Mutual Understanding

Here’s the original poll:

Poll question from my 12yo: Everyone responding to this poll chooses between a blue pill or red pill.

* if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives

* if not, red pills live and blue pills die

Which do you choose?

The original plan was to talk to Emmett Shear about it, but he ended up being late, so first we talked to each other. This is not the promised second half to the Shea episode! That is still coming at some point.

I’m going to post the followup to this where we talk to Emmett next.

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Jonah and I talked a bunch about developmental models, especially Susan Loevinger’s, using AI to do research about those models, what interests Jonah in studying them, and how it may make sense to think of LLMs in terms of developmental stages.

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I recorded a short episode with just me with a bit of a rant about how I think about the “does intrinsic motivation drive out extrinsic motivation” parenting discourse.

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My guest today canceled (for a great reason), so I talked about some stuff that’s been on my mind lately, including:

* how I have been feeling about the election

* a couple of more predictions

* a little about what I’ve been reading

* how I’m relating to having young kids these days

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We originally live streamed some election night results and takes to Twitter, but I wanted to post it here too.

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It was great to have Ben back on the podcast to talk election predictions!

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I had a great time learning more about the Stratfordian perspective on Shakespeare by talking to Draculaic, my twitter mutual.

Divia (00:01)

Hey, I'm here today with my Twitter mutual, Draculeac, who is mostly remaining anonymous. And we are here to talk about something that I touched on in the podcast with ThinkWork, but to go into it in greater depth, which is why Draculeac thinks that Shakespeare is the guy from Stratford.

And he has some expertise here. He studied this stuff in college, wrote his undergraduate thesis on Lear, and is currently in the process of getting a paper on Shakespeare published. So I've prepared some. Ultimately, I am far from an expert in this topic, though I know more about it than I did when I talked to Thinkwart on a previous podcast. But yeah, I'm really excited to hear what you have to say and ultimately become more informed over the course of this conversation.

Draculaic (00:50)

I appreciate that. Thank you for the introduction. I think I should probably caveat one or two things before we dive in. And I'm happy to let you steer the conversation however you'd like. One is that my interest in this is primarily as in the plays as what we could call literary artifacts. And so my interest is what the plays are and how those affect the audience of Shakespeare primarily.

I'm not personally a historian, but I've read up a little bit about this and I know enough to, think, know, muster an opinion. But I also just want to say that I don't particularly have a dog in the fight about authorship. don't have any particular care about who wrote the plays. I care about the plays themselves. But just in what I've

Divia (01:29)

Yeah.

Draculaic (01:46)

been looking into researching myself. think that, and what I remember from what I've read about this previously, I think that there's, it's probably the strongest case that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. And I'm definitely happy to give you my opinions about why that is.

Divia (01:58)

Mm-hmm. Cool. And I think one of the things I discovered, which anyone who knows about this probably already knows, unless I'm wrong, is that that is the more common position, at least with academics, right?

Draculaic (02:09)

Yeah, people who are sort of academic literary critics or people who are literary historians tend to converge on that argument, and I think probably for good reason.

Divia (02:23)

Okay, so I have various things I expect to wanna ask you about that, but I would love if you would just start out by laying out the basic case for why you think for the Stratfordian position.

Draculaic (02:37)

Yeah, so the rough shape of it is that we know that there was a person who existed named William Shakespeare. He has plenty of peers that wrote about him. We know that he was an actor. We know that he there are people who testify at the time that he was a playwright. The people who referred to him as a playwright are generally pretty reliable people. They're people like Ben Johnson, who wrote the four basically the forward poem to his folio.

which came out after he died. A lot of people I think would have

Divia (03:10)

And wait, sorry, and just to be clear, like he mentioned, he didn't just say Shakespeare, he mentioned like more details about him.

