Category: Education
Yale Faculty v. Administrators
Yale has approximately one administrator for every undergraduate student (see also here and here). Years of simmering tension about the growth of administration relative to faculty has now been brought forward. President Trump has threatened to cut funding to Yale, the Yale administration has threatened to stop hiring faculty and raises, some faculty are now threatening to revolt.
Over 100 Yale professors are calling for the University administration to freeze new administrative hires and commission an independent faculty-led audit to ensure that the University prioritizes academics.
In a letter written to University President Maurie McInnis and Provost Scott Strobel, signatories addressed the “collision of two opposing forces: extraordinary financial strength and runaway bureaucratic expansion.”
…Professor Juan de la Mora, a letter’s signee, said that a significant number of Yale professors believe that the institution is using funding for “improper” purposes and neglecting the school’s founding principles of emphasizing faculty and students.
…Professor of Philosophy Daniel Greco mirrored these sentiments, recognizing the increase in administrative spending in Yale’s budget.
Greco said these spending habits have faculty “puzzled,” as they hear of the money being spent but do not see a change in their day-to-day work.
Professor of Law Sarath Sanga, author of the letter, wrote to the News that over the last two decades, “faculty hiring has stagnated while administrative ranks have by some estimates more than doubled–outpacing peer institutions.”
University are supposed to be faculty-led but over the last several decades most have been taken over by administrators–perhaps we shall see some change.
My 18-minute podcast with Ehsan Adouane
AI Goes to College…for the Free Money
Last year, the state [CA] chancellor’s office estimated 25 percent of community college applicants were bots.
Everyone understands that students are using AI; sometimes to help them learn, sometimes to avoid learning. What I didn’t appreciate is that community colleges offering online courses are being flooded with AI bots who are taking the courses:
The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.
The state has launched a Bladerunner-eque “Inauthentic Enrollment Mitigation Taskforce” to try to combat the problem. This strikes me, however, as more of a problem on the back-end of government sending out money without much verification. It’s odd to make the community colleges responsible for determining who is human. Stop sending the money to the bots and the bots will stop going to college.
Sam Altman, as usual, is ahead of the game.
The Library Burned Slowly
A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.
It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.
Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.
…Clumsy governmental dictates on contentious matters such as transgender rights do not merely settle disputes; they inflame societal divisions by transforming moral disagreements into winner-takes-all political battles. Civil society, by contrast, thrives precisely because it embraces diversity and facilitates compromise, allowing pluralistic communities to coexist peacefully without being conscripted into ideological warfare. The left, fixated upon uniform outcomes, consistently undervalues the power of voluntary cooperation and cultural persuasion. Their shortsightedness has delivered into the hands of their opponents the very instruments of coercion they forged, vividly confirming an enduring truth: the power you grant government today will inevitably be wielded tomorrow by your adversaries.
Read the whole thing.
How do very smart people meet each other?
When two of the smartest people in a university class meet each other, and become friends or start working together, how is it they typically meet? In class is one option of course, what else is there?
This important question seems oddly underdiscussed. I thank L. for suggesting it to me.
We need more elitism
Even though the elites themselves are highly imperfect. That is the theme of my latest FP column. Excerpt:
Very often when people complain about “the elites,” they are not looking in a sufficiently elitist direction.
A prime example: It is true during the pandemic that the CDC and other parts of the government gave us the impression that the vaccines would stop or significantly halt transmission of the coronavirus. The vaccines may have limited transmission to some partial degree by decreasing viral load, but mostly this was a misrepresentation, perhaps motivated by a desire to get everyone to take the vaccines. Yet the vaccine scientists—the real elites here—were far more qualified in their research papers and they expressed a more agnostic opinion. The real elites were not far from the truth.
You might worry, as I do, that so many scientists in the United States have affiliations with the Democratic Party. As an independent, this does induce me to take many of their policy prescriptions with a grain of salt. They might be too influenced by NPR and The New York Times, and more likely to favor government action than more decentralized or market-based solutions. Still, that does not give me reason to dismiss their more scientific conclusions. If I am going to differ from those, I need better science on my side, and I need to be able to show it.
A lot of people do not want to admit it, but when it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic the elites, by and large, actually got a lot right. Most importantly, the people who got vaccinated fared much better than the people who did not. We also got a vaccine in record time, against most expectations. Operation Warp Speed was a success. Long Covid did turn out to be a real thing. Low personal mobility levels meant that often “lockdowns” were not the real issue. Most of that economic activity was going away in any case. Most states should have ended the lockdowns sooner, but they mattered less than many critics have suggested. Furthermore, in contrast to what many were predicting, those restrictions on our liberty proved entirely temporary.
