This week we’re discussing C.P. Snow’s influential 1959 lecture The Two Cultures, on the growing division between literary and scientific intellectuals:
“So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
Why do literary types tend to be Luddites? Is it kinda good that hubristic tech bros refuse to read the classics? Has the gap narrowed or widened in recent decades? How closely does The Two Cultures map onto the stemcels vs shape rotators meme? And of course Cam analyses the various status dynamics at play.
Trickling out episodes atm while Rich is on paternity leave. Normal service will resume shortly.
who knows the third law of thermodynamics
Cam: Don’t start talking to your missus now.
Rich: The due date is October 13. So, you know, do the math.
Cam: Yeah, that’s close.
Benny: Damn, man. It’s coming up. I’m gonna have two kiddos running around. It’s fucking crazy.
Rich: Yeah, I’ve got to get my life sorted out.
Cam: Are you going to lose your book club office?
Rich: There’ll be a crib in the corner of it. I guess it depends when the baby’s napping, but hopefully not.
Cam: And then, like, most kids share rooms. How old do you share rooms? Like five? Older?
Rich: You can share until puberty pretty much.
Cam: Yeah, well I did, but I thought I was weird. I was a bit old sharing a room — like 12, 13.
Rich: Yeah, well, you can share a room forever. It’s just weird.
Cam: Or your library in the other room with 17-year-old kids.
Rich: Yeah. I think we’ll have to move house maybe one day. I love this house. I never want to leave, but.
Cam: I quite like a house though. Should have got the four bedrooms, mate.
Cam: Benny, do you know the second law of thermodynamics? Do you know what that is?
Benny: Entropy, baby. You know it’s got to be something. Yeah.
Cam: Do you know the third law?
Benny: Uh, I don’t know. I think — what is the third law?
Rich: Conservation of energy, or is that the first law?
Cam: That’s first.
Benny: What is third?
Rich: Shut up, what’s the third law?
Cam: I think third is…
Benny: None of us know.
Cam: No, it’s freezing. I don’t know what exactly. It’s around freezing water.
Benny: Oh, is it about absolute zero or something?
Cam: Yeah, absolutely. He didn’t use that as an example.
Benny: Oh, it’s impossible to reach absolute zero.
Rich: I was thinking second law, no worries, and then he said and they couldn’t even define something like acceleration or mass. I thought, mass I actually would kind of struggle. Energy is famously really hard to define — I think I would even struggle to define mass. But then I’m not really from the scientific culture, so that’s fine. I’m not like either of these guys. I don’t know how to define mass and I haven’t read a single page of Dickens.
Benny: You’d be like, they haven’t found the Higgs yet, so how are we supposed to find them?
Cam: But you were almost a perfect example for him, though, because you’re reading the book and bringing up entropy all the time. It’s like, you know, you’re the key guy, you know second law of thermodynamics.
Snow’s thesis
Rich: Should we say — let’s say the thesis, just in case we release this. We probably won’t, but.
Benny: So okay, so he’s got, you know, the two different cultures. One culture is the scientific culture, and the other one — what does he call it? Literary culture. Yeah, basically literary culture. So like, think of the humanities versus the sciences, sort of like that very classic binary split. And the first part of the essay he’s just talking about the differences of these cultures and how they sort of look down on one another. They have some disdain for one another, and that, you know, scientists will often not have read Dickens, or have tried to pick up a Dickens but don’t really understand what’s so special about it. And because of this, scientists get made fun of by the intelligentsia, which at that time was largely defined by people who were schooled in the humanities and stuff.
Rich: Poets and playwrights and editors and journalists.
Benny: Yeah, and he points out that it was very common to make fun of scientists for not being well educated in the humanities. And it is sort of easy to see what they’re missing — something like someone who’s never read like an SBF-type character who’s really good at math but has never read a novel in his life. It’s easy to make as some sort of obviously impoverished worldview.
Benny: But then he notes that there’s an asymmetry here, because it’s also extremely impoverished to have no idea what’s going on in science land. And yet that is totally socially acceptable for a lot of these humanities-type people, who are like, if you ask them what the second law of thermodynamics is, or even how to define acceleration or something — I think that’s an example he uses — they’ll just have no idea what you’re talking about. And they won’t even pretend to have an idea what you’re talking about. And no one sort of recognizes this as being equally as embarrassing, but it clearly is. Because especially at the time he was writing, they had just undergone this huge revolution in physics. And he was like, it’s absolutely embarrassing that people who consider themselves intellectuals just have no idea what’s actually gone on in this field.
Rich: Well, we’re trying to — our project is sort of being that we lean more towards the scientific culture and we’re trying to bridge across to the literary culture and pick up whatever we are impoverished by. It’s not exactly true, because I’m personally not actually really a scientist or a technical person, but it’s sort of broadly true in terms of where our interests have been historically.
Benny: I mean, also like, some of the prose here is worth quoting because it’s pretty funny and very pointed. When he’s talking about literary culture he says they are impoverished too, perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that traditional culture is the whole of culture, as though the natural order didn’t exist, as though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences, as though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity, and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet many non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone deaf, except that this tone deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training. Oof, spicy, man. It’s good. It was fun to read.
Rich: Yeah, did you enjoy the dunks on the literary side more than the dunks on the scientific side?
Benny: Very fun to read, especially that first part. I think I probably did. Yeah, I think because we’ve all probably experienced that more too, right? Like just people who consider themselves extremely elite, but it’s clear that if you bring up some basic concept of economics, prices set on the margin or something like that, they’ll just have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. And so it’s sort of vindicating in that sense.
