162 | Leidy Klotz on Our Resistance to Subtractive Change

There is no general theory of problem-solving, or even a reliable set of principles that will usually work. It’s therefore interesting to see how our brains actually go about solving problems. Here’s an interesting feature that you might not have guessed: when faced with an imperfect situation, our first move to improve it tends to involve adding new elements, rather than taking away. We are, in general, resistant to subtractive change. Leidy Klotz is an engineer and designer who has worked with psychologists and neuroscientists to study this phenomenon. We talk about how our relative blindness to subtractive possibilities manifests itself, and what lessons might be for design more generally.

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Leidy Klotz received his Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering from Penn State University. He is currently Copenhaver Associate Professor of Engineering Systems and Environment and Architecture at the University of Virginia. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a school designer, and before that was a professional soccer player for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds. His new book is Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.

• Web site
• University of Virginia web page
• Google Scholar publications
• “People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes,” Adams, Converse, Hales and Klotz, 2021.
• Wikipedia
• Twitter

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0:00:00.3 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And I wanted to start today’s episode with a story. I was on the internet and I noticed on Twitter a link to a very interesting paper in Nature. It was sort of a psychology study, but an interdisciplinary group of people carrying it out. And the study was basically the following: They would give subjects a little grid on a computer where there were some blank spaces and some colored-in spaces, and they asked the subjects to alter the pattern of squares to make the image they were looking at symmetric in some well-defined way. So you could either add more squares to the image to make it look symmetric, or you could remove squares, you could click on squares and have them disappear to make it look symmetric. And the human brain, says the study, has this feature that it is much more eager to add extra squares than to remove them.

0:00:58.7 SC: This turns out to be a more general feature, the authors claim, that if we have some design problem or some puzzle in front of us, we instantly move to adding stuff. Subtractive change, taking things away, is a little bit more alien to us. And so you can think about why that is, the neuroscience of that, the evolution of why we evolved that way and so forth. So I thought that would be a fun topic for the Mindscape Podcast, a little bit different, but interdisciplinary and interesting. So the lead author of the… Or the leader of the lab that performed the study was Leidy Klotz. Looked him up on Google, and to my dismay, when you type in “Leidy Klotz” into Google, what appears is the name of a professional soccer player, not a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, so I’m like, “Ah! That’s not what I’m looking for.”

0:01:45.3 SC: And then I realized, further Googling, it is the same guy. Leidy Klotz was a professional soccer player, later got his PhD in architectural engineering and is now a professor at the University of Virginia and carries out these really interesting interdisciplinary studies involving neuroscientists and psychologists, design people, and engineering people. So he agreed to come on the podcast and we had a lot of fun in this episode. And one of the reasons why it’s fun is there are, like I said, these questions of cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary biology, why did we evolve this way. There’s also questions of engineering and design. Given this tendency of human beings to like to add to things rather than to subtract, does that offer us new hints to maybe improve our design principles by looking a little bit more at subtracting things?

0:02:35.2 SC: And finally, it’s almost a self-help, self-improvement kind of thing. Can you get through your life better if you take more seriously the option of getting rid of things? I know that Marie Kondo already patented this idea, and Leidy brings her up, but what is the science behind that? Why do we feel happier getting rid of things rather than our usual tendency, which is to just add them on? Leidy does have a recent book on this called Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, where you can learn about both the neuroscience, the psychology, and what it means for design, engineering, and our everyday lives. So fun conversation, both serious, but also fun in the sense of ranging over a lot of different cool ideas. With that, let’s go.

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0:03:38.0 SC: Leidy Klotz, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:03:40.0 Leidy Klotz: Thanks, Sean. It’s great to be here.

0:03:42.1 SC: I have to start… I always try to come up with some useful way to start the conversation, and sometimes the person I’m talking to has already figured out the perfect way. So you’ve written a book and in the book and elsewhere, you tell this wonderful story of playing Legos with your son, that basically reveals the whole point of what we’re going to be talking about here today. So, I can do no better than to ask you to relate the Lego story.

0:04:04.6 LK: Alright, great. My son will be happy, he’s getting his word out all around the world, so. He was three at the time, and as I just was, spent a lot of time playing Legos with him, and I’d always been interested in kind of how we design. I’m an engineer by training, and I enjoy behavioral science, too, and interested in the thought processes behind our design. So I was playing Legos with my son and we had this bridge that we were trying to build, basically, and the problem we had was that one of the columns was shorter than the other column, so the bridge wasn’t level. And I went to fix this problem, as any good, well-trained engineer would, I turned around behind me to grab a block to add to the shorter column, and by the time I had turned back around, my three-year-old had removed a block from the longer column.

0:05:01.4 LK: And so, again, I’d long been interested in this idea of kinda like minimalist design and how can we be more sustainable on our planet, but never really boiled it down to something that just happened literally, that I could hold in my hand, this model of Legos. And what my son showed me in that moment ended up being pretty close to what the research revealed after tens of thousands of hours of studying the phenomenon is that, yeah, as humans, our first instinct when we’re trying to make something better is to think, “Okay, what can we add?” And then, oftentimes we move on and don’t even consider subtracting.

0:05:37.0 SC: So number one, it must be intimidating to be a three-year-old designing Lego structures with your father who is a professional engineering professor. But number two, so you…

0:05:47.5 LK: He’s not intimidated at all.

0:05:49.0 SC: Not intimidated, alright. I would have been intimidated. But the other thing is, you were already primed, you said in some sense, you’ve been thinking about ways that we can build and engineer things in subtractive ways or more sustainable ways, and yet even you fell for the impulse to stick the extra thing in there. So, do you think this is a completely natural human thing?

0:06:14.5 LK: I mean, that’s what the research says after doing it and… Yeah, and that was myself, but also I took Ezra’s, Ezra’s my son’s name, I took his Lego replica around to people and I would give it to my graduate students and say, “Okay, solve this bridge,” and they would add, and then one of the co-authors on the paper we ended up producing about the research, Gabe Adams, I took it to her. And I mean, she’s a genius, plus I had been having all these conversations with her about what I thought was this same idea, which is like taking away or minimalist design, and she added, and then when she, after she added, I told her what Ezra had done, and she said, “Oh, oh, oh, so what you’re thinking is why don’t we subtract as a way to make things better,” and that makes things better ends up being really a key part of it because that was the… It seems like a simple distinction, but that’s what makes it different from a whole bunch of other reasons why we don’t subtract.

0:07:14.4 SC: Before we get into the details of the research that you actually did on this, beyond working with Ezra, do you think that there… Let’s ask a nature versus nurture question, if your three-year-old is better at it than you are, does that tell us that it’s culture that is inculcating this idea, we should add things rather than subtract them?

