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David, good to see you.

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Good to see you, Dave.

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Uh, what is your last name?

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It's Petra Zuski.

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It's not easy to say.

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And what's my last name again?

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Uh Pinsoff.

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Although you uh you late I heard you there's a rumor that you would like to go by Von

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Pinsoff.

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Uh yes, that's right.

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Ideally.

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Uh if you could call me Von Pinsoff, that would be much appreciated.

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Um, we have a wonderful episode today, and uh that episode involves actual evolutionary

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psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists, which is our tagline.

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Oh, I was gonna say, I think there's a a podcast with a tagline like that.

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So yeah, enjoy and uh we'll see you in a few seconds.

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I can cut that out.

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Um let's see.

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We'll be back in a few seconds after a brief musical interlude.

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Seven seconds, yeah.

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Okay.

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So David, today we have Christina Moya.

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We do.

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Uh this was a oh sorry, David.

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Uh Christina uh goes by.

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I don't know if she still has this her signature in her email, but it's Christina without

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the H.

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So it's C-R I S T I N A.

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Okay, cool.

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Um I mean it's a homonym, so you can't tell the difference, but that's right.

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Uh we're doing great so far.

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Uh it's Christina, not Christina.

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Yes.

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And uh what who is she?

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Christina Moya is I don't well, who she's uh Christina Moya.

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I don't know if I'm like wow we're like three minutes in and we still haven't even gotten

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it.

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Uh no, no, no.

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She's a professor of anthropology at UC Davis.

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Uh and Christina is from the academic family over at Boyd and Pete Richardson.

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Um, she was a graduate student at UCLA.

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And um Christina is just an incredibly uh I think she's one

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to my mind, she's one of the most sort of um well rounded and just intensely

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fierced intellects in the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

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Um and I just love talking to Christina.

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She's so charitable and willing to argue in a very positive way.

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Um and so I just I'm always happy to talk to Christina and it makes my my uh my day

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and my month and my year when I get to see her.

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So it's it's been a while because we're all busy professors now.

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And so it was really good to talk to her on this episode.

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And she talks about um ethnolinguistic boundaries.

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Yep.

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We get into uh you know intergroup boundaries, intergroup essentialism, which we get into

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in the podcast.

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We even get into some of the different branches of the evolutionary social sciences.

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Uh and and we we go into some interesting tangents too.

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We talked about like coolness and charisma, like it was a really fun, wide-range.

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This is when we also talked about uh flat Earth uh flat earth conspiracies and yeah

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uh conspiracies in general.

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Yeah.

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So um yeah if if you're interested in flat earth um things, uh this is the one for

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you.

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Yep.

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Uh so with without further ado, I love this one.

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This is a great, great episode.

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Uh without further ado here is Christina Moya and David and I talking about um flat earth

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and everything uh related and joy okay

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we're recording um christina moya from uc davis anthropology uh professor

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there um is joining us today christina we're super happy to have you thanks so much for

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having us well us me the royal um uh christina yes exactly um

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uh christina i was thinking about this like what um i was thinking yesterday like what to

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say about you.

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And I think honestly, you're probably one of the people who has like most changed my mind

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of any person I've talked to.

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Yeah.

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Um, and we can get into sort of what that is, but I mean the short version is like you were

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a student at UCLA.

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I was a student at UCSB.

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And the idea of sort of cultural evolution and the validity of it and why it was important

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and how it fits with natural selection or biological evolution is something that you and I

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over kind of conversations as we were graduate students, we just went over year over year.

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And um, you know, I really learned a lot talking from you.

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And you know, you convinced me that cultural evolution is a thing and it's important to

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understand.

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And so thank you for doing that.

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It's the nice to be honest.

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Oh my gosh, that's like the nicest thing I've gonna hear this week, I'm sure.

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So we're we're gonna end the episode right now.

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So thanks for joining us.

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Done.

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Done.

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Mission accomplished.

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Dave, why don't you you should tell the world, but I convinced you of none.

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Oh, I mean, I I was already on board with cultural evolution.

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I think there's a bit of a difference in between the UCLA and UCSB uh schools of thought.

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I think um UCLA is more like let's marry the two approaches of you know classic to

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be cosmedies of psych and you know Boideian cultural evolution.

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They're compatible, let's find you know how they inform each other.

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And that's very much Clark Barrett's approach that he he put forward in his uh

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excellent book, um, The Shape of Thought.

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Um, we're getting a little in the weeds here, but no, it's great.

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No, shape of thought is great.

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Yeah, we'll we'll yeah.

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But I feel like, yeah, no, the the UCSP school is more like we're gonna stick to the to the

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Bible, the Tubian Cosmeties Bible, and anything outside of that we're gonna be a little

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hostile to.

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Is that is that unfair, Dave?

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Um, no, I think I was uh uh embodying that and I think during this conversation with

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Christina.

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And I mean Christina and Christina, I also have we I also have great guilt because we're

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working on this uh paper.

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And maybe we can talk a little bit about um uh why why we wrote the paper, because I think

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in some sense, uh time has assassinated it to some degree for us, but I think it's still

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worth doing the paper.

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I mean, um, but but basically, David, and and we can explain because there's gonna be

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different audiences for this, some people who know us, some people who don't know anything

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about this.

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But um this I think this goes in the category of like the people you fight with are the

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people that you're closest to.

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And so compared to everyone else in the world, UCLA, sort of Rob Boyd, Pete

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Richardson doing taking an evolutionary approach to understanding cultural dynamics, and

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then Lita Cosmid is in John Tuby taking an evolutionary perspective to understand cultural

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dynamics through psychology.

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I mean, that's like really similar, UCLA, UCSB, really close by.

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And, you know, I wasn't there for all of the um

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controversy.

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I heard stories about it from more senior folks um like Clark.

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Um but um and but but I do understand that there was sort of controversy.

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But I think our generation, Christina, you and I, we sort of we were the on the ground um

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grad students sort of resolving what that conflict was.

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And I would say I wouldn't want to diminish that some people do like I I still hear from

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some parts of the evolutionary social sciences kind of this wariness about evolutionary

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psychology specifically, right?

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Um, and that I think is born out of maybe like some of what the worst part of that work

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might be, but also some of these old conflicts that haven't been totally resolved.

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So to your point, Dave, that I do think there is still value in saying where is our

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division of labor and where is our true disagreement.

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Like that was kind of one of our goals there because what and I try to do this even my now

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that I'm undergraduate teaching, um, which I guess you're starting as well, right?

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Like like thinking about what how do we teach our students to make sure that, you know,

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they're go they're going to hear different stories from different classes and to recognize

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the value of different fields and different approaches as specialization to some extent.

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But then also being able to engage like when it really is when the when there really are

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debates, like figure trying to figure out like where where is the debate, like name that

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debate, and figure out is it something tractable from a scientific perspective?

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Right.

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Yeah.

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Um and I and I think there might be some of those still, but I think some of them it's

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increased like you said that it's assassin time has assassinated that paper.

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I think that some of the big debates that remain are like about just hard,

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really hard to answer questions, maybe intractable.

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Um, what do you think?

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So I'm curious.

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So you you put that out there, and it's a really interesting distinction between like a

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pseudo-disagreement where there's actually no conflict, and it's just an intellectual dil

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division of labor where we're gonna focus on these questions and these topics, and we're

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gonna focus on these questions and these topics, and then we can, you know, meet each other

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in the middle when we tunnel through the mountain on on either side.

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Um But there may be some genuine disagreements and genuine conflicts about how the world

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works.

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Do you see that existing?

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And if so, what are those genuine disagreements and conflicts?

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I think we might we could even talk about them as like different priors about how the way

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the world works, like different emphasis put on different processes as being

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relatively more important.

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And I think um those probably come down in the to the field of like cooperation.

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That's a big one.

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Um and then um kind of how much how much

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information has to be in the mind or has in that how much how strong do

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those priors that natural selection endowed us with have to be or how are they structured

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um to be able to get us like the full range of complex behavior that we see today.

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And so I think we start with different assumptions or different, at least priors.

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I would like to think that hopefully we can all update our beliefs as you know Dave has.

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But it's hard sometimes, right?

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Like we're we have a lifetime of living our world in our subfields.

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But those two, those two questions I think are ones that we start with different

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expectations of the world.

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Yeah.

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So just to clarify for people who don't know, a prior is in Bayesian mathematics, it's the

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expectation you have uh that a certain hypothesis is true before you encounter the

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evidence, and then you update your prior once you get the evidence.

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Um what's interesting about you highlighting this um disagreement about what the prior is,

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is that I think the difference in priors is itself about our priors.

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Because uh for so we come to This is getting too meta for me.

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So on one perspective, let's say we come to the world with a rich set of priors about how

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reality works.

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We're expecting to receive certain kinds of really precise inputs.

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Uh and we and we come to the world with a a a wide variety of hypotheses about how the

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world is structured, you know, plants, animals, people, social categories, etc.

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Uh and the other perspective is our when we come into the world and our priors are actually

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quite relaxed and we're kind of open to any kind of input uh and we sort of the the mind

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sort of evolves based very contingently on the input and we and we don't really have uh you

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know a a strong expectation one way or the other and the development of the mind is very

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much a product of the inputs themselves and not of the the priors that we have uh before we

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get the input.

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Is that one of the big way of characterizing?

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I think that's true.

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I think that's one of the big debates.

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And then I think the other one which we can or don't have to talk about is like what helps

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explain like large-scale cooperation.

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Right.

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Um, or most of cooperation, maybe with but yeah, I agree.

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That's a really good way of putting the debate about the nature of the mind.

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Um priors about priors.

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Um Christina, um, your um we'll start talking about your research too.

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Um, do you think uh this is a choose your own adventure?

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Do you think it's useful to um talk about when you said sort of we in different areas

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have different fields?

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Do you think it would be helpful to sort of sketch out what the different areas are um um

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of of the social sciences, like kind of like a recapitulation?

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Because we haven't really done that.

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We've sort of de facto had lab experimentalists on, and then also field

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anthropologists.

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And I can almost hear people listening who don't know already sort of the

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topography or the map of the landscape of who does this thing.

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That I would expect, you know, a podcast uh with evolutionary psychology

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in the title.

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People might be imagining certain things and not other things that's different than sort of

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those of us who are actually in it.

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Would would it be okay to sort of, you know, what's or or or you know, what's your take on

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sort of what is the the landscape of who does it and what is that division of labor?

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Yeah, I there's this classic paper that tries to divide the evolutionary social sciences

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like in the early 2000s by Eric Smith into three flavors, right?

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So maybe that's a place to start.

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I think it's it's gotten more complicated to some extent.

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But you know, some of the three flavors are, you know, one coming from the psychology,

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like grow growing up out of psychology and maybe cognitive sciences as well, which is

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evolutionary psychology per se, that is um kind of trying to do well, you you guys could I

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don't want to put words in your mouth, you guys could probably define it better, but I my

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understanding is kind of make sense of the computational machinery that evolves and include

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like including its contingencies, right?

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Which is something that I think a lot of people get wrong.

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Like, how does it take input to adapt to the current world that it sees, right?

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So it is a contingent computation, you know, machinery that is um under investigation by

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most evolutionary psychologists.

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And to some extent, um, then there's another field that traditionally has been called human

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behavioral ecology that's coming out of anthropology and to some extent, like more rooted

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in animal behavior as well, I would say, and ethology, given that the tools of behavioral

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ecology make basically how do animals, including humans, respond adaptively to

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the environments that they see?

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Like again, if it it it's it sounds so similar to some extent, because you're saying it's

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about how do the inputs into the psychology burn to the mind that

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behavioral ecologists tend to black box because they're trained more as biologists and

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anthropologists?

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How do the different environments that serve as inputs kind of get translated into adaptive

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behavior?

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And the classic assumption in behavioral ecology, or at least their area of investigation,

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is that we're going to be investigating the adoptive out um kind of parts

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of the phenotype.

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And we're kind of going to ignore the neutral forces in evolution for now because whenever

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you see something that kind of looks like a complex behavior, it's probably there by

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design.

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It's a little bit of a simplifying assumption with the kind of the recognition that those

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are models of that probably there are non-adoptive phenotypes as well.

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And then gosh, where does cultural evolution come from?

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Like it has a complicated history because it's using like uh in the 70s, like it's you

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know, it develops using population genetic models is where it first kind of gets to be

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formalized.

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And there are people working on it who are um geneticists, who are ecologists.

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Um yeah, I guess like not necessarily squarely in the anthropology

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tradition, when it first gets developed by people like um Mark Feldman, Kavale Sforza,

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Pete Um Richardson, and Robert Boyd.

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Um at least the first instantiation, I think it's expanded what it what that means, but but

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then it gets kind of rooted in more ethnographic work as well.

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So I think it tends to get done more in anthropology departments, even though it has that

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um history.

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And it's um trying to make sense of a cut, it has a couple of questions at its heart.

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Like, why are humans a cultural species?

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Like, what was that good for?

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How can we make sense of um our cultural nature?

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Like when would c culture meaning social learning from others and you know there are other

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entailments?

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A lot of species do social learning, but humans do social learning at a massive scale, and

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we kind of accumulate it intergenerationally in a way that some people like to distinguish

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as culture or at least cumulative culture.

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And so how did that get off the ground?

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How can that evolve?

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And then what are the consequences of having those kinds of um that type

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of cultural cognition for the way that um behavior is shaped.

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And so it does have a, you know, at least part of it is a psychological question also of

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like what is that?

282
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How did natural selection shape our social learning capacities?

283
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Right.

284
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So is that okay.

285
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Yeah, That's good.

286
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I mean, I want to add one more uh chess piece on the board.

287
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So cultural evolution itself has different factions within it.

288
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So there's the the school coming out of you know Rob Boyd, uh Joe Henrik.

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Um that's very much about um how culture accumulates in an adaptive way and and um and

290
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it talks you know it's about cultural adaptation, about how cultures are smarter than any

291
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individual.

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Um We did the canoe and kayak example on the podcast a couple episodes ago.

293
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So we did the classic, Christina, just to let you know sort of what we talked about.

294
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And then you were thinking about the Sperbarian.

295
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Yes, and then on the other side of the pond, we have this sort of French or the Paris

296
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School of Cultural Evolution, uh, pioneered by Dan Sperber, um, uh, you know,

297
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currently uh uh put forward by you know people like Hugh Mercier, uh Nicolas Baumard, um

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uh, Pascal Boyer uh in in America.

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Um, and this approach uh is uh uh derives less from population genetics and more

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from epidemiology.

301
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So it looks at culture uh not necessarily as an engine of adaptation, but just

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as a spreader of representations.

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And in order to understand how these representations spread, you need a more detailed and

304
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thorough ex uh uh model of what's going on in the mind.

305
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So you need to know what ideas are sticky, what ideas are memorable, what ideas are

306
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counterintuitive or intuitive, and that helps you predict which um ideas or which

307
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representations are going to be stickier or going to persist.

308
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And and and it it's very much and it's it's more of a psychologically um informed

309
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approach than than the Boidean uh school of cultural evolution.

310
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Increasingly I I think they're they're beginning to merge and there's you know becoming

311
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less and less of a of a distinction between them.

312
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But um that is another piece of the puzzle.

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I guess I would add also um kind of across the pond as well, the kind of a British

314
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tradition that is also more grounded in animal behavior as well.

315
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And sometimes there's still some of their practitioners are in biology departments um that

316
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looks that um looks at social learning in non-human animals um

317
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and often goes is this a fair characterization but the like

318
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the the concept of niche construction the fact that that non-human animals as well kind of

319
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um socially learn or even if they are not socially learning they construct different

320
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niches, they change their environment in some ways that are parallel to the ways that

321
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humans change their environments and therefore are create new forces of selection.

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And the classic case of that would be um like a beaver dam, which actually now I feel

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bad.

324
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I don't know how socially learned that is.

325
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Is that do you just get to do that like totally with genetics?

326
00:19:40,180 --> 00:19:44,750
Yeah, no that's a good question adaptations as we joke I'm not that kind of doctor like I

327
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don't know I'm not sure what's be fascinating to look at being a little bit more if there's

328
00:19:48,910 --> 00:19:52,910
a beaver specialist listening please reach out we would love to have you on I would love to

329
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talk about I'd love to have a a beaver focused episode that would be fantastic but even if

330
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whichever its sources like it is a new and like those dams then create like new

331
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environments that shape um evolution and yeah So so both for that

332
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reason that new niches are created in the same way that culture in humans creates new

333
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niches.

334
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Um and for the reason that like social learning is just so prevalent in so many different

335
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species.

336
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There's also that kind of that focus of um research that's you know somewhere between

337
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comparative cognition and animal behavior and cultural evolution.

338
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Yeah.

339
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Yeah.

340
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When you you um yeah, we should have the Stu West folks out like Nikolai Morhani and Max

341
00:20:30,160 --> 00:20:33,010
Burton Jones out and just all kinds of people.

342
00:20:33,170 --> 00:20:39,090
Um, Christina, you worked with Rob Boyd and you you talked

343
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about sort of cultural evolution, human behavior ecology, and of psych.

344
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How do you think of yourself or no or how did you get to Rob Boyd?

345
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What was the I actually don't think I know this story.

346
00:20:48,530 --> 00:20:52,450
Oh my goodness, that's this is like just because I was such a naive undergraduate and I did

347
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an undergraduate.

348
00:20:53,330 --> 00:20:57,250
So this might be relevant to a lot of listeners, is like I did an undergraduate degree in a

349
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place that was did not have evolutionary social sciences.

350
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And it was yeah.

351
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I was at yeah, I was at Berkeley and in fact like all of the biological evolution um

352
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anthropologists had kind of been kicked out of that department.

353
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So then I just kind of pieced together classes that from different fields from psychology,

354
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from anthropology.

355
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I actually did a double major with psych and anthro, but from biology as well, that had

356
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something to do with human evolution.

357
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Um and then I just started trying, I forgot how I how I found them, but I just found like

358
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the the universities in the world that had those um those

359
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fields well represented.

360
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And you know, UCLA and um came out as one that did have a lot of um

361
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expertise and I actually did like that at UCLA there were people who are more

362
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psychologically and uh focused and also ones who are more anthropologically and cultural

363
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evolutionarily focused.

364
00:21:51,740 --> 00:21:56,060
Um but yeah it's it's it was almost like an accident of history because I didn't really

365
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know what I was getting myself into.

366
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Um and then like how I identify today.

367
00:21:59,980 --> 00:22:04,300
I don't I usually just say I'm an evolutionary anthropologist because it's like so

368
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inclusive.

369
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And I'm in an anthropology department.

370
00:22:08,940 --> 00:22:13,510
But but that can mean that I study like Homo erectus fossils, which I definitely don't.

371
00:22:13,830 --> 00:22:15,350
Although Homo erectus is awesome.

372
00:22:15,510 --> 00:22:17,670
Maybe you guys could have some Palio people if I do.

373
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If if if somebody gave you a fossil, you would be happy to look at it.

374
00:22:21,670 --> 00:22:24,070
But I teach about it actually.

375
00:22:26,630 --> 00:22:29,110
But it's not my it's not not my expertise.

376
00:22:29,350 --> 00:22:30,070
Right, right.

377
00:22:30,230 --> 00:22:36,150
Um, what what um so when you got to UCLA and like how and

378
00:22:36,280 --> 00:22:39,960
and you don't have we can like edit this or you cut it out like what was the training like

379
00:22:39,960 --> 00:22:42,040
with Rob Boyd and Pete Richardson?

380
00:22:42,200 --> 00:22:45,320
Um and you're the first sort of representative from that.

381
00:22:45,480 --> 00:22:47,720
And you know, I've had lovely conversations with both of them.

382
00:22:47,800 --> 00:22:48,680
They've been wonderful.

383
00:22:48,840 --> 00:22:50,280
I've gotten to know them more.

384
00:22:50,440 --> 00:22:53,080
Um what was it like sort of in that?

385
00:22:53,240 --> 00:22:57,640
Um we've had a bunch of CP people on, but we haven't had a lot of UCLA folks on.

386
00:22:57,880 --> 00:23:03,830
What was the what was the feeling there and sort of what was like when you show up and what

387
00:23:03,830 --> 00:23:08,470
you start to study and maybe this can be a segue also into like what your your in your day

388
00:23:08,470 --> 00:23:13,110
job sort of thinking not just about like these broad field wide things but sort of what you

389
00:23:13,110 --> 00:23:15,990
study um and what you're really passionate about.

390
00:23:16,150 --> 00:23:21,270
Um yeah either scientifically or sort of personally what was it like to sort of start there

391
00:23:21,430 --> 00:23:26,630
and what was what was the trajectory sort of for you um uh there

392
00:23:28,140 --> 00:23:32,460
so it I wish I could recreate that environment because it was so intellectually

393
00:23:32,460 --> 00:23:33,020
stimulating.

394
00:23:33,180 --> 00:23:38,940
Like we had weekly, it was a community of um people who studied evolution of human

395
00:23:38,940 --> 00:23:40,540
behavior and cognition.

396
00:23:40,780 --> 00:23:46,380
Um so Clark Barrett, Zan Fessler, uh Rob Boyd was there, were there, and then

397
00:23:46,380 --> 00:23:48,620
several behaviorally oriented primatologists.

398
00:23:48,700 --> 00:23:51,660
So Susan Perry, Joe Manson, and Joan Silk.

399
00:23:51,820 --> 00:23:54,450
They were kind of the core when I first got there.

400
00:23:54,610 --> 00:23:56,850
Some people have um since joined.

401
00:23:57,250 --> 00:24:01,890
And we would have weekly speaker series that would bring people from all sorts of different

402
00:24:01,890 --> 00:24:06,290
fields, like across the social sciences, across the natural sciences, some people in the

403
00:24:06,290 --> 00:24:06,850
humanities.

404
00:24:07,010 --> 00:24:10,290
Like it was just really a rich intellectual environment.

405
00:24:10,450 --> 00:24:16,360
And we would also have a seminar that every um fall

406
00:24:16,520 --> 00:24:20,840
all of those faculty, it was like an amazing faculty to student ratio, right?

407
00:24:21,320 --> 00:24:24,120
Would give us feedback on what we were up to.

408
00:24:24,440 --> 00:24:30,120
And then we also had a really good um kind of culture of engaging

409
00:24:30,280 --> 00:24:34,280
just kind of on a regular basis, um, kind of informally and socially.

410
00:24:34,440 --> 00:24:40,310
And so just having so many different people who are focusing on evolutionary approaches to

411
00:24:40,310 --> 00:24:46,310
behavior, including across some species, was really stimulating to the

412
00:24:46,310 --> 00:24:52,070
point that like it didn't particularly feel like I was any one particular person's

413
00:24:52,070 --> 00:24:52,710
student.

414
00:24:53,270 --> 00:24:59,190
Um and and of course it like became more relevant as like, but but the expectation was that

415
00:24:59,190 --> 00:25:03,190
we would take seminar, like whenever those people would offer seminars, the expectation was

416
00:25:03,190 --> 00:25:06,070
that if we could make it, we would try to make those people seminars.

417
00:25:06,380 --> 00:25:08,540
um for graduate students.

418
00:25:08,780 --> 00:25:13,980
Um and then of course as we got into more the nitty-gritty of like each particular like a

419
00:25:13,980 --> 00:25:19,180
dissertation topic we'd start talking more to um and have like yeah

420
00:25:19,340 --> 00:25:24,060
committees that were more focused, but we would still be getting all of that feedback from

421
00:25:24,300 --> 00:25:27,180
these kind of structure, these institutional structures.

422
00:25:27,260 --> 00:25:28,460
So that was really great.