Recommended.
My history with philosophy
At the same time I started reading economics, at age 13, I also was reading philosophy. I lived in Hillsdale, New Jersey, but River Vale had a better public library for those topics, so I would ride my bike there periodically and take out books (I also learned about Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis by bringing home scratched LPs).
Most of all, I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there. I figured I should read all of them. So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come. Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.
I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato. In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better. The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.
My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium. Parmenides was a special obsession, though reader beware. It seemed fundamental and super-important. Timaeus intrigued me, as did Phaedrus, but I found them difficult. I appreciated The Republic only much later, most of all after reading the Allan Bloom introduction to the Chicago edition. My least favorite was Laws.
The other major event was buying a philosophy textbook by John Hospers (yes, if you are wondering that is the same John Hospers who wrote all that gay porn under a pseudonym). I think I bought this one in NYC rather than taking it out of the library. It explained the basic history of “early modern philosophy” running through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and that fascinated me. So I decided I should be reading all those people and I did. Berkeley and Hume were the most fun. I already could see, from my concomitant economics reading, that Kant could not think at the margin.
Other early philosophy readings, in high school, were Popper, Nietzsche, and Doseoyevsky, at the time considering Karamazov a kind of philosophy book. Some Sartre, and whatever else I could find in the library. Lots of libertarian philosophy, such as Lysander Spooner’s critique of social contract theories of the state. I also read a number of books on atheism, such as by Antony Flew and George Smith, and a good deal of C.S. Lewis, such as God in the Dock. Arthur Koestler on the ghost in the machine. William James on free will. Various 1960s and 1970s screeds, many of which were on the margins of philosophy. Robert Pirsig bored me, not rigorous enough, etc., but I imbibed many such “works of the time.” They nonetheless helped to define the topic for me, as did my readings in science fiction. If I was reading Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, and Theory and History by Mises, I also was thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.
For a brief while I considered becoming a philosopher, though I decided that the economist path was better and far more practical, and also more useful to the world.
I kept on reading philosophy through my undergraduate years. The biggest earthquake was reading Quine. All of a sudden I was seeing a very different approach to what social science propositions and economic models were supposed to mean. (I never had been satisfied with Friedman, Samuelson, or the Austrians on ecoomic methodology.) For a long time I thought I would write a 100-page essay “Hayek and Quine,” but I never did. Nonetheless some radical new doors were opened for me, most of all a certain kind of freedom in intellectual interpretation. I also was influenced a good deal by reading Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men/Starmaker novels, feeding into my speculative bent.
I didn’t do much with philosophy classes, though in graduate school at Harvard I sat in on Hilary Putnam’s philosophy of language class (with my friend Kroszner). That was one of the very best classes I ever had, maybe the best. At Harvard I also got to know Nozick a bit, and of course he was extraordinarily impressive. At that time I also studied Goethe and German romanticism closely, and never felt major allergies toward the Continental approaches.
One day at Harvard, in 1984, I walked into Harvard Book Store and saw a copy of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which had just come out. I hadn’t known of Parfit before, but immediately decided I had to buy and read the book. I was hooked, and spent years working on those problems, including for part of my dissertation, which was hardly advisable from a job market point of view. Like Quine, that too changed my life and worldview. “Quine and Parfit” would be an interesting essay too.
When I took my first job at UC Irvine, I hung out with some of the philosophers there, including the excellent Alan Nelson and also Gregory Kavka, with whom I co-authored a bit. Greg and I became very good friends, and his early death was a great tragedy. I also enjoyed my periodic chats with David Gordon, a non-academic philosopher who lives in Los Angeles and the best-read philosopher I have met.
In the late 1980s I met Derek Parfit, and ended up becoming Derek’s only co-author, on the social discount rate. The full story there is told in Dave Edmonds’s excellent biography of Parfit, so I won’t repeat it here. These posts are for secrets! I will add that Derek struck me as the most philosophical person I ever have met, the most truly committed to philosophy as a method and a way of life. That to me is still more important than any particular thing he wrote. Your writings and your person are closely related, but they also are two separate things. Not enough philosophers today give sufficient thought to who they are.
