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All right, I'm David Pinsoff.

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I'm David Petrozowski.

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This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, which is a podcast about actual evolutionary

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psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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Enjoy.

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David, today we have uh somebody who needs no introduction, Lita Cosmodes.

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Yes.

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Lita Cosmodes uh together with John Tuby invented

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the field of evolutionary psychology, which is the name of this podcast, in fact, in case

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you you didn't know that.

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so it was uh a real treat to talk to Leda.

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Um we kind of wanted to save her for a while.

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I mean we we're almost a year now, I think, since we started.

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Almost a year, yeah.

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I was gonna cut the number of guests, but yeah, I think we're getting getting up on a year,

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yeah.

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Yeah, but we wanted to like get a lot of practice before we we invited Leda on to like, you

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know, figure out how to do this podcasting thing.

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That's right.

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We wanted to go from JV to V varsity or at least from like kindergarten to elementary

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school.

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Um although we're we're probably just not even at the we're just at the crawling to the

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cruising stage here.

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Yeah.

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But anyway, I mean like it was just uh a fantastic conversation, just a

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total delight talking to Leda and just learning like a really interesting history and

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sociology of science and like how this thing got off the ground and there are a lot

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of fun human stories that emerged.

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Um and uh yeah it was it was a very reflective episode about how evolutionary psychology

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got going, uh where it's headed, w whether there are any regrets.

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Uh we we we talked a bit about economics and rationality and stuff, but mainly it was just

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kind of um it was kind of a sweeping retrospective of of how we got here.

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Yeah.

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I it's an important part of the scientific record.

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And I think, you know, when you're talking about at the level of Lita or John, we're just

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sort of part of the messengers of getting this in the scientific record.

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And I'm I'm happy that we got this a little bit and we'll I'm sure we'll have Lita back on.

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But yeah, without further ado, here is sort of uh episode one of Lita on Evolutionary

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Psychology, the podcast.

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Enjoy.

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Lita, it is um well overdue for us to have you on um uh about

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uh a podcast about evolutionary psychology.

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Um uh I actually on purpose wanted to not have you on right away though, because I also

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we also wanted to have people who are sort of younger doing the work um uh in uh

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um in their earlier career stages on.

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Many of them we asked how they got into it and uh into EpSec or into evolutionary

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approaches to behavior, and um almost invariably somebody read a

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book or a paper that inspired them.

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Uh probably, I don't know, David, you tell me, but like I think 30 to 75 percent of those

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was a paper by or book by you and John.

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Um paper or even a conversation or a c class they sat in on a class or whatever.

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Exactly.

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Yes.

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Except for Ed Hagen, who apparently did not like John's class and disagreed with John while

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he was sitting in the class, which to me was hilarious.

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Like I I would have loved to talk to Ed Hagen back then.

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Um uh but uh but but but but this is all a lead-in to um your

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story about how you got into evolutionary psychology cannot be I read myself and therefore

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I was inspired to do it.

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Um so so this this begs the question of uh how does

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a uh a younger uh or very young Lita Cosmodes um you know uh

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start moving towards taking an evolutionary approach to psychology.

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And that's obviously a big, a big question.

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Um and we don't have to the whole it's not okay, then if if we

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please if I remember correctly, Dave, you were one of the people that you found the adapted

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mind in your college library.

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Right.

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Which makes the uh pain of putting it together worth it.

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Right.

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Exactly.

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It was it was uh human universals, and then human universals led me to the the

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index of human universals, and then it was to um uh a

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bunch of your papers and then the adapted mind.

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Yeah.

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Um uh well okay well this will sound

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odd, um, but um I

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I was uh a child during the late 60s and

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um everybody everything seemed everybody seemed to be angry at one another and

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I lived in a suburb of Washington DC and there were protests that

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was the daily news, which huge protest was happening and it was during

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the Vietnam era and um just and then there was the

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youth culture and the generation gap and everybody just seemed angry all the time.

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And I kept thinking there has to be a better way for people

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to live.

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And then I kept thinking about that through junior high and high school, especially high

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school.

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And then I and thinking about that, then I thought, yeah, but how would you know what that

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was unless you knew something about human nature?

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So I thought, okay, well then I gotta I I need to understand human nature.

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And um and it was sort of in a in a vague sense.

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I mean I I I read in in tenth and eleventh grade, uh read and then reread

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um uh B.

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F.

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Skinner's Walden 2, which is his you it was a very famous book that almost nobody knows

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anymore.

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Um it would it's uh it's his utopian uh novel in which a behaviorist,

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basically him, is uh running society and

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running a community.

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Walden is uh it's it's as a Walden Pun, but this is Walden two.

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Um and uh he's running it based on uh behaviorist

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principles and of of positive and negative reinforcement.

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And it was very clear that he thought that the mind was a blank

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slate, that everything people do is because of positive and negative reinforcement,

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which is sometimes called the equipotentiality assumption that any stimulus has an equal

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potential for reinforcing any response.

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And I thought that was just wrong.

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I thought it was really wrong.

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It made no sense to me because life is too various.

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Um, so sitting in a boring suburb of Washington, DC, you know, I thought, well, if that

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if what he's saying was true, you'd see people like swinging from the chandeliers.

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I mean, you wouldn't everybody was basically behaving the same way, you know.

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And I just thought you'd see a hugely more beh variation between people if everything

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that you did was because of a history of reinforcement.

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And also, like, how consistent can that history of reinforcement be?

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It made no sense to me.

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Plus, it was, you know, he was basically arguing things like, you know, that you could,

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through the right history of reinforcement, you could make, you know, a mother just as

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happy to be nursing somebody else's child as her own child, or that you could make

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somebody deliriously happy to walk in on their spouse having sex with somebody else um,

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and and just with the right history of reinforcement, they'd be thrilled by that.

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Um, and that just didn't seem that didn't make sense to me either.

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So when I um I mean, it always my dad was a psychopharmacologist, an early

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psychopharmacologist, and used to pound the table about the importance of interdisciplinary

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research, which as a child I always thought uh obviously, why why is he

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why why is he pounding the table?

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Sometimes it would be about the Freudians because they were very much against

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psychopharmacology.

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And but it was he was at NIH and he was always pounding the table.

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I was like, why do you have to pound the table?

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I don't understand this table pounding about this because this is obvious.

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And uh, you know, when I grew up, I realized it it was not obvious to most people.

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And I guess also in that environment, the idea of taking a more of a some sort of

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biological approach to understanding human nature made sense to me.

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But at the time, by the time I was a senior in college and ready to start uh

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college, uh the only thing like that that I knew about um was uh

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was psychobiology.

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But in my freshman year, I realized I don't like psychobio.

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I mean, I'm glad people do it.

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I'm glad people study neurons and hormones.

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But it wasn't telling me anything even remotely like what I wanted to know.

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It was not what I wanted to know.

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And I was by the end of my freshman year, I was having kind of a crisis because I didn't

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know what to major in.

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I I hated the process.

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Like I would have gone nuts doing that research.

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I'm glad there's people that do that research, to be clear, but it shouldn't be me.

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And I thought, how can I do?

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I still want to understand human nature, but how can I do that if I don't feel like I'm

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getting any answers and if the process is not something, it is something that I hate, you

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know.

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And so that summer I did a lot of things that summer.

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Among them, among the things that I I read, just because they were on my parents' shelf,

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uh, I I read Conrad Lorenz's On Aggression and Robert Ardry's territorial imperative.

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And this is this was basically ethology.

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Um and if you think about it, ethology kind of is cognitive psychology.

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Uh um Not with the full trappings of an

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information processing revolution that happened in the next few years.

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But it is, it is trying to understand the design of the mind of non human organisms in

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their natural environment.

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And I thought that was very interesting.

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I wasn't aware of the things about group selection versus not group selection and in in

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Conrad Lorentz's on aggression and so on.

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But but I thought those were interesting, but I still had no idea what what I had to

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declare a major.

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And um so when I I got back to school like a week early or something,

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and so I thought freshman week, they had

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the year before, the a year before, they had they had told us to get two these two books

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to read before we got there because freshman week there were going to be and it's gonna be

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these two different lectures for us.

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And uh one of them was E.O.

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Wilson and the book was The Ant Society.

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And I thought that lecture was really interesting.

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I thought I thought it was really interesting.

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So not knowing what to do, I thought, I'll talk to Professor

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Wilson about this.

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He seemed like an interesting guy.

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You know, I'll see see what he says about this.

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And so I went to um I made an appointment with him and he was

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important for the rest of my life, five minutes late.

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And um that was important because on the cork board next to his door, there was the

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fly leaf of his new book that had just come out.

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This is this is fall of 1976.

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Uh, his new book, Sociobiology, which I'd never heard of before.

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And on the fly leaf, on the back fly leaf, it said, This field is it's not about

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how organisms do things.

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It's about why they do things.

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You know, why do they behave this way rather than that way?

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Why why?

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And it said it applied to humans too.

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And I thought, why?

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That's what I that's what I want to know.

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Why?

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Why do we behave the way that we do?

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So uh with the hubris of a 19 year old, um

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when he he showed up, I said, okay, Professor Wilson, this sociobiology thing that you

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wrote about.

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That's what I want to major in.

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That's what I want to do.

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I want to understand human nature.

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I want to do it from this perspective, what should I do?

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What should I major in?

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And and he said very sensibly, he said, well you could either major in psychology or in

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biology.

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He said, if you later decide to go to graduate school in evolutionary biology, that would

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be hard to do if you majored in psychology as an undergraduate.

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On the other hand, if you've got a good foundation in evolutionary biology, then

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you would probably still be able to go to graduate school in psychology if you wanted.

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So I said, okay, I'll do that.

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And then he said, and then uh, well, this had good and bad consequences.

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But he says, and um, you should get this uh younger professor, Robert Trivers, to be your

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advisor.

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And so I said, okay.

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And uh so so that that's how, well, but see the thing,

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I still wanted to understand human nature.

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And that's more than the questions about ultimate causation.

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That's more than why.

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It's it's how, but it's how on a cognitive level.

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And and and cognitive thinking was it was on the newer side at that time.

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And um but um it it w it

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was clear that that was necessary, that that was a necessary level of explanation is

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uh and what what information are you processing what do you what's the design of the mind

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um uh and that wasn't what was happening in

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so there was a very there was there was Irvine Voer

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uh who's an anthropologist who was

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part of several different revolutions was at Harvard and he had um something called the

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Simeon Seminar.

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And um the Simeon Seminar met like four or five times a semester, and uh

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it was in Herb DeVore's living room, and some of those famous people in the

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field came through and talked at at that, and including um John Maynard

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Smith, the great evolutionary biologist.

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Richard Dawkins did, W.

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D.

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Hamilton.

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Irv had a lot of graduate students who were primatologists and doing field work in

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primatology.

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And so it was it it was it was like his lab group in a way.

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But with the people coming through, just astonishing.

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Joseph Sheffer, who did the red light of incest, who did the Kabot studies on incest, all

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these people were coming through living room.

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Um, and that was phenomenal and a and and and a really good background

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in evolutionary biology and some thinking and uh by people who were approaching

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behavior from an evolutionary point of view, but very broadly.

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So a lot of what they were doing was um Noting

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correspondences that were kind of loose between selection pressures and social

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organization.

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So, yes, kin selection implies that kinship will be a very

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important part of uh of of human life and who we help

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and so on.

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Um And yes, anthropologically, you see that many societies

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are organized along kin lines, although in complicated ways.

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But it was too it was too loose of a correspondence.

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It was it was really it was there was a missing level.

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There was selection pressures, and then there was manifest social organization.

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but the thing that's connecting them is missing because there has to be a mind that of

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people have to have minds that are making decisions and wanting to do some things and not

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other things.

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I mean that's the human nature part.

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And so in those in the Simeon seminars that that was largely missing.

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And um and and people would also engage in fitness

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teleology, um, including by the way, Trivers.

261
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Um what is yeah, go ahead.

262
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Yeah, sorry.

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00:17:03,840 --> 00:17:09,760
So fitness teleology is it's it's sort of assuming well, it's assuming that people are

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doing things to spread their genes, as if they have a motive to spread their genes, as if

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it's as if it's a depth psychology, and that whatever you may be thinking on the surface,

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deep down you have you want to spread your genes.

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And and uh without people really exactly

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understanding that there were psychological implications to what they were saying.

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And so they'd say, so they'd say things like, well, these monks, medieval monks

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who are are being celibate, how are they, they must be doing that to increase their

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inclusive fitness.

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How is that how is that increasing their inclusive fitness?

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Oh well maybe they're helping their their siblings, you know, maybe it's a helpers at

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the nest kind of phenomenon.

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No, you have a psychology, it's leading you in different environments to do certain things.

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And it's not because deep down you're trying to spread your genes.

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I don't think it makes any sense to say that a celibate monk is choosing to be a celibate

278
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monk instead of having a family to spread his genes.

279
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It just that that's that that's not what natural selection is about.

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Natural selection is a it's it's an account, it's a

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causal account of how you come to have the phenotype that you have.

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And in this case, it's a cognitive phenotype.

283
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In this case, it's how do you come to have the psychological mechanisms that you have.

284
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Okay.

285
00:18:36,110 --> 00:18:42,110
And so when a mother loves her child and is taking care of her child, it's not because deep

286
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down she wants to spread her genes.

287
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That has nothing to do with it.

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It's that ma mammal mothers who had psychological

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mechanisms that caused them to care for their children, to provision their children, to

290
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make sure they're safe, had more children.

291
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They had more offspring than those that neglected their offspring.

292
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And that's why selection favored maternal psychologies that cause you to

293
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big take care of your children.

294
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Um it's not adept psychology.

295
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And um, so a lot of that's what I mean by fitness teleology.

296
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People are acting as if you have a deep down motive to spread your genes.

297
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And and that's a forward-looking thing.

298
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That's that's it's perspective.

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It's it's it's assuming that here I am, there are various things I could do right now,

300
00:19:33,990 --> 00:19:38,800
and I will choose them based on which one is going to my genes the most.

301
00:19:39,040 --> 00:19:42,000
And also, natural selection is not about spreading your genes in general.

302
00:19:42,160 --> 00:19:47,760
It's about why one genes underlying one design feature outcompete those

303
00:19:47,760 --> 00:19:49,360
underlying another design feature.

304
00:19:49,520 --> 00:19:53,520
So this whole level of design was missing in how people were talking about it.

305
00:19:53,680 --> 00:19:58,560
Except, of course, from George Williams and adaptation to natural selection, which many of

306
00:19:58,560 --> 00:19:59,840
us uh had read.

307
00:20:00,000 --> 00:20:02,320
But when people read, it's like a Rorschach test.

308
00:20:02,400 --> 00:20:07,650
When people read, anybody watching this, if you haven't read George Williams' 1966

309
00:20:07,650 --> 00:20:10,690
adaptation, natural selection, do it now.

310
00:20:11,090 --> 00:20:14,130
It's still it's it's still a it's still a classic.

311
00:20:14,290 --> 00:20:14,770
Yes.

312
00:20:15,010 --> 00:20:20,210
And and and but but people's reactions to George Williams, it's almost like a workshack

313
00:20:20,370 --> 00:20:20,690
test.

314
00:20:20,930 --> 00:20:23,090
Um, because it's two components of it.

315
00:20:23,170 --> 00:20:25,410
One is the gene is a unit of selection.

316
00:20:25,570 --> 00:20:29,810
And he's very clear, and he talks about the

317
00:20:31,100 --> 00:20:34,700
subtitle is a critique of some current evolutionary thought.

318
00:20:34,940 --> 00:20:40,780
And so he brings up a Scottish biologist named Wynne Edwards, who

319
00:20:40,780 --> 00:20:46,620
proposed that the reason why in populations of deer there'll be like

320
00:20:47,340 --> 00:20:52,940
the weaker, the 90-pound weaklings will well, and hard winters will not try to

321
00:20:52,940 --> 00:20:53,580
reproduce.

322
00:20:53,740 --> 00:20:58,700
And he said that's in order for the stronger ones to reproduce, and that's for the good of

323
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the group.

324
00:20:59,810 --> 00:21:04,610
And George Williams goes through the logic of that and you know why that's not going to

325
00:21:04,610 --> 00:21:09,970
work because what if there's a mutation in one of these deer that makes them want to um try

326
00:21:09,970 --> 00:21:13,730
to have have sex if it's safe to do so.

327
00:21:13,970 --> 00:21:18,290
Um that that's going to be favored over this restraint and so on.

328
00:21:18,450 --> 00:21:22,050
So one part of George Williams is the gene as a unit of selection.

329
00:21:23,250 --> 00:21:26,930
And this is actually the first book of evolutionary biology I read, which is because

330
00:21:27,090 --> 00:21:28,850
Selfish Gene wasn't out yet.

331
00:21:29,080 --> 00:21:35,000
And it's it's it's it's really it's it's it's great, but it was

332
00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:39,640
hard going for that to be your first reality.

333
00:21:39,800 --> 00:21:43,640
Um but the second half of George Williams was about adaptationism.

334
00:21:43,800 --> 00:21:48,680
And then in fact it starts out saying adaptation is an onerous concept for which you have

335
00:21:48,680 --> 00:21:53,960
to have evidence of special design and you have to show that um that the trait you're

336
00:21:53,960 --> 00:21:59,490
talking about is not more uh parsimoniously explained as a byproduct of another

337
00:21:59,490 --> 00:22:03,570
adaptation or as a byproduct of just physical law.

338
00:22:03,730 --> 00:22:09,090
He says, so when a to understand why a fine fish comes out of the ocean, yes, you have to

339
00:22:09,090 --> 00:22:13,490
evoke adaptations to understand why it comes out of the ocean, but why it comes back in,

340
00:22:13,570 --> 00:22:15,170
that's gravity, right?

341
00:22:15,490 --> 00:22:21,340
Um uh you know, you don't even need to Nothing special for it coming back in.

342
00:22:21,420 --> 00:22:24,620
Um, although I suppose there could be different ways you could land back in.

343
00:22:24,700 --> 00:22:28,620
But anyway, um, so it's funny because some people, when they read George Williams, they get

344
00:22:28,620 --> 00:22:33,740
the adaptationism out of it, and other people read it and they get the gene as a unit of

345
00:22:33,820 --> 00:22:38,780
selection out of it, and it's as if they're having seen the adaptation part.

346
00:22:39,020 --> 00:22:44,060
So George Williams had both, and his emphasis was on design.

347
00:22:44,220 --> 00:22:48,590
That I think he even says, I don't remember if he says this or he quotes somebody else

348
00:22:48,670 --> 00:22:52,910
saying he says the question is not reproduction per se, the question is designed for

349
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reproduction.

350
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And so I I only took two

351
00:23:00,270 --> 00:23:03,150
psychology courses as a biology major.

352
00:23:03,310 --> 00:23:08,750
I took um I took my first freshman year a social psychology course.

353
00:23:08,910 --> 00:23:10,030
It was it was okay.

354
00:23:10,190 --> 00:23:15,940
Um it was um uh but then um I took a

355
00:23:16,100 --> 00:23:22,020
behaviorist course uh called Motivation in Action that was taught by Richard Hernstein, who

356
00:23:22,020 --> 00:23:28,020
was um, you know, uh a complicated person, but a very brilliant but

357
00:23:28,020 --> 00:23:28,820
complicated person.

358
00:23:28,980 --> 00:23:32,500
And it's from him that I actually learned about the equitentiality assumption.

359
00:23:32,660 --> 00:23:33,860
I learned that there was a name.

360
00:23:34,020 --> 00:23:37,940
I learned that there was a name for the thing that I objected to in Skinner's book.

361
00:23:38,100 --> 00:23:43,870
The thing to realize is that Hernstein was Skinner's star pupil and

362
00:23:43,870 --> 00:23:47,550
basically took over the Skinner labs at Harvard.

363
00:23:47,790 --> 00:23:53,310
And um they only had two major disputes in their

364
00:23:53,310 --> 00:23:53,950
life.

365
00:23:54,270 --> 00:23:59,790
Um one was that Skinner wanted to believe, because he he was very utopian in his

366
00:23:59,790 --> 00:24:04,830
thinking, and he wanted to believe that punishment doesn't work, that

367
00:24:05,150 --> 00:24:10,380
causing pain uh does not work in terms of operate conditioning, but it c

368
00:24:10,540 --> 00:24:11,580
clearly does.

