Why Do We Settle?

MAUGHAN: I don’t know what that meant.

*      *      *

DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth.

MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan.

DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show: Why do we settle for suboptimal situations?

MAUGHAN: King George’s final prank on the U.S. was, “You guys take the imperial system.”  

*      *      *

MAUGHAN: Angela, we have a fascinating question today from John from Fallon, Nevada.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, Fallon, Nevada. Go!

MAUGHAN: He says, “Why do we entrench in the suboptimal? One would think that the best stuff rises to the top, but not so. We often get stuck with things that are not that good. Think,” he says, “of the QWERTY keyboard.” I mean, that’s just what it’s called, because of the letters, right?  Q W E R T Y at the beginning. “Think of the QWERTY keyboard. We still use it, even though we know it’s suboptimal. Fahrenheit makes less sense than Celsius, but the U.S. stayed with Fahrenheit. Even two-liter bottles of soda use a different measurement than the rest of the U.S. measurement system. Why doesn’t the cream always rise to the top?”

DUCKWORTH: You know, John from Fallon, Nevada. I just Googled Fallon, Nevada. According to Wikipedia, there are only 9,326 people other than John who live in Fallon, Nevada.

MAUGHAN: Wait, can I just say quickly? I have been to Fallon, Nevada.

DUCKWORTH: What?

DUCKWORTH: Wait, why were you in Fallon, Nevada? 

MAUGHAN: I went to help a friend’s grandmother re-roof her trailer. It was the most random trip of my entire life. I actually didn’t know what I was doing. I got a phone call from a different friend named Jason, and Jason said, “Hey, our buddy needs help. We’re leaving tomorrow morning. Just drop what you have, we’ve got to go help his grandma.” And I remember being like, “I don’t know if I have time for this.” And then Jason was very insistent that when someone needs help, friends drop everything and go. And so we went. 

DUCKWORTH: True, it’s a good rule. How’d the roof come out? I mean, you don’t know anything about roofing, right?

MAUGHAN: Well, that’s what I was going to say. Of all the people that you want helping you, I am not the guy.

DUCKWORTH: I don’t know that I would have asked you for that, yeah.

MAUGHAN: And I’m going to send you a photograph, but Jason took this amazing picture of me. I think I’m holding, like, a drill in one hand and a — I don’t know — some piece of wood in the other hand or something. And I look like this fierce construction guy. And then I, I said to Jason after, “The only reason people take pictures of you doing stuff like this is if you never do stuff like this.”

DUCKWORTH: That is so true. Nobody’s like, “Let’s take a picture of MacGyver getting this, like, jar of jam open.”

MAUGHAN: Right, so while it’s a cool picture, by virtue of having the picture, it denotes that, like, I’m a fake.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, I want to know how’d the roof come out?

MAUGHAN: I don’t know. I actually never asked. I imagine if it was, like, leaking all the time, someone would have called me and said, “You’re the worst.”

DUCKWORTH: Okay, well, I have thought a lot about this question for so many reasons. There’s a jargony term, like a “local max.” You’re like, “Yay, I’m at the top of the hill.” But you don’t realize there’s, like, a mountain peak. And you’re like, “Oh, if I just went down to this little valley and I kept climbing up, I’d be even higher”  

MAUGHAN: It’s called a “local max”?

DUCKWORTH: Well, did you take calculus? You took calculus, yes?

MAUGHAN: Oh gosh, please don’t go there. But can I tell you what I thought of instead of calculus? Because I hate calculus.

DUCKWORTH: What?

MAUGHAN: My friend Karen and I were hiking one summer in Arizona, and Karen was not a hiker. She is now. She’s great hiker now, but she kept yelling whenever we got to, like, a spot that she wanted to just stop, she’d be like, “Personal summit!” And so that’s what I thought of when you said that: personal summit. Like, this is my summit. I don’t have to get to the top — we did, by the way, get to the top.

