Interintellect show with Linus and Maria

Linus Liu

Hello, and welcome to the “Interintellect hostcast”. My name is Linus Liu. The Interintellect hosts some of the most interesting conversations on the internet. We have dozens of intimate salons and events every week, where curious thinkers from all over the world gather to talk about a wide range of topics, from philosophy to technology to literature. Check out all of our salons and join our growing community at interintellect.com.

In this episode, I talk with two amazing guests, Maria Górska-Piszek, also known as “Made in Cosmos” on Twitter, and Malcolm ocean, both of them are writers, artists of various sorts, entrepreneurs, and deep thinkers engaged with big problems. We talk about what human agency means, how to raise independent autonomous children, how to make our own goals, and much more. And without further ado, my conversation with Maria and Malcolm.

Hey, Maria & Malcolm, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you both.

Yeah.

Hi, thanks for inviting me.

Awesome. So I think where I would love to start, is talking about individual agency as both a means to an end and as an end in and of itself. So I'd love to start by asking, how do you guys think about maximizing agency both in your own lives and the lives of your children? If you have any.

So, there's this whole thing really, something like, "What is agency?" And I feel like part of the puzzle here is, "what sort of thing is an agent?" Am I one agent? Am I many agents, kind of all trying to use the joystick on the same body? Both of those seems somewhat true to me. There's... I've been talking a bit about this thing I call sort of "refactoring my self-other boundary", which is a kind of weird way to refer to something like, just getting really clear on, not who I am in an identity sense, but something like, "If I'm alone in my room, I can do whatever I want, basically." And it's easy to sort of forget that and kind of be nebulously thinking that I should do what somebody expects me to do, which I may want to do but I don't have to, unless I feel like, in fact, at this moment doing the thing that they're wanting me to do.

Or I may sort of be confused, because I'm sort of nebulously trying to coordinate with one of my roommates, but my roommate doesn't even know that I'm trying to coordinate with them, you know? There's sort of "ah, should we have dinner together tonight or something? Do I want to get into work if we're going to have dinner?". And then there's a thing where my agency is sort of fractured, I've put part of it outside of myself. So I would say, step one to getting clear on agency is almost even just, getting clear on what agent you're referring to. And you can also talk about a collective agent. And that can be anything on the scale from just two people deciding -married couple or whatever- "Where do we want to live" right? Or a bunch of roommates deciding do we want to invite this other person to come stay with us for a month. There's a collective decision making, collective agency kind of thing there. And, in a sense agency comes from a kind of alignment, where if you can respect the different... if you can respect and surface all of the different pieces that are part of the decision -so that could be parts in yourself or that could be the people in a conversation- and it's not to say that they're going to all agree, alignment is maybe not even quite the word, but there's a kind of bringing them into coherence, having people be able to see the sense that each other's "care abouts" make.

And if they can't come to some shared sense of things, on some timescales, at some scale, it might make sense to not try to make a collective decision there, if you're dealing with multiple people. You're dealing with one person, you do kind of gotta live with yourself. You can't just say, "Oh, well, my parts that want to drink should go to the bar, but the rest of me will stay home". It's like that doesn't really work so well. So yeah, it's almost less about maximizing agency and more about untangling the things that get in the way of agency and then it sort of does itself. I guess. I don't know, that's one take that I have, I can probably give you a completely different take as well.

Yeah, there's a lot of rich insights there and would love to dive a little bit deeper into that. But Maria I want to get your take on agency, as defined perhaps a little bit more colloquially and narrowly, which is just both the actual number of choices one has and the belief that, that person has choices, and as it pertains to raising a child that believes in their own agency.

So, yeah, you know, when you look at a toddler, I don't think they need convincing that they have agency, they're just testing it out by every possible way. And you know, [testing out] "What happens if I do this? What happens if I do that? If I jump off the table will I be able to fly?" Like they're trying to test every possible scenario and see where they can have an impact and what kind of impact they can have. And it's usually like triggering to all the adults around them, because some of the stuff they might try is dangerous. And then as they go to school, they get socialized into not really exercising that agency at all, they are told what to do, with whom to do. Like, what to learn, what to read, at what time they should take a break, and at what time they're allowed to, eat, or drink, or go to the bathroom.

