 Now, in the middle of all of these dialogues, we have a section called underrated, overrated. I'm going to name some things, some people, and ask you if you think they're overrated or underrated. And feel free to pass on any one of them. But let's start with rap music. Oh. I never got rap music. So I don't want to say it's overrated. It may be that I'm overrated, or at least I overrate myself. But I just know. I was probably born too soon. But there's a much younger Stephen Pinker on YouTube debating with William F. Buckley. And Stephen Pinker, of that time, is defending black English. And telling William F. Buckley, he basically doesn't understand what's special about it, and indeed, Buckley doesn't. So is rap music in a sense not just a musical extension of the black English you once defended on Farringline? Well, it is in the sense that I would not make the argument that there's anything, that the fact that I don't have any rap music on my iPod is not an argument for the objective merit of rap music compared to any other kind of music. There, I'm a relativist. And likewise, the grammatical structure of African-American English for vernacular, as linguists call it, black English, ebonics, there's really nothing inherently to choose between the rules in black English vernacular and any other English vernacular. There, I'm also a relativist. On the other hand, when it comes to what dialect we should use in formal essays, in the academic literature, in the New York Times, it's good to have a standard. The standard could have been black English. If history had run differently, it doesn't happen to be. It's good that we all settle on a standard to maximize communication and efficiency and certain aesthetic judgments. So the standardization is a good thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one standard is objectively better than another. Aerobic exercise, underrated or overrated? Oh, underrated, I like it. You like it, and you think it's good for you. I hope so, because I do. I like to think that I'm also accomplishing something when I go jogging or cycling. Behavioral economics, economists playing at psychology, obviously you have a stronger background in psychology than the economists. What do you think of behavioral econ? I'm for it. What's it missing? Well, I do think that it's missing. I'm completely out of my depth here, but I do think that it is too quick to dismiss classical economics. I don't think there is maybe another false dichotomy, but that the idea that the rational actor and models derived from it are obsolete because humans make certain irrational choices, have certain rules of thumb that can't be normatively defended, those aren't necessarily incompatible, because even though every individual human brain might have its quirks and be irrational, it is possible for a collective enterprise that works by certain rules to have a kind of rationality that none of the individual minds has. Also, it's possible because we're corrigible, because the mind is many parts, we can override some of our biases and instincts, either through confrontations with reality, through education, through debate. And we do know that people who are experienced in market transactions, for example, don't fall for the kinds of fallacies that behavioral economists are so fond of pointing out. You really can't turn a person into a money pump, even though in the lab I can set up a demo that shows that people can be intransitive in their preferences. But you actually put a person in a situation where there's real money at stake, and all of a sudden they're not so irrational. They walk away. The passive voice in writing. It has its underrated. Well, underrated, yeah, in the following sense. You open up any style manual, and one of the first bits of advice is, don't use the passive. That's too crude. Academics overuse the passive. Or maybe I should say the passive voice is overused by academics. That's better. That is better. That is better. But you know, it is thought as such by many people. So it is thought. But it is, the case is overdrawn. Because no construction could have survived in the language for more than 1,500 years if it didn't serve some purpose. And there are circumstances in which the passive is the better choice. In particular, when you have to, when the topic of the conversation, the entity that's already in the spotlight, is the done to or acted upon, another rule of style, aside from avoiding the passive, is start the sentence with the given information, the topic, end the sentence with the new information, the focus. If you're already talking about something that is done to, then that's the logical way to begin the next sentence. And the passive voice makes that possible. If I'm talking about, if I'm saying, you know, look at that mime in the park. He's being pelted with zucchini. Then since I've already called your attention to the mime, now I want to add information about him. If he happens to be the brunt of an action, then the passive voice is the way to begin the next sentence with him, as opposed to saying, some people are throwing zucchini at him, where he gets put in the focus of the sentence, which is the best place to introduce new information. And in fact, as I pointed out in the sense of style, the two most famous style guides in the English language, namely Orwell's Politics in the English Language and Strunk and Whites the Elements of Style, both accidentally use the passive in the very sentence in which they say, don't use the passive. William Shatner. You're connected to him in several ways. Oh, fellow Montreal Jew. I'd have to say underrated. Underrated. Although maybe not as singing. Here's Susan. You're well known for your photography. Here's Susan Sontag writing on photography. And I quote, photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. And she also wrote, it is mainly a social right, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. Overrated. Overrated. Photography is or Susan Sontag? Well, maybe just that passage. Like any art form, photography is many things. And first and foremost, it's a simulacrum of perceptual experience. It's possible because visual perception doesn't consist of knowing the external world directly, but rather making hypotheses about it via a two-dimensional array of light that's reflected from it. You duplicate that two-dimensional array of light with pigment or LEDs. And you can fool the perceiver into thinking that he's seeing the actual thing. That is then intention with the fact that the photograph itself is a splash of geometric and colored patches. And the challenge of photography is to both convey a sense of something out there, but also for that two-dimensional patch to itself be an aesthetically pleasing object. And as a photographer, I'm always cognizant of what will that two-dimensional patchwork of color look like and what is it a photograph of? If you think on all the different things you've written in various areas, what do you think has been your biggest mistake? Oh, where do I begin? Yeah, where to begin? Biggest mistake. Maybe I'm going to punt on that. OK, that's fine. Why don't I just say that? So it's not to convey the impression that I've never made mistakes? There's so many. Where do I begin?