DUCKWORTH: Sometimes that’s all you want — is the personal summit. But I think in other respects, like what system of measurements should we have, or like, you know, how do we lay out this keyboard? I mean, generally people would say they would like the first best and not, like, the second best or the third best. But what happens in life often is that you do get to a personal summit or, like, a small summit and because you can’t see very far, it feels like you are on top of the world, right? You look to the left. You look to the right. You’re like, “I can’t get any better than this.” But if you could see through the mist, and if your vision were really eagle eyed, then you would glimpse this mountain peak in the background, and maybe you would choose to go down into the valley and then back up to a higher summit. So metaphorically, I think that’s the idea here: why do we settle, in a way, for what we think is optimum, but is not optimum?  

MAUGHAN: I do want to note one thing though, on the QWERTY keyboard. I was taught in my typing class that the reason we have the QWERTY keyboard was because of typewriters and that it actually was built to slow down typing.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah! Because the, the keys would get stuck, right? 

MAUGHAN: Yeah, the keys, the letters would hit each other.

DUCKWORTH: I am old enough to have typed on an electric typewriter, but also I did have a mechanical typewriter at some point and they did sometimes get jammed if you went too fast. Is this not the origin story of the QWERTY keyboard?

MAUGHAN: So far as I can tell, nobody actually knows, but that is maybe the most popular of the myths.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, what? What do you mean nobody knows? Like, nobody knows why, like, frequently used keys are annoyingly in the top row, right? It’s like, come on, put the E down here. And then, who wants K? Why is K under my right third finger.

MAUGHAN: I’ll give you some background. I got this from the M.I.T. Technology Review. The QWERTY keyboard has been around for 150 years. Obviously now it’s so ubiquitous it would be hard to change, but they said that early typewriters had all kinds of different creative layouts, but the QWERTY keyboard was developed by this Wisconsin journalist and inventor named Christopher Latham Sholes. And, according to the M.I.T. Technology Review, no one knows how Sholes came up with the arrangement of letters, but it was in an 1878 patent. And there are a lot of different theories, like the one we talked about, which is that it was to slow it down from the letters jamming. A 2011 Kyoto University researcher proposed that it maybe came because it was due to what telegraph operators would use, because it would help them transcribe Morse code messages more quickly. Now there was this Dvorak keyboard, which puts the most common letters in the center row of keys. So, for example, the E is in a very easy spot, instead of where it is now. Either way, like, it happens, and efforts to replace it over the years, nothing’s really caught on. 

DUCKWORTH: You know what this whole conversation reminds me of? I don’t remember when I sent this to you, but this little op-ed by the linguist John McWhorter?

MAUGHAN: Oh, yes, yes.

DUCKWORTH: I don’t know John McWhorter. I think our good friend Stephen Dubner is slightly obsessed with him. But he’s a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. And there is this website called The Edge, and every year they pick one question — like one big, deep, philosophical, existential question — and then they ask smart people like John McWhorter, or Steven Pinker, or whoever to write a little op-ed or like a response. And this is 2011. The question was: what scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? And John McWhorter said “path dependence,” and understanding that, as he puts it, “often something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

MAUGHAN: Right. I think it’s really interesting when you look at the metric versus the imperial system. Imperial system which is what we do use in the United States with inches, feet, all that.

DUCKWORTH: From the king, right? From, like, the king of England?

MAUGHAN: Yes, but guess how many countries use the imperial system?

DUCKWORTH: Oh gosh. Now I should be thinking about, like, the British Empire, right?

MAUGHAN: I will just give you a hint. The British are basically a metric system at this point.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, what?! Seriously? Did they give us this crappy system with, you know, inches and yards that, like, make no sense that we now use, and then they what,  went on and used the metric system because they’re in Europe?

MAUGHAN: King George’s final prank on the U.S. was, “You guys take the imperial system.”  

DUCKWORTH: Yeah! Gotcha. Okay, wait, wait, wait, I want to guess. Mmmm, twelve. 

MAUGHAN: Three! 

DUCKWORTH: What?!

MAUGHAN: The United States.

DUCKWORTH: United States, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I’m going to get this.

MAUGHAN: No you’re not. 

DUCKWORTH: Australia? 

MAUGHAN: Nope. 

DUCKWORTH: No? Not Australia and not the United Kingdom? 

MAUGHAN: Nope.

DUCKWORTH: All right, I give up. What are the other two?

