Transcript
Speaker: Adam Mastroianni, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Thanks for having me. um I'm in Brooklyn, New York, but soon to be in Zurich and Budapest, giving some talks and doing some escape rooms. I tried.
Speaker: my My biggest flaw as a person is i really like escape rooms. A lot of people find them pretty cringe. There's always like an episode of a sitcom where someone gets conned into doing an an an escape room now, but every every place I travel, I try to do some.
Speaker: You know, if that is the, your biggest flaw, then Adam must be a pretty lucky person. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a little bit of murder, a little bit of fraud and, and, you like escape rooms.
Speaker: Well, would you mind telling me a bit about yourself, Adam? I'm from the middle of nowhere in Ohio, a town called Monroeville, 1,400 people there and not a lot else. My seventh grade teacher was also the mayor.
Speaker: I went from there to college, learned that the whole world existed, which I didn't know before. In college, i I took a psychology class and fell in love with it and haven't fallen out of love with it, but have fallen out of love with a lot of things around it. So I went to graduate school, got a PhD in psychology, planned on being a professor and then realized like, oh, there's a lot of trade-offs for being an academic.
Speaker: All of them I'm totally willing to make. I'm willing to move wherever the job is. I'm willing to not make much money. I'm willing to have job insecurity. If in exchange I get to like... do cool stuff and tell people about it using the words that I think are right. And the further I went in academia, the more I realized like, oh, you actually don't get that either.
Speaker: You ah will be like very heavily encouraged to lie. I mean, obviously no one says that you should, but they will reward you for doing it. And i just thought, no, I can't. I can't. I won't. not worth that It's not fun. And so I started writing this blog at the encouragement of some friends who blog pseudonymously under the name Slime Mold Time Molds. they were like, you really start a blog. I was like, I don't know. and know like, no, you really should. And they were they just would not stop annoying me until I did. And as soon as I started doing it, I felt like that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie where he's got that staff with an amulet in it and he sticks it in that like underground map and the light shines through and lights up the map. And and I'm like, oh, this is exactly where I i should be. And I realized like I could actually make a living doing basically what I did when I was an academic psychologist. Like,
Speaker: I can run studies. I can write papers. i can like write about ideas and try to make them true and useful. And I can do that direct to the public. And it is possible to make a living doing that. Like we live in a brave new world where you can do that. and I feel very fortunate to be there. So so that that is what I do. That is that is my job now. I write I write this blog and that is how I don't starve.
Speaker: So that's me. How did you go from, i guess, being an early blogger to whatever you might consider to be your first success, the next success, being able to pay some bills? And now we will get to soon your book that will have come out just before this episode is released.
Speaker: The first success was realizing i liked it. And more and more I realized like, oh, this is actually really rare and useful information. Not everybody gets that. Just this sense of when I'm looking at the blank page, when I get my fingers on keys, like I am, it's so frustrating, but in an addictive way, in ah in in a way that's like you're playing a video game that's exactly at the right difficulty. Like you die sometimes, but enough to just keep it interesting. That I felt was the first success. The the next one was realizing like,
Speaker: Okay, when I started out, I was like, you know, if 500 people read this regularly, that would be a great success. and And as we're talking, I think I'm like 500 away from about 100,000, which never crossed my mind as possible.
Speaker: And so the success was being like, oh, I'm doing something that people find useful, that they will spend their time on, which I take really seriously that like, You know, at any time, you can be watching anything on Netflix. You can be eating Pringles. Like, you get like people's time is is limited, and you should treat it well, and you should try to use it well when they give it to you. And so realizing, like, oh, I can do that for people, that was the next success. And then realizing that was true enough that, like, total strangers would decide to send me money over the internet, which, like, I still sometimes can't wrap my mind over around that like, the world can work this way. ah Like, it really increases my faith in humanity that, like, we're willing to do this for each other. And I do it for other people, too, that I'm like, I...
Speaker: support a few writers entirely because I'm like, I like what they do. I want them to succeed. I'm not entering into a commercial relationship with them. This isn't like the money that I sent to the New York times where I expect to get a a certain product in return. And I'm asking like, is the product worth this? Like maybe I should cancel my subscription. I'm like, no, if, if you want part of the world to not work under capitalist, like logic, then you have to behave in ways that, that ah don't make sense under that logic. And I think sub stack and kind of the, the the patronage part of the economy works that way. And I feel it feels very rewarding to be on both sides. So yeah, the, the, the next success was basically being like, I can walk away from my academic job and feel afraid, but not reasonably. So.
Speaker: Were you writing before in one way or another, were you writing before the blog? Some like in college, I wrote sketch comedy. I've always done improv, which is obviously not written, but it but it's public facing in a way that feels very spiritually similar to me.
Speaker: i always thought when I was a kid that I would be a writer when people asked me what I was going to be when I grew up. be Like, yeah, writer. And I didn't write, which I think is a weirdly common affliction that people have that they like like the idea of being this kind of person.
Speaker: And i think writing means a lot of like comes in many different forms. And I hadn't yet found the one that had this resonance with me that like I was writing academic papers in grad school, but always felt like I was bad at it. That I'm like, as soon as i sit down to do this, I feel like I lose 50 IQ points and I don't have many to spare in the first place. And it was only when I started writing in this other format that everything clicked in. I'm like, OK, now I can use everything that I have to do this. But before that, I guess I'd never written in that way that would make me realize that.
Speaker: And i guess that there are a number of things that plug together here, but two of the big things in my mind are writing and you choosing psychology.
Speaker: So how did you decide that psychology was going to be the the the career or you know the vocation you were going to follow? I remember the the day in particular that I was in my sophomore year taking a social psychology class. We were reviewing for the midterm and we were playing like a Jeopardy review game. Like the TA had like drawn a Jeopardy board on the board.
Speaker: And I answered one of the bottom row questions, right? That are supposed to be the hard ones. And he turned to me and and he goes, you're pretty good at this. And just like, that's actually a pretty rare thing. Like, I think in our lives, we very rarely get told the things that we're good at. And so I really took notice in that moment. I was like, oh, I guess I spend a lot of time on this.
