Some reasons why Rob thinks long (e.g., 2-6 hour) interviews are an unusually good medium for sharing ideas
(This is from memory and thereās no transcript, so Iām probably missing some things and distorting other things. Also, I think Rob has written about this elsewhere, but I canāt remember where.)
Itās usually easier to pay attention to a spoken discussion than to something written (even if itās later read aloud, as in audiobook)
The social aspect of discussions keep them engaging
Interviewees will essentially always have to cover the basics of an idea if they want to talk about it. If they have enough time, theyāll also cover key counterpoints. But usually they donāt have enough time to go beyond that and discuss the counterpoints to those, and to those, and so on.
So three 1-hour interviews will probably cover similar ground each time, and never get to a lot of what the interviewee finds most interesting about the idea.
In contrast, one 3 hour interview can cover the basic stuff just once, and then spend the rest of the time on interesting further points.
It takes much longer to write ideas up well than to say them in conversation
Expressing ideas through speech comes more naturally to people
Speech allows for conveying things like uncertainty through tone, pauses, etc.
(Related to the above) Usually, there are a bunch of ideas that are well-known among specialists in a given field, but which havenāt yet been written up and which are thus known to very few people outside of that field. Historically, the main way to learn these ideas has been to have 1-1 discussions with a specialist. Obviously, most people donāt get a chance to do this. But now a specialist can have such a 1-1 discussion and then huge numbers of other people can listen to that.
So that means more people can get a sense of the latest thinking in a field than was previously possible
I agree with all of these points.
And I found the final point particularly interesting. In my limited experience as a researcher so far, I have indeed been struck by how many interesting and potentially important ideas, framings, elaborations, counterpoints, etc. seem to be floating around in discussions, work-in-progress talks, internal drafts, etc., but havenāt been fleshed out fully in any widely accessible content. Often thereāll be some mention of these things in widely accessible content, but missing lots of details, or framed in a way the researchers not feel isnāt quite right. And I think unfortunately this is a totally understandable and hard-to-fix problem, and applies to some of my own work and ideas as well.
I think more long interviews with specialists in various areasānot just researchers but also practitioners, grantmakers, etc. - seems like a great, low-cost way to address that issue. And Iām glad various people are already creating such interviews.
Some reasons why Rob thinks long (e.g., 2-6 hour) interviews are an unusually good medium for sharing ideas
(This is from memory and thereās no transcript, so Iām probably missing some things and distorting other things. Also, I think Rob has written about this elsewhere, but I canāt remember where.)
Itās usually easier to pay attention to a spoken discussion than to something written (even if itās later read aloud, as in audiobook)
The social aspect of discussions keep them engaging
Interviewees will essentially always have to cover the basics of an idea if they want to talk about it. If they have enough time, theyāll also cover key counterpoints. But usually they donāt have enough time to go beyond that and discuss the counterpoints to those, and to those, and so on.
So three 1-hour interviews will probably cover similar ground each time, and never get to a lot of what the interviewee finds most interesting about the idea.
In contrast, one 3 hour interview can cover the basic stuff just once, and then spend the rest of the time on interesting further points.
It takes much longer to write ideas up well than to say them in conversation
Expressing ideas through speech comes more naturally to people
Speech allows for conveying things like uncertainty through tone, pauses, etc.
(Related to the above) Usually, there are a bunch of ideas that are well-known among specialists in a given field, but which havenāt yet been written up and which are thus known to very few people outside of that field. Historically, the main way to learn these ideas has been to have 1-1 discussions with a specialist. Obviously, most people donāt get a chance to do this. But now a specialist can have such a 1-1 discussion and then huge numbers of other people can listen to that.
So that means more people can get a sense of the latest thinking in a field than was previously possible
I agree with all of these points.
And I found the final point particularly interesting. In my limited experience as a researcher so far, I have indeed been struck by how many interesting and potentially important ideas, framings, elaborations, counterpoints, etc. seem to be floating around in discussions, work-in-progress talks, internal drafts, etc., but havenāt been fleshed out fully in any widely accessible content. Often thereāll be some mention of these things in widely accessible content, but missing lots of details, or framed in a way the researchers not feel isnāt quite right. And I think unfortunately this is a totally understandable and hard-to-fix problem, and applies to some of my own work and ideas as well.
I think more long interviews with specialists in various areasānot just researchers but also practitioners, grantmakers, etc. - seems like a great, low-cost way to address that issue. And Iām glad various people are already creating such interviews.