Episode 153: Sam Enright discusses lifelong learning
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Why is lifelong learning important after formal education?
Hello
and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Sam Enright, editor-in-chief of the Fitzwilliam, which is an online publication about Ireland policy, philosophy, and literature. And he's also non-resident fellow at the policy think tank Progress Ireland and an emergent ventures fellow. And he's here to discuss lifelong learning. Sam Enright, welcome.
Thanks for having
me. So I would definitely put you at the top of my list of people who are really good at learning. But before we sort of talk about some of the ways that you like to learn, maybe we could just address this question of like. Is it a good thing to learn? I mean, I think a lot of us assume the answer is yes. I certainly assume that. I love learning. But like, I don't know, is that wrong? Is it a waste of time to be learning?
I think the question of the returns to effort of learning about different fields is a really non-trivial and interesting one, where... By default, maybe people assume that kind of linear model of you on average will get a lot greater wisdom and insight about a field by reading about it more, discussing it more with people. But also an effect of learning more about a certain topic can be to make you more insulated in your views. I believe it's a reasonably consistent social science finding that people's views are more correlated with one another at higher levels of knowledge.
Yeah, you definitely find that in academia. You get these little bubbles where no one challenges anyone's basic assumptions because there aren't enough outsiders learning about the conversations that are taking place in the particular bubble.
Yeah, like my friend Sam Bowman, who I think you might also know, had this line to me before, which was like, it seems like our options are either to be open-minded ignoramuses or extremely polarized, politicized, knowledgeable people. Yes. On the whole, he would prefer that we be highly ideological, knowledgeable people. But it is like somewhat depressing. It's kind of a sad
choice though,
isn't it? Yes.
And I feel like you kind of just described college versus PhD school right there. Like college is the time where you're excited to learn about all new things. You're kind of a neophyte. And then like, you know, doing your PhD is the time in which you've been like conscripted into the service of a field. You're no longer like working for yourself. You're working for the field, right? And now there's like ideology to contend with, not as much ideology perhaps to contend with when you're like shopping around the buffet of college classes.
Yeah, I have an economics professor friend and he was commenting to me recently that one of the things he likes about economics is that the returns to learning about it as a field are, it's quite straightforwardly diminishing returns. Like you can get the majority of the value that people will get, let's say, a whole degree in the first one year or two years. You can probably get a decent fraction of the value from those years within a single class. Even within that, if you can really convince people of the usefulness of certain economic ideas, you can get a lot of it across in a couple of hours. And he was Commenting upon like how history, which is another field that he thinks about a lot, seems to basically be an area of linear returns where he feels glad on the whole that he has like many different mental models from different cultures and time periods to think about, for example, modern political problems.
But he suspects that the returns to this are totally linear where like it's just better and better the more history, you know, but there's no like general lessons of history or something like this.
Hmm. Are there fields where it's the reverse, where there's no payoff for the first few years that you study it, and then suddenly it just gets exponentially better once you've put in a certain amount of time? Do
you think philosophy might be like that?
No. I think it's not like that. Okay. No, more like economics, I would say.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is lifelong learning important after formal education?
0:09–4:34
2
How do returns to learning differ across philosophy, economics, and history?
4:34–9:23
3
What is spaced repetition and how can it be used for long‑term recall?
9:23–14:41
4
How can reading groups replace classroom discussion for deep learning?
14:41–21:13
5
What role do AI chat‑bots play in supplementing reading and recall?
21:13–27:13
6
How can you create effective flashcards that evolve with your knowledge?
27:13–33:30
7
Why might a small amount of AI hallucination be useful for learning?
33:30–39:35
8
How can you combine spaced repetition, reading groups, and AI to build a personal learning system?
39:35–43:08
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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Episode 156: Oliver Traldi discusses political expertise
Episode 155: Rebecca Lowe discusses speaking freely
Episode 154: Greg Salmieri discusses free speech, "cancel culture," and "academic freedom"
Epsiode 152: Luca Gattoni-Celli discusses the housing crisis
Episode 151: Witold Więcek discusses statistics and academic research