Speaker: I must like it. Oh, I'm inferring my preferences by looking at my behaviors. That's what self-perception theory says says that we do. And i was like, oh, maybe i should I should be a psychologist. And around that time, i was reading a book called Stumbling on Happiness, which is by this guy, Dan Gilbert, which I loved. It was so well written, like reading it felt like your mind was slicing through butter. It's all and it was it's all about the ways that we're bad at predicting what will make us happy and bad at predicting our emotional reactions to things.
Speaker: And then I got an email from the department being like, hey, Dan Gilbert's lab at Harvard is is looking for research assistants for the summer. And I was like, this guy's mortal. Like you can meet him. ah You can work with him. And and I went and worked there that summer. And ah that is where I i like really fell in love. with I'm like, these people are so interesting. They're so smart. Like the the studies are really cool. I want to be like this. And so my PhD was basically sitting in a room with him for five years and talking. Like that's really what I did. I mean, we ran studies too. wrote papers. But the crux of it was, um apprenticing to this person and, and learning how to think like they think.
Speaker: I suppose both in your studies, but then also today, do you have a particular focus in psychology? Yeah. So when I was in grad school, I did kind of two things. One was studying people's perceptions and misperceptions of interpersonal interaction. So conversation. So like the first project ever did in graduate school was this paper called Do Conversations End When People Want Them To? Which are very relevant for what you do talking to people. And we put people in a room and we and we told them, talk as long as you want. ah Let us know when you're done. You'll be here for a full hour, regardless how long you talk. And then afterward, we asked them a bunch of questions like,
Speaker: Was there any moment at which you felt ready for that conversation to end? If so, when was it? If not, how much longer did you want to go? Now, guess whether your partner had that moment. When was it? Or how much longer did they want to go? And we found that people, the conversations do not end when people want them to. Most often, they end after people want them to. But but like a quarter of the time, um about 20% of the time, both people wanted to continue, which i think is really interesting. And this happens, this this ah ah mismatch between what people want and what they get happens for two reasons. One is...
Speaker: people don't want the same amount of time talking. So when we ask them afterward, when did you want to go or how much longer? Very few people pick the same time. So both people can't possibly get what they want. And when we ask them, guess when your partner wanted to go they are off by about half of the length of their conversation. So Not only do I, and I don't know what you want, and we don't want the same thing. So it's very unlikely that either of us are going to get what we want. and that's what we find.
Speaker: And no, so I did kind of studies like that. And then the other thing I worked on was how do people think the world has changed and how has it actually changed? And so my dissertation was on how people all over the world think that people are less kind, honest, nice, good than they used to be.
Speaker: um They think morality has declined. They think this has been going on as long as they've been alive. They think it in every country that's ever been surveyed. And i just took this seriously. I was like, well, if this is true, that's like very concerning. We should try to understand it. Like this is the most important thing that's happened in the social sciences ever, probably. So I did a bunch of research and like, no, actually we find really good evidence that it's not true, that these things haven't changed. And so we try to figure out why might people think this? and we think there's a couple of biases that combine to perform, to to form this illusion.
Speaker: So those are kind of the two things that i that I've worked on is social interaction and people's misperceptions of of change in the world over time. Well, I suppose before I ask you my question, I will say that you have written two posts, if I recall correctly, called, I think it's, is it the theory of moral decline?
Speaker: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The illusion of moral decline. Yeah. The illusion of moral decline. And the, well, I know that at the very least, the first one, if not also the second one, but was very popular and yeah quite interesting to me. So I'll throw that out there for the listener to hopefully look these up and I will include links in the show notes.
Speaker: What I wanted to ask you, and this probably applies in a lot of places. It's just something that I'm very interested in, Adam. When you were talking about asking those conversation partners, you know, when did you want the conversation to end and all of that?
Speaker: did you tease out and, or in any other research you've done, did you tease out how much of their statements reflected how they actually felt in the moment versus some sort of, i guess it wouldn't be post-hoc rationalization, but it'd be post-hoc something or other. Basically, you know, what was reality? What was the story people tell themselves and so on.
Speaker: Yeah, this is a great question. And when we thought about for a long time, um because you might have this feeling in a moment of a conversation, but afterward, you might rewrite that story. um And so we wanted to run a study where we allow people to tell us in real time that now is the moment that I want to go. And so there was this point where I had ordered a bunch of them.
Speaker: It's like a mouse, but you can press it with your foot. Like ah like people who um who play keyboards often have these like they they press this with their foot to like change the the sheet music. And so was testing them and like all of them clicked too much. And so you'd be talking and you could hear here it. You go like and you would know that the other person had just clicked there. I want to get out of here like escape button.
Speaker: So we didn't we didn't do that. And where we ended up was, you know, people might have one reaction in the moment and later on that might get overwritten by what they tell themselves about their conversation. What we're actually interested in is the story that people take with them for going forward. And so even though there might be this moment and and their thoughts might change, those those later thoughts, the changed thoughts, are the ones that will influence whether they talk again, how they think about conversations and in the future. So although we couldn't capture, if there are different, those those kind of those thoughts in the moment,
Speaker: we tried to capture the ones that we thought were most important, which is what's the story you tell yourself afterward, even if it isn't the same story that you had in the conversation. Okay, if you felt ready to leave at some point, did you continue to feel that way or did or did that feeling ah pass? Because we showed some early results to people and like, well, you know, I might have a passing thought that I'm ready to end, but maybe time goes on and things pick up again. And we found about 90% of our participants said, no, when I had that thought, I continued having it until the end of the conversation.
Speaker: which again might be just something that they told themselves afterward. But I think because these answers are anonymous, they only come to us, the other person doesn't doesn't see them, that people don't have a strong reason to like deliberately lie any more than they are lying to themselves about what they felt.
Speaker: There are a lot of questions that that brings up for me about things like trying to make sense of, or simply categorize things that I have to explain after the fact. Like if I don't have an opinion at all and you ask me for my opinion, then I'll do this background PR work.
Speaker: Yep. that opinion and why it's completely rational. And it's just one of these things that I find fascinating. Yeah. For someone like you that has you chosen this as your profession.
