Robin Hanson: belief

Transcript context

…OK. You’ve written about this notion of a view quake book, a book you read — it changes how you think about so many different things, and you go around thinking about it, talking about it for weeks, months, maybe years. Do view quake books dwindle as you get older? And if so, how should this alter one’s intellectual diet? I was very selfish as a young person, and I had very little career sense or sense of how to succeed in life. I was just really interested in things, and so I would go into an area and read about it as it held all these interesting insights, and as those ran out, I got bored and switched to other things. It took me a while — actually, until the age of 34 — to go back to school to get my PhD, where I had a little more career sense to realize I would have to be a seller, not a buyer, to make things that other people would want. I think if you’re eager for these big innovative changes in how you look at things, I think there’s a peak, somewhere in the middle, perhaps. There’s two contrary effects. One is that the more you know, the more you can learn. The more you know about many different fields, the more intersections you could make, the more easier it is to read each new textbook, the easier it is to understand each new thing they’re presenting. And so there is a scale and scope economy of knowing more over life. But they won’t be view quakes.…

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