Draculaic (03:18)

yeah, I mean, he talks about specifically, you know, I think attributes of him, like he talks about his wit is there some things that he's talked about in like, you know, written correspondence and features of Shakespeare. but he also like talks about him specifically as a playwright, in that poem. and I think he also, you know, he's generally speaking, he himself was a playwright and a peer of Shakespeare. he

would have undoubtedly known him. And again, is a pretty reliable guy. Doesn't really, there's not a lot in the historical record of things that he's written that are trying not to be true. would be, he'd have to be, it'd be a pretty big lie for him to be doing that. And it would be an extreme.

Divia (04:02)

Okay, wait, let me, and I know I said I was gonna want you to lay it out. Now, I guess I'm nitpicking on this point. So just to be clear though, because the case that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare includes that there was a guy using the pen name Shakespeare, right?

Draculaic (04:07)

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, that's from what I have looked into. That's the primary version of it is that it was some kind of masked identity by various different candidates. know, Christopher Marlowe, who somehow survives his murder or, you know, or sort of dies. of the big ones.

Divia (04:35)

Earl of Oxford is one I read a bunch about. So I guess so how do you know, now I've forgotten the name, but the guy who was talking about him as a playwright at the time, like how do you know that he wasn't just referring to whoever went by that pen name?

Draculaic (04:49)

Yeah, that's a fair question. think...

That would have to be like a pretty sly maneuver. And I think that

I just, I don't know. I think that it doesn't really comport with the way that Johnson sort of tends to represent himself and to represent, you know, represent Shakespeare in again in that poem and in sort of the private correspondence. I'd have to look into that more. It's a fair question, but I don't, just, the idea that it would be an inside joke is sort of, I think, what you're implying. And I just don't think that fits.

character some of the writing that he's done.

Divia (05:36)

Okay, like that he was talking about him as though he knew him personally, basically. And that to use his pen name while talking about he knew him personally, it just doesn't really fit when you think about it that way.

Draculaic (05:40)

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And there's, other people besides Johnson that write about Shakespeare. it's also, mean, Shakespeare, when he was coming up before he was sort of an established playwright had haters. And there's this guy, think Robert Greene who writes this pamphlet called Greene's Grotes Worth of Wit. And it's sort of one of the most famous things that was written sort of contemporaneously about Shakespeare. And he talks about him as this upstart crow beautified with our feathers, you know, our other playwright's feathers that he's this pretender.

Divia (05:59)

Mm-hmm.

Draculaic (06:18)

Why would you be writing that about a person, somebody who was, you know, pseudonymous? This is somebody who's really trying to, I think, go after Shakespeare. There's like, I think pretty strong case that, you know, that if it was well known amongst the writing class at the time, or, you know, the playwrights that he was a pseudonym that he probably wouldn't have been, you know, he wouldn't have written that. It would have looked really completely ridiculous to do that.

Divia (06:27)

Mm-hmm.

Like you think you would have used the real name of whoever it was or you wouldn't have written it all or something different.

Draculaic (06:49)

Yeah, I think you probably wouldn't have written at all in that case. think that it's, you know, the purpose of it was to damage Shakespeare's reputation. That was the purpose of that pamphlet. And he's like, I think he even like uses like paraphrases of Shakespeare's text in order to denigrate him. And the entire purpose, it was a hit job, because he was, he saw him as a rival. And

Divia (07:15)

Yeah.

But like, what if, I mean, I don't know, there are pretty popular Twitter accounts that are pseudonymous and in some cases like really pretty anonymous too. It seems like people could write hit pieces about those Twitter accounts using their handle instead of trying to find out. I mean, I think it's more common among people who are trying to write hit pieces that they do try to dox people and find out their government name or whatever. But I think I've seen it.

Draculaic (07:19)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Divia (07:47)

Funny the other way too.

Draculaic (07:51)

The other way meaning...