Speaker: i always have a lot of questions about what do we know and what do we not know? It is ah is a motivating question in psychology. And one of my favorite papers of all time is this paper from the 70s just called Telling More Than We Can Know, which is just about like, all right, can people explain their mental processes to us?
Speaker: and And now we let everyone go like, no, obviously you can't. But at the time, like people hadn't thought about this as much of like, OK, we run these studies. We run some cognitive dissonance study. Oh, look, people had cognitive dissonance. Then they changed their opinions because of it.
Speaker: If you asked people afterward, hey, did you feel any cognitive dissonance? ah If you explain to them what that is, would they say yes? And generally they say no. They say, oh, I'm sure many people feel that way, but I don't. I didn't actually feel that. That didn't that didn't influence my answers.
Speaker: And there's a great anecdote in that paper about this... um ah This task where you put people in a room and and there's two ropes hanging from the ceiling and your goal is to tie the ropes together, but you can't reach one rope while holding on to the other one.
Speaker: And so it's kind of this brain teaser thing. there's There's a bunch of like random junk in the room. The solution to this problem is ah you hold on to one. ah You like set one rope swinging. And then you grab the other one. And when it swings back, then you can you can grab them and tie them together.
Speaker: And people sometimes figure this out, but they can't tell you how they figured it out, even though sometimes the the reason they figured it out is because a researcher will deliberately come through and accident like accidentally bump one of the the ropes. But afterward, people will say things like I, I saw a vision of monkeys swinging through the trees and that's how I got.
Speaker: And it's just like. There's a lot going on under the hood. And then there's a layer of stories on top of that that we tell ourselves to make sense of everything going on under the hood, which may or and it may not line up with what's actually going on under the hood. It doesn't have to be wrong, but it also doesn't have to be right. I think that is a big part of what makes psychology interesting.
Speaker: It's fascinating. Well, Adam, you have a book coming out by the time we release this. The book should be out, I believe. It will at least be available, available to pre-order. Yeah, yeah. It is called The Strangest Idea in the World. And it is framed around the question, why did it take us 300,000 years to invent a toilet? It's not a book about toilets, primarily. It's really about like, why did it take so long to discover and invent everything? We've been humans a long time. Most of the things that we've figured out have been in the past 500 years. Like, why would that be? And I think there's good historical economic answers to that question. But I think we're missing a psychological answer to that question, which is,
Speaker: It was a bad idea. Basically, everything that we have to do to discover new knowledge is in the short run for a human in our evolutionary environment, a bad idea. We didn't evolve to do it. It's a miracle that we can't at all. It's unsurprising that we're not better at it because to discover new things, you have to use the mind for a thing that it wasn't built to do. And so each part of the book takes you through like, okay, this is another, this is like a strange step. This is why the mind wasn't built to do it. Here's how we can overcome that barrier and what it looks like to to do that. So you have to do things like realize that you don't know something already. You have to understand that other people don't know it either. You have to believe that it is better to, to know something than to not know it.
Speaker: Then you have to actually figure it out. Then you have to be open to the weird ideas that you might discover when you go looking for them. All of these things do not come naturally to us because if a hunter-gatherer had done them, they would have been more likely to end up dead. And so it makes sense that so many things in science now are weird and difficult for us because they don't come to us naturally and by default. And I think this is why we've built so much of our scientific scientific ecosystem in spite of these ideas, like not taking them seriously. And that's why we don't have more progress.
Speaker: think if I... heard you correctly. A lot of what we have discovered has come in the last 500 or so years.
Speaker: So is there are there things you can point at that caused some sort of change? that to that process, to the fact that we weren't evolving to discover new things or we weren't. Yes.
Speaker: All of a sudden we are and we're not just doing it slowly. It sounds like we're doing it very quickly. Yeah. I think not as quickly as we could, but much more click quickly than we used to in the distant past. Although there's there's good evidence... Now suggesting that we get a lot less bang for our buck in scientific funding that, you know, for instance, a billion dollars used to be enough to to bring dozens of drugs to market adjusted for inflation. Now a billion dollars is basically what one drug costs to to bring to market. So basically what happened was the scientific revolution, which kicks off with this idea that like, hey, the law, we think there might be consistent laws that govern the things in the sky.
Speaker: then they might also be the laws that govern the things on Earth. And that one insight was enough to to open the door to a lot of further insights. Meanwhile, this thing is happening where Europeans have landed on a continent that they didn't think existed. kind of throws into crisis um this idea that maybe the ancients knew everything. Now it seems they didn't know about this. What else didn't they know?
Speaker: i think there's a lot of great history out there about like why did the scientific revolution happen where it did? What I think is even more interesting is why didn't it happen where it didn't? There are plenty of cases in history where we were close. Ancient Rome, various points in Chinese history. We are close. Like, word it looks like, if you didn't know what wass coming next, it looks like we're ramping up to a scientific revolution to like, okay, we got a few of these things.
Speaker: and then we stop and it is a stopping that i'm really interested in because that is mainly what we did we we kept going once we stopped ah every other time and i think it is because all the things that it took were things that are really counterintuitive even to people who know that they are counterintuitive so i mean when galileo is kicking off physics in the late 1500s early 1600s he's like rolling balls down inclined planes or dropping balls out of towers these things look stupid The early Royal Society, like the earliest scientific society, is doing stuff that like sounds like a junior high science fair And people made fun of them at the time. They made fun of them for 200 years. They were saying you know they haven't done anything. They haven't made any progress. And so there's this long startup period where people basically have to do a bunch of strange stuff, embarrass themselves, which makes a lot more sense like why i why it didn't happen at all the other points that it could have happened.
Speaker: And because science is such a strange way of thinking, the book is also a strange way of reading because it's really hard to get across this feeling of like, I know you think it's counterintuitive, but it's even more counterintuitive than you think. And so if you're gonna make that argument, think the book itself should be strange. And so there's some choose or an adventure elements to it. There's some points where we have to make a choice.
Speaker: If you choose not to do those things, you get a slightly different reading experience. There's multiple endings depending on the choices you make as you go through the book. There's some secret pages that you'll only get if you don't follow the rules. There's a part where you might have to interact with the book in a physical way that I don't want to give away too much about. But all of these things to try to widen the confidence intervals of the mind and to try to put you in the mindset of like these people who are you know listening to Galileo say, hey, the the the earth is turning, it's moving.
