108. Success

Episode 108. Success
Cooked, slayed, delivered, ate. In episode 108 of Overthink, Ellie and David break down what it means to succeed, and why this sneaky word pervades our society today - in everything from the ambitions of classic American stage figures, to the refined effortlessness in Zhuangzi’s tales, to the corporate world of buzzwords. Your hosts discuss party planning, tenure tracks, inspirational quotes, haters, why science seems so successful, and the pitfalls of thinking we’ve got it all figured out. Plus, in the Patreon bonus, they reflect on the interpersonal tensions of sharing successes, and making the best of our mishaps.
Overthink is a philosophy podcast hosted by your new favorite professors, Ellie Anderson (Pomona College) and David Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State University). Check out our episodes for deep dives into concepts such as existential anxiety, empathy, and gaslighting.
Support Overthink on Patreon here: patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Works Discussed
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
William Desmond, “Philosophy and Failure”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, What is Success?
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Tim Wu, “In Praise of Mediocrity”
Zhuangzi, “The Secret of Caring for Life”
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[@theillalogicalspoon]

“If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”
― Thomas Merton, Love and Living

[@harshithharsh2542]

Success is counted sweetest
BY EMILY DICKINSON
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory
As he defeated - dying -
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

[@josephsuruiz]

You guys are fun to listen. I'd have a great time learning, smiling, and laughing while listening. Thank you Prof. Ellie and Prof. Guzman!
Love from the 🇵🇭🇵🇭🇵🇭

[@BillyMcBride]

One of your listeners bought up the poem about success by Emily Dickinson. And, in honor of Miss Dickinson, I would like to share just a stanza from William Cowper's poem, "The Castaway" because it reminds me of how neglected Dickinson was in her own lifetime. Yep, thanks for your show!
"No poet wept him: but the page
Of narrative sincere;
That tells his name, his worth, his age,
Is wet with Anson's tear.
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead."

[@zaidanzifana2046]

please talk about lie

[@eqapo]

You gotta bring John Vervaeke to present a "Contact Epistemology" argument for realism

[@andrewpenfold7777]

Success is not the same as. excellence. If you succeed, you just achieved what you set out to achieve. Not failed to do it.

[@Aki-wq6xh]

3000views are too few for such gem ❤

[@crowboggs]

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
-- Mary Ann Evans *Middlemarch*
Don't often agree with the accuracy of Eliot's perception/s of the human condition writ large (and despise her friends Spencer and Comte), but admire/respect her nonetheless on multiple levels. And, though it would be interesting to unpack/deconstruct some of the terms she uses in this quotation, it is an interesting quote I come back to from time to time, because it alludes to a definition of success that demonstrates a perspective of success that does not recognize it as something that must be subjectively recognized by the agent who achieves it, nor does it definitionally determine success as an end that results in the increase in status or self-esteem. I don't think a theory of essential altruism is necessary at all here, but questioning the stability and centering of the subject and "self" may be constructive... thank you for your podcasting. This episode (from my vantage) increased in success with duration (likely unbeknownst to it).

[@oomenacka]

Because of the blatant cooption by achievement society of these words, I try to avoid words such as "success" and "productive" like the plague. They carry too much baggage so I actively try to expand my vocabulary around them.

[@robertalenrichter]

I often have a problem with adjectives that have been turned into nouns. "Successful" refers to something specific, concrete, unless the subject is a person, which would be an absurd generalisation. "Success", on the other hand, can refer to anything and everything. There are holistic nouns, such as "health", which can encompass a lot without losing their meaning.

