Show notes
This conversation with economist and late bloomer Robin Hanson probably peaks towards the end, when we were bouncing ideas around, but the whole thing is highly interesting. Robin has a habit of rephrasing questions to make sure he is answering something specific, something I have seen in successful lawyers. Robin talked about his idea for a polymath department in universities, why desperation not inspiration was what made him change his life, how to talent spot late bloomers, and whether Robin might become lazy if he lived for ever (I don’t believe him). We also covered ems, the magic of motivation, signalling, and the importance of having a good spouse. Robin is a professor of economics, a former physicist and AI researcher, and the author of two books. He works at George Mason University and blogs at OvercomingBias. Although we didn’t cover it here, he is very interesting on the subject of aliens. This is a very selective description of what Robin does and you can and should read more about his work here. The page of wild ideas Robins thinks are true is especially good value. This is also a good summary of what drove Robin to change his life in his mid-thirties.Henry Oliver: Did you always wanted to be an economist or are there versions of your life where you could have stayed in AI research?Robin Hanson: I don't know. That is, my trajectory was one where I changed a number of times, and each time I wasn’t sure that I should change, I was making these guesses about what would be better, and then I guessed economics, but under alternative stars, I could have guessed different things or not made changes. A couple of years before I switched and decided to go into Econ, I applied to a bunch of graduate programs in Social Studies and Science, and I got accepted into some. And I even had told them I accepted their acceptance. And then a day later, I changed my mind. I decided not to do that. So I was on the borderline, I guess, of doing that.Henry Oliver: And was that... Were you changing your mind for practical reasons or was there just deep uncertainty about what to do?Robin Hanson: It was more, do I want to go into that world? Is that world going to be good enough or congenial for me? And I initially thought, yes, and then I guess let my subconscious tell me no.Henry Oliver: So it was kind of instinct, you would just get a feeling and think, “Okay, don't go with it.”Robin Hanson: Right, it was like... Part of it is about sort of the size of the world you could inhabit, so one of the nice things about physics where I started, and economics where I ended up is that you could just do a lot of things and call them that, and then there’s some other fields where you’re going to be pretty narrowly confined to things close to the prototype of that. And so science studies is more of that second sort, whereas economics is much broader, and physics was much broader as well. I think that I do well there. I think that’s done me very well to be in a much broader place where I can just do a lot of things and call it economics.Henry Oliver: Do you think that one explanation of why there are late bloomers or how people become late bloomers could be that some people’s talents or interests are just naturally interdisciplinary or broad in the way you're describing, and that there are fewer maps for that kind of thing, and you just will get more late bloomers because it’s not straightforwardly specialized?Robin Hanson: Well, so the question is, if you’re going to have a wider range, does that take longer training or longer time to recognize?Henry Oliver: Right.Robin Hanson: So, certainly, if most standard training is somewhat narrow, and if you’re going to have a broader range than that, then you’re deviating from the usual thing, and you might in fact need to do several things... So I guess somebody who’s just more uncertain about what narrow thing they want to do might similarly take longer, but somebody who’s just more inclined to have a wider range, that also just might take longer both to figure out that that’s what you want and to realise that the wider range just means you’re going to take longer training for the wider range.Henry Oliver: So in one interview you said this, “Early in life you're a seller not a buyer.” Can you tell us what you mean by that?Robin Hanson: Well, many people think about what career they want and what life they want, as if they are the main consumer of it, as if it’s about what they want out of it, and when you’re independently wealthy, say, then you could just decide what you wanted to do with your life based on what you liked because you can pay for it. If it’s a job or a career and you need a job or a career to survive, then you can’t just look at what you might want to get out of it, you’ll have to have other people get something out of it. And so that’s the sale that you’re selling yourself to other people. What can they get out of you? So you want to keep an eye on what you want to get out of it, but it isn’t enough, you know, if you decide, I love singing, so I’m going to be a singer. Well, that may not work if the world doesn’t love your singing, you’ll need to pay attention to what the world likes from you, for a while at least, and then if you get some idea of a range of things the world might be