Let's Make a List

Why are humans so fascinated by lists? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the reason we can’t pass a top 10 clickbait headline and are forever haunted by incomplete lists. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And now, o muses dwellers in the mansions of Olympus,
tell me for your goddesses and are in all places,
so that you see all things, while we know nothing
but by report? Who were the chiefs and princes of
the Danaans. As for the common soldiers, they were so
that I could not name every single one of them,
though I had ten tongues, and though my voice failed,

(00:23):
not and my heart were of bronze within me, unless you,
o Olympian muses, daughters of Egists bearing Jove, were to
recount them to me. Nevertheless, I will tell the captains
of the ships and all the fleet together, Welcome to

(00:45):
Stuff to Blow your mind from How Stuffworks dot Com. Hey,
welcome to stuff to Blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
to be taught talking about lists. So that opening was
from the Samuel Butler translation of the Iliad, and it

(01:08):
proceeds a section of the Iliad that's often known as
the Catalog of Ships. If you remember, Iliot has a
lot of sections where it kind of lists things. This
is like the most famous list in it um. It's
this long list of the ships and the leaders of
the Achaean expeditionary force called the Denayans in that passage,
and so to get a sense of the many items

(01:30):
of the lists that follows, I think maybe we should
we should read a couple more of them. They've got
a lot of tricky Greek names, but we'll do our
best for them. I'll take the first one. Okay, Escalaphus
and Almana, sons of Mars, led by people that dwelt
in Asplodon and or common Us, the realm of Minnius.
A Styachy, a noble maiden, bore them in the house

(01:51):
of act Or, son of Asius, for she had gone
with Mars secretly into an upper chamber, and he had
lain with her. With these there came thirty ships. It
sounds a big gossip, he doesn't. I thought, you're just
naming ships, and now you're you're having to tell me
who's sleeping with who as well. Well, they're naming like
the captains and the numbers of people and where they

(02:12):
came from. But they also got to slip in a
little bit of like a divine rumor. Yeah, all right,
it continues. The fierce Abantes held Via with its cities Calcus,
Rita Historia, rich in vines, Corinthus upon the sea, and
the rock pushed town of Beam. With them were also

(02:32):
the men of Caristus and Steira. Elephin Or of the
race of Mars, was in command of these. He was
son of Calcodon and chief over all the Abantes. With
him they came fleet afoot and wearing their long hair, behind,
brave warriors who had ever strived to tear open the

(02:53):
corsets of their foes with their long ash and spears.
Of these there came fifty ships, and they that held
the strong city of Athens, the people of great Erecttheus,
who was born of the soil itself. But Jove's daughter
Minerva fostered them and established him at Athens in her
own rich sanctuary. There year by year the Athenian youths

(03:16):
worship him with sacrifices of bulls and rams. These were
commanded by Menestheus, son of Peteus. No man living could
equal him in the marshaling of chariots and foot soldiers.
Nestor could alone rival him, for he was older. With him,
there came fifty ships, but there are a lot of
these in the poem. Uh. This passage in the Iliad

(03:38):
is interesting because there's a lot of debate about its
origin and authorship, like is it part of the original poem?
Is it a later insertion? Is it maybe a gradual
accretion as audiences of the epic song in every locale
wanted to hear their own local tribe and legendary hero
incorporated into the story. But it's also something that calls
attention to itself simply be cause it is a list.

(04:01):
It's a list of so it's a list and accounting
of things, a list of numbers of ships, of their commanders,
of the numbers of soldiers they brought. And it is
right in the middle of a poem. Uh. And we
might not often think of like a list of forces
as having a very like literary or poetic quality, but
I guess they're They're also scholars who would disagree with that.

(04:22):
For example, Umberto Echo, the medievalist and Simiatitian and author
including of the Name of the Rose, which I just
read for the first time this year, and I loved. Yeah,
but Echo loved lists. He was pretty much obsessed with lists,
and he clearly considered them not like a deviation from
poetic form, but a really valuable form of art and

(04:43):
object of study, So much so that in two thousand nine,
when Echo was invited to curate an exhibition at the Louver,
the subject of the exhibition he put together was the list.
I wish I could have seen that, and umberto Echo
curated exhibit on lists. But he was interviewed that year
by Der Spiegel and ended up talking a lot about

(05:03):
his fascination with the power of lists. In the interview,
one of the central examples he talks about is the
catalog of ships from the Iliad. So Echo says in
the interview, quote take Homer for example. In the Iliad,
he tries to convey an impression of the size of
the Greek army. At first, he uses similes, and he
quotes as when some great forest fire is raging upon

(05:25):
a mountaintop and its light is seen afar. Even so
as they marched, the gleam of their armor flashed up
onto the firmament of heaven. But Echo continues, but he
isn't satisfied. He can't find the right metaphor, and so
he begs the muses to help him. Then he hits
on the idea of naming many many generals and their ships.

(05:46):
And then later in the interview, he says, quote Homer's
work hits again and again on the tow posts of
the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always
been fascinated by infinite space, by endless stars, and by galaxies.
Upon alexis, how does a person feel when looking at
the sky, He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues
to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopped

(06:09):
describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are
in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language,
a lack of words to express their feelings. But do
lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists.
Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth
and your collarbone. One could go into great detail. And

(06:30):
I think there's something interesting in what Echo says there.
What he says makes me think of other poems like
the Song of Solomon and the Hebrew Bible and uh
like you know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how do I love
thee Let me count the ways I love you in
the morning and in the afternoon. I'll love you in
the evening underneath the moon. Oh yeah, I will not
eat it with a goat them, eat it on a boat,

(06:51):
et cetera. Well, even in Sam I Am and the
Green Eggs and Ham, I think there's something going on
there with the use of a list to try to
convey what cannot be expressed in in simple language. The
idea that, like one's discussed, is without bounds. You know,
you have infinite disgust for the idea of green eggs
and ham, and so all you can do is start

(07:13):
listing all the ways you would not eat it, right,
But then ultimately, like each one is, is each argument
against trying the green eggs and ham is just as
ridiculous is the last, because the whole argument is we'll
try it, give it a try, and eventually he does.
But yeah, there's it's it's there's a lot of listing
in that particular, But there's a lot of listing, I guess,
and kind of lyrical um fiction, lyrical children's books especially.

(07:40):
Another example that came up they will probably bring up
again is the is the night before Christmas the naming
of the reindeer, Like all the reindeer must be named
and listed as part of this. There's there's almost kind
of a magical spell quality to it. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah,
the recitation of figures of qualities. Another one I think
of a great list in in poetic form that sort

(08:02):
of conjures a magical environment of inexpressible quality is The
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti. Yeah, that's a fun one.
We actually helped record a reading of the Goblin Market
for movie. It was then food Stuff, now known as
a Saver the podcast hosted by a Lauren Vogel bomb
In any Reese Well have to include a link to

(08:22):
that on the landing page for this episode. That was
a really fun episode. But it what what? What is?
What happens in that poem? So the basic plot of
the poem is it's about some a pair of sisters
who are corrupted by these goblins who are selling sort
of supernatural fruits at a market. But there there are
these long sections where the goblins are just listing all
of the fruits, and it goes on and on and

(08:44):
on more and more fruits, and it eventually has this
cumulative quality where it suggests that the fruits are infinite. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
there are there are a lot of encind of this,
a lot in uh, you know, rich descriptions of places
and settings, um where where the author will just just

