MIT Compass

What is value?

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For a transcript of this episode, click here (https://sites.mit.edu/compass/files/2025/06/Value-Podcast-Transcript.pdf).

This episode explores the question “What is value?” with MIT professors from philosophy, science, technology and society (STS), history, electrical engineering and computer science. 

Featuring: Sally Haslanger, Professor of Philosophy (host); Munther Dahleh, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; William Deringer, Program in Science, Technology, and Society; and, Caroline A Jones, Professor of History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT.

This podcast was created as part of the MIT Compass Initiative, 21.01: “Love, Death, and Taxes.” For more information about Compass check out⁠compass.mit.edu⁠⁠.

This podcast was recorded at the MIT AV Studios, and produced by Adina Karp. 

Intro Speaker 1:

Welcome to "MIT Compass: Thinking and Talking about Being Human," a show about exploring fundamental questions.

Professor Emily Richmond Pollock:

What do we value and why?

Professor Sally Haslanger:

What do we know and how do we know it?

Professor Alex Byrne:

What do we owe to each other?

Intro Speaker 2:

Hosted by MIT professors from across the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, each episode takes on the moral and ethical questions of the human experience.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

This week, we'll get into questions of what we value and why. I'm your host today, Sally Haslanger. I'm a professor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and I'm also affiliated with Women's and Gender Studies and with D-lab. With me today is Professor Munther Dahleh.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

My name is Munther Dahleh. I'm a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I'm also a core member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. My research is in decision theory, convenes under the banner of decision under uncertainty, and I'm very happy to be at this event.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Thanks, Munther. Also with us is Professor Caroline Jones.

Professor Caroline Jones:

Hi, I'm professor in Architecture and an Associate Dean in the School of Architecture and Planning. My training is as an art historian, but at MIT, I also get to apply the curatorial and critical realms.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Thanks, Caroline. And finally, joining us remotely is professor Will Deringer, Hi, Will.

Professor Will Deringer:

Hi, I'm Will Derringer. I'm a faculty member in the program in Science, Technology, and Society. I'm trained as a historian of science and technology. In a previous life, I worked as an investment banker, and what interests me is the history of techniques of calculation. So I'm sort of think of myself as a historian of calculation. I'm particularly interested in how calculations function in the economy and in finance and politics, in realms like that. And a lot of what I study are the role that calculations play in determining what things are valued in different social contexts.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Great. Well, it's a great combination of people from different disciplines, and I love that, and that's part of what we're aiming for in the class, is to have these kinds of conversations with different people from different backgrounds. Okay, so we're going to start with the question, what are some of the things you value, either personally or professionally, and what makes them valuable to you? Who would like to start us off?

Professor Caroline Jones:

Well, I brought a cheat sheet here.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Okay!

Professor Caroline Jones:

So working in the art world, value is a constant question, and value is a question that has been theorized in modernity, right, and by philosophy and as aesthetics, a word invented by philosophy and so on and so forth. So the first thing I want to get out of the way is that I'm not going to talk about value as a Veblen good, which is a fabulous concept that confounds economists, because as demand increases, it's because the price increases.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

So say more about what a Veblen good is.

Professor Caroline Jones:

Well, I kind of want other people to talk about it, because I kind of can't stand it. In other words, I'm privileged to be in the academy where we're not driven by the market. So I don't have to teach NFTs. I don't have to talk about why they're not art, right? But this is a classic example of a Veblen good. You produce rarity, you ascribe uniqueness, and then you see the market compete for this ostensibly rare good. So a Veblen good might begin historically as rarity. Think about if diamonds, you know, were under the pavement, they wouldn't be valuable. If gold ran in the rivers, you know, more than water, it wouldn't be valuable, right? So humans treasure the rare. And of course, the thing we call art is that peculiar species product that creates the rare, the unusual, the unique, and yet paradoxically, in my argument, it must be in a conversation with all the other things that humans have produced as art to have actual value.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

So tell me some of the things that you value, other than Veblen goods.