So you start with a kid that's fully capable of trying things out and seeing what works, and then you put them through a system that spends the next 12 years telling them exactly what they're allowed to do and think and learn. So I don't like the word maximizing, because we're complex creatures and maximizing any single thing is always going to go wrong at some point. But I feel like our world and the society we live in, is deprived of agency because of how our kids are raised nowadays, and I'm thinking a lot about how I want to raise my kid, so that her sense of agency doesn't get lost in this.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so going back to this question about disentangling all the different parts of oneself, and how that affects how one makes decisions. If it's not about optimizing or maximizing agency, how do you guys characterize this exercise of disentanglement? And I think maybe one way of framing it is making actions and intentions more aligned. Because I think that one might say that a lot of the problems in society and what creates a lot of harm and self harm, is confused action. People do things without really knowing why. And maybe maximizing agency was the wrong phrase that I was trying to use to really capture,"How do we become more deliberate and considerate about what we do and what we spend time on?"

Yeah, what I would say to that is, it's largely about recognizing the ways in which what we're doing actually already is intentional, we're just disidentified with the part that's intending it. It's like if you've got some pattern that you exhibit that you're like, "I keep wavering*". Well, your system is generating that, it has some problem to which that is the solution that it is enacting. And so trying to intentionally do something else, is basically arguing with that part of you without even sort of acknowledging its existence like this sort of a "But I should just do my homework instead of procrastinating". It's like well, if that were actually true, you already would be. So there must be something going on such that you can't just do your homework. So yeah, where I'm coming from with this comes from the coherence therapy model basically, although it also totally dovetails with perceptual control theory and a few other frameworks.

But yeah, it basically says what you're doing is actually already deliberate, you just don't understand why. And one thing I like to say about this is, if there weren't some sense that it made for you to be doing what you're doing, even if it seems senseless, then you'd be doing some different apparently senseless thing. Even somebody with Alzheimer's, they still wander into the woods in particular, as opposed to into the museum, or vice versa. Like there's still some, in fact behavior, that they're exhibiting some specifics, and somehow that specific was generated. And so there's some sense making process that's happening. And it may be very narrow, you know? It may be like tunnel vision, it may be collapsed into some sort of projection of like, "This is definitely my abusive boss who's telling me what to do." Like, no actually, it's your partner, but within that frame, you're responding in the way that makes sense to you. And so it's about kind of dialoguing between those frames and opening up the awareness.

Yeah, I really enjoyed your inter intellect session* on dream mashups and about how we act in a certain way because of something that reminded us of a totally different situation and usually the situations where in childhood where you feel like you're in danger, and if you're a little child, this might as well be true. If your parents or teachers or primary caregivers are angry with you, this defense mechanisms might make a lot of sense but then you grow up and it's 20 years later and your coworker gets upset at you in a similar way and suddenly, you're not in danger anymore, but you're still acting as if you were. And yeah, this happened to me a lot of times, and to me, maximizing, or getting in touch with my sense of agency includes, in a very large part, just realizing that I'm not a child anymore.

I'm not in danger anymore and if somebody gets upset with me, that's not a big deal. If somebody doesn't enjoy my company, that's not a big deal. And you know, just untangling all this beliefs that I formed when I was like three or four years old, and they're still active in me on some level until I recognize them, give them a name, thank them for their service, they're not needed anymore, and now I can choose a different way.

Yeah, I really enjoyed both of you guys' points. And I think that Malcom, what you were saying about working backwards from first principles, assuming that action makes sense and then figuring out how that might actually make sense is a really powerful framework. And I think Maria, your point about growing up and kind of updating your priors, updating your frameworks, is a really important and crucial part of becoming an adult who's aware and deliberate and can really kind of live an intentional life. These seem like, really important ways of being and ways of growing up but it seems like more people could be doing these things, day to day. And so I'm curious about what the point of failure is, in terms of why more adults aren't doing this or more kids aren't being taught these types of things.

I feel like the failure mode here is that we're a society that maximizes on safety. And as I mentioned before, maximizing on any single thing can lead to.. yeah, its own set of problems. And now, if we're raising kids to be as safe as possible, we're depriving them of a chance to make mistakes. Like you can't learn to make good decisions without making a few bad ones and getting burned and learning that lesson from getting burned. And sometimes, when you're like "oh, yeah, I need to take teach my kids to make great decisions" and then you see them doing something that you don't like, and you're like, "No, no, no, these kinds of decisions," you know? So yeah, it's a really challenging thing to do, letting your kid do something you don't like, letting [them do] something that might be potentially dangerous.

I let my toddler fall off her child highchair and it was heartbreaking, but now she's very careful around that highchair and she's not trying to climb it anymore. And yeah, so I feel like if you're not allowed to make decisions until you're 18 year old, you won't be able to do it at that point. You will still look up to something or someone who will tell you what to do, take you out of difficult situations, or at least you will have someone to blame for the typical situation that you're in.