423
00:25:29,730 --> 00:25:34,770
it was a very supportive um community but it like each faculty also had like very different

424
00:25:34,770 --> 00:25:39,410
advising style so i don't know when when when did you get your PhD there

425
00:25:40,210 --> 00:25:46,130
2012 oh we just missed each other I started in 2013 okay

426
00:25:46,450 --> 00:25:49,970
so we just because you're because you're describing your experiences it was like I had the

427
00:25:49,970 --> 00:25:54,260
same experience uh at UCLA as well uh in that environment.

428
00:25:54,420 --> 00:25:58,180
I I was actually in the psychology department, but I was sort of considered an honorary

429
00:25:58,180 --> 00:26:02,100
anthropologist because I spent way more time with uh with the anthropology people than with

430
00:26:02,100 --> 00:26:06,500
the psychology people just because there was more evolution happening in the anthropology

431
00:26:06,500 --> 00:26:06,820
department.

432
00:26:06,900 --> 00:26:11,780
And so yeah, I also got to experience that, you know, diversity of different perspectives

433
00:26:11,780 --> 00:26:16,020
and and the and the richness of you know the the faculty member is uh it was it was a

434
00:26:16,020 --> 00:26:17,620
really cool uh experience.

435
00:26:18,150 --> 00:26:20,310
Yeah, and they have it's it just seems like it keeps growing.

436
00:26:20,390 --> 00:26:21,510
I don't know how they do that.

437
00:26:21,910 --> 00:26:22,070
Yeah.

438
00:26:22,790 --> 00:26:26,710
We David did mention though, he talked to Dan Fessler and he was like, This whole like, you

439
00:26:26,710 --> 00:26:28,470
know, field work thing, do I actually have to do it?

440
00:26:28,630 --> 00:26:29,590
And Dan was like, Yep.

441
00:26:29,750 --> 00:26:32,070
And David is like, Nope, not for me.

442
00:26:33,350 --> 00:26:39,110
I do it I do wonder about that, like who gets attracted to different fields based on kind

443
00:26:39,110 --> 00:26:42,660
of the expectations and um yeah, I don't know.

444
00:26:42,820 --> 00:26:48,580
I I do think fieldwork is really valuable, and uh I just don't want to do it myself.

445
00:26:48,900 --> 00:26:49,700
Yeah, yeah.

446
00:26:49,780 --> 00:26:51,060
I but it is really hard.

447
00:26:51,140 --> 00:26:55,220
Like, I think there's a bit of like a taboo in anthropology to talk about like the

448
00:26:55,220 --> 00:27:00,260
difficulties of field work, um, because it might mean that like you're not cut out for it,

449
00:27:00,340 --> 00:27:04,580
or you're not strong enough, or you're not being socially gracious enough, and it is like I

450
00:27:04,660 --> 00:27:06,820
I at least my experiences have been quite difficult.

451
00:27:06,980 --> 00:27:11,830
Um, and so but I don't want to dissuade people from doing it because it is I think a

452
00:27:11,830 --> 00:27:16,230
necessary part of uh a robust evolutionary social science, right?

453
00:27:16,470 --> 00:27:16,550
Yeah.

454
00:27:16,710 --> 00:27:16,870
Yeah.

455
00:27:16,950 --> 00:27:21,270
I almost want to like say thank you for your service whenever we have an anthropologist on

456
00:27:21,350 --> 00:27:23,910
like I have that impulse like I can't believe you're doing this.

457
00:27:23,990 --> 00:27:27,590
Yeah and I'm sitting here in the comfort of my home in Los Angeles.

458
00:27:27,750 --> 00:27:29,110
Like I I feel so guilty.

459
00:27:29,190 --> 00:27:29,510
I don't know.

460
00:27:29,830 --> 00:27:35,430
Especially in especially in like the especially in the low latitude, like does like very

461
00:27:35,430 --> 00:27:41,140
high like pathogen parasite load places where like the like I cre I mean

462
00:27:41,300 --> 00:27:45,140
like people just like at these conferences like pulling up their shirts comparing their

463
00:27:45,140 --> 00:27:48,420
scars for where you know like a worm ate into their torso.

464
00:27:48,740 --> 00:27:51,220
Sorry if people are eating while we're they're listening to this.

465
00:27:51,300 --> 00:27:55,060
But I mean to be honest and frank, like I actually chose where I work.

466
00:27:55,220 --> 00:27:59,860
So I you know I started I wanted to work on ethnolinguistic boundaries and kind of that's

467
00:27:59,860 --> 00:28:05,770
something like all all um primates, you could think of all primates living in some kind of

468
00:28:05,770 --> 00:28:09,930
group, even if there's some solitary ones, but most of them have some social grouping.

469
00:28:10,010 --> 00:28:12,970
But we're pretty weird in that we have these like ethno-linguistic boundaries.

470
00:28:13,050 --> 00:28:17,210
And that's what motivated me to do field work in a place where like ethno-linguistic

471
00:28:17,210 --> 00:28:19,610
boundaries were quite different from the ones we see in the US.

472
00:28:19,770 --> 00:28:24,810
Like there's so much social psychology on like ethno-racial taxonomy in the US, but that's

473
00:28:24,810 --> 00:28:26,410
a pretty weird system, right?

474
00:28:26,730 --> 00:28:30,920
Um, but you could go to a lot of places to study ethnolinguistic boundaries that are

475
00:28:30,920 --> 00:28:31,320
interesting.

476
00:28:31,400 --> 00:28:34,440
And I definitely chose one that was above the mosquito line.

477
00:28:34,520 --> 00:28:35,400
I'm not gonna lie.

478
00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:40,360
So I have very little oxygen where I work in the Peruvian altiplano.

479
00:28:40,680 --> 00:28:45,720
It's at like 13,000 feet above sea level, um, or through 3,800 meters.

480
00:28:45,880 --> 00:28:51,150
I don't know who your audience is, but there are no mosquitoes and that's really valuable

481
00:28:51,230 --> 00:28:51,470
to me.

482
00:28:51,710 --> 00:28:56,110
But I to me like the difficulty is actually like the social difficulty more than like the

483
00:28:56,110 --> 00:28:56,990
environmental.

484
00:28:57,230 --> 00:28:57,390
Yeah.

485
00:28:57,550 --> 00:29:00,830
Uh do you when you when you come back from the field site, do you feel like s like a

486
00:29:00,830 --> 00:29:01,470
superhero?

487
00:29:01,550 --> 00:29:04,190
Like you can just run around when you get to some level, yeah.

488
00:29:04,750 --> 00:29:10,350
I have I when I was at UCLA I would swim sometimes with do you know do you guys know

489
00:29:10,350 --> 00:29:11,150
Andreas Vilki?

490
00:29:11,230 --> 00:29:11,790
He's also an opposite.

491
00:29:12,030 --> 00:29:12,190
Of course.

492
00:29:12,750 --> 00:29:13,870
Oh yeah, Andreas Andreas.

493
00:29:14,030 --> 00:29:17,320
Well well, I I I I have a lot to say about Andreas, but I'll just shut up and let you tell

494
00:29:17,320 --> 00:29:17,640
your story.

495
00:29:18,040 --> 00:29:19,240
Can I shame him online?

496
00:29:19,720 --> 00:29:20,680
You could cut this if you're not sure.

497
00:29:21,880 --> 00:29:23,320
Hi Andreas, good and talk.

498
00:29:24,440 --> 00:29:29,000
So he's a really large, strong German with very little hair.

499
00:29:29,080 --> 00:29:31,320
And so which is important for the swimming part, right?

500
00:29:31,400 --> 00:29:33,400
Like you know, hydrodynamic.

501
00:29:33,640 --> 00:29:39,320
And usually like it wasn't a competitive endeavor because there's like Norway that I can

502
00:29:39,720 --> 00:29:40,680
um beat him.

503
00:29:40,840 --> 00:29:46,770
But it's not that I was stronger after coming up down to sea level from um

504
00:29:46,930 --> 00:29:49,970
the high altitude it's that I could stay underwater for longer.

505
00:29:50,450 --> 00:29:51,090
Oh nice.

506
00:29:51,250 --> 00:29:52,930
So you just you just beat Andreas.

507
00:29:53,170 --> 00:29:53,250
Yeah.

508
00:29:53,650 --> 00:29:56,450
I don't know that he knows that I beat him, but I was keeping track.

509
00:29:56,930 --> 00:29:57,730
Now he does, yeah.

510
00:29:57,890 --> 00:29:58,290
Yeah.

511
00:29:58,610 --> 00:30:00,770
Yeah the ox the hemoglobin's amazing.

512
00:30:01,250 --> 00:30:01,730
Fantastic.

513
00:30:01,890 --> 00:30:07,860
Um uh can you tell us a little bit about um so ethnolinguistic boundaries are

514
00:30:07,940 --> 00:30:08,420
super interesting.

515
00:30:08,500 --> 00:30:12,260
We just had Brenda Bowser on talking about that with Schwar Achwa or Qichwa.

516
00:30:12,740 --> 00:30:16,820
Um I my ignorance is overwhelming, so apologies.

517
00:30:17,060 --> 00:30:22,260
But um that's a really interesting issue and question.

518
00:30:22,340 --> 00:30:24,260
And there's also the field site.

519
00:30:24,340 --> 00:30:29,940
Um, can you tell us a little bit about like how did you so you get to UCLA, there's all

520
00:30:29,940 --> 00:30:31,150
this, all these people.

521
00:30:31,310 --> 00:30:32,190
Like, what is it like?

522
00:30:32,270 --> 00:30:33,630
Or how do you pick a field site?

523
00:30:33,710 --> 00:30:35,230
Like, I don't I actually don't know any of this.

524
00:30:35,390 --> 00:30:41,070
Like, can you where do you go from like you're walking around, is it Haynes Hall and UCLA,

525
00:30:41,230 --> 00:30:44,350
you know, doing doing stuff in Southern California?

526
00:30:44,910 --> 00:30:48,990
How do you get to Peru and study ethnolinguistic groups?

527
00:30:49,310 --> 00:30:51,150
I think everybody has a slightly different path.

528
00:30:51,310 --> 00:30:55,940
I was lucky that actually an undergraduate I mentioned there weren't evolutionary social

529
00:30:56,020 --> 00:31:00,580
scientists, but I was lucky that I worked with some archaeologists, um, Christine Hassorf,

530
00:31:00,660 --> 00:31:05,220
who um helped me get to the Peruvian ultiplanetary, like help with archaeological and some

531
00:31:05,220 --> 00:31:06,500
ethno-archaeological field work.

532
00:31:06,660 --> 00:31:10,260
So I did some interviews in undergraduate in the Bolivian on the Bolivian side of the

533
00:31:10,260 --> 00:31:11,060
boundary.

534
00:31:11,300 --> 00:31:17,220
And I had, you know, I had read some on also some ethnolinguistic boundaries in Panama

535
00:31:17,540 --> 00:31:19,540
that I thought would be interesting to study.

536
00:31:19,620 --> 00:31:24,790
Um, but I ended up, you know, it's I I will admit that like the fact that

537
00:31:24,790 --> 00:31:29,590
mosquitoes much more really love me and much more common where I would have been working in

538
00:31:29,590 --> 00:31:33,030
Panama did play a role in saying, like, well, actually the ethnolinguistic boundary between

539
00:31:33,030 --> 00:31:35,990
Kachwanaymara speakers sounds pretty interesting.

540
00:31:36,150 --> 00:31:42,150
And I was also lucky that there were um not social science or or not ethnographers who are

541
00:31:42,150 --> 00:31:47,030
working in that area, but archaeologists at UCLA who worked in that area where I wanted to

542
00:31:47,030 --> 00:31:49,510
work with Ketchwanaymara speakers.

543
00:31:49,800 --> 00:31:54,280
So I did have a little bit of previous experience knowing that I would be, you know,

544
00:31:54,440 --> 00:31:57,640
environmentally comfortable enough in that area.

545
00:31:57,800 --> 00:32:00,200
Um, and that there was like something interesting to study there.

546
00:32:00,280 --> 00:32:06,200
And there's was very little previous work done on interactions, at least definitely no

547
00:32:06,200 --> 00:32:09,960
evolutionary work done on interactions between Ketchuna and Mara speakers, but I don't

548
00:32:09,960 --> 00:32:11,560
think that's the great barometer.

549
00:32:11,640 --> 00:32:17,590
But more generally, like we're relatively little um kind of anthropological work um done in

550
00:32:17,590 --> 00:32:18,230
that area.

551
00:32:18,390 --> 00:32:21,270
So yeah, I was cool.

552
00:32:21,750 --> 00:32:26,230
It was a confluence of convenience, having good social connections, and then it being an

553
00:32:26,230 --> 00:32:29,110
appropriate place to study the questions that I wanted to study.

554
00:32:29,350 --> 00:32:29,510
Yeah.

555
00:32:29,590 --> 00:32:31,030
And what what can you set up?

556
00:32:31,110 --> 00:32:32,630
Like what is the scientific question?

557
00:32:33,030 --> 00:32:33,990
Rationale, right.

558
00:32:34,310 --> 00:32:40,230
So I want for my dissertation, I wanted to know whether actually it c it comes back

559
00:32:40,230 --> 00:32:41,350
to priors a bit.

560
00:32:41,590 --> 00:32:46,820
Like I wanted to know if humans kind of had genetically evolved priors for

561
00:32:47,780 --> 00:32:53,700
thinking about, learning about certain kinds of social groups that were present in

562
00:32:53,700 --> 00:32:57,220
humans and we know not present in our closest relatives.

563
00:32:57,380 --> 00:33:02,500
And those are symbolically marked groups of people that oftentimes share

564
00:33:02,900 --> 00:33:07,070
cultural traits, oftentimes are marked by linguistic boundaries.

565
00:33:07,310 --> 00:33:10,910
That was another reason why Dave and I have talked a lot because Dave, I think, has showed

566
00:33:11,070 --> 00:33:16,590
has you done some research to suggest that, yeah, maybe, maybe it looks like humans are

567
00:33:16,590 --> 00:33:20,510
thinking about language in a way that's fundamental language differences, linguistic

568
00:33:20,510 --> 00:33:24,830
differences in a way that's fundamentally different to the way that we think about race and

569
00:33:24,830 --> 00:33:25,870
coalitions.

570
00:33:26,190 --> 00:33:26,830
Right.

571
00:33:27,070 --> 00:33:33,060
And so I that in the American context, the

572
00:33:33,220 --> 00:33:37,460
those boundaries that we, that like sociologists, that social psychologists tend to look at

573
00:33:37,540 --> 00:33:42,500
between like African American and European American and Hispanic and Hispanic of various

574
00:33:42,500 --> 00:33:48,420
kinds and Asian American, they're just, I mean, that like all boundaries are

575
00:33:48,420 --> 00:33:52,820
complex, but these have been really studied and they confound a lot of different processes,

576
00:33:52,900 --> 00:33:57,870
including the fact that They're the result of long-distance,

577
00:33:58,030 --> 00:34:02,750
oftentimes forcible or self-selected migrations

578
00:34:04,030 --> 00:34:09,870
that then come with incredible economic differences and power differentials

579
00:34:09,870 --> 00:34:11,390
between and then get perpetuated.

580
00:34:11,470 --> 00:34:15,150
And these power differentials get perpetuated by institutional structures.

581
00:34:16,110 --> 00:34:21,960
There is residential segregation, but like in a very weird kind

582
00:34:21,960 --> 00:34:22,920
of way, right?

583
00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:28,920
Like sometimes it's um because of policies like red mining, like it's it, it's it's

584
00:34:29,000 --> 00:34:33,800
not um, but sometimes it's because of like the patterns of migration.

585
00:34:34,120 --> 00:34:39,530
So it's it's kind of unlike most of the boundaries that we think were

586
00:34:39,610 --> 00:34:42,810
probably important for human evolutionary history, right?

587
00:34:43,050 --> 00:34:43,210
Right.

588
00:34:43,370 --> 00:34:47,290
So just just to interrupt, so basically if you're walking around or driving around or

589
00:34:47,290 --> 00:34:52,570
traveling around the United States, for example, or sort of North America, most of North

590
00:34:52,570 --> 00:34:58,170
America, and the relationship that people see between language and social interaction, or

591
00:34:58,170 --> 00:35:03,680
sort of what the groups look like, the ideas that that, if that's your intuition for sort

592
00:35:03,680 --> 00:35:09,200
of basing the full range of human experience or what a linguistically marked

593
00:35:09,200 --> 00:35:15,200
group is, the idea is that that's you're a little bit in trouble because we there's a very

594
00:35:15,200 --> 00:35:16,720
particular history.

595
00:35:17,120 --> 00:35:17,360
Right.

596
00:35:17,600 --> 00:35:20,640
And everybody, you know, I don't want to presume that like I'm working with

597
00:35:20,640 --> 00:35:21,600
agropastoralists.

598
00:35:21,680 --> 00:35:24,560
They're a sedentary, they're ag agricultural societies.

599
00:35:24,720 --> 00:35:28,210
Like I don't want to presume that this is the type of the type of boundary that like

600
00:35:28,370 --> 00:35:30,210
represents human Paleolithic.

601
00:35:30,290 --> 00:35:31,810
Like that doesn't really make sense either.

602
00:35:31,970 --> 00:35:34,530
Um, but it is quite different in important ways, right?

603
00:35:34,690 --> 00:35:38,610
They have been so Ketchua and IMAR speakers, they are speaking totally mutually

604
00:35:38,610 --> 00:35:41,410
unintelligible languages, which is also quite interesting.

605
00:35:41,570 --> 00:35:46,050
But they're languages that, as far as we can tell, um, have been in touch with each other

606
00:35:46,050 --> 00:35:47,490
for centuries.

607
00:35:48,050 --> 00:35:51,250
And nobody, yeah, they've mutually influenced each other.

608
00:35:51,410 --> 00:35:56,580
Um, and nobody in the area where I work is like, oh, we've been here longer and you guys

609
00:35:56,580 --> 00:35:59,940
are recent migrants and maybe you don't belong and maybe you should go back to where you

610
00:35:59,940 --> 00:36:00,340
come from.

611
00:36:00,420 --> 00:36:04,420
Like that's not a part of the rhetoric because for a time immemorial, obviously everybody

612
00:36:04,420 --> 00:36:08,340
comes from somewhere, but like for time immemorial, like they've been in that place.

613
00:36:08,980 --> 00:36:14,580
Um, the power differentials are also um not like

614
00:36:14,820 --> 00:36:20,310
pretty much minimal compared to the power differentials that exist between like indigenous

615
00:36:20,310 --> 00:36:24,390
people and more mestizo or urban or market-integrated people.

616
00:36:24,470 --> 00:36:28,710
Like that's really kind of the source of status and power differences in that society.

617
00:36:28,950 --> 00:36:34,070
So it's not to say that power doesn't matter, but it's just not super highly correlated

618
00:36:34,070 --> 00:36:36,230
with being ketchup my speaking.

619
00:36:36,470 --> 00:36:38,680
Or at least it's a different all right.

620
00:36:38,760 --> 00:36:43,640
So like minimally I think we could all agree that at least it represents some other part of

621
00:36:43,640 --> 00:36:49,400
like the vast diversity that um human social boundaries uh

622
00:36:49,960 --> 00:36:52,920
yeah, represented in human social boundaries.

623
00:36:53,160 --> 00:36:57,480
But maybe we could easily even be a little go a little bit further to say that like the

624
00:36:57,480 --> 00:37:02,440
lower status differentials, the fact that there aren't phenotypic differences like that are

625
00:37:02,440 --> 00:37:06,910
not cultural, like you know, marked morphological differences between Ketra and AMR

626
00:37:07,150 --> 00:37:08,830
speakers that are important to them.

627
00:37:08,990 --> 00:37:14,830
Um, and that one of them isn't like a recent migrant and the other one's not like a

628
00:37:15,230 --> 00:37:20,990
kind of a host, that those might be informative for some kinds of

629
00:37:20,990 --> 00:37:23,550
boundaries that are important to human evolution.

630
00:37:23,950 --> 00:37:24,270
Right.

631
00:37:24,430 --> 00:37:24,910
Yeah.

632
00:37:25,230 --> 00:37:29,940
So it it's a really interesting set of distinctions you made between sort of the the group

633
00:37:29,940 --> 00:37:34,740
dynamics that we see uh in the US, for example, and the group dynamics that you see in the

634
00:37:34,740 --> 00:37:36,420
communities you study.

635
00:37:36,580 --> 00:37:42,500
So uh here are we have, you know, a a strong correlation between group and class.

636
00:37:42,740 --> 00:37:42,980
Right.

637
00:37:43,220 --> 00:37:49,220
Uh we have this immigrant native dynamic as well, and you throw in um the dynamics

638
00:37:49,220 --> 00:37:52,340
of political coalitions and how different ethnic groups are associated with different

639
00:37:52,340 --> 00:37:56,770
political coalitions, uh, and you get a kind of volatile mix um that can perpetuate

640
00:37:57,170 --> 00:37:59,730
conflict stereotypes, animosity, and so forth.

641
00:38:00,930 --> 00:38:06,690
In the communities you study, insofar as there is conflict and animosity, if

642
00:38:06,690 --> 00:38:10,770
it's not coming from the sources that we're familiar with here, where you know, where it's

643
00:38:10,770 --> 00:38:16,530
like conflicts over social class, you know, natives versus immigrants, um, conflicts over

644
00:38:16,530 --> 00:38:20,180
political power, and so forth, if it's not coming from there, then where is it coming from?

645
00:38:20,340 --> 00:38:25,540
What what do you think uh is uh is the source of of the intergroup hostility, uh if there

646
00:38:25,540 --> 00:38:25,940
is any?

647
00:38:26,500 --> 00:38:30,340
So where I work there isn't that much intergroup hostility, which is also quite nice.

648
00:38:30,580 --> 00:38:36,500
But there but there is, but there is, but it's not so um it's like these are not

649
00:38:36,500 --> 00:38:37,140
at war.

650
00:38:37,380 --> 00:38:43,050
Um but but um in recent memory, and to some extent now, there are like land

651
00:38:43,050 --> 00:38:47,450
conflicts that don't don't result in like war or anything like that or raiding.

652
00:38:47,610 --> 00:38:52,730
Um, but there are land conflicts, and those tend to be like the the organizational

653
00:38:52,730 --> 00:38:58,650
structures that um kind of rural altipano people have for dealing with those land

654
00:38:58,650 --> 00:39:01,370
conflicts are usually at the community level.

655
00:39:01,540 --> 00:39:01,860
right?

656
00:39:02,020 --> 00:39:06,020
So it's like, what is the boundary of this community versus this other community?

657
00:39:06,180 --> 00:39:11,460
And they can call on other members of their community oftentimes to like help

658
00:39:12,020 --> 00:39:15,140
um deal with those kinds of conflicts.

659
00:39:15,300 --> 00:39:21,060
Um but the big conflicts are again like something not around in the Paleolithic.

660
00:39:21,220 --> 00:39:25,700
The big conflicts are with like the massive power differentials with the state and the

661
00:39:25,700 --> 00:39:31,470
urban people that um kind of are represented um by I

662
00:39:31,470 --> 00:39:35,870
mean, I don't it is a bit of a it is a racialized let me see, how should I say this?

663
00:39:35,950 --> 00:39:39,630
There there is a morphological variation that's associated with this.

664
00:39:39,710 --> 00:39:44,590
Like a hundred percent the people who are wealthier in Peru tend to be less ancestrally

665
00:39:44,590 --> 00:39:48,270
indigenous, for example, like have more European ancestry.

666
00:39:48,430 --> 00:39:53,550
And this is something very common in Latin America, which is really striking, like every

667
00:39:53,550 --> 00:39:59,460
time you look at uh TV that shows like the centers of power and

668
00:39:59,460 --> 00:40:05,060
who is elite culturally in a society, they're like so unrepresentative of the kind of

669
00:40:05,060 --> 00:40:07,700
diversity of Latin American societies.