Professor Caroline Jones:

Well, experience. And I love the fact that you situated this entire podcast as around human experience. So I'm gonna I can see my economist friend here, itching to say something, I want to just hand it over to you.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

It's interesting that you talk talk about NFTs, because my son, in his early days of professional days, started trading NFTs, and then he gave up that terrible habit. But, but I think what is interesting about this is that I actually never thought that he looked at it as a piece of art.

Professor Caroline Jones:

Well, okay, so the art world is--

Professor Munther Dahleh:

Right, what he is valuing is-- money that he can generate from

Professor Caroline Jones:

Right selling this later on. And he was unequivocal about the value there. It wasn't about art at all.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

One of the things that we could say here is that there are different kinds of value, and one kind of value is exchange value. So the exchange value of a piece of art is, you know, the money you get from selling it, from exchanging it, etc. But then there's a question about whether there's some other value. And I hear you saying, and I hear all of us agreeing there's some other value to a piece of art than its exchange value. But I also want to hear from some of the others, because part of what we've heard from Caroline is that experience is important. So one of the things I think is interesting to point out here is when we say,"Why do you value it?" There's different kinds of answers to that. One of them is, what caused you to value it, or what explains your valuing it. And then there's something when you say, "Why do you value it?" Where you look at the thing itself and you say, what is the form or the appearance or the experience I get from it, et cetera. And so I think that there's a sense in which we are called upon by certain objects to value them, to appreciate them, regardless of what our motivations are, what our history is. I mean, I don't think that's exactly true, so I'm not going to--

Professor Caroline Jones:

Right, and we don't want to be too universalist.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Totally.

Professor Caroline Jones:

But can I throw that question to Will, who hasn't had a chance to break in?

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Yeah

Professor Caroline Jones:

Will, is there an aesthetics to calculation? I mean, in other words, the art world can go on forever about materiality, form, phenomenology, experience, vibration. I mean, you name it, it's all a part of the sensory encounter with this transcendental good, right? So I'm just gonna force a hard question on you, because numbers are, to me, alien and abstract. But I know mathematicians like to talk about elegance and beauty. What you know, take it away.

Professor Will Deringer:

Yeah. So, that's an interesting way into the into the question, that's something, it's a different way of thinking about the question than I've thought about it in the past. Yeah. So one of the things I think about so in my own, my own research, a lot of what I study are the tools that people use to value certain things in a very particular sense, right? In the sense of using numerical calculations to try to put a number on the value of things and and, you know, my own work just ranges across a lot of different kinds of things; plots of farmland in the 17th Century or corporations in the 20th century, coal mines in the early 19th century and things, lots of different kinds of things, usually in some kind of economic sense. And a lot of what I've become interested I mean, a lot of the ways that we sort of think about the dominant ways that people think about value in a kind of economic or financial sense, is the idea that there is some sort of objective the value can be sort of reduced to some sort of objective calculation

Professor Sally Haslanger:

And measured, too.

Professor Will Deringer:

Can be measured, right? Can be measured. You can put a number to it. It's a sort of a reflection. You can you can measure something sort of true about the world out there,

Professor Caroline Jones:

Can be standardized, can be calculated, can be quantified across different sites, etc,

Professor Will Deringer:

And so to be even more specific about it, the research project that I'm working on now is it is a history of account of a particular calculation called discounting. It's a sort of a simple way of a simple way of thinking about it, but the idea there is that the value of something comes from the future flow of income that it will generate, right? So basically, you hold anything, it's going to produce some series of benefits to you in the future, right? If it's a piece of land, it's going to produce crops or rents. If it's a coal mine, it's going to produce coal. If it's a company, it's going to produce profits. And you can use this calculation to basically say, well, all that flow of of good stuff that's coming to you in the future, we can sort of project it out into the future and and calculate it back to some value today. And a lot of my interest in this comes from the fact this is, I think, an extremely weird thing. This is something, you know, is the sort of the first day, you know, the first things I could have learned when I was in my my previous career and working in finance and and I've always just been, sort of, I've kind of marveled at it in the street, like both the sort of almost esoteric kind of sort of woo, woo spirit you're sort of dealing in these kind of future, right? This, like this kind of future with wish casting, and so I often think about it in terms of aesthetics, exactly, but I think the answer is yes. I think that in some sense, this is a this activity of thinking about the future, using calculations to sort of measure things that happen in the future has a kind of it does have a kind of aesthetic, sort of an aesthetics to it, right? It involves people kind of engaging with some sort of speculative vision about what they think, some some sort of good that is going to come in the future. But I have much more to say about that, but it's just an interesting way into--