Yeah, there's a thing here around, like Alfie Kohn has a bunch of great stuff on this. He has some books titled "Unconditional Parenting", "Punished by Rewards" and stuff like that. And he cites some research showing that, if you let kids choose how much to eat, they will choose how much to eat - they will self regulate, "Ah, I have eaten enough." And sometimes they'll eat a lot and sometimes they'll eat very little at any given day. If you try to say "No, you should eat this much" or "No, that's too much," then you actually mess with their ability to calibrate themselves. And so it's, I think likewise, what you were saying about the toddler climbing the highchair. It's like, if you had stepped in and stopped that, then the toddler would have been like, "But I don't understand I want to climb this I want to do it more."

And you can get increasingly aggressive about that, such that even attempting to climb it they know that they would get punished. But they may do it when you're not there because they can tell, wait "but if I climb it when my mom's not there, then I can't be punished because she won't know", right? And then you know, if you really want to get them, you can convince them that if they do that, then they'll go to hell - that's a pretty clever trick for trying to get people to behave even when there's sort of nobody around to catch them. It's like, "Santa is always watching", "Santa will send you to hell", but none of that actually allows them to calibrate based on their own their own values or whatever. Now, there's a different thing where it's like, a kid might have values that say, it's good to have the walls covered in permanent marker or paint or something, and you might have a value that's different than that, in which case, now you got a different situation where what you're trying to do is communicate, not, "Hey, you need to not mark on the walls", but "I need the walls not marked on", right? Which is a different thing to be communicating actually, and this is part of the "refactoring yourself other boundary" thing. It's like, the kid wanting to color on the walls does not mean the kid has a problem, you have a problem, the kid does not have a problem.

And, being able to differentiate that is really important. Likewise, and this is, I think, related to properly allowing other people to make the mistakes that they want to make, if you see what I mean. And I've encountered this in myself. I sometimes have trouble letting my partner make her own mistakes, because I have the sense of, "If that is not going to work, oh my God, why are you doing that?" Right? And there's this feeling of, wanting to step in and stop her, but, I mean, there are situations where, if it's, "Hey, that's not going to work, and it's going to break my whatever", maybe I would want to step in. Maybe. It depends on the thing. Sometimes it's worth just having the thing break and replace it in order to have the learning process actually properly work. And there's a difference between stepping in and being like, "Hey, can you pause for a sec," and letting it sort of settle, versus being like,"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa", which can sometimes cause more breaking or more falling off the thing that you're climbing on, or whatever. So there's this whole kind of how do you actually go about doing that too, because I think inviting more awareness into a moment is different than saying, "Hey, stop it," right? It's like yelling out "careful" is not usually a very good way to actually do that.

Yeah, I like this example that you brought with a toddler, trying to create art on your walls and carpets. I'm not there yet, with my kid. But I really like the idea that in a situation like this, I am the adult, and I'm setting the boundaries, and I'm like taking responsibility for it. Which means I tell her, "I won't let you draw on my carpet, you can draw it on, I don't know this piece of paper instead". And then just let her react in whatever way is appropriate. So, if she gets upset and starts crying, that's on me, I caused her to cry. And yeah, it's acceptable, that she doesn't approve of my decision, and she can cry as much as she wants to and as much as she needs to do.

So I'm not sure yet how it's going to work like in practice, because, yeah, it's still ahead of me. But I like the idea of taking responsibility for setting the boundary, instead of saying, "Oh, polite children don't do that sort of thing". Like, who said that polite children don't do that sort of thing? You know what I mean? Or "this is not what we do in our house?" Or "maybe it's not what you do, but I am doing this". So in this situation, I am the one who wants my wall clean, and I am the one who says "That's not allowed in my house". And if the kids gets upset, yeah, they get upset and I accept that, and I will let them cry and I will hug them and I will help them process these emotions and name their emotions, and find a different outlet for them and then maybe find a different solution for them.

Yeah, because ultimately a kid doesn't have an intrinsic need to color on walls. The thing that that desire is wanting to care for definitely can be cared for some other way, right? This is not saying, "No, you don't get to eat or something" or-

Yeah, and in many situations, you can find a different way to satisfy that need like there are very... although this morning, I saw a two year old boy who just wouldn't want to take off his shoes and jacket and spend like 30 minutes crying about it. And eventually, he didnt take them off. So yeah, this is still ahead of me, and I'm still not 100% sure if I could handle the situation differently than his mother did, but it was pretty exhausting for everyone involved.

Yeah, yeah.

I think these are all really great points. So extending this conversation about autonomy and letting people make mistakes as kids to adults, when should we allow adults to make their own mistakes? And when is it become a society's obligation kind of morally to intervene?

