Philosopher and University of Chicago Professor Agnes Callard sits down with Eric on this episode of the portal. Agnes is a champion of the philosophical tradition of attempting to detach the capacity for inquiry and reason from the fog of feelings and societal taboos that often keep us from delving deeper into the questions that animate our lives.
Agnes began this unusual back and forth by writing an article about status negotiation in first meetings shortly after the pair first met. Eric and Agnes then use the opportunity of this episode to continue this line of thought by exploring the limits of courage and meta-cognition within the examined life of a modern Philosopher. This results in a real-time exploration by two people who mutually respect each other as to whether they can actually negotiate a detached discussion in real time on the very issues of status, feeling, and taboo that may divide them and/or arise between them.
As Agnes has written thoughtfully about the many layers of anger, the conversation culminates by exploring dyadic feelings of hurt and indignation with which we all struggle and suffer in our relationships. Ultimately the two finish this experimental conversation with good cheer, together with a wish to continue the discussion at a later date under continuing mutual fondness and admiration.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [intro music] Hello, you found The Portal. I’m your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I’m here with University of Chicago Professor of Philosophy, Dr. Agnes Callard.
00:00:16
Agnes Callard: Hi.
00:00:17
Eric Weinstein: Agnes, welcome.
00:00:17
Agnes Callard: Thank you.
00:00:19
Eric Weinstein: Um, I wanna talk to you about everything.
00:00:21
Agnes Callard: Okay.
00:00:21
Eric Weinstein: Do you mind?
00:00:22
Agnes Callard: No.
00:00:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So, uh, you just had an interesting and bizarre gambit. I didn’t know that you were coming out to Southern California, and you said to me that, uh, after a meeting we had at, in your office at the University of Chicago, “Hey, um, you should, uh, take a look at this article I wrote partially based on our meeting.” And the me- the, the article is one about negotiating initial meetings and what are all of the layers of dynamics that are going on when two people collide for the first time.
00:00:56
Agnes Callard: Yeah. I think that, um, when two people collide for the first time, I guess there are sort of two things at the base level that are happening. One of them is, like, they’re trying to figure out how to get along, how to cooperate, and the other is they’re trying to take the measure of one another, and those activities aren’t totally separate from one another.
00:01:12
Eric Weinstein: And I’ve noticed a pattern with you, which is that you take great delight in talking about the things that many of us do sort of naturally or unconsciously, and might be very uncomfortable to promote to full consciousness so that you can use your metacognitive facility to interrogate and dissect what is going on on many, many different levels. Some of them philo- philosophical, some of them rooted in biology, um, some of them may be with allusions to literature. Uh, when you and I met, were you aware of what you were going through in real time, or did it come to you later that, uh, this was gonna be grist for an article?
00:01:59
Agnes Callard: Oh, totally later.
00:02:00
Eric Weinstein: Totally.
00:02:00
Agnes Callard: I, I was… My mind was completely on another article I was working on. [laughs] Um-
00:02:04
Eric Weinstein: Oh, so you weren’t concentrating when we were, when we were meeting-
00:02:07
Agnes Callard: On that-
00:02:07
Eric Weinstein: … on our meeting?
00:02:08
Agnes Callard: No, not really. I mean, I, I, oh, I mean, I think that a lot of the time-
00:02:12
Eric Weinstein: I do love that
00:02:14
Agnes Callard: … um, you know, I, I feel like, um, a lot of the thinking that I do is, like, unpacking thinking I did earlier but wasn’t realizing I was doing or something like that. [laughs] So, like-
00:02:25
Eric Weinstein: It’s hard with this, this language when you have to say I, and you’re actually realizing that you have so many different processes, right?
00:02:31
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:02:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay, keep going.
00:02:32
Agnes Callard: Um, but I guess maybe one common thread, I do like to… Yeah, maybe I, I have a kind of affinity towards, like, the provocative or something, but at, maybe at a, at a deeper level I think that there’s just, like, um, when we talk about ourselves, when we think about our lives, there are all these sort of cracks in the facade of, like, who we take ourselves to be and how we represent ourselves. And but the thing is that, like, we’ve kind of convinced ourselves that the cracks are parts of the design, ’cause we’ve been looking at them for so long, right? We’re like, “Ooh, what a pretty pattern.” And I just wanna split those cracks open, and be like, “Look, there’s something incoherent in the way that we think about ourselves,” and we’ve covered that incoherence over with a certain kind of language. And just a lot of the time, those cracks are to be found exactly in the places that you would call maybe provocative or something like that. But sometimes they’re not, and I’m interested in them in those places, too. It’s just other, um, people who are not philosophers are less interested in those [laughs] cracks, right? Um, so I wrote my dissertation on weakness of will, um, where I think that there’s something ba-
00:03:35
Eric Weinstein: Weakness of will, like Ulysses lashing himself to the mast?
00:03:38
Agnes Callard: Well, that would be a case of strength of will, right? But yes, he’s responding to the prospect or the possibility of weakness of will there.
00:03:43
Eric Weinstein: So he’s using his agency ahead of time with a strong will so that he can actually go through an adaptive valley of weak will that he anticipates correctly.
00:03:52
Agnes Callard: Exa- he’s, yeah, he’s sort of turning a synchronic problem into a diachronic problem, right? I- into, he’s giving a diachronic solution to a synchronic problem. But, like, so which I could do, say, if I know that I’m very susceptible to certain forms of temptation. Um, I could i- in advance make sure that I don’t encounter those forms of temptation, right? So what Ulysses, uh, Odysseus is doing. Um, but I’m just… I was very interested in just how we describe a situation in which we say, “I know I shouldn’t have another cookie, but I take one anyway.” Um, it’s totally familiar. We’re totally comfortable talking in that way. I think it’s an incoherent way of talking. So that’s an exa- where, where that’s an example where it’s not particularly provocative. [laughs] It’s not contra- like, um, controversial, um, in the sense of a sensitive topic, but it’s just a place where our speech about ourselves is cracked and incoherent, but we just have done it for so long that we don’t notice it.
00:04:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, only because the cookie isn’t a threesome or a pile of cocaine.
00:04:45
Agnes Callard: No, I think it would be just as incoherent in those cases. If you could say to yourself-
00:04:49
Eric Weinstein: No, no, but it would be provocative.
00:04:51
Agnes Callard: Oh, yes, absolutely, right. [laughs]
00:04:52
Eric Weinstein: So the issue of provo-
00:04:52
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:04:52
Eric Weinstein: … th- th- the issue of provocation doesn’t have to do with the, uh, abstract universality class of the problem, it has to do simply with its particular instantiation.
00:05:02
Agnes Callard: Correct. Though I think that there are problems where even, um, like there the correct level of abstraction is to, um, abstract from the difference between cookies or cocaine, cookies and cocaine, ’cause that difference isn’t philosophically interesting. But there are some problems where the correct level of abstraction is the provocative level, right? So I think the status one, it’s the provocative level, I think.
00:05:22
Eric Weinstein: Say more about that.
00:05:24
Agnes Callard: Um, I think that, um, I guess I think it’s not the case that, um, the problem that I raised there about status, about, um, you know, wanting on some level to be worth more than other people, but then also recognizing that that desire is somehow not one that you can ask another person to recognize, right? That problem isn’t some instance of a more general problem. [laughs] Um, I don’t see it as an instance of a more general problem where the solution would lie at that abstract level. I think that’s the correct level at which to address it.
00:05:54
Eric Weinstein: Why do you imagine that, um… Why do you imagine that status… So in your article, you say that the status game is one in which you can’t really discuss your desire or need for status.
00:06:07
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:06:08
Eric Weinstein: Is that true?
00:06:09
Agnes Callard: Um, it’s not, um, it’s not true in all contexts. Um, like I could, I got, you know, I wrote a column about it, so obviously I can discuss it and I am discussing it with you right now. But there’s this, um, um, um, um, there would be something wrong, like, you know, I had this interaction with somebody who I felt was asking me to acknowledge their status recently, and I had this instinct to say, “I would like to acknowledge your status. You’re more important than me. Now can we just go on?” And I couldn’t do that. That wasn’t allowed. I knew that was not allowed within the game. That would’ve been offensive, right? So, um, it’s a rule of the game that you have to pretend that you’re not playing it, but, um, you can then sort of like take a step back, right? And then be like, “Oh, let’s anal-” You can always do that. Um, and, um, sorry, you can’t always do it, but you can sometimes do it. Um, but that’s not the s- that’s almost like putting the game on pause and then stepping back and analyzing what was happening.
00:07:10
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, you have the game in a debugger and you’re stepping through line, lines of the code in a different facility than that which is actually running the code.
00:07:19
Agnes Callard: Yes.
00:07:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So if that’s the case, um, why is it-
00:07:25
Agnes Callard: Sorry, can I interrupt you? There, there, um, there’s no guarantee that you won’t then be, um, reprising the game at the second level.
00:07:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, so that’s the issue, which is that each layer of analysis that you put on it becomes non-meta relative to the following level of meta-analysis that includes that layer. And then you have a question of convergence, in essence, where you have an initial game, then you have a meta game. So your article was ostensibly in the second level of that game.
00:07:53
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
00:07:53
Eric Weinstein: But then effectively what you did was you communicated to me, um, whatever status game you and I negotiated in your office-
00:08:00
Agnes Callard: Right
00:08:00
Eric Weinstein: … I have a different status game, which is that I have access to a, a, uh, a, a learned journal in which I can write articles. I thought you important enough to write an article in part inspired by our meeting, and then I’m communicating that I, too, uh, you know, have levers that may not be available to you, and I wish to let you know that you are both important enough to warrant this thinking. Simultaneously, don’t think that you got away with something, because in fact, I can see things.
00:08:29
Agnes Callard: Awesome. Yeah. I think that’s right. So I think what that reveals is, like, I’ve, so I’ve noticed you use in a couple of your practices the word metacognitive.
00:08:35
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
00:08:36
Agnes Callard: And, um, I think that I’m much more of a skeptic about how much work the meta can do, at least immediately, for exactly this reason. Um, I think that, like, like when you step back, it doesn’t matter what you’re stepping back from, okay? Like, you’re, you’re in a situation, you’re like, “Let me step back and think about this,” or, “Let me step back and c- cool my, you know, from my emotions. Let me step back.” You’re never stepping back. You’re always just the same person you were. [laughs] Um, it’s an illusion to think you can step back. Um, but I think what, what does happen when you step back is like stepping back happens at least a moment later than what, what was happening before.
00:09:09
Eric Weinstein: I, I don’t think so, in some sense, because really what I, the way I see it, and I- I’m eager to hear-
00:09:15
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:09:15
Eric Weinstein: … if I’m wrong in your eyes, is that w- what we just did is we had a, a zeroth layer, which is our initial meeting. Then we had the issue where you wished to notify me that you had written an article-
00:09:26
Agnes Callard: Uh-huh
00:09:26
Eric Weinstein: … partially inspired by this, and then I wished to bring this up on the podcast, which is a next layer.
00:09:32
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:09:32
Eric Weinstein: And then we can talk about the fact that I just… And, and, and my point in doing this is that we build an infinite tower of analyses of the previous level analysis. So meta is not a different facility, but simply the recognition that lay- layer I plus one is commenting on layer I.
00:09:50
Agnes Callard: Right. But the thing that, that, the metaphor of the tower, the problem with it is that it’s synchronic, and so I think that I’ve changed between our initial meeting-
00:09:58
Eric Weinstein: Okay
00:09:59
Agnes Callard: … and, um, like the, writing that article, it wasn’t like I just sat down and wrote it. I had to think really hard about that meeting. I had an initial version that was totally scrapped. Um, I learned in between, um, our meeting and writing that article, and I’ve even learned in between, like, you know, talking about it with you and now.
00:10:19
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:10:19
Agnes Callard: Right? So I’m like a different person. You’re talking to a different person than you were talking to when we first met. And-
00:10:23
Eric Weinstein: In one sense.
00:10:24
Agnes Callard: In one sense, yes. Um, in the sense that, um, I’ve, um, it’s not a tower. Like I’ve, I’ve sort of incorporated some of the lessons from that interaction. Um, so, um, uh, and I think one thing is like, you know what it’s a little bit like? I remember there were these, um, when, when my, my, my son’s preschool, when he first started, there were these charts, um, that were like diagrams of how kids move around a room in like a pr- So he’s like two or three years old, right? Like, so it was like this line. Like first they go to the sandbox, then they go to the blocks, then they… Right? So what was amazing is you look at the lines for like a, um, a three-year-old-
00:11:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:11:06
Agnes Callard: … and it’s like, just this like scribble scrabble. They randomly wander around, and then, oh, and you, then they had these diagrams for like the five, you know, uh, not even, no, I think it would be like a couple months later, towards the end of the year, of the same, um, so they’re the same age, but they’re like a little bit older, and they’re like much more organized, right? So I see that as happening with the conversation with you, um, where part of what’s happening is like learning to focus.
00:11:32
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:11:32
Agnes Callard: And that’s not really well captured, I think, with the idea of a meta level.
00:11:37
Eric Weinstein: Not sure that I understood that.
00:11:39
Agnes Callard: Well, um, the-
00:11:42
Eric Weinstein: So, so can we talk a little bit about the particular status game and our, and our subsequent interpretations of what it meant?
00:11:49
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:11:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So it was very interesting when I was just talking to you before the show. You talked to me about saying, “I’m not even sure that status is exactly the right word for what we were negotiating,” and that was an intuition where it hadn’t grounded yet in language. It’s in some sort of more primitive, um, kind of intangible state.
00:12:07
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
00:12:10
Eric Weinstein: I had forgotten exactly what the issue was, but that you’d known, you’d known very little about me. I think Tyler Cowen had maybe alerted you-
00:12:16
Agnes Callard: Yes
00:12:16
Eric Weinstein: … to me.
00:12:17
Agnes Callard: Yes.
00:12:17
Eric Weinstein: And that wasn’t particularly surprising to me. I didn’t, don’t expect people to know who I am. Um, but what e- what little you did know about me was that somehow I was part of a money machine as a, uh, managing director of a family office, and that that was going to be kind of the expansion point, that that was going to be, like, the zeroth approximation, and then we’d add first and second and third-order approximations based on that expansion point.
00:12:44
Agnes Callard: Right.
00:12:44
Eric Weinstein: Which drove me nuts.
00:12:46
Agnes Callard: Right. [laughs]
00:12:47
Eric Weinstein: Because that would never be the expansion point that I would choose for myself, nor do I think it is the correct one. And then we had some interesting other issues, if I-
00:12:56
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:12:56
Eric Weinstein: … which is that, um, I’ve heard a great deal about you more than I’ve read of your thinking and work, and many people that I like, uh, regard you highly, and I thought, “Okay, well, this is likely to be a singular person, and it would be a shame to lose a singular person based on a wrong expansion point in a conversation.” So there was sort of an emergency need to rebase the, the conception of, of the other around a more fruitful point so as not to lose a potentially interesting interaction. And then when I communicated this to you, you and I both share an aversion to talking about the world of exceptional people, which often f- the members of the world of exceptional people constantly regard themselves and the, and the others exceptional in a kind of self-congratulatory display. So the whole thing kind of descends into an orgy of, um, analysis on analysis on analysis. And I wonder why we’re not just more capable of doing this more simply, like, “Hey, I’m worried you’re forming a, an incorrect impression of me,” or, “I need some acknowledgement from you, um, that there is a, an, an issue of accomplishment or, you know, so that you don’t start lecturing me about basic mathematics if I’m a mathematician,” let’s say.
00:14:14
Agnes Callard: Right. So, um, first of all, like, I think, I actually do think this is probably a sort of a difference between us in that suppose that I thought you knew me as just all that you knew about me was that I was a mother or something.
00:14:27
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:14:28
Agnes Callard: Um, like, I’m not sure… Like, I, I guess what I thought you knew about me was that I was, like, an academic or something, and I, I’m not sure that that would have mattered to me, like, which of those p- you had picked. Um, but it, um, so, so, so, um, um, but in terms of why we can’t just directly ask for this, I think we could have if, like, we were, like, teenagers or something. Um-
00:14:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:14:54
Agnes Callard: … but I think we learned not to do it. Like, we learned, um, we learned how to interact with people.
00:15:00
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:15:01
Agnes Callard: And that’s a rule, and so we’re both following the rule.