0:07:34.1 LK: Yeah, that’s the one downside of the Ezra story, is… It kind of leads you to think that, “Oh, this is the nature versus nurture thing,” and we have absolutely no evidence that that’s the case, and in fact, I would posit that Ezra is even worse than me at adding, it’s just that he plays a ton of Legos and this was the one chance where we… Where I stumbled across him subtracting. So, we haven’t explicitly studied it in kids, but we have in our experiments looked at the different, segmented people by groups and things like that to see, oh, are younger people better, is there any difference between male and female, or other ways that might indicate a difference that would suggest it was cultural as opposed to just kind of innate, and haven’t found any evidence of that. Again, I think that, that is high on our list of next step studies. It wouldn’t surprise me if there was a slight variation, and as an educator, I’m really interested in what are we doing in our education that might be kind of propping up this bias or what could we do to help people deal with it, but no, Ezra is not a master subtracter.

0:08:51.6 SC: Okay, yeah, I was going to say he’s probably just a master Lego builder, that’s a perfectly sensible response there. But before we get into the experiment, which is really what I want to get into, but let’s pretend that we’re following the scientific method we were taught in high school, and so we’re supposed to formulate the hypothesis before doing the experiment. So what is the most rigorous way you can state the hypothesis, when you have literally a set of Legos and you’re either putting blocks in or taking them away, I see the difference between subtracting and adding, is there a more general idea of what that means? What is the hypothesis we’re trying to test here?

0:09:31.3 LK: Yeah, there is a more general idea and it spans across physical objects, ideas and situations, so basically, when we’re trying to change things, whether they’re ideas, objects or situations, from how they are to how we want them to be, are we likely to overlook subtraction, basically, or do we… Yeah, do we think of adding before we think of subtracting?

0:09:57.5 SC: But I guess is… Maybe this is an obvious answer, but is there… Do we always know the difference between adding and subtracting? Is it always clear what counts as adding and what counts as subtracting?

0:10:08.0 LK: Yeah, that’s a good… Yeah, that’s an amazing question. In the experiments, yes. I mean, in the real world, no. It’s impossible to tell where, as I’m taking an item off of my calendar, am I really looking at that as a subtraction or am I looking that as freeing up space to be able to add something. But in our experiments we were able to, that’s the beauty of experiments, for example, my favorite experiment, we basically, well, we created this grid on a computer screen where people could add and subtract, and we did a couple of things. One, we told them explicitly what was adding and what was subtracting and then after the fact, asked them did you add or did you subtract? So we’re confirming there that yes, this thing that we are counting as adding, they are thinking of as adding. So, yeah.

0:11:05.5 SC: So this is…

0:11:05.6 LK: It’s good question, though, because a lot of the examples I use in the book are more real world design, and in real world design, I use Maya Lin, designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and it’s this cut into the Mall in Washington DC and it’s this beautiful, monumental architecture and you’re like, well, it looks… I can argue that it’s subtractive compared to the Washington Monument, but what was Maya Lin really thinking. And I use it in the book because we have record of her thinking of it as a subtraction, but most things we don’t actually have what the person was thinking, yeah.

0:11:42.5 SC: So you mentioned the grid, you mentioned the experiment. You’re an engineer by profession but this is clearly some kind of psychology, cognitive science experiment. So you’re giving your subjects a computer and a 10 x 10 grid with some white squares and green squares, and you’re asking them to add or subtract. So what exactly were they asked to do and is it clear that they’re assuming that a white square is a nothingness, an absence, an emptiness, and a green square is a thing, is that how they’re conceptualizing it?

0:12:14.0 LK: Right. Yes, so I should deal with the I’m an engineer first, because I am indeed an engineer and I’ve dabbled in behavioral science, basically. One of the things that I like about behavioral science and one of the things that’s happening with behavioral science is people are starting to apply it and use it to make things better, so nudging and other ways to use behavioral science to make change, that’s a very engineer-y way of looking at the world, it’s we’ve got the science, okay, now what can we do with it to try to make the world a better place or meet certain objectives?

0:12:52.2 LK: So, I’d always been approaching it from that perspective and was able to kind of take some really well-known nudges, for example, and apply them in engineering, and I could study that by myself. But these grids… As you’re listening to me talk you’re not just listening to an engineer, you’re listening to the combined work of an engineer plus three behavioral science co-authors who worked with me on the paper, and Gabe Adams I mentioned before, but also Ben Converse and Andy Hales, all three of them are trained in psychology and really helped us… I wouldn’t have been able to do this research without them.

0:13:27.5 LK: So, the grids. The most convincing paradigm, in my mind. We ended up with a number of different paradigms that we used, showing people kind of adding more than they subtracted, but all of them were subject to this criticism that you can make about the Legos. And the Lego criticism would be, “Well, that’s just because that’s what we do with Legos. We’ve been taught to build with Legos, we’ve grown up building with Legos, this is what we assume we’re supposed to do with Legos.” And then you can also argue, “Well, this only applies to Legos.” And so we made this grid example. I was thinking, “Okay, nobody’s done these specific grid activities before, and there’s no kind of inherent value in the grids. There’s no value to blocks on a computer screen.”

0:14:12.1 LK: And we set these things up so that the grid pattern basically was broken into four quadrants, and what we did was put extraneous marks in one of the quadrants and then told people to make the pattern symmetrical, from left to right and top to bottom. So we had different patterns, but in all of the patterns, there are a couple of basic options. One would be to subtract the extraneous marks by clicking on them, and the other would be to add marks to all three corners. And the other nice thing about this way of doing it is that it’s just better to subtract, in this case. I mean, the bridge example, you can make the argument that adding and subtracting, either or, doesn’t matter.

0:14:58.3 SC: It’s equal.

0:14:58.5 LK: But in this case we said, “Do it in the fewest clicks possible,” so subtracting was the right answer, not just one answer. And before people did the studies, we would give them opportunity to practice and say, “Okay, you can add green blocks to the area, or you can subtract these marks from the area.” And we’d have them practice so that they knew how to do it, and they would practice adding and subtracting. And then in that case, we asked them after the fact, “Did you add or subtract?” as one of the checks afterwards. And they kind of responded that they were doing the thing that we thought they were doing. Does that make sense?

0:15:40.0 SC: So they knew? They had conceptualized the idea of subtracting blocks, you weren’t tricking them by not even letting them think about that?

0:15:47.7 LK: No, no. Yeah.

0:15:49.7 SC: And so it’s interesting, the comparison of that with the Lego example, because I’m trying to play the devil’s advocate and think of alternative explanations here.

0:15:58.5 LK: Yeah, please.

0:16:00.5 SC: With the Legos, I think there’s plausibly an implicit idea that if there are blocks already there, they’re there for some purpose. Even if you did it, even if there… You made it up, but there’s some structural idea, so we can’t just take things away without hurting someone else’s plans for what’s going to happen, right? But I suppose that this is part of the point of the computer grid, is that there’s no purpose whatsoever. It’s just a design.

