#299 — Steps in the Right Direction
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I speak with Russ Roberts, the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, about the shortcomings of economics as a science, the power of books, the difference between wild and tame problems, the utility of techniques like decision analysis, incommensurate goods, and free-riding counterfactuals, and how the decisions we make change us how bad we are predicting future experience, changing moral norms, effective altruism, free speech, and much more. I hope you enjoy this one, and that you do as you listen to this one! To access full episodes of the making sense podcast, you ll need to become a member of the M.I.P. subscriber, which is made possible entirely through the support of our listeners.We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, there is no way to support the podcast without becoming a subscriber.We do not run ads, and therefore it is possible that you would not be making moral progress.So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast, and thus consider becoming one of our sponsors, which would greatly help us continue to make a better listening experience for the podcast. You ll get access to all sorts of excellent resources, including books, podcasts, courses, and podcasts, including the latest in the latest and greatest podcasts, as well as access to the latest podcasts available on the most widely available on our social media platforms, such as The Making Sense Podcast. . If you like what we're doing here you'll need to subscribe to our newest podcast, subscribe to the Making sense Podcast, where you'll get the most up-to-to date updates on the latest episodes of Making Sense. I really hope you'll consider subscribing to the podcast! - Sam Harris to get the latest updates on all things making sense, and learn more about what we do here, and other great things happening in the world, including how to make sense of the world. -- Thanks for listening to this episode, I really enjoyed making sense! -- making sense? -- Sam Harris and making sense of it all! -- -- Thank you! -- Jon Els, Jon Harris -- Jon -- Make sense? -- Jon's Making Sense? -- Jon Parcast -- "Making sense?" --
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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of this conversation in order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast you'll
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podcatcher along with other subscriber only content we don't run ads on the podcast and
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therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy
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what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'm speaking with russ roberts russ is the
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president of shalem college in jerusalem and a research fellow at the hoover institution at
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stanford he also hosts the award-winning weekly podcast econ talk which i highly recommend and
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he's the author of five books including how adam smith can change your life and most recently
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wild problems a guide to the decisions that define us and that is the topic of today's conversation
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we discuss the shortcomings of economics as a science
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the power of books the difference between wild and tame problems darwin's embarrassing attempt to
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rationally decide whether to get married the utility of techniques like decision analysis
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incommensurate goods free riding counterfactuals how the decisions we make change us how bad we are
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predicting future experience changing moral norms effective altruism free speech whether we are in fact
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making moral progress social media truth versus comfort problems with consequentialism free will
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meditation and other topics anyway i really enjoyed this one i hope you do as well and now i bring you
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i am here with russ roberts russ thanks for joining me great to be with you so i've been looking forward
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to this i you uh you are in a truly og podcaster you uh you got into the game earlier than i did uh you
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have a great podcast econ talk and uh you have a wonderful new book wild problems a guide to the
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decisions that define us uh which i i it was a great audio book too i i think i consumed it all
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as audio on on a few long walks and it's especially good for that it's really um you're a great company
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for those hours so um thank you for what you're doing and perhaps you can uh summarize your your
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intellectual and academic background that you're you're bringing to those projects oh well thanks
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thanks for the kind words about the podcast and the book i i should warn my podcast listeners that
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the audio book is not read by me yeah which they have complained about but in a friendly way i was
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disappointed but it's actually it's still good so it's uh thank you i'm glad to hear it my my journey
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is a little bit off the beaten track but i think the more you talk to people the more you find out that
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there is no beaten track but i started off as an academic economist trained at the university of
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chicago taught at rochester stanford ucla washington university in st louis and george mason
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worked for a number of think tanks including the hoover institution that i'm still affiliated with
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but somewhere in there i got interested in communicating economics to a general audience so
