Cocky triteness, cinematic disrespect, rational-fu: a double-barreled interview with Andy McKenzie

Extending my conversational enterprise from sound into text, I shot an e-mail to blogger and reader Andy McKenzie to see if he'd submit to a public interview about, y'know, whatever's fascinating. A Vassar student with strong interests in the full span of ideas from neuroscience to the arts, he came off as a promising subject for the first iteration of this entirely experimental venture. Though I originally assumed that I'd simply ask him questions and he'd respond, we inadvertently stumbled upon an even more intriguing format: the two way —or, as I think I'll call it, "double-barreled" —interview, where both of us take on the roles of interviewer and guest. Brilliance, folly or something in between, here is the result.

Andy McKenzie: Do you consider yourself a better tweeter or blogger? I don't want to implicitly insult The War on Mediocrity, but you can write one hundred and forty characters with the some of the best of them.

Colin Marshall: It increasingly looks as if I'll have to face the reality that I may well be a better tweeter than blogger, at least if the metric is the number of compliments I get on my tweets versus the number of compliments I get on my posts. (Or is this just a function of the relative accessibility of what I do in each medium?) While I'd long assumed that the unrestricted freedom of blogging (potentially) allows me to do my best written work, I also buy, from experience, all those assertions about creativity only really being unleashed under constraints. Errol Morris (appropriately) tweeted it best, providing his own definition of art: "Set up a series of arbitrary rules, then follow them slavishly." I genuinely enjoy working around Twitter's 140-character limit; blogging, I sometimes feel out at sea as far as what, in the limitless realm of posting possibilities, I should actually do. So maybe that's at the heart of it. (Maybe I should impose more arbitrary rules on my blog.)

Since we're in the territory, then, I'll hold off on my more substantive questions for the moment and ask you this: how do you think of the relationship between your own blogging presence and tweeting presence? Two fundamentally different entities? Two expressions of the same central core? Brothers from other mothers?

Andy McKenzie: My Twitter presence oscillates between cocky and trite. Being sarcastically cocky is such an effective way of being funny in person that I want to try to do it on the 'net too, but it's so tough because sarcasm doesn't always transfer to print. Look at the relative dearth of emoticons. Wikipedia says that :d implies sarcasm, but I've never seen that used, and although :P might work, it seems a little bit too cheerful. Generally, from my experience effective tweeting has been much more difficult than blogging. I can sit down at the computer with no ideas and think of something decent to blog about, but that almost never works for tweets. Nearly all of my insightful tweets I thought of earlier during the day and copied over to the computer merely as a conduit.

Nevertheless, I remain a huge Twitter evangelist. One of the most frustrating things for me is losing touch with good friends. It's simply very difficult to stay in touch with people, despite what the wunderkinds of the domain insist. Since Twitter takes relatively low effort, is not as dorky as blogging, and is an opt-in media, it's a great way to stay in touch with old friends. At the very least I feel comfortable that my tweeting friends are out there in the world, doing stuff. So in large part I tweet in order to encourage others to do so too, if that makes any sense.

One of my favorite parts of your website is the "icons" section of your Livejournal user page, which is made of black and white head shots of various people. I recognize a few of them, like Hofstadter, Foster Wallace, and Ang Lee, but others I am blissfully unaware of. How did the designation of icon come about? What makes each of those guys special?

Colin Marshall:The good old icon grid has become slightly outdated, but I'll replicate it here for the readers:

Articulating exactly how I came to designate these fellows "icons" —which, in practice, seems to mean "people whose works and lives I look to as examples" —actually comes as a beneficial mental clarification exercise that I should have undertaken long ago. So, going from left to right, top to bottom, we have:

