David Shaffer

Interview with David Shaffer by Alan Macfarlane on 19.2.24 and transcribed by Sarah Harrison. (AM – Alan Macfarlane, DS – David Shaffer)

AM

So it's a great pleasure to unexpectedly meet David Shaffer. He's come to Cambridge to give some talks. David, I always ask first when and where you were born.

DS

So I was born in 1964, in May 1964, in New York City.

AM

Right, and then I asked people to go back as far as they would like. One or two old Etonians I've interviewed go back to the Norman Conquest. I was rather dismayed with Marshal Sahlins, the anthropologist who I asked. He said, my 13th ancestor was a Rabbi and I thought, I'm going to have all the... He said, I know no one else until me. Anyway, grandparents or such generations.

DS

Sure, yeah. So my father's parent, my father's mother was born in Poland and immigrated to the United States when she was three. The rest of my grandparents were born in the United States, although all from Jewish families that had emigrated from Lithuania, Ukraine, and Germany. Both of my grandfathers were very musical. My mother's father was actually a jazz pianist in Rochester and played with some of the greats as they came through in the 1930s, I guess. And my other grandfather played a bunch of different instruments, had some amateur bands, but never did it professionally. My father's father was a printer.

AM

What were the mother's family, were they professional musicians? Is that...

DS

No, so my... I'm starting this a little confused, let me go back. So my father's mother was born in Poland and worked in the home. She was a housewife. My father's father was... Family came from Germany. He had a bad heart, which... So he was enlisted in World War I very late. He was born in 1898, so he was coming in at the end of the war from his enlistment. He had a bad heart and had a heart attack later, which kept him from working. So he retired very early from the printing business. He was, I would say, an amateur musician, although quite a bit of a gifted one. He was actually a very gifted amateur painter, so we have a whole bunch of his paintings that I've saved that are copies of Modigliani's and things like that. On my mother's side, both of my mother's parents were from Ithaca and Rochester, so upstate New York. They both went to college, which was somewhat unusual, especially for a woman in those days. My grandma Alice, my mother's mother, majored in home ec and was a fabulous cook, well known in the family for that. And my mother's father, Grandpa Norman, was the one who was a part-time professional musician, and later he owned a dry cleaning business, but he was always very musically gifted and very mathematically gifted. And that has sort of got past, it's skipped a generation and wound up with me and my brother. I'm not sure what else I would say about them.

AM

Are they Orthodox?

DS

So none of my grandparents were particularly religious. We did occasionally do seders. I like to say that I'm Jewish by cuisine, so we celebrate all the holidays where there was something good to eat. But for example, my father growing up had a Christmas tree because his family was very assimilated, so they were Jewish and we were Jewish, but we sort of grew up in a kind of pastiche of not very much of any religion.

AM

I did a very interesting interview with a Jewish academic colleague recently and I asked him about his beliefs and he said, well I stopped believing in God when I was six, but I'm a Jew. I can do some of the festivals, but I don't believe in God. You don't have to believe in God if you're Jewish.

DS

I would say that's a pretty good description of me. So I've always been agnostic and I think most of my family has been agnostic or atheist, so it's not really been a subject that ever came up very much. That was always kind of assumed and to be fair, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in New York, it was not a particularly religious place at the time. Certainly there were people who were.

AM

Did you do a bar mitzvah?

DS

I did not do a bar mitzvah, nor did my brother. I went to plenty of them. All my friends got bar mitzvahed, but yeah, so I had no religious training at all really.

AM

Yes. And what did your parents... what did your father do?

DS

So my father worked in the information technology industry. So he was an engineer, graduated from Cornell with an engineering degree and then got a master's in engineering. But he worked for IBM in sales initially. Later on, he and two of his colleagues started a consulting company, basically building custom computer systems for companies, so like accounts payable systems and accounts receivable systems. And I would say they were just a bit too early.

AM

So this is the 70s?

DS

Yes, this is the early 70s. So they essentially went out of business right before personal computers came in and there was kind of an explosion of the affordability of computation. Later, he worked at Prodigy. So Prodigy was like the precursor to AOL and CompuServe and the other large internet service providers in the 1990s. And they were trying to provide essentially what became the World Wide Web, but before there was the infrastructure for it. So once again, sort of that company that he was working with was just a little early.

AM

The 80s?

DS

Late 80s and early 90s. Yes. So there was a sense in which he was actually quite visionary, but was always starting a little bit before the wave was going to hit. He got very sick in the early 1990s. He was diagnosed with cancer and so in a sense retired early, although he did a bunch of consulting work and lived for another 30 years. So he died in 2019, just before COVID. And my mother was a nurse. And so she was graduated Cornell with a nursing degree, worked for a while as a nurse, went part-time when my brother and I were born in the early 1960s, 64 and 66. And then when she went back, she went back into teaching. So she was a nursing instructor at one of the community colleges in the New York area. And then she died when I was in my, I was a teenager. So I had no career after that.

AM

How did their character influence you, do you think?

DS

Well, so they were divorced. And so one of the things that I've always thought about my experience being the child of the divorce is that, as a child, you take influences from your father and influences from your mother or your two parents, whoever they are. And in some way, you have to integrate those and become a person who has pieces of each of your parents. And one of the challenges when you're a child of parents who've divorced is, they basically had two world views, two ways of being that were irreconcilable. That's why they got divorced. And so you carry both of those things and have to somehow solve the problem that they couldn't solve, which is how to reconcile those ways of being. Because my mother died, I was 14 when she passed away. So I think in some ways, my father's influence was very prominent. And so my father thought about things very analytically. And he was an engineer, so kind of a problem solver. So when we were kids, for example, on a long drive, we would do crazy math problems, like figuring out how many pencils it would take to reach the moon, or figuring out how many gallons of water there were in all the world's oceans. So you had to make estimations and then computations and then round things so that you could do it all in your head. And so I carried that with me. And then also, just a very kind of problem solving oriented approach. So when I see something that doesn't work, my first thought is to fix it.

