title: Building institutions that bend towards truth, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine
author: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
contenttype: podcast
publication: Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11)
published: 2025-10-02T07:01:00
sourceurl: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/prfx.byspotify.com/e/media.transistor.fm/93048fdd/1e29c0fb.mp3
word_count: 13293
Welcome to Complex Systems, where we discuss the technical, organizational, and human factors underpinning why the world works the way it does. Hi, everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio 11 on the Internet, and I'm here with my buddy Claire Collier, who is the editor and publisher, I suppose, Astros Magazine. And you told me just before we started rolling that you are engaged in how we create social institutions that bend towards truth, and would love to talk about that both in the context of magazines, and also in the context of universities and things that are shaped somewhat like a university in our system. But since you run a magazine at the moment, why don't we start there? So the people of them had the opportunity, what is Astrosk? Astrosk is a quarterly magazine in print and online, which is a little bit anachronistic in this day and age. We are broadly general interest, I should say, with an emphasis on what I like to call intellectually exploratory writing. A lot of the impetus for it was feeling around when I founded the magazine in 2022 now. Oh my god, that a lot of writing, long form writing I was reading was really in this like science journalism mode or policy journalism mode of trying to synthesize an expert consensus without showcasing the intellectual work that went into that synthesis. And I think this is like, I am not against that mode of journalism. I think it is very valuable. I think it can be done extremely well and I am very glad it exists. But I felt that a lot of the blogs I was reading and other things I was reading outside of legacy media were much more transparent about how they were constructing stories on quite complex topics. And this felt more interesting and vital for me, but also missing a lot of the rigor that I found in more traditional publications. And I wanted to create something that could bring together those two modes of engaging with information. So that's what we're trying to do at least. Yeah, I feel long form writing is an interesting phrase with me because I like nice short form writing on my blog 8,000 words or so. And occasionally it moves me to go longer than that. Just so people have a some context, how long is long form? The typical asterisk piece is probably around 4,000 words. Some are longer, some are shorter. Yeah, and I did not make a great friend of magazine editors when I dropped a 28,000 word tone on their desk. And yet we still ran with it because it worked out. This was the vaccinate CA piece. The vaccinate CA piece. Yeah. It started at 13,000 and I tried to cut and got longer every day if I've had that happen. No, it's also well works in progress now has a print edition, which is fantastic. I'm also like really interested in the phenomenon of more and more small magazines going print because it's an objectively crazy thing to do. But it's harder for us because we've been print from the beginning, which means there is 120 physical pages. And my printer has to know in advance how I will be filling those 120 physical pages. And if one piece goes twice over, then another piece needs to be cut or dropped. It creates, but this is actually maybe a point that's not obvious. When you're in print, it doesn't just affect not just an additional thing that you do. It affects your work back schedule and affects how the piece is edited. It affects what you see online as well. And so it would have part of me wishes like, yeah, we could just do like a novella. But it's hard with the way that our print schedule works. Yeah, we used to talk about column inches in print media and bloggers mostly know column inches. That's the thing that we laugh at print media for having. But when you have an actual physical artifact with a printer, we have a contract with where the artifact is going to be 120 pages. We'll not be 100 day teen pages and won't be 122 pages. And we have a shipping schedule that you mentioned the work back schedule where you must get it to us by this date. Or it physically will not come off the presses fast enough to hit your ship date. And they have other clients. So it needs to get off the presses when we have scheduled it to get off the presses. And so I find that sort of thing intellectually fascinating often. It is not obvious to people that that drives a lot of the things that they see in the world. The broadly speaking, I think one of the best things from martial revolution is that it popularized the idea of a production function where when you understand the production function magazine things start to make more sense. As one of the examples, we're living in a rich media landscape right now. And much much of it has reoriented itself to work around Twitter speeds in the last couple of years. And I think there's a pluses minuses to that. One of the things I like is that we have many more voices than we used to have. You can find a sub stack on almost any topic these days and different takes on different topics. There's not the suffocating amount of culture of New York journalism so much anymore on the flip side. Many people have realized that that's being a take merchant is really what sells and what the algorithms in the various places reward for distribution. And so you don't get the like classic media magazine piece that will, you know, devote an appropriate amount of time an appropriate amount of depth and appropriate number of months of research. To end up with one thing that ends up, you know, in the hands of the subscriber in a library in the store for record. There are still a few places that do it. It's actually, okay, it's interesting. You say this. It's definitely true that there's a lot fewer traditional magazines doing this kind of work. They do still exist. I have also noticed, especially in the community that we probably that encompasses your audience and my audience broadly, there is an enormous appetite for consuming text. There is like consuming like quite dense technical text. And like, for example, there's people here who will read white papers or academic papers dozens of them constantly. It's fascinating. It's difficult to monetize this kind of desire for content. There's people who can do it. I think the people who do it best are people bloggers who have a very distinctive personal voice. This is actually another challenge of running a magazine. I think the people who are best suited to this media environment are people who are smart and thoughtful and incredibly prolific and have a naturally compelling voice and can create a kind of parasocial relationship with the reader. You have to be like a little bit of a grapple media to succeed in the modern media ecosystem. And if you're that person like great, there's never been a better time to be a blogger who is writing at enormous length and enormous speed. I think there is a little less magnetism around something like a magazine that's a bit more depersonalized. Where you don't necessarily something that I think about all the time is for myself and my co editor, Jake Eden, who's not here. Can we like make the readers of a parasocial relationship with us a little bit? Can we be characters in the magazine? We don't do a lot of this because it's not actually either of our natural strong suit or preference. But I think that is the kind of thing that drives people towards more in-depth writing these days. And historically that has been something of the mix with the brand personality of an Atlantic or similar and playing up there. The much-wanted Atlantic fact-checking department. The New Yorker, you mean? The New Yorker maybe. You can tell I'm not in media circles 100% of the time. Or even on the less maybe thought-centered side of publishing. But there are people whose construction of their childhood or youthful identity has centered around various magazines. And the magazine has a personality and a vibe to it where individual writers for the magazine are based on the production function for magazines, perhaps present in their life four times a year. And which in expectation, the typical reader encounters the typical writer will probably never, even if they are quite attached to the magazine for a period of years. Well, this actually goes back to the exigencies of print. Like the New Yorker is a good example here because the New Yorker is a magazine that has a lot of personality. And that has had many different personalities over his existence from kind of a like humorous like New York society and culture magazine in the 30s to being this much more serious kind of like they. Serialized silent spring in the 60s, I believe. I wouldn't actually sure