past to stop them. We have better tools to understand what they are as soon as they emerge with genomics and so on. It feels like we're kind of playing catch up with the technology versus the risks, but they're also various ways that we can reduce the risks while still having growth and development. So for example, having much more biodiversity conservation, having much more urbanism, having people live in places that are not so risky that we have to worry about these spillovers and so on. Having cultured meat, for example, makes a big difference as well. One of the big drivers of spillovers is factory farming, for example. We have like avian flu very often breaking out around the world. That's something that could be avoided with technology and so on. So yeah, I think that's a big underrated risk.

I also think in general new technologies do often carry risks. So if we look at the 20th century and we look at lead use for example, leaded gasoline and so on, those were big breakthroughs in technology but they also had risks of pollution that people didn't necessarily see at first or didn't take much attention to. And I think we should also be thinking about those happening now. So what are the inventions or tools that we're creating now that have big negative effects that we're not seeing yet? Usually when people say that they are kind of anti-growth and they're afraid of new technology in general, I think if we look at history we have to recognize that these things have happened before with lead, with x-rays for example and so on. And there are many risks that we wouldn't have foreseen at the beginning that we should still be aware of.

Ben (36:52):

That's very balanced. Do you have a view on any of the ideas of effective altruism then? Because it seems that some effective altruist or EAs are very worried about these existential risks or the risks of going too fast in AI. So something bad happens, some of them are very worried on biosecurity. On the other hand, you can say that a lot of this technology is going to happen and it's like how we use antibiotics, how we do cultured meat or whatever which will be there. Where do you think there might be most right or wrong? Or do you have no particular view?

Saloni (37:28):

It's hard to say. I haven't really thought very much about AI in particular. It just seems so out of field for me that I've kind of avoided and stuck with what I think I'm better at. But I think in general, we should take these risks seriously. It's not necessarily the idea that we should just stop technological development in some areas or just try to align it with what would be best for us. In the past there have been lots of examples of these kinds of new technologies just being banned. For example, CFCs which were responsible for the hole in the ozone layer and there were replacement technologies that we could use for them. I think that's kind of one thing that I think is underrated. It’s having this kind of backup or contingency technology that could be used instead if there are growing risks with something that we don't recognize yet. So trying out different things, comparing them, not being satisfied with something that works just because we've looked at how effective it is, but also thinking about are there other options that are safer and effective at the same time and not treating it as a tradeoff between growth and safety. I think you can often just do both.

Ben (38:55):

That seems fair. Okay. I have a couple I guess Tyler Cowen inspired type of questions that he asks on this type of thing. Maybe I'd start one about sort of ambition in the future. So one of the things he ask is, I guess how ambitious are you?

Saloni (39:20):

I think people find it annoying when I tell them that I just don't have ambitions. I don't think I've ever really had ambitions. I have short term goals of projects that I want to complete and things I want to do. I generally want to improve myself and be a better person and so on. But I don't think there are big goals of things that I want to achieve. It's just a path that will kind of emerge and I'll see how things go in my life. I didn't really plan to be where I was. I just kind of tried out different subjects that I was interested in and fell into various jobs along the way. I think it's nice to have an open mind about what the possibilities are just because you don't know what opportunities will arise, but you also don't really know where you'll be when you're able to achieve them.

Ben (40:19):

That's very modest of you because I think you are doing a lot to both improve science and meta science and speaking in public about it which perhaps is not a stated ambition, but I think is a pretty big thing. My next question in this trio is which of your beliefs are you least rational about? In another way he asks it sometimes the thing is, what views do you hold almost irrationally or like a religion?

Saloni (40:51):

Okay. So I think the main one is-- And I feel like this is not really a religious belief. But I think the motivation is what you're getting at. I generally think that it's very important to be honest and transparent in general just because-- My reasoning for that is that you don't know what the consequences of those facts are. So if you're trying to kind of lie or misrepresent something because you want someone to believe a certain version of the fact, you don't know what other consequences that might have, how other people might interpret it and misuse this kind of distortion and how that might affect other research and other views or policies. So I think it's better to just be very transparent and honest with what you're doing just because of that.

There's so many different ways to use this information that you can’t really predict how it should be used in each situation. But at the same time, there are examples of when those things might be more effective if they were slightly distorted. If you kind of downplayed the risks of something that was in general very good, people might be better off in some ways. I think it's very hard to know those things and I think it's better to stick with a rule. Mainly, I feel like it prevents yourself from going down routes that you wouldn't want to.

Ben (42:44):

That's very fair. I'd interpret that as-- to use Tyler Cowen's term generally don't be Straussian. He's got this idea of reading between the lines. I think we saw that in the pandemic. A lot of people even in good faith knew a certain thing but said a certain other thing because they thought that's what was going to help them achieve the original thing which is very meta. I see it actually at the moment on climate. I try and do quite a lot of work on this broad sustainability climate space and I don't quite know what to do about it. But the sort of median scientist or the median paper makes the point that we've come some way, but they also make the point that there's a really big gap between that and where we should be, could be, want to be.

And a lot within the climate community, some who know this don't particularly want to talk about how much we've come through because they want to focus on a kind of either fear or a raising or they have a particular theory of change that they are using which means that they intentionally-- They don't normally misinformed, although I think sometimes they do. But they misinform by omission instead. So it's even sneakier. They’ve got a definite theory of change about it. But I'm a little bit like you. I worry that it first of all isn't correct, and second of all actually has the second and third order bigger impacts. Like well, you've said literally the world will end in 12 years and some people have taken you at those literal words and actually the median scientist is not saying that at all. So 12 years will come around and then some people I'm sure will say, "Wow, look..." Like Nostradamus, the world didn't literally end like that. And it's like, "Well, that's not quite what we're saying."

Saloni (44:43):

It's hard because I feel like when you frame things as something to worry about, some people will take action because of that and other people completely turn off and they just say, "Well, we're doomed anyway. I might as well just not try to improve things." I think there's like a third important factor here as well that when you are truthful and accurate about something, it means that we can understand where exactly the problems still are. If you are being transparent about how much progress has been made in X and how much lack of progress has been made in Y, that's really important because it means that people know where they should focus their attention. Having the ability to compare things in a way that's neutral and not distorted is very important.

Ben (45:34):

I agree. I think it raises trust and I think trust is a very important sort of meta layer. But also when I think you get it right then you can also say, "Look, this is what I really don't know." That's very useful information to know when trusted people really don't know something and that will then inform versus when you have a reasonable chance or reasonably informed on where it is. Okay. The last one in these type of questions goes along the lines of, what is something which is esoteric that you do? So I guess this is, do you have an unusual habit, hobby, belief or action, something that is perhaps a little bit esoteric or weird?

Saloni (46:22):

I'm trying to think of one. I think the only surprising thing that people find about me is that I really love really silly game shoes. I recently watched this show called "Is It Cake?" where there are these bakers who are trying to make these hyper realistic cakes and fool the judges into thinking they’re real objects. I like silly things like that. I really love detective novels and crime shows and things like that. I like film noir, the 1940s and fifties genre of crime and detective films. That also seems odd because I think people often think if you're in this kind of progress studies kind of space that you prefer the modern version of anything that exists. There are often genres that have just faded out just because of fashion. But when they existed they were really good. There are also different things that we focus on now. We have much better ability to take very good cinematography, have lots of cool special effects and stuff like that. What I like about old movies is that because people didn't have that, the only way to really get people's attention or keep them entertained was by focusing on the dialogue and the acting. So those are things that I care about much more when I watch a film. And so it means that I enjoy those kinds of films much more even though they're much less developed in a lot of ways.

Ben (47:58):

I agree. I guess there's a thinker, Nassim Taleb, although it's not just his idea, has called certain things which last lindy which is the idea that things which last are quite important. He tends to go back to ancient Greeks and beyond. But I think it's the true of same of film and books of culture. Books which have actually lasted from the 1800s are usually pretty good even if they're not in fashion. And obviously, movies and films are a little bit of a younger art to those which have survived on the forties, fifties and sixties are actually really good. Mine is children's books. As I like to say, that actually they shouldn't really be called children's books because simply they're books that everyone can read as opposed to books only for adults. I think we're in a kind of golden age of children book writing. It's never been better. There's amazing stories and literature which includes children as well as adults can read. But they usually think quite serious investor, podcaster, sustainability person, why are you reading children's books? But they're really wonderful.

Saloni (49:05):

I mean, children's movies are also quite underrated because people who make them have this very difficult task of keeping children entertained but also keeping their parents entertained. I sometimes watch kids’ shows and stuff and I notice that there are lots of silly jokes and very plain dialogue, but at the same time they also have these more sophisticated jokes that I assume they're just there because parents might be watching them. It's cool to see-- I think it's not the case that they're only targeted at kids.

Ben (49:39):

For sure. You see that in a bunch of Pixar type movies but you also see it in, for instance, some Japanese anime or the Studio Ghibli work which actually doesn't always have adult in jokes. It's just very beautifully done storytelling which can then appeal to everyone from the age of four to a hundred and beyond. I actually think in some ways that's some of the pinnacle of storytelling when it appeals to everyone and not just certain groups. But yes, reasonable people can disagree on that. Okay. So I thought maybe we have a short section on overrated and underrated and then we'll come to the end. Although I think couple of these might be obvious from where the conversation is going. But overrated or underrated, vaccines in general?

Saloni (50:31):

Very underrated, I think. People don't realize how much progress we've had because of vaccines. In many countries they're so widely used that we don't actually see the counterfactual. We don't see how much disease would be spreading without them. It's hard to see how they could be overrated. I think people often don't understand how vaccines have worked historically. They don't realize that many of these vaccines get better with taking several doses. They don't realize that they don't have super high efficacy but that isn't necessarily a reason to down rate them because if you have very high coverage and also depending on how the vaccine works, you could reduce the transmission of the disease to a much greater extent than like... Say polio vaccines have a 60% efficacy of reducing the disease by that much in a single person who takes them. But if everyone takes them, the disease can't really transmit between them and also because of how a vaccine works, it reduces transmission much more than it reduces infection. So it prevents the spread of disease in a much bigger way. And I think that's also something that people tend to not realize and tend to not put into the calculation.

Ben (52:05):

And would you say the same on pharmaceutical drugs in general?

Saloni (52:13):

It's such a wide range. I think many drugs are very underrated. Especially in psychiatry, I think people tend to talk about psychiatry as an area where we haven't had that much progress or things were just in the same place that we were 50 or 60 years ago. And that's just not true. We have so many treatments that work. We have so many treatments now that focus much more on their safety profiles where they're just as effective as they were before but they're much less toxic and they have much fewer side effects. That's also really important because if people are going to take medications on a long term basis, you really don't want them to be developing other problems as well. So I think in general that's quite underrated. But at the same time, we also haven't had that much experimentation on new types of treatments that could be made and so there's a lot of scope for development there.

Ben (53:16):

Great. Overrated or underrated then, doing a PhD?

Saloni (53:22):

Good question. I mean, it really depends on what you want out of it. For me, I haven't really been interested in academia from the beginning. I did my PhD because I wanted to develop the skills that I would get from a PhD like being able to read the research and learning about various methods and so on. But I think many people-- If you're planning on being a full-time researcher in a specific field, then it totally makes sense to do a PhD and it also kind of allows you to focus on this one big project for a few years in a way that you often can't when you're older because you have other students to manage and grounds to apply for and so on. But I think it really depends on the person. If that's not something you want, then it doesn't really make sense to do it. But there are also other benefits of doing a PhD just because of the social structure of how things work. PhDs tend to just put you on track for a higher salary or they make it easier to migrate to certain countries and so on and people don't factor those in. Not that things should be that way, but they are beneficial in other ways apart from academia.

Ben (54:44):

Yeah. The second order benefits from all of that. Women in the sciences?

Saloni (54:53):

I don't understand how underrated and overrated can apply.

Ben (54:59):

Well, I guess we could go do you think there's significant underrepresentation and that's a problem? Or are you more kind of like, "Well, it's maybe not such of a problem?"

Saloni (55:13):

I think underrated. I think there could be a lot more women doing science. I think what's difficult about science is we have different gender roles and expectations in terms of what we expect from careers and how much work people spend at home or with children. But also academia is very high pressure and you're expected to be continuously doing research for a very long time at a very high rate of publication and so on. And what that means is that even though there are lots of brilliant women who are great scientists, they often drop out along the career progression just because it's difficult to flexibly work on research and also care for their children or whatever they want to do. I think there needs to be a lot more flexibility in what we expect from people and how we structure career progression in academia just to allow for that. And for that reason, I think it's underrated and women are highly underrepresented especially at the later career stages.

Ben (56:31):

Yeah, I agree. I'm quite distant from it, but I see it as generally a problem for science because if it means that there's a big pool of people which on average should be adding a lot and you're not accessing that talent pool, then your science is going to be significantly worse than it could before, I think to your point, reasons which you should be able to at least mitigate a lot more. We seem to have the same problem in economics as well. I mean, maybe you could roll that into science under the social science banner and that seems to have flared up. Again, I'm quite distant for it but it seems quite problematic if you don't have these talent pools. I guess you could extend that to the whole of Africa to some degree like that. But I think it's even obvious within that. Great. So last couple on here. Overrated or underrated, misinformation?

Saloni (57:32):

I'm going to assume that means the impact of misinformation.

Ben (57:35):

I guess you could take it there. Impacts of misinformation or whether perhaps there isn't as much misinformation out there as might be deemed. That's another way you could take it.

Saloni (57:46):

Yeah. I think underrated. Maybe overrated in the sense that people don't just believe anything that they hear. But at the same time, there are memes and things that get shared much more widely and much more frequently than they did in the past just because we have different ways to communicate than we used to. Having all of these WhatsApp forwarding groups and things like that means that communication is very different from what it used to be. So I generally think it's underrated. I feel like it's something that we haven't yet learned how to tackle or moderate correctly and it's something that we're still kind of catching up with. I don't think that there needs to be a trade off again between how much we communicate and whether misinformation occurs, but I think we're just not very good at putting it into context and helping people understand things accurately.

Ben (58:55):

Yeah. I think I agree. That vaccine issue, some of it during pandemic certainly seemed to be misinformation or some people would say disinformation. And then we refer to the climate thing. I think there might be an issue there as well maybe on both sides. So I think it is probably a bigger problem than some people think. But yeah, not exactly sure. The last one on this, writing a newsletter. What everyone is doing nowadays it's via Substack. So underrated or overrated endeavor?

Saloni (59:28):

I think underrated. I think Substack is really cool because blogs had this problem that people didn't really follow updates when they came out. So for example, I'd love somebody's blog but I'm not going to check their Twitter feed all the time to see if they have a new blog post. I don't really use RSS. And even RSS doesn't really give me the information at once. It just tells me that there's something new. The thing that's different about newsletters is that it just gives you a lot of information on a platform that you're already using like email. So it means that you can keep up with writers that you really like but also you don't have to be reading all of their stuff. You're just kind of having this feed in your inbox. And obviously some people just use it as a blog. So they just have their usual blog post type formats and then you don't have to subscribe. The fact that you can do both on these platforms I think is very cool.

Ben (01:00:30):

Great. And on that note, you should subscribe to Saloni's Substack which I think is Scientific Discovery. Is that what you named it in the end?

Saloni (01:00:37):

Yeah.

Ben (01:00:38):

Great. So last couple of questions. What are the projects you're working on now or future projects or things that you are excited about?

Saloni (01:00:48):

I'm currently working on this big-- I've just started this big project at Our World in Data on the history of pandemics. So what I'm looking at is essentially just putting together good estimates of the mortality of various pandemics in history. The reason for that is that currently the collections that you see online when you try to Google for how many deaths were caused by each pandemic come from different sources, but often they're also not even cited. So you have these infographics where it shows the size of each pandemic and then there's just no references at all or the references are very dated and you don't know where they come from. So what I'm trying to do is put together good estimates for each big pandemic that we know of and that will hopefully be useful for many people. So I'm currently just going through each one, one at a time, looking for good data sources and methods and putting together these numbers.

Ben (01:01:50):

That sounds really exciting. I was speaking to Mark Koyama the other week who does economic history. He was looking at economic history cross with Black Death and there was a lot which came from that. But there are issues with the data and I don't think there's been so much studied on other pandemic. So that could be a really exciting data project for a lot of people. And then last question is, do you have any advice or thoughts for listeners out there? Maybe young, independent researchers thinking about wanting to make an impact in the world or any other sort of life advice or thoughts that you might have?

Saloni (01:02:29):

I feel like it's so hard for me to give life advice because I often feel like a lot of things that I'm doing just kind of happen by chance. Like I just knew the right people, things were happening at the right time. I also have been doing lots of different things at the same time. That means that I've had many different opportunities than people would usually have. I think if you're someone who doesn't really know what they want to do in the future, doesn't have a particular interest, then my advice is to just keep your options open. Just try out different things and see how they go and take opportunities as they arise. Whereas if you really do know what you want to do, then focus on a good way to do that. Focus on what you're good at.

Ben (01:03:18):

That makes a lot of sense. But I guess that was partly your early career tactic was to do a lot of things and then you get cross links between those or different networks and then you don't, like you say-- Although you seem to fall into it by accident under one reading, another reading is that you kind of made your own luck by trying out lots of things.

Saloni (01:03:38):

Yeah. I mean, I feel very fortunate. I do work hard, but it still feels so weird that I'm doing all these different things and it feels very much up to chance.

Ben (01:03:51):

Great. I saw you did some travel this year. You've been to India, you went to Italy. Other places that you still have on your bucket list that you really want to go to? I kind of assume that you think travel is underrated still. Or somewhere you've been in the last few years you thought was really brilliant and you'd want to go back?

Saloni (01:04:12):

So I was in Florence for a conference in Italy and it was amazing. I've never felt so happy to see old architecture but also how... The history of Florence is really interesting. I listened to loads of podcasts while I was there while just walking around the city. I really like places that are very walkable, where there's lots of history, and there's lots of culture. There are so many places that I haven't been to. I think lots of Europe I haven't really been to. I also want to go to those big national parks in America. I haven't been to America at all in my life except for once when I was two years old and I don't remember that obviously. So I would love to go sometime. I think I should have some time to go next year and so hopefully that'll be good.

Ben (01:05:15):

Great. Well on that note, Saloni, thank you very much.

Saloni (01:05:19):

Thank you.

---

Why host events, talent, unconference, weak social ties

I recommend Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’ book on Talent. I’m still sifting through my notes as the book applies to both how I think about people I collaborate in my theatre making as well as my Angel investing, microgrant making and my main job of global equity investing. 

I wanted to pull out one idea which is almost an aside in the book. The holding of an unstructured event/meet-up/conference. The unstructured part is important.  They write: 

Send Them to an Event (or Create an Event) One advantage of an event is that it may expose the attendee to top achievers and performers and help make those trajectories vivid alternatives. In those regards the event is similar to a travel grant, except you are sending them to a location that is important only temporarily. But event attendance may serve other purposes as well. An event may convince the attendee that a social or tech movement is real, or that it is benevolent, or that it is popular and desirable to belong to, or that it is not crazy. Events make that knowledge vivid in a way that reading about a movement does not: “Look, here are all the other people interested in nuclear fusion!”—or cryptocurrency, or venture capital. For exactly the same reason, events are risky, as they may scare some people off (“Hey, those people are crazy!”). Usually, though, the scared-off individuals were not going to make major contributions to that cause anyway, and so event attendance speeds up their possible reallocation to another cause or venture, one that might prove a better match. Or maybe those people really are crazy; if so, it’s better to find that out sooner rather than later. Events are an accelerated test of cultural fit. Creating your own event is costly in terms of time and money, but it can be an ideal way of raising the aspirations of those you consider talented. You get to control everything, from the invitees to the program to what they will eat for breakfast. Daniel has organized successful events for Pioneer winners, and Tyler has done the same for Emergent Ventures. But here is the important thing to understand about organizing your own event: the group has to gel. You can raise their aspirations a bit, but the group itself creates most of its own dynamic and its own theater. The members of the group will raise each other’s aspirations, at least if you have selected well and structured your event to give them enough interaction with each other. When the leader (you) and the peers are pushing in a common direction—the raising of aspirations—the effect can be very powerful indeed. But you will need to give them the freedom of letting them contribute to defining what the group is all about. [BY: my emphasis]

When I went to check out the Effective Altruism, EAG conference,  there was an element of this, EA were raising each other’s aspirations but I don’t think the main structure of the EAG I went to is quite the best. (I am told UnConference formats happen in their smaller events).

Much better, in my view are forms of “UnConference”. Tyler Cowen hosts one for Emergent Venture winners very much in this model. Kyle writes about the EV 2021 UnConference here.

I have co-hosted with my Chatham House Sustainability Accelerator friends now two Unconferences with sustainability themes. Here is Nina Klose on coming to my UnConference. Attendees who have been both to Tyler’s and my UnConferences report there are differences (I used a moderator to help people along) but the vibe and principles work similar. People found much value in the events and much more fun than a “standard” conference.  I also host even less structured mingle/parties.

I have several reasons for this. First, I think there is much (under-rated) value in “weak social ties” (here is the wiki on the work, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties). These connections are valuable to everyone. 

Second, in particular for UnConferences you have these benefits:

Advantages

• (Easier) Discovery of people with similar project interests 

• More inclusive, less hierarchical 

• Opportunity for everyone to share ideas 

• Higher use of agency

 Although there can still be disadvantages… Disadvantages : Can be harder for introverts, can still be dominated by extravert characters and less well known norms can leave people uncertain on how to react.

if you are trying to solve problems by creating more social capital and ideas is a much better form of conference. There is much more interaction and the interaction is with like-minded peers who have typically selected themselves for a similar broad purpose. 

Lastly, there is the point on Talent that Cowen and Gross are making. These forms of unstructured meet-ups are an excellent way of gaining sense of whether you might have a talent fit if you are looking to hire or collaborate with new people. I found a recent hire this way, or perhaps, a recent hire found me this way as well - as the process is two way.

Many more soft skills, characteristics and a muce border and deeper sense of understanding about someone is discovered in these types of events. They synergise well with information you will glean from an interview but I suggest they will be much more revealing. UnConferences are also much much more fun.

ThenDoBetter Grant winner: Bryan Kam

I awarded a grant to Bryan Kam, he writes:

I am developing a methodology for healthy philosophical inquiry, which aims to provide better strategies for thinking about problems at an individual and collective level. This approach will identify warning signs in thinking and discourse. I’ll propose strategies which have worked historically to prevent us from doing either too much abstraction without testing, or too much action without reflection.

Philosophy must be contextual and alive. It is just as dangerous to leave intellectuals in an insulated realm of abstractions as it is to encourage unwise action by those with no understanding of history and theoretical context.

I think of this approach as “neither pure theory nor pure action, but both at once” or Neither/Nor for short. We need both strategies to thrive.

The current consensus is that truth is something objective and static, and that the scientific method is the only way to unveil this truth. This narrow conception of truth, which restricts how science must be practiced and communicated (“scientism”) impedes us rather than empowering us and is preventing the experimentation we need for progress. Thus, rather than something static we uncover, we should be aiming for a practical methodology for inquiry.

I do not oppose science but I believe that a narrow vision of it will limit our ability to understand the problems we face. However, I also oppose relativism and resist the modern tendency to dichotomize which makes it easy to leap to the conclusion that if there is no objective truth, then the only alternative is the opposite extreme: “everything is equal.”

As the first part of this project, I am working on an article, which will become a chapter in a book that I’m writing, about how a better understanding of philosophy and history can help innovation. This is a project I’ve been working on for the past two years (self-funding), but I’m now out of savings, just as I near the first public milestone. As part of writing the article, I plan to record podcasts and video lectures.

My main goal for this stage and for all my work is to move beyond theoretical formulations. I seek to also test and enact the conceptual framework I am elaborating, through a series of dialogical experiments. In the near future, I will look at how conceptions of selfhood have changed over time, and what impact this has had on society. I will question when a commitment to abstract truth might contribute to technological and scientific progress, and when such a commitment might impede progress. I’m also planning a practical guide to the technique of Buddhist “dependent origination,” which promises to end suffering through an analytical method. These would appear in a series of lectures, podcasts, and gatherings.

As part of this effort, I’m drafting video lectures on YouTube. You can also see a 2 minute summary of one of the main ideas here.

The microgrant has allowed me more time to make progress on this writing and the conversations that will support it.

If any of this sounds exciting, I’m searching for collaborators, so please reach out.

If you want daily updates on this work, please check out my Patreon. I post everything there, nearly all of it for free. If you just want the big news, please check out my Substack.

Shape of Friendship

Shape of friendship. I went to my friend, David Finnigan’s, performance piece at the Barbican Theatre, last week.

I took my 10 year old. From what I could tell, there were no other young people in the audience which was a shame in many respects.

A shame because this form of theatre is more relevant, more exciting, more dramatic than, say, a standard piece of Shakespeare performed in a standard type of way.

A shame because if we want to engage young people in live performance, we are still an art form where liveness and vividness counts.

You can observe this in the music gig scene which is still strong.

I also think you can engage young people in serious, fun and thoughtful art from a very young age and that’s better for everyone. In a world where rich nations are - in part - moving more digital and remote, then the importance of liveness and vividness increases.

The Barbican is a living piece of visual and performing art history. Considered a brilliant example of Brutalist architecture, it was considered by the Queen in 1982:

“...one of the wonders of the modern world”

The Barbican is built from and atop ruins from World War 2, atop ruins which stretch to Roman times, atop ruins which stretch back further.

The site is within a javelin distance of where a Roman Amphitheater used to be. There is history that stretches back and back…

Performers and audiences on occasion are sensitive to this history. I have worked in and around the Barbican area, on and off, for 20 - 30 over years.

By no means, do I see even a small sliver of everything at the Barbican but the space has held some of the most profound pieces of human expression that have occurred in modern times across music, dance, theatre and arts.

And so into that space we walk.

David is a friend and we have collaborated. You can listen to us/read on podcast here and below.

It’s a privilege then to see how a show develops (I saw it in one of its earliest incarnations) and live with its creative’s hopes and fears.

Shows performed by friends then have a special resonance. You can not watch them as strangers any more than you can watch friends kiss differently from strangers arriving at a station.

This echo plays into the lives of those who create – and we all create – so plays into all our lives.

My son can have a level of emotion and experience richer for knowing David. Especially in a piece such as this which plays to stories in David’s life.

The show I saw might well be the last time the performance is ever staged.

Certainly, it is the last time it will be staged in that time and place and audience (and so we can suggest all performance is fleeting like this). There is an aphorism which comes about in Open Space and UnConference that people in the room are the ones that matter and thus we can only have the conversations we can have.

Live performances have these lives and these lives are mostly short-lived.

There is a sensation joyous and deep in experiencing live and vivid art with other humans in a fashion never to be repeated.

At its best an urgency and richness which changes you and leaves you changed forever more.

Unlike books or even visual art, performance is not an object to last, performance is a shared experience.

Books and paintings, arguably, are not completed without a reader or a viewer but they can have a life of their own.

Performance lives when experienced together. Anything else is mostly only rehearsal.

Perhaps that is partly why performance through storytelling or dancing seems to have been around before writing and likely at the dawn of homo sapiens.

There is a sadness as well for events that can not be replayed. There is a part of us that wishes to capture part of that dream and bottle the feelings as keepsakes.

Therein lies all the countless visual snaps and videos of live gigs and events hardly ever to be viewed again. The liveness was in the moment and – if we were to be honest – never to be captured again. Live performance shared is a singular experience. Those video snaps are wasted. (Be like the lady at the top photo).

I am both happy and sad then to be part of a final showing. There near the beginning of its journey. There near its end.

David is a newer friend. We first met in the tail end of the last decade. I cherish being able to make new friends and create experiences together.

I cherish that we collaborate deeply in making art.

But, we also tell ourselves the myths that all our types of friendship last forever. Relationships form and crumble. Made and re-made.

Some burnout due to their intensity, others fade due to accidental or intentional neglect. We can be sorry for these things too.

I still have friends from school, but I think I have lost many more. That is not to devalue the friendships when those relationships are alive.

And like that – friendships also are like live performance – they thrive in shared experience, they can end in sadness and in joy, they can go on long lifetime journeys.

We can fool ourselves about them too because someone always dies, and shows always end. 

Still – we can and should nurture and celebrate them where we have them.

Tend, repair and grow – and dare I say perhaps prune – like flabby parts of performance – parts which are already dying

But, if possible, in full recognition of the joy they gave while alive.

What are the shapes of our friendships and relationships? Pocket-shaped, world-shaped, love shaped?

We would not think to measure and manage them.

And so… my tangent into “ESG” - these are the intangible (though sometimes tangible) often difficult, sometimes impossible to measure parts of business, they have a shape and importance, but exactly what that shape is… well perhaps like the shape of friendship.

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Naomi Fisher: home education, unschool, agency in learning, meltdowns, child-led learning, cognitive psychology | Podcast

Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book: Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning. The work is an excellent look at self-directed education also known in the UK as home education, or in the US as home school or unschooling.  You can follow her on Twitter here and her book is available here and her substack newsletter is here.

We discuss her background as a psychologist and her work with autistic people. We chat about her experience of eleven schools and why she has ended up asking questions about control. Why we control people and particularly why we control children.

Naomi discusses the different schools of thought on education and why progressive doesn't necessarily mean child-led education and why she likes the idea (Alison Gopnik) of a child as scientist.  

We chat about what Naomi views as  the problems of the current system such as the overuse of exams and why behvaiourism only covers a tiny slice of what learning is in the real world. Naomi highlights some of the benefit of self-directed education process and what home education can bring.

We talk about the amount of time we have spent in the world of Minecraft and why parents may be overworried about the use of technology and screen time. Why YouTube might be more beneficial than not.

Naomi answers my question on how to deal with child meltdown and outlines the idea of zones of tolerance. I pose a question on to what extent we should influence a child’s learning “syllabus” and Naomi outlines her view that a child should always have agency and not be forced into “learning” but that does not mean we should not seek to give a child a rich environment and opportunity to learn.

Naomi answers listener questions. First on if home education is only for rich people, and second the impacts of the pandemic on home educators.

We play overrated/underrated and Naomi rates: the government setting the curriculum,  the role of exams, social media and technical colleges.

Naomi talks about her latest projects including a second book on neurodiversity and self-direct education, called “A Different Way to Learn” and available in 2023.

Naomi ends with advice:

“my number one advice for parents would be trust your instincts about what your child needs and how your child is. There are a lot of parents I talk to they say, "I think that my child is really unhappy or I think that my child needs these things, but the professionals are telling me that I'm wrong." I think you need to just retain your knowledge that you know your child better and you probably have a really good sense. You don't just know your child better, but in most cases you share genes with your child. Therefore you often have a kind of intuitive understanding of the experiences that your child is having and that you can get inside their heads in a way that professionals often can't. So I would say really listen to your instincts, give yourself space to think about what you think as sort of apart from what everybody tells you, you should be thinking. The other thing is lean into the things that your child likes; whatever they are, lean into them and embrace them because this is a short time of life when they're like this and when they're young and it is an amazing opportunity to connect with them if you choose to do that rather than choosing to pull them away from the things that they love.”

Transcript below, video above or on YouTube (captions available). Podcast available wherever you get podcasts or below.

 PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

---

Transcript with Naomi Fisher (only lightly edited, expect typos etc.)

Ben

Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. Is the traditional school system failing us? And what can we learn from a child-led way of education? On this episode, I speak to Naomi Fisher. Naomi is a clinical psychologist who has studied how children learn. Her work focuses on the importance of agency and choice and putting children in control of their learning and allowing them to flourish. Hope you enjoy the show. Please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.

Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Naomi Fisher. Naomi is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book, "Changing Our Minds: How Children can take Control of their Own Learning," which is an excellent look at self-directed education, or some in the UK would say home education, or in America homeschool or unschooling. It also covers a brief history of educational thought. Naomi, welcome.

Naomi (01:03):

Thank you, Ben. It's great to be here

Ben (01:06):

Over 20 years ago, we studied experimental psychology and neuroscience together and then you went off, did some PhD work with autistic people and children. So tell me what you've learned and how you've ended up thinking about children and education and the route to where you've got to today.

Naomi (01:25):

What's happened to me since you mean.

Ben (01:27):

Yeah. Or even during.

Naomi (01:29):

Or even during, yeah. It's been a long way. It feels a long time ago that we were studying experimental psychology together. So I went off and did a PhD in autism and then I went on to do my doctorate in clinical psychology. I started working as a clinical psychologist and then I had my children. My oldest child is 14 and my youngest is 11. I had my own unusual education experience because I actually went to 11 schools when growing up. So we moved around the world. I went to schools in Botswana, I went to schools in the Congo, I went to like a state comprehensive school, I was at a boarding school. I really went through-- I was at a Steiner school at one point. I really got to try out the full range of educational experiences.

I think what that did to me was kind of fostered a slight cynicism about the claims that the education system make because as I moved from school to school, I would find that each school had quite strong an ethos about how they thought things should be done and they tended to think this is the way things always should be done. In fact, they make a big fuss about it. The thing I remember most is that I was at an international school in the Congo where no one had uniform. We came back to the UK, everyone had uniform obviously, and it was quite strictly enforced and it became an issue immediately. We were having our skirts measured as we came in the door and if your skirt was too long or too short you could be sent home. I don't remember at the time thinking this is really weird because my last school we all just wore jeans basically and nobody ever worried about it. So in fact, skirts weren't really a thing. It's weird that you made us wear this thing and now you are making it into an issue if we don't wear it the way that you want to wear it.

So I think that a kind of theme running through my whole life has been asking questions about control and why we control people and particularly why we control children. So to come back to post-study in adulthood, I did my clinical psychology doctorate and I then started working as a clinical psychologist. I had my own children and I quickly discovered that many of the things I'd learned as a clinical psychologist weren't as straightforward and simple as I thought they were. I couldn't just apply them to my own children. Also, as my children grew, I started to feel this real clash between what I'd learned as a psychologist and what I understood about how children grew and developed and what was going to happen to them in the education system. So my son was a very-- He's July birthday, summer born, very active little boy, not really interested in reading, writing at all when he was sort of approaching four. So we actually had a place for him at the school down the road; excellent primary school. I went long for the introductory day and they gave us a list of keywords and they said, "Can you teach him these words over the summer?" So I had my three year old and it was a list of words like, 'the, but, if.' They were completely out of context. I looked at this and I was like, "Wow, all of his learning up to now has been in context, meaningful for him because he thought he wanted to learn things. And suddenly, I am meant to bring this into our relationship of where I'm presenting this list of random words and I'm saying, “You need to learn how to read them." Why would I do that? What's the point actually? Won't I be teaching him things like actually reading isn't meaningful? Because it's such a thing for me that we learn when something has meaning for us.

So to cut long story short, we decided to home educate him and his sister as she came along too. And the more I did that, the more I was thinking all the time of how I thought psychological theory and what I was seeing happening in my children, that there was a really important story that needed to be told here. That I thought that the way that schools run doesn't take account of what we know of human psychology and human development. It actually in many ways makes learning hard and that maybe if we didn't do that, maybe things could be a lot easier.

Ben (05:44):

Yeah, that's really fascinating. And I guess that rolls into things like over testing and how schools are and all of that. I hadn't understood that you traveled and been to quite so many schools yourself so that's almost like a mini case study and cross-cultural studies as well as the catalyst of your own children and therefore reality coming up against theory. And obviously reality is the truth. It made me think that also in our studies if you go back in time to the time of Piaget or even before you refer to the school that Tolstoy built, that today there are kind of two broad schools of thought which have these deep historic roots. One of them-- I think they might call it constructionists, but in even words they tend to argue for this schools based, rules based, fact based, curriculum based system, where from facts and these kind of learn knowledge does everything flow.

Then the other school of thought which I guess you could call progressive, but in the sense tends to be child centered, emphasizes child agency and choice and curiosity driven learning. Has actually been around probably for longer actually, if you go back all the way to thought. Some people can even trace it to ancient Greece thought. A lot of your ideas seem to center close into the second school of thought but seem grounded in your psychological studies and things. I was just interested in what you think is maybe misunderstood and how you arrived there from, was it observing both your children and autistic people and just knowing, well, these are how we're meant to, or you seem to develop. We use real world situations, we learn in situ, we don't learn these kind of funny stripped down psychological tests which are very important for psychological models but don't affect how our learning works, and then this kind of joy or learning or curiosity which we see and I think a lot of people see in very young children. You can't stop them asking questions and things. And then this observation that a lot of people have, it stops them. It stops partly because parenting or adults or the system kind of tells it to stop. So I was kind of intrigued how that all catalyzed and come together and whether you'd have any comments about my characterization of the kind of history of those two schools or thought was approximately correct.

Naomi (08:21):

Yeah. I mean, when people say to me, which they sometimes do, "Your ideas are progressive," I generally say, "I think there's a different school of thought that's progressive." Because I think for me, the thing that is key about the way I see education and the way I see thought and learning and child development, is that how the child feels about what they're doing is really important. How the kind of center of the child being the person who is exploring the world. I love this idea from Alison Gopnik, “A child is scientist.” Child exploring, child asking questions, child hypothesizing. And I could really see that in my young children. It was just happening all the time. Then I came across the traditional ideas like the... I was interested because they used cognitive psychology to back it up.