(09:04):
dive in head first and just describing one thing after
the other, just really really list the sights and sounds
of a particular uh scene. Yeah, exactly. And so it's
interesting that there's uh the use of lists and in
the literary sense, I feel like has completely opposite usages
in which it works both ways. One way is an
author can use a list to sort of suggest infinity

(09:27):
and inexpressibility, like qualities that are beyond measure and beyond
counting can be suggested by listing. But at the same time,
you can use a list to start to make understandable
and make manageable something that otherwise is is completely chaotic
and doesn't make sense to you. Like another quote of
Umberto Echoes in that interview is he says, quote, the

(09:49):
list is the origin of culture. It's part of the
history of art and literature. What does culture want to
make infinity comprehensible? It wants to create order, not always
but often. And how is a human being does one
face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible
through lists, through catalogs, through collections and museums and through

(10:10):
encyclopedias and dictionaries. Well, certainly if you begin to list
something and it gives you the ability to then break
up that list into consumable parts. Like, for instance, the
list of all organisms on the planet is an ongoing
list that has not yet been finished. Uh, we continually
add new species to it, and yet by subdividing that list,

(10:32):
we have a really good idea of of what the
basic shape of life on planet Earth consists of. Yeah. Yeah,
you can construct an evolutionary tree by making lists of
organisms and then listing their characteristics and then comparing your lists.
You know, I think of making a list is often
similar to um, there's a process at the beginning of

(10:55):
cleaning a messy room, you know, where at first a
mass is sort of a singular quality. It's just like
a thing that you are faced with, and it has
this unified evil, magic and aura that cannot be penetrated.
And the best way to deal with it is start
just sort of like making a catalog of Okay, what's

(11:16):
actually here, and sometimes you'll make piles of things and stuff.
Essentially you're sort of physically making a list out of
individual elements. From what was originally just a mess. Oh absolutely,
with a with a proper list of a task that
would otherwise seem insurmountable can seem beatable. Be it something
that does have a definite end to it, say, like

(11:39):
a like a long legal process, like say an adoption process.
That was my experience. It was a very very long
process to reach the endpoint. But you know, you divided
it up, and indeed the first step is just like, well,
let's look at the list. Likewise, though, we also take
this same thing and we apply it to such situations
as say, human mortality. And if you take just the

(11:59):
bucket list, well, not just that, but say Aubrey De
Gray's approach to actual mortality, like, you know, how can
we beat death? Well we can, Well, let's start by
just dividing it up into winnable avenues, like winnable battles. Yeah,
and even though so Aubrey de Gray, if you're not familiar,
he's like a gerontologist and general a smart guy, I think,

(12:21):
but he he's tried to address the problem of aging
and said, hey, let's not treat this as an inevitability.
Maybe we can scientifically beat aging and stop you know,
death from Old Age, from Happening Um and the way
he approached it. I think, though a lot of people
disagree with his confidence in his you know, prediction that
we can beat the problem. The way he approached it is,

(12:44):
let's break death and aging down into a list of
all of the things that go wrong. And that's a
that's a brilliant way of looking at it. Even if
he's wrong about what we can do. Just seeing the
like actual number of problems in aging in new a
rated and named it gives you suddenly this feeling of
power over the problem that you didn't have before. Yeah said,

(13:06):
you start thinking, well, maybe this wizardy looking guy does
have a point. Maybe we can beat death death It
isn't isn't that big of a deal. He does have
a magnificent beard, he's like he's like a resputant of life.
And so I think maybe this should lead us to
make a distinction. That's an important distinction when it comes
to lists. I was thinking about, like finite versus infinite games.

(13:27):
There's also a big difference in in the way lists
play roles in our lives depending on whether they're finite
or infinite. Lists. Like we make finite lists of things.
I think in order to better understand something, so like
a list of organs in the human body. And then meanwhile,
you make an infinite list in order to try to

(13:48):
begin to address an infinite problem, like, you know, how
do you express an unbounded feeling of love for somebody?
You start listing the ways or how do you live
your life? Well, one way to do that is to
try to make it to do list. Ideally, a to
do list is not something where you're like, Okay, I'm
done with all my tasks and I can just stop
living now. It's just something that you're trying to prioritize

(14:10):
the whole future you have in front of you. I
have to admit that the the idea of infinite lists
here is is maybe a little confusing to me, because
I'm thinking, like, is there really an infinite number of
reasons that once they loves their spouse? I mean, there's
there's probably a finite list of things. I mean, the
the human experience is only so varied, right, Well, I

(14:31):
mean you could keep breaking down reasons into smaller and
smaller sub reasons. I guess, so, yeah, that's right. You
could sort of of what you know, a foot race
with Achilles. Yeah, you can pull that number off. I mean, likewise,
you could say the stars in the sky, to a
certain extent, the human experience, there's sort of a small
eye infinity there, though of course there is there is

(14:54):
there is a definite, finite number out there. So I mean,
in the same way you could say there is no
such thing is an infinite game, because eventually we'll have
the heat death of the universe and nothing can go
on forever. But I mean things that are things that
are for your purposes infinite, like you never to do
list is something you might cross all of the items

(15:14):
off of, but that doesn't mean you've run out of
things to do, all right, fair enough, fair enough. But
then on on the other side of lists, one of
the things that I often think about is how how
funny it often is to me, just how funny listicals
are to me. We've both worked in web publishing, and
oh man, there was a period. I mean, I guess
listicles are actually still popular, like they do well on

(15:36):
YouTube and end on, you know, on social media and
all that. But but back in the day, I remember,
especially like for Google Search and like homepage optimization, trying
to make trying to make the house Stuff Works homepage clicky.
It was. It was listicals all the way down. Oh yes, yes,
and some of them are were quite good. I remember
even when we're putting out a bunch of towing articles

(15:57):
at the time, there was one top ten that they
spun out of that effort to a top ten Heaviest
Things Moved by Man, which is a fun little article. Yeah,
oh yeah, yeah, I mean I can enjoy good listical.
I know, Robert. I think even the past expressed your
love for for a good cracked listical, right, Yeah, I
have enjoyed some of some of those cracked listicals in
the past. I also really like some of the um

(16:20):
the ClickHole listicles. Those are amazing. Like I think it's
like five or ten signs that your therapist is about
to go to six flags after your session, you know,
stuff like that I'm always on board for. Well, that's
what ClickHole is great for, is like just highlighting the
bear absurdity that lies underneath the Internet content strategies. But yeah,
I remember back in the day, like around two thousand

(16:41):
and ten, some of the listicles going up on Discovery
and TLC were so funny to me. It was like
it would be things, you know, like ten backyard games
your Golden Retriever will love. Yeah, I think so. So
there are a few different appealing aspects of the top ten, right,
I Mean A big one is that it's easily absorbed,

(17:02):
the ideas that I'm I'm not I'm in a hurry.
Maybe I don't even really want to read this article,
but it's a top ten. So at the very least
I could scan the ten items and I kind of
instantly want to know what made the list and what didn't.
I think that's very Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Scannability is a big part of it, right, especially with
things that are because so there are different types of

(17:23):
top ten's obviously or ten or list based things. Sometimes
there are a process. For instance, the so many wiki
how articles that are a list of ten steps to
do something including there there. I found one the other
day for faking your own death, so it's everything from
fixing a toilet to faking your own death. My favorite
eh how article of all time that I ever found,

(17:43):
I think I checked recently. It's not still up, but
it was how to pray for money. Um, yeah, so
that so there's that area, and then there's the ranking
of things like the ten best superhero movies, um or,
and so you want to click on that because you
just want to Maybe you're just you're comagined and you

