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Wait a minute. I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Mike Mon. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, what makes an idea interesting?
Oh, hey, look over here.
What you thought was true is not true.
Angela, I am so excited to be with you today.
But first things first, even before we hop into today's conversation, we have an important announcement to make.
That's right. Mike, after five years and more than 200 episodes, next week will be the last episode of No Stupid Questions.
And I want to say I have loved doing this podcast.
First, co -hosting with Steven, now Mike with you.
We love our listeners.
We love their questions.
But like all good things, this one must eventually come to an end.
And I've loved doing it with you.
And I know we both are so grateful to all of our listeners for their questions to us over the years, because they've been the catalyst for us to talk about a lot of interesting ideas on the show, whether it's a piece of research, a philosophical concept, a think piece from a newspaper or a magazine.
So I thought, Angela, given that this is our second to last episode, that it might be appropriate to address sort of a meta question.
And I just wanted to talk about why are certain ideas so captivating?
What makes an idea interesting?
What makes an idea interesting versus, I guess, boring, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
You know, there is an article that I have read and reread and read again.
And actually, I'm not the only dorky scientist who ritually rereads this article.
It's by a sociologist named Mary Davis.
And it was published a year after I was born, 1971.
And it's called That's Interesting, towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology.
Tell me more. This is this article that I can't even remember where I stumbled across it, because I'm not a sociologist.
And it's published in this journal called Philosophy of the Social Sciences, which I have never read again.
I don't even know if it's still printed.
But I mean, this is like a cult favorite among, you know, anybody who studies human behavior.
And here's the first line of the article.
It's long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true.
But this is false. A theorist is considered great not because his theories are true, but because they're interesting.
I've heard this before.
That's actually quite often quoted not just in scientific circles.
Yeah. Well, you know, Mary Davis was I think he was the first to at least elaborate this idea.
Like, I think the idea is that if you think about somebody like, you know, Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud, I mean, people have had these very famous theories of how the world works, how psychology works, etc.
They're not remembered.
And they're not even great because they were right, but because they said something that was interesting.
And then he gives you quite literally a formula for all things that are interesting.
And then if you just reverse the formula, you can understand like, what is boring also.
The punch line for Mary Davis is, and I'm quoting, interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of their audience, while noninteresting theories are those which affirm certain assumptions of their audience.
In other words, he thinks that like all really interesting propositions have that exact form, like everyone thinks that X is true.
In fact, X is not true.
Here's why. Right. I can give you an example that I don't think he uses, but B .F.
Skinner, the great psychologist who designed these little Skinner boxes for rats, and they were pressing levers and learning to get the pellet to come out, etc.
Like a lot of people learn about Skinner in intro psych, but a lot of people also learn that, you know, many things he said were wrong.
But nobody learns that Skinner was boring.
And the reason why is that Skinner had this really provocative theory.
He was like, oh, most people think that they take action because of their thoughts, right?
Like you have a kind of intention and then you decide to do something like turn left or turn right or press the lever or don't press the lever.
But he was like, no, there are no thoughts.
Like, that's not true.
You are simply responding to the rewards and punishments in your environment.
So even if we don't teach Skinner in intro psych because he was fully correct in all of his propositions, we have to teach him because it was a theory that upended what everybody thought before Skinner came along.
Of course he was upended, too, but like he will remain forever interesting.
The thing I think so, so well, now I'm going to overuse the word.
The thing that I think is so interesting about it is interesting, more important than true.
I hope that truth is still very, very important.
I mean, it's almost heretical because in science you're supposed to be chasing truth.
But the end of Mary Davis's article, he says, I contend that the generation of interesting theories ought to be the object of as much attention as the verification of insipid ones.
I don't know how interesting I am.
I will say that I appreciate, though, the people who go around and look for what we're not looking for, who go around and think, like, well, what if we're wrong?
Sometimes they're right about our being wrong.