MAUGHAN: Liberia and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

DUCKWORTH: Oh.  

MAUGHAN: There was no way you were going to get that one.

DUCKWORTH: So, it did originally come from King George, and then England moved on to a higher max?

MAUGHAN: Yeah, so let me give you a bit of, of background on this. Civil War ends in 1865. And by then, most of Europe had adopted a metric-ish system. Now, in the Constitution of the United States, it says, “Congress has the power to coin money … and fix the standard of weights and measures.”   So, why don’t we have it?

DUCKWORTH: Yeah. Exactly.

MAUGHAN: In 1971, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards recommended that the U.S. transition to the metric system over the course of 10 years.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, so that was 1971. I was one.

MAUGHAN: Yes, and maybe someone measured you not in feet.

DUCKWORTH: I think it was in inches. Pounds and ounces.

MAUGHAN: But anyway, in 1975, in the Metric Conversion Act, the U.S. stripped out the 10-year deadline and said it would be voluntary. And if it is voluntary, because people respond to incentives, it never happened. And so, today, we still don’t have it, even though everybody else kind of switched. Now I will say, recently in the U.K. with Brexit, there was a brief moment where there was a movement to maybe move further away from the metric system, but that did not last. And so, we are still here stuck with the imperial system. And if you think about the cost, how many companies are global? And so, they’re making these products that have to be measured differently. And there are so many different risks of converting measurements and stuff like that.

DUCKWORTH: Have there been any, like, tragic stories? I feel like I’ve heard there was this crash or something, like a rocket or whatever. Like, have there been?

MAUGHAN: So, one conversion error between the U.S. and the metric measurements sent a $125 million NASA probe to a fiery death in Mars’s atmosphere because someone had miscalculated it.

DUCKWORTH: But no astronauts.

MAUGHAN: No, thankfully, it was —.

DUCKWORTH: Not to say that probes don’t matter too, but no humans.

MAUGHAN: Correct. But there — I mean, there are a lot of things. If you look at Fahrenheit for example. It’s the exact same story by the way. Celsius assigns freeze —.

DUCKWORTH: Is that part of the imperial system, too?  

MAUGHAN: I don’t know if it’s part of the system or not, but it basically followed the same model, which is: everybody else in the world switched except the United States.

DUCKWORTH: Ah, what does that say about us?

MAUGHAN: Well, because freezing in Celsius is zero. And boiling is a hundred. 

DUCKWORTH: Yeah. So, logical.

MAUGHAN: And in Fahrenheit, it’s 32 and 212. It’s like, um?

DUCKWORTH: Yeah. Makes no sense. So, I am not a philosopher, but David Hume was one of the early thinkers to grapple with this deep question, like, why do we stick with the status quo? And what Hume said is, like, it’s a confusion between “is” and “ought.” So, when we know that something “is” — this is the way we measure temperature; this is the way we eat — we confuse that with the way we “ought” to measure temperature, eat, you know, raise our children. So, I think this question is so philosophically deep. By the way, I don’t think, um — I know Hume thought it was a vice, like a moral failing.

MAUGHAN: Moral failing because we don’t ask ourselves the question “What ought to be?” We just go with what is?

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, like, this is not a Hume example: I grew up in — I can’t believe this — in the ‘70s, which is not that — okay, maybe it’s a long time ago. Half century. But in our kitchen, there was this long wooden paddle and a little leather loop. I remember exactly what it looked like. 

MAUGHAN: Wait, seriously?

DUCKWORTH: Yes! And it was there sort of as a symbolic threat or reminder, but also, uh, yeah, my dad used it. Like, maybe not so much on me, but he definitely used it on the eldest of us, who was my brother, who was about eight years older than I was. And I know today it’s taboo, but it wasn’t then. And I do think there are things where you can make a moral mistake by saying, “Well, we’ve always hit our children, going back generations and generations.” You know, “My grandpa hit my dad, and my dad hit me.” And, like, so it’s a really deep question. And I don’t think Hume, other than saying it was a mistake, did a lot to unpack why we keep making that mistake.

