JOSH: Hello and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Jacob Falkovich about rationality, education, and politics within the rationalist community, the social and aesthetic pressures on rationalist approaches, the impact of intelligence on trust and dating, and population stability. I also wanted to note that the conversation at one point centers around COVID. While we are releasing this episode on February 24, 2021, it was actually recorded back in September of 2020. Please keep that in mind during the COVID portion of the conversation, as Spencer's and Jacob's views might have changed since then based on new information. And now here are Spencer and Jacob.

SPENCER: Jacob, really glad to have you here. Excited to discuss some topics with you. Especially, I wanted to talk about things that we disagree about, and I think we disagree about some things related to rationality education. So do you want to tell me about that a little bit?

JACOB: Yes. So my own rationality education followed the classical path, which is through the website Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing. A lot of it focused on the heuristics and biases literature that was started by Kahneman and Tversky, things like anchoring and base rate neglect and things having to do with how people don't think about probability in the right way, etc. I think the focus of the community in general has recently shifted into talking about the underlying causes of why we have the biases, which especially has to do with most of our thinking being done as social animals, rather than just abstract minds in space trying to figure out problems.

SPENCER: The book The Elephant in the Brain is a good example of this by Robin Hanson, right?

JACOB: Yeah. So The Elephant in the Brain, to me, really articulates what I think should be the heart of rationality. Most people, most of their thinking has to do with needing to fit in with the group, so you need to signal the right values and morals that you fit in with the tribe. You need to signal loyalty. It's more important how other people perceive you than actually being an accurate map of reality.

SPENCER: Would you say that comes from the idea that when we lived in small tribes, the way the tribe viewed us was as important to our survival as, let's say, almost anything else, our ability to gather food?

JACOB: Yeah. I think so. Most of evolutionary psychology, I know how very precise and contingent I am in the models, but the way I see it is that our tribe, the people around us, were just a much more complex thing that we had to navigate. There are animals in the environment, there are many plants, there's the weather, and those things are pretty hard to deal with, but they're not as hard to deal with as 100 other humans who can have 100 square relationships between them and alliances and reputations and shifting norms and status hierarchies and all of that stuff.

SPENCER: Game theory comes into play as well, right? Whereas that doesn't necessarily come into play as strongly with these kinds of natural things.

JACOB: Game theory is a way to mathematically formalize a lot of optimal ways of behaving in this complex social environment. But a lot of our intuitions let us implement things that game theory tells us we should do, things like giving gifts and keeping track of favors. Game theory can tell you, Oh, we're basically playing tit for tat and prisoners' dilemmas, but I think we really evolved to be very good at that and tracking this over many levels of who's loyal, who's ungrateful, etc. Yes, I think the initial rationality writings once focused on the biases. The core group they attracted seemed to be a lot of nerds who weren't very good at fitting in socially, and so maybe they were more amenable to just saying, Okay, let's discard your ways of thinking socially and try to figure out how to think about reality clearly from scratch, using your brute reason, or using what Daniel would call your system two, your slow, sequential thinking and not your intuition. It works for a few people, and I feel like those people have stuck with the rationality community and are very involved with it. But I feel that the next wave, where most rationality education is happening right now, is not around talking about those biases. I think for most people, it's a bad idea to just start thinking about, Oh, anchoring is a thing. How do I overcome my anchoring bias to make better numerical predictions? That's not something useful or important to people, because their thinking is so deeply enmeshed in just dealing with social reality and the relationships and politics around them. All this stuff might even backfire. It might just make them smug about, Oh, I know about all those biases. I notice them in my political enemies. But I think if your thinking as a whole is very social and political, then all of this education about basic biases would just be subverted to political ends. It's very interesting. When I see you, I see you very much writing in the old tradition of rationality. You get 12 ways to charitably interpret arguments or think about probability or overcome anchoring. I see you're writing about that stuff in forms like Twitter, where the level of conversation is very much not there, but everybody's playing social and political and signaling games.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's very well said, and I think it's a very interesting hypothesis. I would also add that some of Eliezer Yudkowsky's early writings on topics like "Politics is the Mind Killer," which I think was actually talking about these social realities, may have given some people a sense of, Oh, we have to stay away from that. Talking about politics and these kinds of topics is going to make us less rational, whereas I think you're suggesting that to be more rational, we have to dig into those topics and navigate those difficult social realities. What do you think about that?

JACOB: Yes, I think "Politics is the Mind Killer" was the first thing that I read that actually made a change in my own life. For example, one of the first big mind changes I felt was when I came to the US from Israel in 2011. I came here for school a couple of years before I discovered rationality. I was always in conversations with people about Israel and the Middle East. I was pulled into debates and advocacy, and then I read "Politics is the Mind Killer." I realized that the entire way I saw Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was very much not from a truth-seeking perspective, but as an advocate. For that reason, I thought it was a very simplistic us versus them, good versus evil way that I was embarrassed by. Immediately upon realizing that, I noticed it in everybody around me on most political topics.

SPENCER: That's so interesting to me as an example, because I sometimes will just mention a conversation, where's the completely unbiased account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right? Maybe that book exists, but it feels like it would be really hard to find that book.

JACOB: Yeah, I don't even know if you can have one. I think as you're reading about this, you do have to keep in mind the conversation on multiple levels: what's the person telling you about the actual facts on the ground of some military operation or disagreement or something like that, then about the values that people sneak in, like the normative idea, and then also the person's own biases and interest in this topic. You have to put your picture together from many accounts that you have to think of on all of those three levels.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess, with regard to this topic in particular, I'm super interested in trying to understand what ideology is, all the different component parts, and then to consider how we can move beyond ideology or to better ideologies, from worse kinds of equilibriums. So I'm super fascinated in that, and I want to push my work into that area more and more, and I've started to do a little bit. So that's one reason I'm really interested in this particular critique.

JACOB: Yeah, I guess maybe another way to say it is I have a sense that you're writing about rationality and the advice you give, the lists of tips, as they're aimed at a very friendly audience, somebody who has already decided that they need to figure out how to think more clearly about the world, and now they're just looking for the tools to practice. I think there are basically no people in that situation. For example, this is something that came up thinking about COVID. This is a clear example where there's a lot of information out there and not a lot of trustworthy sources, and you can actually apply your reason to it, kind of looking at the data, the growth numbers, even back in February, the data on things like masks and crowds and indoor versus outdoor, kind of make your own decision, but things actually have a big impact on your health, and most people straight up refuse to do that, even things like wearing a mask or whether hydroxychloroquine works, things in which you have reams of scientific data that's available to everyone. People just defaulted to either looking at what their friends are doing. Very few people started preparing for COVID lockdown when they looked at the exponential growth and said, "Oh, wait, if I run the math two weeks forward, it looks bad." Everybody just started locking down when it became socially fashionable in their city and social group to lock down, and everyone's opinion on masks is completely driven for most people by their political affiliation.

