SPENCER: Cate, welcome to the Clearer Thinking podcast.

CATE: Thanks, Spencer. Thanks for having me.

SPENCER: So, as someone who just put out a self-improvement book, is most self-help useless?

CATE: From one self-help author to another? I think so. I think this is not a product of the actual quality of self-help, though it is also the case that the quality of most self-help is low. I think this has more to do with the way that people choose the self-help that they pay attention to, sort of the adverse selection that is inherent in that, where people pick the things that are actually less helpful for them.

SPENCER: Is that because they're afraid of something, or something about which they don't understand themselves.

CATE: I think we all kind of have a default lens that we use for seeing the world. This has many manifestations, but one manifestation of this is that there are certain types of self-improvement — there are certain levers that we may be called to pull on internally that are comfortable to us, and certain ones that aren't. The ones that we feel most comfortable with are the ones that we intuitively develop ourselves; we instinctively steer toward self-help that flatters that way of seeing the world. We will tend to select self-help that aligns with a view of ourselves and the world that already syncs up with where we are strongest, and ignore the stuff that is counterintuitive, where we might actually gain the most from paying attention to it as a result.

SPENCER: So, would a valid metaphor be someone who's really good at working with the hammer, who's trying to prove their skills, and they're like, "Oh, I know what I need to do, I need to work on my hammer skills."

CATE: Yeah, I think that's a good example. It's like, think about the difference between me and my husband. We have extremely different ways of solving problems and working on ourselves. I am drawn to solutions that require a lot of determination, and if you just apply enough effort, you can get through them. Efforts to improve my life that require me just putting in a lot of hard work are really intuitive for me, and I also tend to gravitate towards self-help that lines up with that way of seeing the world, like, "Oh, just work harder." He has a sort of more free-form relationship with reality, where he's sort of bumbling through things in a very emotionally intelligent, intuitively informed way, and as a result, he is not a super systematic person. He tends to gravitate toward self-help that is all about developing your inner wisdom and becoming a more emotionally intelligent person. I think in both cases we would benefit and have benefited from paying more attention to the opposite category of advice, like me trying to work on my emotional skills and intuition, and him trying to work on systematizing things and applying more consistent effort, but this did not come naturally to either one of us.

SPENCER: So, how do you apply this in your own life? What do you do instead of just using your default strategy?

CATE: A great question. I think the last four or five years of my life have primarily been about developing more as an emotional creature, and a lot of that has been downstream of my relationship with him. Learning to acknowledge and work with emotions instead of suffocating them and pretending they don't exist has been a big area of improvement for me. More recently, I think I've just been really getting into this way of seeing the world that is basically everything, your entire relationship with the world is downstream of this default lens that you apply to everything, and the way this shows up for me is I've begun to notice how little my internal state, in terms of my anxiety levels, my stress levels, and my level of connectedness to people, has anything to do with the circumstances in which I find myself at any one point in time. It seems to just sort of be a persistent feature of my reality. Learning to notice this default approach that I have has made my reactions to things in the world, how I respond to individual situations, feel a lot more optional, which has sort of increased my personal freedom in how I respond to things.

SPENCER: This reminds me when people have a whole series of failed friendships or whatever, and then someone's like, "Look, you're the thing in common between all of these relationships." It's like you're the thing in common in terms of all of reality that you've experienced, generalizing that.

CATE: Yeah, it totally is. And I suspect that this can be hard to notice when you have a pretty steady life. I think I've benefited from having a life with some really high highs and really low lows, and just noticing the fact that my orientation to reality, my psychology is fundamentally not hugely variable from the high highs to the low lows has made it really hard for me to ignore the fact that my internal reality is not dependent on the substrate out there in the world.

SPENCER: So you don't find that if there are more life stressors or things going wrong, that doesn't have a big impact on you.

CATE: Certainly, there are times when I'm more or less stressed. I think I'm not the first person to notice how strong the hedonic treadmill is, though, and how quickly we return to baseline. Let me actually take a step back and say there are some situations in life where I think this doesn't apply. So, when I was in active addiction to drugs, every day was shit, and there was no escaping that, and it doesn't pattern match to the way that my life is now. But if I compare the time shortly after I got sober, when I was broke, didn't have a job, had a bad relationship, didn't know how I was gonna get back on my feet to my life now, which is a great husband, super fulfilling work, projects that I'm excited about, everything is just excellent, I find that the way that I feel about my life is pretty similar in both circumstances, which is, "Yeah, this is pretty good. Got some significant challenges that I'm going to work on," and I kind of feel like if I had 100 times as much money as I have now, and I was king of the world, I would sort of feel the same thing with a surprisingly small degree of variation between life circumstances.

SPENCER: So, is it fair to say when things are really bad or really tough, it's going to pull you out of whack. And maybe when there's some big success, temporarily you'll feel different, but we're talking about this equilibrium where there's not crazy environmental stuff going on that you're going to just go back to the state.

CATE: Yeah. I think it's been really wild for me to understand how quickly it happens. I was recently in a circumstance where I was contemplating the prospect of a big financial windfall and thinking about how that would change my life. I spent 12 hours feeling like life is going to be amazing now, I can just do whatever I want, I can buy whatever I want, all of my concerns are gone, and then so quickly my default shape just took back over and was like, "Yeah, but think about all these other problems, and think about, will that amount of money be enough? I don't know," and I just realized I have this through line of a certain degree of scarcity mindset and a certain degree of optimism that just levels up and down with whatever my life circumstances are, and it's really wild when you can have those moments where you can see that clearly because things are shifting enough.

