Category: Philosophy
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK takes a step toward us
To escape our predicament, we cannot just cling to multi-party liberal democracy. Rather, we must find new ways of building social consensus and establishing active links between political parties and civil society. The immediate task is to oppose the new left-right populists, and that may require aligning with exponents of capitalist liberal democracy – just as WWII-era Communists fought alongside Western “imperialist” democracies against Fascism, knowing full well that imperialism was their ultimate enemy. These were strange bedfellows, but they at least could see what was really going on.
Here is the full piece, via Arthur Wright.
My excellent Conversation with Reid Hoffman
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there’ll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how AI will affect the media ecosystem and the communication of ideas, what percentage of the American population will eschew it, how gaming will evolve, whether AI’s future will be open-source or proprietary, the binding constraint preventing the next big step in AI, which philosopher has risen in importance thanks to AI, what he’d ask a dolphin, what LLMs have taught him about friendship, how higher education will change, and more. They also discuss Sam Altman’s overlooked skill, the biggest cultural problem in America, the most underrated tech scene, and what he’ll do next.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Given GPT models, which philosopher has most risen in importance in your eyes? Some people say Wittgenstein. I don’t think it’s obvious.
HOFFMAN: I think I said Wittgenstein earlier. In Fireside Chatbots, I brought in Wittgenstein in language games.
COWEN: Peirce maybe. Who else?
HOFFMAN: Peirce is good. Now I happen to have read Wittgenstein at Oxford, so I can comment in some depth. The question about language and language games and forms of life and how these large language models might mirror human forms of life because they’re trained on human language is a super interesting question, like Wittgenstein.
Other good language philosophers, I think, are interesting. That doesn’t necessarily mean philosophy-of-language philosophers à la analytic philosophy. Gareth Evans, theories of reference as applied to how you’re thinking about this kind of stuff, is super interesting. Christopher Peacocke’s concept work is, I think, interesting.
Anyway, there’s a whole range of stuff. Then also the philosophy, all the neuroscience stuff applied with the large language models, I think, is very interesting as well.
COWEN: What in science fiction do you feel has risen the most in status for you?
HOFFMAN: Oh, for me.
COWEN: Not in the world. We don’t know yet.
HOFFMAN: Yes. We don’t know yet.
COWEN: You think, “Oh, this was really important.” Vernor Vinge or . . .
HOFFMAN: Well, this is going to seem maybe like a strange answer to you, but I’ve been rereading David Brin’s Uplift series very carefully because the theory of, “How should we create other kinds of intelligences, and what should that theory be, and what should be our shepherding and governance function and symbiosis?” is a question that we have to think about over time. He went straight at this in a biological sense, but it’s the same thing, just a different substrate with the Uplift series. I’ve recently reread the entire Uplift series.
Self-recommending!
+1 For the Veil of Ignorance
From a new paper in Cognitive Science:
Most people in the United States agree they want some income inequality but debate exactly how much is fair. High-status people generally prefer more inequality than low-status individuals. Here we examine how much preferences for inequality are (or are not) driven by self-interest. Past work has generally investigated this idea in two ways: The first is by stratifying preferences by income, and the second is by randomly assigning financial status within lab-constructed scenarios. In this paper, we develop a method that combines both experimental control and the social experience of inequality—a simulated society experiment. Across two experiments (N = 138, observations = 690), participants voted on the distribution of rewards—first behind a veil of ignorance, and then when they were randomly assigned a status within a game of chance. Status varied repeatedly across five rounds, allowing us to measure dynamic preferences. Under the veil of ignorance, people preferred inequality favoring the top status. When the veil of ignorance disappeared, self-interest immediately influenced inequality preferences. Those who randomly landed in top positions were satisfied with the status quo established under the veil of ignorance, whereas those who randomly landed in bottom positions wanted more equality. Yet these preferences were not stable; decisions about the optimal level of inequality changed according to changes in social status. Our results also showed that, when inequality grows in a society, preferences regarding inequality become polarized by social status. Individuals in low-status positions, particularly, tend to demand more equality.
