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58. Adam Mastroianni - Let Me Be Useful

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Description

Adam Mastroianni (Website, X) is an experimental psychologist and the writer of Experimental History. He earned his PhD in psychology at Harvard before leaving academia to pursue research and writing independently.

I first came across Adam through “Good conversations have lots of doorknobs,” which remains one of my favorite essays on Substack.

We talk about why psychology is stuck, why science needs people willing to look stupid, and how prestige can lead you toward a life you don’t want. From there, unpack Adam’s coffee bean test for figuring out what to do, getting “de-bogged,” and what improv teaches us about better conversations (or: create doorknobs). We also discuss writing that surprises its author, his upcoming book, The Strangest Idea in the World, and the prayer he says before publishing: “Let me be useful.”

I hope you leave a little more willing to question what seems obvious, risk looking stupid, and spend your time in ways you actually enjoy.

Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Notion AI works across your documents and context, while custom workers can automate recurring tasks and connect with your other tools. You can also explore Notion’s Knowledge Board, which evaluates how AI models perform on real knowledge-work tasks. Learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

This episode is supported by Google. Google Antigravity is Google’s agentic development platform. Describe what you want to build, and its agents can plan the work, write and run code, and test the result, with plans and changes you can review along the way.

Gemini 3.5 Transcribe turns audio into text with a choice of verbatim and Smart modes. Verbatim mode keeps fillers and false starts, and supports speaker labels and word-level timestamps to help you check the transcript against the recording. Smart mode removes filler words and repetitions and formats speech into readable text. I used Antigravity and Gemini 3.5 Transcribe to build a Mac app for producing and reviewing Dialectic transcripts.

Timestamps

  • 04:33 Start: Why Psychology is Stuck & The Focus of Adam's Blog
  • 14:43 The Scientific Virtues of Stupidity and Rebellion & Escaping the Prestige Trap
  • 25:08 Patronage for Weirdos
  • 33:53 Progress in Psychology
  • 52:15 Figuring Out What to Do, The Coffee Bean Test, and Unpacking Adam's Day-to-Day
  • 01:03:22 Getting De-bogged and Making Ideas Land
  • 01:14:11 Conversational Doorknobs: Giving and Taking
  • 01:22:23 Blogging, Community, and Rules we Invent
  • 01:28:35 Writing Advice, Thick Art, Giving The Reader an Egg to Crack
  • 01:44:03 Adam's First Book: The Strangest Idea in the World
  • 01:53:23 Closing Questions

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Transcript

Timestamps refer to the final episode audio (2:06:16). This transcript contains only the interview. The intro, trailer, and Google and Notion reads are omitted; their elapsed time remains included in the timestamps.

04:33 Start: Why Psychology is Stuck & The Focus of Adam's Blog

Jackson: (4:33) How you feeling?

Adam: (4:34) Feel good. Yeah.

Jackson: (4:35) Adam Mastroianni, thank you for joining me. Welcome back to New York.

Adam: (4:38) Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jackson: (4:40) I guess I should state up front, you've done a lot of work on when conversations end and whether they end when people want them to. So hopefully for both your and the listener's sake, we have a conversation that people don't want to end too soon.

Adam: (4:55) The ultimate effect of that research, I think, has just been to make people feel more self-conscious. I don't actually wish I could take it back, but I don't feel like anyone has been better off for knowing that about me.

Jackson: (5:06) Well, both about you—I mean, one of the things I think you wrote somewhere is, especially with the Jimmy Kimmel stuff, a lot of the media reaction was just, "Everyone's awkward and people want to end conversations sooner," which wasn't really the—

Adam: (5:17) It's not what it said. But what it said is kind of complicated. You sort of have to get three levels deep before you really get it. And by the time I'm trying to get there with—I meet someone at a party and they're like, "Oh, what do you work on?" and I mention that—by the time I get to level two already, the light has gone out of their eyes and the fear has come in. And I'm like, "I'm a ghost that haunts parties and makes them worse for people. See ya," and I float back into the wall.

Jackson: (5:44) I guess that's the peril of being a psychologist broadly.

Adam: (5:46) Yeah, yeah.

Jackson: (5:49) You said there is no thing in the mind called creativity. And you've talked about why it is so important to study verbs and not nouns. Can you explain that?

Adam: (5:59) Yeah, this comes out of a long dissatisfaction with psychology not knowing what it's doing, being pre-paradigmatic, in my opinion. And I think a mark of this is we kind of just pick words and study them. "Creativity—that's a thing, right? Let's make a scale. How creative are you? How creative is this thing? When are you more creative? Let's turn up the temperature. Do you get more creative then? Let's make you sleepy. Are you more creative?" And not really realizing, what is it that we're talking about? And I don't just mean we all need to agree on the definition. I mean we need to have a mechanistic view of the mind where we can point at the thing and say, "That is what creativity is in the mind." It acts—it is like this piece that does this thing—rather than just—obviously we know that people make stuff. We know there is a propensity to make stuff. We can gesture at that propensity by calling it creativity. That is totally different from understanding it. And I think if we understood the mind the same way we would understand a car engine, it wouldn't just be, "Well, the engine has propulsion. We know the engine makes going. It makes a go-force." That's the difference. It's like, no, the piston comes down and it moves the thing, and that's where the propulsion comes from. When we can get to that same point with, "The mind has this module that does this thing and exerts this force on this other thing, and that's what we say the creativity is"—I think we're very far from that. But part of the reason we're far is we're not even trying to get closer.

Jackson: (7:26) Do you think there's some—is there some kind of implicit part of this that is maybe people, personality, our minds are more about a string of actions and what we do next than some noun in the first place? Or am I reaching there?

Adam: (7:42) Yeah, I mean, I think we invent these nouns because they're a useful way of talking about things. And in fact, they're so useful that it's hard to leave them behind. This is why I think it's much harder to do psychology than it is to do almost anything else. The hard part doesn't come from the difficulty of doing math in your head or holding a lot of concepts. It comes from letting go of things that are too intuitive. This is why I think we haven't made more progress. It's why I think psychology got its start 250 years after physics did. It's not that psychology was harder than physics in the sense of, "Well, there's more math" or whatever. It's that what we had already was too intuitive and too useful for us to realize that it wasn't doing anything. And I think this is still why we haven't made more progress.

Jackson: (8:29) That's a fascinating frame. It probably also indicates why even stuff like personality types or tests—we tend to be drawn to them in part because there's aspects of it that just sort of feel intuitive. And also maybe there's something about, "Oh, I know how my own mind works." Whereas I've learned pretty early that my intuition on a lot of physics is just bad.

Adam: (8:53) Yes, and this is why physics can exist, because you can have your illusion of explanatory depth dispelled. You can realize that you don't know something. So if you're like, "I don't know, it seems like heavy things would fall faster than lighter things," if you at least have the notion to test it, you will discover that they fall at the same rate. And then you're like, "All right, well, that's weird. What is heaviness if not the propensity to fall faster? What's going on there?" And as soon as you're in that world, then you're like, "Okay, now I can do physics because I can ask the question." But if you're like, "What's personality? Well, you have your extroversion and you have your agreeableness," and that's kind of everything. Then there's no visual illusion, there's no experiment I can show you that could be like, "You have no idea." We have no idea what personality is, and we need to start from square one to figure it out.

Jackson: (9:46) Yeah, that's really helpful. Your blog's almost at 100,000 subscribers. Congratulations for that. You've been full-time on it for maybe four years? Five years?

Adam: (9:55) I started in 2022 and I walked away from academia in 2023 or '24. The years blend together anymore.

Jackson: (10:06) You are well into the compounding; things are working. You've written about a huge part of writing being about your motive. And maybe it's worth noting that motive and goal aren't always the same. But I think your stated goal of the blog on the about page is about doing science in the open. You're an experimental psychologist, all this stuff. I'm curious at this vantage point, to what extent is the blog in line with that goal that you set out for, which is doing more science in the open versus some other thing or some amalgamation of other things?

Adam: (10:47) It is many things. I have realized that what I like to do is take something that I think is underthought, under-understood, not fully worked out, and then do the working out and the thinking that it takes to get it there. Sometimes that might mean collecting new data in the way that I used to do when I was a PhD student and a postdoc. And so I will still do that from time to time when I think that's necessary. It is rarer and rarer that that feels like the thing that's missing. Part of this, I think, is because I think that psychology is pre-paradigmatic. And so to really make progress in the field of psychology, I kind of think it's going to be a lot more of depriving people of iodine and seeing if they want iodine and doing these kinds of studies that I think are cool and I'd like to help with. I'm not going to be the iodine guy, most likely. And so the kind of research that I'm good at, I think I'll still do from time to time, but it's not the kind of research that I think is going to be—100 more of these is going to make the future of psychology. That's why I do less of it now. I still think it's cool. I still think it's cool to tell stories that have some numbers attached to them. I have found it really helpful and meaningful in my life. I think other people do too. I don't think it's a recipe for science.

Jackson: (12:00) What is the boundary of that core orientation around adding more clarity? You could write about anything and I would probably be excited to read about it. A lot of your work—you might not like this, but I think a lot of your work could be described as actually effective, actually good self-help, even.

Adam: (12:17) I hate it. No, no, it's fine.

Jackson: (12:19) Granted, you could say that about most of Substack.

Adam: (12:21) Yeah.

Jackson: (12:21) Maybe we can talk more about some of this later, but what is the thing beyond your interest? What is the filter that allows it to be Experimental History versus not qualified?

Adam: (12:33) It is: Does this idea possess me and refuse to go away until I learn to exorcise it by putting the right words in the right order? That has been the filter. Nothing to me has felt off-limits. By the time I'm done with an idea, it is going to have the imprimatur of the way that I approach that idea. So probably at some point I'm going to touch on the psychology of this thing because that's what I know and the way I think about things. But even if it doesn't, that's fine. For now, I've been lucky enough that no one's ever been in my comments or in my email being like, "You're not doing what it says on the tin." It's just: Was it good? Was it helpful? Was it interesting? Was it true? That's what I'm going for.

Jackson: (13:17) How much of what you do—if you're willing to not be too dogmatic around the term—how much of what you do is science?

Adam: (13:28) I think that we have a too-restrictive view of what science is. Do I gather a lot of data anymore? I will probably do one or two of those a year—here's a totally new dataset that I gathered or helped gather. But I don't think the gathering of the data is what makes it science in the first place. There is a lot of theoretical working out of what is going on that helps push knowledge forward. If I was still an academic, this would be a very important distinction for me. Now, it all feels like knowledge work. I do see some distinction between the kind of person who's going to be like, "No, I really need to figure out what this theory means and I have to test it twenty different ways, and I'm going to be the person who gives my life to do that." I'm not going to be that person. I don't think I was ever going to be that person. Actually, if you look at a lot of psychologists, almost none of them are that person. So I think there's a lot of different kinds of useful work. What is the amount on the blog that is strictly science? Probably 10% or less. What is the amount that is relevant to pushing forward the bounds of knowledge? Baby, everything I do.

14:43 The Scientific Virtues of Stupidity and Rebellion & Escaping the Prestige Trap

Jackson: (14:43) Speaking of science, you reference Slime Mold Time Mold all the time. You are specifically keen on their Scientific Virtues. One line from that post I really loved: "Science is too important to be taken seriously." I'd love to talk through some of them and talk a little bit about how you've thought about cultivating scientific virtuosity.

Adam: (15:11) I love that piece in the sense that it takes everything that you think is right about science and argues for the opposite of it.

Jackson: (15:19) Maybe I should just list them:

Adam: (15:22) Yeah.

Jackson: (15:22) Stupidity, arrogance, laziness, carefreeness, beauty, rebellion, and humor.

Adam: (15:27) To start with stupidity, this is basically what I was saying before about why psychology hasn't made more progress. We're not willing to be stupid enough. We are not willing to say we don't really know anything.

Jackson: (15:40) Stupidity, in this specific sense, is almost like rejecting your intuition.

Adam: (15:45) Yeah, I think that's one take on it. It's also a form of arrogance to say that how much has accumulated is not that much. It's not zero, and I fight with psychologists all the time about this. They'll be like, "Well, what about this?" and I'm like, "Okay, yes, but we are arguing about whether the confidence interval includes zero or doesn't." If that's the bound of our conversation, then clearly we're not doing really well. Rebellion is also a form of this. Look, you basically learn how to be a scientist by pattern matching. No one ever really sits you down and says, "Here's how it's done." You look at the papers and you go to the talks, and then you kind of do the Mad Libs version of that, the same way people learn to do stand-up. That's good when things are going well and all we need is more of what we already have. It's not good when things are going poorly and what we need is something completely different.