SPENCER: I think this is one of the most fascinating topics of the last 12 months, the way that COVID has exposed the way that people's minds work, and also the way that institutions work in a way that we usually can't see so directly, because usually this stuff happens in slow motion. And right now everything's on fast forward, and it gives you a lot more insight into what's actually happening. So I'm really glad you brought that one up. In late February, I think it was around February 24, I wrote a Facebook post where I urged everyone to at least consider preparing for COVID, and I kind of laid out the reasons. I felt kind of insane posting that; I felt that people were going to perceive me as being alarmist. In fact, I literally said, you know, I'm not trying to be alarmist here. Then I actually had two people email me and attack me for having done it, saying that I was being alarmist and I was causing harm by posting this. So I very much feel what you're talking about, that kind of social pressure, and that feeling that you might be crazy if you say something that's not accepted in your social circle, et cetera. There were friends of mine who reached out to me about COVID even earlier. I think a few weeks before that, one of my friends reached out and said, "Hey, are you following this COVID thing? This looks like it could be bad." I was kind of like, "Ah, yeah, I don't know. I'm not too worried about it." So, I mean, is that the kind of effect you're talking about where you basically feel like you're a crazy person if you say this thing, even though the data from the world is telling you that this thing is very likely to be true?

JACOB: Yeah. So the person who told me about COVID is a guy I kind of connected with recently. He doesn't live in New York; he's not very socially popular, maybe even a bit socially maladjusted. He told me on February 10, exactly like a nerd living alone, saying, "Hey, I'm buying food and ammo. I think COVID is going to be bad." It took me two more weeks because I'm a bit more social and more sensitive to that. I wrote my most read blog post of all time on my website on February 26. I wrote that not only do I recommend preparing for COVID, but that I have noticed that everybody is waiting for permission. Now the interesting thing is that since about early June, and I live in Brooklyn, New York, I've been meeting people, throwing small parties, going on trips with friends, and telling people about it. "Hey, I've done the math; like, New York right now, the number of cases is so low, the probability of a randomly taken person in my social group being infected is low enough," you know, the numbers of infections, and people are now giving me crap for that.

SPENCER: It's so funny, because at first they thought you were crazy for thinking COVID was serious, and now they think you're crazy for hanging out with friends.

JACOB: People who followed me after that post, I don't know, 500 people followed me on Twitter after I wrote that, and people shared it.

SPENCER: And now they hate you, the same group?

JACOB: After the criticism, they're telling me, well, with this hubris, you're certain to get COVID. Hard to explain that COVID is caused by viruses in your respiratory tract and not by offending the gut. But I think the broader point here, some of the analysis that I did early on, actually looking at the numbers, trying to see comparable things in the reference class, understanding infection rates, what's the likelihood, given a certain number of people sick around the world, the number of people traveling, what's the chance it's going to come to the US? The reactions, this sort of explicit thinking, I think most people are very bad at it, and even more, people don't even try it. If you've spent your entire life basically getting by on following what everybody around you does, because A, it makes you popular, it makes you fit in with the crowd, and people don't think you're a weirdo. And B, it's hugely convenient, right? Because most of the people around you now brush their teeth twice a day. You can just brush your teeth twice a day and wear the same clothes and have the same reaction to COVID, right?

SPENCER: Coming up with what clothes to wear based on first principles. Probably not the best idea.

JACOB: Yeah. So people who are used to just kind of thinking socially and following the crowd and then maybe kind of having their own original ideas in very specific domains, like in their job or some particular hobby that they have, it's a tall ask for them to even start switching, right? You need to first develop your ability to use explicit reason. Then you need to learn which domains you can apply it to and which domains you don't. If you try to figure out clothes from first principles, I'm not sure where you're going to end up. Then you have to learn how to do that in a way that people don't start hating you, which happens to a lot of younger rationalists. They fall into this hole where they've learned a little bit of explicit reasoning and how to use it for everything, and they end up alienating people around them. So it's a huge barrier to climb, and most people are not very motivated to even start climbing this. And I think the way I'm thinking of rationalist education is how to find some people and maybe emotionally set them up for climbing this mountain of barriers to even thinking about applying explicit reason in different places in your life, rather than assuming that somebody is halfway up the mountain and now they just need good tips about base rate fallacy.

SPENCER: I guess the way I think about it is that, first of all, there's some value on the margin of some of these techniques, right? So if someone's already in the midst of making a decision, if you can give them slightly better tools for that decision, let's say you teach them about probabilistic thinking or you teach them about generating more options and not just stopping with the first two options. I think that there is marginal value there that can be additive to what they're already doing, so they don't necessarily have to go totally against their social group or anything. So that's the first thing, I'd say.

JACOB: I think that's actually a good point. If you can find things where people can add them a little bit to their mental toolkit without making big, sweeping changes, I think there's value to that. I just think the value to that is probably somewhat limited. So how much you actually change people's epistemology or approach to life by throwing them a few more things in their toolkit, unless those little tricks actually inspire them, right?

SPENCER: So for our work on ClearerThinking.org, when we first started out many years ago, we were like, okay, we're going to make a module on sunk cost fallacy and the planning fallacy and whatever. Because, you know, these are powerful ideas, people should know, and we really struggled to get anyone to care about them. And, you know, I think they're quite good modules for what they are. You know, if you want to know about sunk cost fallacy or planning fallacy, I would definitely recommend you check them out. I don't know of a better resource on those. But that being said, nobody really cared. And as time has proceeded, we've moved a lot more towards thinking, okay, what are people's explicit goals already? Like, what are they conceptualizing themselves as trying to do? And then how do we insert good thinking into that? Right? So, an example of this, we made this tool called the decision advisor. And when you're in the midst of making a big life decision, you already know you're making a big decision. You already know that you don't know what to do. We actually put a little bit of education about cognitive biases right at that moment, and we actually customize the education based on which biases seem most likely to be affecting that decision at that moment, rather than say, oh, let's take a module on cognitive biases and hope that six months later, when you're making a big life decision, you somehow can recall that content and use it.

JACOB: Yeah, I think another challenge that happens is that the internet is full, and every airport bookstore is full of self-help books about, you know, learn critical thinking, learn to be smarter, learn the tips and the tricks. So for somebody to actually, if you have the best resource on sunk cost fallacy on the internet, the fact that somebody has found that and recognized that as a good resource is a significant achievement of personality.

SPENCER: Right? So, certainly, I would say there are material things that do not appeal to everyone equally. There are certainly selection effects on who's even interested in the first place. We can reduce those effects by trying to phrase the work we're doing and frame the work we're doing in terms of the things they already care about. A lot of people know that they sometimes have big decisions that they struggle with. Very few people know that they're looking for answers to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. That's part of the reason we've been moving in that direction as well. A second point I just wanted to make is that I think some things are sort of orthogonal to social pressure. One example of this is, let's say if someone grows up in a conservative circle, there might be pressure to support certain causes and not other causes. Whereas, if they grow up in a progressive circle, maybe climate change is considered really important, and they should work on it and endorse that. Very often, I think the details of these theories are not that fleshed out. You may be rewarded in a progressive circle for caring about climate change, but your exact theory of change on climate change may not have social pressure one way or the other. It might be somewhat orthogonal to the social pressure. One thing I hope for is that by giving people better thinking tools, you can say, yes, you're being socially influenced into what you care about, but given that you care about climate change, can you think more effectively about how to achieve it in a way that there's no social pressure in either direction? You're just trying to figure out the best way to accomplish this goal.