Has the imbalance flipped
Cam: Well, I do wonder if the problem’s flipped somewhat. So, CP Snow kind of has two theses. One is there are these two cultures and they don’t really interact, and that’s just kind of interesting sociologically. And then the other one seems to be more of a dunk on the literary intellectuals, where it’s acceptable — and I think this is still true — you can be otherwise extremely smart and be totally ignorant of maths especially. You can just have nothing about maths apart from high school. You know, if you can’t factorize something, that might be weird, but even then, it’s kind of accepted, and you’re still viewed as erudite. But this thesis that these guys are kind of running things and it’s more of a problem being ignorant towards STEM stuff and being intellectuals — I wonder if it’s flipped a little bit now. I think these two cultures are still alive and somewhat embodied by like tech versus journalism, or tech versus literary elites, humanities elites. You just get a lot of tech bros — I was one of these guys as well — who are just totally ignorant of all the humanities. I mean, sometimes there’s exceptions in philosophy and stuff. And totally just bite the bullet, double down, you’re like, fuck it, yeah, none of that shit matters. And then, to be honest, I’m actually open to that argument. Maybe none of that shit matters that much compared to tech and progress. But you get these — I’m thinking like Balaji types and stuff like that. You know, I like reading stuff, but it’s just like, yeah, that’s all stupid. Like, to the moon with tech stuff.
Benny: That’s true, actually. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Rich: So are you — I was thinking maybe the Straussian reading of this essay is that actually it is asymmetric, and it’s the literary boffins who have some work to do more so, because the work of science and technology is more important for driving forward progress, improving the condition of humanity. But are you saying that he actually is more so saying that kind of explicitly?
Cam: No, no. Maybe I was just projecting and reading enough into it.
Rich: I just noticed that his arguments for one side seem to me to be stronger than for the other. And also, I just cannot shake my belief that — and in spite of it cuts against the project that we’re doing ourselves — but I still just can’t help but think that the scientific culture is more important and valuable than the literary culture. If I could raise everyone up, you know, 10 points on one or the other, I would definitely do it on the scientific culture. I would not have everyone have read Homer or something. I would have everyone understand a little bit of epistemology or scientific method or something like that.
Benny: Yeah. I mean, it’s also a bit unclear where he draws the boundaries of these things, though. So do you think philosophy is included on the literature side of the scale?
Rich: Hmm. That’s a good question.
Cam: Yeah. What about logic, right? Yeah, Wittgenstein. That’s a bit of both, isn’t it?
Rich: Well, philosophy has that problem, right? Because as soon as it gets any good, it leaves the realm of philosophy and becomes science. So it’s sort of —
Cam: I do think there are some thinkers and maybe even fields that do somewhat bridge the gap. I was thinking about Borges, even Wallace and Pynchon perhaps, seem to have this kind of science brain about them as well as the literary side. And then I wondered even like Dawkins and stuff, kind of in a different way. There’s this really literary quality.
Cam: Well, yeah, I know he’s totally retarded about philosophy. But no, I didn’t really mean that. I mean, his books are kind of like literature, so well-read, and like, you know, some humanities literary intellectual type I can imagine would read a Dawkins book as well.
Benny: He’s honestly — he’s a great example. Is this supposed to be science fiction? What is going on?
Rich: There’s another interesting observation in here — I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it was something like, the one thing that science culture people tend to be more interested in is music, and the thing they’re worst at is literature. Which holds true for Dawkins, I think, and maybe — I don’t know about Deutsch, but you definitely think that people appreciate classical music more quickly, maybe because it’s mathematical in nature or something like that, than they are literature.
Cam: Yeah. Like STEM guys now — oh, I suppose like the STEM bro just like bumping, you know, Yeezy or something, or whatever rapper is popular now. But yeah, there was an odd thing. I remember — I sound like the atheist club — but I remember Hitchens always saying he didn’t have a musical appreciation, and he wondered, out of all his friends he was the one that didn’t. All his friends were novelists and he was the journalist that wasn’t a novelist. And he wondered if that was related in this kind of lack of creativity or something.
Rich: Something about the mathematics of it that is appealing to them specifically. I don’t know, because I can’t feel what they feel or whatever, but it’s like more so the interest in the technical mastery of certain patterns than of the aesthetic experience itself. Well, you can’t really separate those two actually, but yeah.
Benny: One confusing thing about this essay is that, so he talks about two cultures, the scientific culture and the literary culture, but then he attacks them both for not appreciating engineering culture and applied science and industrial policy enough. And this is in the second half of the essay when he’s talking about rich versus poor and how do we actually make the poor better off and how does progress happen. And he says it’s about production, about production processes, about industrialization processes. And he faults — I don’t know if he faults both cultures equally for not paying enough respect to these industrialization processes, but it’s not as if he says scientists appreciate it and literary people don’t. And therefore we need to make literary culture more receptive to applied science and production. And so then I was like, well, aren’t there sort of three cultures then? Isn’t he pointing out, you know, pure scientific culture, literary culture, and then also the culture of people who, in his view, actually get shit done? Namely engineers and applied scientists, and people who actually build things.
Rich: And what do you call them, like tinkerers and handymen or something? The boffins were so busy that we had to leave the industrial revolution up to the sons of day laborers. And I can’t really — like, quite disparaging terms.
Benny: Exactly. Which was a pretty interesting thesis that I’d never really thought about before. Like, who was really driving the industrial revolution. And he really makes it out to be, yeah, these tinkerers and, you know, laborers and craftsmen and things like that. And he says the intellectuals were at best disinterested, at worst actively opposed to industrialization.
