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Exploring how humans connect and get stuff done together, with Dan Hammond and Pia Lee from Squadify.
We need groups of humans to help navigate the world of opportunities and challenges, but we don't always work together effectively. This podcast tackles questions such as "What makes a rockstar team?" "How can we work from anywhere?" "What part does connection play in today's world?"
You'll also hear the thoughts and views of those who are running and leading teams across the world.
[00:00:00] Dan: Are you sure you are focusing on the right things in your team, or could you just be going fast in the wrong direction? In this week's We Not Me, we meet Greg Radick and Tom McClelland, professor and lecturer respectively in the history and philosophy of science. They've uncovered how we sometimes take the wrong path, and what we can learn from the great scientists about what we can do about it.
[00:00:25] Hello and welcome back to We Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect to get stuff done together. I'm Dan Hammond.
[00:00:33] Pia: And I am Pia Lee.
[00:00:34] Dan: This podcast, Pia, sort of started when, um, I, my friend Greg, who I also play, uh, music with, who is a professor of the philosophy and hist history and philosophy of science, beg, beg their pardons. He's been working on this huge book, um, for about five years, and I've been sort of keeping tabs on him and I I was really interested. Yeah, it's, It's
[00:00:57] Pia: you using big words.
[00:00:59] Dan: Well, obviously I haven't, as anyone would expect, but Yeah. He's, it's, it's, it's extraordinary how much work has gone into this. And so I thought, wonder how collaboration played a part or, uh, it was the, you know, what's the team behind the, the book if you like? But, Greg came up with another idea, um, in conversation with, um, another academic, Tom McClelland. And so we got them on the show today, and they're gonna be talking about salience. And we'll reveal, well, they will reveal what that is all about. And then, um, we can have a really good conversation about how it relates to teams.
[00:01:34] Pia: And a really warm welcome to Greg and Tom.
[00:01:39] Greg: Thank you. It's a delight to be here.
[00:01:41] Tom: Hi. Thanks for having us.
[00:01:42] Pia: And we've got a topic that I'm not going to spoil by telling our listeners what it is because I don't know what it is, that's why. Um, but we're gonna find out all about it and, um, and really deep dive into the topic. Before that, well, it's a double act. You've both gotta go into the chamber with the Hammond and face the cards. Is it one card each?
[00:02:03] Dan: I was thinking we might go shared cards and then we can see what emerges from the, exactly, exactly, exactly. Okay, here we go. We have had this on the show before. It be quite interesting considering where you both sort of are now, um, what everyone said I would be when I grew up.
[00:02:19] Tom: I was quite young when it suggested that I might grow up to be a philosopher. 'cause I was always asking annoying questions. In fact, I was, I was so young I couldn't even say the word. I said phiropopher. That was about as near as I could get.
[00:02:30] Dan: So you've become a phiropopher. So
[00:02:34] Tom: I'm only doing this now because I've got no imagination. I was
[00:02:36] Dan: Yeah.
[00:02:37] Tom: that that's a good idea for a career, and here I'm.
[00:02:41] Dan: Oh, excellent. What about you, Greg?
[00:02:42] Greg: in my case, likewise, almost nothing comes to mind except one kid when I was in elementary school saying that I was gonna be a professor. and, uh, here I am. So I said almost no one said anything that I can remember, but the one thing I can remember is that.
[00:02:57] Dan: Yeah. And what was that based on? How were you professorial even at school?
[00:03:03] Greg: I think I was, I was bookish. I loved reading. It's still my favorite pastime. One of my favorite pastimes is to browse, not necessarily reading, uh, but, but browsing, uh, and a kind of absorbing, absorbing knowledge in, in a kind of environmental way. Um, so, uh, maybe, I think, I think I, I, was, my love of books was probably clear then, um, and, uh, remains, remains as, as lively today.
[00:03:29] Pia: preferably drinking good coffee at the same time. That's,
[00:03:33] Greg: Not, not when I was nine. Uh, but, but, uh, but now, yeah. I, I try, yeah.
[00:03:38] Dan: Even for a New Jersey boy, you, that, that hadn't quite happened. Well, it, Greg, I have to say, it makes you into, uh, the, the, I think, the best conversationalist I know. So, uh, you're always fascinating to spend time with. So it's, it's working. It's working. Um, excellent. So actually, why don't we p why don't we riff on this theme? Greg, why don't you just go back to that nine, just give us a quick. Run forward through the years. What's your, give us a quick bio.
[00:04:04] Greg: Well, the quick bio goes like this. Uh, I was born and raised in New Jersey, uh, in the United States. Uh, as an undergraduate student, my degree was in history, with a minor in music. But I never lost my sense that science was something that fascinated me. And, uh, after uni I had a little time to read around and think and, and decided that I had to bring science back into my life. And eventually that took the form of a subject that I had never heard of when I was an undergraduate, which is what Tom and I both do now, the history and philosophy of science. Once I saw that in the prospectus for Cambridge University where I was looking to do a master's degree, I thought that's it.