JACOB: Yeah, I think this has been pretty naive about how most people work. In your example of climate change, you can look at nuclear energy. Most people with an engineering background who actually look at the data and the numbers say, "Wow, nuclear energy is a relatively safe way to provide zero-emission power at scale everywhere in the world that doesn't depend on the wind and sun." Now, nuclear energy sounds like the sort of techie industrial thing that's really the opposite mood of buying local tomatoes. Most people who say they care very deeply about climate change talk more about things like buying locally grown tomatoes than about building nuclear power plants everywhere. At that point, it's not like they've never seen or come across the argument about the emissions per gigawatt of power generated by a nuclear plant; it just slides right off them. I don't think they look deep inside the concept in rationality called belief in belief. A lot of people believe that they believe in climate change, that it's a big problem, but really they believe in the aesthetic of environmentalism, of hemp canvas tote bags, recycling mason jars, and buying local tomatoes. They don't really care about looking at charts of emissions per gigawatt generated.

SPENCER: I think that's a super interesting example. The way I think about that is that being in support of nuclear power is not orthogonal to social pressure. In other words, if you're a progressive, there's a good chance that you're expected to think there's something icky about nuclear power, but there are other interventions where there's no accepted view, and those are territories where I think people can be free to think much more clearly and be more consequentialist and say, "What's actually going to work?" Digging into that a little bit more, I think people care a great deal about fitting in socially, so that's part of what's going on, and they also just trust their social circles. It's partly that they want to fit in, and it's partly that they use their social circles as trusted sources of information. In addition to that, I think people also care about outcomes. They don't all care about outcomes equally, but some people really want the environment to be improved, so that is a third force pulling on them. If you can find a topic that's a subtopic within environmentalism where there is no agreed-upon social answer to the question, and they do care about good outcomes, that's an opportunity to think more clearly and hopefully work towards better outcomes.

JACOB: This is a good idea. I think Robin Hanson calls it pulling the rope sideways, where you can get a lot more done than if a bunch of people on either side are pulling the rope parallel to it. You can actually move it quite a bit by pulling sideways. The problem here is you're seeing almost every issue becoming politicized, with some tribes being for it and some tribes being against it, and it happens at lightning speed. I remember Scott Alexander wrote about some case studies of politicization. In the early days of the Ebola epidemic, which I think was in 2015, it wasn't really a partisan thing. Then some Democrat senators said that we should not have quarantines for people arriving from West Africa, and some Republicans said we should, and overnight it became a partisan issue when every Republican was convinced of the evidence for quarantine, and every liberal was against it. With face masks, again, there is a particular reason for face masks to become so partisan right now. When I was walking around Brooklyn in March, I think the baseline infection rate was probably between five and ten percent, and maybe forty percent of people were wearing masks. Now that everybody knows that good liberals wear masks, about ninety percent of people wear them, even though they maybe don't need them outside in a city with less than one in a thousand chance of infection. They start pulling on the rope sideways, and then immediately someone comes in and turns that into a partisan issue.

SPENCER: Here is something that drives me nuts. I see people getting really angry at other people for not wearing masks, and yet they seem totally okay with outdoor dining, where you have a table on the sidewalk, and hundreds of people are flowing by. Of course, the diners are not wearing masks because you can't while you're eating. Somehow, people are not at all bothered about this outdoor dining situation, but they are bothered by one person not wearing a mask passing by another person outdoors. It actually makes no sense, and I think it highlights these creepy scenarios where people are just copying what they hear rather than actually thinking based on evidence or reason. What do you think about that?

JACOB: Exactly. A friend of mine remarked that everybody seems to be treating COVID behavior as a religious matter of sin and virtue. Wearing a mask while you're jogging, even though COVID doesn't do much, is just trying to test people, but it's very virtuous, and it causes you a lot of discomfort, so you must get extra virtue points, and then you deserve to be rewarded for your virtue by sitting down for a beer at an outside table without the mask, right?

SPENCER: While 100 people stream by.

JACOB: Again, viruses are invisible things that we have never seen with our own eyes. We just heard about them. We haven't evolved to care about them. We have evolved to track who in our tribe is sinful and virtuous.

SPENCER: It's interesting to me how people seem to not use their mental model of viruses. This literally happened to me. Someone posted an angry Facebook post about all these people that are not wearing masks and how they suck so much. I said, "Well, look, I understand why you say that. Indoors, I think it's a really good idea to wear a mask if you're shopping, but if you're outdoors and you're keeping six feet, does the evidence actually say there's any reasonable chance of getting infected?" My current reasoning is that it's actually quite safe. A biologist stepped in and critiqued me, saying, "Well, actually, it's hypothetically possible that at 20 feet you get COVID outdoors." I responded, "Okay, it's hypothetically possible. But is that the decision criteria here? Do you actually think it's at all dangerous?" She said, "No, we're not using our mental model of this as an actual thing in the world with certain properties." Any thoughts on that?

JACOB: Yes, I think balancing low probability risk is something that everybody absolutely approaches, including people who call themselves rationalists. A lot of people I know live lives that are way too risk-averse, with really small probability occurrences that they inflate in their own lives. I think it relates to most people being worried about not wanting to be blamed for things, including things that happen to them. Most people's thought is, "If I catch COVID and I'm a young person, it's not that bad, but if I catch COVID after I tweeted that maybe we don't have to wear a mask while jogging in the park, then everybody knows God struck me down for my hubris, and people will mock my tragic fate until the end of my days." I feel like that's much more salient to people than, "Oh, I'll catch something that's like a bad flu and might be out of commission for a while."

SPENCER: I think with these things, it gets really complicated, because to a lot of young people, I think really the biggest risk is that they spread it to someone else and kill an elderly person, which is incredibly tragic. On the other hand, sometimes they act in a way where it feels like the risks are not properly balanced. In other words, they might be taking a strangely high level of risk in one domain and a strangely low level of risk in another domain, rather than thinking about how much risk am I willing to take in total and basically acting consistently on that. The outdoor dining one I mentioned is an interesting example of that. I'm not saying people shouldn't do outdoor dining. I'm just saying it's completely inconsistent with other behaviors. But I think there are actually quite a lot of examples of this. People will do things like leave their packages outside for 24 hours or wash their packages before they come in, but then at the same time, they're wearing a cloth mask. As far as I can tell, again, the evidence is uncertain. It could change, but as far as I can tell, wearing a cloth mask is just not as good as wearing a surgical mask. So I'm very confused about seeing so many cloth masks around.

JACOB: Yes, I had a rationalist friend who visited me yesterday, and you're going to agree that, yes, with the masks. If you're in a place like New York, it's not super important. The risk is kind of small, the base rate, etc., we understand that. And then he's also somebody who is scared to join Twitter because he's worried that he'll get canceled, even though he has absolutely horrible opinions that the world would be aghast at. I'm trying to tell him, okay, you realize that it's some of the same thing, right? People getting canceled for something relatively benign on Twitter is something very rare that you just hear about every time it happens, because it kind of becomes this popular story. You're giving up on this opportunity to express yourself and connect with people over this very low probability fear, like maybe your chance of catching COVID from 20 feet is about the same as the chance of an average person suddenly finding a Twitter mob hounding them over something banal.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's kind of like being scared of plane crashes or terrorism. People after 9/11 were terrified of terrorism, and people living in small towns were acting like terrorism was going to happen to them. Maybe this fear of being canceled for someone who's joined Twitter is sort of similar, blowing it out of proportion.

