Into the COLAverse – Episode 29: Art Markman

[00:00:00] Frederick: Welcome to Into the Coliverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me, your host, Frederick Luis Aldama, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It’s my great Pleasure and honor to have Art Markman, Annabelle Arion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing, as well as Vice Provost of Academic Affairs.

Welcome, Art. It

[00:00:36] Art: is great to be here. Thanks so much. So

[00:00:39] Frederick: Art, um, already with this incredible title that you have. Uh, there sounds like there might be a story there. Um, maybe it’s a story that we can get to immediately or where the journey will take us. I do want to talk a little bit about how you ended up in cognitive science at Brown, but maybe we should start with that incredible title that you have.

[00:01:04] Art: Well, I mean, I was fortunate enough to get, uh, to, to, to get a, uh, a professorship with, uh, an endowment on it. But you know, when I saw it for the first time, the, uh, the, the, the, the name on it is Animal Irian Worsham and the, the, the, that second name, Irian, I R I O N. When you look at that, you actually, it’s not obvious how you pronounce it.

And for many years, I actually didn’t know how to pronounce it and, and so people would Would come up to me, uh, before I gave a talk and they’d say, I have a question for you. And I’d say, I don’t know. And they’d say, I haven’t asked the question yet. I said, no, but I know what the question is going to be.

And I don’t know. And they’d say, well, let me ask the question. How do you pronounce the middle name in this? I say, I don’t know. Uh, and then, uh, maybe six, seven years ago, I was sitting with, uh, uh, an older alum of UT, uh, when I was director of the IC squared Institute and. Halfway through the conversation he said something about, Oh, I, I knew Irian Warsham.

I said, Wait, stop. What did you just say? And, and, and he said, Yeah, Irian Warsham. And I went, Okay, this is great. So, so after, after all of those years, I suddenly had the pronunciation of the name. I was so Excited. So

[00:02:23] Frederick: good. Because yes, I needed help with the pronunciation. Absolutely. Um, so yeah, well, you’ve got this title for for a reason.

Um, you’re absolute kind of incredible productivity, a productivity that actually reaches way beyond classrooms way beyond the university in a way It’s a kind of exemplar, an embodiment of, you know, you know, what we aim to do as university professors, right? But it begins, um, long before you started publishing your many books and your, your, um, podcasts, your, you know, all of the public facing work that you do, um, Psychology Today, the Harvard Review, all of that.

Um, so, but tell me, Cognitive Science, 1988, Brown, what… What led you to, uh, to a degree in cognitive science? I know that you have a deep interest, more than interest, passion for history and literature. Um, so yeah, why cognitive science? You

[00:03:34] Art: know, like, like so many people, I went to college not really knowing what I wanted to study and being profoundly influenced by people around me.

So my, my mother was a teacher. My father was an accountant. So I don’t know. I thought, well, maybe I should be an accountant, but But Brown, where I was an undergraduate, didn’t have a business school. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll study, uh, economics, but, but I also sort of liked physics when I was in high school.

So I thought, well, maybe I’ll take physics and do that. So my first year in college, I took economics and I didn’t really, didn’t, I didn’t like it. I didn’t, it didn’t resonate for me. I took a couple of economics classes and it didn’t, didn’t really work for me. And I took, I took a physics class, uh, and, and it didn’t like me.

At all. I just, it was not, I did not do well in that. And, and, and so I drifted actually for a couple of years in college. I took a lot of classes. I, there were a lot of things I enjoyed, but I, I, I wasn’t sure what to major in. And I had to declare what at Brown they called a concentration. And I had an advisor who sat down with me at the end of my sophomore year and said, it’s really time to declare a concentration.

What do you want to study? I said, I really don’t know. I said, but yeah. I, you know, I took a psychology class. I kind of liked it, but I don’t think I want to be a psych major, and I took a neuroscience class, and I like that, but I don’t really want to be a neuroscientist. I took a linguistics class, and I like that, but I don’t really think I want to be a linguist.

I took an anthropology class. I like that. I don’t think I really want to be, uh, you know, and I kind of, and, and, and I got to the end of this list, and, and the advisor looked at me and said, you realize every single thing you’re describing to me counts towards the major in cognitive science. Is it possible you’re a cognitive scientist?