[00:04:48] Uh, and I went to do a master's degree, which became a PhD, and I've been very fortunate that it's become a career which has been entirely at the University of Leeds in the north of England.
[00:05:00] Tom: Yeah, so I started off asking annoying questions in Harrogate, Yorkshire. I grew up, and then my academic life has taken me on a magical mystery tour of UK University. So I studied at Cambridge, York and Sussex, and then I've worked at Glasgow, Manchester, Orrick, and then back to Cambridge again. Um, and I, I've been at Cambridge five years now.
[00:05:22] Pia: And I hope, Tom, you are now going to tell us what the, the history and philosophy of science is. 'cause I'm still a little bit in, in the dark. Sounds lovely. But what, what do you browse on that subject?
[00:05:33] Tom: What? What do we browse? Yeah, so I mean, scientists are doing their things and the history and philosophy of science looks at the history of how science has developed over the years, and related to that as philosophical questions about some of the underpinnings of that. So, for example, you can ask questions like, what is science? What is the scientific method? How has our understanding of the scientific method changed over the centuries? But also loads of more specific questions? So scientists throw around particular concepts in their work. They use particular strategies to address a question, but rather than doing the experiments, people like Greg and I are sitting back and asking some of the more foundational questions about how scientists are thinking about things, uh, how they're approaching them, and often suggesting ways of improving that.
[00:06:17] Dan: So you're still asking annoying questions, Tom, by the sound of it that you started off back, yeah, excellent. Um, and so is there, sorry, I'm gonna come back to your bio in a moment, Tom, but what does the practical application of this look like? How does it, does it influence science today? Looking forward, what, what impact does the, does your work have?
[00:06:34] Tom: Yes, it's quite interesting and dialogue between science and philosophy of science. So for example, one of the issues I work in is, um, philosophy of psychiatry. So mental disorder is a really important concept, but it's a, a concept that's got very fuzzy boundaries and it can be misused sometimes. So some of the work, um, I do looks at what it means for something to be a mental disorder, and that's helped inform what people do in psychiatry. So again, I'm, I'm not doing the kind of face-to-face work with, with patients that's for psychiatrists. But some of the more kind of tricky conceptual work is making a difference to how psychiatrists approach these issues.
[00:07:13] Pia: So we are talking about this subject. I really want to ask our listeners, do you know what this word means? Because I didn't. Salience, what the meaning of it is and what the value of it is for people in teams. So, which one of you is gonna start the ball rolling?
[00:07:35] Tom: Let me start. Yeah. So, yeah, so, so salience is, is a really useful concept. Although it's a bit of jargon. It's, it's not one that's too tricky to understand. So something is salient to the extent that it grabs your attention. So, for example, imagine you, you look out the window. Your eyes can't look at everything at the same time. What grabs your attention? What's the most salient thing? Um, so maybe it's a car going past or maybe it's a tree or something. In conversation, some things are more salient to you than others. If there's loads of people talking, maybe one person's voice stands out more than somebody else's. If you are, um, trying to communicate information, you'll try to make some things more salient than others. You'll try to make them, uh, uh, grab somebody's attention.
[00:08:17] It's particularly easy to see this in a journalistic context. So think about the structure of a newspaper article. The most salient thing, the most attention grabbing thing is the headline, right? That's the bit that's really gonna grab your attention initially. And there's a choice there to try and make one bit of information in this newspaper article more attention grabbing, more salient than other things.
[00:08:39] Dan: Is this because we have, you mentioned this, we have so much information coming at us there as humans, we have to. be ideally very good at, sort of filtering that and quickly finding relevance. Is that, is that the sort of, the need that we're filling ourselves through, through this?
[00:08:54] Tom: That. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. So we are always presented with more information than we can fully digest. So what we've done is we've. Evolved this capacity to filter things in quite an automatic way. And sometimes that works really, really well and information's filtered, and you get exactly the information you need and you filter out the information you don't need. But sometimes it doesn't work and you are attending to the wrong stuff.
[00:09:17] But one of the really interesting things about salience is it reflects our skills. So the skills you have might mean you're more tuned into some things than another. And often one of the differences between how a really expert person sees a situation compared to a novice is that their attention is grabbed by the right thing. They're tuned into what's relevant in a way that a novice isn't tuned into that they're just looking at the wrong thing.
[00:09:42] Dan: So what does the history and philosophy of science tell us about salience? What's, um, what's, what's been uncovered? What's your interest in it?