After the collaboration with Parfit, he wrote me a letter and basically offered to bring me into his group at Oxford (under what terms was not clear). That felt like a dead end to me, plus a big cut in lifetime income, and so I did not pursue the opportunity.
I ended up with four articles in the philosophical equivalent of the “top five” journals in economics. I also was pleased and honored when Peter Singer invited me to present my paper “Policing Nature” to his philosophy group at Princeton. I think of my books The Age of the Infovore and Stubborn Attachments as more philosophy than anything else, though synthetic of course.
I have continued to read philosophy over the years. Next on my list is the new translation of Maimonides, which on first glance seems like a big improvement. However I read much less philosophy in refereed journals than I used to. Frankly, I think most of it is not very philosophical and also not very interesting. It is not about real problems, but rather tries to carve out a small piece that is both marginally noticeable by an academic referee and also defensible, again to an academic referee. That strikes me as a bad way to do philosophy. It worked pretty well say in the 1960s, but these days those margins are just too small.
Most professional philosphers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers. They simply do not embody philosophic ideals, either in their writings or in their persons. Most of all I am inclined to reread philosophic classics, read something “Continental,” or read philosophic works that to most people would not count as philosophy at all. An excellent tweet on AI can be extraordinarily philosophical in the best sense of the term, and like most of the greatest philosophy from the past it is not restricted by the canons of refereed journals. Maxims have a long and noble history in philosophy.
My notion of who is a philosopher has broadened extensively over the years. I think of Patrick Collison, Camille Paglia, and the best Ross Douthat columns (among many other examples, let’s toss in the best Matt Y. sentences as well, and the best Peter Thiel observations), not to mention some art and architecture and music critics, as some of the best and most important philosophy of our time. The best philosophy of Agnes Callard (NYT) does not look like formal philosophy at all. I know it is hard for many of you to make this mental shift, but revisit how Kierkegaaard and Schopenhauer wrote and you might find it possible. And of course the very greatest philosophers of our time are the people who are building and learning how to use the quality LLMs.
A simple rule of thumb is that if no one is writing you, and telling you that you changed their lives, you probably are not a philosopher. You cannot expect such feedback in mathematical logic, or early in your career, but still it is not a bad place to start for judging this issue.
Looking back, I now see myself as having chosen the path of philosophy more than economics. I view myself as a philosopher who knows a lot of economics and who writes about economics (among other things). I am comfortable with that redefinition of self, and it makes my career and my time allocation easier to understand.
And now to go try that new Maimonides edition…
Brian Potter on what he has learned writing Construction Physics
- Individual construction tasks have, on average, not gotten cheaper since at least the 1950s.
- Bricks haven’t gotten cheaper since the mid-19th century, despite massive improvements in brickmaking technology.
- Construction has a reputation for being slow to innovate, but innovations seem to spread in construction at roughly similar rates to other industries, like car manufacturing or agriculture.
- Single family homes use less energy per square foot than multifamily apartments, likely because certain “fixed” energy costs like refrigerators and water heaters are spread across more living space.
- Historically high US homebuilding rates were in large part driven by falling household size. If you control for this factor, the current low rates of US homebuilding looks less dire.
Noting that his numbering scheme has those as 9-13, though it will not let me edit to such. Here is the full link.
My Blind Spots
“Based on everything I’ve ever asked you, what do you think my biggest blind spots are?” ChatGPT replies:
Here’s a speculative, analytical take based on your past questions and style of interaction:
1. Underestimating Non-Market Frictions in Implementation
You’re extremely sharp on incentives, regulation, and institutional design, especially in economic theory and historical analysis. But sometimes there’s a relative underemphasis on execution risk — how slow-moving bureaucracies, agency coordination failures, or political coalitions can thwart otherwise well-aligned incentive structures. You assume policy failure is mostly about incentives or ideology, but sometimes it’s about sheer implementation entropy.Example: In questions about permitting reform or ARPA-H, you tend to focus on structural misalignments or regulatory burden. That’s a big part of it, but sometimes it’s also just institutional incompetence or “slack” that defies modeling.
2. Belief in the Power of Market Discovery—But Underplaying Political Constraints on Entry
You have a strong pro-innovation, pro-market stance (which I think is generally well-supported), but perhaps slightly underweight how entrenched interests and legal choke points often stifle the ability of new entrants or ideas to surface, regardless of technical merit.Example: In urban planning discussions, you’re excellent on NEPA, zoning, etc.—but some of the constraints (e.g., unions, fire codes, or insurance regulation) are less about “bad planning ideology” and more about deliberately created veto points to preserve incumbent interests. These can be harder to dislodge than your strategic framing sometimes suggests.