okay with from you, then you can start to think about which of those you prefer.Henry Oliver: And this was the sort of thing you were realising when you worked at NASA?Robin Hanson: So... I mean, honestly, for my early life, I really wasn't paying attention to buyers, I was just paying attention to what I wanted, and I would just change my mind about what I wanted, and then I would see if anybody else would let me do that, and if somebody else would, then I just switched. But I didn't try to become a singer or actor or something where it’s sort of known to be much more competitive, or Olympic athlete or something else, I wasn't trying to be those things, but I was maybe more on the edge of what I could get away with.Henry Oliver: But you were doing something pretty competitive?Robin Hanson: Well, initially, I was just being a grad student and applying to various grad student programs, and so I guess I was good enough to get into the grad student programs, and then I wanted to do computer research, and so I went, asked, applied for jobs and I got some jobs, and so it's more competitive than being a janitor, I guess but...[laughter]Robin Hanson: Not as competitive as trying to be an actor or a musician.Henry Oliver: This is the sort of thing that people often advise you to do, so it’s like the Steve Jobs thing like, “Do calligraphy, do whatever you feel like, and it'll all sort of work out and you'll pull the threads together later,” but you seem to be saying, “Well, it’s one way of living a life, but it’s maybe not a good way.”Robin Hanson: Well, you have to make a judgment of just how selective something is and how selective you are, right? It’s a matching thing, so I don't think... I mean, so I think it’s basically a brag to tell everybody that I always just did what I wanted. I mean, because some people can get away with that, and you’re basically saying, “I was good enough to get away with that, I could do that, I could pull it off, because I was in high enough demand, I was good enough.” And so I... It is a brag and it does apply to some people, but you have to realize, if you’re just taking it as some sort of inspiration and attitude toward life advice, it’s not going to work for everybody, and so... Now, you’ll have to ask just how good are you and how lucky do you feel punk, about how selective you can be. So, for most people, say, who might be listening to this, they don’t have to just take the first job that appears to them, right? They have some ability to select among jobs out there, and they should use that ability to think about which things they would like better, but they can’t just ask, “What does my heart love?” And just do that, regardless of what the world seems to offer or what abilities they seem to have, and so that it’s a compromise.Henry Oliver: If you were talent spotting or recruiting, and someone came with a CV a bit like yours, and they said, “Well, I’ve just been doing the stuff I wanted to do,” would this count against them, would this count in their favour, like how would you assess that now?Robin Hanson: So in some sense, the person I would be most able to assess would be someone who is very like me, that is, when I take a very unusual life path, I’m just going to be much worse at judging people who took other life paths, I’m not going to know who’s good or not in those other paths, someone who is near my path, I have a better shot at, and for people who look like that path, I guess the thing I would most be looking for is sort of how driven or passionate are they, because you meet a lot of people who switch between various things they want to do, and it seems almost like that they just don’t have much motivation or interest in anything, and they’re just sort of drifting past things that might grab their attention, and that wouldn’t inspire... That wouldn’t inspire much confidence in me. So somebody who just changes things a lot just because they’re bored or nothing seems to matter, nothing seems to interest them, that... I would be wary of that, they probably will switch yet again, they probably won’t put that much energy into whatever they do, but somebody who is... Whatever they’re doing, they’re really into it, and they’re really trying hard, but then they also have these other big things that target them and tempt them away, that would be more appealing.I would want to see that it was a whole bunch of things, each of which they would love to do, but they are... Can’t be sure which one, but whichever one they pick, they will be into it and they will be really immersing themselves into it and pursuing it, then that would be better, and then of course, that... They are much more likely to be a good generalist or a wide range person. So some people call themselves generalists just because they can’t be bothered to get into anything very far, and I would want to distinguish a different kind of generalist. So I’ve had this idea for a while, I'll tell you, which is, you might say universities neglect generalists, right? So we reward people for being very specialised and knowing the best about some very narrow area, but a lot of great things have happened by people who have been in different areas, and so how could we reward and pick out generalists, and so here’s... So, a problem is a lot of interdisciplinary