Weekend Reading & Selected Links
Happy weekend! Here are some links to things I've been reading that you might also enjoy:
- My new podcast episode, with Andy Matuschak. (This one is best watched on video.) At the bottom of this email, I've included five excerpts from the conversation.
- 'The Diffusion of New Technologies', a new QJE paper.
- 'The Scaling Paradox', a new blog post by Toby Ord.
- 'AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless', a new Substack post by Maxwell Tabarrok.
- 'On the origins of the demographic transition: rethinking the European marriage pattern', a 2022 paper by Faustine Perrin.
- '“Dey Took Err Jerbs”: Immigration and the Lump of Labor Fallacy', a new Substack post by Zixuan Ma.
- I'm looking to hire a short-form video editor to help grow the podcast on YouTube. If you know someone who might be a good fit (even if they don't already have video-editing skills), feel free to share this position doc with them.
- This coming Wednesday (29 Jan) I'm hosting a live salon in Sydney with Andrew Leigh. There are still some tickets left if you're in Sydney and would like to join us.
Have a great weekend,
Joe
Excerpts from my podcast with Andy Matuschak
1. Why do so much preparation for podcast interviews?
ANDY MATUSCHAK: The bar here is kind of interesting because when you did that Karikó interview, it was so significant because she'd not done other interviews. And so it was the first longform interview that anyone got to hear from her about it. And that alone has value kind of irrespective of anything else.
I guess one thing I'm wrestling with here is, Joe, of course you don't have expertise in her field. Even if you did have the full 200 hours to devote to it—which sounds extraordinary; it sounds like a huge amount of work to prepare for a podcast guest—it is obviously inadequate for understanding a deep niche expertise like synthetic biology. People go to PhD programs for that. So how is it possible to understand the field well enough? Even with the extraordinary 200 hours? How is it ever possible?
JOSEPH WALKER: Right. Well, I mean, I think that's part of the project of the podcast: to work out the extent to which those kinds of endeavors are possible.
MATUSCHAK: There's some kind of “satisficing” thing where it's like: you get far enough. I can see this in your interview with Taleb: I can see a difference in your preparation. And maybe it's because you've been thinking about those questions for so many years, where it's almost like you get to pose as not a peer, but like a really interested, rising senior undergrad or something who's like talking to the professor and can kind of hold up the conversation. As opposed to somebody who showed up for the podcast, “I have some questions for you”. And the way that manifests for me as a listener is in the unprepared stuff, where he says something that you don't expect and you come back immediately with an improvised follow-up or reply that requires that you understand his response thoroughly as it relates to the domain. And that you can generate a thoughtful or curious follow-up, it does indicate a different degree of expertise.
2. The podcaster as archivist
MATUSCHAK: I was thinking about what are the archetypes of interviewers, right? There's the low effort podcast interviewers, right? And you've left them behind and you know, Karikó doesn't want to talk to them. And now we have the Joe tier. And then I was thinking, well, what would it mean to be more prepared? What would it mean to understand the topics way better? Is there an archetype like that?
And one easy example is to look at research disciplines, where most professional societies have memoir-style interviews that they will conduct. The association of physicists, something like this—I don't remember its name—and the mathematician association, both of them publish these interviews when a mathematician or physicist turns 70. Someone from the society will sit down and interview them, but they are a physicist or mathematician themselves. So it's a colleague doing the interview.
And that really does have a different character because they can go into the paper and probe it deeply. They can ask: Where did that insight come from? Did that come from this person? They know things that you couldn't possibly ever know.
So I'm wondering about what's essentially a continuum hypothesis: Is there a spot between the level of expertise that you acquire now with your current level of prep, and the far end of the spectrum, where a colleague physicist deep in the domain, who has published a hundred papers, is interviewing their more senior colleague? Is there something meaningfully different from what you're doing now between those points?
WALKER: That is an interesting question. I think so... And not every person who needs to be interviewed has the benefit of one of those colleagues to interview them.
MATUSCHAK: That's true...
So over dinner, we were talking about this idea of making accessible interviewees who are not served by that kind of a society. [It] is a very interesting question.
WALKER: Because there are so many people who are not going to take the time to write a book. So there's value to digging the information out of them.
MATUSCHAK: It doesn't really say much about what it would mean to be more knowledgeable as the interviewer of those people. Because you're still not going to be their colleague.
3. Is my podcast too eclectic?
MATUSCHAK: It doesn't really say much about what it would mean to be more knowledgeable as the interviewer of those people. Because you're still not going to be their colleague.
But one model is that there are some podcast hosts, often because they once worked in the field, [and] their podcast is focused on one topic—you know, maybe finance or something. So maybe they worked in finance and so they're interviewing a bunch of people who do finance things and they do some prep for each interview as they learn more about finance. And there's an accumulation that really caches out over time.
And maybe they're not going to be, you know, an economist, but they are extremely expert for a non-economist. And so they get to kind of a different strata. And you've pursued a breadth-y approach. It seems to make it harder to do that.
WALKER: It means that the knowledge isn't going to compound [as quickly]...