Speaker: And everyone going like, I would know if it's moving. And to put yourself in that strange mindset of like, what what if he's right? I think it's a difficult place to get. sounds like, well, I'll say this, the book experience of your book sounds fascinating, first and foremost. So I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker: And then correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you have said numerous times that it is not getting harder to discover new things. Is that correct?
Speaker: Yeah. So there's this idea out there that like, okay, you know, discovering new ideas is like, you know, mining for gold and we get the easiest stuff first and then we dig down and we get the harder stuff. And so obviously over time, there's going to be less and less gold because we already got it. you have to dig deeper to find the stuff that that wasn't you know easy for people to get before.
Speaker: And I think the ease with which you can understand that metaphor belies its accuracy. I don't think the world actually works anything like this. And the evidence for it is the fact that if you look at the history of our discoveries, it didn't go from easy to hard. There's lots of like very hard things that we did very early on and lots of easy things that we didn't do until very recently. So for instance, it's very difficult to build a pyramid or a Stonehenge, but these things happened in like 2500 It's hard to do quadratic equations, but the ancient Sumerians could do those. Something that seems way easier than building a pyramid or doing a quadratic equation is realizing that if you want to know whether one thing causes another thing, you have to run an experiment. You have to do if it if it's medicine, you to do a randomized control trial.
Speaker: But randomized control trials did not exist until 1948. We literally we got the theory of relativity before we got the RCT. So like we can't be going just in order from easy to hard. Relativity is so much harder than, hey, we need a control group, an experimental group. Like literally, you know, on the SAT, you get asked about control groups and experimental groups. We do not expect high schoolers to understand relativity. So like, why would it happen that way?
Speaker: And i think one explanation is we don't discover things in order from easy to hard. We discover them in the order that we realize that there's something there is something to discover that basically we discover them in order from least obvious to most obvious.
Speaker: So, like, why were we able to solve quadratic equations 4000 years ago? It's because people were trying to figure out how to divvy up a father's property for his sons. And they're like, oh, it's not a it's not a square.
Speaker: Uh, okay. We need to find this a regular thing. We have to like, oh okay. We need to do some like weird math to figure out the fair way to break this up. Like, how do we learn how to build a a pyramid? We tried building one and it was like falls down. We're like, oh, okay. We need, we need a different way of building this.
Speaker: There was, but there was nothing in the environment that tells you, Hey, if you want to know whether a medicine works, you need to like give it to some people and not other people. and you need to randomly assign them because you need to make sure they're the same at the beginning to, to see what changes come at the end. It's just so obvious that like if a medicine works, if you take it, you'll get better. And and if it doesn't work and you take it, then you don't get better. It's like very unobvious that in fact you need a counterfactual there. And I think that's why it takes us so long to realize that long after we've done things that are much harder, but ah but tell you much earlier on that that you don't know what your work what you're doing.
Speaker: Another piece of evidence for this is like, why does math and why does physics come so much earlier than, say, psychology? I don't think anybody would argue that like a psychology major is harder than a physics major or a math major.
Speaker: So why did they start sooner? Like physics kicks off in the 1600s, psychology, not until like the 1850s. Why is that? I think like physics, it's very clear when you when you don't know things. Like if you think that heavier things fall faster than lighter things and then you drop the balls off the side of the Leaning Tower of Pisa they hit the ground at the same time, you're like, oh well, what else don't I know? And then you start asking questions and then you invent physics.
Speaker: I think our theories ah of psychology, our lay theories that we that we're all born with and grow up and acquire, are so satisfying to us, even if they're not correct. It's so hard to see that they don't work, that no one's ever like, hey, maybe we should actually study this stuff systematically.
Speaker: Because you ask people, like, oh, like, why do people do what they do? And everyone's like, well, it's because of their personality. What is a personality? Oh, it's the way people are. Like, none of these theories have any content, but they they feel very satisfying. And it's very hard to show that they have no content.
Speaker: um And until you can until you do that, you can't invent psychology. Okay, going back to the idea that discovering new things is...
Speaker: not counterintuitive, but we didn't evolve to discover new things. At least it sounds like in the way that we seem to talk about the the human mind, like we're just, you know, constantly figuring things out. And I do think we are, and depending on how you want to, you know, define certain words here, but going with, I think my understanding of what you've said,
Speaker: It sounds to me like some of this is cost benefit and that that comes back around to, you know, you said something like that if I was spending time researching something or trying to discover something new, I might get eaten by an animal or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker: And yet. if the perceived benefit of that exploration is high, then not only was there a need, you know, but also because we need to divvy up property, for example, not only was there a need, but the perceived benefit was high. So we were spending time almost like Adam, you and I are standing in a dark forest where you're standing alone and you have a need for firewood.
Speaker: perhaps. And so you start exploring. You don't know that there's firewood behind you, right? But you explore the the terrain that is closest to you and you start to make sense of your location and the potential you know firewood and whatever else based on you know one step, then another step, one discovery, then another discovery. and But again, seems to me a lot of it comes back to cost-benefit and if I'm right here, if this is a fair way to look at things, is it also fair for me to think that the perceived cost of exploration has gone down over this roughly 500 year period?
Speaker: Yeah, I think, I think so in some ways. Um, so it is certainly the case that, uh, like the institution of academia has made it less costly to try to discover new knowledge. 500 years ago at the University of Oxford, like you could be this story may be apocryphal, but there are some accounts that you could be fined for contradicting Aristotle that like we are not trying to discover new knowledge. We're trying to protect the good knowledge that we already have.
Speaker: That is not the case anymore. We if you are a researcher, you are expected to discover things that people haven't discovered before. At the same time, in the in the recent past, there there I think has been increasing constraints on what kinds of things can you discover? Nothing too weird. Even though we'd like big breakthroughs, we would actually like them to be very legible to us because we want to make sure that we're spending our money correctly.