SPENCER: Yeah, there's a lot I identify with regard to this because I think I have the sort of mind that just tends to look for threats, and I think I've always been that way since I was a child. I think I probably will always be that way for the rest of my life. However, I do think I've made a lot of progress on the effect that has on me, where I'm able to be much calmer, I'm able to deal with situations with a lot less anxiety around them, but I still have that sort of default orientation.

CATE: Do you think that you have made progress because you have changed your underlying shape, or because your circumstances have changed?

SPENCER: I think neither, actually, I think partly it's because I've learned tools that I can deploy when a stressor happens, and I am better at noticing the reaction I'm having to it. I'm better at deploying a tool to work on it, whether it's a cognitive tool, like thinking about what my mind is doing or my thoughts, or a behavioral tool, like going for a walk or using meditation. So that's partly the tools I'm deploying, and I think also maybe partly some kind of different way of thinking about things in the world, but I don't know that that changes my default orientation. I think it's still threat-based.

CATE: No, that makes sense to me. I think that maps onto what I was saying earlier about understanding the extent to which this is my default shape colliding with the world, and not an inherent property of the world itself. The situation that I find myself in has created more optionality in terms of how I respond, applying tools that mean I have a different kind of response that is less panicked and starved. I think that's an example of the optionality that I have in mind.

SPENCER: Yeah, so how do you think about doing self-help well with regard to this idea of default shape or default strategy?

CATE: Well, I think it is possible with a little bit of effort to get insight into what your default shape is, and you can extrapolate from that to where you might be able to reap some low-hanging fruit. Pick some low-hanging fruit. You can steer yourself toward the strategies that will actually be most transformative for you. I love, and will constantly try to turn the conversation toward the Enneagram. It has been really personally transformative for me, in part because I feel like it has given me this insight into what my default shape is and the way that the full contours of my life, both assets and vulnerabilities, are a product of this, which has allowed me then to acknowledge my weaknesses in a way that I wasn't earlier and work on them. I think the Enneagram is wonderful. I think there are other templating systems that will do something similar, but having something that is a quick sketch of your psychological shape and what that implies about the things that will be intuitive or unintuitive to you can be really helpful.

SPENCER: Let's talk about the Enneagram for a moment, because I should put my cards on the table. I have mixed feelings about Enneagram. I know that you love it. So, let's just start. What is it, actually?

CATE: The Enneagram is a personality typing system. It's called the Enneagram, as in the Ennead, which is nine. There are nine personality types according to this system. I think the core conceit of the system is that each of us has one underlying category of fear that is most salient for us — the thing that we tend to design our adult lives around avoiding. This core fear is the generator of both good coping strategies, which become assets in your life, and negative coping strategies, which can become liabilities in your life. The core fear, for me, is being morally bad or selfish or corrupt. For my husband, it's the fear of boredom or being trapped in a situation where he can't have his value of excitement met. There are a bunch of these different ones. I will not anticipatorily defend any aspect of the system against the questions that I think you're going to ask about it. I will just end my statement there.

SPENCER: That sounds great. One thing I find really funny is that sometimes people are really proud of their Enneagram. They're like, "I'm a type whatever," and I just think that's funny because I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's really about how you're flawed and deficient, is that correct?

CATE: One framing I've heard, which I really like from Richard Rohr, is that your gifts ruin you. There's this underlying thing that generates both your weaknesses and your strengths, and they are very intimately connected. For some people, their core fear is something they don't want to acknowledge, whereas for others, it is a thing they recognize. For example, ones, which I am, are characteristically proud of being ones because it's like, "Well, why wouldn't I be afraid of being evil? That's just the right way to be." It doesn't seem pathological when you describe it as a fear. However, the fear of being unremarkable or without value to others in an achievement-oriented sense is something people typically don't like having called to attention. Fours are another example; they are individualists and very unique, and if you point out to a four that they are really scared of being like other people, they don't like that either. It depends on how much the fear itself is something people endorse being afraid of. I didn't do a great job explaining that, but I think you get me.

SPENCER: No, that makes sense. It reminds me of a funny thing that happened. We made this thing called the Ultimate Personality Test that incorporates three different frameworks: the Big Five, a Myers-Briggs style test, and an Enneagram style test. We wanted to make it sort of like a typical test, where it gives you a type, but it integrates three systems, so we decided to create our own data-driven type. We ran a cluster analysis of our actual data to cluster people into nine types, and a funny thing kept happening: people in one type kept complaining about their type, saying, "This doesn't match me," "I don't like the name of this," "It doesn't fit." We kept re-examining the data over and over, wondering if there was anything wrong. We thought we must have screwed something up, and eventually, we realized that this is actually a characteristic of that type.

CATE: Yeah, what was the type?

SPENCER: Anyway, I think it's funny how the characteristic of the type influences how people talk about their own type. I've also heard it said that some people who worked on the Enneagram viewed it as connected to personality disorders, from the classic DSM personality disorder system. Each of the types can be linked to a personality disorder; for example, type one would be obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, which is not the same as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and type five would be schizoid personality disorder, etc. What do you think of that framing?

CATE: I'm familiar with that as being a thing, but I haven't thought about it as much. I think there are some types that are relatively straightforward to map onto personality disorders, and maybe that's unsurprising. If you take the source of somebody's personality or neurosis and crank it all the way up to the point where it becomes very damaging to them and they become unhealthy, that may be sort of the same thing as a personality disorder. The question becomes, how faithful is the mapping of one type to one personality disorder? How tight is that? I know my husband Sasha has thought about this and is interested in it, but I haven't yet absorbed this piece of Enneagram lore from him.

SPENCER: Yeah, a natural criticism of the Enneagram would be, where do they get the nine types from, and is it really carving reality at the joints? Are there really only nine major fears, and are these those, and are they really distinguished well enough? Yes. What do you think about that?