369
00:24:11,820 --> 00:24:17,180
And um, I mean, Skinner thought of Mao's China as sort of a

370
00:24:17,180 --> 00:24:19,740
large-scale experiment in Weldon II.

371
00:24:19,820 --> 00:24:23,340
Um, and at the time that it was a very closed society.

372
00:24:24,060 --> 00:24:30,060
And um, so well, you could know that very bad things were happening in Maoist China, but

373
00:24:30,060 --> 00:24:33,180
if you wanted to not know, you could not know.

374
00:24:33,500 --> 00:24:39,050
And so one of their big arguments was about that, because Skinner didn't want to

375
00:24:39,050 --> 00:24:40,730
acknowledge that that was a thing.

376
00:24:40,970 --> 00:24:46,250
But the other one was about the equipotentiality assumption, because Hernstein knew that

377
00:24:46,250 --> 00:24:47,370
that was false.

378
00:24:47,610 --> 00:24:53,450
And he knew it because there had been a number of different demonstrations that it's false.

379
00:24:53,610 --> 00:24:58,680
One of the biggest ones was the experiments by John Garcia, which if you if you had to

380
00:24:59,080 --> 00:25:03,000
sometimes people will say, Well, what is the most important experiment of the 20th century

381
00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:04,040
in psychology?

382
00:25:04,200 --> 00:25:06,840
Um, I would say the Garcia's experiments.

383
00:25:07,080 --> 00:25:12,600
This is where about learned taste aversions, and he's um showing that he had

384
00:25:12,600 --> 00:25:18,120
rats that are simultaneously, they they they taste an unusual

385
00:25:18,120 --> 00:25:18,920
flavor.

386
00:25:19,160 --> 00:25:24,360
And at the same time, a red light goes on and a I think it's a red light, and a sound goes

387
00:25:24,360 --> 00:25:24,680
on.

388
00:25:25,170 --> 00:25:30,690
Then what happens is one set of the rats, their feet are shocked two seconds later.

389
00:25:30,850 --> 00:25:36,530
The other set of rats, they're dosed with um X-rays, or

390
00:25:36,530 --> 00:25:40,530
sometimes it was a chemical, that makes them nauseated, that nauseates them.

391
00:25:40,690 --> 00:25:44,290
Rats don't actually vomit uh, but they become nauseated.

392
00:25:44,610 --> 00:25:49,970
And um then he the question was if they're then if you're if the rats then

393
00:25:49,970 --> 00:25:55,720
presented with the option to drink to go to unflavored water with the

394
00:25:55,720 --> 00:26:01,320
light and the sound, or flavored water with no light and sound, are they equally likely to

395
00:26:01,320 --> 00:26:02,520
go to either one?

396
00:26:02,680 --> 00:26:05,160
And the answer is not at all.

397
00:26:05,560 --> 00:26:11,480
The ones who were nauseated avoided the flavored water, the

398
00:26:11,480 --> 00:26:12,840
unusually flavored water.

399
00:26:13,000 --> 00:26:15,320
And they were fine going to where the light and sound was.

400
00:26:15,400 --> 00:26:17,240
They were lapping up the water.

401
00:26:17,720 --> 00:26:20,200
His graph is actually laps per minute.

402
00:26:21,010 --> 00:26:24,530
They were happy to drink the unflavored water with the light and sound.

403
00:26:24,610 --> 00:26:29,970
And the and the ones who had had their feet shocked, they were fine drinking the flavored

404
00:26:29,970 --> 00:26:30,210
water.

405
00:26:30,290 --> 00:26:32,210
They did not avoid the flavored water.

406
00:26:33,170 --> 00:26:39,170
And basically it was showing that it's completely false that it's equally easy to pair

407
00:26:39,170 --> 00:26:41,010
any stimulus with any response.

408
00:26:41,170 --> 00:26:47,140
You can pair the stimulus of a taste very easily with nausea, but you cannot pair it

409
00:26:47,140 --> 00:26:48,980
with the electric shock to the feet.

410
00:26:49,060 --> 00:26:50,580
They just don't buy it.

411
00:26:50,900 --> 00:26:56,740
And you can very easily pair the electric shock to the feet with the light and

412
00:26:56,740 --> 00:27:02,260
sound, but they they don't they they don't avoid at all the the

413
00:27:02,660 --> 00:27:03,620
flavored water.

414
00:27:03,700 --> 00:27:08,580
And yet they were exposed to all three at the same time, and then they were subjected to

415
00:27:08,580 --> 00:27:11,030
this negative, this negative outcome.

416
00:27:11,270 --> 00:27:16,710
There couldn't be a more clear refutation of the

417
00:27:16,710 --> 00:27:22,710
equipentiality assumption, and using the same methods that

418
00:27:22,710 --> 00:27:25,270
behaviors typically use.

419
00:27:25,590 --> 00:27:31,590
And it was so disturbing to the behaviors community that he couldn't get it

420
00:27:31,590 --> 00:27:33,190
published for a really long time.

421
00:27:34,020 --> 00:27:39,220
Journalists say, well, he must have done something wrong because this violates the other

422
00:27:39,220 --> 00:27:39,220
thing.

423
00:27:39,380 --> 00:27:41,220
Well, at least they were following their logic, right?

424
00:27:41,380 --> 00:27:42,980
If they understood, understood the inhalements.

425
00:27:43,220 --> 00:27:46,420
So Hernstein was what there was was a disagreement with Skinner.

426
00:27:46,580 --> 00:27:49,860
Did Skinner or did Hernstein communicate what Skinner thought about this?

427
00:27:50,260 --> 00:27:51,300
Oh yeah.

428
00:27:51,380 --> 00:27:52,660
So oh yeah.

429
00:27:53,060 --> 00:27:55,940
So Hernstein wrote this great paper.

430
00:27:56,020 --> 00:28:00,340
It's still a great paper, and it's an American psychologist in 1978.

431
00:28:00,910 --> 00:28:04,670
And the title it ended up with is The Evolution of Behaviorism.

432
00:28:04,830 --> 00:28:05,150
Okay.

433
00:28:05,390 --> 00:28:07,470
But that was not its initial title.

434
00:28:08,270 --> 00:28:12,110
It's a paper that's saying why the equal potentiality assumption is false.

435
00:28:12,270 --> 00:28:12,590
Okay.

436
00:28:13,150 --> 00:28:18,030
And it goes through Garcia and it goes through the Breland and Breland expense, their

437
00:28:18,190 --> 00:28:23,840
animal trainers that were trying to they just couldn't get the raccoons in their commercial

438
00:28:23,840 --> 00:28:28,640
to do certain things, you know, uh it they it was there they I won't go through it, but

439
00:28:28,640 --> 00:28:32,400
yeah, they were finding that it was the the the commercial they were trying to create, it

440
00:28:32,400 --> 00:28:36,720
was eliciting a species typical behavior where raccoons rub something and dip it and

441
00:28:36,720 --> 00:28:39,840
anyway, something they were not being reforced reinforced to do.

442
00:28:39,920 --> 00:28:43,510
Um and um I can't remember which other things were in it.

443
00:28:43,750 --> 00:28:47,910
It also had the observation that when it comes to similarity, psychological similarity,

444
00:28:48,070 --> 00:28:52,790
it's not, we don't construe similarity along simple physical dimensions like skinner or

445
00:28:52,790 --> 00:28:53,350
thought.

446
00:28:53,830 --> 00:28:59,510
If you think about similarity of colors in terms of wavelength, red is the longest

447
00:28:59,510 --> 00:29:02,470
wavelength and blue is the shortest wavelength.

448
00:29:02,800 --> 00:29:04,160
green is intermediate.

449
00:29:04,320 --> 00:29:09,280
If it was simple physical dimensions, we should see green is more similar to red than blue

450
00:29:09,280 --> 00:29:09,600
is.

451
00:29:09,840 --> 00:29:11,520
But that's not at all true.

452
00:29:11,760 --> 00:29:15,520
Through purple, it's like the color circle, it's better, the color spectrum is

453
00:29:15,920 --> 00:29:18,160
electromagnetic spectrum bent like this.

454
00:29:18,560 --> 00:29:24,400
And red is seen as much more similar to blue than to green, which is at the other end of

455
00:29:24,400 --> 00:29:25,200
the color circle.

456
00:29:25,360 --> 00:29:29,930
And so one of the things that her side is pointing out is that from a psychological point

457
00:29:29,930 --> 00:29:33,370
of view, the similarity space that we have, it's not simple physical dimensions.

458
00:29:33,450 --> 00:29:39,210
The same is true when it comes to, you know, a piano middle C sounds more like the C that

459
00:29:39,210 --> 00:29:41,530
comes an octave above than it does to D.

460
00:29:41,930 --> 00:29:47,050
Anyway, the the thing was the initial title of the paper was

461
00:29:47,530 --> 00:29:49,770
post-scanarian behaviorism.

462
00:29:50,980 --> 00:29:56,740
And he said Skinner found it on his desk, saw that on his desk

463
00:29:56,900 --> 00:29:58,260
and hit the roof.

464
00:29:58,500 --> 00:30:02,500
Um, and uh I was very, very upset.

465
00:30:02,900 --> 00:30:07,700
And uh, which is why he changed it to you know, the evolution of behaviorism.

466
00:30:07,780 --> 00:30:09,380
Um that a draft?

467
00:30:09,540 --> 00:30:10,900
I mean it was a draft.

468
00:30:11,300 --> 00:30:13,380
Okay, because I mean it was Skinner, so who knows?

469
00:30:13,460 --> 00:30:17,460
Maybe it could have gotten published and re re uh redacted to the different title.

470
00:30:17,540 --> 00:30:23,270
Uh no no no no no no he but okay yeah yeah yeah he he it it just upset skinner so much that

471
00:30:23,270 --> 00:30:26,790
he right but it's a bet evolution behavior is a better title anyway.

472
00:30:27,110 --> 00:30:33,110
It's pretty good yeah it it's more it it's more indicative of the content of the paper than

473
00:30:33,110 --> 00:30:34,470
postgenarian behaviorism.

474
00:30:34,950 --> 00:30:40,470
Oh it's not about the person yeah no but that was like a full throated why equipotentiality

475
00:30:40,470 --> 00:30:40,870
is wrong.

476
00:30:40,950 --> 00:30:45,440
Now it's not that it's not that Hernstein then liked domain specific uh the idea of

477
00:30:45,440 --> 00:30:46,560
domain-specific mechanism.

478
00:30:46,720 --> 00:30:48,240
He called that botanizing drives.

479
00:30:48,320 --> 00:30:49,360
He really didn't like that.

480
00:30:49,680 --> 00:30:51,920
Um, he continued to not like that.

481
00:30:52,640 --> 00:30:57,760
It was so funny, he had the same conversation, had had the same conversation with John five

482
00:30:57,760 --> 00:31:01,760
years earlier that he had with me about this kind of thing.

483
00:31:02,000 --> 00:31:04,160
Um, but anyway, uh

484
00:31:07,970 --> 00:31:13,970
so I was very I I I I was in in additionally, even though I wasn't a psychology

485
00:31:13,970 --> 00:31:19,730
major, I was in the environment of a psychologist because I was doing my I was such an

486
00:31:19,730 --> 00:31:20,290
idiot.

487
00:31:20,530 --> 00:31:26,450
Um I was doing my research like uh uh what like

488
00:31:26,610 --> 00:31:32,420
um uh senior thesis research, but I I started it earlier um on

489
00:31:32,500 --> 00:31:38,340
um with pigeons on mental rotation in pigeons and and the reason that I

490
00:31:38,740 --> 00:31:42,260
I had been talking with her site was one of the people that was interesting to go to his

491
00:31:42,340 --> 00:31:42,820
office hours.

492
00:31:42,900 --> 00:31:47,540
There were certain professors that I uh were very interesting to go to office hours and

493
00:31:47,540 --> 00:31:47,940
talk to.

494
00:31:48,020 --> 00:31:50,660
And so I would I was a big office hour grower.

495
00:31:51,220 --> 00:31:55,570
And in fact that's actually partly because of Hernstein, because he had said in in the

496
00:31:55,570 --> 00:32:01,010
class that I took my sophomore year, he'd said, um, you know, I have to have two hours of

497
00:32:01,010 --> 00:32:03,570
office hours every week and nobody ever comes.

498
00:32:03,810 --> 00:32:05,250
And I'm just sitting there bored.

499
00:32:05,410 --> 00:32:07,490
And so I thought, I'll come.

500
00:32:07,970 --> 00:32:11,330
So I sort of I st that's how I became an office hour goer.

501
00:32:11,570 --> 00:32:15,010
But um uh he um

502
00:32:18,460 --> 00:32:23,660
And what in talking to him, one of the things, one thing he's he he brought up, Roger

503
00:32:23,660 --> 00:32:28,380
Shepard had done the mental rotation studies that came out, the Shepherd and Metzler

504
00:32:28,540 --> 00:32:30,620
studies in 1971.

505
00:32:30,780 --> 00:32:35,420
And actually that was one of the things that made a big impression on Hernstein and why he

506
00:32:35,420 --> 00:32:41,180
put himself, they had there were research and training groups in the psychology department,

507
00:32:41,340 --> 00:32:47,110
um, and uh Rather than areas, so that a person could be on

508
00:32:47,110 --> 00:32:48,790
several research and training groups.

509
00:32:48,950 --> 00:32:53,430
And, you know, Kernstein had always been on the behaviorist one, but it was the Roger

510
00:32:53,430 --> 00:32:58,150
Shepherd's mental rotation experiments that caused him to put himself on the cognitive one

511
00:32:58,150 --> 00:32:58,710
as well.

512
00:32:59,270 --> 00:33:04,630
Because it was very clear that the most parsimonious explanation for those results was that

513
00:33:04,630 --> 00:33:10,240
there's that there's mental representations and that that people are

514
00:33:10,240 --> 00:33:13,920
imagining with these blocks that you can't tell by their features.

515
00:33:14,080 --> 00:33:20,080
They're imagining that they're a rotation to see whether they're both left handed or one's

516
00:33:20,080 --> 00:33:22,160
left handed, one's right handed, and so on.

517
00:33:22,320 --> 00:33:27,040
Um, that's where I learned about Roger Shepherd's research, which is funny because I ended

518
00:33:27,040 --> 00:33:29,040
up doing a postdoc with Roger Shepherd later.

519
00:33:29,200 --> 00:33:33,690
But the reason I end up doing this thing with pigeons is because Hernstein in in in the

520
00:33:33,690 --> 00:33:36,250
hole at some point uh was passing by.

521
00:33:36,330 --> 00:33:41,530
He he's very mysteriously said that this would be an interesting topic, mental rotations in

522
00:33:41,530 --> 00:33:46,250
pigeons, because he's he said very mysteriously, because it would show whether pigeons have

523
00:33:46,490 --> 00:33:47,130
a mind.

524
00:33:47,930 --> 00:33:53,200
And I thought, oh it doesn't in any way.

525
00:33:54,080 --> 00:33:59,440
I mean actually like my senior year, I went to talk to Steve Cosslin, who had done a lot of

526
00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:01,120
research on mental imagery.

527
00:34:01,360 --> 00:34:07,280
And um I I said to to I I said, Professor Cosslin, you know, I'm doing this

528
00:34:07,280 --> 00:34:12,960
thing on mental rotation because in does it if does the how if they if they

529
00:34:12,960 --> 00:34:18,160
can if they can do this mental rotation thing, does that mean that they have a mind?

530
00:34:18,320 --> 00:34:22,870
And he's he said sort of in disgust, he says, it has nothing to do with it.

531
00:34:23,030 --> 00:34:23,350
Nothing.

532
00:34:23,510 --> 00:34:28,790
And then he took a paper he had on imagery and and and mine and he threw it at me and he

533
00:34:28,790 --> 00:34:29,990
said, read this.

534
00:34:30,470 --> 00:34:34,950
And it's like a it sounds like a cartoon, but it's real, right?

535
00:34:35,110 --> 00:34:36,870
Like it's the parody of academia, right?

536
00:34:37,350 --> 00:34:38,390
I read it and he was right.

537
00:34:38,470 --> 00:34:39,510
It had nothing to do with it.

538
00:34:39,830 --> 00:34:45,350
So I mean, you know, just because somebody's grumpy uh doesn't mean that they're not worth

539
00:34:45,350 --> 00:34:45,830
talking to.

540
00:34:45,910 --> 00:34:50,640
It was less with people who are kind of grumpy and but still very worth talking to.

541
00:34:50,880 --> 00:34:52,560
Um that's just how they are.

542
00:34:52,880 --> 00:34:58,880
Some professors are grumpy because they figure you're only gonna come back and talk to

543
00:34:58,880 --> 00:35:01,600
them if you really, really want to know stuff.

544
00:35:02,080 --> 00:35:05,600
I mean, I get grumpy when people are wrong and they won't admit that they're wrong.

545
00:35:05,760 --> 00:35:07,920
And so I get it.

546
00:35:08,160 --> 00:35:11,600
So the heuristic is the grumpier the person, the more likely they are to be right.

547
00:35:11,680 --> 00:35:17,350
That's no, some people I I've known people who I in fact I think Steve Cousin later told me

548
00:35:17,430 --> 00:35:23,270
because he he was at he became for a brief period my advisor in graduate school that that

549
00:35:23,270 --> 00:35:24,470
was kind of a strategy of his.

550
00:35:24,790 --> 00:35:29,750
People really wanted to know something and were really interested, they he'd weed out the

551
00:35:29,750 --> 00:35:32,550
ones that didn't care by being grumpy at first.

552
00:35:32,950 --> 00:35:33,430
Yes.

553
00:35:33,750 --> 00:35:39,600
Anyway, anyway and and and and so anyway, at the Simeon seminar, people

554
00:35:39,600 --> 00:35:43,600
were thinking in this way, and it just seemed to be missing a major thing, which is a

555
00:35:43,600 --> 00:35:45,280
psychological level of explanation.

556
00:35:45,440 --> 00:35:48,640
I'm saying all this much more clearly than I would have at the time.

557
00:35:48,880 --> 00:35:49,360
Sure.

558
00:35:50,880 --> 00:35:56,240
And I but also it was clear to me from what little I knew about cognitive psychology,

559
00:35:57,950 --> 00:36:03,870
Which included Dave, this will be relevant to you, ties to you, which included this is the

560
00:36:03,870 --> 00:36:09,630
time when the um Who Said What paradigm, uh, when the uh

561
00:36:09,790 --> 00:36:15,710
the that great paper that Shelly Taylor, Susan Fisk, I thought Van Rutterman paper came

562
00:36:15,710 --> 00:36:17,310
out, that came out in 1978.

563
00:36:17,630 --> 00:36:22,110
And it had this really cool method where you could see how people were categorizing things,

564
00:36:22,270 --> 00:36:26,990
which you know, and somehow I heard about that and I thought that's really neat.

565
00:36:27,220 --> 00:36:31,060
You get you can do experiments that are gonna reveal something about

566
00:36:33,380 --> 00:36:34,580
how the mind works.

567
00:36:34,820 --> 00:36:38,820
And I thought, okay, these cognitive psychologists, um, because they were doing they were

568
00:36:38,820 --> 00:36:44,020
early social cognition people, these cognitive psychologists, they've got methods, no, they

569
00:36:44,020 --> 00:36:46,020
know how to ask questions about how the mind works.

570
00:36:46,100 --> 00:36:49,300
So I should go to graduate school and cognitive psychology.

571
00:36:49,540 --> 00:36:55,300
Um uh so uh but anyway, in the course of these semi-seminars, there would be this um

572
00:36:56,130 --> 00:37:00,690
these discussions and they were sort of off from the point of view, they're really

573
00:37:00,690 --> 00:37:02,770
interesting, but off from this point of view.

574
00:37:02,930 --> 00:37:08,930
And then there was this uh undergraduates never uh are shy

575
00:37:08,930 --> 00:37:14,530
to raise their hands because this is a graduate seminar, and I would go to this and I would

576
00:37:14,530 --> 00:37:17,330
be this polite undergraduate raising my hand.