Yeah, I mean, to take a really extreme case, it does seem like if somebody is trying to make mistakes that involve physically hurting other people somebody would want to step in and do something about that. As for whether punishment is a good deterrent for that sort of thing? That's actually a very separate question. Stopping somebody from doing something by saying, "Hey you seem to think you seem to think that violence is a good way to solve problems, and we're going to keep you from doing that until you can learn the different way", that's very different from, "We should punish people who think violence is a good way to solve problems". Those are two structurally different things. Like, in relation to the kid, it's the difference between saying, "We're just not going to have any markers or paint out, while you're trying to paint the walls", that's different from saying... it's different from being like, "You're going to get punished, grounded, spanked, shamed," which is a kind of withdrawal of love and connection and so on, or whatever.

Saying "Those are going to happen if you paint the walls", as opposed to, "We can't have paint around, if you're going to use it on the walls". And this is like.. that could still be experienced as, "Oh, I'm being punished, right?", even if you're not intending it as punishment, you're just intending it as creating an environment where the kid can, in fact, do whatever they want, within that environment. So it's tough, I don't really think in terms of the... some of what you were pointing out there in terms of, if somebody's being unproductive, what obligation does society have to step in. I take as a general assumption that people actually want to contribute quite a lot. I mean, I've had conversations with people, there was a guy I talked to at an airport who was begging for money, and he'd been, I think, homeless, or at least jobless since he'd had a stroke. And he felt awful that he couldn't be a productive member of society, and I think, in general, people want to contribute to society. And so if they're not, they don't need some sort of intervention like, "You're making a mistake here." They need some sort of help.

They are somehow blocked on being able to contribute, which could be psychological, or it could be their skill set is not one that the market knows how to create a job for, or they have some sort of interpersonal relating challenges that make it so that they can't be an employee who others like to work with, and therefore they can't seem to just get a job at a restaurant or something like that. But all of that, can be seen as helping them to contribute, which we are assuming people want to. People want to participate, they want to contribute.

I think that makes a lot of sense. But I think maybe intervention is a loaded term, in terms of, it has a connotation of some sort of punishment or coercion. And I think that intervention can also be what you were saying about helping and supporting people, like a federal jobs program would be a good candidate as an intervention. And so I think what it sounds like you're saying is that, as much as possible lean into positive incentives. So creating an environment, using positive incentives to help people, want to do the right thing or the things that we agree are generally good, but trying to not use can negative incentives in terms of punishments and types of moral-

Yeah, so to be clear, "positive incentives" can mean a few things. Reward, is sort of just the temporary removal of punishment, as I see it. In terms of behaviorism, which is where reward and punishment got operationalized, in order to actually sculpt someone's behavior via reward, they first have to have a scarcity of the thing that you're going to reward them with. Otherwise, they don't care about your reward. You know, you can pay a teenager 100 bucks to do all sorts of things. You cannot pay a millionaire a 100 bucks to do almost anything that they don't already feel like doing, in which case you didn't get them to do it with the $100, you got them to do it by letting them know that the opportunity exists. So in order for a reward to work, somebody already has to have some sort of scarcity of the thing that you're rewarding them with.

And so if you're thinking of positive incentives in those terms, my sense is that, that's still structurally the same as punishment. Again, I think if you're thinking of it more of, "We have to just actually create the opportunities themselves", like a federal jobs program is not necessarily about reward, it's about the existence of a situation in which that person can, in fact, contribute. Is there a bridge to be built or not? A random citizen can't just go build a bridge themselves. But if there's the materials and the context or whatever, for getting that bridge built, then they could go and participate in laboring on that bridge. That's separate from whether they're getting paid on it, which I mean, you probably would want to pay them, right? But that's a whole separate piece.

Yeah I love it. And it reminds me of a situation I had, like, many, many years ago, where my boss gave gave me a promotion, which required a college degree, which I didn't have at the time. And he was like, "Okay, you shouldn't technically be promoted, and everybody objected to this. But I know you can finish that college degree in six months. So I told everyone, you will do that." And I was a little bit shocked but at the same time, it really motivated me to finish that college degree. And I did it in three months, rather than six because I really wanted to live up to my boss expectations. You know, someone taking a chance on me before I deserved it turned me into a person[sic] who deserved taking that chance, if that makes sense.

Yeah, people will kind of live up to the expectations that you have of them.

So when I want to motivate someone around me to change, ideally, I try to treat them as already the person I would prefer them to be. And, of course, it happens with mixed results. But it happens, and sometimes people who used to behave really irresponsibly around me, they start behaving much more responsibly, when I treat them like an adult who can do that.

So how does setting expectations for other people, as a way of helping them actualize their potential interact with letting the person themselves create their own goals and know and set their own agenda? Because that, to me, seems like a bit of a contradiction. I don't think it necessarily contradicts, but I can see a source of tension where maybe a parent really wants their child to be successful, financially independent, so therefore set this expectation of going to a good college and getting good grades. But maybe the child really is gifted artist and wants to drop out and pursue that career. In that case, how do these things interact? And what's a good way to think about that, and disentangle these tensions.

