How do we think together? [Tyler Cowen]

Tyler Cowen has a very interesting post today (April 9, 2025): Why not inquire together more? He sets things up by quoting Robin Hanson. Here's Cowen's complete response to that passage:

I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.

For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we use that method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.

I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke. As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person — somewhat separately — refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke. The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.

When people do wish to “talk through a question with me,” I find I am personally most useful offering reading references (I do have a lot of those), rather than ideas or analysis per se. The reading reference is a short computational strand, and it does not require joint, coordinated maneuvering at the end of very long computational strands.

Sometimes Alex and I make progress working through problems together, most of all if it concerns one of our concrete projects. But keep in mind a) we have been working together pretty closely for 35 years, b) often we are working together on the same concrete problem and with common incentives, c) we are pretty close to immune when it comes to offending each other, and d) our conversations themselves do not necessarily go all that well. So I view this data as both exceptional (in a very good way), and also broadly supportive of my thesis here.

For related reasons, I am most optimistic about “inquiring together more” in the context of concrete business decisions. Perhaps John and Patrick Collison are pretty good at this?

Or so it seems to me. Maybe I should go ask someone else.

After quoting the paragraph where Cowen talks of joking, which I liked, I say this:

David Hays and I worked together quite closely for two decades, from the mid-1970s (when I became his student) through to the mid-1990s (when he died). He had been a first-generation researcher in machine translation and thus one of the founders of computational linguistics (a term he coined). By the time I began working with him he was interested in semantics and how cognition was grounded in sensorimotor perception and action (perceiving and moving).

Our interests and skills were complementary. He'd been trained in the social sciences at Harvard and had that methodology down. He was mathematically sophisticated and had technical skills that I lacked. But I had sophisticated mathematical intuition and was a killed analyst of literary texts. We both liked to draw diagrams and worked together on models of mind best expressed in diagrams. My 1978 dissertation, "Cognitive Science and Literary Theory" was Both a quasi-technical exercise in cognitive science and examination of two literary phenomena, 1) the long-term cultural evolution of narrative form, 2) a detailed semantic analysis of Shakespeare's sonnet 129, "The Expense of Spirit." Once I'd completed my degree we continued to work closely together on our common intellectual project. My point is simple: we were deeply familiar with one another's thoughts and had complimentry skills.

Periodically I would visit him in Manhattan for two or three days and we'd work. Sometimes we'd stay in his apartment and think. And sometimes we'd walk in nearby Fort Tryon Park. Inevitably we'd get to a point where we were stuck. Here's a passage from my eulogy:

This ritual began when both of us were exhausted from the intellectual work, and frustrated because we weren’t making progress. Each of us would lie back and drop into fitful reverie. Every so often one of us would make a comment or ask a question. The other would reply, to no mutual satisfaction, and the fitful reverie would continue. Eventually we would work through it, begin talking and talking, and Dave would sit down to the computer and write up some notes on what we had accomplished.

Looking back I surmise that the point of all the talk was to get us to the point where we could no longer talk. The deep work happened during those (mutual) reveries.

To which I appended this:

Perhaps our single deepest paper is "Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence." I forget just how we decided to pool our knowledge and write something about the brain, a mutual interest we'd been pursuing independently for awhile. The actual work began when we met at my parents house in Allentown, PA. We sat at the kitchen table, pen and paper in front of us, and began listing the various ideas, observations, models, etc. we thought should be included. When the list had reached, say, fifty or so items, I suggested that we start grouping them into piles that seemed to go together. That gave us five piles. Hays then suggested that we come up with a principle for each pile. I forget whether or not we named any of the principles in that session. But however that actually happened, we did end up with five: 1) mode, 2) diagonalization, 3) decision, 4) finitization, and 5) indexing. In the paper we identified brain structures having primary responsibility for implementing each principle and associated each principle with characteristic behaviors. FWIW the final paper had 15 diagrams or illustrations. I take that as an indication of how much our thinking depended on visualization.

As a final comment, I note that my book about music, Beethoven's Anvil, was pretty much about how individual minds collaborate, albeit in making music rather than discursive thinking. "How do we THINK together may be as deep a question as one can ask about homo sapiens sapiens."