Elijah Millgram: preference

Transcript context

…But isn’t some of it rent-seeking: we might be better if we had a rule that no one would do it? So to some extent people do it so they don’t screw up, and they want to get a higher post or keep the post they have, but that’s to some extent a zero-sum game, and if they just all were more willing to be more interesting, there’d be more philosophy, more interest in philosophy. There’d be more errors — but wouldn’t that be a better equilibrium? So I really don’t think it’s about — well, let me separate out two things. There’s interesting, and then there’s protecting yourself from people’s complaints. I actually think that — maybe this is just me, I have a blind spot for my own practice, but I do script my own talks, but I rehearse them so it looks like I’m — they’re interactive, right? That’s the way it looks. I don’t just monotonously read the thing that is written. Everybody could do that, and that would just spare people a lot of pain. I do see why you want to make sure that your formulations are precise and you’re not sacrificing interest for that. You want to make sure you said it exactly right, not because you’re competing with other people, but because the formulation is what you have to convey. Now, here’s something you could be thinking. We could just get rid of the talks. In previous stages in my life, I thought, “Why do I bother going to talks? ” I mean, I can read way faster than I can hear, and if I zone out for a moment when I’m reading, I can just go back, but if I zone out while they’re giving the talk, I can’t raise my hand and say, “Can you just repeat the last five minutes? ” It’s just not efficient. The reason you go to talks is for the Q&A: it’s that point of Plato’s — you want to see if the person can answer questions about the view they presented. Then you want them to have the view presented clearly; you don’t want the questions to be them cleaning up the sloppiness in the presentation because they haven’t stuck to the way they thought it out. Let’s do all Q&A then. University of Chicago used to do that. To some extent they still do. Everyone has read the paper and you start with Q&A. Isn’t that much better? I think it’s much better.…

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