577
00:37:17,490 --> 00:37:21,000
But of course when there's a bunch of graduate students there you you can't get a word in

578
00:37:21,160 --> 00:37:24,440
end wise because they they don't raise hands they just jump in right they're they're the

579
00:37:24,440 --> 00:37:30,280
worst graduate students yeah yeah no it's like but

580
00:37:30,520 --> 00:37:34,600
it's it's wonderful we were all graduate students what you need is undergraduates to jump

581
00:37:34,600 --> 00:37:40,440
in too no exactly yes yes but um um I there would be some debate going on and

582
00:37:40,440 --> 00:37:46,360
I think no no this is just completely wrong they're missing the like an really important

583
00:37:46,680 --> 00:37:50,070
point Sometimes it was about the philosophy of science, lots of different things.

584
00:37:50,230 --> 00:37:54,950
And I'd be there and then there would be this one graduate student that would suddenly say

585
00:37:54,950 --> 00:37:56,470
exactly what I was thinking.

586
00:37:56,710 --> 00:37:57,670
Exactly.

587
00:37:57,910 --> 00:38:00,550
And I was like, who is this person?

588
00:38:00,790 --> 00:38:02,230
Like this is really weird.

589
00:38:02,390 --> 00:38:05,430
Why is this one person saying exact I was a little bit hurt?

590
00:38:05,750 --> 00:38:08,470
Like, because this is a pattern that kept happening.

591
00:38:08,630 --> 00:38:13,740
And that was John to be um that's how I met that's how I met John.

592
00:38:13,900 --> 00:38:15,820
That's how I became aware of John's existence.

593
00:38:16,220 --> 00:38:22,140
Um I mean, I think he had been at these things, and I I just like I I

594
00:38:22,140 --> 00:38:27,180
didn't know everybody that was at these things, but I became aware of John's existence when

595
00:38:27,420 --> 00:38:33,100
he was this person saying things that were exactly what I wanted to what I was about to

596
00:38:33,100 --> 00:38:37,570
say, and that were not even close to what other people were saying.

597
00:38:37,890 --> 00:38:41,090
Um and that's how I ended up talking to John about things.

598
00:38:41,250 --> 00:38:45,010
John all he came to this in a from a different path.

599
00:38:45,170 --> 00:38:48,210
He was actually originally planning to be a physics, a physicist.

600
00:38:48,450 --> 00:38:53,970
And um he his he had as as a as a

601
00:38:53,970 --> 00:38:59,090
teenager read a lot of Poole Anderson books, a science fiction writer who often imagined

602
00:38:59,090 --> 00:39:03,490
other worlds, other planets, and where evolution had gone differently and the the the

603
00:39:04,940 --> 00:39:10,620
intelligent beings from these other planets thought and felt very differently than humans.

604
00:39:11,820 --> 00:39:13,820
But he was going to be a physicist.

605
00:39:14,060 --> 00:39:20,060
And then his freshman year, he took a class by Eric Warner, who

606
00:39:20,060 --> 00:39:21,580
was a psycholinguist.

607
00:39:21,900 --> 00:39:26,620
And Eric Warner was showing how these experiments and they can use reaction time and you

608
00:39:26,620 --> 00:39:30,460
can find out where phrase boundaries are in a person's head.

609
00:39:30,700 --> 00:39:35,490
And John was like, oh my God, you could actually have a science of the mind.

610
00:39:35,730 --> 00:39:41,570
And so he thought, this is thing go, that that that they're okay without me.

611
00:39:41,810 --> 00:39:47,730
Um, but this, this where you could actually find out how the mind works, this is this is

612
00:39:47,730 --> 00:39:52,290
really this is really important and interesting.

613
00:39:52,450 --> 00:39:57,490
And and he all he he thought evolutionarily because of all the in part, in part because of,

614
00:39:57,600 --> 00:40:01,600
I don't know if it was entirely, but in part because of the poole Anderson books, also

615
00:40:01,680 --> 00:40:07,600
because of the Schrdinger, what is life and about life being the only anti-antropic, you

616
00:40:07,600 --> 00:40:08,560
know, process.

617
00:40:09,920 --> 00:40:14,080
And so John signed up to be a psychology major.

618
00:40:14,640 --> 00:40:19,520
But then all the cognitive psychologists in the Harvard Department of Psychology and Social

619
00:40:19,520 --> 00:40:24,450
Relations, which is what it was called at the time, they all were kind of squeezed out by

620
00:40:24,450 --> 00:40:26,610
the behaviorists and psychophysicists.

621
00:40:26,690 --> 00:40:32,450
So John was left in the midst of um behaviorism and

622
00:40:32,530 --> 00:40:38,050
uh and uh he he john's five years older than me so this was

623
00:40:38,050 --> 00:40:41,010
happening before uh before I was there.

624
00:40:41,250 --> 00:40:47,060
Um so he he wrote he was writing a senior thesis um but

625
00:40:47,060 --> 00:40:52,980
it it it was basically uh the senior thesis i've never seen it but it would be interesting

626
00:40:52,980 --> 00:40:58,820
if i could ever find it in the millions of papers um it was a brief for why why

627
00:40:58,820 --> 00:41:04,660
behaviorism was just wrong and why you had to take an evolutionary approach to psychology

628
00:41:05,140 --> 00:41:10,980
um and skinner had a famous book called the behavior of the the behavior

629
00:41:10,980 --> 00:41:15,290
of organisms And uh

630
00:41:16,730 --> 00:41:22,490
and John's thesis, I don't remember what he told me that he called it,

631
00:41:22,570 --> 00:41:26,730
but it started out saying because most of the behaviors work was with rats and pigeons,

632
00:41:26,970 --> 00:41:27,290
right?

633
00:41:27,610 --> 00:41:32,730
And it started out saying organisms applies to more than rats and pigeons.

634
00:41:32,810 --> 00:41:38,650
It includes orchids and you know and a list of other kinds

635
00:41:38,650 --> 00:41:41,210
of of uh animals etc.

636
00:41:41,680 --> 00:41:44,480
Um, and he wrote 300 pages apparently.

637
00:41:44,960 --> 00:41:50,160
Um and whoever was giving it a look before uh he turned it in.

638
00:41:50,240 --> 00:41:55,200
I I'm not sure if he finished it at 300 pages, told him to not bother to turn it in because

639
00:41:55,360 --> 00:41:58,000
um it it just wouldn't fly.

640
00:41:58,240 --> 00:42:04,080
Uh this this is why it at at Harvard you have to turn in

641
00:42:04,160 --> 00:42:09,870
you have to do a senior thesis in a topic to it for your for your diploma to say that your

642
00:42:09,870 --> 00:42:12,670
degree is in, you know, in this case in psychology.

643
00:42:12,910 --> 00:42:16,430
And otherwise your your bachelor's degree is in general studies.

644
00:42:16,590 --> 00:42:21,150
So John's technically in general studies because after writing 300 pages of this

645
00:42:21,150 --> 00:42:24,510
dissertation, he took the guy's advice and didn't turn it in.

646
00:42:24,590 --> 00:42:26,670
So it's not technically in psychology.

647
00:42:29,390 --> 00:42:34,220
It's really hard for people to realize now, but everything was in the in the behaviorism

648
00:42:34,220 --> 00:42:39,420
had like a death grip on the field of psychology and it had for many many years um

649
00:42:40,140 --> 00:42:46,060
uh so um it's not some antique

650
00:42:46,220 --> 00:42:52,220
yeah view from the point of view of from my point of view yeah um it's the view

651
00:42:52,220 --> 00:42:56,690
that was dominating yeah Almost all the thinking at the time.

652
00:42:56,930 --> 00:43:00,530
Enough so that, you know, they made Jerome Bruner left.

653
00:43:00,610 --> 00:43:02,210
He had been doing cognitive development.

654
00:43:02,290 --> 00:43:08,130
And just they they they just made it uncomfortable for uh anybody who was doing

655
00:43:08,130 --> 00:43:09,250
cognitive stuff.

656
00:43:09,490 --> 00:43:14,770
Um so so anyway, that's that's and then I I started talking to John

657
00:43:15,010 --> 00:43:17,890
sometime in the middle of my senior year.

658
00:43:18,050 --> 00:43:21,410
We started talking and discovered that we were thinking about things in the same way.

659
00:43:21,720 --> 00:43:26,840
in many domains of life, but including about psychology.

660
00:43:27,320 --> 00:43:27,640
Yeah.

661
00:43:27,880 --> 00:43:33,080
Where do the thinking does thinking at that sort of computational middle level, is that

662
00:43:33,080 --> 00:43:36,120
something you just felt like was the way you always thought?

663
00:43:36,280 --> 00:43:37,240
Or was that?

664
00:43:45,090 --> 00:43:49,730
I I I don't know how to answer the question.

665
00:43:49,970 --> 00:43:50,690
Yeah, it's fair.

666
00:43:50,770 --> 00:43:51,010
Yeah, yeah.

667
00:43:51,250 --> 00:43:54,770
If you know that the equipotentiality assumption is wrong, then you know that there's such

668
00:43:54,770 --> 00:43:58,690
a thing as a mind, whether you use the term mind or not, because you know that there's

669
00:43:58,690 --> 00:44:04,290
something there's some cognitive mechanism that is making it the

670
00:44:04,610 --> 00:44:10,050
that that is making it more likely that you think that the nausea was caused by what you

671
00:44:10,050 --> 00:44:11,410
ate than something else.

672
00:44:12,100 --> 00:44:14,340
And I I do believe I I thought about it.

673
00:44:14,500 --> 00:44:16,580
Yeah, no, I I did think about it.

674
00:44:17,060 --> 00:44:20,900
I did think about it as a cognitive level of of explanation.

675
00:44:21,140 --> 00:44:25,380
Um because I was kind of obsessed with certain topics.

676
00:44:25,540 --> 00:44:27,300
I was a bit obsessed with Quine.

677
00:44:28,020 --> 00:44:33,060
And uh uh Kline had arguments that

678
00:44:33,710 --> 00:44:39,310
that I took to be why um equipotentiality is wrong.

679
00:44:39,470 --> 00:44:41,310
Although I don't think that Klein meant them that way.

680
00:44:41,470 --> 00:44:44,750
No, he was because he was like a pretty rabid behaviorist.

681
00:44:44,990 --> 00:44:49,550
I think I mean that that was the ex I mean it it is weird because yeah if you read I've I

682
00:44:49,550 --> 00:44:52,350
also per your recommendations I've looked at that.

683
00:44:52,510 --> 00:44:56,670
And so what he explicitly will say, but then what like yeah the Gabagai problem, you know,

684
00:44:56,750 --> 00:44:59,310
being a great Gabagai problem is really, really important.

685
00:44:59,390 --> 00:45:01,790
And I teach that to all of my students always.

686
00:45:01,920 --> 00:45:02,160
Yeah.

687
00:45:02,320 --> 00:45:08,320
Um the the the indet indeterminacy problem that that that without some structure to

688
00:45:08,320 --> 00:45:09,600
the mind you're never going to learn anything.

689
00:45:09,920 --> 00:45:10,080
Yeah.

690
00:45:10,240 --> 00:45:14,640
If a rabbit runs across the road and you're in some other country or civilization and they

691
00:45:14,640 --> 00:45:20,000
yell get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of where you don't even where you

692
00:45:20,160 --> 00:45:24,480
where you cannot assume that they have the same cognition as you do.

693
00:45:24,720 --> 00:45:25,200
Yeah.

694
00:45:25,520 --> 00:45:31,170
And and which is why you know uh he he he shows that there's an infinite number of things

695
00:45:31,170 --> 00:45:32,850
that Gabagae could refer to.

696
00:45:33,010 --> 00:45:33,330
Right.

697
00:45:33,570 --> 00:45:39,490
And uh if if so if the if you manage to know what the the alien w yes and

698
00:45:39,490 --> 00:45:45,490
no in the alien language, um and you point it he points this as

699
00:45:45,650 --> 00:45:51,570
Gabagai, then you can you have to ask, Well, is this Gabagai pointing to

700
00:45:51,570 --> 00:45:52,050
fur?

701
00:45:52,320 --> 00:45:52,640
No.

702
00:45:52,800 --> 00:45:53,920
Is this God guy?

703
00:45:54,000 --> 00:45:55,360
But then there's an infinite number of these things.

704
00:45:55,440 --> 00:45:57,040
It could be rabbit or light bulb.

705
00:45:57,120 --> 00:46:01,440
It could be, you know, and Klein goes through all this, which I took it as an argument that

706
00:46:01,440 --> 00:46:06,320
there has to be, you know, that there has to be a structure to the mind to solve this

707
00:46:06,320 --> 00:46:08,800
problem because it's a combinatorial explosion problem.

708
00:46:09,040 --> 00:46:09,120
Yeah.

709
00:46:09,200 --> 00:46:12,000
And I think Hume actually did uh land there.

710
00:46:12,080 --> 00:46:14,720
Like as much as he was an empiricist he did he?

711
00:46:14,960 --> 00:46:15,120
Yeah.

712
00:46:15,200 --> 00:46:20,450
When I because I remember I would I would read uh Hume being the empiricist, and he was to

713
00:46:20,450 --> 00:46:24,690
some degree, and he obviously had a big influence on Skinner, but reading Hume again, um, I

714
00:46:24,690 --> 00:46:26,290
think he was a fellow traveler.

715
00:46:26,370 --> 00:46:29,090
Like he definitely has there's human nature in there.

716
00:46:29,170 --> 00:46:29,890
So yeah.

717
00:46:30,290 --> 00:46:32,770
There it's it's really funny.

718
00:46:33,970 --> 00:46:38,530
John thinks that I have a very peculiar sense of humor because uh uh

719
00:46:40,180 --> 00:46:45,940
As a joke in my, I think it was my dissertation, I have a little

720
00:46:45,940 --> 00:46:48,580
quote from Hume at the beginning of one of the chapters.

721
00:46:48,740 --> 00:46:53,780
And it's a quote uh where he's saying it it's not from any uh

722
00:46:54,740 --> 00:47:00,180
I'll just put it in my terms, it's it's not from any sense sensory sensorally detectable

723
00:47:00,180 --> 00:47:05,630
quality of bread that you know that it's it it can nurture your body.

724
00:47:06,910 --> 00:47:08,270
It's not detectable.

725
00:47:11,230 --> 00:47:16,990
He's basically saying there's there's something else that's like leading you to to um

726
00:47:17,230 --> 00:47:20,270
assume that that you can live by eating bread.

727
00:47:20,750 --> 00:47:26,220
And the reason it was a little joke for me because I thought of Hume as a huge blank slate

728
00:47:26,380 --> 00:47:26,940
empiricist.

729
00:47:27,020 --> 00:47:27,100
Yeah.

730
00:47:27,260 --> 00:47:32,540
Yet here he was saying that there's something the mind is predisposed to to know.

731
00:47:32,940 --> 00:47:35,980
I mean I I understand it's a joke to me.

732
00:47:36,140 --> 00:47:36,380
Yeah.

733
00:47:36,540 --> 00:47:40,220
But because I think I think it was at the I think it was at the beginning of a chapter of

734
00:47:40,220 --> 00:47:43,900
my dissertation on why there have to be domain-specific mechanisms.

735
00:47:43,980 --> 00:47:44,220
Yeah.

736
00:47:44,460 --> 00:47:49,810
Um uh yeah, I think Hume got uh re-revised uh by the

737
00:47:49,810 --> 00:47:50,530
behaviorists.

738
00:47:50,610 --> 00:47:55,810
I actually think that there's a place to re-write or set the record straight uh for Hume, I

739
00:47:55,970 --> 00:47:56,610
I would argue.

740
00:47:56,690 --> 00:47:57,330
Yeah.

741
00:47:57,810 --> 00:48:03,810
Well apparently he was Well, I'm not even gonna say I'm gonna get it wrong, but there was

742
00:48:03,810 --> 00:48:08,210
people that he was arguing with where the the argument had to do with

743
00:48:09,720 --> 00:48:12,040
the church and the Yeah.

744
00:48:12,360 --> 00:48:13,080
It's the Don Sim.

745
00:48:13,480 --> 00:48:14,920
You have to know who somebody's arguing with, right?

746
00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:15,240
Exactly.

747
00:48:15,320 --> 00:48:15,480
Yes.

748
00:48:15,800 --> 00:48:16,360
Even Descartes.

749
00:48:16,520 --> 00:48:16,840
Yeah, yeah.

750
00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:17,240
Same thing.

751
00:48:17,320 --> 00:48:17,640
Yeah, yeah.

752
00:48:17,880 --> 00:48:21,400
My daughter has told me this and I keep forgetting who it was he was arguing with.

753
00:48:21,480 --> 00:48:22,200
I apologize.

754
00:48:22,360 --> 00:48:25,720
Um so yeah, I think I was unfair to Hume.

755
00:48:26,360 --> 00:48:26,760
It's okay.

756
00:48:29,560 --> 00:48:30,040
He's dead.

757
00:48:30,120 --> 00:48:30,760
He'll for he'll forget.

758
00:48:32,360 --> 00:48:38,270
But also Quine made it very clear that you had to at least have uh it had to

759
00:48:38,270 --> 00:48:42,670
be a property of the mind sensory dimensions what what dimensions of the world that you're

760
00:48:42,670 --> 00:48:48,350
even capable of perceiving had to be something that was part of human nature and so

761
00:48:48,590 --> 00:48:52,270
yeah I actually was guided to Quine by Hernstein.

762
00:48:52,430 --> 00:48:57,200
Um yeah so I got to meet Quine before I left graduate school.

763
00:48:57,440 --> 00:48:57,840
That's cool.

764
00:48:58,560 --> 00:48:59,760
It was it was very cool.

765
00:48:59,920 --> 00:49:03,920
I was telling him about uh he used to teach the logic course.

766
00:49:04,080 --> 00:49:07,520
The only time he didn't teach the logic course was the one year that I took it

767
00:49:07,840 --> 00:49:08,640
unfortunately.

768
00:49:09,120 --> 00:49:12,000
Because I would have I really wanted to take it something from him.

769
00:49:12,960 --> 00:49:18,510
But I I did get to meet him before I left and I told him about the experiments on uh

770
00:49:18,670 --> 00:49:23,710
social change and cheetah detection and how people weren't using logical reasoning to do

771
00:49:23,710 --> 00:49:23,790
it.

772
00:49:24,030 --> 00:49:25,150
He thought that was very cool.

773
00:49:25,790 --> 00:49:28,510
I thought it was very cool that Klein thought it was cool.

774
00:49:28,670 --> 00:49:28,990
Yeah.

775
00:49:29,150 --> 00:49:31,070
But it's very cool.

776
00:49:32,030 --> 00:49:36,270
Another version of this question, because I mean, independent of how you think you you got

777
00:49:36,270 --> 00:49:41,120
to this point, is there's also this sort of like elephant in the room of that both the

778
00:49:41,120 --> 00:49:46,720
evolutionary and the cognitive people or the psychologists are being sort of

779
00:49:46,720 --> 00:49:49,360
blind to this level of description.

780
00:49:49,520 --> 00:49:55,200
And that sounds like I mean really that it what I'm hearing you say is, and I read this in

781
00:49:55,200 --> 00:49:58,560
your the writings Oh the evolutionary people were definitely blind to this level of

782
00:49:58,560 --> 00:49:58,800
description.

783
00:49:59,120 --> 00:49:59,200
Yeah.

784
00:49:59,280 --> 00:50:00,960
And so not not not all of them.

785
00:50:01,120 --> 00:50:05,590
So not not Martin Daly and Margot Wilson for example they were always yeah we just had

786
00:50:05,590 --> 00:50:10,390
Martin on actually so oh great great they were always you know they were trained as

787
00:50:10,390 --> 00:50:14,630
comparative psychologists so they were studying the psychology of non human animals yeah um

788
00:50:14,870 --> 00:50:18,790
they were never blind to it there was people and then other people would be sometimes blind

789
00:50:18,790 --> 00:50:22,390
to it and sometimes not blind to it you know it they were there were like funny people are

790
00:50:22,390 --> 00:50:24,860
often funny amalgams of of things Yeah.