0:16:28.8 LK: Yeah, that’s great. There’s an awesome YouTube video that Nature made about our paper, and the most liked comment is a version of what you’ve…

0:16:38.5 SC: Oh, good.

0:16:38.7 LK: What you’ve just said, which is… But it also brings up a really important distinction here. Our paper showed that all else being equal, people don’t even think of subtraction. But the thing that… So we ruled out the thing that you just described, where okay, there’s some inherent value to the stuff that’s there, or somebody thought about this, it’s like, “Okay, somebody smarter than me thought about building this bridge, and who am I to take it away without putting a whole bunch of thought into it?”

0:17:12.5 LK: And that’s really important for subtracting in the real world, but it happens after you’ve thought about it, right? So what we found is that people don’t even think about it, but then after you do think about it as an option, then you could have this deliberative process where it’s like, “Okay, I thought of this option but I’m not choosing it because… ” For any number of reasons, and one of those, one very good reason would be, “I’m not going to subtract because somebody has put more thought into adding this thing, and who am I to take it away?”

0:17:42.6 SC: So you’ve ruled out that hypothesis that even if that’s clearly not going on, people are still more reluctant to subtract.

0:17:47.4 LK: Right. And I think that… There were several paradigms that we used: We had a grid example, we had miniature golf, maybe describing another way that we use the grids might help explain how we ruled this out. So, first and foremost, the grids don’t have any inherent value. There is clearly just a random pattern. And so it’s hard to think that somebody would look at that and say, “Oh, the person who arranged this random pattern thought it was really important, and therefore we’re not going to take away.”

0:18:22.2 LK: But also, evidence that people weren’t even thinking about this option but recognized it as superior after they thought of it, we had them do repetitions on the grids, so give them a number of grid patterns, a series. And this is similar to what was happening with Ezra, it’s like, “Okay, you did this a bunch of times,” and if on the third or fourth time they did it, they did recognize subtraction and did actually stumble upon it and choose it, and then you ask them afterwards, “Well, what’s the best option? Which… ” And they’re like, “Well, obviously the subtractive one, it was fewer clicks.”

0:19:00.5 LK: And so what that shows is that it wasn’t that they were choosing against it for some reason, whether that be they don’t like taking things away because of loss aversion or whether they don’t like taking things away because they feel like somebody’s thought about this, that rules that out pretty clearly when the people don’t choose it when they don’t think of it, but then do choose it when it’s brought to mind in some way.

0:19:26.4 SC: Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense. And the other thing that I thought was very clever in your experimental design was that you also tested them when they were being distracted by some other task at the same time, and if I remember, the effect was even stronger, is that right?

0:19:41.0 LK: Exactly, so the theory there would be that if this is something that’s a heuristic or just an innate way of thinking, we’re more likely to go to those default mental settings when we’re under load, when we’re under a cognitive load, when we don’t have much time to think. And so, this is funny too, because we knew that that was a way that we could test it, and here we are, four people who’ve been thinking about subtraction for a long time, and all we could think about was, “How do we add cognitive load? How do we add cognitive load?”

0:20:17.4 SC: Add cognitive load. [chuckle]

0:20:19.5 LK: Well, we did also manipulate this by removing some cognitive load. But anyway, and one of the ways you add cognitive load is having numbers scrolling across the bottom of the grid experiment, for example, while people are doing the study. And you say, “Okay, every time a 5 comes by press F on your keyboard.” And so you can do both of those things at the same time but you’re a little bit distracted. And when people were more distracted they were even more likely to go to that adding default, to not think of subtracting.

0:20:52.3 LK: So that was evidence that it’s like, “Okay, this is some kind of mental shortcut that we’re using, because when we add this cognitive load we’re even more likely to use it.” It’s also a very… Kind of speaks to a more problematic thing as you get out into the real world, because as we add ideas and concepts and thoughts, what’s that doing? That’s adding cognitive load, which is making us even less likely to take away, and so it’s kind of this reinforcing loop that works against subtraction.

0:21:24.0 SC: Yeah, so it does seem that you got a lot of evidence that we favor the idea of adding new things in problem-solving in general, rather than taking them away. Is there anything we can say about how the brain works that makes that happen, either at the level of neurons and so forth, or at least at a level of sort of other psychological strategies that we use to get through the day?

0:21:50.3 LK: Not at the level of neurons. I think the best thing that we can say is that adding is the first thing that comes to mind, basically, that this is a heuristic that we’re using, for whatever reason. It may have been very helpful in the past, and it kind of lines up with query theory, if you’re familiar with that. It is what it sounds like. Basically, we consider options in an order, and the order that we consider options matter. And so the way this becomes harmful is we consider adding first and then we’ve satisficed, we’re like, “Okay, I’ve solved my problem by adding,” and you move on without even considering subtraction. So the best kind of “why” we have or the best “what’s going on” is that we’re considering adding first when we encounter these situations that we want to try to make better by changing them in some way.

0:22:46.5 SC: Could you actually elaborate on the notion of “satisficing,” which is a terrible, terrible word that I’m coming across more and more often, but it’s certainly a very useful concept in how we make decisions.

0:23:01.0 LK: Yeah. So, Herbert Simon coined this term, and I love Herbert Simon as a scholar, he’s kind of the precursor to Kahneman and Tversky, basically. His big contribution, one of his big contributions… He actually made a lot, in a lot of areas, but one that he won a Nobel Prize for was showing that people aren’t rational in this specific way and that they “satisfice.” I mean, you just don’t have infinite time to optimize every situation. So when I’m buying tomato sauce at the supermarket, I’m not sitting there doing this complex optimization problem between price, sodium content and, I don’t know, taste.

0:23:46.5 LK: I’m just like, “Okay, this one is less than $5, it doesn’t have a ton of salt,” and so I “satisfice” and move on, and I’m able to spend more thought on what kind of pasta I want to buy. And we do this all the time, and it makes perfect sense. You can’t spend all your time on trivial decisions. But it is a terrible word, “satisficing,” and I had to use it over and over in the book, ’cause Simon coined it. And I remember my neuroscientist neighbor who was a reader of the book, he’s like, “This is horrible jargon. Can you get rid of it?”

0:24:20.3 LK: And I was like, “You know, I tried to get rid of most of the jargon, but this is like… It means something, I can’t just… ” We need to re-coin it. But yeah, so “satisficing” is this portmanteau of “satisfactory” and “suffice.” And it’s since been shown in all kinds of decision processes, and it just makes sense as something that we would do. And this tendency to satisfice combined with adding first can lead us to not kind of optimize, if subtraction was an option.

0:24:55.6 LK: And I guess the last thing I would add on satisficing is what’s really great about Simon, and even Kahneman and Tversky, they always point out that there’s often a helpful reason for these biases, these deviations from rationality. As a general thing, they’ve evolved for a reason and they’re mostly helpful, but there can also be situations in which they become harmful. So satisficing, mostly good. But in a case where the right answer is not the first thing that comes to mind, then satisficing is going to be problematic.