Divia (07:52)

Meaning that people will write something very negative about a Twitter user, but use their Twitter name, even if it's obviously not t…

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In this podcast, Shea and I tried to hunt down a philosophical disagreement we seem to have by diving into his critique of rationality. We went off on what may or may not have been a big tangent about Internal Family Systems therapy, which I’m a big fan of, and which I think Shea thinks should have more caveats?

Unfortunately, our conversation got cut short because partway through, Shea got a call and had to deal with some stuff. We hope to record a Part 2 soon!

Transcript:

Divia (00:01)

Hey, I'm here today with Shea, who is my Twitter mutual, recently got a job doing software engineering management at Andro and is an objectivist. I think I've, listened to a long podcast with Shea about objectivism on Daniel Filan's podcast, The Filan Cabinet, which I recommend to anyone who's interested in that. We'll see how much we get into that today. I'm sure it'll come up. Our primary topic for today is, Shay sent me a long list of things and one of them was Contra.

rationalists. So I, if you check my Twitter bio, it says I am a rationalist. So I figure there's probably some interesting disagreement here that we can dive into.

Shea Levy (00:38)

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I guess with respect to the rationalists, I've been rationalist adjacent for lack of a better term for I guess over a decade now. I originally kind of became aware of it through Ozzy. So Ozzy was on, I don't even remember what the thing, there's something

Some feminist blog kerfuffle and somebody, a blog I followed, Provocracy, recommended looking at Ozzie's thing on this. And then through Ozzie, I then found the rest of the rationalist sphere. I was mainly on rationalist Tumblr for quite some time. I've been socially connected and intellectually engaged with the community since then in various ways. Some of my closest friends are rationalists.

Divia (01:35)

Like they say.

Shea Levy (01:37)

And throughout all that, there's been a kind of general fascination and love for some of the things and then deep frustration and then for some parts of the community, going from frustration into I think something seriously wrong, defective there. I don't know what's interesting to you if you want me to just give my spiel or if you want to talk, I don't know.

Divia (01:57)

Mm-hmm.

So something that comes to mind, I don't know how much this will relate or it won't. The first conversation I remember us having on Twitter, which may not be the first one we actually had, is talking about AI boxing. Does this ring a bell? Yeah, because I think, I don't remember, but I think I was like, okay, who wants to talk about AI boxing or something like that? And you were like, no, this doesn't make any sense because I just would simply not let the AI out of the box. And we ended up talking about it, though then it seemed like-

Shea Levy (02:17)

Yeah. Yeah.

Hey.

Divia (02:35)

This is probably what you're saying all along, but what I eventually understood you to be saying is, unless I think the AI should come out of the box.

Shea Levy (02:41)

Well, so, okay, let's start with that one. So I feel like there are a pieces to it, but let's drill into me personally, if I'm the one in charge of the AI Box. So like, will, will see that there are people you should not put in charge of that. But the fundamental thing that I don't buy in the AI Boxing argument is that there is some, like,

Divia (02:52)

Yeah, you were clear about that. You were not like arbitrary person. That's a good idea. Yes.

Right.

Shea Levy (03:10)

general like key you can turn in anybody's mind to make them believe anything illegitimately like You can I'm not saying I'm like some like you completely like never fall for any scam kind of thing. I'm not saying that like if somebody could trick me about things if I were like in a normal situation where I'm treating them as a like good faith human being that I'm interacting with like I'm certain certainly people can pull something over me I'm not my claim is not that

But my claim is if I know that this is a like potentially hostile intelligence and now let's set aside whether an AI could do that That's a separate concern I have but like yeah, if I know there's a potentially hostile intelligence. I don't understand how it works I'm well aware that it doesn't work like a human being even if I don't know the details of how it does work like there is not some magic sequence of words that it can tell me that

will convince me of something false relevant to letting it out. I just don't buy that and none of the arguments I've seen suggest that it's true and it all really seems to rest on the sort of like determinism, lack of like the impossibility of objectivity that like, like the AI could present a like picture that is an illusion.