Contra Rawls, people behind the veil of ignorance choose greater inequality which should thus be given high ethical weight. It’s the demand for equality that should be interrogated for self-interested motivations.
Hat tip: The excellent Kevin Lewis.
*All Desire is a Desire for Being*
A new collection of essays by Rene Girard:
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven, self-recommending, buy it here.
What does Geoffrey Hinton believe about AGI existential risk?
I was struck by a recent article in the (often quite interesting) New Statesman. Here is Harry Lambert interviewing Hinton:
I asked Hinton for the strongest argument against his own position [on AGI risk]. “Yann thinks its rubbish,” he replied. “It’s all a question of whether you think that when ChatGPT says something, it understands what it’s saying. I do.”
There are, he conceded, aspects of the world ChatGPT is describing that it does not understand. But he rejected LeCun’s belief that you have to “act on” the world physically in order to understand it, which current AI models cannot do. (“That’s awfully tough on astrophysicists. They can’t act on black holes.”) Hinton thinks such reasoning quickly leads you towards what he has described as a “pre-scientific concept”: consciousness, an idea he can do without. “Understanding isn’t some kind of magic internal essence. It’s an updating of what it knows.”
In that sense, he thinks ChatGPT understands just as humans do. It absorbs data and adjusts its impression of the world. But there is nothing else going on, in man or machine.
“I believe in [the philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein’s position, which is that there is no ‘inner theatre’.” If you are asked to imagine a picnic on a sunny day, Hinton suggested, you do not see the picnic in an inner theatre inside your head; it is something conjured by your perceptual system in response to a demand for data. “There is no mental stuff as opposed to physical stuff.” There are “only nerve fibres coming in”. All we do is react to sensory input.
The difference between us and current AIs, Hinton thinks, is the range of input.
As I interpret that passage, the claim is that AGI risk is significant because ChatGPT possesses sentient understanding of a kind not less valid than what humans have, though the current GPT understanding is monomodal only. Furthermore, humans (and AIs) should not be understood as being conscious. On top of that, he seems to suggest that his arguments for AGI risk rest upon the fundamental non-divergence of humans and AIs.
Now, I am not sure what is the polite way to put this, but…I think those arguments are just a teeny, tiny, teensy, trifling bit ever so slightly wrong. As in “not entirely accurate” by at least a smidgen.
No, I am not going to go “full Bryan Caplan” on you, as I believe we are not in control through our “inner theatre,” and furthermore the nature of that “inner theatre” is not transparent to us. But an inner theatre there is of some kind! I am not persuaded otherwise, not even if your inner theatre is screaming “no”!
Hinton’s view oddly cuts against his own AGI risk argument. Let’s say there were some kind of intrinsic difference between AIs and the human “inner theatre,” as my own inner theatre seems to want to insist. Why does that make it so hard to imagine highly dangerous AI scenarios? (And I am hardly the biggest AI doomster.)
Here is further feedback from Philip Ball:
I’m quite taken aback at some of the simplistic comments Hinton makes. He seems to feel that the only thing separating deep-learning AI from the human mind is a matter of scale. I can’t fathom this conviction that somehow all intelligence must be heading towards ours.
…”But there is nothing else going on, in man or machine.” But this is not how cognitive scientists think about human cognition.
And more at the link. You might argue that, in considering Hinton’s claims, I am not steelmanning the AI worry arguments. But that is exactly the point here. We have a movement — the AGI worriers — that uses single sentence statements, backed by signatures and arguments from authority. Hinton signed the latest letter, and in this area his name carries a lot of force.
So perhaps it is worth looking more closely at what those authorities actually believe, and whether that should impress us.
Elephant tusks, incentives, and the sacred
In a heap of burnt and powdered elephant tusks, you can see so much of social science.