JACOB: Yeah, I was on a flight to the US on 9/11, 2003. That was wonderful. I just slept across the five middle seats the entire way. The plane was completely empty on the two-year anniversary.

SPENCER: So I wanted to bring up one more reason why I care about trying rationality education. And this one, I'm a little more skeptical of my own perspective on this, but I'm kind of hopeful, which is that I'm really worried about civilization driving itself off a cliff. I am really worried that we're too advanced technologically relative to our wisdom, and that this is dramatically bad. I don't know how to solve that problem, but one kind of step in a forward direction, to me, is trying to get more people who can see through the social bubbles, can adopt multiple ideologies and take them on as lenses, but then put them down when they're no longer useful, and see multiple perspectives. Because I think a lot of the biggest problems we have in the world, if you view them from any one lens, you're basically doomed to not be very effective at solving them. So you really have to move beyond these simple ideologies. That being said, I think it's a really hard challenge.

JACOB: Yeah. I mean, that's a worry that I also share. And I guess one instinctive approach is to say, okay, I'm not going to really try to appeal to the masses, but maybe people who are kind of smart, and maybe I know they have friends who are kind of in the tribe, I can help them become more rational or meta-rational. It might be more effective to actually teach people who are already in this tribe how to gain power or to improve the aesthetics of using rationality in a way where it's kind of more appealing, or people are more comfortable with that. People are very uncomfortable with somebody who uses explicit reasoning in positions of power.

SPENCER: Do you think they're uncomfortable with that?

JACOB: Yeah, people hate utilitarians in power, just in general.

SPENCER: But that might be for another reason, though, in part, which is that utilitarian thinking leads to wild consequences relative to standard human morality, right? To give some examples, from a classical utilitarian perspective, the optimal world might be one that just has the smallest living beings that can experience pure bliss and just fill the entire universe with that. That's a very weird and unpleasant idea to most people, and not really an ideal world, but that one's a little bit abstract. Another one might just be in the utilitarian calculus. It says there should be no such thing as loyalty, except insofar as it gets you more utility, right? Or lying is not bad unless it leads to worse outcomes. I think most people's morality says that's not right, that's not the way to think about morality.

JACOB: Yeah, so again, I think maybe the utilitarian thing to do is for utilitarians to stop talking about tiny brains made of computronium experiencing bliss. They're just weirding people out and making them hate utilitarians. So I do think rationality is a useful sample. I had the idea again, because for most people with such a barrier to overcome their social thinking and start applying explicit reason, at least occasionally, that you need to create a space where people can do that, a space like a stronger rationality community, or the communities and meetups that you organize. It has to be really a place where you go far the other way. For example, people say that they don't like international meetups because we have a lot of socially awkward individuals that can squeak people out, and that people could really just learn some more social skills. That's part of the point. You can only get better results from using your reason if you're in a place that really devalues things like aesthetics or social savvy or loyalty or dealing with your emotions or thinking about the world. You have to devalue all of those even though they're important, just so you can learn enough reason not to hurt yourself and to actually get better outcomes. But then for people who are actually going to be making the difference, you then have to go back, and I feel like a lot of people have been in rationality for a while, who are now a bit older, maybe in their mid-30s, spend most of their time talking about meditation and psychedelics and getting into things that might even sound like esoteric mysticism or talking about trauma and embodied cognition and things like that, things that are not really core to rationality, but you actually have to come back to them eventually after getting your training in the safe space of the rationalist community.

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SPENCER: So is the idea kind of, okay, you need the existence of a dojo where you just focus on, let's say, jiu jitsu and nothing else? Even though jiu jitsu is not the only useful thing, you have to have this space where you can just do jiu jitsu and you're not allowed to punch, even though punching is a useful form of fighting. You're only allowed to do jiu jitsu, and then you go into the world and learn all the other skills. If you value these other things, it kind of affects your ability to explore these radical ideas and to push boundaries and try things that might be weird and so on.

JACOB: Yes and you can come back to all those weird things with a rationalist point of view. So maybe have some progression of, if you're really naive, you believe in astrology, and then you learn a bit of rationality, and you go, Haha, look at all those idiots. Believe in astrology. But then I feel like at some point you actually have to stop and say, Okay, there are millions of people who read their horoscope every day. What's happening there? What deep, universal human need is this fulfilling? What could be missing in the way my mind works if I just completely reject that? It's always a bit of a problem and a danger. Because if you start thinking about, Okay, what truth and understanding can I extract from astrology, you really don't have a lot of people to talk to. You can talk to actual astrology believers, and that's bad because they're wrong about a lot of things, and they might also seduce you into having really, really wrong beliefs about reality. If you have a lot of people who actually kind of apply it, or if it's even possible to understand the value of things like astrology with reason and more than a superficial level, I actually have a model that would predict ahead of time from first principles why so many people would like it and find it useful.

SPENCER: I think there's so much to be learned from asking this kind of meta question about things like astrology, which is not, does astrology work? But why does everyone like astrology? That's a very important question. Or, if someone hates Trump and they want to rail on Trump all the time, I think it's important to ask the meta question, Why is Trump so popular? By asking these kinds of meta questions, we can actually learn a tremendous amount. If you can't see what's valuable in astrology, then you are missing something. There's something there. It may not be what astrology claims, but there's something there.

JACOB: It's also somewhat in tension with a lot of early rationalist writing. They basically use religion, and I think especially Christianity, as the go-to example of wrong thinking and dogmatic thinking. You could say, well, that's not super healthy because it doesn't really teach people to be self-critical. Presumably, almost everybody who stumbled upon that was already non-religious. There are almost 2 billion Christians on the planet, so Christianity must be doing something right. But there is a value to just saying, Hey, we're like a tribe, and one of the markers of our tribe is explicit atheism. We're not ashamed of it, and we can actually bond over that and make fun of Christians as a way to establish our own community and their own norms.

SPENCER: Is it fair to say that there are these different levels where at level one, you're just in the system, maybe the one you were raised with? You're just a true believer. Level two is you reject the system, and then you're like, Oh, the system sucks. Level three is you realize the value in the system without being stuck in it, so you are no longer just a true believer. But you can also pick out the parts that are useful without being inside it and stuck in it.

JACOB: Yeah, I think that's kind of the next level. And okay, maybe that's where I'm at. Maybe I'm at less thinking about how to bring the masses behind me. But I see right education happening there and not on the level of, "Here are 12 ways not to fall for availability bias."

SPENCER: I'm really curious to talk to you more about this question of how do we help people see through the kind of social bubble, or is it a bad idea? Are they just being harmed if people are too aware of the fact that they're being heavily socially influenced on all different topics that they don't even realize? Is that bad for them?