AM

Was he a kind man?

DS

He was, but he was also very hard on himself. And I think as a result, also hard on others. And let's just say that there are people who say something similar about me. So I think I've carried that forward. My mother was, I think, sort of softer, but also got caught in... So if she was, say, five years younger or 10 years younger, she probably would have been a doctor instead of becoming a nurse. And she got married and had kids and was living in New York right about the time that the women's liberation movement took off. And so I think she, in some ways, led a bit of a conflicted life. I used to joke that, of course, my parents got divorced because in the 1970s in New York, everybody got divorced. But part of the reason for that was you had a bunch of people who got married relatively young and when there's one set of expectations and through the 1960s, the cultural expectations changed and they were sort of caught a little bit in between those two things.

AM

So coming down to you, what is your first concrete memory?

DS

Yes, I get asked that occasionally and I'm not sure that I have a very concrete one, but I do recall... So I've always had trouble sleeping, insomnia. And I do remember waking up in the middle of the night and going to the little desk that was beside my bed. And this must have been when I was like four and like scribbling and making notes and doing little math problems or something in order to kind of entertain myself while I couldn't sleep.

AM

How old do you think you were?

DS

Probably four or five, something like that. Really, really quite young.

AM

So your first school was what?

DS

So I went to a preschool, which was just up the street. It was a non-sectarian preschool in a church that was right up the block. And I don't have very many memories of that other than occasionally doing little picnics in the park and sitting around in a circle and doing all the kinds of things that you do in preschool.

AM

Did you have brothers or sisters?

DS

I have a younger brother, so he's two years younger. And then after my mother passed away, my father remarried and his wife, my stepmother, had a daughter. So I have a brother and a stepsister.

AM

So after preschool, where did you go? So I started right away at the Ethical Culture School, which is an ethical humanist school in Manhattan. My grandfather actually had been involved in the Ethical Humanist Society when he was younger. And I think I didn't wind up going there because of that. I wound up going there because my parents wanted to send me to some place that would get me into a good high school, that would get me into a good college. And so this was a good start. But it was an interesting place to be a kid in elementary school because it actually did have an ethical humanist side to it. So we had ethics classes, for example. It wasn't religious classes, it was ethics classes. All through my preschool and, oh, sorry, kindergarten and elementary school and all the way through high school.

AM

And it was non-denominational?

DS

Well, it was non-denominational. So ethical humanism is essentially the idea of trying to construct a religion without the notion of God. So thinking about morality as coming from ourselves rather than coming from some higher power, but still recognizing that there's an ethical foundation.

AM

There were some nominal Christian background people there or were they all Jewish?

DS

I don't actually know. I think certainly most of the kids in the school were Jewish because it was on the West Side in New York City in the 1970s. But it really was very clearly non-sectarian. I have this very strong memory of the ethical humanist meeting room, I don't know what to call it, sort of like a church or a synagogue, dark wood and pews and a platform. And that's where we had graduation. We had assemblies. We're in this sort of beautiful room. And across the top above the stage, it said, the place where men meet to seek the highest is holy ground. And so it was this very interesting, literally there was this sort of the idea of constructing a religion without actually having a God as the centre of it.

AM

Very interesting. At that sort of time, age sort of six, eight, and so on, did you have any particular hobbies, passions, interests?

DS

So probably from that age and continuing through high school, I was really interested in mathematics. So I liked actually doing math problems. But I also like the philosophy of mathematics. So I have a memory of reading, not when I was that young, but later reading G.H. Hardy, 'Life of a Mathematician', and thinking about, I sort of love the idea of thinking about these abstract ideas that were, that has some relationship to the world, but thinking about their own, their own beauty and the idea that there was beauty in a mathematical proof. And there was kind of this aesthetics to it. I played, you know, a few sports, none of them very well. I wasn't a very athletic kid. And I was a very, I was a bookish kid. So I read a lot. And that actually did cause some conflicts because my father was not a bookish man. And so there was this odd tension because, so my brother was athletic, ran a marathon with my father and was on the track team at his school. And that always like counted for something. Whereas just reading and thinking and writing was not actually a thing to do. So, you know, you would, you could be asked to do something else because you weren't actually engaged in a real activity. Whereas if you're off for a run, that counted somehow.

AM

And then where did you go on to school from there?

DS

Yes, so the Ethical Culture School, that's what it was called, was in Midtown Manhattan. And then there was an upper school that was still affiliated with the same society that was in Riverdale. So if you know the geography of New York City, Manhattan is an island, right? And then above it is the Bronx. And tucked in one little corner of the Bronx on the river just above Manhattan is Riverdale, which is a very sort of affluent part of the Bronx. And the school was there. But it did mean the very well-off kids took a special bus that took them from Manhattan up to school. And those of us who were not quite so well-off maybe took the subway. So starting in seventh grade, which would have been when I was 12 or 13, I would take the subway all the way up to the Bronx and then walk up this big hill for 10 or 15 minutes and then come back down every day. Which is, I would say, it's a little character building.

AM

The walking or the subway?

DS

The subway, actually. New York was a little rougher back in the 1970s than it was then. And so I had my subway pass stolen or my wallet taken at different times while I was riding the subway. So you learn to be street smart very early.

AM

So 13, 14, 15, were you beginning to specialize in any particular subjects?