• Douglas Hofstadter, author of the immortal Gödel, Escher, Bach —one of my favorite books of all time —and a bunch of other neat stuff. I'm drawn by his distinctive combination of interests in emergent systems, language, aesthetics and how the three tie together. I happen to enjoy learning about all those subjects, and usually others only like one or two of them: systems people look down on aesthetics, language people don't care about emergence, aesthetics people don't think about systems, etc.
• P.J. O'Rourke, the libertarian conservative humorist and journalist. Happening upon his books in high school at a Borders during a 15-minute break from my job —I worked in the adjoining mall —led me to realize that essays dealing with politics and current events could be hilarious, even if they're written in the middle of a war zone. While I don't aim to fill a very similar journalistic capacity to his, his work taught me that any subject can, with sufficient skill, be described entertainingly. (David Sedaris probably deserves inclusion as an icon for nearly the exact same reason.)
• Takeshi Kitano, the filmmaker/television host/author/painter/comedian/poet who evidently bears a strong resemblance to Ang Lee. He'd almost merit inclusion based simply on how many occupations he manages to juggle —those who claim the renaissance man is dead, behold —but the fact that he does them all so well puts him over the top. Having directed, starred in and painted images for Hana-bi, at least for the moment my favorite film of all time, doesn't hurt either.
• David Foster Wallace, the novelist and novelistic journalist and novelistically journalistic essayist who killed himself last year. Where P.J. O'Rourke showed me how entertaining you can make essays, Wallace showed me how fascinating you can make them, delivering an enormous depth of curiosity-driven detail in a hyperdescriptive voice both staggeringly intelligent and almost breezily conversational. I've never read anyone like him from the past, and I'm not sure we'll see anyone like him in the future.
• Paul Graham, entrepreneur, programmer, essayist and funder of new entrepreneurs. Readers can surely tell by now that I read a lot of essays, and perhaps won't take it lightly when I say that he's quite possibly our finest living essayist, writing with unparalleled clarity, concision and nose for what's interesting.
• Brian Eno, music-making "non-musician," thinker about the whole of culture and co-creator of the Oblique Strategies. Props be to him first for inventing the modern iteration of ambient music, one of my most beloved genres of sound, and for elaborating upon the widely-applicable idea behind it that a thing can —and should! —be as ignorable as it is interesting, as backgroundable as it is foregroundable. He also appears —especially in his published diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices, also known as my favorite book —to live his live in accordance with the same principles that go into his artwork, including the mandate to continually experiment. And he doesn't simply make art; he makes art and honestly cares about how it fits into the culture (as opposed to spinning made-up reasons it fits into the culture in order to secure grant money).
• Charlie Rose, the interviewer whose (aesthetically near-perfect) program prompted me to get into the public talking game myself. His willingness to put in a solid hour with a guest shouldn't be a rarity, but it is, and thus he's one of the very few beacons of long-form conversation in broadcast media. Too many network owners seem to believe that, say, 25 minutes constitutes long-form, almost dangerously so, when in fact that length of time can't even scratch the surface of dust on top of the surface.
• Errol Morris, the documentarian behind Gates of Heaven, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, the television series First Person, the Ellen Feiss Apple spot and a bunch more neat stuff. As I type up these justifications, I begin to realize that curiosity is the most prominent common trait. (It's probably fair to say that I only truly like curious people. To the uncurious: see ya, wouldn't wanna be ya.) Errol Morris may hold the title of Most Curious Man Alive. Standing in evidence are his films about subjects as wide-ranging as police incompetence, pet burial and astrophysics; his interviews about subjects as wide-ranging as attempted cryonics, the pursuit of giant squid and how to control a DC-10 without hydraulic fluid; and his New York Times blog about every possible aspect of photography.
• John Brockman, the literary agent and "organizer" —I can think of no better title —behind Edge.org, the nexus of an ongoing conversation between scientists and sci/tech thinkers with the uncommon ability to communicate well to a general readership. The importance I find in communication and conversation should be obvious, and I have enormous admiration for anyone who can orchestrate it at this scale about material this cutting-edge, as it were. I regard the scientific enterprise's quantification, organization and falsification of knowledge as pretty damn foundational in human society, but without communication, all the research ever performed wouldn't mean a thing.
• Robert Hughes, one of the few art writers always worth reading. I've written before that I have no respect for those who write unclearly about soft subjects, respect for those who write clearly about hard subjects, and high respect for those who write clearly about soft subjects. By "soft" and "hard," I don't mean that the former's somehow "easier" to think about and discuss than the latter; in fact, the opposite is true. That's why good popular physics writers outnumber good popular painting writers at least a hundred to one. Hughes never fails to pen strong, clear, solid sentences, essays and books about the visual arts, a topic which has suffered and continues to suffer endless abuse at the hands of fuzzy thinkers. This legally makes him a miracle. (Kenneth Clark represents another such miracle, but his wealthy Londoner's voice doesn't speak to me quite as directly as Hughes' more rugged Aussie one.)
• (Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Clive James, known, somewhat to his chagrin, as a "cultural polymath," but more specifically an essayist, poet, critic, novelist, travel journalist, autobiographer, television presenter, etc. As with Kitano, I'm fascinated and impressed by James' occupational range, but the way he thinks about culture —really thinks about it —and then translates that thought into words will never stop inspiring me. Curiosity, again, plays no small part.
• Tom Stoppard, playwright. That is to say, writer of the best plays ever written: Arcadia, Jumpers, The Coast of Utopia, Night and Day, and so on, and so forth. I was hooked when my family attended a production of Arcadia at Seattle's ACT, but for some reason we never attended the rest of the season after that. Though I haven't actually seen any on-stage Stoppard since, I've nearly memorized his festivals of wordplay, speculation, anti-communism and multidisciplinary fact and fiction, free from what I believe the man himself once called Pinteresque "moralizing from on high."