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i wrote a few novels that teach economics i wrote a couple of rap videos started a podcast
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wrote an animated poem and strangely enough about a year and a half ago i got asked to be the
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president of a college in jerusalem shalem college israel's only liberal arts college with a core
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curriculum and philosophy history great great books great texts and um decide to move to israel
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and uh be the president of a college so it's a it's an unusual journey i used to be really interested
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in economics i'm still a little interested in it but part of the reason i'm the president of this
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college is i got a lot more interested in philosophy the life well lived yeah and education more generally
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which is a quite a hard hard thing to uh to do well it turns out yes did you have a deep connection
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to israel already had you spent a lot of time there or or was this truly a blind adventure well i'm
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jewish i've been to israel i don't know before i moved here probably a dozen times maybe more
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i've always loved visiting i never planned to live here was not a life for some jews it's a dream to
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move to israel and and become a citizen it was not our plan but we jumped anyway when when this
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opportunity came along to be president of shalem college did you have any hebrew at that point
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a little bit a little bit katsat uh now i have a little bit more my wife is semi-fluent in a
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conversational way i'm embarrassing but trying to get better every day nice my college all of our
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courses almost everyone's taught in hebrew so that's uh even though i'd like to sit in on say
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the plato and aristotle class or homer or shakespeare i wouldn't get that much out of them unfortunately
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maybe next year we'll see right so um before we jump into the book which raises a lot of topics
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that are kind of core to my interest you just said a few things about your perhaps waning interest in
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economics and the difficulty of charting a path through education that retrospectively makes
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a ton of sense perhaps you can give me some of your thoughts on the the limits of economics
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as a discipline i think you know many of us who are lay consumers of its products tend to marvel at
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how unlike a science it often seems to be and sam don't tell anybody so give me the uh kitchen
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confidential version of uh economics but perhaps also you can say something about how you view the
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enterprise of of education at this point and its challenges so economics is very mathematical as it's
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taught at the graduate level and it's taught as if it were a science it's the science of human
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behavior and in in graduate economics and in undergraduate economics i think that's the wrong
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word uh it certainly is a formal way of thinking about human behavior and the essence of that formal way
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of thinking is maximization uh we're trying to get the most out of our money or our time i think one of
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the misconceptions people have about economics is they assume it's only about the stock market or
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gdp or unemployment or interest rates it is about many other things it is about how we spend our time
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it is about the power of leisure and it's about the fact that if i choose one thing i can't choose
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something else so in many ways economics is the study of choice choice under constraints i don't have
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an infinite amount of money i don't have an infinite amount of time and in particular economists are
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interested in both individual choices and then how choices aggregate in what are called markets it's a
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funny word because we think of a market as like a farmer's market or a stock market but when economists
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talk about markets they mean the complex dance between buyers and sellers and say housing or restaurants
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and the prices that emerge from that process and understanding those things and thinking about them
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thoughtfully in is a tremendous craft and it's very valuable and it's very useful but economists
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um are kind of imperialists one of my professors george stigler said there's only one social science and
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we are its practitioners not the most humble view i'm a big fan of george but uh he was a very funny
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man rare in our profession but what he meant by that was uh the other social sciences don't really have
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any models they're just sort of they have some theories but they're not rigorous whereas
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economists they can predict they can do sociology they can do anthropology they can do psychology
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and i was trained that way and it's a powerful toolkit uh for thinking about human behavior