If you visit Nairobi National Park, you will see rhinos, hippos, and giraffes, all within sight of the city skyline. You also will see an organized site showing several large mounds of burnt and powdered elephant tusks. They are a tribute to the elephant, and along with the accompanying signs, a condemnation of elephant poaching.
Starting in 1989, the government had confiscated a large number of tusks from the poachers, and as part of their anti-poaching campaign they burnt those tusks and placed the burnt ashes on display in the form of mounds. There are also several signs telling visitors that it is forbidden to take the ashes from the site. There have since been subsequent organized tusk burns.
In essence, the government is trying to communicate the notion that the elephant tusks are sacred, and should not be regarded as material for either commerce or poaching or for that matter souvenir collecting. “We will even destroy this, rather than let you trade it.” In economic terminology, you could say the government is trying to shift the supply and demand curves by changing norms in the longer run.
The economist of course is tempted to look beneath the surface of such a policy. If the government destroys a large number of elephant tusks, the price of tusks on the black market might go up. The higher tusk price could in turn motivate yet more poaching and tusk trading, thus countermanding the original intent of the policy.
This scenario, whether the most relevant equilibrium or not, is not just fantasy. Economics Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer (with co-author Charles Morcom) has a well-known paper simply called “Elephants.” In that research, symbolic goods and the sacred are put aside and they take an “incentives only” approach to elephant tusk policy. The abstract runs like this:
Many open-access resources, such as elephants, are used to produce storable goods. Anticipated future scarcity of these resources will increase current prices and poaching. This implies that, for given initial conditions, there may be rational expectations equilibria leading to both extinction and survival. The cheapest way for governments to eliminate extinction equilibria may be to commit to tough antipoaching measures if the population falls below a threshold. For governments without credibility, the cheapest way to eliminate extinction equilibria may be to accumulate a sufficient stockpile of the storable good and threaten to sell it should the population fall.
The key sentence there, for our purposes, is that the government might end up selling its stock of tusks on the open market, to deter speculators. And thus, in that scenario, you do not want to be burning the tusks.
The Kremer and Morcom policy analysis (is it a recommendation? I am not sure) would of course involve the non-credible government in the market for elephant tusks. Periodically wiping out the speculators would have its benefits, for the economic reasons outlined in their paper. At the same time, a government playing around in that market would have a much harder time making the case that elephants and elephant tusks are something sacred. Such a government would have a much harder time making the case that the tusks never should be traded.
Which is better? The policy conducted by the Kenyan government, or the policy described in Kremer and Morcom?
From this distance, I do not pretend to know. I can also see that an anti-poaching government may not have credibility now, but it may wish to invest in “the sacred” for a pending future where its credibility is greater. Treating elephants and elephant tusks as sacred, even if counterproductive in some short runs, may contribute to establishing the credibility of said government. And indeed part of the credibility of today’s Kenyan government (while decidedly mixed) comes from its ability to keep many of the nature reserves up and running in good order. Many of the animals are coming back, and tourism continues to increase.
Many non-economists think only in terms of the sacred and the symbolic goods in human society. They ignore incentives. Furthermore, our politics and religious sects encourage such modes of evaluation.
Many economists think only in terms of incentives, and they do not have a good sense of how to integrate symbolic goods into their analysis. They often come up with policy proposals that either offend people or simply fall flat.
Wisdom in balancing these two perspectives is often at the heart of good social science, and not just for elephant tusks. And who exactly is an expert in that?
My EA fireside chat with Kelsey Piper, on Effective Altruism
Recorded before the SBF implosion, and full of predictions. Only now available on YouTube, with Q&A from the EA audience as well
Interesting throughout.
My Conversation with Noam Chomsky
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.
I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole. Read the whole thing, if you dare! Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:
COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?
CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.
His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.
COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?
CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.
It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.
Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.
COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?
I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.
My excellent Conversation with Peter Singer
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more.