They say these are cognitive science ideas and I was like, "That's really interesting," because I studied cognitive science for a long time and this is one part of it, but they didn't boil it down to this. When we did learning memory and cognition they didn't say, “We've stopped learning. This is how it works. This is the model. What we need to do is seat the children in rows, tell them what to do, test them frequently, do lots of retrieval practice, and they'll all get good test results and that's learning.” They didn't did they? What I basically learned in those courses was that learning's really complicated and that there's loads of different things going on here. I remember actually a supervision we had particularly at university where we were talking about learning and our supervisor said, "It's so easy to just reduce children down all the time. We're kind of reducing them down to this set of boxes.” But they're actual children and they're people and they're complex and they've got so much else going on. When we start reducing them to a set of boxes, what have we lost? And of course, I wasn't a parent at the time and I don't think I really got that until I had my own children. It's much easier to reduce children down to a set of boxes when you are not living with a three year old and seeing how it doesn't fit.

But I really wanted-- Part of me, whenever I see something that doesn't jive with me; like this particular thing about the best way for children to learn is to seat them in rows and tell them what they need to know. When I find something like that that doesn't jive with me, my first instinct is to understand why they say it. I want to go and find out. So I go and read all the stuff about why this is right. I read all the books and I listen to the podcasts and I really try and get in depth about why they think this is right, because when I understand why they think that, then I could start to develop my own critique. So that's very much what I did with that. But I thought even when I read-- because I also read about the kind of more progressive people, and I still felt that often in the field of more progressive education there's still something missing. And it's still who is in control of this whole process. You can read very progressive educators and it's all about how to form this, how to get the children to do what we think they should be doing.

So let's give you a really good example. Lots of schools are set up along the lines of children spending loads of time on outdoor play. That's their ethos and they have this idea of childhood they would definitely call themselves progressive. They would say, "Childhood is all about play, particularly about outdoor play; unstructured, outdoor play. Let's provide them with loads of time to play in the forest and we'll have sussed childhood." Obviously that's not. That’s a gross characterization of what they do but that's the ethos. Then you come across the child who wants to spend all their time playing on Minecraft and the child who doesn't want to be in the forest; who finds that quite kind of-- They just don't know what to do with themselves where they're unstructured play in the forest.

And then the model doesn't work because although it's meant to be this model for everybody, in fact, it only suits certain children. I think you find that across the board. When the model actually meets the child and when they meet a whole range of children, then that's when you see the problems. So that's why for me the key thing I always ask when I'm looking at any educational model is, "Does the child have agency here? Can they choose to leave?" And if they can choose to leave, then I think that makes all the difference. I think this is what is a big difference with home education and kids in school and I think you see parents go through this learning process when their kids don't go to school or come out of school, which is that children at home have a lot more power because they're in their homes. They have their stuff upstairs. They have their things that they do. If they really don't want to do what you're doing with them, generally they can stand up and walk out, and they do. Whereas at school they can't do that. Just that simple fact means that home educators have to get alongside their children in a different way. They cannot rely on control, peer pressure, "You can't leave this classroom because there's nowhere to go. If you get up and walk out, there will be consequences." They just can't rely on that. So they have to find a different way forward.

Ben (13:34):

Sure. That makes a lot of sense. So under this language you got traditional schools and we can come back to maybe how Victorians kind of set it up to control their population to read and write because they needed to power the industrial revolution and all of the thinking around that. You might have progressive schools but they may not be child centered or child-led .

Naomi (14:01):

Well they think of themselves as child-led.

Ben (14:02):

Yes. But if you force people to be in the woods, that's potentially the same errors as forcing people to be in the classroom because the child doesn't have agency and the learning is not child-led. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I've now met  - like you -  and actually to my initial surprise, many people who were unhappy at school. So I was pretty happy at school. I go back and ask a lot of my friends there and things. Again, this is not a significant end, you probably have the study. But I would say at least half of them weren't that happy and then another quarter were kind of neutral. So I would say maybe half was sort of saying, "School, average to below average." Another quarter was sort of, "No average, that's fine." And then maybe only a quarter were in my camp who actually actively got quite a lot of it. And I reflected that that's a really small number. Then I've seen some studies which seem to say-- Well, the surveys are always a little bit tricky, but seems to kind of hone in on the same number. 

Now I've met many people who are homeschooled-- They tend to say this in America whereas in the UK they prefer home education to that distinguishing between the structure school, or in the US they might say unschooled people or some people say deschooled if you've been in school and then that-- who have turned out to be pretty happy growing up. I'm not quite sure maybe why I've met quite so many now, but I have, and they've gone through a different route and they've ended up roughly in the same place given all everything. I think actually every one of them I've met have had essentially their curiosity intact and everything else, not saying that some other typical schoolers might not have, but some of them it seems to have died out which I kind of also find really interesting.

And I guess maybe another blob for me is seeing people who are either autistic or have had other needs or learned differently or things like that. I've seen a lot of them now also if they've been able to go into a different way of learning or system outside this institution and they have flourished; obviously not for everyone and everything and there's all of these complications around it. I've also found that observation really interesting. If the stats system is not working for so many people, why can that be and can we not do more about it? I don't know whether that resonates with you and if you've heard of any thoughts around how that is or whether you feel that's maybe right in the kind of work that you've done.

Naomi (16:43):

Yeah. I think it's really interesting that you say that so many of your peers weren't happy at school because I'm thinking-- I can't remember where you went to school, but I think you went to somewhere that was perceived as an excellent school, right?

Ben (16:57):

Yes.

Naomi (16:57):

The interesting thing for me was that in my tour through 11 different schools of the world, I went to schools that I really loved and I also went to schools that I really hated. So I had that experience for myself. I particularly had the experience actually of having been mostly socially okay at school and I went to one particular school where I was suddenly the outcast. It was when we came back from Congo and I went into this school where they had all been together as a class since they were like five. It was one of these schools where they kept everyone together. I went there and I was the one that nobody liked and it was horrible. But what was so interesting for me is that there was a boy in the class as well who nobody liked. I remembered from previous school experiences that there were so often the child who nobody liked and nobody would play with, but I'd never been them before. I remember that moment of thinking I haven't changed. I'm still the same person.

At my last school I had friends, I was happy, I was a valued member of the community. Here, I'm the outcast that nobody wants to have anything to do with. And it just made me think even at the time at 14, the environment that you are in makes such a difference to different people, but also that there's no fixed right environment for people. We can't provide one environment which is right for all young people and children. It's a bit like the Forest school. Parents go and see these schools and they think this is so lovely, it's so beautiful. Then the child gets there and they're like, "This isn't for me." So a school that for you could have been wonderful and excellent and exactly what you wanted for one of your peers could have been a frightening and hostile place, and it's the same school because it's about what we bring and how that interacts with our environment.

Ben (18:55):

Exactly. And that's it. My school is really high regarded and actually let me follow my curiosity a lot. I ended up doing A-level art, as well as theater, as well as sciences at A-level...

Naomi (19:07):

Which is amazing because you’d have to wait to university to do science.

Ben (19:11):

Yeah. Actually, I still did theater and all of that. But I know a lot of people who were unhappy, so it definitely does that. And I still remember the silly quirks which I sort of felt like that. "Like wow, uniform." I really clearly remember that you couldn't wear a colored jumper and it just seemed really ridiculous to me, but also it is not something which I know impacted me that much, but I still remember to this day. You wouldn't class that in any form of trauma, but the fact that I remember something so clearly from almost 30 years ago obviously had that sort of impact. Then I really see it now thinking about the autistic community because it's so obvious that autistic thinkers often don't work very well in school institutions.

But then I observe that and I observe it in a whole range of autistic thinkers and it strikes me that a lot of what applies to them actually applies to people who don't have such an autistic cognitive profile as well. So it kind of goes the other way. It's kind of like, "Yeah, well, what should we be learning for what autistic thinkers might do or need or think?" Some of that might be sensory. Some of that is following the center led for where you are there. So I guess I'm kind of interested in what do you think are the barriers in the system? I think in the UK the government has made it harder. The US is sort of a movement which depending on the state, seems to go sort of in parallel and fly under the regulatory radar, but they have a slightly different cultural ethos in some of them and actually they've also got a faith based things for that. So it'd be interesting what you think are the barriers and maybe what we could do or think about making it easier or particularly if you're interested in this kind of area.

Naomi (21:12):

Well, I think it's interesting that you bring up autistic thinkers then because I really think that autistic adults and autistic children highlight the drawbacks in the system. Clearly they show us that the system doesn't work for everybody. And unfortunately what happens often is that there's a kind of attitude. We kind of say, "Well, okay, so these people have special educational needs. They're different. They need something different, but it's okay for everybody else." I don't think our system is really okay for most of us. It works on its own terms, but that's because the terms that have been set are usually quite limiting. We are basically saying, "How do we get children to get to this end where they pass their GCSE and they pass their A levels?" That is the aim of this whole system that we're doing. For most kids that's what it's like. It's not always that there are some exceptional schools which don't take that approach.

But once we've defined that end point as we want you to get the top grades that you can in these GCSEs, then we've limited what we are thinking that this child is going to do through their education. When I talk to parents of autistic children or of children with special education needs, they're often more open to thinking about different ways of doing things I think because partly they can see so clearly that their child isn't going to thrive in that convention system. Whereas it's harder for parents who maybe think that their child might do well in the system to see the emotional damage that it's doing to them or the other damage. And I suppose the other part of my puzzle of what came in for me was that I worked as a clinician. I'm a clinical psychologist. I work with adults as well as young people and children. I know as a psychologist that when somebody comes along feeling powerless and feeling they have no control over things, it's associated with all sorts of negative feelings about themselves and also all sorts of difficulties with making changes in their life that they might want to make changes about.

It just seemed weird to me that we sort of induce that sense of powerlessness in our children. That we say to them for example, "You can't wear a colored jumper." Educationally, I can't see what the justification would be for saying, "Everybody has to have the identical jumper." It's control. It's about controlling young people. If you go to school from the start and maybe particularly if you're a relatively high achiever and therefore you get lots of approval at school and lots of validation, you kind of slowly get into this system of control. By the time you're 17 or 18 you are so used to being told exactly what you have to wear, exactly how you've got to cut your hair, the shoes you wear; all of that kind of stuff. You don't even really question it anymore because it's just how it's always been. I suppose that was something I really noticed coming in and out of the UK system. A different system didn't have those requirements and seemed to manage fine. So why did the UK think it was so important to have that control?

Ben (24:24):

I guess it's that all about agency. I'm not from the school of thought so probably I'm going to do that argument weaker. But I guess someone like the Michaela School or something would argue, "Well, uniforms make this certain culture, you follow certain rules, and that will help learning. You have less choice..." Describing it badly because to me it's like that is a controlling systems and you're preparing people for the workplace, but what sort of work you want them to do. But there is this idea that I think they argue, fun rules or routine and then they go fast to say that knowing a lot of knowledge comes through that. And I guess maybe it's because it's roots of just understanding. I think you mentioned this in the book; just a tiny slice of what behaviorism or Pavlovian learning has done, which is not the whole of learning. It's a certain section of learning for a certain thing and they've carried it through to a very far conclusion in a straight line drawing of just two or three little dots which are definitely true in themselves.

Naomi (25:39):

Tiny slice is a lovely way of putting it because I think it applies to the cognitive stuff as well.

Ben (25:45):

I mean, it's obviously true in its little thing.

Naomi (25:47):

It works. That when people say, "There's not a problem with the science, there isn't a problem with the behavioral science as it is defined and how it is used. There's not a problem with the cognitive science." The studies do show what they say they say that's absolutely indisputable. The problem is that when that becomes your approach to childhood and learning and education and everything, when you talk about creating a culture, I suppose my question would be, why do we want to create a culture of conformity? Because that's what we're doing. We are creating a culture of conformity and our people often say, "We set up these rules and regulations and things and children will learn these things and then they'll carry them all the way through life." Well, okay. But you know, carrying the-- I don't know how useful that is in terms of let's train our children to conform and not to question and to do what they're told without making a fuss about it.

Well, that only takes you so far in life really. I'm sure I'm not alone-- I know I'm not alone in this kind of feeling. I observed in my peers which was that we went through all the process of education. We were all high achievers at university. That's why we were there because we'd done well in the system. We got to there and then you come to the end and then you're like, "Well, now what? People have basically been telling me what to do all the way through this system. Now I've got to the point where I'm not being told what to do anymore and I'm maybe 24. I've never really made big, significant choices about my life." And I think it's really at odds with the cognitive neuroscience findings which are showing that in order to develop that system in your brain; the prefrontal cortex, the part that enables us to make decisions, we need those experiences. Have you read Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's work about the adolescent brain?

Ben (27:39):

Not yet.

Naomi (27:39):

I think her stuff fits so well with what I talk about because I think what's happening when we have self-direct education is that we are giving young people lots of practice in making those kinds of decisions; in making decisions for themselves. We know that part of the brain matures in an experienced dependent way. So if we give children lots and lots of experience of doing what they're told, keeping the rules, not stepping out of line, then that's what they're learning. It's all learning, I suppose. I'm frustrated at the way that schools define learning as the stuff that's in the curriculum because I think we have to look at everything that a child is doing at school. They're learning from all of it. Actually from my own memories of school, what I learned outside the classroom has stuck with me much longer than the actual stuff I learned in the classroom.

Ben (28:30):

Sure. Obviously I'm going to agree with all of that. I guess I'll go a step further. When I look now out into the world and you think about what governments or people claim they want; so innovation, new ideas, creativity, critical skills thinking, they've got all fancy terms for it. But you think where do new discoveries come from? Where do you push ideas which haven't been thought before? Well, they don't tend to come from conforming to the system. They do not tend to come from a bureaucracy because by their nature they are, "Well, whatever the rules are set for me." So when the rules are wrong, either scientifically or morally, if you've been told to just conform to them, well, that's no good because you'll be following something as a false premise.

You need to somehow have learned to question something either scientifically, morally, or whatever. A school system or any system which has taught you just to obey doesn't get there. And I think this is where it goes to the roots I briefly mentioned, or we mentioned; is Victorian roots. Because they did or purposely wanted a system of control. We can argue rightly or wrongly about how important that was for the industrial revolution where people were a lot poorer and no one could read and write. But to use a system which has basically... I don't know what-- Maybe you would probably know more, but hasn't really evolved in 150 years of thinking whereas the cognitive science, even educational pedagogy in its kind of small fields seem to have gone on a quantum leap in knowledge the way we school has not.

And there's not too many areas. Although there's some like maybe buildings, actually. We haven't seem to made a quantum leap in there. But in a lot of the knowledge rich industry, I find that's really fascinating about why is it? Do we not seem to know? Again, there's not been huge worldwide studies on it. But I would guess if you could do a controlled trial of a few thousand people who go through some form of child centered learning in any of its variation, and you control that to some control form in any of its variations, I think you'll end up with better outcomes for those. And maybe the academic outcomes of having that will be roughly equal. But I think all of the other outcomes in terms of critical thinking or happiness or anxiety and all of those from what I'm thinking would be higher. I would strongly bet quite a lot on that hypothesis, but I haven't seen the study. I don't think the study will be done.

Naomi (31:27):

No one's done the study.

Ben (31:27):

Why are there not 10 thousands of those studies as opposed to...?

Naomi (31:30):

Because school is the invisible intervention, isn't it? I didn't realize until I thought about not sending my children to school. I didn't realize that everything I had been taught in my developmental psychology courses at university, in my PhD, everything, assumed that all the children were at school and didn't even mention it because the assumption was that they were always at school. It's been such an interesting ride for me watching my own children but also watching children around me because of course, I now know lots of other children who don't go to conventional school. Thinking to myself, "Wow. I wonder how many of the things that I was taught as child development and how humans develop was actually child development in the context of school." Because 30 hours a week is a massive intervention. We do these controlled studies for psychology interventions. It's one hour a week. We think that 12 hours once a week is a lot. In the NHS that's a lot. 20 sessions is quite a long term intervention.

They're at school for 30 hours a week and nobody ever set up the random control style at the beginning. The Victorians definitely didn't say, "We'll, just see if these children are in a rich learning environment where other people are literate.” That is really important because people always say to me, "Are you saying children will just learn?" No, you need these things in your environment. Of course there are children all over the world who aren't learning to read and write because their environment doesn't have the necessary information for them to do that. The adults around them can't read and write. That's part of what the Victorians were working with.

The Victorians were thinking, “We have a largely illiterate population. We need them to be literate. Let's get the children in, we can deliver this, and they will learn how to do it.” And it worked. But we are not in that situation now. Our population is largely literate. We don't know what children learn when they don't go to school simply from being around other people, following their interests. It was such a moment for me when I was looking into this when I was thinking about not sending my children to school. I looked at the research done on self-direct education and on schooling and I was thinking, "Wow. So if it really is true that you don't have to go to school and you come out at a quite similar place but without having had lots of the difficult experiences lots of people have at school, why don't more people know about this?" Because people feel trapped in school and I think that's a serious issue. It's definitely an issue for many autistic people and parents of autistic children. That they feel like, "This is really going wrong. I think this is doing a lot of damage to my child but I don't think there's anything else I can do. We are told school is the only way.” I think schooling works and I think the most effective thing it teaches us is that we must be schooled. We have to go to school, and we are taught that right from the age of three, right through until we're 18.

Ben (34:28):

Yeah. I guess there is another way. I think anecdotally if you go back to the Victorians, their rich elites didn't do the school system.

Naomi (34:36):

They had something different.

Ben (34:37):

So there is a sort of not quite paired control, but you can see how, and they did quite well. And I think I do see some studies that's not necessarily always child-led, but tend to be these small group mastery type of things but often are actually very influenced by what the child wants to do. It's often like a child and adult choose, or there's a sort of selection of choice. It's not a hundred percent child-led, but it's not, "Oh, we're going to do this." So they end up if they want to do maths all week or whatever they go, "Okay. We'll do that." So it's not quite a hundred percent 0% curriculum or that. It's interesting now if you think about it sort of maybe turning to some of the practice rather than in the theory and we can go a little bit as to what it might mean to deschool. But even if you're not-- I guess I'm moderately a techno optimist about the world and I think people miss a lot about how children use technology in the same way that I think people were really worried about reading newspapers a couple of hundred years ago and things.

So for instance, I spent I'm pretty sure hundreds of hours in the worlds of Minecraft with both of my sons; one who's more of an autistic thinker, one who's probably a little bit less of an autistic thinker, and I've seen whole worlds open up. Some of them have used this kind of discord chat thing, there's a whole community out there. It's not necessarily adults excluded, but most adults I know, certainly if you're over the age of 40 will typically not know anything about these discord communities and they are some of the biggest communities in the world. I learned so much about creativity, what they might think, how they think, and some of these decisions that you make in a world of digital pixels, but which actually does reflect our own world. I was wondering what you think about how people use technology as well, or I guess it comes to what you sort of said earlier. You can lean into technology or you can lean into time in the woods. It kind of depends on how the child is learning. But do you find that people, parents or families are almost-- they can be too technology phobic if that is what their child is learning?

Naomi (36:51):

Definitely. It's one of the number one things that families come to me worried about. Screen time is what they say. "I'm really worried about screen time. They've got way too much screen time," particularly if children come out of school. Because when you're in school, you have all these hours every day when you can't be on your device because you're at school and you're not allowed to take your device with you. Then you come back and you have to be in bed by a certain time. Your whole day is structured in a way that means that you can't spend eight hours of it playing Minecraft. And then the child's now home educated and they will be--

Ben (37:23):

They can do eight hours playing Minecraft.

Naomi (37:25):

They can spend eight hours playing Minecraft. I also have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing Minecraft. Some of the best memories when my children were little were us all playing Minecraft together. I think there are many different ways that children use technology. But I do think that fear-- When I talk to parents who are frightened of it-- and I talk to a lot of them, they often have very little idea of what their children are actually doing on it. Typically they'll say things like, "It's so isolating. They're not connecting with other people. It's passive." They have all these words that trot out. None of them really make any sense to me when I spend time with my children on a screen because it's generally not too passive. Minecraft is certainly. If you're passive, you're not going to get anywhere in Minecraft. You just get there, you sit there, and nothing happens until you're killed by a zombie or something. You have to be active. But also, there's so much that children can do on their devices. It's a place where they can feel really competent. One of the theories I write about in my book is self-determination theory and I think it's a lot of what underpins self-direct education. It says there are three things children need or adults need in order to have this kind of intrinsic motivation. It's autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Competence is this kind of feeling, "I can do it." Doesn't have to be being good at something. It's this sort of sense of this is something I could do. I think you see children getting that in Minecraft when they don't get it anywhere else.

I often work with parents whose children are really unhappy at school, are really struggling and video games are the only place they're really happy and their parents are worried about it. I think that's so sad because the only thing which is really bringing this child to life is the thing that their parent is trying to limit. So I always say to parents, get alongside them, sit with them, learn how to play it. And they say, "I don't know how to start with Minecraft." I say, watch the YouTube videos. There are loads of YouTube videos showing you how to get started with Minecraft. Just go in there and have a go. I've actually played enormous numbers of video games with my son in particular. My son is really into video games. The interesting thing is that neither of my children have limits on how much time they can spend on their device and that has always been the case. My son now at 14 is spending a lot of his time coding. So he played games a lot and now he is making games all the time, writing games. He's taught himself how to code using Codeacademy and he's in game development basically, most of the time. My daughter isn't really into spending any time on a device. She's into making stuff and she always has been. She's into constructing, painting; she's really creative with her hands. People often say to people, "What about addiction? Aren't you worried about addiction?" And I mean, we both know as psychologist addiction is about so much more than the 'thing.' You can be addicted to all sorts of things. But it's not just about the 'thing.'

Alcohol is a prime example. Alcohol is all around in our studies. Some people are addicted to alcohol, some people aren't. Why is that? It's generally about everything in their lives and the way that they're using alcohol. I do see some children who I think are using withdrawal into a video game because the rest of their life is so unhappy and they are very attached to it. Parents will say, "We try and get them off it and they shout and scream. They must be addicted." And I'd say, "No. You need to think about what's going on in the whole rest of their life. Let's think about that. Let's make that better." Limiting the thing that they really enjoy, banning it, or making it restricted, isn't going to make their life happier. We can pretty well guarantee that. I think the more that parents lean into it, the less fearful it becomes because the more they can see what their children actually do.

Ben (41:16):

It's their happy place. My youngest has taught me-- In fact, both of them have through these YouTube videos because a bunch of them teach better than most teachers. A whole range of esoteric thought from wars in China, how the US Senate works, to the latest in alternative proteins. Actually, the sheer variety.

Naomi (41:41):

It's amazing. And then they bring it out, don't they?

Ben (41:43):

Exactly.

Naomi (41:44):

And it's such a surprise. They're like--, and you're like, "Oh, okay."

Ben (41:46):

"Yeah, I didn't know that." Why should we persuade? You made this point in the book. That's kind of what-- I would use the term, that's what adulting is. Adults you go, you find this thing and you... I think adults spend probably-- Most people in knowledge work industries if they're gone into that, they're on their screens eight to 10 hours. Some of it is in Excel spreadsheets, but some of it is on Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is. I'm interested what else practically maybe our own stories then? So I did a lot of Minecraft, you did a lot of Minecraft. We do some handcrafting as well. But what else have you learned from your children do you think? What are a couple of pivotal things or skills or maybe anything which has surprised you or not surprised you?

Naomi (42:27):

Okay. So there are loads of things that have surprised me. One thing that surprised me was when we started out with this, I had the assumption which I think lots of parents have which is that play-based learning is great when they're younger and that our system cuts that off too short, too early. Four or five is too early to stop playing to try and channel them into more formal education. So I thought, "Well, let them play for longer. And by the time they're about seven, they'll probably be ready for some more formal work." You read about education systems in Denmark where they don't start more formal education until eight. And I was like, "Okay, that'll be fine. They get to seven." In no way were they in any way interested in any kind of formal work. In fact, by the time they got to seven, I would say that the gap between them and what a school child was doing had widened. And I was perhaps thinking it wouldn't. I was thinking that they would mature and it would sort of shrink. Actually, it just widened and widened and widened. Because what I saw was that they were developing in a different way. 

Both of my children learnt to read much later than I would've expected them to. We are very literate environment. I learnt to read at the age of about three. I love reading. We have books everywhere. I thought that they would be reading early. My son learnt to read between the age of about eight and 10. The first word that I knew he read-- well kind of, he looked at a sign on the road and he said, "Does that say zombie?" Now you're going to get the reference of why he was able to read the word zombie. It didn't say zombie, it said zone. Minecraft is this amazing game where everything has the name underneath. So he started reading things like obsidian and all these words that he learned from Minecraft and it took a long time as well. People sometimes say, "They start learn to read, it all clicks into place." And I was like, "Okay, we've started to learn to read. Now it'll all click into place." It was actually about two years before he was a fluent reader. Now, he's a really fluent reader. He's just read the Lord of the Rings. He's an enthusiastic reader. He reads books for pleasure all the time and yet he wasn't doing that. So I think that really surprised me.

The other thing that I saw which I think is really important is how lots of children sort of cycled round to doing things in a way that I think school stops people doing. So talking particularly about imaginative play. I noticed that lots of children that I saw around me would've been either, they were autistic-- They might have had diagnosis, might not have had diagnosis. But many children weren't playing imaginatively in those early years which as a clinical psychologist, been taught looking for this, looking for them to be playing imaginatively in these early years really important, they should be doing all this. Quite a few of the children I saw around me weren't doing that. They were much more interested in facts and feelings or Minecraft or doing other stuff. But what I would see is that as they got older, they would start playing imaginatively. At a much later age like eight or nine, at the point where many schooled children had really moved on from that stage completely. And it was often connected to the video games they played. So I'd see a lot of children playing real life Minecraft, real life Plants versus Zombies.

And again, their parents would have sometimes a slightly denigrating approach to that. They kind of say, "Well, it's not like real imaginative play because it's derived from this other stuff." But I would be like, "It is real. It's in their imagination." In fact, I think a lot of imaginative play goes on in Minecraft. And I think for lots of autistic kids in particular, that's where loads of imaginative stuff goes on and it's not really seen by the adults around them because what they're looking for when they're thinking about imagination is tea parties and playing school and all this kind of teddy bears and dolls. As play gets more sophisticated, if children were allowed to continue to play without being stopped from doing so, we haven't really got a roadmap for how that becomes so much more sophisticated and that was just a moment of real insight for me and interest.

Ben (46:40):

Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So I'm going to ask for two free pieces of consulting, if I may then.

Naomi (46:47):

Okay.

Ben (46:48):

So one is a question of again, practically around this area. I have a lot of discussion with people around giving children this wide choice. So parents often feel like, "I want to have a basic level of maths, or you've done it with reading and things like that. I want to give them choice, but that." And I guess the sort of pure child centered way of thinking is that, "Well, you keep the environment rich and they will fall into it in terms of reading and things like that.” But I hear a lot particularly on the math bit as well, and maybe reading has come from that time. How do you balance or do you even balance some of the things you might want to expose your children to? Maybe because you just really love it yourself. So I guess part of it is I do my sort of things like podcasting and children may or may not naturally pick up yours. But I do get this thing from others that just talk about, "I'm really worried. I need to do this," or to what level can you shape a curriculum or not on your thinking around that? Then my second question around this is maybe this tends to be sometimes a little bit more for people in an autistic profile, but not only is-- Sometimes we all-- whether actually adults or children, is we kind of lose control. I really don't like the word tantrum because actually in my view, mostly it is not. It tends to be a sensory overload or something hasn't gone things, or it's not triggered in that.

So we work a lot on trying to get regulation and emotional regulation and we can talk about the development of that in that. But again, I know a lot of people within this and particularly, I guess within a home education environment they're kind of worried about, "We don't have the techniques and methods for dealing with dysregulation or where it goes really wrong." Some people might hit out or some people might do whatever there is. So I guess those are my two thoughts that you have from your field and your experience. So one is I guess the kind of more positive learning aspect. How do we think about giving that really wide range of richness and is it okay to nudge or not, depending on all things? And the second is on the other side of like when things are slightly going wrong, when they do it or people get dysregulated, how should we think about that? Is there a different way? This is probably because they would've exhausted all of the other things that they're normally being told about this type of behavior and this has led to it which is why they're now thinking of that. So I think we can assume that a lot of the 'regular ways' have been done.

Naomi (49:41):

Okay. So let me start with the maths. So a lot of people say that to me as well. They say, "Isn't it so important that we can't just leave it up to chance." I usually say, "In my opinion, things that are really important are too important to make children do, because we know-- I don't have the studies to mind, but we know that an awful lot of children finished the school system thinking they can't do maths or actually not able to do basic maths. You can be taught maths for 11, 12 years and come out in the end still struggling with basic number concept. It isn't a guarantee. So the way I see self-diverse education really is that we are providing the opportunities and the environment for learning to occur. The moment that we bring in compulsion we have messed that up a bit, basically. The moment we've said, "You must do this," we've taken away some of that ideal intrinsic motivation environment which is going to change the child's relationship with that thing. So some children might be like, "Yeah, I love maths. That's great. I don't mind if we're going to do math every morning because I really enjoy it." Okay. That's fine. That child's intrinsic motivation probably won't be bother. I actually was a math lover and I was a bit like that. What frustrated me in maths was I was always like it was just boring because I'd done it all. Once I was allowed to accelerate in maths, I love maths so I would be doing maths for the joy of it.

But also, there's nothing in self-directed education which says you can't offer stuff, make suggestions, have it in your environment. The bit that you can't do is compel them to do it. So we have maths and stuff around. We had like maths manipulatives when they were little and those-- whatever they called them, can't remember. You know when you have all the different number cubes and all that kind of stuff, we had it all around. You by doing this podcast, your sons are going to be exposed to that as a thing that's happening. If they're interested, they know how they can go and learn more about podcasting. They may never be, and they may not choose to. If you said to them, "You must learn about podcasting. One of my aims for your education is that you will come out of this able to make a good podcast at the end of it," the likelihood is that you would immediately-- I don't know what your sons would be like. But certainly if I said that to my children, that will probably pretty well guarantee that they weren't going to learn how to do podcasting.

Ben (52:07):

In fact, never podcast ever in their entire lifetime.

Naomi (52:13):

Exactly. When you have a child like this-- my son is like this, I think they're such a gift because they make you really alert to any kind of hidden agenda. My best Minecraft story is that I read stuff about Minecraft online when my son was quite young and I thought Minecraft would be great. I thought we should do it. I suggest it to my son and he would not even look at it. For like a good year afterwards he was like, "No, I downloaded it. I bought it on the iPod. I downloaded it." I said, "Oh, let's look at this game." He was like, "No, I'm not interested." And that was kind of his approach to suggestions from me at this stage in his life. Every time I would bring it up, I'd try to casually bring it up and he'd be like, "Nope, we're not playing that boring game." The only reason we got into Minecraft was we were at some gathering, he saw another child building a house in Minecraft and he was like, "Oh, actually I’d quite like to have a go at that." Didn't comment. Didn't say anything about the fact we'd have it on the iPod for a year. But he had to come to it in his own way. And I think that's the case for so many kids. He has played Minecraft. He's sort of almost coming to the end of his Minecraft playing now, but he has been playing Minecraft for like eight years and it has developed along with him. It's amazing to see they start code... They can code and everything in Minecraft, but I almost killed it at the beginning by being too enthusiastic.

His math story is really interesting because I learned from things like the Minecraft, I learned that I needed to really keep back off. Provide opportunities, but don't push them. Don't make them a compulsion because the moment you do that, you've introduced that element potentially of resistance. So he did no maths at all until he was 12. I didn't introduce any kind of formal mathematics. We had workbooks, I had them around, but he wasn't interested. Didn't want to look at them, didn't want to do it, so I didn't do it. Then he went to this place that he's at now, the Self Managed Learning College in Hove where they have learning advisors and where you can you can say, "I want to learn this" and they will help you do it. And the learning advisors will do a group. So they do one-to-ones on you, but again, it has to come from you. They're not going to say, "Right now, you need to do math." He started doing maths, he absolutely loves maths. He's now two years in and he's working sort of above a GCSE level. Having done nothing and really nothing until he was 12. I think it's just because he watches videos like you're saying about YouTube. He looks up videos about maths on YouTube. He watches stuff. He even at some point said, "I'm going to go back and just go through the whole of Khan Academy and look at all the earlier maths in case I've missed anything” because he's motivated.

So when you are motivated you learn these things in a whole different way. I think because the school system takes away that motivation from children, because it says, "This is what you have to learn, we decided what you're going to have to learn," things take a really long time and they have to be done in a slow and ponderous way. Then because we are mostly schooled, we come out thinking that's how it had to be done. We think you had to have 12 years of maths, for example, or you'd never be a mathematician. But actually I think a lot of that early stuff is what people are learning is maths is hard, maths is something that I'm not really good at, I don't know how to work this out. They're learning all those things along with the maths. If we just back off from it, they don't learn those things. But I don't think there's anything to stop parents having an influence. Sometimes parents sort of equate unschooling or self-direct education as we don't do anything unless they bring it. That isn't what it's about. It's just about it's here round, but we don't make you do it. We don't insist.

Ben (55:56):

It's the agency point.

Naomi (55:57):

Yeah.

Ben (55:58):

What happens when children get dysregulated sort of the other side?

Naomi (56:03):

So, okay. I guess it's another thing that's important to know that that isn't something that schools have got sassed.

Ben (56:09):

Not at all.

Naomi (56:11):

So it's not like we're-- The maths people are going to say, "Well, they math at school, they'd be doing maths." So lots of children have math down.

Ben (56:18):

Isn't this even worse, like go and sit in isolation on the naughty step or something?

Naomi (56:23):

Yes.

Ben (56:26):

At least maths works for some people in school. I think dysregulation bit works for basically no one, but anyway, I'm interested in your thoughts.

Naomi (56:36):

So, one way that I find helpful to think about this is basically that what happens is that when children have accumulation of stresses around them, they get pushed over the point of what they can manage and we come out of the window of tolerance. Do you know about the window of tolerance idea? Should I talk about that briefly?

Ben (56:55):

Yes.

Naomi (56:56):

So the idea of the window of tolerance is that we all have a zone in which we can cope with psychological stresses. We can cope with the things that happen to us. We're calm and engaged, we're able to learn. If something happens, we're able to manage it. We're able to be flexible within that zone basically. If things happen that pushes out of that zone, we go two ways. We either go into the fight or flight response which is a kind of danger response. It's the kind of I need to fight something or I need to run away, or we can go into a kind of more shutdown response; a freeze response or the foreign response which is kind of like going floppy, submitting. Those are all responses that are designed to keep us safe. That's the survival part of our brain. It's a pretty primitive part and it's basically our brain trying to keep us alive. It's responding to threat and it's responding as if the threat is a wild animal. If you're about to be attacked by a lion, really your choices are-- Well, with the lion fighting it's probably not going to be great unless it's maybe a baby lion. But you're going to run away, you're going to fight it, you're going to freeze hope it doesn't notice, or you're going to fall and you're going to play dead. And you're going to hope that it'll just kind of back you around and then go off.

So when children go out of their window of tolerance they go into this zone where they're not really processing information rationally anymore because when you're in your survival system, your point is about keeping yourself alive. It's not about listening carefully to what's being said to you. So I think what parents can often find is that if their children have quite a narrow window of tolerance sometimes, and we expect toddlers to have a narrow window of tolerance. We know that toddlers often get out of their window of tolerance because they're offered the wrong color cup, for example, or because their food is slightly darker or they haven't got chicken nuggets today, or the chicken nuggets are a slightly different shape to how they're meant to be, or it's dinosaurs rather than chickens. All sorts of things can push children out of their window of tolerance and then they have these meltdowns. We expect children to grow out of that relatively quickly and lots of children don't. This is a bit like I was talking about before that we have this kind of schooled form of thinking about how development should happen. That by the time children are four or five they should be past this stage. They should not be going into these meltdowns anymore. They should be able to regulate themselves better. Loads of children can't. Loads of children need more help with it.

So I think the number one thing for me is seeing that as distress, seeing it as an overwhelmed child, and seeing it as a situation which you're not going to be able to rationalize that child out at all, you're not going to be able to punish that child out at all, you're not going to be able to do something right and then it will all go away. Effectively in that moment it's just about we need to calm the nervous system down, we need to help soothe you, to help you bring yourself back into this window of tolerance because lots of children can't do that. Once they're into meltdown they don't know what to do with it and it's really frightening for them. The big shift that I find parents make is if you're just seeing this as this is distress and that there's nothing that I can-- This isn't something I've done because parents will often say, "Why are they behaving like this? It's bad behavior." It's not bad behavior. There's nothing intentional about this. This is the child showing you that the demands of the situation is too much for them. They cannot manage the demands of the situation whilst keeping themselves within their window of tolerance. And so you see this.

Ben (01:00:29):

That makes a lot of sense. Based on my own experience I would say that is true. The ability to regulate back down before you can do anything. I have a pet theory, actually. So we say it's in children. I actually think a lot of adults don't really have this nailed either and that's why you see in the workplace even these kind of-- I guess it comes out in what we interpret as either bullying or harassment or this anger and these things. But actually if you think about it as how we think of a toddler, is actually a lot of adults go out of their window of tolerance. They don't have the mechanisms or they're out of it and then they're in this other system which leads them to all of these 'irrational behaviors.' But it's this other thing.

Naomi (01:01:15):

Yes. Because they're not thinking rationally. The survival system cuts off all that rational thought because you cannot afford to think rationally when there might be a lion about to attack you. You just have to get out of there.

Ben (01:01:25):

Yeah, exactly. So this happens a lot more. Great. Did you have something else you wanted to comment on that? Otherwise, I have another couple of questions.

Naomi (01:01:33):

No. I was just going to say I think you're right. And I think that one of the things that happens at school perhaps is that children are learned to kind of not show that distress, but they don't necessarily actually learn how to manage it. Because you have to not show things at school, don't you? That's the kind of key thing at school. You need to not show if you're feeling distressed because everybody will notice and you might feel... There are all sorts of reasons.