Rich: Yeah, I think he does come down harder on the literary types there, because he describes them as — the literary culture are natural Luddites. Which does ring true to me. I still think that’s true today. When you think about journalists and prominent novelists and literary types, they are much more likely to be anti-technology than the typical person, I would have thought, or other types of elites. And certainly there’s, as you said Cam, basically a huge battle between the media and tech world.
Cam: Which is probably largely driven by a lot of autism.
Rich: Yeah. So I think that’s a more damning condemnation, because the scientists, the pure scientists at least, are just sort of more interested in doing their pure science than they are in sort of applying it and making money and all that kind of thing. Which is sort of reasonable enough, especially because the pure science is what provides the foundation for clever tinkerers and entrepreneurs to build out the industrial base. But I liked how he said the intellectual people didn’t comprehend what was happening. Certainly the writers didn’t. Plenty of them shuddered away as though the right course for a man of feeling was to contract out. And then he mentions, for instance, Thoreau and Emerson, who we talked about recently. And, you know, they tried various kinds of fancies, which were not in effect more than screams of horror. Talks about how Thoreau Walden Ponding-type stuff just doesn’t scale. And it’s this very damning bit, which I really liked, about the stupid sort of Thoreau-style fantasies of going to live by a pond in the woods in this romantic way. And he’s like, yeah, sure, if you want to do that and have half of your children die before age five and reduce your natural lifespan by 20 years and just turn away from all of the great things that progress has brought about for us, it’s like, yeah, if you want to own that, great. But it’s not really an admirable position. At least because it doesn’t scale, he says. If you choose to do that for yourself à la Thoreau — although Thoreau is kind of like LARPing, he was a LARPer really — but if you do that for yourself, all right. But if you impose that on other people, fuck you, basically. He said something like, every time they build factories the poor people vote with their feet and they stream out of the fields and they stream into the factories.
Benny: Yeah, they flock to the factories. That was a great line.
Benny: So was your read of why he thinks literary intellectuals in particular are Luddites just because it tends to be sort of the elites of society who are the literary intellectuals, and they just have a natural resistance to things changing? In other words, they have a natural desire to just maintain the status quo. And so they just, you know, their lives are good and they just want to maintain things as they are basically. Like, is that the reason?
Literature lacks the error-correction of science
Rich: It has to do with this observation that I’ve never heard before, and which kind of is the opposite of my intuition, which is that literary culture is in some sense more conservative or slow-moving than scientific culture. We think of literaries as like progressives, and they are politically, but in terms of error-correction mechanisms — which I think is almost the language he uses — they have worse error-correction mechanisms. And so they lag. They have to lag. Whereas scientific culture, for all of its flaws, tends to approach the good somewhat more quickly. This is a really interesting point, which I’ve never heard before. I’ll just see if I can find the quote to make sure I haven’t butchered it too badly. Yeah, he just says literature changes more slowly than science. It hasn’t the same automatic corrective. And so its misguided periods are longer. And again, I kind of think that does seem true to me.
Benny: So do you think — because now I think you’re right, so now I think we would look at the stereotypical literary intellectual and say of them that they’re extremely progressive, like they’re out of touch in that sense. So it’s almost a complete 180 of what he’s complaining about here. But I guess he would just say, yeah, this is basically just another fad and they aren’t error-correcting fast enough here either, and so we should expect that this fad lasts longer among these kinds of intellectuals than among scientists.
Rich: I realize — I don’t know, Cam, I don’t know if you have thoughts — but it’s something like, there’s no incentive really to be right about the nature of progress. So you can just hold on to your wrong beliefs. Like, I think if we were to talk about what frustrates us most about literary culture, what they’re wrong about, for me I think it would be hostility to progress, or not understanding what the drivers of progress are, and the thing that prevents us from pulling those levers harder, basically. That would be the thing that would be most galling to me about it.
Cam: Yeah, I think that’s right. One of my problems now thinking about it all is, in terms of what nth-order counter-signal I’m at — because I came so squarely from the science bro, you know, you read all these science popularizers to get you into non-fiction, then you read heavier stuff and you get annoyed at all these literary types, and then I sort of came to realize, well, as CP Snow pointed out, they’re missing something as well, and ignorant. I sort of can’t shake that thought of the techno-utopian or, you know, so focused on science scientific study, or you know, just those lists of like non-fiction books of like “this is what you should read” and never reading anything kind of deep. So, but yeah, I think that’s right.
Benny: Have you seen Lex Friedman’s list of books, dude? He’s cranking through books.
Cam: Yeah, well, I mean, he had a few novels in there as well, but there are always a few novels slip into his list. Yeah, that was the funniest thing — was Tyler just being like, this guy’s a fucking idiot. Which, you know, I like about Tyler. But yeah, some pretty funny dunks.
Wordcels vs shape rotators
Cam: So I mean, the other thing as well I wanted to bring up around these two cultures still being alive is the kind of recent shitpost meme thing around wordcells versus shape rotators. It seems to also kind of fit into this mold. You know, the joke that for whatever reason shape rotation — like literally rotating 3D shapes in your head — is this predictor of being successful and smart and stuff. It’s just absurd and funny. But you know, there is a slight orthogonal divergence between verbal tilt and shape rotation, although it all kind of correlates as well. But that’s the biggest diversion. And then so that’s kind of a true thing where you get math types versus literary types, and like, that’s a nuance I’ll talk about later. But even that’s not perfect with shape rotation, because I think you get math shape rotator guys, and math kind of wordcell types as well. Like being big on logic and theory — I think even with the Manhattan Project, you had someone like Teller, who was big on abstraction and logic, and then someone like Fermi, who could see things. I think Fermi was kind of good at both apparently. Or like Mandelbrot, who did stuff with infinity, like, you know, he just apparently just saw it. You think of like 3Blue1Brown YouTube, like that’s shape rotation on acid. Where I always feel bad — there must be some people that are good at maths that are less good at shape rotation, and then everyone’s like, you must do, look at 3Blue1Brown and such good YouTube thing, and they’re like, uh, they just prefer some algebra. Anyway, sorry, I’m getting a bit lost here. There is that kind of split.