CATE: Yeah, I think it's fair. I think people have different schools of thought on this, and there are some people who view the Enneagram as essentially a metaphysical tool that really is incredibly mysterious and maybe God-given. There are some people who have just a more pragmatic approach to it. I've actually written a whole piece on my blog, Useful Fictions, at one point about why there would be nine types, and the conclusion that I drew in that post is just, well, there's nothing really magical about nine types. It just happens to be the case that for most people one of these nine fears is the thing that is most relevant to them. There's no big category of fear that is common to a lot of people that isn't represented in this system, and then, for various reasons, "Why not 11, why not seven?" I think there are certain aspects of the Enneagram as a system that are memetically fit, and therefore, among the systems that are like this, this happened to be the one that has survived.

SPENCER: The 42 fear systems are not going to make it in the memetic war.

CATE: Exactly. I've read the Clearer Thinking research on this, and I think you have shown, and I would agree, that a way of looking at the Enneagram, where instead of having one type, you can think about each of the types as sliders, almost like the big five has five sliders, you can think about each of the Enneagram types as a slider, and if you actually conceptualize it that way and test people on that basis, it becomes much more predictive of life outcomes than just the binary test. I think that would be a more true depiction of reality with greater detail, and it's just much less memetically fit, and therefore, the memetic fitness is actually a feature of the system. It's not just a useless thing that happens to make it easy to pass on; it is useful to have a way of chunking reality that gives you a shorthand for understanding the relevant features of somebody without so much detail that it becomes useless that way of crystalizing reality.

SPENCER: Yeah, one of the really fascinating things to me, you could argue with Enneagram and say, "Look, it was made up by people, this was not based on collecting lots of data on large segments of the population, this was based on people thinking about things and coming up with ideas. It had this kind of history where different people worked on it over time; different thinkers added things to it or adjusted it or treated it differently. It kind of had this history which developed." And you could say, "Well, why would we assume that they're onto anything? It could just be totally random what they come up with." For things like that, I'm more like, "Well, let's get data on it," because I don't know, maybe they were really good at thinking about things, maybe they met a lot of people and had good intuitions about human nature. I don't know. One of the interesting things we found about it is, if you use it as a type system to try to predict life outcomes, like different facts about people, it worked a bit better than Myers-Briggs, which is interesting because Myers-Briggs is probably the most popular such test ever developed. Enneagram is up there, but not so. That was interesting. And then, when we used it as a scoring system, where we assign each person a score for each of the types, instead of just one type, it actually performed really well at predicting things. I think it performed even slightly better than the big five in that format. It was about the same, but slightly better. So that was really interesting, and I think what that shows is, whatever it's measuring, there are reasonable bases of things about humans. Covering a lot of the important stuff somehow, however they cooked it up. So that's interesting, but I would say probably one of my biggest critiques on it is the wing system. Can you explain that wing system?

CATE: I'm also not a defender of the wing system. I think it's a little bit silly. The more elaborations on the Enneagram you get, the more risk there is that you're just overfitting to something that you're seeing in a particular group of people. I don't think that, I've never seen any basis for thinking that the wing system actually adds something material to the overall picture.

SPENCER: Yeah, just to clarify for the listener, I think the idea is that for each type you can kind of have this subtype, it's like your secondary type, and there are certain claims about which types are which subtypes, based on the drawing of the Enneagram. We tried to check that because we thought our reading of that theory implied that a type should be more correlated with its wings than other types, and we checked the data; it just is not true.

CATE: Yeah, I'm not surprised.

SPENCER: Yeah. So we were just, "Ahh this seems wrong," and as you point out, it kind of creates these epicycles, it's like. "Well, your Enneagram type doesn't quite fit, you add a wing to it."

CATE: Yeah, go really off on these tangents. One thing that I would be curious about is if there was a way to test it. In contrast to the wing types, there's this other elaboration that will sound pretty similar, which is direction of integration and disintegration. There are basically a series of lines that you draw around the Enneagram connecting types to different types, and the theory is if you are of a particular type, and you move in your direction of integration, that is, you become healthier as you take on more attributes of whatever other type it is connected to. Disintegration is the opposite. As you become less healthy, you take on more attributes of the direction of disintegration. I don't know how you would test that exactly, but that one feels more true to me. I think it can just be a product of certain features of how the types relate to one another. The directions of integration are always drawn such that you are moving from something to something that is its opposite in some relevant sense. My direction of integration as a one is toward my husband's type, which is a seven, the enthusiast, and it's someone who's outgoing and freewheeling and really enjoys life. I think that it is true that as I become a healthier person, I am moving in that direction, but I kind of think that might just be because you can always draw a line to something that is the opposite in some relevant sense, and the direction of health always moves toward an opposite; it passes through moderation. I don't know if there's anything to that, but I'll just throw it out there that there might be something to the directions of integration and disintegration that is not metaphysical in nature, but is nonetheless interesting from a life planning perspective.

SPENCER: That certainly seems plausible to me. I'll give just one more critique of the Enneagram, which is, do people really fall into one type, and is it kind of stable across time? I'll just give myself as an example. I've taken a whole bunch of online Enneagram tests. We tried to make the system work in our data, where we started with lots of explanations to understand what the type is supposed to be. We looked at prior research, and then we cleaned up the types to help make sure that the items actually correlated with each other. That's how we built ours, and through all of these systems, what I find again and again is I don't fit into one type. I tend to fit into three types that are almost always equal; sometimes one is a little more. To me, the Enneagram just doesn't resonate because I don't seem to fit any of the buckets well.