It could present something that looks like something, but it's actually, you know, it looks like X, but it's actually Y and could confuse me visually. And I think there's this idea implicit and sometimes explicit, but implicit in the argument that like, reason is like that, that there's some like reason level illusion possible. I just, that's just not how reason works. So like, if I knew what the situation was, I know it's an AI in the box. I know that it's extremely dangerous.

I think it's possible I would let it out, only under the circumstance that it actually convinced me properly and like, because it was right, not because it came up with a clever argument. Like, I would know, I would set up controls beforehand and then reevaluate those controls if I thought they were being breached. Like, there would be a number of things that I could do depending on the specifics to like, actually confirm that the argument it's making is legitimate or not.

Divia (05:09)

Yeah.

Shea Levy (05:28)

And so like, yeah, that's basically my view. like, don't think that's something, I don't think it's, certainly not everybody in the population is true of, but I don't think it's something like distinctive to me that like, I've got some special skill here. I think like there's a certain degree of like objectivity and self-awareness and understanding of how, you know, how reasoning and how like persuasion works.

that you want to reach that point, like there isn't this magic button that a known adversary in a known adversarial context can compress.

Divia (06:04)

Yeah, ultimately I think you convinced me that that was basically right.

Cause I had, so as people may know, I guess I should say what AI boxing is. And many years ago, Eliezer Yudkowski was, and of course like the whole thing in some ways is moot because his argument was, this was about an AI safety argument where he was like, look, AIs are dangerous. And then at the time people used to be like, but we could put the AI in a box and not connect it to the internet. And then that would not be dangerous. And he was like, okay, but people would let it out. And people were like, I don't think so.

And he was like, I'll tell you what, I'll do an experiment and I'll role play the AI and then the person will let me out. And he did do that a number of times. I don't know if it was 100 % of the times he tried it. It might've been, but it was certainly a bunch of them. And he didn't say exactly how he did it because he was like, well, if I say, then people will be like, well, that exact argument would have worked on me, it was in the point and.

Shea Levy (07:01)

Yeah.

Divia (07:03)

And then I tried it too. I tried it with a friend of mine and in fact, he let me out as well. And so I was sort of like, okay. Yeah, and as it is, people of course have made AIs and immediately put them on the internet. like no AIs are in boxes as far as I know. Like maybe some hypothetical future AI could be in a box, but that's not really what people are up to anyway. But like it is interesting to me because I, because the first time I heard about LAO's are doing it, I was like, well, how could that possibly be right? I can't imagine anyone doing that. And then I was like, all right, I thought about

I think of some ways mayb…

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I would say this one was hard to summarize, since we jumped around and covered a lot of ground, but I had a ton of fun finally talking to Visa from Twitter in realtime.

Transcript:

Divia (00:02)

Hey, I'm here today with Visa from Twitter. That's mostly, I know you're on other platforms too. You have essays, you're on YouTube, but that's definitely how I think of you. When I got back on Twitter in like 2019, I think of you as really the one that kind of created the Twitter scene that I then joined. I don't know. I don't know to what extent you see it that way, but like, you you really the guy that started with all the threading and like the...

Visa (00:10)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Divia (00:30)

actually friendly norms and I don't know, maybe nothing ever starts, but like you popularized it in the corner of Twitter that I'm in anyway, so I'm super glad to be here with you today and get to actually talk.

Visa (00:43)

Yeah, it's nice. I still remember there were a couple of things that you responded to on my tweets that I remember thinking were uncommonly insightful. One of it was, I think it was I was asking my timeline to psychoanalyze me about why I like angry women, like my wife or my friends. And your answer, think, was one of the best ones. Something about them being able to express something that you feel like you can't express.

Divia (01:02)

Yeah, I remember.

Visa (01:11)

And that just struck me as so true. And all the other responses were so, I don't know, superficial. And yours was like, I think that it's correct. And I think it helped me shift my understanding a little bit. And so I'm grateful for that. And yeah, so.