MATUSCHAK: I mean, clearly we saw some ways in which it does—
WALKER: Yeah, it will, but it'll take a much longer time until the exponential curve starts to take off.
MATUSCHAK: Yeah. That's super interesting.
4. Should I even bother using memory-prompts to prepare for interviews?
MATUSCHAK: So I think one of the questions I wanted to ask you is that I think it's pretty non-obvious why memory prompts should be a big part of your process. Like you're sort of cramming.
You're doing this for like two weeks before the big thing. And memory prompts, their big advantages, naively, one might see them come over months and years. But they seem to really help you with your process. And I want to understand, that I think it's really interesting and non-obvious, how even just in the span of like 10 days or something, the memory prompts are really helping you. So tell me about how.
WALKER: I can answer that question in two ways. The first is I want to be in a place where my knowledge is compounding and prompts that I've created for interviews years ago, I'm now re-leveraging for future interviews.
MATUSCHAK: So it makes your study more rewarding because it doesn't feel like a one-off thing. It feels like something where you're really you're growing yourself in a durable way that's compounding over time.
WALKER: Absolutely.
MATUSCHAK: So even if it didn't help with just that one interview. It would still be worth doing because it would make you more enthusiastic about studying and help in the future.
WALKER: Yep. And as I'm writing them, I'm writing them with an eye to the future. So when I was doing the Boyd & Richerson interview, I know a lot of that—the whole deck, it's like four to five hundred prompts—I'm going to be using for a future interview I do with someone in their field.
But I think in these kinds of intensive sprints the prompts help in two ways. And this is the second way to answer your question. And the two ways they help with the intensive sprints are firstly, because I'm retaining more information, it makes the next day of the sprint even easier. So I'm compounding the information.
MATUSCHAK: It's really interesting and non-obvious that you'd notice that day- over-day. And the thing is that I wasn't convinced that that would be true. And I noticed it actually depends a lot on what I'm reading whether it is true. When I'm in a situation like the one I think you're in where it's just it's difficult materials new to me—it's outside of my field—that's what tends to make it most likely to be true.
And the thing that makes it most obvious to me that it's true is I like to—when I'm doing a session like this—write the prompts and then at the end of the day do the prompts like the same day at the end of the session even. And it's kind of humbling how often I will not be able to summon the answer to a prompt that I just wrote an hour or two ago.
WALKER: I have that feeling sometimes, often I should say.
MATUSCHAK: When that happens it increases my confidence that this practice is helpful. It's very humbling. It is hard to write good and effective memory prompts.
WALKER: I should say the second reason I find the prompts super helpful is when you're doing—and you would be able to empathize with this—but when you're doing solo research you don't get a lot of feedback, and for me the final output is the feedback [from], firstly, the guest themselves in the interview and how they respond, and then ultimately the audience after the interview is published.
But it can be quite a tedious, lonely, difficult process doing these one-to-three weeks of long days of research by yourself. And having a little ritual every morning where I'm reviewing the prompts from the previous day and, you know, getting 90% plus of them correct or whatever is incredibly rewarding. So it adds some kind of shorter feedback cycle to my prep process. So it's been incredibly motivating.
MATUSCHAK: Right, you can also see you're producing something. It's like a pile that's growing. There's an output.
WALKER: Yeah: I'm making progress.
MATUSCHAK: Right. Whereas this book [picks up book from desk] kind of it retains its shape as you work your way through...
Yeah I really resonate with that.
5. Tips for effective prompt-writing
MATUSCHAK: I want to ask you about prompt-writing. This has been an interesting question in my research and it's just a thing that a lot of people who try to do this deal with. So it's hard to write prompts about this general material as opposed to like you know memorizing vocabulary words or whatever. So tell me about your challenges with that, or if you even have them.
WALKER: Firstly I should say everything I've learned about prompt-writing I've learned from you! Your writings online.
So I think for me personally the way I would articulate the most important overarching meta-skill is to have empathy for your future self—and to know what kind of prompt is going to be trivially easy to guess, what kind of prompt is going to be too ambiguous or confuse you, and what kind of prompts are going to be most durably useful.
MATUSCHAK: And sometimes it's probably hard to write a prompt for a particular thing.
WALKER: Yeah... And again, I'm articulating a lot of these principles for the first time here—but one rule of thumb I have is I won't write a prompt on something that I don't understand.
MATUSCHAK: Yeah. This actually I learned a lot from Piotr Wozniak's 20 rules of effective space repetition flashcard writing or something like this and his number one suggestion is: understand before you memorize.
WALKER: Right. Having said that... Okay maybe there's one little exception to that, which is for definitional things, I might write prompts even if I don't fully understand all of the contours of the underlying concept. And it's still helpful because even if I'm slowly, stochastically, learning this concept, I'm still picking up the language and it's making the eventual understanding easier.
MATUSCHAK: It also creates some feedback, right? If you have this review come up and you can parrot the answer, but you can feel that you're parroting and that you don't know what these particular words in the middle mean. It's like it's an extra signal for you. It's like, okay, I better track down those words.