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but it has shortcomings there are many things it's not very good at looking at and as i've gotten older
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i've started to think that those things that it's not very good at looking at are the things that most
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of us care the most about our sense of belonging the the tribes we're in the kin
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folk we have the sense of dignity that we crave the feeling that we matter that we're important
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that people pay attention to us these are the things that with respect these are the things that we care
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about these are the things that bring deep satisfaction not just happiness or fun or pleasure
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uh when an economist talks about pleasure they mean everything they mean the ice cream cone they mean
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a good job well done they mean a great vacation problem is that calculus of adding up pleasures and
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taking away pains which is a fundamental utilitarian calculus i think has limitations when applied to the
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things i was talking about earlier family love belonging transcendence the things that that we care
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about deeply i don't think the tools of maximization fit very well in there i think we need other tools
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other ways of thinking about it so as i got older i got less interested in sort of not sort of i got
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less interested in what economists tools tell us and we're interested in the parts of the world
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and our lives that economics has less to say about i discovered adam smith's other book the theory of
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moral sentiments which is a book about ethical behavior the life well lived why we do decent
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things to one another rather than merely be selfish and grasping he says in there that the pursuit of
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money and wealth is a fool's game and will tarnish your soul so those kinds of more philosophical thoughts
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became more interesting to me the other thing that i think is related which i think you're hinting at
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when you asked about education is that you know most education as it's practiced in the united states
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around the world is um the passing on of information and knowledge and we live in a world where we have
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tremendous access to information and knowledge uh via wikipedia via youtube via podcasts and what i think
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education should be about is the kindling of the fire that is the human mind that's uh plutarch's line
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but i didn't say in english the the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled
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i think most education around the world in high school college and even sometimes in graduate school
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there's a lot of filling of vessels and not a much not much kindling of a fire and i've gotten
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interested in the question of how do you allow someone to explore a great text to read a great book on
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your own when you're reading the company of other people and with a great teacher to guide you you're
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changed you're transformed when it's done correctly and that process which is sadly missing uh in most
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undergraduate education i think around the world is the um is magic and when you've experienced it most
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of us never did as an undergraduate but when you do experience it uh it's not just sharing ideas with
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other people it's sharing ideas in a thoughtful way under the guidance of a of another great mind
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the the teacher and that is uh gives you superpowers superpowers of how to read how to think how to talk
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with other people respectfully i think it's the essence of what i think of as real education it's
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what we try to do here at shilliam college we don't always succeed but that's the gold standard
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yeah and i often think about reading a great book as a conversation even though it's it is in one
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direction if you as you point out if you're having a larger conversation with a great teacher and your
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own colleagues about the book it definitely enriches the experience but yeah that's the wonderful thing
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about books we have you know some very smart and in many cases wise persons side of a conversation
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that they have taken in many cases years to prepare so we're getting the best of their
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thoughts and um we're getting them across the centuries it's really amazing i mean what an amazing
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technology a book is how strange though that even though it's one-sided when you read it 10 years later
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the second time they're saying something different yeah yeah a really great book is a conversation
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in that sense and i agnes callard the philosophers so said to me when i had her on econ talk she said
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you know great teaching is teaching you how to talk to dead people and that's uh that's the magic of
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of of a book it's extraordinary and there are a lot of really talented dead people worth talking to yeah
