Cate Hall: I define agency as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers. So it has two components: One is noticing degrees of freedom, the other is taking action on the basis of them.
Clara: There’s an interesting cleavage between the way that you think and write about agency, and agency as a tech world buzzword. Why do you think this concept is so popular now?
Cate: I've wondered a lot about this. Certainly at least some part of it is that different ideas just become fads, but it's hard to understand why things take off when they do.
However, I suspect that some part of what is driving this interest is a concern that people have that they don't really know what their future looks like. They desire to control or lay claim to their future in a way they hope agency will provide.
The idea that intelligence is not what matters — because intelligence is becoming cheap — is growing. So there has to be something else that we can rely on, as humans, to supply a sense of control or meaning to life. Part of the enthusiasm about agency emerges from that perspective.
Clara: One thing in this space that I find concerning is the idea of “just do what high agency people are doing”. I think that leads to inauthenticity, where people pursue something that they think they should do just because it seems to be “high agency.”
Cate: That seems like a valid concern. I am interested in a flavor of agency that has to do with freedom above all else. There's one version of agency that is primarily concerned with personal freedom. There's another version that is primarily concerned with personal ambition — the version of agency that I hear more often in tech circles. I think that LARPing [live action role play in gaming] as a high-agency person by following the playbook of a tech founder seems unlikely to be a true exercise of agency, and therefore is unlikely to confer the benefits of “true agency:” a meaningful life that, upon reflection, you are happy to have lived.
Clara: I like the term reflection there. I have a kind of Rawlsian definition of agency: doing what you would do at reflective equilibrium.
Cate: I think that makes sense to me. There's the concept of coherent extrapolated volition: What would you do if you had more information? I've always liked that idea. If you were a better version of yourself, wiser and more knowledgeable, what would you actually want?
Jake Eaton: Maybe we can narrow this down more by talking about your own experiences, Cate, because I think you define agency orthogonal to how it’s sometimes used in the Bay. When you were younger, you graduated Yale Law, you held several high-status, high-performing jobs — you were a supreme court attorney and you clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit. I think most anyone reading your CV would think: This person has high agency. But you talk about these accomplishments as if they were done before you had any.
Cate: Yeah, I think this points to where agency and ambition actually diverge. It seems fairly clear, at least to me, that you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.
You can also be highly successful and highly ambitious without being highly agentic. That looks like following a path with a certain kind of excellence and endurance that reliably leads to success, to accolades, to money. But you haven’t reflected on that path; it’s not a matter of you having decided, yes, this is the life path that I want to be on. And that is what characterized my life until around the age of 30.
Jake: Do you reject the use of the term NPC? [non-playing background character in gaming]
Cate: I really hate it. The one context in which I will not reject it outright is when somebody is using it to describe their own personal transformation. Otherwise, I have a very strong allergy to the term and find it morally repugnant. The idea that some people do not count because they are not thinking for themselves in the way that the speaker believes they should is, to me, really vile. I have a hard time even getting along with somebody who I know has used the term, I find it so offensive.
Jake: Yeah, our Slack is full of both of us ranting about everyone who uses it and how much we hate it too.
Clara: It's so horrible. I'm not against ambition. I like being around people who want to change the world. I like being around people who want to do unusual things. But the more time I spend in spaces that valorize these qualities, the more I tend to run into people who have this deeply dehumanizing view of others. How separable are these things?
Cate: My first instinct is that you're seeing some sort of selection effect, where sociopaths tend to do both. People who tend to view others in transactional terms are also people who are high agency, in the sense that they have never bothered to learn social scripts. They are very low in conscientiousness. And so, naturally, without any study, they are able to exude high-agency instincts. A large part of learning high agency is learning not to be so constrained in your view of the world and of what comprises possible action. The people who, for whatever reason, never learn those things in the first place are who we think of as naturally agentic — but they are also high in dark triad traits.
So this is a consistent concern that I also have: that it is probably the worst people that you can think of who are really high agency. Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.
Jake: What's your model for how someone actually gains agency? Where did it come from for you; what happened around age 30? My own experience, and that of others I’ve spoken with, is that you can read plenty about self-determination or self-actualization that simply doesn’t click, until, one day, it does. That experience feels to me much more like grace than something that can be deliberately chosen or affected.
Cate: I think that there are a few different types of situations which reliably prompt people towards this direction. The first one that I ever benefited from was LSD. Drug experiences can be really useful in extracting you from your ordinary environment and giving you a newfound perspective on how you’re living your life. I think if I had never tried LSD, I might plausibly still be a lawyer living in DC. So psychedelics in particular — maybe MDMA.
Another is something that I discuss in my TED Talk and in the book: desperation, or call it being in emergency mode. I was trying to escape from the very low-agency point of addiction. Sometimes life becomes unbearable, and that prompts you to take dramatic action. In addiction circles, this is called the gift of desperation. That can be a result of addiction, but it can also be a health scare, or any event that serves as a trigger to reevaluate how you are living.
The third category is exposure to high-agency people. You can osmose agency from your environment if you're exposed to the right kinds of people. I experienced this while at Alvea, my gig before Astera, where I was working with a couple of people who were radically high agency — total outliers in this sense. I saw how they operated in the world and how much they were willing to question. That was really instructive for me.
So psychedelics, desperation, exposure to high-agency people. I think those are the standard things. And then there is just grace. Sometimes people wake up one day and they're like, oh, I don't like the way that I'm living. And that happens. But it's less reliable for me.
Jake: From a predictive processing framework, it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is just finding some way to break your priors about what’s possible for yourself.
Cate: Totally.
Jake: How, then, does the book fit into the broader project of actually providing people with agency?
Cate: I guess I'm trying to provide a fourth pathway, which is: Somebody puts a book in front of you and gives you something to think about. Agency has a reputation for being an inherent trait, as opposed to something deliberately cultivated. I think that fairly describes how a lot of people pick up agency. If it's not inherent, then it can be a matter of luck — who they happen to meet, or life circumstances that call them to become higher agency.
But I think agency is something that can be deliberately cultivated by a lot more people. And the hope is that I'm able to describe a useful set of approaches to life that cause people to feel more free and able to do what they want to — as an alternative to taking acid or bumping into people, you know?
Clara: This is also something I've noticed in my own life. Moving to the Bay Area and ending up in a very particular community here was really instrumental in me deciding I could do things that had not been on my action menu before. On the other hand, it's always hard for me to tell. When am I doing something that is actually, again, high agency? And when is it something that my community considers valuable, or cool, or agentic?
Cate: Working in AI safety is a version of this too. There are certain scripts you can follow that seem radical from the perspective of somebody outside of the community, but within the community, they're just the way that things are done. It can be easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are doing something radical and creative as an expression of your own deep interests, when in fact you are doing what everybody around you is doing. This is not an indictment of AI safety, or anybody in particular. [...]
Clara: What do you think about the relationship between agency and risk?
Cate: There definitely is a relationship. It's interesting: a lot of what I view as high agency involves taking a chance on something that is uncertain, instead of sticking with something certain. For example: Going to work at a startup instead of taking a corporate job, or deciding to break up with your partner of two years who you aren't enthusiastic about marrying, knowing there's a chance you won't meet anybody that you are more excited to date.
I think that there is an openness to risk and uncertainty that seems to go hand in hand with agency. Beyond that, there's probably a sociological overlap: many of the groups especially drawn to agency discourse right now also tend to be risk-loving for other reasons.
Fundamentally, I believe that most people take too few risks and limit their results in life because of that. Embracing some degree of risk is probably part and parcel of a high-agency mindset.