Professor Sally Haslanger:

But let me, let me intervene here for a second, because when Caroline is talking about the value of experience, it feels very much present, immediate experience of something, and what that does, and what you're talking about, Will, it seems to be so different from that, because it's this imagined future, and it's not really about present experience. I mean, there may be, as you said, at the very end, there's some kind of, you know, thrill that comes from imagining this future and the benefits that will come to you, but there seems to be a kind of a tension between these. So you can even imagine someone sort of having to make a decision about, do I do something right now that is going to give me this amazing experience and lose some of those long term benefits, or vice versa. And so this kind of gets us into one of the other questions about hard choices, if there are different kinds of value, if we can't do what Will is thinking about is putting everything on a scale and measuring it and then making a decision based on that?

Professor Caroline Jones:

Well, again, they're connected. If you think about extractive capitalism, you know, there's like you're pulling a lot of coal out today, right? And you're looking forward to the future when you will endlessly, be able to pull coal out, right?

Professor Sally Haslanger:

You're looking forward to it, but you're not experiencing the future.

Professor Caroline Jones:

Right, yeah, and that is actually a problem. Humans, humans have a hard time imagining the impact of their current pleasure.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

So I was going to say actually, because this is maybe the right time to jump in and--

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Yes, please.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

Thinking about what is it that I value the most, personally is my time, which gets right at the middle of this conflict. Because what is it that, I mean, it's the one asset that I'm constantly trying to manage and failing and doing it right. I want some free time, some flexible time to do something, but then when I'm doing it, it's no longer the freedom or flexible, it's kind of a contradictory of its own, right? And I suffer from this problem, right? And it's exactly that about the what I'm experiencing now and what I can do now versus the projected thing that I could have if I had time, what other things could have happened. This conflict is right there in my mind, and to say that you can navigate it and make decisions is so difficult, because how can you let go of something interesting you can do right now for the sake of something elusive of the future that you haven't even thought about yet? Right? And I struggle a lot also related to this particular issue between routine and free time, right? And so free choice, so to speak, because I feel the routine, which is takes away a lot of my time, honestly, is efficient. I get stuff done in the routine. I do the same things. I know what to do them. Everybody's lined up. It's very efficient. I miss the punctuation of these events. A week later, I can't remember the detail of how that went. If I do something free fall, and it's not part of the routine, and it will be totally inefficient, I remember, and I'm and I cherish that, so I remember that, but I don't remember three months just passed by where I Monday, Wednesday. I go to teach. I do this, I do this, and I haven't really thought it through. And I value this idea that I can go back and actually punctuate it in an interesting way. And to your question at the end, how do I manage it, and how do I think about the conflicts that are fighting in this? I have no idea.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Yeah, Will, jump in.