JACOB: Again, I have a sense for most people they can't, but if somebody is actually not that intelligent or trained in using explicit reasoning, they would have a lot to gain from trying to use it for things in the world. Ultimately, even if they look forced to it, like all their friends are rationalists, they will always feel like they're kind of low status. They're the dumbest person in the room because everybody's doing all those Bayesian calculations in their head all the time, and they feel dumb. Eventually, they might say, "Okay, I don't like this. I want to be in some tribe where I'm more respected, and my way of viewing the world, which is maybe really based on intuition, is better." I thought initially that one of the mantras of personality is to raise the sanity waterline, to bring more and more people along with you. But if you look at the survey of all the people who are actually reading Less Wrong, those are all people who score very high on cognitive tests. I think the community has a crazy number of people in it who have PhDs. Almost everybody is working in something related to STEM. I think most people will just not want to join this tribe. You can't learn this yourself, and if you join this tribe and you don't actually have a background in STEM, you're not very good at this stuff, you won't like it. The way to raise the sanity waterline is to make the final results coming out of our tribe more acceptable, with high-status people in the community writing about COVID statistics and giving recommendations about testing. I know my friends recently did an analysis of some studies on vitamin D, telling everybody, "Hey, you should take vitamin D. It has basically no downsides and a significant chance that it will help you." I think the way to make the world more reasonable is just to convince more people to listen by making him appear cool, high-status, and trustworthy. Then people will take vitamin D, rather than trying to teach them to replicate the way he thinks about reading medical studies.

SPENCER: I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to improve the packaging of a thing to make it more accessible. I've actually seen cases where people have taken an idea from Less Wrong, rewritten it in simple language, and then had the rewritten simple version be really popular, much more popular than the original, more technical version. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think it's valuable to package things in a way that's easier to consume and understand. I also think this is part of the reason why Wait But Why is so successful, because what it does often is take very complex ideas and then break them into a long series of very simple parts that are very easy to understand. I think that's partly why the blog posts are so long, because instead of doing what a lot of people do, which is dumb down an idea to make it simple, I think Wait But Why stretches out the idea to make it simple so that you can explain it in lots of simple pieces. I think there's nothing wrong with that, but I do have a lot of distaste for a strategy that is based primarily on persuasion, because I think persuasion is very, you know, I think, it's very symmetrical. You can use those persuasive techniques to convince someone of a false idea or a true idea, and using those techniques, the true idea doesn't necessarily have much advantage. Maybe it even has a disadvantage because it's locked into the way the world really is, whereas the false idea can be flexible and just be a made-up falsehood designed to have memetic potential.

JACOB: It's not just about marketing. So there's a big discussion around June in the rationalist community when The New York Times was writing an article about this. A guy from The New York Times interviewed me. He wanted to interview Scott Alexander. He talked to a lot of other rationalist bloggers, and Slate Star Codex had a weird fallout where they said they would publish Scott's real name. He had to shut down his blog for a while. But apparently, lots of people in the community just said, "Oh no, this is horrible. People will find out about us. Never violate our safe spaces where we have a discussion. They will make fun of us, narratives, etc." I thought that we are actually riding high on observable successes. We were clearly ahead of everybody on COVID for months and months. Everything that people talked about, from lockdowns to convalescent plasma to vitamin D to drugs to growth rates. Literally, you can read the stuff on Less Wrong, where it's not common wisdom, and then two months later, it's in The New York Times itself.

SPENCER: It is really an example of a huge win for the rationalist community, the whole COVID thing. I mean, the rationalist community was not only ahead of the narrative, it was actually ahead of the stock market.

JACOB: That's another thing that, I mean, I sold some stocks in February, and people on Less Wrong wrote about their growth and their strategy and did even better.

SPENCER: I bought put options in February that, you know, it was a really good time.

JACOB: It sounds like the percent of rationalists who bought put options was 10,000 times higher than even people in industries that should be related. It's something that I thought it's good for mainstream publications to write about us, that The New Yorker actually wrote an article about the community. The New York Times hasn't actually published yet because we're not doing nasty persuasion. We can say, hey, this is a community of nerds that you haven't heard about, but they got cryptocurrency right. A crazy percent of people in this community made a lot of money and funded all of their charities. They were right on COVID. They're excited about Effective Altruism, which is a good brand, and you've seen some successes. So it's very good for the world to hear about just the community and what it's doing. It will cause some people to be curious about it and stumble into it and start learning rationality, but it might cause other people the next time the world thinks one way and rationalists think the other way, to maybe say, "Oh yeah, aren't those the people who were right about the crypto and the COVID and the other things?" I don't think we're very good at dishonest marketing or salesmanship. This is actually a battle; I don't think it's symmetrical. I think we will just lose to people who are actually experts at it, and they're only doing persuasion. I won't mention any current training heads of state.

SPENCER: Do you see areas where you think the rationalist community could improve a lot?

JACOB: Could improve in terms of its production, or?

SPENCER: I guess, I really mean in terms of being better at what makes it unique and special?

JACOB: Yeah, I think the way for it to improve is to really integrate a lot of other things that people care about into rationality. So there should be rational norms and discussions around lifting weights, art, and spirituality, which some people are getting into. There are a lot of parts to the human experience. There are a lot of people who have a lot of wisdom to offer, and that wisdom is in their aesthetic sensibilities, or in the way they are embodied, or in their spirit of attainment. The community may be a bit hostile to them; it doesn't do a good job of integrating them and learning from them. It also makes people's lives more boring. I go to rationalist meetups less and less over time because my interests change into other things, basic things, like why I would go to an art fair, or why I would go play pickup soccer or watch a soccer game. I'm trying to explain that to rationalists, and they're not buying it in the end. These are very important things that have a lot of hard-to-articulate benefits.

SPENCER: I agree, and I'm really interested in trying to analyze those topics, to learn more about them explicitly. But even in lieu of that, just developing an intuitive sense of those topics, trying to figure out what's valuable in experiencing them that seems worthwhile. But I'm also interested in the thing that it seems almost nobody is doing, which is trying to extract the value in a way that you can explicitly understand as well.

JACOB: I guess we'll find out. For some of those things, it's somewhat interesting in New York that the various communities in the city go to quite a lot of meetups and hang out with different people. The one that seems closest to rationalists are actually somewhat like hippie people who do things like ecstatic dance, tarot card readings, and go to parties where people drink hot cacao and chant things in ritual. It would seem that those people have much farther information than, let's say, the finance community, or people in startups, or crypto enthusiasts. But somehow there's a lot of overlap, and a lot of people find themselves kind of emotionally at home in both.

SPENCER: What's the overlap? Why do you think that is?

JACOB: It just looks socially like a lot of people feel very comfortable in both, even if it seems strange. A lot of people from the sort of hippie spiritual community show up at the rationalist meetup and say, "Oh, I kind of dig it. I like the vibe here. You boys are a bit weird, but I'm enjoying it." I'm not sure if trying to take all of the tarot readings and cacao rituals and stuff and trying to turn it into something you can articulate in a less strong blog post in such a clear way that people will read it, do the math at the bottom line, and become convinced. I'm not sure that can happen, that you can actually make everything explicit and legible in this way.

SPENCER: It's a big challenge, but I'm interested in trying. I would suggest that perhaps those communities get along in part because they both are willing to entertain weird ideas, and that the hippie spiritualist might see the rationality people being a little weird and think whatever weirdness is cool, and maybe vice versa. What do you think about that?

JACOB: It would be interesting, right? This is something people wouldn't think of initially. I do think it's true, but if you just come to a place and you say something really weird, then the cosplay people just tell you that you're weird. And then in the rational community, people will ask you, "Okay, why do you believe that? And what's your prior probability of this being true?" In those hippie communities, people will immediately agree with you, even if they don't. They'll say, "Yeah, yeah, totally." It's just that they might say something that generates the same mood. So it might be something like, you won't notice and articulate it until you just spend a lot of time with people, and then you notice that not being shut down when you just say something weird is actually the main reason I'm hanging out with those people, and the core part of this community, and not any of their object-level beliefs about whether the world runs on magic or in quantum physics.