Sometimes they're not, but they really move things forward in a non -incremental way.
And maybe you can, like, hack Mary and say, well, in a conversation where you're talking about something or just listening and someone says something, like, oh, I think so and so is true or I think we should do this.
I mean, maybe when they say that, you should just flip it on its head and say, well, what if we're all assuming that this is true?
And in fact, this is false.
Well, truthfully, I think that's where some of the most interesting books or ideas that we have in the last several decades have come is because they hit on something that's counter intuitive and therefore people want to talk about it or argue about it.
Do you think some or all?
Well, I always hesitate.
Now I'm making an always statement.
I was going to say.
I always say sometimes.
I don't want to make a declarative that all things.
But my immediate reaction went back to the book Freakonomics, the original Freakonomics book.
I think I was early in my collegiate career when it came out.
And it introduced this idea that crime reduction was a direct result of the legalization of abortion.
Right. And that was counterintuitive and it was controversial.
And I felt like everyone I knew was discussing the book mostly because of that.
Now, it had lots of interesting tidbits in it, but that was the thing that I felt got everybody talking because it was counterintuitive and it was controversial.
Behavioral economics, by the way, is the whole discipline of like everyone in economics thinks that human beings act like computers.
Right. Like they process information and they subtract the cost from the benefits and they figure in the probabilities.
Surprise. That's not always how we make decisions.
And then like the provocative, you know, oh, that's not true, proposition was like people are not like computers.
They act on emotion and so forth.
Your fellow Wharton professor, Adam Grant, has written an article in courts about why Malcolm Gladwell's ideas are so interesting, whether or not they're true.
Is that the title of the article?
Yes. He, by the way, is one of my friends who reads and rereads and rereads this article.
I know that Adam and I share a love of that's interesting, the article.
That's interesting.
See what I did there?
Only if you didn't think that were true before I told you, but go on.
Adam Grant writes about Malcolm Gladwell, who's the well -known author of many New York Times bestsellers like David and Goliath, Tipping Point, Outliers.
Adam writes in this article that a lot of people give Malcolm Gladwell credit for being a great writer or storyteller.
But Adam would say it's actually his ideas, not his storytelling that makes it interesting, right?
And one of the things that he talks about in terms of why Malcolm Gladwell stands out is this idea that he challenges conventional wisdom.
And just two quick examples from some of his books.
One is this idea that disadvantages can give you advantages.
In one book, David and Goliath, he talks about how dyslexia can actually make people more successful because in the absence of one ability, like reading, people can develop other abilities like creative problem solving, acting, listening, rule -bending, et cetera.
I mean, another example is he writes about things that appear to be like an individual accomplishment or an individual failure, but are really part of a collective phenomenon, something based on society or the situation.
One example that Malcolm Gladwell uses so effectively is about professional hockey and soccer players.
The data shows that if you're just born a few months earlier than your peers, it has an impact on one's ability to play professional sports.
You're like a few months older than your little league co -players.
Right. And so it's this idea of challenging convention that Adam Grant posits is one of the reasons that Malcolm Gladwell stuff is so interesting.
You know, if you think about like writing a high school essay, you're like, please write about Shakespeare's treatment of coincidence in like Romeo and Juliet.
Can I just say poor high school teachers who've read the exact same essay because they're not interesting because people don't have new insights for 30 years?
Well, this is the thing, like then if you were trying to craft a really interesting essay in response to any prompt where like it's not like a personal story, it's like an idea.
You basically have to start with someone's assumptions and then say that's not true.
Like what seems to be true is false and what seems to be false is true.
That's the formula.
And I think it can be abused, right?
I mean, I don't know if I should confess to this, but it was very clear to me when I wrote grit that what made the idea interesting is that we had a view that what makes somebody great at what they do is talent.
That is the accepted wisdom.
Right. But in fact, it's not.
It's sustained effort and interest in what you're doing.
That's grit. So I had this idea that for grit to be interesting, it had to have a foil.
