Learning to Live, Living to Learn. On Scientific Research and Just Reading Books.

I think the real question we all have to
answer when engaged in research is what kind of person are you going to become and I'm here absolutely refusing to fall into the trap of saying well how much money you gonna make because that's not the question that's not the constraint that's not the limit we're surrounded by people with money a mystery we just vacation in the South of France what's the financial worth of any ten people we walk past or ten yachts we walk past and we were just in Las Vegas and you walk past people who are not just wealthy but wasting a lot of money money is everywhere and yet the potential to make a positive difference in the world is scarce why because self-cultivation is scarce self-discipline is scarce clarity of mind is scarce right what's common is the mind frame to sit at a poker table smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and ignoring a beautiful woman in a bikini who's dancing about three meters away from you while you you know play with these cards it's sickening but this is the human condition this is the the kind of ignorance in the unexamined life we're all born into and some people play poker and some people play video games and for some people it's its other vices right but the ultimate constraint on your ability to make the world a better place is you it's easy to be cynical about these things it's easy to be contemptuous and dismissive when you get this kind of question from many many different people I received the question why he read books how can anyone possibly justify spending their time reading nonfiction doing original research trying to learn new things instead of just playing video games just living a life for short-term self-indulgent pleasures and there's no doubt some of the questions were insincere but I tried to muster up the optimism to answer as many of them as I could treating them as sincere treating them not just as insults from people who are making excuses for their their lifestyle choices in many cases lifestyle choices that they don't have a vet so the way this one is phrased is also interesting quote I am curious if you have a positive example in mind okay that , was misplaced I'm curious if you have a positive example in mind it seems to be human nature that people just want to enjoy life and avoid doing things they don't like why would they be interested in the history politics or culture of Africa of course could be Africa could be Asia could be any example here why is it better to read a newspaper than having fun with friends so you can see I was pretty Curt I was pretty brief in my reply to this but it's interesting that this is also framed in do you have an example in mind do you have a positive role model in mind and I say yeah and let's really talk about and think about people like Socrates in contrast characters like Batman in fiction or what what children are perceiving or receiving um but yeah it's it's deeply saddening to imagine people growing up with this basic concept of reading books doing original research and and learning learning about the real world not just learning about fiction not just reading for entertainment but reading to make yourself a better person and to make a world the world a better place that that's so fundamentally alien that you'd get this as a sincere question and you can see from this reply it actually was a sincere question this person went on to watch my other video and education and politics what do I read and are checking out some of the other stuff in my channel this is someone who was really sincerely questioning why read books there you go guys when you get that kind of question on YouTube it's not always trolling sometimes it's people really stopping and reflecting on their own lives and maybe on the lives of the role models that grown up with one of the most corrupting influences that universities have on our society is that people misapprehend them as if they represent learning as if they represent education the modern Western university is a research institution they represent an opportunity to do original research the modern Western University is a credential issuing institution they represent the opportunity to get a credential tragically if you really want to know about education and learning almost all of that goes on it's actually conversa t that's what universities are today i can become fluent in Chinese and then I can go to a university and they can give me a credential for writing up my original research on Chinese literature Chinese poetry you name it right that's when universities work well that's what you do but if you look at the mechanics if you look at what's actually involved in learning the Chinese language and this is sometimes comically true the university will not do very much for me aside from giving me a library card and a desk in the opportunity to teach myself believe me I know some examples were where people paid a lot of money to study a language university and they didn't even get that they got incredibly little support of course I used to be married to an anthropologist anthropology is a very very strange field that way the relationship between universities as educational institutions and research institutions so you answer two questions in this video one of which was sent in by a particular viewer a supporter on patreon who's asking about the nature of research and the other is a question that's coming from many many many different people in just the last couple of weeks asking about the value of reading books what yeah I got this question again and again why read books and it seems observed and it seems insincere and it seems stupid but many of the people asking the question are indeed being entirely sincere and I get this letter from a guy