Cam: But also the thing with wordcell itself — like the “cell” is this negative connotation, and I think where that comes into it, it’s this kind of sociological thing around, yeah, it’s these people that feel like they should have high status because they’re, you know, literary genius, and they don’t earn as much as the kind of engineer bro. And they’re annoyed about that. They’re disgruntled. And then, I mean, you can probably talk about wordchads, but yeah. So I think I kind of fit in this same sort of ethnography as the two cultures, really.
Benny: Yeah. Well, I think, isn’t it sort of explicitly modeled after that? I mean, I think basically those are the two camps, right? Like shape rotation is sort of the scientific, logical, rational etc. camp, and then wordcell is the literature camp. Like to me those are basically synonymous with his two cultures.
Cam: Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah, basically saying it was modeled on this essay.
Benny: Well yeah, okay, maybe explicitly was the wrong word, but —
Cam: I think it just maybe just happened to be true. When it’s making the same insight, you know, 50 years later. But I mean, what’s interesting about the shape rotation as well is, it’s not quite — I remember Rune, who’s like, you know, the Twitter shitposter who’s talking about this a lot, I often wanted to point out, well, like, shape rotation isn’t necessarily just maths. But I think the split between math and like literary stuff is probably the more important split in terms of culturally. You know, you get like STEM bros and finance bros and non-bros who are just, you know, actual academics versus literary types. I think that’s the biggest split really, which is like 90% captured between shape rotators versus wordcells.
Benny: I was just going to re-raise the point of, I guess shape rotation does also capture just engineers who are actually building things on the ground. And my sense is that Snow actually wasn’t really dealing with those people. I think he’s often talking about sort of pure scientists, people who deal in abstraction mostly, and who are like cloistered in the lab.
Cam: Do you reckon? Because I thought his whole point was, if you get into the STEM stuff, like, that’s good and that’s progress, and like, if you’re not building things —
Benny: Well, he has these — I mean, he talks shit about pure scientists, right? So I’ll just quote — he says, pure scientists have by and large been dim-witted about engineers and applied science. They couldn’t get interested, they wouldn’t recognize that many of the problems were as intellectually exacting as pure problems, and that many of the solutions were as satisfying and beautiful. Their instinct, perhaps sharpened in this country by the passion to find a new snobbism wherever possible and to invent one if it didn’t exist, was to take it for granted that applied science was an occupation for second-rate minds. And then he says, I say this more sharply because 30 years ago I took precisely that line myself. So, you know, I think he is drawing a distinction between people doing applied science and people doing pure science.
Cam: Yeah. To me, I think that was pointing a discernible common thread between some of these pure science types and literary types — like there is that similarity where the kind of pie-in-the-sky ivory tower stuff, yeah.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. Whereas shape rotators don’t really draw that distinction, I guess, which is, yeah, a difference.
Cam: Well, you get the shape rotators who just rotate shapes in the head. This is engineers who are actually building things.
Rich: I feel like the dividing line is something to do with abstraction, and how much you want to wrangle abstractions versus being in the world. And I keep thinking more and more as time goes on that I’m very curious about the world and I want to understand the world, and I’ve coming from very high-level theories of the world, and I keep thinking I actually just have to go down — and the way to truly understand it is to learn physics and, but actually maths. And I’m never actually going to get anywhere. I’m never going to get to see the structure of the world actually in the way that very great people of history have seen it, because I don’t know maths beyond high school maths, and I’m probably at this point just not going to learn it.
Rich: Yeah, it’s sort of, I’m reading this Cormac McCarthy book at the moment, his latest book, The Passenger, Stella Maris, which is basically very much about this subject. It’s written by a wordcell, one of the best to ever do it, but it’s about brilliant mathematicians and physicists who have been sort of driven mad by various metaphysical horrors of like being unable to find a consistent foundation for mathematics that isn’t self-referential, or by solipsism and not being able to find a convincing disproof of solipsism, and stuff like that. And which has actually happened to various mathematicians and physicists throughout history. So it’s talking about real figures as well as the fictional characters. Man, I’m rambling, I don’t — I think I’m still feverish. What the fuck am I talking about?
Benny: Dude, that book sounds sick. I want to read that now. Sounds awesome.
Cam: Talking about a good book, man.
Rich: Oh, it’s a crazy book. I’ve been reading it while I’ve been sick, which has made it even eerier to read. I was trying to think if you guys would like it or not, I don’t know, but yeah. I think what I got out of it, and what I’m trying to get at, is that I imagine Cormac McCarthy is maybe the best version of wordcell that you could be — the best version that I could be. I know he hung around at the Santa Fe Institute a lot and he loves learning about complexity science and all this kind of stuff. But like, reading this book of the best guy to do it, I realized, like, I don’t know what these things are. These are just like cute riffs that name-check all of the thinkers and say sort of like quasi-profound things about their ideas, but I don’t understand the ideas, and I never will understand the ideas through words. I’ll only understand it through physics and through math. That’s what I realized. And I didn’t necessarily think that was true before, but now I think that’s true.
