unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Where does the concept of rules originate from? And how does that history inform the rules we use to organize society today? 

Lorraine Daston is the director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Her book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, takes a wide-encompassing view of rules throughout history, going all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. 

Lorraine and Greg discuss thick vs. thin rules, how recipes are some of the oldest forms of rules and the important and complicated role judgment and equity play in the system of rules and laws.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Do people perceive paradigms and rules as inconsistent?

30:27: I think paradigms and models suffer from one problem, which is a political problem, which is the suspicion that discretion inevitably means either favoritism or corruption in the political domain. In the domain of knowledge, they suffer from being foggy. Nobody can explain how we think in terms of models and paradigms. We do it all the time. Our life would be impossible if we did not do it. So we know that we can do it, but we can't explain how we do it. And that makes the philosophically minded profoundly uncomfortable. 

Why are recipes an important genre in the history of knowledge?

09:41: Recipes are amongst the oldest and most mobile of knowledge genres that we know. If you want a genre that travels across continents, centuries, and classes and breaks down the barriers between men and women, it's recipes.

Thick vs. thin rules

19:23: The thick rules are rules that anticipate a high degree of variability and unforeseen circumstances. So they come upholstered even in their articulation with caveats, examples, and exceptions. They warn you that you're going to have to use your judgment in applying these rules…[20:09] The thin rule, on the other hand, is short, usually short, peremptory, and imperative, and it does not anticipate exceptions. This is a rule which is made for a world which is predictable and uniform.

Judgment straddles into two categories

46:50: The problem is that we divide our world into the objective and the subjective, but judgment straddles those two categories. It's possible to give reasons—good reasons, bad reasons, and arguments—for why one judgment should prevail over another. And if we don't exercise that faculty, like any other faculty, atrophy. And my fear is that because judgment discretion is the faculty that dare not speak its name, we are in danger of becoming judgmentally flabby.

• Nicolas Bourbaki 
• Thomas Kuhn
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• Pascal’s Provincial Letters
• Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant

• Professional Profile at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
• Professional Profile at University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought

• Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
• Against Nature (Untimely Meditations)

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Technological progress drives productivity improvements and increases wealth, but the distribution of those gains depends on both technological and political factors. The debates we see now over the impact of AI on social welfare are not new: similar debates surrounded previous waves of innovation. One thing we have learned from those previous waves is that society and politics can dramatically impact the trajectory of technological change. 

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is head of the Global Economics and Management group. He has also co-authored several books, his latest being Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity with Daron Acemoglu.

Simon and Greg discuss how technological advances had disrupted industries in the past, ranging from the industrial revolution in the English midlands to the mass production of Henry Ford in America. They discuss how some innovations can bring about catastrophe, as in the 2008 financial crisis, and the current landscape of disruptive technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular. Simon talks about how it may be deployed in business but how, in education, there will be an adjustment period before being incorporated.

Listen in for insights on the past, present, and anticipated future of technology and prosperity with Simon Johnson.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When workers became a cost, not a resource

37:55: Managerial thinking, including what was taught at business school, shifted in the 1970s and 1980s, and the concept of shareholder capitalism, which I would contend has been around for a long time. In the 1970s and 1980s, there's a different concept that comes to the fore, and it's one which treats the workers much more as a cost to be minimized rather than a resource to be developed. And I think that wasn't just business schools; business economics played a role in that broader social discussion. That corporate thinking and corporate logic are very powerful, and that is part of what's propelled us in this particular direction that's led to a lot of job market polarization.

The future of tech is too important to leave to a few

42:07: We should be very careful about placing our technological future in the hands of a few individuals, even if those individuals have previously had great success in something that seems like it might be quite relevant for what comes next.

How prepared ideas shapes history

55:43: I don't think that books, ideas, or, I'm afraid, podcasts, change history. I think what changes history is events, but when you have an event, when you have a scandal, when you have a big problem, when you have something that is really in people's faces, it matters whether or not you have prepared ideas, whether or not you understand what the problem could be, and whether or not you are ready with solutions, not just solutions as something that I wrote a paper about; you should do what I say, but solutions that have been kicked around, debated, and hammered out.

What’s the key point of the industrial revolution?