670
00:40:07,860 --> 00:40:10,260
Um, and in Peru that's very striking.

671
00:40:10,420 --> 00:40:15,750
So you get very, very white, like European ancestry-looking people kind of representing the

672
00:40:15,750 --> 00:40:17,110
elites of Peruvian society.

673
00:40:17,190 --> 00:40:22,870
And people in increasingly have like access to TVs and satellites and phones in the rural

674
00:40:22,870 --> 00:40:23,110
area.

675
00:40:23,190 --> 00:40:24,150
So they know that.

676
00:40:25,030 --> 00:40:31,030
But it is complicated by the fact that there it's not a super racialized boundary.

677
00:40:31,190 --> 00:40:37,030
Traditionally, like in Peruvian society and in the Andes, like moving to the

678
00:40:37,030 --> 00:40:42,800
cities and losing your indigenous language capacity is seen as like a

679
00:40:42,960 --> 00:40:46,000
a form of ethnic change in a sense.

680
00:40:46,160 --> 00:40:46,400
And important.

681
00:40:46,880 --> 00:40:50,560
But is it seen as like a betrayal to your to your it can.

682
00:40:50,640 --> 00:40:55,120
It seems like it does cause some like both admiration and resentment is my sense of that,

683
00:40:55,200 --> 00:40:55,440
right?

684
00:40:55,520 --> 00:41:01,440
There's like envy that goes along with it, but also um admiration because frankly, like a

685
00:41:01,440 --> 00:41:06,480
lot of people want to be able to live in the bigger cities in Lima or Arequipa, or maybe

686
00:41:06,480 --> 00:41:09,280
even Huliaca, which is like a more local big city.

687
00:41:09,440 --> 00:41:15,370
Like so there's so much um yeah pr desire to have your

688
00:41:15,370 --> 00:41:19,770
students like your kids educated be good students and then have a good job.

689
00:41:19,930 --> 00:41:23,290
Like everybody aspires to that even if it's not attainable.

690
00:41:24,490 --> 00:41:29,130
So it's almost like what you're saying is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that

691
00:41:29,130 --> 00:41:34,980
there is a difference between the ethnolinguistic divides and the

692
00:41:34,980 --> 00:41:37,620
divides that actually create conflict and hostility.

693
00:41:38,180 --> 00:41:41,860
So when you have an ethno-linguistic divide, that doesn't necessarily lead to animosity.

694
00:41:42,100 --> 00:41:45,860
What leads to animosity is is something that we'd actually be more familiar with as

695
00:41:45,860 --> 00:41:51,620
Westerners, like a conflict over land or territory, or a conflict between high status and

696
00:41:51,620 --> 00:41:55,460
low status, or or groups' relative uh positions in a in a social hierarchy.

697
00:41:55,620 --> 00:41:59,860
That those are really the drivers of conflicts, not ethnolinguistic differences per se.

698
00:41:59,940 --> 00:42:01,390
Aaron Powell I think that's fair.

699
00:42:01,470 --> 00:42:06,030
And I think that we see, you know, I'm not the first person to say that you're we're not

700
00:42:06,030 --> 00:42:07,630
the first people to highlight that.

701
00:42:07,790 --> 00:42:13,470
Um, but it could like, I guess the question that remains in my mind, and I'm not sure that

702
00:42:13,470 --> 00:42:18,190
I've resolved this for myself or that I have a s very strong belief, is like, does it be

703
00:42:18,350 --> 00:42:23,550
does the fact that a boundary is ethno-linguistic or culturally structured make it more

704
00:42:23,550 --> 00:42:29,070
plausible that that conflict arise or exacerbate the conflict once it does arise?

705
00:42:29,320 --> 00:42:33,480
And I think we can't really answer that question with one case study.

706
00:42:33,560 --> 00:42:39,080
Like that's a type of work that requires kind of multi-sided comparative research.

707
00:42:39,720 --> 00:42:44,760
But yeah, like we, you know, we've seen in the Balkans, for example, some boundaries that

708
00:42:44,760 --> 00:42:47,960
do matter that are, or in that case, it's amazing.

709
00:42:48,040 --> 00:42:52,440
Like there is barely an ethnolinguistic boundary, and yet people really fight over it.

710
00:42:52,600 --> 00:42:58,590
And in other places like Switzerland, where language has divided people or people are

711
00:42:58,590 --> 00:43:00,510
very multi multilingual in Switzerland.

712
00:43:00,590 --> 00:43:05,070
They have four official languages, but it has, you know, the Swiss identity overrides that

713
00:43:05,070 --> 00:43:09,470
linguistic variation and been a pretty stable nation state for centuries.

714
00:43:09,630 --> 00:43:15,390
So I don't know, I still don't know if it, you know, just by virtue of, for example,

715
00:43:15,470 --> 00:43:21,230
like inhibiting communication or meet or when it's when it's a more structured

716
00:43:21,240 --> 00:43:26,120
ethnic boundary where there are more cultural norms that are different between each other

717
00:43:26,280 --> 00:43:30,600
between each other, which is not so much the case among Ketra and Aymar, where I work.

718
00:43:30,680 --> 00:43:34,600
Where like at the very local level where I work, Ketra and Aymara speakers are pretty

719
00:43:34,600 --> 00:43:35,800
similar culturally.

720
00:43:35,960 --> 00:43:40,040
And so that also probably mitigates conflict, be my guess.

721
00:43:40,120 --> 00:43:44,120
But but I think it is possible that like with more cultural variation, then it just becomes

722
00:43:44,200 --> 00:43:47,640
like harder to coordinate with each other and come to agreement.

723
00:43:47,720 --> 00:43:52,290
So I think that's possible, but I think it hasn't really been totally demonstrated.

724
00:43:52,610 --> 00:43:52,770
Yeah.

725
00:43:52,930 --> 00:43:58,770
Just for sort of the uh people like me who are slow to catch up, sort of, um, or for people

726
00:43:58,770 --> 00:44:02,850
who may not know, like what is the so you talked about Ketchuaimara.

727
00:44:03,330 --> 00:44:08,290
Um what is the relationship between them other than not super con conflictual or like

728
00:44:08,370 --> 00:44:09,410
you're in a a field site.

729
00:44:09,490 --> 00:44:11,730
Can you just like walk us through like do they live different places?

730
00:44:11,810 --> 00:44:12,850
Like I don't I don't know anything.

731
00:44:12,930 --> 00:44:13,090
Yeah.

732
00:44:13,410 --> 00:44:13,890
Right, right, right.

733
00:44:13,970 --> 00:44:16,300
So they so there is a boundary.

734
00:44:16,380 --> 00:44:22,300
They if you're in rural community, that's maybe let's say um a community of

735
00:44:22,380 --> 00:44:28,380
let's say 20 to a hundred families, let's say those tend to be only Ketra

736
00:44:28,540 --> 00:44:32,860
speaking or only Aymara speaking, with like a handful of people, like especially younger

737
00:44:32,860 --> 00:44:37,420
people who have maybe migrated in at marriage, like that married across that language

738
00:44:37,420 --> 00:44:38,060
boundary.

739
00:44:38,540 --> 00:44:43,580
But then there are these towns, like the one that I did my dissertation in Wata Sani, is

740
00:44:43,660 --> 00:44:48,750
like a town where it's pretty split because there's that's kind of a stepping stone of

741
00:44:48,750 --> 00:44:50,670
rural to urban migration.

742
00:44:50,830 --> 00:44:56,190
Um you can have some um yes everybody kind of has does some

743
00:44:56,190 --> 00:45:01,710
agriculture and some pastoralism, but you can also have your little shop there or you can

744
00:45:01,710 --> 00:45:04,910
make it easier for your kids to go to the high school which is in town.

745
00:45:05,150 --> 00:45:06,750
And there it's much more mixed.

746
00:45:06,830 --> 00:45:12,180
The high school when I was working there had about 70% of its students were Ketra speaking

747
00:45:12,260 --> 00:45:14,500
and 30% were MR speaking.

748
00:45:15,140 --> 00:45:20,900
And then you have these opportunities to go to even larger market towns, where, for

749
00:45:20,900 --> 00:45:26,820
example, Wangane is the nearest market town that everybody in this area would go to

750
00:45:26,820 --> 00:45:30,740
pretty regularly, once a week or every two weeks.

751
00:45:31,060 --> 00:45:37,010
And that is squarely on the Aymara speaking side of the boundary, but people from both

752
00:45:37,010 --> 00:45:38,370
sides of the boundary go.

753
00:45:38,530 --> 00:45:44,370
And then you have even a larger city that's about um an hour and a half uh

754
00:45:44,610 --> 00:45:46,690
bus ride away called Huliaka.

755
00:45:47,170 --> 00:45:52,290
And again, it's a because it's a center of urban rural migration, it's just very heavily

756
00:45:52,290 --> 00:45:58,180
mixed between Quechua and Aymara speakers, and of course, increasingly um just uh Spanish

757
00:45:58,180 --> 00:46:00,260
monolingual speakers as well.

758
00:46:00,740 --> 00:46:06,740
Um, so there are all these opportunities for interaction in markets, in schools,

759
00:46:07,060 --> 00:46:12,980
um, and um increasingly well at marriage.

760
00:46:13,060 --> 00:46:18,340
Um, so there was a sociologist who did work there in the 70s in Watasani who did document

761
00:46:18,340 --> 00:46:24,310
already at that time quite a lot of intergroup um marriages as well.

762
00:46:24,710 --> 00:46:24,950
Yeah.

763
00:46:25,030 --> 00:46:30,630
So can I just so so the idea is that in the rural areas, roughly speaking, you know,

764
00:46:30,790 --> 00:46:34,470
because I think people are asking like what maintains the linguistic difference, it's sort

765
00:46:34,470 --> 00:46:39,110
of the rural areas, the just the way it works, where you like, you know, you grow up and

766
00:46:39,110 --> 00:46:41,670
what do the people around you speak, you learn that.

767
00:46:41,830 --> 00:46:47,510
But then if people are moving in from the rural areas, there's more contact.

768
00:46:48,180 --> 00:46:50,660
Um is that fair?

769
00:46:51,220 --> 00:46:52,340
I think that's probably true.

770
00:46:52,500 --> 00:46:56,820
I guess there's there that is an interesting question of what maintains cultural boundaries

771
00:46:56,820 --> 00:46:58,660
if there's constant contact, right?

772
00:46:58,900 --> 00:47:00,580
And the default would be something like that.

773
00:47:00,740 --> 00:47:01,940
People don't interact.

774
00:47:02,180 --> 00:47:07,300
I think that there's reason to be skeptical that generally that's the only process, right?

775
00:47:07,460 --> 00:47:11,060
Um and I don't know enough about I haven't done like a quantitative study here to know

776
00:47:11,060 --> 00:47:16,650
exactly, but do you know um William Lebev's um work in the US

777
00:47:16,890 --> 00:47:22,890
suggests that even with contact, even with common interaction across, in his case,

778
00:47:22,970 --> 00:47:28,490
like dialectical groups, people maintain their dialects for potentially something like

779
00:47:28,490 --> 00:47:29,850
signaling purposes.

780
00:47:30,490 --> 00:47:32,090
Maybe that's too much interpretation.

781
00:47:32,250 --> 00:47:36,650
So I I don't want to go too far on a limb to say that it's only because of a lack of

782
00:47:36,650 --> 00:47:38,810
interaction that they're maintained.

783
00:47:39,530 --> 00:47:45,460
And I will say that there's a lot of more Spanish speaking

784
00:47:45,620 --> 00:47:50,580
and actually I think that the kind of l loss, some people don't like that term, but the

785
00:47:50,580 --> 00:47:56,260
loss of indigenous language use in the multilingual areas might be actually a bit faster

786
00:47:56,420 --> 00:47:59,060
because Spanish is such a useful lingua franca.

787
00:47:59,220 --> 00:47:59,380
Right.

788
00:47:59,620 --> 00:48:03,780
So some neutral kinds of processes might be involved, but but it's possible that there's

789
00:48:03,780 --> 00:48:06,740
also kind of identity based reasons for

790
00:48:09,810 --> 00:48:14,450
just I mean, there's like even the social inputs to these learning systems, like kids

791
00:48:14,450 --> 00:48:14,930
learn.

792
00:48:15,090 --> 00:48:18,530
And Christina, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, you know, kids learn like what are the

793
00:48:18,530 --> 00:48:20,770
other kids speaking, and that's sort of what they learn.

794
00:48:20,850 --> 00:48:24,930
And that's why you can get something like a pigeon or to into it turned into a creole,

795
00:48:25,010 --> 00:48:29,090
which is you know, where there's people forcibly removed, like, you know, in the slaveries,

796
00:48:29,170 --> 00:48:30,610
um, in the slave trade.

797
00:48:30,770 --> 00:48:36,160
Um, the adults couldn't speak a a grammatical language because they were

798
00:48:36,160 --> 00:48:41,440
speaking uh they they were coming from different places brought together forcibly to work

799
00:48:41,440 --> 00:48:42,000
together.

800
00:48:42,160 --> 00:48:47,360
And so they were just sort of getting by on sort of a um what is called a a pidgin.

801
00:48:47,440 --> 00:48:52,320
And then the next generation, Des Nouveau, the kids build in build that into a grammatical

802
00:48:52,320 --> 00:48:53,040
language.

803
00:48:53,440 --> 00:48:59,350
That was all often used sort of to argue against sort of sort of a skinarian

804
00:48:59,590 --> 00:49:04,470
minimal language acquisition system to show that kids can just, you know, make up a new

805
00:49:04,470 --> 00:49:06,710
language kind of de nouveau.

806
00:49:06,790 --> 00:49:12,710
But it's also relevant to show that there's a lot of social cues to language learning

807
00:49:12,790 --> 00:49:16,630
and that you learn from other kids and it's a coordination thing.

808
00:49:16,790 --> 00:49:21,960
Um, and I mean even when I looked at like sort of second language learning capacity, People

809
00:49:21,960 --> 00:49:25,880
who, for example, are like romantically involved with somebody who speaks the other

810
00:49:25,880 --> 00:49:27,560
language are much more likely to learn it.

811
00:49:28,440 --> 00:49:32,280
Independent of sort of like the age at which they, you know, um uh show up.

812
00:49:32,440 --> 00:49:35,480
Like obviously, like when you're young, it's much, it's better because that system is

813
00:49:35,480 --> 00:49:36,040
turned on.

814
00:49:36,200 --> 00:49:41,160
But I think there's probably all kinds of social cues, even of sort of quote unquote, like

815
00:49:41,160 --> 00:49:44,440
more prototypical language learning, as opposed to sort of something like a dialect.

816
00:49:44,520 --> 00:49:48,070
And I mean the boundaries are all fuzzy, but you know, there's all this code switching

817
00:49:48,070 --> 00:49:52,150
stuff of, you know, how do you speak when you're in a professional context versus with your

818
00:49:52,150 --> 00:49:52,710
friends?

819
00:49:52,870 --> 00:49:55,430
Um, and these cohort your generational effects.

820
00:49:55,510 --> 00:49:57,110
So yeah, I just wanted to flesh that out.

821
00:49:57,190 --> 00:49:58,710
But yeah, that's really interesting, Christina.

822
00:49:58,950 --> 00:49:59,030
Yeah.

823
00:49:59,270 --> 00:50:00,150
Yeah, that's a good point.

824
00:50:00,310 --> 00:50:02,390
That's interesting about the romantically involved.

825
00:50:02,470 --> 00:50:06,150
I wonder if they're also accounting for just having more access to a teacher.

826
00:50:06,470 --> 00:50:06,710
Yeah.

827
00:50:07,750 --> 00:50:09,430
But I but I but I take your point.

828
00:50:09,510 --> 00:50:11,110
Like the motivations matter, right?

829
00:50:11,270 --> 00:50:11,510
Yeah.

830
00:50:11,590 --> 00:50:11,910
Yeah.

831
00:50:12,070 --> 00:50:17,660
Um and and we do see people who were um trilingual even in this area

832
00:50:17,820 --> 00:50:23,340
or who were market like who are vendors and so therefore had more of an incentive to learn

833
00:50:23,340 --> 00:50:24,780
a little bit of the other language, right?

834
00:50:24,860 --> 00:50:27,660
Because they'd want to go to the market towns on both sides of the border.

835
00:50:27,820 --> 00:50:28,060
Yeah.

836
00:50:28,220 --> 00:50:28,860
Um yeah.

837
00:50:29,260 --> 00:50:30,540
Sorry David, you were gonna say something.

838
00:50:31,100 --> 00:50:33,740
No, I mean I I have a a thousand questions running through my head.

839
00:50:33,900 --> 00:50:38,170
I mean one one thing that um is is popping into my head is is something that stuck with me

840
00:50:38,170 --> 00:50:40,170
when we had Brenda Bowser on.

841
00:50:40,330 --> 00:50:46,090
Um and she mentioned that there was a uh pretty strong uh difference between saying I

842
00:50:46,090 --> 00:50:50,650
am a member of Group X versus I am with a member of Group X.

843
00:50:50,970 --> 00:50:55,290
So the former is sort of mark you know marking your ethno-linguistic uh membership and the

844
00:50:55,290 --> 00:50:59,720
latter is more of a political statement that I am I am loyal to this group and I'm going to

845
00:50:59,720 --> 00:51:03,080
support them in whatever uh conflict uh might be underway.

846
00:51:03,320 --> 00:51:07,720
Do you see a similar distinction in the communities you study between belonging to a group

847
00:51:07,720 --> 00:51:09,960
and being with or loyal to a group?

848
00:51:10,600 --> 00:51:12,600
Yeah, that's such a good distinction.

849
00:51:12,840 --> 00:51:18,760
Um the something maybe a little bit parallel to get it to get me to start thinking

850
00:51:18,760 --> 00:51:24,440
about this is um the fact that when I I would ask people if they were catch where I amara

851
00:51:24,600 --> 00:51:28,330
when I first got there, and they wouldn't really use those terms.

852
00:51:28,410 --> 00:51:31,370
They would say quechuista or aimarista.

853
00:51:31,690 --> 00:51:36,330
So the ista ending is the same as the American, the English ist, right?

854
00:51:36,570 --> 00:51:42,490
Which to me denotes kind of like a a practice, like a maybe potentially like temporary

855
00:51:42,490 --> 00:51:42,810
identity.

856
00:51:42,890 --> 00:51:43,690
Like I'm a socialist.

857
00:51:43,770 --> 00:51:47,850
I could stop being a socialist tomorrow and become a capitalist or an anarchist.

858
00:51:48,330 --> 00:51:49,450
I'm a flautist, yeah.

859
00:51:50,090 --> 00:51:50,650
That's true.

860
00:51:51,530 --> 00:51:53,210
Once a flautist, always a flautist.

861
00:51:53,450 --> 00:51:53,690
Exactly.

862
00:51:53,850 --> 00:51:54,410
That's really interesting.

863
00:51:54,490 --> 00:51:58,100
I mean, it sounds kind of odd to substitute it with like Western like I'm it would be very

864
00:51:58,100 --> 00:51:59,300
weird to say I'm a whitist.

865
00:51:59,380 --> 00:52:02,340
You know it would make me sound right that sounds really bad.

866
00:52:02,660 --> 00:52:03,780
It sounds terrible actually.

867
00:52:04,180 --> 00:52:04,420
Yeah.

868
00:52:04,980 --> 00:52:08,260
And yet that's that's sort of how it's linguistically differentiated.

869
00:52:08,740 --> 00:52:08,900
Yeah.

870
00:52:09,060 --> 00:52:12,420
So that's how they would use well and but then if you looked at the signs like the

871
00:52:12,420 --> 00:52:17,940
political signs when you walk into town it's it when it got there it would say um the land

872
00:52:17,940 --> 00:52:19,780
of Quechua's and aymaras.

873
00:52:19,860 --> 00:52:24,370
And so they would use the I like to actually, I think like a more centralizing language,

874
00:52:24,450 --> 00:52:27,890
like you are a Ketra, you are a Aymara, you don't practice Ketra, you don't practice

875
00:52:27,890 --> 00:52:28,530
Aymara.

876
00:52:28,850 --> 00:52:32,610
But the people would use the ist, the practice Ketra and practice aymara.

877
00:52:32,770 --> 00:52:37,090
And I did do some studies where I would ask people, like, well, what if somebody marries

878
00:52:37,090 --> 00:52:40,290
in, learns a language, becomes fully competent?

879
00:52:40,610 --> 00:52:46,320
Are they um like how quechwa are they or how queista are they um

880
00:52:46,560 --> 00:52:50,720
and and you would become queista like i like most people would say that i would become

881
00:52:50,720 --> 00:52:55,920
quechista like if i that they admired my attempts at quechwa but they're not nearly as

882
00:52:55,920 --> 00:53:01,440
fluent as they could be um and so like it wasn't about ancestry it

883
00:53:01,440 --> 00:53:04,970
wasn't about being for your life.

884
00:53:05,050 --> 00:53:07,210
It's about it was about practicing for them.

885
00:53:07,450 --> 00:53:11,610
Um I am currently now doing like more regional studies.

886
00:53:11,770 --> 00:53:13,770
I get farther away from the border.

887
00:53:13,930 --> 00:53:19,530
And I am getting the suspicion, the impression I should say, that that less

888
00:53:19,530 --> 00:53:25,530
essentialist attitude um might be more common closer to

889
00:53:25,530 --> 00:53:30,540
the boundary and that people farther from the boundary might have more of these like are

890
00:53:30,620 --> 00:53:34,380
and do seem to be using like their quechua, their nah.

891
00:53:34,620 --> 00:53:36,940
Could you unpack what with what this word essentialist means?

892
00:53:37,020 --> 00:53:39,260
Because it's a really important concept and might not be familiar to everyone.

893
00:53:39,820 --> 00:53:45,820
It's really it's really complicated to so let me let me use for na for

894
00:53:45,820 --> 00:53:45,980
now.

895
00:53:46,060 --> 00:53:50,940
I would I was using it in as an operational definition, I was using it to mean kind of like

896
00:53:50,940 --> 00:53:54,930
a fixed part of somebody's identity.

897
00:53:55,170 --> 00:53:59,970
But people really debate whether essentialism has to be also uh

898
00:54:00,930 --> 00:54:06,450
like something that you're born with, um, j if it has to be thought of as something that is

899
00:54:06,450 --> 00:54:11,170
genetically transmitted or as if genetically transmitted, and whether people have to have

900
00:54:11,170 --> 00:54:17,120
kind of this notion in their head that it's some deep core part of you that then has

901
00:54:17,120 --> 00:54:20,560
these outward manif like multiple outward manifestations.

902
00:54:20,800 --> 00:54:22,800
So do people do use it differently.

903
00:54:23,280 --> 00:54:27,840
Some of the classic work, I think we're almost all of your listeners are going to be

904
00:54:27,840 --> 00:54:29,200
essentialists about species.

905
00:54:29,360 --> 00:54:30,800
So that's a good place to start.

906
00:54:30,960 --> 00:54:31,200
Right.

907
00:54:31,680 --> 00:54:37,600
Where if you people do really fucked up experiments, even with kids, and they ask them like

908
00:54:37,760 --> 00:54:42,910
if we take a fox and then we give it plastic surgery and change how it looks and make it

909
00:54:42,910 --> 00:54:43,790
look like a dog.

910
00:54:43,950 --> 00:54:45,870
Is it a fox or is it a dog?

911
00:54:46,350 --> 00:54:51,150
And I think we all have that intuition that it would still be a fox and that would be kind

912
00:54:51,150 --> 00:54:53,710
of an indicator of essentialist reasoning.

913
00:54:53,870 --> 00:54:59,390
Um so if you change the outward appearance, it still has this internal essence of dog.

914
00:54:59,790 --> 00:55:00,670
Of dogness, yeah.

915
00:55:00,990 --> 00:55:01,390
Dogness.

