There’s a quote about how you end up the average of your five closest friends. I think there’s a very deep truth to that. But if you accept that, then of course who your five closest friends are, choosing that, and we do, though we may not think of it this way, we do choose those people. Like, you are choosing who you are. And of course that’s a bidirectional process where who you want to be is determined by who you’re around, which determines who you want to be around, and so on.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. There is a lot of interesting material, and I may have another post on it.
As I read this portion of the interview, Collison is saying that your personality is correlated with that of your peers, but we have to be agnostic about causality. Maybe we could improve our personality by choosing better peers, or maybe we just select peers that fit with an innate personality.
My reaction was to try to relate it to my own life.
1. Right now, I don’t have five close friends. (Note: reading Jonathan Rauch’s new book, this is not so unusual for old people, who tend to trim their relationships.) But at my age, if you want to look for influences on my personality, presumably you would want to look back at my friends when I was younger.
2. I see my life as very compartmentalized. One reason I don’t have close friends now is that my worlds don’t overlap. The people who read my books don’t know that I go Israeli dancing three nights a week, and the people who I dance with have not read any of my books. My social friends and my intellectual friends would not get along with one another.
3. Also, the time periods of my life have been very different. Typically, someone matters to me very intensely for a few years, but hardly at all apart from that. In the late 1990s, I talked with my main business partner several times a day. Now we communicate about once a year. If you don’t count family members, it is hard to think of anyone I have been in close touch with for as long as ten years. My “best” long-term friend is someone I speak with for an average of about an hour a month.
4. If I were to say that my intellectual life is an average of other people, I would list my father (a political science professor), Bernie Saffran (who was an economics professor at Swarthmore), and Russ Roberts. All three rank much higher in wisdom than their place in the academic hierarchy would indicate. All I would describe as much more open-minded, capable of lifelong learning, and able to change their mind more than typical academics. In general, I have found that people in business (such as Collison) are much more oriented toward learning than are academics. Many professors by age 30 have narrowed their intellectual world to a few peers that operate within their narrow sub-field. In business, you fail if you do that.
But in other aspects of my life I wish I were closer to an average of: my wife (and dance partner), who is constantly asking herself how she ought to act and trying to follow that; Dave, a former Freddie Mac colleague who has the same traits; and dancers with whom I have no personal connection but who on the dance floor can be inspiring, natural, balletic, athletic, regal.
At all points in my life, the key people in my life have been very high in conscientiousness. Compared with others around them, they have been far more averse to recreational drugs or sexual adventures. You might accuse them of being inhibited. They are very conservative with personal finances and could live on much less than what they have. They would never allow career ambition to jeopardize family cohesion. They have a strong sense of agency–they would never celebrate victimhood. (In new-age jargon, they are “at cause” as opposed to “at effect.”)
The trope about being the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with strikes me as something that’s personally useful, but socially harmful if everyone pursues the policy the same way.
If you take the advice to heart, the best way to accomplish it is to sequester yourself into a peer group that has a bunch of people more accomplished than you are, probably with an (undisclosed) preference that others with lesser behavioral aptitudes not have the same access that you do.
Now, if you imagine everyone trying to do this it’s not easy to see that you’d have a social dynamic that promotes top-heavy segmentation. “A Race To The Top” if you will.
Not surprisingly, the people who trumpet this advice most aggressively tend to be Silicon Valley types who presumably collect generous rents from being at the epicenter of self-reinforcing knowledge clusters. Patrick Collison, Timothy Ferriss, Drew Houston, etc.
And by the way, your social life sounds a lot like mine Arnold.
I’ve always had a hard time blending my social spheres, and consistent, life-long friendships have been sparse for me.
I’m not sure if it’s circumstance or something about my own priorities that makes it especially difficult, but my personal life never seems sufficiently oxygenated to give the necessary energy that new social bonds require.
I think being an introverted intellectual type makes it tough. As a default you prefer to be on your own, and I need a minimum amount of time to delve into my own habits of thought in order to feel satisfied. Once you stack family obligations on top of that I find there’s just not enough air to readily pursue new social experiences as much as I would like.
Good post, and your second point about separating intellectual friends from social friends (and of course family) particularly applies. Book authors have long numbered among my “best friends”. Some of us who didn’t get that college degree, seem to return late in life to quality non fiction as a comforting daily source of inspiration. Plus all those history (including historical biography) books I brought home in the years when I traveled a lot, are finally getting their share of attention as well.
You fall among the thinkers of our times.
Most fascinating is to observe (or guess) HOW people such as you think; and then, to conjecture from the observations WHY they think as they do.
This kind of piece is great for that exercise.
One observation of many, many people (especially writers), over many, many years, is that both the HOW and the WHY change with age (of the subject observed and of the observer).
Re 2: how would you feel if your social friends started reading your books and talking to you about them? Is mode switching between sets of friends a feature or a bug in your overall social system?
“Many professors by age 30 have narrowed their intellectual world to a few peers that operate within their narrow sub-field.” This is not at all my experience in biology. Maybe economics is les interconnected? Or just smaller?