3. Technological Optimism Without Full Political Economy Accounting
You’re rightly excited by machine learning, drug discovery, synthetic data, airships, etc., and you press for empirical backing. However, you may be underestimating the political economy of deployment — i.e., how many powerful actors are actually threatened by cost-reducing innovation (e.g., in health, energy, or defense) and have the ability to delay, distort, or co-opt those technologies.Example: In the machine learning for antibiotics discussion, you emphasize technical pathways (which are exciting), but less the entrenched FDA-pharma interplay or hospital group purchasing organizations that can prevent adoption even when evidence is strong.
4. Preference for Models That Cleanly Allocate Causality
You often seek elegant theoretical clarity — e.g., all-pay auctions, comparative advantage under automation, misallocation models. But the real world often features multiple overlapping distortions (e.g., taxes, zoning, union rules, insurance, etc.) that interact nonlinearly. Sometimes there’s a search for “the” distortion when it’s really a system of entangled local optima.5. Policy-First Lens vs. Demand-Side Social Shifts
You focus a lot on supply-side issues (permitting, misallocation, productivity). This is correct and important. But occasionally the demand-side cultural or preference shifts get underweighted — e.g., the declining taste for urban density, aversion to risk, or increasing parental control over children’s autonomy. These may not be fixable through supply-side tweaks alone.
Hat tip: Aashna Doshi.
Harvard says no
Harvard University said on Monday that it had rejected policy changes requested by the Trump administration, becoming the first university to directly refuse to comply with the administration’s demands and setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university.
Other universities have pushed back against the Trump administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which essentially called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure…
Some of the actions that the Trump administration demanded of Harvard were:
Conducting plagiarism checks on all current and prospective faculty members.
Sharing all its hiring data with the Trump administration, and subjecting itself to audits of its hiring while “reforms are being implemented,” at least through 2028.
Providing all admissions data to the federal government, including information on both rejected and admitted applicants, sorted by race, national origin, grade-point average and performance on standardized tests.
Immediately shutting down any programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Overhauling academic programs that the Trump administration says have “egregious records on antisemitism,” including placing certain departments and programs under an external audit. The list includes the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Public Health and the Medical School, among many others.
Here is more from Vimal Patel at the NYT.
What should I ask John Arnold?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. John might be the smartest person I know about the energy sector and also about philanthropy. Here is the opening of his Wikipedia entry:
John Douglas Arnold (born 1974) is an American philanthropist, former Enron executive, and founder of Arnold Ventures LLC, formerly the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. In 2007, Arnold became the youngest billionaire in the U.S. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund specializing in trading energy products that closed in 2012. He now focuses on philanthropy through Arnold Ventures LLC. Arnold is a board member of Breakthrough Energy Ventures and since February 2024, is a member of the board of directors of Meta.
So what should I ask him?
The Russian paradox
So much education, so little human capital:
According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) statistical database, Russians age 25 and older averaged 12.4 years of schooling circa 2019—almost the same as for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Europe, which averaged 12.6 years. While some Western European countries—Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, and the UK—reported mean years of schooling (MYS) well above Russia’s, others reported lower levels than Russia: among them, Austria, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain…
But while Russia’s educational profile looks solidly First World, its health profile assuredly does not…Among the dozens of countries from Asia, Europe, the New World, and Oceania included in the HMD, Russia presents as the extreme outlier—with shockingly low levels of life expectancy given its level of educational attainment. According to Barro-Lee, MYS at age 15 in Australia and Russia in 2010 were basically indistinguishable, yet in that same year, combined male and female life expectancy at age 15 was almost 14 years lower for Russia. The last time life expectancy at age 15 in Australia was at Russia’s 2010 level, according to HMD, was in 1929—well before the penicillin era…
As of 2019, Russian male life expectancy at age 15 looks to be solidly in the middle of the range for UN’s official roster of least developed countries (LDCs)—the immiserated and fragile states designated as “the most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of the UN family.” If WHO calculations were correct, life expectancy for a young man in Russia was all but identical to that of his Haitian counterpart at that time—and practically half of the world’s LDCs in Figure 3 had higher life expectancies than Russia!
That is from a longer piece by Nicholas Eberstadt, via Mike Doherty.