CATE: I think that this is fair. I think it works better for some people than others. It's not true that each of us has exactly one core fear, and our whole life is designed around avoiding it.

SPENCER: Maybe I just have more fears.

CATE: I think this is true of many things that I find to be useful tools. They are not good for all people, they are just super useful for some subset of people. I found the Enneagram to be really useful for understanding myself. There are a significant number of people who read all of the types, don't feel like any of them really hits them in the gut, and they are just like, "This seems useless to me, and that seems completely fine." One of the nice things about viewing the Enneagram as a tool that is potent for some people is that I don't need to believe that it works for everybody.

SPENCER: Right. You have this interesting point that you once wrote about, astrology, where astrology, I think we can admit that it's just randomly assigning people, essentially. Your date of birth doesn't really say anything about you, but it sometimes resonates. Did you want to make a point about that?

CATE: Yeah, okay, instead of the nine types of the Enneagram, maybe you try to do it to 12 types, and you cluster traits that are often found with one another, and you say, "Oh, well, there are roughly these 12 types of people, and there's a distribution throughout the population," that astrology is basically doing that, but then randomly assigning people the types and just saying this is your type based on the date of your birth. So when you think about, when you ask, "Why do some people believe really strongly in astrology?" I think my answer to this is it's basically just the subset of people who have been sorted into the category that aligns with their actual personality that happens to line up with their birth. About one in 12 people believe that astrology is really strongly true for them, which is kind of what you would expect if you had a sorting system that covered most of the range of personality traits, and you sorted it into 12 types, and then you randomly assigned people.

SPENCER: Right. One in 12 would, their closest type would be correct?

CATE: This does totally disgust me.

SPENCER: It would be interesting if someone were to take the types from astrology and build a personality test that assigns you not based on date of birth, but based on actual questions that measure that thing, and just see how good a test it is. That would be pretty fascinating.

CATE: I would love that. It sounds like a Clearer Thinking work.

SPENCER: Your real astrological type. I have a funny anecdote about astrology, which is, we've collected insane amounts of data about humans, and one question we can ask from the data is, "How well do things predict other things?" We can look at something we collect and try to predict many other things from it, and say how well it predicts. Do you want to guess what the least predictive thing we've ever found is?

CATE: Is it astrology?

SPENCER: It's astrology. Yeah, literally, because one day I sorted them by how little ability they have to predict things, and all the astrological sign ones were at the top. I was like, "Wait, they actually chose the least predictive thing I've ever been able to identify as their sorting mechanism," which I thought was ironic.

CATE: I bet you have all of these astrologers who are like that, "But my most loyal repeat customers all say it's super predictive for them."

SPENCER: It's funny. All right, anything you want to finish on about the Enneagram? Actually, I'd love to hear your story of the Enneagram resonating with you and what it did for you. Tell me about the time you first read about it and what happened.

CATE: Yeah, I first read about it three years ago. Sasha and I were driving down to Southern California to visit some friends of his, where it was a couple that was really into Enneagram, and the woman was actually an Enneagram coach. I thought, "This sounds stupid, let me read about it." So we listened to an audiobook on the way down, and it was sort of going through the types, giving an overview of each type and the pathologies associated with them. They were not in an order where one was first for some reason, but at some point we got around to one type, and we got a couple minutes into it, and Sasha and I just looked at each other like, "Whoa, that is what my type is." The thing that I found really interesting about it was the way it predicted both the aspects of myself that I was really proud of and the things about myself that I didn't want to acknowledge. The core example of that for me was my relationship with effective altruism. I was really deep in the EA community at the time, and it was a time when EA was going through a lot of tumult because it was right after FTX had blown up. I think I had a view of effective altruism that was, "Yeah, it has some problems on the edges, but it's kind of the only game in town." You have to be doing the most good you can do, so what else are you going to do besides be involved in effective altruism? I think the Enneagram helped me understand that my degree of devotion to EA on a philosophical level was sort of an unhealthy emanation of my personality type. I was so afraid of being a selfish person, a bad person, that I would attach myself to systems of seeing the world that gave me an answer for how to avoid feeling this way. I think if I'd had a different upbringing, I could have been Catholic, but instead I encountered effective altruism, and I was like, "Yes, I'll just follow this way of thinking, and then I will not have to worry about whether I'm able."

SPENCER: It will cleanse you of your guilt.

CATE: Yeah, yeah. I think getting insight into that and seeing how my personal relationship with effective altruism might not be super healthy allowed me to move into slightly different spheres in life where I think I've actually been able to be much more effective and do better in the world, but I would have recoiled from if I had been clinging to this particular view of the world as an absolute truth.

SPENCER: Why would you have recoiled from them?

CATE: I think that I was just really latched onto this, basically utilitarianism is the objectively correct way of seeing the world, and I should do what the utilitarian calculus says. For instance, that means doing a job that I don't enjoy. This is a kind of cartoon version of utilitarianism, but it was nonetheless the one that was in my head at the time, which is I will do jobs that I don't enjoy because the greater good demands it, and I will burn out doing stuff that is not interesting to me because it is where my competitive advantage is. I think that is not a totally unique way of viewing the world within EA. I think it is a way of viewing the world that a lot of EAs would explicitly endorse, and it turned out to be very counterproductive for me. You can say, "Oh, you're just doing the math wrong; you were under a misapprehension about what would actually be good for the world," but that grinding relationship to myself was nonetheless a product of my relationship with that philosophy at that time.

SPENCER: How do you think about things now?