how I would characterize the New Yorker's personality now and there's also been just like a grand smoothing out of magazine personas. I think the New Yorker is one of many publications that had more distinctive personalities in the past because the internet disaggregates things like a lot of the personality of a magazine like the New Yorker comes from content like the front matter, the talk of the town sections or the back matter. They're special columns and these are all things that don't perform as well in the isolated landscape of digital media. It's like little extra things that you get when you are reading a physical magazine cover to cover like in the bathroom as a kid. You just spend like I spend a lot of time reading magazines as a child and spend a lot of time thinking about physically how they're put together and what goes into them. This is a very, very common thing for people who end up as magazine editors and it's just you just have fewer affordances to create that kind of connection digitally. There are ways to do it. There are some publications that have been very smart about it like New York magazine classically is very smart about this, but it's harder. Because also there's a bit of a flattening of our social class and similar accelerated by any number of things, increased mobility around the country, increased internet working within the communities that create magazines, which are extremely overrepresented in say Brooklyn versus any other town in America. And then a talk that has come up in a number of different talks this week with people is Twitter as an acculturation force and how the for a few years there was not quite a monoculture on Twitter, but it had some very monoculture of Jason aspects to it where when one is sort of duking it out for distribution on Twitter with one's production function exposed on Twitter. And Twitter also being the place where like meta commentary on artifacts happened that there was a lot of harmonization across organizations that didn't technically exist in the same building and technically employ exactly the same people, but might have done a very good performance of doing it for a few years. I have a very complicated relationship to Twitter. I should also say I don't want to claim to be more original than I am a lot of what I'm saying is kind of old hat in the people who professionally bemoan the state of the media world. But most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about media economics professionally, so I hope I'm saying something new to the people listening to this now. Yeah, complicated relationship with Twitter. On the one hand, I have to be on it for my job. There is no question. It is relevant to figuring out what people are talking about, where is the site guys sharing stuff, getting your name out there being recognized. Also, one, it makes me sad and I don't like it. Two, you can be too zeitgeisty. This is where being quarterly is both a blessing and a curse. It means you can never be totally current, but it also means you can't be too captured. Whenever I'm commissioning a piece, I have to think about, okay, this has to be done by such and such a date. So I can get it to the printer so they can send the proof so I can correct the proofs. It just cannot be up to the moment. It never will be like logistically that is not possible. And that means I need to push myself to think outside of the minute to minute news cycle. The way that I handle this right now is I just have a blocker and I get 15 minutes of Twitter a day. No more. And this works, okay. So curious for the audience, what does the production cycle for one of these that look like my indicative fingers of the wind from having been published in a magazine or two before is it's probably minimally two months out from the time where you commission a piece to that piece actually appearing in people's hands. Yeah, but it could be plus or minus that depending on how you do operations, right? Yeah, minimally, I mean, we've done it faster than that. Two months is good. I like more ideally like right now we are in a couple weeks going to print, which means I will send our PDF files to our printer. Actually, I should step back even from that. While this is happening, I am beginning to commission our winter issue, which will appear in December. So I'm starting to reach out to people and solicit pieces and ask them to write for us. They will send in drafts. The reason I'm doing this so early is some people send in amazing clean copy that I can just send a fact checking on copy editing. Others do not we'll we've done anywhere from one to like four editing rounds on pieces some pieces just need a lot more work. And I want to make sure there's plenty of time if a piece does come in needing a lot of surgery. So however many rounds of editing it takes fact checking, which takes a lot of time copy editing, which takes like somewhat less time, but I can't do it to my standards yet. I pray that day will come soon. I spend half of my budget on this podcast every week doing manual passes over a transcript. And so even copy editing the transcript to get it up to the standards of two intelligent people talking to each other is unfortunately still behind beyond the state of the art. It's really hard and I've also learned it's very hard to find good copy editors and good fact checkers because it actually requires a lot of attention to detail and skill. And people who are good at it can make a lot more money doing something else. This is the sort where it sits ugly head again. If you are sufficiently good to catch mistakes being made by a professional engineer in the moment when they are writing about a highly technical topic. The software industry has any number of things that you can do and I think that once upon a time there was sort of the implicit promise that one would serve once time in a institution in the fact checking department or the copy editing department. And then take some steps up in that institution and so you know you started in the mail room you end up as the CEO you started in the copy editing department you end up as I don't know commissioning editor 25 years from now. And the media landscape has made that trade sort of breakdown I think. That's true and also some people are just nature's copy editors. It's a very specific skill set I've had to get better at it. I am not one of nature's copy editors and now I spend all of my time noticing things like when a number is written as a numeral and when it is spelled out or m dashes versus end dashes. Or like nobody can format a Chicago style footnote. I don't know why this is so hard. I didn't think it was hard until I became a professional editor and I've worked with so many copy editors who for some reason just cannot do this. It's like baffling some people just naturally have it some people don't. That sounds to me like something that opus can almost certainly do and which I'm not be offloading to it but yeah. It's funny m dashes versus end dashes that's become a. Some people think if you've ever seen an m dash and something it's because it was a I generated it's like or or you've had one person in the organization that fought a very good fight for a very long time. Hi critics. Yeah. So I was convinced on that one that she did not convince me that the internet should be lowercase and that is a mistake I will take that one to my grave but. Actually the more interesting for copy especially I think a lot of people think that it's just mechanical and parts of it are but there is a surprising amount of judgment involved like coming up with a house style guide is always complicated. I remember very very early on we had a piece about China's semiconductor industry and we had so many questions relating to Chinese name so the author was coming from the China watching world and so he said. Oh you should do China project style which is to have the name spelled out in pinion and then have it followed by the Chinese characters and this is often important because you're talking about someone. Who is working in China primarily known in China just having the pinion transliteration of their name will not be useful if. A person reading this article can read Mandarin and wants to find information about them on the Chinese internet so you want to include the characters great but then you have a question what if there is a person who is. Who is famous in English with a translation of their name that is not pinion like Mao Zedong or what about someone like Morris Chang the CEO of TSMC who has an English name that is not like he presumably also has a he also doesn't have a Chinese name but he doesn't go by that in English or what about in one case. Almost everyone in this article was a Chinese person working in China whose name was always used in Eastern name order so surname first. Makes sense except for one Chinese Canadian professor who had a fully Chinese name but Western name order how do you refer to that person without an explanatory footnote there is a