MAUGHAN: Well, Angela and I would love to hear your thoughts on why sometimes we entrench in less than ideal conditions, when it’s totally possible to improve your situation, and maybe how you have broken out of the status-quo if you have. Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to NSQ@freakonomics.com and maybe we’ll play it on a future episode of the show. And if you like the show and want to support it, the best thing you can do is tell a friend about it. You can also spread the word on social media or leave a review in your podcast app. 

Still to come on No Stupid Questions: When is it actually worth it to make a major life change?

DUCKWORTH: “Should I start my own business? Should I propose? Should I move?” 

*      *      *

Now, back to Mike and Angela’s conversation about why we settle for less than ideal situations.

MAUGHAN: So, I mean, I think there are some things like spanking or hitting one’s children, that are — I don’t want to say easier to change, but that don’t depend on the same network effects as, like, a QWERTY keyboard, right? Like, even if you wanted to change that, every computer, every typing class, every — like, you’d have to almost raise up a new generation of kids who used a different keyboard, because the chances of all of us at this point changing are negligible.

DUCKWORTH: That’s probably why we still have the, you know, inches, yards, imperial system, right? Because, like, at least in our local network, if you’re like, “I’m going to go metric,” people are like, “Wait, what temperature is it? Do I need a sweater or not?”

MAUGHAN: Exactly. I have a dear friend from Canada who lives in Utah and sometimes he’ll be like, “Oh, it’s blank degrees.” And I’m like, “I’m so sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

DUCKWORTH: No idea.

MAUGHAN: “So do I need a sweater or not? Because I don’t know what that meant.”  

DUCKWORTH: Any time my weather app goes to Celsius, I’m like, how do I get this back to Fahrenheit? I need to go back to my suboptimal system. But network effects are a good reason. Right? So, maybe we should talk about all the good reasons for status-quo bias. Like, what are all the reasons we should stay with things? I think network effects, I don’t know if it’s a great reason, but it’s not necessarily a mistake, right?  If you’re just sort of, like, calculating the costs and benefits and you’re like, “You know what? This is going to confuse more people than it’s going to unconfuse.”

 MAUGHAN: Right, I mean there’s enormous initial upfront pain in any sort of switching. I think sometimes the challenge is: do we put too much weight on the short-term pain versus the long-term potential benefit? One of my favorite examples of a change that happened on a societal level was in Sweden when overnight, back in 1967, they changed from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. And when I say overnight, I literally mean overnight.

DUCKWORTH: How’d they do it?

MAUGHAN: They deployed all of these people to switch almost 360,000 street signs nationwide in a single day.

DUCKWORTH: In one day. So then, how did they get everyone to do it from a behavior change standpoint? The habit of driving on the right should be very strong.

MAUGHAN: I mean, uh, you kind of didn’t have a choice. They’d done these massive marketing campaigns and prep to the country. Now, what was interesting though is that I would have thought traffic fatalities would go up because, like you were kind of saying, people were so used to it. In fact, traffic fatalities went down for several years, and they think it was because —

DUCKWORTH: Because people were paying attention? 

MAUGHAN: Yes.

DUCKWORTH: Like, people were not on autopilot? Wait, why did they want to switch? Like, what a pain in the butt. And impressive. You know, only a Scandinavian country, I think, could get, like, the whole country to switch. Can you imagine trying to do that in — honestly, anywhere in the United States.

MAUGHAN: Anywhere. And I think Sweden would acknowledge that that would never happen today. Like, there’s no way they could do it now. The cost is too high. I mean, I was reading this article in the BBC about this. They talked about how many of Sweden’s neighbors all drove on the right side of the road. And so, then when people would visit the country, it was just so discombobulating.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, okay, so they were, like, not in the rest of the network. Like, there were network effects going against driving the way they were driving.

MAUGHAN: Right. And if you think about car manufacturing, so the network effect of that as well — I mean, if you drive on the left hand versus right side of the road, the steering wheel is in a different part of the car. So, the network effects went beyond just visitors coming to your country, but also what cars you can buy and how easily they’re manufactured and shipped given the surrounding area. So, lots of reasons for it. Now to your point, though, there are some really beneficial things about maintaining the status quo, even if it’s not perfect. It can still be a lot less painful and, and help things work more efficiently and effectively, weirdly.