791
00:50:25,020 --> 00:50:30,860
So when you so when you're talking to John about this, and then you're seeing this uh this

792
00:50:30,940 --> 00:50:36,940
um landscape of missing this, the a lot of the papers were about

793
00:50:36,940 --> 00:50:42,780
making this argument was the idea that it was when you guys were having this, did you land

794
00:50:42,780 --> 00:50:48,570
on that people just aren't applying the they're not thinking the right way, and it just

795
00:50:48,570 --> 00:50:51,450
wasn't they're missing the entire level of explanation.

796
00:50:51,610 --> 00:50:51,770
Yeah.

797
00:50:52,010 --> 00:50:53,210
So you have to understand something.

798
00:50:53,370 --> 00:50:58,650
In the sociobiology community at Harvard and elsewhere,

799
00:51:00,250 --> 00:51:05,850
what was valorized was ultimate level explanations, theories about selection pressures.

800
00:51:06,100 --> 00:51:10,180
You know, of course, Trivers valorized whatever Trivers did, and that was theories about

801
00:51:10,180 --> 00:51:10,900
selection pressures.

802
00:51:10,980 --> 00:51:12,420
That was social theory.

803
00:51:12,900 --> 00:51:18,260
And um and then theories about like psychology, for example, that was mere

804
00:51:18,500 --> 00:51:20,020
proximate mechanisms.

805
00:51:20,740 --> 00:51:25,860
It wasn't like that's important, proximate mechanisms are actually that which

806
00:51:25,860 --> 00:51:28,900
Darwinism was designed to explain.

807
00:51:29,130 --> 00:51:29,450
that.

808
00:51:29,850 --> 00:51:30,810
Right, the phenotype.

809
00:51:31,210 --> 00:51:32,170
The phenotype of organism.

810
00:51:32,330 --> 00:51:33,850
It's so little, it's just the phenotype.

811
00:51:34,330 --> 00:51:35,610
That's the explanandum.

812
00:51:35,690 --> 00:51:41,530
That's what natural selection's trying to explain how you get complex functional design in

813
00:51:41,530 --> 00:51:43,930
organisms without there being a creator.

814
00:51:44,330 --> 00:51:50,090
Um but at the time it was being treated as something trivial

815
00:51:50,600 --> 00:51:56,120
because what what the people with vision wanted to understand was the

816
00:51:56,120 --> 00:51:57,080
selection pressures.

817
00:51:57,160 --> 00:51:58,440
And I love selection pressures.

818
00:52:00,600 --> 00:52:06,120
But because that was being valorized at the expense of the approximate

819
00:52:06,120 --> 00:52:07,240
mechanisms.

820
00:52:07,560 --> 00:52:12,040
And and and in fairness, people like a lot of research on

821
00:52:13,450 --> 00:52:17,050
approximate mechanisms wasn't necessarily that interesting at the time.

822
00:52:17,290 --> 00:52:20,650
Because it was before the cognitive revolution was just sort of starting.

823
00:52:20,730 --> 00:52:24,490
It wasn't in full it wasn't in full bloom.

824
00:52:24,730 --> 00:52:28,970
So a whole cognitive level explanation was not known to most people.

825
00:52:29,610 --> 00:52:30,250
Yeah.

826
00:52:30,650 --> 00:52:36,260
Um I mean it was obvious to John because he when he was in high school,

827
00:52:36,420 --> 00:52:41,380
he he programmed in Fortran and he knew how to program and so forth.

828
00:52:41,540 --> 00:52:47,540
Um uh but yeah, I guess I did yes, I I I

829
00:52:47,540 --> 00:52:53,220
did because I wrote to myself a lot of times things about why the mind cannot be a blank

830
00:52:53,220 --> 00:52:54,660
slate and things like this.

831
00:52:54,820 --> 00:53:00,810
I I didn't one thing that I didn't fully realize um Is I I thought that there

832
00:53:00,810 --> 00:53:04,170
could be some domain.

833
00:53:04,490 --> 00:53:06,890
This is just as an undergraduate, this is not after.

834
00:53:07,290 --> 00:53:11,610
I thought that there were surely had to be lots of domain-specific psychological

835
00:53:11,610 --> 00:53:13,050
mechanisms, or else.

836
00:53:14,170 --> 00:53:20,010
But I thought that it was not impossible that there could be such a thing as a

837
00:53:20,010 --> 00:53:24,120
domain-specific mechanism that tracked fitness.

838
00:53:24,520 --> 00:53:29,240
And I hadn't fully realized that that's computationally impossible.

839
00:53:30,360 --> 00:53:34,760
And part of my realizing that that's that's because I was thinking that this is something

840
00:53:34,760 --> 00:53:36,440
to be empirically adjudicated.

841
00:53:36,600 --> 00:53:36,920
Right.

842
00:53:37,080 --> 00:53:37,400
Right.

843
00:53:37,640 --> 00:53:42,920
And it was in talking, John invited me my last semester of uh of college.

844
00:53:43,080 --> 00:53:47,960
He invited me to sit in on a seminar he was taking, teaching rather, um, which was very,

845
00:53:48,040 --> 00:53:48,920
very interesting.

846
00:53:49,160 --> 00:53:54,890
Um But so I it it

847
00:53:54,970 --> 00:54:00,730
it that was it was I don't know it was

848
00:54:00,730 --> 00:54:05,850
then or later that I realized that this the the computational impossibility of a completely

849
00:54:05,850 --> 00:54:11,770
domain general system causing behavior that would have tracked fitness ancestrally.

850
00:54:12,140 --> 00:54:17,420
Um so I was on all on board about the importance of domain-specific mechanisms.

851
00:54:17,580 --> 00:54:23,580
Um but yeah, the so my

852
00:54:23,660 --> 00:54:29,180
uh my attribution as a student of yours and John's was that it was a timing issue,

853
00:54:29,500 --> 00:54:35,260
and that you you guys were there, could see that the computational

854
00:54:35,260 --> 00:54:41,100
level was uh there enough that if we connect up psychology with evolution,

855
00:54:41,370 --> 00:54:46,730
that that's um uh fireworks happen in a way that is kind of rare

856
00:54:46,730 --> 00:54:47,450
scientifically.

857
00:54:47,530 --> 00:54:51,210
Like it was sort of a unique time and a unique place where these things could come

858
00:54:51,210 --> 00:54:52,010
together.

859
00:54:52,650 --> 00:54:53,290
Yes.

860
00:54:54,010 --> 00:54:59,210
It's not that people hadn't previously thought that evolution could illuminate

861
00:54:59,370 --> 00:55:00,250
psychology.

862
00:55:00,490 --> 00:55:02,010
Darwin thought that.

863
00:55:02,440 --> 00:55:02,760
Right.

864
00:55:03,000 --> 00:55:08,440
I mean, and um Darwin thought that there had been various

865
00:55:08,440 --> 00:55:14,280
attempts uh to take on psychology with an evolutionary lens.

866
00:55:14,360 --> 00:55:16,280
I mean, William James thought that.

867
00:55:16,600 --> 00:55:20,040
Um Sean Bowlby certainly thought that.

868
00:55:20,120 --> 00:55:24,360
I mean, John Bowlby was, I consider him an early evolutionary psychologist with attachment

869
00:55:24,360 --> 00:55:24,680
theory.

870
00:55:24,760 --> 00:55:30,050
He he started with like primate behavior and he thought that that

871
00:55:30,530 --> 00:55:36,530
clearly there were mechanisms that kept an infant monkey staying within range of his

872
00:55:36,530 --> 00:55:41,810
mother and uh going back to her when uh frightened and using her as a base of exploration.

873
00:55:41,970 --> 00:55:44,210
He thought he thought that was an evolved mechanism.

874
00:55:44,370 --> 00:55:49,820
Um but there wasn't uh um there wasn't a

875
00:55:49,820 --> 00:55:53,820
language and even when you look at the early ethologists who I do think of as cognitive

876
00:55:53,820 --> 00:55:59,420
psychologists, they were still doing things before cognitive psychology was really much of

877
00:55:59,420 --> 00:56:00,060
a thing.

878
00:56:00,300 --> 00:56:05,660
And so they're they're grasping towards um

879
00:56:05,980 --> 00:56:07,180
explanations.

880
00:56:07,820 --> 00:56:11,580
Um and that's why they talk about things like fixed action patterns and so forth, because I

881
00:56:11,740 --> 00:56:17,410
I think I think it's because they lack a more of fuller throated language of

882
00:56:17,410 --> 00:56:18,690
information processing.

883
00:56:18,850 --> 00:56:19,170
Yeah.

884
00:56:20,050 --> 00:56:25,730
And so yes, the this this

885
00:56:25,970 --> 00:56:29,010
this cognitive revolution was happening around the same time.

886
00:56:29,170 --> 00:56:30,130
It was full of revolution.

887
00:56:31,890 --> 00:56:37,890
And but people, this is why like that there's an

888
00:56:37,890 --> 00:56:39,490
87 paper that we wrote.

889
00:56:39,650 --> 00:56:45,170
It's actually based on the fourth chapter of my dissertation because I I had to

890
00:56:45,500 --> 00:56:51,100
I have a very too long dissertation um because part of what I had to do is explain

891
00:56:51,420 --> 00:56:56,220
why you would take an evolutionary perspective to cognition in the first place.

892
00:56:57,660 --> 00:57:00,620
And what what would that lead you to think differently?

893
00:57:01,020 --> 00:57:05,740
And so there's a whole chapter about why you would expect domain-specific mechanisms, since

894
00:57:05,740 --> 00:57:10,270
the empirical work was about a domain-specific reasoning mechanism for detecting cheaters,

895
00:57:10,350 --> 00:57:10,590
right?

896
00:57:11,390 --> 00:57:15,950
And um so we worked that chapter into this 1987 paper.

897
00:57:16,030 --> 00:57:20,990
And the title of it is From Evolution to Behavior, Evolutionary Psychology as the Missing

898
00:57:20,990 --> 00:57:21,550
Link.

899
00:57:21,870 --> 00:57:26,830
And the audience we had in mind actually when we wrote that paper was sort of the

900
00:57:26,830 --> 00:57:32,220
sociobiology community, because this was a missing link in their

901
00:57:32,540 --> 00:57:33,180
thinking.

902
00:57:34,220 --> 00:57:40,220
Um so yeah, that wasn't that that paper wasn't even aimed particularly at psychologists.

903
00:57:40,380 --> 00:57:44,940
It was aimed at the people who were just going straight from selection pressures to

904
00:57:44,940 --> 00:57:49,020
behavior without a pit stop on how the wine works.

905
00:57:49,260 --> 00:57:49,580
Yeah.

906
00:57:49,740 --> 00:57:50,140
Yeah.

907
00:57:51,420 --> 00:57:54,380
Uh I mean, David, uh jump, feel free to jump in.

908
00:57:54,460 --> 00:57:56,060
Um, fast forwarding.

909
00:57:56,220 --> 00:58:01,790
Um, so there there's people are missing this cognitive or

910
00:58:01,790 --> 00:58:03,310
computational level.

911
00:58:03,710 --> 00:58:06,430
Um, what is your opinion now?

912
00:58:06,590 --> 00:58:09,550
So we were doing history and we can kind of go back and forth.

913
00:58:09,790 --> 00:58:15,390
Um, what is your take on to the extent to which people uh do

914
00:58:15,390 --> 00:58:21,150
understand that level, or the extent to which it's still not adequately understood,

915
00:58:21,230 --> 00:58:24,830
either in psychology or even in evolutionary psychology?

916
00:58:26,960 --> 00:58:31,120
Um not adequately understood.

917
00:58:31,920 --> 00:58:35,440
A little understood, but um

918
00:58:38,880 --> 00:58:41,840
less supplied than than it could be.

919
00:58:42,240 --> 00:58:48,000
Um and and and a lot of people, even in evolutionary psychology,

920
00:58:48,160 --> 00:58:53,870
are not fully adaptationist in the sense of looking for evidence of special

921
00:58:53,870 --> 00:58:54,510
design.

922
00:58:57,470 --> 00:59:02,590
But it's all so much better than what came before that you can't even believe it.

923
00:59:03,070 --> 00:59:07,630
I mean, there was just nothing in psychology.

924
00:59:08,750 --> 00:59:09,470
Nothing.

925
00:59:09,630 --> 00:59:14,430
You wouldn't even come across the word natural selection or evolution in a psychology

926
00:59:14,430 --> 00:59:20,300
article ever, let alone have any, let alone have hypotheses that were derived from

927
00:59:20,300 --> 00:59:22,540
evolutionary principles.

928
00:59:22,780 --> 00:59:27,820
Um your cognition, you you told me, I alluded to this earlier on an earlier episode of your

929
00:59:27,900 --> 00:59:33,740
uh just trying to get your Wayson uh stuff published just because of the source of the

930
00:59:33,740 --> 00:59:34,300
hypothesis.

931
00:59:34,700 --> 00:59:36,460
It was because of the source of the hypothesis.

932
00:59:36,540 --> 00:59:41,420
It was literally I could have been playing pinball and had the idea, and that would have

933
00:59:41,420 --> 00:59:42,140
been okay.

934
00:59:42,300 --> 00:59:47,930
Yeah, but the the fact that it was sort of logically derived from uh you know Trevor's

935
00:59:47,930 --> 00:59:53,690
evolution of reciprocal altruism uh selection pressures was what was

936
00:59:53,690 --> 00:59:55,530
making it not okay.

937
00:59:55,850 --> 01:00:01,690
Um uh yeah no it was yeah Lita some future historian of science will use that

938
01:00:01,770 --> 01:00:07,450
uh for for having a logger narrative of the theory crisis in psychology and early 20th and

939
01:00:07,450 --> 01:00:12,140
21st century psychology theory I'm sure It could be.

940
01:00:12,300 --> 01:00:15,500
I think it's not the easiest thing in the world to think computationally.

941
01:00:15,900 --> 01:00:16,220
No.

942
01:00:16,460 --> 01:00:18,380
Uh I could just work on it myself.

943
01:00:18,460 --> 01:00:19,180
Um Yeah.

944
01:00:19,260 --> 01:00:23,980
And and and this is another question is like I think, yeah, because I mean, even even among

945
01:00:24,060 --> 01:00:29,420
the all levels of evolutionary psychologists, or even just getting students, I do sometimes

946
01:00:29,420 --> 01:00:33,660
wonder that if the psychology part of evolutionary psychology is the harder one than the

947
01:00:33,660 --> 01:00:34,700
evolutionary part.

948
01:00:34,780 --> 01:00:35,180
Yeah.

949
01:00:35,500 --> 01:00:36,940
Oh, I think it absolutely is.

950
01:00:37,100 --> 01:00:37,420
Yeah.

951
01:00:37,580 --> 01:00:37,900
Yeah.

952
01:00:38,140 --> 01:00:39,100
I I do think it is.

953
01:00:39,260 --> 01:00:39,740
Yes.

954
01:00:40,010 --> 01:00:40,650
Yes, absolutely.

955
01:00:41,050 --> 01:00:46,890
I mean in part because we have such a rich folk psychology system that

956
01:00:46,890 --> 01:00:49,530
we lean on for explaining people.

957
01:00:50,090 --> 01:00:55,210
Uh and it's it's very hard to jettison that, to let that go, to put it aside.

958
01:00:55,450 --> 01:00:55,770
Right.

959
01:00:56,010 --> 01:01:01,610
And take a to t to activate a different module in the mind to think about the mind.

960
01:01:01,850 --> 01:01:07,850
Um, to use your sort of um folk mechanics mechanism to think about minds.

961
01:01:08,010 --> 01:01:10,560
That's it's really tricky for people to do.

962
01:01:10,720 --> 01:01:13,840
Um I think it's your artifact.

963
01:01:13,920 --> 01:01:16,560
Yeah, uh I think it's yeah, yeah.

964
01:01:17,120 --> 01:01:22,480
Um yeah, whatever you want to call it, it's a different way of of looking at minds than we

965
01:01:22,480 --> 01:01:24,720
are intuitively accustomed to.

966
01:01:24,880 --> 01:01:28,640
Uh and and and it comes more naturally to some people than others, for sure.

967
01:01:28,800 --> 01:01:31,170
But yeah, I I sometimes have a hard time doing that.

968
01:01:31,330 --> 01:01:36,450
It's it's it's like it's hard to to let go of the fact that I'm a little homunculous that's

969
01:01:36,450 --> 01:01:40,370
seeking, you know, mental substances of good vibes and bad vibes, you know.

970
01:01:40,690 --> 01:01:41,970
Yes, yes, uh yes.

971
01:01:42,210 --> 01:01:42,610
Yeah.

972
01:01:42,930 --> 01:01:48,050
Well, I that's why when I teach undergraduates, I teach it completely from the artifact

973
01:01:48,050 --> 01:01:52,770
module point of view, the design stance that we're looking for machines that are designed

974
01:01:52,770 --> 01:01:54,210
to perform functions.

975
01:01:54,770 --> 01:02:00,640
Yeah, and I know yeah and I and I I teach that a good way to think about genes from

976
01:02:00,640 --> 01:02:03,760
this perspective is to think about them as particles of design.

977
01:02:04,000 --> 01:02:04,320
Yeah.

978
01:02:04,720 --> 01:02:09,040
That they're the means by which a design replicates itself through generations.

979
01:02:09,280 --> 01:02:14,080
It's sort of like in in the extended phenotype, which is actually my favorite Dawkins book

980
01:02:14,160 --> 01:02:15,280
is the extended phenotype.

981
01:02:15,360 --> 01:02:15,520
Yeah.

982
01:02:15,680 --> 01:02:18,240
And he's got these necker cubes on the front of it.

983
01:02:18,400 --> 01:02:24,000
And the point that he's making in is you can ship do you can do a gestalt switch on the on

984
01:02:24,000 --> 01:02:29,650
the necker cube about the perspective you're taking, that talking about individual

985
01:02:29,650 --> 01:02:33,250
reproduction versus inclusive fitness is a Neckercube shift.

986
01:02:33,490 --> 01:02:39,090
And so if you think about um Hamilton and Ken selection uh

987
01:02:39,090 --> 01:02:44,850
theory, that's actually starting from the that's seeing it from the perspective of the

988
01:02:44,850 --> 01:02:47,680
reproduction of an individual, right?

989
01:02:47,840 --> 01:02:53,040
That the individual is trading off some of the individual's own reproduction to

990
01:02:53,680 --> 01:02:58,880
help um increase the reproduction of say a sibling.

991
01:02:59,760 --> 01:03:04,960
But if you're thinking about it from the point gene side point of view, um genes that code

992
01:03:04,960 --> 01:03:09,120
for designs that promote their own product reproduction are going to be selected for uh

993
01:03:09,280 --> 01:03:11,120
regardless of who they're in, right?

994
01:03:11,280 --> 01:03:16,730
I mean, um and so part of the point of the extended phenotype is he was

995
01:03:16,730 --> 01:03:22,490
gently saying, you know, you can do this gestalt switch uh to a

996
01:03:22,490 --> 01:03:26,970
gene's eye view, in which case things look kind of different.

997
01:03:27,210 --> 01:03:31,050
Um so yeah, no, I I I teach entirely from it.

998
01:03:31,530 --> 01:03:35,850
When we were in graduate school, John used to say, you know, when we understand enough

999
01:03:35,850 --> 01:03:40,820
about the mind, we'll understand more about how to explain this.

1000
01:03:41,060 --> 01:03:42,100
Yeah, exactly.

1001
01:03:42,980 --> 01:03:48,900
And and so I was really it was really useful uh learning about you know research on um the

1002
01:03:48,900 --> 01:03:54,740
idea that we have mechanisms that are for understanding tools and that tools have

1003
01:03:54,740 --> 01:03:57,140
functions or design for functions and so forth.

1004
01:03:57,300 --> 01:03:58,980
Um I found that helpful.

1005
01:03:59,220 --> 01:04:04,660
But yeah no I think it's really it's really um not not easy to do.

1006
01:04:04,740 --> 01:04:06,900
And I think there's probably things that we miss.

1007
01:04:08,420 --> 01:04:09,770
I shouldn't say we.

1008
01:04:10,490 --> 01:04:15,850
People like me who did not have uh training in

1009
01:04:16,330 --> 01:04:18,170
you know computer programming.

1010
01:04:18,330 --> 01:04:24,010
I think there's things that we miss about how how

1011
01:04:24,090 --> 01:04:29,130
psychological mechanisms need to be designed, or what are good ways to design them.