whole. Set of consideration this is just one tiny example there's a whole set of considerations that go into coming up with a consistent style and I realize that I sound like an insane patent when I'm talking about this but I think it actually matters for a magazine to have a unifying grammar and a unifying way of referring to things and understanding things. I would probably agree with that and you don't want the magazine to feel like separate sub magazines when it discusses China versus discussing I don't know in Japan or India which have their own issues that are adjacent to those but not exactly the same or. This came up in that conversation we were talking about translation and someone's like what about Russian names like what do we like what standardized translation should we use there how would you refer to someone in Russian who has a name whose modern translation will be different from when they're historically known by. We should just do it the tech industry does and compress Chinese Japanese can Korean all into one plane for the fence because that will have no negative consequences this is the thing that's here people seriously argued for a number of years and one the day technically to the enduring discontent of people who are. Forced to live with consequences of what it's called CJK unification but yeah there are no easy answers to it which I guess it's why we get to have so much fun on doing style guides I will confess I have attempted to write a style guide before for prior employers and it is just very very difficult you can get the mechanical parts of style and have a you know a house version of like here's the difference between an m dash and n dash great. But style in terms of imparting taste upon people who do not have exactly the same take on taste is just murderously difficult. I think the acknowledgement of an ad read sounds cooler in Japanese. Let me tell you a scary story you work in marketing and are all set for the new campaign leadership love the wire frames design producer and their usual tool chain. And everyone is plus one for launch except your customers can't actually clicked on a wire frame engineering told you that no one ever gets promoted to staff engineer for just quote making websites and quote. And it's not quite what design envisioned we've all been there unless you use frame or a sponsor of today's episode frame are already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of design pages a free canvas based design tool frame or is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform from social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons all the way to a live site. Frameers where ideas go live start to finish. Frameers of free full feature design tool think unlimited projects unlimited pages unlimited collaborators and all the essentials vectors 3D transforms gradients wire frames. Everything you need to design totally free ready to design iterate and publish all in one tool start creating for free at framer.com slash design and use code complex systems for a free month the framework row. That's framer.com slash design promo code complex systems all one word all capital letters rules and restrictions may apply. This podcast is brought to you by mercury as many listeners are aware I love a good bit of banking I even enjoy the sucky frustrating bits of working with large banks because I'm broken. You know who isn't broken mercury which offers business banking services to 200,000 companies including mine I've used them for business banking for more than six years and been quite happy for the duration. Everything happens in a well designed website and mobile app I use them for the debit card that pays for the studio rental for paying myself profits and for transferring money to contractors. I even use them for wires to angel investments and I've never gone through an involved rigmarole over a single one and wouldn't you know what most of those wires go to other mercury customers. Mercury works well for businesses at a variety of stages and industries from quickly growing funded startups to this relatively tiny internet publishing operation. Visit mercury.com to apply online in 10 minutes mercury is a financial technology company not a bank banking services provided through choice financial group column and an involved bank and trust members FDIC. And it's why you can't just a light it and why having a good copy editor is important because it's not just like as in the Chinese name case it's actually about communicating to the reader and making it easy for the reader if I reference someone can anybody look them up and get. Useful information about them it's about yeah it's about imparting information in a useful way and that is actually hard to compress and those decisions are contentful it's not just arbitrary mechanical choices. What's an example of how a style guide has something which is not about the just mechanics of something but attempts to impart taste upon someone who. Again most of the writers are presumably freelancers they have a periodic encounter with your editing process but. Often after the work is actually delivered how do you. A level done with respect to the kind of taste that asterisk represents well that happens like well before the copy stage it's actually a debate that Jake and I have all the time which is. We like to preserve writers voices while making their pieces better what counts as preserving a writer's voice what should be preserved what shouldn't be preserved what if we just think that something sounds bad how free should we feel to just change it pretty free honestly. I think really a magazine is an extension of the editors taste and. What this means in practice is especially working with writers who have not written for publication before who are more used to writing for themselves there's like in a way it's kind of like being a therapist you have to be able to into it what are they going to react really strongly to what are they going to be okay also. There's a balance of. Just exerting your own will and saying okay I as the editor know that this isn't working and trying to figure out. I can always tell when I'm reacting badly to something what one of the best pieces of editing advice I ever got was it's easier to diagnose problems and it is to diagnose solutions so just because I'm reacting badly to something in a piece doesn't mean that I know how to fix it. And I think often especially in early rounds of editing it's better to just say this doesn't make sense to me or I noticed my eyes blazing over here this isn't working and give the author a chance to figure out how they want to course correct and then if they are stumped or just like don't know how to respond to that feedback I can talk it through with them and try and figure out like together what isn't working. Yeah I think one of the cardinal sins of editing pieces is to go into the line by line to early before you have like meeting of the minds on core things like what is fundamentally the story that this is trying to tell or what is what we are in part upon the reader with it. You know how is that laid out on a macro level and then okay on a paragraph to paragraph level maybe these three paragraphs don't belong here or they're not making sense to me or similar. And maybe have a discussion of that before you start saying okay if we read pen here and then move this here and spending a stake here yada yada yada and that makes it more efficient for both parties and also more likely that you put your cycles against things that are actually meaningful in the final draft versus. You know doesn't no one any favors to to copy edit sentences that will not be in the final draft because the thesis will wander or change during regrets. Well yeah exactly like you don't want to get into line by line to early because it's all going to change anyway. In fact a thing I attempted to do at my prior employer was at institute going to write two drafts for we have an idea that there's an artifact that needs to exist on the internet I will write two drafts for it. And they will have the same punch line but be very different takes on the piece and the first decision that only is like it is completely binary a or b you don't get to say I didn't like the title you don't get say I noticed a you know dangling modifier in the fourth paragraph it's just like take a or take b and then we can polish one of them but let's be aligned more on the like the core thesis and the core five and et cetera. And there's a little bit of difficulty convincing writers to do that partly because many of us are very precious with words and partly because like produce twice the amount of words for you know one X the amount of like pay and publishing opportunities is not great for many writers but if it can win arguments in your organization I would suggest people try it interesting yeah I don't think we will be adopting this practice but I would be interested to hear how it goes. In places are doing it it might be slightly easier