Cam: All right. So, um, you go, Benny, ‘cause I’m going to change.
Benny: Yeah, I don’t know. It just seems very — I understand the take when it comes to like physics, but I don’t think it extends much beyond that, right? Like, I don’t think you need advanced math to understand our deepest theories of biology, or even, I mean, maybe a bit of chemistry, but not really, but, or like neuroscience or any of the things that I’ve seen you be really interested in. You know, this seems like very specific to physics, I guess, is my point. Which, yeah, I mean, in that case, I agree — you can’t understand the deepest theories of physics if you don’t have a grasp on the math, but like physics is just one — I mean, it’s cool but it’s one tiny sliver of human knowledge.
Rich: Yeah, maybe I got sucked into the mindset of the people in the book of their despair about it. Probably is what happened. I need some more distance from it. Yeah, I’ll think about it more. I’ll probably write a book review because it’s a pretty interesting book.
Benny: Right. Yeah, nice, let’s go.
Midwit cope
Cam: I was reading that at the time of CP Snow’s essay, there was a pretty big counter-essay against him by this guy, if I leave this — I don’t really know much about, but he was a critic, and he just like eviscerated CP Snow, pushing back. And it got quite personal. But I think — and I’ve kind of believe it just from reading about it — like one of his criticisms, CP Snow wrote bad books, like his novels were shit. They were kind of like tell-don’t-show, kind of sterile characters. And like, yeah, I kind of thought of, you know, techie type, STEM type people and like kind of write this novel, which is like, scientifically true or economically true or something like that. Which, you know, I quite like some of those — I don’t know, you know, like Robin Hanson and Russ Roberts I write some of these books, I’m sure there are others, and you people have this criticism of sci-fi. But I thought it was kind of funny — you know, this guy who’s dissing literary stuff and trying to be the spokesperson for like knowing both the cultures, he’s just kind of like a STEM guy who, you know, doesn’t understand the richness and the beauty of the humanities and like can’t write a great novel. I forgot the name —
Benny: Oh no, FR Leavis.
Cam: No, I think it was FR Leavis. So it looks like Critchley was someone else who talked about it.
Benny: Yeah, okay. I want to read that essay now. That sounds hilarious.
Cam: But yeah, I mean, maybe we should read a Snow book at some point to fact-check, but it was kind of funny. And then it kind of reminded me, I don’t know, maybe I just feel like I’m just being devil’s advocate because I think ultimately I do kind of simp for the science side. But I always remember, you get sort of a midwit-level appreciation sometimes of things like movies from Christopher Nolan or something like that, whereas like, “oh man, the science, like so smart and shit.” And then like, I don’t know, just like, it feels mechanical sometimes. Like I sometimes joke about Inception. It feels like it’s like video game. Like you got to go to the next level. And it’s like all these faceless baddies. And the dream — like to really analyze dreams and stuff, you know, something like Lynch or something, seems more smart and to get what dreams really are. And maybe Nolan’s a bad example, because I think I’ve actually — I forget where I’m at with Nolan, I think I’ll like him again. But yeah, there’s just a cope or a midwit style thing where you’re like, this is the science. And not really understanding why the literary greats are great.
Rich: Yeah, it’s very obvious what science is for and what technology is for, and it’s harder to appreciate what literature is for, except entertainment — if it’s for something more than entertainment.
Cam: True. And it’s not obvious that the claim that it’s all kind of fake or overrated is wrong, I suppose. And then you get these confident people kind of making that claim, who were like totally ignorant to, you know, the great works, or couldn’t analyze it. So I suppose I’m pointing out the ignorance.
Benny: It is an interesting phenomenon that if someone attacks literature and just says, what would I actually lose in my life if I never read a work of literature — well, what would I lose? It is interesting that you’re like, it’s not totally obvious what the answer is, right? You’re like, well, I have a feeling you’re missing out on something profound, but —
Cam: Yeah, exactly.
Rich: We’ve got one case study, right? Sam Bankman-Fried is a very interesting case study. He’s the perfect poster child. He literally said, why would I read a book? Right, there’s something along those lines. And he totally disparaged the value of reading.
Benny: Yeah, he said all books should be — he himself never read fiction. And then he also had a slightly tangential take, which was that he wouldn’t expect Shakespeare to be that good just because there have been many more writers since him. And the odds that he was actually really good, if you just do the math, are extremely low. Just by, I think, the number of writers in each decade. And he was like, I would expect the best writer alive to have lived in the last 30 years, just based on the number of people writing. Which seems like a very classic rationalist argument.
Rich: Yeah, totally. It’s like, why don’t you just go fucking read some Shakespeare and find out for yourself?
Benny: Yeah, like when you make an argument, you fucking — oh my god, yeah.
Cam: Well, that’s why I think Simpsons season 37 is the best Simpsons season. There’s more writers and more money. Yeah, exactly.
Rich: Yeah, right, yeah, true, yeah. What are the chances that the first five would be the best? It’s a numbers game.
Cam: There’s so many more writers now.
Benny: Exactly. That would have been a great quote-tweet. That thing.
Cam: I think someone did it. I stole it.
Rich: If Sam Bankman-Fried read the classics, he would have a better understanding of human frailties — and I don’t know, maybe if you’ve read Dostoevsky or something like that, or Homer, and understood hubris, could have changed his path through life. But I almost wonder if it might be better for society on net if tech bros remained delusional and remained hubristic in some sense. Because a lot of what you’re trying to do as a startup founder in particular requires you to create a reality distortion field and just not see reality exactly how it is, but be way too optimistic and try and do the impossible and so on. And I don’t know, maybe literary culture on the whole is quite trad and moralistic and sermonizing and anti-technology and so on. Could it be worse for the human species overall if tech bros were more steeped in literature?