Speaker: so So please, we want to we want to ensure that if we give you this grant that you're going to do something useful with it. The problem with wanting to do that is you actually decrease the chance that you're going to do something useful with it because you have to prove beforehand that it's going to be useful. And very few of these breakthroughs are...
Speaker: predictable beforehand. They don't look like we expect them to look. That's why they're breakthroughs. If they were obvious to us, we would already make them. So I think there's these countervarying forces where, yes, in the long term, it is much easier now to to see the benefits of discovery and the costs have come down.
Speaker: In the short term, I think even within that world where we're much better off than we used to be, we could be even better off if our structures were better for understanding what it is we're actually doing here and why it can't all be made sensible and legible. We can't figure out exactly the how we're getting bang for our buck before we spend it. So in the long term, better off. I think short term, we are worse off than we were fairly recently.
Speaker: please reframe if you think that there's some clarification or reframing that might help. But you said something like ah billion dollars in medical research or pharmaceutical research or whatever used to get us a lot. And now, you know, we might discover one new drug instead of 10 with a billion dollars.
Speaker: So, I suppose there's the potential for us to have increased the cost of discovery because of you know, we we require certain types of trials and regulation or whatever else.
Speaker: I suppose there's also the potential that the perceived benefit has gone down, at least relative to the cost. But I'm trying to make sense of Fact various factors that would hinder discovery or that would push it forward.
Speaker: And we could talk about medical research, but I suppose there are other areas of life, humanity that are shooting forward while others are slowing down for various reasons.
Speaker: I think people are often surprised by the thesis that that we're getting less bang for our buck in science when they're like, well, what about AI? Like, that seems to be a lot is happening there. And I think actually the the rapid pace of progress in AI is sort of overshadowing the much less rapid pace of progress elsewhere. And I know there's there's people who think that like, well, all that progress over there, we're just going to be able to to turn the spigot toward these other things and we're going to get progress there too. And I think some of that will happen, but I think a lot of these bottlenecks are not a matter of like, we just don't have enough computer chips. I think we don' we don't know the questions to ask in the first place.
Speaker: And one reason we don't know those questions to ask in the first place is because we have a so much narrower version of what we're doing. So one big advantage that someone in Galileo's generation had was there was no profession of science. There was no real way that you were trained to be one. There there was not like a PhD system where you had to get good grades in college and then pass a standardized test. that that like the The way that you became a Galileo was like much weirder and there were many more paths to do it. Not necessarily that it was like a better system, but a very different one and one that tolerated a lot more weirdness in terms of the paths that people took to get there.
Speaker: Today, there's one path. If you want to be a researcher, it really behooves you to be a good student in college. It means you probably have to be a good student in high school, get good grades, get good test scores, go to the right labs, publish the papers in the right places. get a job at a good university, get your grants.
Speaker: All these things require you to be a pretty standardized kind of person. They're like yes, you're discovering new knowledge, but nothing too crazy, which really limits the area that we can search when we're trying to find new ideas.
Speaker: That like the the more homogenous we make the group of s searchers, the less area that we're going to search. And the most important ideas, which I think have way outsized weight that like the the most important ideas are like a million times more important than than the average idea. So it's very important to find them and finding them often means searching like weird people searching in weird places.
Speaker: And I think we've kind of optimized our pipeline of scientific talent for not having weird people. Coming up through graduate school, i was I went with weird people. I think I was a weirder person myself. Those weird people did not become the professors. And it's not that like the people who became them aren't good or aren't talented. They're they're very good and they're very talented, but there's way less variance in them.
Speaker: And so they they are primed to do good research, not necessarily primed to do research that shakes up the paradigm of their field. And i think that is one structural reason why ah we're getting less bang for our buck.
Speaker: really interesting you're reminding me of i wish i could remember where i came upon this idea adam but i recall reading a book and someone said that one reason that there is so much business that occurs in new york city proper you know in manhattan more or less.
Speaker: And there are actually a lot of innovations and discoveries that occur there is because you have so many people from so many different backgrounds that are on top of each other. And so you're just bound to have one person with one specialty run into a person a different person with a different specialty.
Speaker: And we could talk about diversity of backgrounds. We could talk about interests. We could talk about any number of things, but you have all these people crammed together. And yet, right on the other side of the river in New Jersey, you don't have nearly as much innovation.
Speaker: And whatever book this was that I was reading, yeah another example that they gave was the discovery of DNA, the structure of DNA. And they talked about Watson and Crick having, they were both biologists, one was a molecular biologist, one was a zoologist or something like that.
Speaker: And how they had related backgrounds, but different. And they would go and walk And they would talk and one would say that one was top talking about their research. The other one would say, well, have you thought about this?
Speaker: And it was something from a new and different perspective. And so as you were talking about, you know, the quote unquote weird folks, I'm wondering if the, you know, falling in line.
Speaker: And also only spending time with perhaps more psychologists or more physicists, whatever my specialty is. It reduces that possibility to have two disparate ideas and challenges collide and create some potential insight or a potential experiment, let's say.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's totally true that I think in order to do interesting work, you have to be in a group of people who thinks it's cool to do interesting work, because if if I'm right, that this requires some pretty strange ah mental activities, you need a community that that that things are like, yeah, it's cool to think in weird ways. We don't find that threatening. We find that interesting. And in fact, we're going to compete on who can think the weirdest things. um You would think that that is the way universities and academia work.
Speaker: In fact, it's much more conservative. And I don't mean that politically. I mean, I mean that constitutionally than you might expect that, like, you know, people will say that they want bold new ideas. And when they show up, they're like, oh, not not those bold new ideas. We want the bold new ideas that are, in fact,
Speaker: just like the old ones, but ah they look a little different and acceptable to us because we kind of have our egos tied up and the in the way that things are done. i mean, this is what it means to be a profession. um That like having a profession means that there are certain standards and standards means that things are more standardized and there are pros and cons to this. It's not as inherently bad. Like,
Speaker: You would prefer your dentist to be a member of a profession because you want them to meet a certain minimum standard of the care that they can provide for you. They don't don't necessarily want them doing a lot of experimental techniques on your mouth.
Speaker: So you're willing to limit the downside, if it even if it also means limiting the upside. OK, so you're you're not going to get a generational talent of a dentist, but you're not going to get to get a quack. And actually, what you want to do is avoid the quack.