these days and that you can have AI do the two stabs for you or make like a very different take on the first one and then say okay just on a pure vibes level to you now are you attracted more to five or five even though certainly although I think they have many surprising strengths and writing they are nowhere near ready to do have a year intellectual writing for magazines yeah. I think that's true I think it's also very hard at least for me personally to figure out what I really think and how my arguments fit together before I written them down it is very easy to have an inquiry idea in my head of what I believe but I find like the exercise of trying to get it on paper well getting just an outline is part of it but then even between an outline and a finished piece just trying to work out like what is the proper connective tissue here and how do I make these transitions work often I'll find something that I think is kind of just a like technical. It's not a technical issue or a flow issue is really a conceptual issue like the reason a transition or something isn't working is because I really haven't thought through how the thoughts are connected and I at least cannot imagine using AI for those preliminary stages of my writing process because I just wouldn't be thinking about things in the same way. And I as an editor to I found I don't think that the models give great feedback I have friends smart friends for whom they do and this could just be user error on my part but like I will spend a long time with a piece and I will really try and like reverse outline it take it apart figure out does this like actually imply the thing that it's implying here what is this argument doing does it make sense in its context and yeah I don't think that the models are quite there. I have been pleasantly surprised this year for where they are in terms of doing feedback on things in particular. Going through the exercise of if you're feeling this piece with six different ones on it with that you should then being say a persona for a potential reader. You know, embody the persona of venture capitalists to embody the person of this particular venture capitalist etc etc. Even when they're wrong it is useful for me to have someone say well in the voice of Mark Andreessen I would say here here and like no I don't actually believe that Mark Andreessen would say that but I'm glad that one person at this table saying I'm the voice of Mark Andreessen for the purpose of the exercise. That's extremely interesting because one piece of advice that I give we're doing a blocking fellowship right now and a piece of advice that I've given to fellows that I've given to people who I've done editing workshops with is user personas. I think it is incredibly useful when you are writing a piece to have in mind who is this for and what am I responding to. It's very hard to write without this and I do have a model of the asterisk reader in my mind and this just helps inform things like what do I need to explain? What can I take for granted? What counter arguments should I anticipate having to respond to and this just informs a lot of how you word and structure pieces and yeah that actually that is a really useful point. This is something that's not easy for a lot of people and even for me like I don't I have an I am lucky in that I have a magazine with an audience and I have an idea of what that audience is but often people will be writing things for quite different audiences. Yeah, that sounds like a really good use case. I should try that. Yeah, the moment at which I first woke up and took notice of how far I'd come earlier this year was there was a piece I was working which was quite professionally significant for me and I passed it through. I believe it was opus 4, not sure off the top of my head, but one paragraph at a time and said this is this is important and you know maybe even a little legally. It's really consequential and so I want to make sure that I know exactly what I'm saying to the various audiences for this here's a paragraph. Tell me what you're understanding the subtext is tell me how you react to that subtext as you know ABCD and did I imply anywhere here. The thing that I'm not trying to imply in the paragraph right twist the knife did like you know what did you get a subtext here because it really needs to include like a knife was twist or either. I could be miscalibrated or I need to go back and do some more twisting and I've worked with very competent communications professionals and magazine editors and similar over the course of my career. The non person I was working with was in the top 50% of anyone I've worked with and so do maybe experiment with it is a wild time to be alive. For sure I should also say I am a professional editor I know that AI is useful for me for programming because I am not a professional programmer and I am not especially good at it. So the fact that I do not find AI feedback on writing a significant value out of for my life does not mean they're not good at it. I'm switching the gears a little bit you had mentioned earlier that I noticed when you pronounce that you pronounce that in the original German and you had mentioned that you had made some study of German university specifically and then I feel a great deal of attachment to the ecosystem that is university as well also feeling a little bit of they're both unfairly aligned in communities like ours. But there is a gap between what we would hope that they would accomplish for us in society and what they actually do to live around and you given Tuesday. And what are your thoughts on the synthesis of that? Thank you for letting me talk about my hobby horse here and for context before I became magazine editor I wanted to be an intellectual historian and my area of expertise was 18th and early 19th century German academia so this is something that I think is very interesting and like to talk about but also and it's something that I wrote about recently in our not our last issue a few months ago I had a piece on the origins of the research university which did come out of 19th century Germany and is the piece that I've wanted to write for a very long time and it's actually like related to exactly what you said it actually came out of talking to some people who you know I'll tell you later in the progress studies community who spend their lives thinking about scientific institutions and knowledge creating institutions. And I was in the process of researching this piece and I was talking about about it and they're like wait, wait, the research university is German in origin. And I was like I'm sorry like what? I think the reason both of us are well obviously this is your professional hobby horse. I thought that was just one of the sort of ambient things in the water that one learns while one is you know going through the cultureation process that results in getting out of a research university but anyhow apologies for derailing us. This is my feldspar and I realize it is a kind of like specific thing to be obsessed with it is it is in lottery ethanations this is what I rolled but I that made me feel really motivated to talk about it because we are both in or adjacent to communities that are extremely interested in institutions of knowledge production in my own very small way I operate an institution of knowledge production and I think it was it was very surprising to me to learn how much we take that infrastructure for granted. And the reason I wanted to write that piece is it's a small miracle I think that we have research universities if you asked a informed person in 1800 where would most original research happen in a hundred years from now I really think almost no one would have said a university. I think they would have said it will be something like the French Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society. It will not look like academia is dead it's medieval it's there an outgrowth of the monastic tradition we are trying to we are trying to move away from that whole thing why you think they'll be doing medicine really well they were doing medicine they were the things that universities did was in Europe. And I can really only speak to Europe in an informed way here was they would have typically four faculties law medicine theology and what in Germany they called philosophy in other places they call it other things but everything else. And philosophy is at the bottom of the totem pole so the real function of the university is a teaching institution they are producing future lawyers or simple servants doctors and priests. That is what they are for there are scholars affiliated with universities who do do research but they're not getting paid for it they're not and more importantly they're not getting promoted for it. The way that you get promoted is kind of insane very political very nepotistic sort of related to teaching not especially strongly related to teaching definitely not related to your intellectual output unless you're like a huge superstar