And I realized that what I liked about all of these different disciplines was that they were providing this different lens on, on, on human thinking and human behavior. But, and that what I liked was, was being able to take that, that, that variety of different vantage points. And, and so, uh, and so I ended up declaring that concentration in, in cognitive science, and actually did most of my undergraduate coursework, uh, in computer science.

Um, and, and much less in some of these other areas. But back in the 1980s, when I was a college student, uh, computers were We’re small and slow and and didn’t have a lot of data associated that you could process. And so, um, so I remember then being in a taking a graduate seminar in artificial intelligence in 19.

That would have been about the spring of 1987. Yeah. And, um, and I remember we All right. We read a paper on, on how robots could learn to navigate a space, and it started with a little experiment that the, uh, that the author of the paper did on, on people learning to navigate a space, and then built a little computer model that, that mimicked what people were doing, and at the very beginning of class, the professor teaching the class made a disparaging comment about robots about doing an experiment like that and, you know, we should just do the computational work and, uh, and I remember raising my hand and giving an impassioned five minute defense of the importance of doing experiments to understand intelligent behavior while the other graduate students who were taking this class, uh, you know, I was one of the few undergrads in the class.

The graduate students taking the class were looking at me in horror because I was Disagreeing fundamentally with the with the faculty member teaching it and and as they were staring at me like this and I was giving this this little diatribe, I realized I might I might be a psychologist and and at that moment decided, Okay, I’m going to pursue graduate studies, but I’m going to do it in in psychology and and become a cognitive psychologist and uh and then and then went from from Brown to uh and ended up luckily getting into Illinois Uh, which was a wonderful cognitive psychology program and, and, and going there.

But, uh, but having that multidisciplinary background was incredibly Helpful, because I think it, it, it’s, it’s humbling to realize that there is no single discipline that actually has the answer for anything. And that, and that you have to be willing to take multiple vantage points and listen to experts from multiple perspectives if you’re actually going to understand anything complicated.

[00:08:04] Frederick: Is that also the inspiration for human dimensions of organizations? Um,

[00:08:10] Art: you know, it’s, it’s interesting. I mean, it, it certainly plays a role in, in why I resonated so much to, to that as a, as an approach. So, you know, the, the interesting thing about human, the human dimensions of organizations program was, um, you know, this was back in the, in, in 2011, the 2010 and 2011.

So, so Mark music. Was it was one of the associate deans and and he and Amy Ware, who was an American Studies PhD, was working in the dean’s office, had put a lot of effort into thinking about the prospect of creating some kind of liberal arts based. Master’s program that might, uh, might appeal to people in in business, and they found some historical precedents for that in in some work that got done and attend.

And at that point, um, they the dean’s office reached out to me and asked if I’d be willing to talk to them about how this might get. Operationalized and, um, and I immediately, I think, maybe because of the, you know, this, this background in thinking about multidisciplinarity, um, I, it, I, it immediately, I found it really appealing and, uh, I remember taking the document that they wrote, uh, saying that we should build a master’s program and, and writing a four page document.

Response, um, that I titled the human dimensions of organizations and said, you know, and and sort of gave my addition to the really great work that they did. And, um, you know, my and and and it was a fascinating thing because, you know, we we often call the pace of change at universities glacial because we don’t know anything slower than a glacier.

But, uh. But, but actually they reached out to me. It was about the first week of February of 2011. And, uh, and they gave me that we had a meeting and they gave me that, that initial document that, that, uh, Mark Music and Amy Ware had written. And then the following week I, I sent a document back and we had another meeting and, and on March 1st.

So, so about. Three and a half weeks later, um, they committed to creating the program and, and Amy Ware actually transferred from the Dean’s office into the, the fledgling program. And, and, and we were off recruiting people to, to, to engage them in, in, in this new venture. And it was, it was just so much fun because, and I think it was that same thrill of recognizing that so many of us in liberal arts have a deep.

Passion for understanding people from our perspective and a wealth of knowledge. That a lot of other people would benefit from understanding and and so, you know, we just we just run around the college describing what we were interested in doing and and just thankfully got got a number of people who were willing to commit time to a dream and, uh.

And, and, and put, put together a group and, and, and ultimately developed, uh, first the master’s program and then, and then, you know, the, the, the non credit classes and finally the undergraduate program and it, what a, but, but it was just, it was so much fun and, and it was just so much to learn from, from, from all the, all the different people that we, that we brought together, it was, it was really just, just a, I mean, the, the kind of couple of years that we spent in developing the master’s program was so much fun.

Thank you.