0:25:35.1 SC: I think it’s actually an underappreciated fact of life how finite we are in our ability to think of all the possible ways to do things. And maybe Herbert Simon knew about this very well, and I’m just not familiar enough with his work. But I talked to Stephen Wolfram recently on the podcast, and he emphasizes what he calls the computational boundedness of finite structures such as himself, such as ourselves. I talked to Karl Friston with his free energy principle, and we try to be good Bayesian updaters, but really we sort of approximate it in some nice way. I think the idea that you’re adding here that I’m not sure I ever thought of or stumbled across is that we have a list of strategies that will implicitly apply to different problems, and it’s an ordered list, it’s not random, and if we have some goal of satisficing, then whichever strategy gets us there first is the one we’ll use, even if it’s not the best one. Is that a fair way to say it?

0:26:35.9 LK: Yeah, that’s a fair way to say it. And Eric Johnson has done more work than anybody in this area, and Elke Weber. Elke’s at Princeton, Eric’s at Columbia. Eric has a book coming out called The Elements of Choice, that is all about this, a popular book that’s all about this. But yeah, you summarized it exactly correctly, and it is incredibly important. I would add too that, my guess is that this kind of overconfidence in our own numerical abilities or our optimization of things is especially prevalent among researchers. That’s going to be a blind spot…

0:27:16.3 SC: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

0:27:19.3 LK: To us, and to engineers too, right? It’s like we’ve been doing these calculations our whole life and getting the right answer, and we think that that applies to every situation that we encounter in life, which is not the case.

0:27:30.5 SC: Right. The other bit of jargon that maybe comes from Kahneman and Tversky that you use is loss aversion. For whatever reason, we are more hurt by losing a little than we are made happier by gaining a little bit. I’m not sure I’m explaining it correctly, but maybe this has some relationship with subtraction versus addition.

0:27:53.3 LK: Yeah, perfect explanation. And there is a relationship, it’s our nature… Well, it gets back to that kind of clarification that Gabe made and gets back to Ezra’s bridge, actually. It’s like, to make things better. What we are interested in is taking things away to make things better, and in that case, less is not a loss. What Kahneman and Tversky were looking at was these cases where you lose something, where it is harmful in some way, and you overweigh that relative to gaining something. And so that’s a very good reason we might… A danger as it relates to subtracting, I think, is when we subtract something, if we interpret it mistakenly as a loss and focus on the things that have been taken away, then it can fall into this kind of thinking and weighting that we do related to loss aversion, where if you mentally categorize this thing as a loss, you’re going to be more emotionally damaged by losing it, when in fact the subtraction was actually to make things better.

0:29:10.9 LK: And we’ll go from Simon and Kahneman and Tversky to Marie Kondo here. So she’s the decluttering guru, right?

0:29:19.6 SC: Sure.

0:29:20.3 LK: And she tells us to take stuff away, but what does she do? The whole focus is on the clean room, if you’re going to have the tidy space. It’s not about the physical things that you’re taking away, because it is a barrier to taking away if you’re sitting there thinking, “Oh, well, I really liked this, my T-shirt that I never wore, and I’m going to feel bad when I lose that T-shirt.” And sure, you’re going to feel a little bad when you lose that T-shirt, but overall, you’re going to feel really good when you have this streamlined room. And so what she does is kind of steers us around loss aversion by keeping us focused on the game that we’re going to have by subtracting, the good thing that we’re going to have by subtracting. And I think you can take that and think about how you would apply it in all kinds of subtractions, whether it’s physical stuff or whether it’s your to-do list or the ideas that are in your head, taking things away. Sure, there is some emotional attachment to the thing that you’re taking away, but the bigger picture goal is this end state that is in fact better, it’s not a loss.

0:30:30.1 SC: It’s always a little bit dangerous, I think, to try to apply evolutionary explanations to some of these psychological features, but maybe it’s worth trying in this case anyway. Is there a story we can tell, ideally a testable story, but at least some kind of story about why we would have evolved or developed, maybe? I guess the distinction being, maybe it’s not through adaptation, but maybe just some reason why the brain chose to prioritize our strategies to put subtraction way after addition.

0:31:00.7 LK: Yeah. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun to think about these things.

0:31:03.9 SC: Yeah, it’s fun.

[laughter]

0:31:08.3 LK: So chapter 2 of the book is, I thought of as like evolutionary explanations for this, and then chapter 3 of the book is more like cultural evolution. I’ll start with the biological ones, and then you can tell me if you want me to go into the cultural ones. Obviously, the biology, this desire to acquire stuff, that’s something that… Getting food allows us to pass down our genes, and there’s a… Stephanie Preston does a lot of research on this. She’s at the University of Michigan and other psychologists, and I cite her in the book a lot, but she’s looked at acquisitiveness, why people get and keep things, and she basically shows that this acquisitiveness… She has this brilliant study that she does on a computer screen where people are shopping and they keep all this useless stuff and then they are told to constrain their items to the shopping cart and they’re unable to do it, unable to get rid of this completely useless thing.

0:32:03.0 LK: She shows that that basic behavior is continuous with hoarding, but it’s also tied to just pack rats, for example. I mean, pack rats, they… When you take away their supply of stuff, they immediately start stockpiling it. And when you first think of that, you’re like, well, of course, that’s what we do when our pantries get empty, but pack rats aren’t thinking and planning animals, they’re doing this entirely on instinct. And so there’s that. The other kind of… Surprisingly for me, again, being kind of coming at this from the outside, was how biological this desire to display competence is to basically show that we can interact with our world. And so the classic example is bowerbirds building nests.

0:32:56.7 LK: And so the male bowerbird builds the ceremonial nest and the female bowerbirds are going around looking at the nest and deciding who they want to mate with based on the nest, and then after they mate, the female bowerbird goes and builds another nest and raises the young in that nest. So the whole point of this ceremonial nest is just to show that the male bowerbird was capable of interacting with the world. And to the extent like adding Legos or adding to-dos, or just showing you’re busy can kind of display this competence, that’s also kind of a biological tie-in that would lead us to add. But to be fair, the last thing I’ll say about biology is that if you talk about this just beautiful, if you’re using it as a metaphor, adaptation and what’s the other, selection, right?

0:33:48.1 LK: So nature is moving forward by… Not moving forward, nature is evolving by adding and subtracting, and so as a metaphor that is actually pretty helpful in thinking about, oh, there’s multiple ways that we can kind of evolve, and one is by adding to what’s there, and one is by subtracting from what’s there.

0:34:10.9 SC: I don’t think we necessarily need to go to bowerbirds. I think there’s plenty of human beings who clearly want to show off their ability to acquire and own things.