who makes your university famous and draws in more students. Not a great system and increasingly scholars who wanted to spend more time focusing on research were being drawn outside of the university to these different kinds of state funded scientific institutions. But this creates a problem at least relative to the current system which is how do you produce new scholars there's no affordance in this system for teaching someone to be a researcher or for developing an institutional culture around producing new knowledge. It's kind of individual people doing their own thing and then increasingly over the course of the 18 like 17th 18th centuries coming together with other practitioners but there's no sense that there is a research culture that we can inculcate new students into and then they will have the career of being a researcher and producing new knowledge and learn the skills that go into that you really have to teach yourself. And then once you've taught yourself then you can publish and then you can like go to that the Royal Society it's not institutionalized in any way and what you get through a bunch of contingent things that happen in Germany between like 1730 and 1810 stretching through like the 1870s is an institution where being a researcher is a career has a professional culture. Professors advancement like promotion becomes tied to their research output and these are all new things like the idea that you would get hired or promoted or paid to do research and there would be a culture in your field of evaluating that research and that an important goal professionally would be to teach students the particular skills that go into producing research that are specific to your field and passing on the professional culture that allows that that's all new. It comes to exist in this one context in a very short period of time and then spreads all over the world like the American system of graduate education is copied from Germany basically everywhere where graduate education is research oriented they were copying Germany. There's these amazing letters from like Louis Pasteur in like 1868 I want to say he was complaining about like he's doing his research in an attic and German biology professors have university like state funded laboratories. Did not really exist in France at that point and whenever I hear someone dismiss I mean there's like a million reasons why universities are valuable now and I don't need to go into them there's just there's so many other people have made this case better than I can but whenever I hear anybody now dismissing the university system I just think the fact that we have an institution that has cultural mechanisms for rewarding the production of knowledge. Is very special and very contingent and then for perpetuating itself like and fragile and I think we should feel a real sense of gratitude and appreciation that this thing has come to exist because it so easily could not have and the effects that it had on the world were just immense German universities of the 19th century created so much of modern science so much of the modern world is only possible because of this system. I think if you know literally just graph the periodic table over years and we start filling the blank spaces of the map one almost poison chemistry at a time and you know we we sit on the shoulders of giants in a lot of ways. This is yeah and this is an important point that because it's not that actually like you can go back earlier you can talk about like levoscale or whatever and I feel like people in the progress world often like to lionize these enlightenment lone wolf scientists and a lot of them are like priestly like a lot of them are great I love these people I admire these people but I think we just under estimate the importance of bureaucracy as a force multiplier. Like you can be a priestly or a love of see if you're a genius and you have a lot of money and you today it's harder but you could back then but the thing that was really important in Germany was the idea that is like a bright but fairly normal bourgeois German young man you could become a chemist and plug away at doing chemistry work and you would exist in an infrastructure where you would be taught how to do chemistry and you could be professionally rewarded for making new discoveries in chemistry. And you would have access to a lab with materials to do chemistry and we were essentially at the time as a civilization doing red first search across all chemical space and just requires more bodies you can't well knowing what we know now you could like reason from first principles to oh there must be something interesting but the production function of chemistry knowledge is a lot of people with various like volatile chemicals and applying one of you know 16 transformations they can do on them and then hopefully not immediately tasting what comes out that leads to short lifespan for chemists but the fruits of 18th century chemistry synthetic fertilizer etc etc etc you don't really need anything else but the first one but okay synthetic fertilizer is a really interesting one because the cover and Bosch are operating at a time when the system is the German university system in particular is changing a lot there are really like that's a set of 19th early 20th century innovations I forget which one is which one of them was a university chemist one of them worked for a large chemical company and one of the reasons I think why the American university system overtook the German system is that German universities had a very strong bright line green pure and applied research basically for class reasons I do not know what that was. I don't need to get into all of this right now but those kinds of collaborations were somewhat structurally harder to do in the German system then in the American system Americans are just like much more Lucy goosey about oh we can have like a school that teaches science and engineering and pure chemistry and applied chemistry all in the same place it's great like you get the hoverbosch is process out of Germany and it's fantastic but that kind of thing is like a little bit structurally easier to do in America and we continue to have derivatives of this side too. The present day with granted there are other ways of doing scientific organization. Obviously around the war there was a and all doors a great government interest in directly funding science and Manhattan program etc kind of model and we've had labs in industry for a while Bell labs in particular gets a lot of credit in spaces like this one but the aggregate output of all the industry lab. Is like not it's not nothing we're certainly glad we have it but it does not approach the aggregate output of research universities in the United States or our close peers right no and it's also I am just not nearly as much as knowledgeable about the post world war to American scientific apparatus and so I want to constrain what I say I know that like a lot of people talk about breaking down like different sources of funding and the rise and fall of industrial research labs and like they're and also now innovation clusters are a major topic of concern like I know certainly like the China watcher space there's a lot of discussion of linkages between universities and corporations and government labs and how innovations flow between all of these sectors public private partnerships were really big for a few years. I think that exact term has a fallout favor in some places but that the fact of like an organization where we're going to mix some academics some people from government some some people from industry and then push money into it from all the sources but really from government. Has led to some amount of good in the world yeah I don't want to say the universities are the only institutions that produce knowledge like clearly they're not but I do think that. The structure of the research university is the backbone of knowledge production in the modern world because it is one of the very few institutions we have come up with that is able to. Create a culture that is an assist at this goes back to the beginning of the conversation to create a culture that is in a sustained way oriented towards truth towards the production of knowledge and transmit that and make it a career someone can follow like there is no like a lot of nature that says that something that. Does that has to exist and we have created very few things like that yeah and it is unfortunately I believe lots of institutions have taken it on the chin over the last couple of years universities no less than many. And I think probably more fragile than anyone expects. I went to a decent research university took a look at potentially joining it and then. Got a few red flags and had to exit and then. As a result when I finally got to make my one contribution the academic literature they asked me what is your institutional affiliation and I said. Bingo card creator because instead of working in American lab I was grinding up bingo