Benny: Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s very interesting.
Rich: It’d be better for them personally, to be clear, probably, but it wouldn’t be better for society, maybe. I don’t know, just a thought.
Literature as inherently conservative
Benny: It is just an interesting thesis that I want to play with now, that literature is conservative by its very nature. Which I wonder if it’s just back to second law of thermodynamics stuff. Like, it’s just easier to write a book where things go wrong because they change, than it is to write a book where things go right because they change. And so you can have all these masterpieces that explore ways in which society is changed by technology or a new idea or something, and then like things go wrong, versus, you know, you’re just not going to have that many techno-optimist manifestos out there that are actually great works of literature or something.
Rich: Hmm, that’s a good thought. It’s very hard to write a utopia book because it’s too boring. Once upon a time, happily ever after. And certainly even within sci-fi, which is the realm of the nerds, even within sci-fi it’s very usually dystopian in some sense, or it’s exploring means to explore negative consequences of progress and technologies more so than it explores — like, there’s so few counter-examples. The Iain Banks novels are a good counter-example that we should read at some point.
Benny: Yeah. And then I was trying to resolve the issue in my mind where I was like, but aren’t literary people more like woke and progressive on average? But now I’m not —
Cam: Techno-to-the-moon-type progress, and then there’s a focus on like human rights and social things. And often that gets coupled with degrowth and equalization. I mean, I think you kind of square it that way.
Benny: Yeah, I mean also I think — I think I’m just, also the premise is a bit wrong because if you think of, you know, take like just your classic poster boy of wokeness at like Columbia or something in the past couple of years, like what have we seen? We’ve seen all those people actually try and — there’s complaints about reading too much old literature. They don’t want to read like dead old white men or something, right, and they want to read new stuff. And in some ways they’re right about that, like in the sense that if you adopt their worldview, like the older books actually are conservative in some sense, and so it is like totally contrary to the social justice message to want to read them. And so it was like — it’s not just the fact that it’s written by like old white dudes, it’s like in some sense a more strategic play than that, somehow. Because the message actually will be — you know, if you pick up Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, like, it’s super conservative, right? No.
Cam: This came up in the Dostoevsky episode. It’s kind of funny like how trad it is. And then it’s just an interesting case where some of these older works can kind of slip through, and still, you know, someone who can be quite progressive politically might say, yeah, I’m reading Dosto right now, it’s great, and you’re kind of like, yeah, well, yeah.
Benny: You’re like, are you reading it though?
Rich: Well, that was what I sort of cynically wondered, is, do people actually read and understand these books, or do they just sort of pretend to have read them? Or they’re just capable of having complex thoughts about books and I’m an idiot. That’s the actual answer.
Benny: Nah, we’re right and they’re all idiots.
Rich: No, that’s the actual answer, to be clear. But it is fascinating. On the one hand, obviously modern contemporary fiction is very woke and very leftist and progressive and so on. But if you zoom out and look at the corpus, the canon, it’s not at all. That’s been so surprising to me on our little journey. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, I’m like, yeah, that was just quite shocking to me. I mean, maybe it’s less so in the other great works of English and American literature, I don’t know, I guess we’re going to find out. But yeah, there is a conservatism embedded in the fact that great works survive. Like, another way of saying it is that scientific works tend not to get better with age, generally speaking, because there’ll usually be a better theory that comes along. But literary works often — I don’t know if they get better with age, but maybe they hold their value with age quite well, because of Lindy. Like, stuff gets filtered for and selected on over time, and you just get to sort of skim the best stuff from all of history. And it’s often still just about as good now as it was then. And so you end up with this body of work which skews more backwards-looking, only because it contains many ancient ideas. I mean, we’re reading Homer — we’re reading stuff from 3,000 years ago about guys who think it’s a wonderful honor to die in battle, and conquest and pillage and rape and stuff like this, right? Like, it necessarily has to be a bit more backwards-looking.
Benny: Right, yeah. But then, you know, because there’s also the sort of book like The Dispossessed, where you take elements of modern society that you don’t like and then you ramp them up and you show what’s like — you ostensibly show what’s really wrong about that. You might even put something like One Hundred Years of Solitude in this camp — books that seem to be more like a critique of the status quo. They don’t necessarily offer an alternative, but they’re a critique. And literature could be dominated by books like that. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s something like a 50-50 split between books with actual conservative messages versus books that are some sort of criticism of the way we’re living, and those could be taken as quite progressive. There’s nothing inherently, I think, conservative about The Dispossessed.
Rich: That’s true. And that still seems progressive to our eyes today. It’s just that usually when you read a progressive book from 2,000 years ago, it’s going to seem pretty conservative from our point of view. Like the Bible seems conservative. The New Testament seems pretty fusty to us, but it’s like incredibly radical at the time. I don’t know if you’d call it liberal, but it’s incredibly progressive.
Benny: Right, yeah, true.
Cam: So, there’s one comment I want to make around the two cultures. Like, I feel like there’s a status aspect to it, or this coolness aspect — like the science nerds, it’s almost like nerd culture versus literary culture in one sense. Yeah, it’s kind of uncool, and even when I think of literature that’s more, you know, sci-fi as an example, that feels sterile. Yeah, I said it before, part of it feels like a like soul. But there also seems to just be like, you know, these are kind of the nerds. Should stick to the nerd stuff. And I have that in me a little bit. Like, I like the nerds, but then sometimes I do think, yeah, like these guys are nerds, like maybe read some normal shit as well.