1012
01:04:29,370 --> 01:04:33,210
And I I that's sort of you know distressing sometimes.

1013
01:04:33,290 --> 01:04:34,890
I feel like I have to go back to school.

1014
01:04:35,050 --> 01:04:37,770
There's lots of things I have to go back to school to learn.

1015
01:04:38,620 --> 01:04:41,500
Um well, but I think that's to your credit though.

1016
01:04:41,580 --> 01:04:47,020
I think that you when you're confident that you know everything is the that's when you

1017
01:04:47,180 --> 01:04:49,500
should hang your spurs up, right?

1018
01:04:49,580 --> 01:04:55,260
I think that's the um uh that engineering approach to things

1019
01:04:55,420 --> 01:05:00,540
and um that you know there are people like Don Simons or Martin and Margot.

1020
01:05:00,700 --> 01:05:05,710
Um when you when you encountered people like that Um, and maybe this comes back to the

1021
01:05:05,710 --> 01:05:06,350
original question.

1022
01:05:06,430 --> 01:05:10,510
I'm always just m mystified like where people like that come from who are just

1023
01:05:10,510 --> 01:05:15,070
design-minded, um, and and they're sort of fellow travelers.

1024
01:05:15,470 --> 01:05:18,830
Um the the can you continue the story then?

1025
01:05:18,990 --> 01:05:24,670
If so, you you and John, uh, how did you discover uh Don Simons and how did that?

1026
01:05:24,990 --> 01:05:26,830
Well, first we discovered Daly and Wilson.

1027
01:05:27,390 --> 01:05:33,300
And that was simple because uh Martinal Daly Margot Wilson uh spent a sabbatical year

1028
01:05:33,300 --> 01:05:38,820
at Harvard when we were graduate students and they were at the Simeon seminar um the whole

1029
01:05:38,820 --> 01:05:39,060
time.

1030
01:05:39,220 --> 01:05:44,420
Well even before that it it there was a psychology um

1031
01:05:44,820 --> 01:05:50,420
wide seminar that people actually came to um um but the

1032
01:05:50,420 --> 01:05:56,390
speakers were actually chosen by graduate students and so um I was on

1033
01:05:56,390 --> 01:06:02,070
that committee I think my freshman year and and um Martin was one of the people that

1034
01:06:02,230 --> 01:06:08,150
that I suggested and so Martin spoke but then they came they came I can't

1035
01:06:08,230 --> 01:06:12,550
I can't remember which year it was I think that might have been eighty eighty three eighty

1036
01:06:12,630 --> 01:06:16,660
four 82, 83, around that time.

1037
01:06:16,820 --> 01:06:18,740
Um, they spent the whole year there.

1038
01:06:18,820 --> 01:06:19,220
It was great.

1039
01:06:19,300 --> 01:06:20,420
We talked many times.

1040
01:06:20,900 --> 01:06:26,900
Um, and then Don um Don came

1041
01:06:26,900 --> 01:06:32,020
to all of this in a different way, Don Simons.

1042
01:06:32,420 --> 01:06:37,940
Um he he was doing, I think he was a psychology major as an undergraduate.

1043
01:06:38,770 --> 01:06:43,090
But then he went to graduate school in biological anthropology.

1044
01:06:43,250 --> 01:06:48,930
Well, I'm not sure what the formal division was, but he was a student of Sherry Washburn's

1045
01:06:48,930 --> 01:06:49,970
at Berkeley.

1046
01:06:50,290 --> 01:06:56,210
And Don's dissertation was on um

1047
01:06:56,530 --> 01:06:59,010
uh aggression and play in Rhesus monkeys.

1048
01:06:59,090 --> 01:07:04,610
And it was an adaptationist analysis where he was saying, look, if you look carefully at

1049
01:07:04,610 --> 01:07:10,280
how Rhesus monkeys play, it has features a special design for calibrating your

1050
01:07:10,280 --> 01:07:12,200
ability to fight.

1051
01:07:12,360 --> 01:07:18,120
There's a there's turn taking one the one will be like on top, and and and then the up

1052
01:07:18,280 --> 01:07:20,440
they'll switch and the other one will be on top.

1053
01:07:20,520 --> 01:07:23,400
There's a play face that signals this isn't true aggression.

1054
01:07:23,560 --> 01:07:25,320
This is we're just practicing.

1055
01:07:25,480 --> 01:07:31,080
Um, he went through various features of design from his watching the in the field

1056
01:07:31,160 --> 01:07:36,770
watching um the Rhesus monkeys and so he was Don I don't know Don

1057
01:07:37,410 --> 01:07:40,450
was always an adaptationist and

1058
01:07:43,330 --> 01:07:47,970
I don't know how that came to be yeah

1059
01:07:49,330 --> 01:07:54,610
yeah I'm not sure I mean Don would have of course read a lot of ethology for sure yeah um

1060
01:07:54,850 --> 01:07:59,570
and he wasn't in the middle of this sociobiology thing because he's um

1061
01:08:03,180 --> 01:08:05,340
I think he's 15 years older than me.

1062
01:08:06,220 --> 01:08:06,860
Yeah.

1063
01:08:07,180 --> 01:08:13,020
And and uh but when it came to the evolution of human

1064
01:08:13,020 --> 01:08:18,620
sexuality, his book that came out in 1979, um he

1065
01:08:18,780 --> 01:08:24,540
he just thought and thought and thought and thought about about this for a very, very long

1066
01:08:24,540 --> 01:08:24,860
time.

1067
01:08:25,020 --> 01:08:30,950
And from an evolutionary point of view And and um I don't know

1068
01:08:30,950 --> 01:08:32,230
how he came to study that.

1069
01:08:32,550 --> 01:08:35,270
Don always said that he liked to study things that he liked.

1070
01:08:35,430 --> 01:08:37,110
And sex was one of those things he liked.

1071
01:08:37,910 --> 01:08:39,110
Totally straightforward, yeah.

1072
01:08:39,350 --> 01:08:40,870
He said he liked he liked to sleep.

1073
01:08:40,950 --> 01:08:46,950
He wrote a very cool uh paper about dreaming called The Stuff Dreams Are Not

1074
01:08:46,950 --> 01:08:47,270
Made of.

1075
01:08:47,510 --> 01:08:47,830
That's correct.

1076
01:08:47,990 --> 01:08:49,830
Um that was published in Cognition.

1077
01:08:49,990 --> 01:08:55,580
He thought about he loved e eating in interesting things and he would have blind

1078
01:08:56,140 --> 01:08:57,660
blind taste tests of different things.

1079
01:08:57,980 --> 01:08:58,220
That's great.

1080
01:08:58,380 --> 01:09:02,220
And so he th he thought about doing uh food, but then he decided that there was too much

1081
01:09:02,220 --> 01:09:04,700
literature on that already and he didn't want to go through all that.

1082
01:09:04,860 --> 01:09:05,100
Yeah.

1083
01:09:05,180 --> 01:09:06,620
Um very reasonable.

1084
01:09:07,020 --> 01:09:13,020
He thought he thought about doing uh uh laughter and humor but then when he started

1085
01:09:13,020 --> 01:09:17,820
reading about humor he found all everything he found about humor was so humor humorless he

1086
01:09:17,820 --> 01:09:18,940
couldn't stand it.

1087
01:09:19,710 --> 01:09:20,590
Yes, exactly.

1088
01:09:20,670 --> 01:09:22,350
Although he did get his float article, right?

1089
01:09:22,430 --> 01:09:26,910
It's if anybody nobody's had the float article, it's uh it's a it's a parody.

1090
01:09:26,990 --> 01:09:27,230
Yeah.

1091
01:09:28,270 --> 01:09:29,550
Didn't he always say there wasn't enough?

1092
01:09:29,950 --> 01:09:33,470
I think even in that, I think he said there's not enough humor in in psychology.

1093
01:09:33,630 --> 01:09:35,390
Uh probably.

1094
01:09:35,550 --> 01:09:36,190
I don't know.

1095
01:09:36,350 --> 01:09:42,350
Um but so he he he well since Don can't speak for himself since

1096
01:09:42,350 --> 01:09:45,710
he uh died in in 2024.

1097
01:09:46,190 --> 01:09:51,920
Um the people watching this might might or might not know about the famous

1098
01:09:51,920 --> 01:09:55,280
bet that was made between Don Simons and Don Brown.

1099
01:09:55,520 --> 01:09:58,560
Um Don Brown, who later wrote Human Universals.

1100
01:09:58,880 --> 01:10:00,240
Yeah, which was the book that got me.

1101
01:10:00,320 --> 01:10:01,600
Yeah, the book that got me.

1102
01:10:01,680 --> 01:10:01,760
Yeah.

1103
01:10:03,680 --> 01:10:09,600
So Don Simons told Brown that he said that I'm gonna write a book about the evolution of

1104
01:10:09,600 --> 01:10:10,560
human sexuality.

1105
01:10:10,800 --> 01:10:14,400
And he said, I think there's gonna be some universals of human sexuality.

1106
01:10:14,670 --> 01:10:19,070
And I'm gonna go through all the ethnographic record and I'm gonna look at this from an

1107
01:10:19,070 --> 01:10:20,830
evolutionary point of view, etc.

1108
01:10:21,310 --> 01:10:26,910
And Don Brown, who was uh trained as a political anthropologist, uh, Don Brown

1109
01:10:26,910 --> 01:10:32,590
says, Any universal you think you find, I'm going to be able to find an exception.

1110
01:10:33,630 --> 01:10:36,030
And Simon says, I don't think so.

1111
01:10:36,190 --> 01:10:38,190
And Brown says, I'm sure I will be able to.

1112
01:10:38,270 --> 01:10:41,080
So they made a bet about that.

1113
01:10:41,400 --> 01:10:43,640
And they bet a pitcher of beer.

1114
01:10:43,880 --> 01:10:49,800
Um and um after Simons wrote what he wrote and

1115
01:10:49,800 --> 01:10:54,600
did his research, Brown couldn't find any exceptions to the things that Simons said.

1116
01:10:55,000 --> 01:10:59,240
And so acknowledged that Simons clearly had won the bet.

1117
01:10:59,930 --> 01:11:05,530
And then Brown started asking himself, why was I so sure?

1118
01:11:05,850 --> 01:11:07,690
Why was I so sure?

1119
01:11:08,090 --> 01:11:14,010
Because there had been a tradition in anthropology of looking both at universals and at

1120
01:11:14,010 --> 01:11:18,810
things that varied from culture to culture, but the field had sort of changed more into

1121
01:11:18,810 --> 01:11:21,210
being interested only in variation.

1122
01:11:21,600 --> 01:11:25,120
And so he started, I said, Why was I so sure that there would be no universals?

1123
01:11:25,280 --> 01:11:31,040
And he um in the course that I started reading more of the history of

1124
01:11:31,040 --> 01:11:36,640
anthropology, and that's where why he wrote Human Universals, which he dedicated to

1125
01:11:36,640 --> 01:11:37,280
Simus.

1126
01:11:37,760 --> 01:11:41,600
Um, so that's where the book that got you into this field came from.

1127
01:11:41,760 --> 01:11:46,790
It was his thinking about the bet, yeah and and the fact that he made the bet in the first

1128
01:11:46,790 --> 01:11:47,030
place.

1129
01:11:47,430 --> 01:11:51,830
And and and and actually they hadn't done the official um

1130
01:11:53,350 --> 01:11:59,350
uh picture of beer um thing yet and and so in uh in our

1131
01:11:59,350 --> 01:12:03,510
first or second year uh here at UCSB um there was an

1132
01:12:03,510 --> 01:12:09,300
anthrotic picnic party at um in the hills where Don Brown and

1133
01:12:09,300 --> 01:12:10,660
Don Simons lived.

1134
01:12:10,820 --> 01:12:16,740
And there was a ceremonial uh giving of the pitcher of beer from Brown to

1135
01:12:16,740 --> 01:12:17,300
Sassman.

1136
01:12:17,460 --> 01:12:18,740
So I got to I got to see that.

1137
01:12:18,980 --> 01:12:20,100
That's fantastic.

1138
01:12:21,860 --> 01:12:23,220
It was historically.

1139
01:12:26,820 --> 01:12:27,460
Yeah.

1140
01:12:28,430 --> 01:12:29,390
Such a lovely story.

1141
01:12:29,470 --> 01:12:35,230
I feel like um you know it's it's an example of like of science working how it should be.

1142
01:12:35,470 --> 01:12:40,190
Like making making a bet about something that you think is true and then changing your mind

1143
01:12:40,190 --> 01:12:42,430
when the data come in and and you're wrong.

1144
01:12:42,590 --> 01:12:46,830
And admitting that and you know it it it just it's it's an inspiring story.

1145
01:12:46,910 --> 01:12:50,910
I wish that you know we had more of that kind of thing happening.

1146
01:12:50,990 --> 01:12:54,990
I think we should bet more pictures of beer on various pictures of beer.

1147
01:12:55,070 --> 01:12:56,350
Yeah no I know I know.

1148
01:12:56,510 --> 01:12:57,070
Yeah.

1149
01:12:59,160 --> 01:13:02,280
Actually care about what's true.

1150
01:13:02,760 --> 01:13:05,240
And I'm not always clear that people do.

1151
01:13:05,400 --> 01:13:09,560
I I've had a an informal bet like that that I've completely lost.

1152
01:13:09,800 --> 01:13:15,800
Um uh this has to do with work that I uh uh uh recent work that I I did and

1153
01:13:15,800 --> 01:13:21,470
and am continuing with uh Ricardo Guzman in in Chile, um, I had been too

1154
01:13:21,470 --> 01:13:23,630
influenced by Tversky and Kahneman.

1155
01:13:23,870 --> 01:13:28,830
I mean, even though I thought that they were wrong about lots of things, and you know, I

1156
01:13:28,830 --> 01:13:34,750
and John and Garrett Renzer had done research showing that when you put the same

1157
01:13:35,310 --> 01:13:41,310
um probability problems, when you express them in frequencies and absolute frequencies,

1158
01:13:41,710 --> 01:13:43,790
natural frequencies, that people do very well.

1159
01:13:43,950 --> 01:13:48,720
So I knew that Tversky and Kahneman were they're not wrong about the phenomena.

1160
01:13:48,880 --> 01:13:53,200
If you don't do that, people will be bad at conditional probabilities.

1161
01:13:53,440 --> 01:13:57,520
But it doesn't mean that the mind doesn't have mechanisms that are well designed for

1162
01:13:57,520 --> 01:13:58,560
statistical reasoning.

1163
01:13:58,640 --> 01:14:01,040
You just have to give it information in the right format.

1164
01:14:01,280 --> 01:14:06,400
But still, they had made other claims as well, like that people

1165
01:14:06,560 --> 01:14:12,170
violate the principles of rational choice all the time, and that people wouldn't

1166
01:14:12,170 --> 01:14:18,170
possibly be able to that they they're not capable of of being transitive uh like

1167
01:14:18,170 --> 01:14:22,410
having transitive preferences which which people always explain as if you like a better

1168
01:14:22,410 --> 01:14:26,570
than b and b better than c then you'll like a better than c although that's a terrible way

1169
01:14:26,570 --> 01:14:32,180
of putting it because a b and c are not things like

1170
01:14:32,740 --> 01:14:35,540
John's taller than Nike and Nike's taller than Lita.

1171
01:14:35,700 --> 01:14:38,020
So John's they're bundles of goods.

1172
01:14:38,420 --> 01:14:44,260
Like you know, five avocados and three tomatoes and twenty tomatoes and five avocados.

1173
01:14:45,060 --> 01:14:46,420
A, B, and C are bundle of goods.

1174
01:14:46,500 --> 01:14:50,500
So it's very not communicated well to people who are not in economists.

1175
01:14:50,580 --> 01:14:50,980
But anyway.

1176
01:14:51,390 --> 01:14:51,550
Right.

1177
01:14:51,630 --> 01:14:55,310
And the alternatives also give you information about the nature of the sample that it that

1178
01:14:55,310 --> 01:14:56,270
is being drawn from.

1179
01:14:56,510 --> 01:15:00,110
And you're going to make different inferences if the alternatives are different, right?

1180
01:15:00,670 --> 01:15:01,070
Yes.

1181
01:15:01,230 --> 01:15:01,550
Yes.

1182
01:15:01,710 --> 01:15:07,310
You know that guy at at at uh UC San Diego that um did research on that.

1183
01:15:07,870 --> 01:15:08,670
Oh interesting.

1184
01:15:08,910 --> 01:15:09,230
Yeah.

1185
01:15:09,390 --> 01:15:12,430
I I I'm I'm blanking on his name right.

1186
01:15:12,510 --> 01:15:16,830
He's at at he's at the business school at at the at um UCSD.

1187
01:15:16,990 --> 01:15:22,900
And I came across his pay this guy's paper in a in

1188
01:15:22,900 --> 01:15:25,380
a journal that had economics in the title.

1189
01:15:25,460 --> 01:15:30,100
And I'm reading it and he starts out talking about well, that's a little bit off topic.

1190
01:15:30,180 --> 01:15:32,500
Anyway, I'll find it and send it to you.

1191
01:15:34,660 --> 01:15:38,260
But he he he not only makes that argument, he demonstrates it.

1192
01:15:39,060 --> 01:15:44,980
So anyway, I I I had I but I had believed them about that people would

1193
01:15:45,330 --> 01:15:49,170
you know, not be able to have transitive reasoning.

1194
01:15:49,330 --> 01:15:53,650
I thought that their prospect theory and other things were, I thought that had been shown.

1195
01:15:53,970 --> 01:15:58,850
And Ricardo was one, my my colleague said, no, no, no.

1196
01:15:59,170 --> 01:16:05,090
I I think that people will be rational in the

1197
01:16:05,090 --> 01:16:06,530
sense of rational choice.

1198
01:16:06,690 --> 01:16:12,660
And I think we should do this with uh moral trade-offs because people keep saying things

1199
01:16:12,660 --> 01:16:18,420
like that, you know, either you're being utilitarian and using your domain general

1200
01:16:18,420 --> 01:16:23,380
reasoning, deliberative reasoning system, or you have these crude uh

1201
01:16:23,620 --> 01:16:29,620
emotions that will make you s not push the guy off of the footbridge in the trolley

1202
01:16:29,780 --> 01:16:34,020
problem and that they're fighting and that's how moral we and so Ricardo said that that's

1203
01:16:34,100 --> 01:16:35,460
that's that that's not gonna be true.

1204
01:16:35,620 --> 01:16:41,390
People are gonna be able to make trade offs between different kinds of uh moral values.

1205
01:16:41,550 --> 01:16:46,750
And but you need to have a different kind of uh moral dilemma in order to even test that

1206
01:16:46,830 --> 01:16:51,070
because nobody even gives you the opportunity to, because you only have either push the guy

1207
01:16:51,070 --> 01:16:56,270
off the bridge in front of the trolley to save the five people, or don't push the guy and

1208
01:16:56,270 --> 01:16:57,070
let the five people die.

1209
01:16:57,230 --> 01:16:58,670
There's only two options there.

1210
01:16:58,910 --> 01:17:03,230
And anyway, he said, I'm I he said, I'm sure it's going to work out that people will not

1211
01:17:03,230 --> 01:17:06,190
only be able to make trade-offs, but they'll make rational trade-offs.

1212
01:17:06,350 --> 01:17:08,360
And I said, but there's all this stuff in psychology.

1213
01:17:08,440 --> 01:17:10,360
He says, no, no, that's what's going to happen.

1214
01:17:10,520 --> 01:17:12,680
And he he he was completely right.

1215
01:17:13,320 --> 01:17:18,680
He was gloriously right, to my surprise.

1216
01:17:20,280 --> 01:17:26,280
So, you know, people behaved exactly as if they're doing what economists talk

1217
01:17:26,280 --> 01:17:32,250
about when they talk about generating a utility function and then using whatever options

1218
01:17:32,250 --> 01:17:35,370
are available to you, the costs and benefits of the options available to you to choose

1219
01:17:35,370 --> 01:17:36,890
which is the best option.

1220
01:17:38,170 --> 01:17:40,810
The economists are not psychological about it though.

1221
01:17:41,290 --> 01:17:47,130
The economists they they they say that they are agnostic about the

1222
01:17:47,130 --> 01:17:47,450
mind.