Ben (01:02:02):

Yeah. We talk a lot about it in communities I speak to about-- Essentially they say the word masking because there's a lot of masking and actually we talk about in that. But I think it’s true actually there's masking overall for everyone to a certain extent.

Naomi (01:02:17):

I think schools are full of children masking and workplaces as well. I mean, actually, that's what you have to do. It's a functional response that humans need to have these kind of different ways of being in different situations. The problem is when it means that you are squashing down your own emotions in order to project that kind of different way of being

Ben (01:02:39):

Yeah, that makes sense. So I have a couple of questions in from readers, listeners, social media, Twitter. Please follow Naomi on Twitter if you are a Twitter type of person. So one was around COVID and the pandemic. I guess this actually had two parts. One was whether the experience of home education was maybe more resilient or different I guess, for those already doing it? And then the other one is like it gave people, I think a glimpse maybe as to how bad trying to do school at home on Zoom didn't work versus this other thing. And then the second question I have which has come through this which you haven't touched on is I guess the kind of potential critique of saying, "Isn't this just the kind of rich person, middle class person way of doing that? If you have a lot of resources, if you have the privilege or luxury of doing that.” And I guess there's a hint or truth to that because of the system, but I'd be interested-- I think you have a much more comprehensive view and how that maybe isn't just the case. So one I guess is thinking around the pandemic and the second is this just a rich person's thing?

Naomi (01:03:50):

Yeah. Okay. So the pandemic. Really interesting what happened with the pandemic. Families responded in so many different ways as I think you said in the question. Many families tell me that they were quite horrified to see what their children were doing and also how hard it was to keep their children doing the stuff they were meant to be doing for school. And I thought that was really interesting because I think it was like the control that goes on at school was suddenly brought into homes. You know how I was saying how a child at home has much more power than a child at school and that therefore I think any home educated child is going to be more autonomous than a schooled child unless they're from an extremely-- there probably are some homes like this, unless they're from a very strict and controlling home who deliberately set out to be very strict and controlling.

But with COVID, suddenly the classes were happening, the children were behind the computer screens, and it was up to the parents to try and keep the children on task. The parents discovered how much the children didn't really want to be on task or how much they weren't really interested in what they were doing. And so I was actually really hopeful for a time with the pandemic. I was like, "Maybe everybody will realize that we should be doing things with children that doesn't require this degree of control that we don't even see." I think it's weird that we don't see the control in a whole set of six or seven year olds all seated in rows, all dressed in the same clothes, all in one classroom of other children their age with one teacher at the front. We did it. We were all put through that system and so we don't see it as controlling. But if we came from another planet we'd be like, "This is a really odd thing that they do to their children. They dressed them all up in the same way and they make them all sit at the same desk and then they make them all do the same thing." But that control is invisible to us because it was done to us. So I was quite hopeful about that with the pandemic. But actually what happened was lots of parents or few who can send them back to school where we haven't got to do the control bit ourselves, but there were also parents who found that their children were much happier once they were out of school. And I think that was a bit of a revelation for parents who had thought that their children were just the way they were, quite dysregulated generally, or quite unhappy, quite stressed.

Then suddenly school stopped and their children were at home. These were often the parents who gave up quite early on with them making them do the Zoom stuff which is what some parents did. And they would be like, "Wow, everything is more relaxed. House is much more relaxed. Things are generally much more relaxed. Why are we doing this? Why are we making them go to school?" So I've known quite a lot of parents who haven't sent their children back to school after COVID for that reason. But I think the question also was whether the impact of COVID was less on home educated children? I think that's very dependent. I don't think that's necessarily the case because most home educated children do go to see other children. They go to groups, they go to outings, they go to visit places, and all of that stopped.

So I think that for lots of children their lives became much more limited. I think they were probably less affected in a way than the school children because they usually already have friends online. They already had connections with other children online and often their parents would have already had a more relaxed attitude to screens which probably helped, because by that point everything had to be via screen. I talked to quite a few schooling parents who were really worried about the amount of time their children were spending on screens during COVID. And I was like, "Well, this is the only thing that they can do that connects them with the rest of the world." I mean, in a way isn't it amazing that when we had this lockdown we had it at a time that we were able to make these connections via technology because if we hadn't been, our children really would've been very limited. But I think the impact is variable. It's probably as many impacts as there are children.

Ben (01:07:45):

Yeah. And in some ways everyone's agency was lowered or taken away for various reasons--

Naomi (01:07:50):

Yeah. Completely it was.

Ben (01:07:51):

Regardless of that. And so, I mean, that is why arguably all nations were stressed along with everything else. I think it was through the agency framework along with everything else.

Naomi (01:08:02):

Totally. And I think our ideas of what choices we had about our lives and our children's ideas of what choices we as parents had about their lives were really shaken. So yes, we didn't know or did we? I didn't really know that the government could simply say, "All right, everybody. You have to stay at home. We're closing everything down." It was a shock to know that they could do that and that that could happen. But I think it was a shock for children to see that that could happen to their parents because younger children in particular think their parents are all powerful. They think their parents are the ones who can make things happen. And suddenly, their parents also can't go out the house or can't go to work. It's a huge psychological shock across the board really for everybody.

Ben (01:08:48):

Yeah, exactly. Is this just a rich person's thing?

Naomi (01:08:53):

Yes. I was going to go on to privilege. So I get asked this a lot. One of the things that I always say is that if you spend any time with the home educating community, you will discover that the way it's perceived from the outside and the people who are really in the inside are very different. So home education or homeschooling in particular in the press is usually portrayed as something which people do to try and hot house their children, to get them into Oxford at age 14, or to allow them to develop some very special skill like tennis or golf, or that they're going to be these kind of supercharged children with this very intensive program. A very high percentage of children in the UK at least. I don't know about the US and I don't actually know about the research. But I know from my own experience and from surveys that I've seen, a very high percentage of children who are home educated come out the school because they are absolutely not managing school.

So some of those children are excluded or in some cases their parents think they're heading for exclusion and they take them out before that happens. These families are not a privileged group of families at all. In fact, I think that the group of families who I've met the least probably in my experience have been the more privileged families and that's because they have the capacity to move their child to a private school. For example, move their child to a school that's much smaller, where you have smaller classes. They have many more choice by virtue of having the money. And actually, families for whom school is really not going well at all, home education is one of the cheapest things that you can do as an alternative because it doesn't require you to pay school fees. Also, a lot of these parents that I talk to, if your child's having a really hard time at school or if your child has significant special needs, it's very difficult for families to continue with two parents working. So people often say, "Well, you have to have a parent at home." Not everybody can afford to have a parent at home. But actually, having a child who's really unhappy at school pretty well requires you to have a parent at home as well because parents will tell me things like, "I would drop the child off at school. I get to work within an hour. There'd be a call saying, 'Can you come in, please? They're having a meltdown.'"

One parent I talked to from my book said they're on the porta-cabin roof. Child's always on the porta-cabin roof. They would call me to come and get my child. And she said, "My employer said to me, 'You're going to have to choose between answering the calls from the school or this job.'" And she was like, "Well, there's no choice." I can't say to the school, "Sorry, just leave him on the porta-cabin roof. He'll be fine." So I think there's a real misconception about who home educators actually are. I think there's a very high percentage of special educational needs and a very high percentage of actually less privileged families who are doing really the only option that they can do when school isn't working for their child because it is a cheaper option than other choices. But I think there's obviously always a certain amount of privilege in being able to make a choice. I don't think you have to have abundance of stuff in your home to make this choice. There are lots of home education groups where people go and where you can pool resources basically with other families. 

I know of parents-- I know many single parents who've made this choice and who've made... People do all sorts of things to work around it. Just in our example, I gave up work in order to home educate my children. I gave up my job in the NHS which was actually my dream job in the NHS. It was exactly the job I wanted. The way we made it work was that I worked in the evenings and on Saturdays. So I set up a private practice. My husband would be at work during the day, he would come back, hand the children over, and I would go down the road and fit in a couple of clients. It was really hard work. I would not recommend it. I used to buy lucozade at the local shop on the way back and I'd literally be chugging it down because I just had a whole day with a five year old and a two year old and now I was going to go and see clients. People do these things of kind of working around it because it's like we need to do something. I think you'll find that families from all over the walks of life are doing it.

Ben (01:13:19):

Yeah. That's my experience too. I think it echoes in the US where-- Although there's also a US group which are a little bit faith based in this as well.

Naomi (01:13:27):

Yeah. That's different. I don't think we really have that group in the UK. I've talked to Americans. They always assume we do, but I haven't met many people who are home educating for religious reasons as their major motivation.

Ben (01:13:42):

Great. So I have a little section of overrated and underrated. So I'll give you some quick fire and you can say overrated, underrated, or you can pass, or you can make some comments. I actually think now having had this conversation I know what you're going to say on all of these. But we can see how they go. So overrated or underrated, a government set curriculum?

Naomi (01:14:08):

Completely overrated.

Ben (01:14:14):

No redeeming feature whatsoever?

Naomi (01:14:16):

I don't think it does. I cannot think why the government would be setting a curriculum.

Ben (01:14:23):

So overrated, underrated, exams? So I guess we would say we have talked about the fact that we're over tested. Is there any place for exams or testing? Can it do anything or is it pretty much like a waste of time?

Naomi (01:14:40):

I think there's a place for exams as a kind of entry to other things in a very practical way. I think part of the problem with our GCSE and A-level system is there's far too much invested in it and it's used almost as a way of evaluating whether you are a good and worthwhile person or not for the rest of your life, whether you're going to be a loser or a success. That's how it feels. I would like it if exams were much more like the driving test. If you want to be able to go and drive you need to show that you have a certain level of confidence in driving, but nobody thinks that that test indicates anything about you as a person, apart from whether you can drive or not. I can say that because I failed my driving test three times.

Ben (01:15:23):

I can't even drive.

Naomi (01:15:25):

Well, there you are. So I don't think you should just be able to go out and drive. We need to have competency based tests for things, but I don't think we should be rating everybody against each other in the way that GCSEs do because GCSEs aren't actually a competency based exam. It is about where are you in the spectrum of everybody else. And I think we need to get rid of this idea that everybody does these exams when they're 16, everybody does these exams when they’re 18. What I would like to see is, so young person would like to go to be a games designer or something. In order to do that, they need to demonstrate that they have certain levels of literacy and numeracy. So they do those because they can see that that has a point and that's the next thing to do. I haven't got a problem with entry requirements and stuff like that and demonstrating competency, but I think that's the real problem with these high states exams. I see so many young people who think that their life is over because they're not going to do GSCEs at 16 for example. They think that this is it. There's such a high stakes feeling around that whole period of development of adolescence and I just think that's really unhelpful.

Ben (01:16:36):

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So overrated, underrated, social media? Although I guess we could go social media overall and then social media within children.

Naomi (01:16:48):

Well, I have mixed feelings about social media. Social media in particular I think can be a source of lots of bullying for young people. I do have concerns about the way that if young people are being bullied at school and everybody's on social media, that bullying basically continues around the clock 24 hours 7. My approach generally to technology is the parents need to lean into it. Parents need to know what's going on. I think social media's an amazing tool but I think it's only as good as the people behind it. It's not a thing in itself. If your child's in a community where they're being bullied a lot, then you might want to rethink whether they're actually always being accessible by that community.

Ben (01:17:38):

Yeah. So that's neutral. All right, that makes sense. And then overrated, underrated, technical colleges or a schooling where it's kind of more I guess, skills based? There is sort of this, but you're maybe learning carpentry or coding or something. We don't have such a great tradition of that here in the UK or at least not anymore, but at least the concept of having more-- I don't even really like the term technical college, but it is more of a skills based type of learning or maybe apprenticeships.

Naomi (01:18:11):

Yeah. More of an apprenticeship based model. I think those would be great if we had more of those for young people. And I think that would go alongside-- I mean, again, I don't think that should be enforced on anybody. I don't think it should be a, "This is what you have to do." But I think if young people are doing something that's meaningful and that they find rewarding, then I think we would have... Many adolescents would have an easier ride and society might have an easier ride with them. But I also think it's about getting away from this idea of academic exams being the be all and end all and being the kind of market... There's a nice YouTube video by Ken Robinson. You know his work?

Ben (01:18:48):

Yes.

Naomi (01:18:49):

One of the things he says is we have this weird system which puts being a university professor at the top of the hierarchy. The skills that we teach children in school are all these academic skills which I use every day as a university professor. But actually, I'm this tiny part of society. There are so many other things which we don't prioritize in the same way. It's like we measure everybody against this benchmark of how far did you get towards being a university professor? How many qualifications did you get? I would just love it if we could see child development and education in a much wider way.

Ben (01:19:24):

Great. Okay. So coming up to the final couple of questions. What projects are you working on now? Do you have another book or ideas? Obviously you're running on your own consulting? What's happening today?

Naomi (01:19:40):

Yes. So I've actually just finished my second book on self-direct education yesterday. I sent if off to the editor. And that is on neurodiversity and self-direct education. So it's called “A Different Way to Learn” and it's going to be published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers next year, I hope. I interviewed lots of families with neuro divergent children of all types and also young people. I also interviewed neuro divergent adults about their experience of school. So as compared to my first book which was more theory based, it's a lot more experienced based. I hope it will give parents the confidence because often parents will say to me, "But my child's autistic and I've got all these reports that say they must be in school. If they're not at school..." It's so common. I've heard people say so often with autistic children in particular, "They have to be in school to learn how to socialize." And I'm like, "How does anybody-- That's not what school is for, for a start. But also, have you talked to any autistic people about their experience of socializing at school? And really what do you think they're learning through it?" So I'm kind of trying to give accounts balance to that. As you say, I'm doing webinars at the moment and I'm thinking of moving in to do some online courses about how parents can help their autistic children with various different things like anxiety and trauma.

Ben (01:21:03):

Great. Well, I look forward to reading that. The final question then is, do you have any life advice or advice for parents and families in your experience maybe who are thinking about this or any other observations that you've had about the world?

Naomi (01:21:23):

So I think my number one advice for parents would be trust your instincts about what your child needs and how your child is. There are a lot of parents I talk to they say, "I think that my child is really unhappy or I think that my child needs these things, but the professionals are telling me that I'm wrong." I think you need to just retain your knowledge that you know your child better and you probably have a really good sense. You don't just know your child better, but in most cases you share genes with your child. Therefore you often have a kind of intuitive understanding of the experiences that your child is having and that you can get inside their heads in a way that professionals often can't. So I would say really listen to your instincts, give yourself space to think about what you think as sort of apart from what everybody tells you, you should be thinking. The other thing is lean into the things that your child likes; whatever they are, lean into them and embrace them because this is a short time of life when they're like this and when they're young and it is an amazing opportunity to connect with them if you choose to do that rather than choosing to pull them away from the things that they love.

Ben (01:22:29):

That sounds excellent. So follow your intuitions and follow your child's interests.

Naomi (01:22:37):

Pretty well. Yeah.

Ben (01:22:38):

With that Naomi, thank you very much.

Naomi (01:22:42):

Thank you, Ben.

Ben (01:22:44):

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Vanishing Asia, Kevin Kelly photos of the past looking forward

I have bought one of the most extraordinary travel photo books. 9,000 photos of a current and vanishing Asia.

On travel photos. The average photo of Kevin Kelly’s is not as “artful” as the equivalent from - for instance - a Magnum photographer (such as Steve McCurry) but this is more than outweighed by the breadth of photographs and its glimpses of the “ordinary”.

When you think about the ordinary you can look at the work of - say - Martin Parr looking at the life of typical British people; their food, their culture, their breakfasts. Or, in the US, deceptively normally, or artfully plain work of William Eggleston. Eggleston influenced Parr and many of those who came after (see image below for glimpse). Touches of Kelly’s photos capture these influences and his look at design, clothing, doors and the like. There is a touch of the pattern book. It does not step into the kitsch or the high (?)  art of Eggleston but it steps into an important area of documentary, nevertheless.

Part of a Parr photo, left; Part of Eggleston’s photo, right.

In the US, there is the work of Diane Arbus for those who are more off-mainstream, or Robert Frank in the Americans. Or further back, Doreathea Lange. Or in another way, Cartier-Bresson. These capture the human portrait and way of an older American life. I see echoes of these in Kelly’s work.

Arbus, left (part of female impersonators). Frank, right (from Americans).

I view all of these photographers as important in the history of visual art and photography and on their influence on culture (partly because of the artists and creatives they influence).  I think this history is understudied. 

In parallel, you have documentary of culture and people as the world has globalised.  This is perhaps less serious for art collectors but no less important for our understanding of the world. 

Kevin Kelly to my mind has photographed perhaps one of the single largest collection of visuals of Asia by a singular individual person over this time. (Selection below, found at Petal Pixel also including essay on his books)

A professional travel photographer such as Steve McCurry has perhaps a wider range of images. I would suggest Magnum and “professional” travel photographers are perhaps more artful in their final selections.

But, Kelly has specifically sought out a vanishing Asia. He has looked for places in people with traditional clothing, clothes and language. And so, in capturing stories, ideas and documentary his books are equal, or arguably, in advance of these travel photographers - as Kelly is capturing a different set of ideas.

He observes that the first items to vanish are traditional costumes, then architecture then music, then food then language. 

He notes while often beautiful, this way of traditional living is often undesirable.  It’s bad for health (indoor fires, poor heating and cooling). It’s bad for liberty and choice. Ornate clothing and jewellery restrict movement and freedom.

He suggest despite the pollution, neglect and chaos of cities, the transformational leap in opportunities for wealth and choice has driven 1 billion Asians to leave their traditional ways to join the cities. Exchanging beautiful homes built by their own hands, organic food grown themselves, dressed in fabrics made by their own hands too.

He ponders that he too would make the same shift. Kelly is a futurist and technologist. Arguably, also one of our great future thinkers  (as befits the founder of Wired, a curator of the Whole Earth Review, creator of cool tools). Perhaps, rarely and counterintuitively, Kelly is keen on remembering these old ways even as he is a supporter of modernisation.

The future never leaves the past behind; it carries the old forward. To steer this future, we need to recall and employ the richness of the past. … I made this book to help transmit this ancient richness into the future.

I agree with much of Kelly’s thinking. His pictures not only tell stories - as mine have done in, for instance, a part of Indonesia even Kelly - has not yet visited, eg Sulawesi - but they record designs, and patterns and ways of life. And with an eye for this, the book is something more than simple travel photos, part pattern book, part history, Kelly documents something more than a vanishing beauty.

Almost $300 dollars / GBP200+ for the collection but worth it, there I think will only be around 5,000 copies and over half (maybe most) have sold already. Amazon link here, but will come from third party sellers if any have stock.

Kana Chan: living in a zero waste village in rural Japan, Kamikatsu | Podcast

Kana Chan is living in Kamikatsu which is Japan’s first “zero waste” village in rural Japan.  She writes a substack at Tending Gardens and runs INOW which is an educational homestay programme to stay to at Kamikatsu. She has lived and worked in Bangladesh, and travelled widely as a photographer and story teller. You can find her @laurkana on Instagram, at her Substack, or on her own podcast. 

I ask Kana about how she arrived in Kamikatsu.

I ask what people should understand or misunderstand, how Kana finds Japanese culture and how it differs between rural and city. What she misses about the city.

 What people have learned coming to Kamikatsu, all the farming knowledge she has learned growing and harvesting her own food, and what the process of tea farming (awa bancha) has been like.

 Kana explains that zero waste currently means here that 80% of all waste in the village is recycled (in 45 different categories!) and how the villagers manage their waste systems.

We play overrated/underated on toilets that play music, sitting in hot baths and Japan train journeys.

 Kana ends on her latest projects and her advice on what can be learned from disconnecting from a culture of convenience.

 I think being able to just see a diverse amount of the way people live and seeing how people choose to spend their time, how people choose to spend their money, I think can be just a really enriching experience. And so you have those things to contrast and see, "Oh, that's probably something I can take into my own life or not." I don't think the countryside is necessarily for everyone, but I do think that people can incorporate aspects that bring more nature into their lives or bring more self-sufficiency into their lives and I think a good starting point for that is spending time in the countryside and then being able to see what you can take back to wherever home is for you. 

If you do decide to move to the countryside, just changing your frame of mind and seeing the things that are inconveniences as opportunities for you to spend your time in other ways, and disconnecting from a culture of convenience can be just a really personally enriching thing. That's what I've found for myself and so, yeah, I hope everyone gets to spend some time in the countryside; whether it's permanent, temporal, or just transient. If Kamikatsu interests you in particular or sustainability from a countryside perspective, I'd be happy to welcome you here to Kamikatsu

Transcript below, video above or on YouTube. Podcast available wherever you get podcasts or below.

 PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

Transcript (only lightly edited, expect typos etc.)

Ben

Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Kana Chan. Kana is living in Kamikatsu, which is Japan's first zero waste village. It's in rural Japan. She writes a substack at Tending Gardens and runs INOW, which is an educational home stay program to stay at Kamikatsu. Kana, welcome.

Kana

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ben

So you have roots in Canada, as well as Japan and Hong Kong. What's the story of what brought you out to Kamikatsu and why?

Kana

Yeah, sure. So as you said, my mom is Japanese and my father is from Hong Kong. They actually both met in the UK studying abroad and then immigrated to Canada where I was born and raised. I had never lived in Japan and I've never actually lived in Hong Kong either, but would visit quite frequently as a child. I was working during COVID, but my job stopped and so I had a chance to pause and reflect and decided that I wanted to live somewhere that was more in nature. Japan's countryside was somewhere that I wanted to move to so I looked into that and now here I am in Kamikatsu.

Ben

Wow. So you just thought Japan is my roots and countryside and figured it out on a map and just kind of pointed and went, or was there some other kind of impetus or catalysts, or was it really kind of almost as random as that?

Kana

Yeah. There's a word in Japanese called 'goen,' which is kind of like fate. So I definitely do feel like I have some fate that tied me to this place. I would also say that I studied sustainability and so I was interested in towns where maybe sustainability was something that the town was thinking about, or there were initiatives related to sustainability. Kamikatsu is the first zero waste village so it was on my radar. I had no intention of moving to Kamikatsu, but then again, goen (fate), was such so that I had the opportunity to move here. So then I came within a month of researching and starting the search and that was a year and a half ago.

Ben

And maybe before we get to living in a zero waste type of way, I'd love to understand a little bit more about your rural life experience versus city life. I've been to Tokyo and Kobe and particularly Tokyo, if you've been to big cities like New York or London, although Tokyo is obviously very Japanese, there's something very familiar about it. Lots of people, subways, busyness, although I know people in Tokyo are very good about crossing the road and there's no actual rubbish around and things like that. But I get the impression when going through the Japanese countryside that the rural life is still quite different. And in some ways, Tokyo being different from rural countryside is kind of more different than Tokyo being different to somewhere like London. Was that your kind of experience? I guess you started off in a city and then went off to Kamikatsu.

Kana

Yeah. So I spent my whole life in cities; born and raised in a city as well. I was born in Toronto and then moved to Vancouver; so both the largest cities in Canada. I've spent a bit of time in Tokyo and other big cities in Japan and it's just such a contrast. I think most noticeably being surrounded by nature, the inconvenience of not having-- Especially being in a place like Tokyo, I think every two blocks you see a convenient store so things are really within arm’s reach wherever you are in the city. Here, we have to drive 20 minutes to the nearest convenient store. I would just say the pace feels different. I think anyone who spent enough time in a city knows that there's a flow and there's a pace and that just feels like its halted when you're in the countryside and people move at their own pace. Not to say that people aren't busy, but just the perception of time is probably a little bit different.

Ben

I noticed that there was a sense of rhythm actually throughout Japan, which I don't really note in Europe and America as much. You really see it through the seasonality of food, even sometimes the plates, and the cutlery. I get the sense from where you are living you are very close to that because of the way that you do harvesting, the way that the kind of food cycle works, the dishes that things would come out. So maybe would you reflect on that and what season it is at the moment? What are you growing and picking, or farming?

Kana

Yeah. I love talking about the seasons and I love talking about food through the seasons because I think it's something that you can only truly experience in the countryside. I think again, just to contrast to the city, you have kind of anything and everything at your disposal. Here, we have one small farmer's market, but the farmer's market only grows what is grown in season and so you can kind of really see what's available and what's being grown. Right now it is very hot. It's a hot and humid summer in Japan. But right now, what is being grown and harvested is tea. Kamikatsu has a long tradition of a fermented tea called awa-bancha and it is right now the season to pick the tea leaves.

Ben

And I was reading, there's an extraordinary process in your region for doing this. That you still pick it by hand in essentially kind of semi wild. They're not fully cultivated, they’re patches, and they have this fermentation process and it was only kind of locally. But maybe, how have you found that and do you think you're going to become a tea farmer, or is this only ever going to be for local consumption?

Kana

I technically am actually the "youngest tea farmer" because we did make our own small batch production of awa-bancha tea last year; my friend Linda and I. Tea, unlike for example, green tea or maybe some black tea that you see in regions like South Asia, there're usually rows and rows of tea leaves that can be cut by machines. But awa-bancha is grown wildly in the mountains. So rather than cultivated, it's more maintained. The bushes are maintained. Machines can't pluck the tea leaves off the stems and so hand and labor is required. So it is a very laborious task. Once it's collected, it's boiled, rolled, and then put into wooden barrels and fermented for up to a month, and then dried under the sun for up to three days. When you do the drying process, most farmers say that's the most tedious process because you have to pick apart each tea leaf because it's been so pressed. Then after that you have awa-bancha fermented tea.

Ben

The flavor is like a roasted green tea. Is it worth all of this effort?

Kana

I actually would not compare it to green tea. I would compare it more to something purple. I think because people hear fermented-- And it's fermented in the same way that a lot of the pickles are fermented in Japan. So people imagine it being quite sour or acidic, but it's actually quite mellow. Matcha has a very strong flavor as well. But maybe something more like a chamomile, you have kind of a lighter flavor. I would say it's quite unique. It's worth trying if you can get your hands on some.

Ben

And everything around the village life-- or not everything, but it seems so much more manual. Is that really true or is this crossed between manual and machine, or much still seems to be embedded with the countryside traditions out there in Japan?

Kana

Yeah. I think there's a bit of both. I think that people who practice agriculture, for example, as a living, use machines to harvest rice. For example, I also am growing rice right now and it's quite a small plot of land. I don't have those kind of machineries and everything is doable by hand, especially at that capacity. So I am almost only exclusively manual labor.

Ben

Is it just you, or can you get some friends or other people to help you, or do you have to do your own paddy field?

Kana

We do get friends. We do get help. We just had some students visiting Kamikatsu who wanted to make a documentary about Kamikatsu and part of the exchange was that they would help us with the weeding in our rice fields.

Ben

Okay. So how is the rhythm of your day? So kind of just waking up, breakfast, and then you are going out doing a lot of this farming stuff as well as working in the café. Then we'll get to the waste sorting and everything. Is there a still busy, but there's a slower, more deliberate rhythm to the day?

Kana

It's interesting. This was surprising to me. It's not surprising to some Japanese who at least have a bell that rings at 5:00 PM. But in Kamikatsu, there's a bell that goes off at seven, ten, noon, three, and five. So five bells during the day, and that kind of breaks apart your day. The idea was that this was introduced for farmers. So that kind of rhythm is really true especially when doing something like tea picking where you start the day in the morning, and then you have a tea break at 10, then you continue to work until noon, and then you have another tea break at three, and then you done the day at five. Then you really just go home and then it's dark. Your days are full, but there is kind of rhythm to it.

Ben

Excellent. What about some of these other things that you've picked and harvested? What have you been most intrigued by? So I was really intrigued by your picture of you picking yuzu, which is a citrus I really like but I didn't realize the plants had thorns. Obviously there's the bancha tea. I hadn't realized that you were also growing rice. So, do you grow most of your own food and things and what's been the most strange or interesting harvest that you've been involved in?

Kana

Actually, some of the prefecture that Kamikatsu is located in is known for citrus fruits. So not just yuzu, but there's a hybrid between yuzu and yuko, which is like a mandarin orange called yuko. About 90 percent of the production of yuko is made in Kamikatsu as well. I didn't even know about these types of citrus fruits, but harvesting these have been quite interesting and learning about these have been quite interesting. I think more than the harvesting itself, it's interesting to see how people ferment them or make them into juices or make them into things for food. So that part has been more interesting than the actual just repetitiveness of harvesting. Same with the tea leaves. To make the tea is more interesting than just picking the tea leaves.

Ben

And it's still very manual. All the citrus picking is still essentially done by hand rather than machines, right?

Kana

Yeah. That is all by hand.

Ben

But I did get the impression that along with the rituals of making the tea and the foods afterwards, there seemed to be a kind of storytelling banter with the workers who work together and come together and do this. Is there some ritual element to that or is that just people meeting and chatting while you're picking?

Kana

I think that happens naturally. Because Kamikatsu is a very mountainous village, there's no central gathering spot; maybe other than the recycling center where we recycle our garbage. But otherwise, people are busy doing their own harvesting. So when there's the harvesting that requires a lot of people to come together at the same time for a shorter season, I think naturally people like to catch up and so there's a lot of chatter. I don't know if that's part of the ritual, but it definitely happens yearly.

Ben

There’s no religious town hall space or temple, or like a square that you have in some European type places to meet. It's more dispersed and people meet actually on the harvest rather than in community spaces.

Kana

Yeah. No European square. Actually, there are Matsuri which are festivals in Japan and that is also another time for gathering. Just recently a couple days ago, there was a gathering actually at a temple where people who were planting rice in the same area came together to say prayers and make wishes for a good harvest in the fall. So that's something that happens yearly. And so people wrote wishes that bugs won't eat the crops and wishes that the harvest goes smoothly or that the grass continues to grow well. So those things still persist.

Ben

Is there something you found really surprising about overall Japanese culture or Japanese village culture compared to your experience in Canada or even Bangladesh and places like that? It's too big a question, isn't it? Because there's everything. It's like the food, the people; everything. I was wondering, I guess, about the everyday rituals or the way that people are or interact with you.

Kana

Well, growing up in kind of half Japanese household, there are a lot of things that I grow accustomed to. My mom would speak Japanese and we would still visit Japan every summer when I was young. I think though actually living here, I'm aware of how people are very hospitable; not just necessarily polite or kind. But particularly in Japanese countryside, people look out for each other and are very generous with what they have in abundance and are willing to share that abundance. I have no other countryside experience in Japan to compare that with. But that's certainly the case here for me.

Ben

Great. So maybe let's move on to the zero waste aspect, because a lot of this you've talked about rural, in the city, which I can kind of get, but it still seems amazing this pace of life and being closer to nature. But it seems that Kamikatsu has gone one further and tried to be much more circular in its living and zero waste. I was reading you have some extraordinary number of different recyclables that you have to sort and that everyone spends time in the recycling. Tell me how people have found the zero wasting. I guess it's kind of closer to how rural farming works to some degree anyway. But we use a lot of plastic in our every day. Obviously there's clothing and all of that. I don't know how you find the zero waste. Is there a rhythm to that because everyone gets together and recycles.

Kana

Zero waste is not the zero waste concept in maybe traditionally the west where you're not producing any garbage. But what Kamikatsu does focus on is recycling all the waste that is produced. We currently recycle into 45 different categories. That seems like a lot when you hear the number, but it's not overwhelming because the separation is done very clearly when you bring your waste to the recycling center. A lot of the things are just separated by colors. So if you have glass bottles; you have clear, you have green, you have brown and so that kind of increases the categories very quickly.

Ben

So there's a lot of sorting and recycling. Is that the major element, or are there other things that the village has had to adapt to? I guess people would probably maybe try and buy less plastic or single use or that type of thing, or is it much more focused on whatever you do have just making sure that goes circular and recycled?

Kana

Yeah. Their waste system started about 20 years ago and there are other efforts, not just recycling, but also on the reduce and reuse side. It's not just recycling, but I would say that has been the focus.

Ben

Great. How does the recycling center and things operate? A lot of people in the village rotate and work there, right? Everyone goes there together and you have these big sorting machines and then they crush and then it goes off. Is that kind of the process? That's what I gathered from the pictures

Kana

Yeah. So every person living in Kamikatsu is responsible for bringing their own waste to the recycling center. After you bring your boxes of waste to the recycling center, you separate at the facility. So you actually go into the garbage station. And while you're separating, there's staff there all the time who help with the separation. The staff are managed by the town office so there's a lot of support. You never really get in trouble for improperly separating and you do get a whole lot of guidance if you don't know. Especially when I first moved here, it’s like, "Where do I put this piece of rubber or something like that?" You can also collect points if you recycle into certain categories and so it's kind of a whole system. There are also a lot of elderly in Kamikatsu. So if you are unable to drive a car or bring your own waste to the separation system, they pick up your garbage once every two months and then bring it to the station.

Ben

I guess most people do not have a car, would that be right? And there's a little carpooling sharing and I guess most people walk or maybe even cycle.

Kana

Actually, most people do have a car because Kamikatsu is very mountainous. About 80% of Kamikatsu is mountainous. So only 20% of flat land. Even the rice field and the personal gardens are kind of on mountains. So cars are quite necessary. You do see people with e-bikes, but walking is difficult.

Ben

Okay. I didn't get that sense. But yeah, you don't want to be walking 20 minutes just to your paddy field up and down all the time I guess, especially as you get older. I guess with a village that size around 1500 - 2000, your local hospital is going to be quite far away if you need that sort of emergency. I remember you had to travel quite far when you had some sort of injury to attend to. Does that make life and living that much harder or is there a rhythm that you just incorporate it in? Is it just an inconvenience or can you see like, "Oh, if it was that much more remote, it be even harder?"

Kana

Yeah. I think it depends on what life circumstance you are in. Being able bodied and healthy is such a privilege and I don't normally need any hospital care. That time I was recently attacked by my rooster and had to tend to the wound. There is a local clinic in Kamikatsu, but for certain injuries we have to go to the nearest hospital which is about 45 minutes away. So it is certainly an inconvenience, and again, that would require a car. Relying only on buses in such emergencies could be very risky.

Ben

How are you getting on with your animals? Because as part of this deal, you have to look after chickens and dogs. And like you say, at one point your rooster was a bit of a bully. Have you made peace with each other?

Kana

Yeah. I grew up in a city and I grew up in a family that traveled quite a bit so pets were never something that made sense for my parents. But I've always wanted a dog and I always wanted to live with animals. So I finally get this chance to take care of two dogs and four chickens. They also kind of add to the daily rhythms of life; waking up and then taking the dogs for a walk, feeding the chicken, letting them out so they're free range and run free. It's been wonderful.

Ben

In exchange, I'm gathering you get great eggs.

Kana

Great free eggs and great cheap ranch.

Ben

Do you cook with the eggs often or do you have a particular dish? Do you do this Japanese omelet thing or do you do much more Western style stuff?

Kana

Tamagoyaki. Yeah. That's a classic. I do that definitely if I have to prepare some sort of bencho for the day.

Ben

What would be your signature dish? If you have a friend or if a family or someone would come around, do you have anything you particularly cook and this is what you whip out?

Kana

Well, right now it's summer so the only thing I'm really whipping out is cold somen. It's like a thin noodle and we put it over ice so it's very cold. That's something I'm eating almost every other day so probably that. And then a squeeze of sudachi which is like a lime and it's local to Tokushima.

Ben

Wow. That sounds amazing. Making me feel hungry. So you've adapted to this slower living or different pace of living seemingly quite quickly from city life and Canada life. Do you feel that's true? Do you think now that you found this kind of pace or type of living, do you think this could be this kind of lifestyle for the rest of your life, or do you think this will be a period and you might get the travel bug again or go back to cities? Or do you think this is somewhere, even if it's not forever, you'll always come back to this stillness and being closer to nature.

Kana

Yeah. I do think I adapted quickly and I think adapting quickly came from also traveling quite a bit in my early twenties. But I think that when people spend enough time in nature and not just as a trip, I find that it's really just better for your mental and physical wellbeing. So in that sense, it almost feels kind of natural or intuitive to return to nature. There are challenges and things I certainly miss in the city. The cultural aspects and access to different entertainment, arts, and culture. But I think that especially coming out of the pandemic and the worst of the pandemic, that this is a lifestyle that feels much more sustainable for myself personally, but also for the planet and being able to do things like grow my own food, and being in close contact with a community that feels very nurturing. That definitely does feel more long term than short term.

Ben

I guess you have Golden Week and these festivals and holidays and things like that. But I'm supposing there isn't much theater or music or cinema. I guess you probably have streaming online services there that you can have at home like everywhere else. But that sort of arts and culture still probably seemed quite concentrated in the cities.

Kana

Yeah, definitely. There's no theater. I think that if you take entertainment or arts and culture from a broader perspective, the festivals, the Matsuri that happens in the summer and the fall, and small ones throughout the year, they are definitely so fascinating from an outsider perspective where there's a lot of dance that have been passed on and performances. There's a lot of instruments and musical components to these festivals as well. But certainly not theatrical performances or entertainment in maybe the more modern sense.

Ben

Yeah. I remember going all the way to actually Kyoto to go and see a Noh play. So obviously that doesn't happen very much anywhere anymore, but still very much of the cities. So how have you found your home stay program? Have you had many visitors and how's that been? How have people found it and have they been very differently surprised? What have they been surprised about the way of life?

Kana

So the home stay program I run is called INOW. INOW is the local dialect for return home and so the idea was to create a place in Kamikatsu where people felt like they could come back to any time and create connections with the community so much so that they felt like it was kind of a home of sorts. So the home stay program we primarily guide foreigners; so our English speaking guests in Japan. We started in the pandemic so our borders have been quite strict. It was foreigners already living in Japan who wanted a chance to travel domestically but couldn't leave. And so a lot of our guests were seeking also an escape from the city to go somewhere more in nature.