cards for elementary school teachers next to a rice paddy in Japan which not to make this overlay about myself but. When we break pipelines like that the nature of pipeline is that it can be 40 years long. And when we create them will have a bubble in that pipeline for 40 plus years and it's tough to look at the experience the last 10 years and think we've probably got some bubbles in the tubing at this point. This is something actually to tie it back to my actual job that I think about a lot because I worry the next our next the issue that we're assigning for now the winter issue is going to be science. And the reason is I like to do issue themes based around whatever I'm preoccupied with and this is a thing that I'm going to be thinking about all the time anyway that I might as well just make it my job. And the thing that I am preoccupied right now is institutional science and how do we do it now how do we do it better how is it breaking how can we prevent it from being broken. Both because this is literally what I am working on and because I run a general interest publication that has quite a bit of technical content I've been thinking a lot about what is the role of science communicators and I think that. The collapse of institutional trust in the sciences is very multi causal very complicated has been going on for a very long time I certainly think a big part of it is science communication running ahead of the evidence base. Which goes back to why I wanted to start asterisk and part of it was a reaction to well it was like the question of doing your own research right like this was in 2022 I was in the rationalist community and I felt like wow my friends got some things right about covid that it felt like more mainstream sources weren't on the other hand there are people out there who have concluded that vaccines are a conspiracy to kill us all and. How can I like I was really rest was then an am now wrestling with the question of isn't responsible to say well when my smart friend who I trust say the expert consensus is wrong I should trust them but when those other people do with their loony tunes and from there to wait like what is the expert consensus is there a consensus when I'm trying to draw these conclusions i'm still citing academic papers but then like when rfk junior is trying to draw these conclusions he's also citing academic papers on some level I can't I think it is impossible and you're not responsible. To say a lay person who does not have significant expertise in a technical field can just do their own research I think this is like nobody can do this for all of the things that a person in the modern world needs to do in order to make informed decisions about their lives. This would be catastrophic to from an economic or any other sort of perspective if you have to be able to describe the physics of how a light bulb works before you can't. It doesn't work and on the like and the consequences of trying to do this can be personally catastrophic and on the other hand like some institutions have made some pretty discredited calls over the past few years and the question that I am like obsessed with that I am constantly returning to is how do I present information to the world in a way that is like intellectually responsible that that leaves the reader with a better model of the world and they had before they encountered it. And what level of deference should I exercise like how do I determine even what an expert can what can says this in a field looks like what is a reasonable contrary in view I don't have good answers to these questions like I'm curious to hear what you think because it's something that I like I wanted to do a science issue because I really don't know how to approach this and it's something I'm trying to work out every day yeah I don't think I will immediately give you something that you've never thought about before. I think from a communications perspective and also a strategy of the institutions perspective we had a number of years where I should mention people claim consensus ahead of the evidence base and where the claim of consensus itself became sort of self self referential yeah I think this is. I think this is. It's happening in a number of places is most acute and say climate science climate science I think about yeah that's the other big example where I don't even think it's that the science itself is there is some bad science bad science every field I think it's that there is a cottage industry of communication around it that does not interpret that science in a responsible way. I also think that the call is coming from inside the house on that one too there's a quote I can fish out for the transcript on a particular climate scientist who said I will keep ex out of the scientific record even if I need to redefine what peer reviewed research is and then actions like that which didn't come out of nowhere they felt they were under attack for very politically order. And they were like this is the other they were under attack for politically motivated reasons that absolutely did happen there's a book that I like have you had merchants of doubt no. The Naomi arrest is and I forget the other author's name okay this book is really interesting it's also really frustrating it's about politically motivated attacks on. First like science showing that smoking tobacco causes cancer and then on climate science and they do a very very good job in this book of showing there was a specific group of scientists mostly physicists mostly like cold war era Republicans who were solicited by industry groups to muddy the waters and spread out first about the link between. Cigarettes and cancer and then about like a variety of environmental and climate goals is like a real phenomenon that happened on the other hand there's a difference in the level of actual scientific certainty on these things from like the link between cigarette smoking and cancer like it is just not responsible to spread out about that that is completely real that happened to on the other extreme. The idea of nuclear water that like a nuclear war would cause these extreme climactic events pretty uncertain much more uncertain based on modeling that was available at the time and a lot of things were kind of in the middle there and. And I think people sort of latch down to nuclear winter as well uncertain sure but it contributes you know if we just shut up and multiply here it spreading this will. Cost of some points over the long term on being honest interlocutors but avoid nuclear war which are very large. Impact in the presence and so therefore we will only have to compromise this once and more to the point like science communicators at the time I think made this calculation of deliberately exaggerating their certainty about this outcome and then their opponents seized on that to say look they're lying to you because they kind of were. And then this was discrediting without and we see this dynamic happening again and again I think another really good example today is extreme weather events where my understanding and I am not an expert so like I would love to be corrected on this if I'm wrong. That the link between like climate change very real the link between climate change and specific extreme weather events much much more uncertain like I saw this might my family live in the Pacific palisades. So I saw I was following news about the palisades fires in Los Angeles at the beginning of this year pretty closely and a lot of people really really wanted to link it to climate change and I think that the case for this is pretty weak for various reasons that I don't need to go into right now fires happen in Southern California for a lot of reasons. And this is because it is of course useful for narratives about wanting to prevent climate change a good and noble goal to make this connection. And again it's a company it's not like oh scientists are lying to you they're mostly not it's that you can make a case that it's connected and then you can make another case that it isn't and I think on balance the case that it is not a result of climate change is stronger. But there's a whole cottage industry of science communication that amplifies one side of the story and it makes the whole thing look less credible. And there's also I think increased politicization in a lot of places where after it is the capital as science you are to use the parlance of her times a denier if you would ever take the other side of the science on anything. And then increasingly it gets to the point where you know cross things with like wildly different mechanisms fields etc etc well if you sign up for one bit of the science. You got to sign up for everything that we put capitalist science on and if you disagree with one bit of the science or deny her and so and then people get released into this free floating atmosphere where they find themselves disagreeing with one thing and then find that the only people that will validate them on one thing are crazy and so like get