DS

I was, or I thought I was, I think. I was much more interested in the sciences than in the humanities. So I took like, you know, advanced mathematics, advanced physics. I did, I took all the sort of the regular courses. Keep in mind that there isn't sort of the same specialization in the U.S. as there is here in the U.K. But yes, I went off to college. I finished high school and went off to college thinking I was going to be a math or a physics major. And I was relatively quickly disabused of that notion when I got to school, when I got to college. So, you know, my high school partly was, you know, about that and partly also my mother had passed. And so there was a lot of, just a certain amount of energy that went into coping with that when I was in high school as well.

AM

Were there any teachers who you particularly remember?

DS

Yes, there are a few. So I took Latin. I, well, Latin was kind of optional. I took it. I'm not really sure why. It seemed like a good idea. At the same time, Spanish was my actual foreign language, which we started in seventh grade. And I was terrible at it and hated it.

AM

Latin or Spanish or both?

DS

Well, no, so Spanish. And the reason was after a semester or so, the teacher said, okay, so now we're going to do all our learning and all of it, everything in Spanish. And so I was trying to learn a language while somebody was talking about the language in the language that I didn't yet know. And that seemed very contradictory to me. Whereas in Latin, Latin was like a, was like a puzzle. It was like math class. You know, you, you sat and you translated the text. Nobody was expecting you to have a conversation. And as you know, Latin has got this very mathematical quality to it. So I, I enjoyed that very much, but I think probably I also just enjoyed it because the teacher was a very, was a very kind woman. And also she was very, I'm not quite sure what the right word is. Almost, she was very kind of human about the way she, she taught. So she just, her reactions were very genuine. And I think I, I think I appreciated that. And then also she, I was very interested in teaching. And so she let me.

AM

You were already interested in teaching?

DS

I had been interested in teaching probably from the time I was six or seven.

AM

That's strange. In what way were you interested in teaching?

DS

I don't, I, I'm not sure I could tell you exactly, but I do have a memory of finding books, like usually like a little science book and then trying to get my brother to take lessons. And we'd like... I would ask him to... we would go through the book and I would try and make up homework. And as you can imagine, he was not very interested in this. But there was something about communicating about ideas that was very appealing to me. And so she gave me a chance to actually put together little lectures about Roman and Greek history, which I would give to like the younger students when I was an upper class man. So Barbara Ellis was her name. So she stands out. I had an ethics teacher, Mal Goodman, I think who had a similar quality of, of relating to us kind of more as, as if we were adults. So he used to, he used to joke, for example, about how the way teachers grade it. And he would say, give me your paper before I, before you hand it in and I'll tell you what your grade is. And so he would take the paper and he would do this, like just leave it in his hand. And he would say, that's an A-. And we would compare and see like what the grade was. He taught me to play bridge. So we had a little bridge club. There was four of us. I was the chairman of the bridge club, which I of course put down on my college application that I was chairman of the bridge club.

AM

You were good at bridge?

DS

No, I was terrible at bridge, but at least I know how to play it. And so the, so those were, I would say two memorable teachers. A third was our, our calculus teacher. And so he was, he had a PhD, which was unusual in high school teachers in the U.S. And I think I, I liked him because he had this view that mathematics was about the ideas. And so when, when you would start to work on a calculus problem, at some point it, it just becomes solving an algebraic equation, the actual conceptual work of modelling the situation and then turning the complex model into a algebraic representation. So taking it, deciding what integral to use, and then reducing the integral to its, its algebraic form. And then he would say, the rest is just algebra and like wouldn't ask us to do it. And so there was this sense of really thinking about the important stuff and not worrying about the trivial stuff, which as you know, is not always characteristic of of school. But I have a very strong memory, even in elementary school, I was sitting in the classroom and watching my teachers and thinking, this is so frustrating. I could do this so much better. Like in just the, just in terms of their pedagogy and how they were presenting the ideas. And I could see how I and my peers were responding. And I was usually pretty quick to pick up whatever the teacher was talking about. And then I would think, okay, well, there's a much better way to explain this to the, to us. And so I really spent a lot of time, not just in school as a student, but in a kind of reflective place, thinking about what my own education was like and what was good and what wasn't.

AM

That's interesting and so early. This really doesn't apply perhaps, but in English education as a Christian, there's a phase around the age of 15, when you become confirmed in your religion. And that is the maximum period of religiosity in many people. And I went through quite a strong evangelical phase for about five years or so around then. Did you have any return or revival of or subsequent interest in religion?

DS

No. Although, interestingly, so from a religious point of view, I think you'll enjoy this. So when we, when my wife and I had kids, we had no intention of raising them within any religious tradition. But as I said, I'm Jewish by cuisine. And so we wanted them to be aware of their heritage. And so there were certain Jewish holidays that we celebrated. For example, we celebrated Passover with the kids and we celebrated Hanukkah. We also celebrate Christmas to be fair. But I actually, I actually rewrote all of the, I wrote my own Seder, which if you know, is the sort of the reading that you do, it's a relatively extended reading that you do at Passover. And I wrote a different set of blessings at Hanukkah. And so we had a religious tradition. It was very religious without a big presence of God. But it was through these rituals, partly that I had invented. And there's a funny story in the family that my older daughter, when she went off to college, she met a young man who was from an Orthodox family. And they're now engaged to be married in the fall. But the first time that they did Hanukkah together, they lit the candle and they said the first part of the Hanukkah prayer. And then my daughter went on to recite the part that we used to recite in our family. And her, her partner who was, had raised Orthodoxy, had been Bar Mitzvahed, he was Jewish in a much deeper sense, looked at her and said, what the heck are you doing? That's not actually the prayer. And she called me and said, wait, did you make up all the stuff that we did? And I said, yeah, kind of. So there was that sort of religious piece, but it was really about ethnic identity. And I very much wanted my children to know that they were of Jewish heritage, even though my wife is not. And oddly, they both wound up so my older daughter is with a man who's Orthodox, although not practising. And my younger daughter was in a Jewish acappella group when she came to school. And I was like, well, how did they become how did this Jewish identity become so strong? It wasn't really our intention to make that their primary identity, but it sort of happened. I would say my own beliefs come much more through existentialism. And I had a kind of profound experience when I was in college of and I think this is in part a response to my mom's death, but of realizing that I kind of needed some sort of core that I didn't really have from growing up. And I found it in I had been reading existentialist works and autobiographies from the from the 20th century. And it just kind of all came together. And I was like, Oh, I see, like, at some point, you have to take some kind of responsibility about yourself and about the world. Or kind of none of it actually means anything. So that was much more my own personal, personal sort of centre.