named Lee and Leroy writes to me and asks hazel I've been thinking quite a bit about your recent videos on regret and there's a New York Times article on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and generally about spending excessive time and energy on efforts that may not have positive outcomes I'm a 23 year old physics PhD student studying antimatter and particle detector design and I feel like a wave you may be wasted by potential to make a positive difference in the world well I enjoy what I do scientists often get a free pass on thinking critically about what they spend their time and energy on just because their work is so intellectually challenging studying pure physics will never have as direct of an impact as working on clean energy science policy or even finding a way to apply my stem knowledge to vegan activism however I understand that physics has changed philosophy and society in some profound ways my question for you is to what extent are pure Sciences awardee endeavor even if there are no obvious applications the only people I know that will take this question seriously are convinced that physics is the most important work in the world seemingly because it is difficult or elegant or something of the sort and he says correctly I'm sure you've experienced something similar with British scholar scholars of Buddhism who who really believe this or thing and I'd like to hear an opinion outside of my own academic research in physics bubble okay so great question the meaning of the word experiment absolutely by definition if something is experimental if it's truly an experiment then the outcomes are unknown right and this becomes a kind of problem and corrupting influence in academia because churches often designed in such a way that some kind of important finding has to be at the end or people have to be able to dissimulate some kind of important finding what if you do four years of anthropological research and it's not even a null hypothesis you really have no particular findings what if you know you engage in years and I've seen I recently looked at the the laws concerning internships in the in the sciences in areas exactly like physics and chemistry where people can do academic internships for years and years and years being paid very very little money to be part of you know experiments that go on for very long time and what is the outcome the outcome may really be unknown and it may be trivial right the findings may not be what anyone was was hoping to discover however I think the real question we all have to answer when engaged in research is what kind of person are you going to become and I'm here absolutely refusing to fall into the trap of saying well how much money you gonna make because that's not the question that's not the constraint that's not the limit we're surrounded by people with money a mystery we just vacation in the South of France what's the financial worth of any ten people we walk past or ten yachts we walk past so it depends on where you live even in Detroit I'm surrounded by very wealthy people all the time we were just in Las Vegas and you walk past people who are not just wealthy but wasting a lot of money money is everywhere and yet the potential to make a positive difference in the world is scarce why because self-cultivation is scarce self-discipline is scarce clarity of mind is scarce right what's common is the mind frame to sit at a poker table smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and ignoring a beautiful in a bikini who's dancing about three meters away from you while you you know play with these cards it's sickening but this is the human condition this is the the kind of ignorance in the unexamined life we're all born into and some people play poker and some people play video games and for some people it's its other vices right but the ultimate constraint on your ability to make the world a better place is you the vast majority of people on earth the vast majority of people who could see this video what they need is the motivation to engage in learning research and self-improvement in the absence of an institution to help them in the absence of a university in the absence of any clear credential or financial reward at the end of that process of learning doing a PhD in physics I think what you've hinted at here is that you've correctly apprehended that in some ways this is changing you this is changing you psychologically and philosophically it changes your outlook on the world you look at the scientists around you again it's in there briefly but you're alluding to the fact these are people who've adopted a kind of ideology a kind of scientism a sense of self-importance a sense of mission and they're in some ways blinded to the importance of politics the real world maybe you know the world outside of the chalkboard and the laboratory they've shut themselves off from certain aspects of reality as history unfolds around them and they've convinced themselves to narrowly focus on areas of research that could make a big difference in the world but as you've alluded to in all probability may not you can spend millions of dollars and years of your life on research and the outcomes may be merely academic the outcomes may be less decisive even than a null hypothesis they may kind of discover nothing one way or the other that's part of the definition of an experiment right but what kind of person are you going to become and it has been a somewhat crushing revelation from to realize when looking at many PhD programs that if I get on this path if I do this I am NOT going to like the person I will become this is gonna make me a worse person I'm not saying that of all PhD programs but we're looking at a specific program looking at the process what I'm gonna learn what I'm gonna do even the social process I have really had to