916
00:55:07,470 --> 00:55:09,320
Anyway, uh we can continue it.

917
00:55:13,080 --> 00:55:18,120
Well, in in the human domain, we don't do anything quite so brutal, but we do t often tell

918
00:55:18,120 --> 00:55:22,840
these stories of like, um, imagine that a child was born to one community and then raised

919
00:55:22,840 --> 00:55:25,240
by a different by members of a different community.

920
00:55:25,480 --> 00:55:26,440
What would they be?

921
00:55:26,600 --> 00:55:31,240
Like to kind of Brenda's um language term, like what would they be?

922
00:55:31,400 --> 00:55:34,230
And so and it's very underspecified what that means, exactly.

923
00:55:34,470 --> 00:55:35,110
Being right.

924
00:55:35,270 --> 00:55:37,830
And so we don't totally know what that literature is telling us.

925
00:55:37,910 --> 00:55:42,230
I've done a meta-analysis of it that shows that it's really variable.

926
00:55:42,310 --> 00:55:46,390
Like children around like that one has been done cross-culturally quite a bit.

927
00:55:46,630 --> 00:55:52,150
And children tend to be a little bit on the end of essentialism of saying that that child

928
00:55:52,150 --> 00:55:57,510
will be, will be the identity of the parents, um, of the birth parents,

929
00:55:57,900 --> 00:55:59,980
rather than the adoptive parents.

930
00:56:00,380 --> 00:56:05,260
But by the time we get to adulthood, at least cross-culturally, it's really variable.

931
00:56:05,420 --> 00:56:10,380
Like um that some people it depends on the identity, it depends on where you're doing the

932
00:56:10,380 --> 00:56:10,780
study.

933
00:56:10,940 --> 00:56:16,620
But you get anywhere from like 90% of people saying that I think it was like

934
00:56:16,700 --> 00:56:21,420
let's say um Fijian native Fijians versus um

935
00:56:22,110 --> 00:56:27,790
Indophagyans, like their identities are fixed at birth, all the way to like

936
00:56:28,350 --> 00:56:34,110
10% or lower of people saying that, let's say among Himba and

937
00:56:34,510 --> 00:56:40,430
Herero pastoralists, like if you move at birth and you're raised in one community, you're

938
00:56:40,430 --> 00:56:43,550
just going to become the member of the community that you're raised in.

939
00:56:43,790 --> 00:56:45,390
So it's it's really quite variable.

940
00:56:45,470 --> 00:56:51,150
And I'm not sure, like if we do have priors about treating ethnolinguistic

941
00:56:51,150 --> 00:56:57,080
groups as kind of having some sort of essence, they're very weak priors and

942
00:56:57,080 --> 00:56:58,200
they're quickly overridden.

943
00:56:58,520 --> 00:56:59,240
Christina, that's cool.

944
00:56:59,320 --> 00:57:03,880
And it's really, and I'll I'll David, I'll let you I just uh that variability, and it

945
00:57:03,880 --> 00:57:06,040
sounds like you're doing this meta-analysis.

946
00:57:06,200 --> 00:57:12,120
Um, to me, that variability suggests that there's systems in the mind that

947
00:57:12,120 --> 00:57:15,800
the function is just sort of like to just it's social learning or prediction, right?

948
00:57:15,880 --> 00:57:21,870
It's sort of like what's the what do I experience as the correlation

949
00:57:21,870 --> 00:57:26,590
between a social identity and what I need to do to deal with them.

950
00:57:26,670 --> 00:57:26,990
Right.

951
00:57:27,230 --> 00:57:33,070
So if if there's like a a group membership that is like belligerent towards me,

952
00:57:33,310 --> 00:57:39,230
um, if anybody um can become that based on their behavior, it's in

953
00:57:39,230 --> 00:57:44,960
my interest to not be essentialistic about it because, you know, it the the the the

954
00:57:44,960 --> 00:57:49,520
whole point of me representing that group is to predict like how they're gonna treat me.

955
00:57:49,680 --> 00:57:51,040
Um so that's just one example.

956
00:57:51,120 --> 00:57:55,040
And I mean there are others, it could be not how they behave, but like what you know, what

957
00:57:55,040 --> 00:57:55,840
do they tend to do?

958
00:57:56,000 --> 00:57:59,200
What are their beliefs, what are their characteristics, where do they live?

959
00:57:59,440 --> 00:58:03,920
Are they good coordination partners or just predicting like just sort of like what what how

960
00:58:03,920 --> 00:58:06,690
the how they live, what they eat, how they talk, right?

961
00:58:07,010 --> 00:58:09,090
Um is that a fairer characterization?

962
00:58:09,250 --> 00:58:13,890
Like even if we haven't, I mean, it's a it's a huge lift to sort of wrap your head around

963
00:58:13,890 --> 00:58:13,970
it.

964
00:58:14,050 --> 00:58:15,090
I'm glad you're doing that.

965
00:58:15,170 --> 00:58:18,130
Um but uh is that a fair characterization?

966
00:58:18,530 --> 00:58:24,450
I think that that for sure that that it's kind of about predicting kind of correlations

967
00:58:24,450 --> 00:58:24,850
in the world.

968
00:58:25,090 --> 00:58:29,900
Now, what those correlations, which which correlations matter, I think is still an open

969
00:58:29,900 --> 00:58:30,140
question.

970
00:58:30,300 --> 00:58:35,100
I think like some of the early people proposing a functionalist kind of approach to

971
00:58:35,100 --> 00:58:40,460
essentialism, like Susan Gellman, who's a developmental psychologist, or Larry Hirschfeld,

972
00:58:40,700 --> 00:58:46,620
it's not always clear exactly what all of these proponents of like humans

973
00:58:46,620 --> 00:58:51,340
being essentialists have in mind, but it does seem to be like that this helps do the heavy

974
00:58:51,340 --> 00:58:55,010
lifting of being able to predict lots of different things about people.

975
00:58:55,250 --> 00:58:58,290
And you need to learn that there is definitely types in the world.

976
00:58:58,370 --> 00:59:01,970
And then you have to figure out like who's going to be a good partner to do, who's going to

977
00:59:01,970 --> 00:59:03,570
be easy to coordinate with.

978
00:59:03,810 --> 00:59:06,930
Like you're going to be able to predict lots of things once you figure out what the types

979
00:59:06,930 --> 00:59:07,730
are in the world.

980
00:59:07,890 --> 00:59:12,130
Um, what we're seeing so far in the meta-analysis, although it's you know, it's the sample

981
00:59:12,130 --> 00:59:16,600
of societies where we've done these studies, but it it does seem like it's more likely when

982
00:59:16,600 --> 00:59:19,240
there are power differentials across those boundaries.

983
00:59:19,640 --> 00:59:24,200
And so it might be that some kinds of predictions are more important than others, right?

984
00:59:24,360 --> 00:59:30,040
And the predictions about um kind of whether you can transcend that boundary, whether are

985
00:59:30,120 --> 00:59:34,120
barriers in place to be able to move across that boundary might matter.

986
00:59:34,280 --> 00:59:35,560
And it's a bit mixed.

987
00:59:35,640 --> 00:59:40,680
Like we did um, we did not see that when I collaborated with Brooks Shelde to do this among

988
00:59:40,840 --> 00:59:43,370
uh Hemba uh Herero.

989
00:59:43,850 --> 00:59:47,930
Well, she did it with Himba participants, but thinking about the Herero and Damara

990
00:59:48,010 --> 00:59:52,010
boundary, where one of those has a big power difference and the other one does not.

991
00:59:52,970 --> 00:59:57,530
Or like pretty much 100% of her participants said that they would be, um, they would prefer

992
00:59:57,530 --> 01:00:01,050
their daughters to marry a Herero person than a Damara person.

993
01:00:01,210 --> 01:00:03,210
So clearly there's a status difference there.

994
01:00:03,370 --> 01:00:07,240
And yet that didn't really correspond to or at least our measure of essentialism.

995
01:00:07,400 --> 01:00:12,440
But other studies done with like the Indian caste system, which is very hierarchical, very

996
01:00:12,440 --> 01:00:17,240
rigid, kind of cloud, you could call it class, more than class hierarchy.

997
01:00:19,000 --> 01:00:21,080
There you do see these asymmetries.

998
01:00:21,160 --> 01:00:27,080
And Mahalingam has showed that, for example, higher caste individuals are

999
01:00:27,080 --> 01:00:28,520
more rigid about that boundary.

1000
01:00:28,600 --> 01:00:34,590
Like you cannot become one of us than the lower caste individuals who don't maintain

1001
01:00:34,590 --> 01:00:35,950
that boundary as rigidly.

1002
01:00:36,190 --> 01:00:42,110
So it's probably it seems like it's not just about predicting stuff, but that it's

1003
01:00:42,430 --> 01:00:43,790
at least by adulthood, right?

1004
01:00:43,870 --> 01:00:48,110
Like it's work maybe in childhood it's working differently than it is in adulthood, but at

1005
01:00:48,110 --> 01:00:52,510
least by adulthood it seems to be working kind of through this pathway of predicting

1006
01:00:52,510 --> 01:00:54,910
certain kinds of interactions.

1007
01:00:55,380 --> 01:00:55,540
Right.

1008
01:00:56,020 --> 01:00:57,380
Yeah, and just so I understand.

1009
01:00:57,460 --> 01:01:02,100
Sorry, David, it is just that um yeah, because the early essentialism stuff, it's it was

1010
01:01:02,100 --> 01:01:05,460
great, but it was like very vague about what was being predictor, what dimensions.

1011
01:01:05,780 --> 01:01:11,620
And so what you're saying is if I understand it, is that um power and power and status

1012
01:01:11,780 --> 01:01:17,350
and class, things like that, roughly speaking, um That's a really privileged,

1013
01:01:17,670 --> 01:01:23,030
it seems to be so far, in some cases, that it's a really privileged dimension in the sense

1014
01:01:23,030 --> 01:01:28,390
of when those things are more open or closed

1015
01:01:28,870 --> 01:01:34,870
correspondingly, essentialism is sort of higher or lower, meaning that if if

1016
01:01:34,870 --> 01:01:39,910
you can't become the higher class thing, then you will

1017
01:01:40,070 --> 01:01:44,760
represent that these social categories are quote unquote more essentialized.

1018
01:01:45,080 --> 01:01:50,760
And then there's additional like sort of flavoring, which is that if you are high

1019
01:01:50,760 --> 01:01:56,440
class, you're also incentivized to sort of be like, let's all agree on a norm where

1020
01:01:56,440 --> 01:02:02,120
nobody can be where I I am permanently the winner of this sort of

1021
01:02:02,360 --> 01:02:05,000
sort of um uh you know arrangement here.

1022
01:02:05,160 --> 01:02:05,880
Is that fair?

1023
01:02:06,360 --> 01:02:06,840
I think so.

1024
01:02:06,920 --> 01:02:11,630
And I think it's an open question how much this is working kind of in at the individual

1025
01:02:11,630 --> 01:02:16,590
level, like people perceiving that boundary versus like taking the story for give like as a

1026
01:02:17,150 --> 01:02:21,710
like is it that people are individually interacting with others and then building up that

1027
01:02:21,710 --> 01:02:22,830
sense of that boundary?

1028
01:02:22,990 --> 01:02:28,270
Or is it that they just have been told, you know, you're not going to become high

1029
01:02:28,350 --> 01:02:29,150
cast.

1030
01:02:29,550 --> 01:02:29,710
Right.

1031
01:02:29,870 --> 01:02:33,790
And that's what's being so I don't I don't know about we don't have the details of how that

1032
01:02:33,790 --> 01:02:35,550
those representations arise, but yeah.

1033
01:02:36,030 --> 01:02:36,830
That's really cool.

1034
01:02:36,910 --> 01:02:37,230
That's cool.

1035
01:02:37,310 --> 01:02:38,350
You're making progress on that.

1036
01:02:38,430 --> 01:02:39,560
Thank you for your service.

1037
01:02:40,520 --> 01:02:41,560
This one's easier.

1038
01:02:42,200 --> 01:02:43,320
I mean, no mistake.

1039
01:02:44,760 --> 01:02:50,520
So could it be that when a group boundary is politicized or becomes a

1040
01:02:50,520 --> 01:02:56,040
marker of rival conflicting alliances, that that marker

1041
01:02:56,040 --> 01:03:00,600
becomes more essentialized so long as the marker is still present?

1042
01:03:00,920 --> 01:03:06,710
So for example, in the United States, there are uh conflicts between uh black and white

1043
01:03:06,710 --> 01:03:06,870
people.

1044
01:03:07,030 --> 01:03:11,750
Um, I if if a white person is raised by a black family or a black person is raised by a

1045
01:03:11,750 --> 01:03:13,350
white family, that doesn't change their race.

1046
01:03:13,510 --> 01:03:16,870
So the white person is still white, still white even if they're raised by black parents,

1047
01:03:17,030 --> 01:03:20,470
the black person is still black even if they're raised by white parents.

1048
01:03:20,630 --> 01:03:26,460
Um, could it be that the reason that is true is because skin color itself is a

1049
01:03:26,460 --> 01:03:32,380
cue of uh alliance membership and is used by everyone else in the society as a cue of

1050
01:03:32,380 --> 01:03:35,100
alliance membership as as Dave has shown.

1051
01:03:36,780 --> 01:03:42,620
And once a a trait becomes a common knowledge that that is signifying

1052
01:03:42,620 --> 01:03:48,060
which side you're on in a in a particular conflict, that uh as long as that

1053
01:03:48,220 --> 01:03:51,260
difference is there, it sends a signal to everyone of whose side you're on and there's

1054
01:03:51,260 --> 01:03:52,540
nothing you can do to change that.

1055
01:03:52,860 --> 01:03:58,310
Whereas if um if there's a different marker of of alliance

1056
01:03:58,310 --> 01:04:02,790
membership, um, and it can change such that if you change it, then you're signaling that

1057
01:04:02,790 --> 01:04:06,150
you're on a different side, then uh the essentialism goes away.

1058
01:04:06,230 --> 01:04:09,670
And that's sort of how I'm starting to try to understand what's going on here.

1059
01:04:09,750 --> 01:04:11,030
Do you think I'm on the right track here?

1060
01:04:11,750 --> 01:04:13,430
I think it's a good hypothesis.

1061
01:04:13,590 --> 01:04:16,470
I think I I have two points of skepticism.

1062
01:04:16,630 --> 01:04:22,400
One is that we also have political alliances that we're very happy for people

1063
01:04:22,400 --> 01:04:23,840
to move between.

1064
01:04:24,560 --> 01:04:29,280
So like we're very happy for to convert people to becoming Democrats or Republicans.

1065
01:04:29,360 --> 01:04:33,600
And we don't like it's kind of the opposite of essentialism and that we want to grow those

1066
01:04:33,600 --> 01:04:34,320
coalitions.

1067
01:04:34,560 --> 01:04:38,720
At least it's at least it's the opposite of essentialism, insofar as essentialism is about

1068
01:04:38,720 --> 01:04:40,000
having a fixed trait.

1069
01:04:40,240 --> 01:04:40,480
Right.

1070
01:04:40,880 --> 01:04:41,440
Right.

1071
01:04:41,840 --> 01:04:47,760
And the other thing is like if I'm thinking phylogenetically, like I kind, I think I

1072
01:04:47,830 --> 01:04:48,870
would you guys agree with me?

1073
01:04:48,950 --> 01:04:52,390
Like we have a coalitional psychology that we share with non-human primates.

1074
01:04:52,550 --> 01:04:54,150
Do you agree with you agree with that?

1075
01:04:54,390 --> 01:04:54,710
Definitely.

1076
01:04:55,030 --> 01:04:57,990
Like that it's pretty similar, like at least those are the building blocks, right?

1077
01:04:58,630 --> 01:05:03,670
And and I again, like I'm not sure that those building blocks are

1078
01:05:03,670 --> 01:05:05,110
essentialists either.

1079
01:05:05,190 --> 01:05:10,180
Like I guess I don't know I should know more about primate coalitions, but I would imagine

1080
01:05:10,180 --> 01:05:14,340
that like you know, dominance hierarchy shift and whose alpha shifts, and then like whether

1081
01:05:14,340 --> 01:05:19,380
beta and whatever the third primate is in the dominance hierarchy, like they

1082
01:05:20,260 --> 01:05:23,780
might all of a sudden find themselves like on different sides of the coalition.

1083
01:05:23,940 --> 01:05:28,340
So I'm a little bit skeptical that that's kind of like the building, that coalitional

1084
01:05:28,340 --> 01:05:34,150
psychology is like the building block or has like a notion of fixedness attached to it for

1085
01:05:34,150 --> 01:05:34,630
those reasons.

1086
01:05:34,790 --> 01:05:35,590
I don't know what you guys think.

1087
01:05:35,910 --> 01:05:36,070
Right.

1088
01:05:36,230 --> 01:05:39,670
So let me let me see if I can reframe the hypothesis.

1089
01:05:39,830 --> 01:05:43,190
So with with the example of say switching a political party.

1090
01:05:43,350 --> 01:05:43,670
Yeah.

1091
01:05:43,830 --> 01:05:49,190
Um, so I would imagine that some features of being a Republican or Democrat are more

1092
01:05:49,510 --> 01:05:52,550
diagnostic of of political loyalty than others.

1093
01:05:52,950 --> 01:05:57,510
Um say voting for a particular party, that's probably one of the most diagnostic.

1094
01:05:57,750 --> 01:06:03,520
So it let's say I vote for Republican, but all of my outward beliefs are

1095
01:06:03,520 --> 01:06:06,480
consistent with uh progressive ideology.

1096
01:06:06,720 --> 01:06:11,920
I think we would have uh something of an essentialist intuition there that I'm still a

1097
01:06:11,920 --> 01:06:13,040
Republican, right?

1098
01:06:13,200 --> 01:06:17,200
Because I'm I'm I I'm exhibiting the cue that is a stronger cue of alliance membership,

1099
01:06:17,280 --> 01:06:22,480
even if all of my superficial features uh are are resembling um the Democrats.

1100
01:06:22,640 --> 01:06:26,590
It's more about you know, secretly I'm loyal to Republicans.

1101
01:06:26,670 --> 01:06:28,830
I'm a closet Republican or something like that.

1102
01:06:29,310 --> 01:06:35,230
And so I I would suggest that, you know, the hypothesis is that some traits

1103
01:06:35,550 --> 01:06:39,150
are categorized by the mind as if you have it, you're on this side.

1104
01:06:39,310 --> 01:06:41,310
If you don't have it, you're on the other side.

1105
01:06:41,470 --> 01:06:46,800
Um and I think that is is more what's what's driving the essentialism intuitions.

1106
01:06:46,960 --> 01:06:49,600
And and of course it depends on what that what that thing is.

1107
01:06:49,680 --> 01:06:54,800
If it's something that can be changed, like say voting for one party or another, then uh

1108
01:06:55,120 --> 01:06:56,720
categorization will change.

1109
01:06:57,040 --> 01:07:01,360
Um but if it's something that can't be changed, like skin color, uh then there's nothing

1110
01:07:01,360 --> 01:07:03,600
you can do to uh erase that.

1111
01:07:03,680 --> 01:07:08,400
It's always going to be um it's always going to signify that you're on one side or the

1112
01:07:08,400 --> 01:07:08,560
other.

1113
01:07:09,040 --> 01:07:11,130
Does that sort of track?

1114
01:07:11,690 --> 01:07:15,770
I mean, I s I still think I disagree with you, but I do think it's like a cool hypothesis.

1115
01:07:15,850 --> 01:07:21,770
And like that idea that like essentialism is about like the the core part

1116
01:07:21,770 --> 01:07:24,970
of what essentialism is about predicting is like whose side are you really on?

1117
01:07:25,050 --> 01:07:26,970
I think is a really cool hypothesis.

1118
01:07:27,130 --> 01:07:28,970
Um I'm gonna give you another case study.

1119
01:07:29,050 --> 01:07:31,690
Maybe this is like too much of a an ethnographic veto.

1120
01:07:33,530 --> 01:07:35,610
That's why you're here, is to is to keep us honest.

1121
01:07:35,820 --> 01:07:37,900
That's a great question ethnographic veto.

1122
01:07:38,300 --> 01:07:39,020
It's not mine.

1123
01:07:39,260 --> 01:07:43,340
I forget where I I I mean it's usually used disparagingly to be like, Oh, I'm I'm going to

1124
01:07:43,340 --> 01:07:44,940
be the anthropo the annoying anthropologist.

1125
01:07:45,980 --> 01:07:48,700
I want to raise my hand in a talk and be like, here's an ethnographic.

1126
01:07:50,860 --> 01:07:51,020
Yeah.

1127
01:07:51,820 --> 01:07:56,300
And I do accept that like if there are tendencies in the world, then like we should accept

1128
01:07:56,300 --> 01:07:59,580
that there are tendencies and also the possibility to vary away from that tendency.

1129
01:07:59,660 --> 01:08:03,580
So I don't think the ethnographic veto should be used as a like blunt instrument.

1130
01:08:03,900 --> 01:08:05,350
But it should be Christina.

1131
01:08:05,510 --> 01:08:06,310
We should just use it as a blood.

1132
01:08:06,550 --> 01:08:07,510
But here's my admiration.

1133
01:08:08,710 --> 01:08:10,550
Beat us with that blood instrument, please.

1134
01:08:10,870 --> 01:08:11,590
And it's not my work.

1135
01:08:11,670 --> 01:08:13,190
It's Rita Astudi's work.

1136
01:08:13,270 --> 01:08:19,030
And she's worked in uh Madagascar with um people who are well she works with the

1137
01:08:19,030 --> 01:08:21,510
Veso who are uh Austronesian descent.

1138
01:08:21,590 --> 01:08:26,230
So they're an indigenous um kind of Malagasy uh

1139
01:08:28,180 --> 01:08:30,420
Madagascar uh natives.

1140
01:08:30,500 --> 01:08:32,260
They work, I think, mostly with fishing.

1141
01:08:32,340 --> 01:08:37,300
And they have, at least by adulthood, they have this notion that you are Veso, that that

1142
01:08:37,300 --> 01:08:39,620
ethnic category, if you do the Veso things.

1143
01:08:39,700 --> 01:08:45,220
Again, kind of like the is ending, like you go fishing and you do the kinds of work that we

1144
01:08:45,220 --> 01:08:45,380
do.

1145
01:08:45,460 --> 01:08:46,900
That be makes you Veso.

1146
01:08:47,140 --> 01:08:51,540
And she talked, she did these kinds of same essentialism studies, both with children and

1147
01:08:51,540 --> 01:08:56,350
adults there, um, to ask them about this boundary with um

1148
01:08:57,630 --> 01:09:02,270
with Karani, which are actually um more recent migrants from India.

1149
01:09:02,510 --> 01:09:04,830
I forget the history of their migration there.

1150
01:09:04,990 --> 01:09:08,110
It probably had something to do with the British, but I don't remember the details.

1151
01:09:08,270 --> 01:09:13,870
But there's like an Indian origin population in Madagascar and an

1152
01:09:13,870 --> 01:09:18,660
Austronesian kind of earlier migration to Madagascar.

1153
01:09:18,820 --> 01:09:20,500
And they do look physically different.

1154
01:09:20,580 --> 01:09:23,940
Like they can't change kind of your skin tone.

1155
01:09:24,580 --> 01:09:25,780
And they recognize that.

1156
01:09:25,940 --> 01:09:28,260
Like the adults that I forget of the children.

1157
01:09:28,420 --> 01:09:33,220
I think the children also, like by age eight or seven or so, like they recognize that the

1158
01:09:33,220 --> 01:09:35,220
skin tone is something that you're not going to change.

1159
01:09:35,380 --> 01:09:41,370
And presumably, like in the real world, um, like this does map on to some kinds

1160
01:09:41,370 --> 01:09:42,010
of coalitions.