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yeah okay so let's talk about your book again the title is wild problems and you uh
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distinguish wild problems from tame ones maybe that's a good place to start what are wild problems
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and and what are tame ones tame ones are ones that we can find solutions to using data and algorithm
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evidence you know what movie do i want to watch saturday night you get a pretty good idea of what
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might be interesting to me from recommendations that i would get online uh if i want to get from um
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boston to chicago and be traffic as as much as possible ways or google maps will will help me get
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there i want to get to the moon it's a tame problem uh it's not an easy problem but we know how to do it
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it's a certain set of steps there's a recipe and certain problems in life recipes are the way to go
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an algorithm is is the way to go and we're spoiled we have lots of those techniques for many of the
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challenges we face in life uh we have websites to give us recommendations we have crowd the wisdom
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of crowds to help us with recommendations even even more richly and we'd like most of life to be
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that way and most of life is actually it's a remarkable time to be alive with the tools that
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we have for those kind of problems problem is there's a handful of problems in our lives that
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aren't like that or data and evidence are very little value and standard decision making tools i
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argue are are not helpful in fact can mislead us these are problems where we don't have a lot of
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data either because things aren't measurable or the people who have access to the experience can't
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share it easily it's hard to put those things into words or after i make a decision one way or the
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other i'm going to be a different person i'm going to be changed and so it's even a question of
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whether rationality is is well defined so these kind of problems are whether to get married who to
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marry whether to have children how many where to live what kind of career to pursue now some of
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these problems you can get some information you can get some information about the average salary in
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a business in a field for example may or may not apply to you you can certainly ask people if
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they're happy if they're married or happy if they have children but i think those are very thin
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unbelievably thin and and sterile ways of thinking about these kind of choices and as i
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suggest in the subtitle these are the decisions that define us they turn out to tell us both who
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we are and who we can be and i think um for many of these decisions trying to make a cost benefit
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analysis which is the economist uh central element of the of the economist toolkit uh is i think the
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wrong way to go the most important pieces of those cost benefit analysis of that cost benefit analysis
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are hard to measure can't be entered thoughtfully and we're often deceived by the ease with which
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we can quantify certain things and that often pushes us to ignore others i make the analogy of
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of the person coming home from the party can't find their keys uh they've lost them someone comes to help
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out finally the person helping says uh are you sure this is where you lost him no i don't think it is
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but this is where the light's best and you know i think it's under the street light yeah and i think
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a lot of times we're seduced by where the light is best and often the most interesting things are in
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the shadows in the darkness so part of my book is trying to help people live in the darkness
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well i want to get into some of the core ethical and and meta-ethical issues around how we conceive of
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what is good and you know the questions about measurement and aggregating utility you know i
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know you have concerns about the limits of utilitarianism or consequentialism as i usually
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refer to it and you know i i share some of those or at least i acknowledge the veracity of some of those
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concerns but i think we might there might be some daylight between us philosophically there and all of
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this has implications for other things you and i have both talked about in other contexts like
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effective altruism which is in vogue at the moment but before we get down to something like bedrock
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let's stay at a level above that and just kind of around the pragmatics of just how people make
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decisions how they can make decisions what is worth thinking about and how you know as you point out
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so much of our our recipes for a good life don't really prove that useful when you're trying to