04:23: The key point from the Industrial Revolution is that it did increase productivity. It did increase the surplus. That could be shared in some fashion, but it also increased the power of a certain set of people—the people who owned the mills, the cotton mills in particular, in the north of England, for example. And that change in the balance of power is part of what, of course, encouraged them to invest, as part of what gave them a good return on investment. But it also meant they didn't really care that much about the workers.

• Jeremy Bentham
• Henry Ford
• Ferdinand de Lesseps
• Edwin Chandwick

• Faculty Profile at MIT Sloan Management School
• Faculty Profile at Peterson Institute for International Economics
• Simon Johnson on LinkedIn
• Simon Johnson on X
• Professional Profile at IMF

• Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
• Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream
• White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You
• 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown
• NBER Papers
• Reuters Articles
• Google Scholar Page

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The history of money isn’t just an Economics story, but it’s a cultural and philosophical one, too. 

Felix Martin, a columnist for Reuters, charts this history in his book, Money: The Unauthorized Biography – From Coinage to Cryptocurrencies, and argues that money as a social institution has always been wielded as a political instrument. 

Felix and Greg discuss the determining factors of money’s value, some of the key moments in the history of currency, and what could be done to improve modern financial banking systems.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Money as a credit relationship

21:08: There is this great value in thinking about money as a credit relationship. And the real value is to think about two dimensions. One dimension is the creditworthiness of the issuer…[21:52] And another dimension I think conceptually, you can think of them as different. Some people like to think of them the same, but I think the difference is the liquidity question. Creditworthiness is about this bilateral relationship between you and the central bank. And then there's this question of how many other people in the network will accept this in payment of goods or services? And that's this sort of liquidity question. And, so these are two factors which are behind that. They're all subsumed under this (V) in the Fisher equation, but you can break them down a bit conceptually, I think, in terms of money as credit is useful to do that.

Money is a social institution

04:02: I believe that money is a social institution, a communal fiction, then a history of money is not a history of coins and notes and that kind of thing. It's an intellectual history. It's a history of these ideas and these institutions and where they come from.

What is the whole point of banking?

52:00: The whole point of banking and its historical origin is precisely the flexibility of the balance sheets of the banks. The whole way that the capitalist economy works, what is useful about banks and the reason they exist is precisely that they are able to expand and contract their balance sheets in line with the needs of trade.

Theories around money are useful but contingent

18:22: It's not that the Fisher equation or the quantity theory of money are not useful. All these theories of money are very useful for interpreting and predicting given points in time. But they are contingent.

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• John Locke
• The Nature of Money by Geoffrey Ingham
• Walter Bagehot
• Ecu de marc

• Author Page at Reuters
• Felix Martin’s Website
• Felix Martin on LinkedIn
• Feliz Martin on X

• Money: The Unauthorized Biography – From Coinage to Cryptocurrencies
• Articles on Financial Times
• Articles on Muck Rack

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As more and more humans came up against the edges of wilderness in American history, new laws were needed to help guide and shape what the process would look like. As time changed, so did the laws dealing with preserving nature and society’s view on its importance. 

Jedediah Purdy is a professor of Law at Duke Law and the author of several books. His latest work is called Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening―and Our Best Hope.

Jedediah and Greg discuss the complex terrain of America's environmental laws, tracing the roots from the liberal tradition of conquering Fortuna to modern ecological movements. They also dissect the tension between preserving nature for human benefit and maintaining its mystical allure. They also talk about the often overlooked role of class in environmental politics, analyzing in-depth how this has influenced public debates over laws and public lands.

Listen in and explore these intersections of politics, law, and nature with Jed Purdy.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

On the four different visions

04:02: There are definitely, even more than four kinds of ways of experiencing and relating to the natural world that exist in the broad shape of American life. And then, especially if we were to take account of the variety of indigenous ways of relating that continue to have a life and have their own kinds of futures, these are four that are really embodied in legal regimes. So, they're a way of trying to understand how environmental imagination has been very practical in lending a shape to the law's world making activity.

Viewing nature as a spiritual source

12:00: There is this very different way of seeing nature, which is as a spiritual source, as a way of connecting us with a meaning that goes beyond and, in a way, above our practical and material projects. And has a religious significance, whether understood theologically or in a romantic register, that replaces religion traditionally understood with aesthetic experience and mystical intuition of a sort of world soul.