00:15:04
Eric Weinstein: Somewhat. I mean, I, I think that there’s also this problem, maybe I’ll pose it to you, uh, why truth doesn’t work. Like, I, I’m not a huge fan of truth the way some people are, and I-
00:15:15
Agnes Callard: I’m a huge fan of truth, so.
00:15:16
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I… That’s beautiful.
00:15:18
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
00:15:18
Eric Weinstein: So I posed them the problem of if I have only mildly bad breath and you wish to let me know that for my own benefit, what’s a way in which you could communicate to me that I have mildly bad breath? And I’ve actually never met anyone who’s solved this puzzle. So you should try the zeroth order first, and we’ll see why it gets into trouble.
00:15:39
Agnes Callard: Right. So that would just be saying, “You have mildly bad breath.”
00:15:42
Eric Weinstein: Right. Now, because of the context of that, the interpretation of that statement is, my God, it is such a taboo to talk about someone’s breath-
00:15:51
Agnes Callard: It must be horrible
00:15:51
Eric Weinstein: … that it must be horrible for you to say that it is mild, and so what you’ve done is you’ve communicated an untruth even though you intended. So then you start thinking about the problem of, like, your eyeball is distorted, so you need a second distortion in this, in, uh, in this case your spectacles so that the aggregate of the two is undistorted.
00:16:10
Agnes Callard: Can I give my answer?
00:16:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, please.
00:16:12
Agnes Callard: I think that-
00:16:12
Eric Weinstein: You’re the philosopher.
00:16:13
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
00:16:13
Eric Weinstein: This is gonna be awesome.
00:16:14
Agnes Callard: Um, I think I would be like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe this is actually happening, because this one time I talked to Eric Weinstein, and he posed this as a problem. Um, what do you do? What do you tell someone when they have mildly bad breath? And now I’m in that situation.” That’s what I would say to the person.
00:16:32
Eric Weinstein: Do you think it gets read that way?
00:16:34
Agnes Callard: I have no idea. I mean, I’m giving you an answer in the abstract.
00:16:38
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m, I’m-
00:16:38
Agnes Callard: Abstracting from the person.
00:16:39
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:16:39
Agnes Callard: Right?
00:16:39
Eric Weinstein: But I’m trying to, I’m trying to make the point that-
00:16:42
Agnes Callard: I… My point is that would be a cool way that… Uh, like, I would say that just because I would be curious what, how the person’s gonna respond. So, like, there’s a question, how do you, how do you do this? What’s a successful interaction?
00:16:52
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:16:52
Agnes Callard: For me, that’s a, um, that’s a promising response because it might generate an interesting conversation.
00:16:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, it will generate an interesting conversation. The, the issue, though, is i- to my way of thinking, that you have to give up on truthful communication because of its impossibility in order to start seeing what is possible wh- where truth is a component and a, and a, and an interest, but it can’t be a goal. In other words, if I say, um, you know, “What is the fractional representation of pi?” Doesn’t mean you can’t, can’t come close, but you’re never gonna get there with two integers dividing one by the other. So my claim is, is that it’s very important to give up on the possibility of truth from the g- from the get-go.
00:17:38
Agnes Callard: So that, that doesn’t seem right to me. So, um, I mean, one thing is it may be that I cannot immediately communicate to you the truth. I think we’re often-
00:17:47
Eric Weinstein: But as I learn you, then I, then I will realize that you speak in an un- undistorted fashion, you believe.
00:17:52
Agnes Callard: No. Um, I think that, um, one thing that happens is that people, um, they learn, like, a new shared language. Like, they learn how to communicate with one another, right? Um, and, um, they become better at doing that. Um, and it may be that- Um, it, it, it seems to me that the goal of that process is always to communicate better and more truthfully, though it’s also I think really important to distinguish which truths are important and are unimportant to communicate or less important to communicate because you have to focus somewhere too right? Um, but I think that the only goals you can have in modulating that process um, the only possible goal is um, being able not… And not just to communicate, but to learn truths from that person. That’s the fueling the whole process. Otherwise, what, what, what, what would you be in it for?
00:18:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the, the, the four things that I try to reduce my objectives to um, and I’m, I’m, this is subject to change. In fact, you, you, you somewhat frighten me. Maybe I will have to change it based on-
00:19:00
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
00:19:00
Eric Weinstein: … what you’re about to say next, are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. So something can be truthful, but it can r- lead to a reduction in my fitness as a creature.
00:19:10
Agnes Callard: Mm.
00:19:10
Eric Weinstein: So a self-extinguishing truth is not an interesting truth to me. Jordan Peterson tried to fold fitness into truth itself, and he got into trouble with Sam Harris, who was having none of it. Then there’s a question of meaning. M- maybe I’m, uh, something is true and it means that I will be fit, but it actually robs my life of meaning. When somebody I care about deeply is regarded, uh, as an aggregate of, um, hadrons and leptons and force particles, uh, that may be true, but it d- it, it completely robs that person of meaning.
00:19:43
Agnes Callard: Mm.
00:19:44
Eric Weinstein: If I, if I realize that, you know, with 26 letters let’s say, a- and a few spaces I can take let’s say an alphabet of I don’t know, 40 characters or less and raise it to a very high power and, and say that Hamlet is, uh, somewhere found within, that isn’t… That may be truthful. It may be that there are a finite number of works possible, and Shakespeare merely selected one from a giant, uh, lookup table. Um, but that tends to rob the work of any majesty and meaning. And then there’s an aspect of grace, which is that even if I can find meaning and fitness and truth together, um, if the solution is brutal and cruel and lacks some sort of ineffable quality of, of mercy and, uh, a- a- and kind of, I don’t know, simplicity of heart, I tend to turn against those things where one has to do something absolutely despicable, for example, to perpetuate one’s group’s fitness. So I don’t know how to get beyond those four object… Those, those four sub-components of an objective function, and what I’m always astounded by is people who are crazy about truth.
00:20:54
Agnes Callard: Yeah. Good. So, um, maybe can I defend being crazy about truth? Okay.
00:20:59
Eric Weinstein: The floor is yours.
00:21:00
Agnes Callard: So, so first of all, like I think anytime you divide things, and like philosophers disagree about this, um, uh, like some philosophers are fine with the sort of thing I’m about to describe, but like I think you can’t just divide things into four things. You’re like, “Here are the four things. These are the things I found.” I’m like, well what’s the principle of division? Like, is that just something you made up? Like, what if we come up with a fifth one? Um, uh, so I wanna understand-
00:21:20
Eric Weinstein: I’m totally amenable to it
00:21:21
Agnes Callard: … I wanna understand sort of how the whole is articulated into those things. Until I understand that, I just don’t feel like I’ve, I’ve understood anything. Um, um, like why not, okay, why not pleasure? Why isn’t pleasure one of them? Enjoyment.
00:21:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, in part that is part of meaning, and it’s also part of grace as, as long as the, the proximate of pleasure… See, pleasure arises in my concept, concept as the, as proximate to fitness. So the way in which that we’re structured as, as animals is that our ultimate concerns like, um, nutrition and, uh, re, re, consolidation of long-term memory, uh, are encoded as hunger and sleepiness. And the, the proximates cause us to take actions to service the ultimates. So pleasure is the, is in some sense the divorcing of the proximates from their ultimate goals. I just ate a cupcake, and I really shouldn’t have, but the proximate pleasure, because my, my body thinks that I’m starved for sugar when in our current environment it’s abundant. So I, I, I’m al-
00:22:29
Agnes Callard: But you, you just gave an argument that suggested that pleasure does not fit into fitness because the proximate divorces.
00:22:34
Eric Weinstein: Pleasure can be divorced from its ultimate goals.
00:22:37
Agnes Callard: Right. So at least some people might think that would warrant putting pleasure into its own, into a separate category. Um-
00:22:44
Eric Weinstein: But I, I don’t want it.
00:22:45
Agnes Callard: Right. But what I’m saying is the fact that you don’t want to, that indicates that for some reason you’re wedded to this quadripartite division that w- it, which is not like-
00:22:53
Eric Weinstein: Did you just say quadripartite?
00:22:55
Agnes Callard: Yes.
00:22:55
Eric Weinstein: I’ve never said that.
00:22:56
Agnes Callard: [laughs] Um, but so let me, let me tell you how I would divide this up.
00:22:59
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:22:59
Agnes Callard: Okay? Um, so I, I, I would start with thinking, okay? There’s thinking, right? Anytime you’re do… And I think conversation is a form of thinking. In fact, a lot of times it’s the best form of thinking. Um, and I think that any thinking has to have a goal. Well, there’s an exception, but okay.
00:23:15
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
00:23:15
Agnes Callard: The, the main case, thinking has to have a goal, and I think there are two goals that thinking can have. One of them is understanding, okay? Where truth is a necessary condition. It has to arrive at the truth in order to be understanding. It’s not sufficient, ’cause you, there are just truths that are not important to know. Um, and so, so a lot of thinking that we do will end when you’ve understood whatever it was you’re trying to understand. You’re like, “I got it. There, we’re done.” Um, and some forms of thinking are wonderful. Like ma- a lot of mathematical forms of thinking are wonderful precisely because you rec- It’s really clear when you’ve gotten to that point, and you have this like aha moment. Plato actually described that as almost like you’re remembering something you knew before, ’cause it has that recognition like memory. Okay, that’s understanding. Then there’s another kind of thinking, and I think of it as very different, and you are right that some people wanna collapse these two, and I don’t think they should be collapsed, which is thinking that aims at the good in some way. Um, and that’s deliberation. So it’s reasoning about how to achieve some good, and I also think we often do that with other people, right? Um, and so we might wanna bring something about, and we think about how to do that. I think those are the basic aims of thinking, either understanding or some good that we’re trying to bring about, and I don’t think they’re the same. And some people, like especially like some… Like economists I think are especially prone to collapsing them. You know, Marx’s idea, the point of philos- philosophers have tried to understand the world. The point is to change it. It’s amazing ’cause the Humboldt, um, the philosophy department in Germany, in the, um, uh, you know, the, the Humboldt University actually has that as their slogan. And I was like, “Guys, you are philosophers. How can that be your slogan? You’re trying to… You’re not trying to do this. You’re the one people who should not have this as your slogan.” Um, but in any case, that idea that Marx, but not just Marx, um, um, is trying to collapse the theoretical and the practical, the, the idea that understanding is a goal, and it’s like the only reason you would ever have to understand is that you want to achieve some good. That’s a way to collapse the two. So I don’t think they should be collapsed. I think they’re separate. But that’s the basic division. I actually think we do some thinking that doesn’t fall into this division that’s very, very interesting. I think some of the kind of emotional upheaval in our life doesn’t fall into this division. But for me, see, that’s a principle dis- division, right? Um, and truth has a part in it. Now, I think a lot of the things you’re worried about with meaning, like are there these truths that rob my life of meaning, what I would say is that those are situations in which you have accepted a descriptive analysis as a reductive one. So like it’s true that I’m made of atoms, okay? That’s tr- I think it’s true. Um, but that doesn’t tell you who I really am. It’s, it’s a truth about me, but it’s not a good answer to a certain question. And so you shouldn’t confuse the idea that something is a true proposition with the idea that it’s a good answer to a question. In a, in a sense, the question who I, who am I really is like the question you were seeking an answer to when we first met. Um, and, and if I had said, “Oh, I’m a bunch of atoms,” like [laughs] that wouldn’t have satisfied you. It wouldn’t have been an answer to your question. So I would fold the meaning into understanding, um, with the proviso that you have to, you have to hold on tight to your question and make sure that what someone has said in answer to it isn’t just a true statement, but actually an answer to the question.
00:26:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, to, to my way of thinking, I would not say it’s a category error that questions or, as physicists would call them, observables, uh, are tied to a strata, and that there are certain questions that are badly suited to a particular strata. So your description as atoms and your description as Agnes, uh, correspond to two different, let’s say, effective theories, which is sort of the tower of lies where there are more lies when, when I call you Agnes than when I sp- specify each of the atoms in your body. But the point is, is that the question about what is Agnes like is not really a question at the atomic layer. It’s a question at this personality layer where the, where, um… So in fact, it, it is a kind of category error to explore. Meaning doesn’t belong at the atomic layer. There is no atomic meaning.
00:27:13
Agnes Callard: Right. Exactly. But that’s why I think that you don’t need a separate meaning box. You just need to keep track of your questions.
00:27:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, that would be a, so, so, you know, just the way polar versus, uh, rectangular coordinates are two different ways of talking about something, I think you could, you could make that point. But what I, I think what I’m trying to get at is that I watch people… You know, y- the reason I’ve never taken a particular intes- interest in philosophy is that once you’ve taken a particular interest in mathematics, you understand just how sensitive many of these things are to small issues of language, right? And this is partially what happened to philosophy, is that there were a lot of big, interesting questions, and then there was a period of time where it became a focus on language rather than on big, meaningful, meaty questions. I don’t know that the human layer supports this level of analysis because of some of the reasons that we’re talking about. So, you know, we can notice… I, I mean, I don’t even think, for example, that there is a status game. I think that there’s a panoply of status games and that they’re t- taking place simultaneously in a million different dimensions, and the key question is, can we isolate the principal components of some of those so that we understand, like, what, what is, what is, where’s the majority of the action happening? Or are we actually doing violence to the problem by virtue of the fact that we’ve singled out a few of them, and then we’ve misnamed it? Well, that was going on in the status game. So for example, any univariate measure has the property that it has an ordering on it. But every bivariate measure, unless there’s a metric, does not imply an ordering. Like, if you have one c- attribute that’s positive that is greater than mine and one that is worse, until we can say in some sense how those two things interrelate, we can’t say Agnes is better than Eric or Eric is better than Agnes.
00:29:05
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
00:29:05
Eric Weinstein: However, if there’s only one attribute, like who can run faster, then one of us is better and the other of us is worse, unless there’s a b- bizarre tie. Now, what, what I’m trying to get at is here we are, um, 21st century beings, and we’re outside of the confines of the academy. And the key question is, what is this philosophical modality doing in our lives? How does it… Is the, is the examined life really aided by philosophy, or is there a sort of infinite tower of questions and that it’s sort of a, an intellectual check k- kiting scheme by which, um, you keep getting into deeper and deeper water by noticing something, only to find out that the noticing created a larger problem than the previous one that you had?
00:29:55
Agnes Callard: I think one way to put the case for philosophy is, like, you have to have a right. You have to… Um, you can’t just draw a distinction. You’re just not allowed to just draw a distinction. That’s why I said a thing about the quadripartite. You’re not just allowed to slash the world up into bits. Um, the place where this come… The place where philosophy comes from is Parmeni- Parmenides was really the first philosopher, okay? And, you know, this is pre-Plato, right? This is the pre-Socratic philosophers. Um, and he- you know, he’s, he … Like Zeno’s paradoxes are sort of woven into Parmenideanism. But the basic idea of, base- Parmenides’ basic thought is that there’s only one thing you can say. It is. Okay. So there’s just, there’s just one thing, it, and there’s one thing you can say about it, that it is. And you’re like, “Well, um, Parmenides, no, look, there’s also, like, this chair is.” And Parmenides is saying, says, “Well, if you say that the chair is, and you wanna say that the chair is something and is different from, say, that table, right, then you’re saying that the chair is not the table. So you’re saying that the chair is not. Um, but you’re also saying that it is.” Parmenides and generations of people after Parmenides thought this was, like, just this really terrible puzzle about how non-being can be. How can, how can there be anything that isn’t? Like this chair not being this table. Um, and um, the, the, the, the problem of non-being is, has a lot of different manifestations. So difference is one manifestation. Change over time. How can the chair at one time exist and then later it’s collapsed and it’s not there anymore? Um, and um, you know, Parmenides’ thought was that our, like, our thinking cannot support this way of talking. It’s like it’s just words when we, when we, when we talk about the diversity out in the world, and there’s only one thing we can coherently say. There’s only one thing where when we say it, we’ve understood what we said, and that’s, “It is.” Now, Plato comes along and he’s like, “No, Parmenides, that’s nuts. We have to be able to talk about some kinds of difference. But you’re right that the entire world as we see it, right, the entire sensible world, that’s just nonsense. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s a bunch of contradictions. But there are these things called forms, okay? Like the beautiful or the just or whatever. And at least the beautiful, it’s always beautiful. The only thing that’s true about it is that it is beautiful, and that’s something I can say. The beautiful is beautiful. The just is just. So at least I’m, I’m, like, one step beyond Parmenides, right? I’m like, ‘I can talk about these forms.’ I still can’t talk about the chair,” right? Um, okay, and then you get Aristotle, and Aristotle’s like, “Um, no, guys, we have to be able to talk about, like, human beings and things and, and we need to enrich our language further.” Now, the reason I bring all this up is that the basic philosophical impulse is that when you draw distinctions and you carve things up and you talk about layers, okay, you’ve in a sense, you’ve in a sense collapsed your own thought into a bunch of different things that are, like, not unified, right? And you need to be able to see the unity of them. If you can’t, you haven’t actually had a thought. Like, you haven’t thought anything. Um, you’ve just said words. So philosophers are constantly attuned to this worry that we might just be saying words and not having thoughts, and that there’s a standard for the unity of a thought. That’s, like, a pretty high standard. Um, and um, and so, like, if you draw a distinction, you need to understand the unity u- that underlies the distinction and what legitimates the distinction. Um, and so, like, if I say, you know, if I say even, like, “I ate the cookie even though I knew that it wasn’t the right thing to do,” and you’re like, “Well, wait a minute. You freely ate the cookie? You chose to eat the cookie?” Yes. “So that was an intentional action?” Yes. “So, and intentional action’s when we have a reason?” Yes. “So a reason means that you think that it’s, all things considered, the best thing to do?” Yes. That’s what a reason is. “Wait a minute. You just said you thought it was, all things considered, the best thing to do, and you thought that there was something better that you should do. You just contradicted yourself,” right? And Parmenides thought that contradicting yourself was written into this is a chair and this is a table, right? Um, and so, you know, so we’ve come really far. We can talk about so much now. Um, but only, I think, because o- o- only if we can sort of back those checks that these distinctions have some way of, like, holding together.