AM

Do you know the work of Karl Jaspers?

JS

I don't.

AM

I'll talk about him later.

JS

Excellent.

AM

He was supposed to be one of the founders of existentialism. So you then move on to university. You went on to Harvard?

JS

Yes, I was at Harvard as an undergraduate.

AM

It's not an easy place to get into. So you presumably did well at your school?

JS

I did. And I think I... so when my kids were applying to colleges, I actually wrote to Harvard and I asked them to send me a copy of my application, which of course they keep on file as a paper application. And I was going to show it to my kids as sort of like, well, here's, here's how I got into Harvard. And when I got it, and I read it, I was like, so horrified. I couldn't believe that they had admitted me to school. But, but I guess they saw something in what I had written that got me in. Keep in mind, this was a school where there were seven of us who went to Harvard that year out of my class of 100. So it was a feeder school.

AM

But you said that very soon you discovered that the thing you went to study wasn't what you should have studied.

DS

Yes, so I took like basically the most advanced math and the most advanced physics course you could take as a as a incoming student. And I was, I've actually dropped out of the more advanced physics class into a more basic one. And what I found was, essentially, there was just a limit as to how abstract I wanted to be. How pulled away from human experience that I wanted to be. I thought that I really enjoyed this kind of world of mathematical ideas and physics is obviously a way of describing the world at a very high level of abstraction. And I had at the same time taken some classes, I took a class like in medieval history and Japanese history, and I just found that those were much more compelling to me at that age. So I transferred and I majored in history. And I'll tell you a funny story, you'll appreciate this from sort of the point of view of a problem solving engineer. When I was deciding what major to declare, I knew pretty much that I wanted to do something in that in that neck of the humanities. And it turned out that if you, if you majored in history and minored in East Asian studies, they counted the... your classes double counted. And so all of a sudden you opened up all these electives. So I sort of chose this, this little loophole as my major which let me do a lot of what I wanted. And a lot of that was East Asian history. I did a thesis with Alan Brinkley, a relatively famous historian on the Vietnam War. Alan actually got me my first job which was teaching history at a little farm school in Vermont called the Mountain School.

AM

We're talking in the 80s?

DS

Yes, so I graduated in '87.

AM

So by this time, Vietnam War was coming into perspective.

DS Yes.

AM

Had the Pentagon Papers come out by then?

DS

Oh yes, they were out in the early 70s. Yes, so this is very much a historical look and I was actually looking at American policy in Laos rather than in Vietnam so sort of the precursor. But that having been said, the Vietnam War was a very formative experience for me. And I grew up very much aware of the war. It was on television in the 60s and early 70s when I was, you know, in my six and seven and eight and nine and 10. One of my cousins was drafted and got a medical exemption, would tell the story about it. My aunt worked as a draft counsellor. So I actually grew up with this kind of visceral fear that I was going to be drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in the war. So in some ways that was a very formative experience for me even though in the 1980s the war had been done for 10 or 12 years.

AM

That's interesting because recently someone like John Pilger said that the Americans for a long time... the war was deliberately obscured from their view. The reporting on it and so on was minimal as in Gaza and Israel now. But that's wrong, is it?

DS

Well, I mean, I wouldn't debate with somebody who has studied this in a scholarly way, but it certainly was, I mean, some of the scholarship on the Vietnam War, a substantial part of it, looks at the way in which a part of the war was actually not about what was happening on the battlefield. It was what was happening in the American consciousness and that what the Vietnamese Army in a sense, and the Vietnamese government in a sense, the North Vietnamese government, what was happening was the war was getting protracted and their will to fight was stronger than the will to fight of people in America, a continent, an ocean away, for whom this wasn't really that critical. And so it wasn't in a sense a media campaign as many guerilla conflicts are. So I think that the awareness of the war back in the United States was a significant part of that time. The Army certainly learned that lesson in the Iraq War and subsequent wars. There has been much less coverage and much more controlled coverage.

AM

Embedded journalists and so on.

DS

Yes.

AM

So were there any outstanding teachers during your Harvard history?

DS

Well, so obviously Alan Brinkley, who was my thesis advisor. But I have a very, very strong memory of being in a Japanese history class, and the tutor who lived just down the hall in my dorm was a was also a historian, and East Asian historian. And my very first paper, large paper, research paper that I went to write, I took a draft to him and we sat down together and kind of co-rewrote it. And watching how he thought about the construction of the paper and the sentence structure and the way the argument was structured was like a light bulb going off for me. And I really felt like I had developed the ability to write in a very different way. The other experience, so keep in mind that in high school and through college up until my senior year, I was either writing things by hand or with a typewriter. I got a typewriter, I was very memorable when I got a typewriter as a, I guess I must have been a freshman in high school or something like that. And my handwriting is terrible, and my spelling is terrible. And so writing, we were talking earlier about writing and whether it's enjoyable and it had been this incredibly painful process for me. It was agonizing to write. And as you know, when you're writing, you want the words to come out in a way that keeps up with your thoughts. And writing by hand was like having this dam of ideas that just couldn't get out into the pen. The typewriter made that better. But I had an experience working, I was working at MIT briefly in computers. So I had, I should have mentioned this, I guess. So I had worked in the summer... my dad was working in computers. I was interested in learning to program. So I taught myself how to program in BASIC, which was the most simple language. And I got a job in high school working as a computer programmer. And so I leveraged that and was working at MIT as a programmer for their business school, Sloan School. And one of the things I started doing was writing, like technical manuals for people to use the soft, the system was a mainframe computer. So I was writing these technical manuals. And all of a sudden, I had my first experience of writing on a computer, where the words could come out fluidly, you could move them around. There wasn't spell checking in those days, but it was incredibly freeing. And those two things kind of coming together, just opened up a whole world of writing that hadn't been accessible to me at all when I was younger. And so this is at the same time that I'm finding that the sort of abstract math and science classes are not as interesting. And so it was really this kind of opening up in a new direction in the study of history, but also just in writing.