Divia (01:24)

Yeah, thank you. It's definitely, mean, I don't know, maybe one reason I think of it is just because, you know, I'm female, I'm like five feet tall and you're, you you're a guy, you're tall, you're like browner than the other people around you. I think it's hard, I imagine, with the anger, right?

Visa (01:35)

Yeah. Mm-hmm. You become the threat. mean, it's like the beauty and the beast dynamic, Where, yeah, I am the danger when I walk down the street at night. so I don't fear for my personal safety around other people. But like, if there's something like, you know, if I'm in a random country and there's like a bar fight and like someone blames me, I'm not going to get the benefit of the doubt. And I think that's

Divia (01:51)

Yeah.

Visa (02:05)

Subconsciously, think that influenced my whole friendly game game thing, so that I have people around who know me and can vouch for me. think there's this bit from, I can't remember, it Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle. And they got into a traffic stop, and they were stressed out about it. But then the cop recognized them, and then they had a good interaction. And then they're like, yeah, being famous kind of, it sucks that that's, you know, it's.

Divia (02:11)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

huh.

Visa (02:34)

as a solution to that kind of problem that's not ideal. But it is a solution. yeah.

Divia (02:39)

Yeah, I mean, if you can swing it, right? And as you've said, also, I think it's different when you go around with a baby,

Visa (02:47)

so much. So much. It's like, man. And sometimes I remember, think I'm walking with my wife and my child. And then the world around me just feels so warm and open. And then let's say we're going to the park or something. And I'm like, I should go and get some water or something. And I'm like, OK, I'm going to go to the store. And I separate from them. And I cross the road. instantly, it's like, the warmth is gone. It's like people are like, you know.

Divia (03:13)

Yeah.

Visa (03:14)

And I get it, know, it delivers society, people have to make snap judgments and whatever, but like it's so striking. I think I might have been motivated to have kids sooner if I knew that, but I mean, and not knowing it intellectually as well is not, I don't know if that's helpful, but so my recommendation to a lot of young guys is try and borrow a baby, like you're like a nephew or a niece or something, like borrow a baby and like walk the streets with that and feel it for yourself. And I guess some people tell me that,

Divia (03:25)

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah.

Visa (03:41)

Having a dog is kind as opposed to having nothing.

Divia (03:44)

I think especially if you have like a little puppy, or at least this is my brother said, he goes around with his kid a lot, but he also, he said it was pretty similar when he had a puppy that people would just come up to him and like be really friendly.

Visa (03:47)

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can imagine that. Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe I might be likelier to get a puppy after my kids are grown or something like that. It is very addictive when people are so nice.

Divia (04:09)

Yeah, that makes sense. actually, know, I some other stuff, my most extreme story of this, because I don't really, I don't know, I didn't notice as dramatic a contrast. It's true that people are more likely to talk to me when I have my baby, but I feel like people are pretty warm regardless. But I would, so one time, this is when I just had one kid and my midwife had organized like a, I don't know, like a walk around with your baby type activity, so there were like five of us.

Visa (04:21)

All right, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nice. So important, yeah.

Divia (04:37)

with babies and our midwife and then I ran into this guy that I kind of knew and he had been climbing around in some off-limits area and he was wearing these like distinctive, they were like red or orange pants or something and the cops came over and then he started talking because I knew him, we were talking to him and the cops came over and they were like, you know, we heard someone was like climbing around in that area and they were like, and I think we heard, it was, and they sort of.

Visa (04:50)

Hmm.

Divia (05:03)

I think they picked up, were like, yeah, they said he had red pants or something, but they looked at him and they were like, but it obviously couldn't have been you, because he was standing with all these people with babies. And I don't know if they were like, I don't know if they were like, it was you, but like wink, wink, nod, nod, we can tell you're not actually dangerous, or they were just like, no, it couldn't possibly have been you, this guy standing with the babies. But either way, it was pretty dramatic.