(18:04):
just want to notice what they didn't include and and
shame them for what they did include. Well, the top
ten ranking thing is I think popular for multiple reasons.
Number one, I mean, humans, even though we don't like
to admit this, we clearly look to other people to
form our own tastes, right, you know, we we start
to think, I should have my own ideas of what's

(18:25):
the top ten movies in next category, and then like
looking at other people's ideas gives you something to react to,
either to base yours on theirs, or to react against
it or whatever. But it's also popular, I think for
the same reason that like You're doing it wrong articles
are popular. It feels like an aggressive, opinionated statement that
is highly tempting to argue with. Right, yeah, and and

(18:49):
certainly sharing like five five films that shaped you or whatever,
you know, whatever the current version of it that's going
around on social media is a great statement of self.
You know, it's say it's it's a way of sort
of summing up your character in a selection of films
or books or albums or what have you. Yes, at
the same time that it's easy to share by it's

(19:10):
easy for audience members to share because you know, it's
fun to say, I disagree. How could they leave off
you forgot X? Yeah? We we could. I mean, we
even we don't do top ten episodes, but one of
the most common types of emails we get is I
can't believe you forgot to mention X when we're like
talking about, you know, giving a selection of examples of something.

(19:31):
Whenever we do a list. Yeah, yeah, I mean, and
sometimes we do really forget to mention things, or we
you know, we have them in the notes and we
don't mention. The other times we just don't know about them. Yeah,
that's the the other problem about trying to make any
kind of fully inclusive list. Yeah. So, I think for
the rest of this episode, we we should try to
think about what what is the role of the list

(19:52):
in human culture? And for a couple of things we're
going to focus on. I think one should be the
to do list and the psychological power of the to
do list. The other one would be the idea of
a list as a type of literature media. Why is
it so popular? Why why does it work? Yeah, I
think it's interesting to think of lis even just purely
in an entertainment um and and even outside of the

(20:14):
necessity their necessity and things like crafting, mixology, cooking, building
a Lego kid. I mean, those are the things where
you you need a series of steps to follow in
order to get it right. Oh man, what is the
Is there like a visual version of a s MR?
I don't know what when you just get like goose bumps,
like seeing an image of a toy from your childhood.

(20:36):
For me, it would be Lego instructions and they've only
gotten better, Joe. That's the thing when when I read
let current Lego kit instructions versus older Lego instructions, that
they're just they's they're so clear and precise, that can
follow them so easily. Um, they should do instructions for everything.
You're just mocking me, like I should leave the studio
and go buy some Legos to play with right now.

(20:59):
You should go buy yourself Hogwarts and and have at it.
That one. That one has a lot of steps to it.
I keep saying I think one of the best things
about having kids has got to be that you get
to play with legos again. Yeah, and then step on
legos again. The Harry Potter sorting hat, by the way,
specially painful to step on. That's probably the most painful
lego I've ever stepped up anyway. Outside of children's play things,

(21:22):
you also find a lot of lists in um you know,
in in in and say video games for all ages. Well,
a lot of video games are highly acquisitive in nature,
you know, you accumulate stuff in them. Oh yeah, Like
the main example, UM I I have right now is
Fallout seventy six because that's that's a game I'm currently playing.
And uh I stopped though to think the other day

(21:44):
is as we were talking about doing this episode, that
there's man man. There sure are a lot of lists
in this game because you open your inventory and what
is it a series of lists like there's a great
there's a big list, and then you can break down
your list into sub lists of the various weapons are humors,
bits of scrap, junk notes, uh, hollow tapes, etcetera. So

(22:05):
it's just one big list. And then when you when
when it comes to the things you're trying to do
in the game. There are a whole there's a whole
other like wide array of to do lists. You get
your like your main quest items, your side quests, your
daily quest. Uh, it's just a game full of lists.
The story is a list of mission objectives and what well,

(22:25):
I mean, I haven't played seventy six. I assume it's
like the other followut games. Oh yeah, basically the same concept. Yeah,
and it's it's just a list of things you have
to have to get done, which is kind of weird
that we we sometimes retreat from our real life of
to do lists and then we go into a fantasy
world where we have, you know, another list that we

(22:46):
have to do, and it's not necessarily this just simple
equation of well, your your your real life list is
harder to do and you have it's it's you know,
the video game is a world in which everything is simplified. No,
sometimes the to do list is impossible in the video
game world as well, Yeah, for for varying reasons. But
but yet we we go to it and we expect

(23:08):
it to be there now here. Here's another question though,
aside from like internet content type listicles, I mean, like
lists within broader works of fiction or or something. What
What is it that makes a list inherently entertaining? Some
lists are boring and other lists are really engrossing. I
remember looking at lists of things in my like Star

(23:31):
Wars Illustrated Encyclopedia when I was a little kid, and
I was like, this is a good list. Oh yeah.
When it when it comes to the lore and the
glossary of any kind of created world, and I'm instantly
on board for any of that, Like things like, uh,
you know, the appendix to The Lord of the Rings
or Dune. The Dune Glossary is almost as good as

(23:51):
the novel itself. Absolutely, The Dune Encyclopedia, even though it's
not technically Cannon was one of my favorites when I
was younger. Um, yeah, pretty much any book that I
really get into, the Second Apocalypse saga or the Game
of Thrones books, you know, like give me, give me
an alphabetized list of all the names, places, and things
in a given universe, and I'll just I'll read through it.

(24:14):
I'm currently reading the Harry Potter Monster Book to my son.
Or it's an alphabetical listing of various magical beasts from
the setting. He does he get down with lists two
um I will. I don't know if he's as down
with lists as I am, but he's really into Harry Potter,
so that works. But but yeah, outside of that though,

(24:35):
like like, for instance, Lord of the Rings, Okay, like
it's kind of built around a whole list, isn't it.
I mean you kick off the whole novel with this
list of rings and who has them, and it's vital
to the the basic setup of the entire saga, even
better than it's a rhymed list though. Yeah, yeah, the
whole three rings for Elphin King's under the sky, seven

(24:55):
for dwarf lords in their Halls of Stone. It's usually
read with some degree of drama, but I often wondered, like,
what if it what if it was just this was
just written on a like a cocktail napkin, and Sauron
just had it on hand. He's like, all right, what
am I making today? Okay? I gotta make three rings
for Alvin kings under the sky, seven for dwarflords in
their Hall of nine geez, nine for mortal men doom

(25:16):
to die. That's a lot. I don't know why I
said nine, okay, with the one for me on my
dark throne right here in more door, etcetera. But then,
of course, because he's the lord of mort Or, the
to do list just ends up gloating right and in
the darkness behind them. Yeah, I've never thought about it
that way. I like that it's it's Saron's to do
list from before the rings were made. So I think

(25:38):
that should steer us into talking about the power and
nature of to do list. But first we should take
a break and we come back. We'll discuss some of
the psychology of to do lists. Than all right, we're back, Robert.
Do you find to do lists useful? Yeah, to a
certain extent. I mean, so sometimes it's a matter of

(26:00):
just having a reminder, right, Like on my hand, I
have the remnants of it to do list for today
that include picking up two items from from various stores,
Otherwise I might forget them if I didn't have them
written on my hand. And likewise, if I have more
than two items to pick up at a given store,
I need a list of those otherwise I'll forget them.
But yeah, I mean a LISTA lists are necessary for

(26:24):
tackling various larger projects. And especially if you're approaching something
from a project management standpoint, uh, something like say launching
a podcast. That's the kind of checklist we see a
lot around here when there's a new podcast that rolls out.
When we roll that invention for existing for for instance,
there was a standardized list of things that needed to
be done, that needed to be figured out, that needed

(26:46):
to be started or assigned to somebody else, and you
you would not have a finished product until you've finish
that list. So, I mean, I have to like to
do list because they are one way that things get done. Well,
you're clear right, I think that there is clearly a
difference between good lists and bad lists. When you're trying
to come up with a to do list and it's

(27:09):
sort of like you know it once you're in it.
To like, you like, this isn't a good list, it's
not working for me. But I was trying to think,
what are the actual characteristics that make it to do
list helpful rather than something that just hangs over you
like a wraith that's making you feel anxious and depressed. Well,
they need to be things that you can easily check off.

