My Conversation with Matt Teichman
An appearance on the Elucidations podcast
I was recently (ok, not that recently) interviewed by my friend Matt Teichman on his podcast Elucidations. His page for the episode links to all of the usual podcast platforms. Matt works at the University of Chicago Library, but has a side gig hosting a philosophy podcast supported by Emergent Ventures.
My favourite episode of Elucidations is Matt’s Q&A with Agnes and Ben Callard. But he also hosts episodes of questionable relevance to philosophy, such as Witold Więcek on statistical inference and Shruti Rajagopalan on talent scouting in India.
Unless you count being a background character on Conversations with Tyler, this was my first podcast appearance. I hope you find it less painful than I do to listen to my voice.
Matt and I discussed:
How and why people’s views might be more correlated at higher levels of knowledge.
The individual returns to learning different academic fields.
Whether we have lost the ‘process knowledge’ for building quickly and beautifully.
The evidence and arguments for maintaining a spaced repetition practice.
The philosophy of David Deutsch, and whether humans are ‘universal explainers’.
How Andy Matuschak influenced me.
The joy and usefulness of reading groups.
How long-term recall and LLMs enhance the joy of learning.
Whether a non-zero rate of hallucination makes LLMs more valuable.
I am told a transcript is on its way. Here is one excerpt, which relates to my recent Notes on Taiwan:
SE: I worry a lot that certain of the topics that I look into, I will never have the time to approach the thing with depth, and I could be accused of just basically learning trivia. Like memorising basic details of a certain thing, or names and years. Maybe there’s something to that. I found that, interpersonally, there’s a lot of returns to, for example, learning basic things about the histories of different countries. I just got back from Taiwan and China. The bar for knowing anything about Chinese history among Westerners, even among the people who visit there, is so low. To the point where you have lots of interesting interactions with locals just by knowing the bare minimum. And, like, I hope I know more than the bare minimum.
Also, at a certain point, I realised that I also enjoy learning trivial details about things. Now, that’s quite a peculiar personality characteristic. I know there are a lot of people for whom those precise details, and memorising dates, are quite unpleasant. But I found that the raw experience of recall, I found relatively enjoyable.
My grandmother used to say, when we were kids, “Knowledge is no burden”, anytime we asked why some specific piece of information was useful.
Again, you can listen here.