AI on Tariffs
There is some evidence that the White House used AI to come up with a quick and dirty (and incorrect) formula to correlate tariff rates with trade deficits. I have no problem with using AI, I think they just didn’t go far enough. The White House should have asked the AI a question like this:
Suppose the US imposed tariffs on other countries in an effort to reduce bilateral trade deficits to zero using the formula for the tariff of (exports-imports)/imports. What do you estimate would be the consequences of such a policy?
Answer (O1 Pro):
A tariff schedule keyed to bilateral deficits—imposing a rate equal to (US exports − US imports) / US imports—would be extremely disruptive and unlikely to achieve its goal. Key points:
Immediate Impact on Prices and Supply Chains
If the US imports more than it exports from a given country, (exports − imports) is negative, making the tariff percentage negative unless the formula is modified (e.g., by absolute value). In practice, one would presumably set a positive tariff aimed at closing the bilateral gap.
Such high tariffs would sharply raise import prices for both consumers and firms reliant on foreign inputs. It would encourage attempts to switch suppliers but at the cost of disrupting supply chains and increasing production expenses.
Retaliation and Trade War Dynamics
Targeted countries would almost certainly retaliate with their own tariffs. Retaliation would damage US export sectors—especially agriculture and high-value manufacturing—and risk a broader trade war.
Countries with a US trade surplus would apply punitive measures that shift US business to alternative suppliers, undermining the very exports the policy is meant to foster.
Misalignment with Macroeconomic Fundamentals
Bilateral imbalances reflect global production patterns, comparative advantage, and macro factors like savings–investment imbalances and currency flows. A country that persistently imports more overall does so because it’s running a capital account surplus. Tariffs don’t fundamentally alter that global saving–investment arithmetic.
If the US still runs an overall current account deficit, restricting imports from some countries will simply shift deficits to others. Global supply chains will rearrange, but the total US deficit will be largely unchanged.
Violation of Trade Agreements
Such a policy almost certainly violates WTO rules, since it imposes discriminatory tariffs based on bilateral imbalances. The resulting litigation and sanctions would add more uncertainty.
Net Effect: Reduced Efficiency, Higher Costs
Economically, the net effect is negative. Costs rise for US consumers and US manufacturers reliant on imported inputs. Retaliatory measures reduce export opportunities. Overall trade volume shrinks. Growth slows, and no fundamental improvement in the US external balance occurs.
In summary, a bilateral “deficit-equalizing” tariff policy would create severe distortions, invite retaliation, and do little to fix the structural causes of US trade deficits. Empirical evidence and standard trade theory both suggest it would reduce economic efficiency and likely harm US producers and consumers alike.
Good answer.
Hat tip: SB.
My early history as a chess player
Continuing with my semi-autobiography for the AIs, we now go back to when I was ten years old.
One day I felt terribly sick, really just awful, as if my innards were on fire. Fortunately my father insisted I go to the doctor, and it turned out my appendix was bursting and infected. I was rushed into surgery, and luckily I survived.
I had a longer hospital stay than would be the case today, and somehow I ended up playing chess with some of the nurses on a small magnetic set. All of a sudden I was hooked.
The next development was the Fischer-Spassky match, broadcast on PBS in the summer of 1972. I followed the match closely and rooted for Fischer. (Much later in life I met Eugene Meyer, through the Federalist Society. He was a real celebrity! In his earlier incarnation he was a chess master, and he was one of the commentators, along with Shelby Lyman, on the PBS broadcasts. He will always be “Eugene Meyer” to me. Remember when Reuben Fine walked into the PBS studio and made a cameo? As a ten year old I was thinking what a horse’s ass he was.)
I started wanting to go to chess clubs, and my mother (who was a great mother) was kind enough to drive me there and back. I also took chess books out of the public library and studied them. Irving Chernev’s Most Instructive Games of Chess was my early favorite. Then I bought a copy of Bobby Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games, which became the favorite as my skill improved.
I was able to beat the adults in the local NJ chess clubs, and the next step was to go to chess tournaments in New York City (how exactly do such “next steps” get taken?). And so I did. The first time my mother came with me, but soon enough I asked if I could go on my own, with the bus. I think by then I was twelve? Astonishingly, she let me. Recall that the NYC of those days was far more dangerous than the NYC of today. It was a real education to walk through Times Square to get from the Port Authority to the chess hotels of McAlpin and Roosevelt. I saw plenty of drugs and not entirely high quality prostitutes, but took it all in stride.