00:34:18
Eric Weinstein: Breathe with me. Um, yeah, I don’t … I don’t know why I’m so singularly unmoved by this kind of thinking.
00:34:30
Agnes Callard: Well, object to it.
00:34:31
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:34:31
Agnes Callard: What did I, what did, where did I go wrong?
00:34:33
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know.
00:34:33
Agnes Callard: Find one place I went wrong.
00:34:35
Eric Weinstein: You know, Hegel at some point said, “The absolute idea, the idea’s unity of the subject of an objective idea, is the notion of the idea, a notion whose object is the idea as such and for which objective is idea, an object embracing all characteristics in its unity.”
00:34:51
Agnes Callard: Okay.
00:34:53
Eric Weinstein: When I talk like that, I sound insane to myself, and the key question for me is: What is an idea that settles down when its analysis doesn’t sort of alter and destroy it? It’s a, sort of a fixed point, if you will, under analysis. So if I communicate … The problem with, let’s say, with the status game with which we began our-
00:35:18
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
00:35:18
Eric Weinstein: … discussion is, is that in some cases when you call attention to your need for status, you diminish your status.
00:35:25
Agnes Callard: That’s also true, though I think that’s not the only reason why you can’t call attention to it.
00:35:28
Eric Weinstein: But there are ways in which you can try to call attention to your status in which the ele- the amount of status that you achieve by calling attention to your status remains constant, that the calling doesn’t effectively alter the problem. For example, you might signal that you’re comfortable enough in your own skin to talk about p- a part of your mind’s petty needs and a part of your mind’s reasonable needs for status. I have both, for example, and I don’t think it’s a terrible thing to say that there are times when I simply want to be regarded because I am, and that there are times that I want to be regarded because it is important not to derange a conversation. Um, let’s say I only have 45 minutes for something, and if we begin with the wrong notion of who I am, it will take too long.
00:36:14
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
00:36:14
Eric Weinstein: So there’s always this question … In, in the bad breath example, the problem is, is that the talking about it has to do with an interpretive complex around client side and your inter- inside your interlocutor’s mind. And so your input stimulates a process that is … transpiring, uh, within the client side architecture-
00:36:33
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
00:36:33
Eric Weinstein: … and it leads to an uncomfortable and unpleasant and not- untrue outcome. If I could find the input, which when processed remains the input, right? I- in other words, it’s like an eigenvalue of truth, an eigenvector of truth, then that’s something which is philosophically interesting to me. What, what concerns me is the tower of, um, concepts and conflicts which don’t seem to settle down, uh, the more we understand them. You know, that-
00:37:07
Agnes Callard: So one thing is, um, I really liked what you said about Hegel. When I talk like that, I sound crazy to myself. So I think that is Parmenides’ point about saying that something is not. Parmenides is the guy who realized, when I talk like that, when I say the chair is not the table-
00:37:22
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:37:22
Agnes Callard: … I sound crazy to myself. You’re really used to talking that way, ’cause that’s just how we talk. Parmenides saw the giant crack in everything, [laughs] right?
00:37:30
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:37:30
Agnes Callard: And, um, and so if you think about how, um, like when I hear someone say, “I know I shouldn’t have this cookie, but I really feel like it, so I’m going to have it,” if I talk like that, I sound crazy to myself. And so I’m like, “I can’t, I can’t talk like this. I have to find another way of talking.”
00:37:48
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so that’s the idea that at some level, first of all, you need a primary description. Most of us understand weakness of will intuitively, but we don’t understand weakness of will as a, as emergent from fundamental principles.
00:38:03
Agnes Callard: And I think you don’t understand it intuitively. You just think you do.
00:38:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, again-
00:38:07
Agnes Callard: You can pick out the phenomenon. You can point to cases of it
00:38:09
Eric Weinstein: … it may, but to, to your point about the practicality, you may be able to work with it at a practical level. So for example, I might be able to sell a product where you put cookies in a time-release safe, and so you, you can’t get at your own cookies until, uh, one is dispensed to you. People will immediately understand that. But the key question is, you know, can I take a placebo and get the placebo effect if it’s labeled placebo? You know, these are the sort of unstable, non-fixed points of the, of the philosophical problem. One of the reasons that I really love physics as an alternative to philosophy at its ground level is, is that it tends to be stable under analysis when we have an idea of it. Now, in quantum mechanics, the propagation in quantum mechanics has a very stable interpretation. S- It may, may be wrong, but we think we know what’s going on when we’re asking how an electron moves.
00:38:59
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
00:38:59
Eric Weinstein: It’s when an electron gets measured when you’re asking a bad question, which is, are you in state A or state B, and it was in state A plus B.
00:39:07
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
00:39:08
Eric Weinstein: Then the multiple choice nature of that quantum mechanical question is bizarrely accommodated by the system w- somewhat randomly falling into state A or state B as a weighted probability. Now, that bothers us because we have the sense that maybe that’s not really a fixed point. Had-
00:39:28
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
00:39:28
Eric Weinstein: … did we know what we were when we asked the question? Were we part of the quantum system? Did we hold ourselves aside and keep ourselves classical while asking that the electron be c- considered quantum mechanically? Was it in a semi-quantum, semi-classical state? So we’re not really sure whether we’ve committed a sin against God and logic in that case.
00:39:48
Agnes Callard: Yeah, good. I mean, I think that a lot of your worries about the, the tower and the, um… I, I still think they go back to something, um… There’s a question whether we ever make any progress in a conversation.
00:40:07
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.
00:40:08
Agnes Callard: That seems to me to be the real question there. Like, um, can we learn from each other? Um, and can we learn from each other in some sense, um, um, without making, um, any, um… Without taking as the frame of our conversation something that we just happened to get slotted into-
00:40:34
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:40:34
Agnes Callard: … and that we don’t question, right? Um, and, um, and I actually think that it’s true about philosophy that you are not guaranteed in any way that the answer to that question is yes. You don’t know that it’s yes. And there-
00:40:48
Eric Weinstein: You, you’ve had epiphanies in conversations which have changed your life?
00:40:52
Agnes Callard: Uh, my problem is that I have too many of them, but yeah. [laughs]
00:40:55
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:40:56
Agnes Callard: Um, um, it’s not, it’s not a dearth of-
00:40:58
Eric Weinstein: That, that must be an awesome life
00:40:59
Agnes Callard: … it’s, it’s not a dearth of epiphanies. It’s a total sta- instability. Um, but w- can I just say, there’s a, there’s a, there’s this moment, okay, um, like I feel like you’re, um, you’re Meno, okay? This is the Socra- this is Plato’s Meno, and they’re having this conversation. Socrates is like, “You’re, you’re a, a big opponent of excellence.” Um, Socrates… Meno comes to Socrates and he’s like, “I want it, I want excellence. How do I, how do I get it?” Um, and Socrates is like, “Well, let’s start by figuring out what it is.” And Meno’s like, “That’s not hard,” right? Um, “That’s super easy.” Meno says, “It’s easy” about like seven times in a row. It’s really funny. Uh, he’s like, “Here’s what it is. Here’s what it…” And, and Socrates like refutes him a bunch of times. And at a certain point, Meno’s like, “Look, this is not going anywhere. Like, obviously you can just sort of come up with more words against my words. Um, how do we ever know we’ll ever get anywhere with this?” Right? And Socrates actually at that point turns to math, and they use a mathematical example about finding the double square. So if you have a square, um, and you want to find the square whose area is twice as big as that square, and how, um, somebody who’s goes into that problem making a certain set of assumptions will never find the answer. We can, we can talk about it if you want. It’s, it’s a great example. Um, but the point is, afterwards Socrates is like, “Yeah, the truth is, there is no guarantee. We don’t know.” Right? “But, um, I think that it is better… We will be better men and braver if we believe that we ought to inquire than not.” And you know, you say you like physics, but I don’t see it as an alternative in the sense that it’s not going to give me… It’s the layers. … levels problem, right? It’s just physics is not gonna give me the answer to the questions I have, and I can’t just abandon those questions, and I would be a coward if I didn’t try to find answers to them.
00:42:42
Eric Weinstein: No, a coward is in a very high state of the sta- or high level of the stack, right? In some sense, the questions that really have, have come to animate me throughout my adult life have to do with this question as how, how can we improve upon it is without involving ourselves in the equation?
00:43:03
Agnes Callard: Maybe that’s a good… Um, I’m mostly interested in equations that essentially involve me. [laughs]
00:43:08
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:43:10
Agnes Callard: So that might be a big difference. When you say coward, like, I think in some sense courage is what makes life worth living. Like, I wouldn’t… If I didn’t… If I thought I was-
00:43:21
Eric Weinstein: Are you a courageous person?
00:43:22
Agnes Callard: Um, if I thought I didn’t care about courage-
00:43:25
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:43:25
Agnes Callard: … like, if I thought I was okay being a coward-
00:43:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
00:43:28
Agnes Callard: … I would think that my life might not be worth living. I think courage is the sense, the, at least the sense of the importance of courage is the sense that life is not merely biological, that life is worth something.
00:43:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, okay, so I mean, first of all-
00:43:43
Agnes Callard: There are conditions under which I would rather not
00:43:44
Eric Weinstein: … I’ll just say something about your background. You are not only Jewish, but Hungarian Jewish?
00:43:48
Agnes Callard: Yes, that’s correct.
00:43:50
Eric Weinstein: Notice anything… I mean, you want to talk about a group of non-cowardly human beings, I would say Hungarian Jews are about one of the most courageous groups of people I’ve ever dealt with. Ethnically, courage is a huge trait, different even from other parts of the Ashkenazim.
00:44:10
Agnes Callard: I, I think it was very courageous of my parents to come here.
00:44:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?
00:44:13
Agnes Callard: Um, yeah. Um, but, um, I don’t think that they, like… Um, I don’t know. Did they, did they… I don’t think courage is something you can, like, hand down in that way, though I do think that you can facilitate the conditions of its acquisition and you can kind of help someone.
00:44:28
Eric Weinstein: I’m just saying that there’s a system of selective pressures that existed in Hungary-
00:44:33
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
00:44:33
Eric Weinstein: … in the Jewish community that produced an exaggerated extremophile response, right? I mean, Edward Teller came from a firmament. There was the… He, he… You know, you can’t look at a giraffe in isolation from the trees on which it feeds.
00:44:51
Agnes Callard: Sure. That, that could be right. Um, that mode of thinking is one that… It’s a little bit like the atoms, you know? It doesn’t for me shed light on, like, um, like, the circumstances in which I have to fight and what I have to fight for under those, like, circum-
00:45:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, have more courage and take another look at it. I mean, in other words, the, the… This is the… This is part of the problem, which is, is that there are… There is that which you feel… And I’m, I’m not gonna use anything personal because I, I eschew going into somebody… Like, I, you know, I had this, um, erotic actress in your chair not too long ago, and I didn’t wanna ask her about the details of her sex life. I wanted to talk around sex, not about her sexuality, which is what happens in every… Uh, so I don’t wanna talk about anything that you haven’t already surfaced. But for example, you held a seminar at the University of Chicago with an ex-husband-
00:45:40
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:45:40
Eric Weinstein: … talking about divorce.
00:45:41
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:45:42
Eric Weinstein: Now, that is an incredibly courageous position from many f- from m- many perspectives, right? Because you’re, you’re dealing with something that would usually cause feelings to well up and might touch on things that would actually alter and, and perhaps deform your life. But you felt that you had enough ability to do that with strength and distance that it was something that you were not only willing to do, but interested in doing in front of an audience.
00:46:10
Agnes Callard: Right. So maybe one thing… It’s interesting about the personal, you know. I think I wrote this to you in an email, that, um, I… It’s just, I guess, this is, like, just a psychological factor, but… No, it isn’t just a s- I think it is… I- it’s connected to some philosophical things, but I don’t… Um, things that other people would find, like, too personal and uncomfortable to share, um, I often have to consciously classify in my head which of those… which are those things and be like, “Don’t say this.”
00:46:40
Eric Weinstein: Because they don’t tag that way to you.
00:46:41
Agnes Callard: Yeah, yeah. And so, like, I, um, like, I’ve just learned by experience it will make other people uncomfortable if I say things to someone I don’t know that are too personal. But it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, so I don’t have an inner sense of that. Um, so there isn’t really anything where I would be like, um… I mean, maybe there is, but-
00:47:00
Eric Weinstein: There is
00:47:00
Agnes Callard: … I can’t think of it. [laughs]
00:47:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, I can think of it.
00:47:02
Agnes Callard: Um-
00:47:02
Eric Weinstein: A- a- and it wouldn’t be interesting for me to go there to prove-
00:47:05
Agnes Callard: Right
00:47:05
Eric Weinstein: … to you that that exists for you.
00:47:07
Agnes Callard: Right, but that’s relevant, I guess, to the divorce thing. Like, I think it’s not as courageous as it would be for other people because-
00:47:12
Eric Weinstein: I think it’s not as courageous for you as it would be for other people.
00:47:15
Agnes Callard: Yeah. Um-
00:47:16
Eric Weinstein: But are you really looking… Like, I, I, I think, you know, another person who sat in that chair was Brian Callen, the comedian and actor, and he made the point that there are no tough guys, that, um, ultimately the human condition is so frail and so prone to abuse and insult that in the face of actually, you know, incredibly destructive pressures, we all fold. And y- you can discuss-
00:47:46
Agnes Callard: I think that’s true.
00:47:47
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So then courage is also important to me. One of the reasons I’m doing this, this show and, and the whole idea of naming the intellectual dark web and all that stuff has to do for me with answering the question, what would I have done during the McCarthy era, is that I watched my family terrorized by this government, and I wanted to know, would I, would I have stood up, or would I have cowered under a table? So it’s a particular kind of courage. And by the way, this has been very unpleasant many days, but it’s also a kind of courage to which I am partially well-suited. Okay, so my question is, isn’t it a question of marginal courage and the marginal courage to which you in particular, Agnes, are particularly well-suited? I mean, the act of bringing another life into the world turns us all into cowards. I guarantee you that you are a coward when it comes to your child.
00:48:40
Agnes Callard: Um, uh, I actually think that question of courage with respect to one’s children is much, much more fine-grained. Like, it comes up a thousand times a day in my interactions with them. Um, so it’s, um… But certainly, certainly there are circumstances in which that, um, you could say, “I’m a coward with respect to my children.” In other circumstances, I think I have to exercise a lot of courage [laughs] with respect to them.