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weigh up the the pros and cons of a a major decision that defines us and as an example in your book you
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spend a lot of time looking at darwin's certainly comical but in the end somewhat silly checklist for
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deciding the pros and cons of marriage perhaps you can describe what darwin was up to there and we
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can use that as a jumping off point sure so darwin was 29 years old uh he'd taken um his trip on the
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beagle and he was uh he's thinking about settling down so he wasn't sure it was a good idea and being
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a rational person he made a list of the pros and cons of marriage it's a really embarrassing list
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for starters at one point he says a wife would be better than a dog anyway to come home to a very low
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bar this is one could be thankful he wasn't test piloting this on twitter because uh yeah he'd be
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done we would not have had the origin of species exactly he'd be done it's a low bar even in the
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19th century but you know it's it's so that part there's a little bit of it's embarrassing when you
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look over the list and it's a little bit disorganized i reorganized it a bit in the book when you look at
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it the negatives of marriage are are both more numerous and more serious the positives are things
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like someone to come home to maybe companionship the negatives are things like stuck with their
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relatives socializing with them the expenses of childbearing and child rearing the tragedies of
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losing children to illness won't have time to do your science won't make an impact on the world
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it seems like a no-brainer when you look at the list if someone brought this list to you and said
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what do you think you'd say well obvious choice don't get married you're gonna you risk not becoming
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one of the greatest scientists of all time in return return for what he calls female chit chat
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another less than honorable uh summary so despite that he then scribbles a we have his journal so we have
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this in his own hand at the end he writes this stream of consciousness narrative about how horrible
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it would be to to to be returning it alone to his dingy apartment at night and all of his rational
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pro-con list falls apart he just finally says i'm gonna marry marry marry exclamation point after
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each one qed you know that you know quite a semestratum that that was supposed to be proved it's over it's
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like a math proof got to get married and there's a puzzle there why would the decision that he
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clearly favors in the sober light of day which is to not marry because it it's going to be likely not
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worth it to him and and and by the way kafka makes the same list yeah and he overwhelmingly decides it's
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also similar it looks horrible and so he doesn't get married but darwin does and uh i think it's about
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six months later he marries his cousin which is amusing because it means that the relatives who's
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worried about are his own relatives so anyway why what was he thinking you know the standard answer
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would be well he just made an emotional decision he went with his gut i don't think that's what's
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going on when you look at his list and if it would be true of anybody making such a list and
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actually i opened the book with a conversation with a friend who was trying to say whether to have
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a child and he and his wife made a list of the pros and cons and he told me after they made the list
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they couldn't decide there were so many pros and so many cons that were so easy seemingly evenly
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weighted and certainly darwin and my friend i would suggest don't know much about marriage or
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childbearing child rearing child raising certainly in the case of marriage there's nothing in darwin's
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list about love sharing a journey through life together the ups and downs of that emotional experience
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he didn't have any access to it how could he know about those things now he could read novels i don't
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know if he's a big reader of novels but his married friends if he had any which he probably
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did he could see them socializing but most people who are married can't explain the specialness of
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staying with somebody for decades they can't explain and by the way it's not all rosy of course
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certainly you you can't appreciate the upside but there's also sometimes a very bad downside
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all of that is veiled from most of us before we make a decision about whether to get married or
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not or whether to have children or whether move to israel or whether to become a chemist rather than