There are others who I suspect could make it to icon status if not for my lesser familiarity with their work: Werner Herzog's pretty much a shoo-in, "intellectual gatecrasher" Geoff Dyer seems promising indeed, I find I could do with more of whatever ultra-prolific literary stuntman William T. Vollman's imbibing, I already look to 70s talk show host Dick Cavett for examples of engaging interviews and, for whatever reason, Thomas Dolby's rising through my ranks too, perhaps because he's a musician for whom the creation of music springs from something more than an impulse. I recently described my goal as becoming "one part Werner Herzog, one part Brian Eno, one part David Foster Wallace, one part Charlie Rose." Grand as that might sound, it's not too wide of the mark of my actual aspirations.

Good lord, this conversation has already hit 1967 words. To think I'd originally planned to wrap it at 1,000. I suppose we should go to 5,000. In any case, here's my question for you; it's the one in which I try to get an idea of your blogging persona, specifically. Your blog's front page states pretty prominently that you're "an undergraduate at Vassar College studying neuroscience and the liberal arts." It's that last bit I'm interested in: that you stand at the intersection of these two (commonly perceived to be) vastly different intellectual threads can't be an accident, can it? What's preventing you from diving into a neuroscience obsession —though lord knows enough of those victimize students even as we speak —or a completely humanities-driven life of the mind? How does the duality manifest itself in your thought and writing?

Andy McKenzie: That's a good question, and I wish I had a good answer. I haven't yet found a way to weave the emphasis on both neuro and more traditional stuff into my personal narrative. There are a few possibilities:

1. In Creativity in Science, Simonton notes that the most creative scientists read broadly outside of their subject matter. I believe in one-boxing on Newcomb's paradox. If the people who have success at creativity read broadly, then I shouldn't expect myself to be an exception, and I should read widely too.
2. Vassar requires at least eight classes outside of the natural sciences, thus I am forced to study both. This is the cynical explanation.
3. Most of my friends and peers are much more interesting in fiction, movies, TV, econ, sports, and current events, so if I want to have fruitful conversations with them (which I do), then I have to understand what is going on in those worlds. Perhaps I would prefer a utopia in which everyone would subscribe to and discuss Hippocampus and Neural Networks, but that is unlikely to ever become a reality. So if I want spend most of my time in the Real World then I need to consider and study the liberal arts.

Regarding pure integration of the two, there are lots of people attempting to do that. I find most of these attempts to be mostly bullshit. The ones that have some success, like Lehrer in Proust was a Neuroscientist, do so mainly when they focus on the interplay between psychology and art instead of actual brain structure and function. Of course nobody wants to admit this because psychology is so much less sexy. But the reality is that until something like serial section transmission electron microscopy becomes automated and performed on a number of humans (presumably post-mortem), it's going to be difficult to talk conclusively about neuroscience. So, IMHO, the most important advancements in neuro over the next twenty years will be technological, emphasizing advances in biomedical optics especially.