(27:29):
I mean, it seems like a no brainer, but they
need to be things that are achievable in the short term.
So like, you can't have a checklist that says like
sarrance checklist wasn't enslave Middle Earth and check it off. No,
he started small, building various magical rings to work up
to this. In fact, maybe he should have started even smaller.
Uh he should maybe should have been thinking about the

(27:50):
individual materials he needed for the ring, and like making
the mold and all that. Uh So we'll get into
this in a minute. I was wondering, like, obviously there's
a million self help books and productivity seminars and all
that about about like how to have better to do
lists and and be more productive. But I was wondering,
is there anything that draws on actual psychology research. Um.

(28:12):
One thing I came across was a chapter about to
do lists in a book about willpower by one of
the authors was the psychologist Roy Baumeister. Uh So it
was by Baumeister and Tyranny, and I thought some of
their points were were kind of interesting, some of them
were kind of obvious, others I was interested in the
reasoning behind them. So one of the things that they
point out in this book is that studies show that

(28:35):
often when we get asked to like list out our
goals and priorities, a lot of our goals are in
conflict with one another. And this this is something that
I don't know should be kind of obvious to us,
but it's clear that we just don't really think about
it this way until we like list things out and
realize things are in conflict. A common example is like
when you have two different goals that are both competing

(28:58):
for time you don't have. So like, you're already busy
and you're asked to make a list of your goals.
And your goals include things like, you know, spend more
time on ex personal project and also spend more time
with family, and so like, those goals are obviously in
competition with each other for an already scarce resource. Or
things can be like that with money. You know, they're

(29:18):
competing for a limited pool of finite resources that you have.
You know, I can't help me. Be reminded of of
a ClickHole headline I saw recently, uh titled the only
thirty one thing standing between you and your dreams. I'm
scrolling through it now, Uh, it's gout entries like your
dog crippling doubt your past. See that's that's a wonderful,

(29:44):
terrible list because you're including some things that are reasonably
specific but just also huge and vague and totally not actionable. Yeah.
So so in this book a great example of of
like when you know, how our goals can come into
conflict with each other. So the authors talk about, you know,
Benjamin Franklin was obsessed with maximizing his life. He was

(30:05):
a maximize er, sort of a life hacker type dude,
and he tried to do this by making to do
lists about everything, like huge to do list for daily
virtues to fulfill, so like one every day you'd have
to fulfill, like like a frugality and industry. But he found,
of course these things came into conflict because he's trying

(30:26):
to be frugal, so he ends up having to spend
a lot of time like doing things for himself instead
of paying somebody else to do them. But then that
prevents him from doing work, so he finds he's less industrious.
So you know, these things are large in general, and
the goals are actually fighting each other. And so the
authors point out that like psychology and neuroscience, research does
not always show that thinking about lists of goals is helpful.

(30:49):
It's only helpful in some cases given certain kinds of
lists and goals. Like the psychologist Robert Emmons and Laura
King demonstrated in a series of study, is that that
quote the result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action. Again,
that might seem kind of obvious, but how many obvious
things do we get stuck in a rud over all

(31:10):
the time? Uh So, First of all, they found when
people when people make a list of goals and and
think about them, if the goals are in conflict, First
of all, people end up worrying a lot. They end
up The psychological term for this is rumination. And that's
the word that just means like repetitive negative thought patterns,
worrying cycles. The second thing is they actually get less

(31:34):
done when they think about these lists of goals. People ruminate,
not only ruminate, but they ruminate instead of acting to
get things done. And productivity on reaching goals decreases. And
then finally, physical and mental health suffers. People report more
negative emotions, more depression and anxiety, and more physical sickness.
So thinking about lists of your goals listing out the

(31:55):
things you want itself is not enough to make you
become happier, more active, and all that. It really matters
what those goals are and how they're formulated, and when
they're in the wrong format, it could leave you worse
off than before. Who reminds me of a bit of
wisdom that I've seen numerous times about New Year's resolutions,
You know, about how you set too lofty and new

(32:17):
Year's resolution and you're just you're you're kicking your own
self in the pants, like there's that's not going to
do you any good. You've just you've just gone ahead
and made this formalized version of your own impending failure.
Well when really you should you should scale it back
more and make something that's again more actionable and more
achievable and fits in with the the other commitments in

(32:39):
your life. You know, I wonder if sometimes we set
really ambitious goals for New Year's resolutions because subconsciously we
want to make sure that we will have an excuse
to quit trying sooner. I tell you one I always
hate is I forget what it's called, but it's like
a challenge to write an entire novel manuscript during the

(32:59):
month of no November nano remo. Yeah, which is the
with the I can't scarcely think of a worse month
to try and commit to a daily writing project. The
November that you're getting right into the holidays, there's Thanksgiving,
You're trying to to get a lot of work done,
like they should do it. More like I'm thinking it's
like in April. Maybe it's a challenge to go swimming

(33:22):
outdoors every day of January or something. I mean, everyone
smile is just gonna vary. But that is always my
my realization is like I say, oh, that that thing
going on, and I'm like, oh, it's no, it's November.
This is this is a complete waste of my time.
I'm just remembering what our November last year was, like, Yeah,

(33:42):
somehow I didn't have time to fit in writing a
novel while we were also launching an extra podcast. Right,
uh so, But anyway, so if sometimes goals are in conflict, right,
sometimes this just happens, and thinking about those goals can
paralyze you make you unhappy. How do you resolve this?
I mean, you would think one way would be to
reformulate your list of goals in order to remove conflicts.