AM

Was it after then that you went to Nepal on VSO?

DS

Yes, so I, after I graduated, I went and taught in at this small school. And this was a school that was very, it was a, it was sort of focused on environmentalism, way before that was a cool thing to do. And there was a, you know, the kids went on a solo in the Vermont woods and they read Thoreau. And so there was this sort of very big focus on kind of authenticity and really understanding what you know what it was you were doing. And I felt like I really wanted to be able to talk about life in the United States and history in the United States, from a, from the perspective of understanding that this wasn't the only context in which you could live. I read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', the Robert Pirsig book, which is a lovely summary of Western philosophy, but also somewhat of a critique of Western culture. And so I really wanted a different experience and I didn't necessarily think about the Peace Corps first, but I didn't want to just travel and backpack around. I wanted to actually live somewhere and be engaged in the culture. And every place I called that did work overseas required two years of experience. And I would say, well, how am I supposed to get two years of experience? Everybody requires two years of experience. And literally they would say, we take people who've been to the Peace Corps. That's where you get that experience. So I joined the Peace Corps and at the time, the process was incredibly bureaucratic. And the best advice was just take whatever post they give you because the wait, if you try and be picky is, and I thought, you know, I don't really know anything about any of these places in any deep way. So sure, I'll go to Nepal. The irony is that it's like, it was the most desirable country to go to. And I was kind of like, eh, whatever, I'll go there, sure. But yes, so that's how I got to Nepal. I met my wife there, obviously, but that was also...

AM

You went to Dang in West Nepal as a teacher?

JS

Yes. So I was in the teacher and teacher trainer. So I worked for a year in the classrooms and then I worked within the Science Education Development Centre and developed curriculum materials and taught lessons for secondary teachers.

AM

What lessons did you learn from Nepal?

DS

I don't even, I'm not sure I even know where to begin, actually. I mean, it was a pretty transformative experience for me. I think one of the things that was helpful for me about going to the Peace Corps was I never had any illusions that I was saving the world. It was very clear to me that I was there to learn about Nepali culture, not really to teach them about American culture. I mean, except to the extent that they were interacting with me as a person. It was a very, sort of very personal experience for me, in the best sense, right? I mean, we had a volunteer who lived near us who raised money and built a school, which is great. It was a nice monument to himself. My accomplishment was my family and the family of the man who was my counterpart as a science master teacher, boil their water. It was just a very, sort of, micro experience, but it was transformative for me in part because I really did, I mean, as you know, Nepal in the 1980s, late 1980s, early 1990s, was a very different place than anywhere in the West. And a different value system. And just, you know, there were no running water, I had no electricity. And, like, learning to be in that place and to be part of that culture, or at least to be part of part of that culture, just gave me a different perspective on the things that we, you know, that we take for granted in the West. And that was partly what I wanted to accomplish. I mean, I would say that there are two... So one thing you'll find amusing given my discussion of being a problem solving engineer was, you know, I built a latrine. I built a water tank where somebody from the village filled the tank from the tap so I had running water. I, the only way to treat water in Nepal was to use iodine or to boil it. I figured out what the ratio of chlorine you needed in order to chlorinate the water. And then I also figured out, and honestly I have no idea how in the middle of nowhere in Nepal I figured this out because there was no internet, there were no books, I have no memory of how I did this, but I realized that if you put hydrogen peroxide into chlorinated water, the hydrogen peroxide interacts with the chlorine, and it produces a tiny bit of hydrochloric acid, but it aerates the water. And so I would shock the water with chlorine, and then when I went to drink it, I would put in hydrogen peroxide and let it sit to take the chlorine out. So it was this very sort of sense of like working to solve these problems in a place where, like the tools were way less than what we had in the United States. But the other thing that I would say was kind of profound for me was that one of the challenges of being a Peace Corps volunteer, and I think the same is true for being an anthropologist actually, I mean in some sense I was there in a much more anthropological sense than many volunteers, or in a much more ethnographic sense than many volunteers go. But one of the challenges is that you're explicitly in a different culture, which means that you expect that there are going to be things that you are confronted with that feel different to you. Again, you were in Nepal, so you probably know this better than I do, but in the United States, there's kind of an expectation of privacy. There's an expectation that your information is your own and that somebody is asking you a favour to ask of it, whereas at least where I was in Nepal and at that time, there was kind of an expectation that you had a right to know. So people would say, that's a nice watch, how much did it cost? Or how much do you make in the United States? Or whatever it was they wanted to ask about. And as a volunteer, and sort of in this ethnographic sense, one of the things you had to realize was that there was not a will and you were feeling uncomfortable, but you had to learn to negotiate that. But there were also times where somebody would say something or do something that would feel like it wasn't really okay, but there was always this question, is this just a cultural misunderstanding? Or is this somebody actually doing something that isn't okay? And I was living with a family and I found pretty much every time when I would tell them a story about something that had made me feel like something was wrong, they would say, oh no, they shouldn't be doing that. That's not okay. And I had this very deep sense that across these different cultures, there was both a sort of common sense of what decency meant, and also that you could detect that even if you didn't necessarily know all the cultural substrate. That you're feeling that in fact something was wrong, if you were at least partly culturally sensitized, was actually not a terrible guide to whether or not somebody should be doing what the cultural situation was. And that sense of this common humanity, I think, was very profound.