0:34:18.3 LK: I’m just thinking…

0:34:19.3 SC: You can just see on Instagram, who needs to…

0:34:21.5 LK: Exactly. I’m just making an excuse for those people. Yeah, that it’s a… I have a biological excuse. But the cultural… You’ll be interested in the cultural one, because this is not something that I think gets enough… It was surprisingly clear among the anthropologist set and historians that at the dawn of civilization, so when we’re going from hunter-gatherer to farming, there was this thing that was always there. So they talk about writing had to be there, and then organized social structures, back then it was often religion, and then they talked about monumental architecture always being there. I was like, I’m a civil engineer, I love big structures, but I thought, well, this is a pretty lofty place for big structures to be one of the things that has to be there for something to be considered a civilization.

0:35:19.5 SC: Yeah.

0:35:21.4 LK: But the theory there is that by building the body of the civilization, that’s what helps build a culture of civilization. So these early settlements, you’ve got 25 hunter-gatherers roaming around in a band can only do so much, but then if they want to build some kind of ceremonial thing similar to the bowerbird nest or similar to some of these pyramids or other temples, things like that, then all of a sudden the people have to coordinate, and so the theory is that this desire to build is actually what brings people together to kind of scratch that itch. So there’s that kind of cultural thing too, to the extent that we’ve all evolved from those civilizations. I mean, those are the civilizations that spread around and then became us, whether you’re Western, Eastern, Interdependent, Independent, whatever.

0:36:15.0 SC: Well, you’re sparking all sorts of things that came up in previous podcast episodes, so I hope you’ll forgive me for mentioning them, but I want to press on that a little bit. We already talked about the cultural aspects, could it be different in different countries. I did have Joe Henrich on the podcast and he was emphasizing how we Westerners are a little bit different than everybody else, and I noticed that in your book you quote Lao Tzu, right. And I recently had Edward Slingerland on the podcast to talk about Ancient Chinese philosophies, Daoism and Confucianism and so forth, and how a big goal that is common to most of those is trying not to try. Sort of living in the moment, going with the flow, etcetera. But maybe that’s just aspirational, maybe it’s not the natural thing, the natural way that people behave. Can you say anything about if we had done all of your studies in China or in Africa or whatever, do you think you would have gotten the same answers?

0:37:14.0 LK: Well, what I can say is that we did do studies in Japan and Germany, and the variation between the US culture, like the US population, the US samples and those samples was less than the variation within the US sample, so that’s what we’ve found. It’s high on our list of things to study next, what the variation is across cultures, ’cause I do think that there would be some variation. I don’t think… The evidence that we have suggests that it wouldn’t turn off this bias, but certainly you could think that different people would be different and better or worse at it. I think… I mean, the Lao Tzu quote that gets attributed to him anyway is that, “To gain knowledge, add things every day. To gain wisdom, subtract things every day, ” which is a beautiful quote and it ties in nicely to how we do this in our ideas and the benefits when we actually subtract ideas.

0:38:23.8 LK: The kind of do nothing approach I see as a third option, because this… Subtracting is not not trying, it’s a very active like, “Hey, I want to change this thing.” It’s a very kind of… If you’re talking about it in terms of independent versus interdependent cultures, that’s Hazel Markus’s kind of way of categorizing them. And so the independent cultures are more like the Westerner way of like, “Hey, I’m in control of my own destiny, I can change the world and make it how I want it to be,” and the interdependent is every, you know, Yin and Yang, everything’s going back to the way that it used to be, or everything’s going back to this kind of equilibrium. And I think subtracting’s a very independent thing to do, it’s an action that you’re taking to try to change things. So in that way, it’s different from this sit back and let’s just see what happens approach that is part of some of these philosophies.

0:39:20.9 LK: Certainly your other guests know way more about this than I do, but I’m just trying to offer what I know about it from thinking about it through this very specific lens of what it means for our ability to add and subtract, and I think that’s why it’s a really interesting question for future research, because there’s reasons to think that… There’s reasons that it might go both ways, for example, where the… Allow me to explain this. One theory might be that if you’re a interdependent culture, so these are the ones that are affiliated more with Eastern cultures, although of course, it’s never so simple as that, you’re better at seeing the big picture. And if you’re taking the big picture back to our grids on the computer screen, people who can see the big picture might be able to see, okay, here is something that can be subtracted from it. If you’re just looking at the blocks in isolation, you’re less likely to see that a single subtraction could improve the big thing. That could be one reason or one theory why maybe these interdependent cultures would be better at seeing this as an option.

0:40:36.0 LK: But at the same time, I just also made a case before where independent cultures that are more likely to think about maybe how do we change things from how they are to how we want them to be, which that would say suggest, maybe they would be better at this. So yeah, that’s what we know about culture, there’s certainly a lot to learn there still. I don’t know. I think for me, the punchline about cultures is like so… What can you do about it? Again, it’s a very engineer-y way of thinking about it, and I think it’s really useful to understand why these things evolve differently in different cultures, but giving people the recommendation that you should have been born in some culture that was better at thinking about subtracting, it’s not very practical advice.

0:41:25.7 SC: Not very actionable, yeah. I have been pressing you on all these questions about biology and evolution that I know in psychology, that I know are not what you’re mostly trained to do. Let me give you at least the opportunity to elaborate on something you said over emails while we were discussing this, you hinted at this entropy-based discussion that you wanted to put in the book, but your editor wouldn’t let you. So you’ve come to the right podcast to give an entropy-based explanation of anything at all. So is this, what was the entropy-based discussion? Was it a purported explanation for why we like to add things rather than subtract?

0:42:00.4 LK: Yeah, I think the reason I put it in the email is, I wanted to hear your thoughts on it, and I think the editor rightfully subtracted it out of the book. I didn’t have any evidence for it, and I feel actually less well-trained to talk about entropy than I do about loss aversion, for example. Not that they’re on the same level as a scientific concept, but anyway, the shortest logical entropy explanation that I could think of is, one reason that we might develop these thinking heuristics over time is that we’re just surrounded by a world that it reminds us of them or advantages them, or it’s an advantage to do them.

0:42:46.3 LK: So if over time it’s been really good to add, when we added more shelter that allowed us to pass down our genes more, we added more food that allowed us to pass down our genes more or help that culture thrive, the more times we do it, the more likely we are to continue doing it. And then in addition, the more we’re surrounded by these examples of adding. So if you’re walking around a city, all around you are things that people have added. Something that somebody took away, like in my book, I use the example of the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco. Amazing subtraction created this beautiful waterfront. I visited that waterfront as a civil engineer, I didn’t know for, till five years after I visited that there used to be a highway there, so that the reminder of subtraction is gone, and so we walk around in this world where there’s all these constant reminders of adding.