SPENCER: One of the things I find super valuable, but not everyone agrees with me on this, is trying to take the conversation you're having and extract the most valuable element from it, rather than having this assessment view, where you're trying to evaluate, "Is this person right? Is this correct? Is this logical?" So it's really flipping it on its head and saying, "What is valuable about this?" I'm curious if you have a reaction to that.

JACOB: I think it's important. I think together, you kind of have to not care about competing with people. I realized I had a shift in recent years. I remember myself as a teenager where the most important thing to me was to be thought of as smart.

SPENCER: That seems pretty common in the rational community, wouldn't you say?

JACOB: Yes, and I've noticed recently that I almost get uncomfortable when people tell me I'm smart. When people read the blog post that I wrote and say, "Oh, you look absolutely correct. This is the most brilliant thing I ever read," I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, cool. It's probably not that good; it just has holes in it." And if people tell me I'm an idiot on Twitter, I'm like, "It's such a relief." Actually, I don't know if you trust me more if they think I'm dumb.

SPENCER: Do you think it's just because you build up confidence over time so you no longer feel like you need to show it, or you feel like you have such strong signals of intelligence that you don't really worry that people are going to doubt it, or what?

JACOB: Yeah, I guess it kind of came from both of them. Maybe just hearing that I'm smart a lot, or actually having some achievements, or maybe just contacts with time, and maybe it's realizing that if people think I'm smarter than them, they don't trust me. Whenever I say something dumb, they don't believe that they said something dumb. They think I'm running some clever manipulation. I'm like, no, no, I just actually said this thing without thinking. I'm sorry.

SPENCER: So you see strategic advantages, basically, to being perceived as less smart.

JACOB: I think so. I'm not sure what had happened. It's going to notice that it somehow went from being super important to almost the sign being flipped in the course of like 15 years of my life. They're thinking, oh, with this attitude, it's a lot easier to talk to people who believe in seemingly crazy things. Now it's a lot easier for me when I talk to people and they believe in something crazy, whether political or magical or whatever. It's going to talk with them in their world.

SPENCER: I feel like there's this superpower that people don't really talk about, which is just knowing what is true about yourself, so that you are impervious to external perspective on that aspect. For example, one thing that I'm pretty convinced of is that I have ideas that I can share that people will find valuable, and sometimes people trash my ideas. I remember posting something about philosophy, and I had two philosophers just jump down my throat and tell me I had misinterpreted John Rawls and so on. It was embarrassing, but it's like, whatever. Okay, I have 100 other ideas. Yes, I'm going to have an error rate. Yes, some of my ideas are going to be dumb. That's fine. I accept that, and I'm just trying to commit to realizing when I'm wrong and iterating and getting better. But what I'm getting at is that the more certainty you have about what you actually are like, it gives you this power to be wrong, which I think can really accelerate learning and growth dramatically. I just think about how much worse of a thinker I'd be if I didn't put my ideas out there for scrutiny. I think one thing that's really helped me as a thinker is just being scrutinized so many times by so many people, because I'm not too scared to put ideas out. Any reaction to that?

JACOB: Yeah, that goes back to sort of rationality education. I thought of less strong writing as, "Hey, have you considered that you might be wrong? Have you considered you might be biased?" Maybe the more useful thing is the first step is to convince people emotionally that it's okay if you find out that you were wrong, really deeply okay. You just have to feel it in your heart that it's kind of okay if you were wrong, and only then can you start actually looking for cases where you might be wrong because you fell for one bias or the other. If you don't feel emotionally safe to be wrong, then learning about biases, your brain will resist that lesson.

SPENCER: I totally agree. I have this interesting thing that happens when I'm critiqued. Simultaneously, I'm like, "Ah, I made that mistake," assuming I think it's a good critique. If it's a bad critique, I don't care. But if it's a good critique, I'm like, "Oh man, I made that mistake." Simultaneously, I'm proud of myself for absorbing that critique. That pride in being the sort of person that absorbs a critique and becomes stronger is so helpful when it comes to actually being able to be wrong.

JACOB: This is something that I think the best way to generate this feeling is through other people. One of the best things about the community is that you are rewarded. In late February, I wrote that post about it's worthwhile to prepare for COVID. Then in mid-March, I was talking with some friends privately about how bad I think it can get in New York regarding planning some events for April, and my worst-case scenario for how I predicted COVID would be in New York in early April was too optimistic by about a factor of five. I wrote a public post on Facebook saying, "Hey, just so you know, because I feel like people trust me, and this COVID thing is another prediction I made, and I underestimated my worst-case reality by a factor of five," just the number of people being sick. I think most of the credit for me writing that is the fact that half of my Facebook friends are rationalists who liked that and told me, "Okay, good job catching that."

SPENCER: It's a reverse incentive that people normally have, right?

JACOB: Yeah, some of the things you learn about personality is how important it is to admit that you're wrong, but you actually only start doing it if you surround yourself with people that will give you Facebook likes for it. I think it's insanely hard to just do that for yourself in the absence of social rewards.

SPENCER: I've seen a taste of that too, where if someone makes a really good critique, let's say, on a Facebook post I make, I'll say, "Oh, that's such a great point. I'm going to go edit my post to take it into account." I think they feel good. Commenters reading it are like, "Oh, that's cool." Then my post is better. I think it creates a virtuous cycle. But I definitely get your point that it also depends a lot on who's reading that, and some people might think negatively of it, but if people are open-minded, and especially if they're rationalists, they might actually reward you for it.

JACOB: I think this is one of the bad incentives on Twitter. I know that you joined recently. I joined a while ago, but only kind of started gaining significant numbers of followers recently. A lot of things I write, I get really, really dumb critics, like people telling me that I'm stupid, at such a basic level that even my actual tweet was two levels above that. I am kind of worried about that. I don't feel insecure because of that. I feel it makes me more immune to actual good criticism, just the avalanche of really dumb criticism you get on Twitter because it's such mass media once you get into four or five figures of followers.

SPENCER: So the idea is that, because you kind of start to build this reflex of just dismissing it because a lot of it actually is not valid. Then that could mean you miss out on actually valid criticism.

JACOB: Yeah, you get 10 replies saying the obvious, dumb thing, and the 11th one writes something that's kind of subtle, but it seems close to it. I think it might be something hard to spot. I know where you are and how many followers you have, close to 4,000, so I don't know what the quality of your followers is. How can you get replies that shake your faith in humanity?

SPENCER: One of the things I started doing is in the early days, I was posting a lot of really technical stuff about theorems and math. I feel like that was actually a benefit because it got me originally, my core audience was very technically minded and maybe less likely to make really dumb critiques, hopefully. So I don't know, I think that that's been somewhat helpful, but definitely, I would say, you know, something like Twitter, anyone can follow you, right? You're going to get every sort of person eventually if you get large enough, and you're going to get every sort of critique and criticism, and a bunch of them are not going to be valid. Some of them might be valid.

JACOB: I am trying to do political curation also. So if I write some post that's on the face of it critical of, let's say, the excesses of the social justice movement, and 20 people follow me, then I'm going to tweet something that is very much aligned the other way politically.