AM

We'll talk about it afterwards. So after that, that was two years or so, what did you do then?

DS

So I came back to the United States and I worked briefly in an education development centre, which is a curriculum development and research organization. I worked very briefly developing curriculum, math curriculum for them. And then I went back into teaching and I taught for two years at an independent school in California, teaching both math and history. At the time, I was being fairly strategic because there are lots of history teachers, like more history teachers than there are jobs for history teachers. And there are more jobs than there are math teachers. So if I was going to stay in teaching, this was sort of a way to be able to stay in the field. And when I went, being at this curriculum development centre, one of the things we were doing was developing computer-based curriculum. So this is like in 1991, 1992. So very early computers, no internet. But I was exposed to some educational technology, a geometry sketch pad, it was called, it was dynamic geometry software. So for working in mathematics, and I had this kind of revelation that the computer technology was a way to change education. And I went back and brought computer technology into my classroom. And actually, I was lucky enough to meet John Bransford and Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Breiter and Anne Brown and Joe Campione, who those may or may not be names that you know, but they were really prominent in the field of educational technology and educational psychology in the early 1990s. And Anne Brown and Joe Campione developed something called the Communities of Learners, which was basically kind of a Vygotskian approach to developing education through technology. Marlene and Carl were doing something similar. And I met them and went to a conference that they were holding at Stanford, and then became one of the teachers who was working in their research project. I actually convinced them that they could take this tool that they had developed for science teaching and use it in history class. And that the idea that science was understood through the web of ideas, and that students could co-construct this web of understanding of scientific problems, that they could do something similar in history. History was also a web of connections, and that we could model that and have students interact with technology to learn that. So they got me some computers and we set up a computer lab. And that actually was relatively formative because I've had the experience not only of being a teacher, but when I went to be a researcher, I also had the experience of being a teacher with researchers in their classroom. And that gave me a kind of sensitivity to what it was going to be like to what it was like to work in an educational setting as a researcher because I'd been in the educational setting, essentially being researched. So that was really interesting and important, I think. And so those two years I spent teaching and I decided that I wanted to go back to graduate school because I wanted, I basically found that yes, technology was a powerful tool, but I didn't actually have the voice that I needed to impact change. Nobody would listen to me, even though I had this tool and they had a problem. So that was my original purpose of going back to graduate school.

AM

Unless you got a PhD, you mean?

DS

Yes, exactly. And what happened when I went to graduate school is, I mean, as I tell my students, the purpose of graduate school is to transform your identity. There's no point if you think about exactly the same things in exactly the same way when you come out with your PhD, we didn't do our job. And part of that transformation was becoming interested in the research side, rather than in the direct practice in the classroom or working in the field of education directly.

AM

So you got a PhD in, what was the title of the PhD?

DS

Media Arts and Sciences. I was at the Media Lab at MIT. Yeah, so my PhD was with Seymour Papert, who is quite well known in the early field of educational technology. But also one of the important things about Seymour was that his focus was on epistemology. He was actually interested in the way that technology changes the epistemology of learning and the epistemology of mathematics. And so I absorbed that and essentially thinking about epistemology has been one of the core threads of my research since. And so that's where epistemic network analysis comes from. The idea of an epistemic frame comes out of Seymour's work.

AM

Those are both things for which you're well known. So can you give a brief overview?

DS

Sure. So let me just take a step back first. So where all of that came from was the very first time I was a history teacher, having been trained as an historian, as an undergraduate. What I saw and wanted to change was the difference between the way history is taught in high school and the actual practice of historians, because those are two completely different things. High school history is about trying to learn essentially a sequence of events and perhaps a canonical explanation for those events. The work of historians is to recognize that that very thing is actually contestable, that what you're trying to do is construct an argument about what you think happened and why, that you can defend using evidence. One of the things I would tell students at the beginning of the semester was, I would ask, what is history? And they would come up with all sorts of explanations. You know, it's the account of what happened in the past, it shapes the future. And I would say, it's a story that purports to be true. And so my work was trying to get them to think in this historical way, because the details of American history were less important than the actual process of thinking about historical material and being able to understand it as something that was alive and was discussable and was important and so forth. And when I went back to teaching again, and then in graduate school, that theme of trying to make the educational experience more like what was really happening in the world, that was a kind of a core of what I was doing. So, how do you make mathematics education more like what mathematicians do? How do you make history more like what historians do? And so that idea is what became more or less the basis of my PhD, which was looking at how we can construct a learning environment that both looks like what mathematicians do, and what looks like graphic designers do. And we could take these two ways of thinking, these two epistemologies of practice, and put them together and help students see the relationships. As it turns out, that's not what happened. They didn't actually see the relationships. The result of the PhD was when they were thinking about the problem mathematically, they learned a little bit about the mathematics. When they thought about the problem from a graphic design point of view, they learned about graphic design, but there was not really much transfer across them. But what came out of that was the idea that we could use technology to build environments where students were engaged in real-world practices that were too difficult or dangerous or expensive to do without the technology.

AM

Simulated.