Benny: Maybe shut up.
Rich: Give me your lunch money.
Cam: What more do you want from me?
Rich: So we’re still just as polarized now as in 1956.
Cam: Well yeah, do you think so? I mean —
Benny: It does seem like that, right? Potentially worse.
Cam: Yeah, I just wonder if this will always be the case.
Rich: Benny, you’ve probably got the best insight of all of us because you work in academia with other very techie wonk people. Do you have a sense of how aesthetically developed they are?
Benny: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean — let me just think. Okay. It’s certainly true that the average PhD student is significantly under-read, if you’ll accept that word. Like, the vast majority of them are not going to be well-versed in, let alone old literature, leave alone literature, just like almost like culture in general, or just even the big ideas in other fields.
Cam: What about artsy films and stuff?
Benny: Like my sense is that, yeah, like artsy films —
Cam: Because no one really reads it anymore.
Benny: No, I mean, people might have niche, like, you know, some person has a random niche interest in like French film or something. You’ll come across stuff like that. But like, you know, it’s rare. I can go to a dinner with a bunch of PhD students in stats or ML, and then talk about the two cultures, or talk about Isaiah Berlin, positive and negative freedoms, or talk about The Secret of Our Success, or like, just big ideas that you would take it for granted.
Cam: I would put those in science culture though, somewhat.
Benny: So that’s what I mean. Like, that’s what I mean by, it’s even worse in some sense, because, like, putting aside literature, it’s like other big science ideas. You’re like, you can’t even bank on a lot of people knowing about. And I mean, Faden has said this too, like PhD students are somewhat boring often. And it’s like, I can’t quite figure out what the fuck’s going on, like intellectually, in that, like, often their interests just don’t extend very wide. But I don’t know if that’s — but I think that actually does change once you get to like, if you keep going and you get to professor levels. Like I’ve met a lot of professors who actually are pretty well-read and know a lot of stuff. Yeah, so I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to say, to be honest.
Cam: My guess is PhD students would be more likely than not — like, I think you’re just saying it’s surprising even amongst PhD students. So like, no one seems to appreciate learning outside of credentialism, or like a narrow kind of —
Benny: Yeah, maybe that is what I’m saying.
Rich: PhD students should be right at the center of the scientific culture, right? So I think they’re a good sample audience of whether or not, you know, they have this broad grounding in things or not. And it seems like not.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. Like all of his tests would still pass with flying colors, or fail with flying colors, depending on how you look at it. Like, if you go to a dinner with a bunch of PhD students and you ask them, who’s read Hemingway or McCarthy or Shakespeare, like, all these things — and not in school, like elsewhere, who’s done it — and very, very few will have read any of their stuff. So yeah, it’s still very much holds, I think, in that sense.
Cam: I’m just thinking, insofar as there is a big status element to all this, of being across the artsy films and the influential, you know, books of the last 50 years or whatever — I feel like these nerds sometimes, they’re less caught up in that. So it’s like, “oh yeah, like I haven’t seen, you know, whatever latest artsy film there is. And I just don’t enjoy it because a lot of the stuff’s not that enjoyable.” And maybe there’s this kind of felt sense of security as well. It’s like, you know, I’m working at OpenAI, I’m in machine learning, I’m not intellectually insecure. So yeah, this artsy movie that made no sense to me — I’m not coming across as someone who doesn’t get it. Now, I think the irony is sometimes that is also true — like, this person is kind of maybe dumb in that sense and doesn’t get it. But yeah, just in terms of knowing what albums are the right albums to listen to and all that shit, you know?
Benny: Yeah. I mean, but that’s also Snow’s point, is like, within their social circles, it’s not low status to not know about the most recent artsy film or the most recent novel, or have read the collected works of whoever. And, like, yeah, which is bad.
Do you believe in ghosts?
Rich: Maybe a feature of intense specialization that’s required now more so than ever, but probably even somewhat in Snow’s day. I just want to share an experience I had recently, which I just thought of, which is that I went to a dinner, which was like a salon kind of fun dinner, with a bunch of tech founders, you know, C-suite type people and investors, really smart, really successful. And the prompt that we got started off on was, do you believe in ghosts? Everyone went around and talked about it. And for about an hour, my jaw just dropped to the floor. I had to listen to, like, the most unsophisticated, you know, an electrical engineer invoking quantum physics in a sort of woo-woo consciousness, just people who had no idea about epistemology, who just hadn’t thought clearly about anything beyond their particular fields, and just clearly just had no philosophical background. And again, very smart, intelligent, successful people. And I was sitting there and I was kind of bored, to be honest, and disappointed, because I don’t get out that often, and I wanted to talk to these people about the things that they are in fact very knowledgeable about. My first thought that I had was, like, this is why we need philosophy, because these people are so unsophisticated, and they don’t even realize how stupid they sound. And then the second thought I had was, well, this is why philosophy is completely useless and no one needs to learn it, because it just hasn’t encumbered them one little bit in their highly successful careers, and here I am just like seething because I’m having to listen to some tortured nonsense about like the weight of the soul.
Benny: It’s not predictive of — yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you say?
Rich: I mean, I tried not to rain on the parade obviously, so I just said, like, oh, I’m just a materialist, and I’m very interested in epistemology, and I would, you know, be pretty confident I could find materialist explanations for the various types of — they’re talking about people who remember their past lives, and weighing a soul before and after it leaves the body, misinterpretations of physics, stuff like that. So I didn’t try and correct them, I just tried to move the conversation on when I could, basically. And they’re all really nice people, to be clear, just a strange experience.