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a lawyer or a poet and so how do you think about that i mean how do you when you confront that and
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i think what darwin confronted was i see myself i have always seen myself as a married person as a
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father and so he he took a leap he married he had many children tragically some of them died but he
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had a very good marriage most of the time towards the end he had some issues with religion and his
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wife his wife was very religious but for most of her life they had a blessed marriage a wonderful
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marriage and ironically one of his favorite things she did what i don't know if i mentioned this it was
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where they might have to leave london what if she doesn't like london she didn't like london
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they had to move to the countryside turned out he liked it he liked coming home for spending time
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with her at night she would read to him so many of the things that make marriage and a shared life
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with another person special he didn't know about but something in him knew that it was worth making
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a leap over even though it didn't appear to be a good choice and i give many examples in the book of
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people from the world of science math very analytical areas where these kind of decisions they make what
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appears to be a rat an irrational decision and i would suggest it's not irrational and neither are
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they making a decision with their gut what they're doing is they're recognizing as i think we all can
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and should and sometimes do that these decisions are about more than just how happy will i be day to day
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with another person or with a child or living in a different place or in a different kind of career
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those are not the only things we care about those day-to-day concerns which i call narrow utilitarianism
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they're not irrelevant they matter they're what economists tend to focus on they are only though
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part of the story the rest of the story is the overarching narrative of our identity our sense of
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self of who we are and and our and the virtues of those those identities and who we could become
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not just who we are now you know in the economist model you have a set of preferences and you try to
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get the most out of them the idea that you might want to change your preferences that they might be
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unattractive or immoral is rarely it's not ever hardly ever considered but in real life we should
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consider those things we should consider who we want to be who we want to become and those choices
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we're talking about set us on those paths and so it's about more than just the day-to-day pleasure or
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pain i argue in the book i don't know if you're married sam i don't know if you have children we have
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both i i'm married i have four children it is very possible that the number of days as a parent that
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are positive are smaller than the number of days as a parent that are negative there are a lot of bad
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days things go wrong with your kids they have challenges they have trauma you can't help them
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they are not just like you they give you heartache but they also give you joy and they are amazing and
00:25:28.160
they give you a taste of what it's like for your own parents they connect you to your own parents in
00:25:32.440
ways that are unimaginable they create a future for you you couldn't have otherwise they're not it's not
00:25:37.540
for everyone it might not even be a good idea for everyone it's certainly not but it's not just about
00:25:44.180
the number of good days versus the number of bad days there's so much more at stake there and i think
00:25:50.340
people realize that okay well as much as i wanted to hover above it i'm feeling the gravity of the
00:25:57.000
issues you have with consequentialism pulling us inward so there was a lot in there before we truly slip
00:26:04.480
over the event horizon maybe i just want to ask you about a tool i think this is you know properly in
00:26:11.300
the economics toolkit i i learned it in um the engineering economic systems department when i
00:26:17.820
was an undergraduate at stanford actually you you say you taught at stanford what years were you there
00:26:22.240
i was there uh 85 to 87 okay so and then a lot of summers uh visiting interesting that's exactly
00:26:31.040
when i was there that's when i was a freshman in 85 taking economics so i took it so did you know uh
00:26:38.180
did you know ron howard uh it's funny you mention ron howard i i had a story from my book that i
00:26:43.880
didn't get into the book but uh he has some very very uh i heard a story about him from one of his
00:26:51.200
students that i almost put in the book i could share it if you want yeah i'd love to hear it cut it if
00:26:55.120
you want so part of my book is about certainty and our desire for certainty and that's the power of an
00:27:02.600
algorithm or an equation an app it tells us what to do and then then i'll get i'll make the best
00:27:08.100
decision that we have such a craving for that uncertainty makes us uneasy and somebody told
00:27:14.140
me a story about ron howard that i thought was really extraordinary which was i heard the story
00:27:19.040
from the student i contacted professor howard and he gave me his version and i don't what i'm going to
00:27:24.600
give you now is some might be one of the other or a mix but the point is the same in both of them