Like it had to have a, it's not what you think, it's this.
And I have since actually looked at the covers of lots and lots of books.
I've read and endorsed a lot of books.
And I don't know if I can say that all of them do this, but I do think there is a universal endeavor to do this, which is to surprise the audience, to upend their assumptions, because otherwise, you know, why do you pay attention?
And Mary Davis says, like really, what you're trying to do is grab attention.
The human mind is only able to process a tiny fraction of reality.
So where you allocate that little pen light of attention, where you direct your engagement, your mind, it has to have a function, has to have a reason.
Right. Oh, hey, look over here.
What you thought was true is not true is an incredibly effective way to grab attention.
Well, to me, it seems like it's so powerful in attracting our attention because it strikes at our curiosity, because then we suddenly think like, wait a minute.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, does being self -centered make life more interesting?
Everyone thinks the best thing is to be selfless.
But actually, it's good to be selfish.
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And now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about what makes an idea interesting.
Can I just confess one thing?
You know I teach this class at BYU and we bring in so many different speakers from widely different backgrounds.
So we have actors, we bring in movie directors, professional coaches, stylists to the stars, on and on.
And the thing that drives me most crazy is I would say 80 % of the students learn something from everyone and then there's always this subset.
There's a minority of students.
Yeah that are like, hey I'm glad you brought in such and such an actor but I'm not going to go into acting so there wasn't anything for me to gain there.
So that bothers you because you're like why can't you learn something from this person?
Yes. Okay well your speakers are not saying like everybody thinks that X is true but in fact X is false right?
That's actually an elaboration of what we're talking about because that's not what makes your speakers interesting right?
I find I will say that these speakers are always saying something that I find contradictory to my point of view or what I had thought regardless of what it is.
And I feel like most really smart people I know, most really interesting people can find interesting things from anybody.
It comes down to this curiosity and willingness to learn and pay attention to those things in order to generate interest.
Is that crazy? So what you're bringing us to Mike is that Mary Davis's article might be true of interesting ideas or theories or if you have to write an essay for your high school teacher.
But I think there are other ways that we can be interested.
Like if there's a speaker in class and they tell a story about how they got into what they're doing and that they tell you like oh and here's something that like I've learned along the way and I have some advice for you.
That can be really interesting even if it's not a proposition that upends all the logic of your entire life and takes something that you thought was true and makes it false.
Yes. I think the broader idea of what makes things interesting right?
Not just theories but things.
I think the key to all of this is that interest is also an emotion.
This is a kind of recent discovery in psychology.
You know, when people were studying emotions at the beginning of the science of emotion, they studied things like happiness and sadness and fear.
But it's also true that interest itself fits all of the criteria for an emotion.
It has a physiological signature.
It's a sort of high arousal state.
It also has a valence like people would prefer to feel interested than the opposite which is bored and emotions all get us to do things.
They motivate us. Right.
You said it yourself like curiosity or interest which you can use interchangeably here.
Those emotions get you to learn to pay attention to something that has value for you informationally.
And I think that when you have a really amazing guest speaker or I'm reading like Steve Jobs daughter's memoir Small Fry.
Oh, my gosh. I'm just leaning into every detail.
And it's not because she's saying things that have upended my idea of who Steve Jobs was.
It's just itself new to me like novelty and I'm really learning.
Like I didn't know that.
I had no idea she saw her dad a handful of times all the way up till age seven.
And then I had no idea that this is what he was like personally behind closed doors when nobody could see.
It wasn't that it defied my assumptions of Steve Jobs.
It was just really novel.
And I think that's maybe a broader category.
Things that are new attract our attention and spark this emotion of interest.
Look, that makes a lot of sense.
I guess I just think that everyone has something novel to share.
And the more different they are from you, the more opportunities for novelty.
So everyone's story should be able to spark that emotion of interest in some way, no matter how small.
Can I ask you a question about things that you know, that pick your curiosity?