The paradox of political energy and political aversion

35:00: The book begins with the observation that our political moment feels paradoxical and that it's extremely politically energized, but the mobilization often feels connected much more with fear and despair around politics than any real sense that it's a constructive or hopeful activity. So we're very political, but we're very, obviously, big and crude, inviting people to recognize some part of their own experience and observation. But we are also very anxious about and averse to it.

Climate crisis is an everything problem, not just an environmental one

54:17: I don't think anyone would want to make averting the climate crisis hang on our ability or willingness to change all of those things at once. In some ways, the environmental question finally refuses to be siloed, and it may lose some of its distinctiveness. It may even be a residual habit—that sort of category error—to think of climate as an environmental problem rather than an everything problem.

• Alexis de Tocqueville
• John Locke
• The Homestead Act of 1862
• National Park Service Organic Act
• The Wilderness Act
• Henry David Thoreau
• The Frontier Thesis

• Faculty Profile at Duke Law

• Two Cheers For Politics
• After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene
• For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today
• The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination
• Jedediah Purdy Amazon Author Page
• This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth
• A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom
• Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World
• New Yorker Articles
• The Atlantic Articles

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Humans, as a species, are unique among the animal kingdom in a number of ways, but several of those involve how we have and raise our children. In a class of our own, even compared to other primates, humans spend an extremely long time in childhood and even longer until all parts of us, including our bones, fully mature.

Brenna Hassett is a biological anthropologist and archaeologist. She is also the author of two books, Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death and her latest book, Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood.

Brenna and Greg discuss the significant impact of cultural adaptations on reproduction, exploring the complexities of human birth and the uniqueness of human fertility. Brenna goes over the hurdles of breastfeeding in diverse societies, the sway of nutrition in modern societies and its tie to fertility cycles, and what unexpected correlation humans have to zebras.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The perfect parenting myth

16:03: The idea that there is one true way to parent is insidious because it preys on every insecurity you have as a new parent, which is, "Oh my God, this machine that I have purchased from the store and brought home is glitching. I can't turn it off and on again; there is no helpline that is working. What on earth am I supposed to do?" And a lot of people look for answers in a sort of imagined past where, if the phone wasn't ringing off the hook, if the television wasn't on, if you didn't have to go back to work after three weeks or something, childrearing would be much easier. And a lot of that stuff is true.

Are babies demanding?

25:48: If you think about the signaling mechanism in a human pregnancy being much more baby-led than maternal-led, I think you start to see how our very demanding babies can take advantage of that.

The challenges of balancing work and care

34:44: The thing to remember with humans is that every single evolutionary adaptation that we've made, we have adjusted the levers of the adaptation with our culture. Our culture is essentially another mechanism by which we move our adaptations forward, backward, sideways, or whatever. So if you think about something that ought to be straightforward, like birth, and then you look at the actual mechanics of it for humans.

The push for adulthood in our changing world

47:47: We've set up a society that had some expectations and a culture that had some expectations, and then we changed them, and we are slowly allowing some people in our society to fit our changed expectations. We are pushing our expectations absolutely to their limit in some ways. And that's why fertility treatment and things like that are so important now, because people are waiting longer; it is harder to meet the sort of traditional adult milestones in the economy we have today.

• r/K selection theory
• Countess Báthory
• The Dutch Hunger Winter
• Holly Dunsworth

• Faculty Profile at UCLAN
• Brenna Hassett on X
• Brenna Hassett on Talks at Google

• Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood
• Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death
• Sapiens.org Articles
• ResearchGate Publications
• Other scholarly articles

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In the information economy, reading is an essential skill. How can competency in reading be measured, and how can it be improved? In the 19th century, there emerged a science of reading that led to the “reading wars” that are with us to this day.

Adrian Johns is the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago and also an author. His latest book is titled The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America.