[00:11:41] Frederick: You’re, uh, as vice provost of academic affairs, um, and as a professor, do you, is this in many ways, um, the kind of ideal model for a university? I mean, if we scaled it up, or is it actually a scaled down version of the university, depending on our perspective? In other words, um, and I guess related, uh, What is, I guess, your ideal, your utopia for learning, you know, at the college level, at the university level?

[00:12:16] Art: Yeah, so interesting. I mean, I would say that, that where I think that, that what we did with, with human dimensions of organizations was something that we should continue to strive for is, It’s more in being willing to try some things that go beyond the traditional boundaries of how we structured college education.

So, you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s funny. We we we build, uh, departments, which are basically accounting structures, right? They’re they’re ways of doling out money. Um, we build departments around things Things that are intellectually valuable at a particular period of time. So, you know, there was a period of time where history was the discipline people needed to study.

And so, and so we have a history department and, and we have departments like that, that are very old. And then, and then, you know, there are, there, there are times where we have the rise of, of new types of new, newer departments that are organized in different ways. And so, um. And so, you know, uh, you know, a program that is organized around a theme, um, you know, can, can, can, can, can then become a department and that gets solidified into, into that kind of accounting structure, but, um, intellectual inquiry and intellectual engagement and education don’t stop.

At the point where we reify stuff into accounting structures. And so, you know, I think I think what what happens is we we then often feel like we have to keep perpetuating only the stuff that we built into into the department structure when there may also be other things. Other ways of trying to engage students are trying to engage research or trying to engage scholarship that would benefit from a different approach.

And so, you know, it’s the tension is how do you continue to be flexible when money wants to be or. And, and, and so, you know, that’s, I think the challenge that universities face and I think the, the, the joy of, of, of engaging with human dimensions of organizations was it was a chance for all of us to escape our particular accounting structures and get together to do a new thing and by building it as a program rather than a department, it didn’t, it didn’t have a, you know, a fixed budget coming from somewhere else.

But there was an added advantage that because HDO was built initially as, as you know, what we affectionately call an option three program, which is a self sustaining, uh, uh, graduate program. We, we did have money that, that was, that was able to support the program that was coming from the for the, for the master’s program and the other classes.

So it was entrepreneurial in nature, but it, it, it, it was also intellectually Uh, just. You know, stimulating and and and great fun. And I think creating opportunities for people to find ways to to think about things differently and to pursue those things in a different way that escapes the way that money usually flows is is something that universities need to continue to learn to do so that we can be Thank you.

Thank you. Responsive to new disciplines, new scholarship and new education. And I think that, you know, in in my role now as an administration, a lot of what we what we think about is how can we how can we do that? How can we promote? Flexibility and thinking and, and, and, you know, in education in particular, how do we meet the students where they are right?

And, and, and that’s, you know, not to do it in a way that, um, reduces the rigor of what we do. But rather brings the level of, of, of scholarship and rigor that we have as faculty to the kinds of issues and problems that our students are, are eager to learn to solve and, and, and will be asked to solve when they leave the university, um, in a, in a, in a rapidly changing world.

[00:16:37] Frederick: Yeah, I could see this as a kind of a part two to your 2019 bring your brain to work rather bring your brain to, I don’t know, making the college the higher education environment new. Um, yeah, really exciting. You know, I give these mock lectures for admissions to prospective students that come to campus.

Um. And I love doing that. Um, 1 of the questions I asked them just to, like, you were saying, kind of be responsive to are those coming in and the questions they have. I actually asked them the question. Why college? It’s fun to hear. They’re very varied responses to that. Of course, better job, the usual stuff, right?

Um, exploratory learning, um, how. In, let’s just say, a hypothetical, bring your brain to college, what would that book look like for you,

[00:17:37] Art: Art? Yeah. You know, I, I, I mean, I, I think that, that, you know, we need, we need two versions of that book, right? We need one book for college faculty, and then we need one version for college students and, and, and, and they need to be.

Uh, I think complimentary versions of this of the book that that that help us to begin to achieve a consensus about about what we want to accomplish from from a college education standpoint. And I, you know, I think that that, you know, we, we, one of the things that I think we’ve seen, and this is one of the reasons why it’s actually fun that in my portfolio in the provost office, we also have continuing education in In the, in the mix is that there was a real move in the continuing education space for a long time towards what were called bootcamps.