Yeah. When you have a question and you don't know the answer, how does it feel and what happens next?
And I'll give you just one example.
I think I've talked to you a lot recently about social media and smartphones and whether it is or is not creating a mental health crisis among teenagers.
This is an interesting question because half the people think quite obviously the answer is yes, that our young people Gen Z, they're like incredibly lonely, depressed and anxious because of social media and smartphones.
And then there are, it seems an equal number of people on the exact opposite side of the debate.
So when I came across this question, I'm not kidding.
I literally couldn't sleep for days.
I would wake up and try to read more articles.
And then I would write in my notebook and then like type some things out and then I'd be like, oh wait, and I would email people and then I would read another article and then I would have a conversation with the scientist and then I have another conversation with another scientist.
And it was curiosity, but in a way, a kind of a dark form of it because I couldn't shake the question and I actually never got to resolution.
But to me, it was not a very positive experience.
And by the way, I'm still a little bit in this, like I want to figure it out.
It's like hunger, but it's not a positive state of emotion, like most of the research on interest.
I think there are some questions that won't have answers.
And I think that the too dogged pursuit of them is just an exercise in frustration.
Yours is, I think, different here because you're talking with great scientists on both sides of what you once told me was a Grand Canyon sized gulf between the two sides.
You've got data, you've got research, you've got scientists trying to answer a question coming up with vastly different answers.
And I think that's really hard.
I think that's different because you're trying to come to an answer.
I am. I'm no closer to it, by the way.
But the dissonance, right?
Like interest is often a very positive emotion.
And we think of it as the opposite of boredom.
We're like, I will take interest any day of the week.
But I do think it's sometimes the case where the resolution doesn't come, but you keep thinking it's going to come.
So you can't like write it off as one of those questions that will never have an answer.
The scientists who study the emotion of interest will say that not only does there have to be like a core of novelty, like I didn't know that I could learn something, but the I could learn something has to have a realness to it.
You're like, I could figure out this puzzle, like I will solve this riddle.
I don't know whether that has in a way like kept me in this cognitive limbo.
I mean, I don't know why I don't find this like a really positive experience.
I find it really like an aversive experience wanting to know.
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood.
By the way, other researchers who studied curiosity do say that like when people talk about being curious or interested in something, it's not always a kind of like, it's amazing.
I love it. There is a form of interest which is like a nagging, gnawing, wanting to know.
Can I give you a much less consequential example, but one that I find interesting?
Absolutely. I'm going to go back to Malcolm Gladwell.
In his masterclass, he talks about how he learned about this one chef who had kind of transformed much of the culinary world and started researching this and in the process, learned how mustard has been changed or iterated on countless times.
But ketchup, the other kind of primary condiment in the why has mustard been iterated on so much and ketchup almost never.
And at the end, he's like, there is no conclusion.
I don't know. But it was just interesting to talk about.
Wait, that's it? That's the end of the article?
It's like shoulder shrug.
Yeah, but that was kind of Malcolm's point.
Is it too often? You want to get to a resolution too often you want like, some bottom line answer.
Or you only write about it or talk about it if there is some conclusion.
Whereas sometimes interesting things are just interesting, but we don't have an answer.
By the way, when we're talking about what's interesting, we're like, oh, it has to be attention grabbing.
And that could be because it's new, it could be because it's a kind of new, which is defying your original assumptions.
But there is a dimension, which is just how relevant is this to me personally.
And so I think maybe for the things that are really relevant to me, like I really want to understand teenagers and mental health, that's what I do.
I'm a psychologist, and this is my age group that I study.
It's super relevant.
And maybe it's so relevant that the lack of resolution is killing me.
But in general, what is shown in research is that something can be new.
It can be assumption defying even.
But if you don't have any connection to it, right?
Like if it doesn't feel like it's related to you and your existing projects, your current goals, that's another way that something can fail to be interesting.
That's another thing that I think about all the time when I teach.