CATE: I think that it is good to enjoy life. It is important to enjoy life, and there are effectively unlimited ways that you can improve the world materially. You will be better off, and other people will be better off ultimately if you choose one that is aligned with your self-interest to the extent that you are excited to get up and go do it in the morning. Again, I think this is a viewpoint that lots of people in EA would not disagree with. They would say that I was just sort of doing the math wrong before, but I think that it's a misperception, or it's a mistake that is easy to make if you are deeply entwined in a particular community that says there are certain ways, there are certain things that you can do that are useful, and most things are not useful, and you should pick one of the ones that's useful.

SPENCER: So do you still believe that you should follow utilitarianism, do the thing that maximizes the expected value of human or all conscious beings' well-being, or do you now actually reject that and say that's not actually the true thing you should be doing?

CATE: I think somebody I know used the frame of I'm a deontologist that cares a lot about consequences. I think that perhaps if we are one day ruled by a hopefully benevolent artificial intelligence, I would probably hope that that intelligence is doing something like consequentialism. However, I've seen that lead to really bad results in human cases a lot of the time, in part because humans are not very well built for doing consequentialist calculus. I feel like I just used calculus wrong with a mathematician, that's okay, just moving on.

SPENCER: I think early utilitarians did use the word calculation.

CATE: Okay, okay. So I think basically I'm something that is more like a virtue ethicist now than anything else, but I would be more likely to identify as a deontologist than a utilitarian if I had to pick one of them.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's a big difference from your utilitarian upbringing. How did you get there? Was it the burnout that got you there, or something else?

CATE: Moving away from utilitarianism?

SPENCER: Yeah.

CATE: I think that the thing that really started me down that path was, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but there's a problem that I see sometimes among people who are doing utilitarianism, which is that because everything is kind of a matter of math, in the sense of you're making a bunch of assumptions and you're trying to figure out what the best result is rather than applying a rule, there's a lot of discretion in the assumptions that you make that can get obscured by the seeming objectiveness of it. To make this a little more concrete, I would say that I had a period of years where I identified primarily as utilitarian, and that was in my 30s. During that time, I think I became a worse person. I think that I started doing things like seeing my time as more important than others, seeing my value as higher than others, because I was going to be instrumentally useful for some purpose. I think that caused me to privilege myself in ways that were not previously intuitive to me, and in ways that just made me like myself less and become less moral. I'm trying to make this more concrete without describing any of the specific circumstances that I saw, but a pretty real-life example I saw was somebody who was a really fervent utilitarian buying a $10,000 chair because it would make him slightly more productive, and then he worked out the numbers and that would lead to some lives saved in expectation. That just seems like highly suspect math. Maybe that's true, but I kind of think that you want to buy the chair and you're making the math work out such that you should buy the chair. It would probably be better for everybody involved if you just said, "I want to spend $10,000 on this ridiculous chair," and just did it, without having the gears turning in that way, because it becomes really easy to justify a lot of stuff and to be convinced that you are doing it because it is instrumentally useful, and that kind of scares me.

SPENCER: I'm not a utilitarian; I was for two to three years in college, and then I haven't been since, but I do have a lot of sympathy for utilitarianism as a theory. I like many aspects of it. I think it did a good job historically of getting things right, such as, we shouldn't treat women poorly, and we shouldn't torture animals needlessly, and all these kinds of things. Also, I think almost everyone cares about happiness and suffering. Not literally everyone; there are people who don't, but almost everyone does, and that's a pretty good thing. It's pretty good if your moral theory focuses on this thing that everyone cares about, so that's nice. But I have also seen some of the failure modes you're talking about. For example, one of the most egregious cases I saw was someone trying to convince me that the reason they had friends was that it increased their effectiveness. I'm like, that is so warped and bizarre. I didn't even believe them. I was like, "I don't think that's actually why you have friends." The fact that you have to try to reframe the reason you have friends in terms of your effectiveness in producing utility is both disturbing and a warping of reality. They were kind of deluding themselves in some way.

CATE: Yeah, I briefly dated somebody who tried to tell me that I should stop caring for stray animals because it wasn't an effective use of my time, and I should be doing farm animal welfare instead if I cared about animals. I'm like, but there's a cat starving on my porch, so I'm going to help it. I don't want to stifle the part of myself that feels things and is moved by feeling things.

SPENCER: It is interesting. Maybe we're just not the right kind of beings that can handle utility, but I do think it should inspire a lot. For example, when you're thinking about policy, I think it's a good starting point to consider the well-being effect of this policy. It's a really good frame.

CATE: Yeah, and I think a lot of the properties of utilitarianism are just deeply ingrained in me. Some amount of scope sensitivity is part of the way that I see the world, whether it is part utilitarian or not. I think that if you are getting your behavior from a different moral code, that does seem really important to me. It can easily not be true of you, and so I think most people could stand to be more utilitarian, except for the people who are hardcore utilitarians, and then they should be a little bit less.

SPENCER: It's so funny, I feel exactly the same way, and we need some effective altruists to be less utilitarian and everyone else to be more, and that would be a great balance for society. It's so funny. When I talk to effective altruists about career choices, I'm usually trying to get them to think about what they are passionate about, still trying to make it really effective, but take that into account, make that part of the calculus, and then see there, I missed these calculus myself. When I'm talking to non-effective altruists, I'm like, "How about you pick somebody that matters?" It's just funny, opposite advice. Okay, I'll go into shifting topics here. What is agency? Why does the agency?

CATE: Thank you for asking. I think so. I'll just give the definition of the agency that I like, and then we can go from there. For context, I have a book on agency called You Can Just Do Things that is coming out on July 21st.

SPENCER: Congratulations, and I love the title.

CATE: I have mixed feelings about it, actually, but I've learned to embrace it. So, I think about agency as this dual capacity - it's the capacity to both see and act on degrees of freedom that other people overlook, so it's noticing things that feel like constraints that are actually optional, and then having the courage to act on that realization. For me, agency is really about freedom and optionality, more so than achievement and success, which I think is another way that people sometimes think about agency.