1161
01:09:42,090 --> 01:09:43,290
They live in different areas.

1162
01:09:43,450 --> 01:09:49,130
But they all but they don't, at least by adulthood, they do not um treat that

1163
01:09:49,130 --> 01:09:53,770
cue um as an indicator of being, right?

1164
01:09:54,010 --> 01:09:54,250
Right.

1165
01:09:54,570 --> 01:09:55,450
Yes, yes, yes.

1166
01:09:55,930 --> 01:10:01,530
So if so you'll ask adults, Veso adults, like if a Karani child, like a child born to

1167
01:10:01,530 --> 01:10:06,170
Karani parents is then raised by Vesoparents and they'll say yes, it'll be Veso when it

1168
01:10:06,170 --> 01:10:06,810
grows up.

1169
01:10:07,050 --> 01:10:12,500
So I'm a little bit skeptical that So they will say that that a person who looks

1170
01:10:12,740 --> 01:10:18,660
uh right like they belong to one group and is raised by uh a a group that looks different,

1171
01:10:18,980 --> 01:10:21,780
that they will be that they will become the different looking group.

1172
01:10:22,020 --> 01:10:22,180
Yeah.

1173
01:10:22,260 --> 01:10:26,020
And so it would be equivalent to say a white person becoming black by being raised by black

1174
01:10:26,100 --> 01:10:26,340
parents.

1175
01:10:26,740 --> 01:10:27,140
Exactly.

1176
01:10:27,300 --> 01:10:27,780
Exactly.

1177
01:10:28,340 --> 01:10:33,860
And that's my reading of the literature too, that the inference about the Q um and the

1178
01:10:33,860 --> 01:10:38,210
group and the group um underlying membership, those are distinct things.

1179
01:10:38,370 --> 01:10:41,250
And the old literature sort of conflated those.

1180
01:10:41,410 --> 01:10:43,490
Um, and it that's sort of what made it confusing.

1181
01:10:43,570 --> 01:10:48,370
But if you tease the two apart, people will still say, look, this feature is biologically

1182
01:10:48,370 --> 01:10:49,170
inheritable.

1183
01:10:49,330 --> 01:10:49,730
Right.

1184
01:10:49,890 --> 01:10:54,290
But but they'll but that's separate from what constitutes the group identity.

1185
01:10:54,450 --> 01:10:55,010
Sorry, Christina.

1186
01:10:55,090 --> 01:10:57,170
I just wanted to that that's that's fascinating.

1187
01:10:57,250 --> 01:11:02,700
So my follow-up question would be is there a political divide or

1188
01:11:02,700 --> 01:11:05,100
rivalry by skin color per se?

1189
01:11:05,260 --> 01:11:08,620
So is there social stratification based on skin color per se?

1190
01:11:08,780 --> 01:11:13,340
Is there some kind of uh intergroup conflict over power or resources or status or whatever

1191
01:11:13,500 --> 01:11:18,300
based on skin color like there is in the United States, or is it not based on skin color

1192
01:11:18,300 --> 01:11:18,700
per se?

1193
01:11:19,470 --> 01:11:23,310
I suspect that it's not like institutionalized by skin color, but I'm not totally sure.

1194
01:11:23,390 --> 01:11:25,150
I definitely should read more about this case.

1195
01:11:25,390 --> 01:11:30,030
And but I think that another way to talk about your your hypothesis about this being about

1196
01:11:30,030 --> 01:11:34,990
loyalty detection is that if you are raised, if you do have this information that you are

1197
01:11:34,990 --> 01:11:40,270
raised in a different community, like not only is that going to influence like how your

1198
01:11:40,510 --> 01:11:45,660
your cultural expectation, like your your cultural worldview, it very likely is going to

1199
01:11:45,660 --> 01:11:47,020
affect your loyalty as well.

1200
01:11:47,100 --> 01:11:47,340
Right.

1201
01:11:47,980 --> 01:11:48,220
Yes.

1202
01:11:48,860 --> 01:11:49,180
Yes.

1203
01:11:49,420 --> 01:11:53,420
And so I think that this idea that it's not just about predicting lots of different

1204
01:11:53,420 --> 01:11:57,580
cultural traits, but predicting who you're loyal to, I think, is a really interesting

1205
01:11:57,580 --> 01:11:58,060
question.

1206
01:11:58,940 --> 01:11:59,660
That is interesting.

1207
01:11:59,740 --> 01:12:05,260
But you also have to consider not just the person's loyalty themselves, but how everyone

1208
01:12:05,260 --> 01:12:08,030
else in society will will treat them.

1209
01:12:08,590 --> 01:12:12,990
So if if I'm raised by black parents, I might be loyal to the black community, uh, but

1210
01:12:12,990 --> 01:12:17,310
everyone else in society is still going to see me as white and give me the privileges that

1211
01:12:17,310 --> 01:12:22,110
are granted to white people in our society and and uh make all sorts of assumptions about

1212
01:12:22,110 --> 01:12:25,710
me based on my skin color, regardless of of of my personal loyalties.

1213
01:12:26,110 --> 01:12:28,750
And that may itself also change my loyalties.

1214
01:12:28,990 --> 01:12:33,230
If people are treating me differently, then that might be a factor that pushes me in a

1215
01:12:33,230 --> 01:12:36,590
different direction than I otherwise would have gone if I was black.

1216
01:12:37,140 --> 01:12:37,460
That's right.

1217
01:12:37,620 --> 01:12:37,700
Yeah.

1218
01:12:38,420 --> 01:12:43,780
So it's not just the individual's loyalty, but it's it's it's um uh common knowledge of of

1219
01:12:43,940 --> 01:12:48,340
uh of of the person's perceived loyalties and how how they're seen by others and how that

1220
01:12:48,340 --> 01:12:50,100
affects the alliances.

1221
01:12:50,580 --> 01:12:51,300
No, totally.

1222
01:12:51,540 --> 01:12:51,940
Yeah, yeah.

1223
01:12:52,260 --> 01:12:56,420
That that is, I mean, yeah, when I talk about you know the alliance stuff and and sort of

1224
01:12:56,420 --> 01:13:02,310
race or any cue, that thing is also that really inhibits individuals who want

1225
01:13:02,310 --> 01:13:03,350
to change it, right?

1226
01:13:03,510 --> 01:13:08,630
So even if somebody says I don't want to do this, you know, just um um I don't want to

1227
01:13:08,630 --> 01:13:14,470
discriminate based on race, um, let's say somebody in like, you know, 1960s US or now,

1228
01:13:14,630 --> 01:13:20,550
um, but if if they see that other people are, they're still representing this as a relevant

1229
01:13:20,550 --> 01:13:21,190
cue.

1230
01:13:21,350 --> 01:13:25,660
Um and it just or if people treat me based on this, but I would prefer we didn't.

1231
01:13:25,980 --> 01:13:26,700
They didn't.

1232
01:13:26,860 --> 01:13:32,860
You know, it makes the individual decision is not sufficient to stop the cue from being

1233
01:13:32,860 --> 01:13:33,900
relevant because it is.

1234
01:13:33,980 --> 01:13:36,780
It's a coordination thing that it requires common knowledge.

1235
01:13:36,940 --> 01:13:42,940
And so especially when that's why you need like larger scale coordination to sort

1236
01:13:42,940 --> 01:13:48,460
of stop using a cue or circumstances to change or institutions to change

1237
01:13:49,260 --> 01:13:50,860
precisely for this reason.

1238
01:13:51,020 --> 01:13:56,850
And then especially when the feature or the cue is permanent, like

1239
01:13:56,930 --> 01:14:01,410
you know, I I like to to an extreme aversion, like you know, in in Germany people could

1240
01:14:01,490 --> 01:14:03,490
like take their swastikas off, right?

1241
01:14:03,730 --> 01:14:08,610
But you can't do that if the way that a group is marked is like what you look like or the

1242
01:14:08,610 --> 01:14:09,090
way you talk.

1243
01:14:09,250 --> 01:14:14,850
I mean, what the way you talk is a bit different, but um so that that also has an effect as

1244
01:14:14,850 --> 01:14:15,170
well.

1245
01:14:15,640 --> 01:14:15,880
Yeah.

1246
01:14:15,960 --> 01:14:21,080
And I think it's an important distinction and has probably been some, but could do more

1247
01:14:21,080 --> 01:14:25,720
theorizing like how other members of your group are going to interact with you versus the

1248
01:14:25,720 --> 01:14:27,880
other, the out group is going to interact with you.

1249
01:14:28,120 --> 01:14:34,120
Because um some of those things like um there's been a lot of proposals that like you're

1250
01:14:34,200 --> 01:14:39,550
the fact that we have a really hard time in adulthood, like changing the accents that we

1251
01:14:39,550 --> 01:14:43,950
are raised with, or the fact that like tattoos much more

1252
01:14:44,750 --> 01:14:48,510
permanently like can be used as kind of bridge-burning devices.

1253
01:14:48,590 --> 01:14:53,550
Like you tattoo your face, and all of a sudden people know something about you and will

1254
01:14:53,550 --> 01:14:55,630
treat you differently because of it.

1255
01:14:55,790 --> 01:14:58,910
And actually, tattoos, I guess, now we can take get rid of them.

1256
01:14:58,990 --> 01:15:04,620
And that's an important tool for like dealing with kind of reintegration into

1257
01:15:04,620 --> 01:15:06,300
society for some members, right?

1258
01:15:06,620 --> 01:15:07,580
Like gangs.

1259
01:15:08,540 --> 01:15:11,900
But but traits like that that are harder to get rid of.

1260
01:15:11,980 --> 01:15:15,660
Like there's been a lot of speculation, I think, among evolutionarily social um

1261
01:15:15,820 --> 01:15:19,500
evolutionary social scientists that this is like a really way good way of like committing

1262
01:15:19,500 --> 01:15:20,460
you to the in group.

1263
01:15:20,780 --> 01:15:25,340
But what's I think what's missing in that theorizing is that it requires it's not something

1264
01:15:25,340 --> 01:15:28,210
that the in group can control by itself.

1265
01:15:28,370 --> 01:15:31,250
It actually totally depends on how the out group's gonna perceive you.

1266
01:15:31,410 --> 01:15:31,650
Right.

1267
01:15:31,810 --> 01:15:36,930
It it requires that the outgroup burns that bridge as well, which is not always it

1268
01:15:36,930 --> 01:15:38,130
shouldn't be taken for granted.

1269
01:15:38,210 --> 01:15:43,490
Like we should be thinking more carefully about like why would the out group not be willing

1270
01:15:43,490 --> 01:15:47,410
to interact with somebody with a certain accent or a face tattoo.

1271
01:15:47,650 --> 01:15:49,490
And I think it's not always clear.

1272
01:15:49,980 --> 01:15:52,460
Yes, that's a really crucial point.

1273
01:15:52,700 --> 01:15:58,540
Um there's also this this uh interesting idea that beliefs themselves can be bridge burning

1274
01:15:58,540 --> 01:15:58,860
tactics.

1275
01:15:59,100 --> 01:15:59,260
Right.

1276
01:15:59,500 --> 01:16:05,020
So if I voice support for a particular narrative or myth in my culture, um that you know

1277
01:16:05,100 --> 01:16:08,140
people in my culture you know won't think twice about it and they'll they'll find it

1278
01:16:08,140 --> 01:16:08,940
plausible.

1279
01:16:09,100 --> 01:16:14,780
Um but people in other cultures might think that I'm crazy or or or stupid or you know,

1280
01:16:15,020 --> 01:16:19,610
out of my mind, whatever, that that itself can be a bridge burning tactic.

1281
01:16:19,690 --> 01:16:24,970
So a really, you know, uh flagrantly nonsensical conspiracy theory can can can can be a

1282
01:16:24,970 --> 01:16:30,170
signal of loyalty to uh the the extremist group that I'm a part of while uh alienating me

1283
01:16:30,170 --> 01:16:31,530
from everyone outside of that group.

1284
01:16:31,610 --> 01:16:37,290
Or if I belong to a cult, if I subscribe to this really uh Rococo uh myth about, you know,

1285
01:16:37,450 --> 01:16:41,770
aliens or abducting me or whatever, that that could signal loyalty to that group and

1286
01:16:41,770 --> 01:16:44,540
alienate me from everyone outside the cult.

1287
01:16:44,860 --> 01:16:47,260
Do you do you buy that way of thinking?

1288
01:16:47,420 --> 01:16:48,780
Uh I'm I'm curious.

1289
01:16:50,220 --> 01:16:50,540
I do.

1290
01:16:50,620 --> 01:16:56,380
I'm laughing because one of our students here at Eli Elster is working on um kind of why

1291
01:16:56,380 --> 01:17:01,180
people have beliefs that the majority of kind of educated elites don't have.

1292
01:17:01,420 --> 01:17:03,580
And he uses the example of flat earth.

1293
01:17:03,740 --> 01:17:08,030
And um he's trying to talk about some other reasons why people might have those beliefs,

1294
01:17:08,110 --> 01:17:12,190
but I very much think that they can act as bridge burning devices.

1295
01:17:12,350 --> 01:17:16,510
I still think it's interesting that as somebody who would be a bit wary of somebody who is

1296
01:17:16,510 --> 01:17:21,550
espousing flat earth beliefs, for example, um, like why wouldn't I want to

1297
01:17:22,590 --> 01:17:28,350
like buy fruits from them or you know, engage in other mutually beneficial interactions?

1298
01:17:28,510 --> 01:17:32,270
Like maybe I wouldn't want to like learn my geography from them or my geology from them.

1299
01:17:32,510 --> 01:17:37,560
But like, why would why would it inhibit other kind of mutually profitable profitable

1300
01:17:37,560 --> 01:17:38,440
interactions?

1301
01:17:38,600 --> 01:17:38,840
Um

1302
01:17:44,680 --> 01:17:47,640
I would go to yeah, I would go to a flat earthers restaurant if they, you know, if it was

1303
01:17:47,720 --> 01:17:49,400
highly recommended and had good food.

1304
01:17:49,480 --> 01:17:51,000
Like, yeah, I don't care what they believe.

1305
01:17:51,160 --> 01:17:51,320
Yeah.

1306
01:17:51,480 --> 01:17:55,480
Um, but yeah, I might I wouldn't uh you know get maybe maybe I wouldn't get directions from

1307
01:17:55,480 --> 01:17:55,640
them.

1308
01:17:55,720 --> 01:17:56,360
I don't know.

1309
01:17:56,680 --> 01:17:57,400
I wouldn't buy it.

1310
01:17:57,480 --> 01:17:58,920
I wouldn't I wouldn't trust their like GPS.

1311
01:17:59,240 --> 01:18:00,680
Don't don't go too far in that direction.

1312
01:18:00,840 --> 01:18:02,920
You'll you'll drive off the edge of the earth.

1313
01:18:03,320 --> 01:18:03,560
Right.

1314
01:18:04,110 --> 01:18:04,510
Exactly.

1315
01:18:04,910 --> 01:18:05,230
Yeah.

1316
01:18:05,390 --> 01:18:07,310
Um That's funny.

1317
01:18:07,390 --> 01:18:11,390
I mean, I my intuition is that I'd be like a bit wary about going to their kitchen.

1318
01:18:11,790 --> 01:18:12,350
Oh really?

1319
01:18:12,510 --> 01:18:14,110
But I don't know, like I don't know why.

1320
01:18:14,270 --> 01:18:14,750
I don't know why.

1321
01:18:15,070 --> 01:18:19,230
Well, I guess what it meant, it would does it depend on sort of like how their beliefs, you

1322
01:18:19,230 --> 01:18:21,790
know, like it's interesting.

1323
01:18:21,870 --> 01:18:27,230
I I I think part of the reason why I would eat at a flat earthers restaurant is because

1324
01:18:27,870 --> 01:18:32,360
I uh I am a social scientist and I understand the logic of bridge burning tactics and I

1325
01:18:32,360 --> 01:18:35,880
know that it's just a bridge burning tactic and it doesn't actually c communicate anything

1326
01:18:35,880 --> 01:18:39,880
about their intelligence, that they're probably no smarter or dumber than anyone else.

1327
01:18:40,040 --> 01:18:43,000
And so because I know that I would I would feel comfortable eating the restaurant, but I

1328
01:18:43,000 --> 01:18:47,000
bet the average person does not think that way and might actually judge them as as being

1329
01:18:47,000 --> 01:18:48,040
dumb or crazy.

1330
01:18:48,520 --> 01:18:52,290
Oh, I think I'd be hesitant precisely because of the British reading.

1331
01:18:52,530 --> 01:18:55,170
Like I think it is me thinking coalitionally, to be honest.

1332
01:18:55,410 --> 01:18:55,650
Interesting.

1333
01:18:55,890 --> 01:18:56,450
Well, it depends.

1334
01:18:56,690 --> 01:19:00,530
Do they want to bring you into the Flat Earth Society or are they like spiting you?

1335
01:19:00,690 --> 01:19:00,850
Right?

1336
01:19:01,090 --> 01:19:04,770
Because if they're want to be like we want, we're appealing, that might be cheaper and

1337
01:19:04,770 --> 01:19:06,770
better because there's an agenda, right?

1338
01:19:07,170 --> 01:19:10,450
Um, so sort of, you know, like they're they're trying to sell you something.

1339
01:19:10,610 --> 01:19:11,650
And so that's true.

1340
01:19:11,730 --> 01:19:12,930
Like, think of Hare Krishna.

1341
01:19:13,170 --> 01:19:17,010
Like, would you eat, yeah, would I eat the Hare Krishna food where they are using the food

1342
01:19:17,010 --> 01:19:18,610
for proselytizing purposes?

1343
01:19:19,220 --> 01:19:22,900
I think I haven't, and I'm a little bit wary because I don't want to engage in the

1344
01:19:22,900 --> 01:19:25,460
proselytizing endeavor, but like I probably would.

1345
01:19:25,860 --> 01:19:26,660
So I don't know.

1346
01:19:26,820 --> 01:19:28,420
I'm being inconsistent here.

1347
01:19:28,580 --> 01:19:29,220
Yeah.

1348
01:19:29,540 --> 01:19:34,260
Um, I definitely think this is a cool area of research, the the ways that they do act as

1349
01:19:34,260 --> 01:19:38,260
bridge burning and like what it does for what other in-groups think and what other

1350
01:19:38,260 --> 01:19:40,580
out-groups think and about what, right?

1351
01:19:40,820 --> 01:19:45,620
Um, I think like categories the whole categorization and stereotyping literature is um, I

1352
01:19:45,620 --> 01:19:49,410
think like very underspecified about what are those predictions about.

1353
01:19:49,970 --> 01:19:50,290
Yes.

1354
01:19:50,770 --> 01:19:52,850
Because they tend not to think very functionally.

1355
01:19:53,090 --> 01:19:58,290
And um like bringing it back to materially in the world, what is this going to do for you?

1356
01:19:58,530 --> 01:19:58,770
Yes.

1357
01:19:58,930 --> 01:20:01,650
What is it going to do for your interactions, I think would be really helpful.

1358
01:20:01,890 --> 01:20:02,050
Yeah.

1359
01:20:02,130 --> 01:20:05,170
And I think that's ultimately like what and what this is another example of like where

1360
01:20:05,250 --> 01:20:07,170
taking evolutionary approach is helpful, right?

1361
01:20:07,410 --> 01:20:12,690
Because it it grounds like sort of and Christina like one of the things I love about your

1362
01:20:12,690 --> 01:20:18,560
work is that we we are taking this thing groups that's so amorphous and trying to sort

1363
01:20:18,560 --> 01:20:23,760
of create like what what is the underlying like what's the bone structure like you know is

1364
01:20:23,760 --> 01:20:28,880
it about coordination is it about power and like there's reasons to privilege those kinds

1365
01:20:28,880 --> 01:20:34,640
of things over like other categories because of an evolutionary approach right like

1366
01:20:34,720 --> 01:20:40,000
because these are like things that actually matter to us as organisms that matter to us as

1367
01:20:40,000 --> 01:20:41,120
social beings.

1368
01:20:41,520 --> 01:20:41,840
Right.

1369
01:20:42,090 --> 01:20:42,330
Yeah.

1370
01:20:42,490 --> 01:20:46,330
What are the benefits that we get from being with other people?

1371
01:20:46,730 --> 01:20:51,450
Um, whereas there are a lot of things, and this speaks to kind of these what we think of as

1372
01:20:51,450 --> 01:20:56,890
like implausible beliefs or improbable beliefs, is like a lot of them don't really have any

1373
01:20:56,890 --> 01:20:58,730
consequences for your day-to-day interaction.

1374
01:20:58,890 --> 01:21:02,490
And I think that's kind of why it does make sense to think about them as bridge burning,

1375
01:21:02,730 --> 01:21:08,560
because um it probably isn't going to change your GPS settings, even though we joked about

1376
01:21:08,560 --> 01:21:08,640
it.

1377
01:21:08,800 --> 01:21:12,800
Like, you know, I'm guessing that flat earthers and non flat earthers, round earthers and

1378
01:21:12,800 --> 01:21:14,400
cone earthers, like all of them are.

1379
01:21:14,960 --> 01:21:15,440
I don't know about those.

1380
01:21:15,680 --> 01:21:16,640
No, no, that's Eli.

1381
01:21:16,880 --> 01:21:17,760
That's Eli's term.

1382
01:21:18,080 --> 01:21:18,800
I don't think they exist.

1383
01:21:18,880 --> 01:21:23,200
And his argument is like, isn't that interesting that only certain kinds of earth shapes

1384
01:21:23,200 --> 01:21:23,440
exist?

1385
01:21:24,000 --> 01:21:28,240
The ones that are like more intuitively realistic is his argument.

1386
01:21:28,960 --> 01:21:29,360
Interesting.

1387
01:21:29,710 --> 01:21:33,710
And and so they could have burned the bridge with the cone with the cone Earth as well, but

1388
01:21:33,710 --> 01:21:37,070
they didn't choose that one because it's not as intuitive as his argument.

1389
01:21:37,310 --> 01:21:41,390
Um but I I suspect that in their day-to-day lives, like it doesn't have an effect, right?

1390
01:21:41,470 --> 01:21:44,350
They I do do they use different GPS?

1391
01:21:44,510 --> 01:21:44,670
No.

1392
01:21:44,830 --> 01:21:46,270
Do they fly on planes?

1393
01:21:46,350 --> 01:21:46,670
I don't know.

1394
01:21:46,750 --> 01:21:47,630
That's an interesting question.

1395
01:21:47,710 --> 01:21:48,910
Do they fly on planes?

1396
01:21:49,310 --> 01:21:50,030
I think they do.

1397
01:21:50,110 --> 01:21:51,230
And I think they do, yeah.

1398
01:21:51,620 --> 01:21:52,340
And it doesn't such a lot of people.

1399
01:21:52,580 --> 01:21:56,180
And the fact that the the fact that the pilot doesn't have to keep steering down, I think

1400
01:21:56,260 --> 01:21:58,260
is an argument in favor of the flat earth.

1401
01:21:58,340 --> 01:21:59,220
I think that's the argument.

1402
01:21:59,540 --> 01:22:00,260
Oh, I see.

1403
01:22:00,500 --> 01:22:01,380
Interesting.

1404
01:22:01,860 --> 01:22:02,100
Okay.

1405
01:22:02,180 --> 01:22:06,100
So yeah, so it doesn't really have an ap a practical implication for the life.

1406
01:22:06,180 --> 01:22:10,260
And then and that is interesting, but like it is harder to theorize about why we have

1407
01:22:10,260 --> 01:22:15,910
beliefs that don't actually affect our everyday material interactions.

1408
01:22:16,230 --> 01:22:18,790
Um except if it has a social purpose, right?

1409
01:22:19,030 --> 01:22:19,350
Right.