00:48:59
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, but i- i- I don’t wanna talk about your child, because I find it actually… I, I, I brought that up and I would like to… That would be the last time I would actually bring up your actual child.
00:49:09
Agnes Callard: Okay.
00:49:10
Eric Weinstein: If I think about Sophie’s Choice-
00:49:12
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:49:12
Eric Weinstein: … I get very angry at the existence of that book, right? Because the issue of deforming people by choices involving their own children, where they lack the power to choose what item should be on the smorgasbord and are forced to choose between the shit souffle, the shit salad, and the shit soup.
00:49:32
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:49:33
Eric Weinstein: There’s an evilness to simply making us participate. I’m thinking about Saddam Hussein’s penchant for executing a family member and selling, sending the bill for the ammunition used to the family so that they’re forced to become complicit, right? Everyone who brings a child into this world is almost without exception either a monster or a coward. And in fact, this is the Abrahamic sin.
00:50:02
Agnes Callard: I’ll tell you the version of that thought that I have, and then I wanna answer the marginal question about courage. The version I’ve tho- of that thought that I’ve had is, um, like there are things that… So when you invest yourself in anything, right, it’s a point of vulnerability. And if it’s your child, then in a sense you’ve invested, like, your mind into them in this way where there are things that could happen to them that you would never recover from. And so it’s almost like you’ve made yourself someone who could become insane, because, um, you have opened your mind to be wounded by the world in certain ways that you cannot control anymore, right? And, um, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what the name for that, if that’s co- It, it certainly, um, in order to prevent those things from happening, you might do anything, and so that would be the cowardice maybe, right? But it’s more than that, right? It’s this kind of, um, this kind of exposure of yourself where, like, in a way your mind isn’t your own anymore, um, that in a way maybe that’s even deeper than the question about courage. Marginal question about courage. So the way Aristotle would think about this is that, um, um, there’s a lot of different circumstances a person can be in, and we call them courageous relative to a set of circumstances that are also relative to them, and that’s how you were thinking about the marginal point. So, like, there are certain circumstances so extreme that we couldn’t expect of anyone to do anything but, um, be crushed by the pressure of those circumstances, and we wouldn’t call them a coward for not responding. But then there are also circumstances where we would sort of expect of anyone that they would stand up, and we would call them a coward, right? And then there’s the intermediate case. And of course, it’s intermediate relative to us in some way. So what I mean is you have to care about courage, a- and that is a way of putting the marg- the point about the margin. I have to, I have to care about, um, not just, not just immediately caving to certain pressures. I mean, can I, can I give an example that I actually think is a better example than the divorce one?
00:52:01
Eric Weinstein: Please. But, uh, total- I will never attempt to interrogate your person if you don’t offer it up.
00:52:06
Agnes Callard: Yeah, that’s fine.
00:52:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:52:07
Agnes Callard: Um, um, you know, in a way, it would… This, this, this, this sort of reveals our difference. It’s like I think through my personal life, that that’s like the, the lens or something, you know?
00:52:15
Eric Weinstein: No, you think you think through your personal life.
00:52:16
Agnes Callard: That’s also true.
00:52:17
Eric Weinstein: But there, but there are levels at which I could interrogate that would be different than the levels at which you’re interrogating.
00:52:23
Agnes Callard: Yes, absolutely.
00:52:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:52:23
Agnes Callard: But I might still have those in my head even if I don’t say them. Um, um, so, like, when, um… When I… Like, having that conversation with my ex-husband, who I’m good friends with, we were divorced, you know, 2011. It’s a long time ago, right?
00:52:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
00:52:50
Agnes Callard: Um, that really wasn’t so hard. But there’s a thing I did in 2011, which is that I gave a talk about getting divorced in 2011. Um, because our divorce caused a huge… He’s a faculty member at Chicago, and it caused this huge sort of emotional response in the whole community, and, uh, a lot of people hated me. Um, a lot of people still don’t really talk to me as a result of it. Um, but-
00:53:19
Eric Weinstein: Just because of your divorce even though the, the two of you have accepted yourself?
00:53:22
Agnes Callard: Correct. Um, but a- it was like, you know, sometimes there are wounds that are created, and then they get, um, supported. Um, they, they, they, they, they, um… I, I don’t know what the right word is. It’s like they, they get scarred over. Um-
00:53:40
Eric Weinstein: It doesn’t sound like it comes from the divorce. It c- comes from the, uh, etiology of the divorce.
00:53:45
Agnes Callard: Yes. Right.
00:53:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:53:46
Agnes Callard: So it, um… But I gave a talk about this, um, about getting divorced and falling in love and what love and marriage and divorce are, and I gave this talk because I was wor- I didn’t mind if people were, um, didn’t like me or my choices or whatever, except my students. I was worried about my students. I was worried that if the students that I had taught came to sort of, I don’t know, accept a bunch of gossip and rumor about me, that I would, that it would both undo the teaching that I had done of them and get in the way of potential f- teaching in the future. That it was like a, um, professional obligation that I had to clarify the situation for my students. Like, I don’t mind if people gossip about me, but I do mind if the people I’m trying to teach do that.
00:54:35
Eric Weinstein: But I don’t even think you’re… I mean, I don’t believe you that you don’t mind if people gossip about you. You may not be able to control it-
00:54:41
Agnes Callard: Sorry. I do… I, I, I… Right. That’s all I meant. What I meant was I don’t have a moral obligation to try to correct that. But I did feel I had an obligation, and there was a lot of pressure. Like, people, you know, through back channels were telling me like, “Don’t give this talk. [laughs] Do not, like, you know, do not give a public talk about your life.” Um, and, and it was like-
00:55:02
Eric Weinstein: Can you say what the contents of the talk were about, or is that-
00:55:05
Agnes Callard: Absolutely
00:55:05
Eric Weinstein: … is, is that-
00:55:05
Agnes Callard: And someday I’ll publish it
00:55:06
Eric Weinstein: … it’s not a… Okay.
00:55:07
Agnes Callard: [laughs] Someday. Um, um, it was, um… So I mean, really, the [laughs] i- in some ways the talk was quite academic. It was a talk about love. So it was… It started with the circumstances, which is, um, I was married to someone and I fell in love with someone else.
00:55:28
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:55:29
Agnes Callard: And then I was like, I didn’t think that that was like the kind of person I was, the kind of person to whom that could happen, but it did happen, and I tried to explain it, and I tried to explain it using some of, um, some of the texts that I think shed the most light on my own situation. So they were… I, I think I talked about this passage from Henry James’ Wings of the Dove and from Plato’s Symposium about what I thought love was and how it was related to the kind of quest to become a person.
00:56:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:56:03
Agnes Callard: Um, so that, that’s what the talk was about. Um, but it was like, it was like, I wanted to give to my students my own understanding of what had happened to me. I felt very much like, this might be self-aggrandizing, but I felt like Socrates when Socrates says in the sym- in the Apology, “I want to show to you the meaning of what has happened to me.” And he’s, he’s speaking there after they’ve condemned him to death, and he says, and he’s already spoken to the people who condemned him, and he’s like, “To the people who voted not to condemn me, to my students and my friends, I want to show to you the meaning. I want you to understand.” Um, and it was really important to him that those people understand because he didn’t want to sabotage the educational project that they had been involved in, and that’s what I felt at that time.
00:56:47
Eric Weinstein: So in other words, in order for me to infer why you would do this, because it’s a rather odd thing to do at one level-
00:56:53
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:56:53
Eric Weinstein: … and very understandable in another, I would have to surmise and infer that you had in fact invested certain teachings of yours to your students with the personal, therefore calling in… I mean, you s- you see, one thing that-
00:57:07
Agnes Callard: Actually, no. A- actually, no. That’s not quite right. So first of all, I don’t have any teachings, um, so I didn’t, I hadn’t invested any-
00:57:13
Eric Weinstein: You teach ethics?
00:57:15
Agnes Callard: Absolutely.
00:57:15
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I can’t imagine wanting to teach ethics because if I’m aware of my own ethical failings, a- and, you know, there are many.
00:57:27
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:57:27
Eric Weinstein: They are many and varied and unremarkable.
00:57:29
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
00:57:30
Eric Weinstein: Um, the idea of getting up and talking about ethical failings, uh, of others and why you shouldn’t fail ethically… You know, I’m friends with Sam Harris, and he really doesn’t believe much in lying. Now, he’s not absolutely fanatical about it. He, he knows that there are certain cases where he has to lie. But I would never want… Because I’m trying to be aware of truthfulness and fickleness and all of these sorts of things, you know, status for example, I have a need for status. Um, it’s not a standard need for status in some ways. In some ways it’s boring. But I don’t mind talking about it because I, I can make contact with it and I don’t feel diminished by inheriting a human condition. The thing that really distorts me is that I feel like we’re all handed this white suit that we don’t want at birth, and then as we live our lives, all of the things that we do when we spill our soup or, you know, we spend time in the barn, end up soiling this white suit, and people look at us and say, “My God,” you know, “look at you.” My question is, well, who ordered the white suit to begin with? Wouldn’t I rather start with a baseline that says, I bet I’m a fairly standard person, and if lying is a problem and if hypocrisy is a problem, if injustice and bigotry are problems, wouldn’t I want to give myself a budget in all of those areas? And the key question is trying to live within one’s means.
00:58:59
Agnes Callard: I, I think that’s absolutely right. So when you said, like, “I have all these flaws,” like, that’s why you want to teach ethics, ’cause you wanna understand them. I mean, um, the thing about the white suit, so I think that’s a really pervasive myth in our society, and it’s maybe a bad… There are a lot of good legacies of Christianity, but it’s a bad one, the kind of virtues of innocence idea, the idea that we all start out ethically good, right? And that’s related to the status game point about how we get something for free, right? But the, and the idea is, well, maybe you can sully it. Maybe you can sort of… And then, and then, and then clean it up again, and that, that can be your ethical agency, right? But I don’t think that children have some kind of innate virtue. I think virtue is something you have to acquire, like, and you have to, you have to come to an understanding of what matters.
00:59:40
Eric Weinstein: But w- the point is society foists the white suit upon you.
00:59:43
Agnes Callard: Right. That’s-
00:59:44
Eric Weinstein: So you can’t-
00:59:44
Agnes Callard: That’s the-
00:59:45
Eric Weinstein: So you, you have to say, “I reject this white suit. I will fashion my own”-
00:59:49
Agnes Callard: Yeah
00:59:49
Eric Weinstein: … if you don’t wanna disappoint people, right? Now, the, the problem there is that I believe that your privacy… Uh, like for example, we, we see very few of our colleagues naked.
01:00:03
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
01:00:03
Eric Weinstein: Um, there was a-
01:00:04
Agnes Callard: I’m puzzled by that
01:00:05
Eric Weinstein: … there was a-
01:00:05
Agnes Callard: Yeah
01:00:05
Eric Weinstein: … there was a professor that, uh, w- was probably the closest to being my official advisor. I didn’t have a, a, a PhD advisor, but the person who signed my thesis as if he was my PhD advisor-
01:00:16
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
01:00:17
Eric Weinstein: … had a home in, in, in, uh, Martha’s Vineyard, and we would, we would swim naked together, you know?
01:00:23
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:00:23
Eric Weinstein: Because that was what one did. He was a sun worshiper.
01:00:25
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:00:26
Eric Weinstein: And a, [laughs] and a Hungarian Jew, by the way.
01:00:28
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
01:00:28
Eric Weinstein: Um, the, the fact that we don’t see each other naked means that we’re stunned whenever we do catch a glimpse of somebody out of context in which they are in their most natural state, and this has to do with the fact that we are handed these clothes and told to wea- wear them at all times. And then our, our simple underlying reality is totally shocking. So it seems to me very sad that you would have to give the lecture. I’m not saying that you, you might want to give the lecture.
01:00:58
Agnes Callard: Hmm.
01:00:58
Eric Weinstein: You might enjoy the exhibition of it. You might enjoy the courage exercise of it. You might enjoy the intellectual puzzle of it. But the idea that there’s a compulsion so as not to ruin your students has to do with the flaw of having accepted the white suit to begin with, and therefore losing your privacy.
01:01:17
Agnes Callard: Um, that’s a really good point. Um, so I think that-
01:01:21
Eric Weinstein: Wait, can I do a victory dance?
01:01:22
Agnes Callard: [laughs] I thi- but I think, and, and I see what you mean, and I think what you’re helping me to see is that I’ve somewhat framed what I was doing slightly wrong. Like, I … It’s, the point, what, the thought isn’t like, “Well, um, if people, if I don’t give this talk, then, um, my students, um, will think I did something evil, and then they won’t respect me anymore. And, um, now… And, and so instead I need to like, um, um, excuse myself, right? And I need to show that actually I’m as white as they thought I was.” Um, um, and that’s definitely not like, um, like for instance, that’s not at all what Socrates does at that moment in the Apology. Um, actually what he says is that, um, he’s like, “You might think that, you know, some really bad thing has happened.” But he goes on to say, “You might think some really bad thing has happened to me. You might think this is terrible that they’re putting me to death,” which is what everyone thinks about Socrates. “Oh, look, this sh- Plato showed that you can’t have philosophy, ’cause look at this terrible result.” And the whole point of the Apology is Socrates is like, “This isn’t a bad thing. No, no bad thing happened to me. Yes, they’re putting me to death, but a good man can’t be harmed, neither in life nor in death. And I’m not, you know, I, I, I’m … Like, it’s bad for them, ’cause they’re doing something unjust, so it’s bad for their souls, but it’s not bad for me. Don’t, like don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel bad for … Right. Okay.” Um, and I guess, so I guess as much as, um, a- and I, like I think you were right in picking up on the kind of self-excusing nature of the way that I put it, but like if you think about what I, um, g- t- told you as the content of the talk, right? Um, it was more, like as much as anything, it was an opportunity like to say something truthful about love that I had never, I’d never had such an opportunity, because I had ne- I … Someone, one of my, one of my colleagues came to the talk, and he’s like, um, this was not a compliment. This was sort of a criticism. He’s like, “You talked as if you were Moses come down from the mountain, like you, like you ha- like as though you had so much knowledge, like as though you thought you were Socrates or something,” you know? And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s what I felt like. I felt like I had all this knowledge, and it was wonderful, and I had to share it with my students.” And I, so it was sort of, it was almost like there’s a, um, there’s two points of correction, right?
01:03:40
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:03:40
Agnes Callard: So one point of correction would be to get to the white suit, but the, the, the actual content of the talk was to go the step further. Like this was an educational opportunity. Um, and, um, and I think that I, I let myself not frame it that way in telling the story, um, maybe somewhat under the pressure [laughs] of the idea of self-purification, but it’s not a truthful way of telling the story, I realize.
01:04:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, but it, but this is the question about w- whether to use the avenue of truth, you see? Because at some level there’s an aspect of, of grace and meaning that is present here, which is, um, the, you know, whether you know it or not-
01:04:19
Agnes Callard: Hmm
01:04:19
Eric Weinstein: … and I don’t know that you know this, uh, at l- at least in the male, arousal takes place on two different systems, both of them within the autonomic nervous system, one sympathetic and one parasympathetic, called psychogenic and reflexogenic arousal.
01:04:34
Agnes Callard: Hmm.
01:04:35
Eric Weinstein: And it’s not under the conscious control of the prefrontal cortex. It’s a much more primitive system. Nature’s not going to trust the reproductive system-
01:04:45
Agnes Callard: Hmm
01:04:45
Eric Weinstein: … to the prefrontal cortex. And a friend of mine, uh, Lesha Lee, just came out with a company, I think called Rosebud AI, that generates faces of people who never were. And you can find that, you know, she, I’m sure she will release a tool at some point in which she finds your phenotype and can hone to a fare-thee-well and create a person that you cannot tell has never existed and put them in all sorts of situations so that you can fi- fall hopelessly in love with that which is not. Okay. Now, because that’s taking place, effectively your prefrontal cortex is like your parent trying to get control of a child who’s been asked the, the terrible question, “Who wants ice cream?” And the child is now out of control. Okay. You can’t really talk about this, because this is happening everywhere in a certain sense. I mean, we can talk about it in the general, but not in the specific. So for example, you can say that, um, self-gratification is natural and normal and that the world, uh, engages in this almost without exception. You cannot say, “I’m sorry I was late for the meeting. I spent the morning lost in onanism.”