SPENCER: Can you give an example of what something a high agency person would do in a situation that a lower agency person wouldn't?

CATE: I think you can go sort of micro or macro on this question. Just to take the first example that comes to mind, last time I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do for work, I was thinking about starting a new organization, but I also noticed that there were a few organizations that were doing work similar to the work that I thought I wanted to do, so I just went and emailed the leadership of those organizations and asked, "Do you have a job for me? Would you like me to lead your organization?"

SPENCER: "Would you like me to lead it?"

CATE: In a couple of cases? Yeah.

SPENCER: That's a bold first email to send.

CATE: But in that specific case, there was an organization that was spinning out of another organization. It seemed the new organization had leadership already, but it wasn't completely clear how it would overlap with the old one. I thought you probably have a CEO for this, but just in case you don't, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. That particular one didn't work, but a sort of similar strategy ended up getting me the job that I eventually took, which was at a large private foundation.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's a great example, because I think a lot of people, even if they really wanted that job, would send their resume through the standard application process, which might actually go into a paper shredder.

CATE: Well, it might not exist because it's not like they were advertising a CEO role. Yeah,

SPENCER: Right. They might check, "Are there any jobs listed? Okay, no jobs listed. Oh, well," so yeah.

CATE: I think a lot of agency at a high level is just noticing a problem in the world that nobody else is addressing and deciding that you will address it. A lot of my favorite people that I deeply admire have taken this approach to their careers and the projects that they've chosen in life.

SPENCER: It's kind of that meme of, "Somebody should do something, and they're looking around for somebody else to do it."

CATE: Yeah, and it's actually kind of freeing to realize that that's the case, because there can be so much, it's so dispiriting to feel like you're in a world that doesn't make sense, where nobody is responding appropriately to the fact that something doesn't make sense. Instead of waiting for somebody else to take up that mantle, you can just go out and do it, and that's a really fun way to go through life that I've found.

SPENCER: It's a very expensive test for an agency, but I think probably a pretty good test of agency is that famous study where they start putting smoke under the door when someone's doing work with a group of people. What they'll do is have the other people be confederates, and so nobody will react to the smoke, and they'll see what happens. Will the person actually do anything, or will they just let the room fill up with smoke? It's surprising how many people don't do anything when they see nobody else acting, and they kind of think, "Oh, I guess it's fine." Actually, a friend of mine literally had this happen where she was sitting in a classroom full of people, and the alarm starts going off, and then I don't think smoke came in the door, but they start smelling smoke, and nobody did anything, because I think everyone was looking around, thinking, "I guess it's fine." The teacher kept teaching, and finally my friend was like, "I'm leaving," and just walked out, and then the entire class followed her. All it took was that seed of someone acting.

CATE: That's wild. I always think of such studies when something is happening. If I hear somebody screaming outside, or if I smell something weird in the airplane cabin, I'm not going to be a victim of the bystander effect.

SPENCER: Yes, I actually had this happen to me recently, where I was walking down the street and I saw someone lying on the sidewalk. In some cities, that might itself be an extreme cause of concern, but in New York, you're like, "Well, the person's probably on drugs, and they're just passed out. I don't know if calling an ambulance would help or harm them." It's hard to say. But there was something about this person that made me think they were not on drugs, that they seemed sick. There were huge numbers of people around, just all streaming by; nobody was paying attention to this person because I think they all just assumed that someone on drugs is whatever, I'm not going to mess with that. But because I started thinking this person seemed sick, I walked over to them and said, "Are you okay?" I tried to get their attention because they were moving very slightly. The moment I did that, it was like something burst; suddenly five people instantly paid attention to this person and all came around to see if they could help. I somehow changed the dynamic of how everyone viewed this person. It was fascinating to me how quick that was.

CATE: It's not surprising, but it's really interesting to think about. I feel like I've seen that happen before too, and the idea that there's social proof that nothing remarkable is happening is really strong. It doesn't even pass through conscious thought most of the time.

SPENCER: It also reminds me, I have a friend, and the first time we ever hung out, the moment we left the coffee shop, she passed by a homeless person who was begging, and she immediately went up to them and said, "I'm so sorry, I don't have any money on me, is there some other way I could help you?" I was really struck by that because I had not noticed that person, but she was in this other frame of mind of, "Oh, there's a person I need to help," and it reminded me of how I can have the same kind of blinders of just not processing things.

CATE: Yeah, absolutely.

SPENCER: Going back to agency, what are people misunderstanding about it?

CATE: I think agency is kind of having a moment right now, which was less true when I started writing the book, but the particular way in which it's having a moment means agency is associated with a lot of really obnoxious things, and so I think there are a couple of misperceptions. One is that agency is basically about being successful, another is that agency is about exerting a lot of effort and willpower, and another is that agency is kind of a sociopathic trait of questionable value, so I'm happy to dig into any one of those because I'm a little bit obsessed with the topic.

SPENCER: Yeah, which one do you think the listeners are most likely to have as a misperception?

CATE: I think probably my favorite agency myth of the moment is the idea that agency is kind of a sociopathic trait, and the people who are high agency are also kind of the worst people on earth.

SPENCER: You could see why someone might think that. If someone is really high agency, it could seem like they're trying to get an angle. They're not just hanging out with you; they have an agenda, or there's something they're trying to do.