My question: You once tweeted (and later elaborated in a blog post) that one of the two keys to success is to cultivate risk tolerance. Now, does this require conscious effort on the part of the risk taker? Or, can one cultivate a risk tolerance by simply doing risky things? For example, every individual in a densely populated area now stands at a higher risk of illness in their day to day lives as a result of swine flu. Going to public places is in some ways an exercise in risk tolerance. Will this lead to an inevitable increase in risk tolerance throughout the country over time?

Colin Marshall: You're right; most attempts to get science in with the humanities don't pass the bullshit detector. I often wonder why this must be the case, since I'm extremely interested in seeing tighter integration of the two. I've stopped counting the times I've attended exhibitions promising a union of art and science only to find some art simply placed next to some science. If I'm lucky.

You've hit on a terribly fascinating point in your response to which I can't simply note without making a big deal of. The notion that a working knowledge of the liberal arts —let the record show that I've never been crazy about that name —aids one's functioning in the real world is, I think, quite true, though it's stated so infrequently that it sounds as counterintuitive as a Malcolm Gladwell article pitch. If you want to operate effectively in the real world, which is the wider social world, you've got to get conversant in the arts. There is no escape; it's just how humans interact, and if you don't want to interact, you might as well pack it in. If anyone's looking for a reason why studying topics outside of engineering, natural science or quantitative business isn't a waste of time, there it is.

For readers who don't know —or, even more likely, have forgotten —"cultivate risk tolerance" is one plank of my two-plank success guide, the other plank being "cultivate endurance." To address the first point of your question, I've so far found that doing something a bajillion times to be just about the only way to cultivate any personal quality; I'd argue that most traits are essentially habits, and one forms habits by doing the same thing over and over. So indeed, cultivating risk tolerance would seem to require doing risky things, or at least things one perceives as risky. (Let's not forget the human risk-overperception and loss-overaversion factors.) Thus there's definitely a conscious element: if you don't deliberately take on tasks you believe to be risky, you'll never sand the edge off that familiar "Don't do it! Don't do it! Don't do it!" impulse.

As for the second point, well, good question. The relevant distinction here comes, I suppose, between instances of risktaking on the part of an individual and a rise in the ambient level of risk that's out of any individual's control. I can't help but believe that people from riskier places exhibit a higher risk tolerance threshold —think about how those who emigrate from dangerous, fatalistic and thus relatively high-risk foreign countries behave when they get to safer ones —but I'd be surprised if the effect reached anything like the level someone reaches when they really bear down and boost their own risk tolerance.

So what's your own relationship to risk-taking in life? Do you think you do to little of it? Too much? About enough? And in this vein, I'd also like to compare notes on these alleged success rules I pulled out of the air; surely you've pulled a few out of the air yourself over the years. If items one and two are "cultivate risk tolerance" and "cultivate endurance," where, based on your own observations of life, people, everything, etc., would the list go from there? Or might you strike those first two in the interest of improved revisions?

Andy McKenzie: My own relationship to risk taking is fairly mild. I try to take risks on things I value like education or relationships and not bother with things I don't value like jumping from high heights. Does it always work? I don't know. I have read that people who are moderate and rational risk takers are the most satisfied with their lives (from the sidebar here). And since anyone reading a blog is probably at least a bit of a nerd, we are probably on the lower end of the risk taking spectrum compared to the majority of society. So, take more risks and be merry!

I like "cultivate risk tolerance" and "cultivate endurance" a lot as a success guide. The main thing I might add would be a subsection to cultivating risk tolerance. I think that the two ways it can be done are either a) having confidence or b) subjugating your ego. I don't think you can fake the confidence part. It's true that people vary in their levels of self-serving biases but at some point the fact that you suck at something will be staring you in the face. And contrary to some public conceptions, telling yourself that you're good at everything in the mirror won't help because you won't believe yourself. So the point is that you can't fake confidence, but it's really useful for risk tolerance if you do have it. That's why it seems easy to string successes together. Your other option towards risk tolerance to subjugate your ego, i.e. "I may suck at this, but that won't hold me back, I don't care what people think of me, etc." This option is probably more sustainable over the long term but it's also definitely less fun.