Speaker: We want the opposite for science. So there's a piece I wrote called Science is a Strong Link Problem, which basically argues that some problems you succeed by making the worst better.
Speaker: Those are weak link problems. And some problems you succeed by making the best better and weak and and the worst stuff doesn't matter. And science is that second kind where we succeed by making the best better. If you look back at scientific history, like... There's many ideas, many papers, many things done.
Speaker: Most of them fall away. They don't matter in the long run. And a few of them matter a lot and everything gets built on them. So the discovery of DNA, for instance, being a real hinge point without that, like we we lose a ton.
Speaker: But there were, you know, probably another half a million papers that came out that year that maybe mattered a little bit and most of them not at all. um And so when you are searching for these positive outliers,
Speaker: You actually want to crank up the weirdness. You don't want things to be standardized because it means, okay, yeah, we've gotten rid of some of the worst, but the worst didn't matter. And what really matters is we got rid of some of the best. This is why being a scientist is ah the the the things we're looking for are totally different than being a dentist.
Speaker: the I'm really glad that you brought up the strong link and weak link point. I'm familiar with that post. And I hadn't actually thought about this experience in my life in terms of that. But so I got my first master's degree in Germanics and I was really interested in writing about this time in Germany where these various philosophers and writers and all of that were into vegetarianism and what at the time they understood as being, you know, a real, i don't even know how to describe it, but, you know, like a more back to nature sort of life.
Speaker: And this was a around 1880 to 1900 or so. Some people that ended up being influences on Nietzsche, for example, were people that I was interested in.
Speaker: And I recall this experience very clearly. I was sitting with one of the German professors, not my thesis advisor, and talking about my interest in this. And I remember him saying, you're getting a German degree, not a food science degree.
Speaker: And i I think actually his guidance, if I can call it that, was the right thing because I probably would have written a terrible paper and added nothing to the field.
Speaker: But as you were talking, I was thinking about you do sort of have to have this kind of this willingness to put two weird things together. You know, nobody had ever thought of chocolate and peanut butter together, but you put them together and it's amazing.
Speaker: And you have to have that kind of willingness to try things in order to have Some, you know, like winning the lottery sort of things that you get a really big benefit.
Speaker: And again, i probably would have added nothing to the field whatsoever. But to me, that was for some reason just a really interesting topic. And I ended up writing about something completely different, of course.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. I mean, ah even if you ended up in a better, ah like on a better track because of that feedback, I think it's so interesting that professors are so quick to say ah there are these lines. The lines are real. um Nature has divided itself, curiously similar to the way that the university has divided itself. There are pieces of the universe that are psychology and there are pieces that are Germanics and there's pieces that are food science. And these things have nothing to do with each other. So don't cross the line.
Speaker: When in fact that like there was there was no ah there was no entity making the universe being like, let's divide everything so that it can be clearly understood by different departments only doing what that department does, that the most important truths are going to cut across a bunch of these divisions.
Speaker: i think when you put it to people who work in one of those divisions, of course, they would agree. It's just in practice. they They like to police the bounds of their field and argue about what's in and what's out, what counts as psychology and what isn't psychology. When in fact, like psychology is a man-made tool for trying to understand this particular aspect of reality.
Speaker: But the aspect of reality is going to have many other aspects to it. And so there's no reason why to to expect that we've figured out the exact right way of looking at nature ah that like probably we're going understand it better by looking at it from many different ways.
Speaker: think I think understood you to say earlier that something that depresses discovery or throttles discovery in psychology is that throughout our lives, you know, we have, we've made sense of ourselves and the world and other people's inner lives and so on through our understanding of psychology, I suppose, even if we didn't have that word for it.
Speaker: And, because we believe we have an explanation for the way that my mind works or your mind works, that we're not quite as motivated to go for discovery in the in the area of psychology. Is that correct?
Speaker: I think of this as the illusion of explanatory depth, which is one of my favorite findings in psychology. The canonical study is you bring people into the lab, you ask them, hey, do you know how toilet works? And everyone's like, yes, of course I do. you're like, okay, can you just explain how it works? Like, how does it always, that the water in the bowl, why does it always come back back up to the same level? How does that happen? And people, most people discover they don't know how a toilet works. What they really mean mean is they know how to use a toilet for their purposes, which is different from knowing how the mechanics actually work.
Speaker: And I think this is what people have with psychology that if you ask people, how do people work? They'll go like, well, you know, they, you know, you're raised in a certain way and you have a personality and you know, there's experiences that you have. And if you ever, there's nothing that makes people feel like I don't understand people. In fact, most people feel like I understand people really well. I'm a very good judge of character. I understand why people do what they do.
Speaker: These are feelings that get in the way of actually understanding why people do what they do. I think there is a reason why our our first true science was astronomy. That like you look up at the sky and things happen.
Speaker: You don't have any good explanations for this. And you can't influence it. You can't p-hack it, as we say in psychology. You can't you can't like ah cook the books. Just like the moon is where it is. And if you want to understand why it is where it is, you're going to have to like... Measure it over time, come up with some theory of what makes it move there. And that theory can be disproven by by the fact that, like, you were wrong about where the moon was going to be.
Speaker: There's a philosopher of science who suggested that, like, if we didn't have a solar system around us, if we couldn't see the stars, we might never have any science at all. Because this is where our first scientific thoughts began. And it's kind of the key that unlocked the other ones.
Speaker: I think even though people are very mysterious, they don't feel mysterious to us in the same way. We don't have that sense of, like... well, why does Mercury sometimes stop in the sky and seem to go in the other direction?
Speaker: Instead, it's just like, well, why do people do what they do? Well, you know because they have this kind of personality. Well, what is that personality? Like, where does that come from? Oh, it comes from how we were raised. Like, how does that happen? i don't know. It just does.
Speaker: Like, all these things are like, we have no good explanations for them. But the fact that people feel like they're so straightforward ah stops us from like actually studying them systematically. It sounds to me like for many discoveries, not not serendipity, you know but for an actual experiment, to for me to be motivated to experiment with something that often I need to start from a place of
Speaker: understanding, recognizing that I don't have a an explanation. Yes. Yes. So I'm really curious about how do we go about discovering, no, what's the step, I guess, what happens between thinking I have an explanation for something and then recognizing that maybe I don't.