Jackson: (16:49) Stand-up definitionally needs to be super deviant.

Adam: (16:53) Does it? You go to most stand-up shows and the guy's going to do jokes about women, and his wife, and his girlfriend. If he's a parent, there are going to be jokes about the kids.

Jackson: (17:05) At the very least, the stuff that is—maybe this is even wrong. It would be interesting to look at the twenty most popular Netflix specials to see if they are more convergent, or do some of the analysis you've done on other parts of media. But my intuition would be that the more deviant stuff is rewarded more so than in science.

Adam: (17:21) Maybe. I do no stand-up now. I used to do a lot of stand-up when I was living in the UK, so I sat through a lot of gigs. These were, by and large, semi-pro gigs. I know as soon as he gets up—and it's almost always "he"—exactly what this set is going to be. I think when we're thinking of stand-up, we're thinking of the best stand-up.

Jackson: (17:47) But I think that is relevant for scientists because part of the challenge of science is that—at least as I understand a lot of your work correctly—science is a strong-link problem, and thus we have a ceiling problem in science.

Adam: (18:02) Yeah. If we're thinking about the best stand-up, at some point that comedian had to think from first principles about what it is we're doing here. When you look at interviews with really serious comedians, they think really specifically about what they're doing, the function of it, and where you come from in the beginning. I think this mass middle that's not that good doesn't do that. For the best science we have, I think there is some thinking from first principles: What is it we're doing here? Why are we doing this? Then there's some serendipity and some accidents. But if you don't get the people who are trying to ask from the beginning, "Why would I do this at all? Why get out of bed and do this?" then you don't get any of the best stuff.

Jackson: (18:52) Yeah, and this is certainly not news to you. Science is such a high-status — it's such a status-laden space, maybe is the right way to put it. Even looking from the outside, my first intuition, which I think most normal people would agree with, is, "Oh, I couldn't do science." Because it's like you need a big badge.

Adam: (19:15) Yeah, it's super status-laden. I wish I had a better answer as to whether it was always as status-laden. I think it was somewhat less so in the past; at least there were many more different status hierarchies, so we weren't all competing on the same ladder. There were different ways of becoming prominent. Now there is really one way of becoming prominent: going to elite schools and publishing in elite journals. I think that is part of what makes — there's always going to be status struggle, but what makes it really destructive is when it's all struggle on a single dimension. And so there's no way of being like, "Okay, I'm not going to compete this way. I'll compete over here, and maybe I can do something more interesting over there."

Jackson: (19:59) Right. To me — again, I don't have a wide comparison set — but you seem to have embodied at least a lot of those virtues in your approach to things. Maybe that was just a sort of default frustration or resistance to academia, but how have you cultivated those?

Adam: (20:20) I think it was like a reaction to a series of degradations and humiliations. I don't think I was anything like this five years ago.

Jackson: (20:28) Okay, well, I would argue that's a good thing, then. There's hope.

Adam: (20:31) Yeah, there's hope. I mean, I've been friends with the Slimes for a long time, and I can remember talking on the phone a long time ago defending the journals. I was the guy defending them, saying, "Well, you know, they don't work perfectly, but the correlation is there on average." I feel very far from that now. I think part of it was a bunch of things that forced me to see that this can't be the way to do it. I've talked about some of this before, but things like being forced to use the abbreviation 'y' instead of the word "years" in the introduction of a paper. Just like, "Many y ago." And I'm like, that's not the word I wrote. Could we please just make it slightly more readable? And they fought me on this. I'm like, this is so small and it's so stupid, but I want to use the words that I want to use. I don't want to make it slightly harder for people to read. Already they can't access it if they don't have a .edu email address. Or things like — without going into too much detail to not get people in trouble — getting an accidental email from an editor at a journal revealing that the only reason we'd been published is because my advisor has a famous name. That was what got us in the door in the first place. I realized, "Oh man, there is no Wizard of Oz thing going on here." At the same time, I was constantly being told, "Look, just don't be yourself now. You can wait until later, and then you can do whatever you want." But I heard that at every stage, not just in academia. There was a moment when I was at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. It felt for a second like you could do anything. And then you get there, and the warden of Rhodes House, who was a big McKinsey guy at the time, was like, "What you guys should really do after you go here is work for McKinsey for a couple years, and then you can do whatever you want." And I'm like, I thought putting in our time was what we did to get here. And now you're telling me there's another stage where I have to put in the time? I know when I get to that stage, they're going to tell me I've got to put in some more time. There's no one who's ever going to tell me that my princess isn't in another castle. So if the princess is always going to be in another castle, I have to stop going into the castles. This also happened in academia: "Just get into a good program and then you're set." "Actually, get your first job and then you're set." "Actually, get tenure and then you're set." "Now you have tenure, but now you have students, and they need all the things you needed." So you just keep doing this until when? Half of it was being pushed away, being like, "Oh, I have to do all these things that feel degrading." And half of it was realizing I’m never going to get out of this cycle unless I leave myself.

Jackson: (23:17) Lots of people get stuck in a kind of inertia. At least my sense is most people opt out pretty quick or they stay in academia forever. You finished a PhD after doing all this. Why do you think you took it that far? And what was the conversion point where you said, "I finished the PhD; now I'm going to abandon it all"?

Adam: (23:45) The reason I finished the PhD is I loved my PhD. I loved my advisor, and I loved my lab. That was part of what made it so hard to leave later, because I kept thinking, "Well, there's a good version of this." It took me a long time to realize that version existed despite everything, not because of it. I kind of needed the context of being in other places to realize that was really exceptional. There's no one like my advisor who was willing to turn down everything other than talking to me and his other students. At the end, it was just me. People would be like, "Hey, do you want to do this really cool thing that would increase your prestige?" and he’d be like, "No, I have enough of that. I'd rather just talk to Adam." I just thought everybody was like that. I didn't realize that very few people are. So part of it was that, and part of it was that at the beginning, you still feel a lot of the pressure — you feel the pressure of having to get a job — but it really becomes much more acute at the end. At the beginning, when I was going to conferences, people were talking about ideas. By the end of my PhD, when I was going to conferences, people were talking about jobs. I can't just go to conferences and be like, "Jobs, jobs, where are the jobs? Who's got the jobs? Did you get a job?" I got a job, but I did two postdocs after that. I'm a slow learner on some things, so I still spent three years after that consciously decoupling.

25:08 Patronage for Weirdos

Jackson: (25:08) It's funny, you've talked a little bit about this — or maybe I don't know if it's exactly your wording — but something along the lines of how it's basically like everyone is working for the same person in academia and in science. Maybe I was putting in some of my own ideas here that it's almost more homogeneous than the previous era where patronage just funded science. Have you thought at all — and I know there's some earlier stuff around Science House — but have you thought at all about how, in some sense, what you do is patronage? I would argue it's a slightly different thing, or it's mass patronage or something like that. I don't know if you've — maybe you did take some money from Tyler Cowen and Emergent Ventures at some point? Have you thought at all about new prototypes for patronage or what makes a good patron to the extent maybe things swing? That's actually how we get a wider distribution in science.

Adam: (25:59) Yes, totally. To the first part of your question, it's weird that academia isn't weirder — that there aren't weirder people in it. You can see the weirdness decreasing at each career stage. My PhD cohort was pretty weird. I mean, there were people in it who were like, "I was a good psych student, and I'm a good psych graduate student. I'll be a good psych professor. I do everything right." I think it's totally cool, but you can't have a whole field that is only that kind of person. In my graduate cohort, there were people doing other stuff. There were people who were [Comp Lit?] undergrads and had really weird, interesting backgrounds. I think one of them got kicked out for kind of shady reasons, but while he was there, he was an interesting guy to be around. He might have been doing some scams; we don't know.

Jackson: (26:44) More people getting kicked out, by the way, as a process.

Adam: (26:48) Yeah, exactly. If we're kicking nobody out, then probably we're not taking enough risk. There was someone who was 10 years older than all of us and had a kid and just had a very different perspective on it. That intellectual life was really rich because of that. The most interesting people are not on track to be professors. And that's not to say anything against the people who are; they're good. But by "interesting," I mean off the beaten track, because they've been filtered out. So what are the mechanisms by which we can create something for them? There's something I've been working on a little bit for a while and finding over and over again that you really have to find someone who is willing to risk their reputation on it. This, I think, is the bottleneck and the thing that people are not willing to do. There's a lot of money sloshing around in alternative science right now, with people saying, "Let's build alternative institutions." And it seems, over and over again, what they end up doing is building the same kind of institutions, just with a futuristic font. They're like, "All right, what are we going to do with all of our cool money and our cool freedom? What if we get some people from Stanford here?" And then they just port in all the same people. Of course, no one wants to look like an idiot, but if you have a bunch of money, shouldn't you be able to buy yourself out of caring about looking like an idiot? That's what it should be for. That's what the money's for. There's a bunch of these projects going on now. I hope they succeed, but I can see that the problem with legibility is that it's legibility. That's the whole thing about it. If what you want is to find these weird people and give them a home, they're going to look weird. When I ran this prototype Science House, which was what I got the Emergent Ventures grant for — literally seven weeks of getting a couple of weird undergrads and trying to train them and seeing if we could do this...

Jackson: (28:36) Yeah.

Adam: (28:36) It's not easy to run this kind of thing because they're not the goody-two-shoes people. My students were great and I loved them. At the same time, we had a stealth sublet that we almost got kicked out of because they were playing the ukulele too loud or something. These are the kinds of things you're going to deal with. If you don't want to deal with that — like Ruxandra Teslo has a good article about this — the problem of the weird nerd is that they're a weird nerd, and you've got to be willing to deal with their weirdness. This is what I think is missing. It's not the money; it is the appetite for reputational risk. I don't know how to solve that problem to the point where I have decided not to spend a ton of my time trying to do it. I'm just like, I'll do what I can with the resources I have. If I find the right person who I think is down for this, let's do it.

Jackson: (29:27) Find the right person to fund, or find the right person to be the funder?

Adam: (29:31) Both. Both.

Jackson: (29:33) Because I've talked with others and I've interviewed Tyler. I've talked to other people about this. Tyler is pretty good at this. It's hard to separate how much of it is the compounding — now people like you route themselves to Tyler, and half the people I've interviewed have been funded by Emergent Ventures — or if Tyler Cowen is a one-of-one person. Both of those are definitely true, but it does seem that maybe one of the things that would just be really good is if we had seven of those and not one of those. Maybe there are, and they're less legible to me, but my sense is it probably starts more with the funder than it does with the talent.

Adam: (30:08) Yeah, I think there's plenty of talent. It's leaking out of the pipeline all the time. It's not easy to identify. I don't think there's an overwhelming amount of it; it takes a lot of work to identify it. You're not going to find these people via applications because they don't quite look right on paper. You really have to know them in depth. They come from weird places, they have weird backgrounds, but they're there. And if you find the right people, they can find the right people. It really is: Do you have someone with a considerable amount of money who doesn't care what other people think about them, and who doesn't want this to be a vanity project? The reason so many people give to Yale or whatever is because they bask in the reflected glory of that. And it's like, man, I hope that this wouldn't be true of me, and maybe it would. Maybe this is what happens to anybody who makes a lot of money — that I still need some reflected glory. "Why don't I just toss $300 million and get some reflected glory?" I hope that if you have that amount of money, you just stop caring what other people are going to say about you and just do something cool. Don't care if it fails. Some of these are going to fail. Everyone says, "Oh, we're willing to take risks. We're willing to see if it fails." No one actually wants to do that because it sucks. It sucks to fail, and people laugh at you.

Jackson: (31:23) What do you think it says about the fact that even someone like you is kind of like, "I'm not really going to spend as much time on this anymore"?

Adam: (31:29) Yeah. Well, it's because I don't really think it's what I'm good at. There are some people really good at it, like, "I'm going to find the right person, I'm going to make a partnership with them, and then we're going to buy this house." I'm not good at that stuff. I'm willing to do it if it will help this happen, but I also don't think that I personally am going to be the person to write the next chapter of psychology. But I do think I know those people, and I want to help them.