1410
01:22:19,510 --> 01:22:19,750
Yeah.

1411
01:22:19,910 --> 01:22:24,550
No, I I I find that extremely fascinating as well to what extent we really believe our

1412
01:22:24,550 --> 01:22:26,870
beliefs or whether they're just social signals.

1413
01:22:27,270 --> 01:22:32,230
Um, you know, because be precisely because they don't serve the practical functions that

1414
01:22:32,310 --> 01:22:36,230
that beliefs normally serve of guiding behavior, you know, of you know

1415
01:22:41,420 --> 01:22:43,100
By the way, I just I just quietly looked this up.

1416
01:22:43,340 --> 01:22:46,060
There's a great documentary about Flat Earthers called Behind the Curve.

1417
01:22:46,460 --> 01:22:47,420
I don't know if you guys have seen it.

1418
01:22:48,460 --> 01:22:50,780
It sounds like it's fodder for puns, though.

1419
01:22:51,100 --> 01:22:52,380
Oh yeah, a lot of great puns.

1420
01:22:52,460 --> 01:22:53,100
No, it's a great document.

1421
01:22:53,260 --> 01:22:57,100
It just basically just follows people in a flat earth society, just interviews them, and

1422
01:22:57,100 --> 01:23:01,390
just and you just get a glimpse of what life is like, what these people are like.

1423
01:23:01,550 --> 01:23:03,070
Uh and I found it really fascinating.

1424
01:23:03,150 --> 01:23:08,510
And I think it does largely support this idea that the beliefs are are social signals.

1425
01:23:08,990 --> 01:23:13,470
Um that that these people get a sense of community from being part of the Flat Earth

1426
01:23:13,470 --> 01:23:18,750
society, that this is a a collection of of weirdos and and the flat earth belief is a way

1427
01:23:18,750 --> 01:23:24,500
for them to find each other and and demarcate themselves from uh the rest of society.

1428
01:23:24,660 --> 01:23:28,820
Um and it's it's very much a social thing and not an intellectual thing that was arrived at

1429
01:23:28,820 --> 01:23:29,380
intellectually.

1430
01:23:29,540 --> 01:23:30,900
So I'd I'd recommend that documentary.

1431
01:23:30,980 --> 01:23:32,340
It's it's it's it's a good watch.

1432
01:23:32,660 --> 01:23:32,820
Cool.

1433
01:23:32,980 --> 01:23:33,700
Anyway, yeah.

1434
01:23:33,780 --> 01:23:38,100
I also like just want to say, like, you know, because I people, it's easy, especially like

1435
01:23:38,100 --> 01:23:43,300
scientists, to make fun of flat earthers, but I also feel very I see I feel affection

1436
01:23:43,300 --> 01:23:49,050
towards them in the following sense: of um You shouldn't just believe something because

1437
01:23:49,050 --> 01:23:50,250
people tell you, right?

1438
01:23:50,410 --> 01:23:56,010
Where where I would take issue is they're not typically, I don't want to

1439
01:23:56,010 --> 01:24:01,770
paint broad strokes, but in my experience, what I've seen is they're not one

1440
01:24:01,930 --> 01:24:07,530
remains a flat earther because one doesn't look exhaustively for the evidence for why the

1441
01:24:07,530 --> 01:24:09,100
earth isn't flat, right?

1442
01:24:09,260 --> 01:24:14,220
So there's a difference between sort of like not accepting the digested outcome of science,

1443
01:24:14,380 --> 01:24:14,540
right?

1444
01:24:14,620 --> 01:24:17,500
Like I personally have an experience that the earth is a globe.

1445
01:24:17,580 --> 01:24:21,020
Um, that's a fine starting point to be a scientist.

1446
01:24:21,100 --> 01:24:22,700
That that is being a scientist.

1447
01:24:22,860 --> 01:24:26,780
But then the question is: well, if the earth is flat versus if the earth is around, what

1448
01:24:26,780 --> 01:24:27,260
does that predict?

1449
01:24:27,340 --> 01:24:29,900
And what is the evidence in for one and the other?

1450
01:24:30,140 --> 01:24:34,620
And there's all kinds of data, you know, we weren't flying spaceships or satellites for a

1451
01:24:34,620 --> 01:24:37,390
long time, and people knew the earth was around like for a long time.

1452
01:24:37,470 --> 01:24:41,550
Like, you know, um, what data did people use just from like the way the sky looked, you

1453
01:24:41,550 --> 01:24:46,190
know, just from the way things like worked on Earth, like seeing a ship go go across?

1454
01:24:46,350 --> 01:24:52,270
Like, so I think um I want to just like demarcate that it's it's sometimes people laugh at

1455
01:24:52,270 --> 01:24:58,110
flat earthers, but I think like the thing to be laughed at is ignoring evidence as

1456
01:24:58,110 --> 01:25:01,710
opposed to sort of like holding a belief that's different from what other people believe.

1457
01:25:01,870 --> 01:25:06,110
I think those are two very different things, and it's important to distinguish between

1458
01:25:06,110 --> 01:25:06,270
them.

1459
01:25:06,840 --> 01:25:12,280
Can I can I add to that by saying we shouldn't la laugh at fat earthers because we're all

1460
01:25:12,280 --> 01:25:13,880
flat earthers about some things.

1461
01:25:14,120 --> 01:25:14,680
Exactly.

1462
01:25:14,920 --> 01:25:17,640
And I would say like it's and a lot.

1463
01:25:18,520 --> 01:25:23,400
I I think of quantum mechanics always as this example of like there's no like we cannot

1464
01:25:23,400 --> 01:25:25,400
investigate all of the evidence, right?

1465
01:25:25,560 --> 01:25:26,440
It's just impossible.

1466
01:25:26,520 --> 01:25:29,800
And I do feel like as somebody who does who's interested in culture evolution, I think this

1467
01:25:29,800 --> 01:25:33,750
is one of those places where cultural and evolutionary psychology really have to work

1468
01:25:33,750 --> 01:25:38,630
together um to make sense of like how people process the vast amount of information that is

1469
01:25:38,630 --> 01:25:39,830
available to them right now.

1470
01:25:40,470 --> 01:25:46,230
And like I don't it's really hard and unintuitive for me to imagine that a

1471
01:25:46,230 --> 01:25:52,230
particle is a wave and a particle like quantum mechanic phenomena like don't work with my

1472
01:25:52,230 --> 01:25:52,470
brain.

1473
01:25:52,710 --> 01:25:56,390
But um or probably I would argue with like most people's brain you have to really develop

1474
01:25:56,390 --> 01:25:59,590
those intuitions um through a lot of hard training.

1475
01:25:59,910 --> 01:26:02,280
Yeah and I don't think it is I don't think they ever do.

1476
01:26:02,440 --> 01:26:07,080
I think people who you know they just they just sort of like it, nobody understands it.

1477
01:26:07,160 --> 01:26:10,040
You just sort of get familiarity with it, but it's not intuitive.

1478
01:26:10,360 --> 01:26:15,000
And so like and the reason that I believe that is just because I trust a certain group of

1479
01:26:15,000 --> 01:26:17,800
people and not an an over another group of people, right?

1480
01:26:17,960 --> 01:26:21,880
So it's not because I've actually looked through all the I didn't go and look at like the

1481
01:26:21,880 --> 01:26:24,840
people who are against quantum mechanics and consider their evidence.

1482
01:26:25,160 --> 01:26:25,800
I didn't.

1483
01:26:26,040 --> 01:26:28,390
It would just waste all of my time.

1484
01:26:28,630 --> 01:26:33,670
So I do think that there is a really big challenge right now, probably for a lot of human

1485
01:26:33,670 --> 01:26:34,550
history to deal with that.

1486
01:26:34,870 --> 01:26:35,030
Yeah.

1487
01:26:35,110 --> 01:26:40,070
I mean it's almost like what you're saying is that with the flat earth earth example, sorry

1488
01:26:40,070 --> 01:26:44,950
to return to it, um, the the bridge burning is not happening from the side of the bridge

1489
01:26:44,950 --> 01:26:46,150
that we think it's happening from.

1490
01:26:46,310 --> 01:26:48,790
So we think of it as the flat earthers are burning the bridge.

1491
01:26:48,870 --> 01:26:53,510
They're choosing this crazy sounding, stupid belief that's going to alienate themselves

1492
01:26:53,510 --> 01:26:54,550
from the rest of society.

1493
01:26:54,710 --> 01:26:58,880
But really, uh, once you think about it, the idea that the earth is round is kind of

1494
01:26:58,880 --> 01:27:00,000
counterintuitive.

1495
01:27:00,160 --> 01:27:04,080
Uh and we are the ones who have to take that leap of faith by trusting the experts and

1496
01:27:04,080 --> 01:27:07,840
trusting the scientific community that to to believe in this counterintuitive thing.

1497
01:27:08,000 --> 01:27:10,720
If you think about it, that's really the crazy sounding belief.

1498
01:27:10,880 --> 01:27:14,320
And we have already agree.

1499
01:27:14,400 --> 01:27:14,720
Yeah.

1500
01:27:15,120 --> 01:27:18,160
Um and so maybe we already bri burned the bridge from our side.

1501
01:27:18,480 --> 01:27:22,800
How did and how did the podcast transition into a flat I'm sorry.

1502
01:27:22,880 --> 01:27:23,360
I'm sorry.

1503
01:27:23,520 --> 01:27:28,670
But but I think like but but I but you can't I do think that the bridge burning hypothesis

1504
01:27:28,990 --> 01:27:33,710
for why people believe things as a marker of group identity is a legitimate one.

1505
01:27:33,790 --> 01:27:38,350
And it just only makes sense if you consider both what's happening within and outside the

1506
01:27:38,350 --> 01:27:38,590
group.

1507
01:27:38,830 --> 01:27:43,390
So I'm not like it like bridge burning could be a thing and it requires some sort of

1508
01:27:43,390 --> 01:27:45,950
understanding of what the outgroup things and so forth.

1509
01:27:46,030 --> 01:27:48,350
So the c it's a culturally constructed bridge.

1510
01:27:48,520 --> 01:27:52,600
Like everyone needs to know that the bridge is there and that it's been burned, otherwise

1511
01:27:52,680 --> 01:27:53,000
it doesn't work.

1512
01:27:53,400 --> 01:27:55,400
And how you're going to interact with people once it's been burned.

1513
01:27:55,480 --> 01:27:57,160
Yeah, that it exactly that it's no longer there.

1514
01:27:57,240 --> 01:27:57,320
Yeah.

1515
01:27:57,560 --> 01:28:00,840
So Christina, like your point is that like if somebody sort of like says something

1516
01:28:00,840 --> 01:28:04,760
outrageous and in one social context nobody cares about it.

1517
01:28:04,920 --> 01:28:08,520
And in another context it immediately causes people to break up into groups.

1518
01:28:08,680 --> 01:28:08,840
Right.

1519
01:28:09,080 --> 01:28:13,670
That's the point is like the same behavior in two different social

1520
01:28:13,990 --> 01:28:15,110
ecologies.

1521
01:28:15,430 --> 01:28:19,750
One creates coalitional divisions and the other one is just sort of like, well, this is

1522
01:28:19,750 --> 01:28:22,230
just some person saying something kind of weird.

1523
01:28:22,550 --> 01:28:22,710
Yeah.

1524
01:28:22,870 --> 01:28:28,790
I interact with a bunch of people who I have disagreements with and it doesn't mean um

1525
01:28:29,110 --> 01:28:33,830
that I'm no longer their friends or that I disrespect them in other domains of life.

1526
01:28:33,910 --> 01:28:38,520
Like it would be impossible to find somebody who totally believes exactly the same things

1527
01:28:38,520 --> 01:28:39,080
that I do.

1528
01:28:39,320 --> 01:28:42,680
I guess like the point of it being outrageous, I do think is interesting.

1529
01:28:42,840 --> 01:28:48,600
Like um like there's maybe like a a bit of a positive feedback loop to go kind

1530
01:28:48,600 --> 01:28:52,520
of into one extreme corner that's opposite of what somebody else believes.

1531
01:28:52,600 --> 01:28:54,760
So that maybe is a bit different.

1532
01:28:55,080 --> 01:28:55,320
Yeah.

1533
01:28:55,560 --> 01:28:59,770
Or like a dynamic that ensues when it is for coalitional purposes.

1534
01:28:59,850 --> 01:29:00,410
But right.

1535
01:29:00,490 --> 01:29:01,850
This is something John Tuby talked about.

1536
01:29:01,930 --> 01:29:03,370
I actually started doing empirical study.

1537
01:29:03,450 --> 01:29:04,650
I never finished it up.

1538
01:29:04,730 --> 01:29:09,050
I shouldn't start it again or somebody should um where the idea is sort of like really

1539
01:29:09,050 --> 01:29:12,570
outrageous ideas um versus normal ideas.

1540
01:29:12,730 --> 01:29:17,370
The outrageous ideas are much more diagnostic of a social interaction.

1541
01:29:17,450 --> 01:29:19,050
It's kind of like the language principle, right?

1542
01:29:19,130 --> 01:29:23,580
Like if you see two people or you hear two people and they speak similar languages, the

1543
01:29:23,580 --> 01:29:28,860
inference is just like at some level, there's been a concatenated series of like

1544
01:29:29,500 --> 01:29:34,780
events where like these two people share a fuzzy set of like um social

1545
01:29:35,020 --> 01:29:36,060
interactions, right?

1546
01:29:36,220 --> 01:29:41,260
Like it's impossible that they speak similarly and grew up without growing up in like sort

1547
01:29:41,260 --> 01:29:43,580
of this fuzzy set of like common people.

1548
01:29:43,820 --> 01:29:48,460
And if you like show up and like some two people say, Well, it's raining outside, versus

1549
01:29:48,540 --> 01:29:53,810
like, you know, I believe God is like a purple headed elephant, you know, the purple headed

1550
01:29:53,810 --> 01:29:55,970
elephant, like that's really low prior, right?

1551
01:29:56,050 --> 01:29:57,650
That like anybody's even going to think that.

1552
01:29:57,810 --> 01:29:59,570
So it's really much more diagnostic.

1553
01:29:59,650 --> 01:30:04,850
Like at some point these two had a weird conversation and for whatever reason agreed on it,

1554
01:30:05,090 --> 01:30:08,530
versus, you know, you could just arrive at it's raining because you're looking outside and

1555
01:30:08,530 --> 01:30:09,650
it's raining, it's not predictive.

1556
01:30:09,890 --> 01:30:15,250
And so, like John Tubi's point was sort of maybe sometimes, and Christina, this sounds like

1557
01:30:15,250 --> 01:30:20,740
what you were saying too, is like the the weirdness of the of the content is actually

1558
01:30:20,740 --> 01:30:21,940
serving this function.

1559
01:30:22,100 --> 01:30:24,340
It's not always the right thing to do.

1560
01:30:24,500 --> 01:30:30,340
Um, but it might be it it it it's sort of more clearly it's such a low probability thing

1561
01:30:30,740 --> 01:30:36,500
unless it was arrived at by um people all getting together and sort of agreeing on it.

1562
01:30:37,140 --> 01:30:37,540
Yeah.

1563
01:30:37,780 --> 01:30:38,660
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1564
01:30:38,740 --> 01:30:39,220
Exactly.

1565
01:30:39,460 --> 01:30:41,940
And otherwise it'd just be like a single crazy person.

1566
01:30:42,340 --> 01:30:42,820
Exactly.

1567
01:30:43,620 --> 01:30:43,940
Yes.

1568
01:30:44,090 --> 01:30:46,730
And and so that is something I'm kind of working on now.

1569
01:30:46,890 --> 01:30:48,090
Sorry, not to make this about myself.

1570
01:30:48,650 --> 01:30:49,930
No, this the this is about you.

1571
01:30:51,050 --> 01:30:53,450
No, it's about Christina, you should be asking us.

1572
01:30:55,210 --> 01:31:00,010
No, but it is like it is precisely like how we arrive at

1573
01:31:00,810 --> 01:31:06,730
common understandings of w what a lot of people would think of originally as a crazy

1574
01:31:06,730 --> 01:31:11,280
belief, that it's kind of motivating me to look at the origin of a pilgrimage site in the

1575
01:31:11,280 --> 01:31:12,480
Peruvian altiplano.

1576
01:31:12,960 --> 01:31:18,960
And that's that's that's kind of exactly the yeah, the contrast I make is

1577
01:31:18,960 --> 01:31:22,960
like so people started celebrating like the fact that Jesus Christ appeared on the side of

1578
01:31:22,960 --> 01:31:26,000
a mountain um in 2014.

1579
01:31:26,560 --> 01:31:31,840
And so then I've been trying to map on like through time, like who's adopting that belief,

1580
01:31:31,920 --> 01:31:34,240
who's going to this pilgrimage, who doesn't believe it.

1581
01:31:34,560 --> 01:31:40,490
And the important connection here is just that um The first

1582
01:31:40,650 --> 01:31:44,730
person who saw Jesus' face on the side of the mountain and thought it was worth

1583
01:31:44,730 --> 01:31:48,730
celebrating, it is a low prior.

1584
01:31:48,810 --> 01:31:50,730
People should have a low prior on that.

1585
01:31:51,450 --> 01:31:53,930
And so they could have just been dismissed as a crazy person.

1586
01:31:54,010 --> 01:31:59,930
So then how do they go about creating a set of people who both all

1587
01:31:59,930 --> 01:32:00,410
agree?

1588
01:32:00,570 --> 01:32:00,810
Yeah.

1589
01:32:01,210 --> 01:32:05,060
And I don't think that it was that concertive of an effort of one person trying to create

1590
01:32:05,060 --> 01:32:05,860
that community.

1591
01:32:05,940 --> 01:32:09,140
Um, although some individuals might have been more involved than others.

1592
01:32:09,300 --> 01:32:14,740
Um, but yeah, the first person who said this is a flat earth, that the earth is flat, like

1593
01:32:14,900 --> 01:32:16,180
I d don't know the history of it.

1594
01:32:16,260 --> 01:32:20,980
Um maybe we do have enough records, but they somehow managed to not just be a crazy person,

1595
01:32:21,140 --> 01:32:25,060
perceived as a crazy person by the society, but actually build a community around it.

1596
01:32:25,300 --> 01:32:25,460
Right.

1597
01:32:25,540 --> 01:32:27,540
It's like the origins of religion religion, right?

1598
01:32:27,700 --> 01:32:27,780
Yeah.

1599
01:32:28,020 --> 01:32:28,260
Yeah.

1600
01:32:28,340 --> 01:32:34,090
I mean, so uh a working hypothesis I have about this is that in order to trust

1601
01:32:34,090 --> 01:32:39,530
someone's testimony, um, you have to assume that they have your best interests at heart and

1602
01:32:39,530 --> 01:32:42,250
they're not trying to manipulate you or ex or exploit you.

1603
01:32:42,410 --> 01:32:47,610
Um, so you have to be sort of loyal and trusting to the person to to trust what they have

1604
01:32:47,610 --> 01:32:51,530
to say about any topic, whether it's you know, flat earth or or or Jesus being born a

1605
01:32:51,690 --> 01:32:53,050
virgin or or whatever.

1606
01:32:53,210 --> 01:32:57,800
Um And so it could be that maybe the first person who started Flat Earth as a maybe this

1607
01:32:57,800 --> 01:33:00,920
was like a really high status, charismatic beloved person.

1608
01:33:01,480 --> 01:33:06,040
And people wanted to basically signal their loyalty to this person by trusting this

1609
01:33:06,040 --> 01:33:08,680
person's opinion and not calling them crazy.

1610
01:33:09,240 --> 01:33:12,840
And maybe that was diagnostic to the person of, you know, these people believe me, these

1611
01:33:12,840 --> 01:33:13,240
people don't.

1612
01:33:13,400 --> 01:33:16,040
These people are my friends, they're with me, they're on my side, they trust me.

1613
01:33:16,200 --> 01:33:17,240
These people don't.

1614
01:33:17,610 --> 01:33:23,370
And so bel belief itself can become a cue of loyalty and trust to a

1615
01:33:23,370 --> 01:33:23,690
group.

1616
01:33:23,770 --> 01:33:27,530
And that might be the origin of where these crazy beliefs come from, is it's precisely

1617
01:33:27,530 --> 01:33:31,530
because they're hard to believe that they're good signals of loyalty and trust.

1618
01:33:32,170 --> 01:33:32,330
Yeah.

1619
01:33:32,410 --> 01:33:35,050
So that would be like a different process.

1620
01:33:35,210 --> 01:33:40,170
Like by one, by one dynamic, like you have the kind of extreme belief to begin with.

1621
01:33:40,250 --> 01:33:42,970
Um, by another one, like they become more.

1622
01:33:43,130 --> 01:33:45,240
Another possibility is that they become more extreme.

1623
01:33:45,320 --> 01:33:50,840
Like you start off with somebody who just asks you to believe that, um, to question whether

1624
01:33:50,840 --> 01:33:55,480
we have good evidence that the earth is round, let's say, and then like it becomes more

1625
01:33:55,480 --> 01:33:55,880
extreme.

1626
01:33:56,040 --> 01:33:58,440
So I don't, again, I don't know the history of this one.

1627
01:33:58,520 --> 01:34:04,360
Um, I think that in some ways, what our results are suggesting in this particular case is

1628
01:34:04,360 --> 01:34:10,090
that another pathway is like for it not to be to try to work with the

1629
01:34:10,090 --> 01:34:13,850
perception of the extremity to of the content itself to begin with.

1630
01:34:14,010 --> 01:34:14,890
So I agree with you.

1631
01:34:15,050 --> 01:34:19,770
We do have evidence that people are more likely to go to the site if they first learned

1632
01:34:19,770 --> 01:34:23,370
about it from somebody that they trusted, like a close family member or friend, right?

1633
01:34:23,450 --> 01:34:25,530
So that increases our belief.

1634
01:34:25,690 --> 01:34:28,410
That's not we're not, we actually can't actually find the person.

1635
01:34:28,730 --> 01:34:32,730
Everybody says that there was a first person who saw this, and they everybody agrees that

1636
01:34:32,730 --> 01:34:33,770
it was a minor.

1637
01:34:33,930 --> 01:34:38,900
Um, and then beyond that, we have not been able to find the first person, and we have not

1638
01:34:38,900 --> 01:34:40,820
been able, like they have very different beliefs.

1639
01:34:40,900 --> 01:34:43,780
Like some of them say he's dead, some of them say he's in jail.

1640
01:34:43,940 --> 01:34:46,900
Like it's so we have not been able to track that down.

1641
01:34:47,220 --> 01:34:51,300
But we are able to see that, in fact, like it consistent with your prediction, David.

1642
01:34:51,460 --> 01:34:56,500
Like, you are more likely to believe this, you are more likely to go if you have

1643
01:34:56,500 --> 01:35:00,980
trustworthy sources, and you've and other people tell you that miracle has been granted

1644
01:35:01,140 --> 01:35:03,750
there, because it does require that kind of faith.

1645
01:35:03,910 --> 01:35:07,750
However, another thing that seems to be happening, which is quite different then from the

1646
01:35:07,750 --> 01:35:12,870
flat earth, possibly possibly, is that it's trying to piggyback on belief systems that

1647
01:35:12,870 --> 01:35:14,230
already exist, right?

1648
01:35:14,470 --> 01:35:17,750
And so making it feel less unfamiliar.

1649
01:35:17,990 --> 01:35:21,910
So I think and that is an inherent tension, right?

1650
01:35:21,990 --> 01:35:26,700
Like of like whether a belief system acts for bridge burning purposes, or if it's trying to

1651
01:35:26,700 --> 01:35:31,180
bring everybody in along for the ride and say, like, no, no, no, this is actually quite

1652
01:35:31,180 --> 01:35:35,020
similar to that other pilgrimage site that you've been going to for several years.