[00:09:49] Greg: Well, in, my own case, uh, coming at it as someone looking at, uh, debate in genetics, uh, at the early, uh, in the early years of the 20th century, where the paper that, uh, Gregor Mendel people remember from school, uh, Mendel, who crossed peas, some of which were, were green and some of which were yellow, or some of which were round and some were, were wrinkled. Uh, whenever we, we teach about genetics at any level, we start kids off with Mendel's pea crossing experiments, uh, partly because they're, they're charming and, and not that difficult to understand, partly because they're genuinely foundational for the way that the science of inheritance genetics got going in the early 20th century. And, and our textbooks credit Mendal with the discovery of the gene.
[00:10:44] Uh, and thanks to work, associated most closely with someone that, that you may have heard of Thomas Kuhn whose book, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962 gave us that ubiquitous jargon word paradigm and paradigm shift, that comes from this technical work in HPS, uh, as we acronym it.
[00:11:09] As I said, there's dis ubiquitous disagreement in science. There's ubiquitous disagreement in HPS, uh, about, about Kuhn's work. But I think one thing that's, uh, for keeps is the idea that successful sciences get going because they. uh, organize themselves around exemplary achievements. There's a consensus that emerges that something really, really important has happened in Isaac Newton's work, uh, or Einstein's work, or, uh, in this case Mendel's work.
[00:11:40] so to bring it back to salience, what's effectively happened is that for a community of inquirers, Mendel's achievement stands out from the background as the thing. Uh, and if you want to proceed in this science, the, the, the best way to do it is to figure out how you can extend Mendal's concepts, Mendel's methods to whatever, whatever reachable next step problem is.
[00:12:10] And so it ends up organizing your sense of what the important problems are, right? Important problems are problems that, uh, you can potentially successfully solve by extending. Mendels methods and concepts. By the same token, uh, problems which don't seem as if they're taxable, using those concepts and methods tend to get relegated to the margins,
[00:12:36] And so, in a remarkable way, uh, a successful scientific education, you know, Kun shows us effectively inducts people into a kind of salience regime, to the point where they become so cognitively and emotionally invested in, uh, the particular concepts and methods that they've been given, that they're kind of unable to criticize them.
[00:12:57] And so, um, to my mind, uh, that insight into how scientific educations work and the way that, a scientific education structures a communities sense of mission, is kind of fundamentally important. And, and absolutely what one sees, uh, in the case that I know best, which is the case of, of genetics.
[00:13:20] Dan: You used a really, um, well that's quite a salient term there, I suppose the community of inquirers, you call the scientific community, community of inquirers. I'm thinking about, um, teams and organizations today where the ability to learn and inquire and explore has become so vital because we are in, even companies that were quite sort of in quite stable industries are now seeing problems they'd never seen before. So this sense of curiosity and learning and inquiry is really important.
[00:13:51] So I can imagine, that in those groups. That the same thing happens that, um, in any, any group that you can latch onto these ideas and go deeper down there. And I think the, the danger I, you've, you raised this the just ignore, I thought powerful, ignore problems that can't be solved by that. And, and I can imagine that could really happen in any, any group actually.
[00:14:16] Tom: Yeah. So, um, you know, what to ignore is such an important thing, and the, the pretty tricky thing about ignoring stuff is you tend not to notice that you're doing it. That's in the nature of ignoring. So, so a team can be going along, doing its thing, uh, and they don't notice what they ignore. But ignoring is actually really important success of a team. And ignoring the right things is what's important.
[00:14:37] So sometimes I think it's important to, to step back and think about more explicitly what you're choosing to put aside and what you're not putting aside. 'Cause if you always do that on autopilot, then there's a good chance you'll be missing what matters. .Because really it's shaped by these, uh, these, uh, traditions and ways of doing things that we are inducted into quite uncritically, and that means you're gonna do things the same way as everyone else does them. Whereas if you stop and say, wait a second, I'll be right to be ignoring this thing. Is it okay to be putting this thing aside? Well, that's when you've got the opportunity to, to do something differently. To do something a bit better.
[00:15:14] Pia: A bit controversial here, but isn't this sort of an innate human quality of wanting to be accepted and therefore not wanting to stand out? I mean, you know, on a very basic level, we find that people's ability to challenge the status quo is a predominantly low scored question in our data set. People would prefer to be accepted or keep their head down, and not challenge.
[00:15:40] Tom: Yeah, I think, I think there's really important links there.
[00:15:42] So, um, there's interesting research showing how attending to the same things is one of the most sort of fundamental features of our developmental process. So if you look at, um, very young children before they can talk, they learn to do this thing where they attend to the same thing as their caregivers, right? So say parents look at a particular thing and then the baby looks at it too, and then they're attending together. It's called joint attention. So they're learning to find things that salient in the environment from their parents, they're falling in line with what their parents find salient.