Adrian and Greg discuss both the problems of literacy levels in society and the problems with measuring it accurately. Adrian goes over the central target that past literacy texts tried to hit or sometimes ignore and the missteps they make when they get it wrong. They discuss what has caused literacy panics and what those have looked like throughout the years. From the staccato rhythm of reading to the unexpected way people view images, our understanding of reading behavior has been transformed by technologies like the eye movement camera and the Tachistoscope. Adrian shares the ripple effect these tools have had on fields like marketing and user interface work.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Jerome Bruner’s idea of a good reader

43:39: The people who are the best readers are the people who have a hypothesis-testing model for how they read. So, as you imagine this, as your eyes are moving across the line, you are all the time predicting what the next word is going to be. And the people who are really good readers are better at predicting this. So they're making hypotheses, and then they're experimentally seeing whether the hypothesis is born out really fast. And if it's not, then they go back and come up with another hypothesis.

Does being a good text message reader mean you're also a good book reader?

53:34: Being a really good reader of text messages is not the same thing as being a really good reader of Moby Dick, but they're both good things. They're both worth having, and we want to train people to be masters of all of those things, which in a certain sense is what the people were aiming for in 1900, but we're in a different world now, so we have to adapt to that.

On looking at experts insights more than credentials

06:17: There's a notion that, in application, the science of reading can tell us how to make our schools create the next generation who will be more efficient and more adapted to the world in which they live.

Reading is not just about decoding words

52:32: Once you're beyond that very basic level of phonics character-by-character interpretation, it's not actually clear that the target that you are aiming at is one thing. So we think of reading singular as one or would be a gerund. One verb, but if you look around empirically at what happens in the professional social world, this thing, if it is one thing, is carried out in lots of different ways.

• Explanation of Taylorism
• Tachistoscope
• Paul Fitts
• USS Vincennes
• Jerome Bruner
• Horace Mann Bond
• Flesch-Kincaid readability
• Book: why johnny cant read

• Faculty Profile at University of Chicago
• Adrian Johns on LinkedIn

• The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America
• Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
• The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
• Time Article
• Google Scholar Page

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Even well before the suffragettes of the 19th century, women had been writing, thinking, and pushing for equal rights for almost a hundred years. How did those early feminist activists inform policy and the way we view household and family politics today? 

Erika Bachiochi is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute. Her new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, provides an intellectual history of the women’s rights movement going all the way back to the 18th century. 

She and Greg discuss the influential work of Mary Wollstonecraft on the women’s rights movement, how industrialization and the rise of capitalism shifted priorities in the movement, and the history of the abortion debate. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The effect of technology in reproduction

37:43: What answers asymmetry now, what answers the fact that men and women can engage in sex but women get pregnant and men don't, is technology. So, you have contraception and you have abortion, and when technology fills in the gaps, again, you have this shift, so that's when you see the sexual revolution come about: more sexual risk-taking, more sort of casual sex as a sexual ethos that kind of takes over because we're relying now on technology instead of our development of self-mastery in the sexual realm.

The big shift in the women's right movement

19:28: With industrialization and the rise of capitalism, women started to become far more dependent, where they used to work together on the agrarian homestead. That dependency puts them at great risk because they now depend on men for a paycheck. So it's not just women's ambition that sent them into the workplace; it's a real desire to have some insurance against male vice in a lot of ways, which is what you saw in that first wave of feminism.

The challenges of balancing work and care

52:32: We need to listen more to those who would prefer to be in the home and prefer to be caring for their children, who would prefer to see the work of the home that both mothers and fathers engage in as having great value, as getting back to the Wilson crafting insight as kind, kind of underlying every social, political, and economic good. And that we've forgotten about that. And thinking about what children really need to become independent and mature—not only workers, not only citizens, but also spouses and neighbors—is a really important shift that needs to happen.

On Ginsburg's fight for women's equality

14:43: By really fighting for women to be understood as equal citizens, Ginsburg is constitutionalizing Wilson's craft's principle. What Ginsburg is fighting against in the 1970s as an advocate for the ACLU is that we shouldn't have these laws that basically confine women to maternity and expect that just because a woman has the capacity for childbirth and motherhood, she should be kept out of professions. And that was a really important gain and a really important underlying political philosophy.