00:27:29.340
which is that on his exams with each question that you answered you had to assign a probability
00:27:35.480
that you were right and if you the higher the probability that you assigned to a question you got
00:27:41.460
right the more points you got and the lower the pro the higher the probability to that you assigned
00:27:46.020
a question you got wrong you'd lose points and he told people he said don't put a hundred percent
00:27:53.180
certainty next to any answer because if you put a hundred percent that you're a hundred percent
00:27:59.900
certain and it's wrong you will get a score of negative infinity and negative infinity cannot be
00:28:06.140
outweighed by your score on the final if your midterms a negative infinity you fail the class so that
00:28:12.600
was the story so he gives the exam and some people i don't know how many put a hundred percent on a
00:28:19.900
question that they got wrong and their lives were who knows what happened to them you know i i don't
00:28:25.740
know how how much he he actually enforced it he did tell me that that at some places where he taught
00:28:30.940
they didn't allow it they found it cruel to give students confront them with this this decision
00:28:36.840
it hardly seems cruel to me and and what's powerful about it of course is that this student who told me
00:28:41.540
the story had had the class 20 30 40 years ago and it says i've never forgotten that because
00:28:47.580
it it taught me that you should never be a hundred percent certain about anything and that is i believe
00:28:53.800
a very very deep lesson in life and very very useful to be aware that some uncertainty cannot be resolved
00:29:01.020
certainly you you're not shouldn't be a hundred percent sure of anything and uh so that's my run
00:29:06.860
howard yeah but i i never knew him when i was at stanford oh oh yeah it was too bad he he was he's
00:29:11.560
really um i i have lost touch with him mostly although i did interview him for my book lying
00:29:17.300
maybe um i don't know six or seven years ago but uh yeah he had a great effect on me ethically more
00:29:25.160
than anything else because he taught this course that he called the ethical analyst i think it was a
00:29:30.040
graduate seminar but it was just a an investigation there's a conversation among you know 10 or 12 of us
00:29:36.020
for a quarter about whether or not it's ever ethical to lie right and and you very quickly
00:29:43.360
push past the the ann frank scenario and then you're talking about white lies really for the rest of the
00:29:50.460
course and you know i i and i it really seemed virtually everyone else in that class came out of
00:29:57.220
the black box of that course it really changed with respect to the ethics of lying and i wrote a short
00:30:04.880
book titled lying that was really my version of what i learned when i was 18 in that class but he
00:30:11.640
also taught and really pioneered this area of um i don't know what it's considered now if it's
00:30:19.320
operations research or i don't know you know where you find it on the shelf but it's called decision
00:30:24.000
analysis and it's a technique of integrating all the information one has about a decision and all of
00:30:31.520
one's probabilistic intuitions in a systematic way so that you can make a what purports to be a more
00:30:38.240
rational decision than just doing what darwin did with a you know the pros over here and the cons over
00:30:45.520
there and you sort of stare at your piece of parchment in his case for a while and then you throw up
00:30:52.380
your hands and you make a gut decision integrating everything you've been ruminating over so what
00:30:59.780
howard purported to be able to do and and you know the experience of using the tool i almost never do it
00:31:06.580
but you know back in the day when i was studying it and trying to apply it to my life it did seem
00:31:13.260
better than just the pros and cons it seemed like it allowed you to systematize your your intuitions
00:31:23.620
and especially he demonstrated this a lot in class that we're far better at making probabilistic
00:31:30.140
judgments than we think we are you know like if you ask a class of undergraduates you know how many
00:31:36.480
mcdonald's franchises are there on earth at the moment and you get a i mean certainly you see
00:31:43.720
something like the wisdom of the crowd if you aggregate those guesses but most people are pretty
00:31:47.820
good i mean they're not orders of magnitude off and it's true for probabilistic judgments about things
00:31:53.700
that are going to happen in the future and you can get better at doing that so i guess this is a long
00:31:57.360
and i actually don't remember whether ron did that on on any of the tests i took for him but that's a
00:32:03.460
very ron thing to have done with um infinite negative outcome but uh it was an experience of
00:32:10.100
feeling like we could in some perfect world get better at aggregating that our complete state of
00:32:17.400
information and thinking about this from the other side as a counterpoint to what you just suggested
00:32:23.180
i mean what what else do we have to go on but the totality of information we have and think we have
00:32:30.940
about the you know what's likely to happen on the basis of taking one path or another and couldn't
00:32:39.480
we at the end of the day also build into our forward-looking model of what's likely to happen
00:32:44.700
the probability that we'll be changed by the decision itself and this is a topic i want to explore with
00:32:51.360
you that just as you point out certain decisions change us so like it's so what's so silly about
00:32:57.960
darwin's list is that he's so completely blind to this prospect and really this certainty that you
00:33:04.920
know once you're married things are going to seem different you know you're just you're not able
00:33:10.660
in this list to value things the way you will value them once you have this wife you love right
00:33:18.040
and so um anyway i gave you a lot there but what what do you think about decision analysis or some
00:33:24.500
other as yet uninvented tool for leveraging our our rationality more than than we do at present
00:33:32.840
i think about emails i get ads that pop up on my web pages about try this this is the path to being
00:33:42.260
more productive this is the path to being more fit the seven minute workout you ever click on the
00:33:48.640
seven minute workout sam yeah yeah ever look at it that was that was popularized by the new york times
00:33:53.700
yeah i tried it for a while separated my shoulder doing one of the dips on my piano bench it was a
00:34:00.180