affiliated with a lot of other crazy things downstream of it. We were talking about vaccine policy. Yeah. Complicated thoughts which I couldn't possibly go into in a sufficient depth in an hour. But is there a case for optimism on how we can do science communication better how we can reform our institutions to people of the trust. Really really really really okay big question. But like this is also my job so my maybe most naive and polyanna ish view is like I think people should just tell the truth. I almost want to be argued against here because this feels like I think it betrays a very rosy view of the world but I am fundamentally an optimistic person. And what I what I try to do is just not print things that I don't I mean I will print things I disagree with I will do that all the time but like I won't print things that I think are dishonest or that are trying to push the reader to a conclusion that isn't that can't be defended by the arguments in the evidence that are on the page because ultimately people aren't I mean I'm not going to say people are morons some people are morons. But I think people are not irrational morons there when even when they're morons like pretty rational morons who will respond quite negatively to being deliberately misled. I also think that the kind of writing that I publish reaches a very small audience in the grand scheme of things in an audience that is more selected to care about truth. So it's not I think that I have a role in shaping a certain kind of discourse in a select community and I don't want to underplay that because I think that. That work also matters like candidly like elite discourse matters and there is no guarantee that things that like smart people we know talk about will be correct and I want to increase the extent to which like smart people who read asterisk because all asterisk readers are brilliant are correct. I don't have a great solution for like mass public trust some thought I have thoughts about it. One thing which feels somewhat obvious is to the extent we rack up wins and like make the fruits of those wins widely available it's easy to buy trust with with wins and like ultimately that is a big part of the exercise and the combination of what's the local our goal for this you know your belief should pay rent and experiences like if we if we spend you know $10 billion on funding an institution yeah really got to deliver like bring home the bacon and 2020 was rough for that. I think and I actually okay to go back to 2020 again I think this is it like case in point for a lot of these things so I think a huge amount of falling trust in scientific institutions is the fact that public health figures were in a very verifiable way contradicting themselves or trying to cover up information they disagreed with and this led people to conclude like oh maybe they're lying about more stuff and again that's not irrational I think that like a lot of people just have incorrect beliefs about like the extent to which there was there was there were widespread conspiracy theories but like yes if you try to suppress information that will cause a backlash but also Operation Warp Speaks a huge win yes and that hasn't increased vaccine uptake. Okay I would put there one it did increase vaccine uptake because the counterfactual we probably don't have a vaccine right now that's true but there was like I mean COVID vaccines were a huge huge win a concrete win and that didn't have the effect in repairing public trust that I would have hoped it would have had. And I think that this says that even once you have a concrete win getting that to translate into trust is still a function of the media environment so I think it's a harder problem. I think media and policy environment we did not do nearly as good of jet like on a policy side we could have said okay not that we have the vaccines the pandemic is immediately over the biology to support that and etc etc But a more concrete linkage between you know we're going to graph our vaccination rate on a dashboard and the things that you hate about the last two years about not being able to meet your friends about these positions on individual liberty etc etc those things get rescinded as we go up on the dashboard would have made it more of a put more bacon in the package for people versus like yeah we're going to have vaccines and in fact we're going to fire you if you don't take the vaccine because that is what honest people do to sell you for something but the fact of having the vaccines changes nothing about the overall you know containment strategy here which seems like an unforced error to me but I will say this for my point of minimal expertise I was just the person trying to get the vaccines to people because in our institutional rush to make sure that everyone got them we lost them all that happened was a little weird a lot of political discourses in the United States I feel have the punchline and this is why people who are in positions of authority are not at fault for all the bad things we are seeing and vaccine hesitancy is like well you know sure they won't say it out loud they certainly won't say it in a press conference but the government people on civil society etc etc were incompetent with regards to doing a product rollout and that competence cost lives but if you say oh the real problem is that I have not failed the people the people have failed me they have refused this vaccine there is no hesitant about it then it is no longer a problem that I can't like write down the locations where I set the vaccine to or successfully get that information out on light news or do a persuasive campaign and in many other places in government where we have things that people should want like say free money you know there is no concept in the Department of Education or any literature about it for Pell Grant hesitancy it's understood yes we do have a mechanism within this institution to explain the fact of a Pell Grant to someone who might be a first generation college student it is free money we tell you that fact we will clarify it is not alone if you have questions about it at this point like that sounds too good to be true I don't know is taking the money going to cause my child to have autism then we will like say we will not say you are an idiot we will say we want you to attend this university and so we would like to confirm any questions you have even that one and and you know treat you like responsible adults human and then give you the free money and you know our unwillingness to do that with respect to vaccine hesitancy is a choice I think there is a common underlying phenomenon here which is that it is very hard to be rational about a world that you don't understand so with vaccine hesitancy dying of COVID is a low probability event I actually don't know anyone who has died and I think a lot of people don't and so you get a vaccine you may or may not notice a significant difference in your own life but you do notice that the logistics of the roller being handled in the shambolic way and this does not fill you with confidence in the overall situation or similarly if you're a first generation college student you haven't been exposed to the content of Pell Grant but you have noticed like oh my mom is on welfare or my aunt is on welfare and it's this like horrible intrusive system where I have to perform in all these ways and the money is super conditional I don't understand it and it just feels degrading and I don't want to get involved in that and it may be the case that like yes in fact it's free money and they should just take it but without that extra communicative work they might be quite rational to say oh it'll make my life worse to get involved in this system you know why should I believe that the government is going to do something totally with no strings attached when it has never done that before despite many people telling me over the years that you know food stamps and similar have no strings attached except for the 47 that we will attach to you immediately on the meeting and your necessity of filling out a report every six weeks for the rest of your life. Yeah exactly and these systems are humiliating. I think I don't remember if you we had this conversation when you were at our house but one of my housemates used to work at a croakers in the Midwest and has talked a lot about dealing with WIC which is for mothers like new moms and small children and it's just the most like baffling degrading set of restrictions on what you can buy like she would talk about being a check out clerk and having moms like weeping in the checkout line because they bought strawberry yogurt because they're toddler like strawberry yogurt but they're only allowed to buy the like plain unflavored yogurt and they can't afford the yogurt and like it's a horrible system of course people have this negative reaction to it and I mean again not an original take at all very very cold take but a lot of institutional trust just comes from institutional trust