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
• Edmund Burke
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• John Locke
• Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone
• Alice Paul
• Lochner v. New York
• Victoria Woodhull
• The National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose
• Why Women Still Can’t Have It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter
• Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gillman
• Mary Ann Glendon

• Professional Profile at Ethics & Public Policy Center
• Contributor’s Profile on The Federalist Society 
• Erika Bachiochi on LinkedIn
• Erika Bachiochi on X
• Erika Bachiochi on TED Talk

• The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision
• The Cost of Choice: Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion

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Even though central banks have become independent over the years, is it fair to say they still face political challenges? Could inflation be viewed as a political problem or a technical one?

Stephen D. King is a senior economic adviser at HSBC and has been writing about global economics for years. His most recent book, We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years, examines the root causes of inflation through a historical lens. 

Stephen and Greg discuss whether inflation is inherently tied to politics, why deflation is not necessarily a scary thing, and the greatest challenge facing central bankers today. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Inflation tends to create a world for winners and losers

07:00: So, inflation tends to create a world of both winners and losers. And it's a profoundly undemocratic process in that sense because that process of creating winners and losers is pretty arbitrary. But of course, the problem there is that if you happen to be a loser initially, you're going to want to push for your own wage increase or your price increase later on because your next-door neighbor has already had one of those, and you're waiting for your turn. So when you try to stop inflation, you are effectively trying to stop it when some people have already perhaps benefited from it. And other people feel quite rightly quite justifiably that they haven't; in fact, they're actually worse off in some sense. So stopping it once it's started becomes a lot more difficult.

Have we forgotten the adverse consequences of inflation?

05:47: With the advent of central banks becoming politically independent, I think there was a habit of thinking that inflation was a technical problem. It was a technical challenge for central banks, but not really a political challenge in any significant way. But actually, I think inflation is a huge political challenge.

Does the central bank overestimate the degree of control they have over velocity?

33:22: It's not just how much money you print; it's what the public thinks of what it is you're doing. Do they trust you? Do they think you're on the right track or the wrong track? In other words, the velocity partly depends on how the public rates you as a credible monetary institution. So, if you're doing stuff that seems to be overly experimental or peculiar, you may suddenly discover that what you thought was a relationship between money and the economy breaks down one way or the other.

Will we be entering into a new era where the central banks reassert their independence and reestablish their credibility?

57:27: I think that where inflation is relatively high and economic growth is relatively low, it's going to be a very interesting situation to monitor over the next three or four years to see whether central banks, first of all, are able to reassert their sort of independence. And secondly, whether, politically, they can get away with it and have the legitimacy to do so.

• Hugo Stinnes
• Adam Smith
• Paul Volcker
• Arthur F. Burns
• Lawrence Summers
• Jason Furman
• Martin Wolf

• Professional Profile on Bruegel
• Speaker’s Profile on London Speaker Bureau Asia
• Stephen D. King on LinkedIn
• Stephen D. King on X

• We Need to Talk About Inflation: 14 Urgent Lessons from the Last 2,000 Years
• Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
• When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
• Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

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Sometimes, the ideas that end up being the most revolutionary come from outside the scientific mainstream. People who can approach the problem with different eyes and thoughts and see solutions from another angle. For medicine, the idea that revolutionized trauma wound care came from a complete outsider and accelerated when he joined forces with another outsider to promote a new way to clot blood.

Charles Barber is a professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several books. His latest book, titled In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US Army, recounts the story of the unlikely development of Quikclot and the hurdles that were along its path to adoption. 

Charles and Greg discuss what doctors had tried before Quikclot came along and then the story of how Frank Hursey and Brad Gullong turned heads and changed minds with the effectiveness of their new product to clot blood quickly and save the lives of those who had wounds that would previously have been fatal.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How two outsiders and three combat veterans revolutionized medicine

25:39: One of the reasons they don't go in for the very expensive things that the army went in—these high-tech blood-clotting things that eventually failed—is they just didn't have the budget. They didn't have the money for it. And the Quikclot that was produced out of the Zeolite, which, by the way, was deployed very early in Iraq war and saved a lot of lives, was like $15 a packet. And so it was this kismet of two outsider inventors with no credentials doing things that would allow them to lose their medical license had they had a medical license, putting a rock in the bloodstream, and then meeting up over a number of years with these three outsider medical people. What they all shared was combat, raw combat experience, and an intolerance for the bureaucracy if it got in the way of the phrase that they all used independently, saving the kids in the ditch.