DUCKWORTH: I mean, I don’t know all of the reasons that somebody might rationally think about for keeping the status quo, but I do have a husband who loves tradition. He likes coffee hour after church. And I’m like, “This is dumb. Like, church is so long and, like, really, who wants to, like, stand around with a plastic cup of lemonade?” And he points out that, like, coffee hour is a time-honored tradition among Presbyterians, and Lutherans, and many churchgoers. And, you know, he loves things like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and, you know, there’s wisdom passed down. I mean, I think that’s what he thinks. It’s not that different from Darwinian evolution. So, one of the things that David Hume said was that we shouldn’t confuse “is” and “ought,” but from a Darwinian-evolution perspective, things that survive do tend to be better, you know, more fit, than things that get weeded out. And I think tradition — I mean, let me tell you about this study by two psychologists, Scott Eidelman and Christian Crandall. And they have done a series of studies that show what David Hume speculated, which is that when people learn that something exists and that it’s been around for a long time, they think that it must be good. So, what they do is they randomly assign people to learn a little bit about acupuncture and to find out that it’s been around for A) 250 years, B) 500 years, C) 1,000 years, or D) 2,000 years. And then, you’re asked your opinion of acupuncture. Like, do you think this is a good idea? And the graph is really stunning, because the more years that it’s been around, the more people are like, “Yeah, acupuncture is a pretty great idea.” I mean, just the fact that I was like, “This question about “is” and “ought” has been around since, like, David Hume. I mean, centuries.” Already, that’s like, “Well, that must be an interesting question. People have been debating it for years.” So, this idea of this bias is kind of substantiated by modern science. And, again, I keep thinking about Jason. I think about Darwin, and a knee-jerk reaction is like, “Well that’s dumb, you shouldn’t have the status-quo bias,” but if you were an animal, and you knew that if you made your nest in a certain way, your eggs would be okay, right? Would you say, “You know, tomorrow I’m just not going to brood these eggs? I mean, who knows? Maybe they don’t need to be sat on to keep warm. Maybe I’ll roll them off a cliff. See how that goes.” And you can imagine that the possibility space is, like, full of stupider solutions, so maybe you’re at a local max, but you’re also not falling off a cliff. So one of the, I think, best studies that’s been done on status-quo bias is shockingly recent. It was done by Steve Levitt and our friend Stephen Dubner. And I call it the Heads or Tails study. I don’t know whether that’s what they call it.

MAUGHAN: Oh, oh, of course. No, I know this study very well.

DUCKWORTH: What Levitt and Dubner did was they asked the question: you know, how do we really know people will stick with the status quo? Like, not in these, like, lab experiments or, like, these hypotheticals, but, like, in life. I mean, do we really stick with the status quo in life? When I read about the study, I’ll tell you the details — I thought of this Mark Twain quote: “I’m in favor of progress. It’s change I don’t like.” So they wanted to ask the question, is Mark Twain right? Do we yearn for change but cling to the familiar?

MAUGHAN: Mark Twain was always right.

DUCKWORTH: Mark Twain was pretty much always right. So true. Okay. So, what they do is they come up with this website that has, like, a virtual coin that you can virtually toss for an important life decision that you’re struggling with. So, the website said, “Sometimes in life you face a major decision and you just don’t know what to do. You’ve considered the issue from every angle… but no matter how you look at it, no decision seems to be the right one.” So, they set this up, because they’re thinking that in that kind of 50/50, like, “I guess I could leave my job or not. I guess I could break up with him or not.” It’s then when you can really put status-quo bias under a light because, like, if people stick with the status quo in a biased way, then more than 50 percent of people will, on that knife edge, just stick with what they already have. So, you log on to this website. You also have an opportunity to describe your 50/50 dilemma. And then, you know, you hit a button and the virtual coin is flipped for you. Heads, you’re told to make the change. Tails, you’re told to stick with the status quo. And by experimentally manipulating people to be encouraged one way or the other, Levitt and Dubner are like, “Okay, now we’re going to see what happens.” So, they follow up with people months later.

MAUGHAN: Wait and were people committed? They were going to do what they were told?