[@IDontKnowMyName-tv1ze]

As always really interesting. I had a thought around what was being discussed around 47:07 about how scientific theories do or do not mirror reality and (around 48:40) how the success of scientific theories must in some way mirror reflect reality. My thought was about how scientific theories can be thought of as models / approximations over a subset of the domain of everything rather than being thought of as reality.
The best example I can think of is how in mathematics you can use a Taylor series to approximate a function but localised around a given point. If we use, for the sake of example, the analogy that the 'truth' of reality was a mathematical sine wave, then the scientific model/theory would be an approximation of this wave that a scientist put together after taking a series measurements at different points. The theory could be considered successful if its approximation of reality is likely highly accurate around the points of measurement and there is confidence that accuracy remains high around these points with (relatively slowly) diminishing accuracy as you move to situations that are in some sense further away from the original empirical evidence used to construct the model/theory. The analogy with the Taylor series of the sine wave here is that as you move further away from the point at which the approximation is centred the accuracy starts to diminish after a point and beyond certain bound is well within its rights to be completely out of line with the 'truth' of reality.
So in this way the scientific theory is not expected to be the actual 'truth' of reality but instead a 'good-enough' approximation of reality over the range of scenarios that we find useful. A good example of this happening is when people decide to use Newtonian physics rather than relativity to solve some problem because it is accurate enough for their use cases and has other benefits (e.g. relative simplicity & potentially performance if a simulation of some kind is needed). Another example currently could also be the difference between quantum and classical mechanics as there currently does not exist a unifying theory of the two and so each sets of theories are used within their respective sub-domains.
There is an argument that the theoretical physicist does have the aim to find the exact truth of reality (e.g. to find the exact formula for the sine wave to continue the analogy), but I think most empirical scientists would concede the following points:
- They cannot test all the infinite possible states of reality
- If they encountered a set of measurements of reality that consistently contradicted their theory enough times to not be fluke then they would admit that their theory is wrong
- For any given model of reality they cannot prove that there doesn't exist another variable of reality that they haven't thought of that could also be added to the model.
With these things combined then even with extreme confidence in a theory (e.g. like with the basics of the theory of gravity) it is still 'just' a model of reality, not the 'truth' of reality.
Ok so after all of that, my point is that a scientific theory can closely approximate reality (either over all known domains or just all domains considered useful) but it is always valid to say that outside of the bounds of some defined domain it is unknown how good the approximation to reality is and that it is well within reason that the approximation could completely fail to mirror reality outside of these bounds. In this way a scientific theory can both be successful and not mirror the actual 'truth' of reality what-so-ever (i.e. the fundamental premise, logic and reasoning of the theory of relativity or the theory of gravity, or Newtonian physics or etc etc. could be completely wrong, but we know that it is consistently accurate enough within the domains we have tested / find useful).
And I think this is a fair rebuttal of the point made starting at 48:18 as the theories both can 'work' really well and without necessarily actually being at all accurate to the truth of reality (because beyond the known / useful domains the accuracy of those theories may not just be slightly wrong but could be wildly wrong and have no bearing on reality at all, like how beyond the bounds of a Taylor series approximation of a sine wave the approximation cover can veer steeply up or down to infinity (or -infinity) while reality stays cycling between values of -1 and 1)
I have no background in the actual philosophical debate around this so would be interested if anyone knows some examples/books/references of the discussion around this idea because I assume this something around this will have had proper philosophical discussion by philosophers engaging in this realist vs anti-realist debate.
Also if I understood what was being said in this video correctly my argument above would likely fall under an anti-realist camp rather than a realist right?
Just another really interesting video as always. I might have to go have a proper read of the some of the sources in the description XD

[@exodusthang]

First! 🎉😂

[@anonymoushuman8344]

Ha.

[@johndoe-rq1pu]

Whether by Emerson’s standards, tech bro standards, or my own, success is not looming.

[@noor9946]

can you guys do a future episode on climate change? it’s all i can think about with the heat wave going on where i’m living

[@OverthinkPodcastPhilosophy]

Thanks for this! We do discuss climate change in last summer's episode on World, but there's definitely room for more
overthinkpodcast.com/episodes/episode-86?rq=world

[@prpaudiovisual8656]

❤