Prioritizing insights over credentials

17:32: We live in this age of experts, where you have to have PhDs, MDs, and everything at the same time. And we don't pay attention the way we did even a hundred years ago to people who don't necessarily have the credentials but have the insight.

Does our approach to medicine create fertile ground for pharmaceutical company marketing?

46:22: If you were to pick one thing that changed the commodification of psychiatric drugs, it was the television advertising of drugs. And New Zealand and the US, then and now, are still the only countries that do it. And so, it's not far afield from this sort of American Wild West of grabbing highly potent, sometimes effective, often not effective technological solutions without going to the undergirding issues.

Mental illness is complicated

48:45: Mental illness is nothing if not extraordinarily complicated, and we've grown up with even advanced psychiatry. It's all this: either medicines or therapy, genes or character, environment or hereditary. And for some reason, we can't seem to understand that it's not that complicated.

• Faculty Profile for Demetrios Demetriades
• Frank Hursey
• Bart Gullong
• Zeolite
• John W. Holcomb
• Quikclot Website
• William James

• Faculty Profile on Wesleyan University
• Author’s Profile on Penguin Random House
• Charles Barber's Website
• Charles Barber on LinkedIn

• In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took On the US Army
• Peace & Health: How a group of small-town activists and college students set out to change healthcare
• Citizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gangleader to Peacekeeper
• Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Medicated a Nation
• Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors (American Lives)

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Humans have a tendency to see the glass as half full. What arguments can be made on behalf of the half-empty perspective? Whether it's evaluating your life or making decisions about becoming a parent, viewing things through a pessimistic lens could ultimately help reduce suffering in the world.

David Benatar is a professor of philosophy and director of the Bioethics Centre at the University of Cape Town. He is also the author of several books. His latest book, titled The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions, explores the meaningfulness of life. 

David and Greg discuss optimism versus pessimism and the positive and negative qualities that they both possess. David talks about suicide and the historic and where our views on it have evolved from. David and Greg talk about the ethics of having children, what true immortality would really mean, and how to get the most out of our time on the hedonic treadmill of life.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

General broad pessimism is a product of the clear-eyed view

48:48: General broad pessimism is a product of the clear-eyed view. If you look at the human condition realistically, you're going to reach unhappy conclusions about all the things I've said that you should reach unhappy conclusions about. But now the question is, "Well, what do you do with that information?" Do you just become morose? Do you withdraw? What do you do with this information? And one mistake would be to become overly morose about it, to derive no joy, because then what happens is there's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy there where you're making; there's another feedback loop. You're making it actually worse for yourself than it would be if you didn't have that kind of response to the pessimism. At the same time, I don't think you should fall into optimism because now you're going to lose the clear-eyed view. So, what I would say is preserve the clear-eyed pessimistic view but be pragmatic.

Is there a feedback loop between the subjective and the objective?

18:29: If you think your life is better than it is, it objectively becomes a bit better. That doesn't mean it reaches the level you think it's at. It doesn't completely eliminate the gap between the subjective and the objective, but the subjective view makes it a little better. And similarly, when we're speaking about negative evaluation. So, there is that feedback loop.

Life’s meaning doesn’t have to be broad

22:05: I don't think that we should conclude from the absence of that kind of meaning that our lives have no meaning. Because they do have meaning at more micro-levels, and we matter to other people. We can have a positive impact on people and beings around us. And I don't think we should pretend that isn't the case simply because our lives can't have a broader kind of meaning.

On the relationship of quality and meaning of life

13:29: There are different views about what the relationship is between quality and meaning. Some people want to treat meaning as part of the quality of life. Others want to separate it out. There is some value in separating them, but I don't want to be committed to that view. I don't think we need to be.

• A. J. Ayer Wikipedia Page
• Hedonic Treadmill Wikipedia Page

• Faculty Profile from the University of Cape Town

• The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions
• Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
• The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys
• Conversations about the Meaning of Life
• The Fall of the University of Cape Town: Africa’s leading university in decline
• Debating Procreation: Is It Wrong to Reproduce?
• New Yorker Article 

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