DUCKWORTH: Well, you know, Levitt and Dubner knew that, like, they can’t force people. It’s called an encouragement design where you’re randomly assigned to be encouraged to switch or encouraged to stick with the status quo.  And they could just ask you months later, like, did you, did you not? And you’re right, Mike, by the way. Like, you didn’t get 100 percent of people who were like, “Yeah, I quit my job, I broke up with my partner.” So, the questions that they got were from the mundane to the sublime. Some of them were like, you know, “Should I dye my hair?” Not a big life decision. I mean, maybe. Uh, “should I try online dating?” But some of them were really big. Like, “Should I start my own business? Should I propose? Should I move?” And when they followed up with people, what they find is that people who got heads by chance — were encouraged to make a change — were actually happier and also that they did report making that life decision more often. And that is evidence for status-quo bias putting you in a suboptimal position. Right? So, what’s your reaction? I was, like, blown away.

MAUGHAN: Here’s what I actually thought of initially. I’m sure you know Ellen Langer?

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, Harvard psychologist.  

MAUGHAN: Okay. So, I don’t know Ellen at all. In fact, I just have seen this one clip of her on a podcast. And she basically says, “Rather than spending so much time trying to make the right decision, just make the decision right.” She’s basically arguing for if you’re thinking about — well, I shouldn’t put words in her mouth. As I took it, like, “should I have kids or not?” was an example she used. Or, “should I move or not?” Her point was, like, it doesn’t really matter. You can’t compare a future that you didn’t pursue with the present that you did or the, the life you have. She said, “If there was some way to compare Ellen Langer who lived in X place and did Y job —”

DUCKWORTH: In Fallon, Nevada, as opposed to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

MAUGHAN: But there’s no way to compare those two. So, her point was, like, why do we spend so much time trying to figure out, “Did I do the right thing? Should I have done that? Should I move here?” She literally says, just flip a coin.

DUCKWORTH: Did she really?

MAUGHAN: Yes. And just go make a decision, and then make your decision right.

DUCKWORTH: What Levitt would say, and I think he did somewhere in his writing, or maybe the press release or whatever, is like, flip the coin, but know that you’re going to be biased. I mean, I think he wants you to flip a coin because, you know, we have this invisible force that keeps us with what we already have. And I don’t disagree with Ellen that we can tie ourselves up in knots, and like, “Oh my gosh, I have to get to the highest, highest peak and, like, what if I should have gone to this management consulting company instead of this other one?” But I think the status-quo bias is itself really dangerous if it’s going to prevent you from moving — which, by the way, sometimes you move and you’re running away from your problems, and sometimes you don’t move, and you absolutely should have.  

MAUGHAN: So, I’m sure you’ve heard the story of the ham, right? Where there’s this husband — 

DUCKWORTH: Wait, is this, like, a true story of a ham?

MAUGHAN: I have no idea. It’s probably apocryphal, but —.

DUCKWORTH: Okay, this is not a Maughan story.

MAUGHAN: This is not a Maughan family story. There’s a man that is cutting off both edges of a ham before he puts it in the oven. And his wife asks him, “Wait, why are you cutting off the edges of the ham? That’s perfectly good meat. I don’t understand why you’re doing that.” And he said, “Oh, that’s just how you make it.” And she said, “Well, Why?” He said, “I don’t know. That’s how my mom taught me to make it. That’s how she always made it.” So, the wife’s like, “Let’s just call your mom and figure out why.” And so, they call her and she’s like, “Oh yeah, you cut off both ends.” And the, the wife says, “But why did you do that?” And she said, “Well, that’s what my mom did.” So, then she has the husband call his grandma and say, “Hey, why, when we make the ham, do we cut off both edges? I mean, it seems like a waste of good meat.” And she said, “Oh, well, that’s just because the largest pan I had didn’t fit a whole ham in it, and so I had to cut them off to make it fit.” And it’s this idea that sometimes we should just ask ourselves: is there a better or different way of doing it? Maybe, as you’ve said, there’s a lot of power and benefit to status quo, and maybe sometimes, especially in our personal lives, there’s a lot of benefit to moving on and trying something different.