(34:06):
So one way to do this is think about the
time horizon of your top goals. I think it's probably
easier for things on your list to remain in conflict
when they're more general and when they're more long term time.
Thinking about time helps you think about like, Okay, what
do I really care about this month? What do I
really care about this week? For instance? Come up with

(34:26):
an idea for a novel in November? You go and
and that time horizon thing really does matter in multiple ways,
like Some studies show that short term goals are more
effective at at causing action and improvement than long term goals,
can sometimes be better than no goals at all. One
example side it is this research conducted by the psychologist
Albert Bandura and Dave Schunk on kids from seven to

(34:50):
ten who are taking this self directed math course. So
the kids are trying to learn how to do certain
kinds of math problems, and they're separated into four groups.
One group gets this set short term goals. Their goal
is to do six pages of math problems in every
one of seven sessions. And then a second group has
a second has a different goal. It's to complete forty

(35:10):
two pages of math problems at the end of seven sessions.
So these two goals, if both completed, should give you
the same level of progress. And then there was a
third group that didn't have any particular goals, in a
fourth group that didn't do math exercises, and the results
were the kids in the short term group did a
lot better. They completed more problems, they were better at

(35:30):
solving problems at the end of the course. Kids in
the long term group who were just like, Okay, get
it all done at the end of the course did
no better than kids who had no goals at all.
And if you think back to your own childhood or
maybe your own adulthood, you can you can probably see
that that really rings true. At least it does to me,
like if I didn't have work broken into smaller chunks,

(35:51):
I would never get it done now. On the other hand,
at the same time, there's research that's found that particularly
an older students around high school age, thinking about long
long term goals is associated with better outcomes like academic
performance overall. And a common explanation here that that might
be going on is that once you're older, it's easier
for you to see a connection between your long term

(36:13):
goals and your short term work, like short term tasks
are sort of they're given a motivation boost when you
think about what your long term goals are. So you
could maybe think about these two results sort of in conflict,
but I don't think they're necessarily in conflict, because the
possible takeaway is it's good to keep long term goals
in mind to help motivate you as long as they're

(36:33):
not conflicting. But you also, in order to get stuff done,
you need to chunk things down. You've got to put
your you've got to formulate your to do list items
in small, discrete chunks of work with clear goals. And
that's what we're talking about with sour On earlier. You know,
if it's just conquer all of the lands, that that's
not going to work as well. You've got to separate,
break it into smaller tasks. Right. But likewise, having having

(36:56):
that overall goal of subjugating Middle Earth probably helped him
put even more effort into making that one ring really dope,
you know, I think so. Yeah, So it's like visualize
the end, but focus on what you have to do
right now. The very next thing. Another important insight that
they side is just it's important to be flexible. Like

(37:17):
if you try to over rigidly plan out to do
lists of things, uh that can that can actually get
you bogged down. In one example they side is research
that found that people who made monthly plans for goal
attainment did better than people who made rigid daily plans
for goal attainment, just because the day to day things
come up, you get you get sidetracked. You need to

(37:38):
have a plan that has has some some wiggle in
it if something comes up today and you can't do
your thing today. Yeah, yeah, I guess I can definitely
see that with bigger projects. I'm if I'm trying to
think on a day to day basis, something's going to
wreck that plan. But if I'm thinking more weekly and monthly,
like by the end of this month, I will have

(38:00):
reached this point more or less, then that's it. That's
it that tends to work. Yeah, totally, though, I would say,
like each day within a monthly goal setting thing, it's
good to like plan out more minute parts of the
day as you get You shouldn't wait till right then
you get into like do your forty two pages by
the end kind of thing. You just never do it. Okay.

(38:21):
The next big thing that these authors bring up about
to do lists is going back to something we've talked
about on the podcast before, which is the Zigarnic effect. Oh, yes,
we've discussed this, We've discussed in our Tetris episode. And uh,
there was another one too. I'm trying to remember the
the incomplete unfinished one. Yes, yes, about various bits of artwork,

(38:42):
etcetera literature in which there is some incomplete aspect to
the thing. Right, Well, it certainly applies to that, because
the Zigarnic effect is the brains tendency to be brought
back to incomplete tasks and to remember them better than
complete tasks asks. So it was. It was a concept

(39:02):
originally expressed and studied in the nineteen twenties, I think
in nineteen seven by a Russian psychologist by the name
of bloom O Wolfovna Zigarnik who lived nineteen hundred to
ninety eight, and supposedly this came about after she and
a colleague were discussing watching waiters in a restaurant and
how the waiters could remember all of the details of

(39:23):
the order one of their tables until the check was cleared,
and then once the check at that table was cleared.
It was like their brains were just wiped. They forgot everything.
The task is complete, and therefore the the information, Uh,
the various road signs to completion are no longer necessary. Yeah,
exactly so uh to to sum it up in a

(39:44):
two thousand and eight social psychology textbook by Roy Bauminster
and Brad Bushman, uh the author's right quote, the Zigarnic
effect is a tendency to experience automatic intrusive thoughts about
a goal that one has pursued but the suit of
which has been interrupted. That is, if you start working

(40:04):
toward a goal and fail to get there, thoughts about
the goal will keep popping into your mind while you're
doing other things, as if to remind you to get
back on track to finish reaching that goal. So, given this, like,
the Zigernic effect is often cited as an explanation of
what we talked about earlier, rumination, you know, unproductive patterns

(40:25):
of recurring negative thoughts. Uh. The Zigernic effect can kind
of like just pull you out of whatever you're doing
right now and make you start thinking about that thing
you're worrying about the goal. You haven't attained the task
you haven't finished, but it's also used to describe more
mundane stuff like earworms and music, like, if you hear

(40:46):
part of a song play, your brain may try to
keep completing the task of the song until you actually
are able to listen to the whole thing. And as
personal anecdotal evidence of this, you ever notice how, at
least if you're like me, you're more likely to get
a song stuck in your head if you hear it
in an unfocused way, like playing in a grocery store

(41:06):
or on the radio in a car, as opposed to
a song that you like, sit down and listen to. Yeah, yeah,
for sure. It certainly it makes for more more of
a chance encounter. Yeah, um, not a deliberate encounter, but yeah,
those will be the times where I leave the grocery
store and then there's this song stuck in my head.
I feel like, literally, at least seventy percent of the

(41:28):
time that somebody says to me, why are you singing
that song? I don't even realize I was singing it.
And then what I realized is it was playing in
the store. But that seems perfect because like in the store,
you walk in and out, you're not really paying attention
to the music. You hear a bit of it and
it just gets lodged in there, and then your brain
is like trying to play it back and and and

(41:49):
complete it um. But we should note that it appears
that the Sigartic effect has a sort of mixed replication history,
like some studies replicate the effect, others fail to. So
if we assume that it is real and based on experience,
I think it does at least somewhat seem to be real.
There may be conditional qualities to it that we don't
fully understand yet, and one complication to the effect, for instance,

(42:12):
seems to be related to creating to do lists. So
I just want to mention one study by Roy Baumeister
and E. J. Massa Campo called consider It Done. Plan
making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals, and
this was in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
in two thousand eleven. So this paper, they they recount

(42:34):
a number of studies that the authors did to test
the persistence and intrusiveness of thoughts about an upcoming finished
task like an exam in school, and a few examples
of how to test things would be like testing how
often people became distracted while trying to read something after
being made to think about that upcoming task, or testing

(42:55):
how primed this. The subjects were to complete a partial
word puzzle with a task related solution word, so like,
if you're given like e x blank, do you complete
that as exam or as something else? So they found
evidence of the Zigaric effect that people who had been
made to think about an upcoming task and it wasn't
something they had finished yet, it did become an intrusive,

(43:18):
repetitive thought for them. But they found that you didn't
actually have to go complete the task in order to
find it less intrusively occupying your thoughts, less likely to
cause rumination and distraction. You just had to come up
with a concrete plan basically a to do list of
concrete steps about how you would solve the problem. Uh So,

(43:41):
to quote from their abstract quote. Allowing participants to formulate
specific plans for their unfulfilled goals eliminated the various activation
and interference effects. Reduction of the effects was mediated by
the earnestness of participants plans. Those who ultimately executed their
plans were those who also exhibited no more intrusions. So

(44:04):
it's not just that the people who made the concrete
steps uh did better with eliminating the zigonic effect intrusions,
also the ones who actually ended up being successful in
their plans that was correlated with it. So it's like
it's almost like your brain can tell whether you're taking
your own plan seriously. And to quote more from their