Like if you wanted to, to learn to, to, to be a coder, you’d take a a, you know, a 12 week coding bootcamp. And for a while people were taking those bootcamps and companies were hiring them, uh, out of the bootcamp to, to fill roles that they needed for coders. And there was a growing dissatisfaction in, in, among employers.

Uh, for the graduates of these boot camps, and the reason that they were dissatisfied was that there was this feeling that the, that the graduates could solve problems that they, that they had seen. In the bootcamp and close cousins of those problems, but if you gave them a new problem, then they got lost, uh, and that, and that what, what you got out of college graduates, what you got out of master’s degree students was, uh, not just a skill at coding, for example, but also a, an ability to take a new problem and Really put it into its context and understand it and develop an approach to it that was novel that went beyond just being able to write code and and that you know if you think about what disciplinary thinking does.

For for for somebody, I mean, you know, certainly for those of us who are scholars, it helps us to push the boundary of knowledge within our area of scholarship. We have a we have methods that that are particular to our discipline and we have content that’s particular to it. And we and we leverage that to find a new problem that nobody’s characterized in what we think is the right way yet.

And then we use our our discipline to Thank you. To, uh, expand the range of, of knowledge in that discipline, you know, and, and, and, and that’s, you know, that’s, that’s what keeps us excited and writing books and writing papers and things like that, but, but I think that, that, you know, equally well, you know, equally important is, is that our students are, are learning a discipline in order to have some base for solving Thank you.

Problems that, that haven’t been solved yet that they’re going to face in the workplace and, and, and where we need the, the book, the bring your brain to college for one version for faculty and one for students is in helping us as faculty to remember that we need to help our students to be able to articulate not just.

This is the discipline you studied and this is what it might mean to be a scholar in that discipline, but also even if you choose not to be a scholar, these, these are the ways that the things that we have taught you are going to help you to face the world and break down any problem that you find in a way that is going to give you insight into that.

And and methods for addressing that problem that that are unique to the the intellectual background you’ve gotten as a college student and and then on the college student side to to kind of explain. The importance of having that, that, that, the, the, the discipline, not just disciplinary knowledge, but, but in some ways the, you know, the, the, and the other sense of the word discipline and the, the willingness to use the knowledge and skills that you’ve attained to, to really focus on intractable problems and turn them into things where, where you can begin to get some purchase on them and, and, and to help students To do that in ways that allow them to help prospective employers to understand what they’re bringing to the workplace.

You know, I mean, particularly in the College of Liberal Arts, you know, a lot of times people will, will say, well, why would anyone get a degree in, you know, and, and, and, you know, you pick your favorite discipline to make fun of, you know, somebody, why, why, why would you get a degree in philosophy? You know, are you going to be a philosopher?

Well, You know, philosophy is brilliant at helping people to understand the hidden assumptions that go into, uh, things that people take for granted, and then take those assumptions, pick them apart, and understand the implications of those for the way that people are thinking about something moving forward, which makes philosophers often incredibly valuable for organizations for helping them to get unstuck By recognizing some of those hidden assumptions that they’re making, which is one of the reasons why, if you actually look at the data relating to wages that people are making, which is a proxy for the value they’re providing for companies, the philosophy majors do pretty darn well, uh, you know, in the workplace a few years out.

So, so it’s, you know, we may, we may need to give, give our philosophy students and other students a little, you know, a little more help in articulating the value that they bring on day one, but they’re clearly going to be bringing value, you know, in year five. And, and I think that, that, that that’s, to me.

The thing that, that, that, that we have to, we have to continue to improve is, is that ability to help all of our students across the university, um, to, to be better at recognizing that, that, that, that the value that a college degree really provides is this, is this ability to be able to look at the world And and and take a disciplinary stance that allows you to see the assumptions that people are making to have methodologies for gathering information and data to help you look at that problem in a different way and bring insights that in the absence of that disciplinary knowledge.

No one would, would, would be able to come up with and, and college students do that exceptionally well. It’s, it’s the value of having a degree. It’s the value of having an advanced degree for those students who go on to get master’s degrees and PhDs. It’s incredible. It’s, it’s an incredibly important part of what the liberal arts experience is about and Thank you.