DUCKWORTH: So, from cutting off the ends of hams, which does not seem to be that big of a deal, or the QWERTY keyboard, which we can all live with, to, like, maybe more serious things like the ridiculous imperial system we have for measuring, to like more profound things like, you know, sticking with where you live when you should move — I think John from Fallon, Nevada and also David Hume have asked a very good question. 

Coming up after the break: a fact-check of today’s episode and stories from our NSQ listeners.

*      *      *

And now, here’s a fact-check of today’s conversation:

Mike and Angela wonder whether the Fahrenheit scale is part of the imperial system of measurement. The imperial system does, in fact, measure temperature using Fahrenheit, and the metric system uses Celsius — previously known as Centigrade, meaning “100 degrees.” And the United States is not the only country to measure temperature this way. A few other hold outs — including the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and Palau — continue to use the Fahrenheit system.

Later, Angela says that the online magazine Edge.org asks public intellectuals to explore one “big, deep, philosophical question” each year. Website editor John Brockman retired this feature in 2018 — saying that after 20 years he had “run out of questions.” His final question to contributors was: “What is the last question?”

Then, Angela jokes that only a Scandinavian country could get its entire population to switch to driving on the other side of the road. However, countries including Myanmar, Ghana, and Nigeria, as well as several Canadian provinces, have successfully made the switch.

Also, although the quote “I’m in favor of progress. It’s change I don’t like” is widely attributed to Mark Twain — like many quotes ascribed to the author — there is no evidence that Twain actually said or wrote this.

Finally, Stephen Dubner is not the co-author of Steven Levitt’s 2020 paper, “Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Decisions and Subsequent Happiness.” However, Levitt was inspired to do the study after listening to a Freakonomics Radio episode about the upside of quitting.

That’s it for the fact-check.

Before we wrap today’s show, let’s hear some thoughts about our previous episode on A.I. companionship.

LuAnn YOUNG: Hey, Angela and Mike. In your discussion of A.I. replacing human connection, I think a key point was missed. True connection is reciprocal. A connection with A.I. is a one-way connection. The people I’m most connected with are the ones who not only listen to me when I’m processing hard things, but I listen to them as they deal with hard things. Having an A.I. conversation seems to reinforce the isolation that so many already feel in our world today. It’s a connection that seems self-absorbed and self-centered. We need the empathy and compassion that comes when we’re pulled out of ourselves to really see others. A.I. is clearly a useful tool, but as a replacement to relationships with actual people, I believe it will ultimately leave us feeling lonelier than ever.

Robyn BRENNEN: Hi Angela and Mike, this is Robyn from Australia. In your episode on whether A.I. can replace human relationships, one thing that you didn’t discuss was the potential cost of A.I. and many of the unknowns around things such as energy usage. I personally try to avoid using A.I. unless it is particularly helpful for a job or a task that is an important job or task, as I don’t want to increase the energy consumption and the potential ramifications for our planet. 

Krish ARUNASALAM: Hi NSQ team. My name is Krish, and I work in the data-science space. I’m fairly close to the large language model world and I have to say the latest NSQ episode on A.I. has made it to one of my favorite episodes of the show. Navigating social interactions is like tiptoeing through a minefield, each step cautiously measured, dodging the hidden triggers of awkward pauses and misread cues. That said, I still wouldn’t trade that clumsy dance, missteps and all, for anything else. There’s something oddly satisfying about stumbling through it along with everybody else.

That was, respectively, LuAnn Young, Robyn Brennen, and Krish Arunasalam. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we’d love to hear your thoughts about status quo bias. Send a voice memo to NSQ@Freakonomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show!

Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions: How important is having a good sense of humor?

DUCKWORTH: “Hey everyone, I’ve got this great joke.”

That’s coming up on No Stupid Questions.

*      *      *

No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter @NSQ_Show, and you can now watch video clips of Mike and Angela at the Freakonomics Radio Network’s YouTube Shorts Channel or on Freakonomics Radio’s TikTok page. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ@Freakonomics.com. To learn more, or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com/NSQ. Thanks for listening!

MAUGHAN: If it were socially acceptable to keep a Christmas tree up from October through March, I 100 percent think I would do it.