OK, I know you watch a lot of movies. So, what is your routine for movie watching? You recently tweeted that you can't eat while watching a movie, but can drink tea. Any other rules such as that? Do you take notes? Watch with subtitles on? Rewind crazy scenes? What about watching with other people, can you tolerate that? If you've already written a post about this feel free to refer me to that instead of re-writing it. I searched but couldn't find anything in one place.


Colin Marshall: It's not so much that I can't eat while watching a movie, but that I'd rather not. I suppose I'd fallen into the habit, over twenty or so years, of eating meals while watching at home. It only recently dawned on me that, hey, I can't really enjoy the movie or the meal to the fullest extent while desperately trying to handle both at once. Both films and food are meant to be experienced, and if you treat either as non-experiential fodder —as many do —you're going to find both pretty boring. Acknowledging that I can't experience two things at once in any meaningful way, I now separate these acts whenever possible.

(The issue of consuming meals while viewing films at home is, of course, entirely separate from the issue of scarfing down huge boxes of candy at a theater, which behavior is and has always been a grotesque abomination.)

As for the others:

• Do you take notes? I should, more often. I can usually bring myself to dig out the old notebook when I know I'll be writing something big, like a 3Quarksdaily column, on what I'm about to see. But since I write up almost half the pictures I watch on this blog anyway, it might well be a good idea to keep pen in hand as a matter of habit. All too often I'll go to write something about a movie I and just sit there, discouraged by having to cast around at slightly-too-faded memories for minutes on end.
• Watch with subtitles on? Only if I don't understand the language —my interest in Korean cinema provided the impetus to start learning Korean —or if the dialogue was recorded particularly poorly. (These things happen.) I most certainly prefer my foreign-language movies subtitled rather than dubbed, not out of purism but of a desire to remain as close to the authorially-intended product as possible.
• Rewind crazy scenes? Depends on how you define "crazy," but yes, when I'm doing some re-watching by myself, I have been known to repeat my favorite sequences —i.e., those I think I can learn the most from —over and over again. To think of how much time I've spent viewing the "Painters" montage from Kitano's Hana-bi alone...
• What about watching with other people, can you tolerate that? Oh, my. Can I tolerate it? I must really come off as a titanic film weenie. I actually prefer watching films with friends and such whenever possible, since I find some fairly rich discussions can result. Plus, I just like to compare cinematic notes —not that, per the above, I'm physically taking them —whenever possible. That's one reason I so enjoy reading film criticism.

However, I must admit that this can backfire; the upside of watching movies with others is, like the upside of anything else, proportional to its downside. In another interview that will appear here soon, my interlocutor relates the experience of screening Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century —one of my own personal favorites —for his art school friends, only to have them bitch and moan about it afterward. Sometimes even my most earnest attempts to share the joy of my favorite directors with friends —Abbas Kiarostami, Chris Marker, Jim Jarmusch —produce similarly disheartening outcomes. Few things irk me more than that sort of disrespect. On a larger, more public scale, I'll never forget the time I saw Béla Tarr's The Man from London screened at LACMA: half the people in the audience spent the entire runtime coughing, shuffling and, very slowly, exiting.

One of the more useful lessons I've learned about filmgoing, and one that I've only recently acknowledged, is that watching is rewatching. Just like writing is rewriting and reading is rereading, the second time you watch a film is really the first time you watch the film. I suppose I can't speak for others, but my attention during the first viewing of most any given movie gets burnt up following the plot, which I kind of resent since I tend to find plot to be the least interesting aspect of cinema. If I want a plot, I can open a book.

I'd like to ask you about your interest in rationality, or, more broadly, the way we think as perceived on the subective human scale. I specify that because I want to get at the issue of how tied it is to your interest in neuroscience, which I think we can safely say does not operate on the subjective human scale —if it did, none of its findings would be quite so counterintuitive. (I'm reminded of a time Brian Eno talked about having lunch with a table of particle physicists. He listened to their discussion of their research for a while, then asked, "Do any of you actually perceive the real world like this?" They all said "of course not.")

So when you write about human decisionmaking and such, and when you quote the likes of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson, is that merely a branch sprouting off of your main fascination with neuroscience, or is being an observer of your own thought process a whole other area of interest, deserving its own circle on the Venn diagram of your life?