Ben

Have people been really surprised when they've come to visit or have they been surprised by how it hasn't been as different or difficult to live or adapt there? Or if they've sort of come away with like, "Oh, I didn't realize about this or that."

Kana

Yeah. I think in terms of natural beauty, I certainly think that Kamikatsu is a beautiful place in Japan; maybe in the world. But I think people are less surprised by the nature and more surprised by the sense of community they feel in Kamikatsu. I think that kind of access to community is very hard in the countryside, even for Japanese who speak Japanese. Not that necessarily people are closed, but that fostering those relationship just takes time. And I think that's true anywhere else in the world. But through us and through this home stay program, they have a chance to really have that access to the community much quicker and then can feel the depths of that.

Ben

How have you found meeting up with the locals? I guess picking tea and making tea together must immediately bond you. As you say, you're the youngest of the bancha tea farmers. Suddenly they embraced you with that. But I guess that community aspect, because there's just that sense of time and doing things and going through those seasons so you experience things together. Have you learned anything particular from maybe the older locals or that sense of community you'd want to share?

Kana

Yeah. I think that certainly the only way to be in the community is to just spend time doing the things where the needs are the most and that is often labor. So spending time harvesting tea as you said. I'm also part of a woman's group in my local area within Kamikatsu and what we do is we plant flower beds along the sides of the road just to make Kamikatsu look pretty. So there are a lot of community efforts that are done from Kamikatsu as a whole, but even within the smaller areas within Kamikatsu. So spending time doing those activities really helps strengthen and nurture the relationships.

Ben

I'm interested also because you speak Japanese, but I've been told even people who spoke for a long time you have a lot of… Well first in the rule, there's a very strong dialect which can be very hard to understand even for people who lived all of their life there but come from the city. I forget the technical word, but there are a lot of these sounds in Japanese which don't have a specified meaning, but really change the context of a sentence and give a sense of like ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and those type of words. Like these ‘was’ and ‘cause’ and ‘O's’ and ‘no’ type of sounds. But the way you put them into sentences really have a very subtle meaning of how conversations happen. Have you found that sort of conversation goes well still with the locals, or do you find you feel you are missing some nuance about what they're saying? Or do you just let the musicality of their words flow over you?

Kana

I would definitely say a bit of both. The local dialect, especially in people who are more elderly is so thick that I sometimes question if I can really speak or understand Japanese. But slowly over time I'm starting to hear some of the words or as you said, the way people integrate or use those kind of smaller particles. I think what's more interesting is that Japanese has a culture of kind of reading the air or trying to understand what people feel. It's kind of like empathy but maybe even more nuanced in that you're trying to understand how the room feels. So that kind of culture is quite challenging for me. Growing up in North America and being used to just being much more direct; if I don't understand what you're feeling, I'll ask you how you're feeling, and communicating that is sometimes difficult for Japanese who are trying to share that through what they say, like the air. So that's difficult and that's probably true of most of Japan, not just where I am.

Ben

Okay. That makes sense of that sort of feeling that sometimes it's a little bit more closed as a first order impression on the surface. But like you say, actually there's a lot going around in the room or through other things, which you can understand if you understand the culture very well. But it's harder to if you're just visiting or there for a short time. Do many of the younger people in Kamikatsu end up leaving to the cities, or do they find that they want to live this way of life? Is there this typical pull between the rural and the city that you found, or if you have this reverse that we’ve seen with people like you coming back to the village?

Kana

Yeah. Kamikatsu has no high school so that's definitely a challenge for the younger kids. There's only a middle school, and after middle school people have to leave Kamikatsu to do boarding school in the city or go to other cities and other prefectures. So that's definitely a loss of young people. You see more late twenties or people in their thirties moving to Kamikatsu. There's a term in Japan called I- turn and U-turn. U-turn is when someone born from the rural areas leaves and goes to a city and comes back to the rural places. I-turn refers to somebody who is born in a city and moves to the countryside. So you see a couple U-turns happening now, but more I-turns; people from the cities coming to rural areas, rural places like Kamikatsu.

Ben

I was reading an article about wasabi farming and how on the one hand, some of the wasabi farms are dying out because traditionally they were in families and the younger generations of that family don't want to work on the farms anymore. But it was partially offset a little bit by these people returning from the city-- not being part of the family, but being welcomed as potentially handing over to the farms to these essentially strangers, but people who work there. So I can see that in the tradition. Do you think this might happen a little bit with the tea farming? Because I had the impression that a lot of these older tea farmers-- It's very hard work, so they've got to an age where they can't farm that season anymore and so you are losing those tea farms. But they've managed to recruit someone like you at least for the now to do that, or do you think inevitably this sort of tradition will start decaying away because there's not enough of a younger cohort to come and keep it alive?

Kana

Yeah, I think that's definitely a concern of the locals in Kamikatsu for the tea; for bancha. Well, in the case of bancha, people used to do it only for their families and it was not something that was being sold and produced. I think when it reaches a level of selling and production then it is necessary for others from outside to come support that. I think that there are an increasing number of farmers who are coming to Kamikatsu to support those things. So I hope that's not the case and I hope it doesn't die out. I hope that people see the value in these traditions or these kind of agricultural practices and are motivated by the lifestyle to move to the countryside.

Ben

Excellent. I thought maybe we'd play a very short round of overrated underrated. I just give a thing and then you can say whether you think it's overrated or underrated, or you can pass or make some comments.

Kana

Sounds good.

Ben

Okay. So the first one is toilets that play music.

Kana

Underrated.

Ben

I found this was quite common in the cities. In hotels and places like Tokyo and things they would often have these kind of toilets and things. I don't know whether you have many restaurants or communal toilets in the village; probably not. But I'm assuming you don't have music playing toilets much in Kamikatsu or is it a thing as well?

Kana

No, no music playing toilets in Kamikatsu. You're so far apart from your neighbors that you could really make any noise you want and probably won't be heard. But I think that they're nice definitely in the city when you want a bit of privacy and it's usually nature sounds.

Ben

Sure. Okay. Sitting in very hot baths

Kana

Underrated. I love the bathing houses and I enjoy a nice soak.

Ben

Yeah. Is there a bathing house in the village? Is there like a village inn or something like this as well? Is that still a tradition or do people just mostly have it in their houses?

Kana (44:54):

Yeah. There's one actually about a hundred meters away from me, so I'm very close to an onsen and I frequent the onsen especially in the winter.

Ben

Is there a little community which builds around that or is it still a very kind of private thing? Because sometimes you have more of a community feel and obviously sometimes there's like a woman female gathering aspect to it.

Kana

Yeah. There is. In the past actually, the onsen thing used to be free for locals. It's not anymore, there's a discounted rate for locals. But during that time I heard that it was just a gathering place. Even now if I go there I'm bound to run into somebody I know. So I think that can be a turn off for some people, but for me, it's not a problem.

Ben

Were there a lot of grumbles when they were being charged?

Kana

Yeah, probably.

Ben

I can imagine. Okay. Train journeys in Japan.

Kana

These are all I think underrated. I think that the train journeys are some of the best things about Japan. It's really accessible, and as a foreigner you can usually get a discounted Japan rail pass. So I think it's the best way to travel.

Ben

Great. Well that's all of my underrated overrated ones. Just a handful there. Is there any other local foods or dishes around in your place that you've either learnt to cook or that you really like? So you say there's a lot of citrus and obviously you have this quite famous tea. But there seems to be a lot of regional specialties which you really only get around the region. Have you picked up any and is there a little local restaurant that people go to or do people mostly eat at home?

Kana

Yeah. There are not so many restaurants in Kamikatsu. But the ones that are here I think they're great, in my opinion. I think that there's a lot of dishes using shiitake (like a mushroom), and that's delicious in the season. In early spring there's a river fish called ayu. It's kind of a sweet fish that's also delicious. A lot of the vegetable and rice in Kamikatsu is great and people attest to the water being the source of tasty vegetables and rice. I think for an average Japanese there's nothing extremely special, but for me being able to eat such good local seasonal vegetables it’s very wonderful.

Ben

And is maybe like a quarter or a half of your vegetables now grown by you in some fashion or you have a helping hand in it, or is it not quite that large amount?

Kana

Not quite that large amount yet. But I aspire to be able to grow that much, or maybe all of my vegetables. Right now, I do go to the farmer's market and purchase most of my produce there which is grown by local farmers in Kamikatsu.

Ben

Great. What sort of projects are you working on at the moment? Obviously you have INOW, so the home stay, and it seems that you write this wonderful newsletter. But before that you did a lot of photography and you seem to have rediscovered writing. Are these kind of artistic projects you're doing? Obviously you're growing food. Are you excited for any projects now or into the long term?

Kana

Yeah. I definitely enjoy capturing what I'm feeling and what I'm seeing through writing and photos. That's something I've always done, maybe a bit more privately and now a bit more publicly through the newsletter. But touching dirt and doing things with my own hands is quite new to me. I didn't think I was capable of doing things like growing my own food or making things with wood, but these are things that I'm learning I actually can do. So using my hands and doing these projects are something that I have been putting a lot of time and labor of love into.

Ben

Great. And then final question. Do you have any advice or thoughts for people? Maybe advice if you're thinking about traveling, or advice for people who are thinking of going from city to rural, or thinking of living in a more circular or slower way. Any thoughts or advice you've had on all of the travels and things and living that you've done so far?

Kana

Yeah. I think being able to just see a diverse amount of the way people live and seeing how people choose to spend their time, how people choose to spend their money, I think can be just a really enriching experience. And so you have those things to contrast and see, "Oh, that's probably something I can take into my own life or not." I don't think the countryside is necessarily for everyone, but I do think that people can incorporate aspects that bring more nature into their lives or bring more self-sufficiency into their lives and I think a good starting point for that is spending time in the countryside and then being able to see what you can take back to wherever home is for you.

If you do decide to move to the countryside, just changing your frame of mind and seeing the things that are inconveniences as opportunities for you to spend your time in other ways, and disconnecting from a culture of convenience can be just a really personally enriching thing. That's what I've found for myself and so, yeah, I hope everyone gets to spend some time in the countryside; whether it's permanent, temporal, or just transient. If Kamikatsu interests you in particular or sustainability from a countryside perspective, I'd be happy to welcome you here to Kamikatsu.

Ben

Excellent. That would be an excellent opportunity to visit and that sounds really good. So change your mind-set in terms of inconvenience, and wherever you go bring back something to wherever you think of is home. That sounds excellent. So Kana Chan, thank you very much.

Kana

Thank you so much.

Larry Temkin: transitivity, critiques of Effective Altruism, international aid, pluralism | Podcast

Larry Temkin is a moral philosopher. He has major works on inequality (book: Inequality); transitivity and social choices  (when A > B > C, A > C ?; book: Rethinking the Good) and recently on the philosophies of doing good (critiquing some aspects of Effective Altruism, long-termism, international aid, utilitarianism | book: Being Good in a World of Need). As of 2022, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He was Derek Parfit’s first Phd student, and he supervised Nick Beckstead’s thesis*.

The podcast is in two parts. The second part focuses on Effective Altruism (EA) ideas. The first part looks at transitivity and other debates in philosophy through a pluralist lens. I am still reflecting greatly on the conversation where I judge I learned a lot. The whole conversation is 3 hours long, so please feel free to dip in and out of it, and if you are intrigued go and look at Larry’s original works* (and other critiques of Larry). I provide some links at the end, to his books and some commentary from others (Tyler Cowen, reviewers). There is a transcript at the end, which I have put into a shared google doc for ease of reading (approx 30,000 words).

In the podcast, I ask:

How should we value a human life?

What is transitivity? And we discuss the axioms that transitivity underpins for economic, social and moral choices.

I ask how Larry comes up with such unique ideas such as on inequality and transitivity, and the story of how he was rejected by three great philosophers when he first proposed his idea.

Larry explains consequentialist notions of personhood, especially with respect to a question I had on Singer’s view on disability, and even though our general views are more pluralist.

I pose a dilemma I have about the art of a friend who has done awful things, and Larry explains the messiness of morals.

(In part 2…) Larry recounts the dinner with Derek Parfit, and Angus Deaton, along with a billionaire and other brilliant philosophers. This dinner gave Larry bad dreams and lead to Larry thinking up many disanalogies to Peter Singer’s classic pond analogy.

We discuss the pond analogy and how it may or may not be a good analogy for doing good in foreign places especially the disaster that was Goma*. Larry discusses how he changed his mind on whether international aid may be doing more harm than good and both philosophical and practical reasons behind it. 

Larry also discusses some concern on the the possible over-focus on long-termism.

We barely touch on Larry’s work in inequality, but I will mention that it has been influential in how the World Health Organisation and potentially, ultimately, China has viewed access to healthcare. The work has also highlighted the complexity around equality, and that it may be more individualistic and more complicated than often assumed.

Throughout all of this is the strong sense of a pluralistic view of the world, where we may value many attributes such as fairness, justice, health and that a focus on only one value may lead us astray.

Larry ends with life advice:

“I've taught many students over the years. I'm coming to the end of my career. I'm retiring. I've had countless students in my office over the years who are struggling with the question of, "How should I lead my life? This is extremely controversial, but being the pluralist that I am, I believe in a balanced life. Now, you can find balance in a number of ways. But just as I'm a pluralist about my moral values, I'm a pluralist about what's involved in being a good person and what's involved in leading a worthwhile human life. I'm signed up in the camp of, "We only have one life to lead."

It would be great if there's reincarnation and we led multiple innumerable lives. It would be great if there was life after death, et cetera. I'm on board for all of that if it's there, but I'm not leading my life assuming any of that is true. I'm leading my life thinking I have one and only one life to lead. How am I going to lead it? I would like to lead a life. I would like it to have been true that I led a life that at the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and feel good about the life I live. This involves the life for me of things like personal integrity. How do you treat other human beings? Do you treat people with respect, et cetera? I believe that personal face to face confrontation matters. I believe the things in my life...

I'm wearing a shirt right now. I’m wearing this shirt on purpose today. It says, "I have been: Mr. Professor, and Doctor...” If you turn around to the back, it says, "But my favorite title is grandpa." I now have five grandchildren. I understand that having children is not for everybody, but for someone like me, or for my father, for my parents, the amount of joy and pleasure and pride that I get out of my children and grandchildren, there's nothing in my professional lives that compares to it. For all the accomplishments that I've had-- I've had a few. All the impact on the world that some people have say I've had which is major-- none of that. It all pales in comparison to the relationship I've had with my wife going back to when we met decades ago. .

I put a tremendous amount of weight on the value of human relations. Parent a child, love towards significant others. These are tremendous services of value in human life. I pity my peers who are at the absolute pinnacle of intellectual achievement, but whose lives are lacking in so many other ways. So Derek Parfit who I've mentioned before, he was my mentor. He was my closest friend in philosophy for 40 years. I still think about him almost every day. I love Derek, but I would never have wanted to be Derek. And I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be Derek. He accomplished unbelievable things as a world class philosopher. But his life was, to my mind, missing so much of what makes a life valuable. So I wouldn't recommend that life. He didn't regret the life he had. And I have other philosopher friends like Derek; single minded, focus on their philosophy, that comes first, second, and third, and they wouldn't have traded their lives for anything. I get that.

I don't see that as the most valuable human life. One of the ways of thinking about this is, I have a model which I use in my Rethinking the Good… It was called the Gymnastic Model for many years and now I've given it a new name. Often when we think about like, "Who's the greatest gymnast? The best all-around gymnast?"

The greatest all around gymnast is not the gymnast who excels at the parallel bars, but stinks at everything else. I don't care how good you are at the parallel bars or how good you are at the mats. If you are not good in anything else, you're not a great all round gymnast. Similarly, when you think about the virtues, I don't care how much Genghis Kahn might have the virtue of loving his mother-- pretend that's a virtue.

He might love his mother an unbelievable amount, but he's not a virtuous person if he rapes and pillages and kills and steals and does all these other things. It doesn't matter how accomplished he is along that one dimension, if he's abysmal along the other dimensions. If you want to be a virtuous person, a truly virtuous person, you have to score pretty highly along a whole bunch of dimensions. Similarly, I think for the human life, if you really want to have a great human life-- and this is why I try to urge my students, you can't be narrowly focused on any one of the aspects that make a human life valuable. That's my view. I have colleagues who don't share it, but you're interviewing me right now and you're asking my view. When I give my advice to the people I care about...

Nobody can do everything. You can't be everything. We live in an age of specialization. I don't do every academic field. I don't even do every academic field within philosophy. I don't even do every academic field within moral philosophy. I specialize. One of the reasons I'm as good or not as good as I am in moral philosophy is… I spent 15 years working on my first book and, 30 years working on my second book. That means a lot of hedgehogging rather than foxes. So I get the appeal to focusing on something and trying to do it well. But when it comes to living a good human life, it can't just be narrowly focused on one thing. There has to be space for these other things that allow a human being to flourish. That's what I believe and that's certainly how I've tried to live my life.

There's an old expression from the tradition I grew up with that says, "If you are not for you, then who will be? If you're only for you, then what are you?" Basically, that means we do have the right and the permission to look out after our own wellbeing and those of those we love. I believe that. But if we only look out after ourselves and those we love, and we don't take time to sense of the larger world of which we're apart, our lives are not good lives…”

Listen above and with video, or below on podcast wherever you get podcasts:

*Links to work:

I mention Derek Parfit. Derek was consider by many to be one of the great (if not at the end of his life in 2017, one of the greatest) moral philosophers. Larry was Derek’s first phd student, a long time friend, and his work on transitivity is deeply tied up with Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. Parfit was also an EA supporter.

I mention Nick Beckstead, as Beckstead is CEO at FTX Foundation and was an early leading figure for Open Philanthropy, and the Centre for Effective Altruism.

For Goma, see Linda Polman’s The Crisis Caravan and also Chapter 7.5 in Temkin’s Being Good in a World of Need.

This is the Amazon link to Inequality.  Here is Larry Temkin’s essay which draws together some central results of his work on inequality.  Inequality: A Complex, Individualistic, and Comparative Notion.

“...I discussed at some length a position I then called extended humanitarianism, and which I now call prioritarianism. On this view, one wants each person to fare as well as possible, but is especially concerned with—and hence gives extra weight or priority to—the worse-off….  “

This is the Amazon link to Rethinking the Good.  Here is a detailed review of the book (Richard Kraut, 2012). And this is Tyler Cowen with a blog post on the book (2012). Tyler writes:

 “While not an easy read, it is the most important work in choice theory and social choice in some time….The main contribution of this book is to show you that the transitivity postulate is far less intuitively appealing than it seems at first.  Twenty-two years ago I disagreed with Temkin but now I accept much of his critique.  Here is one very good Temkin piece from JSTOR.  These days, I see the good is more holistic than additive-aggregative.  This defuses Temkin’s arguments, though at a high cost.  (You will find Temkin’s criticisms of holism and related ideas at around p.355, though I find them unusually lacking in force.  One of his worries boils down to how a multiplicative view will handle negative numbers but I see the scale as sufficiently arbitrary that they need not pop up to begin with.)  We can make some gross comparisons of better and worse at the macro level, with partial rankings at best, but for many individualized normative comparisons there simply isn’t a right answer.  I view “ranking” as a luxury, occasionally available, rather than an axiomatic postulate which can be used to generate normative comparisons, and thus normative paradoxes, at will.  I see that response as different than allowing or embracing intransitivity across multiple alternatives and in that regard my final position differs from Temkin’s.  Furthermore, in a holistic approach, the “pure micro welfare numbers’ used to generate the paradoxical comparisons aren’t necessarily there in the first place but rather they have to be derived from our intuitions about the whole”

This is the Amazon link to Being Good in a World of Need. You can view the 2017 Uehiro lectures here (although his ideas are a little updated from this). This is a 2021 YT video/podcast with Friction purely on notions in the book. This is the TLS review of the book (Mark Hannam,  March 2022).  And this is Tyler Cowen’s blog post:

His new book is Being Good in a World of Need, and most of all I am delighted to see someone take Effective Altruism seriously enough to evaluate it at a very high intellectual level.  Larry is mostly pro-EA, though he stresses that he believes in pluralist, non-additive theories of value, rather than expected utility theory, and furthermore that can make a big difference (for instance I don’t think Larry would play 51-49 “double or nothing” with the world’s population, as SBF seems to want to).

So where does the red pill come in?  Well, after decades of his (self-described) intellectual complacency, Larry now wonders whether foreign aid is as good as it has been cracked up to be:

…In this chapter, I have presented some new disanalogies between Singer’s original Pond Example, and real-world instances of people in need.  I have noted that in some cases people in need may not be “innocent” or they may be responsible for their plight.  I have also noted that often people in need are the victims of social injustice or human atrocities.  Most importantly, I have shown that often efforts to aid the needy can, via various different paths, increase the wealth, status, and power of the very people who may be responsible for human suffering that the aid is intended to alleviate.  This can incentivize such people to continue their heinous practices against their original victims, or against other people in the region.  this can also incentivize other malevolent people in positions of power to perpetrate similar social injustices or atrocities. …

The book also presents some remarkable examples of how some leading philosophers, including Derek Parfit, simply refused to believe that such arguments might possibly be true, even when Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton endorsed one version of them (not exactly Larry’s claims, to be clear).

Another striking feature of this book is how readily Larry accepts the rising (but still dissident) view that the sexual abuse of children has been a grossly underrated social problem.

What is still missing is a much greater focus on innovation and economic growth.

I am very glad I bought this book, and I look forward to seeing which pill or half-pill Larry swallows next.  Here is my post on Larry’s previous book Rethinking the Good.  Everyone involved in EA should be thinking about Larry and his work, and not just this latest book either.

Transcript Below, also available on shared google doc here:

Larry Temkin and Ben Yeoh in Conversation Transcript (July 2022)

This is an unedited transcript of a podcast transcript between Larry Temkin and Ben Yeoh. (Expect typos, and grammar errors typical of a conversation). The transcript covers 3 hours of conversation held in July 2022. The podcast is in two parts and available on podcast platforms and YouTube. The second part focuses on Effective Altruism ideas. The first part looks at transitivity, and other debates in philosophy through a pluralist lens. There is more in this blog post. You can CRTL-F  the word “rhubarb” to quickly go to part 2.

Ben (00:03):

Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Larry Temkin. I told my friend I'm going to be podcasting with Larry and they replied, "He is a genius." This assertion, I think, rests on Larry's work on inequality and so called transitivity. In particular, the work on inequality might have been very impactful on thinking around the importance of access to healthcare. Reading Larry's work, for me, has made me think quite hard about how to live a good life, especially living in a rich nation, and questioning some of the assumptions behind certain aspects of effective altruism. Larry's books have also led me to question how much weight we can put on using expected value decision making tools, especially for moral questions. For those of you on video, this is a copy of one of his books, and this is a copy of another one of his books. I would suggest you get them; Being Good in a World of Need and Rethinking the Good. I just realized on Rethinking the Good, just today, that is the lollipop analogy on the front page there which I hadn't twigged until today. So I'm feeling-- I don't know whether slightly clever or not clever for only realizing that. So, Larry welcome.

Larry (01:21):

Well, thanks Ben. It's great to finally meet you. We've been talking about doing this for some months now, and it's great that this is finally happening. I have to say, as long as you were kind enough to hold that up, you cut off half of the picture. So I'm going to hold it up a little bit higher. The reason for that is the cover of this was actually drawn by my daughter. I love that she did that. She asked me, "Could I do the cover of your next book?" And I said, "Sure." But you're right, it is the lollipop example which is a seminal example in that book. Anyway, great pleasure to meet you and to be talking with you today. I hope it is enjoyable for your audience.

Ben (02:02):

Excellent. So I'm going to start with an easy one. How should we value a human life? Can we put a dollar figure amount on it? And when should we, or should we not? I have an example in mind. So here in the UK, we have a national health service and this health service has to make judgements. Broadly speaking, there is a set of people and policymakers who have decided that if a lifesaving treatment costs more than about 30,000 pounds for a life year, technically a good quality life year, they will pay for it. But if it costs more than 30,000 pounds for a life year, then they are minded not to pay for it because they can do other treatments which would be saving a life for under 30,000 pounds. So they decide this way for most treatment such as a diabetes treatment or a migraine treatment or something like that.

However, they also make some notable exceptions. Two of these exceptions which are quite notable for me, are for rare genetic diseases and also for premature babies. Here, treatments for that under most reasonable assumptions cost much more than 30,000 pounds per life year, particularly for premature babies where you can easily get into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. But one of the arguments given is that there is society preference-- not by everybody, but by quite a lot of people, and in the majority of people it seems when they've done this work to help premature babies, because there is no other treatment for them. So that's a kind of practical example thinking about this and how you go about valuing a human life and some of these problems or challenges which I can touch upon your work. So what do you make of that?

Larry (04:01):

Great question. In fact, I've never been asked that question before, and I don't have any pat answer to pull out for you. But I have a bunch of things to say about this kind of question. So the question of, "How much is a human life worth?" It's not the right question. It's not how I would frame the question though I realize that societies have to, in essence, answer that question every time, all the time. Not just in the healthcare system, but when you talk about, “Should you fix roads? Should you fix a curve in a road? How much is it going to cost? How many people are going to drive on it? How many people might die if you do or don't do it?" These are all sort of cost benefit analysis type questions of, "What's it worth for?"

The questions for me that we have to answer are not an absolute, “How much is a human life worth?” as if there's a single answer. But, what are the values that we care about as a society, as individuals, as members of the society when we think about these questions. So the reason I put it that way is that there are fundamental issues of fairness and justice that come into play here, which stand opposed to-- as my work and as you are well aware of, certain kinds of questions which the, "How much is life worth?” question push us towards, which is the kind of cost benefit analysis. How do we get the most pay for the buck? It seems it's inefficient to spend a lot of money to save an infant or to save someone at the end of their lives if it's going to cost millions of pounds to do so, when you could take those same millions of pounds, in theory, and spend it in lots of other ways and save far more people. Doesn't that seem better?

Well, the sum total of people who say it will be better, yes. But, questions about fairness aren't just the same as questions about efficiency. They’re unrelated-- there are certain ways in which they are related, but they're not related. The other question is, the reason why I want to bark at just answering the question the way it's framed is, we as a society are constantly being told that we have to make trade-offs between this costly procedure and this cheaper procedure which affects similar ends, et cetera. And I think perhaps we do. But the question really is-- when we're asking this question, "What is the actual trade-off? Why is the trade-off between this person's expensive care in order to save their lives and these people's less expensive cares to save their lives, rather than this person's expensive care to save their lives and this person's ability to buy a jet and fly down to an island that they own, which is a private island somewhere in the middle of nowhere, blah, blah, blah.”

When we as a society spend here in the United States a billion dollars on our pleasure palaces which is the State Arena where our football teams play, or a billion dollars on arenas, or half a billion dollars on arenas where our basketball teams play or our baseball teams play, and you think about all these kinds of issues, these are the trade-offs I really want us to think about. I want us to think about when we have these questions. We're constantly told, "We only have a budget. Budget is this amount. How should we make these trade-offs between this expensive health policy and this much less expensive health policy?” If those were literally the only trade-offs in play, I could be moved more to think, “Well, it's 12 lives with this cheaper efficient way, and it's one life with this way, blah, blah, blah.”

But if you tell me, but meanwhile, in the background there are these massive amounts of inequalities and accesses-- what some people regard as accesses, things that people spend enormous amounts of funds on that actually don't necessarily improve the quality of their life; maybe not even at all, but even if it does, maybe perhaps the bad image. They're not sure that we should be taking seriously this question of, "How do we choose between who lives and who dies in this area?" Rather than putting pressure elsewhere on it as it were, the economic systems that are fortunate to make these choices while we allow all these other kinds of things to go on in the system.

If I just say, "Well, I think a human life is worth this, and so we should make all our decisions that way,” I'm already buying into all the background assumptions, most of which I actually just reject. So I'm inclined to sort of not answer the question the way it was put and to want to shift our attention to these other larger questions. But I can enter a philosopher's room where I say all these other things are not there. We don't have vast inequalities and we don't have people spending hundreds of millions of dollars on giant yachts and they have 12 homes and so on. None of that is prevalent. Now we have to make some of these tough choices. Even then I would decline to say a human life is worth one amount rather than another. I would then still be trying to pay attention to questions of, "What would be fair, what would be just, how do we give everyone equal opportunities to live? How should we weigh those kinds of considerations?" These are more about comparisons and about values than about the absolute value of a human life.

Ben (10:09):

That makes sense. So I pull two things out of that, although there's quite a lot. One is, there's a higher level question as to-- Maybe I misused the word in terms of pluralism, but thinking about other aspects, both on the systems level, are there other things we should be judging? But also these other ideals of fairness or equality or things like that? I do think there is something though that the health authorities, for instance, do in the end have to try and make that decision. But in some ways, you're sort of saying that the philosophy question is perhaps a tier above that.

Larry (10:51):

Let me re-enter the question for a second with a concrete case that I discussed in my most recent book, “Being Good in a World of Need.” So there is a charity called Village Reach. It's a well-known charity and it operates throughout the world, but mostly in Africa. The aim of Village Reach is to reach so called last mile communities. And the idea is the Village Reach is a charity that recognizes that there are all sorts of very needy people; mostly in rural areas scattered throughout Africa and elsewhere, where there are infrastructure problems and there are medical personnel problems. There's a whole host of problems that are in play that make it difficult for people who are very ill in these distant rural communities; the so-called last mile communities, to get healthcare.

Strikingly oddly, certain effective altruist organizations such as GiveWell, for many years had ranked the Village Reach as one of their top rated charities. What that basically means is that they judged that the money that you spent in contributing-- if you made contribution to Village Reach, was money well spent, that was efficiently being used, and that this charity was doing what it said it was doing for the money that you were giving it. It turns out that for a variety of well-known reasons that Village Reach is actually intended to counteract. A charity of this kind is not efficient. It's not efficient if what you want to do is maximize the number of lives saved. This is what health organizations like the World Health Organization and many international aid organizations have recognized because by and large, you can do a lot more good if what you're merely interested in is saving the most lives.

If you focus on the large cities; you put a hospital in a large city, you put a hospital in a place like Kibera, which is the largest slum in Africa, and a single doctor can reach hundreds of thousands of people. Where similarly, if you go to villages that are in the middle of nowhere and there's a hundred people in the village or less, to send a doctor out there to address the needs of a dying child is just not efficient. It's not cost effective. But the point of a charity like Village Reach is to say that the child who's born in rural Africa, their life is just as valuable as the lives of the children that are born in the major cities in Nairobi or wherever else. And they should have an equal chance at life and having a normal life expectancy.

So this charity has risen up to meet a demand that most of the poor nations of the world healthcare systems just can't meet that demand. But the thing to note here is that this is a charity that at its root, has a certain conception of fairness in mind. It's not a, "How do we do the most good with the money?" It's a, "Does this child's life matter any less than these children's?" It's with that in mind-- And there are deep philosophical backgrounds to this kind of thinking. Kant famously claimed that each person's life was worth infinite value. That may be too strong. But the point about each person's life is worth infinite value, is in essence the view that you don't crate off between lives. You don't say, "Well, here's one life here and here's two lives here. I could save these two people if I'm just wanting to kill this person and distribute their organs. Are two lives more valuable than one?" Kant says, "Well, each of their lives is infinitely valuable. Each of their lives has value without bound, and you don't increase the total value in the world by killing one innocent person in order to save two others.” That's not how we should be guided in our thinking.

I'm not a strict counting by any means. I actually give a great deal of weight in my own thinking to so called consequences considerations, the kind of efficiency considerations that motivate organizations like effective altruism and such. I give great way to it, but that's kind of one important moral ideal and it has to be balanced against other ideals. That was the point of my initial response and the point of my talking about places like Village Reach. I think there's the place in our Pantheon of valuable charities that will rank something like Village Reach, which is highly inefficient in terms of most life saved for the dollar, but highly efficient in terms of giving weight to a value like equality or fairness.

Ben (16:04):

Sure. That makes sense and that feels like an analogy to the UK health service issue. I guess that has made me reflect a little bit on something to do -- And you've written about this a little bit as well. The nature of perhaps time and also distance. There's a little bit on the sense of fairness, I think particularly with babies, because we feel that they have a future and there is something about thinking about future selves. Then I think drawing in the example of the Village in Africa, there is something about distance, about perhaps it not being necessarily as morally relevant when we're thinking about weighing lives. And like you say, if you get to the Kant view of it being infinite, then actually things like time and distance fade away. Have you changed your view of thinking about time and distance over your thinking around this?

Larry (17:02):

Not over my thinking about this per se. Historically, people have thought questions about time and distance are philosophically simple, but practically complex. So, the thought would be historically that we should be neutral with respect to people; all people's lives are valuable, places; it doesn't matter where in space someone is suffering. What matters is that someone is suffering somewhere, and neutral with respect a time. So if I could save one person alive today, or 500 people who will be alive in a hundred years from now; 500 lives obviously is equal, more important than one life. This gets into the question we started with. Supposed we take that for a minute. And the fact that it's in the distant future, that doesn't matter. It's 500 versus one. So from a theoretical standpoint, most philosophers and economists and others have agreed that we should be neutral, theoretically with respect to people, places, and times. But practically speaking, it can make a big difference whether someone is right next to you or further away. It can make a difference whether you can help someone now or in the future. Because someone who might need your care now will assuredly die if you don't help them.

Someone in the future might die if you help them. They might not even come to exist if you do or don't make certain actions now. Or they might come to exist, but there might be technological developments that will enable you to save those 500 people. The technologies you would have saved, not use the resources here now, in order to say in the future, turn out to be obsolete and aren't even necessary as you let this person die for nothing. These are sort of practical considerations. They're not theoretical considerations. They're practical considerations. As a matter of fact, I've come to the view and published a bit that even the theoretical questions are not nearly as simple as most people have thought; that it's just a simple matter of being neutral with respect to people, places and times.

When I say that, there's always a kind of other things equal clause here. So when I say that you ought to be neutral with respect to people, I'm not suggesting that means that there can't be special relationships. So, between me and my wife, me and my children, me and my mother. But the point is, if there are special relationships that enable me to treat my mother differently than a stranger, then that's supposed to be true for everyone. That's the kind of neutrality I'm talking about here. So if another stranger has a mother, they get to treat their mother the same way I get to treat my mother. That's the sense in which neutrality could be compatible with different people having special obligations or agree towards those they're in close contact with. But anyway, the questions about space and time; neutrality with respect to people, places, and times, people have made a lot of assumptions about these over the years. That we are to treat these different possible locations of the good, the same. We are to treat time, or space, or people-- they're all the same from a moral standpoint. I've actually published that that's not right. I think that turns out to be extremely complicated. But that would take us down a philosophical rabbit hole probably which would try the patience of your readers.

But if your readers are interested in this, they might look at some of my articles where I argue about people, places, and times. And I show that the common assumption that they're all different locations of the good and we ought to treat them all the same. That's not only not plausible, it's not even possible in certain kinds of cases. They're actually incompatible with each other.

Ben (21:15):

That seems to be a thread when I follow your work, because it's similar on inequality that if I were to sum it up, you look at it and go, "Well, we thought it might have been theoretically simple, but it turns out that actually it's also theoretically complicated." I'm going to come back to this nearness of people because it's actually a small point in your book, perhaps, but it really struck me that you make a point about when someone is right in front of you, the immediacy of that moment-- I don't whether there is a certain phrase for it. That actually struck me as quite true, but that's from my work within theater and art. But we'll come to that because I think it will help understand the Singer's pond analogy when we get to some of the disanalogies on that.

So maybe before getting to that, I was maybe going to touch on your work on transitivity. But before touching on that, I was really interested in essentially how you've come about your ideas and how do philosophers think. I'm interested in how we as humans say progress. So we can progress technologically. We can progress socially. And I think we seem to progress morally. If you go a thousand years ago, the consensus was, “Slaves are fine.” Come to today, the consensus is, “Slaves are not fine.” I think most people also agree today that's actually some sort of moral or social progress. And some of that could have come from a moral or philosophical thinking. I was just rereading the front of your book and some of your thinking around this area you had quite earlier on. I think maybe you say 1977 or something like that.

You first propose it to a couple of some of the greatest living at the time; moral philosophers. They basically say, "Doesn't seem to make any sense." So you parked that idea for several years. But there's something about it which you haven't quite let go, and you have a couple of students who reignite it with you and you come to it again. It's interesting, and we'll come to this dinner that you have, which I think seems to be one of the greatest, perhaps moral philosophy dinners of the last 10 or 20 years. But again, you have these thoughts go around in your head. You can't sleep very easily. You run all of these scenarios. You seem to be almost dreaming about it to come to some sort of conclusion. It also now seems to be the case particularly if we think about transitivity, that people who didn't agree with you and people who thought this is completely crazy are kind of thinking, "Well, maybe this is truth. Maybe this is some discovery or at least something we need to take really seriously," which strikes me as some form of progress from something which is a very non-consensus idea, has sprung out of your brain somehow and come out into the world.

I'm not sure. Is there anything we can think about or learn about this? Maybe we can't because we don't have a good sense of it. But I was really struck how, if this is true about sensitivity and it seems to be certain true of inequality, and maybe some of these ideas that you've recently expressed, they've gone against a consensus grain but they've also then maybe allowed us to progress. There seems to be something quite important about that process upstream. I wondered whether you'd had any reflections on this, or whether you've come to think, "Well, that's interesting. This is an idea which in 1977 might have died and never come to light,” in which case actually, all of these other downstream effects may not have happened, but actually it did.