[00:16:16] And on a bigger social level, if I, if I point and say, look over there, then most people are gonna look over there, right? You want to attend to what you're being told to attend to, right? We fall in line. And that's fine, up to a point. But it does homogenize our thinking in lots of ways. So, um, in, in that kind of team environment, if somebody's saying, look over there, it helps have somebody in the team who says No, right? That's not where I wanna be looking. I find something more salient over here, and maybe they've noticed something more important.
[00:16:44] Greg: Yeah. And, at a group level, if everybody is only ever criticizing and pointing to different things all the time, it's impossible for a group to make any headway. Uh, this is again, one of one of Koon's insights that, uh, for all that we tend to think of scientists as super open-minded, never taking anybody's authority, uh, for, for anything, they tend to believe, uh, always thinking for themselves, kind of everyone a maverick, it's not like that at all. Uh, actually, successful sciences are really conservative.= And they have to be because if they argued about the fundamentals all the time, they would never be able to move forward.
[00:17:25] On the other hand, it's precisely because they shut down foundational questions early on, uh, that eventually problems emerge that, that have to be dealt with. Uh, and that makes for the kind of awkwardness that Pia was talking about.
[00:17:39] I think quite often about a, a photograph that was in an undergraduate psychology textbook, um, in a course that I took, which, you know, in an experiment, they, uh, had a, a, a group of people in a room saying all, all agreeing about something obviously crazy, uh, and then the, the victim, as it were, is shown visibly so uncomfortable, uh, because everyone else is plainly, on a different page. And his discomfort is something that, uh, as, as Pia says, it's kind of universal, right? People don't, on the whole find it easy to be, uh, in descent from some kind of, of a consensus.
[00:18:21] And so, yeah, belonging to a group is fulfilling, and getting rewarded, as Tom was just saying, you know, getting a pat on the head or a gold star, uh, or, or if you're a student, uh, being able to solve the problem at the back of the, of the textbook, uh, being able to extend the tools that you've been given in ways that the established order rewards you for, uh, all of that stamps in, uh, a sense of, of identity and achievement, which then become very hard to unthink and unpick, uh, again, in, in ways that, that Tom was bringing out.
[00:18:58] _So that what you attend to and what you ignore, what you regard as important and what you regard as marginal and unimportant, _come to be part of the weave of your professional identity.
[00:19:10] Dan: And these, um, breakthrough, people who've managed to lead breakthroughs or groups have who've led to breakthroughs and gone away from the accepted norms of their community with, with all that sort of psychosocial risk that, uh, that Pia mentioned, you know, the sort of detachment and all those things, what mindset would you say they've had to achieve that and what have they done to, to break away in that, in that way and create something new?
[00:19:35] Tom: I think it's a, it's a risky mindset, right? It's, um, it's, it's a high risk, high reward type of mindset. Because we always talk about the mavericks who challenge the received authority and win. Right? But we don't tend to talk about all the, many, many mavericks who challenge the received authority and lose often because they were wrong, right? They're, they're not the heroes of the story, right? They're just, they're just people who, who, who, challenge the orthodox views and, and, and failed to to get anywhere because they were mistaken. So it's a very high risk thing to do, and you have to have that risky mindset where you are, where you are happy to take on that risk and to have that high chance of failure. Because if you are right, then it's such a big deal that it'll be worth it.
[00:20:18] Dan: And, and I guess we, we, in groups, teams, communities, organizations have to see these people who might just think it's just another weirdo or, uh, someone who's uh, sort of, just a contrarian, um, and be more accepting and, and explore, I guess, and look out for that and not, not dismiss it 'cause it doesn't align with this thing that we're all doing now. I, I guess that's something that a, a, a responsibility we all have in order to avoid this, this danger.
[00:20:47] Greg: And to add to what Tom's just said about the kind of, of, of person, uh, that, that becomes the, the, the game changer, uh, going back to a remark I made earlier about, you know, Darwin and, and Einstein and, and Chomsky, uh, one of, one of the commonalities among these three is that they take a wider angle view of their own inquiry. So rather than just kind of getting stuck in kind of tunnel thinking about, about what you're doing and going with the flow, uh, to be able to, to be more thoughtful about how people came to take the questions that they're all taking so seriously, uh, to, to be the ones. And how they came to think of them as requiring certain kinds of answer. So to, to kind of step back and, uh, look at the beginnings, the origins of what everyone else is taking for granted.
[00:21:46] So that to, to acquire some, some critical perspective so that you can, you can see from a bit of an intellectual distance what, what everyone else regards as just kind of given, inevitable, the natural, the way we do things around here. Uh, that, that can be enormously. Uh, going back to salience, this, this grabs people's attention.