DS

Exactly. Yes. So, simulate being a doctor, simulate being an architect, simulate being a lawyer, simulate being an engineer. Not because we want to turn kids into those things, although that's a great outcome for inner-city kids, but because these are ways of thinking. What would it mean, like in the United States, something like 7% of our gross domestic product is spent on healthcare. What would it mean if everybody who went into the doctor had an idea of how a doctor actually thinks about medicine and problem solving? What would it mean if everybody who picked up a newspaper or read on the internet understood how a journalist thought about what's worth writing and how you construct it? So this was sort of the argument, and it's sort of a Neo-Dewey argument, which I actually made explicitly. Essentially, Dewey was too early technologically. You didn't have the tools that you needed in order to fulfill the vision of bringing the life of the child into the school. And this was a way of bringing the life of the culture into the school. So we were building these environments where students were learning science by working as engineers, or learning about the environment by working as an urban planner, or something like that. Of course, the challenge is, well, how do you show that? It doesn't make any sense to say, well, we'll take this place where students are working as an engineer for half a semester, and we'll give them a test about physics. Well, of course, they're not going to do as well as the students who are learning the physics that's precisely what's on the test. So that's a useless measure. So somehow we have to capture what it means to think like an engineer or think like an urban planner. And at the time, as you probably know, so this is now the early 2000s, but coming out of the 1990s, there had been this kind of battle royale between the information processing view of educational psychology and what was called the situated cognition view. So situated cognition comes out of Boguslavsky, and it's the idea that all of cognition takes place within a cultural context. The idea of communities of practice comes out of the Leib and Wagner. And of course, the information processing view was Herbert Simon, people at Carnegie Mellon who essentially described the human thinking as computational. A bunch of if-then production rules that you could boil down. And there was this huge, literally like a fight. And you can see it in some of the pages of the journals where they would go back and people go back and forth having this kind of argument. And so I was trained while that argument was going on and was the first generation of what I would call post-schism scholars who weren't so interested in fighting the battle, but were interested in seeing how these two things came together. And so I was looking at what was happening in these environments, both from a kind of information processing view that focused on knowledge and skills, but also from this socio-cultural view that looked at learning in terms of values and identity. And that my argument was that all of these things come together in the context of an epistemology, a way of making decisions and justifying actions. And so what we would do is look at the transcripts, almost literally the field notes, if you will, of what these students were doing and try and understand how the knowledge and skills and values were related to one another. How these things were connected to make this kind of professional way of thinking. And I call that collection of skills and knowledge and identity and value and epistemology an epistemic frame. And the idea was it was like a frame of glass, a pair of glasses. And I put it on and I see the world the way an engineer sees it or an architect sees it. And it's not, I don't always see the world that way. We all carry these multiple frames. So right now we're talking as two academics. My guess is that when you go to lunch with your granddaughter, you don't turn on a camera and video her, right? Because there's a different way of, there you go. Well, there's a, when I give my PowerPoint lectures to my kids at home over dinner, they didn't like it. So we have these different frames and we can map them. The problem was that that was basically like a kind of boutique enterprise. As long as all we were doing was by hand looking at field notes, transcripts, copies of work, whatever it was that we had of what students were doing it would never scale. And if we wanted to actually have these learning environments have some impact on the education system, there had to be a way to measure the kind of learning that we were talking about without sitting down and finding all the pieces and arguing qualitatively, ethnographically, how they held together. And I had a, I have a friend, my colleague and my office mate in graduate school, who had a startup company at the time where people were wearing name tags at events that were little computers and could talk to one another and pass that information through the network back to the main computer. And he was interested in using that information to draw the social network of people interacting at a party. And we had been talking about this and like how to do it and one morning in the shower, I went, oh, wait a minute. If you just think about the skills and knowledge and values and epistemology and so on. If you just think about those as the people at the convention, wearing the badges, moving around and interacting with one another in the same way that Rick could induce the social network by looking at the data of literally just who is facing whom, right? Who is in contact with whom? We could do the same thing by looking at the data that we had, coding it for the things that we thought were important in the epistemic frame, and then looking to see where those things occurred together. And that's what epistemic network analysis does. And it turns out that it's incredibly powerful, not just for thinking about epistemic frames in the context of these learning environments that we were building. It's essentially a way of taking the work that anybody does when they're doing qualitative analysis and representing it mathematically and visually, because you get both the network and then you get the underlying mathematics of it, in a way that was faithful to the original qualitative investigation. When I look at something qualitatively, when I look at something ethnographically, I'm looking for the codes, whether those are emic codes or edict codes, I'm looking for the things that are important in the culture. And I'm telling you a story about how those things relate to one another. That's the basic work of ethnography and anthropology. So what this is doing is it's saying, well, we'll take those same codes and that same story. But now instead of focusing in on a small incident that we can communicate to you, we can show that that pattern of relationships exists in a much larger set of data. So that now that you have Twitter and you have policy documents online, people conduct multiple interviews, here's a way not to supplant that qualitative understanding, not to supplant that ethnographic understanding, but to augment it. And the fundamental idea is that in qualitative research, at least in grounded theory, there's this idea of theoretical saturation. How do you know that you should stop being in the field? Well, it's when you feel like you have enough to tell your story and that more information isn't going to change your fundamental story. Well, that's essentially a warrant that you have enough data to tell the story. In statistics, we do the same thing. We take a sample and we mathematically analyse the properties of that sample, and when we have statistical significance, we're claiming that we have enough data to make some claim about the larger population which the data was sampled. So those are both ways of saying, I have enough data to make this claim. If you can represent the qualitative claim, the ethnographic claim, mathematically, then you can test it statistically and you get a statistical warrant for theoretical saturation. And that's essentially the idea of quantitative ethnography. And what it says is, no, no, no, these are not two separate epistemologies. They're separate practices, of course, but epistemologically, they're trying to do the same thing, which is to say, I'm telling you a story and I have enough data to warrant that that story isn't just a one-off. I'm not just cherry picking it. Now of course, in statistics, there's this notion of generalizing to some larger population, which is nonsense in ethnography. It is true in sociology, maybe. So what you're doing is you're not generalizing outside of the data that you have, because that's not usually your job in an ethnographic sense. You're generalizing within the data. You're saying, I've seen a pattern, and I can show you that that pattern persists in a way that, given the size of my data, is not just random, is not just chance. There's some underlying pattern that persists in this data, and I can show you the pattern that I've just described mathematically. And so what happened is, it turned out people were much more interested in that than they were interested in these learning environments that I was building. And so I sort of was like looking where the light is good. Here's a way to take an idea and to create it and let people use it to affect the kind of change that I was interested in, to let people ask of educational and other data, the kinds of questions that they would like to be able to ask. You know, so for example, there's a group of people within the quantitative ethnographic community who look at indigenous QE. And the idea there is there are lots of contexts in which people's understanding is expressed in stories. And if those groups come in contact with kind of the policy apparatus of the modern state, they don't really have the language for speaking to policy, because policy expects things to be expressed in numbers and equations and graphs and so on. And so this is a way of collecting people's experience and representing it in a way that actually can have that conversation in the world of policy. And many, imagine many other uses. But, but that's so that's sort of those two big ideas of epistemic frame, which is basically an argument that education and everything else in human experience is about enculturation, and that we can we can model that enculturation, not just in the traditional qualitative sense, but we construct a quantitative model that isn't epistemically violent towards the original qualitative claim.