areas where you have more than one area, people look down on them, it looks like you’re being held to lower standards than you would in either the adjacent disciplines and that you’re trying to evade judgement by making it hard for people to tell how good your work is, and so people tend to think that people in the middle of a discipline are more reliable and higher quality work because they're being held to higher standards and it’s easier to judge them.And so they think of people who are being interdisciplinaries kind of evading judgement, trying to slip by with making it hard to judge them, so my solution to that is to try to create a polymath department where we’re going to have higher, not lower standards. So my standard would be, let’s make a department and in order to qualify for this department, you need to persuade us that you would have qualified for tenure in two departments, and I’ve known people like that, and I might even qualify that way, it’s not necessary that you actually have to have tenure in two departments, but persuade us that you could have possibly gotten tenure in two departments, and two somewhat different departments.Henry Oliver: Right.Robin Hanson: Right? Not in Biochemistry and Chemistry or Biology.Henry Oliver: Yeah, yeah, yeah.[laughter]Robin Hanson: But, two substantially different things. So now, you see, this department would be the elite, you will have to meet a higher standard to be there, and now people might aspire once they have gotten tenure somewhere to, as a next level, become considered a polymath to have gotten to move up. And then I think this would go better in terms of, it would have more respect, it would be more acceptable, and it would then inspire more people to that level of generality by holding it as a higher, not lower, standard.Henry Oliver: And you would expect maybe more of those people to be “late bloomers”, because they would have had to be... They're just doing more different things and not settling into something earlier on, right?Robin Hanson: Maybe, I’m not so sure. I’m more sure that they would have to sort of just be inclined toward generality, so definitely a lot of people managed to focus enough to get tenure and then don't want to focus quite so much, and so we would be tempting those people to say, “Yeah, it looks like you got tenure in here but now you'd want to drift over there, well, that can contribute to what we're looking for.” Maybe even departments would be proud of their members who had graduated to the polymath division, and they would then support you in your efforts to broaden or to make that next step.Henry Oliver: One of the models I have of different sorts of late bloomers is someone who has a double peak, so if you think about Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, he has a great career. By the time he’s 40, he’s done some original staff, he has a successful practice and whatever, but then by the time he’s 60, like it’s all dried up, he’s teaching apprentices, he’s not fashionable, the Great Depression is happening, he’s not getting any commissions, and then a few years later, he starts again, and he builds Fallingwater, and then in the last, I think, quarter of his life, he does more than half his work, including the Guggenheim and other major things. This could be something in the polymath department, like, it would encourage that view of a second career.Robin Hanson: Although, in that case it might be, he didn’t actually go to a separate department, he stayed in his general area.Henry Oliver: Sure.Robin Hanson: We would still might want to wait to anticipate and celebrate that, so it’s definitely true that... I mean, I meet a lot of people who, maybe they’re 22 years old and they got a college degree and they said, “Oops, it was the wrong degree. My life is over, I wasted…”[laughter]No, your life... You're still at the beginning, you have a lot, you can just pivot and move over there, it’s not that much of a problem, you’re a little delayed compared to some of the other people who might have started their path before, but you’ve got plenty of time. And so I think a lot of people like... They have some sort of career path and they reach some sort of threshold like say tenure, and then they quit, like that’s enough for them, and they’ve achieved what they wanted, and... But they might be 30 years old or something, and in some sense, they’ve got a whole life ahead of them, they could try lots of other stuff.Henry Oliver: So you went to get your PhD starting age 34?Robin Hanson: Yes, with two children, age zero and two.Henry Oliver: Oh my God. You’ve sort of talked about this, but I’m interested in what finally tipped the balance, and it sounds like it was a kind of gradual process and that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but was there a sort of conversity to that, like a moment of inspiration, a moment of, “You know what, if I don't do it now…”Robin Hanson: It was more desperation I would think than inspiration.[laughter]Robin Hanson: So basically, I was a research programmer in a... Which is a low level position within a research lab, so research lab is a high level prestigious place, but a research programmer is kind of the bottom of the line, someo…
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