Larry (24:57):

Yeah. So this is a great question, Ben. Some of this is just luck. I couldn't write a prescription for how this happens. I can say several things which is that... I mean, part of it is just me. I remember when I was in ninth grade, I had a high school teacher and she said to me, "Oh Larry iconoclast you.” To be honest, I didn't know what that word meant, but I looked it up and I saw and said, "Yeah. I'm kind of happy with that." For those of you audience members who don't want to have to look it up, I'll just tell you. Iconoclast is just like a breaker of idols. So I've always had it in me that... My absolute favorite expression for the bumper sticker that I love is, question authority.

It's not necessarily disobey authority, but it's always question authority. So in some sense, this is the heart of what philosophies have always done. They question the given. Going back to Plato and Plato's cave, here's this world that we're surrounded in. Is it the real world? Are we just seeing shadows on a cave and we don't know the difference? Kant and Hume and all these great philosophers who have raised all these great skeptical questions they cart, "How do I know that I'm dreaming and I'm not awake?" These are all basically questioning even the most fundamental truths. The most fundamental truths is like there's a tree outside my window, or I exist and lots of other people exist and then people have the problem of other minds.

Well, how do I know anybody else exists? How do I know there's any center of consciousness anywhere, but here? So part of this is just as it were, a philosophical tradition that goes back to the pre-Socratics, to question, to question, to question. Some people have philosophical temperaments and some people don't. It turns out I'm one of those people who do. I have a philosophical temperament. I've always questioned things. My parents would tell me things and they tell my siblings things. I have three very bright siblings. They all have doctorate degrees, or lawyer degrees, or whatever. They're very bright. They're very smart. I would be questioning everything and my siblings would say, "Yeah, okay, that sounds right." So part of the thing is, “Is having a kind of temperament that allows you to question things and to be open to the possibility that even the things that everybody thinks must be true, might still not be true.” I am actually just always open to that possibility.

Then there's the element of, as it were, luck or being sparked. In my case, being sparked by a genius; a certifiable genius. My mentor was Derek Parfit. He was, in my judgment, a great living moral philosopher until the time of his death not that long ago. One of the great moral philosophers, I believe, since Kant. He was a towering figure, and I had the great fortune of working very closely with him. The thing about Derek is he was just brilliant. So you're in the presence of brilliance and he would create these arguments. He was this argument machine. He would generate all these arguments. He was so bright, and he was so clever, and he was so smart. People in the presence of Derek would often just listen to his arguments and they'd be blown away and think, "Wow, that's amazing. That must be right."

But I just always had this element of... I would read Derek's arguments and I would often think, "Well, I can see why he says that, but..." Then something in the back of my head would nag at me and would just make me want to think about it a little bit different way. Both of the things you're discussing here-- and maybe we'll get to the conversation of the dinner which was quite fun for my third book. But the spark of both of my first two books came from incredibly rich arguments that Derek made where he made claims, and most people read those claims and just accepted them. I read those claims and for whatever reason, I didn't just accept them. I thought, "Hmm. Maybe, but maybe not." The story about the transitivity, I'll just quickly relate it for your audience.

It was the case. Derek had created this incredibly clever argument which he called, the mere addition paradox. I won't go to the details of the mere addition paradox, but the form of the mere addition paradox is it was considering three different possible futures where the world would go. He asked us to judge how these different worlds compared, how these different possible outcomes compared. He considered three of them and they were called the A world, the A+ world, and the B world. He gave very powerful arguments for thinking that the A world was better than the B world, and they were very compelling arguments. Then he made very compelling arguments to the claim that the B world was better than the A+ world, and they were also very compelling arguments. Then he gave this incredibly compelling series of arguments for the view that A+ was not worse than A. But that was a contradiction, according to the standard assumptions of what's called the axiom of transitivity for better, which human beings have accepted more or less since we came down from the trees.

The thought is, if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than C. So if A was better than B and B was better than A+, then A must be better than A+. But Derek supposedly had these arguments to show A was better than B, and B was better than A+, but A wasn't better than A+. Derek took that to show that we had this paradox, and we had to figure out which of these various claims had to go. We didn't know which of them had to go, but we knew that one of them had to go because they were incompatible with the axiom of transitivity.

This axiom was just accepted without argument for centuries of human thought. I mean, everybody accepted them. Philosophers accept them, psychologists accept them, economists accept them, mathematicians accept them, physicists; everybody accepted them. But the thing is, when I read Derek's arguments, I thought, "Geez, A really is better than B and B really is better than A+. But it isn't clear that A is better than A+." Maybe the lesson to be learned from the mere addition paradox is not that we have to give up one of these very plausible claims, but rather that we have to give up the action of transitivity. That entered my head and the thing is I was open to that. Nobody else was. Everybody else read that they had an axiom. They just accepted, "Axiom of transitivity must be true." I took this and I went to, as you say, three of the greatest living philosophies at the time. I took this thought that's inside of mine, that maybe the lesson that we learned from the mere addition paradox was that, "All things considered better than wasn't a transitive relation.”

I ran this first by Tom Nagel, who was in my judgment along with Derek, one of the two great living bowl of philosophies of the 20th century. Tom just looked at me and he sort of shook his head very sadly with this kind of mixture of pity and contempt. And he said, "Oh, Larry, I wouldn't understand what someone meant if they said that all things considered A was better than B, and all things considered B was better than C, but all things considered A wasn't better than C." He was the great Tom Nagel and I was like a punk graduate student at the time that thought, "Oh man, I must be an idiot" and I wandered out of his office. But then I took this question to another teacher of mine. A guy named Tim Cannon who was at Princeton at the time and later at Harvard. He was a MacArthur award winner, so-called genius award. Brilliant philosopher. I ran the same thought by him. I said," Tim, it seems to me that maybe the lesson to be learned from Derek's mere addition paradox is that all things considered better than isn't a transitive relation."

He didn't look at me as if I was an idiot the way Tom had, but he basically said, "Larry, that can't be. All things considered better than is true by definition. If you know the meaning of the words, you know that must be true.” And then I ran them by Derek whose paradox it was. I thought if anyone will appreciate the possibility that there's this incredibly mind all three new way of thinking about the world that comes out of his work, it should be Derek. I ran by Derek and Derek gave me the same answer. He basically said, "Larry, that just couldn't be true." So they basically all told me that, "You're an idiot. Go home and do something else with your life." I did put it on hold for a while, but thanks to several students around, I did come back to it. I did explore it. Then eventually, I came to the view that maybe I was right and I could even explain what was going on. So I had an explanation, both for why people thought that "all things considered better than must be true," but for why it might not actually be true. And this had to do with an exploration about the very nature and structure of the good, which people assume to be one way, but on examination, in fact, it turns out perhaps to be another way. If it is another way, then there's no reason at all to expect all things considered better than to be a transitive relation.

And it is a striking feature that when I started this particular work as a graduate student in 1977, it was universally opposed. Now, when I travel to the best graduate programs in philosophy in the world, the next generation or two generations forward now, the graduate students are all perfectly prepared to accept that all things considered better than might not be a transitive relation. In a matter of basically 40 years, two generations among graduate students in philosophy, it's been a radical shift from this is conceptually impossible, or as the great philosopher, former vice chair of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, John Broome once told me, it's logically impossible that all things considered better than might be not a transitive relation. And now, many people, including some people in economics have agree with that, and yeah, maybe this is right.

Ben (36:26):

That strikes me as an amazing story on two or three levels. Let me pick out a couple of reflections and one addition. The addition is that when you came back to this work-- And maybe we wouldn't have all of your brilliant work on inequality had you only come to this conclusion. So maybe there was a silver lining for this. You sent the write up of your thoughts to Derek, who mythology goes was very busy, had just published, and then took it up halfway up a mountain in India, read it and went, "Wow, you might be right. I really paraphrase this kind of thing.” But actually, he had the openness of mind, which you suggest is perhaps a trait of philosophers. I also think Derek has a kind of interesting style of thinking which maybe I've called perhaps autistic cognitive, to some degree as well. But this pursuit of a certain thread of thought. But I thought that was very interesting.

I might just mention why I found it so troubling or at least thoughtful when I've only rarely recently came across your work around this. This is because if things aren't transitive particularly around this-- So like you say, it's very easy to see in numbers. The language of numbers; three is bigger than two. Two is bigger than one. So obviously three is bigger than one. And you can see this within the heights of people, right? So this seems to be quite obvious. But we use this as the background for economic utility theory and all of that decision making theory to actually where alluded to right at the beginning. And so if there is something potentially not always right, or not always situations where we can really hold that, it has really weakened some of my thinking about the moral choices of when you're using utility theory, which is still obviously a very useful decision framework.

But I think that relates to my first question, because actually, it seems to be the case that it isn't really all-encompassing as perhaps we would like it to be. It doesn't solve all of these problems for it. I remember listening to you. You had one very good example around pain as to why you could have a thought of experiment on that. But does that still hold for you then that this does probably slightly down weight the idea of how we can use utility theory because of your thinking around transitivity? Are those sort of examples still…? Has your thinking much evolved around that, or is it kind of evolved as how it was? Maybe you would want to give the quick example around pain or something else so that people can understand what it might be and why this seems so problematic. If you think that's a good example, or maybe anything else which is kind of easy to understand for this axiom of transitivity.

Larry (39:20):

Sure. Let me say several things. First, I'll give the general answer. I'll give a particular example. It's a striking thing because economists have always-- and I admire economists greatly. I think their contributions to the progress of humanity has been immense. I have many very good friends who are economists who I admire greatly and who have influenced me significantly: Angus Deaton, Nobel Laureate, John Broome who was trained under Nobel Laureate as an economist. These are all very brilliant people. There's much to be learned from them and from what economics has given us. Expected utility theory is an extremely powerful theory, but it does have a bunch of axioms. These are the premises on which this theory is built.

I have challenged in my book, Rethinking the Good, a good number of its most fundamental axioms, at least three. If the axioms of a theory aren't true-- and I think there's very powerful reason to think they're not true, then that theory isn't true. It's just not. That should give one great pause of putting too much weight on a theory whose fundamental axioms are questionable. So my thinking about that has not changed. There are still cases where we all implicitly rely on the axiom of transitivity in our everyday thinking. And there are lots of cases where we rely on standard economic expected utility theory reasoning in our everyday reasoning, but that doesn't mean it's right. It's deeply questionable. Let me give a concrete example and then I'll just mention one that's a little bit harder to grasp. But here's a concrete example for your audience.

So, I've been lecturing on the topic of transitivity now for 35 or 40 years; 30 years at least. I've traveled all around the world and I will often ask my audience the following question. Suppose that you or a loved one is going to have to have a certain intensity of pain. So I'm just going to measure that. I'm going to show you a visual diagram. The height of this when I raise this up is the intensity of the pain. So a certain intensity of pain for a certain duration of time. So if I go like that, that's how long it is. So certain intensity of pain for a certain duration of time. So you or a loved one is going to have to have a certain intensity of pain for a certain duration, or you or your loved one is going to have a slightly less intense pain-- so not quite as intense, slightly less, but it's going to last two, or three, or five times as long. And the question is, "What do you want for yourself or someone you love?" Do you want a certain intensity of pain for a given duration of time? Or do you want slightly less? I mean, just ever so slightly. They barely notice it, a little bit less, but it's going to last two or three or five times as long. That's my first question.

Now just to tell you, if your audience is... I should have said, "Think along with this question. When I ask it, think what you want for yourself or someone you really love. Your mom, your daughter, your significant other, whatever." Almost unanimously people say, "I want the slightly more intense pain that's much shorter in duration." It's not literally unanimous, but it's almost unanimous. I then ask my audiences the following question. There are two ways your life might go. In both lives there could be very, very long lives, as long as you might possibly want. And there's going to be 15 mosquito bites a month for the duration of your life. I came up with this example a long time ago when I lived in Houston, Texas. We have lots of mosquitoes in Houston, Texas so I was constantly scratching the mosquito bites. They're annoying. They're not the end of the world, but they are annoying. And I constantly have mosquito bites on me. So I was thinking, 15 bites a month for the rest of your life. Background, that's part of what goes with living in Houston.

But in addition, at one point in this very long life, you or your loved one; your son, your daughter, your significant other is going to have two years of the most excruciating pain humanly imaginable. So everything you've ever seen or heard or read in the worst be novels or movies about how torture might go-- And I don't want to make light of it because some people have actually gone through this. The bamboo shoots under the fingernails, the wax in the eyes, the electrodes hooked up to your genitals. It's everything that could possibly be bad. You're being tortured, and you're being tortured like 20 hours a day until finally you go unconscious. Then they wake you up, and the next day they do it again. The next day they do it again, and the next day they do it again. Every single day the pain is so intense that you really wish you could die. You just pray, "Please, Lord, let me die." But you don't. It goes for two straight years. But, at the end of that two years, because this is philosophy we're allowed to do that, they will give you a pill and you won't ever remember having gone through this pain. But for the two years of your life, it will be the most excruciating pain humanly imaginable. That's one way your life might go. Now, here's the other.

At this point, most of my audience members are thinking, "I don't care what the other is. I'm taking that. You don't have to tell me just what's behind door B. I'm taking door B. I don't want do A." But now I'm going to tell you what's behind door B because you really have to know. Instead of 15 mosquito bites a month and two years of the most excruciating torture humanly imaginable, you will have 16 mosquito bites a month. That's it. Now, which of those do you want for you or anyone you really care about? Here, again, it's virtually unanimous. Human beings say, "I want the life of 60 mosquito bites a month. I don't care how long I live. One extra mosquito bite a month, I'd rather have that than two years of the most excruciating torture humanly imaginable." So I ask those two questions in my audiences. I've asked them around the world. Hundreds of audiences, thousands of people. Virtually, everyone agrees with the answers they give to these two questions.

Turns out that the answers that almost everyone accepts-- And I'll just add, I believe rightly so. I'll say a tiny bit more about that, are incompatible with the axiom of transitivity. I'll just say why. Because you'll remember when I said at the beginning, you have a certain intensity of pain for a certain duration, or a little bit less intense for two or three or five times long. I didn't tell you how intense nor did I tell you the duration, and I didn't need to, because it turns out this is a generalizable truth. That is, whether it's a really intense pain for a month, or a really intense pain for 10 years, or a mild pain for a month, or a mild pain for 10 years, we'd all rather have that pain than one that's a little bit less tense for two or three or five times as long. So it's a general truth. No matter how intense or how long the original duration, we'll rather have that than a little bit-- just barely less, but it's less and much longer.

So now you just imagine a world in which everyone starts off with a long life and 15 mosquito bites. And one of those lives, first life, has two years of intense torture. The next one, just to simplify it, has four years of torture almost as bad. 15 mosquito bites and four years of torture; almost bad, not quite as bad, but almost as bad. Everybody says the two years and 15 mosquito bites is better than the four years of torture almost as bad, and 15 mosquito bites. Or make it eight years or 10 years. It doesn't matter. We're just going to simplify it. Two to four. We all agree. Two is better than four when it comes to torture. Then instead of four years of really bad pain, you have eight years of pain almost as bad. Everyone agrees four is better than eight. Then you have eight years of pretty bad pain or 16 years of really pretty bad pain, not quite as bad, but so close. We'd rather have eight years than 16 and you just continue. Eventually, the pain is getting a little bit less, a little bit less, a little bit less, until at the very end, the pain is equivalent to a mosquito bite.

What we've agreed about is we all agree the first outcome is better than the second. The second is better than the third. The third is better than fourth. The fourth is better than the fifth. That continues all the way down. If all things considered better than is a transitive relationship, then the first outcome is better than the last. But the first outcome is which involves two years of excruciating torture and 15 mosquito bites a month. The last outcome is just 16 mosquito bites a month, and nobody believes that's better. So here we have a conflict. People who are interested in this topic just need to read the book, Rethinking the Good. But the key is to understand what's going on. To understand what explains this. Because a lot of times people make intransitive judgment. We learned this from the work of Amos Tversky for which Khaneman won the Nobel Prize. Tversky would've won the Noble Prize had he not passed away yet. That psychologically, people often make intransitive judgment because they're making mistakes in their judgment.

But I don't think these are cases where we're making cognitive mistakes. I think something else is going on. I think what happens is that there are certain principles that seem relevant and significant for making certain comparisons. There are other principles that are relevant and significant for making other comparisons. It turns out that the principles that are relevant and significant for making the comparison between the first outcome and the second, and the second and the third, and the third and the fourth, and the fourth and the fifth, that's what you call an added of aggregation principle. It basically says, if you have two alternatives that differ only slightly, very slightly in terms of pain or pleasure, then quantity matters. So more pain is worse than less pain if the pains are similar in quality. You call that an added of aggregation account. For cases like that, we just add up the sum total of pain, weighted by the quality times duration. We take the area end of the curve, as it were, tells you which is worst.

But this is key. There are certain kind of cases where we expect what I call an anti-added of aggregation. The case I just gave is one, and my lollipop for life's case on the cover of my book is another. I'll mention that in a second. That's a case where we say, if the difference in quality of pain is sufficiently great, so that the one kind of pain makes a substantial impact on the quality of a person's life, and the other kind of pain makes basically no impact on the quality of their life, then no amount of the second kind of pain is worse than the first. So there we're rejecting the added of aggregation. We're rejecting the view that, "Well, if only there's enough mosquito bites, eventually they'll be worse than two years of intense torture." We say I don't care how many mosquito bites there are.

So basically what we're doing is we're using what's called an added of aggregations approach to compare the first alternative with the second, and the second with the third, and the third with the fourth, et cetera. But we're using anti-added of aggregations approach where we compare the first with the last, and both of those seem right. But then, it turns out that if the principles or the factors that are relevant for comparing alternatives vary, depending on the alternatives being compared, then there's no reason to expect transitivity to hold. Transitivity only holds if the very same factors are relevant for comparing every comparison, but it turns out they're not. It turns out there are lots of cases of this sort where actually the factors that are relevant for comparing A with B is one thing, B with C is another thing, and C with D is another thing. But the factors for preparing A and Z are different. And when that happens, no reason to expect transitivity to obtain. That's what I eventually saw. That's what can explain or account for what otherwise seemed logically impossible. We couldn't understand how that could even be the case until I got to the root of what explains how it could be the case, which has to do with the nature and structure of the good. I could say much more about that, but maybe…

Ben (53:51):

Definitely read the book for that. I think this is maybe the 18th time I've now read or heard your explanation for it and I'm still astonished listening to it, and it feels right. So I am troubled a little bit like you say that there's a theory that we use and it's probably not true because its axioms are not true. On the other hand, when I think about my creative and artwork, I am less troubled because actually there's a lot, I think, in the endeavor of human creativity which essentially kind of only holds in the moment in these certain circumstances and in these things. So the tools are kind of true even if they don't have a greater truth. There's another aspect which I've been thinking about. This idea of rationality or not rationality, that again, this human brain doesn't work necessarily on all of these prepared pathways, like the logic of maths might do. And actually, there might be even some neuroscience for why that might be. Do you want to do your other little example or shall we move on?

Larry (54:58):

Well, we could go on. I was going to give my lollipop for life example as another example of an anti-added of aggregations approach. But it is, as I say, the one that...

Ben (55:09):

Yeah, we've got the picture.

Larry (55:13):

It's a picture. These are little people, they're all licking a lollipop, and this is a big person in intense pain.

Ben (55:19):

You want to go and look it up on the web now. Have a look at the picture.

Larry (55:26):

So, the thing about the lollipop for life case is it's one of the many cases where most people accept what's called an anti-added of aggregation view. And what that means is the following. Suppose you had two ways the world might go. In one, everybody lives really an incredibly, wonderful, flourishing life. So whatever you think matters for a flourishing life, they all have it. They live a long time. They have deep loves. They're very creative. They appreciate music. There are all sorts of scientific achievements and accomplishments. There's justice; whatever you want, the lives are filled with them and everybody has them. So in terms of all the really weighty things that matter in life, billions of people all have them. And in addition, there's a bunch of not so weighty things in life, but that also make life a little bit better. One of them is that over the course of their lives-- these are long lives, everybody gets to lick a lot of lollipops many times. That's one way the world might go.

Here's another way the world might go. Everybody lives that same type of life almost exactly the same. All the things that matter; the high achievements, the good health, the terrific sex, the theater going, everything. Whatever you think is valuable in life, it's all there. They're all healthy and they're all happy. But, one person suffers the most agonizing life. Pain and misery and suffering every single day. Day after day after day and then they eventually die. But, everybody else who have this incredible great life gets one extra lick of a lollipop over the course of their life. Now, almost everybody you ask that question, "If you had to choose between those possible outcomes, which would be better?" They say the outcome in which everyone has an incredibly great life but one less lick of the lollipop. Rather than the life in which all these people, vast numbers of them, have great lives, one more lick of lollipop, but someone suffers unbelievable agony and dies. So I call that the lollipop for life case.

But if one had a simple added of aggregation approach for everything, well, one lick of lollipop might be only a teeny tiny bit of pleasure. But if you just add up to sum total of people, if only there's enough people, eventually the sum total of pleasure gained from all those individual licks of the lollipop would outweigh the suffering of any single person, no matter how bad. On a simple added of aggregation approach of the sort that's typically favored by standard utilitarians. But that just seems crazy. That just seems deeply wrong. There are many examples from literature that try to evidence this kind of a view. The ones who walked away from the omelas are the ones who walked away.

But it just doesn't seem right. Things don't add up in that way. And I have more to say about why they don't add up in that way. But I'll just say one more thing about that because it's important for people to get their head around what does or doesn't work. When I think about the pain of a mosquito bite spread out throughout our life, or the extra value of a lollipop spread out over time across many different lives, I claim that those kinds of pleasures and pains don't add up in the way they would need to, to outweigh the concentrated pains or pleasures that might occur in the same life with two years of torture. When I think about that, my analogy is roughly like this. I want to talk about the straw that broke the camel's back.

So you have a camel, you put a straw on the camel's back, and then you add a second piece, and then you add a third piece, and then you add a fourth piece, and a fifth piece, a six piece, It takes a very long time, but eventually you'll have tons of straw on the camel's back and the camel's back will break. That's the added of aggregation approach. If you add enough straw, the camel's back will eventually break assuming that straw is all there present at the same time. But suppose instead you have a camel and you put these straw on his back and then you blow it off. Then you put a second piece of straw and then you blow it off. And then you take the third, and the fourth, and fifth. But each time you blow it off. The camel's back will never break. It doesn't matter how much straw. It will never break.

Well, I think when we have a mosquito bite; one this month, and one next month, and one next month and one next month. Or a lickable lollipop; one person, and then a different person, and then a different person, then a different person. Those don't add up. That's like the straw on the back that's being blown off each time. Before the second piece of straw comes, the first one's gone. Before the second itch comes, the first one's gone. When the one person has a lick of a lollipop, the other person has one, but they never combine. So there are some kinds of cases where an anti-added of aggregation approach seems right for comparing outcomes. But importantly, there are other cases where an added of aggregation approach seems right for comparing cases.

Then it just turns out it's easily shown that if certain factors are relevant for comparing A and B, and B and C, but different factors are relevant for comparing A and C, then A could be better than B in terms of all the factors relevant and significant for making that comparison. And B could be better than C in terms of all of the factors relevant to C for making that comparison. But it does not follow that A is better than C in terms of all the factors relevant and significant for making that comparison because those factors are different.

Ben (1:02:15):

That still blows my mind. I hope everyone listening can ponder that, and re-listen to that, and go read the book. I’m going to move on to a couple of Peter Singer ideas before getting to the pond, or at least one, before his pond analogy. I have to confess. I found this Singer idea so awkward that I put a little bit less weight to his other ideas on animals and altruism when I first came across it. This idea has to do with disability and I think with some of his utilitarian roots. I hope I don't mangle this, but Singer has proposed that we should allow parents of disabled babies the choice of keeping or ending their lives. Now, Singer has quite a few nuances to his arguments. But I think, as a layperson, this seems to me both are wrong on consequentialist and non-consequentialist grounds. Consequentialist because actually you can see examples where this is probably going to have less welfare in the world, and non-consequentialist because it doesn't seem to be the right thing to do.

But I never really had a chance to ask a moral philosopher on this. So I wonder if this has been problematic in the world of philosophy as well. You can see people as brilliant as Stephen Hawking who lived a very fulfilled live. When you do that, disability rights people talk about the social model of disability, which doesn't also encompass things like focusing on systems change and making lives more fulfilled for people. Is it as problematic as we kind of think?

Larry (1:03:59):

This is not a topic that I address in any of my books, but I'm happy to address it here. So Peter's views about disability are complex and they are nuanced. I think they're often misinterpreted. I'm not saying you've misinterpreted them, but I do think they're often misinterpreted. The question whether they're controversial or not. The interesting thing you said is you think that they're controversial on both consequentialist and non-consequentialist ground. I think they're less controversial on consequentialist grounds than you. I think they're very controversial on non-consequentialist grounds. I think there are lots of reasons why one might or might not worry. But even then, I have to get in. Among philosophers, they're less controversial even on non-consequentialist grounds than many people would think. I say among philosophers-- There are philosophies and philosophers. They always say if you have 15 philosophies in the room, you have 15 opinions about any about any given issue. Do you mind a funny story and then I'll come back to this. Maybe I won't. Remind me if you feel like it. There's a character in The Good Place, Chidi who can never make up his mind about philosophy. That character was a pattern on my reading group, and I can tell you more about that. 

But let me talk about the more serious issue. So the issue for Singer, what makes this so complicated is it gets down to a variety of questions about under what conditions does a being of any kind have a serious right to life. For many people-- I know how Roe V Wade was just decided here in the United States. But for many philosophers, a being doesn't have a serious right to life until they have achieved a certain level of psychological development; a whole bunch of other kinds of things. For Kant, you didn't have a serious right to life until you were capable of following a moral law that you prescribed to yourself.

In other words, you had to be a rational being. You had to be a being that was capable of morality. For some people, you don't have a serious right to life unless you're capable of a kind of inner self consciousness. A life going on, on the inside where you're aware of who you are. Where you are of autonomy, where you have plans that are perhaps being frustrated by being treated one way rather than another. For some people, you don't have a serious right to life until you can envision your future going a certain way, and then have that vision that you have for how your future might go being interrupted by other people who are deciding how your future should go for you instead, et cetera. The point is, there's a whole bunch of candidates for under what condition would we say of a being that they have a serious right to life, and most of the candidates that most people take seriously-- This is one of the wonderful ironies about all of this. About how Peter is castigated on one side, but then not credited on another. But for most people, they don't think a cat, or a rat, or a rabbit has a serious right to life.

But in terms of the mental capacities that are currently held by a newborn baby; handicapped or not, and a cat or a rat… One of Peter's points early on is that an adult male cat, or a dog, or a cow, or a rat, or a mouse has those capacities to a greater degree than a newborn infant. Notice that has nothing to do with the disability per se. That's just true, he thinks and many philosophers think about… You first ask the question, “Under what condition is one a person?” Not a human being, but a person. Whereby person, you mean a being with a serious right to life. Peter tries to ask, "What do newborn babies have that newborn chimpanzees don't, or that cats don't, or that mice don't have? What do they have?" We can say more about, well, they have a potential that the others don't have. And then we could talk about that.

But that potential isn't there now. It's not realized. It might be there in the future. Is that enough? On that view then, these newborn babies, whether handicapped or not aren't persons. They don't have a serious right to life. I'm not saying I accept that view. I'm taking a stand on that one way or the other. But this is a very serious kind of view that's widely discussed and that one has to come to terms with. In virtue of what is it that any being has a serious right to life that would enable us to distinguish, for example, between a newborn infant and an adult cat-- if we really think adult cats don't have a serious right to life. Then his point would be, when he turns to the question about, what about handicap beings? Well, that can put a lot of strain on a family. That can put a strain on the other children in family. It can put a financial strain, emotional strain, all sorts of other strains.

Why not, if they don't have a serious right to life anyway, allow the parents to decide for themselves about something that's of such crucial importance to how their lives go, and how their family's lives goes, and their children's lives might go. Now, if you thought a newborn baby infant, whether a handicapped or not has a serious right to life, then the fact that it puts a lot of burden on the rest of the family might be irrelevant. Doesn't matter. “So I'm sorry, you won't be able to go to an expensive college because we spent all this money taking care of your younger sister. That's too bad. But she's a Persian, she has a serious right to life, and that's just the cost you're going to have to pay.”

But I think his position is more complicated in that really at its foundational roots, there's a question of whether any human being before the age of two, even has a serious right to life. And if the answer is no, even for a healthy newborn baby, then you could see why Peter or others might think when you're dealing with a seriously handicapped child, that might be a huge burden on other members of the family, and whose quality of life depending on how serious it is, may or may not be significantly high. Why not in that case give the parents the autonomy to choose what's best for them and their siblings? That's one element of the kind of view in question.

There's another element which is what utilitarians accept, which non utilitarians don't accept, which is the kind of replaceability argument. On this view, all human lives are replaceable. Let's go back to the very first question you asked me about, "I could save one person, but would cost a lot of money. For the same money, I could save 10 other people." Well, this person's life is replaceable as it were. One life versus 10. Kant thinks and non-consequentialist are over here saying, "No, you can't think about human lives that way. Human lives aren't replaceable that way." And that's my own view. 

But for Peter or for other committed utilitarians, we should be neutral between all beings; all essential beings, including all human beings, and one human being is replaceable by another. So if this human being would have a certain degree level of success and value in their life, and you could have two others or another person that the expected value would be just as high or higher, this person's replaceable by another. So you should allow a parent to not have to support this baby in order to bring another one into existence that would have an equally and better life. That's replaceability thesis. That's a distinctly utilitarian thesis. It's not in general. But I want to get back to one of the things you said which is very important.

You speak about the case of Stephen Hawking. Other people talked about the case of Beethoven. Though Beethoven wasn't in fact deaf at birth, he became deaf later on. So it's not the perfect analogy. But anyway, suppose he had been deaf at birth but still capable of creating his great work. Stephen Hawking and others. What you have to understand here is the form of the reasoning, that Peter and others I suppose, which is a kind of reasoning that I often object to in my work, as you know. But it's the form of the reasoning. In legal circles, people say hard cases make bad law. You can't decide the general principles to government society based on the exceptions, based on the fact that as a matter of fact... And again, Stephen Hawking, same case. Stephen Hawking wasn't born with the disabilities that developed later. They came much later.

Suppose he had been born with those disabilities, what would the expected value of his life have been? Well, the expected value of his life might have been very, very low. It turned out that he was genius and ended up doing great things, but the expected value of his life was quite low. When we any kind of decisions; moral decisions, practical decisions, you don't make your decision on the best possible outcome that could ever occur. You make the decision on your most reasonable guesses of what's likely to occur in general, in cases of this kind. So when you're choosing between-- This goes back to the value of expected utility theory. But you're choosing which profession you go into, and you're going into this profession, you're virtually guaranteed to have a great life. There's almost no downside to it.

You go into this profession and you're virtually guaranteed to have a miserable life, but there's a one in a billion chance or a one in a million chance that you'll have a stupendously great life, a better life than you would have while we're here. Which should you pursue? Almost every rational person forget about the morality of it will say, "Pursue the one where you're guaranteed you have a great life with no downside.” You don't choose the one that is almost certain to lead to terrible outcomes, just because there's some chance it might lead to a great outcome. So when people point to these great lives that have been lived by people who suffer from serious handicaps, that's not necessary. That might be the hard cases that make bad law. Do we really want to adopt general policies for society; moral or otherwise, based on the exceptions rather than what's predicted to be the case. 

Suppose you knew the following. You're going to have a thousand children born with a severe handicapped and 999 of them lives are going to go horribly. They'd be ridiculed at school. They're only capable of certain levels. But one out of a thousand, their life is going to be great. Should you bring the thousand people into the world? Do you bring a thousand people into the world knowing that 999 of them are going to suffer greatly because one of them might fare really well? That's really what Peter and others are trying to get us to grapple with. They're trying to get us to grapple with really, what is the expected value of these lives? And if the expected value of these lives is actually negative, though on rare occasions it’s positive, he says, what right do you have to do that?

But the key thing I want to get here is there are cases. There's a difference between a child that's born not normal, but perfectly capable of a happy, fulfilling life. I take it most down syndrome children have this kind of a life in front of them, and children that really have severe spina bifida. They're likely to be in pain and suffering and live a short life. It's never going to turn around, or highly unlikely. There are different kinds of cases. I'm not going to agree with Peter at any point where the argument turns in essence on the replaceability. "Well, we could get rid of this model for a newer improved model." I just don't buy that. But I do think there are other elements that are underlying his view that need to be taken pretty seriously.

Ben (1:17:10):

Okay. That's given me food for thought. I still find it somewhat troubling, but I understand now the link to his work on animals and sentience better. I have listened to him, but I actually have found your explanation better. Maybe it's easier to do it when you're doing it on someone else's work where you might not completely agree with all of their things because you can elucidate the things out from that. So one more then maybe before the pond analogy. Hopefully we'll have time. Again, this is a personal thing which isn't really in your books either. It was a little bit I hinted at because I somewhat was troubled by some of Peter's views because of a view that he had. This actually comes in the work of art. So I had, not a close friend, but a friend, who arguably was a great artist and made great work.

But it turns out that they also had other parts of their lives which was very troubled and probably horrific. It ends up that this friend then committed something awful and they had long running hidden problems and it didn't end well. Actually, I have their work still on my bookshelves and I'm a little bit troubled. This question is often raised with regards to Ezra Pound. It's a little bit more historic, so we can think because he had very troubling views. But poets would say his poetry is also very brilliant. Do why, or should I have to regard their work any differently in the face of other aspects of their lives when I'm thinking about their art or not?

I mean, I guess it's going to come to every individual and the waiting of the case and all of that which I'm considering. But does moral philosophy have anything to say about those sorts of problems? I guess they extend because people can do other horrific things and they have other parts of their lives. I've read a little bit around that, but I've never had anything which I kind of go, "Oh, I could really think about it in that way." I'm assuming that's because of your 50 philosophers and the light bulb type of thing, there's probably just a huge range of views in that. Is there any easy way of thinking of that or is the answer complicated?

Larry (1:19:32):

So we've hinted at this already. You've hinted at it in the very beginning and I’ve hinted at in my various responses. But I'm what other people call a pluralist about morality. So I think there are many ideals that matter. I think there are many ideals that matter practically and I think there are many ideals that matter morally. So justice matters, autonomy matters, freedom matters, equality matters, perfectionism matters; all these things matter. The truth matters, I believe. Beauty matters. Keith famously saw the connection between beauty and truth, right? “Truth is beauty. Beauty is truth. That's all you know, and all you need to know,” something like that. I probably butchered it. So a very important claim about the importance of truth. Truth itself has its own kind of beauty, and beauty itself has its own kind of truth…

So I believe there are different values and I believe that at the end of the day, a person who wants to be a good person has to give proper expression to all of these different kinds of values. So that is almost always going to make, from my way of thinking about the world, any question a complicated question because there's rarely a case where I'm going to say, "Ah, here's the answer." People who are what I call monolist as opposed to pluralist. They have a single value. It's the one they care about more than anything else, or the only one they care about. Milton Friedman famously claimed, "One can care about only one value and that value is freedom." But anyway, the point was there's one thing that matters; freedom. Everything else is pale. So you assess every single issue in terms of freedom.

Well, if you assess every single issue in terms of-- and now fill in your favorite value; utility, or freedom, or perfection, then most of the questions you're going to ask me or yourself aren’t going to have an easy answer. But as soon as you recognize that morality's not that simple, life isn't that simple… Art itself isn't that simple. It's fragmented. It's complicated. You look at many of Picasso's pieces, he's Kafka. I love Kafka. The truths that he's revealing are not simple straightforward. You don't get to them in a linear fashion, but they're revealing something really important about his inner psyche, but also about the world, and also our relationship. All these kinds of things that you can only see through a distorted lens. There is no clarity. There isn't clarity to be found. There isn't searching to be found.

So I believe that morality is extraordinarily complex and lots of different factors bear on almost every important question. There are some questions that are very nice. They're kind to us. Because those are the easy questions where all the values line up. Utility favors, and perfection favors, and equality favors. They're all favor. That makes it a simple answer. But there's so few real world questions, the kind that trouble us, the kind that keep us up at night that have that feature. There's all these complicating elements. That's the background. Now to the particular question. You asked a specific question. So how should I think about a great poet or a great philosopher? 

Heidegger or others who are affiliated with the Nazis. Nietzsche. What should we make of Nietzsche if in fact Nietzsche's views were used or misused by the Nazis? I think there are theoretical issues at stake. There are moral issues at stake. There are practical issues at stake. I think Insofar as a poet gives us an example of great art that can be inspiring and can teach us about beauty, or ourselves, or the world, or our relationship. It would be a terrible waste of resources to ignore that poem that does that for us. It would be inefficient if nothing else. On the other hand, do you want to hold this poet up as a paragon of virtue? Be like her, be like him when there's all this other baggage going on in your lives? The answer to that is no, you don't want do that.

So you may want to, as it were, there's always the old question of... I always want to say you don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. For some people, the kind of case you describe, it's a very small baby and it's a very big bathwater that's filthy, and dirty, and drudgery, and so on. You want to get rid of the bath water, not the baby. And it's always a continuum, right? Some of these people are very big babies and only a little bit of water. You really don't want to throw out the big baby just because there was a little water there. We're facing this issue as you know, of course, as we try to come to terms with our past. In the west, but not only in the west, in the terrible atrocities that we have helped perpetrate or have perpetrated, or our ancestors did, do we celebrate or not celebrate here in America, Columbus?