(44:24):
abstract quote, committing to a specific plan for a goal
may therefore not only facilitate attainment of the goal, but
may also free cognitive resources for other pursuits. Once the
plan is made, the drive to attain a goal is suspended,
allowing goal related cognitive activity to cease, and is resumed
at the specified later time. Well, this makes a lot

(44:45):
of sense of certainly when when compared to experience, because
I can think of definite times in my life where
there's been like some big thing I've got to start,
and just by starting it, just by safe, for instance,
looking at the list of things to do and then
calling it a day, you know, which ultimately doesn't really

(45:06):
it doesn't really get that much done on the task,
but you began the process, and just by doing that,
you know, you can feel better. You can feel like
you have more control of the situation. Oh well, thinking
about or or making a list of things to do.
I would say that is really getting something done. That's
maybe the most important part of what you've got. But
but in another way, you didn't actually do anything. It's

(45:29):
kind of like cleaning cleaning the room. An essential step
is formulating a game plan and deciding what you're gonna
tackle first so that you can act. But you haven't
actually cleaned anything yet. Yes, but but it's it's a
crucial part. And in fact it's good enough to not
only help make you more likely to get the project
done in the end, but also to make you worry

(45:50):
less about it until you get there. It's a twofold benefit,
more actual success at goals and less rumination in the meantime.
And I think this also makes sense from a sort
of imagining, like a cognitive neuroscience point of view, because
if you think about it, so like the Zigaric effect
is sometimes interpreted as like, uh, the unconscious mind sort

(46:11):
of pinging the conscious mind with like an outstanding problem.
It's like, hey, remember this, you need to get on that.
Hey remember this, And but what it really is asking
for is the help of the conscious mind, and the
conscious mind, we tend to think, is linked to the
part of the mind that has executive control. Executive control
is good for what planning, Like, the conscious mind is

(46:34):
good at coming up with a list of steps of
things you need to do to solve a problem, something
that the unconscious mind is not very good at. And
this is where executive time comes in, right, the amount
of time we spend each day in executive time. No,
that's the exact opposite. That's like period time. So you
rope in the conscious mind for for executive action. Yeah,

(46:55):
but I think it appears that across this stuff like
that that very specific concrete plans are more useful and
more psychologically satisfying. Uh So. One of the things that
you know, productivity experts often observe is that say, like,
if you're trying to, like, you know, fix some stuff
around your house, don't have a step in the plan

(47:17):
that's like fix the shower. The step in your plan
should be the very specific first concrete step you need
to do to fix the shower, like go to Lows
and buy this part that I need and have the
name of the part, or you know, and if you
if you're not at that stage. Yet the thing should
be find out what part I need on the shower

(47:39):
by going to by looking it up on the internet.
I do think that's a useful insight. Like if you're
finding if you've got to to do list, but you're
stuck and you're not getting through it, probably one way
that you can get unstuck is take the items in
the list and try to break them up into smaller
parts figure out how they can be subdivided. All right,
on that note, we're going to take a quick right,

(48:00):
and when we come back more on lists and why
we love them. Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back.
So clearly, as we mentioned earlier on lists are huge
in web content, right, we know the power of list uh,
this is something that web traffic analysis clearly shows. Enumerated
list type articles have an extremely powerful appeal. They're clicky.

(48:22):
Why Well, like I said earlier, I think a lot
of it is ease of absorption and or action. So
it's like ten images or names, uh, you know, and
you probably don't even have to read the rest of
the text. You can just scan it. But then also
like ten steps being a big thing, like ten steps
that sounds doable. I can do ten steps. What you know, what,
what's the offering? Is it ten steps to a better life,

(48:44):
ten steps to a cleaner house? Uh, ten steps to
a better marriage? I mean these are all uh you
put it the phrase it like that. I'm like, well,
let's let's try it. Well, I mean yeah, ten steps
I think are very popular. They're popular maybe for a
different reason than a lot of other kinds of enumerated articles.
Are useful because the steps thing is like a to
do list. It says, this is not an infinitely complex,

(49:07):
impossible problem. This is a problem with ten parts, and
you can do one part at a time. It makes
it seem like, oh, yeah, I could actually begin this
right and like that alone can be empowering, even if
you have no intention of following entities just no, even
just not even reading the list, just knowing that that
process could be broken down into ten steps can feel

(49:29):
kind of liberating. Yeah. So nine rings for men doomed
to die. Okay, so that's one step, or maybe that's
the third step. I don't remember what order they come in,
but Elvin King's our first joke. First, the elves are
picky if you don't take care of them first, they
asked to see your manager. But but to come back
to the scannable nature of list, I think that's big too,

(49:49):
because it's really important. Yeah, because there there have been
recent studies. In fact, there was the most recent one
just came out in the last few weeks. I think
looking at how we easily overestimate our understanding of a
topic based on say a headline of an article or
an article preview and Facebook, Um well yeah, I mean
there's like you remember the the illusion of explanatory depth episodes,

(50:09):
where that's somewhat different, But it's that you know, there
can be a thing that we're familiar with because we
are exposed to the concept of it a lot, and
it gives us the false impression that we understand how
it works. Like you know, you're you're around bicycles all
the time, so surely you can draw one with all
the parts accurately placed, right or can you? It seems

(50:31):
so simple, But it turns out a lot of people
can and it's just like, yeah, you see them enough
that you just think, well, I must understand this. And
I think the same is true for more abstract conceptual topics,
like you know, issues in politics. You think you understand
how it works because you've seen the name referenced in
headlines right or you've or maybe you've seen something broken
down on a list of talking points, etcetera. Uh Now,

(50:53):
speaking of social media, it's also worth pointing out that
something like your Facebook or your Twitter feed is it's
not enumerated, but it is essentially a list. Yes, it
is also not a fineite list because they're designed to
be infinite, infinitely scrollable. But but these are lists, and
many times a day we're probably checking in to see
what the list is offering us this time. Well, I

(51:14):
think that also goes to the fact that lists are appealing.
Listical type articles are appealing on the Internet because they're
easily scannable for content, in the same way that your
news feed is easily scannable for content. You know, like
on Facebook, if you're just sitting there scrolling and letting
Facebook ravage your brain, you are not You're not reading
everything you're scrolling past. You know, You're just like scrolling

(51:37):
until your eye hits something and you look at that
for a second and you're like, oh, there's that, and
then you keep going. So I think maybe it's not
always the numbered and nature of a listical that's important.
Like in many cases, I think the numbers don't matter.
Maybe what's important is that we know to expect a
listical to have headers. Actually, header is very important because

(51:58):
they help you quickly identify the meat of the content
to know what the things on the list are. You
don't really have to read the paragraphs if there are any.
You can just like look at the headers and say,
do I want to go deeper on this one? Knowing
just scroll past right and you know exactly. You know
pretty much how long the article is going to be.
It's like ten items, that's it. Maybe there'll be some
honorable mentions at the bottom, but for the most part,

(52:20):
I have a general length in mind. Yeah, And so
your relationship with the listical type thing is usually pretty mercenary, right,
It's less dedicated than a relationship you might have with
other types of written texts. I think it's also appealing
because a list promises discrete chunks of information that are
desired for some understood reason, like they're either practically useful

(52:42):
useful like steps and how to or um practically useful because,
like say ranked products, you know that these are good
versions of this product that you might want to remember
and look for when you're shopping, or because they're interesting
and you want to have bits of interesting information to remember,
like the the eleven craziest Baffamet statues, or there's something