01:06:01
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
01:06:02
Eric Weinstein: Right? And as a result, um, that kind of layer of indirection, in- including in this situation using a language layer of indirection, is a necessary part of the distortion of the truth that’s needed for meaning, fitness, and grace different from pure truth, and I think that you, you’re caught in the bad breath problem in this story. Right? A- and the self-purification. I, we come from a tradition where there’s a ritual bath known as a mikvah, and these purifying rituals are necessary to do w- you know, and we don’t have to … Unfortunately, it got tied to the issue of menstruation and whether or not women are intrinsically dirty through the process of, uh, renewing themselves. But simply the concept of a mikvah as a ritual, and the fact that our brains have a place to allow us to be reborn-
01:07:01
Agnes Callard: Mm
01:07:01
Eric Weinstein: … is an incredibly powerful facility that people focused on truth very often they try to do things through the truth channel. It doesn’t work as well as doing it through the ritual and meaning channels.
01:07:13
Agnes Callard: It’s interesting that mikvahs are used for conversion too.
01:07:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Right? And-
01:07:19
Agnes Callard: Being born as a Jew.
01:07:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, and, and another thing, if you’ve ever read what prayers we say, uh, on Yom Kippur-
01:07:27
Agnes Callard: Right
01:07:27
Eric Weinstein: … on the Day of Atonement, um, it’s terrifying because you sort of start by atoning for your sins, and then you get into, uh, “We are sorry for pretending to atone for our sins, when actually we’re not really sorry at all.”
01:07:41
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
01:07:42
Eric Weinstein: You know, and you’re just like, “Holy cow. That’s written in?” Um…
01:07:47
Agnes Callard: So I think that the idea that we can step away from being so concerned with truth and move over to, you know, ritual and meaning and something else, it’s like, it’s as though you can step outside of thinking and do something else with your mind than thinking. Like, and my view is there’s only thinking. There isn’t some other operation. Um, th- there are other things that happen, like there are other things that happen to your brain, right? But there’s only kind of one thing you can do with your mind, and there is no way to not care about truth. Even in your dreams-
01:08:26
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, no
01:08:27
Agnes Callard: … you kind of care about truth.
01:08:28
Eric Weinstein: In no way… L- look, if you asked, uh, when, when Rabbi Wolpe sat in your chair, uh, we got to the end and there was an issue about how does a final theory of everything affect our concepts of ourselves, right?
01:08:41
Agnes Callard: Yes.
01:08:41
Eric Weinstein: And I said to him, you know, at some point, the hard thing is to conceive of what we mean by a theory of everything-
01:08:46
Agnes Callard: Yes
01:08:46
Eric Weinstein: … because there’s that which is left undone in the theory of everything, and it usually would… What I believe it means is that we are no longer searching for mathematical improvements at that point, but searching for something ineffable, some kind of gossamer that we can’t touch without it disintegrating a- a- at our touch. Or, um, y- you know, this issue of what is the meaning of life? And to the extent that I’ve been able to try to distill it into a sentence that doesn’t crumble on me, I’ve said that the meaning of life to me is the struggle to impart meaning to meaning. And as soon… Th- th- the reason I constructed it that way is that if you just say that you’re 100% clear, like even on what that means, then you’re no longer struggling. And so as soon as the struggle disappears, the meaning disappears. On the other hand, if you say there is no meaning to life, you know, the, the Shakespeare quote about sound and fury signifying nothing, then you’ve also lost the meaning of life because you, you’ve sort of crapped out of the game. And so it’s only the active part of turning this thing over in your mind that keeps us animate.
01:09:55
Agnes Callard: I think there have to be completion points, even if they’re provisional. That is, I don’t think it can just be struggle. Like, ’cause the short version of your answer is the meaning of life is struggle. Um-
01:10:07
Eric Weinstein: No, this, uh, without the qualification-
01:10:10
Agnes Callard: Cut off all info. Yeah
01:10:11
Eric Weinstein: … it is the, it is a part-
01:10:14
Agnes Callard: You said it’s a struggle to impart meaning to meaning.
01:10:16
Eric Weinstein: Right. It’s a particular aspect of struggle.
01:10:19
Agnes Callard: Okay. But my point is the genus is-
01:10:21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:10:21
Agnes Callard: … struggle, right?
01:10:22
Eric Weinstein: Correct.
01:10:22
Agnes Callard: Um, which is like something k- kinetic, right? Um, it’s a motion. Um, and-
01:10:28
Eric Weinstein: Not necessarily.
01:10:31
Agnes Callard: And, and-
01:10:31
Eric Weinstein: If it, if I’m struggling to, to, uh, pry a, a, a top off of a ketchup bottle, there can be a static moment where I’m simply putting pressure, and there’s not much kinetic.
01:10:43
Agnes Callard: Fair.
01:10:43
Eric Weinstein: Meta- and metaphorically, I mean, obviously it’s not really about ketchup.
01:10:47
Agnes Callard: Right, but like, um, like even if there isn’t, um, um, in order… Imagine you just saw a frozen picture of you like this with the bottle, right? Um, even if your muscles were tensed, you wouldn’t know whether you were trying to get the top on, take it off, or just keep it the way that it was, right? Struggle is, in a way, diachronic. Um, and we s- we, we can see the struggle through a longer-
01:11:10
Eric Weinstein: By the way, every time you say diachronic, the next time we meet, we’re, we’re gonna drink.
01:11:14
Agnes Callard: Okay. [laughs] I don’t usually say it this much.
01:11:17
Eric Weinstein: What?
01:11:17
Agnes Callard: You’re bringing this out in me. [laughs]
01:11:18
Eric Weinstein: I love that.
01:11:19
Agnes Callard: Um. [laughs]
01:11:20
Eric Weinstein: This conversation’s going incredibly well.
01:11:22
Agnes Callard: [laughs] Um, um, so I think that, um… Look, there’s this pr- th- something else you said in your conversation with Rabbi Wolpe was, um, that you hate when people say that happiness is the meaning of life, so I’m gonna say that. I think happiness is the meaning of life.
01:11:38
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] Despite me? Maybe despite is the meaning of life, happiness.
01:11:39
Agnes Callard: Um, um, I, I think it’s true, but-
01:11:41
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]
01:11:41
Agnes Callard: … I think it’s obvious. There’s no other answer. It’s completely trivial truth. No one can disagree-
01:11:46
Eric Weinstein: What?
01:11:46
Agnes Callard: … with this.
01:11:46
Eric Weinstein: What?
01:11:46
Agnes Callard: Um, because, so because of something I would call the value deferral problem, okay? So, and I think this is, like, the, the number one ethical insight of the ancient world. It’s super simple, okay? Um, which is that, like, it’s something like this. Like, the value of my life, my life-
01:12:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:12:04
Agnes Callard: … can never be somehow something outside of me, something to be found outside of me. So like, I mean, suppose, like, okay, here’s a thing that Ar- Aristotle considers a bunch of possibilities for, like, what a really good life looks like.
01:12:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:12:16
Agnes Callard: The most interesting thing about the possibilities that he considers is one that he leaves out. He, um, so nowhere on… He, he has the idea of the life of money-making, the life of honor, the life of, um, um, the intellectual life, the, the political life, et cetera. So it goes on and on. But one that he does not consider is, like, what about altruism? Okay, what about the altruistic life? Like, suppose that I say the entire point of my life, right, is to make you happy. Okay, I’m, I’m an altruist. Um-
01:12:40
Eric Weinstein: Is that what, is that what it means?
01:12:42
Agnes Callard: Look, let me give that as an instance, though.
01:12:44
Eric Weinstein: All right, all right, all right.
01:12:45
Agnes Callard: Okay? Let me give that as an instance. Suppose, suppose you’re an altruist too, though, right? So, okay, so you go around and you make someone else happy, right?
01:12:51
Eric Weinstein: You just dou- doubled the number of counterfactuals I’m entertaining.
01:12:54
Agnes Callard: [laughs] I’m gonna keep going. No. Um, okay, here’s, here’s, here’s wh- why Aristotle didn’t consider the possibility of that-
01:13:00
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:13:01
Agnes Callard: … as a good life-
01:13:02
Eric Weinstein: Okay
01:13:03
Agnes Callard: As an altruist, I’m sort of like deferring the problem of the meaning of my life onto you, and I’m like, well, the point is, like, the point is that Eric be happy, right? And suppose you defer also, right, to somebody else, it’s like we can’t keep deferring. Somewhere along the line, someone’s actually got to do the happening, right? And I, I think it’s gotta be me who does it for my life. It’s not my children, it’s not my students. No one can do the meaning of my life for me, and that’s just what sort of ancient eudaimonism is, is the realization that the ha- the, the value of someone’s life has to come home to them and be available to them in the form of something like an experience, something, you know, not a pleasure, but no one, I mean, no one, and none of these people thought it was pleasure, but, um, something that is in a way transparent to them and available to them as meaning, as an experience, um, and that’s what the word happiness is supposed to capture, um, at least insofar as it’s, say, a translation of the Greek, like eudaimonia, right? Um, um, so, um, um, so, like, a- a- and I think the idea of struggle is kind of another way to get into a worrisome deferral problem, right? Like, you’re always struggling, and the thing never happens. Then-
01:14:16
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. Wait, wait, no. Come on
01:14:18
Agnes Callard: … if, if, if the meaning is the struggle.
01:14:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but the, no. No, look, there is so much work to do, and there’s so many partal… You know, to, to your point where you didn’t say the word milestone, but I think what you, you talked about is partial completions on, on the road.
01:14:31
Agnes Callard: Yes.
01:14:31
Eric Weinstein: Right. So there are so many milestones and partial completions that are part of the struggle. I would never wish to suggest that it’s just pure [laughs] Sisyphean, uh, pointless struggle.
01:14:43
Agnes Callard: Well, you defined it as a struggle.
01:14:45
Eric Weinstein: I did.
01:14:45
Agnes Callard: So you can change your definition, and you can say that, um-
01:14:49
Eric Weinstein: No, sorry. Implicit within the struggle is, uh, progress movement partial completions.
01:14:55
Agnes Callard: Okay. I mean, I, I, I guess I, I wouldn’t hear that as implicit. Like, um, that is to me, um, um, the arrival somewhere. Like, it’s like there’s going somewhere, and then there’s arriving, right? Um-
01:15:11
Eric Weinstein: I’m a huge fan of arriving.
01:15:14
Agnes Callard: And, um-
01:15:16
Eric Weinstein: This, this idea that the journey is what’s important never makes sense to me.
01:15:20
Agnes Callard: Right, but I think your definition, um, suggests that. Your, that the definition that the meaning of life is the struggle to impart meaning-to-meaning, um, is a version of the journey view.
01:15:33
Eric Weinstein: In the long, but the idea that, uh, life is one airline, long airline flight with no landings [laughs] or takeoffs doesn’t really enter into that.
01:15:44
Agnes Callard: Um, well, so I get that, like, you don’t think that, but what I’m saying is you’re saying that. [laughs] So, so there’s, like, there’s, like, how you view life, and then there’s the way that you have of articulating-
01:15:53
Eric Weinstein: This is weird with, like, aca- academics who want footnotes. So there’s a footnote on that.
01:15:58
Agnes Callard: Yeah, okay, but I actually want you to bring the footnote up into the main text-
01:16:01
Eric Weinstein: Oh, wow
01:16:01
Agnes Callard: … and modify [laughs] your definition and say that, um, you know, the pursuit of meaning essentially involves these two components that are actually really hard to fit together, and this is one of those distinctions we’re gonna need to, like, back up, right? To, to be able to cash that check. But it involves both the, um, you know, a kind of movement, a kind of struggle towards something like, and, you know, um, m- m- in putting meaning in meaning or understanding or, um, maybe there’s more than one kind of endpoint. Um, and then, and then there’s something like being at the endpoint, right? And there has to be a what it is like to be at the endpoint, and that has to be part of, um, what the meaning of life is, what happens.
01:16:44
Eric Weinstein: Let me give you a little completion story that actually made a huge difference in my life.
01:16:48
Agnes Callard: Okay.
01:16:48
Eric Weinstein: Um, you ever heard somebody say when you, you complain that you just keep having a problem, and somebody says, “Well, what’s the only common factor to the seven problematic relationships you just described?”
01:16:59
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:17:00
Eric Weinstein: And you’re supposed to say, “It’s me, isn’t it?”
01:17:02
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:17:02
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay, so I was going around and saying to a close friend of mine named Michael Grossberg, um, “I keep having the following bizarre hierarchical relationship problems. It’s clearly me.” He said, “No, not in the sense that you mean it.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Look, I, I know you very well, and you’re imagining that you’re doing something really wrong.” He said, “In fact, think about a different problem. You’ve got someone with a compromised immune system. They’re the only person who’s actually seeing the world of pathogens correctly because they’re actually, uh-
01:17:37
Agnes Callard: Hmm
01:17:37
Eric Weinstein: … not defended against the pathogens.”
01:17:39
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:17:39
Eric Weinstein: “Everyone with a non-compromised immune system is oblivious to what’s actually going on in their environment.” He says, “The problem that you have is that you’re the only guy who isn’t oblivious to the problems in these hierarchical relationships because for whatever reason, you do not have the immune system that the rest of us carry implicitly.”
01:17:57
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:17:57
Eric Weinstein: “So to that extent, if you wanna say that that’s what you’re doing wrong, that’s a really bad example because the pathogens are real, they’re not imagined.” Okay, that totally changed my life. It completely reframed something. I thought I effectively had a, a de facto proof of one thing, and somebody’s better insight came in and made my life much richer, and I stopped worrying about that particular problem. Now I could move on to the next problem. That’s an example of a milestone of completion. I never had to go back. It’s a very durable insight. Okay, that is part of the struggle to impart meaning-to-meaning, to get to these higher forms where you’re not trapped in the same problems that everyone else has. It gives you an ability to teach, to share, to give paradigms, and I don’t think that they’re tied to personality. So one of the things that’s really important to me, for example, and I talk about it a lot on this show, uh, I think, or in other interviews, is the fact that in mathematics, we honor our Nazis, that there were-
01:18:57
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
01:18:57
Eric Weinstein: … Nazis who contributed major insights, and it doesn’t mean that they’re not sons of bitches, but the part of them that contribute mathematical and physical insight is not compromised by their goddamn evil Nazism. Those p- … fuckers, right? Okay, so the ability to divorce to some extent the human b- y- you don’t have any choice in mathematics. If somebody finds something essential, and that person happens to be a son of a bitch-
01:19:27
Agnes Callard: Right
01:19:27
Eric Weinstein: … you don’t have the right to edit that person out of history because it’s inconvenient for you that that happened, right? So I th- I think that, um, the, the moral failings of the people who do the teachings should be assumed by the students. Now, the key question is, do those moral failings compromise, let’s say, the, uh, the teachings themselves? In some cases they do, particularly it comes from a point of sanctimony. If the teacher has not struggled as much as the student, then in fact the relationship maybe would be more profitable if, if reversed.
01:20:05
Agnes Callard: But I, I think it matters a lot. So here the theoretical-practical divide is really helping you out, ’cause I think that mathematics is very squarely theoretical, and the more we move towards the theoretical, the easier it’s going to be to make that kind of divorce. Um, s- a lot of people would find it harder with music. My mom is very torn about Wagner. Um, um, it, um, um, look, for me the very hardest case, and it’s one that I personally struggled with, is Aristotle. So I think that Aristotle’s views on, um, like, women and natural slavery are deeply embedded in his ethical theory.
01:20:41
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:20:41
Agnes Callard: So I don’t think that they’re, like, some kind of little extra bit that you can just ignore those chapters as a politics.
01:20:45
Eric Weinstein: Oh, th- there are ways in which something i- i- is infected with a problem and, and you have to refactor the teaching.
01:20:51
Agnes Callard: It’s, it’s, and it’s not just that. It’s that it’s, like, even what’s… It’s even connected to what’s good about the teaching. There were years when I didn’t teach it for this exact reason.
01:20:58
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:20:58
Agnes Callard: Like, maybe it’s just morally corrupt and we shouldn’t teach it. I, I came to think differently about it. But my point is, um, the question of, like, how should we deal with the kind of ethical infractions of people who have something to teach us, I think has to be combined with the question, what kind of thing do they have to teach us? How theoretical is it? How practical is it?