Visa (05:09)

Yeah, moms, yeah.

Right.

think that's quite plausible. There's a bit in Modern Family that does that where, again, I think a bunch of people knock over some private property, but then there's a realtor and his wife and all the upstanding citizens around. So the cop comes over and when he sees the guy that he knows, he's yeah, everything's fine because of that guy. And similar, think one, I Chris Rock has a bit, which is like, if you're in...

If you're in some random city in the middle of the afternoon and there's a bunch of unemployed women around, chances are they are upper middle class, upper class strollers. And they're likely in very nice neighborhood because they can afford to do that. And whereas if you're in random city and there's a bunch of guys in the middle of the afternoon hanging around, are probably either unemployed, homeless, or druggies, whatever. Statistically, that's how it shakes out.

Divia (06:01)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Yeah.

Visa (06:20)

And it is what it is. I don't know how deep you want to get into that, but it's just a thing that once you observe, think you can use it to your advantage, I guess. It's a thing that is worth trying to figure out. I not necessarily to your advantage, but I never thought about these things very much. How much your experience of reality is sh-

influenced or determined by like the meat bag that you're in, your height, your gender, your... and you don't realize the degree to which that is the case until you share a space with someone who's not like that and you get to witness their experience or like yeah I think one of my...

Divia (06:53)

Yeah.

Yeah. lot of, mean, trans people also, I think, tend to have really interesting perspectives o…

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Matthew Pierce, @MattPiercello on Twitter, comes on the podcast to talk about his model of how to have productive conversations.

Transcript:

Divia (00:02)

Hey, I'm here today with Matthew Pierce, who is my Twitter mutual. He is a professional cellist, systems thinker, interested in what makes people tick and how we can solve problems together. He's MJ Piercello on Twitter. That's where Pierce and cello, but they overlap. And we hadn't planned on talking today, but then I was going talk to another Twitter friend of mine about the Shakespeare thing again, which I discussed in my previous podcast, but he got sick.

So instead I asked if anyone was free and Matthew was. so here we are, welcome to the podcast.

Matt (00:36)

So we're making this up as we go along. It's fantastic. Hi everybody. Nice to meet you.

Divia (00:42)

Yeah, so do you wanna, I don't know, do you wanna tell us a little bit, it seems like your top thing these days, which I read a little bit about, but not as much as I probably would have if I had it longer, is a way that you help people understand each other when they disagree. Does that seem like a fair starting point?

Matt (01:00)

think so, yeah. mean, one of the things you can see when you look around, especially on Twitter, right, which tends to attract these sort of things, is these massive, powerful disagreements that seem completely unsolvable, right? And I'm not convinced they're unsolvable. I think they're just a bit maybe misunderstood. And so I've been playing the cello for a really long time now, almost 40 years, but I've been playing it professionally on the order of 30 years.

lots of different places, lots of different circumstances. And one of the things cello playing does is that it puts you in a position of using your body and your mind together, right?

Divia (01:42)

Yeah, for the record for the podcast listeners, I also play the cello not as well, not professionally, but I do have some context there.

Matt (01:46)

Yeah, yes, I only just discovered this. Yeah, so this is a serendipity point for me. I only just found this out myself. But yeah, so cello playing, you're not just drawing up formal equations on the chalkboard and you're not just building a brick wall that'll last for generations. It's kind of a mix of both that you've got these...

incredibly abstract things you're doing with the music in an orchestra and you're sort of manipulating the emotions of the audience and of each other in real time in a performance, but you're doing it using extremely abstract structures that music itself is built out of that define the sounds while using your body to make them. Yeah, yeah, like, like, okay, harmony, melody, harmonic progression.

Divia (02:28)

But abstract structures, you mean like harmony and that sort of thing? Melody.

Matt (02:36)

form and analysis. So this song has a refrain and then it has an intro, you know, all these different bits and you can, you can categorize things, things like this as abstractly as you would like to, but you have to do them with your own body in real time performance, even if you're really nervous. So it's a very interesting window into a more complete aspect of what I think of as decision-making.