And so, you know, I, I think we just need to help students to, to understand that because, you know, in part because the, the national discussion around college education has tended to focus purely on, on ROI as if, you know, it’s your, your first year’s wages or, or somehow a, you know, a, a, a, a statement of how good your degree was and And as if we should be focusing primarily on the skills that are going to help you to get that first job and and the problem is no matter what you’re studying, you know, even if you’re studying something at the leading edge of a science or technology.

area, the knowledge that you learn in college is going to be obsolete in five years. So, so, you know, the world’s going to move on. And, and so if you don’t learn how to learn and you don’t learn how to take big, ugly, unstructured problems and turn them into something manageable, And if you don’t learn how to get along with people and to work as a team and to manage a large project that, that, that involves lots of people coming together to, uh, to make a contribution.

If you don’t learn those kinds of skills, then you’re, you’re, you’re not going to, you’re not going to survive for a career length amount of time. In, in any area,

[00:26:16] Frederick: in fact, in one of your public facing pieces for psychology today, part of the title is appreciating the discomfort of learning. Um, but let me ask you.

So, so much here are that you have. Are sharing with us and our listeners, um, in, you mentioned all the way back in 87 AI, um, in 90, you know, 98, I believe you’ve published your first book knowledge representation and books, either a year kind of after each, you know, or a couple of years, but the number of books, um, since then, um, including one brain briefs, I, Yeah.

If I read this right, that is something based on the KUT radio show with Bob Duke. Today, 20, what, 23, um, 87 AI, um, And then 98, knowledge representation. And now today we have chat GPT, conversation alarm all over. We have smartphones, we have social media that is just, I mean, the big rabbit hole of our lives, uh, front facing cameras now, uh, or hadn’t we’ve had them for a while.

They were causing all sorts of things. So I suppose the big question is. in your research, and I know you’re very current, you’re constantly writing and putting stuff out there. Um, what are, what’s advanced, what new questions are being asked and what have we still kind of fixed to from 87 AI? Yeah,

[00:28:10] Art: you know, it’s, it’s, it’s funny.

So, so way back as an undergrad, uh, my undergraduate. Honor’s thesis was on neural networks, you know, and using, you know, versions of some of the tools that ultimately end up being embedded in in these large language models that are that are now the basis of things like chat GPT. So the math associated with these is old.

Uh, you know, it’s, it’s, and, and, uh, you know, a number of people have heard about Jeff Hinton, who was, uh, who, who was working for Google. He’s the guy who, who resigned from Google after, after some of the AI models started to come out. I, I jokingly said on social media at one point that he may have woken up one day and realized he was the one that they came back in one of the Terminator movies to kill.

Um, but, but, you know, it, it. Uh, you know that the techniques have been around a long time and have been in development. What what’s changed is is, you know, I mean, some of the techniques have have been improved, but a lot of what’s changed is also computing power and our ability to run these kinds of models over large enough data sets that that we can pick up those subtle statistical interactions among words for in a huge corpus of text.

And so, you know, in some ways it’s, it’s, we’re getting to the absurd but logical conclusion of, of, of movements that started 35, 40 years ago, um, which I, which I find personally fascinating. Right. And, and I, I generally see tools as opportunities, not threats. I mean, in the short term, we have to learn how to grapple with them.

But, but in the long term, I’m my, my question is, what are these, what are these going to enable us to do that we couldn’t do before? Right. And, and, you know, I mean, we’re actually, you know, actively one of the things that we’re doing in, in, in academic affairs right now is, is beginning to think about. So are there things that have been historically difficult to teach?

Okay. That maybe these large language models might make easier to teach, you know, are there, are, you know, for example, it’s notoriously difficult to teach people to write, um, you know, and, and we have great writing faculty in the writing center and, and, and, and, you know, we have lots of wonderful people who’ve been, who, who, who work on this, you know, it’s, it’s an interesting question about whether there are things that these models might provide that, that might create particular templates for specific lessons.

Thank you. Lessons that might, might give people more experience at, at audience design or, or at, at revision or, or at some other aspect of the writing process that, that has historically been difficult to teach. I mean, maybe not, but, but to me, it’s a, it’s an interesting opportunity. It’s something that, that, that we get to pursue and, and, and play with.

And so I, you know, to me, it’s, it’s, you know, I, I, I find. I, you know, I find these, I find all of these tools to be fascinating and, you know, watching colleagues of mine here and at other universities who use social media as a way of gathering data about people, um, you know, which is, which is, has been, been, been fascinating as well because people are leaving behind lots of, of, um, trails.