Professor Will Deringer:

Yeah, so I was it was probably the question was first posed when we were thinking about this podcast, about what's something that I value personally, the thing I kept coming back to was a particular moment, and it's very much along the lines of how the sort of scarce resource in my life is time, and how the things that bring me value are kind of related to how I spend my time. But that situation is, it's about 5;15 and I'm cooking dinner, and that's, that's the thing I value. It's cooking dinner. And the more I kept turning around in my head what would be an interesting thing to talk about, I just kept coming back to cooking dinner and like, why is that something that I value so much? And one of the reasons I've been, I've been thinking about it is I have two small kids. It's the sort of thing that becomes increasingly hard to devote a lot of time to, you know, before I had, you know, I would spend whole, you know, four or five hours on a Sunday, you know, cooking something elaborate, just as a sort of activity. But it becomes increasingly hard when you have small kids, and mostly they want to eat plain pasta. And you have a zillion other things going on. And yeah, despite all that, I keep trying to desperately preserve this one thing, which is 5;15 in the evening, cooking dinner. And why do I--why do I value that as much as I do? And I've been turning this question over in my head for a while, and part of it is because I like to eat, right? So there is an instrumental component. It's a means to making things that I think are particularly good. Part of it is that it gives me control over that, and I can make things exactly the way I want and the way my kids want, and very little of it has to do with any sort of economic calculation that this is more affordable, or, to be even totally frank, any you know, I take some sort of auxiliary benefit from the fact there might be some kind of moral good to producing your own food and not relying on plastic takeout. Or you know that there are many good things. I know that there are, but that's not really on, like, an essential level why I value this, but it's something about that experience. It's about about standing there, listening to music, chopping onions that I just is, like one of the things I value, over, over almost anything else.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

So let me ask you, I mean, I love this, because I think in the history of philosophy, activity has been something that that is much valued, the sort of self realization, the realization of human capability and activity. So I love this, but what I want to ask is suppose you were to have that experience, but you weren't actually chopping vegetables or breaking eggs or serving it to your family. It was all something that was sort of crafted somehow to get you to believe that you were, and experiencing that--

Professor Caroline Jones:

Are we in the matrix?

Professor Sally Haslanger:

We could be--

Professor Caroline Jones:

So your mind, your mind's in a vat, and your energy is being drained for a large machine, but you're being given a virtual, virtual experience.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Yeah, I'm bringing this up because one of the readings for the class is the Experience Machine, where people are asked whether they would be willing to go into the Experience Machine and just have the wonderful experiences, but it was all just virtual. And so I'm prompting this as a as a reflection point on is experience. So I actually think the experience of activity is valuable. I mean, I think that experience is good, but there are some times when when I think it has to be more than that

Professor Munther Dahleh:

But I think, I think maybe the issue is that, you know the practicality of it is one thing, but the issue is having this experience in isolation, somehow that there is no world except that you create this thing where you have that experience, is it still the same positive experience, you know? And I think that there's a lot that gets lost because of the impact of any experience on the others,

Professor Caroline Jones:

Yeah, that'll happen.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

And they want to go Chinese, and and how the value, you know, I was thinking as Will was talking about his example, is, is sort of, what if one of your kids no longer like your food, you know? You know? let's go Chinese, and you're insisting on the 5:15 event, and now it's actually torture, because these kids are refusing what you want to do. You want to do it because you have this experience and you like it, but the externality of it is actually dampening the value. This goes away in the experiential world of a machine. There's no externality, and I think a lot is lost.

Professor Caroline Jones:

And this is actually a problem for economists as well. The externalities are really complex, and it's so much easier to just leave them out.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

And also the sociocultural dimensions, the doing it together, that you know, it's not just the illusion of doing it with others that's important. It's the actual fact that we are, that I'm, that you're here with me, that I'm connecting to you. This would not be a great experience. No, well, it would be a great experience. But if I learned that it was all made up and you weren't actually here, we weren't actually having this conversation, it would change the nature of it completely.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

I have a question for Will, though, because I think that this is what you said about sort of the quantification of something as it manifests itself in the future and the value. And how does one deal with the heterogeneity of, of the future value, you know, of whatever event, like, and I see that a lot of my colleagues, you know, we think, "Oh, but everybody should agree that this is the value." But it's not true, right? I mean, so many different people, so many different values in that way. So I don't know how that gets reflected.