And that's really where a lot of the disagreements live. They're not just rational, are they? They're sort of instinctive and habitual and emotional all at once.

Divia (03:11)

So for the record, I would call myself a rationalist, that's in my Twitter bio, and I'm out of the less wrong rationality tradition, and I would say, I don't know, people, I don't know how well any of us lives it, but I think I use rational, like in my ontology, it doesn't mean just conscious thought or just the things that people are aware of or anything like that.

Just for the record, you should continue to use it however you want to use it, but know that in my own lexicon it means something a little different.

Matt (03:42)

Sure.

I'll tell you how I came to use it because the problem with this stuff is exactly the problem we have in talking about music, right? I used to do this all the time when I was coaching groups of high school students. I would take the cello section of the high school and we'd go off and we'd have a sectional, right? Or I work with just them and we'd say, all right, so play these eight difficult bars for me as a group and they would play it. And then I'd say, okay, so now change.

these two specific things, a little more power on your left hand, for example, or a little faster bow on this one note and play it again. And they would play it again. And I would say this, okay, did that sound better? And they would say, yeah. And then I would say, describe it. And they would all just give me funny looks, you know, cause it kind of nervous laugh because there aren't words that really say exactly what happened.

And this is the whole problem, right?

Divia (04:40)

Or, I would say, or at least, like you didn't have words at that time. don't know, I'm also, maybe that's one of my other positions in life, is I'm pretty, I'm pretty bullish on what people can eventually describe in words.

Matt (04:45)

Yeah.

Yeah, but you have to negotiate a shared meeting before you can do that. That's the fun of it. And if you set up a sort of a dictionary, that's great. But if you encounter someone who's running off of a different dictionary, then that's a bit of a problem because what happens so often in these situations is that anything you have to do precisely is going to develop its own professional vocabulary.

with strict limits and like coding versus talking, that kind of thing. And what tends to happen is that a lot of familiarity with that language causes a sort of a habit to form and become second nature so much so that we forget that other people don't have it. when you, yeah, right? And that's where my entry into decision-making came through the physical and mental.

Divia (05:18)

Yeah, for sure.

Sometimes, yeah.

Matt (05:47)

habit building that goes with playing an instrument.

Divia (05:50)

Yeah, I think that was before we started recording. You were telling me about some of your life history and how you guys, you want to repeat that now for the podcast?

Matt (05:53)

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure. So I've gotten fascinated by decision-making and what I mean by decision-making is very, very broad. I define decision-making as the entire mind space between inputs and actions. It's just insanely broad. Anything you can think of that might go in there, throw it in. I don't care, you know, because we want broad for this kind of thing. And yeah, I've been playing professionally. When I was out in Boston, I wasn't working with a teacher at the time, but I was still

bettering myself as a player. And one of things you realize very quickly when you try to do that is you just cannot pay attention to all of the micro details that matter at the same time. Like say, and I happen to have a cello here, so I'll pull it out and kind of see if I can demonstrate what I mean through sound. So, you know, if you play a cello, you want the bow to go a certain speed and make a nice noise.

Divia (06:37)

I agree with that.

Matt (06:52)

And if your bow is too slow, it'll make that noise. And if it's too fast, it'll make that noise. So you have an audio clue, okay, am I too fast or too slow? But still, you're trying to get to that good sound for what you're trying to do. And the sort of hilarious part about it is that every note you play on a cello, for various reasons, has a different right bow speed and pressure combination. So you can't...

get there by just always keeping the same pressure and speed. That won't work. You have to develop rules that tell you how to get from one pressure to another and when and why so you can anticipate it in time to do it even in the fast stuff. So there's all this really complicated physical stuff and that's just one side. know, that's just your bow hand. Your left hand has its own habits of getting from this pitch to that pitch and up the string or down the string…

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