0:43:45.4 LK: And to the extent that entropy, as I understand it, is this kind of we’re constant adding of complexity, then maybe it’s not just the human-built road where we’re seeing all these reminders of adding, but it’s the whole natural world where we’re seeing all these reminders of adding, which could then lead us to think that this is… Just give us more reminders that this is a way of making change. Does that make sense? And yeah, poke holes in it and interacts like my, you know…

0:44:16.7 SC: You know, actually, I think the concept does make sense to me, I’m not sure if entropy is the right word to attach to it, and again, I don’t have any more evidence for the concept than you do, but if I were to sort of say it back, there’s an idea that… I actually broached this idea in a solo podcast I did a while ago about the meaning of life, the idea being that the… There’s sort of a natural way things would go if we didn’t do anything, right, if we didn’t influence the world in any way at all, and that can be fine, but the idea of a life that is meaningful is sort of one that has worked to improve or make the world better in a way that it wouldn’t have if you just let everything play out as it naturally would have.

0:45:08.8 SC: So in some sense, the value that we bring to and get from our lives is, it inheres in the difference between what happens because we’re here and what would have happened if we weren’t here, and… So it seems very plausible to me, as you just said, that the most obvious signs of those kinds of meaningful changes in the structure of the world are adding things to it. I mean, probably there are other meaningful ways you can subtract things to it, but if you’re just looking for why is it more obvious to add things, that does seem to fit into that sort of way of thinking. Yeah.

0:45:46.4 LK: That… That’s a very independent way of…

0:45:49.3 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:45:50.2 LK: Thinking about meaning, right, yeah. I mean, that’s totally how I am. I think, to the… Like, when you’re donors leaving their $100 million to a university for a building, it’s like, this is the thing that lives on after you, and it’s a very physical artifact of your positive influence on the world, so yeah, that’s interesting. But yeah, that’s the closest to…

0:46:17.3 SC: No-one’s ever left a lot of money to a university to tear down a building, I don’t think.

0:46:22.4 LK: It wouldn’t have to be as much money, you’d only have to give about 10% and you could make…

0:46:28.1 SC: Well, and that is an entropic explanation, it’s easier to tear the building down than to build the building, because you’re increasing entropy when you’re tearing the building down in a very manifest way. So that’s why I’m not sure exactly how the entropy fits into the story. In some sense, it’s the struggle against entropy that we recognize as achieving something or you’ve built something that wouldn’t have just happened in the natural state of things.

0:46:53.8 LK: I see, okay. Yeah, so maybe I’m glad I didn’t write it in the book.

0:47:00.0 SC: But it does bring me to the next big subject here that I want to talk about, sort of move on beyond the psychological explanations for why we think this way, to the ramifications of this way of thinking for what you do in the world of engineering and design and sustainability and so forth. There’s some… In the world of all the things that can happen or we can build or that we can do, there’s far too many options to possibly contemplate, and the implication of your work is we more naturally contemplating adding thins than putting things on, but the point you’re making is, when you have a complicated system, it can very often, maybe equally often, be the case that you can improve things by subtracting, and that’s something we are not as immediately noticing.

0:47:45.3 LK: Right, and this is what drew me to behavioral science in the first place. There’s this great quote that you’ll appreciate about, it’s that complexity science becomes like a gateway into behavioral science or vice versa, but anyway, as a person who is interested in the built environment and then interested in sustainability, both kind of social sustainability with equity and things like that, but also just… I’ll talk about it in terms of climate change, that’s makes it a little more tangible. And the challenge is not, well, obviously, we need new technologies and things that can help with climate change, but for the most part, we know how to do this better, we know how to make net zero energy buildings, the challenge is like how do we get this into practice, and that’s what got me to behavioral science in the first place.

0:48:41.8 LK: Yeah, there’s of course, keep advancing the technology, but what about the technology in our brains as designers and also as people kind of using the designs that would help here. And this bias that we’ve been talking about, this heuristic that we kinda just go right to adding, seems very aligned with the problems of sustainability. If you think about one way that these problems get framed as planetary tipping points in the article in I think it was in Science, not Nature, but the article in Science talking about where we are with these planetary tipping points, and a number of them we’re past them…

0:49:23.3 SC: It’s too late, yeah.

0:49:27.5 LK: We’re past the point of… And so then the option is so obviously, well, we need to subtract, we need to get back down below, but we’re still approaching these problems with this mindset of like, okay, what can we add to this situation. Again, that’s zooming, going back down a level, thinking about it in terms of climate change. I mean, recently, we’ve been thinking a lot more and putting into practice ways of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, whether trees or what have you, but for a really long time, scientists have known that climate change is a thing, and most of our efforts have been at reducing our adding, slowing our rate of adding CO2 to the atmosphere, and it’s only when we’ve exceeded, like we’re literally… Scientists are saying it’s safe to have 350 parts per million, we’re at up over 420 parts per million.

0:50:22.2 LK: And so part of the solution clearly needs to be to subtract some of this CO2, and yet we’ve really been delayed in thinking about that as part of the solution. And you mentioned subtracting in complex systems, and climate and CO2 in particular is an example of how a subtracting can, all else being equal, maybe even be a better option. So of course, we need to think about all the ways that we can address climate change, and I’m not advocating for a single response, because that’s not what we need, we need to be exploring everything, but if you’re… Some of these geo-engineering proposals, it’s like, okay, we’re going to put mirrors up into space and reflect the sun’s rays, and so it’s like, or fill the oceans with iron.

0:51:12.4 LK: And again, I’m not qualified to evaluate any one of things as a good or bad, but what is sure about those options is that we’re adding more stuff to this really complex system that we screwed up without even trying to screw up in the first place, and so yes, adding these things might help with climate change, but they are also adding more kind of tension and more inter-relationships that are unpredictable and that we aren’t really sure what’s going to happen, whereas if you take out the CO2, yeah, that’s still an unpredictable thing, we’re intervening in this really complex system, but we do know what a world looks like with less CO2, it was like the world when we have less CO2, so it’s a more kind of… We have a little more idea of what… How that system would behave than we do when we continuously add things to a system.

0:52:12.0 LK: And tying that same concept back to behavioral science and so climate, obviously, that’s a big physical system, there’s this, another eminent, kind of the founding father of social psychology called Kurt Lewin, and he was… He was like Herbert Simon in that he was very applied in the way he studied things. Lewin was from Poland, he moved to Germany, he had to come to the United States because Hitler was rising to power in Germany, and his whole approach to social science, was like how do we use this to make the world a better place? How do we use this to solve social problems? And so he would look at these systems and try to understand behavior from the system’s perspective. His advance was like, this isn’t just about Sean or Leidy and the thoughts that are in their head, it’s also a lot about what’s going on around them that’s causing them to behave in a certain way.

0:53:14.5 LK: And so he thought of behavior as forces and a field, which are things that he’s borrowing from physics, so there are forces that are acting on you, and there can be forces that are working towards the behavior that you want, and there can be forces that are working against the behavior that you want. And he said that the good way to change, if you want to change behavior, there’s one good way and one bad way. He said the bad way was to add incentives or add forces that are kind of working in the direction that you want it to go and the good way is to remove the forces that are working against you. And it’s the same as climate, if you remove the forces that are working against you, you’re relieving tension in the system, which is better than… If you add an incentive, it’s like, yes, you’re helping yourself get to the… Make yourself more likely to get to the behavior that you want, but you’re also increasing tension should you not achieve that behavior that you want.