1223
01:17:47,770 --> 01:17:53,520
So when they give theories like this about utility maximization, it's not about

1224
01:17:53,520 --> 01:17:57,040
what's going on in an individual's mind, which is very interesting.

1225
01:17:57,120 --> 01:18:00,560
Um it took me years to figure out what the hell they they were talking about.

1226
01:18:00,720 --> 01:18:06,000
I would go to these um these behavioral economics workshops here that would happen once

1227
01:18:06,080 --> 01:18:11,520
every every two years that Gary Charnes uh would would put on, who also

1228
01:18:11,520 --> 01:18:12,960
died recently.

1229
01:18:13,200 --> 01:18:15,520
Um everybody's dying all around me.

1230
01:18:15,600 --> 01:18:19,040
It's really frustrating um and upsetting.

1231
01:18:19,280 --> 01:18:25,050
But I would go to these and when I could and people would there would

1232
01:18:25,050 --> 01:18:30,970
be these 40-minute talks, the first 20 minutes would be a beautiful experiment, like

1233
01:18:30,970 --> 01:18:32,890
some sort of behavioral economics experiment.

1234
01:18:33,050 --> 01:18:36,490
It might be in the lab, it might be in the field with gorgeous results.

1235
01:18:36,650 --> 01:18:41,130
And anybody I know in psychology would have been thrilled to have done these experiments

1236
01:18:41,130 --> 01:18:41,610
themselves.

1237
01:18:42,900 --> 01:18:45,060
Very interpretable results.

1238
01:18:45,220 --> 01:18:49,860
And then the second 20 minutes, they'd be writing some full utility function on a board.

1239
01:18:50,180 --> 01:18:55,940
And and like I'd be zoning out during and so I would I asked people afterwards, I said,

1240
01:18:56,660 --> 01:18:59,380
what is this utility function?

1241
01:18:59,540 --> 01:19:00,500
What is it?

1242
01:19:02,180 --> 01:19:03,860
Is this a theory of the computation?

1243
01:19:03,940 --> 01:19:09,860
Is this a like a David Maher kind of I explained that is this a a theory of

1244
01:19:09,860 --> 01:19:12,580
what problem the mind is trying to solve?

1245
01:19:12,910 --> 01:19:18,910
And the economists and this was the economist, it's not somebody you know, uh Dave, but

1246
01:19:18,910 --> 01:19:24,670
this economist who is friendly to psychology, and so was he said, no, it has nothing

1247
01:19:24,670 --> 01:19:26,590
to do with the human mind.

1248
01:19:27,630 --> 01:19:32,190
And I said, But you do think that individuals are making the decisions in these

1249
01:19:32,190 --> 01:19:32,910
experiments?

1250
01:19:33,150 --> 01:19:34,440
He said, Yes, of course.

1251
01:19:34,680 --> 01:19:37,320
And I said, You do think it has something to do with their brains?

1252
01:19:37,480 --> 01:19:40,040
And he said, Yes, of course.

1253
01:19:40,440 --> 01:19:43,400
And he said, But the utility function has nothing to do with that.

1254
01:19:43,800 --> 01:19:44,360
Yeah.

1255
01:19:44,680 --> 01:19:46,760
I was like, what is it?

1256
01:19:47,000 --> 01:19:48,600
And actually, it turns out he's right.

1257
01:19:48,680 --> 01:19:49,880
And that is the traditional view.

1258
01:19:49,960 --> 01:19:52,040
And it has nothing to do with what's going on in the mind.

1259
01:19:52,120 --> 01:19:53,640
In the way economists think about it.

1260
01:19:53,800 --> 01:19:56,200
The way economists think about it, their problem is different.

1261
01:19:56,360 --> 01:19:58,840
Their problem is usually understanding a market.

1262
01:19:59,250 --> 01:20:05,090
and markets have millions of anonymous people trading in them and the utility

1263
01:20:05,090 --> 01:20:11,010
function is an input output device um where that takes quantities like uh like

1264
01:20:11,250 --> 01:20:16,930
price and and and income and it outputs what's likely demand or what's the likely supply

1265
01:20:17,170 --> 01:20:22,720
and so they're asking questions like if the if the if the price of of of

1266
01:20:22,720 --> 01:20:27,920
corn goes up if there's if if there's a drought and the price of corn goes up what'll

1267
01:20:27,920 --> 01:20:33,040
happen to demand for corn chips that's the kind of question they're asking and that isn't

1268
01:20:33,040 --> 01:20:38,880
about a mind it's like it's a it's a a piece of technology for predicting what'll happen in

1269
01:20:38,880 --> 01:20:39,440
a market.

1270
01:20:39,600 --> 01:20:45,490
Now it's it happens that some behavioral economists um have made

1271
01:20:45,490 --> 01:20:51,250
it almost uh a theory of the mind without really saying that but they they they're the

1272
01:20:51,250 --> 01:20:56,930
economists are usually very careful to say that people are behaving as if

1273
01:20:57,170 --> 01:21:02,530
they're maximizing utility function and they'll and and then when they're being very and

1274
01:21:02,850 --> 01:21:08,770
then the even more precisely there are theorems that show um uh there are theorems

1275
01:21:08,770 --> 01:21:13,780
that show that in this measure of GARP that we use.

1276
01:21:13,940 --> 01:21:14,420
It doesn't matter.

1277
01:21:14,500 --> 01:21:18,980
It's a measure of whether people are making transitive choices.

1278
01:21:19,300 --> 01:21:24,900
That if people's responses respect GARP, then there

1279
01:21:24,900 --> 01:21:30,420
exists at least one utility function that, if rationalized, could explain the data.

1280
01:21:30,660 --> 01:21:30,980
Right.

1281
01:21:31,220 --> 01:21:32,900
That's the way they say qualified, yes.

1282
01:21:33,460 --> 01:21:35,380
Because then they they can prove that.

1283
01:21:35,460 --> 01:21:40,230
They they they can prove and so we were saying, you know, it's not we're we were saying,

1284
01:21:40,310 --> 01:21:45,830
look, the most parsimonious explanation for our results is that people are behaving as if

1285
01:21:45,830 --> 01:21:50,870
they're maximizing this function because that is what their mind is doing.

1286
01:21:51,030 --> 01:21:53,830
It's maximize, it's it's it's built a function.

1287
01:21:54,150 --> 01:21:56,790
We called it a right dysfunction because it was about moral rightness.

1288
01:21:56,870 --> 01:22:02,780
It's built dysfunction, and then it's it's it's making choosing from the set the

1289
01:22:02,780 --> 01:22:07,980
one that has the maximum brightness and it and it has machinery for doing that.

1290
01:22:08,140 --> 01:22:12,540
And so it's not just that they're behaving as if they are, they are.

1291
01:22:13,260 --> 01:22:19,260
Because that that really is the simplest explanation for for our our moral trade off data.

1292
01:22:19,340 --> 01:22:19,820
Um yeah.

1293
01:22:19,980 --> 01:22:25,210
So anyway it would be quite a coincidence that they just happen to behave as if their minds

1294
01:22:25,210 --> 01:22:26,570
are performing these computations.

1295
01:22:26,650 --> 01:22:28,970
Like why don't you just say that they're actually doing the computations?

1296
01:22:29,050 --> 01:22:31,450
Like that's a much simpler I I I know.

1297
01:22:31,610 --> 01:22:31,850
I know.

1298
01:22:32,010 --> 01:22:35,850
But see, but but everybody's interested in different questions and the economists are not

1299
01:22:35,850 --> 01:22:37,530
interested in individual minds, right?

1300
01:22:37,610 --> 01:22:37,770
Yeah.

1301
01:22:38,090 --> 01:22:43,690
Except there's this like this this group of like the judgment decision making Yeah, I sat

1302
01:22:43,850 --> 01:22:46,890
in on that community for nine and a half years.

1303
01:22:46,970 --> 01:22:47,210
Yeah.

1304
01:22:47,530 --> 01:22:47,930
Yes.

1305
01:22:48,090 --> 01:22:48,250
Yeah.

1306
01:22:48,490 --> 01:22:54,480
And and and they're very like, you know heuristics and biases oriented a lot of them but

1307
01:22:54,480 --> 01:22:58,400
that's sort of funny because like even the term behavioral economics versus experimental

1308
01:22:58,400 --> 01:23:04,160
economics they have different flavors to them because the person who who who really

1309
01:23:04,480 --> 01:23:08,960
invented behavioral experimental economics where you have people bring people an experiment

1310
01:23:09,040 --> 01:23:12,720
and you put them in a you know it can be a prisoner's dilemma or a trust game or all these

1311
01:23:12,720 --> 01:23:17,730
different games that was Vernon Smith and his colleagues He did it with Charlie Plott and

1312
01:23:17,730 --> 01:23:18,370
various other people.

1313
01:23:18,450 --> 01:23:24,130
He had a very uh great group around him, you know, uh Kevin

1314
01:23:24,130 --> 01:23:29,890
McCabe, Elizabeth Hoffman, um uh I think Bart Wilson was part of that group.

1315
01:23:30,210 --> 01:23:35,890
And Vernon Smith, when he learned about evolutionary psychology, he he he

1316
01:23:36,050 --> 01:23:40,930
and Elizabeth Hoffman, etc., they they realized that a lot of the they were finding in

1317
01:23:40,930 --> 01:23:46,700
their lab that people did not behave as if their preferences were homo economicus

1318
01:23:46,780 --> 01:23:47,340
preferences.

1319
01:23:47,580 --> 01:23:51,820
Rational choice doesn't mean that you're always choosing the thing that has the highest

1320
01:23:51,820 --> 01:23:53,020
monetary payoff.

1321
01:23:53,180 --> 01:23:58,460
It means that whatever your preferences are, you're choosing the one that's that's best of

1322
01:23:58,460 --> 01:24:02,060
your given how you weight various things.

1323
01:24:03,420 --> 01:24:09,170
The idea that you're always going to choose the highest paying option is a theory about

1324
01:24:09,170 --> 01:24:13,090
preferences and people call that homo economicus economic man.

1325
01:24:13,490 --> 01:24:19,250
And and Vernon Smith was, you know, had shown very shown very uh early, he and his group

1326
01:24:19,330 --> 01:24:25,330
very early, that if you have 27 people in a lab and they're interacting

1327
01:24:25,330 --> 01:24:31,010
with one another in these games, um, they do not behave as if they're maximizing short-term

1328
01:24:31,010 --> 01:24:31,650
profits.

1329
01:24:32,000 --> 01:24:37,440
They behave as if they're in a small hunter-gatherer group where there's going to be

1330
01:24:37,440 --> 01:24:41,520
repeated interactions, whether, you know, even if you no matter what you tell them.

1331
01:24:42,080 --> 01:24:47,200
And so he he they wrote, there's a Hoffman McCabe and Smith paper from 1998 that's great,

1332
01:24:47,280 --> 01:24:51,520
where they were reinterpreting all of their results in light of, you know, evolutionary

1333
01:24:51,520 --> 01:24:55,760
psychology and theory of mind and things like this, and saying, look, there's something

1334
01:24:55,760 --> 01:24:59,920
different that's going on in small groups than what you see in mass markets.

1335
01:25:03,190 --> 01:25:09,030
So the experimental economics people kind of went, at least some of them,

1336
01:25:09,110 --> 01:25:11,190
in more of an F-Sype direction.

1337
01:25:11,510 --> 01:25:16,950
Whereas the people influenced more by Tversky and Kahneman went into this

1338
01:25:17,510 --> 01:25:19,670
heuristics and prices direction.

1339
01:25:20,390 --> 01:25:26,360
And that really, when people say behavioral economics, now they use it

1340
01:25:26,360 --> 01:25:27,880
to refer to all of it, right?

1341
01:25:28,200 --> 01:25:32,280
But initially it was sort of a difference in the use of the term where the behavioral

1342
01:25:32,280 --> 01:25:37,000
economics community was more the heuristics and biases, um uh

1343
01:25:38,520 --> 01:25:44,310
decision-making, cognition, decision-making people and the experimental economic and

1344
01:25:44,310 --> 01:25:46,710
experimental economics had more to do with these.

1345
01:25:47,190 --> 01:25:52,870
Um had it's a it's too bad that the larger community didn't take the turns that Vernon

1346
01:25:52,870 --> 01:25:54,630
Smith and his colleagues took.

1347
01:25:55,350 --> 01:25:59,910
Because that's the more interesting turn turn where you're asking, well, how does a mind

1348
01:25:59,910 --> 01:26:05,750
work and how looking at these games as having to do with interactions of people

1349
01:26:05,910 --> 01:26:11,840
and you know as being produced by programs that evolved for a different kind of

1350
01:26:12,160 --> 01:26:16,800
social world where people did know each other and there were repeated interactions.

1351
01:26:17,200 --> 01:26:21,120
So I I always find the history of these different disciplines really interesting.

1352
01:26:21,360 --> 01:26:21,680
Yeah.

1353
01:26:22,000 --> 01:26:26,320
Because it's part of the Simons principle that you can't understand something unless you

1354
01:26:26,320 --> 01:26:27,840
know who they're arguing with.

1355
01:26:28,320 --> 01:26:31,200
And unless you know what kind of question they're trying to answer.

1356
01:26:31,360 --> 01:26:35,790
I mean, once I realized how they thought about how the economists thought about utility

1357
01:26:35,790 --> 01:26:39,230
functions, I realized that's completely sane.

1358
01:26:39,470 --> 01:26:43,550
If you want to know what's happening in a large market to supply and demand, this is this

1359
01:26:43,550 --> 01:26:44,510
is completely sane.

1360
01:26:44,590 --> 01:26:50,190
So they they have utility functions that represent, you know, a household,

1361
01:26:50,430 --> 01:26:54,750
what they think of as a consumption bundle for a typical household.

1362
01:26:54,940 --> 01:26:59,100
and then they use it and it's very useful for the making predictions and so forth.

1363
01:26:59,260 --> 01:27:02,620
But you got to know what they're trying to do because they're not always trying to do what

1364
01:27:02,620 --> 01:27:03,580
you're trying to do.

1365
01:27:03,820 --> 01:27:04,140
Yeah.

1366
01:27:04,300 --> 01:27:07,500
Sometimes they have a completely different question in mind.

1367
01:27:07,740 --> 01:27:12,700
Um this this reminds me a little bit of the David Hume point, which is in some sense, Lita,

1368
01:27:12,860 --> 01:27:17,830
I think one way to describe what you and John do did so well and do so well is you're a

1369
01:27:17,830 --> 01:27:20,310
contemporary historian of science.

1370
01:27:21,910 --> 01:27:25,510
Which is you're not looking in deep history, you're looking around what is the scientific

1371
01:27:25,510 --> 01:27:29,670
landscape and the ability to sort of articulate, well, here is this group of people, and

1372
01:27:29,670 --> 01:27:33,830
here's what the assumptions they're making, here's what their goal is.

1373
01:27:34,310 --> 01:27:40,230
Uh that is surprisingly rare, you know, to do it at any time and especially concurrently

1374
01:27:40,310 --> 01:27:46,120
because there are status games And it takes courage to sort of speak up when

1375
01:27:46,280 --> 01:27:49,080
when the real flesh and blood stuff is happening.

1376
01:27:49,320 --> 01:27:53,880
And I think that, you know, I hadn't really thought of that this till this conversation,

1377
01:27:54,120 --> 01:28:00,040
but I think that that very much describes one of the things that you you guys do and

1378
01:28:00,040 --> 01:28:01,160
did so well.

1379
01:28:01,240 --> 01:28:07,110
Um is just our You have to be willing to

1380
01:28:07,110 --> 01:28:08,150
listen to people.

1381
01:28:08,790 --> 01:28:09,430
Yeah.

1382
01:28:10,230 --> 01:28:16,070
And you have to be like you may think that people are on the wrong path about

1383
01:28:16,070 --> 01:28:16,710
something.

1384
01:28:17,030 --> 01:28:18,630
And that's fine.

1385
01:28:18,870 --> 01:28:22,790
But you're going to be better off if you assume that they're intelligent human beings.

1386
01:28:22,950 --> 01:28:26,630
And if they're making assumptions that are different than the ones that you're making, they

1387
01:28:26,630 --> 01:28:29,430
probably have reasons why they're doing that.

1388
01:28:29,590 --> 01:28:31,900
And it would be good to know what those reasons are.

1389
01:28:32,060 --> 01:28:35,900
So in psychological foundations of culture, in the beginning of it about the standard

1390
01:28:35,900 --> 01:28:41,900
social science model, that is um uh that that deconstruction of that

1391
01:28:41,980 --> 01:28:47,740
is John's trying to say, um, what are the good reasons why people

1392
01:28:48,060 --> 01:28:51,820
adopted this notion of the standard social science model?

1393
01:28:52,380 --> 01:28:57,260
And um, if you don't know what you so it's always better to assume that people aren't

1394
01:28:57,260 --> 01:29:02,070
idiots, uh, to assume that they're they're smart people and they're coming from different

1395
01:29:02,070 --> 01:29:04,310
assumptions, and you got to know what those assumptions are.

1396
01:29:04,470 --> 01:29:08,070
And you have to know what kind of problem they're trying to solve, what kind of question

1397
01:29:08,070 --> 01:29:09,350
they're trying to answer.

1398
01:29:09,910 --> 01:29:12,150
And you have to not get frustrated.

1399
01:29:12,390 --> 01:29:13,750
This is really hard.

1400
01:29:13,990 --> 01:29:19,910
Um, you can't get super frustrated when they're not using terms the way that you're using

1401
01:29:19,910 --> 01:29:24,070
them, or when they're using them in a way that you find to be fuzzy.

1402
01:29:24,870 --> 01:29:30,060
Um you have to be because sometimes you're using ways not that other you're using terms

1403
01:29:30,060 --> 01:29:33,260
that ways that other people think are fuzzy and you don't realize it too.

1404
01:29:33,420 --> 01:29:37,980
Um but it can take a lot of time and patience sometimes.

1405
01:29:38,140 --> 01:29:44,060
Uh me being able to get into an economist's head uh was a long

1406
01:29:44,220 --> 01:29:49,870
process and it was helped by conversations with both Ricardo and Ryan

1407
01:29:50,030 --> 01:29:56,030
Opria, my colleague here at UCSV who just left for Berkeley, abandoned us

1408
01:29:56,030 --> 01:29:58,110
for Berkeley to my distress.

1409
01:29:59,150 --> 01:30:00,990
I would ask them these different questions.

1410
01:30:01,070 --> 01:30:06,270
And Ryan actually had he had been the second to last student of Vernon Smith's.

1411
01:30:06,510 --> 01:30:12,380
And he actually shared an office with Rob Kurzman at one point chat at at

1412
01:30:12,380 --> 01:30:17,820
Chapman I think uh anyway um so he knew he knew he knew some he had known some

1413
01:30:17,820 --> 01:30:23,420
evolutionary psychology um since he was a graduate student so Ryan is is good at

1414
01:30:23,420 --> 01:30:28,380
translating between disciplines and Ricardo had this background in computer science and

1415
01:30:28,380 --> 01:30:33,660
economics and so for for Ricardo the computational part's easy right that that was that's

1416
01:30:33,660 --> 01:30:37,180
the part that most people have trouble with with evolutionary psychology but for him that

1417
01:30:37,180 --> 01:30:42,730
was like obvious um and so i would ask them questions separately and

1418
01:30:43,370 --> 01:30:49,130
i get i get an answer in one way from i get an i get this exact same answer from them

1419
01:30:49,130 --> 01:30:53,690
both but from very different perspectives

1420
01:30:54,570 --> 01:30:59,690
ricardo would tell me in the for the technical reasons why you have to why this why you do

1421
01:30:59,690 --> 01:31:03,450
these this way and why people make these assumptions and then ryan would give me the the

1422
01:31:03,450 --> 01:31:08,320
historical background of why but they would always have the exact same it was funny because

1423
01:31:08,400 --> 01:31:14,320
their their conclusion about what it is that economists think and why they think it would

1424
01:31:14,800 --> 01:31:20,320
be exactly the same which gave me some confidence in what they were both uh that I wasn't

1425
01:31:20,320 --> 01:31:26,320
hearing an um uh an an outlandish uh

1426
01:31:26,560 --> 01:31:27,200
view.