(53:03):
else that you feel compelled to know, like those best
of lists that people sort of used to help form
their taste. I was reading an article in The New
Yorker by Maria Knakova, science writer who I like is
she She wrote a good book called The Confidence Game.
I enjoyed that one a lot. One of the things
you mentioned is the idea of that the lists basically
benefit from processing fluency. And we've talked about processing fluency

(53:26):
on the show before, but processing fluency is a really
underrated influence on our mental lives. Like we spend a
lot of energy trying to spend less mental energy on
things like a lot of energy trying to optimize our
information environments for processing fluency, which means we're trying to

(53:47):
make sure the information coming into our brain is not
too challenging and it's easy to process. And there are
a ton of ways you can look at the world
around you and understand that we're trying to shape our
environments to favor processing fluency by having these biases for
processing fluency fluency, like remember the example of the the
illusory truth effect. Oh yes, absolutely, Yeah, we're more likely

(54:11):
to what recall something if we've heard it before, and
even more if it's not true, even if it's an
outright lie. Exactly, I've heard it before, and therefore we
we echo it. Yeah, we're so we're primed to understand it.
It's easier to process because we've heard it before. And
so there's scientific backing for the idea for the notion
that if you hear something often enough, you start to
believe it's true. And one possible explanation for this is

(54:34):
that it's caused by a bias favoring processing fluency. You
hear something for the hundredth time, it's just way easier
to process than when you hear something for the first
time and it's new and unfamiliar. Another example I randomly
came across as a study uh by a Grifhenator at All,
which is a great name in social psychological and personality science.

(54:56):
In two thousand ten, there was a series of studies
that just revealed, um, when people are grading handwritten essays,
there's a strong bias in favor of the ones that
are easy to read and against the ones that are
that are more difficult to read. That might not be
that surprising, but even people who don't think they're biased,
in fact are You're biased by the fact that something

(55:17):
that is easier to read and it's easier to take
in just feels better to you. And so I think
this is clearly work with like list type content because you, uh,
number one, lists are pre categorized, you know, like so
you don't have to wonder, like what what box am
I going to put this in? In my mind? Like
you already you know based on the title of the

(55:39):
list what you're going to be getting out of it.
You're not going to be categorically surprised. You've you've already
got a schemata going in for where to put everything.
And then also there's just simple stuff like kna Covid
points out that lists naturally naturally lend themselves to spatial categorization,
like there's vertical placement on a page, and there's ters

(56:00):
to denote placement of information um there in like large
blocks of normal text aren't as clearly spatialized, but that
we remember things better when it's spatially formatted in a
way that's clear. Like think about the memory palace. Uh.
You know, people can remember things better if what they
like imagine a physical space. Yeah, using these yes, spatial

(56:21):
um of processing to understand something that may just be
a list of numbers even Yeah, like a top ten
list is basically taking a concept and putting it in
the format of a Mortal Kombat challenge tower, you know,
where you have a list of opponents and at the
top you've got you know, you've got Shaalcan or whoever,
and that's the main boss, that's the number one ranking

(56:43):
goes all the way down to the who are the
easiest person to beat? Is So if you can take
anything be it you know, global politics or environmental concerns,
break it down into a Mortal Kombat challenge tower, and
then just about anybody can can at least get like
the surface level unders standing of what you're trying to relate.
That's a good point. I mean another way of putting

(57:04):
it is that like, uh, lists tell you the tell
they explicitly tell you what's the important part of what
you're reading. You know, like this is a thing that's
like difficult for younger readers often is like to like
read a passage and then identify what's the thesis sentence
or the most important sentence in this paragraph or in

(57:24):
this page. And like a lot of times it's it's
harder for younger readers to do that. To figure out
what's the point a list, you don't have to wonder.
It tells you here's the point. And that's another big
thing about about lists and ranking is we're often going
to skip to the end. Like Pitch for It comes
out with like top one albums of the year, I'm
going to look at the top ten. Maybe they intentionally

(57:46):
stagger the page nation to make that harder to do. Yeah, yeah,
you have to. Like, of course, you have to click
through a bunch of pages rights part of the game.
You like can't click to the last page from the
first page. You can only click to the like third
to last page from the first page age, and then
you have to click down from there. It's nonsense. People
people get mad about that. But anyway, bringing back to

(58:06):
umberto echo, like, I think there are some some clear
easy reasons to see why, Like, you know, listical type
content on the internet is highly popular, But what about
the appeal of the list to somebody like Umberto Echo
and or in in something like the Iliad. One of
the things that Echo mentions is he just says that
lists are sort of a suggestion of immortality, because he says,

(58:30):
you know, we have this discouraging limit on our lives.
We know we're going to die, and that we like
to assume that things go on without end, and so
a list of creating these big lists, like the catalog
of Ships, it's kind of a way of escaping thoughts
about death because we like to make He says, we
make lists because we don't want to die. Interesting. Yeah,
I mean it comes back, you know, probably one of

(58:52):
the most direct things. We can think of it as
a bucket list or a reading list of viewing list. Uh,
these are all the things we're going to a common
plush in our lifetime. Yeah, which, of course I have
to sadly admit that I still have a couple of
Umberto Eco novels on my two to read list, a
couple that I haven't haven't gotten around to just yet.
Well I've only read one now. Oh yeah, they're uh.

(59:14):
He has some other great ones of Co's Pendulum, Island
of the day before Bartolino. Those are the those are
the ones I enjoyed the most. I've got to check
that out. Name of the Rose was awesome. It's oh yeah,
it's like a easily now a top ten book for me,
I think, really really awesome. And by the way, speaking

(59:34):
of the name of the route, Name of the Rose,
of course, it's said in the medieval period with like
monks who are you know, a lot of times dealing
with these philosophical debates about the nature of things and
dealing with these in cycling medieval encyclopedias, which is just
like the best things that were, you know, the bestiaries
and all that um. And that one of the things
Echo talks about in this interview is sort of the

(59:55):
difference between understanding something by defining it versus understanding something
by way of list uh, and that these are different
ways of approaching knowledge and of seeing the world. When
you define something, you try to like put into a
sentence the essence of what the concept or the thing is,
whereas the other way, I guess is the more like

(01:00:15):
inductive way of understanding a concept, which is making lists
of examples of it or making lists of its characteristics.
You know, This reminds me of the TV Tropes website
that I enjoy using from time to time, especially especially
if we have an episode coming out and there's like
a concept in the show and I would like to

(01:00:36):
acknowledge or remind myself of either know either sci fi
that I've I've read before or I'm familiar with, or
something I am not familiar with it someow ties into
the concept. You can go to TV tropes and you
can look at the various tropes and a given property,
um so, and on one level, it's it's it's fulfilling,
But on the other hand, it feels very very much
like a reduction of these things, you know, like let's

(01:00:58):
just Adam is a film or a novel or a
comic book down to familiar tropes that have appeared elsewhere. Well,
on the other hand, I would say they kind of
TV tropes that site kind of um I don't know,
validates or immortalizes strange cliches and conventions by showing you
just how many examples of it there are. When you

(01:01:21):
thought you you see something in like one movie and
you're like, that's kind of odd, But it feels bigger
than that to me. It feels like a cliche. And
sometimes you look it up on TV tropes and you
find out, oh, yeah, this is in thirty things. You know,
it's in a bunch of anime, and you have it.
But sometimes that thing that has appeared thirty Other times
it's it's so well executed, or it's executed in a

(01:01:42):
way that feels unique, or or or when other elements
are creative sufficiently creative that it it doesn't feel like
one of thirty things, it feels like the thing. Well.
I think one of the great talents of a writer,
especially comedy writers more than anybody else. But but one
of the great talents of a writer who has a
good sense of irony is the talent for picking out

(01:02:06):
one example of a thing that communicates that thing well,
whereas somebody else would have to write a complex definition
or give a list of many examples. You know what
I'm talking about, Like the great talent for picking out
the one example that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of something
like if you were to say, and I'm not even

(01:02:26):
sure exactly what this would mean, but if you were
to say so, and so is the Highlander two of
people exactly Yes, I'm not sure what I would. I'm
saying if I were to pass that judgment on someone,
part of it would depend on obvious aspects of that individual.
But it that I'm still saying something that seems pretty specific.