He discovered America. He also committed genocide on all these various things. So now, how do we come to terms with that? In the United States we're trying to, how do we come to terms with these leaders of the Confederacy? There were all these statues to them, but they were trying to keep slavery as an institution. So we need to weigh off, what do we learn from them? What do we not learn from them? What are the costs of just saying, “We don't need them?” I could get this argument. Someone might say, "Yeah, Ezra Pound was a great writer." But there are plenty of other great writers. Draw on them for their inspiration. You just don't have to talk about him because it's not like he's irreplaceable.

So if you don't need to talk about someone who's this complicated and has all this baggage, why bother? But the philosopher in me is-- There's always one element in me that cares about the truth. It cares about the truth. If a poet or a writer or a philosopher has truths that they've expressed, I think we should hang onto those. But we have to be very clear that what we're hanging onto is the truth, and not the speaker of the truth. That would be my own way of thinking about it. I certainly can see there's the theoretical case to be made, and then there's the practical case because human beings aren't so good at compartmentalizing. Supposed if we say, "No, look. Here's what we want to do. We want to continue to teach these controversial figures, but we're going to do it with the sign at the beginning of class." And all it says is, "Look, they did a bunch of really nasty things. Ignore all that. Just pay attention to the poetry or the story" or whatever like that.

If you say that, are we going to do it, or is this other stuff going to infiltrate? Is it going to have an impact?" You say, “Don't pay attention to it.” But even when you say don't pay attention to it, you start paying attention to it. The old saying from the Bible, "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." This is my point about the big baby with a little bit of water, or the small baby with... If you go back in history, all of the people we teach are complicated because they all come out of a historical period where nasty views were held. And they're part of those nasty views.

Ben (1:27:37):

That is helpful thought to think about it in that way, and perhaps confirms my nudging towards a sort of pluralist type of view as well. So let's go to Peter Singer's pond. Hopefully we still have time. I probably spent a little bit too long on all these other interesting aspects. Who knew that there was so much philosophy?

Part Two Follows Here:

Second Part Starts Here (Rhubarb)

Ben (00:22):

So, I'm going to ask about Peter Singer's pond, and maybe you could reflect a little bit on this amazing dinner you had also with Angus Deaton and some moral philosophers. Maybe I'm going to mangle it a little bit, but I'll talk about the pond and then maybe you can call out some of your disanalogies and some of the perhaps more novel aspects of how you've thought about Singer's pond and what it means for effective altruism and how to think about doing good. But for his pond analogy, very roughly it goes, "You are passing a pond, no one else is about, you spotted drowning child. It would be safe for you to save her at the cost of wet clothes or wet shoes, what should you do?" And of course, everyone says, save the child. And then Singer goes on to say, "Well, this is an analogy for giving aid to those in need when at very little cost to yourself, you can help save a life somewhere else.

When I first heard the example, I wasn't exactly sure it was analogy because of these issues of inter mediation and distance. I'd been to some very poor places in the world and I thought, "Well, in the real life, it's a bit complicated.” But it did have a reasonable force of analogy to it. But on reading your work, I kind of realized there are quite a lot of disanalogies when you get into the real world and some various serious thinkers and economists like Angus Deaton have some quite serious concerns. I was quite moved by the fact that you've kind of changed your mind, or your mind has been nudged, and these are the elements of that which I found quite insightful. So I've only been grappling with the kind of these ideas for a while, and I think we agree that EA or trying to do good as this whole podcast has been about, is on the side of angels, in the sense of we're trying to do good better, or the most good. We can argue a little bit about what that is with the project for effective given and things. But maybe you'd like to recount where you've come to the disanalogies with Singer's pond and how this has come about.

Larry (02:35):

Good. So let me tell this story. I'll tell some stories about this and then you can interrupt at any point. So first, the audience has to understand if they have a chance to look at the book, I describe all these things. But I've been worried about the needy my whole life-- basically, as long as I can remember. I have very vivid memories at different periods of my life of just seeing people who are very poor and just my heart going out to them and thinking, “I'm so lucky, I've got so much. They have so little, and it's just not fair, and we have to do something about it.” From the earliest ages, I was contributing in my own small ways nickels and dimes out of my allowances to give to charities that would help the needy. I would go trick or treating for UNICEF and try to raise money to help hungry children. I happened to meet my wife when I was 16 years old on a hunger hike. We were walking 31 miles to raise money to feed people who were hungry. So this is a very deep and longstanding concern of mine. Both of my parents were very concerned about this. They were very different. One was very liberal. One was very conservative, but they both agreed that when it came to the issue of people in need, this was not a right left issue. This was a humanitarian issue. And this was something that was very important to me.

I got to college, I got to graduate school. When I was in college I was volunteering for all sorts of different kinds of local organizations. I would go door to door, try to raise money for them, et cetera. Eventually, I got to graduate school, started learning about Oxfam, and I eventually came around to the view that there were lots of organizations that I had given to and that I cared about, but they just weren't as important as the international development organizations, the international relief organizations; organizations like Oxfam. Didn't mean they weren't important, I thought. It's good to contribute to Literacy. It's good to contribute to the March of Dimes which tries to address handicaps of various sorts. It tries to address people who are disadvantaged. It's good to address cancer and so on. It's good to save the whales. You can start this large litany of things that it would be nice to do, but contribute to your local PBS station; Public Broadcasting.

Those are all worthwhile activities. Preserve the environment; a park so we can go sit in. It's endless. But people are dying. Children are dying every single day, and it just seemed to me that was more important. So there came a period-- and this was before I'd ever heard of an EA moment, where people would come to my door and they'd want to raise money for some worthy local cause. I would invite them in oftentimes to sit and talk about it. But in essence, I would tell them, "Look, I'm glad you're doing this. It's a good thing. It's a good cause that you want to support. But I'm not going to support this kind of cause because it's not as important as saving innocent children from dying." Once one begins to think about it that way, when beginning to think about which charities are or are not most important, and then among those charities, you begin to think-- And again, this is before I'd ever heard about EA or before I'd read anything by Peter Singer.

There was the thought of charities can do it more or less effectively. You really want to give to an effective charity. If you want to save lives, there can be expensive ways of saving lives or there can be very cheap ways of saving lives. Wouldn't you rather save more lives than fewer lives if we want to save innocent lives, et cetera? So from early on, I found myself in a kind of effective altruist mindset of, "I really am going to focus my giving-- We (me and my wife), who walked on this hunger hike, are going to focus more on really trying to do good and in particular, trying to help the neediest people in the world.” We thought that was what most people do. As you know, the poorest people at the time when I first started thinking about this, in China, in India, in Pakistan, and so on. But also throughout Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.

So that was the thinking. When I started out as a young professor, I started teaching obligations to the needy in a large introductory class where I did a bunch of moral issues. We would teach abortion, and infanticide, and capital punishment, and nuclear war and all sorts of different issues. Other sections came and go, but I always had a section on obligations to the needy. By now, I had started sponsoring. I had some students who sponsored an Oxfam club. We did an Oxfam meal skip program. This was at my first institution, Rice University. Students could swipe their meal cards once a week, and instead of receiving a meal, they go without a meal on that day. And the money that would've been spent on the meal went to Oxfam. We would do Oxford hunger banquets at Thanksgiving where different people were randomly assigned. Roughly 78% reading beings and some other percentage reading something more. Then a few people representing the wealthiest creatures in the world would have some wonderful dinner. We'd all be sitting around; some at the table would find linens, and some on the floor with straw. So people could get that feeling for a night of really the disparities here.

So this is something that's been near and dear to me for a very long time. Eventually, I started reading people like Peter Singer and then later people like Peter Unger who has a wonderful book, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence, and teaching these topics in my classes and raising money along the way. At the end of the section on Obligations to the Needy, I would have anonymous collections. It wouldn't affect people's aids. I wouldn't be in the room. We'd have a half pass and we raised thousands and thousands of dollars; sometimes more than $10,000 in a given year. I would match penny for penny. Every dollar that they gave, dollar for dollar-- my wife and I, in addition to whatever else we would normally give. So this is something that's been a deep concern for me, more or less forever. 

I like many other people would often teach Peter Singer's famous article, Famine, Affluence and Morality, and it did have this very powerful effect on people. Because if you walked by and you see the kid drowning in the pond, it seems you have to save the kid even if it's going to cost you your new shoes and your new clothes, and that's just not important. Then Peter says, “But look, you can give the equivalent of new shoes and a new clothes by writing a hundred dollars check for an international relief organization, and they can be just as effective on the other side of the world and save some kid who's just as needy.” Goes back to one of your earlier questions. We are to be neutral with respect to people, places, and times. The mere fact that they were in Africa, rather than here, that's not morally relevant. If they can be just as effective, you ought to write that check. 

Then this eventually gave rise to be effective altruist movement. You want to write a check, but it's not just writing a check. It had all these various features to it. For years, I had found myself not lecturing on this topic in my classes, but then I was invited to lecture on this topic to help launch numerous chapters of effective healthcare organizations; Giving What we Can Chapters at Princeton, several chapters of a similar fund at Harvard, one at the University of Manchester. I was lecturing around the world, sometimes co-lecturing with people like Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia, of course, and also Peter Singer was co-lecturing with me on one of these locations.

So this is something I've been committed to personally and professionally for years. One of the key points about the kind of lecture I would always give is I would just talk about how incredibly well off we at the West are, and how badly off people are elsewhere, and how every one of us-- not just the richest, but every one of us by making teeny tiny alterations in our lifestyle could help those in need. I thought it was very clear that by making tiny alterations in our lifestyle, it wouldn't adversely affect us at all. In many ways we'd actually be better off if we ate out less, if we drank less, if we took fewer drugs. If we did some of these various other kinds of things, it would be better for us actually and better for them. I basically focused as Peter does in his example on how needy others are and how little it would cost us if we tried to help them. And that remains true.

Then one move that I made, which was important from early on in all my lectures that was different from Peter's kind of view or the views of the effect altruist is I would argue for this, not just on utilitarian grounds, not just on the grounds that this is the way of doing the most good. I was arguing that this is something that one had reason to do in virtual, the kind of pluralism I care about. So if you want to be virtuous, you should be compassionate, you should be generous, you should be merciful, and you should be all these other kinds of things. And that should lead you to want to help people. If you want to do your duty, there are duties to help people in need; positive duties. I argue those can be every bit as strong as negative duties, not to harm people in some cases or not to violate someone's rights. A lot of people say, "Well, there are negative duties and those are really strong. Then positive duties are weak." There's a negative duty not to steal my brother's candy bar, but there's a positive duty to save the child drowning in the pond. If I steal my brother's candy bar, well, that's wrong negatively, but it's not nearly as bad as letting the child drown. So I argued that positive duties can be extremely strong, even much stronger than many so-called negative duties which are supposed to be strict and you have to fulfill them. I think you have to fulfill some of these other duties.

So I had all these arguments that there are duty based reasons to help people, virtue based reasons to help people, and you are doing more good in the world if you make slight alterations in your lifestyle that significantly improve people's lives. So that was my view, and it dominated my thinking from the time I was a little kid until very recently into my fifties; mid-fifties, late fifties. Along the way though, I met Angus Deaton who was a 2015 Nobel Laureate in economics. Angus is a terrific guy and very smart. We met at various different places; Princeton and over in Geneva conferences for international health issues.

We would meet and we would talk and we'd go to lunch together. He had me over to his house. He'd be telling me about this book of his called, The Great Escape, in which he was basically arguing that the inequalities in the world are not as bad as we think. It's not that there aren't inequalities, but they're kind of a necessary byproduct of progress which takes place at uneven rates and uneven pace throughout the world. Since I was a person who spent most of my life thinking and arguing for equality, I wasn't very sympathetic to that. We were getting to these debates about whether we should or shouldn't worry about the extent of inequality in the world, et cetera. But along the way, he would slip in that he thought that people like Peter Singer were actually doing more harm than good.

And I remember thinking, "That can't be right." But I also was acutely aware that while Peter Singer was the god in this domain, I spent most of my life intellectually and otherwise giving to international relief organization and urging that my students do so, and raising money and lecturing to help launch these chapters of giving what we can. If Peter Singer was doing more harm than good, then I was too, and that was a very dismayed thought. I just didn't want to believe it and I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe we were doing more harm than good. I more or less dismissed him. Even though I like him a lot and I respect him, I just didn't really take it seriously. We had numerous conversations on this topic over the years, and every time he would raise it and I would just say, "That just can't be true."

So now we fast forward, and I've been invited meanwhile to give the rural lectures in Oxford. I was planning to give some lectures on justice and inequality and global health, but I had a dinner party at my home. This dinner party, small group of people, but an amazing collection of people. It included the world's greatest living active epistemologist; a guy by the name of Alvin Goldman. It included Derek Parfit who I've already said I thought was the greatest living moral philosopher. It included Jeff McMahan, a philosopher I admired greatly who was the vice chair of Moral philosophy at Oxford. It included Angus who was Nobel Laureate. And it included various other people including a billionaire named Patrick Burns. Anyway, we have this incredible conversation, free flowing conversation. Dinner is going great, if I may say so. It was the greatest dinner party I've ever been a part of by far, whether as host or guests. I've never heard anything like it. It was amazing.

But at some point, Angus who is a very large man pushed back from the table and started talking about his views about international aid and how people like Peter Singer are doing more harm than good. He was on one side of the table, literally, and on the other side of the table, literally, Derek and Jeff McMahan started pushing back. I was the host of the party so I was kind of observing and watching rather than actively participating. And when you put the observing and watching hat on, rather than the active participation hat, it's a very different hat. I found myself listening with fascination to the give and take because I heard Angus putting forward his ideas, and I heard Derek and Jeff pushing back against his ideas. What they were saying was almost word for word what I had told Angus all these years every time we had this conversation. Every time Angus would say something, I would say something, and Derek and Jeff were saying basically the exact same things. “They didn't believe it could be true. How could that possibly be true?”

Normally, if I find myself in agreement with Derek and Jeff that would make me confident that we were right, because they are just great philosophers. Jeff is a really, really good philosopher, I'm a pretty good philosopher, and if we're all on the same side of an issue-- I don't care who's lined up on the other side. For the most part, I'm going to be pretty confident we're right. But this time I found myself thinking, "What the hell is going on here?" Because they just was actually talking about empirical questions about whether Peter Singer and others, and on the ground aid agencies scattered throughout Africa were doing more good than harm. We were all saying-- comfortable, armchair philosophers that we are, arguing that can't be true.

This argument went on well after dessert, after the dishes were clear, eventually everyone went home. My wife and I are cleaning up the dishes. I can't get this out of my head. "What had just happened?" It seemed to me clear there was something wrong methodologically with Derek, Jeff and me all telling Angus he couldn't be right. Well, we were basically arguing about empirical issues. He had a whole lot of empirical background and we had basically none. Even if we're right, how can we be so sure we're right? I went to bed that night and I basically didn't sleep. I just could not sleep. I found myself thinking about Peter Singer's very famous pond example. Then I started generating various examples, versions of pond example. Just one after another, after another, because the basic pond example is you walk across, there's a child, you're the only one there, they're drowning in a pond, can you save them or not? Of course you have to save them.

But what if it's different? What if they're drowning in a pond and there's this person at the bridge and he's like a tyrant. And he says, "Yeah, you can go save them. But before you can save them, you have to shoot somebody." Well then would you save the child? Suppose he says, "No, you don't have to shoot them, but you have to give me an Uzi. Then you can go save the child." Would you save them then? What if you're pretty sure he is going to take that Uzi and he's going to shoot people? What if he says, "No, you don't have to give me an Uzi. I just want you to give me a bunch of ammunition.” But you're pretty sure he is going to shoot a bunch of people. Do you still save the child? What if he just says, "No, you just have to give me a bunch of money," but you know he's going to buy guns with that money and he's going to persecute people with one. Do you still save that child? And I followed through thinking about example after example of variations of a pond example, where what if someone had thrown the child in the pond, and then in order for you to save them they force you to pay them?

I couldn't sleep all night. I'm thinking about example after example. I drifted off at some point in the early morning. I wake up an hour and a half later and I realized, "This has got to be the topic of my rural lectures. I have to think about this more." Because when I thought about it, I had generated all these possible pond examples. In a few of them, you still had to save the child. But in a whole lot of them, you couldn't save the child. And in a bunch of them, it wasn't clear if you should save the child or not. Then the question was, "Is the real world more like the one set or the other set? Is it more like Peter's example or more like these others?"

Then I found out I actually have to do some reading. I normally don't read. I normally just sit in my office and I think. When I did my work inequality, I mostly thought. I didn't read other people. When I did my work on rethinking the good, I mostly thought. I didn't read other people. But now I was trying to figure out what's actually going on in the world and I found myself just reading a whole bunch of books and articles by developing economists and philosophers. But I read a lot of the philosophers stuff. Bottom line, I spent the next five years rethinking my views about this topic and it was very unsettling. I'd spent my entire life, not only living my life a certain way, but absolutely convinced that I was right in doing so. I'm no longer so convinced. I'm still convinced-- I remain convinced that those of us who are well to do in the West and elsewhere, have to do a lot more than most of us do to help the neediest people in the world. I remain convinced about that, but it's no longer clear to me what the best way of doing that is. 

There are so many disanalogies between Peter's original case and what goes on in the real world. It isn't funny. There are all these worries that arise in the real world that simply don't arise at all in Peter's case. Some of them people are acutely aware of, but many of them no one even thinks about. They're very deep and they're very important. I now think they're very serious questions about whether we are doing more harm than good, whether there are much better ways to aid the Navy, whether we should be focusing on the needy in the world's poorest country, or just focusing on the needy wherever they live, because many of the worries about helping people in the world's poorest countries don't arise in wealthier countries. That sounds counterintuitive, but there's reasons to think that's true. There's just so many different questions.

But ironically, when I thought about this as a pluralist, I just found myself thinking the effective altruist approach to this, which is dominated thinking among philosophers at least for years now, we have to do the most good. I just thought that's not the right approach anyway. It's not a question about just doing the most good. We want to do the most good, that's an important value, but we also want to be good. And sometimes these conflict. So I find myself raising all these questions. I find myself looking at a lot of literature. I find myself wondering and worrying about a view. I lost more sleep over this topic than I had in the previous 35 years of my life as a professional philosopher. I could think about inequality the way I did. There was never any, "How does this fit with my own personal convictions and commitments?" I could think about rethinking the good. There was never any deep tension between what I thought about that philosophy and how I'd live my life. For the last 5, 6, 7 years as I've thought about this topic, I've had to seriously reexamine, "Have I actually been acting rightly all these years in doing what I've done and urging others to do what I've done to aid the Navy in the way I have?" It's been very unsettling to think that maybe the answer to that question is no. So let me pause there and then give you a chance to ask about any more details, arguments, asymmetries that you want to hear about.

Ben (25:38):

Yeah. I've got lots I could pick out. Maybe I'd asked you to pick out the ones that you feel most strongly about. I perhaps have two or three reflections. So having come to this somewhat later and a little bit more haphazardly, I was struck by-- and I think you made this reflection-- That I'd known a tiny bit about the real life episode of Goma, but hadn't realized how much of a disaster it is. And obviously, Deaton holds this out as a sort of case for like, "Wow, look. Look what happens." That's one disanalogy or something which has happened in the real world. So that's what I reflected on. Then the small and the tiny other one, which is maybe aside from the whole of it, but I was really struck about where some things might have the force, which was your argument. I referred to this a lot earlier about the immediacy. There is something about the immediacy of when someone is in your face.

Actually, I think you see this in cities all the time when you actually meet face to face someone who is homeless. So it's not a theoretical issue, but it's a here and now issue. I do think from my own experience that there's no real theory guiding this. There is something qualitatively different from it which has been alluded to a little bit, but again, from this armchair philosophy versus where out is in the real world, that has really has really struck me. I probably now understand why I might put a little bit more weight to that liveness of where that is. Again, it's complicated. But there is something to that.

And just to your overall conclusion of that, it just seems uncertain because of that. And that maybe, for instance, you end up in a place where... Depending on how you define it in the UK or in the US, 10 to 15% of Americans or British are below the poverty line here. Direct giving to those poor people or poor wherever you are is definitely something good. Whether it's the most good, or doing good better you could argue about, but it is doing good, and you have less of these governance problems. You could maybe say it's more immediate. So that was one reflection that I had as well. But maybe you could just talk a little bit about the disanalogy which causes you to think that I'm no longer sure that some of this international aid or some of this is actually doing more good than harm.

Maybe the example of Goma is one, if you want to do that. Or there's a couple I could really struck with your disanalogies and you've alluded to some of them. "Do you give this person a lot of money?" Well, that seems sort of fine. But then if you know they're going to use this money for corrupt things-- And you can see in the real world, a lot of corruption has happened. Then this idea I think that Deaton has that countries develop in response to their own citizens. And if you essentially sidetrack that process somehow, you're essentially doing a whole disservice to that nation. That has now really struck me as being plausible. If that's plausible, that's kind of problematic for this international development thing. I think that's where you seem to have landed as well in your thinking.

Larry (28:55):

I think it is. So there's a number of elements you're touching on here, all of which are important. I'll just say a word about the face to face. I do talk about this in my book. As a pluralist, I think that there are many different ethical components that matter. There are certain people historically, who have said that the quintessential ethical moment arises when one human being encounters another human being and recognizes in that other human being a subject like themselves, with similar hopes, dreams, experiences, and so on and so forth. A similar frailty, similar mortality in that moment of direct confrontation. People like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas have said that this is the heart of morality. Now, I don't think it's the heart of morality in the sense of-- It's certainly not the whole of morality. But I do think there's something extremely important about that face to face confrontation which is relevant to the strength of an obligation to help someone in a pond that's lacking when someone is also in danger of dying on the other side of the world.

I think that there's a kind of-- when you confront them... So I give an example in the book; a toy example. "You have a very expensive watch on, and because it's very expensive it has this latch and you need a significant to get the latch on and off. It's so complicated. You can't do it one hand. But it's worth $5,000. Your rich uncle left it to, you love him, et cetera." You're walking by a pond, there's a child drowning in the pond, and you see them. Your first thought is, "I have to save the child." Then suddenly you think, "But wait a minute. I have this expensive watch on. If I jump in, my watch will be ruined." Then your next thought is, "But that's insignificant. There's a child who's going to drown. It's a $5,000 watch, but it's just a thing. It's just not important. So it'll be ruined. So what?" Then you have a further thought and the further thought is, "Wait a minute. If I let the child drown, I could take this and I could sell it for $5,000. I could give it to an effective charity and they could supposedly save two children." Then you think, "Yeah. Well, I've read the effective altruism movement. I've read Peter Singer and so on. I ought to do the most good that I can. So, I'm really sorry about this. It's really too bad, but…." So you call 911. You say, "There's a child drowning in a pond here." There's nothing you can do about it and you go off to work. Then you sell the watch and you send it to an effective charity and they save two people.

Well, I claim there'd be something deeply wrong with you and something deeply wrong about what you did if you were able to do that. I think this is connected to issues having to do with virtue. I think if you're raised to be a virtuous person, those virtues will come to play and forcibly tell you, “You have to save this person there.” I also think there's something what we call a special kind of direct agent relative duty that you can acquire just by being in direct confrontation with another human being in need. Now, there are various analogies on this. 

Notice the following. Suppose I'm walking into a grocery store and there's someone following me and I let that door slam on their face. That's a direct disrespect of another human being. I mean, you're walking into the grocery store. You turn, you make eye contact, you've got the door right there and you let it slam in their face. There's something bad about that. There's something really bad about failing to respect another human being, even over something as trivial as that. It becomes even worse of course, if that person is a woman, if that person is handicapped, if that person is a black and you're directly disrespecting them perhaps for all sorts of biased reasons. That's a kind of thing that arises that direct face to face failure to show respect when you're in contact with another human being. That's just not in play. When somebody on the other side of the world is drowning, metaphorically, and you could help them, the fact that that is in play when it's in your community and when you're face to face with it, gives you, I believe, a further reason to help, which is disanalogous to the other case.

But there are so many other factors. When you jump in the pond, you're saving a life. When you give it to an international aid agency, you are effectively sending them a check that's going into their general fund, no matter what you say. And that's being spent on a whole bunch of things. Now, the net effect might be that on average, that amount of money is saving a life. But what you are actually doing is contributing to a general fund that's going to help pay for the salaries of the people who work there, help pay for the gas of the cars that are being driven by them, help pay for the supplies that you buy. It's going to help pay for the rent for the building in Boston. If it's giving, like I do to Oxfam America, you're going to be paying for all those things with your check.

There isn't the same moral compulsion to pay for all those kinds of things as there is to save an innocent human life. I know money's fungible. I know it works out on average, but they're not the same. There are other issues. When this child is drowning in the pond, it's just me and the child. I don't have to worry about corruption. When I give money to an international LEAF organization, there's an indefinitely large number of people that stand between me and the delivery of that aid. Any one of whom could, for any one of a number of reasons, divert that aid to his or her own purposes. I don't have to worry about that in the one case. I do have to worry about it in another case. There are other kinds of issues. When you have an on the ground, this is an issue that people are aware of in the global health realm, but they pay basically no attention to it in the realm of international aid.

When an agency moves into another country, they want to be effective. In order to be effective, they want to hire really talented people. They want to hire smart people, talented people, energetic people, and committed people. They want to hire people of good character. So they're going to go in and address what's often... Their particular thing they care about is AIDS. So they're going to have an office. They're going to have secretarial help. Maybe they have to do some infrastructure. Maybe they need some roads being built, whatever, et cetera. They're going to want to hire the very best people. Often, they're going to hire local people because those are the people who are going to be willing to work there. Here is a question nobody asks. What are those local people doing before? We often think about opportunity costs. "What else could I do with the money?"

But what we're not thinking about is, “What are the opportunity costs of the people who are going to come to work for you for the higher rate wages than international aid agencies can pay?” Where are they coming from? Because very often, if it's a doctor, or a nurse, or an engineer, or a lawyer, they might be coming from an absolutely fundamentally important social position in a community to address the one particular thing that you care so much about as an outside agency. What are the opportunity costs there when they move from here to there? So you can see the tosses, you can see the gains, but you don't see the losses. There are issues of cover-ups. These are serious issues that no one pays attention to. International aid organizations are not looking for the places where their aid goes awry. When they see the places where their aid goes awry, they often cover their eyes.

It's a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach. This came to headlines with the Oxfam prostitution scandal just a few years back. But it's the tip of the iceberg. There are also cases of corruption in many of these countries. Unfortunately, people say, "Oh, this is like Africa." It's not just Africa. There's corruption everywhere. But in the world's poorest countries; the local, or state, or national level, often they're dominated by tyrants, by thugs, by dictators. These tyrants and thugs and dictators have a multitude of ways of getting their hands on international aid. There are so many ways that a person in power that you have to deal with if you're going to work on the ground to help people can get a piece of your pie. And then the question is what are they doing with that piece?

They can get money from you by forcing you to buy a permit in order to work in the country. They can force you to hire their followers. They can tax their followers. They can say basically for everybody who they get a job for, they're going to take 10%. They can get kickbacks from the people who receive foreign aid. They can insist... Here's a strategy that's used all the time. Countries, governments can set artificial exchange rates and insist that countries working in their area change the money first into the local currency at the official exchange rate, and then buy goods and services on the ground often from their people or through the aid. In Syria recently, there was an article in the Guardian just in last year. Syria has been doing this to the tune of at one point, taking 51 cents on every dollar of international aid spent in Syria off the top, by making the UN agencies that were working in Syria exchanged their money first into local currency before they could then buy goods and services.

What they would do is set the official exchange rate at 50% lower than the so-called black market rate, which is what the value was actually worth. And in this way, able to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars off the top just by manipulating the currency rates. Then those can be used to support the Syrian regime, which is a brutal regime and has gassed its own people. You help contribute to the human rights violations and so on. There are just so many ways. There's something called the resource curse. Economists have been talking about it for a while. People never talked about this when I was growing up, but now suddenly people are aware there's something called the resource curse. Basically, what that means is it's striking how in many countries, poor countries that are resource rich, the general population as a whole remains poor, while a group of elites become enormously wealthy.

The reason it's called the resource curse is because we have an international political system, economic system that allows whoever's in control of the resources, which means whoever's de facto in control of the government, can sell them to the international community at any terms they want. Typically they do so for the benefit of them themselves, their followers, and their political agenda. Well, that often leads to strife. It leads to civil wars. It leads to battles because people are fighting to come to power over the rich resources in their country. And this leaves many innocent people killed, wounded, dead, et cetera, as a result of these ongoing civil wars that lasts for decades in some of these countries like the Central Republic of Africa. All of this is fueled by the fact that whoever is in control of the resources could sell them to outside companies and countries for their own benefit.

There's a kind of resource curse that results in the world's poorest country when billions of dollars funnel in parade. Because people in power, if they're corrupt, if they're tyrants, if they're thugs, if they're warlords can get their hands on that money in a series of ways and use it to advance their political agenda. And when they do, often that political agenda is just terrible and we're complicit in that helping to make it happen. 

I'll pause there. I didn't yet to go. But Goma is the most striking, terrible, ethical disaster maybe in the history of international aid. Unbelievably bad. Your listeners, if they read nothing else in that book, should read the one small section of Goma. But what they really should read is Linda Polman's book on this topic-- I think it’s, The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? An extraordinarily powerful book that describes in great detail how the aid agencies are often complicit in these terrible events occurring. Often they know it, and they cover it up. It's a chilling story.

Ben (43:03):

Yeah. Let's ask people to look up Goma because I think we probably can't do it justice and the whole group of AIDS skeptics. So I think your work-- and we've highlighted quite a lot of challenges to that international aid. I guess I'm going to call it the kind of Peter Singer, perhaps utilitarian style of EA. I think there are a lot of those challenges where it's not exactly clear, and I think there are a lot of challenges which people haven't thought about. Maybe I'd add a couple of extra thoughts around it and try and loop some of the things that we talked about; issues with utility and some of this probabilistic thinking as well. And I guess this three...

Larry (43:48):

Can I interrupt for one second? I want to do that, but that might take us in the direction of which might be a good idea to bringing things together and some final thoughts a little bit. I'd like to add just one more sentence or two about this. So I want to say just a word about effective altruism, if I can, and then go on. And that is this book raises a lot of challenges. I'm not the only one who's done so. But among philosophers, EA is the dominant theme right now. People aren't really challenging EA. It's almost like a religion. You want to give, you want to do good, you need to be in EA.

So among philosophers this is a challenge. There are non-philosophers who have challenged EA, but there aren't a lot of philosophers challenging EA from within. I am challenging EA on a variety of levels; both empirical questions, but also theoretical questions. I do want to be fair in a way, but this gets to the kind of summing up question to EA. There are a lot of current EA leaders who are aware of many of these problems and they are not advocating that we give to on the ground international relief organizations. Many of the leaders of EA-- not Peter Singer, notably, but many of the other leaders of EA-- Here, I mean, people like Toby Ord, Will MacAskill, Nick Beckstead in our country, they have moved on. They think, "No, the most effective way of helping people in need isn't to help the neediest people in poor countries. It's to worry about things like existential risk.”

There's much more bang for the buck in preventing the extinction of humanity than there is in helping a billion people who are in the worst forms of poverty, or 2 billion people who are in poverty, but not extreme poverty. That's just not cost effective. That's not the way to spend our charitable contributions. And I want to say I bark at that too. I think many of the current EA leaders were in the same place I was. They were on the side of the angels, I thought, in wanting to do what they could to help the neediest people of the world. But many of them had now moved on because of expected utility calculations. How do I get the most expected value from charitable contributions? They think the way to do that is work on preventing nuclear war, work on preventing biological destructions, work on preventing chemical warfare, work on preventing an asteroid from hitting us, work on preventing the kind of thing that we have right now going on with COVID; these kinds of things. We should stop pandemics. That's where we should be spending the money. Not spending our money to help the neediest people in the poorest country.

I just want to hold back on that too because I'm not just an effective altruist. I still care about the neediest people in the poorest country. I want to find a way to help them. I believe that should be at the top of our priorities when we think about what we should do in terms of helping people. Not that these other things don't matter. What they care about matters too. We should pay attention to them. We should worry about climate change. We absolutely should. But not to the exclusion the way so many of them now do, because that's how the cost benefit analysis comes in to helping the neediest people in the poorest country. My heart still remains there.

My question is, how do we do that? I am inclined to think that if we end up doing it, the two things that will come into play is by finding ways to promote better governance, to promote democracy, to promote the rule of law, to change the terms of international trade, all those kinds of things. So we find ways to […]help people in Africa without spending money directly in Africa, which gives rise to all these other kind of issues. So that's one issue. But the other issue is we might have to sometimes in some cases step in to help people right now because they're in need now, even if we know there might be terrible downstream effects of our doing so. 

That's because of not just an effective altruism, other things matter too. Sometimes the urgency of the moment when people are in need that we could help now just might take priority over, "Yeah, but will that do the most good in the long run for everybody looking at future generations?" Maybe not. Maybe that's not what we should be doing if we want to be good in a world of need and not just doing the most good in a world of need. I want to just get that out because in fairness, the leaders of the effect altruism movement actually recognize many of the problems I've raised. Often did so even before I raised them. They say, "Yeah, right. That's not where we're spending our focus," but I'm not happy with that answer either.

Ben (49:20):

That's brilliant. I was hoping to wrap a lot of what you just said up in my next couple of questions. So I'm going to try and wrap it around a reflection and a question or two. So hopefully I can keep all of that in. Maybe I can say that because I'm even later to EA and I would view myself as an EA outsider, but I'm very in intrigued. So one core thing, I think, maybe some of the leaders or some people in EA people think as sort of higher level. EA is a project of doing good better, rather than doing the most good. So just thinking about how to do good better is aligned with a lot of this thinking. And I think one of my reasons for doing this is maybe they are open to thinking about... In fact, there has been some post written about, “Well, maybe how do we do better governance? How do we do better systems? Maybe this is doing good better.” This is why I think… I liked your phrase that a lot of the thinking is trying to be on the side of angels. We can disagree about how we might do that.

I think that's quite important particularly for a lot of younger people that I meet under 30, who want to do good or think about this. To think about, "Okay, maybe in a pluralistic view of the world, this is where you might want do something.” And maybe that is working on governance issues. Maybe that is working on some of these systems issues and things like that. Then my second reflection which goes back all the way, which is maybe where I spent so long in the beginning on some of your thoughts about utility, and transitivity, inequality and things like that. It comes down to your asteroid example. It is because there is this movement within EA to think about rogue AI, existential risk, and long termism. You can see from one of your things, if you have a lot of billions or trillions of people in the future and you multiply that by something, you get a really good blob. You really need to save this blob in the future. You can get that when you multiply these numbers under these kind of utility or expected value things. But to our very first point, if there are potentially issues with the axioms behind that, and we can see all of these other things, maybe we do need to be more pluralist, even if we've done that, and we haven't talked about kind of each we dilemmas and some of these dilemmas within long-termism or things like that.

So I may be interested in that final reflection of like, "Yes. So there's problem with international aid and maybe those problems are going away about being too reliant on unexpected value for very big things on long-termism.” We are in some ways pre arguing for actually Will MacAskill's next book which is going to be concentrating on this. I think, on future and future lives. I think you are just sort of holding your hand up and saying, "Well, yes, there are these concerns. Sure, in a pluralistic world, we must work on climate and pandemics." But in a pluralistic world we might think about inequality. In fact, there might be even trade-offs for that, that if we want to have economic growth after poverty might have to accept a certain amount of inequality in order to also think about justice and fairness and good governance and things like that.

And it's like morality, complex, which I think I've got from reading your work. So I don't know whether you might want to reflect on that long termism aspect and why you think some of those expected value calculations may not be doing good better, and that might be some other areas to work on. That I guess is my first question. Then my second, which is a little bit interrelated to that, which actually has come from… I think Tyler Cowen actually was, if you think you've had a little bit of a blind spot, at least previous to coming across Angus Deaton's work, or... This is what I find so interesting. In a way, back in 1977 those three great moral philosophers had a little bit of a blind spot because they couldn't conceive of transitivity to being different.

And actually in parts of EA or international aid development, they couldn't conceive that we were doing something wrong. Is there some other element that you're intrigued about that maybe your intuition or something is saying that, "Maybe we should really examine this because I just don't know, because it's been a little bit of a blind spot and actually two or three or four of the major things or discoveries that I've had have come from really interrogating some of these blind spots.” So two part question: One is when we're thinking about doing good or doing good better, why may we maybe want to rate or less rate long termism or some aspects of long termism and utility theory, and maybe more rate the ideas of health or poverty, but doing those better even if it's not international aid. And then second, is there anything else which you think might be a blind spot and why that is?

Larry (54:28):

So I'm going to start with the second one because I can deal with that more quickly by saying I'm sure there are other blind spots. But you don't always recognize them until they hit you between the eyes, as it were. I don't have anything as it were on my agenda. So percolating in the back of my head, everyone's got this wrong and we need to correct this. I do think we have blind spots. We have lots of blind spots socially that we're slowly-- people like Peter Singer and lots of other people are calling our attention to. I do think that our treatment of animals remains for most people in the world, a blind spot. We just can't take seriously that animals deserve more consideration than we currently give them, which is almost zero.

So I do think that's a blind spot, but I'm not unique in pointing that out. Lots of people have said that's a blind spot. So there are things of that kind that I think we as a species as it were, have not really taken on board seriously certain aspects that we should. So I think that. But a lot of these other things where I find myself suddenly rethinking for the first time something, it just kind of comes. I'm reading someone's work, I'm talking to someone, they're making these claims, and then it's just not fitting. And I suddenly realize something's not right here. It's just not right here. At least that's how it comes across phenomenologically. Then I suddenly realize I never saw this before. I mean, I couldn't. The point about angels, it was a total blind spot. I've been so committed to this.