To me, this is a part of what being an adult means. Your parents can have all these expectations, and your teachers can have all these expectations and your bosses, and all the people around you, but ultimately, this is your life. So if you don't like where it's going, it's up to you to make that decision, change something, move to a different continent, break up with your partner, whatever. And if you make a mistake that's on you. And if you fuck it up, then it's up to you to clean it up and move in a different direction. And yeah, being an adult, to me means, no one is coming to save me when I mess something up. And also, there's no one to blame if I don't like where my life is currently headed.

Yeah, I have not myself had kids, and I've not spent that much time interacting with kids. I mean, arguably, I did when I was a kid, but even then, I didn't really feel like I understood kids very much. To be quite honest. I got along better with adults, but I find it a really fascinating puzzle, how an organism, i mean..., humans in particular, like way more so than most other animals go from being completely dependent, as a newborn, to having some kind of autonomy and agency. And even as an adult, we are tremendously dependent on each other in a way that like, sort of gets taken for granted, but it's like, humans don't live alone. Like, there are not solo humans in general and this is, if you're a bear, or a wolf, or a parrot or something, there are species that basically come together only for mating and otherwise they're just doing their own thing, or they live in a small crew or whatever.

But whether it's the global society or just your family or the grocery store or whatever, we are actually really dependent on each other. And I've been thinking just recently about what it means to have expectations of each other, and to sort of be an adult. Like the other day, I was just like, "Oh, man, the trash is full, I'm going to take out the trash". And I decided to take out the trash, which is to say, take it to the garage of the multi unit building I'm in, without putting my shoes on. I just went down there and my socks. And I was like, "I can do that because I'm an adult." It was sort of this interesting thought, but adult is like, not quite the thing I mean there, but there was a thing of, "I don't have to take out the trash how anybody else wants me to take out the trash. I can take out the trash, how I want to take out the trash." Definitely, an adult moment, which I think a lot of people don't actually get. They're like, "Oh, I'm an adult now, I have to take out the trash." And they have a whole bunch of other people's concepts of what that means, and it's like, "No, actually, you have a lot of liberty there in a weird way."

But then, I was in the trash area of the thing, and I'm putting the big bag of trash in the trash, and I'm putting the various recycling's in all of the different recycling things and I'm trying to figure out how much do I actually care about getting the plastics in the right plastic container, because there's like three or four different places to put different kinds of plastic and I'm like, "It's not really clear that this should be my job". And then somebody else from the building came in and he's got a mask on. And I'm like, "Wow I am maybe sort of supposed to have a mask on here". Like I had one in my pocket. It's kind of nebulous, because the garage is kind of inside, kind of outside, the COVID is in whatever state it's in, the common areas are usually masked, but also people were in there eating cookies together, not unmasked the other day, but you can avoid that situation if you want to, but you can't avoid taking the trash out if you want to. But also the like the airflow of the trash room is kind of closer to outside. It's like all this nebulous stuff. And I'm like, "Am I under an obligation to have a mask on right now?" And I just came to recognize, sharing air with people is uncomfortably intimate, we're not really mature enough to handle it on so many levels.

And yet, we just we have to, because the air is everywhere. And not everything is outdoors enough to just not have to think about that. And we don't yet have good enough ventilation for a lot of indoor stuff to not think about it. Yeah, I don't know, that feels like part of the puzzle somehow.

Thanks for bringing that up. Because I'm surprised it wasn't actually me who talks about interdependence. So yeah, this was a big thing for me, especially since I had a baby. Because for the first month or two, a mother and a newborn baby are both completely helpless creatures, and they wouldn't survive on their own, like neither the mother nor the baby, if it wasn't for other people around them, who just bring them food, and help them get through the day. And it's really opened my mind to this balance between these two perspectives. On one hand, yes, I am an adult and I am responsible for myself, and also for other people. But at the same time, I am a mom with a baby who is like fully dependent on me. And I'm also like, fully dependent on my husband and my family and all these other people who like cook my food and clean up the trash from the garage.

So there's a hero's journey aspect to it, you can't become an adult without learning where's the boundary between yourself and other people's expectations, and where's like... how does taking responsibility for your own life look like? But you can just end up there like you need to go to full circle and come back to the village and share what you've learned and share your gift with the others and learn to live interdependently with all this other people.