Peter described it as “like aerobics for the brain.” Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How much should we spend trying to thwart predators?
SINGER: I think that’s difficult because, again, you would have to take into account the consequences of not having predators, and what are you going to do with a prey population? Are they going to overpopulate and maybe starve or destroy the environment for other sentient beings? So, it’s hard to say how much we should spend trying to thwart them.
I think there are questions about reducing the suffering of wild animals that are easier than that. That’s a question that maybe, at some stage, we’ll grapple with when we’ve reduced the amount of suffering we inflict on animals generally. It’s nowhere near the top of the list for how to reduce animal suffering.
COWEN: What do you think of the fairly common fear that if we mix the moralities of human beings and the moralities of nature, that the moralities of nature will win out? Nature is so large and numerous and populous and fierce. Human beings are relatively small in number and fragile. If the prevailing ethic becomes the ethic of nature, that the blending is itself dangerous, that human beings end up thinking, “Well, predation is just fine; it’s the way of nature.” Therefore, they do terrible things to each other.
SINGER: Is that what you meant by the moralities of nature? I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant. Do you mean the morality that we imply, that we attribute to nature?
COWEN: “Red in tooth and claw.” If we think that’s a matter that is our business, do we not end up with that morality? Trumping ours, we become subordinate to that morality. A lot of very nasty people in history have actually cited nature. “Well, nature works this way. I’m just doing that. It’s a part of nature. It’s more or less okay.” How do we avoid those series of moves?
SINGER: Right. It’s a bad argument, and we try and explain why it’s a bad argument, that we don’t want to follow nature. That the fact that nature does something is not something that we ought to imitate, but maybe, in fact, we ought to combat, and of course, we do combat nature in many ways. Maybe war between humans is part of nature, but nevertheless, we regret when wars break out. We try to have institutions to prevent wars breaking out. I think a lot of our activities are combating nature’s way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow.
COWEN: But if humans are a part of nature flat out, and if our optimal policing of nature leaves 99.9999 percent of all predation in place — we just can’t stop most of it — is it then so irrational to conclude, “Well this predation must be okay. It’s the natural state of the world. Our optimal best outcome leaves 99.99999 percent of it in place.” How do we avoid that mindset?
Recommended. And the new edition (much revised) of Peter’s Animal Liberation is now out.
What should I ask Ada Palmer?
I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is a unique thinker and presence, and thus hard to describe. Here is a brief excerpt from her home page:
I am an historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. I teach in the History Department at the University of Chicago.
Yes, she has tenure. Her four-volume Terra Ignota series is a landmark of science fiction, and she also has a deep knowledge of the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, and the French Enlightenment. She has been an advocate of free speech. Here is her “could be better” Wikipedia page. The imaginary world of her novels is peaceful, prosperous, obsessed with the Enlightenment (centuries from now), suppresses both free speech and gender designations, and perhaps headed for warfare once again?
Here is her excellent blog, which among other things considers issues of historical progress, and also her problems with chronic pain management and disability.
So what should I ask her?
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
The rise of Louise Perry
I am pleased to see Bryan Caplan reviewing the new Louis Perry book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. He opens with this:
I read Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century in a single day. If you want a page-turner, look no further. The sentences are gripping, the anecdotes are shocking, and the thesis is eyebrow-furrowing. For pure entertainment, I honestly don’t think I can compete with this book, which strives to convert today’s young feminists to a heretical syncretic creed of sex-negative feminism and social conservatism.
On Amazon the book has a five-star average with 716 ratings, and I strongly suspect it still will be read and referenced in ten or twenty years. I disagree with much of what Bryan says on this topic, but am glad to see he recognizes the importance of the book. In my view, Bryan is insufficiently Freudian, unwilling to see both “sexual freedom” and “sexual repression” as embodying a complex bundle of options, with no unproblematic way out and with no truly stable solution. I read Perry (who is an Emergent Ventures winner, by the way) as embodying the Freudian perspective, and not denying it, but not willing to emphasize it either. She has chosen her side, and would rather tell the woman not to let the guy choke you for his own fun.