Andy McKenzie: Didn't ask the "tolerate" question because you come off as a film weenie at all! I asked because I myself am annoyed when I watch movies with (some) other people who aren't as into the movie as I am and end up distracting me, or forcing me to watch with subtitles due to irreparable chit chat.

I remember about three years ago I read Eliezer's Twelve Virtues of Rationality on his old site (now here) and I thought it was the coolest thing out. The first couple lines of the "lightness" virtue remains one of my favorite quotes of all time. And over time I've come to love Robin's stuff on Overcoming Bias too. I've said before and I'll say again that as of today, October 21 2009, I think he's the most interesting person on the internet.

On the surface at least, I think part of what made OB attractive at first is that it could actually improve me as a person by making me a better truth-seeker. But now I think I have to admit that this is at least slightly masturbatory and probably won't actually do much good. Robin had a damning post very early on at Less Wrong basically saying that individual, martial-arts style rationality won't help much, and that instead we should prefer institutional design. I still like posting about decision-making "hacks" on my blog because I like them when other people post about them and I think they add more value than a lot of the other stuff I could be writing about instead (a high VORBP!). But for most of the sixteen hours I am awake each day I don't actively think about being rational. So in the Venn diagram that makes up interests, human decision-making is just one of those cool ancillary facet that hopefully becomes part of my subconscious over time.

Ultimately I'm very much a newbie to neuroscience. I have read about some research on human subjects making decisions and undergoing fMRI, but it doesn't make sense to me. Why does it matter that the PFC is lighting up but not the ACC in some given task? Surely it matters to some computational neuroscientist trying to falsify theories, but I can't grok the lay fascination with brain regions. Of course, nobody knows what science doesn't know. However, I imagine that beyond the brain region business anatomical neuroscience doesn't have much to say about human decision-making.

What most interests me most about neuroscience, for the record, is the search for a circuit diagram of the whole human brain. I don't know how long it will take, I don't know how much individual variation there will be, and I don't know how it will happen. But I do know that it would be such a game changer that I am very motivated to look into it and hopefully I will get a chance to work on it.

First a trivial question: If you think you focus too much on the plot the first time you watch movies, why don't you just read a plot summary first? Once you've swatted that fly aside, I'm curious: What is your relationship to your old material on the internet? Your posts on LJ go back to 2002. If I were to characterize those old posts as compared to your current output, I'd say you had more posts about specific convos you overheard, more posts that are explicitly humorous (like your hilarious Life Plan), and more posts about straight pop culture like Rick Astley, and that now you post more mindfully about the future, write more legitimate film reviews, and etc.

Is that fair? If so, has the shift been in any way intentional? More generally, how do you feel that people are able to look back at your intellectual development online?


Colin Marshall: Man, I hear you on the chitchat-while-watching thing. If the people around me were talking at enough volume or with enough frequency to drive me to subtitles on an English-language film, let's just say that the applicable button on the DVD player's remote isn't all I'd punch. I'm as much of a Mystery Science Theater 3000-lover as the next pseudo-geek, but I often find myself having to make the same point about the still-common practice of home MiSTing: when Mike, Joel, Servo and Crow did it, they did it to bad movies. (Also, they were funny.)

Despite having posted to Les Wrong myself, I get the feeling I'm not quite the truth-seeker you are. Don't get me wrong (as it were), I still love that stuff, but a large part of me harbors the same sort of reservations you cite Hanson —whose fascinatingness you're totally right about, by the by —as having. The question I can't shake is, how much does being right have to do with being successful? My natural impulse is to argue that the less wrong (as it were) you are, the more successful you can be, but I have absolutely no way of demonstrating that. How many of the people I admire most could be called true rationalists? Twenty percent, maybe? Thirty, if the definition stretches?

I often read plot summaries in advance of viewing (or simply happen to come across a bunch in my usual research), and I find I do enjoy a fuller experience of the film when I don't have to allocate disproportional concentration to that one particular element of the work. I would submit that this, in large part, causes the utter mediocrity of most films: they're conceived not as films, but as screenplays, and sometimes as mere single-page treatments that can contain nothing but plot. Hence the final, impoverished product that's little more than a very expensively-illustrated bedtime story, harnessing maybe —maybe -- a tenth of cinema's artistic bandwidth.