Jackson: (31:55) Right. And you could switchboard for that whole cluster, right?

Adam: (31:57) Yes, exactly. But I have seen what it looks like to succeed doing this, and you spend the rest of your life being a fundraiser and a human resources manager. And I'm not good at that. I don't want to do it. I will do this as much as I need to to try to accomplish these goals, but I'm much better doing what I do all day.

Jackson: (32:13) Do you think you can be a router? Maybe—not to flatter myself—maybe one of those people is listening, or people with money are listening. To what extent can you be... what would it look like for you to be a person who is, at the very least, the Tyler Cowen-type? Those people are probably reading your blog. Is there a mechanism for some of that to be—maybe it's the blog, something like the Blog Jamboree?

Adam: (32:41) I don't know exactly. Yeah. So, my friends Slime Mold Time Mold—less legible than me—they blog under the name Slime Mold Time Mold. They seem like crazy people. They are crazy people, but they're very smart, and I think kind of the future of science depends on them. I am more legible. When I talk to academics, they think I'm crazy, and I'm like, "You don't even know. There's a whole level crazier than this." But I can talk to them much more easily because I have a foot further into their world. And so I have sort of thought of myself as an apostle to the normies—that I can speak this language, but I can also turn around and see the crazy. And so if someone is looking for, like, "Okay, we're looking for the crazy people, but we want a kind of normal-ish person to tell us that the crazy people are good," that is a role that I can play and that someone has to play. And then if Science House ultimately happens—which is my dream for, basically, a hacker house for basic research—I'm happy to be an uncle to that house. I can help with the ideas and putting together the talks and how we write about it. How do you tell one good idea from another? I'm probably not the person to be like, "Okay, what we next need to do is figure out if there is a drive for iodine." That's what the mom and dad of the house should do, and the uncle should come by to help nudge things one way or the other.

33:53 Progress in Psychology

Jackson: (33:53) Makes sense. Speaking of one of The Scientific Virtues—of stupidity, to ask a stupid question, probably: what is psychology, man?

Adam: (34:02) I don't know. Like, right now, it's nothing. There's a line from a Paul Valéry or William James essay—maybe it's even from The Principles of Psychology—it's like, "What is it? It's a snatch of gossip and it's basically nothing." And, you know, he's writing over 100 years ago. I showed that to my advisor at one point and I was like, "It's still true today." He's like, "No, it's not." We disagree about this a lot. But I think, in the ideal form, it is the attempt to understand the mind and the mechanisms thereof. And I think we are just very early in its history. And I think, hopefully, if we do things right, 50 years from now or 100 years from now, what people imagine when they think of psychology won't be sitting on a red plush couch free-associating with a therapist. It will be something like, "Oh, this is what tells me why I was sad and helped me feel better." Not through this kind of mysterious process of interacting with the modern version of a shaman, but through understanding the actual functions of my mind, where they went wrong, and how to make them better again. "Oh, this is what helps me understand how one person is different from another and gives me a schema for thinking about that." "Oh, this is what helps me understand my subjective experience, like why it is this way." I don't think we can do those things very well right now, but if we could, that would be psychology.

Jackson: (35:24) You say this—and this is a quote—"But psychology, like all sciences, is about discovering the differences between seemingly similar things and discovering the similarities between seemingly different things." Can you say more about why that is, both for psychology and maybe for science broadly, such an important frame?

Adam: (35:45) Yeah. So, early on in chemistry, things seem really similar—it's like dirt. All dirt's kind of dirt. You know, it's brown, it comes from the ground, some is kind of red and more clay-y. But just like, "dirt is dirt." Progress comes from realizing the dirt is made up of a lot of different things. And I'm laughing thinking of—

Jackson: (36:04) —like you've written about depression. All the things we call depression.

Adam: (36:07) Exactly. It's like that right now in psychology. We're like, "Depression: it's feeling sad and, maybe there's a few different types and a few ways to get there, but it's really the same thing." And I just think eventually we realize, no, what we call depression now is 17 different things. Each of them has different causes. Each of them should have different treatments. And I think the way you get there is—and I've written about this, this comes from my friends Slime Mold Time Mold, in a proposal of thinking about this—if you think of the mind as a series of control systems, just like your thermostat. It has to read the temperature. It has to adjust the AC or the heating to keep the temperature at the right point. If the mind is doing this in a bunch of different ways—not just for something like hunger, which is obvious, but for something like social contact, for something like status—then if there's all these systems in the mind, if you look at the way that they can break down, then you realize, "Oh, actually, all these different components, if you break them in different ways, you get different malfunctions." And a lot of them look like what we call depression right now. But you get them for different reasons, and the way to fix them is also different. And so it might be that, oh, breaking this component makes it such that you don't get reward from taking actions that restore balance in your control systems. That's very different from you break this part and you don't generate the plans for the things. So is the problem a feedback problem? Is the problem an imagination problem? These are very different kinds of things. And I mean, who knows if that's the right way to think about it, but that is at least a way to think about it that I think can make progress.

Jackson: (37:45) I think there’s a related quote. You say the fact that we have a noun or verb for something does not mean that it's a unit or a rule. Until you know what board game you're playing, you're stuck describing things in terms of behaviors, symptoms, and abstractions. As you mentioned, you've written a lot about this paradigmatic view—the cybernetic psychology stuff that they've investigated. Perhaps the answer isn't the last thing you said, which is just that it's one plausible board game and we just need more. But to take this board game analogy, this rules-on-the-field analogy, would we be better off going for grand board games or for hyper-specific ones? Maybe there's something in the iodine comment that's getting at what is the right way to model how progress like this might actually happen.

Adam: (38:28) Yeah, I think we go for trying to figure out the board games that we have the tools to understand at that level, and then that might tell us whether there's a bigger one—like this is a mini-game inside of a game—or whether there are many games inside this one. That's always going to be true. Part of the reason I keep bringing up iodine is that it is very clear that there are drives in the human mind for nutrition of various kinds. We call this feeling hunger. If you don't eat for a while, you start imagining hamburgers. If you don't eat for a long time, you start fantasizing about opening a restaurant. If you don't eat for a really long time, you can bring yourself to eat the flesh of another human. These are very strong drives. What if, in fact, this isn't one drive for "food"? What if this is many drives for protein, for carbohydrates, for sugars? And how far can we go? Is there a drive for iodine? If you don't have iodine, you're in trouble; that's how you get goiter. If you deprive people of it, do they crave it? If you give it to them, do they stop craving it? If we can do this kind of work, then eventually we might be able to bootstrap ourselves into more complex areas. For instance, loneliness also seems kind of like a drive. You feel lonely, and then you're like, "I kind of want to hang out with people." It seems to work differently. It's certainly not as strong as hunger. If you deprive someone of social contact, they definitely desire it, but they kind of just break down. The tools that we develop doing these more granular drives that we understand better might be able to help us. If we can do that, then we might be able to apply those to more complex drives. Who knows? Maybe, maybe not. But I think that's why we would start with the things we understand better.

Jackson: (40:08) Or that even just have the simplest feedback loop.

Adam: (40:10) Exactly. Yes.

Jackson: (40:11) Yeah. You spoke with Derek Thompson about some of the loneliness stuff at one point, and he had supposed this idea that maybe it's actually that Americans aren't lonely; they're solitary, and their loneliness drive isn't kicking anymore.

Adam: (40:28) Yes.

Jackson: (40:28) If you didn't have the internet and you were alone for a while, you'd probably be really lonely. But if you have the internet, you get this simulacrum of connection. There are probably all of these ways that maybe that ties into depression or whatever else. In the same way that if I go into a candy store, all those primal instincts are going, "Holy cow!"

Adam: (40:47) Yeah, this is a piece that I've wanted to write about the aloneness or loneliness epidemic as a drive failure. Nobody leaves an all-you-can-eat buffet hungry; they leave too full. But people can leave parties feeling lonely. That's weird. "Loneliness epidemic" in itself feels like an oxymoron. Epidemic means many people have it, but loneliness means we're alone. It's not like there's a lack of people. So what's going on there? I think what might be going on is whatever drive we have to seek out other people evolved in a situation where it didn't have to be that strong or that specific. Not that traditional societies today are a perfect view into what the human past was, but to the extent that they are, they spend a ton of time together. Even if they hunt solo, they have multi-generational housing. If they do something on their own, they come back, and they're spending a considerable amount of time with each other. You read accounts from Jared Diamond where he's hanging out with indigenous Papua New Guineans and they talk all the time. They wake up in the middle of the night and talk to each other. In modern life, you can go days without seeing someone else in person, and that can be normal. So I think we did not most likely evolve in a situation where we were in solitary conditions where we had to desire our way out of them. That desire didn't have to be that strong. This is why when people are in situations that would make them lonely, you get some of that drive, but it's nowhere near as precise a drive as hunger is. Also, you don't die, by the way.

Jackson: (42:20) We can even substitute hunger. So of course it would make sense that even a less obvious feedback loop could be subverted in some weird way.

Adam: (42:29) Yes. This could be a case where we are being put in a situation that we don't have the drives to get ourselves out of.

Jackson: (42:35) This is kind of a frustrating and dumb question, but if you were to hypothesize about 20 years from now—sufficiently far away that we have made some paradigmatic progress, maybe including but not limited to the cybernetic control system view—do you have any hunches? You're allowed to be wildly speculative, and hopefully no one's going to hold you to them too aggressively.

Adam: (42:56) Hunches about...

Jackson: (43:00) Just what plausible board games might be, to use that metaphor.

Adam: (43:05) Yeah, maybe this is—

Jackson: (43:07) Maybe this drive frame is a cut on one of them.

Adam: (43:09) Yeah, I think it is hard for me to imagine another one only because they're hard to imagine in the first place. I'd be really surprised if this had nothing to do with it. I'd also not be surprised if we find that it goes out this far and then, just like geometry eventually goes from Euclidean to non-Euclidean, the rules change, and the units change. I could see that as well. It seems pretty clear that there are some things in the mind that probably aren't governed by control systems, like language. I know the canonical book trying to do cybernetics for psychology is Behavior: The Control of Perception. At the end, the author is like, "And you can get language out of this." Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually you find a limit. I think that's going to be super productive. The last big shakeup in psychology was going from "everything is behaviorism" to "behaviorism doesn't work like that." That whale fall—that carcass—has sustained us basically ever since. Reacting against behaviorism was the thing to do in psychology for several decades afterward. So if cybernetic psychology succeeds and then dies, that would be really productive.

Jackson: (44:18) That's interesting.

Adam: (44:19) That's a great way that that kind of failure is a huge success.

Jackson: (44:22) Yeah. But you talk about this in the context of Karl Popper and falsifiability. Let's say, actually, you want something that you can believe strongly enough that you can then overturn or push back.

Adam: (44:32) Yes. Yeah.

Jackson: (44:34) Maybe this is me relying too much on my intuition around psychology, but I can't help but think that a lot of the things that are most aspirational with humans—learning, creativity, play—feel quite abstracted from these mechanical drives. Do you think that's roughly right? I mean, maybe it's just impossible to speculate on, but maybe there is something to the loose, intuitive structure of the hierarchy of needs frame, which is like: drive up to a certain point, and then beyond that, it's like a mysterious universe, humanity stuff.

Adam: (45:09) Yeah. I mean, I think of this as things seeming random until you understand them. This was also true about everything else we ever tried to understand before we understood it. It sure seems crazy that a flaming ball of fire comes across the sky every day. That seems kind of beyond human comprehension. And then eventually we're like, "It's a star. It's made out of these things. It makes heat because of this reason." So, yeah, I think it totally makes sense that these things feel mysterious to us. All that we can do with that sense of mystery is be like, "Oh, well, then there's something to work on there." It could ultimately elude our understanding—totally possible. But it will definitely happen if we don't try. Every time we've tried before, we have beaten back the randomness. It does really seem like we default to thinking that things are random extremely quickly, because I run into this all the time.

Jackson: (46:03) We think this about our—surely the human mind must be...

Adam: (46:06) Yeah. And just because it could be understood doesn't mean it's not beautiful. It doesn't mean that it's simple. It just means that there's structure there that we haven't found yet.

Jackson: (46:18) Yes, yes.

Adam: (46:19) And that seems to me extremely likely that there is structure that is yet undiscovered.