Benny: Yeah, yeah. That is funny.
Cam: Did I tell you my high school girlfriend believes in ghosts and demons and stuff — and thought she, sorry, spirits, ghosts — and thought she could talk with them and stuff. And then she explained why, and they sort of visit her in her sleep and she can’t move and stuff. And I was like, I mean, I was like, this shit’s just sleep paralysis.
Benny: That’s sleep paralysis, dude.
Cam: Yeah, it sounds like sleep paralysis where it’s like this comment, and she was like, no way. And it was apparently in her family, like her mom had it and her grandma had it, and it’s a special thing. And then I ran into her years later, like a decade later, and she’s like, oh yeah, I have sleep paralysis. She’s like, you’re right about that. It’s like the one thing we kind of talked about. I was like, oh yeah. And it’s like, gotten worse, you know.
Rich: Well, there you go. As progress as possible.
Benny: It’s the worst of both worlds.
Cam: Yeah. But it did make me think, that’s why ghosts started. Like, you know, the myths of ghosts.
Benny: Yeah, no, I think that’s true. And it’s reasonable.
Rich: Oh, it’s totally reasonable.
Benny: That’s super reasonable before you know about sleep paralysis. It’s like, what the fuck’s going on?
Cam: Yeah, fucking demon standing over here. Of course that shit exists. I don’t know what the fuck that means, man.
Rich: I had hypnagogic hallucinations one night. I’ve only ever had it one night in my life. And if I wasn’t able to like Google and stuff, I would have been like, oh yeah, I’m schizo, or God is talking to me, or something. It was just straight up like a voice just telling me deep secrets that I couldn’t remember afterwards while I was trying to fall asleep. Yeah, it was crazy. Never had it since.
Benny: Fuck, that’s crazy. Yeah, that freaks me out.
Cam: Yeah, I think I had that once when I was 10 as well. I was like sleeping out on the couch. It was either like my cousin’s fucking with me, or like a ghost or like a delusion. Just like, camera, like, you know, this is scary-ass shit, man.
Benny: I have this issue where, like, every night I’ll start on my back, and then honestly every night it happens to me — like, I’ll think about sleep paralysis, and I’m just like, I don’t, it’s not worth it. I roll over to my side.
Cam: Don’t want to go to sleep.
Benny: I’m like, I don’t want this to happen, because I’ll be starting to go off, and then I’ll think about it, and I’ll move my finger, and it’ll be like, okay, I’m still — I can move. And then I’m just like, fuck it, I’ll just sleep sideways.
Cam: Oh bro, nah, I got OCD man, you’re going to put that shit in my head.
Cam: So who’s the better culture then, out of the two cultures? Are we — are we the bridge?
Benny: Yeah, let’s rank them. Where are the most important?
Cam: I feel like we’re trying to be the bridge, right? And we think that’s valuable.
Rich: I think to be the bridge — Benny’s the only one who’s got a shot, I think. You have to be like a real practicing scientist or researcher and then bridge across, whereas I’m probably more from the literary side to begin with anyway, and Cam, you’re sort of somewhere in the middle, I’d say. Although more on the STEM cell — yeah, well, you’re not laughing, but you’re not, like —
Cam: Neither — neither culture.
Rich: But it’s perilously close to bullshit science though, right? Like, come on.
Benny: Where does econ fit in, actually? Like, it’s on the science side, I guess, right?
Rich: Econ, it’s perilously close to literary culture.
Cam: The Dismal Science, as wordcel-in-chief Carlyle called it.
Rich: All right, should we wrap it up, leave it there? Do you guys want to hear next book announcement?
Benny: Yeah. Are you joking, or do you actually have one?
Rich: No, I’ve got one.
Cam: I know you said the book.
Benny: Okay, nice, let’s hear it.
Rich: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.
Benny: Fuck off, I hate you so much.
Rich: It’s not that long.
Cam: That’s — no, I think that’s — it’s not Finnegan’s Wake, that’s fine.
Rich: Apologies, have you — but did you, when did you try to read it? You might be better equipped now you’ve read Woolf, you’ve read other modernists. Yeah, dude, you’re our only hope.
Benny: It’s rough. I’ve tried to read it before. It’s rough. I have. But yeah, let’s do it. Reading it with you guys —
Cam: You’re part of the literary culture now, man.
Benny: Yeah, no, I mean, doing it with you guys will obviously take me much, much further than I got on my own. So I’m happy to do it. But I’m just saying that I do not remember it as a pleasant experience trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. But I’m eager, let’s do it. I’ll order that bad boy.
Rich: I did have a backup in case I got vetoed, but Cam, you’re not gonna veto?
Cam: No, no, it’s all —
Rich: I think we’re ready. I think we can handle it.
Cam: I’ll just kill myself in three months.
Rich: Why, what? Jesus Christ.
Cam: Just stress.
Benny: Stress in the housing market.
Rich: Can we wait till we get off the record?
Cam: Just three months time, book club’s over.
Rich: I got one tiny piece of listener feedback to share, which just made me laugh. Just a one-liner that my friend sent me. He said, “I just quoted Tolstoy from a book I haven’t read thanks to Do You Even Lit.” So, you know, we’re doing God’s work. Yeah, I think that’s probably a big — that’s probably the market for it. We are helping people become soyds like us. Anyway, if you want to help us become less soydy, write us in. douevenlit@gmail.com — d-o-u, just literally “do you even lit” at gmail.com — and we will read out your feedback on you. And we’ll see you for James Joyce in about a month’s time, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Let’s go.