Professor Will Deringer:

Yeah. I mean, I think that in the context of this particular sort of mode of valuation which I studied the history of. On one level, it has this kind of, this sort of future-oriented, kind of wish casting, sort of element of sort of opening up outward towards the future. And on the other level, has this sort of dramatic narrowing, right, this idea of that everything can be sort of fit into some kind of calculus, right, that everything can be sort of commensurated, put on a scale, added up in some sort of common set of units. And in effect, what often that ends up in involving is leaving things out is just sort of forgetting, forgetting things. I'll mention here the one of the weirdest theorists of this idea that I that I study, is a early 20th Century American economist named Irving Fisher. And the way he thought about this was that based, and he's really one of the people who sort of theorized this idea, and kind of made it really central to modern economics, this idea that you can calculate, that the value of essentially everything is determined by this flow of future good stuff that it brings you. And he thought this was true of everything, not just sort of financial things that, you know, produced income that could be measured in money, but you know, the value of a piano was the flow. And he specifically talks, he talks about pianos constantly, is the sort of the good experience that it will--this flow of good experience that it will bring you. And he thought everything. He thought of everything in terms of flows that we're just living in this sort of series of flows, that the value of everything is this kind of, these tendrils of sort of flows of benefits they produce out out into the future. But in order to kind of make sense of this, he thought that he sort of thought of what humans were. Was it basically that our that our bodies were a kind of a kind of piece of equipment that took in all of these sort of inputs, all of these sort of sensations of various kinds, and then sort of transformed them into what he called "psychic income." And that was this sort of, and the term he uses is "psychic income." It's, it's totally, totally wild, but they're basically the body is this transformation, kind of transformation device, just like a fact, you know, a piece of factory equipment takes, you know, lumber and turns it into boards, right? Or, you know, takes inputs and turns them into outputs that our body took sensory experience and turned it into this flow of like psychic vibes, basically, and that all of that could be kind of that our body sort of commensurated all that like combined everything into this sort of single form of kind of income into our brain. And it turns out he was very interesting character. He got--archival work I've done showed that he sort of got, he got tuberculosis. He was a professor at Yale. He took three years off, and he got really into sort of various New Age philosophy of various kinds. It's really interesting, but, but he's the sort of founder of American economics, right? This, this idea of our bodies, this sort of transforming flows of sensations and turning them into psychic income. It sounds kind of crazy, but it's very central to, you know, it gets kind of built into, you know, these really, really powerful ideas.

Professor Caroline Jones:

Can we quote Oscar Wilde? "He knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing." I mean, I mean, I want to make that distinction, because that is a theme here, that money is a fault. You know, income, right, is a false metaphor for value, like we have to be very crisp, and this is what I'm hearing and what you're saying. In other words, you you look at the piano as an automatic generator of this sensory input, but you forgot to teach your child, you know, give them piano lessons, or you don't like John Cage. I mean, whatever the piano is just a it's just an assemblage of wood and, you know, cat gut or whatever, anyway. So can we just, like, sit on income for a minute and say that may be a false metaphor of value? Is that what you're saying is that what the work, where the work is going?

Professor Will Deringer:

Yeah, from, from my perspective as a historian, is, you know, what interests me about this idea of income as, as the sort of basis of value, psychic income is somehow, you know, this, this flow of, you know, that we could think about this flow of experience in our lives as some form of sort of income, right? And analogize it to a sort of, you know, flow of money, or, fine, it's, it's profoundly weird. I mean, I think it's, it's, in some ways, when you really start reading it, it's, it's nonsensical, but in a way, it's a it, it is an example, a sort of a historical example of, you know, trying to wrestle with this exact question that Munther was bringing out of, sort of, how do we, you know, how do different value, how do different valuable things get kind of brought into, into some sort of common frame, right,

Professor Caroline Jones:

...metabolizes it into this-- this sort of heterogeneity of different of different values. And, yeah, it's just, I think, as a particular in some sense, in its kind of absurdity, it points out this, you know, sort of frames that central problem, right? Irving Fisher's idea was that our body sort of takes in all of this kind of stuff and somehow transforms it into this--

Professor Will Deringer:

--Yeah, yeah like flow. I mean, he thought of the body, body as a factory, and it turns it into this flow of some and that, like, there is some essential thing that is valuable, which is this, like flow of vibes into our psyche or something. I don't think that's right, but it's a sort of an interesting place to start from, and to give kind of why it's wrong.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Great. So I have one final question that I'd like a short answer from each of you. And the question is, do you think it's important to reflect on our values, and if so, why?