Jackson: (46:25) This is certainly outside of your domain, but you've also written specifically against this idea of comparing AI or machine intelligence and human intelligence—the "bag of words" frame, which is great. Do you have any sense of whether it'll probably be more on the neuroscience side, better comprehending whatever this type of intelligence is? Maybe machine intelligence may impact first neuroscience and then eventually psychology in terms of how we can model some of this stuff, or do you think they're quite divergent?

Adam: (47:02) No, it could. One way it could help us is by again loosening our intuitions. Like, "Oh, okay. You feed every .docx we've ever created into this thing, and it can do these things."

Jackson: (47:15) Hmm.

Adam: (47:16) All right, well, maybe the mind does it in a different way than we think, because we do it with way less data, so it must be a different function.

Jackson: (47:24) I think driving is a great example—self-driving cars versus us driving.

Adam: (47:28) Yes. So I think this can be really useful as a research tool, making grunt work go faster. But I think about how, at least in the history of psychology over the past 30-ish years, there have been pretty big technological advances that I don't think have come with big conceptual advances. I think about the fact that when my graduate advisor was himself a graduate student, he had to call people up on the phone to get them to take his studies. If he could get 30 people in a semester, that was cooking. When I started graduate school, it was like: now we have online recruitment pools, we have Amazon Mechanical Turk, we've got Prolific. You can get 500 people in a couple of hours.

Jackson: (48:06) Should have sped up progress.

Adam: (48:08) Exactly. And I don't think we're better off for it. Some of the work is easier, but without the conceptual insight, we got nowhere. That applies pretty broadly. And can you ask Claude, "Please, may I have a conceptual insight?"

Jackson: (48:27) Well, if you tell it, "I believe in you."

Adam: (48:29) "You got this. Please go step by step. You're really good at this." Maybe it could, but the problem is it's made out of all the assumptions we already have. So unless the right insight is latent in there and we just can't see it, then it could. But I don't think it's latent in there. I think it is something that is very out of distribution, which is why I don't think that the machine is going to speak the future of psychology to us. But it could be really useful for getting there once we know which direction to point ourselves.

52:15 Figuring Out What to Do, The Coffee Bean Test, and Unpacking Adam's Day-to-Day

Jackson: (52:15) Maybe to go back to our accusatory self-help claim. You write a lot about figuring out what to do.

Adam: (52:22) Yeah.

Jackson: (52:23) I think a lot of this is downstream of a possibly romantic view that I would tend to agree with, which is that there's a place for everybody in the world and that you just have to find your weirdness, which is beautiful whether or not it's actually true. I think we should aspire for it to be true. I want to take a few points on this, though. First is this tendency we have to do the things we think we "should" do. I think you've written about this. You were also talking about this, maybe with Chris Williamson. You're like, "It's really hard to tell what you like doing when you have a really strong theory about what you like doing." You've written and talked about this: "Oh, I really like writing scientific papers. I just have to turn off my phone and do the Pomodoro and lock it away and zap myself and do caffeine," etc. As a super broad first question, why do you think inferring our preferences from our behavior is so rare? It feels like it should be so obvious and intuitive, and yet it's clearly so hard for people to do.

Adam: (53:27) Yeah, I mean, it was funny that you said it's so rare, because that's a whole theory of psychology: that's how we discover our preferences. This is like self-perception theory.

Jackson: (53:36) I don't necessarily mean theoretically; I just mean rare among regular people. Most people are bad at this. Like you said, they do the thing that you were doing.

Adam: (53:44) Yeah. This is an idea that we don't actually have conscious access to why we do what we do. We look at what we do, and we backfill that we must like doing that thing. If I'm working really hard to write scientific papers and I'm doing my Pomodoros and drinking my caffeine, "I must really want to do it" is a reasonable inference from that. The theory here is that most of what goes on in the mind is beyond conscious access, and we also don't know what goes on in other minds. A way of solving both of these problems is just that you look at what people do, and that's probably what they wanted to do. So that's maybe one reason why people are actually inferring, but they're drawing the wrong inference. Especially if you have such a strong prior for what you would like to find, because it would be very convenient if what I like is what I'm already doing, what is prestigious, and what other people would like me to do.

Jackson: (54:51) One of my most cited ideas of yours is the coffee bean test, or another version of it being unpacking. You say no amount of willpower can carry you through a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons. And two, apparently you can, through sheer force of will, lack of self-knowledge, and refusal to unpack the details, earn the right to do a job you hate for the rest of your life. Those two quotes are almost in tension, and yet they both are sort of products of people not doing the coffee bean test. There is no amount of willpower that will get you through. I don't really believe in willpower, or I think willpower is at least a little overrated. And people do fail to unpack things, and then let inertia carry them through a lifetime of doing a thing they didn't actually want to do. Why do you think that is?

Adam: (55:48) I see the tension, and I think it doesn't carry you through well. That passage I'm writing there is about this doctor that I had when I was a teenager who just sucked. It's like he clearly didn't want to be the kind of doctor he was, which is a dermatologist. He clearly forced himself every day to do it. But I could tell, even in my three-minute and 30-second interaction with him, that this isn't where he should be.

Jackson: (56:10) So, like sparking joy.

Adam: (56:11) Yeah, no joy there. So you can get through it, but not well. Why do people keep doing it? I think one reason is that they don't know what it feels like when it's right. This is really hard. It's the same way of like, how do you know when you're in love? No one can really tell you, and so it's very easy to get confused and think that you're in love when you're not. Because all you can compare is different subjective states to other subjective states. You're like, "Is this the right one? Is this the right one?" Well, you can't show them to me, so I can't really tell you. And so if you don't know — if you've never experienced what it feels like to be in the right slot — then you could just be like, "Well, obviously everyone's suffering all the time. Everyone hates what they're doing all the time." Yeah, some of them do, but I think a lot of them are in the wrong place. And even the people who are in the right place, they do still have suffering. They do have negative emotions, but it's very different. They’re negative emotions in the service of something. They don't feel pointless. And I think if you convince yourself that everyone feels pointless all the time, well, then you will, my friend.

Jackson: (57:21) That is a great point. And I think perhaps then the coffee bean test is basically a filter to help people not go after things that just on the surface look more romantic. One of the ways people get into the trap of never slotting in — they chase the things that seem good on the surface. Can you unpack your job for us?

Adam: (57:47) Should I also say what the coffee bean test is?

Jackson: (57:49) Yeah.

Adam: (57:50) This is a thing I found talking to academics: a fair number of them don't want to do what they do, or there are obvious downsides to being an academic. When you ask them what they like to do, they're often like, "Ah, it'd be great to run a little coffee shop." So I try to ask them — if I'm feeling a little mischievous that day — "All right, where would you get the beans from? What kind of coffee maker do you want? Where would you locate it? How do you upholster the chairs?" The point being that if you haven't thought about these things, if you don't enjoy thinking about these things, you're not serious about opening a coffee shop. This is a daydream. You don't really want to do this. If you really wanted to do this, you would be googling this at night. You would be drawing up spreadsheets. That's what it looks like to unpack something.

Jackson: (58:39) By the way, your job is a perfect example — or maybe YouTuber is a better example for a certain kind of person listening to this. They think, "Substack, it must be the greatest job ever."

Adam: (58:49) And it is great. I wouldn't want to do anything else, but most of my day is frustration. I will spend 90 minutes working on a paragraph, and then I'll throw it away. I will spend 45 minutes tracking down an example that I think I heard once. And then I find it's actually not the right one. But then it’s like, "Wait, this is actually a reference to a different book. Let's see if I can find that book." Oh, I found it. No, it's actually not what I thought it was. Never mind. Most of my day is spent doing things that will never show up on the page, except for the fact that what shows up on the page could not exist if I didn't waste all this time doing other things. How can I be a fecund thinker? I constantly need to be fertilizing that. My comparative advantage is that I have read this Venn diagram of things, this overlap that no one else has.

Jackson: (59:39) That's the most distinct advantage you have.

Adam: (59:41) I think so. And part of that Venn diagram is not just what I've read, but what I've experienced and what I know.

Jackson: (59:48) And your compounded writing ability. Probably some humor too.

Adam: (59:53) I can think thoughts that other people can't think by virtue of being me. Other people can think thoughts that I can't think, but these are the ones that I can do.

Jackson: (1:00:01) But also critically, a lot of you being you is not like you were born this way. Some of it is, but a lot of it is that you've done all the fertilizing.

Adam: (1:00:11) Yeah, and why did I do the fertilizing? Well, I was born a certain way. It's all a loop.

Jackson: (1:00:15) This goes back to slotting in. The slotting is getting those things to line up in a way that is the most harmonious. How much time do you spend writing versus not writing versus other work?

Adam: (1:00:28) If I can have four good hours of fingers on keys per day, that's a good day.

Jackson: (1:00:34) How many days a week?

Adam: (1:00:36) As many as I have. Certainly Monday to Friday and often on weekends. But every day I also probably go for a 45-minute walk where I call a friend and talk to them. I can take a day off whenever, usually if I've worked far enough ahead. So it is the kind of job that consumes all of my waking existence. My head hits the pillow thinking about the next post and composing sentences in my head, and I wake up doing the same thing. This is good and bad. You’ve gotta really want it, and I really want it. If you don't really want it, it's a curse because you can never turn it off. But the thing is, this feels like me. I'm fine with it being on all the time because I like to exist in all moments. But it does get in the way of relaxing and having a nice time.

Jackson: (1:01:20) What's your least favorite part about the job?

Adam: (1:01:22) I like a lot of parts of it. Probably the hardest part of the job is that everything in my life is entrepreneurial. Because I have left behind every institution and organization, there are big upsides—I can do whatever I want—but a big downside is that nothing is organized for me. What I miss about being in an academic department is that there were talks on Tuesdays. You go, and you have lunch and you see the talk. I almost always hated the talk, but I got to talk with my friends about it afterward. There are all these things that I didn't have to make happen, but they connect me to other people. Even though I don't like a lot of them, I'm in community with other people. Now I have to make all of my community intellectually and purely socially. That part's hard because it draws on the same well of energy that I feel like I have to do my work, and so it never feels like it's time to do that. I think that is the hardest part.

Jackson: (1:02:14) Is there a favorite part, man?

Adam: (1:02:17) Getting to surprise myself all the time. The mark of a good piece is that I didn't know the end of it when I started it, and that I didn't know most of it when I started it. I don't write from top to bottom; I write from the inside out. I write as if I am a tumor metastasizing inside a blank document. I know I want to say this thing—this line sticks out to me—and I'll kind of grow around that, like bacterial cultures. Sometimes they grow together and form one superorganism. A lot of times they're of different species, and they don't belong, or some colonies die off. But when I find the way that they connect, or when one of them really grows, it feels great. That feeling is addictive—the sense of, "I didn't realize I didn't have this insight before I came here." That means I think that this is going to be a successful piece. Because if I didn't know this before, maybe other people didn't either. If I had to put the work to get here—I could just be dumb, and I find that out sometimes, too—but often it means that this thought is not very accessible. If I can make it accessible to people, that's going to help them out.

01:03:22 Getting De-bogged and Making Ideas Land

Jackson: (1:03:22) You have an amazing piece around de-bogging that I think is also related to this in some ways. The frame of being bogged in the pieces, as I understand it, is in this global sense of life and work and being slotted in. Were you in a position like that at any point? And as a sub-question to that, do you get mini bogs? If so, what does that look like?

Adam: (1:03:50) Yeah, I was in a big bog the first year of the pandemic. I've written a separate piece about this. I felt so bad, but why did I feel bad? Nothing particularly bad was happening to me. Obviously, bad things were happening in the world, but going back to what we were talking about with loneliness, I think I wasn't around enough people. I didn't have a drive to do it, and so all of my cognitions just kind of went out of whack and felt horrible. A lot of things in that piece come from the thoughts that I had at that time—just like, "I know, I'll just magically get myself out of it. I just need to change my personality." Exactly. "Probably tomorrow everything will just be better; I just won't have to do anything." People would tell me, literally, when I would be like, "Man, I feel so bad. Do you think it's because the pandemic has taken away all the things that give you joy in life?" and I'd say, "No, it's probably some other reason that's going to go away next week." I call that hedgehogging in the piece—not listening enough to the insight that other people have. It comes directly out of that. So that was the big one. And yeah, mini bogs. I will once again get the sense of, "Oh man, things are so hard," or "Oh man, it's so bad and wrong," and then realize, "Oh, I wasn't listening to my wife when she said, 'You're hungry. You should do that.'"