mistake but the bigger mistake was thinking you know wouldn't it be awesome if there were seven
00:34:05.740
minute workout and i wouldn't have to really like work and studies show that the seven minutes are
00:34:12.080
now i'm sure somewhere there might even be peer reviewed there's data and evidence that shows
00:34:17.020
that it's true i think so there's a lot of things to say to what you said i'm not sure i remember
00:34:22.040
everything i want to comment on but i'd start with the fact that our brains don't always process things
00:34:26.980
so well and we often look for the easy way out or the thing that we already have decided but we tell
00:34:33.020
ourselves a story you know the narrative fallacy and we will find data to convince us that we made the
00:34:39.500
right decision and we'll ignore the data that's on the other side and i think being aware that's
00:34:43.700
very powerful having said that use data when you can i'm not anti-data i'm not anti-proconless it's a
00:34:50.100
good idea it's just that the point of darwin's story is that if you are not careful you will leave
00:34:55.900
out some of the most important things if you have a really good decision making process and you remember
00:35:01.660
those things and you seek counsel which is always a good idea ask a friend who you trust and who can be
00:35:08.260
honest with you to think about help you think about what should be thought about that's very
00:35:12.500
powerful it's not unimportant and then perhaps to even think about how you ought to weigh the different
00:35:17.760
things but i think the other part that i comment on is that the idea that i can imagine what my life
00:35:24.640
will be like in the future as a as a married person or as a parent or as a resident of a different
00:35:30.180
place or in a different kind of career that's an illusion that's that's not like well i'll do the best i
00:35:35.260
can no it's an illusion you can't get very good at it and here's the the other hard point the things
00:35:41.120
that will come to mind are often the things that are that are more tangible and the intangible things
00:35:47.280
are going to be hard to remember that's one good reason why you should seek counsel certainly a good
00:35:50.980
friend can help you think of those those intangible things but at the root of part of the critique that
00:35:57.200
i'm trying to make in the book which has a critique of economics under under the surface is pointing
00:36:03.080
out that many pleasures are not commensurate uh and to think that i can tot them up i can just pile
00:36:09.660
them up and then subtract away the pains ignores the fact that there are certain issues where that's
00:36:15.080
not the right calculus you know this this really raises rears its head in in ethical decisions or
00:36:22.540
decisions of commitment right how should i treat my spouse should i treat my wife uh when i'm thinking
00:36:29.860
about my obligations should i think well you know what can i get away with to be as happy as possible
00:36:36.300
it's tempting right and it's a natural impulse we're hardwired very much hardwired to look for ways to
00:36:42.840
take advantage of our spouses our friends to do what helps us and not have to make sacrifices to free ride
00:36:49.720
on their efforts and what works in the other direction uh well loyalty love commitment uh honor
00:36:57.640
ethics religion there's a bunch of things but for many of us those things are weak and so would you
00:37:04.980
argue that you know the best marriage for you not for your the two of you but for you is to see how
00:37:12.140
much you can get away with in terms of the daily responsibilities of carpooling and dishes and
00:37:17.360
cooking and cleaning and filling out the taxes and you know maybe your wife won't notice i mean we
00:37:23.700
all understand that's despicable it's not a it's not an honorable path but it's also there's nothing
00:37:30.040
attractive about it and we'd argue that that's wrong it's just wrong but why is it wrong i mean
00:37:36.260
seems like isn't that what we do through all most of our life we look for advantages look for a chance
00:37:41.000
to get ahead we look for what makes me as happy as possible but we also understand that sometimes
00:37:47.200
that's just wrong and shouldn't do those things but they're they're hard to do so how do you should
00:37:52.580
you do a cost-benefit analysis and then you know on your deathbed realize you've been a horrible person
00:37:57.480
even though you're really happy i think that's horrifying i think most of us recoil at the thought of
00:38:03.300
that so i don't think i think the standard decision-making analysis if you're not careful
00:38:09.140
leaves out ethical considerations shared experiences that are often complicated it leaves out the
00:38:17.760
incommensurability of certain pleasures over others you can't just add them up and for me part of my
00:38:24.240
goal in this book is to help people recognize there's no right decision there's no best decision
00:38:27.980
i think this is really hard for people when it comes to marriage you know who to marry not whether
00:38:32.900
to marry but who to marry uh you know i want to find the best possible spouse like a car i want
00:38:37.860
to find the car that's best for me yeah so i get on fill out a little questionnaire how many children
00:38:42.580
do you have do you like to drive fast and i found out my the best car for me is a two-seater that
00:38:47.400
that's not what a spouse is it's a different kind of decision for figuring out which car is going to
00:38:53.280
give you the most pleasure sure if it doesn't have a back seat you understand what you're giving up
00:38:56.880
if it it's a minivan you understand what you're giving up but when it's a spouse a particular
00:39:02.460
person a woman of that one what are you giving up well you could find a nicer one you can find a
00:39:09.160
smarter one you can find a prettier one you can find a more exciting one you know you name it so
00:39:14.100
is it always a mistake how should you think about that that's not it's not easy to think about what
00:39:19.320
the rational decision to make in that context i'm not saying oh then flip a coin or do whatever you
00:39:24.280
do just choose randomly close your eyes but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to make
00:39:29.740
a rational decision in these kind of areas that like you do with what kind of car to buy well
00:39:35.260
maybe this is a good place to invoke herb simon's concept of satisficing because that is that gets
00:39:42.700
at what we do instead of arriving at some pinnacle of rationality if you'd like to continue listening to
00:39:51.980
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