01:21:18
Eric Weinstein: Are they the reliable or the unreliable narrator? That’s another question.
01:21:22
Agnes Callard: Right. I mean, in philosophy the question of reliability is almost given that you-
01:21:26
Eric Weinstein: No, no, as a literary device. In other words, are they speaking to us-
01:21:30
Agnes Callard: Oh, I see
01:21:30
Eric Weinstein: … in a way in which we can rely upon their words, or do their words in fact-
01:21:34
Agnes Callard: Right
01:21:34
Eric Weinstein: … uh, tell us that they in fact have a hidden truth?
01:21:36
Agnes Callard: Right, and like, and like in some sense, like with Aristotle, it’s like we know he’s not reliable.
01:21:40
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:21:40
Agnes Callard: Like [laughs] we know it.
01:21:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:21:41
Agnes Callard: And yet, and yet, um, there’s stuff, there’s insights from him that we, I think we don’t have another source.
01:21:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:21:49
Agnes Callard: And so it’s like, um, so for me that was, like, a, a deep, a deep tension, um, that’s in a way harder than the, the Nazi mathematician case. Um, um, but I, I don’t think that there’s a single answer here. Like, um, that is, I, I think that the theoretical-practical divide makes a big difference, and in a way the Nazi mathematician case is too easy.
01:22:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay, should we tear down the Arch of Titus that celebrates the sacking of Jerusalem?
01:22:14
Agnes Callard: Um-
01:22:14
Eric Weinstein: Stood there for a while.
01:22:15
Agnes Callard: So, um, you asked, you asked, uh, Rabbi Wolpe this question too.
01:22:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:22:19
Agnes Callard: Yeah. I, I, uh, so I don’t have a view about it, but I also, um, um… Like, the question, that’s a very different question, right? Because that’s not a question about, um, there’s some knowledge and then there’s the source of that knowledge.
01:22:36
Eric Weinstein: Mm.
01:22:36
Agnes Callard: We have a different set of questions about cultural artifacts and their, um, uh, and their history and what they mean. Um, and um, like, I guess, one, like, one thing that to me is important in asking myself that question is, like, about this sort of question, like, it’s why I raised the Aristotle case. It’s a kind of faux deliberation that I would be engaging in, ’cause no one is ever going to come to me and be like, “Should we tear this down?” [laughs]
01:23:06
Eric Weinstein: No, I’m, but I’m-
01:23:07
Agnes Callard: And be like, “We’ll do what you say”
01:23:07
Eric Weinstein: … I’m willing to start this campaign because I’m really getting tired of people saying that you cannot teach, uh, the canon-
01:23:14
Agnes Callard: But you, so you think it should be torn down?
01:23:17
Eric Weinstein: I’m willing to entertain your, the extension of your ideas until you start to recognize first of… Here, here’s what I’m having a problem.
01:23:25
Agnes Callard: Mm.
01:23:25
Eric Weinstein: I’m an, I’m an incredible hypocrite, okay?
01:23:28
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:23:28
Eric Weinstein: And the reason I’ve chosen hypocrisy as a life strategy-
01:23:31
Agnes Callard: Mm
01:23:31
Eric Weinstein: … is, is that it offered the greatest benefits per unit of responsibility of all major philosophies.
01:23:37
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:23:38
Eric Weinstein: Right?
01:23:39
Agnes Callard: Okay.
01:23:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I’m always troubled when people tell me that hypocrisy is terrible. Now, I struggle to minimize my hypocrisy.
01:23:49
Agnes Callard: So you don’t think it’s okay. You wouldn’t struggle to minimize it, that was-
01:23:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the, the, the id within me struggles to maximize it-
01:23:55
Agnes Callard: I see
01:23:55
Eric Weinstein: … because, like, what a great deal, right? But the, the, the supervisory capacity within me is sort of, uh, it’s an embarrassment of riches by embracing hypocrisy that, you know, the world becomes your candy store. So th- that, that-
01:24:07
Agnes Callard: That distinction-
01:24:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:24:08
Agnes Callard: … between the id, I’m sorry to interrupt, but between the id and the… Like, that’s one of those faux distinctions that I don’t think you have a right to, in the sense that I think you’re one person and you make decisions.
01:24:16
Eric Weinstein: Oh, you dear sweet child.
01:24:18
Agnes Callard: [laughs] So it’s like you struggle with your own hypocrisy, and you try to minimize it-
01:24:24
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:24:24
Agnes Callard: … because you think there’s something wrong with hypocrisy.
01:24:27
Eric Weinstein: I don’t love my hypocrisy in one region of my mind. In other regions of my mind, I certainly enjoy my hypocrisy. I lo- I love steak dinners, and if I actually think about what, you know, what, what veal is, it changes the enjoyment of veal, ’cause veal’s a pretty sick thing to, to really take pleasure from, to be blunt, right? And so there’s this issue, you know, and I bring this up as, uh, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there’s a store in North Cambridge, I think it says, like, Fresh Killed Poultry. You know, it’s just there on… It, it’s advertising what it is.
01:24:59
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:24:59
Eric Weinstein: And if you’re buying from that store, you’re pretty much not going to have the, the shock when you actually think about what it is that you’re consuming, ’cause you bought it with that kind of thought in mind.
01:25:07
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:25:08
Eric Weinstein: So there’s this issue about, you know, obviously when I, when I, when I’m saying that I’m a hypocrite and that I’ve embraced as a philosophy, there’s a, there’s a playful aspect to it, which is that I’m recognizing- That most people don’t see their own hypocrisy. They, they’re structured to see it in others and not in themselves. It’s a very easy teaching to just walk around watching for your own hypocrisy and then, you know, kind of make yourself sick before pointing the finger at other people. What is very odd to me is how few people are aware of how deep their own hypocrisy is, and then to lead a naive rallying, uh, cry of, you know, “I can’t believe this is, this hypocrisy” i- in, i- in other people, it’s shocking to not have an idea of what baseline hypocrisy is based on yourself seems a bit rich.
01:25:57
Agnes Callard: I think you’re the true crusader against hypocrisy.
01:25:59
Eric Weinstein: In some weird way.
01:26:00
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
01:26:00
Eric Weinstein: But it’s tends to be institutional hypocrisy. In other words, the, the, the thing that really bothers me, if we had a, a two-by-two grid, there’s individual versus individual conflicts, there’s institution versus institution. What I really detest is insti- is institutions against individuals.
01:26:18
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:26:18
Eric Weinstein: Institutional hypocrisy, the jackboot of the institution on the windpipe of the individual is the thing that is so offensive to me, that I’m pretty consistent that that’s what I fight. So I always try, um-
01:26:30
Agnes Callard: What if the institution is right and the individual is wrong?
01:26:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, then, then I don’t view that as being a-
01:26:36
Agnes Callard: That’s not one of the cases
01:26:37
Eric Weinstein: … it’s not one of the cases.
01:26:38
Agnes Callard: Okay. Fair enough.
01:26:39
Eric Weinstein: What really bothers me is the institution using institutional power to humiliate, to destroy the reputation of the challenging individual who’s making an excellent point on behalf of other individuals, right? There’s certain institutional versus individual games, g- Goliath against Davids. And when I’m, when I’m up against that case, I’m particularly animated having turned down o- opportunities to behave within the institutional structure. I’m pretty sure I really care about this case.
01:27:08
Agnes Callard: Good. But can I just go back to, um… So something that I… So you, um-
01:27:13
Eric Weinstein: Hypocritical institutions are different from hypocritical individuals to me.
01:27:15
Agnes Callard: Yeah. But, like, y- y- you know, you, you brought up the arch case, right? And so, so the thing that I really don’t like is, like, when a q- question is posed but it’s really masquerading as a point or something else, right? So it’s like I’m actually totally willing to deliberate about whether or not we should take this arch down, but that wasn’t really why you raised it, right? You raised-
01:27:39
Eric Weinstein: Why did I raise it, do you think?
01:27:40
Agnes Callard: Um, I think you raised it as a potential point of inconsistency. Um, but I don’t know what I think about the arch. I think it’s an interesting question whether or not to, to-
01:27:48
Eric Weinstein: The fact that you find it an interesting question means that you are not convinced that it, that the question is settled.
01:27:55
Agnes Callard: Correct.
01:27:55
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:27:56
Agnes Callard: But that, that was sort of my point about all the cases.
01:27:57
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:27:57
Agnes Callard: I don’t think there is one way to settle it.
01:27:59
Eric Weinstein: But I understand. I deal with a lot of people who find that these things are settled, right? The, the, the-
01:28:04
Agnes Callard: Fair enough, but, but then, but, but see, that’s my point. You wanted to know maybe whether I find the question to be settled or not, right?
01:28:09
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:28:10
Agnes Callard: And so you asked me a question, should we tear down this arch or not? And your desire in asking me that question was maybe to figure out whether I thought a certain question was settled, right? But I think that’s an actually a deliberative question, like should we tear down the arch or not, right? And so what I mean is, like, and, and, and that’s the distinction I drew between practical and theoretical reason-
01:28:26
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. But, but by doing that, you’re going to move it closer to the… Like, when you say that something is a live question, it’s not a neutral frame, which is I, I think it’s an interesting question, I’m not sure either way. If I said to you, uh, “What do you think about the violent overthrow of the United States?” And you were to say, “Oh, I think it’s an interesting question,” that’s a very strong statement.
01:28:46
Agnes Callard: Yes. Right.
01:28:47
Eric Weinstein: To, to find it an interesting question.
01:28:50
Agnes Callard: Right. I think, though, that, you know, this goes deep into something like conversational trust, but I could find almost anything to be an interesting question. But I would need… It would be pretty important to me that the person posed it to me as a question rather than as a test, right? Um, because sometimes questions aren’t questions.
01:29:09
Eric Weinstein: But there’s something parasitic about this. You see, you can’t have a society in which everybody finds whether the, the violent overthrow of the United States is to be an interesting question. In general, the substrate that makes this country possible so that a few people can find that an entertaining question have to make sure that that question is, in fact, outre.
01:29:27
Agnes Callard: I mean, I, I, I, eh, with respect to that particular one, I’m, I, I haven’t yet seen the interest. That is, you, you sold me on the interest of the previous one on the grounds of the discussion, right? Um, on the face of it, it doesn’t, um, we, we haven’t yet established the, the grounds that might make it interesting. But I-
01:29:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, the destruction of Monticello. Like I, I, I, I… If I found things that, you know, had been, uh, built with slave labor-
01:29:49
Agnes Callard: Right
01:29:49
Eric Weinstein: … you know? The-
01:29:50
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:29:52
Eric Weinstein: I could start to create a great deal of destruction by opening up a lot of interesting questions, thereby moving the midpoint of the discussion, uh, quite a bit farther. These are not, in fact, neutral. This is part of why I find philosophy troubling, because it doesn’t recognize often that the act of asking these questions is, in fact, um, a non-neutral action. If you remember the Dukakis question where-
01:30:22
Agnes Callard: Mm
01:30:22
Eric Weinstein: … there was a question about Willie Horton.
01:30:25
Agnes Callard: Yeah. Very vaguely.
01:30:26
Eric Weinstein: Okay. [laughs] Yeah, right. The memory hole. It’s pretty amazing. So I think he was asked a question about what should happen if somebody raped his wife or something like that.
01:30:33
Agnes Callard: Oh, yes, yes, yes. That’s right. Yes.
01:30:35
Eric Weinstein: And in general, the correct answer is, “I’m not gonna answer that question, and don’t make me tell you a second time. My wife is sitting right here.”
01:30:43
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:30:43
Eric Weinstein: “Thank you very much. W- I will not be entertaining that. Don’t make that mistake again, sir.”
01:30:48
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:30:48
Eric Weinstein: Right? Because the point is, I don’t wish to open this up.
01:30:51
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:30:52
Eric Weinstein: Now, the philosopher’s impulse is, “Oh, that’s an interesting question,” very often.
01:30:56
Agnes Callard: Not if… Like, sometimes you can tell that the person asked it-
01:30:59
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no
01:31:00
Agnes Callard: … as a test. You mean not, you mean if it wasn’t asked that way.
01:31:02
Eric Weinstein: I’m just saying that very often the philosophical gambit is a pretend state in which we are f- quite comfortable entertaining anything, you know? Oh, yes. Let’s imagine that, um, that Jane uses her steak knife to kill Billy across the table-
01:31:17
Agnes Callard: Right
01:31:17
Eric Weinstein: … at the phils- philosophers dinner, right?
01:31:19
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:31:19
Eric Weinstein: And then you start talking about these- All of these sorts of things. In general, this is again that there are no tough guys. We all should have personal boundaries and limits in places where we wish to say, “I would prefer that that question not be asked,” because the question itself is a form of violence.
01:31:34
Agnes Callard: But so you say, oh, the philosopher has this, um, pretend interest and curiosity, but I would say the non-philosopher has these pretend questions, um, that they put before us, and, um, and then if we, if we say back to them, “Look, there are circumstances under which that could be a real question if somebody were really asking me of it, it of me,” and there is no question such that I could rule out in advance that anyone could honestly ask it of me in any conversation, um, that’s not the same thing as saying like, um, “I’m buying into your gambit, and I’m going to answer your pretend question as though it were a real question.”
01:32:08
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:32:08
Agnes Callard: And if I were to do that, I would have to do it with pretend interest.
01:32:11
Eric Weinstein: But let’s talk about a situation in which a question that maybe should not have been asked too much, in my opinion, must now be asked because of the changing landscape.
01:32:20
Agnes Callard: Uh-huh.
01:32:20
Eric Weinstein: So for example, the Tesla problem, which is that you might have thought trolley problems were bizarre and academic.
01:32:27
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:32:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, now that you have to commit it to code, and you have to say, “Well, what, what should I do? How many baby carriages should I-
01:32:32
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:32:32
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay. That’s an incredibly interesting situation where we can no longer afford to leave an expression unevaluated.
01:32:39
Agnes Callard: Exactly.
01:32:40
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:32:41
Agnes Callard: So there, there can’t really be questions we can’t ask because we might be in those situations. We might ask them.
01:32:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, my point is is that there can’t be a question that we can’t ask under any circumstances, but we may find that a question that was better off being unasked now must be… Like, that, that Pandora’s box could, could su- survive unopened for this many years, but circumstances have changed it-
01:33:02
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:33:03
Eric Weinstein: Right. So…
01:33:04
Agnes Callard: Right. And, um, and a, a lot of… I mean, in that situation, it might even be that, um… I think what, what we’ll probably end up doing is trying to find a lot of ways to avoid exactly answering it, right? Managing the situation in which the question has been asked rather than answering it. Um, um, I mean, I guess, right, um, these kind of, like… I, I thought we’d have self-driving cars way before now, right [laughs]? And I think we do, right? But we don’t have them because of these-
01:33:33
Eric Weinstein: I thought we were going to get stuck here, that having to commit things to code forces us to promote to consciousness and to responsibility things that we would prefer… Like, I, I believe that one of the reasons that we tend to have more sex while drunk than, than sober, uh, at least at early stages of relationship, is because what we’re actually interested in is an excuse.
01:33:55
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:33:55
Eric Weinstein: And that we want to find an excuse, which is, “I, I panicked.” You know?
01:33:59
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:33:59
Eric Weinstein: That’s a great thing to do behind the wheel, “I panicked.”
01:34:02
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:34:02
Eric Weinstein: Everybody understands a momentary split-second decision. To have a series of documented meetings in which we deliberated over this, and then w- it plays out in an actual intersection somewhere, uh, you know, in North Dakota, a- and suddenly, you know, two baby carriages, uh, are taken out so that a, a c- collection of schoolchildren are spared.
01:34:23
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:34:24
Eric Weinstein: That situation is like, well, who made this decision? And then it becomes a very thorny issue that we’re not capable of it, and we may choose to exist in an ignorant state and forgo the benefit of a technology because we can’t bear to take responsibility, uh, deliberatively for what we, what must commit to do.
01:34:42
Agnes Callard: Right. Right. And but there, um, this question is, exists at a lot of different levels, right? And so it’s like one question is, um, you know… So you’re right that we can hide behind the panic, but, like, suppose that I just had the time. So many of these TV shows, you know, like 24 or whatever are about-
01:35:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:35:00
Agnes Callard: … like cases where you’re like, yeah, there’s time pressure, but the person has like a minute to think about it.
