I am a big believer in talking to people from other disciplines. To illustrate, I’ll tell a story about a brief coinversation with @CT_Bergstrom that was literally one of the of high points of my entire career.

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At the time, I was working on charter cities because I thought that they would give us some new options for influencing the evolution of norms.

The basic idea was that by selecting an unrepresentative founding population, it would be possible to instantiate new norms …

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that others would adopt as they moved in.

Mainly I had an intutition, and some examples, e.g. W. Penn and the new norm of freedome of religion in PA. I think I was struggling with how to capture this in a formal model.

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I may already have been trying to use models of the type that Boyd and Richerson had introduced for studying cultural evoltion but I don’t think I was making much progress.

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At a conference, I had a conversation with Carl about what I was doing. After listening to me for a bit he said, “you are working with a model of frequency dependent selection. The emorgence of new norms is just like speciation.”

For me, this was stunning connection.

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To me, there is something deeply satisfying about being able to capture an insight into the unity of nature. Of course, this is closely related to the “unreasonable effectiveness of math” and the power of abstractions that strip away the context and reveal the commonalities

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Someday I will have to try to publish the paper I was working on then. For complicated reasons, I haven’t done so yet. Norms are a sensitive topic. Sometimes, it’s best to wait for the right time.

But I will forever be grateful to Carl for insight he gave me.

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