Jackson: (1:05:18) The hunger one is so frustrating.

Adam: (1:05:20) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:05:22) "Nope, I just needed to eat some almonds."

Adam: (1:05:24) Yeah. "No, it's just, man, it's just that everything's wrong and bad. Don't you see?"

Jackson: (1:05:30) "You could never understand the deep mystery of being me, by the way. You don't get it."

Adam: (1:05:33) You don't. It's so bad. So, yes, that comes from a lot of experience.

Jackson: (1:05:40) One of the beautiful things about that piece, which I really encourage people to read as broad meta-advice on getting unstuck, is the way you slice up all of these permutations of ways that you can get stuck. I think this is probably representative of a lot of your writing, but especially this type of writing. You not only neatly slice off aspects of the environment—like the "not seeing the water" aspects—but then create these lovely little memeable names for them. What is that process? Maybe in the bog one you mentioned a couple of them, but what is the process of identifying those things and putting structure around them? Maybe that's the process of writing, but how does that happen?

Adam: (1:06:27) The best way I can explain this is a study I saw that came out a couple of years ago. I don't know why they did this, but they were like, "Can ants and humans solve problems the same way?" They made this weird little maze, and they made this thing you have to get through the maze. It looks like you took two capital letter Ts and stuck them together at the bottom. It's a weird shape, and you have to maneuver this thing in a really weird way to get it through these barriers to the end. Then you get a treat for the ants and the humans. They had a single ant do it, they had a single human do it, they had groups do it. I have no idea why they did this, and from reading this study a couple times, I don't know what they learned. However, the videos of this... I'm like, "That's exactly what writing is." Watching people maneuver this thing and get it over here—that's what I do. That's what I do all day is think, "Here's this idea. Here are the folds of the human mind. How do I angle it at exactly the right way to get it across, to get it into the mind?" I think this is, for me, a really under-theorized and under-weighted way of thinking about what writing is. So much writing I read just feels like a battering ram: "Here are the facts, here are the arguments." It's not thinking, "What is the theory of change of this writing? Why would someone be different at the end than they were at the beginning?" I think there are often good answers to that, like, "I gave them a new way of seeing it." How did you give them a new way of seeing it? "I connected to something they've experienced before and showed that this thing is just like this thing. I've chopped up the world into categories, and I can show them that there's a structure here that they didn't see before." That's what I'm doing all the time. When I am connecting these colonies—when I am throwing paragraphs away—it is entirely in the service of: how do I angle this weird T-shaped object through the maze.

Jackson: (1:08:19) I love that analogy or that frame. I'm sure that piece has helped many people be less bogged. To the extent you've had people in your life personally, have you used those tactics? Otherwise, have you had much success helping de-bog people?

Adam: (1:08:35) No one will ever tell me if I have. And there's always an appropriate distance, because my writing is so tied up in who I am and what I do. I will change people's names and some details about them whenever I write about them, because I know people in my life are always like, "I never know if you're going to write about me." So there’s that. I think there's also a sense in which people are shy to tell me if it's meant something to them, or maybe it just never has. But I do get people—less so with that one than with what I've written about conversations, like conversational doorknobs and making affordances in a conversation. I've had people tell me, "Oh, that made it much easier for me to talk to people." I’m like, this is exactly it. This is maneuvering that T through the thing. It’s like, "All right, how do I get better at conversation?" Well, what is a conversation? It's a series of invitations, or it's a series of declarations. I say something, you say something. We can just go back and forth, or I can invite your participation, and you can invite mine. These are the two models. And if I have a different model than you, there's going to be friction. But these two models exist, and a lot of people haven't realized that the other model is out there. A lot of the friction they have comes from dealing with someone who's using a model that they don't recognize. So that one I've gotten more people saying that helped them talk to people.

Jackson: (1:09:54) It's a great example because that piece was how I discovered you. That is the classic reaction to that piece, at least from what I’ve been able to tell. Seeing it go viral on TikTok and all that—it's basically this take you have that there are givers and takers. Givers are people who are asking more questions; takers are lobbing grenades into the conversation. Givers always think they're the best.

Adam: (1:10:22) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:10:22) And you're like, "That's giver propaganda." It seems like this deft skill—back to your battering ram analogy—to be like, "Hey, person who's typically going to reject being told that the way they are is not perfectly optimal, I'm going to jiggle you in just this subtle way to get you to see." It feels like a profoundly important way of making an argument. I mean, it's persuasion, of course, but it feels profound and subtle and fascinating. I'm curious—maybe I'm over-fixing on that example—but by the way, the de-bogging stuff to me feels like it's in the same broad bucket. Like, "Help me, let me..." Everyone who's stuck knows the hunger thing. "Yes, I've heard it before, I've heard it before." Okay, but there's some way about how you did it. Maybe it's the ant thing again; I'm not sure.

Adam: (1:11:10) Yes. I think another way I think of it is like you can't make a cup of tea if you just dunk the tea bag; it has to steep for a while. This is also why I often fantasize about writing the short, good piece. I'm like, "Man, this week I'm just going to write the short, good piece. It's going to be 1,800 words, I'm going to get in and out, and people are going to go, 'Man, Adam, you wrote the short, good piece.'" I've never written the short, good piece, because any time I get into it, I'm like, "I cannot get this across without dipping the tea bag enough times." It's just got to be in there long enough for the point to get across. You can see this, I think, in a lot of advice that is true, but it's not potent in the way it's given. Like, "Don't sweat the small stuff." Yeah, obviously, if I thought it was small, I wouldn't sweat it. But if you write a 3,500-word piece about how you know what the small stuff is, and what it feels like when it's actually small but you think it's big—only by the end of that can you come back around and realize this was true from the beginning, but now you can actually feel it.

Jackson: (1:12:14) Now I’ve shown it to you.

Adam: (1:12:15) Yes, yes.

Jackson: (1:12:16) Yeah, you have that great piece where you're talking about Letters to a Young Poet. I forget what the term is—that classic term where Rilke's talking about... Oh, my gosh.

Adam: (1:12:26) Is this loving the questions?

Jackson: (1:12:27) Yes.

Adam: (1:12:27) Living the questions. Yes, yes.

Jackson: (1:12:30) Actually, so much of the best advice is obvious, but you've heard it so many times that it needs to be given to you in a new presentation where you can be made to feel it.

Adam: (1:12:37) Yeah. I mean, why do we read novels and watch movies? Everyone knows that humans think in stories. We love stories. But why don't we just prefer a list of facts? Why do humans like reading novels rather than the dictionary? The dictionary has way more information in it, and a lot of it's really useful and much more efficient. I think it's because the situations we encounter are really fuzzy; they vary in infinite dimensions. When you're dealing with fuzzy situations, you need fuzzy information. Having just pure factual information is not going to be that useful for encountering situations where, well, what if it's slightly different than that? This is why a story like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is so much better than an exhortation to not give false alarms. Because if you're like, "Don't give a false alarm," you're like, "Well, but in what situation?" Or "What's an alarm, actually?" But "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," if interpreted correctly—which I think most people do—it's not about wolves, and it's not about a boy. It also applies to girls, and it applies to other emergencies. You are meant to take a small amount of information, blow it up, and then deploy it.

Jackson: (1:13:52) Yes.

Adam: (1:13:53) We're trying to do the same thing in writing, which is like—I'm not just going to give you a list of facts. I'm going to give you a fuzzy thing that represents something much, much larger than itself. I can't give you that larger thing; I can only give you this thing.

Jackson: (1:14:08) I'm going to compress it for you. Right.

01:14:11 Conversational Doorknobs: Giving and Taking

Jackson: (1:14:11) In what ways has improv made you a better taker?

Adam: (1:14:15) I mean, by introducing me to the concept of taking in the first place. This idea comes from when I was doing musical improv and our director was like, "Look, we've got to do 'take and take focus' here." Because when you are trying to improvise a song, and you're singing lyrics, some masterful improvisers can improvise a song from top to bottom, but most people can do maybe a line or a couple of lines, a verse or a chorus at a time. As they're going, they are running out of runway, and someone else needs to take over, or else they're going to sputter. But they can't just step back because maybe no one else has anything; they don't know who has it. So it's much better in improv to basically push them aside and take focus. That helped me realize that taking focus can be a supportive move and not just a selfish move. That led me to think, "Oh, you know, there are people in my life who I know that when I hang out with them, they will ask me zero meaningful questions." Some of them feel draining, but some of them I love, and I feel rejuvenated hanging out with them. What's the difference? They take focus in a supportive way versus a selfish way. They give me something to respond to, and that's how we connect and have fun. I do think it's good to ask people questions every once in a while. I think it's good for someone who does one of these strategies primarily to do another one at least sometimes. But I've got great taker friends whom I just love being with. They're performing, they're being ridiculous, and I can chime in too, and they'll respond. That's totally fine. I don't need each person to be like, "You've asked me 17 questions in our conversation; now I'll ask you 17 back." That's also a fine mode, but it's not the only mode or the best one.

Jackson: (1:15:53) One of the things I love in the piece too is you kind of describe how, on both sides, you can have more affordances built into them. They're actually questions that are like... versus—what's the line? "What's up?" is one of the most dreadful texts to get. It's short for "Hello, I'd like you to entertain me now," which is such a great point. I'm always frustrated by "tell me an embarrassing story." Because the only two responses to that are either, "I have a preloaded story I always tell," or, "Let me invent a musical... let me invent a song for you."

Adam: (1:16:20) Yeah, yeah.

Jackson: (1:16:21) But conversely, some questions are actually richly affordance-laden. And there are also takes that are actually not. There’s not much to grab onto, which is a cool frame for it.

Adam: (1:16:32) Yeah, totally. Just in this conversation, you're doing both of them, right? Some of your statements have ended in question marks; some have ended in periods. All of them have given me an opportunity to do my thing. And my hope is that I give you the opportunity to do your thing. I'm not asking you as many questions because you asked me here, not the other way around, but it's the same thing.

Jackson: (1:16:53) Yes. I haven't listened to a ton of him, but one of the coolest things I've ever heard somebody describe about Joe Rogan and why he's so successful as a podcaster is that he is remarkably good at saying things. Not asking questions, but saying statements that are basically questions, which make it really easy to respond to. And actually, that is a huge part of—at least what this person was saying—is what makes it feel such like a conversation and less like an interview, which is a cool idea.

Adam: (1:17:22) That's interesting. I've never seen him, but I've talked to plenty of podcast hosts who are like, "I really want this to be more of a conversation." And I'm like, yeah, that's not a thing you really get to decide by fiat. That really happens moment to moment, through the choices that we both make.

Jackson: (1:17:23) Yeah. Yeah. Well, and in this context, I am doing an interview; hopefully there are conversational aspects of it. In other interactions, when I find myself feeling like it's an interview, it's probably worth me asking some of these questions. I've joked about dates where it's like, I asked 25 questions, and there was not a lot back. There have definitely been times where that is the other person's fault. But I think as I've become more mature, I've realized there are also times when I am volleying tennis balls at the other person over and over again in a way that doesn't really give them any time to let up. Anyway, it's an awesome piece.

Adam: (1:18:23) People should read it. I met a friend of mine that I used to improvise with—I was on a bus with her once—and I discovered that we have different amounts of time that we are comfortable elapsing after one person finishes their conversational turn before we feel like the other one needs to happen. For her, that amount of time is extremely short, which is why she will keep going or ask a question when there's any silence at all. Whereas I feel like I have a longer one. But some people have a very long amount of time. There's another way that people differ.

Jackson: (1:18:59) So I wanted to ask about this. It makes me think of a couple of things. Number one, one of the ideas I love comes from this guy Kevin Kelly—he founded Wired magazine. Kevin says when you're trying to be a better listener, you should ask, "Is there more?" twice. So they have three opportunities to really digest it out. A different version of this is just: someone says something, and I'm a person with low latency. But I've met people where if you just wait five seconds—whoa, they were not done, and they will go. You say in the piece: "It turns out that we like people best when they respond to us the fastest. So fast, mere milliseconds, that they must be formulating their reply long before we finish our turn." I'm curious how you square this with being a good listener. Obviously, in the improv context, you really want low latency. You say the best improvisers, like the best conversation partners, have very sharp hearing. They can echolocate a door slightly left ajar, waiting for a gentle push from the outside. And yet, I think I’ve become a better listener over time by driving out the latency a little bit and leaving more room. As someone who's always tempted to think about my reply before the person's finished talking, I wasn't totally sure how to think about that. I don't think they're in negation, but it did seem like a little bit of tension.