On some level, I believe —or want to believe —that nobody would ever go to the lowest depth of my back pages, but since you're now a living counterexample, I suppose I've got to face the facts. While it's easy to dismiss anything one wrote at 18 as juvenile nonsense —and surely much of my archives that old indeed amounts to juvenile nonsense —I've got to give Colin-18 his due: he knew some stuff I don't know now, and he kept in mind some stuff of which I've lost sight. He had a pretty constant strain of enthusiasm where my own has begun to oscillate troublingly, and his sense of humor was all-pervasive, whereas mine has, like a couple centimeters of my hairline, partially receded. I don't miss his tendency to waste time arguing on the internet or spark ludicrous conflicts in life just for the hell of it, but in some ways I'm circling back to what he was, having drifted away involuntarily, gradually, imperceptibly (to me, anyway). And let it never be said that I no longer write posts on Rick Astley.

If someone can learn something by subjecting themselves to the entirety of my archive, I got no objections. I realize that there are few human phenomena as fascinating to observe as the growth, change and odd two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance that an individual takes through life. Lord knows that's the secret to the success of Michael Apted's Up documentaries. Not that I'm self-aggrandizing enough to compare my internet writing to perhaps cinema's greatest ongoing achievement. No, not at all.

As this conversation careens toward 6000 words, I fear we should wrap it up soon. But not yet! I've got a final question for you, and perhaps it's a grand one, so to those who say TL;DR, I say: suck it. By way of setup, let me say that you have a strong blog; it's well-written and unfailingly serves up fascinating ideas. However, most of the idea I've formed of your actual personality has come from this very conversation. I find it fascinating that your other writings maintain what I don't have a precise word for but what I'll simply fudge and call "engaging anonymity." It's as if you hold a poker face while turning over super-interesting cards. Assuming I've managed to convey so much as a part of the concept I'm trying to invoke here, I'll ask this: how much is that a deliberately-cultivated part of your internet persona? Do you make any conscious choices to cultivate a particular internet persona, or is it just the extension of your real-life one? Is the issue of someone's "internet" self versus their "real" self even a distinction you think much about?

Andy McKenzie: Rationality does often get a bad rap for being not particularly helpful to the person practicing it, and perhaps deservedly so. I don't have any data. But I think Eliezer et al's main point is that rationality is helpful to everyone else, too. In theory at least there are huge positive externalities to considering the most important problems that the world faces and methodologically applying oneself to them. Hence "saving the world."

It's interesting to hear that you find my blog somewhat distant. I suppose I'm not actively trying to create any image of myself through the blog. It's certainly not an exercise in personal branding, despite what the self-named title suggests. (I'm working on a cool new name.) I think of my blog more as tracking my intellectual development, much like I track my sleep, or my school tracks my middling academic progress via grades. I'd like to discuss genuinely interesting ideas and leave the rest to the side.

The distinction between "internet" and "real" selves is a fascinating one. Tyler Cowen has said people think he's less funny in person than on his blog, I think Ben Caz is generally more in-depth in person than on his blog (although his blog is great!), and the one time I met Eliezer in person he was more light-hearted and fun-loving that you might imagine from his blog. Tyler is probably the exception in that most people are more willing to joke around in person and will generally be funnier off-line. This makes sense. Online we have to worry about our thoughts being permanent and offending somebody down the line, but in person our words are mostly transient. That's why I tiptoe around the "r" word.

In general bloggers will be more outgoing than the typical educated human. Some of this is personality. To be willing to be a blogger you must have always been willing to "put yourself out there" to some degree. In fact, I expect that if you invited a random group of bloggers to a party, the ones who use their actual name instead of a pseudoname will be more likely to mingle. The real-namers will also be less likely to have aspirations in politics! Some of it is also the creative process that writing ultimately is. Once you recognize how much effort it takes to keep up a blog that others give you little credit or praise for, you'll have more respect for those who chug through their own atypical endeavors.

Thanks very much for the interview, Colin. You asked a number of thought-provoking questions. We'll have to do this again in five years or so, assuming that the Mayan apocalypse hasn't killed us all off in the interim.