CATE: Yeah, I think there's also a live question in my mind about whether there's a real correlation between these things or not. I think the case for there being a correlation is basically that agency is to some extent about not playing along with the rules. It's about acting in ways that are slightly off script socially in order to make your life or the world more like what you want, and that way of relating to reality comes pretty naturally to people who are also high in dark triad traits. So, I think there's a case to be made that there is a correlation between them. However, somebody also pointed out to me recently, and I'm writing a piece on this right now, which will presumably be on my blog long before this airs, that this is actually maybe a case of Bergson's paradox. What happens is that people who are highly successful can get that way via a variety of traits, and it just so happens that the people who don't have much else going on to redeem them are high in agency because it is a generally useful trait that can compensate for weaknesses in other traits. Are you familiar with Bergson's paradox?

SPENCER: So, is that the idea that when you select a specific group, things can become negatively correlated that weren't negatively correlated in the population?

CATE: Exactly, exactly. A classic example would be men who are really attractive are never great in bed. I think that it's easy to sort of invent a negative correlation like this from experience, because in this case, the men that people continue to have sex with are either really attractive or really great in bed; being one can compensate for a deficiency in the other. So although the traits are independent at a population level, for any person that you are continuing to date, continuing to have sex with, it will seem like there is a negative correlation between the traits.

SPENCER: Right. So, just to unpack the math on that a little bit, if we assume the traits have no correlation in the whole population, but you just select on people that people want to continue having sex with, you're selecting people who have one trait or the other, and because it's very rare for someone to have both traits, what you end up finding in that selected group is that most of them have one or the other, but not both, which makes them negatively correlated. It was kind of a statistical artifact.

CATE: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

SPENCER: So, okay, can you apply, how is that happening here? Can you elaborate on that a little?

CATE: I think achieving a certain degree of success in life can be the product of a number of factors that can include whether you have really strong personal networks, bonds of loyalty to other people who will help you out, and/or it can include being high agency and excited to plow through all the barriers in front of you. It can be a product of a lot of other things, but the relevant thing is if you then select for a certain degree of success, it will be people who either have incredible bonds with other people and are very pro-social or people who charge through barriers and exhibit a lot of agency in the sense that we were talking about here. Because of Bergson's paradox, it will seem like there's a negative correlation between those two things when they're actually independent on a population level.

SPENCER: I see, interesting hypothesis.

CATE: Yeah. Because it's like, why else is X person who is very awful also very powerful? It can be confusing because it doesn't seem like they have a lot of other things going for them, but they do have agency going for them.

SPENCER: Do you think a possible part of the explanation, insofar as it's really true, could be that people are afraid to violate norms, and the more afraid you are of violating norms, that can inhibit your agency to the point where someone is so afraid of being weird that they won't do anything that could be perceived as weird, and they're really put in a box? People who have dark triad traits, who tend to be narcissistic or sociopathic, may be actually more willing to step outside of norms.

CATE: Yeah, I think that is basically the positive case for there being a correlation, that's the reason why it seems intuitive that there would be one to me.

SPENCER: Yeah.

CATE: I have historically sort of latched on to that intuitive causal explanation, or the intuitive explanation, and I am only newly coming to realize that maybe it's not a real thing after all, and it's just a spurious correlation because of Bergson's paradox. Yeah, but I think that story makes a lot of sense to me. High agency people, by definition, are those who ignore social scripts and are willing to do unconventional things, and it is also true that sociopaths and people with other dark triad traits are willing to do those things; they're willing to step outside of social scripts, it just comes from a place of unconcern with others.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's interesting. I almost think of it as two different motivations for dark triad type people to violate social norms. For narcissistic people, they tend to think they're above norms or that rules don't apply to them. They also tend to be grandiose, believing their projects are groundbreaking and that we don't need to play by the rules. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are more likely to be indifferent to causing social upset or to people thinking badly of them. They just don't care; whatever. They will follow social norms if they think it's going to benefit them in a transactional way, but otherwise, they are fairly indifferent to social norms.

CATE: So the difference is that narcissists think social norms make sense for some people, just not for them because they're better, while sociopaths think they don't make sense for anybody and that all those people are suckers for following them?

SPENCER: I think that's a simplification, but yeah, I think it's accurate. Sociopaths often have to work for years to figure out social norms because they're so not sensitive to them that they get punished all the time when they're young until they finally figure out, "Oh, this is what I have to do." I remember one sociopath talking about how they had to learn that when someone tells you that something they love died, you have to make certain facial expressions and say certain words to them. Otherwise, you get socially punished, and you're like, "Okay, that's how you handle that."

CATE: Wow, okay, yeah. I think I can kind of relate to that, although I'm not a sociopath at all. I think I'm just a little bit autistic.

SPENCER: Yeah, that's another kind of person that can violate social norms, but usually for different motivations, right. There are very different motivations. So, can we learn agency?

CATE: Absolutely. I think that one of the things that annoys me about discourse on agency is people tend to speak about it as though it is a fixed trait or relatively fixed, like intelligence. I think that it is actually a learnable set of behaviors and an approach to life, and my life is kind of a testament to this fact, where I had a really low agency way of viewing the world up until I was about 30, and then through a series of events and accidents came to have a more high agency way of looking at life. I think that the process of going from relatively low agency to high agency in my own life has convinced me that it is generally a learnable thing, and that's what my book, You Can Just Do Things, out July 21st, is all about. It's like, here's how you can learn agency.

SPENCER: You can just talk about your book. Also, that's the high agency thing to do. I'm just kidding.

CATE: Let's keep doing it.

SPENCER: But I recommend people check it out. So, how do you learn it? What's the approach? Because I think a lot of people don't want to be boxed in, they don't want to feel like they don't have options. There are opportunities out there in the world, there are problems they see that they want to act on, but something's holding them back, right?