Of of their thinking and their attitudes and their and their beliefs. And so, you know, I think I think there’s a lot of data to be mined there. So for us, both as scholars and educators, I think there’s there’s there’s a tremendous amount of. Of opportunity here. I so I, you know, it’s true that when, like when chat GPT dropped, you know, the first the first thing was alarm, you know, Oh, that, you know, educations.

We know it is over. And to the extent that education is we know it is over. That’s a good thing, because I think that those elements that we knew were probably not the best. Of our education, you know the the stuff the stuff that really enables a a student who’s learning something to truly demonstrate their skills is, you know, goes way beyond stuff that that that chat GPT is going to spit out and and so you know if it if it forces all of us to take a big step back and ask are we really asking students to do things that that are are are pushing them to.

to, to learn the kinds of critical thinking skills that we think are, are, are so important. Um, you know, then, then I think it will have been a benefit to us to have to, to grapple with that. And, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, so I, I find this generally to be, I, I, I think a really A really exciting time and and and we’re, you know, we we try to engage with as many people across campus as we can to to get involved in thinking about these kinds of questions.

You know, I think the other the other nice thing is where we’re at. I mean, you tease a what a fun place to work, right? I mean, it’s as the flagship institution for a for a large state. It’s a it’s a chance to to really Mhm. Have an impact, not just on our own students, but on, on, on the entire university system.

Uh, so I think things that, I think that the other, I think, you know, many, many people at, at, at, at, you know, in the system office and in, in, you know, at other system schools are, you know, they do look to, to UT Austin to find out if there are things that we can do that would, uh. That they might, they might benefit from.

So I, I think it’s a, I think it’s a great time.

[00:33:40] Frederick: I do too. It’s, um, you know, I have, I teach this UGS course, um, undergraduate study course, uh, titled smartphone storytelling wellness and there. And also in my intro to comic studies. In the syllabus, I’m like, look, uh, you want to use chat GPT to help you outline a paper?

Fine. Just cite it. Um, you know, et cetera. You know, this is a tool. It’s out there. Let’s embrace it. Let’s use it and see, you know, how it can be helpful. Just just let me know. No big deal. No, I,

[00:34:17] Art: I, yeah. And I, and I think the next generation of this is going to be, you know, really structuring lessons around it.

I mean, suggest. Hey. You know, try this, right? Try, try, you know, build that outline, but now this with it, you know, and, and, and,

[00:34:32] Frederick: you know, yeah, it’s interesting because on Fridays, uh, for the discussion board, um, in the groups, um, they, that I’ve allocated one, So they rotate, but every week one will ask ChatGPT a question that relates to what we did in class, and then they will respond critically to how ChatGPT responded to that question.

Again, it’s there. Let’s, let’s engage it. Um, is there in your, in your kind of omnivorous approach to all of life’s questions and you definitely have, um, so much to offer in terms of giving us deep insight into all sorts, right? So, um, of engaging your neighbor and the significance and importance of that.

Why we feel younger than we are, which of course, you know, for someone like me, um, oddly, you know, in my age, I still think of myself as a teen. Um, right. Um, lying, people tell lies, the care, being charismatic at work. Um, but is there actually a black box to your research or your questions? Is there something that Is, has simply just, like, have, has you flummoxed, you, no idea.

[00:35:57] Art: Oh, you know, I think, I think there’s, there’s huge amounts of, of stuff, you know, because I mean, I, I, uh, you know, I, I think, I think the, the, the, the difficulty is, you know, one of the reasons I like taking these, these, this variety of different disciplines and learning from them is because every discipline has a, has biases associated with it.

And, and, you know, when we think about, um, you know, being cognitive science, I mean, if you’re a psychologist, you study individuals. Right, generally speaking, and, and, uh, and, and yet people, people have to function as part of social groups. So yeah, we’re going to have to draw from, from sociologies to understand some of that.

But also, we come pre programmed with relatively little knowledge. You know, compared to most other species and so, and so we also have to understand the influence that culture has on, on how we, uh, how we develop thinking processes. And so, you know, and so to me, the, the black boxes, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s less a black box and more just a recognition of, of how much there is to know in order to really get purchase on any question that you want to understand really deeply.

You know that that there’s that that that there’s always, uh, there’s always another vantage point that you can take and that vantage point isn’t always a science or social science, right? I think the other thing that I’ve come to appreciate more and more as my as I’ve gotten older is is also the tremendous wisdom that comes from learning more history.