Adam: (1:20:21) Yeah, I think there's different forms of response. One is: I'm going to take my conversational turn and answer your question or do my thing. But there's lots of ways of showing that I'm processing what you are saying without necessarily leaping very quickly onto what you just said with a bunch of words. If I'm breaking eye contact and looking around, you know that I'm being less responsive. But if I'm locked in with you, I'm giving you back-channel feedback—I'm doing my "ah-has" and "yeses," and I'm nodding. That feels responsive without necessarily taking the conversational floor from you. That's another way of being a good listener that isn't just low latency. Some people are very low latency in a way that you can tell they weren't actually responding. You don't feel responded to; you just feel like they've hit the tennis ball back, but it wasn't the ball that you hit. They're just hitting their own balls at you. We're not playing tennis; you're just serving.

Jackson: (1:21:23) Totally. On some level—I don't play tennis, so I’ve got to be careful with this metaphor—but I would imagine that sometimes you're just hitting the ball cross-side over and over. A good rally isn't just the same position; you change it up sometimes. My sense is that the most amazing conversationalist is someone who is giving you space and listening and really attuning to you, and then every once in a while, they'll change the speed and fire something back.

Adam: (1:21:53) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:21:53) And that's how you get out of this—like, wow, this person has only asked me questions, but they've not said anything. Anyway, we could talk about this all day. It's also funny to talk about because you're meta-processing all throughout it. Speaking of which, I'll give you an out. You're allowed to end the conversation now if you want to.

Adam: (1:22:11) Wow. Turnabout is fair play. No, I can't.

Jackson: (1:22:12) Really? You have a few more things.

Adam: (1:22:17) Only you can make that joke. Okay.

Jackson: (1:22:18) Okay. One of my more recommended blog posts over the years, so I appreciate it.

01:22:23 Blogging, Community, and Rules we Invent

Jackson: (1:22:23) Cool. Maybe speaking of blogging, at the one-year mark, I believe you had this post where you were taking stock. You said there are two things that I really love about this: one is cognitive sneezing, and one is interior design for your head.

Adam: (1:22:38) Head.

Jackson: (1:22:38) And this idea that cognitive sneezing is sort of—as you've talked about plenty already—getting these ideas out. Interior design for your head being: one, can other people do this for me? Two, can I do it for them where I rearrange things? This is also very much along the lines of what we said. Have there been other things that have emerged as surprising virtues of having a very successful blog?

Adam: (1:23:06) Yeah. Henrik Karlsson, who you've talked to before, has this great post that I'm sure you've unpacked. The title is really good, and I never remember it verbatim. I don't know if you remember it, but a blog post is...

Jackson: (1:23:19) Yeah, a blog post is a very specific search query to find your people on the internet and route them to your inbox.

Adam: (1:23:28) Yes, it's roughly that. I've made friends doing this that I wouldn't have anticipated. And it's not only people who share my interests. It's people who I feel like are coworkers in the grand project of trying to reduce our ignorance, or just in trying to get sentences to look good, look nice, and be true. That's been a good part. Another part is I occasionally hear from people who say, "This made a big difference to me in some way." That means a lot. And what else? I don't know. It's its own reward in every moment, each one better than the last.

Jackson: (1:24:04) You have a few posts on underrated ways to change the world. One of the points you make is about making a scene or the creation of a scene. This is certainly adjacent to this sort of Science House patronage conversation. But are you trying to make a scene? Are you trying to build this little cluster of a certain type of thing, or is that all a lagging indicator?

Adam: (1:24:27) Yeah, I think not trying very hard and mostly failing is where I'm at right now. I've tried various things to encourage and make it easier for people to do independent science, to participate in this. Most of what I've done, I feel like, has not worked. I operated a Discord for people who are interested in it—mostly lurkers. I think a few people have found each other through it. I try to maintain correspondence with people who are interested in doing this, and I often find that I don't have the expertise necessary, but I can sometimes route them to someone who does. I have not yet identified what it is that people are waiting for, or I haven't been able to give it to them. I think a big part of this is that there has to be a certain amount of activation energy for the scene to form. And I think it really needs a physical presence. You can do a lot of stuff online—I got my start online on Yu-Gi-Oh message boards, and they were certainly a scene.

Jackson: (1:25:25) Smash Bros.

Adam: (1:25:27) There you go. Yeah, it's always the gateway drug. Clearly, something can take off there, but for something like this where you need people to do something that they're not already doing in their lives, I think you've got to hang out in person. You've got to see people doing it. You've got to think it's cool. The one downside on Substack over the past couple of years is, if anything, I feel a little less of a scene. At the beginning, there were way more hobbyists who maybe entertained the idea of, "Oh, maybe I could do this," and just dipped their foot in. A lot of people took their foot back out. There are a lot of people that I miss who used to write, or I used to see them every once in a while, and now they're totally gone. It's sort of filtered out. Now the people left are mainly people who want to do it professionally, which is fine. But just like the filter that was applied to my graduate school cohort, it's like the weirdest people get stopped. That has kind of interfered with it, as it has felt a little more serious, a little more professionalized. There's this weird thing that people have about blogging, especially about writing a Substack, where they're like, "I owe people something all the time. Every week I've got to make a promise to my readers." There are no rules here. Why are we reinventing all the rules that were the reason we got here in the first place? Just send me an email when you have something to tell me. I don't care if it's once a week or once a year. If it's a good thought, I'll read it. Do not bug me more often than that.

Jackson: (1:26:59) How does that speak of maybe bogs or otherwise? I've thought about that. I've been doing a podcast for less than two years, and there are all these things of how I have to do it, and I'm like, I made all of this up. It's not real. I don't know how religious you are—as I understand it, you're pretty religious about every two weeks?

Adam: (1:27:14) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:27:14) Are there any aspects of how you do it now that you maybe are holding on to too firmly?

Adam: (1:27:21) Yes, like writing long posts, probably. There probably is a good short post out there; I just haven't found it yet.

Jackson: (1:27:27) Not too long. I think you're maybe overselling that.

Adam: (1:27:30) I don't know. Sometimes when people share it, they're like, "It's long, but..." Maybe people are used to reading shorter things. That's one, and then I think just really doing a different kind of post. Occasionally I'll do something like that, but I'd like to break the form. Let's not have section headers the same way. Let's do something totally out of left field. I think I could do that more often.

Jackson: (1:27:56) Yeah.

Adam: (1:27:57) And I just don't, because sometimes it's scary. It doesn't occur to me. Or it's easier when you've got to keep it up to do the thing. Yeah, yeah.

Jackson: (1:28:04) It's like a constant paranoia to figure out what is the thing that I'm just letting sort of—yeah.

Adam: (1:28:10) Do you have that for yourself? Like, rules that you feel like you've made up and now have to obey?

Jackson: (1:28:14) They're less explicit. But I certainly like the way I prep or the way I do the interview. You do something a couple of times, and you're like, "All right, this is how it has to be." And I talk to people, and they're like, "Well, why don't you just try doing it differently?"

Adam: (1:28:27) I'm like, "Well, you don't understand. You can't see everything." Yeah.

Jackson: (1:28:33) Yeah. I'm hungry.

01:28:35 Writing Advice, Thick Art, Giving The Reader an Egg to Crack

Jackson: (1:28:35) A few more things on writing. I'm quoting you: the poet Paul Valéry said that for every poem you write, God gives you one line and you supply the rest. Amy Lowell, another poet, described those in-between lines, the ones you provide, as putty. You get no credit for God's lines. All artistry is in the puttying. What have you learned about puttying, man?

Adam: (1:28:58) That it's so hard. Parts are so easy. I think everyone finds this, where something just comes out of nowhere. I've heard it referred to as taking dictation from God. You wake up with a line or an insight and, yeah, you probably put yourself in the situation where that could happen by taking in the right information and spending time thinking about it. But in the moment, it doesn't feel like I was doing the long division problem where I'm like, "And the answer is seven." It feels unearned. And then you earn it back trying to figure out how do I work that in and get to the next one. Why can't they all come like that? This is what takes a ton of the time.

Jackson: (1:29:41) Time.

Adam: (1:29:41) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:29:42) I was reading an interview last night—it's an old, very old interview with the songwriter and lead singer of The National and Phoebe Bridgers, who just came out with a new record, which is why it was revived. I was thinking about—I just read something, maybe this quote from you—and Phoebe was saying the way her songwriting works, she basically has the exact same idea. She's like, "I'll get one line, and I'm like, 'This is the line I'm going to build the whole song around.’" By the time she gets to the end of the song, it's the worst line in the song. So it's kind of this beautiful take on the idea from God. It goes back to your point, though, which is the point of writing is not, "I have this thesis that I have to go convert into words so it can be shared with the world." It is much closer to: "I'm going to find something." And maybe the inspiration, the line from God, whatever, is the ignition to be like, "I have to go on this journey."

Adam: (1:30:35) Yeah. Often the thesis is what gives you the reason to leave home in the first place, and it's not the thesis that you come back home with.

Jackson: (1:30:41) Yeah, totally.

Adam: (1:30:42) But there's no reason to go until you have one.

Jackson: (1:30:46) You say all emotions are useful for writing except for bitterness. How do you avoid or how do you resist bitterness?

Adam: (1:30:55) Part of it is looking back through my archive and asking, "Have I done several complainy posts in a row? Can we do a nice one? Can we do a happy one? Can we change up the energy a little bit?"

Jackson: (1:31:08) Because I don't know that nice is the antithesis of bitterness.

Adam: (1:31:12) Yeah, I mean more just like, how many times in a row have I hit the note of, "This is a wrong thing, let's fix it," versus, "This is a right thing, let's preserve it."

Jackson: (1:31:23) Henrik calls this the difference between "not that" and "maybe this." The world has a lot of "not that."

Adam: (1:31:30) Yes. And there are writers who I really love who are all "not that," to the point where I start to lose trust in them because I'm like, "You kind of just seem like a grouch. Everything's bad." If I can't see you loving something, how do I know you can? And if you don't love anything, I definitely am not going to take cues from you. You might be right about some things, but you've lost legitimacy in my eyes. I've got to see you embarrass yourself in the love of something. So I try to be like, "Okay, when was the last time I embarrassed myself in the love of something?" If it's been a while, maybe I should try to do that again.

Jackson: (1:32:05) It can be hard when you realize that you've been in a rut of the complaining, bitterness orientation. I also just loved your line about it sucking the oxygen out of the air.

Adam: (1:32:17) Yeah. The other way of thinking about it is a lot of people who write online or make content online feel like, "Oh, we're talking about this thing. I guess I've got to talk about this thing. All right, we're doing the Odyssey. Well, here's my Odyssey take." They act as if they don't want to do it. And I'm like, you don't have to participate at all. The discourse can be out there.

Jackson: (1:32:36) There's enough content out there.

Adam: (1:32:37) You don't have to do it. "Oh, we're all talking about this thing." That's fine. You could talk about a different thing. In fact, it's usually better. There are so many people talking about whatever the thing is that it just makes the entry point harder and harder to say the interesting thing about it. Why not talk about the thing no one's talking about? Okay, there's less built-in interest because people aren't looking at you for whatever discourse is happening, but it has felt like a comparative advantage that I have. I am willing to be countercyclical—non-cyclical, also—because I can't write fast enough to get in it before it's over.

Jackson: (1:33:19) Also, maybe to use your own framing, you don't have motive there. People can tell when you care.

Adam: (1:33:26) Yeah, yeah.

Jackson: (1:33:27) You have this in your writing advice: "I see tons of essays called 'Something on X' or 'In Praise of Y' or 'Meditations on Z,' and I always assume they're underbaked." Can you talk about your case against a topic, not a take?

Adam: (1:33:41) Yeah. A lot of times I feel like I'm reading the notes that you write to yourself before you write the piece, but you sent them to me as if they're the piece. Oof. Cutting. You see a lot of these where it's like: Big question. I'm going to give you six possible answers. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that. At the end, who can say? There are so many possible answers. Maybe that's the truth, but if you cook that a little longer, would you find that it's really one thing? Try it. Can you argue to me that most of these are not right and one of them is right?