Professor Caroline Jones:

So we're embedded in a not-for-profit educational institution chartered by the state of Massachusetts. So the answer is obviously yes. The development that is offered to humans through education is again, something I value deeply.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

Of course, the answer has to be yes. Otherwise, it would be crazy to say no, we should not be reflecting. But there's a bit of a problem, and I think because we cannot agree, or we don't agree, maybe we can agree, as to what is valuable in a context like a university, like MIT and so forth, I think we end up talking about things and money and outputs and production functions and so forth, and we put those at the forefront and and then somebody may throw in and say, well, but are you all happy? Or is like--do you really care? And so and then, and wellness, and that gets marginalized a little bit, because nobody knows how to quantify that, but we can quantify how many billions of dollars we can we can raise. And so the conversation drifts, in general, into something that is actually not productive and actually reinforces some of the bad things that we do. And so yes, I do think we should be reflective, but boy, I mean, every time I've been in a in a setting where we are reflecting, I was very unhappy.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Will, do you have any thoughts about this?

Professor Will Deringer:

Yeah, I mean, what strikes me is that, going back to talking about 5:15, and cooking dinner, one of the reasons I, you know, I've been thinking about that as something I value, is because it is something where I, you know, I kind of often feel is sort of under, under threat. I'm often, you know, trading having to trade it off for other things. You know, have kids pulling in various directions, and work obligations, all kinds of other things. And what it makes me realize is that so much of kind of mundane life decision making, particularly about how we use our time, are sort of effectively expressions of our values, but ones that we don't actually often get a chance to stop and and think about. And I feel like you know, one of the challenges of sort of being being busy and having a lot going on is that those decisions end up often getting made kind of very reactively, right, very sort of just, what do I need to do right now? Like, what's the thing that's what's the thing that's not necessarily what's most valuable to me, but what's the thing that's sort of immediately in front of me? What's the thing that's sort of the deadline that's closest, what's the most urgent concern? What's the thing that's making me feel most anxious right now, right? As opposed to what's really valuable to me, you know? And so I think as, as a sort of way of getting us out of the sort of living a constantly reactive life, I think it's something we should all try to find time to do.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

But I think I do want to comment on this and say that part of all of this is is a collective effect, right? Because you know this this nervousness and this urgency that you feel and so forth, is because everybody makes you feel that way, and because this is the environment that you're in, you know? And in order to make that change, you can't just change on your own. Have to change everybody around me, which makes it very difficult.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Okay, so the final, final question that is one that comes from the framing of the whole of all of these podcasts, not just this one, is what artwork, be that a book, a musical composition, or a piece of visual art was your most favorite or most influential when you were in college?

Professor Caroline Jones:

So I became interested in an artist partly because he came, he came from very rural Texas and ended up at Black Mountain College in my mostly rural state. And I was like, "How did that even happen?" So his name was Robert Rauschenberg, so I wrote my undergraduate thesis on him, and I became really interested in a kind of art I had never been taught. And I made art, but I had just never been taught of this moment approximate to my own youth in which art became, you know, automobile tires and radios, and, you know, old sheets, and, you know, he had a theory about that they were called combines, like a combine harvester. They were going to pick up from American life and give us something to think about, right? So that made a big difference for me. And I was taught about art in terms of its formal arrangements, which comes from the Bauhaus and good design and all these ideas that we have universal values, and they have geometric shapes and primary colors and and here was this guy who was, you know, just putting trash, you know, onto a canvas. So that was probably a revolutionary insight, that the work of art could be whatever we needed at that moment in time.