I say to my students, like, look, you're in this class, I'm going to try to make this as interesting as possible.
But there's one thing that you can do to make every minute of this lecture more interesting.
Be selfish. Be like a complete egomaniac in the following sense.
How does it relate to me?
Because the emotion of interest is going to be enhanced when there is that connection.
Of course, we can do that as speakers too, but it is a trick that I have tried to use myself.
I'm like, wow, I don't care, but I have to be here.
How do I connect this to something that I already care about?
I love that. I mean, we've talked about interest now in terms of, is it counterintuitive?
Is it novel? And is it relevant?
I think what I'm taking away from this conversation is that so often, obviously things that you find interesting, I may not find interesting.
And that's okay. And maybe that's because it's not related to my projects, but it's related to yours.
Right. But this is where I love what you've just said is this idea of be selfish.
First of all, kind of counterintuitive, right?
That's not advice we try to give people all the time.
Right. Everyone thinks the best thing is to be selfless, but actually it's good to be selfish.
Murray Davis would give me a pat on the back.
And I love your idea because part of, I think, being an interesting person is that you are able to find relevance in anything or anyone.
I mean, there's the old adage that you can learn from anybody if you're just curious enough that everyone's an expert in something.
But I actually think it's true.
And so I asked you what makes something interesting, but I also maybe should have asked what makes a person interesting.
And I think part of being able to be interesting is living an interesting life.
And part of that is experiencing things and people and places different than your own.
It's so easy to fall into a bubble of people who think like you, who act like you, who dress like you, who eat the same foods you do.
Maybe more and more, right?
Right. And I think we'd be in a way better place if we, as humanity, ventured out a little bit more in terms of being interested in people who disagree with us, in people who act differently than us, whose cultures are different, whose foods are different, and embrace sort of the counterintuitive thing
like, okay, I think this, but someone else thinks that why.
The novelty of experiencing something completely different than what you're used to.
And then that leads to the idea of we come to understand that things that we didn't initially think might be relevant to us probably are because we approach it from a selfish, what can I get out of this?
What can I learn from this?
You know, there is this new theory of happiness that says that, of course, we can seek happiness through pleasure.
And then, of course, as Aristotle said, we can seek happiness through meaning and purpose.
And the theory says there is another kind of life well -lived, another kind of happy life.
And it's the life of learning.
It's the life of curiosity.
And that's not quite the same thing as pleasure, because interest and happiness are not identical emotions.
Like it's a different kind of good life.
And I really think this is true.
Like aligning your life to your values is great.
But that's not the same thing as leading a life that you feel is interesting to you.
So anyway, this idea of the rich life as another life well -lived is, I think, timely.
Maybe we're not doing it enough these days.
I mean, there's more to learn and there's more information at our fingertips than at any moment in history.
And with each passing millisecond, it seems like there's more and more and more.
And yet, it feels to be like we still have a long way to go to figure out how exactly to craft this third kind of life well -lived, you know, a truly satisfying life of learning.
And, Angela, I just want to add that I hope this podcast has been a small part of that sort of rich life for our listeners.
I know it has been for me.
And for me too, honestly, a huge part.
Like, I want to do something different now.
I want to break the fourth wall for a moment.
And I want to say thank you on behalf of both of us to all of our listeners for joining these weekly conversations.
You have been an incredible community and we have loved getting your emails, your insights, and of course, your questions on everything we've discussed on the show.
We have one more opportunity to hear from you.
So, here's what we want to do.
In lieu of our regular segment where listeners share their thoughts on the previous week's episode, Mike and I would love to hear your thoughts about the show as a whole.
Mike, how do you feel about that?
I love the idea. I think it's perfect.
So, you know the drill.
Record a message in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and send it to nsquatfreeconomics .com.
And frankly, you can share anything you want.
Maybe you want to reminisce about one of your favorite moments from a past episode or share something important that you've taken away from the show.