SPENCER: So you're going to get all the people who are just following you for political reasons to unfollow you rapidly?

JACOB: Yeah, so you know something about a real pressure that's happening, or about polyamory or whatever, just to get the most politically tribal people to stay away.

SPENCER: I think that just trying to optimize followers, just pure follower count is a really horrible idea. It matters a great deal who the followers are. Since we both joined Twitter recently, I'll just mention I've been thinking about, Is Twitter good for people? Is Twitter bad for people? What have I found valuable and harmful about it? I certainly think it has an addictive quality, and I've been trying to work on making sure I don't check it too often because of that. I think that's bad. I also think there can be a lot of negativity on it, but I've also seen some really bright spots. For example, one thing I've realized is that by going through this loop of picking a topic and then saying what kind of tweet about this that's actually valuable, whether it's habits or bias or goal setting or whatever, it forces me to try to extract the core of an idea, which I find a really useful mental exercise, and then to try to explain it incredibly concisely. Although that is going to be less nuanced, which is a drawback, there is a lot of value in trying to be incredibly concise and simple in your explanation.

JACOB: I personally love Twitter very much, but I'm not sure it's the best place for just ideas. I actually prefer my blog for that, and I do tweet a lot of just haikus or a lot of puns and jokes. One of my favorite things about it is just how easy it is to connect with people. They know nothing about other than connect with you on the level of ideas.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's really cool. And you can have a sudden interesting conversation with someone.

JACOB: It's an amazing search engine. So remember, even two years ago, it maybe only had a couple hundred followers. I asked an obscure question about the predictive processing model of cognition, its potential conflict with the literature on self-deception. Are you dealing with top-level hierarchical models or disconnected modules in your subconscious? This really abstruse question. Immediately, someone replied with a link to a paper that addressed that in a neuroscience paper.

SPENCER: Literally yesterday, I posted about personality testing in animals and put some speculations about it, and someone responded with a meta-analysis on the topic. I was like, wow, that exists. That's awesome.

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JACOB: Yeah, also, I probably met at least 20 people from Twitter in real life. So I do find it a good place to make friends, where you filter initially, not by whether someone is running in the same circles, or what they look like, or how old they are, but just a face. Sometimes it's not even a face, not even a name, just their ideas in writing. There was a person that I was maybe her 30th follower, just somebody tweeting things about life that I found very poetic, just her expression, her way with words. I really just enjoyed her anonymous Twitter account. I didn't know anything about it. A few weeks back, I reached out and said, "Yeah, I think you mentioned something about Brooklyn. Do you live in Brooklyn? I would like to meet; let's go for a walk in the park."

SPENCER: That's so nice. I love it.

JACOB: Just an anonymous account, really enjoyed just hanging out.

SPENCER: I feel those are the bright spots of social media that we don't hear about enough. We hear all the horribleness of how it's ruining our lives. But I feel there are four general types of accounts on Twitter that seem to get a lot of followers. I'm curious if you have a reaction to it, not to say that it's a perfect hierarchy or categorization. The first is celebrity accounts, where it's just, okay, of course, Barack Obama is going to have a huge number of followers, right? People love Barack Obama, or pick any famous celebrity. The second are humor-based accounts, which are very funny. People love humor, so that's an obvious one. The third are insight-type accounts, which is what I would put you at and what I'm aiming for as well, where you're trying to give people useful things, valuable things, and you also engage in humor, so you're also partly that. The last one are what I would call critique accounts, where a significant proportion of their following comes because they level really blistering critiques at other people or groups. Those get shared heavily. My suspicion is that a lot of the negativity and toxicity actually comes from that fourth type of popular account, the ones that give these blistering critiques that others will then pile on. I'm curious, do you see other types? Do you accept my categorization as a reasonable approximation, and what's your thought on that?

JACOB: The prediction sounds true, except I would say there are maybe 117 other types. Twitter is really huge. Occasionally, I stumble upon different worlds where people hang out. They follow 100 people, maybe they have 20 followers, which are all their friends.

SPENCER: Absolutely. I meant large accounts that have lots of followers.

JACOB: By the way, if you're talking about me being an insight account, my most popular tweet of the last week is, if you want to have your cake and eat it too, just bake two cakes. Then problem solved.

SPENCER: That's not insightful?

JACOB: I don't know, actually, no, I got more likes for a sex joke.

SPENCER: So speaking of sex, before we end today, the final topic I want to talk to you about is dating. You sent me a chart before this conversation. Do you want to just talk about what that chart says and why you find it so frightening?

JACOB: There's a couple of charts, one about Korea, but let's start with the one about America. So Pew Research Group did this survey in October 2019, before the pandemic. Some of the results in the chart are that more than 50% of single people in the United States are not looking for any type of relationship.

SPENCER: Is this much higher than it was previously?

JACOB: I think so. It also doesn't matter where the trend is going. This is horrible. People talk about the labor force and say that I thought about the unemployment rate, because the unemployed people are the ones who are looking for jobs. It's all the people who just gave up or are out of the labor force. If society can get by fine, a third of us are not working, but if half of us have just given up and are alone forever, that's really bad.

SPENCER: To clarify, these are not people looking for short-term dating. These are people saying they're neither looking for long-term dating nor short-term dating, right?

JACOB: Yeah. So among single people in the US, people who are not in a relationship right now, about 14% say that they're looking for committed relationships only, 10% say that they're looking for casual dates, and 26% say that they're looking for either casual dates or committed relationships. Now this is up to 49%. Fifty-one percent say they're not looking for either one, and three-quarters of people are saying that dating is very difficult and has gotten harder in the last 10 years.

SPENCER: Presumably, COVID made this even worse, right? Because this is all pre-COVID, so shortly, it is all now worse than it was.

JACOB: Yeah, right? People have published this recently, and people say, "What do you want?" No, this data is from October before COVID existed. Somebody asked recently on Twitter, "What's the thing that you feel the entire world is crazy about, and you're the only sane person?" I think it's one of my controversial rationalist beliefs. The thing that I answered is, I think dating is fun, and worth the effort. I'm kind of shocked to see everybody around me treating it as some horrible ordeal with an uncertain payoff.

SPENCER: With all these hundreds of dating apps, you might think, "Oh, well, isn't dating much better now than it's ever been? Isn't it easier to find a mate?" So what do you think is going on there?

JACOB: It's the thing with dating apps. You can say, "Well, look, with all this proliferation of restaurants and food advertised everywhere, why are people having trouble with good nutrition?" A lot of the dating apps are a bit like the $1 Taco Bell meal. That's the way somebody can make $1 off you and call it dating, not necessarily the best way for you to find things. I don't think it's shocking. I think people don't use the dating apps well. I think dating seems like it should be intuitive or something people can just figure out by using reason, which is a lot of what my writing is about, and apply rationality to dating. But it turns out that a lot of dating depended on social structures and norms. All this data shows that even after the '60s and '70s, basically everybody just married someone who grew up on their block, and you just met at the corner diner or in some social group or a church. When those things kind of fell apart and people's dating pool expanded from their block and their church to all of the internet-connected singles in their big cities, actually, nobody knows how to navigate that well.

