Original Website Blurb from 2011
Today is the first part of a three-part interview with Barbara Oakley. I was on the phone with her for about two and a half hours, and I still didn’t get to ask nearly all the questions I wanted. In fact, she did some kind of interview aikido on me and got me talking.
I met Barbara Oakley at the Contact Conference at NASA Ames a couple of years ago, where she was plugging a previous book, Evil Genes: How Hitler Rose, Rome Fell, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, which I really enjoyed and blogged about some this summer. We will not be talking about that book today. However, that title should give you some small idea of what talking to her is like. Our conversation jumped around a lot, but kept returning to some themes over and over, which made editing it a real pain.
One of the things that got cut was a cool bit of trivia: Simon Baron-Cohen, who did all the empathizing/systematizing work as a way to get at autism, is the cousin of Sasha Baron-Cohen. Yet another experiment I'll never get to: see if literacy shifts people towards systematizing, as you might expect from reading Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet vs. the Goddess. There go those connections again.
VSI Episode 19