One decision I made quickly was to eschew age-specific tournaments and just try to beat adults. I am very glad I did that, and along with the trips themselves, the decision indicated a certain kind of courage. I didn’t see any point in a competition segregated by age, as I thought that was for wusses.
I sometimes say there were two things I learned in my early chess career. First, that I could win. That gave me further confidence. And I did win a lot.
Second, I learned that I could lose. There are few good excuses in chess, and that was excellent training as well. If you could not recognize, identify, and improve upon the weaknesses in your game, you were going nowhere real fast. Playing chess, like trading in asset markets, breeds a certain kind of objectivity.
I also learned a lot about how to deal with adults. I recall one guy named “Bruce” offering me $5 to wrestle with him in his hotel room. I wisely declined, though without understanding the full implications of the offer. I did not mention it to my mother.
Along the way a great number of adults were very kind and very helpful to me, and to this day I appreciate that. Les Ault and Tony Cottrell were two names in particular.
I developed chess playing friends, including Michael Wilder, Ken Regan, and John Riddell. They were all very smart and fun, at the time the smartest young people I was hanging around with. It was from Ken Regan that I learned about Tom Lehrer, for instance.
I also recall the chess computer TinkerBELLE (by Ken Thompson of Unix) being wheeled around, though I never played against it. I was skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence at that point, even though I was reading I, Robot at home. (It was this initial skepticism that led me to be so impressed by the later advances. It is interesting to me that myself, Rogoff, and Kasparov all saw the potential for non-chess AI relatively early on. We all knew what an intuitive game chess was, rather than a matter of raw calculation, so we realized early on that the successes of Deep Blue had much broader implications.)
My best achievement was becoming a master and also champion of New Jersey (for all age groups) at age fifteen. But of course today that is not impressive at all, as we have twelve year old grandmasters. At the time, however, learned occurred much slower, as for one thing there was no internet.
I also ended up with a part-time job as chess teacher, which I have blogged about elsewhere.
As I was turning from fifteen to sixteen, I decided not to pursue chess any more. As a career it was terrible back then with no real upside. As for my chess future, my main problem was a lack of talent. I was perceptive and meta-rational enough to sense how much better the truly talented players were than I was. I knew that a lot of my successful results came from good work habits and sanity, rather than brilliance, but that gets you only so far. I also didn’t hate losing enough. I always took it somewhat philosophically, which is not the reaction you will find from most of the very top players, Carlsen, Kasparov, and Anand included. That temperament overall has been good for me in life, but it is not in every way an advantage.
And of course my interests in economics and also philosophy were rising rapidly, as had been the case since the age of thirteen…
Why not inquire together more?
Robin Hanson, citing Agnes Callard, asks that question. He writes:
They said (my summary) that we have many standard roles, tools, and scripts to guide practical inquiry, that we have little need to inquire into deep topics, and that social talk is often of short duration, has norms of impracticality and frequent topic changes, is more to bond via relaxing affirming comfort while inquiry is harder work, and it raises fears of seeming uncertain, wrong, in conflict, dominating, or overly serious.
However, we do often socialize via exerting sustained and substantial effort in cooking, sport, hiking, games, travel, and activism. And we often enjoy arguing with each other, even on divisive topics like sex, politics, or religion. We sometimes even sustain such arguments over long engagements, such as on social media. I think that comparison to these cases preserves the puzzle: why not also inquire together?
I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.
For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we usethat method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.
I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke. As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person — somewhat separately — refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke. The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.
When people do wish to “talk through a question with me,” I find I am personally most useful offering reading references (I do have a lot of those), rather than ideas or analysis per se. The reading reference is a short computational strand, and it does not require joint, coordinated maneuvering at the end of very long computational strands.
Sometimes Alex and I make progress working through problems together, most of all if it concerns one of our concrete projects. But keep in mind a) we have been working together pretty closely for 35 years, b) often we are working together on the same concrete problem and with common incentives, c) we are pretty close to immune when it comes to offending each other, and d) our conversations themselves do not necessarily go all that well. So I view this data as both exceptional (in a very good way), and also broadly supportive of my thesis here.
For related reasons, I am most optimistic about “inquiring together more” in the context of concrete business decisions. Perhaps John and Patrick Collison are pretty good at this?
Or so it seems to me. Maybe I should go ask someone else.