question with different kinds of PhD programs not how much money am I gonna make what kind of person am I gonna be at the end of this and I'm being straight with you I did not like the answer even compared to the option of joining the military I know if I join the army it's gonna change me I know and I signed signed up to join the army I mean that was a really life-altering conclusion to come to this relates to the broader and simpler question of why read books at all over time these activities change who you are and what you have to offer the world if your hobby every weekend is to spend the whole weekend knitting socks after five years think of the enormous collection of socks you will have built up and the skill you will have developed in knitting and you can give socks as gifts all your coworkers it's easy to imagine what your life is like you have a closet full of socks after five years and a very narrow skill set as a result and it's gonna change you change who you are you're the guy who knits socks all weekend every weekend that may seem like a ridiculous example if we're really being honest how it is knitting socks compared to playing video games what is going to accumulate over time this is very simply the justification for reading books and we're here talking about of course nonfiction if you took the same amount of time over five years reading books learning new things not in preparation for a PhD not in preparation for a career but to make yourself a better person and to make the world a better place think really about what accumulates I talked to someone today who is a longtime viewer the channel and they explained to me what an important guiding influence this channel has been in their lives if they were someone who couldn't get ahead in school for many years who couldn't get formal credentials formal education someone for whom getting a PhD seemed totally unattainable and one message they took from this channel was hey take yourself seriously as intellectual get motivated take responsibility for your own intellectual development stop looking for the outside world to provide you with a teacher ultimately it's on you whether you're gonna live an unexamined life or a meaningful life whether you can learn with you teach yourself and this particular person obviously a lot of the emphasis in her learning has been on language learning I think she understood correctly whether or not she got this idea from my channel maybe it was her own interest to begin with that language learning is something where the university or formal institutions don't give you a whole lot of help and where you can make a lot of progress on your own on your own time without without a laboratory without any particular equipment that would be provided to you by by large institutions a few days before that I had a series of e-mails back and forth with a viewer of the channel actually a recent viewer recent supporter on patreon I don't think he's watching for that long but he saw my videos dealing with indigenous peoples indigenous languages history of colonialism genocide he got really motivated to start learning the language that's indigenous in his area of the United States of America but a really interesting correspondence back and forth about how best he's gonna proceed with that so he's decided to commit the time and energy again outside of academia he doesn't have a professor he doesn't have a tenure track job ahead of him he doesn't have a PhD coming down you know why to make himself a better person to make the world a better place the people who are going to hear the message this channel has to deliver you are the people who have ears to hear the people who are ready for that message to take it on board and I think some people probably see what I'm talking about on this channel and maybe it burns away in the back of their minds and maybe 10 years later they think you know what there's another way to live you know the unexamined life is not worth living now I'm gonna start living a more gathered focused meaningful life with a real sense of purpose and a real sense of of self-discipline I think one of the tragedies were all burdened with in life is that the options were denied tend to just be the options were not aware of the options we didn't even consider what's like oh you you stop and realize your whole life would have been different if you'd studied Latin back when you were in high school or he would study Greek and it wasn't offered at your school but there was another high school just a few blocks away in the same city where they were teaching Latin or they weren't teaching ancient Greek and he stopped and realized what if I had even been presented that with that option what if someone had just said to me hey you know you can do a transfer course you could go over to that other high school and study Latin and that's gonna open up other opportunities for you and you didn't even consider it when I was growing up I never had a role model I never had anyone to imitate I never had anyone to follow not even on the simplest questions we've dealt with here I never had the idea that you could be a hundred percent sober I never had the idea you could be a hundred percent vegan I never had the idea that you could just not compromise with cultural expectations that are imposed on you I never had the idea and a lot of you guys I know laugh at this me being honest about my sex life and tell you about my sex life I never had the idea that you could be a real intellectual and be honest and open about sex I totally grew up with the idea that being intellectual meant living in celibacy and of course I found that affirmed in Asian philosophy not just European guys I am NOT out here telling you that I have all the answers but I'm really pleased to see the productive outcomes of my at least raising these questions