And, uh, and, and, and, and, and understanding the thought processes that leaders went through in different facets of their, of their lives. I, I’ve spent the last several years, I’ve, I’ve picked Jeremy Suri’s brain a little bit, for example, to try to get recommendations for, for presidential biographies. To listen to, because it just, I feel like I learned something.

I learned a lot of things from those, but I even learned something about my own discipline of cognitive science from trying to think through how leaders in different situations have had to deal with the, the context in which they find themselves, you know, which is something that often doesn’t emerge that that sort of perspective doesn’t emerge from.

a lot of psychology studies where we do our best to control that context as much as possible and put everyone on a, on a fairly equal footing. So, you know, I, to me it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s just that recognition that anything that I’ve ever cared about in, you know, from a scholarly perspective that, that there’s so much out there I don’t know yet.

And, and so, you know, and, and I think the other, the other thing that’s been fun for me is, um, way back in the day, right? When, when, when they were, when, when, you know, when, when, when people were first trying to classify species, you know, there was that distinction between the lumpers and the splitters.

Right, so somebody would find a new skeleton or something and there’d be a big debate over whether that represented a brand new species of being. Or whether it was, in fact, just another example of an existing species. And there were biases, right? There were biases that some people tended to be lumpers.

They tended to want to see each new skeleton as being just a variant of something that had been found before. And then there were splitters who wanted to take subtle… Differences between a between a new specimen and previous ones and say this on this basis, it’s a different species. And I feel like in academia, in many, the reward structure of academia tends to reward splitters as a, as a intellectually, right, that you come up with an idea.

And, and the, and, and, and, and you, you make a name for yourself by demonstrating how your idea is different from everybody else’s. And, and so, um, so there’s a, there’s a real tendency towards a proliferation of theories and a proliferation of explanatory approaches. And, and I have found over the years that I’ve become much more a lumper that, that even across disciplines, I, I tend to look for things and to say, you know, to what degree does this feel like something that is.

Is an extension of something that we’ve seen somewhere else and and it’s what’s nice about it is that doesn’t mean everything is an example of something that’s been seen somewhere else. But by taking that approach, it says, okay, here’s how far you can get by treating this new thing. I just read about as an example of something I’ve seen before.

And as a result, here’s what’s missing, right? So here’s, here’s the place where this is actually a unique species of something versus a variant of something I’ve seen before. And I, I just, I find that to be, I have found that to be really powerful to do. And, and partly powerful because it, it starts to, it starts to force you to think about systems.

And that’s, that’s the other piece that, that not every discipline suffers from this, but, but some do, which is that If you think about research in, you know, all of us, you know, we get, you get to a place like UT because you’re contributing to the research literature in your discipline. And often that next contribution is to burnish the head of a pin in, in, in your discipline, right?

You, you are going to make some subtle distinctions that other. People in your discipline haven’t made before and, and, and so you’re going to, you know, and then that generates great intellectual argument and, and other things. And there’s, there’s real value in, in, in, in really getting the fine points of things right.

But, um, but it does tend to drive us to very specific research questions. And, you know, at some point, you know, when you think about writing papers and even sometimes books, those books are focused on the head of the pin. And they sometimes mentioned the pin. They rarely talk about other pins that look the same or the pin cushion or the table.

The pin cushion is sitting on and and I feel like. You know, a lot of the kinds of problems in the world for which our disciplines can, can play such an important role. It is that step back that, that ends up helping to recognize the value that our disciplines play in, in those bigger problems. And it’s something that I think is important for us to communicate to students.

But I found that by playing this game of trying to look at problems that I find interesting, in wildly different disciplines. So, so, you know, seeing what a historian might have to say, or a classicist, or, or, or, uh, someone who studied a particular region of the world, um, and, and then, and then asking the question, does this feel to me like something that’s, that’s similar to something I’ve seen before, and in what ways, and in what ways is it not?

Um, I, I find it really brings me back to some of those system level issues that force that forces me to think less about the head of the pen and more about how does some of these pieces fit together, which I think has changed the way I teach. For example, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s led me to spend much more time in my teaching, talking to students about the entire system of thinking rather than just.

Memory and attention and, and, uh, problem solving and decision making as separate entities, but really to try to figure out, well, how do all those pieces fit together and by learning to think about how pieces fit together? How does that change the way that you may approach every problem you solve?

[00:44:13] Frederick: Yeah, a couple of things come to mind.