1653
01:35:35,260 --> 01:35:35,500
Right.

1654
01:35:35,660 --> 01:35:38,780
So I I think belief change can work in different ways.

1655
01:35:38,860 --> 01:35:44,860
And and this kind of goes back to the question of like what counts as like a crazy belief.

1656
01:35:44,940 --> 01:35:49,020
And you know, Dave, your point that you're affectionate towards flat earthers, like, um,

1657
01:35:49,500 --> 01:35:55,310
yeah, because because there are like some beliefs that are crazy that we

1658
01:35:55,310 --> 01:36:00,270
just accept, and some beliefs that are crazy that are probably wrong, but like we don't

1659
01:36:00,270 --> 01:36:02,270
really think people are crazy for having them.

1660
01:36:02,510 --> 01:36:08,350
So um it's it's like almost like what you're saying is you you need a backdrop of cultural

1661
01:36:08,350 --> 01:36:11,230
similarity in order to get a cultural difference.

1662
01:36:11,390 --> 01:36:15,900
That in order to have a bridge burning tactic where one belief is considered crazy by one

1663
01:36:15,900 --> 01:36:20,380
side and sane by the other side, is there needs to be a common cultural understanding of

1664
01:36:20,380 --> 01:36:23,260
what counts as crazy and what counts as not crazy.

1665
01:36:23,820 --> 01:36:28,140
Without that common cultural understanding, the the mechanism uh wouldn't work.

1666
01:36:28,620 --> 01:36:29,020
Right.

1667
01:36:29,420 --> 01:36:33,180
So the and then the cultural background can be used either to create something that's going

1668
01:36:33,180 --> 01:36:38,300
to be understood as crazy or like or bridge burning, crazy enough that you're burning some

1669
01:36:38,300 --> 01:36:43,990
bridges, or cultural background can be um used to inform how to make it not

1670
01:36:43,990 --> 01:36:44,950
sound crazy.

1671
01:36:45,030 --> 01:36:47,590
Um so both of those can produce change, right?

1672
01:36:48,150 --> 01:36:53,350
There's a there's sort of a trope too of like, and I I mean it always seems to be like um,

1673
01:36:53,430 --> 01:36:58,710
you know, like if you watch like a Bigfoot documentary or like spiritualism, and maybe this

1674
01:36:58,710 --> 01:37:04,480
is just wrong, but you know, maybe it's just like people with lots of disposable income

1675
01:37:04,480 --> 01:37:05,680
have the time to do this.

1676
01:37:05,760 --> 01:37:08,880
But, you know, people who are like looking for the Loch Ness monster, like when I was a

1677
01:37:08,880 --> 01:37:12,080
kid, I love Loch Ness Monster books, you know, or like those kinds of things.

1678
01:37:12,240 --> 01:37:17,840
Um, there there's this sort of thing of like conspiratorial or sort of

1679
01:37:17,840 --> 01:37:19,280
wacky beliefs.

1680
01:37:19,680 --> 01:37:24,320
And this is my this, I this is me taking off my scientist hat and just like my my personal

1681
01:37:24,320 --> 01:37:29,450
observation is that it almost looks kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of like people

1682
01:37:29,450 --> 01:37:33,930
with status and resources are more willing to sort of say wacky things.

1683
01:37:34,330 --> 01:37:38,410
Um and again that might be wrong and it might just be that like those are the people who

1684
01:37:38,410 --> 01:37:42,490
can afford to like buy the boat in the sonar looking for the Loch Ness monster.

1685
01:37:42,570 --> 01:37:46,250
And the guy who like you know is too poor to do any of that, you know, there's no

1686
01:37:46,250 --> 01:37:47,370
documentary about him.

1687
01:37:47,530 --> 01:37:49,130
He just thinks it's true.

1688
01:37:49,690 --> 01:37:54,800
But yeah, is that is that a thing where, like, sort of can this be used entrepreneurially

1689
01:37:54,880 --> 01:38:00,320
to sort of people are generating, you know, if you find yourself in a high bargaining

1690
01:38:00,320 --> 01:38:06,240
phenotype or context, you're sort of spouting sort of things that are,

1691
01:38:06,320 --> 01:38:10,560
like you said, like within this range of sort of like maybe some people come along with me

1692
01:38:10,640 --> 01:38:11,440
and maybe they won't.

1693
01:38:11,520 --> 01:38:16,160
It's almost like a leadership or um a grouping entrepreneurial thing.

1694
01:38:16,240 --> 01:38:18,800
Is that um is that crazy?

1695
01:38:19,190 --> 01:38:20,230
That seems possible.

1696
01:38:20,390 --> 01:38:26,070
It's consistent with well, with I was thinking of the early adopter literature, which is

1697
01:38:26,070 --> 01:38:31,030
usually not about coming up with like a new belief, but coming like being an early adopter

1698
01:38:31,030 --> 01:38:33,430
of a new technology, is where that's been studied a lot.

1699
01:38:33,590 --> 01:38:39,350
And um some people might be seen as crazy for adopting a new technology, right?

1700
01:38:39,430 --> 01:38:44,870
Um, but but it is overwhelmingly that literature suggests um kind of higher status

1701
01:38:44,870 --> 01:38:49,220
individuals who are um the ones doing the early adoption.

1702
01:38:49,300 --> 01:38:54,580
But then that could be like a very kind of minimal, not so strategic explanation for it.

1703
01:38:54,660 --> 01:38:57,140
It could just be that they can't, like you you hinted at, right?

1704
01:38:57,220 --> 01:38:58,820
That they can afford to do that.

1705
01:38:58,980 --> 01:39:04,500
They can afford to lose some reputational status points if it turns out to be a bad choice.

1706
01:39:04,740 --> 01:39:04,980
Right.

1707
01:39:05,460 --> 01:39:08,020
Or just can about they can afford like the monetary risk, right?

1708
01:39:08,820 --> 01:39:10,020
Even just the monetary risk.

1709
01:39:11,140 --> 01:39:16,470
But also if um like but I think it is an interesting alternative that like all the people

1710
01:39:16,470 --> 01:39:21,750
who did do this kind of early adoption that didn't get followers and didn't it didn't pay

1711
01:39:21,750 --> 01:39:23,750
off like that, we just don't see them in the literature.

1712
01:39:23,910 --> 01:39:24,390
Yeah.

1713
01:39:24,630 --> 01:39:28,230
Um but I think you were hinting at something a bit more strategic, right?

1714
01:39:28,310 --> 01:39:33,910
That like there is a way that people are doing this when they want to create some

1715
01:39:33,910 --> 01:39:35,540
sort of grouping.

1716
01:39:35,940 --> 01:39:36,100
Right.

1717
01:39:36,260 --> 01:39:40,420
I also I I one sometimes wonder like in the context of like science being a status game

1718
01:39:40,500 --> 01:39:44,260
that you know science sort of works this way too or like certain people are just sort of

1719
01:39:44,260 --> 01:39:47,700
motivated to be like, what I'm doing is different, you know, like that kind of thing.

1720
01:39:48,820 --> 01:39:49,300
Yeah, yeah.

1721
01:39:49,460 --> 01:39:50,180
That's true.

1722
01:39:50,340 --> 01:39:50,500
Yeah.

1723
01:39:50,740 --> 01:39:52,500
You do get rewarded for being different.

1724
01:39:52,740 --> 01:39:52,980
Yeah.

1725
01:39:53,140 --> 01:39:57,380
But you I think you have but to your point, Dave, I think you have to have a certain level

1726
01:39:57,380 --> 01:40:02,030
of status to even get away with, you know, going out on a limb and saying crazy things.

1727
01:40:02,190 --> 01:40:02,430
Right?

1728
01:40:02,590 --> 01:40:06,750
People have to be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt um in order for you in order

1729
01:40:06,750 --> 01:40:07,950
for it to pay off.

1730
01:40:08,270 --> 01:40:11,470
Um so yeah I I I buy that that way of thinking.

1731
01:40:11,550 --> 01:40:16,110
I mean I I I don't think it's a coincidence that cult leaders are often very charismatic

1732
01:40:16,110 --> 01:40:16,430
people.

1733
01:40:16,510 --> 01:40:21,150
It's because they have to earn that status and loyalty before they can right whip out their

1734
01:40:21,150 --> 01:40:22,270
crazy beliefs.

1735
01:40:22,430 --> 01:40:22,670
Yeah.

1736
01:40:22,830 --> 01:40:24,900
Uh what is charisma then though?

1737
01:40:24,980 --> 01:40:26,100
Like I kind of unwonder.

1738
01:40:26,180 --> 01:40:29,220
I mean, we know like people have been talking about it since the early 20th century, but

1739
01:40:29,220 --> 01:40:31,860
some people that are currently like obviously very charismatic.

1740
01:40:31,940 --> 01:40:33,700
I have a hard time understanding why.

1741
01:40:33,940 --> 01:40:36,580
Um do we have like good operational definitions of that?

1742
01:40:36,740 --> 01:40:40,740
Because like if we think of it as just like high SES, like they actually have the material

1743
01:40:40,740 --> 01:40:41,300
backing.

1744
01:40:41,380 --> 01:40:45,220
I don't is that also true of cult leaders that they have like the material wealth to become

1745
01:40:45,220 --> 01:40:46,180
cult leaders?

1746
01:40:46,340 --> 01:40:49,930
Um, or is it like these more intangible things.

1747
01:40:50,250 --> 01:40:54,330
I think it's more in I mean, there's so little high quality work on charisma.

1748
01:40:54,410 --> 01:40:56,570
I've been thinking about it a bit myself, actually.

1749
01:40:57,050 --> 01:41:00,250
Um I think it's a kind of social intelligence.

1750
01:41:00,570 --> 01:41:04,090
So um I have a paper uh called The Evolution of Social Paradoxes.

1751
01:41:04,170 --> 01:41:06,010
I'm I'm I'm trying to get published now.

1752
01:41:06,170 --> 01:41:09,770
Um, and it's about how a lot of our signals have to be concealed in order to be

1753
01:41:09,770 --> 01:41:11,050
successfully transmitted.

1754
01:41:11,770 --> 01:41:16,800
Um so we have to uh compete for status without revealing the fact that we're competing for

1755
01:41:16,800 --> 01:41:17,040
status.

1756
01:41:17,120 --> 01:41:20,080
Because if we're outed as a status seeker, we actually lose status.

1757
01:41:20,400 --> 01:41:24,640
Or we try to get other people's attention without being an attention seeker.

1758
01:41:24,880 --> 01:41:30,080
Or we, you know, we try to be be brave and defy social norms in order to win the approval

1759
01:41:30,080 --> 01:41:31,360
and esteem of our peers.

1760
01:41:31,440 --> 01:41:35,520
And there are a lot of these kinds of paradoxical signals that we send where uh the when

1761
01:41:35,520 --> 01:41:39,630
the signal itself is revealed, it collapses and you fail to gain any of the benefits.

1762
01:41:39,710 --> 01:41:42,670
If you're seen as a virtue signaler, you're not going to get virtue.

1763
01:41:42,990 --> 01:41:47,390
In order to get virtue, you have to be seen as authentically caring about helping or doing

1764
01:41:47,390 --> 01:41:47,550
good.

1765
01:41:47,710 --> 01:41:52,030
And if you're just trying to boost your reputation as a morally superior person, then

1766
01:41:52,030 --> 01:41:53,950
you're going to look morally inferior.

1767
01:41:54,190 --> 01:42:00,190
And so I think what charisma is, is the ability to send these kinds of

1768
01:42:00,190 --> 01:42:01,230
concealed signals.

1769
01:42:01,390 --> 01:42:06,360
So a charismatic person is a person that can successfully virtue signal without uh

1770
01:42:06,360 --> 01:42:08,280
revealing the fact that they're virtue signaling.

1771
01:42:08,360 --> 01:42:12,120
They're a person who can display their status without displaying the fact that they're

1772
01:42:12,120 --> 01:42:13,080
displaying their status.

1773
01:42:13,240 --> 01:42:18,680
They can capture others attention without outing themselves as an attention seeker.

1774
01:42:19,240 --> 01:42:24,600
They're exceptionally good at at playing these kinds of social games that require lots of

1775
01:42:24,600 --> 01:42:30,040
levels of recursive mentalizing about knowing what the other person knows you know and and

1776
01:42:30,040 --> 01:42:33,960
knowing that um they're not going to know that you intentionally wanted them to know that.

1777
01:42:35,650 --> 01:42:37,970
That's my working model of what charisma is.

1778
01:42:38,050 --> 01:42:41,090
It's a kind of ability to play social games really well.

1779
01:42:41,250 --> 01:42:41,410
Yeah.

1780
01:42:46,930 --> 01:42:52,930
And that itself becomes a cue of your likely status

1781
01:42:52,930 --> 01:42:53,570
in the future.

1782
01:42:53,730 --> 01:42:58,700
Because if you're socially attractive, Um and and I I I find myself, you you're sort of

1783
01:42:58,700 --> 01:43:02,060
emitting all of the cues that I'm looking for in a good social partner.

1784
01:43:02,220 --> 01:43:05,420
Um well that's suggests to me that you know other people are going to respond the same way

1785
01:43:05,500 --> 01:43:09,260
and you're likely to win a lot of followers and a lot of friends and you're likely to

1786
01:43:09,260 --> 01:43:13,740
ascend uh the the the status hierarchy even if you're not high status right now.

1787
01:43:13,900 --> 01:43:18,670
Um and so I think that's what what charisma is about.

1788
01:43:18,910 --> 01:43:22,750
Sorry, I'm I'm just sort of spewing my my thinking on this topic.

1789
01:43:22,990 --> 01:43:23,870
Um I like that.

1790
01:43:24,270 --> 01:43:26,350
Yeah, I'm curious if if you think that's that's plausible or not.

1791
01:43:26,670 --> 01:43:31,150
Yeah, I like that you're kind of getting to an more operational definition of it.

1792
01:43:31,310 --> 01:43:35,950
And I know that they're like game theoretic models about that, about like um burying

1793
01:43:35,950 --> 01:43:36,830
signals, right?

1794
01:43:37,150 --> 01:43:42,840
Um that I think also boggle my mind a little bit in terms of you have yeah

1795
01:43:43,000 --> 01:43:48,920
being I I don't know how they're stable to like higher order thinking, but I think

1796
01:43:48,920 --> 01:43:49,160
they are.

1797
01:43:49,320 --> 01:43:49,720
I think they are.

1798
01:43:49,800 --> 01:43:51,480
I don't know if they're true well enough.

1799
01:43:51,720 --> 01:43:57,720
Um yeah, like how to be just subtle enough while still having the same

1800
01:43:57,720 --> 01:44:00,280
motivation and having more work is kind of amazing.

1801
01:44:00,840 --> 01:44:06,650
My thinking about why it's stable is that the ability to send deceptive

1802
01:44:06,650 --> 01:44:11,450
signals effectively is itself a valid cue of your likely social status.

1803
01:44:12,010 --> 01:44:12,170
Right.

1804
01:44:12,250 --> 01:44:16,010
But then that's true for so those kinds of like positive feedback loops, they could be for

1805
01:44:16,010 --> 01:44:16,570
anything, right?

1806
01:44:16,730 --> 01:44:19,450
Like if you kind of that's what sexual selection models do, right?

1807
01:44:19,610 --> 01:44:23,930
Like it's like, oh, you you want somebody tall, oh, because other people want somebody

1808
01:44:23,930 --> 01:44:24,330
tall.

1809
01:44:24,650 --> 01:44:26,810
And so that could stabilize anything, right?

1810
01:44:26,970 --> 01:44:32,600
So I I like this idea that it's about like specifically these kinds of

1811
01:44:32,600 --> 01:44:38,040
games um being played where you cannot be too overt about what you want.

1812
01:44:38,200 --> 01:44:39,000
But that I don't know.

1813
01:44:39,080 --> 01:44:42,680
Some people right now don't want to name names, but like some people right now seem quite

1814
01:44:42,680 --> 01:44:46,280
overt about their motivations and still seem to be quite charismatic.

1815
01:44:46,760 --> 01:44:49,000
That is true, but only certain motivations.

1816
01:44:49,240 --> 01:44:49,320
Yeah.

1817
01:44:49,560 --> 01:44:55,110
So um yeah, so I mean I I I imagine you're you're you're thinking about a politician whose

1818
01:44:55,110 --> 01:44:56,230
name rhymes with dump.

1819
01:44:56,550 --> 01:44:59,510
Um but uh yeah I think we'll cut that out.

1820
01:44:59,750 --> 01:45:00,710
We'll cut that out.

1821
01:45:03,430 --> 01:45:08,390
Um yeah, uh he's definitely overtly braggadocious and uh

1822
01:45:08,870 --> 01:45:11,430
overtly um narcissistic.

1823
01:45:11,700 --> 01:45:17,620
Um but I think what ultimately he's he's signaling is uh is a kind

1824
01:45:17,620 --> 01:45:22,580
of loyalty to his his base and an enmity toward their enemies.

1825
01:45:23,060 --> 01:45:27,860
And I think he's signaling that um effectively because he's using bridge burning tactics as

1826
01:45:27,860 --> 01:45:28,500
we've been discussed.

1827
01:45:28,660 --> 01:45:34,030
He's saying things that are outrageous to uh the the left uh wing

1828
01:45:34,030 --> 01:45:35,150
intelligentsia.

1829
01:45:35,470 --> 01:45:40,110
Um and that and then it's precisely because they're so outrageous to the left wing

1830
01:45:40,110 --> 01:45:44,990
intelligentsia that that it wins him uh approval from his uh his base.

1831
01:45:45,710 --> 01:45:49,470
So I think that's that's really what he's signaling.

1832
01:45:49,630 --> 01:45:51,550
Um and I think he's doing it effectively.

1833
01:45:51,870 --> 01:45:53,790
Um whether he's concealing that signal, I don't know.

1834
01:45:53,870 --> 01:45:54,590
That's an interesting question.

1835
01:45:57,000 --> 01:45:57,480
I don't know.

1836
01:45:58,120 --> 01:45:59,800
Yeah, in a different in a different direction.

1837
01:45:59,880 --> 01:46:03,000
I've always thought like, I don't know, has anybody done the evolutionary psychology of

1838
01:46:03,000 --> 01:46:04,440
cool of being cool?

1839
01:46:05,000 --> 01:46:07,480
Is that is cool different than charismatic?

1840
01:46:07,720 --> 01:46:08,520
I think so, right?

1841
01:46:08,920 --> 01:46:09,080
No.

1842
01:46:09,160 --> 01:46:09,560
I don't know.

1843
01:46:09,640 --> 01:46:13,800
I mean, because I think um I mean I'm I I I take a slightly different take.

1844
01:46:14,120 --> 01:46:15,400
Well David, what do you think?

1845
01:46:15,800 --> 01:46:17,800
I I view them as largely synonymous.

1846
01:46:18,040 --> 01:46:18,280
Yeah.

1847
01:46:18,360 --> 01:46:19,800
I think I mean I think cool.

1848
01:46:19,880 --> 01:46:22,440
I think there's like people that just are sort of wired.

1849
01:46:22,770 --> 01:46:28,690
Um, you know, because like, you know, even like kids, so like my son, for example, is much

1850
01:46:28,690 --> 01:46:30,690
more charismatic than me.

1851
01:46:31,090 --> 01:46:34,770
Um, you know, and when he walks into a room like he'll be so harsh on yourself.

1852
01:46:34,850 --> 01:46:37,250
He's well, no, but it's no, no, it's an age thing.

1853
01:46:37,570 --> 01:46:39,650
He is like he's he's just very charismatic.

1854
01:46:39,810 --> 01:46:42,930
Like, like, you know, and I is I'm not the only person to like observe this.

1855
01:46:43,010 --> 01:46:48,000
And like there's just something about the way he's wired that like people enjoy being

1856
01:46:48,000 --> 01:46:48,400
around him.

1857
01:46:48,480 --> 01:46:51,280
And he like the room is different when he's in it and not.

1858
01:46:51,600 --> 01:46:55,360
And and I see that, you know, I've had enough experiences like where, you know, whatever,

1859
01:46:55,520 --> 01:46:56,400
parents are biased.

1860
01:46:56,480 --> 01:47:01,200
But like, um, so even if it's not true, like I still think this can be true even like of

1861
01:47:01,200 --> 01:47:01,440
kids.

1862
01:47:01,520 --> 01:47:07,520
And so I think the value of sort of like that this person is wired to make people

1863
01:47:07,520 --> 01:47:08,000
feel good.

1864
01:47:08,160 --> 01:47:11,910
I think, I think the things David's talking about will come along, right?

1865
01:47:11,990 --> 01:47:17,990
Or or like that skill set or whatever that is, then kind of naturally

1866
01:47:17,990 --> 01:47:23,510
leads into this strategic use for good or bad or neutral.

1867
01:47:23,830 --> 01:47:25,510
That's just because you know people are people.

1868
01:47:25,590 --> 01:47:29,670
But I think um but yeah I was just wondering if anybody's sort of done the evolutionary

1869
01:47:29,670 --> 01:47:33,030
psychology of cool that would be cool.

1870
01:47:33,380 --> 01:47:34,020
I don't think so.

1871
01:47:34,340 --> 01:47:35,300
Not not to my knowledge.

1872
01:47:35,380 --> 01:47:35,620
Yeah.

1873
01:47:35,780 --> 01:47:40,340
No, I I I think may I feel like coolness is like part charisma and part just like status in

1874
01:47:40,340 --> 01:47:40,820
general.

1875
01:47:41,060 --> 01:47:45,860
That like you can be a non-charismatic cool person if you're just really well respected and

1876
01:47:45,860 --> 01:47:46,420
high status.

1877
01:47:46,740 --> 01:47:47,380
That's true.

1878
01:47:47,540 --> 01:47:48,900
That's that's definitely true.

1879
01:47:49,300 --> 01:47:55,140
Like I could be a really awkward um person and yet if I am widely regarded as a

1880
01:47:55,140 --> 01:47:56,820
genius, I could still be cool, you know?

1881
01:47:57,140 --> 01:47:57,460
Right.

1882
01:47:57,700 --> 01:48:01,550
I think this may be a conversation where it's useful it might be again like useful to think

1883
01:48:01,550 --> 01:48:05,470
about like functionally what do you do with that information or with that like leverage

1884
01:48:05,470 --> 01:48:06,590
that now you have?

1885
01:48:06,830 --> 01:48:11,630
And um or like what are the people who are assi assessing you as cool do with that, right?

1886
01:48:11,790 --> 01:48:13,070
Is it that they're gonna learn from you?

1887
01:48:13,230 --> 01:48:15,630
Is it that they want to become part of your coalition?

1888
01:48:15,790 --> 01:48:15,950
Yeah.

1889
01:48:16,190 --> 01:48:18,830
Um is it that you have like insider information?

1890
01:48:19,150 --> 01:48:24,460
Because I had kind of had the sense that cool would also be somebody who's kind of up on

1891
01:48:24,460 --> 01:48:26,860
trends so that they would be like an early adopter.

1892
01:48:27,020 --> 01:48:27,660
Is that not true?

1893
01:48:27,900 --> 01:48:31,820
Like if you're I think you're right that it's a placeholder for lots of different I think

1894
01:48:31,820 --> 01:48:34,300
there's there's ambiguity about what it refers to, yeah.

1895
01:48:34,460 --> 01:48:39,660
And I suspect it's you know well picking up on on social trends and, you know, uh

1896
01:48:39,980 --> 01:48:45,260
conforming to the to the latest trends without revealing the fact that you're a conformist,

1897
01:48:45,500 --> 01:48:49,330
that is itself the same skill that I that uh uh produces charisma, I think.