0:54:13.4 LK: So I think about this in terms of back to Ezra, my son, when we’re trying to get him to not watch the iPad after dinner, I can say, oh, well, if you don’t watch the iPad, you can have a cookie, and that might work. I’ve added an incentive, it’s making him more likely to do the behavior, he might happily eat the cookie and not have the iPad, or, but it can also backfire where he’s like, okay, now he still wants to watch the iPad and he’s super frustrated because he’s not getting a cookie. And the kind of removing the barrier is putting the iPad out of sight or telling them that it ran out of batteries and then it’s not even an option, and you kind of…

0:54:56.8 LK: So anyway, this is where both in the example of this big physical system with climate and also in the example of a social system where you’re trying to change individual behavior, where taking away, removing, can be sometimes even a better option than adding. And again, it’s not, I’m agnostic on adding versus subtracting, I don’t think we should only subtract, of course, but it’s like this is where this tendency that we’ve found to overlook subtraction is really problematic when these are maybe the better options.

0:55:28.5 SC: If you happen to be listening to this, Ezra, don’t worry, these are just thought experiments, we would never tell you that the iPad has run out of battery if it hadn’t really done that, but…

0:55:38.3 LK: Yeah, just covering that.

0:55:43.2 SC: The example of climate is interesting, but it’s also a little bit different. I mean, obviously, the climate is a very complex system, but in some sense, it’s almost too cheap of an example, because we kinda know what we’re doing wrong, we’re putting too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and subtracting them would be good, but there are other examples. You talk about traffic flows, for example, where it’s just much less obvious what to do, and even without trying to people remove a highway from a busy city traffic flow pattern and the traffic improves even though you have taken away an option, and maybe that has to do with how we think and satisfication or whatever it’s called, but I’m looking for the lessons that we might have when dealing with complex systems, like traffic flows, the economy, the internet or whatever, where… Is there some theme that we tend to add things, but maybe we should think of the beneficial effects of subtracting them away?

0:56:50.9 LK: Let me tell the traffic story and the science behind that, and I think your listeners will be smart enough to [0:56:57.2] ____, so there’s this… My editors… Speaking of editors, there’s this thing called Braess’ paradox in math, and it’s the finding that… The best example is highways, but it also applies to these other complex systems that you talked about, like networks, where you take away a part of the system and the system performs better, and that’s considered a paradox. And the fact that that’s considered a paradox is perfect evidence of the fact that we don’t think of subtracting as a way to make things better.

0:57:29.6 LK: ‘Cause the reason it’s called a paradox, and I’m holding up quotes, is because it’s so unthinkable that taking away could actually make something better. And the reason that it works, the reason that it happens, so you think of a highway and you take out a highway from the middle of the city, well, how could that possibly help traffic capacity? And it’s because… It does actually tie back to satisficing, where people… The system wasn’t operating at an optimal equilibrium in the first place, it’s just people had found their way to get about the city, and it settled into this equilibrium that was basically working for people, and when you take out the part of the highway, it’s basically shaking the whole thing up and it settles back down into some other equilibrium. And this other equilibrium, because you weren’t at optimal to begin with, this other equilibrium could be worse, traffic could get worse, or it could be better.

0:58:24.5 LK: And it’s happened a lot, that traffic ends up being better and people just find different ways to get around the city in these highway removal projects that are done for… You know, removing the highway on the Embarcadero in San Francisco was not to make traffic better, it was to open up that waterfront, and people just assumed it was going to make traffic worse, and that was an acceptable cost. And then the fact that it doesn’t make traffic worse becomes this pleasant surprise, but that’s happened a lot in highway removal. There’s a famous one in Seoul, Korea, where it happened, and it happens more and more, and now it’s not unexpected that the highway removal actually improves this… Removing a component of the system actually improves the system’s overall performance.

0:59:15.0 LK: There’s an awesome quote that, tying back into the Braess’ paradox thing, there’s this guy, Kurt Koffka, who is a fascinating scientist, he was one of the earlier gestalt psychologists, and these were these scholars in Germany who were basically taking a complex systems approach to human behavior. He was married four times to the same two women. So, figure that out. But he’s the originator of this quote, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” that sports announcers use, but that’s not the actual quote. The quote he said was, “The whole is something else than the sum of its parts.” And he’d get so mad when people would misquote him. There’s another great quote where he’s like, “This is not a principle of addition.” So he’s fighting the same kind of tendency to think that adding is the only way that the whole is greater. No, the whole is something else than the sum of its parts.

1:00:20.6 SC: Well, but that brings us up to sort of where I wanted to wind things up with the down-to-earth human side of this kind of stuff. There’s one thing when we’re designing a traffic flow pattern for a city, but most of us don’t do that, maybe you do that, I’m not quite sure. But most of us just try to get through our lives, and you’ve already mentioned Marie Kondo and her strategy of removing things that do not spark joy. I can kind of predict what you’re going to say, but to what extent can we human beings improve things in our everyday lives just by at least contemplating subtracting things rather than adding them?

1:00:59.8 LK: I think immensely, and I know that some of these biases, Kahneman will talk about his biases, just knowing about them doesn’t help you be any better at them, but a lot of his biases are related to thinking about something but then not choosing it, and certainly he’s got a whole catalog, so they’re not all just that. But what we’re talking about here is the situation where we don’t even think of something, so to the extent that you can help yourself think of this option that you’re not otherwise considering and then just put it through all the same filters that you’re already using, I think it just opens up a whole new world of opportunities.

1:01:39.8 LK: That’s what I hope to do with the book is show people this thing that’s happening, show them ways that people overcome it and hopefully rearrange your mental furniture just a slight bit so that you consider this option that we’ve otherwise neglected. I think it can make your life a little bit better, and I don’t think it’s impossible to do. I think just by listening to this podcast, you’re going to find yourself seeing more of these options. And then when you… And then the trick, I think, is to help give yourself reminders of how these subtractions have made your life better, because we talk about the subtracting from the waterfront and now the highway is not visible as evidence of this thing that you did, and it’s the same if you stop doing something on your calendar.

1:02:29.0 LK: So if you take away this activity that you’ve been doing weekly for the last 10 years of your life, pretty soon it’s out of sight and out of mind, and you don’t have this reminder that you subtracted and you have subtracting to thank for this beautiful free time. And so somehow reminding ourselves that subtracting is to thank for this. So the calendar example, I know one of Ben… One of the other co-authors, his wife, when she takes something away, she will leave a block on her calendar of this time brought to you by such and such a subtraction, and so here’s this visible evidence of this way that she achieved change, and it serves as a reminder to subtract on future things. So that’s my hope is that it can’t be bad to be thinking of more of our options, especially an option as basic as this one.