Mario Bungay, the Canadian and his concept of convergence and emergence, right? Systems, but also your smart change book where you talk about engaging your neighbors. So in fact, being neighborly, right? Um, um, but so presidential biographies and this is really the, what’s on your book stand question as we come to the end of our beautiful, wonderful conversation.

So, yeah, what, what are you reading? What are you watching? What, what’s engaging you? You mentioned presidential biographies. Um, um, but yeah, what’s

[00:44:54] Art: Yeah. Uh, yeah, so I’ve been, I’ve been working my way through some presidential biographies right now. I’m, I’m, I’ve got, I’m listening to a biography of, of Eisenhower and that, that actually Jeremy Suri recommended and I’ve been, been enjoying that quite a bit.

Um, and, uh, actually read his, his most recent book, Civil War by Other Means recently and, and, and really enjoyed that. Um, I’ve, you know, I’ve been reading some science fiction. Uh, you know, I got a, my, my, my, one of my graduate advisors told me it’s really important to have some genre of fiction that you can read quickly that, that, that, that also is on your bookstand so that you can get your reading speed back up over 10 pages an hour.

Cause, cause when you, you know, when you’re reading in, in, in any kind of scholarly work or, or, you know, complex work, then you, your reading speed slows way down and you need to remember how to move your, your eyes across the page. And I’ve taken that advice for him. It was mystery novels. For me, it’s science fiction.

And I’ve been, been reading. There’s a. There’s a, there’s a series of books that started with the book altered carbon, uh, that, that, uh, I think they made a TV series out of one or one or two of those, but, uh, but there’s a whole series of books and I’ve been, been reading those lately and those have been, been great fun and, and, uh, and, uh, you know, if anybody, I encourage people to come wandering over to my, my office, I’ve been, I’ve been building Lego models out of kits for fun.

I’ve, I’ve got, um, I can, I can show you, you know, but nobody listening to this can see this, but, but because we’ve got video contact here, I’ve got a Concord, uh, behind me that I built and, and it’s, uh, it’s just, those are, you know, it’s, uh, it’s not, it’s not deeply creative work, but there’s something satisfying about getting these things put together and the design of them.

It’s just so. So beautiful and well done that there’s there’s just something really interesting about looking at how the designers chose to take this set of pieces and and create something. I mean, on this concord, the landing gear go up and down if you kind of twist the tail of it. And that mechanism was really fun to build and to see how they they put together.

So, you know, there’s that I, you know, I took up the saxophone in my mid thirties and still try to control it. Still try to play that. And my band broke up during, during COVID, which was unfortunate. I was playing in a ska band and that was, that was, that was a lot of fun. I miss, I miss hanging out with that, with that group of people.

But, uh, but you know, something, something will come up. So, you know, I think there’s a lot going on. And, and I, you know, the other thing is I have, I have, uh, over the last five or six years, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve made a much more concerted effort to, to try to stay in shape, you know, so, so, uh, you know, I, you know, we’re talking about age.

I’m, I, I feel young, but I’m 57 and, and, you know, it, it turns out to just be a lot more work to, to, to keep. in, you know, keep fit. So, uh, yeah, I never owned any exercise equipment. I used to go to the gym and swim and do some things like that. And during, during the pandemic, I, I, I bought what is now a, basically a Peloton showroom.

I’ve got, uh, uh, the Peloton bike and a tread and a rowing machine and things like that. And, and I’ve been, uh, been, been trying to You know, and so, and so my evening commute each day is, uh, is after I leave the office, I go home and I spend, I spend 45 minutes on, on a piece of exercise equipment or doing something just to clear, clear the day out of my head, uh, you know, and, and which has, has, has from, I think has had a wondrous impact on my mental health, uh, of, of, you know, no matter how, no, you know, even if, even on a day where it felt like everything went wrong, um, You know, you, I do, I do two 45 minutes of exercise and the stress is gone from that and it reminds me that I’ll go back to work tomorrow and, and, and the problems will still be there and I can fix them then.

Amazing.

[00:48:46] Frederick: Uh, what a journey from, you know, Brown and finding your way to cognitive science, which is, was the system for you that allowed for the convergence and emergence, a whole career for Filled with all sorts of incredible books, public facing work all over the place, including your radio show, um, to Legos and sci fi and Pelotonia.

Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you Art so much. Oh,

[00:49:18] Art: it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for asking me to do this. This is, this is great fun. Into the Coliverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts. Sound engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Coliverse podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Thanks for listening and see you next time.