worthiness like when you talk to British people they love the NIH the NIH is a lot of problems whenever I talk to a British friend or read about it the consistent thing I hear is the customer service experience is really good like they feel respected by nurses they don't have to deal with all of the like insane billing situation that we have to deal with here. Just having your day to day interactions with an institution be pleasant and positive some is hugely significant. Yeah I would have very different political opinions if I had grown up in Japan versus the United States of America because the retail experience of interfacing with the government in a Japanese ward office is just so much better than at the DMV or Chicago City Hall or similar. Yeah competent people on the front line that have empty very helpful I will say with respect to this particular. Vaccine we you know of the universe of possible chemicals and possible biology we are not in the most fortunate universe which is that you will notice immediately after getting vaccine or you are quite likely to notice that you feel really rough immediately after. And that is not baked into every vaccine everywhere and people come up with some interesting folk theories as to why it happened and I don't think those folk theories usefully describe reality but. An argument people make is well that's just because they are you know. They are doing evil witchcraft on this one it's not like the vaccines of your childhood not like those good vaccines now this is the this is the new mRNA evil brand and I think there was an unwillingness in some parts of scientific establishment to even acknowledge like the level of say side effects and similar. Not merely that there was not a willingness to acknowledge there's we're getting deep in the weeds on vaccines here but my own hyper focused interests. The vaccine adverse event reporting system V A E R S is a thing that exists out in the world you either as a physician or as a person who is receiving care can say okay subsequent to receiving this vaccine I had this event and by law that gets entered in a various and then the scientific community can you know like monitor the population why roll out of these things and say okay. We think it is extremely unlikely that nothing bad will happen it's a risk reward function function that we're going after here and various is a data source great. There exists papers in journals which say that. The ability to people to write information into various is a risk because people could write either untrue things or. And here's the leap they could write true things that decrease the propensity of other people to become vaccinated and so therefore. People advocate in journals to turn bears off or to keep it behind a medical professional and therefore the United States misinformation bureaucracy went out to places like Twitter YouTube etc etc and said hey there's a genre of misinformation where the information is not wrong per say. But it is vaccine hesitancy content and we would like you to zero the vaccine hesitancy content please and an explanation of what their system is and how to put your symptoms into it is vaccine hesitancy content and. We have not taken nearly enough lumps either on the part of the tech industry or the part of the government for for that. I really think we're going to be paying for this bridge generation like it brings me no joy i'm not. It could be worse actually it could be worse have you read about the history of smallpox eradication. Yes but probably not in the way that you meant the question. The history of getting like there was a lot of very coercive stuff towards the end there which I think was ultimately justified but like it got very very rough and the early history the 19th century history of vaccination as opposed to like inoculation and then vaccination also quite interesting because early vaccines were actually dangerous. We just understood the technology a lot less well and there was a there's a lot of missing like what we would now call misinformation a lot of true and quite concerning information and and I think i'm not an expert in this is one of the things that I there's two things that I want to read a lot more about to understand this whole set of issues better one is the early history of vaccination in Britain and then the rest of Europe in the US and how doctors managed to create trust in the first. Place with a much more dangerous version of this technology the second is the kind of professionalization of medicine in the United States in 1920s and 1930s because the 19th is like in the progressive era you have the FDA but it has like the powers are much more restricted than the modern FDA until. There's a huge there's a leap in the early 30s and another leap in the 60s after the ledimide but the early 20s and 30s just full of medical cracks insane quantities of medical hox turism I guess not that insane from like a hyper modern perspective but. Just stay cool like literal snake oil literal snake oil the coca-feuille has cocaine that takes that we have this amazing serious catalog from like 1910 and it's just like our snake in your makeup cocaine medicine are taking your medicine this electric belt that you can buy and it shocks your genitals and it's supposed to cure prostate cancer it's it and you can just advertise this stuff and make these claims and. There was a very active movement to create trusted medical organization that could say like no actually real doctors think that this is crazy pants and they were fighting a much more uphill battle than doctors today because like this institutional credibility didn't exist and actually I think an underrated fact about medicine is that going to a doctor was probably net negative until I'm going to say I don't know 1880. You could probably make it earlier but until modern hygiene germ theory and anesthesia really sanitation. You can even make the case until the introduction of antibiotics which isn't until again the 30s going to a medical professional is like really at least not better probably worse than just doing some home remedy it takes a re it is like really really late in the existence of institutionalized medicine. For institutionalized medicine to be good enough to be like not more likely to kill you so doctors in the 20s and 30s are fighting a much sharper uphill battle to convince the public that like no institutionally we know what is correct and what is poisonous and they also like new less than we know now and they managed to pull together this network of institutions that became much more trusted and they never abolished like quackery or medical misinformation. There's often there's also some interesting compromises that were made along the way there like for example in the United States that. Power practice practitioners are doctors why well we kind of need the votes yeah like there's all kinds of things like this but they did manage to create a level of institutionalized trust in the products of to go back and back to the universities of the scientific medical establishment because like modern bacteriology all of that like the modern medical sciences also an outgrowth of the German research university. This is like really comes out of like the university labs that were being funded in newly unified Germany after about 1871 and this other things going on i'm just a journalist but. This idea that medicine worked and produced more reliably useful results than non institutionalized medicine was new and it took a lot of work to convince people of the fact but that work got done and i'm not an expert in how it got done but like a reading project that i'm excited to engage in. Over the next few weeks and months is understanding how those dynamics played out yeah well i think it will be interesting to catch the asterisk edition of the I guess history of science the science issue we're also going to talk or it's not just going to be a history issue i'm always having to fight my instinct to make everything a history issue. I look forward to reading that when it is available on the internet and unless the same question i usually ask although the answer is fairly obvious for you where can people find you on the internet. They can find me at asteriskmag.com also you could get the print edition it's very beautiful. Well thanks very much for coming on the program today Clara and for the rest of you thanks very much we'll see you next week on complex systems. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of complex systems if you have comments drop me an email or hit me up at patio 11 on Twitter ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons and also because they let me know what you like. Thanks for tuning into this week's episode of complex systems if you have comments drop me an email or hit me up at patio 11 on Twitter ratings and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons and reviews are the lifeblood of new podcasts for SEO reasons and also because they let me know what you like.