SPENCER: Something that I find very upsetting is it seemed to me that OKCupid was on a quest to make dating better. For years, they were trying to figure out how to show you messages from people you're actually going to be interested in, and not just randos. How do we help you find the people that you're really going to be compatible with? Then suddenly, it felt like the entire dating world went off a cliff, and now it's just about swiping left or swiping right based on the most superficial information and what someone's face looks like. Now it's a game that's largely about just judging this person.

JACOB: I'm really surprised at what happened, because they really started going downhill when they were acquired by Match, which is the same group that also owns Tinder. I'm not sure why they made OKCupid more like Tinder.

SPENCER: I heard that they get less money per user than some of Match's other properties (some of the other dating properties) so it created a weird situation where they'd actually prefer people to be on other dating sites than on OKCupid.

JACOB: Yeah. Tinder has its own problems. For example, because everybody is thrown in the same pot, basically 80% of men on Tinder don't really have anybody that matches with them, because the vast majority of women only compete for the top 20% of guys by attractiveness. This is the statistic that I've seen. If people are funneled into Tinder, it is actually very bad for people. You have this competition where most women are unhappy because they're chasing those guys. Those guys show up when they're swiping; they don't intuitively feel those statistics. They just mention those guys and then complain that those guys are not actually looking for relationships or commitment. You have a small number of men who just have their choice of short-term partners, and a lot of men who just swipe, swipe, swipe, don't get matched with anyone, and go, "Well, I guess I'm doomed to be alone forever," because people promised me that Tinder would make it easy, and instead, it's just making me depressed.

SPENCER: I get the sense that the biggest winners on Tinder are the super attractive males, and that it's bad for almost everyone else. What it does is create this really appealing short-term feedback loop with a really unappealing long-term feedback loop.

JACOB: Right? I mean, Tinder is optimized to maximize the number of people on the site who see ads or who buy subscriptions. It is not optimized for people being matched with someone of roughly equal attractiveness and very compatible personalities and interests and getting married and having three kids.

SPENCER: So before we wrap up, let's talk about the Korea numbers.

JACOB: Yeah, so the Korean numbers, it seems like kind of downstream. Something that I just saw while googling is that Korea's total fertility rate right now is 1.05 children per woman.

SPENCER: Just to clarify, for someone who hasn't thought about this before, if each woman, on average, has two children, then that basically keeps a stable population. Right? The population will stay constant, assuming there's no immigration.

JACOB: You even need 2.1 because some children don't survive and some women don't reach reproductive age, but yeah, you need slightly more than two just to keep your population stable.

SPENCER: Right? Assuming there's no immigration or immigration, right?

JACOB: Right. Now in general, almost everything in the world is kind of predicated on populations being roughly stable or slightly growing, right? If you want to invest in real estate, real estate would become more valuable if more people want to live somewhere. You would start the company if you think you're going to have more customers tomorrow. You're going to have pension plans and Social Security if you're going to have more workers tomorrow supporting the pensioners of today. Instead, what's happening in Korea is that the population is going to be cut in half with every generation.

SPENCER: It's such a wild idea of populations shrinking exponentially, and just how hard it would be to do so many things that we take for granted.

JACOB: Yeah, by the time Korean Millennials retire, there's going to be half as many people, roughly, of working age, because they've had this fertility rate of close to one for basically the entire millennial generation now who are in their childbearing years.

SPENCER: Just think about what that does to the total GDP of a country, right?

JACOB: Yeah. So I think, immediately, a lot of culture as a whole is not very romance positive or sex positive, and not in the sense of, "Oh, are you allowed to be sexy?" but in terms of just encouraging it as something fun and meaningful to pursue. Take relationships. One problem is just immediate misery for a lot of people who can't seem to navigate dating and the messaging that is bad. I'm having conversations with people about age gap relationships, and people argue about, "Oh, an older man with a younger woman, is there a power difference?" They talk a lot about the risks. I'm like, yeah, guys, but also, they enjoy dating and having sex with each other. There is actually an upside. There is something that people gain from being in a relationship. Sex is fun. Love is great. So there seems to be a weird general cultural norm shifting away from that. And then downstream from a lot of it is that people are getting married less and less and having fewer and fewer kids, and this becomes a real threat to the survival of countries, the social order, and the economy. Almost everybody's individual outcomes are better when people are married. It makes society much more stable and happier. And you do need kids to build the future.

SPENCER: I have a question. I think I have this intuition that having an exponentially shrinking population is really bad in a lot of ways. On the other hand, you could see someone taking the other side of that argument and saying, resources are finite. If we had fewer people, wouldn't that mean more resources per person? I guess I'm talking about certain types of resources. Obviously, others are produced by humans. Is there something to the idea that maybe one day we want humanity to just have a stable population and not be growing, just figuring out how to do better with the same number of people?

JACOB: Yeah, so this is the post of all the things that I wrote. The post that has gotten the most vociferous hate is the one called anti-antinatalism. So it's partly about this. I talk about the philosophy of antinatalism and also about the economics.

SPENCER: Can you define antinatalism?

JACOB: Antinatalism is the belief that it is immoral to have children. Anti-antinatalism is my belief, which is saying, no, it's a moral good to have children. Part of it is this economic argument. There's a famous essay in economics from, I think, the 60s called "I, Pencil." Are you familiar with it?

SPENCER: No.

JACOB: "I, Pencil" talks about how many people it takes to make a pencil. If you think it's like 15 people, maybe 20, when you actually read about everybody involved, the wood of the pencil comes from trees in Washington State, and the graphite comes from a mine in Indonesia. You need all the transport, all the machinery, or the machinery that makes the machinery, or the people that work on it, or the finance industry that can support and provide for it. It roughly takes a million people.

SPENCER: Wow.

JACOB: If you imagine the world with 100,000 humans on it, and you think, in this world, everybody has so much room and so many resources, the answer is no, everybody in this world is subsistence farming. Maybe 10 people can take a break from subsistence farming to sew together some clothes. But by and large, everybody's trying to grow enough food. If you have a world with maybe 10 million people, then maybe some people can take a break from farming to print some books. But if you want a world with iPhones, it actually has to be a world with several billion people integrated into a global economy to have enough spare surplus, enough specialization for people to build iPhones. You can look at the chart over time of human population and human material well-being, and they really go together, both in huge explosions starting around 200 years ago. You can argue which way the causation goes. It would be shocking if causation only goes the other way, from more material well-being to more population, especially when you see that the richer people are the ones having fewer kids. You can understand the economics of specialization and how many people you need to build anything complicated, how many people you need taking care of the basics of life, like food, energy, and construction, and just support so that you can have a few people doing basic science research or greenfield engineering, etc. I know everybody would be much, much richer if there were 20 billion humans instead of eight. I think there aren't really any resources that we're close to running out of, except for maybe atmospheric carbon carrying capacity. But there's enough food, enough water, enough room for everyone. I think what we really short on is ideas and productive people, especially people in rich countries who will give their kids a good education and their kids will be healthy. I think the world is getting much, much poorer for every child they don't have.

SPENCER: It is fascinating how we live in a world now where one person in one country can invent an idea and then in five years, it can be around much of the entire world.

JACOB: Yeah, more people to come up with more ideas.

SPENCER: Jacob, thanks so much. This was really great.

JACOB: Thank you for inviting me. I had a great time.

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