Yeah, and it's... part of that endured interdependence is culture and the idea of like... I remember having a puzzle and then suddenly realizing the answer to it, I was like, "How is this the case?" And the puzzle goes something like, "If gender norms are as natural as some people say they are, then why are they also policed by the same people who say that the gender norms are natural, right?" it could be assumed that if they were so natural, they wouldn't need policing. But there's a kind of confusion there, actually, between genetically natural, like how it's natural for a cat to like pounce in the way that it does, versus something more culturally natural, like it's natural for someone growing up in China to speak Chinese. That's natural, but it happens as a result of the context.

And you're not coercing the kids, that you have to speak the same language as you. I mean, people do get coerced into speaking certain languages in certain situations like, like school immersion stuff, and even sometimes, cultural supremacy type explicit things that happen in various pretty awful ways. But, when you're just growing up around people who were speaking some language, you just learn that language and, you sort of don't have a choice, but you also shouldn't have a choice, that's not a thing you ought to need a choice for, right? It's sort of, of course, you would grow up speaking the same language as your parents. And yet that is contingent, that is situational... well, what I'm trying to say here is you can't avoid socializing your kids, basically. And you can socialize them more, but sometimes people socialize their kids more as kids than as adults into the culture and getting that balance right seems very complex.

Some philosophies say, "No, you should just treat all kids as tiny adults." But they're not, they are clearly not in some ways. What ways are those? I don't know, are other parenting philosophies overestimating the extent to which kids are different than adults? Probably. But we need to, actually tease apart what is a good experience to be having as a [child]? What is an appropriate sort of learning process for for the different ages? And I think we know lots about that. But yeah, I don't know. It's hard to go back to first principles with this stuff. Because where would you go about finding some first principles when you yourself, were also socialized? And when everybody you know, was also socialized, but socialized in different ways? It's hard to find a place because you can't go to a place outside culture. And you know, there's a difference between having a conceptual philosophy and being able to actually enact that philosophy in a in a given situation.

Yeah, I think there's so much we could talk about culture and how that intersects and how culture forms and how does culture get infused into everything that we do and everything that we believe. But just to connect it to today's overarching topic about agency and how people become adults? I think that one question is, "What does culture owe to individuals?" versus "What do individuals owe to culture?" I think that all cultures, in some ways, discourage rebellion and discouraged questioning, some more than others. Of course, even in the most kind of liberal societies, even in the most libertarian societies, there are obviously cultural norms against violence against intolerance. And then obviously, on the flip side, there are cultural norms that are in and of itself, very intolerant. But as it pertains to creating adults, how should culture operate? Or is that even just like a nonsense question? Because, by definition, there is no should, it just is, culture is just kind of what is the case.

So I come from a pretty rebellious culture in general because, I live in Poland, and we have the fortunate situation to be located right between Germany and Russia. So our history was pretty complicated. And Poland was occupied in some or other form for almost 200 years, and it's only been the last 30 that we're kinda sorta independent. And Polish people are so used to rebelling against authority, and whoever is in charge is the enemy and should not be listened to, and should be subverted by whatever means available that you know, we're not really great at building our own society now that we have a chance. So everything has a flip side to it.

It's got a dream mashup quality to that.

It is. So, when thinking about how society should be organized, I don't think there is a single way to do that. Like, the way to organize the Polish society will be completely different from a Korean society. And even within Poland, there are many different subcultures and many different groups of people who grew up having different experiences, and different personalities and different needs and wants and plans for their lives. So, ideally moving forward, what I would imagine is small village-sized or neighborhood-sized communities that interact with each other and cooperate with each other. But most decisions are made on the small community level. And if you don't like the rules of this community that you're currently in, you can move on to the next city and the next village and look for one that's best aligned with your values. Because trying to create a global uniform culture just ends up with consumerism, because that's the only thing everybody can agree on.

Yeah, I was thinking about a related puzzle recently, which is, I've been getting curious about land value tax, which is a way of basically taxing land, not the improvements on land, so it's not a property tax but taxing the the land itself, basically. I forget how much but, you basically tax it so much, you can't profitably landlord, basically. So if you're living there, you're basically paying rent to the government, if you own the place. And if you are renting it, the landlord is making almost no money because almost all the rent they're getting paid is going to the government. And the effect that this has, is that it is just completely no longer profitable to hold land - land doesn't go up in value unless it actually goes up in value. And you can't speculate on land in the way that you can, and you can't just make a bunch of money by just owning the land that other people need to live on.