1:03:26.5 SC: As long as they don’t subtract their podcast listening from their weekly calendar, that would be terrible, we don’t want anyone to do that, don’t take that advice. But it is an arena where just kind of…

1:03:36.6 LK: And then subtract… Subtract all your other… Yeah, subtract all your other podcasts.

1:03:38.9 SC: Subtract the other podcasts, of course, sorry, other podcasts. But the information that we’re inundated with is clearly a fertile arena for imagining subtracting things, our Twitter feeds, our emails every day, our screen time and so forth. It’s kind of obvious in some sense that there’s too much of it there, and the choice to be made is what to pay attention to and part of that choice is what not to pay attention to, right?

1:04:16.1 LK: Exactly, yeah, and this is an area that we’re working on, this has been really helpful for me. I used to run on a treadmill while watching the news, while listening to a podcast and there was no time… Running used to be the time where I would kind of synthesize stuff and digest the stuff that I had taken in the rest of the time, and again, it’s add and subtract here, you can’t just not take information in, but thinking deliberately about, okay, what do I want to take in, when do I not want to be taking in information so that I can be thinking about stuff that I know that I may no longer want to be… No longer want to believe.

1:04:54.9 LK: I think that as a scholar, subtracting… As a person who writes books and does research, subtracting in our ideas is the most powerful form of subtracting, it’s like what do we no longer believe that we used to believe, and that’s a really powerful thing for self-improvement, but also for scientific revolutions, so many of these scientific revolutions required forgetting, or not forgetting, but stop thinking the old way of doing things. I don’t know, are you… Do you remember this trend towards misconceptions as an educator, so it’s like okay, students come in with common misconceptions about physics, and physics, chemistry and it’s a worthy thought. It’s like okay, we’re going to identify the things that people are coming to us thinking that are incorrect, so that we can kind of start from a clean slate.

1:05:50.6 LK: And there was this whole theme of educational research in that area, identifying these common misconceptions, how to break them down and subtract them, and then eventually that we just gave up on that because it wasn’t how people actually did things. It was so hard to subtract these misconceptions that we just said, “Okay, we need to figure out a way to kind of adapt what students are bringing in and allow them to massage these misconceptions a little bit and then attach the new knowledge on to that,” so it’s really hard to do in our ideas, but also really, really powerful when we are able to do it.

1:06:27.3 SC: Well, I think… Isn’t it even worse? My impression is that when you talk to people about misconceptions and you dwell on them trying to remove them, they end up coming away with even stronger versions of the misconceptions than they came in with, ’cause you spend all your time talking about them. [chuckle]

1:06:43.6 LK: That’s true. Yeah, you’re right. The most helpful thing I found about trying to help with this problem was using analogies, and it seems like a really unscientific thing, but there’s all these record… Nancy Nersessian studies this, it’s like the history of scientific revolutions, but also like a Thomas Kuhnian approach, but looking at the thoughts that were going on inside the revolutionaries’ heads, and it was surprising how many of them used analogies. And the reason analogy helps is because you’re basically taking the new idea and attaching it to something else that’s already in the person’s head, and then when you do that, those two things added together can kind of overpower the misconception, but if you just come at it with the new idea and there’s no analogy to tie it to, it doesn’t overpower the misconception.

1:07:42.6 LK: But anyway, you’re exactly right, though, that… And I hadn’t thought of it, but the more you kinda dwell on it, it’s like yeah, you’re drawing attention to the one thing that if you just smooth it over and just focused on the right ideas you might do better, and maybe that’s why the learning scholars stopped dwelling on it.

1:07:58.6 SC: Well, I don’t recall if you actually mention this example in your book, when you talk about scientific progress, Albert Einstein and special relativity is the perfect example of what you’re talking about. I’m not sure if…

1:08:11.1 LK: No, you’re going to have to explain it to me.

1:08:13.1 SC: You thought of this particular example. Yeah, I mean, it’s a fascinating story, and I’m not a super good historian about this stuff, but we give Albert Einstein credit for the theory of relativity, there was this special theory of relativity in 1905. Speed of light is the maximum speed and there’s no preferred reference frames, etcetera, and then the general theory of relativity 10 years later, where he says spacetime is curved. And clearly, general relativity was his baby, that came out of the brain of Albert Einstein and he gets all the credit and deserves all the credit, but special relativity, which was the first one, was really much more of a team effort. There were a lot of people who thought along those lines around that time, and what he really did was put the final finishing touches on it with this very dramatic conceptual move of saying, everyone is talking about the ether, this idea of something that spreads throughout all space and defines the standard of rest, with respect to things move and so forth, and they went to incredibly elaborate machinations to make sure that the standard of rest of the ether could be completely unobservable, there’s no way of noticing it.

1:09:25.8 SC: And really, all Einstein did was say, “Okay, then we don’t need the ether, just get rid of it, and we can have all the success that we have,” and people… It took a little while and people said, “Yeah, actually, that’s right.” It was a largely subtractive move that made everything much simpler.

1:09:42.4 LK: That’s awesome. Yeah, no, if I had that example, I would have used it in the book, but I didn’t, unfortunately. Yeah, that’s the downside of doing these awesome conversations after writing the book, is you come up with things that… Oh, man, I wish I included that, that’s brilliant.

1:09:55.0 SC: It’s… Yeah, no, I know, it’s very… Well, there could be a sequel and yeah, I’m sure… I presume that… Here’s the last question. You’re a writer now, you got a book out there that people can buy called Subtract, how much were you conscious while writing, of the fact that I’m telling people subtract things, I’d better make sure to subtract things from my writing and from my book.

1:10:19.9 LK: It was horrible. It was like, yeah, ’cause I’m quoting from Strunk and White in there, omit needless words, and it’s… As you know as a writer yourself, it’s hard, and I think that I did a 90% job in terms of creating what I could do in terms getting rid of extraneous stuff, but I’m sure people can go through the book and find stories that they wish weren’t in there or words that they wish weren’t in there, so I was very conscious of it. I try to deal… I also talk about editors in the book, so one of the things… It’s hard to subtract from your own stuff, so this tendency that you mentioned at the start where it’s like, okay, when we… It’s one thing when you’re subtracting a bridge that someone else did, but when it’s your own bridge, that becomes even harder, and so that’s where the editors can come in and be helpful, and so I think that… There’s about 40,000 words that didn’t see the light of day that I wrote, and probably…

1:11:21.2 SC: Very good.

1:11:22.2 LK: Still some more but I was very conscious of it.

1:11:25.5 SC: Once you go out telling people how to behave, you’re going to be open to that criticism all the time but look, all we can do is try to be better, that’s the lesson for all of us. So Leidy Klotz, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast, this was fun.

1:11:39.2 LK: Yes, thank you, Sean. I had a lot of fun too.

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