AM

That's a lot there. People will have to follow it up with some reading. Just getting towards the end, so I've just got three more. Well, one leads on from there. I may have misunderstood it but how do you apply this to history and getting, as I understand it, people in schools to think as they would if they were professional historians. How does your approach help them do that?

DS

Yes, so, so again this is sort of the earlier work but the idea was that if you could pick some... If you look at professional practices, or any practice in the world, they have one in the language of a community of practices is called practice of induction. Right, somehow in order for a community to survive it has to bring new people in. So how do you show people what participation in your practice looks like. And in real world practices it usually isn't just school, you know, you have internships for doctors, you have a moot court for lawyers, you have design studios for architects, places where people who are learning to be part of the community, take action in the community, but importantly, they have an opportunity to get to reflect on what they've done with peers and with mentors and Don Shone's argument about the way that professional practices work is that this process of action and reflection on action and action reflection on action, essentially becomes internalized, so that you no longer need the, the more experienced other to help you think about what you're doing. You're able to what do what he calls reflection in action. And as you're thinking about what you're doing while you're doing it. And these induction practices in professional contexts. They essentially provide a map of how it is that people are inducted into a practice through this process. And so the argument was we can look at these professional induction practices, and we can simulate them. And that being by being able to participate in that students are at least partly coming into the practice again, not because we want them to become full practitioners, but because we want them to see the way the practice operates.

AM

Is there anything I should have asked you that you would like me to have asked you?

DS

Let me give that a moment's thought. So, we haven't talked much about the practice of academia itself. So we've talked about kind of the ideas that I've been engaged with, and the antecedents for those ideas. But there's also a kind of trajectory through the business of academia. And I think, I think different people do that differently. But I would say, I'm, I've reached a point that I didn't know that was out there till I reached it. And I think that one of the things that gets less spoken about... I'm sure you've written about this in your own context but I don't hear much discourse around the idea that academia is kind of a series of transformations. And we all I think recognize that when you get your PhD there's a kind of underlying transformation that takes place. I was struck by something that that happened when I was in my PhD program. In my program and in many programs in the US, you basically do a master's in passing, so you do a master's degree and then if you're successful you continue on to a PhD in the same program. So I had done my master's degree, and I was talking with Seymour about what I was going to do for my PhD. And he was basically describing how we were going to do sort of the same thing but we'd collect much more data, and we'd collect more kinds of data and you know we have much better triangulation of what was happening. And Seymour looked at me and he said, Are you under the impression that a PhD is just like a master's but more? And I said, Yeah, it is. And he said no, it's a total like it's a much different and deeper exploration of the idea of conducting a research study. The master's is like a one off to show that you can do the mechanics of the study, and obviously the conceptual grounding and so forth and study comes with a PhD. And I realized that when I finished my PhD and started as a professor, there's another transformation that takes place, which is you sort of transform from thinking about one particular study to conceptualizing a program of research that's a series of studies, or series of work that that explores some deeper idea in depth, and that your goal in doing that, essentially is to both construct understanding of the idea and to tie that understanding to yourself. In order to succeed in academia, you actually have to construct a brand, more or less, so that people know you and know that you're associated with this body of work. And obviously once you get tenure, you, you're able to open up the scope of what you do and instead of focusing on your own narrow studies you're more connecting with the world. But one of the things that's happened with the development of quantitative ethnography. A quantitative ethnography, yes, right, is, so there's an international society now, there's conferences, there's, you know, many people writing and working in the field. And one of the things that I realized was in order for that field to succeed I had to recede. That if I was constantly associating my name and my brand and my university with these ideas. It was going to actually suppress other people's ability and willingness to step up and take the ideas and take them somewhere I couldn't take them. And so there's, there's this, this next transformation that I don't think I had realized was there of kind of being more interested in seeing the idea, ideas in the world, having the impact, whether that's the academic world or the real world.

AM

Just being parent.

DS

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And less interested in it being somehow associated associated with you. Maybe there's another stage that comes after that I don't know, but it's been an, it's been interesting to see these identity transformations that take place, combined with an intellectual transformation as you as my career and I suspect other people's careers have progressed.

AM

Thank you very much.

DS

You're welcome.