Speaker: is there Is there dissonance? Is there ah that I recognize that maybe my explanation for Mercury seeming to switch directions, maybe that doesn't make sense? What what is it that occurs that allows me to go into discovery?
Speaker: I wish that I had a systematic way for this to happen. Instead, what what I can give you is the reason why the mind doesn't do this. And so basically, when we realize that we don't know something, it is because the mind has failed at what it normally tries to do, which is cover up the things that we don't understand. So you might think that like a good way for a mind to work is it's always trying to find the edge of of its knowledge so you can increase that knowledge and figure out like, okay, what things don't I know that I should know? not the way the mind works at all. Instead, as best as we can tell, the way the mind works is it tries to form the best expectations it can of what's going to come next.
Speaker: It then looks at what happens and it tries to decrease the distance between what it expected and what it experienced. So you're only going to update your explanations when your experiences ah don't match your expectations.
Speaker: So if you come home from work and your couch is in a different place, this alarm in your head goes off and you're like, we need to investigate this. What happened? If you knock a cup off a table and it falls up instead of down, you're like, whoa, that's not what I thought was going to happen. I need to look at this. What's going on? This is why like magic shows are so interesting because they play with our expectations.
Speaker: But if you knock the cup off and it falls down, there's nothing to lead you to wonder, why does it fall down? Even though like that is very mysterious, you cannot explain why it falls down. Your only expectation is that it does.
Speaker: And you might be like, well, why do things fall down? Well, because everything falls down. There's some kind of things fall down force. Like, okay, what what is that force? The mind is trying to cover up cover this up for a good reason, which is that if you were always wondering...
Speaker: about the things that you don't know, you would be wondering all the time because there's an infinite space of things you don't know. If you had like an alarm bell that went off every time you didn't know something, it would be going off 24-7. It's like not useful.
Speaker: Instead, it's better to try to make your best guess and then forget the rest. And then if it turns out that your guess was wrong, then pay attention and try to make it righter. And if you run that algorithm for a while, you will end up with a bunch of explanations that are good enough.
Speaker: They don't get falsified by just your normal life. Doesn't mean they're good. And so even though you will be like, okay, every day the sun comes up, you can't explain why it comes up. You can't explain why the things fall down, but nothing about that surprises you. And so nothing about that signals that you need to investigate. And so what what do you have to do if you want to overcome that? If you want to actually discover things, you have to cultivate the sense of mystery. You have to alienate yourself from all these things that seem so sensible and realize like, actually the world is full of strange and weird things that I can't explain. Like, why do things fall down? Even now, I can't, I can't explain to you why things fall down. I'd be like, well, there's gravity. Like, what is gravity? i'm like, well, I can't, probably There's something about like everything has this force. Like, why does it have that force? I'm like, wow, there's like a space time thing. And it's like, you know, it pushes down. And then I don't know. I actually don't know.
Speaker: But I don't walk around every day being like, why are my feet sticking to the earth? Like, why don't buses float away into space? Which is a better way to live, but a bad a bad way to be to do research. And I think this is why it's so strange that like you have to realize and like meditate on the fact that like the world is much more mysterious than our minds make it seem.
Speaker: How do we identify or how do we distinguish between productive weirdness and just plain old crankery? One way I made this argument in the book that um we think that there's this scientific method and things that follow it are science and things that don't follow it are not science. And I think that's totally bunk. I don't think there is. If you look closely at breakthroughs, they break all the rules as well. And if you look at you can follow all the rules and do nothing of importance.
Speaker: I think actually what what makes a difference between crankery and real discovery is not a method, but a mood. It's that the people who make discoveries are ones who really care about understanding reality. And the ones who don't are the ones who really care about something else. And so that you can go through all the motions. But if you don't have the right emotion, then it's not going to work.
Speaker: And so there are plenty of people who are ostensibly engaged in the job of trying to discover more knowledge. But really what they're trying to do is burnish their CVs, increase their status, make their money. These people are not going to do work that matters. They might live successful lives, but they will not be remembered.
Speaker: Whereas the kind of people get really obsessed with like, why does gravity work? What is going on here? Those are the ones that stand a chance of making progress. There's a quote from Galileo in a letter to a friend where he basically says, I would live on bread and water for the rest of my life if I could just understand how light works. Like that is the kind of mode that we're looking for or kind of mood that we're looking for.
Speaker: And so I think you can tell that like when when people are doing crankery, they really want to persuade you of something. They want to sell you something. They want to show you like everything you know is actually wrong because it benefits them.
Speaker: The people who are doing something else are the ones who like, look, man, this is what I believe. you you can take it or leave it. But like I'm obsessed with this question. um That is how I think you can tell the difference. So for you being, i believe, outside of academia and continuing to do research, it's difficult to, i mean, you're you're fighting against current norms, I believe.
Speaker: And that's not to say that you can't get funding, right? That you can't bring people around to your way of seeing things, whether it's through speaking, writing, finding like minds and so on.
Speaker: But it's also, i suspect, difficult to, if you raise a million dollars, Adam, for putting together, I think you've written before about a science house. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Science house. Yeah. Let's just say you you find funding, you raise a million dollars, then you have to be really judicious about how you dedicate those funds to different experiments.
Speaker: And I'm not saying that you're just going to default to the same model that a university might, but You can't experiment on everything. And it's, if you only have $10,000 to put, you know, ah on each bet, then it's also hard to know where do we have the biggest bang for our buck and the entrenched system feels safe if I'm going to donate a million dollars. So it doesn't feel impossible by any means, but also you're,
Speaker: Getting back to the weirdness that I think I hear you saying was associated with early discoveries. And so it seems more, dare I say, natural, but it feels less safe from a funder perspective.
Speaker: It's certainly less safe in the sense that it difficult to be accountable for it. So, you know, that old saying, that like, no one gets fired for hiring IBM, that it's like, well, you did the best thing that was available. So, like, we can't hold you accountable.