We'd love to hear any and all of it.
We are so excited to hear what you have to say about this weird, wonderful, and not so stupid project.
Coming up after the break, a fact check of today's episode and stories from our NSQ listeners.
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And now here's a fact check of today's conversation.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, the academic journal that published Murray Davis' 1971 article, that's interesting, is an international interdisciplinary peer -reviewed journal that is, in fact, still being published?
Mike's framing of Malcolm Gladwell's writing on dyslexia and success could use a bit more context.
Dyslexia is a learning disability that affects how the brain processes written language that impacts an estimated 7 % of people worldwide.
While it can make language -related tasks more challenging, it doesn't make reading or other linguistic activities impossible.
We should also clarify some details that Mike overlooks in his summary of Malcolm Gladwell's ketchup story, originally published in 2004 in The New Yorker and later explored in Gladwell's online masterclass.
The story's central figure, Howard Moskowitz, is not a chef but an American market researcher and psychophysicist renowned for revolutionizing spaghetti sauce.
As Mike mentions, Gladwell does not pinpoint a single reason as to why mustard has seen more variation than ketchup, but he does examine several contributing factors.
Experts in the piece highlight Heinz's success in blending all five of the fundamental tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami—into a ketchup product with almost universal appeal.
Finally, Angela says that the categorization of interest as an emotion is a fairly recent development in academia.
While it's true that this subject has only become a focus of modern emotion psychology in recent years, we should note that in 1872, Charles Darwin described emotions related to learning and thinking in his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
That's it for the Fact Check.
Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about our recent episode on pessimism.
My name is Katie and I run a bike touring organization and I've been leading bike trips for teenagers for over a decade now and I'm really glad that you guys are having this conversation about whether the world is becoming more pessimistic because this is something I think about often with the work that I
do. I notice it first with parents and the conversations I have with them about whether or not to send their kids on trips.
They seem to be very risk adverse and we're often having to like talk them down and make them feel like it is okay to go out on these trips and have these adventures.
I also notice this with teens themselves.
When adversity comes up, I find kids feel out of control and that makes them nervous and then they become pessimistic when plans unravel or when challenges happen like bike mechanic issues or weather or anything that can kind of happen on an adventure like this.
I often think about like what is the cause of this and one of my concerns is whether teens these days are just like more siloed off at home and connecting more digitally so when they're out in the real world having these interactions they're just not quite able to function and lastly I often wonder
if kids have the opportunity to exercise agency in their everyday lives.
I remember a lot about myself being a kid and getting to run around in the neighborhood and I got to really exercise my agency and become more confident and independent and I don't know if kids have as much of that opportunity living in the fearful world that we do these days.
Hi this is Rachel. I'm a member of Gen Z and to address this question of pessimism within the generation I think part of the issue is social media and news outlets inundating us with negative information all the time.
Presumably in the past letters and newspapers would travel a lot slower and you might not have such a global grasp of all the terrible things happening in the world but right now we're just getting that information all the time so it might feel sort of hopeless to make an impact on a global scale or to
address these issues that are huge looming issues like climate change but I find hope in just being able to make an impact within my community and know that your efforts are fruitful here but that's my take on everything.
I'm 38 years old and I've gotten increasingly pessimistic as I've grown up and realized this is not the reality and adulthood that I was sold as a child.
That was respectively Katie Barnhill, Rachel Feige, and John Cox thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us.
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Send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics .com and you might hear your voice on our final episode.
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Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions what do we do with unanswered questions?
Wait we didn't answer all questions about human nature.
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I don't know why curiosity was supposed to kill the cat, like what's wrong with curiosity?
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Lights are going up.
Snow is falling down.
There's a feeling of goodwill around town.
It could only mean one thing.
McRib is here. People throwing parties, ugly sweaters everywhere.
Stocking tongue up by the chimney with care.
It could only mean one thing.
McRib is here. At participating McDonald's for a limited time.