[00:22:08] So in, in the, the case that I've been looking at, uh, whether it's it's students or, uh, their teachers, or general readers, if, if I tell them that the, the history of genetics that they've absorbed is a history written by winners and that there's a debate that they've maybe never heard about, but, what I'm going to show them is that there were actually two sides of a discussion and, and the side that they've never heard about, they never heard about because, you know, the lead thinker died before he had a chance to publish an alternative view, which was powerful at the time. Is, is powerful. Now you, you grab their attention. That's interesting. interesting
[00:22:57] Dan: salient.
[00:22:58] Greg: That's right. That's right. and so when I, I think of someone like, like Noam Chomsky, Chomsky is able to excite people about something that they had never really thought about, which is that, um, as he put it, little kids around the world, no matter how haphazard their learning and how haphazard their exposure to language learn to talk. And they, they learn to talk in ways that, uh, are, are kind of show these structural universals, uh, across language groups.
[00:23:37] Uh, so, suddenly out of the, out of the background emerges a phenomenon that other people hadn't really taken seriously. Uh, and in Chomsky's view, when you take that seriously, when you take seriously how language seems to not really be learned at all, but to kind of emerge in, in the brains of little kids from around the age of two, you begin thinking very differently, uh, about language.
[00:24:03] So I think he's a, he's a great example of someone who, who changed the salience pattern in a, in a field. And, and he did that in part by being so powerful intellectually. And he was so powerful intellectually as I see him, because he just had this wide angle lens view on what everyone was doing, the questions they were asking, you know, the answers they found satisfying the phenomena that they had anchored on, and was able to, especially with, with younger people, uh, flexibly minded, not already invested, to suggest to them, there's another way.
[00:24:39] Dan: Greg, you mentioned you are unusual in the field of HPS. I'm gonna pick up the acronym, in having done an experiment, what was your experiment? And is it, yeah. How does it, does it relate to the topic? But I'd be interested in hearing how you do this.
[00:24:53] Greg: Well, um, it, it, it relates pretty centrally because, a few years back in thinking about this, this debate between the Mendelian as they came to call themselves, the champions of the view that Mendel's work changes everything. Uh, and the opposing side, which was led by a guy called WFR Weldon, uh, and the Mendelian were based at Cambridge and, and Weldon was based at Oxford. Uh, and, and it was, you know, Weldon had this really interesting perspective that he was developing on inheritance in which the kinds of patterns that Mendel had found, uh, were interesting and instructive, but in a very limited way. They weren't the big generalization around which to hang everything. They were a special case. They were what you get when you strip out all of the variability that's ordinarily found inside organisms and all the variability that comes from outside organisms, uh, as they grow in different environments.
[00:25:57] In Weldon's view, the big take home, which was already well established about inherited characters, was that they can be hugely variable, depending on internal contexts and external contexts. And what Mendel's methods did was to homogenize and stabilize, uh, internal context and external context so that you got these pretty patterns. Uh, and so he was developing all of this in a book that he came near to finishing when in 1906 he died.
[00:26:30] Uh, and, uh, from that point onwards, his view got absorbed, uh, as, uh, something which permanently occupies the margins in instruction and genetics. It's, it's something that everyone acknowledges to be the case, uh, but it's not central. It's, it's marginal. It's a kind of cognitive luxury item.
[00:26:51] So in asking myself, did you know, did this, did this debate matter? Were we always going to have a sience of inheritance which was organized around genes which caused traits, and the idea that actually most of the time it's not like that, it's hugely variable, that that would just be regarded as kind of annoying, extra information? Was it always bound to be like that? Or on the contrary, could it have been different? Uh, and so I thought, well, I can't actually go back and give Weldon a bit more life, uh, and see what would've happened, but I can potentially, uh, develop a curriculum in introductory genetics which is as if it came from the history where Weldon lived longer, a kind of counterfactual past,
[00:27:38] Uh, and uh, amazingly, my colleagues at Leeds and I got the funding to do this. And so we, we ran the experiment and what we found was pretty interesting. Uh, I mean, in some ways, one of the most important things we found is that, yes, you can do this. It, it's not the case that the students run screaming, uh, from from the first lecture 'cause they don't get it. It's also complex. Uh, on the contrary, we're all used to the idea actually in other areas of our lives that things can be hugely variable. You know, we just lived through covid. The idea that the same microbe can have very different effects, uh, in different bodies is not difficult. And, you know, every, everybody grasps it.
[00:28:18] Uh, so in some ways what you're doing is that imagining if, if you could bring that same kind of thinking to bear on the ways that we think about genes. Uh, so, so we showed that you could do that. Uh, but, but even more interestingly, what we found was that on average students coming out of, uh, traditional Mendelism 101 genetics courses were as determinist about genes. So as prone to thinking that heredity is destiny at the end of teaching as they were at the start. So nothing that they had learned on average, uh, in the course had disabused them of the notion that if you've got the gene, you've got the trait.