Jackson: (1:34:17) That's—

Adam: (1:34:18) That's what I want to see. Sometimes these meditations are great because the topic submits itself to, "No, you've got to look at it this way and look at it that way." You've really got to steep in it. That's the whole point—it’s kind of the ambiance of it. But most things aren't like that.

Jackson: (1:34:36) You say every writer is misunderstood. How are you misunderstood?

Adam: (1:34:42) A lot of people are like, "Oh, he's the anti-academia guy. He's the guy who thinks we should burn it down."

Jackson: (1:34:48) I mean, you've written a couple of pretty brutal takedowns of aspects of science and academia.

Adam: (1:34:57) Yeah. Well, a lot of people take the peer review piece that I wrote to mean everyone should stop doing this immediately and we should burn this system down. Sometimes I think writing against something, or in contrast to something, makes people think that you think this thing should not exist—like it should be scrubbed from the face of the earth. Maybe that's between the lines there, but I feel like if you read it through, at no point do I say that.

Jackson: (1:35:26) Right. And our sensitivity to criticism is such that the word "criticism" doesn't even mean criticism anymore. It means "this sucks."

Adam: (1:35:34) Yes. I've wanted to write a piece about this, too. There are words that have meanings that we've stopped using that are actually really useful—critique being one of them. People think criticism means being derogatory. It's like, no, it's about getting to the bottom of it, like pros and cons. So I think people think that I'm much more anti than I am. I think it's a miracle that academia exists. I think it's so much better that it does than if it doesn't. I'm glad it's there. I wouldn't knock it over. It's just it could be so much better, and there should be more in the ecosystem than that.

Jackson: (1:36:10) How are you subtweeting yourself most often?

Adam: (1:36:14) Every post is a subtweet. Every time that I'm writing about something, it is entirely—

Jackson: (1:36:22) "It was me."

Adam: (1:36:22) "It was I." Yeah. I think anyone who claims otherwise is being disingenuous.

Jackson: (1:36:29) Your recent piece on thick art was awesome. I think this is from an earlier piece on reading, but I think it ties in, which is on text: "People are capable of acquiring more interesting tastes if you give them the chance. This is the work art does for us. It stretches our desires rather than merely satisfying them." You talk about movie-shaped objects and book-shaped objects and thought-shaped objects, and this beautiful metaphor of the difference between a corpse and a person. Then you specifically talk about this idea around the Betty Crocker corporation. The Betty Crocker corporation could just put egg powder into the cake mix, but they don't, because cracking an egg into a bowl allows people to pretend that they're baking. Thick art is like that. It gives you an egg to crack. How do you think about putting eggs in your writing?

Adam: (1:37:22) They're there to discover. But they're always there, I promise, even if you don't see them.

Jackson: (1:37:27) Maybe I specifically asked this because you write very—the context of the piece for the people who haven't read it is you're talking largely about the greats of literature. I'm 250 pages into Anna Karenina, and I'm working for the eggs. Your writing—and I certainly don't think that it's flat or simple—is very easy to read and very compelling and very clear. So I thought this was interesting. I do think you put eggs into it, but it's not quite as obvious as Charles Dickens.

Adam: (1:37:59) Yeah. No, I hate being purposely obscure, which I think a lot of art thinks is just good. That's why I want every sentence to be as clear as I can get it. At the same time, any post that I write below my scrap line has ten times as many words as above. What feels to me like the egg is the fact that there was so much that I thought about and tried to write, and I came up with this. This is actually gesturing toward all of those things. If you spend time with it, you might end up where I was, too. Hopefully, this gets you to think, "This small thing stands in for this big thing." I don't expect anyone to do it, which is why it isn't obscurantist. But I hope that if I've done it well, that is in there—like, "Oh, if this is true, what else is true?" Which is the thing we say in improv. All right, you've shown me this thing. Oh, this thing shows up everywhere. Or this would actually lead to this idea, which would lead to this idea. That's what I hope that I've left.

Jackson: (1:39:02) Yeah, it makes me think—one of the things I found, having read enough good stuff on the Internet, is that when people read something that particularly takes what you just described, this sort of glob, and puts words to a thing that was previously fuzzy but that they've felt... I would describe a lot of great Internet writing in particular as this. It's this sort of loose thing that feels intuitive. When you read it, people will say, "Oh, I've been saying this." They'll use it as their flag to be like, "This person's saying exactly what I've been thinking." They fail to realize, typically, if they're not experienced writers, that that is the whole point. That is all of the work. It reminds me of the idea you have somewhere about a book's worth of ideas. By putting it on the page, they have done the incredibly hard thing. I think there's an aspect of this which is maybe two readings of work like yours. One is just like, "Oh, yeah, this is so simple. It's so obvious. I sensed this, and I didn't quite have the words, and now it's here." And the other is like, "Whoa, he did the ant thing."

Adam: (1:40:15) I think of this as bolting a handle onto an idea so you can move it around the world. It is a mark of success if people feel like, "Oh yeah, you put words to something that I've been saying." It's a little bit like how the best roadie is the one that you don't even realize was there.

Jackson: (1:40:34) Art is disguising work. One quick thing. I think it's probably a little over-discussed in the moment, but this is you: there is no text, no JPEG, no CSV that contains this information because it is ineffable. My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable and to eff it. Substack added Pangram to writing recently. Everybody's thinking about this; I've talked with lots of people, including Jasmine Sun fairly recently. As the ability to distinguish between AI writing and human writing fades away, we're hanging on for dear life and trying our best. Pangram will last however long it lasts, but it will go. You've written and thought a little bit about almost competing with the machines in a way. What are the areas where they won't go? I'd love any thoughts or clues or prompts on what the ineffable is. Obviously, a huge part of that is just your experience. Even in the types of writing that you find yourself increasingly drawn to in an era where a lot of the good, solid, hit-them-hard-and-fast content is going to be streamlined.

Adam: (1:41:39) Old stuff. Stuff other people aren't reading. I don't know how people read if they're not also writing a book or a post at the same time. It has felt to me like a superpower because it makes everything so relevant to me. I've always read a fair amount, but it would always be for the purposes of personal edification—it'd be great to read that book someday. Now it's like, no, there's a nugget in there somewhere.

Jackson: (1:42:06) Do you know about the idea from Robin Hanson? It's a famous blog post that lots of people reference. There are two types of reading: there's reading broadly to discover, and there's reading like hunting. I'll have to send it to you after, but it's this idea.

Adam: (1:42:22) Yeah. And it allows for intermittent reinforcement because on page 430 of a book, I could get the exact thing I need, and that carries me through the first 429 pages. The other thing is paying attention to stuff that's not written down or photographed—and therefore not accessible to the machines. There's some writing about improv, but it's not very good, and there's not a lot of it. I think what is interesting about it is that it's an ethereal thing. The stuff that's filmed—if you film it, you've lost almost everything of what made it good.

Jackson: (1:42:59) Totally, totally.

Adam: (1:43:00) So, being there, I'm getting fed data that the machines can't get fed yet. That's how I stay a step ahead. Improv is a very specific form of that, but the rest of life is also like that. Until they outfit the world with more GoPros and strap one on...

Jackson: (1:43:20) You've got three more years.

Adam: (1:43:21) Yeah, until then, I feel like that's how I stay ahead.

Jackson: (1:43:26) It's cool. With that frame, it positions the "doorknobs" conversation piece as such a distinct piece that not a lot of people could write. A couple of quotes on the worldview that reading and books are declining: "All serious intellectual work happens on the page. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write. And at the center of every long-lived movement, you will always find a book."

01:44:03 Adam's First Book: The Strangest Idea in the World

Jackson: (1:44:03) What is The Strangest Idea in the World?

Adam: (1:44:10) The Strangest Idea in the World is a book that I have coming out next March. It is framed around the question: why did it take us 300,000 years to invent the toilet? Which is really the question of why everything took us so long to invent and discover. We've been humans a long time, yet most of the things around us are a product of the past 500 years. How could that be? I think the titular strangest idea in the world is the idea that we can use our minds to discover facts about the world that make our lives better off. I think it's strange because I don't think we evolved to do this. It's not what our minds are meant to do. Doing it requires using them in a weird way, kind of like using a washing machine as a salad spinner. You can do it, but it is unsurprising why we're not better at it. It's miraculous we can do it at all. The book is about why it's hard and how it could be easier. Because it is arguing for a strange way of thinking, it is also a strange way of reading. There are some non-linear elements, some light "choose your own adventure" elements, multiple endings, and a part where I try to convince the reader to rip a page out of the book. This is me attempting to pull apart the confidence intervals, which I think is necessary for scientific thinking and interesting creative thinking in the first place: realizing there are things you haven't seen. There's a color you haven't seen before. How do you go looking for it when you don't know what it looks like?

Jackson: (1:45:46) In some sense, this sounds like a theory of progress. One thought that came to mind is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. It sounds like that, but the cut is specifically on not just why we discover things, but how and why we create things that make our lives better.

Adam: (1:46:06) Yeah. There are some basic steps at the beginning. Each chapter of the book is like: here's a step you have to take, and here's why it doesn't come to us naturally. You have to realize you don't know something already. You have to realize other people don't know it. Then you have to believe it is possible and a good idea to change that. Many humans throughout history have realized they don't know why the sun comes up every day, and other people don't know either. But then they think: "I can't know, it's random, it's too complicated," or "it would be better not to know because it would conflict with my belief system." That third step is where a lot of people get stuck. No, actually, I think the only thing that makes us better in the long term is knowing more things. I'm very Deutschian in the sense that it is just a matter of reducing ignorance. I really mean knowledge very broadly construed. Everything else is fads and fashions that can come and go. But adding to our stock of true and useful information is the one thing that makes us better off. I think it's kind of fascinating that we sort of shrug at it. We say, "Yeah, it's cool we came up with antibiotics; I guess we should do more of that. But whatever, if we need more tanks, obviously we should not fund science." The tanks are the most important thing, and then we should do all of our other stuff. If we have a little money left over, let's toss a few bones to the nerds. I understand why, politically, that would be the case.

Jackson: (1:47:37) To replicate tanks.

Adam: (1:47:41) Yes. Well, they also break down. They get blown up.

Jackson: (1:47:45) Despite the quote I read at the front of that, why write a book? As you have said, books are very important—says man with books.

Adam: (1:47:53) Yeah. Well, a couple of reasons. One is, I think books are the last thing that people give their full attention to. Like, most people, when they're watching a movie, they're also on their phone; they've got the second screen going on. Anything video, anything audio is probably competing with something else. But a book, if you're not paying full attention to the book, you're literally not reading the book.

Jackson: (1:48:18) Can't delude yourself.

Adam: (1:48:19) Yeah. So to have that kind of relationship with people, especially now, I think is really cool and interesting. And you can do stuff in a book that you can't do on a screen. I love writing blog posts, but with pages, you can do things you can't do with pixels. This part where I'm like, "No, deface this book"—I'm trying to make a point here. Do it. I can't be like, "Put your laptop on the stove." I mean, I could, but it’d be much less effective if you weren’t doing that.

Jackson: (1:48:49) I'll use the word gimmick here with a huge caveat that I think it is substantial. If you weren't doing that gimmick, otherwise, would there be any point? Or might it as well just be the substance?

Adam: (1:49:01) There still would. I wanted it to be the maximalist version of what you can do.

Jackson: (1:49:07) If I'm going to do a book, I should do a book.

Adam: (1:49:08) Yes. That book is written. I am now in the process of thinking about a pitch for a second book. I don't want it to have "choose your own adventure" elements, but there's still something worthwhile about a book, which is that it is a coherent argument from beginning to end. When I'm writing blog posts, it feels like I am making a river for people to step in.

Jackson: (1:49:30) Correct.

Adam: (1:49:30) And I see them every once in a while. But this is like, no, you get dunked in the—

Jackson: (1:49:35) In the mug. For Derek Thompson's "Boulder in the Lake," to put it a different way, or at least around how it can spread and so on.