CATE: Yeah, I think a lot of it is about learning to address fear of failure and fear of embarrassment, which for most people steer behavior to a really large extent, even when we're not noticing that. Figuring out how to overcome that fear, which often comes through exposure, is a big part of it. I think also learning to understand the way that our self-concepts limit us is a big factor. The stuff we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, the type of person I am, the types of strategies that are available to me. Moving away from a restrictive sense of identity and from that fear of embarrassment, censure, and failure is really important. A lot of the tactical stuff in the book is just like, "Here's how you can address a fear of rejection, here's how to address a fear of failure," and then there are a lot of tactics that are downstream of figuring out how to deal with that underlying emotional core of fear of embarrassment, fear of rejection, fear of failure. I think ultimately a lot of it is about learning to see yourself more clearly and learning how to relate to the world more authentically in a way that causes you to feel less fear of being rejected by reality.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's interesting, because a lot of times people don't take on something because they're worried they'll be socially punished, or that they'll just fail it, and the world will punish them, so to speak. As you point out, exposure, which actually has a technical meaning, it's not just literally exposure, but exposing yourself to things in a systematic way where you learn to fear them less, yeah, that's really effective for reducing that fear.

CATE: Yeah. And I think a great example of this is just getting used to being rejected by allowing yourself to be rejected in situations where it's low consequence and where you expect it, and sort of tempering your reaction to rejection. A really simple thing that I think people can do is put themselves in a position where they expect to be rejected and therefore don't feel any sort of pain from it. If you genuinely are asking for unreasonable things and attempting to achieve unreasonable results, and you believe that deep down, the rejection doesn't really hurt as badly.

SPENCER: It's still scary to do it, right, for a lot of people?

CATE: It can be. A great example is applying for jobs that you're totally unqualified for, not that are stretch goals, but applying for jobs that you are actually unqualified for, and where you don't expect to pass the screen. Maybe this doesn't work quite as well in the age of AI recruiting, because it's just an AI that's rejecting you, but still to take the example, putting yourself in a situation where the default 99% outcome is rejection, I think you can sort of decouple the fact of rejection from the emotional response in a situation like that, because you don't have the surprise that is attached to rejection and really makes it painful.

SPENCER: It has to be kind of stressful, though, to work. If you're not even finding it stressful to do it, then does it really act as an exposure?

CATE: I think there's a balancing act that needs to happen, but okay, take an example of going to a restaurant and just asking for your meal to be comped. That is aversive for most people because you know you will be rejected and the person might think that you're kind of stupid, but the actual consequences of that at a life level are really low. It's a one-off reaction.

SPENCER: You get judgment from the waiter.

CATE: Yeah, exactly. So getting experience being rejected in situations where you feel that sting, but the actual consequences are low, I think is one way to get used to it and to take all of the anticipation out of asking for things. It does suck to be rejected, but most of the work is being done by our anticipation of that painful feeling, and if you can learn to not feel that anticipation, I think you can get comfortable asking for a lot more in a way that is really useful for you.

SPENCER: This reminds me, with my book coming out, I've had to ask so many people for things like, "Hey, is there any chance you could introduce me to that person?" Day after day of doing this, it becomes easier. It can feel difficult at first, but it gets easier and easier.

CATE: Yeah, I've had to do a lot of this too for my book. The first couple of times I asked someone I sort of knew for a favor, like, "Can you reach out to this podcaster for me?" I really didn't want to do it. Then you do it a couple hundred times, and you're like, "That's fine, they'll just say no, or they'll just delete the email, and who cares?" That's been a good education in getting rejected.

SPENCER: This is kind of surprising sometimes when people say yes. People do those funny experiments, like asking someone for something you think there's no way they'll give it to you, and every once in a while they do.

CATE: Yeah. I think one of the reasons it's useful to ask for ambitious things is you will be surprised by the number of times people say yes to you. People like saying yes; they don't like saying no that much. The actual rejection rate will almost always be lower than you think, and that means that sometimes you get great results just from asking for things.

SPENCER: If you had to leave people with one thing to think about regarding agency, what would you want to tell them? Just as a side thought, it could be about the value of it, or what they're using for not having it, or anything you want, but that's just something that comes to mind. We didn't really talk about it.

CATE: Yeah, totally. I think I would just say agency is often treated as though it is about being a successful and ambitious person, and I think the way to think about it is actually it is the set of skills that you can use to have a life of greater freedom. I think it ends up being a generally useful set of skills. The people who are, as with most of the opposite advice we've been talking about, the people for whom this is least intuitively attractive may be the ones who can have their lives improved to the greatest degree just by thinking more about and seeking to increase their degree of agency.

SPENCER: Yeah, and I think it's fascinating when you really reflect on this to realize how many more choices you have than you think you have. As soon as I think about it, a person could just move to Thailand, as long as they have money for plane tickets, or a person could just paint themselves blue, or whatever weird thing. It makes no sense, but the idea is that we think of ourselves as having so few choices every day, and actually, there is this infinite set of things we're not doing. As you increase agency, you start to notice many more possibilities than were even on your radar; you were kind of screening them out in some way.

CATE: Yeah, absolutely. I think about it as starting to notice hidden doors in the walls of life.

SPENCER: That's a good way to think about it. I also wonder if you observe this too. I feel like it gives people a certain aliveness. When there's a sense of agency that they have, they're not just following some social script like a robot. There's something, "Oh wow, the person really feels alive because they seem like they're creating their own path."

CATE: Totally, I feel like my life has gotten so much better and so much bigger as a result of increasing my agency, and I feel like I am more alive than I was 20 years ago as a result.

SPENCER: Cate, thanks so much for coming on the Clearer Thinking Podcast.

CATE: Thanks for having me, Spencer.