(01:02:46):
I don't know if it works for H two, but
it's but but yes, you're on the right track, that
is what I mean. Now, another way of thinking about
lists is just the nature of list making and list using,
as it's comparable to just how we use language, especially
written language. UM So, if we go back far enough
in time, we get back to the roots of cuneiform writing,

(01:03:10):
which developed around the eighth millennium BC. So this featured
a system of clay tokens to represent individual units of
various commodities. So like one uh, you know, sheep, One
sheep would be one sheep token because it was that
simple and uh, these were pretty useful for keeping track
of of of these commodities as we're dealing now with, uh,

(01:03:32):
you know, with with cultures that that had a surplus
of things in there there was trade going on. Um.
These tokens remained in useful around umt BC, when more
complex tokens came into play, and you would have clay
envelopes which were eventually developed to hold these tokens, and
then you would stamp those envelopes to indicate the contents,

(01:03:55):
and this stamping would eventually lead to solid clay tablet
writing and pictograph writing, logo grams or word signs, and
in sequential writing systems. But written language in this emerges
from counting technology, from the systems of making lists. Yeah,
I've read this theory before, I uh, and this is

(01:04:15):
really interesting. The idea that like the first written language
emerged from trade and originally was more pictographic, but but
became more symbolic as time goes on, and this led
to phonetic alphabets. Right now, a great deal of what
we do with written language is highly sequential. Even in
the case of say, nonlinear narratives and fiction, there is

(01:04:37):
still is an order to what you're being presented with,
even if that order is is altered, you know, it's
it's maybe not chronological anymore, but there is still an order,
Like there is a sequence that you're presented with, and
that sequence presumably means something, whether you're presenting something in
in reverse chronological order or you're skipping around in time,

(01:05:00):
et cetera. And of course we also ultimately experience, remember,
and anticipate the universe as a series of sequential events.
So this is one of those areas where it begins
to sort of you know, hurt the brain a little bit,
but like you know what comes first, right, Like to
what extent is the Is this sequential experience the linear

(01:05:23):
existence of of life? Is it dictated by our language writing,
list making nature or is it the other way around? Well,
that is a great question. I mean, the physics of
time is no different for other animals, right, I mean
their experience of time might be different than ours, but
like it's not the case that like, uh, chimpanzees live

(01:05:47):
their lives out of order, they also experience an order
of events. They might not perceive it like we do.
But yeah, I do wonder about that. With language, are
we like, are we homo album us or whatever? The
list the list making ape? Is that what we are? Well,
I'll tell you this, Uh, list making apes have have
achieved an awful lot when it comes to making lists.

(01:06:09):
And one of the one of the hallmarks of this
that I think we we both found kind of independently
in our our searching, is that there is an actual
Wikipedia article out there that is a list of lists
of lists. It is so good. The intro to this
page reads as follows. This is a list of articles
that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia.

(01:06:29):
In other words, each of the articles linked here is
an index up to multiple lists on a topic. Some
of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists.
This article is also a list of lists. You know,
it's not surprising that Wikipedia is where you would encounter
a list of lists of lists, because Wikipedia is an
example of encyclopedic thinking, which is an attempt, however feeble

(01:06:51):
on our part, to impose order and understanding on a world,
on a world where you know, things do exist in
relation to each other, but order is sort of it's
it's our attempt to master the chaos of reality to say, like, okay,
here's how we can put things into categories. It's also
sort of the project of Aristotle, right, I mean Aristotle

(01:07:11):
like to divide things and put them in categories and
make lists of lists of things. You could say that
list making is in one way sort of deep at
the core of the scholastic impulse. It's, you know, when
you're thinking about what it means to be a scholar
to study the world. It's to like put things in
boxes where they conceptually go and organize the boxes, or

(01:07:32):
to wander out in the into the garden and name
all the animals. Right. Yeah, Well another funny thing mentioning
the garden is um the authors of that book I
was talking about earlier. They point out that Genesis one
is essentially a list. On the first day, it is
a to do list. It's just like, seriously, it is
a divine to do list, and then it gives way

(01:07:54):
to like listing animals and stuff and says that the
first task give to man when he was created is
to name all the animals, which is to create a
list make more lists. Now I have somebody to make
lists with me. That was the major accomplishment there. Well,
that is until that somebody broke the only commandment on

(01:08:14):
the list of thou shalt not so yes. Yeah, but
oh goodness. Getting into rules and laws though, that's a whole.
That's a whole another area of list making that we
didn't really get into here, just the the the essential
nature of of law, like and really that's that's part
of the same process going on. Like it's one thing
to say you there subject, uh do right, or you know,

(01:08:37):
behave yourself. That's this one thing. But if you say, actually,
here's a here are the ten steps to not be
executed by my high guard. Here are ten steps to
not be cast outside the city gates and consumed by
the jackals and h and then you're like, okay, I
can probably do these things. Well, it's a way of
making like virtue or righteousness. You can divide it in

(01:08:59):
the same way Echo does us with He's like, okay,
you can give a definition of something, or you can
give a list of examples of it. You can do
the same thing with like righteousness or the law. You
could say you give somebody a principle like do unto
others as they would do unto you or something, or
you can give them just a long list of rules
like don't do this, don't do that, do this. Both
our approaches humans have used, and I guess they both

(01:09:21):
have their advantages, right, because like the the more like
single principle based system feels more flexible and takes into
account more of the you know, the diversity of human
life and the different things you'll experience. Is less legalistic
and intolerant, and on the other hand, the list of
rules is less ambiguous. You're like, like, if you just
follow a gigantic list of rules, you're less likely to

(01:09:43):
accidentally get into trouble, right, Like, you're more likely to
give a list of commandments to say a robot or two,
or to robocopp er whoever, as opposed to a principle,
or at least you give them rules alongside the principle.
All right, So there you have it, the world of lists.
I would say, bekase, Sorry, we just ended up like

(01:10:03):
trying to list all the different ways that you can
use a list or think about a list. I think
that's what this turned into. This episode, by the way,
one of the top ten episodes we put out this month.
I would, I would say, just to pat ourselves on
the back. Um, obviously, this is gonna be a topic
that a lot of people have thoughts about out there.
You're gonna have varying degrees of success with with to

(01:10:26):
do lists, You're gonna have varying thoughts on top ten lists,
et cetera. Just sort of the list obsessed nature of
our culture, and we would love to hear from you
about it. What are your top thirty seven reactions to
this episode. Yes, lists them, rank them, share them with us.
In the meantime, if you want to check out more
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over
to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership.

(01:10:48):
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(01:11:09):
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(01:11:32):
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(01:11:54):
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(01:12:23):
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