Professor Will Deringer:

When I was thinking about this, you

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Will, how about you? know, I was, I was thinking about books in particular, and books from college that really sort of changed my way of seeing seeing things that was, I came across it when I was a senior. I was writing my my undergraduate thesis, and I was recommended a book by my thesis advisor, and it was called the social history of truth. And it's a book by Steve Shapin, who is a historian and sociologist of science at Harvard. What this book is about, it's about civility in science in in the 17th century. And the upshot of this book is that truth, the idea of what are true things, true statements about the world, is a social thing, in the sense that the standards of what what is true and false, how you sort of determine what knowledge is reliable and not is a function of the societies and the sort of social worlds out of which it's made. And the real kind of core of this book is about sort of science, and the period that was often used to be called the sort of scientific revolution, and how that was related to sort of codes of gentlemanly civility, and about how basically what was considered true knowledge was knowledge that was produced by trustworthy people, and trustworthy people acted in certain ways that were sort of associated with being a gentleman. But that idea that truth was something that had a sort of social history to it kind of just blew my mind. And it's something that I've ended up spending, you know, now the much of my career, essentially thinking about variants of that, of that kind of question about what, you know, what is the relationship between truth and and sort of social order, so the societies in which in which we love. Munther?

Professor Munther Dahleh:

Yeah, so this was really interesting, because in my college years, I was primarily reading math books and and there were some math books, one particular math books in abstract algebra that I read that actually thought was so elegant and such a great way of presenting the material. But I also happened to read 1984 for the first time, when I was in college by George Orwell. And in hindsight, this book probably had one of the most profound impacts on me, and in particular in the whole space of understanding how information control is the most important thing you can accomplish. The best way to affect people, change people and so forth, is about information control. I'm a control theorist. I'm an information theorist. And so a lot of my work is really about information and how information affects decisions and and how information propagate and and what is it about information that allows you to learn and not learn and so forth? Maybe my 35 years trajectory of research is really kind of now, not motivated by that book, but related very much to this question of dictatorship and control and power. And I was thinking about the fact that I read that book in my freshman year in college. And so maybe that I would say, this would be my example.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

That's fantastic. What a great collection of, of text and images to be thinking about. When I was--and my family was not a happy family, and there were a lot of challenges just managing. And we moved at one point when I was in high school, so this is more of a high school experience, I guess, to Houston, Texas, and I didn't know anybody, and I was very lonely and unhappy, and I can remember getting my driver's license and driving to Rice to the Rothko Chapel. And the Rothko Chapel is an incredibly beautiful, very small space where the walls just have Rothko paintings on them. They're very dark, they're very kind of impenetrable, and I can remember just sitting in the Rothko Chapel and realizing that I didn't have to depend on my family and on my immediate circumstances in order to find meaning and beauty and value, because it was it was there in the world. It was there in this art. It could be there in a book, it could be there in these sorts of things. And so there was a moment where I really just took that activity of valuing into myself. It's not to say it was just individual and personal, because it was cultural. It was acknowledging the these cut the art of Rothko. It was saying no, this culture more broadly, can support me in my being who I am, and I don't have to depend on my particular family configuration in order to become who I am and to be who I am, I really want to thank you all for participating in this. I've had a lot of fun. I hope you have too.

Professor Caroline Jones:

I have.

Professor Munther Dahleh:

Thank you.

Professor Sally Haslanger:

Wonderful.

Professor Will Deringer:

Thanks.

Intro Speaker 2:

Thanks for listening to "MIT Compass: Thinking and Talking about Being Human."

Intro Speaker 1:

We hope you'll check out other episodes at compass.mit.edu

Intro Speaker 3:

This podcast was created as part of the MIT

Compass Initiative; "21.01:

Love, Death and Taxes."

Intro Speaker 1:

This podcast was recorded at the MIT AV studios

Intro Speaker 2:

and produced by Adina Karp.