Speaker: It is, I think, much more safe if what you're looking for is a shot at making progress. That I think the the methods that we have right now of selecting people and ideas are actually... very risky in the sense that like we don't stand a chance of making a lot of progress.
Speaker: Like we're we're we're betting against ourselves. It's a lot easier. So I think the bar is not high. And so when thinking about like, how do you pick the right people and the right projects? I think that if you took this problem really seriously, you would do things very different. So right now we select people on projects by like, let's have a long application and let's see what are what are your numbers? Like, because maybe the past you know past performance is going to indicate future results.
Speaker: All of these things, I think, are bad indicators of what ideas are are going to matter and who is going to find them. And instead, if you want to find those people, you have to see them up close. Like, they're not going to make sense on paper. You have to spend time observing them. Ideally, they don't know that you're observing them. Like, the same way that Professor X finds his X-Men is the way that I would try to find the residents of Science House. So a good example is Katalin Karikó, who won the Nobel Prize in 2023 for working on mRNA vaccines.
Speaker: I mean, her story is like textbook or maybe the opposite of textbook that like she's working on this idea. People don't necessarily think it's crazy. They just think it doesn't work, won't work. They you know try to get her fired. They don't publish the paper. They don't give her a grant. And oh, then her research goes on to like save millions of lives in the pandemic. You were looking for that kind of person. And I think if you look at her closely, I mean, I've read her autobiography, which is obviously a biased source about her life. But like, there's a person who was serious, like she was willing to stake her career on trying to figure out how to make these things work. She was willing to be humiliated for it. She was willing to be passed up, ah passed over professionally for it. She's willing to to leave her home country to try to do it. Like, this a person who has the right motivations. Maybe she will succeed and maybe she won't if we're looking at her mid-career, but she's the kind of person who stands a chance of succeeding.
Speaker: That's the kind of person that I would want to bankroll. And they can be hard to identify because you really have to see them in full resolution. Like she wouldn't made any sense on paper. No grants. What? she She's like she's costing us money. And we're lucky that that they didn't succeed in doing that. We're lucky that she hung on. A lot of people haven't and don't.
Speaker: But I don't I don't think I think it takes a lot of effort to find that kind of person. i don't I don't. But I think it's pretty easy to succeed once you do. Did you change your mind about anything or did you discover something new as you were writing this book?
Speaker: Man, so many things. it It wouldn't have been fun to write if that hadn't happened over and over again. One thing that always surprises me is when you think that an argument we're having is new and in fact is very old. So for instance, in the pandemic, there was all of this argument over, are masks effective at preventing respiratory disease? Are diseases spread by droplets or by aerosols? Is this one in particular spread this way? Can UV light ah like kill?
Speaker: All of these arguments are 100 years old. We've been having them this whole time. and And I think it it is sort of embarrassing that we like haven't come and to come to like a conclusion about them. I mean, sometimes things are hard, but but I don't think we've put sufficient resources toward them.
Speaker: And we've paid the price for it, right? That like an emergency happens and we don't have good scientific evidence to go on. And that's why we're we're arguing. That's one of them. Another is seeing how the scientific funding ecosystem had changed over time. So there's this real moment post-World War II where atomic bombs have had just been dropped. And so and which ah is both tragic, but also had the effect of people realizing like, whoa, science is like a really powerful force.
Speaker: Maybe we should invest in this. We certainly don't want to be on the receiving end of people who know more about this than we do. And so there's a lot of appetite in Congress to actually fund science. Like the government doesn't do much in scientific funding before the war.
Speaker: After the war is is where this modern system is erected, where we give grants to university or to to researchers at universities. And there there is a brief period of time where they're like, and by the way, it is extremely important that scientists spend their time doing science. We like, we shouldn't have a lot of paperwork or oversight on this, like give money, let them do their thing. That's what we want to do.
Speaker: And inevitably, and it and it's kind of funny to see it happen. People are like, Well, why why are we just letting do whatever they want to do? We need to make sure that that this is working. Like, this is taxpayer money we're talking about here. So let's have them fill out some more forms.
Speaker: And I think this coincides with the decrease in the efficiency of this system is that, well, now you got the forms and you get less science and you get less science that matters. Okay, so Adam, we'll talk about how people can get the book and follow you and all of that in a second. But before we get there, if someone is listening to this and they remember only one thing, is there something you would want them to take away from this conversation?
Speaker: I would say that that um ah science has to be weird to be good. So, you know, only a few people are going to be scientists. That's totally fine. for people we need People doing a lot of different things. But everybody is going to be a person who hopefully votes for someone. Some those politicians are going to be the kind of people who who are like, can you believe that we're doing this crazy stuff? We need to stop this immediately. Just don't be the person who votes for that kind of person because that crazy stuff is is often the thing that You know, when you are, ah when you're sick, like that's where the, the treatments come from is the person who is doing the crazy thing. And if we want to stamp out the craziness, we'll also stamp out all the progress.
Speaker: I like it. Okay. So two questions then one, correct me about. when and how the book will be available because I had thought that it was coming out next year and then we had a little email exchange and that led me to believe it's coming out soon but I think you said it will be available for order or something like that yes yes and the second part is where should people go to learn more buy the book subscribe to your writing or anything else Yeah, so the there's such a long process of books coming out that like it will officially be launched by the time anyone hears this, which just means that it is now on the internet and you can pre-order it, and then it will come early next year in March. It takes a long time to print those pages and and ship them around the world. The place you can get it so you can find all my writing at experimental-history.com. That's my substack. That's where i'll I'll talk about the book there. The book is called The Strangest Idea in the World, and you can get it anywhere books are sold.
Speaker: Except, I guess, second-hand bookshops at first. Hopefully the people who get it. There's a few things that you do with it that would make it a little bit weird to to take to a second-hand bookshop, but I think you might see it there eventually. But better to get yourself a fresh copy so you can do all of those things that might make it ineligible for giving to somebody else afterwards.
Speaker: Awesome. Well, Adam, I was really happy when you agreed to join me. And so one, thank you for the conversation. Two, I'm really looking forward to the book. And so thank you for being here today.
Speaker: Thank you very much for having me. It's been fun.