Adam: (1:49:41) Yeah. The other thing about a book is it has a literal physical reality. And so it creates a moment and a reason to think about something in a way a blog post doesn't. The way my friend Slime Mold Time Mold puts it is like: no one goes on blog tours, but people do go on book tours. An occasion is also in itself an occasion, and it represents an idea. I think Abundance is a great example of a kind of book that does this really well. Most of the people who have thought about Abundance or been influenced by the ideas in it did not actually read the book.

Jackson: (1:50:14) But it is the center.

Adam: (1:50:16) Exactly. But it's a way you can refer to this. You can send people this book. You see this book around. If you read it and then it sits on your shelf, it continues to emanate its ideas. Someone sees it when they come over, and they ask you about it. It ends up in a used bookshop. You hand it down to someone else, or you borrow it and never get it back. These are just ways for the tendrils of an idea to get into the world that I think the cyberspace is so much more limited in that sense.

Jackson: (1:50:43) What will make the book a success or failure for you?

Adam: (1:50:44) For me, it's already given me what I wanted, which is the ability to think more clearly about these things. I hope it'll be a secondary success if it does that same thing for other people. I hope to become brilliantly rich and famous off of it—that would also be great. But I—

Jackson: (1:51:06) Better ways to get rich and famous these days, man. Sorry. Nobody reads.

Adam: (1:51:10) I think they do. But no, it's like I got exactly what I wanted, which was an opportunity to work the thing into my own brain folds.

Jackson: (1:51:24) Any willingness to share a sense of what the second book might be about?

Adam: (1:51:29) I want to write a book about how to figure out what to do with your life, which is a lot of what I've written about. I just think so many people are struggling with this. There's the AI of it all, and I think we don't really have a lot of good ancient wisdom—or even pre-modern, even recent wisdom—built up about this, because it's such a modern problem. Until about 200 years ago, almost everybody was a farmer. The life advice was like how to make your seeds grow, and not like, "Should I grow the seeds or should I fly planes?" or whatever. And so we just don't have that much depth to draw from. The bar is really low for doing better. I think things like unpacking are pretty straightforward once you see them. If you hand people tools like this, I think they can do much better than they do by default.

Jackson: (1:52:16) Kind of a rhetorical question—clearly, I believe in your work and your ideas, particularly in this regard—but there are a lot of books on this subject.

Adam: (1:52:24) I think there's not exactly a book that answers this question. On one end of the spectrum, you have very heavy philosophical books like Man's Search for Meaning, which is a great book, but it speaks very obliquely to, "Okay, what do I do?"

Jackson: (1:52:39) What do I do about it now?

Adam: (1:52:40) Yeah. Then you have very directive books like Designing Your Life—also really good, with flowcharts and interview tips. But I think there's a middle route. It is not a list of instructions, nor is it a meditation on this. It is giving you cognitive architecture for thinking about the problem that you face. I haven't seen that. Obviously there are many attempts at this, but a lot of them don't actually address the question of how you find the place that you fit in the world. A lot of it is like, "Well, here's how to have a creative career," or general life advice and inspiration. But the question on everyone's mind is: "But what do I do? Where do I go?"

Jackson: (1:53:21) And?

Adam: (1:53:22) Yeah, and I want to write a book that speaks to that.

01:53:23 Closing Questions

Jackson: (1:53:25) I just have a couple more things. I believe as of 2022, you had done 126 escape rooms. How's that trajectory, and why?

Adam: (1:53:34) I think I'm closing in on 200. I'm just searching for that experience, man. I'm trying to get out of this humdrum everyday. I want to be locked in a coffin. They closed that one down in New York, but that was years ago. You could do one where it was a two-person escape room where you got locked in coffins head-to-head. They literally chained you in. I'm pretty sure it was illegal.

Jackson: (1:53:53) Yeah, that sounds—

Adam: (1:53:54) Yeah. I just like having experiences that draw you away from what you're able to experience on an everyday basis. This is what a lot of us want out of a movie or a TV show, but why not do it? Most of them are not that good, so it's hard to find one that really does that. But at their height, that is what I think an escape room is really good for. Not "Can you do this word puzzle?" or whatever—it is the feeling of being in a different world. It's the worst part of my personality.

Jackson: (1:54:30) I think it's cool, minus the coffins. I've done like two or three; they're pretty cool. Have you gotten anywhere near any Supreme Court justice's vomit in the years since?

Adam: (1:54:45) No, funnily enough, no.

Jackson: (1:54:48) No.

Adam: (1:54:50) You're referencing the speech I gave at graduation—my undergraduate graduation. A lot of laughs.

Jackson: (1:54:56) Standing ovation, too.

Adam: (1:54:58) Yeah. I mean, it's so easy on a day like that.

Jackson: (1:55:00) Hey man, most people don't get standing ovations, I don't think.

Adam: (1:55:05) But yeah, it's all been downhill from there.

Jackson: (1:55:06) One of my favorite de-bogs that we didn't talk about is "Declining the Dragon." In some sense—maybe this is an overgeneralization—but to me, a lot of the other ones actually could resolve into declining the dragon. Put another way, you have an opportunity to be brave, and you're not. My question is: How do you improve at both finding dragons at all, but also making sure you recognize the stakes and recognize the dragon for what it is, and thus have an opportunity to remind yourself to be brave?

Adam: (1:55:49) I'm not sure how you see them more, other than to realize there's this certain kind of feeling of squirreling around—like you're definitely suffering. And that is a feeling of being a coward, of just really hoping that you will not be asked to be brave. "How do I get out of doing the right thing here?" If you can recognize that and realize, "Oh, I actually just have to do the right thing and accept the consequences," there is such a sense of freedom that comes with it and a sense of power that comes with it that can be really unexpected. When you're in that squirreling around coward phase, you think it's going to feel so bad to be brave. It actually feels great when you can do it. When it's right, it just feels like, "Oh, nothing can hurt me. I've already decided to die. That's it. It's easy from here." I read a quote from some monks a while back saying, "Our life's easy because we just do whatever we think God wants us to do, and we just don't have to worry about it." I probably don't share a lot of values with those people about what they think God wants them to do, but I definitely recognize that freedom.

Jackson: (1:57:04) This brings up two interesting follow-up questions. One is: You wrote a great piece recently called "Incentives are for Losers."

Adam: (1:57:09) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:57:10) Do you think for a lot of people, to the monk point, it is easy to reject incentives and do the right thing when you have a strong belief? Do you think it's possible that for many people, it's that they don't have strong enough belief? Or is it that if you actually are really honest with yourself, we know what is right?

Adam: (1:57:30) I think there can be a mix, but they feel different. There's that feeling of, "Man, it's really hard to know what the right thing to do is here." I think that feels like the feeling of being torn asunder.

Jackson: (1:57:46) Yeah.

Adam: (1:57:47) Then there's the feeling where, if you really held yourself to account, you know what the right thing to do is here.

Jackson: (1:57:52) Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Adam: (1:57:53) Yeah. Yeah. And you are just trying to avoid it. That feels, I think, more shameful if you can really get to the bottom of what that feeling is. It doesn't feel like, "Should I do this or should I do that?" No, it feels like you don't want people to look at you.

Jackson: (1:57:53) Incentives. Right, right.

Adam: (1:58:10) When you can identify that, that's when I think it's easier to flip. It helps to have convictions so that you will feel more of the second one than the first. But life is complicated; it's not always obvious what you should do.

Jackson: (1:58:20) Yeah.

Adam: (1:58:21) But I think much more often it's like, no, it's pretty clear what the right thing is to do. It's just hard to realize you should just do it.

Jackson: (1:58:28) Yeah. I do think we would be less ruled by incentives if more people had conviction in what they thought about or were doing. The second part of this that still ties back to "Declining the Dragon," too, is that your answer makes a lot of sense and also felt maybe a little more oriented towards being courageous in a certain situation. I think there's an element of this, too, where a "dragon," in theory, was deciding to leave academia and go full-time on the blog. I'm curious how you've thought about that type of risk-taking. And then maybe as a supplement to it—you've written so much about deviance and risk-taking—what do you have to lose now?

Adam: (1:59:14) My own integrity. You can sell it at any moment. That option is always there.

Jackson: (1:59:21) Do an Oreo deal. It's right there.

Adam: (1:59:22) Exactly. Peer review-flavored Oreos. There will never be a lack of opportunities to trade in your values for something else. I also know that this could all go away at any moment. You might feel this too; I feel extremely thankful to live in a universe where there are enough people in the world who like what I do that they support me doing it. I didn't have to be born into that world, and this world could change at any time. So I certainly feel that sense of, "I might have to do something else." Who knows where I'll end up?

Jackson: (1:59:59) It specifically exists not only because of you, but because you did take that risk—which I think is another thing. "How do I take future risks?" It's hard. It's harder.

Adam: (2:00:11) Yeah.

Jackson: (2:00:12) Do you think your dad's photos have affected the writing or the reading of the writing?

Adam: (2:00:16) Yes. People will sometimes message me, being like, "Can we hear more about your dad?" The very first paid post I did was with him. I think it gives a different feel to it. His photos have such a good feeling about them. You have a feeling of, "Oh, I'm seeing a person how they are." He's especially good at photographing kids being kids and people doing their jobs in such a way that you really feel it's a slice of life. I think it puts people in that kind of headspace when they read it. Sometimes I'll meet someone, and they're like, "What are you doing?" and I say, "I'm a blogger." Everyone wants to know, "Have you written anything that I've read?" But then sometimes they'll be like, "Oh, you write the thing that has the black and white pictures at the top." So, hey, branding matters. Yeah.

Jackson: (2:01:10) Any—doesn't have to be holistic, doesn't have to be universal—but any recent favorite bits of writing or essays you've written or read?

Adam: (2:01:19) What have I read recently that I really liked, or historically? Yeah, I keep a list of what I think are the best, greatest blog posts.

Jackson: (2:01:29) Is that available publicly?

Adam: (2:01:30) Yeah. Every time I announce the—

Jackson: (2:01:34) The jamboree.

Adam: (2:01:35) The Blog Jamboree, I'm like, "Here are what I think are some greats of the form." Some more recent additions to that are a post called "Ask Not Why You Would Work in Biology, But Why You Wouldn't," or something like that. I just think it's a beautiful piece about, basically, you should do whatever you can to prevent yourself from being catheterized when you're old. And just working in biology might lead you to not have to have that happen. I'm not sure—that's why I have the list, so I don't have to keep it in mind. It's there.

Jackson: (2:02:03) Yeah. I like to ask people—we often talk about things we regret—I like to ask people, what are—

Adam: (2:02:09) —you most glad that you did? Start this blog? Start writing? And it was my—yeah, I didn't know how much I enjoyed it before I did it, which feels silly. Like, you couldn't imagine what it would feel like to write. And no, it just turns out really hard to imagine before you did it. Once I started doing it, it felt like, "Oh, this is what I should be doing." As it got successful, it felt like, "Oh, this is what I can do." And my life is completely changed because of that. If not for that, I would probably be doing my third or fourth postdoc. Maybe I would have wriggled my way into a department somewhere, and I would have never thought the range of thoughts or met the range of people that I have. I think it'd be a perfectly fine life, but this one's much more interesting, so I'm glad it's the one I get to live.

Jackson: (2:02:56) Hmm. Good reminder to take the risks. Two final quotes. Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. The beauty ain't in the necklace, it's in the neck. And then also you: "All writing about despair is ultimately insincere. Putting fingers to keys or pen to paper is secretly an act of hope, however faint. Hope that someone will read your words and hope that someone will understand." What are you hoping for?

Adam: (2:03:30) The opportunity to keep doing this and to be useful to people. I am not a particularly religious person, but the prayer I say to myself every time before I hit that post button is: Let me be useful.

Jackson: (2:03:42) Can you say one more sentence or two about what useful means?

Adam: (2:03:46) I mean, it's going to mean different things to different people. It could mean that this gives someone a schema for thinking about this they didn't have before. It could mean this gets someone unstuck. It could mean that someone with a lot of money tilts a little bit more toward doing something interesting with it than not. It could mean that someone who's teetering on the edge of, "Do I sell out and do this thing? Or do I live by my values?" goes a little bit toward living by my values. Yeah, it could be any of those things.

Jackson: (2:04:18) Cool. That's all I got. We can end the conversation now.

Adam: (2:04:21) Cool. And it's the perfect time for it.

Jackson: (2:04:22) Thank you.

Adam: (2:04:23) This was a blast. Thanks for having me.

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