We have all these psychological explanations for once people are committed to something. You have anchoring biases, you have confirmation biases, you have cognitive dissonance, you have all these psychological factors that make it very hard to move off of some ideological position that you're predisposed to accept. And that's true for all of us. I mean, just if you're a member of the human species, you have these problems. We all have blind spots individually.

Ben (56:48):

Nothing nagging you at the moment?

Larry (56:51):

No, nothing revolutionary. I think my thought about transitivity is kind of revolutionary. I think that we are way too... I express the sentiment that I have in my most recent book that I am cosmopolitan by nature. I'm capable of feeling moments of pride for the United States if we win more Olympic golds than someone else. But by and large, I never understand how a president can be elected by saying, "Put America first." And this is true on both sides. This is not just Donald Trump saying America first. But basically, Biden and others, they run on the thing, "It's all about the American worker." I'm thinking, "Yeah, well, if we shipped everything back to the American worker, we're taking away from people in the Philippines. We're taking away from poor people in India. We're taking away from people that are a whole lot worse off." I get the political appeal of it, but from a moral standpoint, I just don't get it. The kind of xenophobia that dominates the world, particularly the Western world right now, but the world about immigrants and so on.

I think these are all blind spots. I think they're moral blind spots. I think people are just not capable yet of really taking on board the attitude that they should towards people who are not one of their own; whether that's race, religion, gender, sexual orientation. We just have these terrible in and out; the other versus us. All of those lead to blind spots that I think are bad morally, socially, politically, et cetera. But I don't have anything revolutionary to say about those. I just think people have recognized that, and we're not there yet and we need to work more to get people there, I believe.

Ben (58:48)

So I'm just going to make a quick reflection before going to that first question. I see there's something with children or the art, or particularly talking to children. I was very struck speaking with my son where seeing people suffer in pictures, often particularly when younger. And the question is, “Why are they different?” Because they haven't been taught that they are different. It's interesting that through that lens they see something which becomes a blind spot later which they don't have earlier. I remember listening to school children and there were these forced economic migrants or whatever; refugees crossing over the sea, and real difficulty explaining why that had come to be because their questions of why had very unsatisfactory answers to them. So that's a small reflection. Maybe then coming to that first question on wrapping around how to think about doing good better, why long termism or some aspects of it maybe being over weighted by some within the EA community and some of that. How might we think about that?

Larry (01:00:03):

Good. Maybe we'll end with this discussion of where can you go beyond long termism? I will say this. This is actually quite important, I think. I think it was Derek Parfit at the very end of Reasons in Persons who really put on the philosophical agenda in the course of a single paragraph the issue of long-termism. And I do think that was a blind spot. I think for most of human history we could basically affect ourselves, our family members, and our local community, and the scope of morality extended that far and not much further. My obligations were to my wife, to my children, to the members, my neighbors. That's because I really couldn't do something about people on the other side of the world.

Then as information changed, as technologies changed, as we became in contact with a larger global community, we were suddenly able to recognize that there's a lot more going on in the world; more interaction, more people that we might be able to help or hurt than just the people in our local neighborhoods. And we began to have an expansion of our global awareness, our global reach. But for a long time it continued to be focused on what we call, those people who are alive today. Those who were kind of as it were, both the agents of moral thinking and also the patients; the people to whom we had obligations, with the people alive today. Those were the people you could hurt. So a lot of people in moral philosophy and Derek made this very clear had the view that, "No harm, no foul." So, you can't be violating someone's rights unless you somehow hurt them or leave them worse off than they otherwise would be.

When it came to future generations, there's nothing you do typically that's going to hurt them or leave them worse off than they would otherwise be. Especially once Derek taught us about the nonidentity problem, because if you could bring in future generations at level 200. But future generations are completely different people for reasons he talks about, given the nonidentity problem. At level 500-- well, the people at level 200 will be glad to be alive at level 200. That's an arbitrary number, meaning a decent life. The people at 500, that's also an arbitrary number, are leading much better lives but it's different people. It's not bad for the people at level 200 to be worse off. To be alive at level 200 with good lives than to not exist at all, which is the alternative.

So if the thought, which for most of human history is, "You don't ever act wrongly if you don't actually harm someone, that means leaving them worse off than they would otherwise be,” then we can do whatever we want to future generations as long as we make sure they have lives worth living. That was a blind spot. That was a hole in our moral thinking. It took the genius of Derek Parfit to wake us up to the fact that, "No, we can drastically affect the quality of life for generations to come. Indeed, we can affect whether or not there will even be people existing for generations to come and merely asking the question, "Do we harm anyone, leave anybody worse off, if we picked this alternative rather than that alternative?” That's leaving out a whole domain of moral philosophy.

So the first point to note is that there was a giant blind spot in our moral thinking when it came to the topic of future generations. How the world might go and whether there should even be future generations? Our standard intuitive way of thinking about these matters was poorly fit. It wasn't designed, because our evolution could be placed in an area where everybody who you could affect was someone you could reach out and touch; had nothing to do with future generations. So that was a big blind spot. But now the interesting thing is, philosophers post there-- this is all last 50 years or so, have rushed in to fill this void. One of the things that has resulted is long-termism driven by expected utility theory calculations. One of the leading books on this-- not published yet as a book, but was a thesis by a former student of mine, Nick Beckstead, who wrote a thesis on this topic that has been hugely influential in the effective altruism community, and it is a brilliant thesis.

But it takes expecting utility theory to be the fundamental principle of rationality; how we should make decisions, then it drives forward in that way. Now, three thoughts. There remains a kind of blind spot throughout all of these discussions which places human beings front and center of all these discussion about long termism. I see no reason to do that. If you're really just concerned about the expected utility of the world, the total amount of happiness that exist in the universe, it'd be a lot cheaper to genetically alter cockroaches so that they can experience pleasures. Maybe they already do, but genetically enhance them so they can experience pleasures a little bit more. Just ensure that there are billions of cockroaches all over the universe. Put cockroaches in spaceships and send them out rather than human beings. It’d be a lot cheaper.

There was a great book many years ago before your day probably, written by a guy named Jonathan Schell. It was called The Fate of the Earth and it was about nuclear disaster. I used to teach this in my class. Powerful book. He basically said after the great nuclear army get on when Russia and United States have launched all their nuclear things and they've destroyed the worst, the only thing that's going to be left are grasses and cockroaches. This was being slightly rhetorical flourish, but the question is, “If all you care about is the total amount of happiness in the world, if that's what's driving you, then this focus on humanity is the center of happiness” doesn't make sense. Because lots of beings, squirrels, rats, mice, maybe cockroaches may be genetically enhanced the MIBI; might be capable of having positive experiences, and it might be easy to duplicate them on vast numbers at a very cheap rate. Whereas humans are expensive to maintain, and to send through space, and to colonize.

So this kind of focus on humans from a long termism doesn't make any sense to me. I think that's a blind spot. It's an anthropogenic vestige. But it may reflect something very important. It may reflect that there are values that matter; certain kinds of perfectionist values, artistic values, the kind of things you do. If you're doing theater, or art, or poetry-- we've talked about in here that have a kind of value that can't be on the lollipops for life scale. How many licks of a lollipop are the equivalent of a burle brick play? Maybe no number. Maybe that's why we focus on humans rather than cockroaches. But again, that doesn't fit with the do the most good approach of the effective altruist and long termism if it's really just a matter of adding up how much good exist in the world. It's giving weight to certain things and saying no amount of this outweighs that. Lexical priorities…So that's one issue. And I do think there's maybe an undoing focus given their anteceding concerns on long termism on the human side.

The other thing that doesn't make a lot of sense to me is I believe we live in a vast universe. Set aside the multiverse question, which there's good reason to believe if you believe in Roger Penrose that we have multiverses all over the place. But set aside the multiverse, still the universe is huge. There might be all sorts of essential beings out there that have high quality lives, far more beings than we could even imagine. I suspect that's likely to be true. One of the main reasons people are so worried about long termism is they're worried about extinction. They're worried about the idea that we're going to go extinct and there might be nothing like this kind of high quality of life ever again, ever in the universe if we go extinct. I don't get that. Life will evolve. It will show up again. If not here on earth, it will show up on other planets. It probably already has.

So this kind of extreme angst about the future of humanity, that seems to have an overinflated sense of our own importance. I don't mind caring about our future, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the lives of people in need now. Here and now on this earth, right here, they need us. And we're going to say, "Eh...” We're too worried about future humans. Why future humans rather than future squirrels, rather than future cockroaches, rather than just... There are probably lots of beings scattered throughout the universe who already have high level existence. Our presence or absence in the universe is probably an insignificant contribution to the overall greater good. So why not focus on things like justice or equality, other values, than just more, more, and more. So I have three beefs basically with long termism. I think it’s something we should pay... There was a huge hole before. I want to make that clear. Derek told us there's a huge hole. We need to think about the future and we need to think about that from a moral perspective. That actually runs through all my work. I have arguments through tons of my work that basically say, "We have a moral obligation to pay attention to the future."

It's not just about doing the best we can for people who are alive now. It also matters who will be alive in the future. So I get that. I think that hole needs to be filled. But, I'm not going to drive all of our thinking about morality by this model that's dependent on a whole series of premises that are questionable at best, and most likely false. I'm going to want a more nuance. I'm going to want a more complex. I'm going to want a more pluralistic way of balancing off. I'm never going to want to give the overwhelming priority to human beings for a human's sake that this movement seems to have largely incorporated when they think about long-termism. And there's this incredible focus on us. It just reminds me-- I said we're kind of bringing it to a close so I'll give you the last word. Bur we still haven't gotten over the ….  conception of the universe. Notwithstanding the hundreds of years we are post Copernicus.

The whole thing about the …  conception of the universe is, "God created the world and He created us and we're at the center of everything. It's really all about God, but we're at the center of it all." Then it came as a huge shock to learn maybe we're not at the center of the all. Maybe there's a sun and it’s at the center of our solar system, and it's even not particularly important because there are all these other things out there. This caused untold damage to the human psyche to think, "Oh my God, we're not the center of the universe." But when you talk about holes in our thinking, we still think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We can't help it. It infuses our thinking everywhere and maybe that's unavoidable. Maybe that's an inevitable reflection of the human condition which leads to solipsism and subjectivity because each of us is the center of his or her own universe, right? When we die, our universe in a very real way goes out of existence. But we put so much weight on that, both as individuals and as a species. I think what we are supposed to learn from Copernicus is that it was a mistake to think we're the center of the universe. And it still is.

Ben (01:12:56):

Wow, that's fascinating. I'm going to ask you a couple of last questions to round that up as our sort of closing remarks. But I will offer a couple of reflections. One is, I'm really glad we did start with some work on expected value and transitivity because it comes full circle back to understand how you're thinking about long-termism and things like that. So that's really thought provoking. And that it was a blind spot thinking about the future and that Derek Parfit sort of mentioned it almost in passing, although there was more to it than in that, and that's important. But you don't necessarily want to rely on a theory which seems to have axioms which are not completely true or true in all circumstances. I do think then on EA though, if EA is more simply a project for trying to increase human welfare, maybe that is something which people can agree on, even if actually where the EA project might be going, that still has a lot of debate on.

So I'd be interested if that is a kind of simpler project to think about. If you do want to improve human welfare, how should you do it better? Then my last sub-question after that is if you'd like to offer any final remarks, perhaps advice about being good in the world or a life advice about the world, or even thinking about the life of a philosopher. Anything you'd like to do on final comments. Is that whether EA is a project for improving welfare and how maybe we should think about doing good in the world.

Larry (01:14:39):

Good. So let me start with the simple point. I said a long time ago and I still believe this. I do think that EA as a movement and the leaders of EA are on the side of the angels in one clear respect. They are concerned. They are moral beings who are concerned with acting morally in the world. They do have a larger global scope than what's just best for me, and you have to admire that. In fact, that's the thing that's often the most criticized for them. Is that they're going to require the greatest possible sacrifices that individuals should make for their greater good. Even if you think that's a mistake--and I'll say a word about that in a second, you have to admire people who take that approach to life seriously and put others before themselves.

You also have to admire the grain of truth in this. Suppose you want to do good in the world and you can spend at an earlier time when it costs this amount, something like $30,000 to address a single case of AIDS in Africa, or you could spend that $30,000 on oral rehydration tablets. In the one case you might save one life, and the other case you might save 20 lives. Well, if what you care about is saving innocent lives, it's hard not to think 20 lives has a certain pull on you that one life doesn't. That's important not to me to just become a being counter about doing the most good. Still, there's something valuable about that approach. More of the good is better than less of the good. It has a powerful appeal even if we can't let it drive the bus.

So I do think there's a lot to be said for effective altruist in that they tend to have a scope beyond just themselves, beyond just their country, beyond just people like them. They look towards the future. I'm a person who thinks we always should be looking towards the future. We shouldn't just be living in the past. There's so much to admire about effective altruism as a movement, and there's much to be said for other things equally we want to do more good rather than less. I still think that's an important component of being a good human being and of acting morally. So I can sign onto a lot of what they sign onto. Many of the critiques I make in my most recent book really are critiques that the effective altruism couldn’t fully accept. Yeah, you're right. This just shows that we have to do things differently, not because the goal was wrong, but because we weren't accomplishing our goal by doing the things we are doing now.

So there's a lot that I'm still in agreement with about effective altruism. But, at the end of the day, effective altruism have altruists. You mentioned the issue about might we limit the scope to human welfare. Insofar as we care about human welfare, we want to do the most good with respect to human welfare. Then we can leave it as an open question. “How much should we care about animal welfare? How much we care about alien welfare?” But at least what are the parts we're focusing on human welfare, and that seems to be a reasonable thing to focus on in some cases anyway. Can't we agree that we should do the most good at least there? I agree that we should pay attention to how much good we're doing always. There's always a relevant factor; pragmatically and also morally. But it's only one factor. That's going to be my claim again and again.

I've taught many students over the years. I'm coming to the end of my career. I'm retiring. I've had countless students in my office over the years who are struggling with the question of, "How should I lead my life? This is extremely controversial, but being the pluralist that I am, I believe in a balanced life. Now, you can find balance in a number of ways. But just as I'm a pluralist about my moral values, I'm a pluralist about what's involved in being a good person and what's involved in leading a worthwhile human life. I'm signed up in the camp of, "We only have one life to lead."

It would be great if there's reincarnation and we led multiple innumerable lives. It would be great if there was life after death, et cetera. I'm on board for all of that if it's there, but I'm not leading my life assuming any of that is true. I'm leading my life thinking I have one and only one life to lead. How am I going to lead it? I would like to lead a life. I would like it to have been true that I led a life that at the end of the day, I can look myself in the mirror and feel good about the life I live. This involves the life for me of things like personal integrity. How do you treat other human beings? Do you treat people with respect, et cetera? I believe that personal face to face confrontation matters. I believe the things in my life...

I'm wearing a shirt right now. I’m wearing this shirt on purpose today. It says, "I have been: Mr. Professor, and Doctor...” If you turn around to the back, it says, "But my favorite title is grandpa." I now have five grandchildren. I understand that having children is not for everybody, but for someone like me, or for my father, for my parents, the amount of joy and pleasure and pride that I get out of my children and grandchildren, there's nothing in my professional lives that compares to it. For all the accomplishments that I've had-- I've had a few. All the impact on the world that some people have say I've had which is major-- none of that. It all pales in comparison to the relationship I've had with my wife going back to when we met on the hunger hike decade ago.

I put a tremendous amount of weight on the value of human relations. Parent a child, love towards significant others. These are tremendous services of value in human life. I pity my peers who are at the absolute pinnacle of intellectual achievement, but whose lives are lacking in so many other ways. So Derek Parfit who I've mentioned before, he was my mentor. He was my closest friend in philosophy for 40 years. I still think about him almost every day. I love Derek, but I would never have wanted to be Derek. And I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be Derek. He accomplished unbelievable things as a world class philosopher. But his life was, to my mind, missing so much of what makes a life valuable. So I wouldn't recommend that life. He didn't regret the life he had. And I have other philosopher friends like Derek; single minded, focus on their philosophy, that comes first, second, and third, and they wouldn't have traded their lives for anything. I get that.

I don't see that as the most valuable human life. One of the ways of thinking about this is, I have a model which I use in my Rethinking the Good, which I... I'm blanking on the current name. It was called the Gymnastic Model for many years and now I've given it a new name. Often when we think about like, "Who's the greatest gymnast? The best all-around gymnast?" A cat model moral idealist, that's it. The greatest all around gymnast is not the gymnast who excels at the parallel bars, but stinks at everything else. I don't care how good you are at the parallel bars or how good you are at the mats. If you are not good in anything else, you're not a great all round gymnast. Similarly, when you think about the virtues, I don't care how much Genghis Kahn might have the virtue of loving his mother-- pretend that's a virtue.

He might love his mother an unbelievable amount, but he's not a virtuous person if he raves and pillages and kills and steals and does all these other things. It doesn't matter how accomplished he is along that one dimension, if he's abysmal along the other dimensions. If you want to be a virtuous person, a truly virtuous person, you have to score pretty highly along a whole bunch of dimensions. Similarly, I think for the human life, if you really want to have a great human life-- and this is why I try to urge my students, you can't be narrowly focused on any one of the aspects that make a human life valuable. That's my view. I have colleagues who don't share it, but you're interviewing me right now and you're asking my view. When I give my advice to the people I care about...

Nobody can do everything. You can't be everything. We live in an age of specialization. I don't do every academic field. I don't even do every academic field within philosophy. I don't even do every academic field within moral philosophy. I specialize. One of the reasons I'm as good or not as good as I am in moral philosophy is I spend 30 years-- 15 years working on my first book and, 30 years working on my second year book. That means a lot of hedge hogging rather than foxes. So I get the appeal to focusing on something and trying to do it well. But when it comes to living a good human life, it can't just be narrowly focused on one thing. There has to be space for these other things that allow a human being to flourish. That's what I believe and that's certainly how I've tried to live my life.

There's an old expression from the tradition I grew up with that says, "If you are not for you, then who will be? If you're only for you, then what are you?" Basically, that means we do have the right and the permission to look out after our own wellbeing and those of those we love. I believe that. But if we only look out after ourselves and those we love, and we don't take time to sense of the larger world of which we're apart, our lives are not good lives.

Ben (01:26:01):

That's amazing. I'd sum that out post. Be pluralistic, be balanced, be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and be happy with what you see. So on thinking about that, I think this has been one of the most amazing conversations in my life. So, Larry Temkin, I thank you very much.

Larry (01:26:26):

It's very kind of you to say. Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate it.

David Finnigan: Making theatre, improving creativity, learning from failure, art in a time of climate | Podcast

David Finnigan is an award winning theatre maker, writer and games creator from Ngunnawal country, Australia. David produces performances and writing that explores concepts from Game Theory, Complex Systems science, Network Theory and Resilience. He has also had the dubious honour of performing on stage with me, in our performance lecture collaboration, Thinking Bigly. He has a show coming up at The Barbican, London, 27 September: You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History.

We discuss how all art might be considered climate art. Thus we should consider jobs as jobs, why put green there? or health is health. This can take some of the heat out of the language. 

Even in the great depression, we sort of look back now. There's a tradition of screwball comedies in the great depression. Now, we look back at them and they had nothing to do with the kind of political issues and economic issues at the time. But we look back at them now and say, "Oh, they were deliberately escapist from those conditions of the time." So whatever you kind of create now it's very hard to not find a way to read it. That is a climate reading. And when something becomes all encompassing like that, it's almost such a broad term that it ceases to be useful to use it. I'm thinking now of your comment the other day where you said, "When we talk about climate health or we talk about climate justice, that's just health and that's just justice." At what point is it relevant to use the word climate and at what point is it unnecessary? Because climate's everything. Climate's everywhere. So it becomes a bit too vague.

We chat about the process of creativity in particular in performing arts. The importance of David finding a community in his home town and the constant making of work at the start of his artistic journey. 

David discusses what he learned from scientists and his father. How this has integrated into his art. 

We debate on what is most misunderstood about Australia and London. 

I ask David what he learned from injured possums.  David talks about London foxes and Underground mosquitoes. 

How theatre is narrow but deep. How theatre is bad for being able to pay rent. What David learnt from theatre in the Philippines. 

What we learn from failure. How we practice creativity and how we improve. David’s work in music and spoken word. 

We end on David’s current projects including his one man climate show coming up at the Barbican.

David gives his advice to creatives. 

“Don't ask for career advice, don't ask for professional advice. Ask people their story.”

David’s website here.

Podcast available wherever you get podcasts, or below. Video with captions on YouTube, or above.

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PODCAST INFO

• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

• Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

• Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh

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David Finnigan with Ben Yeoh (transcript, only lightly edited)

Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to David Finnigan. David is an award-wining theatre maker and games creator. He had the dubious honor of performing on stage with me in our performance lecture collaboration. He has a show coming up at the Barbican in London in September called "You’re Safe Til 2024." He's an all-around great person. Welcome.

David (00:56):

Hello, Ben. Thanks so much for having me.

Ben (00:58):

So you have written that all art is climate art. Is this an argument that all art simply reflects its times and we are obviously in climate times? Or do you want to unpack that thought for us a little bit more?

David (01:15):

I think you've actually just expressed it quite elegantly. I think for me, we've probably moved past the point sometime in the last 10, 20 years where climate could be described as an issue. It has just become too big to be an issue. It's too broad. It kind of touches everything. It has become the context or the background for every other issue. So in that sense, I think we could sort of say that we are now living in the climate era. I'm borrowing Alex Steffen's term there. We're in the early years now of the climate era and therefore whatever we make is going to be art of the climate era. People in 500 years I imagine will look back at us and say, "They were making work in the early years of the climate era." So whatever your work is about, it's going to be described as that. So I often say that trying to make work about the climate now is a bit like being a medieval artist trying to make work about medieval. We're trying to grasp something huge and complex and abstract while we're still in the middle of it. That's the kind of broad brushstrokes of that philosophy.

Ben (02:28):

I guess if you go back hundreds of years if you were in the middle of the plague your work would've been... Again, it's the same because the plague would've been all encompassing. You wouldn't say, "Oh, I'm making plague work" because you're just simply making work in the middle of that.

David (02:41):

Even in the great depression, we sort of look back now. There's a tradition of screwball comedies in the great depression. Now, we look back at them and they had nothing to do with the kind of political issues and economic issues at the time. But we look back at them now and say, "Oh, they were deliberately escapist from those conditions of the time." So whatever you kind of create now it's very hard to not find a way to read it. That is a climate reading. And when something becomes all encompassing like that, it's almost such a broad term that it ceases to be useful to use it. I'm thinking now of your comment the other day where you said, "When we talk about climate health or we talk about climate justice, that's just health and that's just justice." At what point is it relevant to use the word climate and at what point is it unnecessary? Because climate's everything. Climate's everywhere. So it becomes a bit too vague.

Ben (03:34):

Do you think there's something particular about its systemic nature or its wicked nature because there is...? Wicked in the sense of intractable problem as opposed to just evil, by the way. If you think about those things; health or justice, you could have made a call for that justice or health was a human ideal which could have been part of its times. But they've never really made it to the level that it is. But to your point, something like the great depression again, we now look back. I'm not sure at the time whether they would've thought of that. We see it back with that lens of history. Do you think there's something particular around about climate? Just kind of a reflection.

David (04:19):

I think the way we use the word climate kind of refers to this grab bag of transformation that the planet is undergoing. We use climate change kind of as the catchall term to refer to biodiversity loss, or land use change, or the transformations in the phosphorous nitrogen cycle, or colony collapse. Any number of these different sort of transitions that we're suddenly going through, climate change is kind of the catchall term for those even though climate change is probably only one small part. Certainly not the biggest part of these issues. Maybe not the part that's going to get us. So it's become a kind of a label that we stick on things. In that sense, I guess I know what it means loosely. I know what people mean when they say, "Oh, that works a piece of climate art."

I can guess some of the kind of genre beats that might exist within or some of the tropes that it might adopt. So it's useful perhaps in that sense, but also, it is kind of a vague label to slap on things. I'm not sure as an artist if you're making climate work-- Maybe you heard this too. But I do have every so often a young artist will come and say, "I want to make work about the climate. What should I do?" It's like, "What about the climate? It's too big. Keep zero in and keep narrowing down.”

So I make work about climate research. I work with climate scientists and I sometimes work with policy makers. I think you kind of exist at that intersection as well. But there are lots artists who make work that look at, for example, a specific community that might have been affected by dispossession or kind of indigenous conflicts. Like indigenous people being driven off land, migration, or gender issues which of course are exacerbated by climate and other planetary transformation issues. I think those are all legitimately equally climate work. .

Probably the work that you and I do is easier to label climate because it has the kind of... We use words like parts per million and greenhouse gases which kind of situated very much in what we understand climate change as being traditionally. Although I think in the last few years we have sort of stepped away from that a bit.

Ben (06:46):

Because it's possibly less useful. In fact, going to your point, the other way that actually is becoming a little bit of a hindrance having that label. I was thinking for instance when you were going through those things; plastic. With plastic you don't necessarily directly think of a climate thing. But obviously when you say climate and plastic it's like, "Yes that makes a lot of sense." But it's a different strand of that whole blob.

David (07:13):

I think like in a word cloud sort of mental association thing I think people do connect micro plastic pollution with climate change. Those two things sit next to each other. I think it's actually surprising for a lot of people to learn that plastic pollution doesn't really have much to do with climate change. They don't come from the same source. I mean, producing plastics, the plastics industry does have an emissions profile. But it's not on the scale of concrete or steel. The cycle of plastic is a kind of different issue. But I think for a lot of people-- well, for all of us, it sits in the same part of our brain.

Ben (07:56):

Sure. Definitely adjacent. So you're talking about your work with policy makers sometimes steeped in climate scientists or speaking to scientists and that in games. How would you view your own origin story starting work in Australia? Starting work with a kind of interactive games or performance. Also, spoken word, poetry. We might come up to your music making and sound creation as well. How do you view how your own creative journeys come about?

David (08:29):

I'll give you the kind of origin story as I think of it now. I'm from Ngunnawal country in Australia which is a region in the Southeast in between Lake George and the Murrumbidgee River. So I'm from the city of Canberra which is the capital but it's also a city of around 350,000 people. So it's not a huge population. There wasn't a huge theatre scene. I came up in my late teens and early twenties making theatre in this independent arts community in Canberra particularly with a collective called Bohemian. We later changed our name to Boho. I and my collaborators set out to make work that was interactive and looked at science. I think my friend Jack Lloyd who's a very close collaborator really was interested in gaming and how that could translate to theatre.

I was very interested in doing something around science. Just been reading some books, some pop science books on the shelves and thought that would be a kind of interesting thread to fold into our work. So our very first show as Boho was called a “Prisoner's Dilemma.” It looked at game theory; the classic prisoners dilemma game theory concept. Game theory for anyone who doesn't know is a branch of science that tries to analyze real world decision making using math. So it tries to break down real world conflicts or complex decisions into a sort of mathematical structure where you can actually calculate. It's essentially any situation where what the best thing to do depends on what other people do. 

One classic example is the game of chicken. You can imagine you have two cars driving towards each other. The first one to swerve is the loser. But of course, if neither car swerves, then you both hit each other and both drivers are dead. So chicken, it's also quite similar in a lot of ways to nuclear escalation and the mutually assured destruction. So you can kind of analyze this game and the scientists who developed game theory in the forties and fifties used it to try and think about how they might fight a nuclear war which they kind of expected to be doing. It's also just a great way to think about choices and decisions. We kind of built this show around a lot of these decisions that the audience might make and scenarios where we put them where they would have to cooperate or compete with each other and hacked gaming devices. So gave Wiimotes and joysticks to the audience and they could use them to kind of pilot the performers around on stage. That was where we began.

From there, we went from looking at game theory to looking at complex systems science and network theory. All of these I guess that you could broadly put under the heading of earth sciences or earth system sciences. They're all sciences that are interested in the kind of complex connections of how things work in the world. Probably it wasn't until 2010 that we really explicitly said out loud we were making a show about climate because wanted to avoid exactly what we were talking about earlier. We were really interested in the other things around climate that weren't being talked about. So biodiversity loss, land use transformation. These are the kind of global change phenomena that weren't being discussed. We kind of deliberately stepped around the topic. Then finally in 2010 we made a show called “True Logic of the Future” that looked right into climate shocks and the intersection between climate and politics and so on. So that work kind of took us into working with scientists. From then on, much of my theatre has been done in collaboration with researchers or in research institutions, in universities, in laboratories making work with scientists about science.

Ben (12:52):

Were you influenced by your family as well? Because your father was a scientist. I'm not sure how much professional science work he's still doing. Was it the kind of cultural looking and reading you were doing at the time or I'm imagining it was a bit of both, or did that come later?

David (13:14):

My dad was a big part of it. None of his children followed him into the sciences and he never really nudged us or pushed us one way or another. Certainly, when I began exploring theatre both my parents were very supportive. But I think it was really exciting for him when I began to sort of look around and be like, "Dad, can you point us in the direction of a resource? We want to talk with a scientist who knows about this issue or this topic." So he was like, "Well, yeah. I have a friend here who can chat with you and have a coffee with you about how complex systems intersect with Australian history or how network theory meets the Murray Darling basin; the kind of river system in Australia. So that was really great. That was really helpful. My dad was originally British. He moved to Australia in the 1970s and began working in what was then called environmental mechanics. So his area of expertise is wind flow over waving plant canopies. That's a thing that he has literally written the book on. A wind flow over low lying plant canopies. For the 10 people in the world who kind of study that, he's written a textbook that they often use.

Ben (14:40):

That has a special name?

David (14:42):

It's micro meteorology. f you see wind through a kind of grass field, the Japanese word for that is honami which means rice heart wave which is quite lovely. So obviously, that micro meteorology in the 1980s began to be folded into these bigger conversations about what was then called the greenhouse effect; what was starting to be called global warming. So my dad and a lot of his colleagues were sort of brought into these bigger discussions about can the climate change? What would it look like if the climate change? How would we know if the climate was changing? How could we model that? When people started making bold assertions saying, "Yeah, we could be facing five degrees of warming in the next century," people like my dad were kind of brought in to sort of go, "Is this realistic or is this not?"

Then in the 2000s, he became really interested in complexity theory. I think after chaos theory in the 1980s complexity was the next hot topic emerging out of places like the Santa Fe Institute. So my dad was kind of really interested in bringing complex system science to Australia and helped built up one of the first labs that looked at complexity theory in Australia. Built a kind of unit and hosted a whole series of conversations with scientists that tried to look at what complex systems could tell us about different sorts of issues that we were facing; climate being one of them. So all of that effectively meant that he was always there with some really interesting conversations around the dinner table and there were always books on the shelf. If we needed some inspiration I could go poking around and be like, "Well, I don't even understand the title of this one but I can skim it through and find some interesting anecdotes within these books."

Ben (16:46):

So we have science if you're interested in game theory. Was there any cultural icon or play movie TV element for teenager David which was really influential, or did you just sift through into that via performing and making?

David (17:07):

This is kind of a funny thing. I feel like the world I come from is very DIY. I actually suspect this is a real difference between you and me because you began making theater in London. So in Canberra in Australia particularly in the early 2000s, one of the things that I think was actually great was there was no weight of influence because there wasn't a kind of scene of theatre makers above us. I wasn't going to see the theatre. When I was in year 12, my friends and I found out that you could hire a theatre. You could pay $400 a week and you could rent this little tiny black box space the size of this room. They would just give you the keys and you could put on a show.

So we just did and it was awful. No one came, but it was the most fun that I had ever had and the most meaningful, fulfilling thing that I could possibly imagine. So I just did that and that was all I did. I spent the next 10 years really just making theatre nonstop with my friends. That's how we hung out. That's how we basically lived. Every cent that we earned went on theatre art and every minute that we weren't working or if we were studying at school, we were in the theatre making these shows that no one saw except each other. I didn't have the money to drive to Sydney to go and see a proper theatre show and when those occasional touring shows came to Canberra I couldn't afford to see them either.

So the only theatre I was seeing was the theatre of my friends and collaborators. Maybe there were 250 people in the scene making music, art, and dance and I would see everything that they did. So for me, the kind of big influences that I had were playwrights like Adam Hadley, Jack Lloyd, Nick McHariston, or Chris Lloyd. People who were my friends, also rivals, also inspirations which meant weirdly-- I think this is probably something I'm really both proud of but also I recognize as a big failing. By the time I came to take a workout out of Canberra and see the bigger world and come to places like London to put things on, I really didn't have a sense of what was going on in the bigger theatre conversation. A lot of the basic skills or basic discussions that had been going on here I had no clue about. 

So in a way I'm really pleased about that kind of upbringing because it meant I got to make a lot of stuff. I got to get all this bad stuff out of the way. I was never intimidated by being like, "Well, I can't put something on because I've seen all this amazing work by all these top end professionals I could never compete with." On the flip side, my standards were really all over the place. I feel like this would be very different for you coming up in London. My impression is as a young artist in London you're bombarded by seeing this work that you're told, "This is the best work in the world." How can you compare yourself to that?

Ben (20:35):

I'm interested in your comment that you could probably tell when your work was good or not good even without a reference to outside theatre. I do think you are definitely in a conversation in London or New York. I remember in my twenties there was an ongoing discussion between the kind of playwriting or theatre making where the playwright was very center and it was their vision and the director and actors would fill out that vision. But it was still a writer centric vision versus the form of theatre influenced by other things where it was much more collaborative; whether that was devised, or a vision or an idea of theatre making that way. Obviously, actually the splintering of all of those and being part of that live debate where actually for someone who has always been a little bit of outside even to theatre, I could see that they probably had more in common than they had apart. But it was very interesting. I've always been an outsider for that, because as most people listening to this will know I have a very different day job in sustainable investing. I'm interested in all of these other things.

But I think there is an element of being an outsider which can be really useful for creating more unique art or perhaps just art which wouldn't happen otherwise, either because you have a commercial imperative and the commercial market tends to be influenced by a certain amount of things. I was listening to MrBeast who's one of the largest YouTubers ever. He started this way but within YouTube. Obviously, he had a lot of feedback and was very obsessed by that and has gone on to have a multimillion franchise which hasn't happened and I don't think would happen in theatre. So there was something about its medium and its time.

David (22:29):

Yeah. The low ceiling is an interesting thing. I was talking about this the other day. The fact that to get into theatre is quite a high floor. You can't just sit down at the desk and write. You need a group of other people, you need a space, and you probably need an audience. Depending on what you're making you might need lights and sound and a set. So it's quite a high floor to kind of get started in. Then there's quite a low ceiling in that unless you're a smash hit first play west end, you are probably only performing to tens or hundreds of people on a good night. You're not on YouTube where it takes absolutely no challenge to make your first video and there's really no limit to how many people you could reach.

Ben (23:13):

I think about that because this series of podcasts has now reached more people than my in person plays probably ever will or ever will have. Maybe my radio play one which went on World Service potentially stole more.

David (23:30):

There's something in this though that I feel like one thing that is nice about theatre. Maybe I tell myself this because I'm a theatre maker. I'm too deep into theatre to shift art forms. So whenever I can think of something that I like about theatre I have to clutch to it. But I do feel like theatre is a very narrow but deep form. You have a very narrow group of people that you can reach. It's as many people that fit in the room really. Those are probably a very specific type of person. But when you have them, you can take them deep. You turn off the lights and they're with you for an hour and they're completely there.

I can't think of many other mediums where you can actually take someone's full attention for 60 minutes of their life. That's quite a generous thing that people give you. Whereas with the podcast or with the YouTube, I think you are getting a huge number. It's a shallow but broad medium. You're hitting a huge number of people but probably you're getting their distracted attention while they're doing something else, or they're watching you but they have five other tabs that they could flip to at any moment.

Ben (24:37):

I think there's a lot of truth to that. There's something to do with the liveness of it as well where a brilliant piece of art or even art that other people don't think is brilliant but transforms you, you can leave that room different than how you entered. Most other art forms do not do that to the same extent. I think all art has that capability but theatre has a higher percentage conversion. Maybe not that high even, but for a narrower number. I was also going back to your Canberra observation. What do you think is most misunderstood then, or perhaps that people would be surprised to know about Canberra or Australia having grown up there and now seen so much of the outside world? Do people really misunderstand Australia or don't get something about it, or even in particular Canberra? Is there something you would give back or forth or the observations? Maybe you could do the same like London. This is as an outside of what London doesn't understand about itself. I'm interested in Canberra or Australia.

David (25:45):

Canberra's a great choice because people within Australia hate Canberra. Canberra is broadly despised because Canberra is the seat of parliament and it's a sort of purpose built capital city. The origin of Canberra is that both Melbourne and Sydney were debating over which would be the capital, and to compromise they built this new city in between the two. So it's this sort of deliberately built town that has a big public service space and all of the politicians in the country come there to be there for six months a year perhaps to work and to be in session.

So whenever you watch a news broadcast in Australia it'll say, "Canberra has decided" some awful thing or "Canberra says," and it'll be some grim thing. If you come to Canberra as an outsider, you'll go to maybe a few kind of Washington DC esque landmarks. There are some museums, there are some nice architecture in the city center part but it's deliberately quite low. There's not much there for outsiders to get into. The perception of Canberra is that it's boring, it's evil because of the politicians that live and work there. Because it's a public service town it's also quite progressive. For years it has had more progressive policies around pornography and marijuana. So you'll often hear people be like, "Oh, Canberra. It's porn, pot, and polys" which is what we're known for.