1427
01:31:27,600 --> 01:31:32,070
Um So, but it takes a long, it can take a long time.

1428
01:31:32,230 --> 01:31:35,030
People you people use the term rationality differently.

1429
01:31:35,270 --> 01:31:35,590
Yeah.

1430
01:31:35,830 --> 01:31:36,150
Right?

1431
01:31:36,310 --> 01:31:40,950
I mean, the term rationality is used in completely different ways in different fields.

1432
01:31:41,270 --> 01:31:47,190
In psychology, you know, starting with um, well, especially with diversity and

1433
01:31:47,270 --> 01:31:48,150
economy, but not just them.

1434
01:31:48,230 --> 01:31:51,830
Yeah, Peter Wyson was interested in logical reasoning, right?

1435
01:31:52,070 --> 01:31:57,040
And he's he's the father of the study of reasoning and psychology, a wonderful

1436
01:31:57,040 --> 01:31:57,920
psychologist.

1437
01:31:58,080 --> 01:32:03,840
Um, and Versky and Kahneman, they they use rationality to mean judgments that

1438
01:32:03,840 --> 01:32:09,520
conform to principles to either uh principles of logic or um

1439
01:32:10,320 --> 01:32:16,320
mathematical theorems about probability, or the savage axioms, you know, which is about

1440
01:32:17,120 --> 01:32:18,400
which is relevant to that.

1441
01:32:18,560 --> 01:32:23,430
And that that's sort of where they get the economic stuff, although it seems to me that

1442
01:32:23,430 --> 01:32:28,710
they kind of there are aspects that of their writing that misinterpret the economic

1443
01:32:28,710 --> 01:32:32,710
perspective because for example when you're doing prospect theory that people think of as

1444
01:32:32,710 --> 01:32:38,150
showing that people have preference reversals it's different groups of subjects

1445
01:32:39,750 --> 01:32:45,480
you you can't actually test whether somebody is violating principles of

1446
01:32:45,480 --> 01:32:50,600
rational choice unless you test the same person in different with different prices and

1447
01:32:50,600 --> 01:32:51,880
different situations.

1448
01:32:52,040 --> 01:32:57,800
You can't you can't have one group of subjects hearing about

1449
01:32:57,880 --> 01:33:02,200
like in that disease problem that 600 people will die if you do nothing.

1450
01:33:02,280 --> 01:33:03,320
And there's these two plans.

1451
01:33:03,480 --> 01:33:09,110
One plan will definitely save 200 people, and the other plan will m has a

1452
01:33:09,110 --> 01:33:13,750
one-third chance of saving 600 and a two-thirds chance of everybody dying, which these T

1453
01:33:13,910 --> 01:33:16,550
have the same expected value of 200 lives.

1454
01:33:16,790 --> 01:33:19,430
Um, you know, which plan do you prefer?

1455
01:33:19,590 --> 01:33:25,590
And if you put it in terms of lives saved, uh people all else people prefer the

1456
01:33:25,590 --> 01:33:27,110
two, definitely 200.

1457
01:33:27,270 --> 01:33:31,980
If you put it in terms of lives lost, people will, they're not the same people, they're

1458
01:33:31,980 --> 01:33:37,980
different people that they'll say um they want the the riskier option that has a chance

1459
01:33:37,980 --> 01:33:39,420
of saving everybody.

1460
01:33:39,660 --> 01:33:45,260
And um that doesn't show anything about preference reversals because you can't show

1461
01:33:45,260 --> 01:33:50,700
anything about preference reversals unless you're doing that the same situation in the same

1462
01:33:50,700 --> 01:33:51,020
person.

1463
01:33:52,190 --> 01:33:58,110
It might arguably be testing some auxiliary auxiliary assumptions, but then you know

1464
01:33:58,190 --> 01:34:04,190
Larry Fitch and Sandy Mishra did these

1465
01:34:04,190 --> 01:34:09,150
beautiful experiments on that exact problem, showing that if you

1466
01:34:10,430 --> 01:34:15,710
if if you know what the person feels that their need level is, their preferences, like do I

1467
01:34:15,710 --> 01:34:17,950
feel like I need to save at least 200 people?

1468
01:34:18,030 --> 01:34:22,060
Or do I feel that I need to save at least 300 people.

1469
01:34:23,500 --> 01:34:27,820
If you need to save at least 300 people, you have to pick the risky option because you'll

1470
01:34:27,820 --> 01:34:29,900
have zero chance of saving 300 people.

1471
01:34:30,220 --> 01:34:31,500
You will save fewer than that.

1472
01:34:31,580 --> 01:34:32,060
You must.

1473
01:34:33,020 --> 01:34:38,620
So when you either set any need level or you ask somebody what their need level is, the

1474
01:34:38,620 --> 01:34:39,900
framing doesn't make any difference.

1475
01:34:39,980 --> 01:34:44,700
It doesn't matter what you put in lives lost, lives saves, it makes zero difference.

1476
01:34:44,970 --> 01:34:50,810
and people do exactly the rational thing they they they will choose the option that's most

1477
01:34:50,810 --> 01:34:56,650
likely to achieve their their need level and if you don't ask them a need level in

1478
01:34:56,650 --> 01:35:01,530
advance and but you ask they you have them make a choice and you do the risk the loss

1479
01:35:01,530 --> 01:35:07,530
versus gain frame um and you ask them afterwards um what was

1480
01:35:07,530 --> 01:35:13,100
the minimum number of people you felt you had to save, it turns out that when you put it in

1481
01:35:13,100 --> 01:35:18,300
terms of saving lives, that number is lower that that people felt that they needed to save

1482
01:35:18,460 --> 01:35:23,420
than when you put it in terms of people dying, they they set a higher need level.

1483
01:35:23,580 --> 01:35:28,860
And so all the all the all the phrasing in terms of lives saved and lives lost was doing

1484
01:35:29,020 --> 01:35:33,340
was changing what people decided their need level was.

1485
01:35:40,230 --> 01:35:45,830
theory, which came out of game theory and math and economics,

1486
01:35:46,070 --> 01:35:49,750
has nothing to do with either logic or mathematics.

1487
01:35:49,910 --> 01:35:50,070
Yeah.

1488
01:35:50,390 --> 01:35:51,910
Nothing to do with either one.

1489
01:35:52,150 --> 01:35:52,310
Yeah.

1490
01:35:52,470 --> 01:35:56,550
And also and it also has to do with like the social dimension of it.

1491
01:35:56,630 --> 01:36:01,110
Like when you describe a certain uh problem, like a disease is gonna kill X number of

1492
01:36:01,110 --> 01:36:04,870
people or whatever, like that's a linguistic phenomenon, and you have to draw inferences

1493
01:36:04,870 --> 01:36:07,740
about what my intentions are based on that communicative act.

1494
01:36:07,820 --> 01:36:11,500
And you're going to draw different inferences if I frame the situation differently.

1495
01:36:11,660 --> 01:36:15,020
You're going to have different inferences about like what the social expectations are.

1496
01:36:15,180 --> 01:36:18,220
And you're going to have different, and those expectations could be correct.

1497
01:36:18,300 --> 01:36:22,140
You could be judged differently if you respond to the utterance framed in one way versus

1498
01:36:22,140 --> 01:36:22,620
another way.

1499
01:36:22,700 --> 01:36:27,630
And there's actually research showing that that if when people make the quote unquote

1500
01:36:27,710 --> 01:36:33,230
irrational uh decision in those types of disease situations, people actually judge them uh

1501
01:36:33,390 --> 01:36:37,710
morally as better uh if they make the irrational decision, quote unquote, than if they make

1502
01:36:37,710 --> 01:36:38,350
the rational one.

1503
01:36:38,510 --> 01:36:41,790
Because there's a social dimension to it where people are making inferences about your

1504
01:36:41,790 --> 01:36:46,270
character and your priorities and what you're setting the need level uh it as when you're

1505
01:36:46,270 --> 01:36:48,350
given a certain uh type of information.

1506
01:36:48,590 --> 01:36:52,920
So uh that is another dimension that is often ignored in these in these problems.

1507
01:36:53,160 --> 01:36:58,760
Just how fluid and and uh language is and how uh we have to infer

1508
01:36:58,920 --> 01:37:04,120
so much about the informative intention of of of of the situation about the the person

1509
01:37:04,120 --> 01:37:07,800
giving you the information and the likely social expectations about responding to that

1510
01:37:07,800 --> 01:37:08,200
utterance.

1511
01:37:08,280 --> 01:37:13,560
So anyway, that's another also an another thing like all this stuff about deliberative

1512
01:37:13,560 --> 01:37:18,790
reasoning and so forth it might be that when you're in conversation with somebody, they're

1513
01:37:18,790 --> 01:37:22,550
pointing out some aspect of the problem that you weren't thinking about.

1514
01:37:22,950 --> 01:37:23,350
Yeah.

1515
01:37:23,590 --> 01:37:29,510
So, you know, if somebody's talking about saving lives, um, it

1516
01:37:29,510 --> 01:37:34,630
might not just be that you're just going with their expectations, but you're not you're not

1517
01:37:34,630 --> 01:37:39,910
really you're not really thinking as much about the number of people that will die.

1518
01:37:40,070 --> 01:37:45,080
I mean, so I think that most times when people are having um

1519
01:37:45,720 --> 01:37:51,480
moral arguments or political arguments and so forth, one of the things that that

1520
01:37:51,480 --> 01:37:57,320
is happening is you can change your mind because you're seeing that there's a part of the

1521
01:37:57,320 --> 01:38:00,600
problem of the issue that you just had not considered before.

1522
01:38:00,920 --> 01:38:06,670
And so so So, like for example,

1523
01:38:06,830 --> 01:38:11,470
I actually think this fits with even though Jonathan Haidt doesn't talk much about this, it

1524
01:38:11,470 --> 01:38:13,870
is actually in in in part of his work.

1525
01:38:13,950 --> 01:38:18,030
Um, because you know he talks about the moral dumbfounding and how people will have a

1526
01:38:18,030 --> 01:38:20,750
reaction like that incest is gross.

1527
01:38:21,070 --> 01:38:26,920
And then you challenge all the reasons that they give, and the reasons you could challenge

1528
01:38:26,920 --> 01:38:28,760
them all and that has nothing to do with it.

1529
01:38:29,000 --> 01:38:34,680
Um but and I and I I think that absolutely

1530
01:38:34,680 --> 01:38:35,400
happens.

1531
01:38:35,640 --> 01:38:41,640
But I think that one of the things that happens when when people talk is issues are

1532
01:38:41,640 --> 01:38:43,880
brought out that you didn't think about before.

1533
01:38:44,040 --> 01:38:50,040
Like, you know, if you're thinking about I uh an issue with um soldiers in

1534
01:38:50,040 --> 01:38:56,030
war, won't it matter to you whether they were drafted against

1535
01:38:56,030 --> 01:39:00,830
their will and miserable and want to return to their families as opposed to whether they

1536
01:39:00,830 --> 01:39:03,950
were volunteers who were happy to fight for their country?

1537
01:39:04,190 --> 01:39:09,470
Wouldn't that and and if you're talking about like some particular war, mightn't it not

1538
01:39:09,470 --> 01:39:13,470
make a difference to your judgment about it if somebody points out that these are people

1539
01:39:13,470 --> 01:39:17,950
that are being, you know, asked that if they're being drafted, they're being asked to kill

1540
01:39:17,950 --> 01:39:23,800
people and with no consent, and it it it it it can bring out so a soldier

1541
01:39:23,800 --> 01:39:25,240
is not just a soldier, right?

1542
01:39:25,960 --> 01:39:30,920
There's a difference in how you might think about it depending on whether they

1543
01:39:31,400 --> 01:39:33,480
volunteered or they were drafted.

1544
01:39:33,640 --> 01:39:37,400
And it's this is not something specific to soldiers, it's about anything you can think

1545
01:39:37,400 --> 01:39:37,640
about.

1546
01:39:37,880 --> 01:39:43,320
One of the things that happens when people discuss issues is you see that there's aspects

1547
01:39:43,320 --> 01:39:45,080
of the problem you didn't think about before.

1548
01:39:45,770 --> 01:39:49,850
And that's usually not how people talk about what when they talk about the effects of

1549
01:39:49,850 --> 01:39:50,490
reasoning.

1550
01:39:50,650 --> 01:39:54,010
And whether you want to call it reasoning or not, I think it's what it's doing is it's

1551
01:39:54,010 --> 01:39:55,770
changing the way you frame the problem.

1552
01:39:56,250 --> 01:39:56,650
Right?

1553
01:39:56,890 --> 01:40:01,450
And I and I think David's right that that part of how you frame the problem, it can also

1554
01:40:01,450 --> 01:40:06,010
involve what these people expect from me and how they'll judge me.

1555
01:40:06,250 --> 01:40:09,610
That can absolutely be part of the framing of the problem.

1556
01:40:10,810 --> 01:40:16,520
But all these things, they're gonna affect what if I was being an economist, they might

1557
01:40:16,520 --> 01:40:18,760
defect affect what utility function I create.

1558
01:40:18,920 --> 01:40:23,320
Because I think that the economists are wrong when they think you have a gigantic utility

1559
01:40:23,320 --> 01:40:25,400
function that applies to all space and time.

1560
01:40:26,760 --> 01:40:30,840
I think they generated on the fly in response to situations.

1561
01:40:31,400 --> 01:40:33,640
I think that's more cognitively reasonable.

1562
01:40:33,800 --> 01:40:38,520
And that we also showed it in in our in our moral trade-off uh studies.

1563
01:40:38,680 --> 01:40:44,410
But but yeah, no, it's hard, it's it's really, really worthwhile to do things

1564
01:40:44,410 --> 01:40:50,010
across disciplines and and um but it's not simple

1565
01:40:50,250 --> 01:40:56,170
right yeah it also goes in the category I mean I think the the the lesson of sort of

1566
01:40:56,170 --> 01:41:00,810
treating things that you might easily poo-poo or think are stupid with respect.

1567
01:41:01,050 --> 01:41:05,050
I think it goes in this category of like there's a million ways to be wrong and only a few

1568
01:41:05,050 --> 01:41:11,040
ways to be right, which I think it hurts yourself as a scientist if you um I mean

1569
01:41:11,120 --> 01:41:16,320
this advice from you and John is something that many of your students took of just and

1570
01:41:16,400 --> 01:41:22,400
anecdotally, like people I've heard people say they would see you and John uh being very

1571
01:41:22,400 --> 01:41:27,200
happy about a talk that some of the early graduate students thought was quote unquote dumb.

1572
01:41:27,360 --> 01:41:32,160
And it was because you were learning something that the graduate students were missing.

1573
01:41:32,320 --> 01:41:36,310
And I think this is sort of being a more mature person, which is that, and it goes back to

1574
01:41:36,390 --> 01:41:39,830
there's lots of ways to be wrong and only a couple of ways to be right, is if you at the

1575
01:41:39,830 --> 01:41:44,390
moment you think something's dumb, it stops you thinking about, well, in what way is it

1576
01:41:44,390 --> 01:41:44,630
right?

1577
01:41:44,870 --> 01:41:48,310
Or like in what respect could it be correct and what insight is there?

1578
01:41:48,550 --> 01:41:52,710
And that's where I think, like, even to this day, like I think one of the things, and this

1579
01:41:52,710 --> 01:41:56,310
is kind of implicit, but Dave and I have talked about it, like in evolutionary psychology,

1580
01:41:56,630 --> 01:42:01,420
because it selects for people who say, look, I don't like the way mainstream psychology is

1581
01:42:01,420 --> 01:42:01,740
happening.

1582
01:42:01,900 --> 01:42:03,820
I like evolutionary approaches.

1583
01:42:04,060 --> 01:42:04,700
It's easy.

1584
01:42:04,780 --> 01:42:08,220
And I mean, I did this myself, where it'd be sort of like, well, this is dumb.

1585
01:42:08,300 --> 01:42:09,820
And there was a sense in which it was.

1586
01:42:09,900 --> 01:42:12,620
Like the things I I didn't like were wrong.

1587
01:42:12,780 --> 01:42:15,500
I mean, this is, you know, what attracted me to Evpsych.

1588
01:42:15,660 --> 01:42:21,290
But at the same time, the more mature evolutionary psychologist that I am now, it's making

1589
01:42:21,290 --> 01:42:26,170
this point of there was a sense in which all of that was right, but I can understand the

1590
01:42:26,170 --> 01:42:30,170
way it was right, even though I didn't agree with it at the time.

1591
01:42:30,330 --> 01:42:34,010
And I think that's an important mature way to approach science.

1592
01:42:34,090 --> 01:42:34,490
Yeah.

1593
01:42:34,970 --> 01:42:39,370
When you when you're hearing a talk, even if you think all of the person's conclusions are

1594
01:42:39,370 --> 01:42:45,130
wrong, even if you think that their approach is wrong, it's really hard to find a talk

1595
01:42:45,130 --> 01:42:50,760
where there's nothing interesting in their data because you have your own mind

1596
01:42:50,920 --> 01:42:52,920
and you have your own questions in mind.

1597
01:42:53,000 --> 01:42:57,720
And sometimes their data is is telling you something or suggesting something very

1598
01:42:57,720 --> 01:43:00,440
interesting with respect to your own what you're thinking.

1599
01:43:00,600 --> 01:43:05,560
I mean, it's not that there's never a talk that I but

1600
01:43:06,680 --> 01:43:12,040
I'd say like 90% of the time, there's something interesting I'm I'm I'm learning or

1601
01:43:12,040 --> 01:43:15,270
thinking about from the talk that I'm that I'm hearing.

1602
01:43:15,430 --> 01:43:18,630
I like hearing talks because I I I read really slowly.

1603
01:43:18,790 --> 01:43:23,590
And so it's it's it's it's good for me to be able to hear somebody speaking out loud and

1604
01:43:23,590 --> 01:43:26,230
explaining what it what they're thinking and why they're doing what they're doing.

1605
01:43:26,390 --> 01:43:28,070
I I I like that.

1606
01:43:28,310 --> 01:43:31,830
Um and also people don't always explain that when they write a paper.

1607
01:43:32,150 --> 01:43:32,630
Yes.

1608
01:43:32,870 --> 01:43:33,110
Right?

1609
01:43:33,190 --> 01:43:36,950
People don't always explain why they're asking the question that they are asking.

1610
01:43:37,030 --> 01:43:38,870
And in a talk usually they do.

1611
01:43:39,620 --> 01:43:39,780
Yeah.

1612
01:43:39,940 --> 01:43:42,740
Papers are weird uh artifacts.

1613
01:43:43,220 --> 01:43:44,020
Oh my god.

1614
01:43:45,140 --> 01:43:46,500
To put it smiling.

1615
01:43:47,540 --> 01:43:52,500
We should be submitting, you know, uh recorded monologues to journals and it should be

1616
01:43:52,500 --> 01:43:53,460
audio journals.

1617
01:43:55,380 --> 01:44:01,030
You know, I just learned that there's this thing called um it's It's not open to us because

1618
01:44:01,030 --> 01:44:04,550
we don't have a research grant from the right European

1619
01:44:06,950 --> 01:44:10,070
entity, but it's called uh Open Research Europe.

1620
01:44:10,310 --> 01:44:11,270
Have you heard about this?

1621
01:44:11,510 --> 01:44:16,310
It's doing things the way that John always had this notion about how publishing should

1622
01:44:16,310 --> 01:44:16,550
work.

1623
01:44:16,870 --> 01:44:19,190
And uh in many ways it's doing that.

1624
01:44:19,270 --> 01:44:25,110
So what you do is if you if you've got a grant from this, from whatever foundation or it

1625
01:44:25,110 --> 01:44:26,800
this it is in Europe.

1626
01:44:27,360 --> 01:44:30,160
They want the data to be openly available.

1627
01:44:30,320 --> 01:44:35,200
So when you write up the paper, it's it's it's published immediately.

1628
01:44:35,520 --> 01:44:41,280
Then the editors ask people to be peer reviewers and

1629
01:44:41,360 --> 01:44:43,840
and and signed peer reviewers.

1630
01:44:44,000 --> 01:44:49,440
And so so often people are more careful when and how they say things.