And there's a bunch of really interesting implications and reasons why this is a really cool idea, but it does have this effect of, if you're living somewhere, you might have to move. And because, there's sort of ways... they've got some ideas for how to manage this, you know, if you've got somebody who's old and retired and not making any money, but just owns a house and then you were to introduce land value tax, people say, "Well, the thing you could do is you could reverse mortgage the house and use that to be paying the tax," and so forth. And I was initially like, "Ah, but it would be such a shame if people had to move." And then I was like, "Well, okay you don't want to just arbitrarily shuffle everybody around," that would be bad. If people have a sense of place to have a sense of home and history and you know, going to visit your grandparents house where your parents grew up is a cool thing to be able to do.

But ultimately, it's like, yeah, "That can't be an overriding factor," that has to be just one factor. And there also needs to be space for a kind of fluid evolution of who actually gets the most value out of this particular piece of land. I was walking along the beach, and I was seeing these cottages or houses by the beach that, you know, had little gazebos and benches and stuff on them and "Private property, keep off" signs. And I'm like, "Should people get to do that?" And I'm like, "Yeah, people should get to do that." But it shouldn't be free, it shouldn't be free to like own lands next to the beach and say nobody can get on this land like that. It's sort of like, yeah it's just sort of feeling into all of that. Anyway, that comes up when I think about, what it means to have, different communities and have people be moving between them as the decisions, as they have differences in how they want to make decisions and so forth. Because yeah, there's that constant tension between wanting to work things out with the people that you've got versus starting over. And I mean, that shows up in something like marriage counseling, too, right? It's like, okay, are we going to try to make this work? Or are we going to try to start over? And, there's no right answer in a sort of general fundamental sense.

There are benefits on the one hand to having a situation in which that's sort of just unquestioned, where breaking up is not something that one does, once one has reached the stage of saying, "We're married". There's totally benefits to that but there's also totally costs to it. And we face this on all sorts of sort of societal scales, where you can't actually go and make new old friends. You can't make new friends from high school. You only have the friends you actually had from high school.

Yeah, that's really great. And definitely, I think that, even just the cultural norms of obligation to one's community versus the kind of the more modern obligation to oneself to be in a place that's in line with your values is certainly a relatively modern problem. And one that, I think, a lot of us or even all of us relate to, because you see, even, we're all on Twitter, people talking about San Francisco, for example, and how a lot of people in tech have left San Francisco, and whether or not they're avoiding a responsibility that they have to the city that they keep on talking shit about, versus they're doing what's right for them and their families. And certainly the flip side of that is immigration as a really strong cultural tool. Like, China for literally centuries, if not millennia, have used forced migration of populations to basically perpetrate cultural genocide. And that's what they're doing in Xinjiang right now. It's not just playing wiegers* and reeducation camps, but giving a lot of incentives for the Han majority to move there. And basically, to make their culture dominant in that region.

So there's a lot of different ways in which I think, Malcolm, your point on just migration, and the movement of people kind of really got me thinking along those lines on the macro scale, as well as on the individual scale. So I think it might make sense to wrap up, is just thinking about goals. I think that's a concept that we've been circling around, but haven't really addressed both in terms of agency, how we make decisions, as well as in terms of cultural norms. I think they all can line up with goals, how do we set our own goals? How do we inherit goals? How do we disentangle our own goals and kind of the goals that were set for us? And what's a useful way to make this process useful, and effective and productive.

I would maybe say that there's a spectrum that never totally gets fully individual. This is related to "Everything is a Remix" thing, but so on the extremely non differentiated side of things, non agentic, or whatever, you could say, there's the kid whose parents have decided that the kid is gonna grow up to be a violinist, or a doctor, or whatever, before the kid can even remember anything else. And the kid is just like, "Yep, I guess that's what I'm gonna go do". And they go do it. And maybe they have a good time of that, maybe they have an awful time. Either can happen.

So that's the extreme "your goals set for you" by somebody else, right? Then there's something more like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, where you're like, "Okay, what do I want to do? Do I want to go in, you know, be an engineer like my dad, or be a marketer like my mom, or entrepreneur like my grandfather, or do I want to, go be a musician like some people have been encouraging me to do because I'm making music?" This is actually slightly what my decision making process looked like with those specifics when I was in high school. And it's, "I'm choosing my own goals," but there's a way in which the goals I'm choosing are very clearly, in the example I put out, very clearly constrained, right? By the kinds of goals that will be legible to other people, and that I've seen other people already do. And ultimately, I decided partway through studying engineering that I wanted to make my own software company and have passive income. But even the idea that I could decide to do that, while very weird, was still inspired by other people like Tim Ferriss, and various lifestyle bloggers and various people who I knew had built profitable software apps before.

And so it's, even though I was picking something really weird and out there that most people had never heard of and didn't understand, it was still something I'd seen people do before. And then one step, more extreme than that is where you can actually come up with something that is, in some sense, new.