01:35:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:35:04
Agnes Callard: And they have to make a decision, right? And, like, I might have to make a decision. Um, and I think, um, you know, the, it, it at least has to be possible for me, not necessarily to approve of the decision I make, even to be able to live with the decision I make, but to accept the fact that I made a decision. Um, I think that has to be possible, and so it has to be possible for me to entertain the question. But the question of whether we can, as a society, deliberate together about that question-
01:35:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:35:32
Agnes Callard: … and come up with sort of like an answer that we can then all live with and in some sense be governed by, that’s like a whole other level, and there are many levels in between, right?
01:35:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, the question of should we derange what it is that we know about the world so that we can live with the noble truth that may be, uh, foundational to our society. You know, i- if we s- came to understand cognitive-
01:35:51
Agnes Callard: Noble truth or noble lie?
01:35:52
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, noble lie.
01:35:53
Agnes Callard: Hmm.
01:35:53
Eric Weinstein: Right. No, noble truths are easy.
01:35:56
Agnes Callard: Yeah [laughs].
01:35:56
Eric Weinstein: You’re correct. Thanks for catching.
01:35:57
Agnes Callard: [laughs] If it’s noble on top of being-
01:35:59
Eric Weinstein: No, but, like, it’s very disturbing to those of us who, who believe in evolutionary theory that people who claim to believe in systems of selective pressures are unable to accept the basic premise, which is that they operate on s- systems with heredity, variation, and differential success. And the differential success is the aspect by which, um, one group, you know, carries an evolutionary advantage over another. The idea that there should be evolutionary advantages and disadvantages relative to different environments is toxic to many of the lies that we’ve told ourselves, uh, to create the foundation of our society. And so to, to be able to say, “Well, I absolutely, I would never question, uh, Darwin’s theory of, of, uh, s- selection. However, I also believe in all of the lies that are necessary,” and th- this is an unresolved conflict, has to do with the partitioning of the mind. I don’t see how you could do it otherwise. And the departitioned mind doesn’t seem to be a healthy state. I know that my friend Sam Harris, you know, has this idea that he should have kind of a uniform interoperable access to all aspects of his mind, but that seems like madness to me.
01:37:06
Agnes Callard: I mean, it’s one thing to think, like, “I should at any given time have access to all of it.” It’s another thing to think that with respect to any particular bit where I don’t have access, I can be sort of okay with that and be okay with the awareness of not having access. Like, um, you can’t just straight-up deceive yourself, right? You have to sort of deceive yourself behind your back. Um-
01:37:30
Eric Weinstein: No, that’s not true.
01:37:32
Agnes Callard: I, I mean, I can’t say to myself, like-
01:37:33
Eric Weinstein: Do, do you go to synagogue?
01:37:35
Agnes Callard: Sometimes.
01:37:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Don’t, don’t you find yourself straight-up deceiving yourself?
01:37:41
Agnes Callard: Let me give you an example of what I mean by straight deceiving and you can see whether-
01:37:44
Eric Weinstein: All right
01:37:45
Agnes Callard: … um, I would say no, not in synagogue. [laughs] But, um, um, but like suppose that you were like, “Look, I’ll pay you a million dollars if you believe that I’m wearing like a red suit.” Right? Um, I can’t form that belief. It would, it would be so advantageous to me to believe it, right? But like, I, I can’t do it. I’d be like, “Self, believe it.” No, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work like that, right? Um, so that’s what I mean by I can’t deceive myself. Um, there’s a kind of, um, there’s a kind of fundamental will to truth that is just built into thinking and that I can’t override manually. Um, so I, I could certainly come to believe that you’re wearing a red suit through very funny channels, right? [laughs] Um, I might even be able to take a pill. If I knew a certain pill would induce in me that belief, I could decide to take the pill and then take the pill, right? And that would be a kind of obscure way of coming to have the belief. Um, so that’s what I meant by you can’t straightforwardly, right? Um, you can indirectly, I think. Um, and people do-
01:38:37
Eric Weinstein: With very few layers of indirection.
01:38:39
Agnes Callard: I think that’s right.
01:38:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:38:40
Agnes Callard: But not with zero, right? That’s, that’s all-
01:38:42
Eric Weinstein: That’s … No, no, no, I, I, I like this point a lot.
01:38:44
Agnes Callard: Um, and, um, and so I think that that like that limit is like a certain kind of, um … That’s maybe where Sam Harris is like there’s a certain ki- or something that’s right about his position there, is that there’s a certain kind of thing I couldn’t accept, a relation I couldn’t ac- accept to myself of opacity. Um, um, and, um, when I, you know, feel … Like the story that you told about the hierarchy case, right? And the way in which somebody sort of unraveled that for you, the romantic hierarchy, right?
01:39:18
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:39:19
Agnes Callard: And brought it, brought to your own understanding what was happening and, um, gave you, uh … It’s like, it’s like shed a l- a light on yourself such that you now, um, um, can, um, can articulate it in a way that like, um, makes sense to you, right? When we’re not, when we’re not in that position with respect to something, it bothers us, and when we get into that position, that’s a real and very significant kind of progress.
01:39:49
Eric Weinstein: Interesting. Let me ask you a different question that’s been bugging me a lot.
01:39:52
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
01:39:53
Eric Weinstein: I think that the Rawlsian veil of ignorance is … There’s something terribly wrong with it, and I see it as having a trem- It’s an example of a piece of philosophy that has got a lot of purchase outside of philosophy departments.
01:40:09
Agnes Callard: Hmm.
01:40:09
Eric Weinstein: And I’m worried that it may be deranging us as a society, that this idea that identity should somehow be fungible and we should say, “Okay, we don’t know who we’re gonna come back as,” and in fact, it means something very bizarre to say that we would come back as s- as the other. Is there something wrong with Rawls, in which if we predicate too much and we, we lean on that pillar too heavily, uh, w- we may do ourselves great damage? It’s an intuition.
01:40:39
Agnes Callard: Yeah. So, um, I think yes, actually. I think I may be a little bit … I’m, I’m somewhat in agreement with you. Um, let me tell you how I would put this problem to myself. The Rawlsian move is, um, a species of a genus of stepping back moves, right? It’s like, look, there are these facts about you, but you could imagine that they were not the case. Um, just abstract them away and now make your decision.
01:41:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:41:08
Agnes Callard: But, um, why, why assume you can do that? That is, um, why assume you have that kind of metacognition available to you, right? And it’s like, look, look at Rawls and look at all the people that Rawls influenced and the Rawlsian tradition. Like, there was … It’s like there’s a very characteristic set of, say, political and social and economic views that go along with those people, and like, did they really step, did they abstract from those sufficiently in, in, in producing the theory? Like, maybe not, right? Um, and so I think that there is, um, uh, the … At, at the very least, there’s that assumption there, um, that it is, that it is possible, and it may be possible, it just may be that you can’t do it so easily. It may be that you can’t do it merely by entertaining like a thought experiment or something like that. It may be possible to really learn to abs- abstract away certain parts of your identity through a lot of work, right? Through a lot of cognitive work and through, like, experience and stuff that you do. But the idea that you could do it just by entertaining a counterfactual, I think is not right. Um, um, I, I’m not sure exactly what the implications are of that. I mean, that is, it seems to me that this problem is, like it’s an instance of something more general that I’ve criticized, but, um-
01:42:25
Eric Weinstein: Have you ever seen John Belushi and, uh, um, Joe Cocker singing Feeling All Right on Saturday Night Live?
01:42:35
Agnes Callard: No.
01:42:36
Eric Weinstein: It’s one of the great moments in television history.
01:42:39
Agnes Callard: I will, I will listen to it later.
01:42:39
Eric Weinstein: John Belushi becomes Joe Cocker, and Joe Cocker is so idiosyncratic-
01:42:44
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
01:42:44
Eric Weinstein: … that to have Joe Cocker watching himself acted by John Belushi-
01:42:49
Agnes Callard: [laughs]
01:42:49
Eric Weinstein: … they collaborate on the song, is disturbing and funny and beautiful because Belushi’s actually amazing as Joe Cocker as a singer. In that moment, I came to believe that John Belushi could run a version of Joe Cocker at least to first, second, and third order in emulation.
01:43:09
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:43:09
Eric Weinstein: To your point.
01:43:09
Agnes Callard: But that was like talent that… Right? Um-
01:43:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing, which is I have people that I could come back as, and I have people that I couldn’t come back as to varying orders of approximation. And so that aspect of non-fungible identity to me dooms the entire Rawlsian project in a way that I can’t explain to people who are under its spell.
01:43:30
Agnes Callard: Um, I, I guess, um, the, um … So m- maybe what I’m willing to agree to is slightly more limited. That is, I’m willing, um, to agree with you that, um, the idea that one can Subtract away the commitments and concerns of identity. And in effect, right, what we’re really arguing about is sort of um Rawls’s um, uh, the sort of the conceit that we can separate away comprehensive doctrines, right?
01:44:05
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:44:06
Agnes Callard: Um, “Oh, imagine if I didn’t believe in God,” or something. [laughs] And like, you know, but that might be really important to me that I believe in God. It is important to me, right?
01:44:13
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:44:13
Agnes Callard: So, um, um, and so I’m like, um, so, so, so, so I, I sort of agree that the sort of conceit that identity is so thin and trivial that you can separate it away and then do your reasoning-
01:44:25
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:44:25
Agnes Callard: … that’s a real problem. But, um, the thing I don’t agree with is that um, there is some particular barrier of identity, um, namely, like say, the set of people who you couldn’t be born as-
01:44:36
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:44:37
Agnes Callard: … where you couldn’t over time spend enough time with those people and talk to them to the point where at the end of that process you’re like, “I could be born as them.”
01:44:48
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:44:49
Agnes Callard: Um, it’s, it’s like now you can’t imagine it. Um, we c- we have the diachronic again for our drinking game. Um-
01:44:55
Eric Weinstein: Yes
01:44:55
Agnes Callard: … but like a- you know. And so, so the, the, the, the, the real, for me, the real objection like is um, that there is a difference between what I can do merely through the op- like through a mental operation that-
01:45:08
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:45:08
Agnes Callard: … I engage in alone-
01:45:09
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:45:10
Agnes Callard: … and what I can do by learning from people. And I think, uh, yeah-
01:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, I work with somebody who I can’t run very well in emulation. I do a really basic Peter Thiel impression.
01:45:20
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:45:20
Eric Weinstein: But I can only go for about 20 or 30 seconds, and then it becomes very clear that it’s just mannerisms because the guy’s operating system is wildly idiosyncratic.
01:45:28
Agnes Callard: Okay.
01:45:28
Eric Weinstein: There’s one guy who can do a better job of it, um, named A- Ajeya Royan, who, uh, could probably get to second order, and I’m, I’m kind of just blown away by it because Peter’s just too hard to model. I don’t think that that’s a convergent process in general, even when you spend a lot of time with somebody. Let me, let me switch gears. Yeah, you can have the last word on that one if you want. I don’t mean to cut you off. The, the two topics I wanna get to after this-
01:45:51
Agnes Callard: Can I say a, a quick thing about that?
01:45:52
Eric Weinstein: Please, yeah.
01:45:52
Agnes Callard: I, I, I think that, um, I, I, I want to, um, distinguish the question of whether you could model them from-
01:45:58
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:45:58
Agnes Callard: … whether you could get yourself into a position where you could imagine being born as them, I guess.
01:46:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:46:01
Agnes Callard: And so, but yeah.
01:46:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, assuming that’s in… Okay, good. Now, I wanna get into one issue, which is that this doesn’t really talk a lot about feeling, and I get s- I worry that critical thinking is something we talk a lot about and critical feeling is something we neglect.
01:46:18
Agnes Callard: I agree.
01:46:18
Eric Weinstein: Group think, yes. Group feel, no. Overthinking, yes. Over-feeling, no. These, every place that you talk about something in terms of thinking, if you substitute the word feeling and you realize that feeling is a kind of enhanced cognition, we somehow don’t feel comfortable. So I wanna talk about something that happened as we sat down in these chairs where I’m very comfortable talking to you about thinking-
01:46:40
Agnes Callard: Mm
01:46:40
Eric Weinstein: … and I’m not very comfortable talking to you about feeling.
01:46:42
Agnes Callard: Mm, interesting.
01:46:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So you were saying that you’d reviewed some episodes of the show, and I said, “Did you find them interesting?”
01:46:48
Agnes Callard: Mm.
01:46:48
Eric Weinstein: And you quite truthfully said you did. And then I said something like, um, “Were they worth your while?” Because you’d also expressed an idea that you would prefer to read things rather than listen because the, you value your time and the time is very expensive in long-form podcasting.
01:47:03
Agnes Callard: I- sorry, can I correct one thing? It’s not only that. It’s that um, I process information much better when I’m reading, and so in terms of what I can remember and think about, et cetera-
01:47:12
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:47:12
Agnes Callard: … given that I heard it, it’s like less of that.
01:47:14
Eric Weinstein: That’s true, but a- it’s also the case that something is lost without seeing the inflections, the body language, hearing the warmth or the coldness of the tone. So it’s an interesting point as to whether or not the transcript is the interview.
01:47:26
Agnes Callard: Right. What information I, there-
01:47:28
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:47:28
Agnes Callard: … so the question, what information do I prefer to preserve? Yeah.
01:47:30
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.
01:47:31
Agnes Callard: Which relates to feeling-
01:47:31
Eric Weinstein: Exactly
01:47:32
Agnes Callard: … actually. But yeah.
01:47:32
Eric Weinstein: Right. But then you sort of said that no, that wasn’t really a great exercise for you.
01:47:37
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
01:47:37
Eric Weinstein: Or something like that. That hurt me. What are your reactions to that? I think that the show is quite a bit better, and particularly one or two of the episodes that you listened to, uh, I think are extraordinary, and it made me feel that you could not possibly have seen what it is that I saw in the, in those one or two episodes because it would’ve been worth 10 hours of your time because it was so rare. Now, I could be wrong, so it’s very interesting that of course I have a vested interest, and so I’m budgeting something for my own distortion. I’m also thinking about what the feedback I’ve had, how specific the feedback is.
01:48:16
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:48:17
Eric Weinstein: Made me question whether or not I viewed you as a reliable receiver of the content of the show. Had I over-invested in my image of you as the person capable of processing what we’re doing here?
01:48:29
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:48:29
Eric Weinstein: And it made me wonder whether or not I’m doing something outside of the Academy, which the Academy sort of, uh, realizes is some cheap version of intellectualism and storytelling and narrative that would never survive in a rigorous academic context. So I went through a bunch of self-doubt, accusation, negative feeling, question, and, uh, uncertainty about you, myself, and the project that we were gonna sit down to create an episode together.
01:48:57
Agnes Callard: This is a great question. So I guess the… Let me report a bunch of different things.
01:49:01
Eric Weinstein: Go for it.
01:49:01
Agnes Callard: So the, the first thing when you said, you asked me, like, how does that feel to me when you said like, “That hurt me.” And immediately I felt hurt. Like, I felt like a, a reflexive, totally not conscious, empathetic response. Though I didn’t at the time, when I first said it, it didn’t hurt me to say that to you. Um, but it often, I don’t, um-
01:49:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, I should say both of us are quite disagreeable as people, and that’s, uh, that’s my perception, that both of us feel comfortable contradicting something if we… It’s an issue about the courage of your convictions, and I think that you in general have very high courage of your convictions and are willing to share.
01:49:34
Agnes Callard: Uh, but also it’s an issue of I had no perception at all that it hurt you when I said it, and I’m often bad at picking up on those signals, and that makes it easier to be correct.
01:49:42
Eric Weinstein: I was masking it because it was obviously a vu- vulnerable question.
01:49:45
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:49:45
Eric Weinstein: So the last thing I wanted to do was to signal to you that I could be easily hurt.
01:49:48
Agnes Callard: But fair, fair enough, and per- but per- perhaps also I could’ve, uh, you know, if I were somewhat otherwise, I would predict that or something, but I didn’t at all, actually.
01:49:55
Eric Weinstein: Cool, okay.