[00:28:58] Uh, by contrast, students who came out of our Interactionist Weldonian course on average were less deterministic about genes, uh, at the end of teaching. So in the course of teaching, we'd, we'd shifted them, uh, so that, uh, they were less prone to that what, what's now regarded as a, as a fallacy, right? It's, it's, it's, you know, the more you we learn, the more you, you know, one learns about genetics, the less confident you should be that you can read off what, uh, an organism is like from their DNA. Uh, so at least the, the genetics teachers that I spend time with, they regard that as a, as a win.
[00:29:39] Uh, and so I, I tried to learn something new about the scientific past, you know, whether we might have had a different kind of a science, had things worked
[00:29:48] Dan: could taken it down a different path.
[00:29:51] Greg: That's right. But, but I ended up, uh, in an experimental way altering salience patterns in an introductory course and finding that it made a difference to what the students were like. Uh, so I, I anchored them on different patterns, different concepts. Uh, and so it is the same information, but reordered as to what's central and noticeable, uh, and attention worthy as Tom put it, uh, and, and, and what you can more safely, uh, push to the margins because as, as Tom said at the start, you have to make choices like that. Uh, and, and if, if, if one in presenting information doesn't do that, your, your listener or or viewer will do it anyway.
[00:30:37] So it, it ended up, uh, and I, I've only recently encountered the term salience by, by getting to know Tom and, and, and, and, uh, Ella Whiteley and other, uh, younger folk in, in the field. Uh, but in some ways I feel like it's the term I've been looking for to try to articulate what it is that I've done with this experiment.
[00:30:55] Dan: Yes, indeed. So if we take that experiment or maybe this idea of salience as a whole, what, what can we do with our teams and organizations to maybe create that other mindset, that one that's more open, less fixed, less binary?
[00:31:09] Tom: I, I wonder if an important thing is, um, to do with how we enforce what's salient, right? So when, when people find the wrong thing salient, we tend to tell them as much and get everybody back on track. So kind of breaking that habit is important. Um, there are times when we do all need to be on the same page. Maybe questioning, questioning the fundamentals of what we're doing isn't always helpful, but as a general rule, it's something we need to do more, right? Our default is to, is to, resist when somebody's finding something else sailing. When somebody's asking the questions that we are not asking, we need to give that space to breathe. And you know, sometimes it won't go anywhere, but often it will, and it's really important to, to give it that space.
[00:31:50] Greg: I, I would add that it's very difficult to become self-aware about what you're taking for granted, what you're regarding as given. Tom put it beautifully earlier. You don't know what you're ignoring precisely because you're ignoring it. it's so difficult to achieve that kind of perspective, uh, and for my money, one of the avenues available to try to achieve that is history. and I don't mean anything grand by that, really. Uh, I mean, simply becoming curious about how it is that your group, whatever, however you define the group, whether it's a, a handful of people, uh, at a firm or, uh, an an industry, uh, or a, a field of inquiry kind of at, at any, at any, uh, level of, of magnitude to just to be a little bit curious about how it came to be this way. Where did this come from? What are the, what are the origins of it?
[00:32:53] Because what I think you, you find is that, uh, you go back to the, the beginnings and there was a kind of diversity that got squeezed out. and it, it's, it's very striking how hard it can be to unthink inherited patterns of thought, inherited patterns of salience. And, and one of the most fruitful ways of, of edging oneself into a kind of self-critical mode is to encounter people in the past who didn't have to unthink what you're having to unthink 'cause they were there at the start. Uh, that's certainly what I found to be the case, you know, with, with genetics hanging out with someone like Weldon. He doesn't have our challenges. He's, he's right there at the beginning watching Mentalism, uh, crystallize, uh, and criticizing it, uh, from, from a different set of inheritances intellectually.
[00:33:55] Uh, and so that, that would be my, piece of advice was, was to not to neglect the power of historical thinking in enabling the critical perspective that's otherwise very hard to achieve.
[00:34:08] Dan: Quite a challenging mindset shift.
[00:34:11] Pia: Yeah. A difficult one. And I think, um, uh, it was interesting. I was listening to you and I thought, you know, when you talk about reordering what is noticeable, I thought, ooh, people working in advertising agencies would have an absolute ball with this. Because it's a mental manipulation as well. And, and we are very gullible. You know, in, in, I mean, the people you are citing, uh, have got very big brains and have, and have contributed a lot to their field of knowledge. But for many of us, our intellectual capacity is being dulled by social media, misinformation and disinformation. So it's a tricky one to, to know when you are being played or not.
[00:34:55] Tom: I think that this link with social media and technology is so important when we're thinking about salience because misinformation is really bad, right? We, we know that false information is something we don't want. But there's this deeper thing going on. Even among true information, we can ask whether it's being prioritized, right.
[00:35:11] So I think one of the problems we find is that even if everything in my social media feed is true. It can still be really problematic because it's telling me what's most important and if it's misrepresenting what's most important, it can mislead me in a really subtle way.