But even things that are in some sense, new, still exist in a context of other components that you're putting together. You can't just go and be orthogonal in every single direction, all at the same time. And even if you did, orthogonal is still a relative direction, it's still a departure from something, and you can't ever avoid there being something from which you're departing. So that's my spectrum of how self-authored goals can be. Even if you're writing your own story, you're still going to be incorporating elements from your life and other people's lives and other stories that you've read, and so forth. And none of those are wrong, I do think in general, people could stand to be a lot more self-authored.

But you know, as we were noting earlier, schools don't really teach people to do that. And much the opposite classroom feedback in particular is like "There's a right answer, and you should just find it", which is very much, not even a personal goal, right? That's not even "You should be a doctor", it's simply "There is a right answer, and everybody's supposed to get the same one and it has nothing to do with you," as opposed to, "I think we could have little kids starting businesses and experimenting with coming up with novel solutions to problems way earlier and discovering, is there is there people willing to pay for this," right? That's a totally different kind of feedback than "Did you get the right answer?". And we could be teaching people to orient towards that kind of feedback.

Yeah, like what you mentioned, reminds me of people who make decisions, "Should I get married? Should I buy a house? Or should I buy a car?" Or whatever based on statistics, because that's how we're taught. It's cool. Like okay, "I can see that getting married at 25 has a 30% chance of divorce, so maybe if I wait another few years, the stats of getting a divorce will be lower". So maybe this is not the right time. And I've seen people seriously considering this-

Oh, no

And yes, this is another side effect of school. Not only there is only one, correct answer, it applies equally to everyone, because that's what the science or the authorities tell you. So finding your own personal goals requires rejecting what's best on average, and looking for what's best for you personally, based on, your personality, interests, history, skills, and whatever. And there's this delightful book called "Soulcraft" by Bill Plotkin, that is about a ritual to reconnect with your soft animal and it's wants through spending time alone in nature and introspection, and some dances, music, getting connected with your body more than your logical mind. And then eventually, the answer will appear to you, and you may not like it at all, if, for your whole life, you were taught to believe that you want to become a doctor and a lawyer and have to involve kids and a house in the suburbs. But eventually, every one of us is different, and what works best on average, might not necessarily work for you.

Yeah, the whole idea that averages are a meaningful thing to apply to humans, is extremely fraught. If you actually have a couple of different dimensions, even some pretty boring dimensions, like height, and arm length, and weight and torso length, as opposed to leg length, you just take 10 dimensions like that, and you measure a bunch of people... they did this, they tried to build an average cockpit that would fit the average size pilot, and they noticed that people seem to be getting in a lot of crashes. And they're like, "Maybe it's because the the cockpit isn't the right size for them". And they were like, "Well, alright, how many average size pilots do we actually have along these different 10 dimensions, and who are sort of within... I forget if it was 10%, or 50%, or something of the average, but sort of, you know, average size pilots".

Turns out, they had none, nobody was within the average on all 10 dimensions. So it's just because you can take a bunch of averages doesn't mean that there exists a single member of the population that has anything to do with that average. You know, the use of averages to understand things originated in astronomy, where yeah, if you average out the errors in your measurements of how the planets are moving, you get very accurate precise data, and so on. And averages make a lot of sense when you're dealing with like basic probability and statistics of gambling and stuff like that. But averages, as a way to understand humans are extremely fraught. The idea that there's an average speed at which kids learn things, and if they're slower, then they're stupid is fraught. If you rush kids along at a certain pace, half of them will be bored, and half of them will be constantly behind. And the ones who are behind will slip further behind.

Does that mean they can't learn the material? No, they just can't learn it that fast. And if you keep trying to move them on at the same pace, they won't learn it. The whole idea that somebody who hasn't learned something as fast as somebody else can't learn it is only true because you're not giving them the time they wouldn't need to learn it. So there's this sort of self reinforcing thing, where it's people who are slow come to seem stupid, because they don't understand the things that other people understand when they are actually simply, slow.

Also, they might be slow in one dimension, and pretty fast in another. Yeah, watching my toddler grow, she's pretty fast to walk, and super slow to grow teeth. Like, all of the children her age have twice as many teeth as she as. And I'm happy that we're not at the school where she's graded on how many teeth she has. Hopefully, this won't be a thing, but a lot of the grades at school are kind of measuring similar things that are not in any way a developmental problem. It's just like different speeds at which kids develop different things.

Yeah, and relatedly the idea of normal, norm, as like normativity it's really interesting. The way that normal relates to average relates to prescriptive.

Yeah, by the age of six So you're supposed to know this and this and this and you don't.

Yeah, I think that might be a really great way to end the podcast. So it's been great having you Malcolm and Maria. This was a really great conversation and thanks so much for being on the podcast. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been fun.