On that I can agree. I am pleased to see this book doing so well.
The Gender Well-being Gap
Overall, are men or women happier? It is complicated, and it depends on what you mean exactly:
Given recent controversies about the existence of a gender wellbeing gap we revisit the issue estimating gender differences across 55 subjective well-being metrics – 37 positive affect and 18 negative affect – contained in 8 cross-country surveys from 167 countries across the world, two US surveys covering multiple years and a survey for Canada. We find women score more highly than men on all negative affect measures and lower than men on all but three positive affect metrics, confirming a gender wellbeing gap. The gap is apparent across countries and time and is robust to the inclusion of exogenous covariates (age, age squared, time and location fixed effects). It is also robust to conditioning on a wider set of potentially endogenous variables. However, when one examines the three ‘global’ wellbeing metrics – happiness, life satisfaction and Cantril’s Ladder – women are either similar to or ‘happier’ than men. This finding is insensitive to which controls are included and varies little over time. The difference does not seem to arise from measurement or seasonality as the variables are taken from the same surveys and frequently measured in the same way. The concern here though is that this is inconsistent with objective data where men have lower life expectancy and are more likely to die from suicide, drug overdoses and other diseases. This is the true paradox – morbidity doesn’t match mortality by gender. Women say they are less cheerful and calm, more depressed, and lonely, but happier and more satisfied with their lives, than men.
That is from a new NBER working paper by David G. Blanchflower and Alex Bryson. Those results are broadly consistent with my intuitions and anecdotal observations, noting that men and women probably mean different things when they say they are/are not satisfied with their lives.
What should I ask Seth Godin?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is part of his bio:
A serial entrepreneur, Godin has a degree in computer science and philosophy from Tufts University, and an MBA from Stanford Business School. He runs the altMBA, a global business-thinking workshop, and founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne. In 2013, Godin was one of just three professionals inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, and in May 2018 he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame too.
Here is his “could be better” Wikipedia page. Here is Seth’s blog. So what should I ask him?
My Conversation with the excellent Kevin Kelly
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
…Kevin and Tyler start this conversation on advice: what kinds of advice Kevin was afraid to give, his worst advice, how to get better at following advice, and whether people who ask for advice really want it in the first place. Then they move on to the best places to see traditional cultures in Asia, the one thing in Kevin’s travel kit he can’t be without, his favorite part of India, why he’s so excited about brain-computer interfaces, how AI will change religion, what the Amish can teach us about tech adoption, the most underrated documentary, his initial entry point into tech, why he’s impressed by the way Jeff Bezos handles power, the last thing he’s changed his mind about, how growing up in Westfield, New Jersey affected him, his next project called the Hundred Year Desirable Future, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Do you ever feel that if you don’t photograph a place, you haven’t really been there? Does it hold a different status? Like you haven’t organized the information; it’s just out on Pluto somewhere?
KELLY: Yes, I did. When I was younger, I had a religious conversion and I decided to ride my bicycle across the US. And part of that problem — part of the thing was that I was on my way to die, and I decided to leave my camera behind for this magnificent journey of a bicycle crossing the US. It was the most difficult thing I ever did, because I was just imagining all the magnificent pictures that I could take, that I wasn’t going to take. I took a sketchbook instead, and that appeased some of my desire to capture things visually.
But you’re absolutely right. It was a little bit of an addiction, where the framing of a photograph was how I saw the world. Still images: I was basically, in my head, clicking — I was clicking the shutter at the right moments when something would happen. That, I think, was not necessarily healthy — to be so dependent on that framing to enjoy the world.
I’ve learned to wean myself off from that necessity. Now I can travel with just a phone for the selfies that you might want to take.
COWEN: Maybe the earlier habit was better.
Recommended. And here is Kevin’s new book Excellent Advice: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.