01:49:55
Agnes Callard: Um, so, um, um- I guess, so that, that was just my instinctive response. And now, like, um, you know, yeah, I think that, um, y- your, your, your subsequent ruminations, um, maybe the most interesting bit in them is the, the bit about academia, right? So what’s interesting to me is that at the moment at which I have this response, it, it, it, it is attri- the, is attributed to me as an academic, right? Um, like, it’s qua academic-
01:50:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, episode 19 of this show-
01:50:27
Agnes Callard: Yeah
01:50:28
Eric Weinstein: … is about the kind of things that take place in universities all over the country that I’m alleging that has not filtered out p- to, to some extent to the general public.
01:50:39
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:50:39
Eric Weinstein: Like, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure to survive in academics, causing people, in my opinion, just as we say that conc- well, let me say it differently. Concentration camp survivors from World War II, death camp survivors, will often say something if they trust you, which is, “Y- don’t celebrate us because the ones who survived weren’t the good ones. We did what we had to do to survive. It’s the ones who perished that you’re really thinking about.”
01:51:03
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:51:03
Eric Weinstein: It’s a very tough thing to say.
01:51:05
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:51:05
Eric Weinstein: In general, when I meet somebody who’s succeeded in academics, they’re always under a cloud if they did it under this era-
01:51:12
Agnes Callard: Mm
01:51:12
Eric Weinstein: … because the pressures are simply too severe.
01:51:14
Agnes Callard: Mm.
01:51:15
Eric Weinstein: Now, it, some people do better than that. You know, if you’re, if you’re good enough, you can have a peacock’s tail that you in fact are an ethical academician. But in general, people are going to have to take, uh, intellectual and moral half measures in order to survive in this competitive of, of an environment. So I was trying to talk about that in episode 19, not a- actually attempting to single out an individual. There’s the weirdness that simply talking about a problem in a particular case when people haven’t understood that problem will tend to privilege an individual. But the, but by the 100th case of it, you start to realize, oh, this is a general feature pervading the society.
01:51:53
Agnes Callard: Good. Um, so like maybe a couple of different responses.
01:51:56
Eric Weinstein: Please.
01:51:57
Agnes Callard: To, to… So I found that, um, the, the sort of, first of all, just the scientific con- it was all new to me. I didn’t know anything about this way in which the, um, um, kind of the propensity of a cell towards becoming tumorous, um, like that that cuts against its ability… Like, if you wanna, if you wanna cut down on that, you have to make it bad at repair, um, and that there’s, uh, that that was so interesting to me to learn that. Um-
01:52:23
Eric Weinstein: That, that is in weirdly the central insight rather than the, the narrative and the drama of interpersonal warfare within the academy. Just what is death?
01:52:37
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:52:37
Eric Weinstein: Why is it baked in?
01:52:38
Agnes Callard: Right.
01:52:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:52:39
Agnes Callard: Um, so but like, it, so, so, so, so as I say, there were a lot of different things, and for me, that was actually super interesting, and I went and looked and read the abstract of the paper and, um-
01:52:48
Eric Weinstein: You’re awesome. Thank you
01:52:49
Agnes Callard: … and, [laughs] um, and but I guess the thing is, like, I, I did feel that the sort of thrust of the episode was supposed to be like, “This is how, um, things can go wrong,” and I get that on an interpersonal level it is that, but the way I hear the story-
01:53:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:53:03
Agnes Callard: … there was this incredible scientific discovery that happened partly because of an academic context, and it happened, and the truth got out. And, like, it’s your brother, and so you love him, and you’re heartbroken about stuff that happened to him, but he’s not my brother. And from my point of view, like, look what academia did. It got this amazing truth out.
01:53:21
Eric Weinstein: Are you fucking kidding, Agnes? Let’s, let’s actually do this as a emotional and cognitive.
01:53:28
Agnes Callard: Good.
01:53:29
Eric Weinstein: Who gets to leave children? People who get to become professors. If you look at the professors who are left by a great professor-
01:53:38
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
01:53:39
Eric Weinstein: … the idea that the thought is what got out there and, and by virtue of the fact, you know, in some sense that, um, there was a conflict to, to div- this is like called the horse and rider problem-
01:53:51
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm
01:53:51
Eric Weinstein: … which is the idea, let’s, let’s knock the rider off of the horse, and as long as we have the horse, then that’s what matters. This is a, a complete misreading of history because the key thing that we find is a Michael Atiyah, for example, great mathematician, will leave multiple Fields Medalists as students, people who are at the very top of their game. This whole thing is about the train, the train of transmission. When you actually, uh, effectively castrate, um, or give a h- a hysterectomy to a professor so that they cannot reproduce, what you’re doing is you’re harming the ability to propagate the specialness that allows the, the, the machine tools of those discoveries. You’re, you’re confusing the important measure of the tool and the machine tool. The machine tool is the tool that makes tools.
01:54:44
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:54:45
Eric Weinstein: It’s a, I, I, I just, I think it’s an incredible opportunity, and you know, you also have written on the subject of anger.
01:54:54
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:54:55
Eric Weinstein: Right?
01:54:55
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
01:54:55
Eric Weinstein: This is a question of functional anger.
01:54:57
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:54:58
Eric Weinstein: I find that outrageous what you just said, and I don’t think that I find it outrageous because I’m f- flush with chemicals. I’m, and I don’t think it’s because it’s my brother. If I, if you were to talk to me about Douglas Prasher, Douglas Prasher was one of the people who gave us green fluorescent protein, or GFP.
01:55:14
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:55:15
Eric Weinstein: He was driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama. Before I was championing my brother, I was championing Douglas Prasher, because how could it be that the person who should have been on the Nobel Prize for GFP in full view of the academic community was driving not only a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama, but after being featured in The New York Times with a full, you know, top above the fold s- uh, picture of Doug, a year later he was still driving a shuttle bus in Huntsville, Alabama. It, so and, and I mean this with all academic ri- rigor. What the fuck is wrong with that thought process that that’s what you think?
01:55:55
Agnes Callard: So I think, like… I’m not sure you’re clear in your own mind as to exactly which bit of this you find offensive. It seems to me that from the way that you were just talking about the Douglas Prescher-
01:56:08
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:56:08
Agnes Callard: … um, that a lot of it for you is about credit and who gets credit.
01:56:14
Eric Weinstein: It’s about reproduction.
01:56:16
Agnes Callard: So your, your problem is that Douglas Prescher didn’t get to have students.
01:56:19
Eric Weinstein: Douglas Prescher didn’t get to have students. This, but, well, this is just like an, an amazing inability to understand what the game is. If you look at-
01:56:30
Agnes Callard: But your brother did get to have students.
01:56:31
Eric Weinstein: No, he didn’t.
01:56:33
Agnes Callard: Well, I mean-
01:56:35
Eric Weinstein: No, he didn’t
01:56:36
Agnes Callard: … he, he went on to teach. Didn’t he have students?
01:56:38
Eric Weinstein: He taught at an, a weird undergraduate institution with no graduate program. You’re, you’re really not getting it.
01:56:45
Agnes Callard: But didn’t he choose to teach there? And didn’t he see that teaching… His description of that teaching there was that it was extremely valuable to him-
01:56:53
Eric Weinstein: Yes, it’s very-
01:56:53
Agnes Callard: … to do it in that way
01:56:54
Eric Weinstein: … it’s a, it’s a very sweet story. And right now, for example, I have a Discord group, and I am teaching people with no formal background how to see gauge theory.
01:57:03
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:57:03
Eric Weinstein: The key point i- is that you don’t understand what a university is. It’s a very special place, and who gets to reproduce and who doesn’t is the story of our future. I mean, this is about… So we belong to this Jewish tradition, and I always use the same phrase, l’dor vador, from generation to generation. What has gone wrong in the academy that it sees things in terms of credit, status, and all of these things? It’s about the resources and the ability to reproduce students in an incredibly intensive relationship where there’s a transmission. You see, in my field, in mathematics, the top mathematicians, they have not externalized what they know into their papers. It’s a fraction of what they know.
01:57:51
Agnes Callard: Mm.
01:57:51
Eric Weinstein: You still can’t get at these relationships from reading work. You actually have to go and you have to sit with the people who produce the papers because it’s the machine tools.
01:58:03
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm. I mean, I, it’s weird to me that, like, in some way we agree more than I thought I would, we, I thought we would on that point, um, in that, look, I think that teaching is the fundamental activity of a university.
01:58:19
Eric Weinstein: I don’t think so.
01:58:20
Agnes Callard: But you… So there’s some other magic way that this reproduces? Isn’t teaching-
01:58:24
Eric Weinstein: Research is the fundamental activity of the research university. The, the problem with the university is that it’s a confusion, and if you think about the biathlon, which is what I always give as an example, I was, I… The first time I heard about the biathlon-
01:58:36
Agnes Callard: Mm
01:58:36
Eric Weinstein: … I laughed. Cross-country skiing and riflery. What the hell are these two activities doing in a one sport? Well, if you live in Finland, you know exactly why you would want to combine those two activities, because you’ve got Russians on your eastern border.
01:58:51
Agnes Callard: Mm.
01:58:52
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so in general, this is a, an activity that’s important in, in Norway and Sweden and Finland and Russia and places like that because you sh- you shoot the enemy while on skis.
01:59:02
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
01:59:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay. The teaching university is an incredibly confusing object to many people. Because of the Vannevar Bush pact called the Endless Frontier, we agreed that we were going to have the federal government’s investment in blue sky research only done through the universities effectively, and that meant we took an incredibly important facility and we confused it with teaching. Now, there’s an extent to which those are symbiotic, that they boost each other, that teaching and research are sort of, uh, happy complements to each other, and there’s a way in which they conflict.
01:59:38
Agnes Callard: But I don’t understand how you think this reproduction ha- ha- so, so, so, so, so there’s… Suppose, um, you’re gonna reproduce yourself in me. Y- how do you do that without teaching me?
01:59:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, the t- kind of teaching that we usually talk about when we talk about teaching, uh, it tends to be very focused on the undergraduates. So when you said, “Didn’t my brother get to leave students?” you’re talking about a relationship of graduates and under, uh, you’re talking about a relationship to undergraduate students because there is no graduate student there. And-
02:00:07
Agnes Callard: I g- I don’t, for me, that line is not as, uh, um, as, as heavy. But-
02:00:11
Eric Weinstein: How many, um, members of your department on the faculty don’t have PhDs?
02:00:17
Agnes Callard: Don’t have PhDs?
02:00:18
Eric Weinstein: Right.
02:00:18
Agnes Callard: I think the-
02:00:18
Eric Weinstein: Like Freeman Dyson doesn’t have a PhD.
02:00:20
Agnes Callard: Right. Um, I believe a- all of them have PhDs.
02:00:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So-
02:00:23
Agnes Callard: That’s new th- in philosophy. That is, like, the older generation, there were a number that didn’t.
02:00:26
Eric Weinstein: I understand that.
02:00:27
Agnes Callard: But now they all do.
02:00:27
Eric Weinstein: But now you have a situation in which-
02:00:28
Agnes Callard: Yeah
02:00:29
Eric Weinstein: … you have a requirement in order to be able to reproduce where you have done research this kind of close teaching, this apprenticeship.
02:00:39
Agnes Callard: Good. And so, like, I think that, um, um, you can say… So this, this helps clarify the situation. So you can say your brother was deprived of an opportunity to do a certain kind of teaching.
02:00:51
Eric Weinstein: Let’s talk about Douglas Prescher.
02:00:52
Agnes Callard: Douglas Prescher was fully deprived of opportunity to do any kind of teaching.
02:00:55
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
02:00:55
Agnes Callard: Right? Um-
02:00:57
Eric Weinstein: Furthermore, he wasn’t able to do any more of that kind of research.
02:01:00
Agnes Callard: Right.
02:01:00
Eric Weinstein: He couldn’t get resources. He, in fact, gave over his work because his grant ran out.
02:01:06
Agnes Callard: Right. Right.
02:01:07
Eric Weinstein: I’m thinking, okay, I don’t, I’m not as interested in the person who’s good at administrative games who got to stay in the game. I’m more interested in the Douglas Preschers and getting the predators the hell out of the way so that these guys can continue to work. In other words, they need a shtarker. All right? The Yiddish for a strong, you know, muscle.
02:01:27
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
02:01:27
Eric Weinstein: So you need muscle to make sure that the sweet people who actually can do great work aren’t preyed upon. Y- you have sharp minds and sharp elbows, and the key point is somebody’s got to break the sharp elbows, right? That’s very important to me.
02:01:41
Agnes Callard: I mean, um, but look, there, there’s, there’s a question about, um, and maybe you’ve seen many hundreds or thousands-
02:01:49
Eric Weinstein: Tons
02:01:49
Agnes Callard: … of these cases. I, I-
02:01:50
Eric Weinstein: I would say thousands. I would say tens.
02:01:52
Agnes Callard: Right. Um, um, and, like, i- inter, you know, in listening to that podcast, that was listening to, for me, one case, right?
02:02:00
Eric Weinstein: Right. Okay.
02:02:00
Agnes Callard: And then-
02:02:01
Eric Weinstein: But how many do-
02:02:01
Agnes Callard: … I also have to go with my own experience.
02:02:02
Eric Weinstein: So you haven’t seen much of this. I mean, you’re in the philosophy department. I know nothing about how you guys do, right? What I will say is, is that in situations, like, let’s take a situation where there’s no skullduggery within academics, but a career stops. So every Galois Couldn’t be a more important mathematician. More or less created group theory and Galois theory the day before he died-
02:02:25
Agnes Callard: In a duel, right?
02:02:26
Eric Weinstein: In a duel, right. Does it matter that he died? Yes, hugely.
02:02:31
Agnes Callard: Mm-hmm.
02:02:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, why? We have Galois theory, we have group theory. Thank you very much.
02:02:36
Agnes Callard: Right. We could have more.
02:02:37
Eric Weinstein: We could have much more. And so the issue of just sort of the casual indifference to saying that the system works, that the story and the work could proceed, is a stunning fact to me. Like, to me, um, you know, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself. And the idea that that is a normal part of academics is effectively the proof to me that there’s something wildly wrong.
02:03:05
Agnes Callard: Yeah, I mean, I guess I just think that, um, there’s a question, like, so part of that story was a lot of, like, venality and pressures that come from people wanting credit for things and people wanting, um, um, you know, caring about, um, name and reputation and et cetera. And there’s a question there, um, suppose we got rid of that. Suppose we could somehow change people’s psyche so that they didn’t care about that. Um-
02:03:31
Eric Weinstein: Suppose we had the ability to leave students and gain resources within the system without needing to care about that. Let’s proceed from there.
02:03:38
Agnes Callard: Right.
02:03:38
Eric Weinstein: Because I think this is going to be more or less almost the last thing. So it comes back to status, which is where we began with.
02:03:45
Agnes Callard: Yeah.
02:03:45
Eric Weinstein: So my claim is, is that status is approximate, and the ultimate is the ability to transmit and create knowledge. And the key issue here is, is that lacking a PhD and lacking the ability to compete for grants handily, which are status mediated, means that your line becomes self-extinguishing. That’s the real issue.
02:04:03
Agnes Callard: Yeah. But I do think that, um, this actually where it gets back to is happiness, right?
02:04:09
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
02:04:09
Agnes Callard: Um, that, um, my life can’t be about whether my line is extinguished or not. My life has to be something the meaning of which comes home to me. Um, and, um, like, it’s not that that’s not integrated into an activity in which I try to put something forward, but, like, the, the point of, um, the pursuit of knowledge can’t be to be always handing down the tools to get, to hand down the tools some more, right? We can’t keep deferring.
02:04:39
Eric Weinstein: What a beautiful place for our next disagreement. You are taking the point of view of Soma, I of Germ, you of the self, and I of lineage. So I think we have a great opportunity to begin our next conversation. Agnes, I just want to say, I find you utterly charming, a huge workout mentally. It’s a great pleasure. You’re welcome to come back anytime, and, um, thank you so much for dropping by.
02:05:00
Agnes Callard: Thank you.
02:05:02
Eric Weinstein: All right. You’ve been through The Portal with, uh, Dr. Agnes Callard from the University of Chicago’s Philosophy Department. Please subscribe to us on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. And if we could ask you to go over to YouTube and not only subscribe, but click the bell icon to be, uh, notified whenever we drop our next video episode. We’ll try to tighten up the time between the audio and the video releases. Be well, everybody, and hope to see you soon. [outro music]