[00:35:25] Correcting false information is one thing, right? I can fact check something and realize that an article is mistaking. Reprioritizing that is so much more subtle and so much more challenging. And I think that's one of our challenges with all the information we are given is it's so hard to be critical about how information's prioritized. The algorithms are prioritizing it for us, and it's not always in our best interests.
[00:35:47] Pia: No, And and, I heard something today where Google News is using AI to, to do that, to take newsworthy stories and then bombard it in such a way that it changes the mindset about the news that's come through. So it's, and that's AI and, and the people discussing it were quite concerned because already that's, there are certain people that are gonna be listening to that to go, that's the truth, rather than that's a potential version.
[00:36:17] Dan: It's also the whole truth, isn't it? There's, that's what you should be interested in. There's a whole thing over here, which we're not even gonna talk about.
[00:36:24] Greg: And I think, you know, that's a, it's a deep point. professionally, but it's, it's a deep point personally and in some ways, like existentially. You know, I remember one of my, one of my greatest teachers would ask is the news, your news? uh, You know, when you, you think about what occupies you in the course of a day, in the course of a lifetime, Pia used, I think the term manipulation. you know, whether, whether it's deliberate or, or not, around us are all of these forces sending our minds in directions.
[00:36:58] Uh, and so the, the ability to stand back from all that and, and exercise a little agency in, in what exactly you attend to and what you do with that, uh, well, we could all do with a bit more of that.
[00:37:13] Dan: Without a doubt, but, well, it is very thought provoking and challenging actually in this world where we are. bombarded. So, um, let us finish with a couple of book, media, podcast, anything else? Recommendations? Um, Tom, what would you, what would, what would you point people towards?
[00:37:31] Tom: Yeah, I, I'd recommend a blog piece by a, a collaborator of ours called Ella Whiteley. She works on salience as well. But like me, she's particularly interested in where salience interacts with bias. So bias things like gender bias isn't really something we've talked about here. Um, but it's, it's very important the idea that the way we prioritize information might reflect and reinforce gender biases.
[00:37:53] Uh, and she has a, a blogs piece summarizing some of her work on this. And it's called A Woman First and a Philosopher Second. And it's the idea that in certain professional roles, your gender. Might be more salient than your professional status, right? So if you, if you see me, then I'm a philosopher first and a man second, that doesn't stand out that I'm a man. Whereas Ella's a woman first and a philosopher second. So in those two descriptions, there's no inaccuracy, there's no, there's no falsehood. But the way things are prioritized is, is problematic, right? And, and Ella explores that in a really, in a really fascinating way that I'd recommend you take
[00:38:25] Dan: Yeah. Excellent. That link will be in the show notes, Greg.
[00:38:29] Greg: Uh, well, uh, selfishly of course, I would like people to, to read my new book, uh, on the debate that I've been discussing, which is called Disputed inheritance.
[00:38:39] Pia: that's a salient point in itself, Greg.
[00:38:41] Greg: that's, uh, uh, Disputed Inheritance, the Battle Over Mendel in the Future of Biology. But, um, having snuck that in, that's not what my recommendation's going to be. Uh, because, uh, I've already mentioned, uh, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which unlike my book is short, uh, and it's a classic for a reason. It is an immensely thought provoking set of insights, uh, and people come away from it changed. Uh, and, uh, I, I think that it's a book that, uh, people listening to your podcast, if they don't know it, if only to find out where talk of paradigm shifts comes from, uh, they, they'd benefit from it. But more than that, I think, I think it, it really does reveal something kind of fundamental about how group activity gets organized both when it's successful and when it's when it's less successful.
[00:39:37] Dan: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you Greg. And thank you Tom. Uh, as, uh, you've done your job as philosophers, you've made us think and, uh, challenged us. So thank you so much. It's been wonderful having you on the show. Really appreciate it.
[00:39:51] Tom: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
[00:39:52] Greg: This has been terrific. Thank you for having us.
[00:39:54] Dan: The weirdest thing happened after we recorded that, Pia. I, I went to a meeting in town. I had went for a cup of coffee with someone who runs a big local charity, and I wanted to pick her brains about what status, you know, Ilkley Live, we've got this thing. We, we don't have a company, we don't have anything. Should we be a charity? Should we be at some sort of community, um, impact company? Blah, blah, because we need this to raise money, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in the middle of this conversation, she was, she said, you know, you really need to be a charity. I said, I don't want to have all that, you know, hard
[00:40:28] Pia: I don't wanna be a charity.
[00:40:29] Dan: and oh, the governor said, oh, please, this is supposed to be just a really quick, simple thing. Anyway, what I did was I walked back through history to think how did we end up in this spot now? Why are we, why are we doing this way, which is where we collect money and give it to a charity. And I realized, so I did exactly what Greg and Tom suggested, which was to try to see more things by walking back to the point where, what you're doing now, actually took root and became salient.