1898
01:48:49,410 --> 01:48:53,090
So I think being fashionable and trendy and being charismatic are largely synonymous and

1899
01:48:53,090 --> 01:48:54,850
they stem from the same underlying ability.

1900
01:48:55,250 --> 01:48:55,650
Yeah.

1901
01:48:55,890 --> 01:49:01,890
Yeah, but I think I think is it worth like um thinking about each of those kinds of things

1902
01:49:01,890 --> 01:49:04,130
that you want to signal without being overt?

1903
01:49:04,370 --> 01:49:08,930
Like that you're trying to signal that you're have inside information without conforming,

1904
01:49:09,090 --> 01:49:15,020
seems kind of different from um you are um trying to

1905
01:49:15,020 --> 01:49:19,100
show that you're very moralist morally racious without showing that you're morally racious,

1906
01:49:19,180 --> 01:49:19,340
right?

1907
01:49:19,420 --> 01:49:21,260
Like they're at least it's different content.

1908
01:49:21,340 --> 01:49:24,860
I don't know if it's going to be functionally then used for different purposes, but

1909
01:49:25,500 --> 01:49:30,860
definitely different content, but I think the the level of rec recursive uh mind reading is

1910
01:49:30,860 --> 01:49:35,500
the same in in both cases, and that you have to descend a few layers of recursive mind

1911
01:49:35,500 --> 01:49:41,210
reading to so that I can know that you don't know that I want you to know

1912
01:49:41,210 --> 01:49:42,410
X, right?

1913
01:49:42,810 --> 01:49:48,570
Or I I anticipate that you're going to be anticipating that I'm going to try to make you

1914
01:49:48,570 --> 01:49:54,570
think uh X and therefore I'm going to do Y instead so that you don't think that

1915
01:49:54,570 --> 01:49:57,290
I wanted you to think X.

1916
01:49:57,530 --> 01:49:58,570
Sorry, that got very complicated.

1917
01:49:59,050 --> 01:50:00,170
I'm stuck at two levels.

1918
01:50:00,250 --> 01:50:01,690
Like I don't do recursive reasoning.

1919
01:50:01,770 --> 01:50:02,490
I'm stuck at two levels.

1920
01:50:02,650 --> 01:50:04,780
Well it's it's precisely that ability that is the same thing.

1921
01:50:05,020 --> 01:50:06,060
That's why I'm not charismatic.

1922
01:50:06,380 --> 01:50:09,340
Well, we do know the systems in the natural format.

1923
01:50:09,420 --> 01:50:10,460
Yeah, no, exactly.

1924
01:50:11,260 --> 01:50:16,220
Um, Christina, um uh to make sure we get to there's a couple of things.

1925
01:50:16,380 --> 01:50:22,060
One is like, how did you um discover evolutionary social science?

1926
01:50:22,140 --> 01:50:23,340
Like, how did you get interested in it?

1927
01:50:23,660 --> 01:50:27,740
Gosh, I'm such I think maybe a lot of us are contrarians, and so maybe it's not going to

1928
01:50:27,740 --> 01:50:31,650
work so much so well for the next generation because I think we're more established now.

1929
01:50:31,890 --> 01:50:37,890
But at the I do remember being a history major and then taking my intro-bioanthro

1930
01:50:38,130 --> 01:50:39,650
class from Jonathan Marks.

1931
01:50:39,970 --> 01:50:45,970
Um, and he is uh a well-respected biological anthropologist, but who really likes to point

1932
01:50:46,210 --> 01:50:51,810
towards the kind of its sordid history and all the ways that it's misused and

1933
01:50:52,780 --> 01:50:58,140
and it's and kind of not propping up some of like the interesting triumphs of like

1934
01:50:58,140 --> 01:51:03,660
evolutionary approaches to um human, to understanding humans, not just behavior.

1935
01:51:03,900 --> 01:51:07,100
And so I think that really hooked me, to be honest.

1936
01:51:07,340 --> 01:51:12,620
Just not the sordid history, but like the search for like what is good about this and like

1937
01:51:12,700 --> 01:51:14,220
what can we do about this.

1938
01:51:14,460 --> 01:51:18,430
Um and so that that's when I switched to anthro.

1939
01:51:18,910 --> 01:51:24,430
Can you clarify so uh that the class was saying like there's a sorted history, but there

1940
01:51:24,430 --> 01:51:28,350
were like there's a a core can you just flesh that out?

1941
01:51:28,430 --> 01:51:33,230
Sorry, I just missed I I kinda I'd have to like reconstruct what his complaints were, but

1942
01:51:33,310 --> 01:51:36,190
um Well wait, was he complaining about biological anthropology?

1943
01:51:36,510 --> 01:51:37,230
Like that sounds good?

1944
01:51:37,500 --> 01:51:37,660
Yeah.

1945
01:51:37,740 --> 01:51:38,860
And I was like, that sounds good.

1946
01:51:39,100 --> 01:51:39,660
Yes, yes, yes.

1947
01:51:39,900 --> 01:51:41,500
That's why I think I'm a bit of a contrarian.

1948
01:51:41,580 --> 01:51:42,140
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1949
01:51:42,300 --> 01:51:45,420
So he was like, biological anthropology, these are all the bad things about it.

1950
01:51:45,500 --> 01:51:47,580
And I'm like, oh, but there must be something good here.

1951
01:51:47,900 --> 01:51:49,340
There must be something useful here.

1952
01:51:49,580 --> 01:51:55,500
And I think at the time, like, you know, that we're also I I I do think about this

1953
01:51:55,500 --> 01:51:56,300
with our current students.

1954
01:51:56,380 --> 01:52:00,300
Like, I think they're often like, and I I mean myself at the time, probably also like drawn

1955
01:52:00,300 --> 01:52:04,790
to issues that seem like um politically like contentious.

1956
01:52:04,870 --> 01:52:07,270
And at the time I think it was maybe a bit more so.

1957
01:52:07,590 --> 01:52:09,590
And so I think that's less so now.

1958
01:52:09,670 --> 01:52:15,030
I think most people believe and understand like how evolution is important to understanding

1959
01:52:15,030 --> 01:52:17,830
humans, but maybe disagree about exactly how.

1960
01:52:18,790 --> 01:52:22,630
And so just the fact that there was like a controversy there, I think drew me to it and

1961
01:52:22,630 --> 01:52:23,990
like wanted to dig more.

1962
01:52:24,150 --> 01:52:28,230
So I did change to being an anthra major and then I just started picking and choosing

1963
01:52:28,230 --> 01:52:34,220
classes that seem to speak to also this possibility of having like a big kind of holistic

1964
01:52:34,220 --> 01:52:39,500
understanding of all of the things about why we are the way we are.

1965
01:52:39,740 --> 01:52:44,780
Um, and I think it's not surprising that it's often a somewhat it it doesn't have to be,

1966
01:52:44,860 --> 01:52:50,700
but it tends to draw kind of secular people, maybe as a replacement for like a

1967
01:52:50,940 --> 01:52:52,460
framework for understanding.

1968
01:52:52,700 --> 01:52:56,300
Um, kind of pretty puzzling things about humans and our relatives.

1969
01:52:56,460 --> 01:53:02,070
And I I suspect it does some sort of replacement, even if it works differently for

1970
01:53:02,630 --> 01:53:06,310
that was that was a big part of Dave's origin story back when I interviewed him.

1971
01:53:06,470 --> 01:53:08,230
You mentioned your religious upbringing, Dave.

1972
01:53:08,790 --> 01:53:11,350
Yeah, that's a that was a two-hour episode.

1973
01:53:12,790 --> 01:53:14,070
I'll have to listen to that then.

1974
01:53:14,310 --> 01:53:15,190
Yeah, episode two.

1975
01:53:15,590 --> 01:53:16,310
Coming soon.

1976
01:53:16,550 --> 01:53:16,710
Okay.

1977
01:53:17,030 --> 01:53:19,350
Out out already by the time people are hearing this.

1978
01:53:19,430 --> 01:53:20,390
So go back.

1979
01:53:21,670 --> 01:53:24,310
Christina, is there anything that we should have asked you?

1980
01:53:24,720 --> 01:53:26,320
Oh man, I didn't prepare for that.

1981
01:53:26,640 --> 01:53:27,280
No, we didn't.

1982
01:53:27,440 --> 01:53:29,280
Well we haven't this is not yet published.

1983
01:53:29,680 --> 01:53:31,760
Pretty much everyone is completely taken off guard by that question.

1984
01:53:32,080 --> 01:53:37,280
And then we just have a couple of thirty seconds of filler banter and then but no we we

1985
01:53:37,440 --> 01:53:41,760
this is a surprise because we're not actually published yet when we've been recording this.

1986
01:53:42,080 --> 01:53:45,680
But we should discuss I don't have an answer to it, but we should discuss about like what

1987
01:53:45,680 --> 01:53:51,030
are the next steps or like the big things that evolutionary social sciences has to do.

1988
01:53:51,270 --> 01:53:51,670
Yeah.

1989
01:53:51,830 --> 01:53:52,550
Um potentially.

1990
01:53:53,510 --> 01:53:56,390
We should have you we should have you back on for for for that.

1991
01:53:56,790 --> 01:54:00,470
Somebody else has better no no no no no that would be an awesome episode.

1992
01:54:00,550 --> 01:54:03,590
Yeah the future of evolutionary social science with Christina Moya.

1993
01:54:04,310 --> 01:54:06,310
I don't know to be continued on that one.

1994
01:54:07,020 --> 01:54:09,260
A bunch of good t-shirts for this episode.

1995
01:54:10,940 --> 01:54:11,340
What was it?

1996
01:54:11,500 --> 01:54:13,820
Essence of Dog and Essence of Dog, yeah.

1997
01:54:14,060 --> 01:54:14,700
Essence of Dog.

1998
01:54:15,100 --> 01:54:16,700
Flat Earther uh restaurant.

1999
01:54:16,940 --> 01:54:17,260
Restaurant.

2000
01:54:18,860 --> 01:54:20,140
I figured it'd be like a hot dog place.

2001
01:54:20,220 --> 01:54:21,100
That's sort of what I was imagining.

2002
01:54:21,260 --> 01:54:22,460
I don't know what you guys were imagining.

2003
01:54:22,860 --> 01:54:24,700
Like I thought more like Casadillas.

2004
01:54:25,100 --> 01:54:26,140
Oh, that would be more fitting.

2005
01:54:27,100 --> 01:54:27,420
Okay, you couldn't.

2006
01:54:28,540 --> 01:54:29,740
You won that competition.

2007
01:54:30,700 --> 01:54:31,420
Sorry, Christina.

2008
01:54:31,660 --> 01:54:32,780
You're saying you were about to say something.

2009
01:54:33,100 --> 01:54:33,900
Oh no, something else.

2010
01:54:33,980 --> 01:54:38,050
I guess like I also I don't have another thing I don't have a good answer for, but I want

2011
01:54:38,050 --> 01:54:38,370
somebody else.

2012
01:54:38,450 --> 01:54:42,050
Maybe you guys should interview somebody else who tells us about kind of um evolutionary

2013
01:54:42,130 --> 01:54:46,690
approaches in the real world and like what they can give us, other because I pr I very much

2014
01:54:46,690 --> 01:54:51,170
come to this from a basic science perspective and I'm just motivated by curiosity.

2015
01:54:51,410 --> 01:54:56,210
Um and I sometimes think that's not enough or like that we could do more.

2016
01:54:56,370 --> 01:55:00,290
Um, and I feel guilty sometimes about just being motivated by curiosity.

2017
01:55:00,530 --> 01:55:06,380
And so just to you know, particularly in this moment where like um science

2018
01:55:06,700 --> 01:55:11,100
and understanding the world and cross cultural diversity, I think is not particularly

2019
01:55:11,100 --> 01:55:11,740
valued.

2020
01:55:11,900 --> 01:55:15,820
Um I think we'd have to kind of work on our argument for that.

2021
01:55:15,900 --> 01:55:18,860
So I think you should cut it because I don't have the argument ready.

2022
01:55:19,180 --> 01:55:20,540
But I think we should discuss it.

2023
01:55:20,780 --> 01:55:21,020
Yeah.

2024
01:55:21,500 --> 01:55:22,780
Not figure out a good answer.

2025
01:55:23,020 --> 01:55:23,900
Yeah, no, that's true.

2026
01:55:23,980 --> 01:55:28,380
I mean, we've had so like we had Michael Moncrief on and he does like work on like

2027
01:55:28,380 --> 01:55:31,180
terrorism, international humanitarian law.

2028
01:55:31,340 --> 01:55:31,660
Right.

2029
01:55:31,900 --> 01:55:37,430
Um, but um, but yeah, but where where these things sort of get cashed

2030
01:55:37,750 --> 01:55:43,430
out into policy, though I know and David is a a good a good critic of this

2031
01:55:43,750 --> 01:55:49,430
of the long history and social sciences of sort of taking a half-baked or maybe

2032
01:55:49,430 --> 01:55:54,870
completely raw idea, foisting it on people and having, you know, the road to hell is paved

2033
01:55:54,870 --> 01:55:56,390
with good intentions kind of thing.

2034
01:55:56,790 --> 01:55:57,110
Yeah.

2035
01:55:57,830 --> 01:55:58,150
Totally.

2036
01:55:58,310 --> 01:56:01,910
And I think that is maybe that is a there's a book called Applied Evolutionary

2037
01:56:01,910 --> 01:56:02,470
Anthropology.

2038
01:56:02,550 --> 01:56:05,240
I don't know if you've David Lawson is your colleague, actually.

2039
01:56:05,480 --> 01:56:06,520
Is a editor.

2040
01:56:06,760 --> 01:56:07,080
Oh, great.

2041
01:56:07,800 --> 01:56:08,760
We're gonna have one another, David.

2042
01:56:09,560 --> 01:56:09,960
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2043
01:56:10,200 --> 01:56:11,640
It won't get confusing at all.

2044
01:56:12,200 --> 01:56:17,160
Um, but but I think some of the case studies that they highlight are ones where actually it

2045
01:56:17,160 --> 01:56:23,000
was just kind of like putting the brakes on kind of strong hypotheses that like

2046
01:56:23,000 --> 01:56:25,000
development econ people had, right?

2047
01:56:25,320 --> 01:56:30,970
Just by being ethnographically informed and thinking like just having a broader set like

2048
01:56:30,970 --> 01:56:34,490
the evolutionary framework giving you like a broader set of like possible predictions of

2049
01:56:34,490 --> 01:56:36,090
the ways that things could turn out.

2050
01:56:36,330 --> 01:56:36,410
Right.

2051
01:56:36,890 --> 01:56:38,730
Sometimes I feel like that's paralyzing.

2052
01:56:39,690 --> 01:56:40,170
At least for me.

2053
01:56:40,250 --> 01:56:41,850
I'm like I don't know where to go from here.

2054
01:56:41,930 --> 01:56:47,770
But but but it but it it is important to have those cautions.

2055
01:56:48,010 --> 01:56:50,860
But I think I think I'm just overly cautious.

2056
01:56:50,940 --> 01:56:52,700
And then somebody's going to make those policies anyway.

2057
01:56:53,100 --> 01:56:53,580
Yeah, exactly.

2058
01:56:53,660 --> 01:56:53,900
Exactly.

2059
01:56:54,140 --> 01:56:56,860
And so then the question is how do we, how do we speak to that?

2060
01:56:57,100 --> 01:56:57,260
Yeah.

2061
01:56:57,340 --> 01:56:58,700
And there's so much documented.

2062
01:56:58,780 --> 01:57:03,180
Like I was, I was just looking at like the Afghanistan papers book, like just for as an

2063
01:57:03,180 --> 01:57:07,100
example for in psych one, just sort of like conformity, because like what's the newest

2064
01:57:07,100 --> 01:57:07,500
decade?

2065
01:57:07,580 --> 01:57:09,020
You know, what's in the last two decades?

2066
01:57:09,100 --> 01:57:12,380
And and there's all this evidence, like tons of people on the ground.

2067
01:57:12,540 --> 01:57:15,740
Um, you know, the war in Afghanistan, there were just tons of people on the ground who

2068
01:57:15,740 --> 01:57:20,150
would be like like criticizing or concerned with like what are we doing in this particular

2069
01:57:20,150 --> 01:57:20,470
case?

2070
01:57:20,630 --> 01:57:24,630
Like, or or now that we're here, which was fine, why aren't we leaving now?

2071
01:57:24,790 --> 01:57:29,670
And this was across parties, across area, like this was just like you know, people who knew

2072
01:57:29,670 --> 01:57:30,310
the situation.

2073
01:57:30,870 --> 01:57:36,860
Um, and so there's tons of examples, like that's just one of it's not like you

2074
01:57:36,860 --> 01:57:41,020
know, you people are splitting hairs often, and it's sort of like, well, is this good or

2075
01:57:41,020 --> 01:57:41,180
not?

2076
01:57:41,340 --> 01:57:44,380
It's often a thing of like the people at the top don't want to hear it.

2077
01:57:44,540 --> 01:57:44,780
Right.

2078
01:57:45,020 --> 01:57:50,460
Or the people at the top, their their life and death, quote unquote, is sort of like

2079
01:57:50,460 --> 01:57:52,460
independent of what's the reality, right?

2080
01:57:52,540 --> 01:57:55,820
Like I don't want to look soft to my constituents.

2081
01:57:55,900 --> 01:57:58,060
It doesn't really matter what's happening on the ground.

2082
01:57:58,220 --> 01:57:58,300
Right.

2083
01:57:58,540 --> 01:58:02,380
So I think like, you know, keeping, I think this is where like having anthropologists on

2084
01:58:02,380 --> 01:58:07,150
the ground or like keeping open, transparent information of like if we do implement this

2085
01:58:07,150 --> 01:58:09,070
policy, what what is the consequence?

2086
01:58:09,230 --> 01:58:13,630
And keeping keeping a conversation with the people affected.

2087
01:58:13,870 --> 01:58:18,270
It's obvious to say, but it's shocking how infrequently that actually like happens.

2088
01:58:18,750 --> 01:58:18,910
Yeah.

2089
01:58:19,070 --> 01:58:22,190
And I mean you're pointing to more intractable problems at that point.

2090
01:58:22,510 --> 01:58:22,670
Sure.

2091
01:58:22,750 --> 01:58:23,230
No, no, no.

2092
01:58:23,310 --> 01:58:27,630
But I think it's just an example of like, you know, I think at every level, like even you

2093
01:58:27,630 --> 01:58:29,790
know, I think this just happens, right?

2094
01:58:30,270 --> 01:58:30,510
Yeah.

2095
01:58:32,040 --> 01:58:35,640
I'm gonna send a message to you, but that's for David as you were talking about your

2096
01:58:35,640 --> 01:58:36,600
charisma paper.

2097
01:58:36,680 --> 01:58:37,160
Do you know what I mean?

2098
01:58:38,360 --> 01:58:38,760
I love that stuff.

2099
01:58:39,000 --> 01:58:39,480
Yeah, I know, yeah.

2100
01:58:39,560 --> 01:58:40,120
The buried signal.

2101
01:58:40,360 --> 01:58:42,920
Yeah, Moshe Hoffman and they do they do excellent stuff.

2102
01:58:43,320 --> 01:58:43,560
Okay.

2103
01:58:43,880 --> 01:58:48,440
I just I couldn't help but thinking about those for for those who would so Chris Christina

2104
01:58:48,440 --> 01:58:53,720
just sent a chat in the in the Zoom thing about um a very cool paper by um Moshe Hoffman

2105
01:58:53,720 --> 01:58:56,790
and Aries Yoeli about the game theory of buried signaling.

2106
01:58:57,270 --> 01:59:02,790
Um and they do also um they're they have a book uh called Hidden Games uh that that reviews

2107
01:59:02,790 --> 01:59:05,110
the research which is is wonderful and highly recommended.

2108
01:59:05,510 --> 01:59:07,110
I didn't know we were still on the air.

2109
01:59:07,430 --> 01:59:09,350
I thought we were doing the Bantary thing.

2110
01:59:09,910 --> 01:59:12,150
No, no, we're still recording.

2111
01:59:12,230 --> 01:59:15,510
So uh so you know swear all you want.

2112
01:59:15,590 --> 01:59:16,230
I don't know.

2113
01:59:17,910 --> 01:59:20,060
Anyways, uh thank you so much, Christina.

2114
01:59:20,140 --> 01:59:21,900
I really uh love this conversation.

2115
01:59:21,980 --> 01:59:24,380
I love that we just got to bounce ideas off each other.

2116
01:59:24,460 --> 01:59:26,780
That's you know the best kind of fun conversation to have.

2117
01:59:26,860 --> 01:59:28,460
So thank you so much for it was super fun.

2118
01:59:28,540 --> 01:59:28,700
Yeah.

2119
01:59:29,100 --> 01:59:30,300
And lots of food for thought.

2120
01:59:30,620 --> 01:59:33,260
Absolutely, including from the Flat Earth restaurant.

2121
01:59:33,660 --> 01:59:34,220
Yep.

2122
01:59:35,340 --> 01:59:36,860
Somebody's gonna start that.

2123
01:59:39,660 --> 01:59:45,580
Well, you've wasted another hour to two uh with David, myself, and most likely

2124
01:59:45,580 --> 01:59:50,150
a guest, unless uh this was one where it's just David and I.

2125
01:59:50,470 --> 01:59:52,150
Yeah, chances are there was a guest.

2126
01:59:52,390 --> 01:59:52,550
Yeah.

2127
01:59:52,790 --> 01:59:57,590
Um but if you enjoyed randomly we're just randomly attaching outros to the to these

2128
01:59:57,590 --> 01:59:57,910
episodes.

2129
01:59:58,230 --> 02:00:00,310
Yeah, we don't know which episode this is going to be attached to.

2130
02:00:00,550 --> 02:00:01,270
I have no idea.

2131
02:00:01,350 --> 02:00:01,510
Yeah.

2132
02:00:01,750 --> 02:00:03,670
So maybe there was a guest, maybe there wasn't.

2133
02:00:03,750 --> 02:00:09,190
Uh but in any case, if you enjoyed what you just listened to, uh please leave us a kind

2134
02:00:09,190 --> 02:00:14,390
review, check out our Patreon page, uh do what you can to support us because you know we

2135
02:00:14,390 --> 02:00:16,630
depend on your support to keep doing this.

2136
02:00:17,060 --> 02:00:17,380
Yeah.

2137
02:00:17,460 --> 02:00:18,820
Um and please just spread the word.

2138
02:00:18,900 --> 02:00:20,740
Let people know if you're enjoying this podcast.

2139
02:00:20,900 --> 02:00:26,740
If everybody who's listening just told one other person, uh, then we would,

2140
02:00:26,900 --> 02:00:31,380
I don't know, when we do the math, that would what, double our listenership?

2141
02:00:31,780 --> 02:00:33,620
Uh I think that I think that checks out.

2142
02:00:33,780 --> 02:00:37,140
And then the next generation, oh, it's like exponential, right?

2143
02:00:37,460 --> 02:00:37,700
Yeah.

2144
02:00:37,860 --> 02:00:43,790
So maybe we could take over the world if if if all of you tell someone

2145
02:00:43,790 --> 02:00:44,430
about our podcast.

2146
02:00:44,670 --> 02:00:48,670
I don't know if this is like a reproduction or uh differential reproductive success in

2147
02:00:48,670 --> 02:00:52,110
natural selection or a pyramid scheme or why choose?

2148
02:00:52,510 --> 02:00:54,030
Yep, all of the above.

2149
02:00:54,270 --> 02:00:54,590
Okay.

2150
02:00:54,910 --> 02:00:56,990
Uh we'll see you guys uh next week and David.

2151
02:00:57,070 --> 02:00:58,190
I'll see you in a little bit.

2152
02:00:58,510 --> 02:00:59,070
Sounds good.

2153
02:00:59,310 --> 02:00:59,630
Okay.