The truth is it's actually an extraordinary city. It’s an extraordinary community. There's the kind of parliamentary triangle which is where all the politicians are, it's where all the museums are, and it's where you get these ambitious young staffers who come from Melbourne and Sydney when they're very young and they work in the triangle for two, three years and move back to the big city. Outside of that you have this weird little community that exists off the outside of any light. Because it's completely hated on, essentially you never get jerks come. You never get anyone come there who wants to be seen because they'll never be seen. So you have this very self-contained, very self-supporting community. It's the community I grew up in and the community that made me as an artist. The kind of art scene there is flourishing and weird and deeply off the radar. But all that said, I actually have no particular. Because of all that I have no real interest in trying to counter that myth. So when people are like, "I hate Canberra" I'm like, "Yeah. Good. Continue to hate it." I don't particularly want to change anyone's mind because it's also my secret.

Ben (28:45):

So if you are a weirdo in Canberra you can find your tribe quite easily as it were. I mean, sort of semi hidden, but you probably don't have to sniff around very much to find it and then probably find quite a happy home.

David (29:00):

I would say yeah. But for London, what do you think is most misunderstood about London? Because you're a proper born and bred London native. You're one of the rare breed.

Ben (29:09):

You've thrown the question straight back at me. I think some people when they first come to London find it somewhat unfriendly because unlike where you go to maybe even Australia or America there's a kind of surfaced, "Hi, how are you?" And you kind of get that surface feel that you're part of their community, which I don't think is the case for a lot of Americans. Although again, that generalization has a lot of exceptions. Whereas I think in London you don't get that surface feel very often. In fact, not at all. But if you scratch below the surface, I still think it's one of the most multicultural deep places because it's still a pivot point for many things. It has a very long, deep culture itself. It's taking a melting pot still despite everything of all of these other cultures and perhaps a little bit like what you were reflecting on Canberra that you can find your weirdness. You can find something in London as well.

Actually, you find a lot of people whether from UK or even elsewhere that are drawn to London to find that. So I think that's true. Our food is pretty good as well. So people think that London food isn't that great. But actually from the low end to high end and probably even better at the so-called low and mid-end, it's extremely varied. Partly maybe if you go back you had the spice trade or whatever through that but because of all of those cultures and things coming through. What's your reflection on London?

David (30:56):

I think you're right. Those are all my favorite things about it. A friend observed before I came here. They were like, "The thing you'll notice about London if you spend some time there is that whatever weird thing you're into you'll find a community.” But you can keep digging. In Melbourne, if you're into historical reenactment maybe there'll be a group that meets that does historical reenactment. But in London you'll be like, "There's a group that does historical reenactment for the Victorian era." When you get there they'll be like, "Do you want the one that does 1890, 1895, or 95 to 1900?" So it's like you can just keep digging and you'll keep finding the weirdness goes deeper.

Ben (31:35):

Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth there. Like you say, I've lived here for over 40 years. I just did the calculation. I have lived and worked-- apart from my time at university, within about a 12 to 14 mile radius of where I was born. Pretty much every week, definitely every month, I'm still learning things about the city which astounds me.

David (32:00):

There's one thing I do find very strange here. I'm speaking as an Australian white settler. My parents are British and they moved out to Australia in the 1970, I think. They're what's called 10 pound palms because you could get a boat ticket for 10 pounds at the time. So growing up in Australia you always have this sense, and it's very hard to put into words but you're very aware of it from quite a young age that you are not on your own land; the land you live on is not yours. At a point, you learn that the land you're on was stolen. Gradually bit by bit you kind of learn the depths of what that entailed. 

Some people never really engage with that and some people really do. But I think no matter who you are, if you spend any time in Australia as a settler you are aware that there is this legacy, there's this guilt, and you're responsible for something that you personally didn't do. By the time you're aware of it, you're already culpable. That's a strange thing and people metabolize that in different ways. Some people metabolize it by trying to address it and some people metabolize it by very actively ignoring it. It's a very kind of sore and contentious thing in the country. Not even speaking about the indigenous people who have born the worst of it in every sort of angle. So it was really weird getting to London and getting to the UK and meeting white people, British people who felt like the land that they were on belonged to them. I realized I'd never felt that. It's a strange sort of sensation. I don't know what your experience has been.

Ben (33:48):

So there is increasing awareness of that. Obviously, you feel it more in Australia. I think it's interesting comparing it to other lands which were colonized in that way; America and Canada. So they feel it less in America, but growing probably more in Canada. I put Canada between Australia and America but with similar reactions into it or sort of against it because of where it's come from. Here in the UK or in England, there is something where you go back to this land owner mentality or not. So when you dig down there is something around-- You have this in these great landed estates. Particularly in London, Marylebone is owned by certain estate around Sloan Square. It's the Catagens around Westminster. It's the Grosvenor or the Duke of Westminster. Going back probably to around the 1066 mark and then onwards, there is a sense that they own it. But actually it's a sense of owned still amongst the kind of landed elite.

Perhaps this is getting a little political, but they probably have gone a little bit into the shadows because they don't want to raise the fact that actually a lot of that wealth-- You see it probably mostly with the queen and things like that. They still own a lot of it. I think the vast majority of UK’s capital wealth is still tied up in the land. That generational wealth has really held for hundreds and hundreds of years. I think there's a kind of myth that we tell ourselves here about how it is, and therefore this quest particularly in the UK about owning your property and your land and things come from that. I think then the offshoots about how when the UK was colonizing everything, there was an offshoot of that mentality. It’s actually if you didn't have the land then-- and most people didn't, they wanted to own pieces of other land because of that. So I do think there is that, but it expresses itself in a slightly quaint way to put it.

Thinking back on the journey as an artist that you have, I'm really intrigued that a lot of your recent work has been in the style of theatre where you are essentially a playwright and a writer. So your voice as a player has come out and other people have put it on and it has been more collaborative from that. Whereas for instance your roots as you were saying were in the kind of collaborative art form. You've kind of gone that way in your journey whereas a lot of other people kind of go maybe the other way. I don't whether they go the other way but it's a mix. You still do both sets of work and I was intrigued. Is this a kind of form versus function, voice aspect, or is it just you've ended up doing more of that because you had done less of it before and you're more interested in it? Is there any kind of purpose to it or is it one of those just falling into it via luck and what opens out to you?

David (36:59):

It's a great question. Maybe now on a good year I'm able to kind of pick and choose a little bit what I'll work on, if I'm lucky. I still struggle to pay rent much of the time. I'm not by any means at the point where I can sit back and say, "I'm just going to do this for the next six months." But the work that I do that earns me money tends to be games. It tends to be interactive scenarios that I develop for research institutions or for organizations that want to communicate an idea. I'll get commissioned to make a game or an interactive activity that illustrates that idea.

That does have the field much more of those collective cooperative works devised theatre. My practicing game making comes from my work in devised theatre and that skillset that I've built up through working with Boho and with Coney and those other organizations over the years. The other stuff that I do that's more sort of playwright centric comes from this playwriting practice which just I don't think will ever earn me as much money. I don't think it'll ever kind of pay a living wage. It's great now that I no longer have to try and pay my bills through that sort of traditional theatre because I think for most people that's not viable, and certainly it's not viable for me. 

If I get a show up, that's a miracle and I'm very grateful for it. But it's not going to pay my bills. It does really scratch a deep, important itch in me. I probably am drawn more towards the playwriting end of the spectrum where I get to write a script and other people perform it or I'll perform it. I'm drawn more towards that. But I think that might be, as you say, because I was doing more of the other stuff for so long and it's still so rare that I get a theatre company say, "Yeah, we want to produce one of your works.” I don't get enough of that. But if someone said, "You'd have to give up the game making," I wouldn't want to do that. So I'm grateful for having both, but the ratio is never quite what you'd like.

Ben (39:15):

Yeah. You always go for the rarity or the thing that you can't have. Do you have a view on how digital or hybrid will work out? There's a phrase within theatre particularly here in the UK with building back better, building back different. Actually, to be absolutely honest I see very limited things about building back any differently than it really was pre pandemic. Really just small things around the edges is my kind of outside of you. But digital and perhaps hybrid which has been talked about for a long time, you might have thought that the pandemic might have finally been a catalyst and trigger for doing more work like that. And actually, I think you have done some successful work on this sort of line but it's been its own thing. What do you think of the future? Does hybrid digital, performing arts have a space? How's it going to go?

David (40:08):

I certainly don't think that what we were doing in the pandemic either has a real organic audience hungry for it or even a huge cohort of artists that are excited about it. I think there's a small group of artists who are really nudging at what that form could be. And there's a small group of audience who are really interested in that sort of experimental work. But I think a lot of it was just theatre artists being forced online. Certainly, that's where I sort of landed. I think you're right completely about the question of building back better. That intention hasn't really carried through. I think it's worse than actually reading your latest newsletter. Was it yesterday, it came out? Was this your prediction or was this a stat? That in fact, a lot of the artists that kind of held on for dear life through the pandemic to the art form might now be knocked out by the oncoming economic downturn. Was that a stat or was that a prediction?

Ben (41:16):

Some of it is stat and some of it is prediction. Some of the stat is if you look at for instance the proportion of people who are in the lowest fifth, and for instance if you're not really making rent you're definitely in the lowest two quartiles. I don't know exactly where you go. But if you look at the lowest fifth, they spend about 10 to 20% of their budget on food. Food is up 10% plus and actually lower cost food is up more. So all of that is now absorbed. And to your point, there are moderate to heavy headwinds still. So COVID is still a cost and it's going to be an ongoing cost essentially forever. This disease is with us forever and it's going to cost us more in everything: in health, in money, how we cope with it. Some of that cost is definitely going to be for some time in live event cost. The cost of managing it, the cost of cancellations; all of this. That hasn't been put in any calculations. So you've had this bounce back because people had no choice of a pandemic. The kind of new normal of what it is certainly for the next year or two is not looking great now.

When you go out five or seven years hopefully as we have done before, humans do quite well in the face of adversity and the coming up of new things. But I think we forget that it's very painful for the people who are inventing this type of stuff. So I think it's completely true. Actually, you see this with artists. The sort of poor artists in adversity kind of trope. There is some truth to it and they do create more and there is really interesting stuff which comes out. But if you also look at it, it's at a huge personal and other cost. Sometimes I speak to some of them and they're not exactly sure whether it was worth it, or at least worth it for them. It's probably worth it for the value they bring to society. So I think that there is some of that.

David (43:24):

I think that's absolutely right. It reminds me of that other Alex Steffen line where he says, “We're not heading towards an apocalypse, like society wide apocalypse. But we are heading towards a situation where there are many more personal apocalypses while society trudges on.” I think what you described is exactly that. People are kind of suddenly seeing years of their life go up in smoke and all of their money has to go towards just survival costs. Within that, how can you make work? How can you innovate or celebrate the work that you're making or the community around you?

Ben (44:00):

Exactly. And if the end part of thinking of human progress is that sense of, "We are wealthy so we can spend our time doing the things which make us human; call that art, or reading, or chatting with friends, or dancing, or music making and all of that," well, that whole blob is squeezed by all of this coming; whether it is climate related, or pandemic related, or inflation related. That blob of humanity seems to me to be squeezed. That's not doom in the sense that we are still about, but we are lesser for it and that does worry me certainly over the next two or three years because the catalyst, particularly in performing arts of pandemic hasn't really changed that trajectory it seems to me

David (44:53):

I think that's right. The personal experience I have of this is not my experience but it's something I've seen. I work a lot in the Philippines and have been doing for about 15 years. Being there since 2006, one thing that's been really extraordinary to see is this surge of-- Philippines is a country of 98 million people. It's the 12th most populous country in the world. In recent decades it has this sort of burgeoning middle class. There are these huge numbers of people who their parents lived in quite severe poverty. They have come to a better standard of living where they can start to experience a better life and as part of that consume art. What they are hungry for is art by Filipinos about Filipino experiences made for them by their peers.

So being around Filipino theatre makers was like nothing I've ever seen here or in New York or Australia. When work was made it was seized on, debated, discussed, engaged with, and grappled with. The audience is growing every year. Now, you can really imagine that trajectory in the coming decades as we hit these various crunches and shocks that growth might just stall. There's going to be millions and maybe billions of people who, as well as all the other sort of suffering and deprivation that they'll have to go through, won't get to see their worlds represented back to them the way they could have done. I don't know where that ranks on the scale of sadness but that does make me sad.

Ben (46:39):

I really would love to hear more about your work in the Philippines. Maybe the other reflection I have is the way you came into creative arts was a lot of doing and arguably a lot of 'failure' or a lot of stuff which wasn't that great and iterating. In some ways I think we talk about this in creative arts. That stays with us whether we had admitted or not that this is an act of failing, and rehearsals are one way. I was thinking about that. Science presents these conclusions to the Anza showings. That's one output. 

But actually, a lot of our interesting other output is the rehearsals. The creative is the messy failure process. Sometimes even the output of that is also a failure. I think a lot of science is actually the messy input before that and they have the hard equation at the end but there's a lot you don't see beforehand. So I was interested in your reflection on that process and what you learnt from failure or not. I think there's a kind of collective failure maybe in and around pandemic. I'm not exactly sure. It's interesting to see how Philippines respond or your own personal practice. So you can go with that wherever you like.

David (47:57):

Sure. The thing that immediately jumps to mind is this idea which I was writing about a little while ago. The pandemic as a kind of rehearsal. This metaphor came up a lot I think in the early days of the pandemic. That dealing with COVID would be a rehearsal for the bigger shocks that would've come. I loved Adam Tooze's kind of in media res history, “Shutdown” which is a book that came out last year that looked at the first 14 months of the pandemic. He kind of grabbed on two examples of where the response went right. The first one being China's initial massive scale lockdown of Wuhan in those first 70 days that managed to at extreme cost get the virus under control and limit the outbreak. Sure enough, people in Wuhan were out in nightclubs while you and I spent most of 2020 in lockdown. Where they're at now is a very different story, obviously.

For two, he sort of points out that came from the fact that a lot of the leading Chinese government officials now came of age in the SARS crisis in 2003. There was this big reckoning post SARS where a lot of officials were kicked out and this whole new generation took over. That was the generation that's now in charge and kind of running the show. The other one he talks about was the sort of financial response, and this is getting very much out of my wheelhouse. But he sort of says, "We came perilously close to some serious collapse in those days of February, March, 2020. That we didn't was because of some lessons learned by financial regulators during the GFC.” 

So if those two analogies hold-- and I like to think they do, then that suggest there's a sort of room where we can kind of rehearse a little bit our way through crises. One way or another we have learned from COVID. The next shock is going to be different and it's probably going to hit us very badly as well. But hopefully, we would have taken some kind of tips and tricks from this experience. In the absence of a sort of global overarching green new deal or kind of Paris agreement that we work to collectively as an international body, I think stumbling from crisis to crisis and picking up some tricks along the way is probably the best we can hope for, for the rest of our lives.

Ben (50:40):

So usually I'm the optimistic one and I think long term optimism is actually both correct and the correct strategy. But I have to say the pandemic or where we are now has tilted me slightly the other way because I don't think we are learning the obvious lessons. For instance, it seems fairly clear that give it a 30 or 50 year view, we are very likely to have another sort of viral pandemic. But we seem to put nothing in place from what we've learned this time around for the kind of things that you would need in order to make that pandemic manageable. So if that is a foreshadowing for some of the things around; either another pandemic or other joint coordination problems, or the first one we talked about right at the beginning which is obviously a major one that also makes me feel less hopeful because essentially the special interests or the interest groups for the smaller bodies-- I say small, whether that's nation state or however, just conflict in a way that we don't seem to be able to coordinate. But to your point, we do seem to learn a little bit every time. I just thought we'd learn maybe a little bit more but that's out of my sayings.

David (51:56):

It's true. I feel like even during the black plague governments didn't think that you could just announce that the virus was over. The fact that there is this sort of willingness from the top down to sort of say, "We are done now. Covid's not a problem anymore." It doesn't bode well for other kinds of shocks and crises that are coming down the pipeline very fast towards us.

Ben (52:21):

Maybe it's to do with the time scale though now because there is something which seems to be compressed. I think humans over history have tended to work more in generations. Actually, maybe in a generational aspect we're still okay. Like every 30 or 40 years we are trundling through. But just because of humans, some of these timelines have really moved up and that has caused perhaps a crunch that we have not kept up with the timelines that we have put on physical world; maybe even also in technological world with what we're doing with AI or nuclear technology and all of these advanced really quickly. Like suddenly, "Well, we're very good at usually killing one another. Now we have capabilities which could wipe out pretty much a lot of life on the planet." That's a kind of really big jump in where you would think in a kind of technological progress.

David (53:19):

I think you're absolutely right. The shocks that we're being hit with there's this pace at which they come. I think COVID probably ranks as a pretty good example of a mid-sized shock for the 21st century. The shocks are going to keep getting bigger on average and the gaps between them are going to get smaller and smaller. I was just sort of doing a kind of back of the envelope calculation for myself the other day and it struck me. I feel like I lost probably two years of my life to COVID. That being a theatre maker particularly, I lost two years where I couldn't practice my art, I couldn't practice my kind of profession. I also went from lockdowns in the UK to lockdowns in Australia.

So I spent probably a long time unable to connect with my community and be around the people that really matter to me. Financially, there was a big impact as well. So I'd say I lost two years and that's out of this decade. Assuming nothing else goes wrong in the 2020s which is a big thing to assume, but I could imagine… Losing two years out of this decade I was like, "Does that mean I could expect to lose four years out of the 2030s, six years out of the 2040s, and eight years out of the 2050s?" What do you think?

Ben (54:40):

I don't think it's linear. I think it's possible but you'd be unlucky. That would be my thought. I think there is a reasonable thesis which suggests is this the whole-- This is like an environmental curve. Things get worse before they get better. So you kind of have a cross between a techno optimist and a techno realist as in the technology will save us, but there will be a period where it could destroy you before it could save you. What you need to do through that period is progress humanity in all of its aspects which I think is both social, moral and everything in order to use the technology well and the technology. So you hit through the other side. But as you're doing that and you have not yet progressed enough and your technology has got more, you could well wipe out everything. So the risk becomes higher.

But you need to go through that because we're now at a point in time that if we don't go through the technology we end up there anyway. So you have to take that risk and hope you get through. You could see a landscape where if we have got through and maybe we'll come onto this… So for instance, I am worried-- I think one of my moral failings is that I eat animals and I can kind of reach a point through a sort of techno optimism or something where you go through that and you have the equivalent and you're not causing any harm to non-human sentient beings. But you probably get through there through technology rather than cultural change. You might get there through a bit of both. You could see this through everything. How we treat the seas, how we treat the land and all of that. But you definitely go through a period where that becomes a lot worse; potentially much worse before you get through to that other side. I don't know what to do with that except that it seems to be that's probably where we're heading.

David (56:37):

It has to be where we're heading. It's that thing where if we had gotten onto this 30 years ago, the transition would've been quite gentle. We wouldn't have had to disrupt our lives and our society very much at all to make the transition. But where we are now after 30, 40 years of inaction, the talk that's built up the energy by not making this move is like we've kind of press this spring down year after year. When it finally unleashes as it's beginning to do, there's no way through that doesn't cause huge damage. I think we are past the point for example, where without the kind of global agreements or something like the green new deal there will be a huge cost to transitioning from fossil fuels and cost in jobs for countless people who are going to lose their jobs, and a cost in energy security for a lot of the people who struggle the most because we haven't put in place the structures that would support those people during a transition. We're not going to at this rate. So I think you're right. We need to make that transition because we all... We will make that transition. But the cost is going to be-- We go through a dark place before we get to that other side.

Ben (58:02):

Perhaps bringing it back to something a little bit smaller and optimistic. I was very intrigued reading about your work with possums and injured possums. Maybe tell us what you've learnt helping injured possums and why this might give us hope.

David (58:21):

Okay. So during lockdown in Melbourne last year, my partner Rebecca Gigs and I were... Rebecca had this notion that we should volunteer. I think she'd been reading about a hedgehog hospital here in the UK. She was very excited and wanted us to go to see the hedgehogs here. We weren't able to because of lockdown. So when we got back to Australia she was like, "I really want to volunteer to do wildlife rescue." So we signed up to Wildlife Victoria and we got our animal rescue licenses. We did our training to rescue injured marsupials. The first thing they get you to do is to become a kind of animal transporter. This is before you feel ready to do proper rescuing of a snake that has run across the road and been hit, or pulling a bird that has run into power lines.

They get you to take an injured animal from the vet to where it's going to be fostered and looked after. We essentially signed onto this service where you get these texts saying, "There's a possum with three children. They're 31 grams, 35, and 37 grams. They're in a vet in Mona Vale and we need you to take them down to Richmond.” So we would drive to these vets and we'd take these animals. But because it was during lockdown we couldn't actually go into the vets. So we'd literally be pulling up to these vets and then a vet nurse would come out into the car park with just a sack that was wriggling and hand it to us at nine o'clock at night. Meanwhile, there'd be teenagers on the other side of the car park actually buying drugs like normal people.

We were trading weird animals. Then you'd have to drive with these possums. Essentially, because they're marsupials they need to be kept very warm. So they're in these sort of bundled up socks and blankets and wrapped around in these baskets. We take them to where they were being fostered and looked after. I think what was extraordinary was realizing that there is this whole network of people who rescue animals and foster animals in the city. Actually, the amount of wildlife going on in the city was extraordinary. We had no idea that there was this much native wildlife moving through these very dense urban areas. Unfortunately, you find out about it when they get injured, but it was still a really lovely thing to see that our own city was threaded through or is threaded through with wild animals.

Ben (01:01:00):

Cities and wildlife. There is a harmony and balance that we can get to.

David (01:01:09):

This is where I want to talk about the London underground mosquito.

Ben (01:01:11):

Go for it.

David (01:01:14):

London obviously has its extraordinary fox population. The quintessential London experience in my mind is coming out of a nightclub at three in the morning and there's a fox just roaming up and down the road with someone's kebab that they've stolen. But there's also this incredible ecology of mosquitoes in the underground. London mosquitoes are a very particular breed of mosquitoes. They drink bird blood. They don't drink human blood. They don't swarm and I think they are only active in summertime. So they're a very particular kind of mosquito. When they built the underground in the 1890s, 1880s, there were no mosquitoes down there. There were no insects down there.

The very first time that people reported encountering mosquitoes was actually during the blitz when people were sheltering down in the tunnels. That was the first time. So it took them 50, 60 years to get there. The mosquitoes that have moved to the London underground are not the same mosquitoes as the ones above. Somehow, they are a different species that's made its way here somehow hitching a ride on something. They drink human blood. They're active year round and they mate in big swarms. So they are their own species and they become over time their own sort of distinct species. But even better, they actually have evolved into distinct subspecies. So there is a Central line mosquito, there is a Bakerloo line mosquito, and there is a Victoria line mosquito. They are genetically distinct and they never interbreed. They are evolving into their own actual separate species. As this researcher said, the only way they would actually get to interbreed is if they all got out and changed trains at Oxford circus. That's the London equivalent. Australian wildlife story.

Ben (01:03:14):

That is incredible that nature will find a way. In fact, someone was commentating that if humanity wiped itself out, probably there will be a lot of other living stuff which will come and take its place. So it's a human problem. Some of these things is not necessarily an earth problem.

David (01:03:33):

It is definitely a problem. Kim Stanley Robinson makes this point. “The biodiversity loss and species extinction is the most final thing that we are responsible for.” What we lose will never come back. This has been on my mind today. I need you to fact check this for me. But tell me, the opera as an art form in my mind is a bit of a dwindling kind of heritage art form. It has been around for a long time but the audience base is sort of old and getting older and they are dwindling and there isn't a new audience for it. So I think it is sort of gradually on the way out. But I still feel like there will be opera performed after you and I are dead.

Ben (01:04:22):

I think that's true. I think that will be true.

David (01:04:25):

But rhinos-- The population is crashing and I think it's very likely that rhinos will be gone before you and I die. So what I've been chewing on. I woke up the other night and was like, "Oh my God. Is opera going to outlive us but rhinos won't?"

Ben (01:04:44):

I think that might be true. Although we can then talk about the woolly mammoth and whether it comes back or not. I actually particularly think of noh plays which are even more niche because I think noh plays will continue to survive in that niche.

David (01:05:06):

Are you going to have a world practitioner on the podcast at some point? I would love to hear that.

Ben (01:05:14):

I've been following a few people in Japan so hopefully we'll get them on. Yeah, I think that might be true.

David (01:05:23):

I think not even opera singers would want their art form to outlive rhinos.

Ben (01:05:27):

I did want to ask before we finish about your music making and actually maybe a little bit your spoken word. But your music and music collaboration, do you find that's in the same kind of blob as your performative work or even your playwright work, or does that exist in an adjacent world for you? It's interesting you're talking about Boho and your time there. You kind of put in a string of performance making, music making, and dancing all in one blob. It seems to me perhaps now that I listen to you, it is more connected than it seems when I've been looking at the outside saying actually it is maybe not a separate work as it seems. Do you find it all as kind of it's all the work of David Finnigan or in your mind is it a little bit more separate as well?

David (01:06:13):

No. I do put things in buckets but I think it's also very much all me. The work I do-- So I perform music with my brothers as Finnigan and brother. My brother Chris is a guitarist and makes music as fossil rabbit. He makes this beautiful kind of guitar and digital soundscapes and songs. He's an extraordinary musician. I'm not, I don't play anything. But I would do spoken word over the top of his beautiful compositions. One thing that I actually really love and appreciate about Chris and about that project is that many years ago when we started performing together I was like, "We are really enjoying this. We should actually kind of take it more seriously. We should try and get some funding to record an album. We should try and actually go and do proper tours." Chris was always like, "No, I don't want to professionalize it like that. I want to keep it as this thing that we do purely for fun and purely for our own satisfaction." Because of that, that collaboration with Chris and the kind of music making has become the loveliest and no strings attached to arts practice I have. I find it very restorative because it's not tied to-- It's not going to pay my rent. It's not going to be part of my professional practice in a big way.

Ben (01:07:40):

No public or commercial imperative with that. I guess riffing back on that failure question earlier then as well, what's been the most disastrous creative things that you've done and what have you learned from them?

David (01:07:57):

That's such a good question. My biggest failure is I think actually-- Perhaps it relates a little bit to what I said earlier about growing up in Canberra and coming up in this DIY community driven scene where it had a kind of punk ethos where we're like you want to make it fast, you want to make it dirty, you want to make it honest, and then you want to get onto the next thing. You set the fuck up, you rock the fuck out, and you get the fuck off stage. You don't kind of overthink and you don't try and make something too pretty. So my work is definitely not too pretty. My work always still now has these jagged edges and broken bits. It's me sort of fumbling around on stage and that's an aesthetic.

The problem with that aesthetic is that it can also just be the same as being sloppy and lazy. It's very hard to know when you're starting out which is which. So I got to a point in my practice probably about in my late twenties, early thirties where I had built up this practice. I was making lots of work and I was touring it and I was getting into venues, but I couldn't get a show of mine produced by a serious theatre company. I couldn't get a script of mine to be taken and picked up and produced. I had enough runs on the board that I could get to meet with literary managers and artistic directors. I could get into those rooms and have those conversations, but I just couldn't get them to actually pick up and take a work of mine.

In my head, it was because they just weren't connecting with this sort of voice that I had or this sort of style that I had which is very distinctive and it's still not for everyone. My stuff is not for everyone by any means. But it actually wasn't the style that was getting in the way. It was that I just wasn't good enough as a writer. I actually wasn't writing scripts that were really world class; had to be produced. I think what had happened is that I'd been so committed to this idea of just churning stuff out and whatever I churned out was honest, authentic, and true that I had stopped getting better. You get better when you start out at age 17 and you make six shows a year for five years. You get better and you do get better quite quickly. You get to a standard. 

But I hit that plateau and I hadn't moved for years. I won an award for Kill Climate Deniers which is a script of mine, which is very kind of scatter shot collage, Tumblr blog aesthetic. It's a really kind of all over the piece work. I'd won an award for it and I was very excited. I thought, "Great. Now it's really going to start happening. My work is going to be picked up. I'm going to have a future." What happened instead was I won the award and nothing happened. I went to meet with these theatres and I was like, "Hey, I just won this script award for this play." They were like, "Good on you." I would show them my other work and they were like, "No."

I had this real slump after the play award where I thought that things would get easier and I could kind of relax a bit and stop working so hard and take my foot off the accelerator a bit. Instead, I was in this sort of weird blank space. It took me-- I reckoned six months before it finally dawned on me very slowly that actually the problem was me and the problem was that I wasn't actually working on improving; whatever that means. That doesn't mean being dishonest or untrue to your voice, but it definitely means not just spitting out first drafts and trusting that that'll be enough which was my kind of classic era. I don't regret much in my career. Your journey is your journey. But I feel like I've lost probably at least six to eight years of my practice because I just didn't know that I had to be working all the time. Perhaps I would've known if I'd been in a city like London earlier and had a clear ladder to climb.

Ben (01:12:29):

Yeah. I reflect on that is maybe that might have helped. But partly, I think our art form or that performing art form is perhaps a little bit harder to know. That's why my earlier question is like, "How do you know your stuff is good?" And actually like you say, your first six years you are always just going to get better and then maybe you'll plateau. I think of it like a musician. If you're a piano player this is a little bit like well, you got to a certain level and you stopped practicing for three or four years. It's kind of really obvious for musicians and they need to practice and it's sort of honed into them that actually there is no other way around it. So it's a very obvious form. 

But you are right. In all of the creative arts I think if you are improving you're essentially practicing at something. Like you say, it is individual, it's your journey. It might be whatever it is. If you stop that practice journey or whatever it is that you do to make yourself get better, that actually slowly decays or it doesn't improve and you lose ground away. Actually in performing arts it is perhaps less obvious because it's sometimes only obvious when it's in front of an audience. Or in this case, you're not getting in front of an audience so you're not getting that. You're just getting a kind of producer script writer who for whatever reason; either they can see it a little bit in the work or maybe they have an intuition, it's not all adding out. Some of that can be just bad luck as well. So that makes it even harder. But as you say, some of it is at the core because actually you've not taken it up to that other level of where that practice would be.

David (01:13:59):

It's not like there's an obvious way to improve as a writer. Sure you have your own experience on this. I'd be curious to know what improving as a writer looks like for you. But you can't just sort of sit and write. If you just sit at the computer and write every day and churn out a thousand words a day, you will get better to begin with and then you'll plateau. To improve you need to focus on your weakest points as a writer, target them, and actually build up craft and muscles in specific parts of their practice that are not strong. They might not even be the parts that you are writing. You might not even care about that. For me, my issue is I've never been a strong writer of characters. I can write dialogue, I can write plot, I can write science ideas but I can't write a believable, realistic character. And that's fine. In my plays, the characters tend not to be fully 3D dimensional rounded characters.

But trying to learn to write a character I think is fed back into my actual... Even if I write something where the characters aren't important, you still need to be building up skills and muscles. I didn't realize that. I thought you could just keep writing and if you did a bunch of writing every day you'd kind of just keep improving. What's it for you? How do you improve as a writer?

Ben (01:15:24):

So there's an economist polymath, Tyler Cowan, who has articulated this question as, "What do you do every day that is like a musician practicing scales?" Particularly in what he would call the knowledge economy of which creative arts is definitely one. I think actually it's a key question when you reach our age or our practice where you've done a lot where you can kind of follow this groove and you'll get to a certain level. What do you do arguably for the next 40 years for where you could take it to this further level? So I don't think there's necessarily an easy question or answer there. I think it also depends on what it is. So within creative arts it is different to what you might do for investing or for other parts. But it does have some elements.

David (01:16:15):

You have brilliantly reframed the question while avoiding answering it.

Ben (01:16:21):

So it has certain parts. One element is the nuts and bolts of the core practice of what you're doing. So if it is writing, there is a certain amount which still has to be writing. That's for instance why I've increased the level of blogging a newsletter and less writing that I've done because there is a certain amount of that core bit of what you're doing. It might not be exactly like in a playwriting or dialogue or a character, but it is the foundational wordsmithing part of what you want to do.

The second element I think, is around reading or absorbing the type of work which you are interested in, in your domain. So novelists or memoirist or whatever should be reading around that. They're probably reading fiction and poetry and things, but around that. I think that performance makers need to be watching a certain amount of performance. I probably don't watch enough. If you can't get to that you can actually still read it in the written form; not as good, but there are certain elements of that. So particularly if you're saying you're very interested in character, then you can read very interesting writers around character.

I think I would go further to say if you've identified somewhere where you think you are weak or you just like to know more about-- so say this element of character, you don't just need to go to the ones who you think are really brilliant around character. You need to go to the ones who did something or are doing something interesting but may not be working out. And then you need to work out what it is you think may be interesting or not interesting. And then why do you think it failed or not failed? Maybe it's not failed. Maybe it's only half there and they haven't finished it and you will pick up that journey. Because I think at this level of where you're trying to take it into sort of an Olympic level sport as opposed to just a county player, you are dealing with all of the embodied knowledge of where the world has got to now, which is actually the same in science. You get all the way to where you are now. So you need to have an understanding of where all of that is. But then when you are there, we know that you can't just repeat what has just gone before because then that is no longer where the edge of the frontier is.

So you need to make these leaps and bounds. In order to do that you have to see where other people make leaps and either be like, "Oh yeah. Sorry, that was dead end. I can see that." Or you needed to stretch one further and you didn't realize there was an invisible stepping stone there had you dared to reach that further point. So at the level I think you are at where you're creating new work with potentially new form, new ways of thinking and seeing, you are combining the best of what you are seeing in the world with some of these leaps of faith as to what it is. Some of it is a recombination of ideas which are already on the edge. Maybe they're not even on the edge because they’re combination of things which have gone before but combined into something new or there's something on the edge. So they're mostly either a combination or something you can see, or I also think that you borrow-- Maybe this is why I was asking about some of your other art forms like music, spoken word, or your work with scientists, or even your work with possums and animals.

I have this thread through your work and Rebecca. The snail, the whale, the koala; all of this. You borrow from another domain. Fairly deeply into that domain as well. Maybe not all the way at the cutting edge of that domain, but quite deeply into that domain and you transfer or you transform the knowledge or skill in that domain into your own domain and you combine it into something new. If you're quite close to the edge of that domain, or even if you're not necessarily at the edge but you see some insight which isn't widely understood except within that domain, and you bring out of that domain and by bringing it out you transform it into something other, and you're transforming it through your voice, then I think you get creative arts innovation. That practicing of that which is that core and going in I think is what you do in creative arts knowledge to create frontier work once you pass the foundation.

David (01:21:09):

Yeah. I think that's right. One of the best things perhaps about working in the space we're working where we create theatre about planetary transformation and global change is that those two domains really don't connect. They don't interface easily. There's no comfortable overlap on the Venn diagram between the huge global abstract slow moving transformation of our planet and our society. On the other hand, the very kind of intimate, personal relationship. Two people having a conversation on stage that theatre’s very good at. The form does not meet the content. Trying to reach to connect things from one domain to the other and trying to find ways to map one in the form of the other is a continual struggle and mostly it's failure. But every so often when you get it right, you are previously on uncharted territory which is exciting. The great thing about this work is that it kind of calls on-- Because it's doomed to failure in a way, it can't really be a rethread of things that have gone before.

Ben (01:22:19):

Exactly. So we've given ourselves a part answer. Great. So maybe coming to the last couple of questions, what projects or work are you doing at the moment?

David (01:22:35):

My next sort of public outing is I'm performing a show called "You're Safe Til 2024." Deep history. I'm performing it at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in August and I'm performing it at the Barbican in London at the end of September. That's a solo show that talks about the deep arc of human history over the last 75,000 years. But really it's a story about the last three days of 2019 when the bushfires were impacting Australia and at that time hit Canberra. My best friend Jack who I mentioned who I made theatre with and my dad who I mentioned as a big influence were both caught on the front line of these fires in different ways. So it's a show about that three days and how that three days has become-- It is kind of an encapsulation of the climate shocks that are yet to come in the future. That's the next big piece. 

But beyond that, the thing that I've been writing that I'm very excited about is a piece called “Dance Dance Insurrection” which is a high school dance competition play. It's about a group of teens of misfits and losers who set out to form a team and compete in a big dance competition in order to save their parents from online radicalization by destroying the internet altogether. So they set out to win this dance competition that happens at a big internet infrastructure hub and destroyed that hub and get rid of the internet for good. So it's kind of a joyful trash dance piece that also unfolds a lot of stuff about the shape of the internet and how that kind of structure has affected our brains in the last 30 years.

Ben (01:24:25):

Wow. Amazing. I look forward to watching or reading that. Last question would be, do you have any advice to people; maybe advice for people who want to be creatives or any kind of life advice that you've thought about in your career or time?

David (01:24:48):

I’ll borrow Scott Young's advice because I thought it was lovely. His advice went for people who were... Basically, if you are seeking to kind of get advice from older artists, professionals, or mentors he suggested that you don't ask for advice. Don't ask for career advice, don't ask for professional advice. Ask people their story. Ask people how they did it and then you can tease out the relevant bits from that. But if you ask people advice they tend to give you these vague platitudes like, "Just keep trying. Don't give up."

Ben (01:25:24):

"Learn from failure."

David (01:25:26):

Exactly. Don't ask for advice, ask for people's stories. That's my advice.

Ben (01:25:31):

Great. Well that seems like excellent advice. David, thank you very much.

David (01:25:36):

Thank you so much, Ben.

Ben (01:25:37):

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