[00:40:57] And, um, yeah, it was, it was, it was, when you look back at that point, it, it just came out of a set of circumstances that weren't well, don't really apply anymore. And, uh, and so I'd got a bit stuck on one track, but by, as they suggested, going back to when there were more options, it really helped me. It was so bizarre. It was within 90 minutes I used that little
[00:41:20] Pia: So, where did you
[00:41:21] Dan: my mind. W Yeah. We do need to become, by becoming a charity, it works better, which we haven't been thinking about before.
[00:41:28] Pia: so you went round in a circle, you mean? No, no, no, no, no, no. Yes.
[00:41:33] Dan: it was exactly, it was absolutely not, uh, absolutely yes. Yeah, it was one of those,
[00:41:38] Pia: Out of the question. Oh, that's a great idea
[00:41:41] Dan: totally outta the question. It was, it was one of the, and I could almost hear my brain moving furniture around, you know, to sort of, oh, we're like this now. It was really, you sort of tried and, and, and I think I was there with, um, with Ian, who's been on the podder and you know, he's involved very much in Ilkley Live as a co-director, and, we both sat there slightly stunned trying to get our brains to get onto this new path. But anyway, point is what we just talked about we used, which was amazing.
[00:42:08] Pia: And I think, you socially learn certain things, and then things become the way to do Something without questioning it because it just is. Can see how truth can be manipulated quite easily because if you say enough things, enough time, it becomes the truth.
[00:42:27] Dan: and as I reflected on this, I realized this is a very complex topic because as we mentioned in the conversation, some of these things, creating salience is good leadership. You know, how do you, it's about clarity, isn't it? In the, in, in the words we would use, it's sort of how do you make this the thing we're doing? And not have an organization or a team that's just sort of doing all kinds of things. We're really focusing our effort on one thing.
[00:42:52] But then on the other hand, you've got this scary notion that, hold on a second, as they say, what are we ignoring? What are we not knowing? And by, by its nature, you, you don't know. You don't know the other path. And Greg's story about how those, how Mel Mendel and Weldon sort of. Propose different stories, we ended up on this one story, and whoa, people just don't look back and say, hold on a second, what about what that guy was doing back there? Because no, no, this is the way now.
[00:43:21] So I think it's a mindset to just keep really being vigilant about aiming to have that focus, but also being vigilant about what, what we're missing and why we got on that track. It's, I, it's, it, I think it's a, it's a complex thing to do in a team.
[00:43:36] Pia: And then you put, you put emotion into it, and then you, you, you put a sort of a, a, a psychological need to be right, and then that, that that clouds everything as well. And, and also that we are full of bias. We are full of bias based on the way we've been brought up our experiences. You know, it is a, it's a really tricky thing.
[00:43:58] I, I loved the bit about what, what are you ignoring? Like what, where do you cut to that you pay attention and what, what is it that you ignore? And that I think is a really good question. Like, what are we ignoring here and not looking at, 'cause we're actually slightly object fixated about something
[00:44:13] Dan: Completely. Completely. And so I think practically this is a good reason to have a regular cadence of workshops, conversations where we say, you know, either, and this is, could be the annual sort of planning thing done right, but sometimes those annual planning meetings or strategy meetings just reinforce that current thing we're doing. So it's worth just making sure we're just almost, if we weren't doing that, what else could we be doing? Or zoom right out and really look at what's actually happening here in our world? You know, to sort of say, but you need some, I think quite formal. Structures and processes to, to just make sure you are, you're casting the net widely enough to try to find what you might be ignoring. I, I don't think it comes in the flow of work. That tends to be a bit more about that sort of pressure point that you're focusing on.
[00:45:05] Pia: No, and it's difficult. It's difficult when you get gut feel, you're under pressure, it's worked before. All of those things that, that, that, that cause us to, to, to take shortcuts really.
[00:45:17] Dan: Definitely, definitely. And even our retros, you think, oh, that's how we learn. Well, uh, yeah, but only about the thing you are, the path you are on. If you like you, it tends to be a thing that accelerates you down that path. Doesn't always say, Hey, what's going on? Totally over there. Are we doing this totally wrong? Tends to be something else. So I think there's a, some practical, it's, yeah, I, it makes you feel slightly paranoid, this, this idea, but I think the practical things you can do, to, to alleviate that, uh, that feeling.
[00:45:49] But that is it for this episode. You can find show notes where you are listening and at squadify.net. If you've enjoyed the show, please share the love and recommend it to your friends. And you can contribute to the show by emailing us at wenotmepod@gmail.com.. We Not Me is produced by Mark Steadman. Thank you so much for listening. It's goodbye from me.
[00:46:10] Pia: And it's goodbye from me.