Entry 3:

I talked to my father today. My book is in the absolute final round of preparation, and one of the copy editors questioned the seemingly improbable answer to a little mathematical puzzle posed in the introduction: "If you folded a piece of paper 1/100^th of an inch thick over and over 50 times, how high would be the pile of paper be, in the end?" (If you want the answer, I'm afraid you'll have to read the book.) Now, I haven't the slightest idea how to solve that problem. But my father, who is a mathematician, certainly does, and when I talked to him, he did that mathematician thing of making it sound like you could actually figure out the answer if you imagined, in your mind's eye, that you had four apples and little Johnny, your friend, took away two of them.

It used to make me feel sort of guilty that I have no interest in things mathematical, particularly since all the prevailing cultural explanations for why a son would reject his father's vocation--He is competing for the attention of the mother! He is staking out his independence from the paternal model!--make it sound like I don't think that what my father does is deeply cool, which I do. Then I ran across the wonderful work of a psychologist at the University of Virginia named Daniel Wegner. (My life is entirely governed, in case you hadn't noticed, by what I read in psychological journals.) Wegner points out that much of what we "remember" actually isn't stored in our own memories. What we remember is where we stored that piece of information. So, you actually "know," in a roundabout way, what the capital of Madagascar is, because you remember that you can find that information in an atlas. Mostly what we do, though, is store information with other people: We develop what Wegner calls transactive memory, which is that we distribute responsibility for knowing things among our family and friends. That's part of what it means to be intimate with someone: that you know what the other person knows, so you can always access that knowledge when you need it, and you are relieved of the responsibility of knowing it directly yourself. In my book I talk about this in the context of organizations, because obviously any company that needs to communicate properly and be intellectually efficient must develop the corporate version of a transactive memory system. (If you want to know how to do that, once again, you're going to have to buy my book.) But, do you see? This explains why I didn't go into math and went in another direction. It's not that I'm rejecting or competing with my father. It's just that I realized very early on that it would be unnecessary. In my family's transactive memory system, we've got math covered.

It occurs to me now that I do the same thing with my friend Jacob (OK, OK: Slate's very own Jacob Weisberg). I stopped reading virtually anything about politics right around the time I met Jacob, since he knows so much about the subject that it struck me as a far more efficient use of my time to "store" my political knowledge with him. What this means, of course, is that the nature of my intellectual relationship with Jacob has changed. Instead of arguing with Jacob over his support for the capital-gains tax, for example, I now come out strongly for the capital-gains tax but worry about whether Jacob has done the necessary research to properly make up my mind for me. Sometimes when I go over to his apartment, I look through the books on his night table, just to make sure he's not reading, like, Marx or something. Jacob's in Italy right now, and I'm suddenly struck with a panicked thought. Jacob--are you getting the Times over there? What if you miss something critical? Remember--you're thinking for two now.