1631
01:44:49,600 --> 01:44:51,520
And those reviews will be posted.

1632
01:44:51,670 --> 01:44:57,270
And then I I believe other people can submit commentaries and so forth so that there can be

1633
01:44:57,270 --> 01:45:03,270
like the sharing of ideas in general without it taking like you know three years for the

1634
01:45:03,270 --> 01:45:04,550
paper to see the light of day.

1635
01:45:04,630 --> 01:45:10,150
I thought that was really interesting that somebody figured out a way of doing that.

1636
01:45:10,230 --> 01:45:14,470
Unfortunately, it's not something that the three of us can submit anything to because we

1637
01:45:14,470 --> 01:45:18,950
don't have the grant from the right agencies, or I assume not um in Europe.

1638
01:45:19,030 --> 01:45:20,390
But I thought that was interesting.

1639
01:45:20,710 --> 01:45:21,030
Yeah.

1640
01:45:22,000 --> 01:45:22,320
Yeah.

1641
01:45:22,800 --> 01:45:28,480
Insert joke about Elsevier here, but yeah, uh, that's that's another

1642
01:45:28,480 --> 01:45:28,960
issue.

1643
01:45:29,200 --> 01:45:33,200
Um yeah, um uh Lita, we're coming towards the end of our time.

1644
01:45:33,280 --> 01:45:34,400
I'm sure we'll have you back on.

1645
01:45:34,560 --> 01:45:36,640
Is there something that we should have asked you?

1646
01:45:36,880 --> 01:45:41,120
No I'm sure there's like 40 things, but yeah.

1647
01:45:41,680 --> 01:45:46,290
Um I I I don't know.

1648
01:45:46,690 --> 01:45:51,570
I'm I'm getting kind of old and so if there's anything you want to know about uh deep time,

1649
01:45:52,130 --> 01:45:54,690
um I'm one of the oldest people left.

1650
01:45:56,450 --> 01:46:02,130
Well I mean uh a a question I wanted to ask you, you know, you you put forward

1651
01:46:02,370 --> 01:46:07,920
with John uh this new way of thinking about human nature and human

1652
01:46:07,920 --> 01:46:08,480
condition.

1653
01:46:08,720 --> 01:46:14,320
And you've had a few decades now to observe the results, the impact it has had on the world

1654
01:46:14,480 --> 01:46:17,200
uh and on intellectual life.

1655
01:46:17,520 --> 01:46:23,280
Um are there any regrets you have about the way that you put those ideas

1656
01:46:23,280 --> 01:46:24,800
forward, the way you framed them?

1657
01:46:25,040 --> 01:46:29,040
Is there anything you would go back and change if you could do it all over again?

1658
01:46:29,360 --> 01:46:31,280
Um nope.

1659
01:46:32,350 --> 01:46:32,670
Nope.

1660
01:46:32,830 --> 01:46:35,870
And and also I'm I'm I'm I'm really okay.

1661
01:46:36,110 --> 01:46:40,270
So I I'm usually the cheerier view and John's the darker view.

1662
01:46:40,510 --> 01:46:46,190
Um uh but I'm amazed that how this kind of

1663
01:46:46,190 --> 01:46:47,470
thinking has taken off.

1664
01:46:47,710 --> 01:46:53,560
It's really it's hard to find in almost any domain that

1665
01:46:53,560 --> 01:46:59,480
I'm interested in, um where people aren't now considering, well, what

1666
01:47:00,120 --> 01:47:05,960
so you in if you're watching even if you're watching podcasts

1667
01:47:05,960 --> 01:47:11,160
about health, you know, people in terms of diet will be saying, well, what would it we've

1668
01:47:11,240 --> 01:47:12,360
been eating ancestrally?

1669
01:47:12,440 --> 01:47:13,400
What would that have been like?

1670
01:47:13,560 --> 01:47:15,560
Maybe we're adapted to some of that.

1671
01:47:15,720 --> 01:47:21,080
Or you you you will hear it when you're listening to like medical researchers talking uh

1672
01:47:21,390 --> 01:47:26,590
podcast by medical researchers, they'll be actually considering some something that they

1673
01:47:26,590 --> 01:47:28,270
were never considering before.

1674
01:47:28,430 --> 01:47:34,270
That doesn't mean that they're full-blown adaptationists, but

1675
01:47:34,590 --> 01:47:40,270
they're they're I actually years ago, I was I was sitting,

1676
01:47:40,430 --> 01:47:42,190
Dave, you remember Tupelo Junction?

1677
01:47:42,270 --> 01:47:46,030
It used to be a lovely restaurant in Santa Barbara that I wish still existed.

1678
01:47:46,110 --> 01:47:46,270
Yes.

1679
01:47:46,510 --> 01:47:46,750
Yes.

1680
01:47:46,990 --> 01:47:50,750
Well, it apparently it exists um down near where Aaron Lukashewski lives.

1681
01:47:51,080 --> 01:47:53,000
Okay, so more towards LA, yeah.

1682
01:47:53,240 --> 01:47:53,640
Yes.

1683
01:47:54,520 --> 01:47:59,240
I was sitting there years ago and I could hear at the next table some undergraduate talking

1684
01:47:59,240 --> 01:48:04,200
to his parents and and and saying, But you see, when we would have been hunter-gatherers,

1685
01:48:04,280 --> 01:48:08,840
you know, I would have been hunting, and I I can't remember what the he was it I I think he

1686
01:48:08,840 --> 01:48:13,690
was talking about, like the uh it might have had to do with maybe his parents thought he

1687
01:48:13,690 --> 01:48:16,890
was doing too much sports and not enough s I don't remember what the context was.

1688
01:48:17,050 --> 01:48:22,170
I just remember laughing to myself because that is not something you would have heard, you

1689
01:48:22,170 --> 01:48:24,250
know, five years before.

1690
01:48:24,410 --> 01:48:26,730
And I now I hear this all over the place.

1691
01:48:26,890 --> 01:48:32,090
It's it's a it's a thought in people's minds that they bring up all the time.

1692
01:48:32,330 --> 01:48:37,770
And the idea that there are that we have a psychology that that is shaped by

1693
01:48:38,440 --> 01:48:43,560
those past circumstances is now part of how people think.

1694
01:48:44,040 --> 01:48:49,240
And I think that that's the most important thing, like that it be something that people

1695
01:48:49,240 --> 01:48:51,000
have in mind and that they're considering.

1696
01:48:51,320 --> 01:48:56,840
Do I wish that people were more cognitive or more computational in their thinking?

1697
01:48:57,080 --> 01:48:57,720
Yes.

1698
01:48:57,960 --> 01:49:00,680
But I mean, at least in psychology.

1699
01:49:01,090 --> 01:49:04,370
But the situation is so much better than it ever was before.

1700
01:49:04,450 --> 01:49:08,050
It's so much it's so much better than it ever was before.

1701
01:49:08,210 --> 01:49:09,730
That I I think it's great.

1702
01:49:10,130 --> 01:49:15,970
You have to have the idea in people's heads before they can you know take off with

1703
01:49:15,970 --> 01:49:16,210
it.

1704
01:49:16,450 --> 01:49:16,770
Yeah.

1705
01:49:17,010 --> 01:49:21,650
Um so no no I I I stand I stand by it.

1706
01:49:21,810 --> 01:49:27,500
I the one thing that I I I wish we could change was um uh when we

1707
01:49:27,500 --> 01:49:33,180
wrote the journal personality article, the one about on the uh universality of human nature

1708
01:49:33,180 --> 01:49:35,260
and the uniqueness of the individual.

1709
01:49:35,900 --> 01:49:40,780
That and maybe also in 89, we used the term innate.

1710
01:49:41,500 --> 01:49:45,820
And the year that we were at the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences with um

1711
01:49:46,060 --> 01:49:48,610
Martin Daly and Marco Wilson and David Buss.

1712
01:49:49,170 --> 01:49:52,930
Martin would yell at yell at us for using the term innate.

1713
01:49:53,250 --> 01:49:55,570
And and and he was right.

1714
01:49:56,210 --> 01:50:00,930
He said he's he's he said, look, the question is whether some some aspect of the phenotype

1715
01:50:00,930 --> 01:50:02,210
was the target of selection.

1716
01:50:02,770 --> 01:50:05,090
Innate means a million things to a million people.

1717
01:50:05,250 --> 01:50:07,010
Do you mean that it doesn't develop?

1718
01:50:07,320 --> 01:50:08,840
No, you don't mean it doesn't develop.

1719
01:50:08,920 --> 01:50:13,560
Do you mean that its development is not influenced by any environmental contingencies?

1720
01:50:13,720 --> 01:50:15,000
No, you don't mean that.

1721
01:50:15,240 --> 01:50:17,000
And he was completely right.

1722
01:50:17,160 --> 01:50:22,040
I mean, I I usually it's longer, but I usually say reliably developing species typical

1723
01:50:22,040 --> 01:50:27,560
mechanism, or I say an adaptation, by which I mean a reliably developing species typical

1724
01:50:27,560 --> 01:50:29,720
mechanism that was designed by natural selection.

1725
01:50:29,880 --> 01:50:34,440
Um uh Martin was completely, completely right about that.

1726
01:50:34,680 --> 01:50:39,690
And um, I think the term innate does take people down the wrong paths.

1727
01:50:39,770 --> 01:50:44,250
Like they'll start to think, oh, well, something must be present in a newborn, or it's not

1728
01:50:44,250 --> 01:50:49,050
innate, or you know, I have to show that it's there before they're, you know, a year old.

1729
01:50:49,210 --> 01:50:53,930
Or there are lots of of of things that make no sense.

1730
01:50:54,090 --> 01:50:58,250
I mean, I see David has a beard here, and I'm guessing that he wasn't born with that beard.

1731
01:50:58,490 --> 01:51:04,480
Um, you know, lots of things that are reliably developing features of phenotype were not

1732
01:51:04,480 --> 01:51:06,080
present at birth.

1733
01:51:07,040 --> 01:51:12,160
So that, but but no, sometimes people thought we were too harsh.

1734
01:51:12,480 --> 01:51:14,400
I don't actually think we were ever too harsh.

1735
01:51:14,560 --> 01:51:18,320
I think in in in psychological foundations of culture and talking about the standards

1736
01:51:18,480 --> 01:51:24,470
social science model, I think it was a very sympathetic rendering of why people would go in

1737
01:51:24,470 --> 01:51:25,190
that direction.

1738
01:51:25,350 --> 01:51:30,790
A desire to not be racist, to not be sexist, to it's just that they were they were wrong

1739
01:51:30,870 --> 01:51:33,590
that the alternative implies that you will be racist.

1740
01:51:35,590 --> 01:51:39,110
The alternative does not mean that you are racist or sexist.

1741
01:51:39,910 --> 01:51:44,550
The people were not understanding the difference between causes of individual differences

1742
01:51:44,870 --> 01:51:48,950
and um universal aspects of human nature.

1743
01:51:49,720 --> 01:51:52,840
So I don't think we were the least bit harsh.

1744
01:51:53,000 --> 01:51:54,920
I think we were really sympathetic.

1745
01:51:55,080 --> 01:51:57,160
We didn't say you're a bunch of bozos.

1746
01:51:58,280 --> 01:52:04,200
We were saying here are the really good reasons why somebody would take this point of view.

1747
01:52:04,360 --> 01:52:08,040
You take somebody from one continent, you raise them on another continent, they are, they

1748
01:52:08,040 --> 01:52:10,120
behave like the people on the new continent.

1749
01:52:10,200 --> 01:52:13,560
And we're we were, I think it was very sympathetic.

1750
01:52:13,720 --> 01:52:18,440
People always think that you're like trying to take their tribe to task.

1751
01:52:18,790 --> 01:52:24,310
and you know the universality of human nature and uniqueness of the individual paper.

1752
01:52:24,550 --> 01:52:30,550
Like a lot of behavior geneticists were angry because they said we're that we're

1753
01:52:30,550 --> 01:52:36,390
saying they're just studying noise, which is a genetic noise, which is not exactly what

1754
01:52:36,390 --> 01:52:37,430
we were saying.

1755
01:52:37,670 --> 01:52:43,030
We're I think of it as more we were saying what are the criteria for saying that individual

1756
01:52:43,030 --> 01:52:45,430
differences are the products of adaptations.

1757
01:52:46,790 --> 01:52:50,100
But but no, I don't I don't know.

1758
01:52:50,980 --> 01:52:51,220
Yeah.

1759
01:52:51,380 --> 01:52:57,380
No, it's easy to fall into the trap, I think, of regretting a framing or a term

1760
01:52:57,700 --> 01:53:01,300
uh based on the way in which it is misunderstood by people.

1761
01:53:01,540 --> 01:53:05,860
I remember, you know, Richard Dawkins had regrets that he titled his book The Selfish Gene,

1762
01:53:06,020 --> 01:53:10,500
because so many people misinterpreted it as implying that we're genetically selfish, right?

1763
01:53:10,740 --> 01:53:14,580
When and you know he re he he wishes he would have called it the immort the immortal gene,

1764
01:53:14,660 --> 01:53:14,900
right?

1765
01:53:15,540 --> 01:53:18,170
Um but I actually think he's wrong.

1766
01:53:18,330 --> 01:53:20,890
I think it's it's correct to call it the self machine.

1767
01:53:21,050 --> 01:53:25,210
I think that is the best way to scribe to describe it and the most insightful way to

1768
01:53:25,210 --> 01:53:25,610
describe it.

1769
01:53:25,770 --> 01:53:30,730
Yes, some people have misunderstood it, but you cannot judge the utility of a metaphor or

1770
01:53:30,890 --> 01:53:34,410
or framing based on the misunderstandings of people.

1771
01:53:34,570 --> 01:53:39,690
You have to judge it by its its clarity and its insight among the people who do understand

1772
01:53:39,690 --> 01:53:39,930
it.

1773
01:53:40,170 --> 01:53:46,080
Um and you know, you're you're making me think that like, yeah, uh you know I I sometimes

1774
01:53:46,080 --> 01:53:51,280
regret using uh the term propaganda or propagandistic bias in in my paper on political

1775
01:53:51,280 --> 01:53:51,760
belief systems.

1776
01:53:52,160 --> 01:53:53,280
Yeah I disagree with that David.

1777
01:53:53,360 --> 01:53:54,640
I think you should I think it's great.

1778
01:53:54,720 --> 01:53:57,840
I think propaganda should be call that when it is yeah.

1779
01:53:58,160 --> 01:53:58,320
Yeah.

1780
01:53:58,480 --> 01:54:01,280
And and you're making me think that maybe I shouldn't like regret that.

1781
01:54:01,360 --> 01:54:05,280
Like yeah it's it some pe it it's it's kind of a harsh way of putting it but um I also

1782
01:54:05,280 --> 01:54:07,280
think it it's an insightful way of putting it.

1783
01:54:07,760 --> 01:54:12,850
And I think that's the the best way to to judge something so yeah uh you're never going to

1784
01:54:12,850 --> 01:54:18,450
please everybody there's no thing you can write that will please everybody my whenever I

1785
01:54:18,450 --> 01:54:24,290
get really frustrated uh and and and and feel attacked

1786
01:54:24,610 --> 01:54:29,970
um my dad uh my dad said

1787
01:54:31,000 --> 01:54:32,680
what are you talking about?

1788
01:54:33,000 --> 01:54:35,560
Jesus Christ was crucified.

1789
01:54:35,800 --> 01:54:40,760
You know, there's not if you're not gonna do anything, say anything where nobody's going to

1790
01:54:40,760 --> 01:54:41,800
object, right?

1791
01:54:54,450 --> 01:54:59,490
um uh yeah you're never gonna you're never gonna make everybody happy there's nothing you

1792
01:54:59,490 --> 01:55:03,650
can do that's gonna make everybody even if you try to make everybody happy you won't make

1793
01:55:03,650 --> 01:55:08,690
everybody happy right yeah you'll either do something super bland and then people who don't

1794
01:55:08,690 --> 01:55:10,770
want to read something super bland will not be happy.

1795
01:55:10,930 --> 01:55:12,370
This is just not possible.

1796
01:55:12,450 --> 01:55:15,890
You it it it's it's one of these things that one shouldn't even aspire to because it's not

1797
01:55:15,890 --> 01:55:16,130
possible.

1798
01:55:16,290 --> 01:55:18,770
What you should aspire to is being clear.

1799
01:55:19,020 --> 01:55:19,260
Yeah.

1800
01:55:20,140 --> 01:55:23,020
Clear and also respectful.

1801
01:55:23,260 --> 01:55:23,500
Yeah.

1802
01:55:24,460 --> 01:55:28,700
And I I don't ever I don't think I don't think we were ever disrespectful.

1803
01:55:29,580 --> 01:55:30,860
Yeah, I think that's right.

1804
01:55:31,020 --> 01:55:36,940
I think um uh uh uh respecting the intelligence

1805
01:55:36,940 --> 01:55:42,620
of things you disagree with I think has been um really a north star of of that work

1806
01:55:43,420 --> 01:55:49,410
yes this is also why um when you ask questions in a

1807
01:55:49,410 --> 01:55:53,090
talk of somebody, it should never be hostile.

1808
01:55:53,250 --> 01:55:56,290
I mean it should never be asked in an angry way.

1809
01:55:56,690 --> 01:55:57,090
Yes.

1810
01:55:57,330 --> 01:56:02,690
It it because you you you or when or when you're writing a review, it should it's just no

1811
01:56:02,690 --> 01:56:03,570
call for being angry.

1812
01:56:03,730 --> 01:56:08,850
Just explain what you think is if it's a review, explain what you think is is wrong and

1813
01:56:08,850 --> 01:56:09,890
what's right and what's wrong.

1814
01:56:10,050 --> 01:56:15,940
And when you're asking it in the in a talk in a question, it's important to be polite is

1815
01:56:16,180 --> 01:56:22,020
important for science to be polite because in science people have to be willing

1816
01:56:22,340 --> 01:56:24,660
to acknowledge when they were wrong about something.

1817
01:56:24,900 --> 01:56:30,740
And if you make this about them as a human being, that you're destroying them as a person,

1818
01:56:30,980 --> 01:56:36,170
they will never admit when they were they're wrong about something and and it's mean.

1819
01:56:37,770 --> 01:56:40,330
It's mean, but but more than that, it's bad for science.

1820
01:56:40,410 --> 01:56:43,850
You just want to ask the question as clearly as as you can.

1821
01:56:46,410 --> 01:56:50,010
And and and and not build a bad as censoring yourself.

1822
01:56:50,090 --> 01:56:51,770
That's not censoring yourself.

1823
01:56:52,010 --> 01:56:54,970
It's being clear and respecting the human being.

1824
01:56:55,050 --> 01:56:59,520
You know, you want to be like the British where they'll be tearing themselves each other

1825
01:56:59,520 --> 01:57:04,640
apart in a seminar and then they'll be at the pub drinking beer together afterwards and

1826
01:57:04,640 --> 01:57:06,800
laughing um together.

1827
01:57:06,960 --> 01:57:12,160
Uh that's a better way I I asked I asked once, you know, how is this the how is this

1828
01:57:12,400 --> 01:57:12,880
happening?

1829
01:57:13,040 --> 01:57:17,120
And they go, well, you know, we're just all unstuck on this island, so we have to get

1830
01:57:17,120 --> 01:57:17,760
along.

1831
01:57:19,200 --> 01:57:21,360
You know, bet the pitcher of beer.

1832
01:57:21,520 --> 01:57:21,600
Yeah.

1833
01:57:21,990 --> 01:57:23,030
Bet the pitcher of beer.

1834
01:57:23,110 --> 01:57:23,350
Yeah.

1835
01:57:23,510 --> 01:57:26,470
You know, it's the beer pitcher litmus test.

1836
01:57:26,550 --> 01:57:29,830
If you can't, if it's not that level of civility, maybe don't yeah.

1837
01:57:29,990 --> 01:57:30,310
That's right.

1838
01:57:30,630 --> 01:57:35,430
Or specificity where you have a specific claim that you could learn from with an empirical

1839
01:57:35,430 --> 01:57:35,670
test.

1840
01:57:35,910 --> 01:57:37,750
Like that's also part of the beauty of that.

1841
01:57:38,070 --> 01:57:43,270
It's not only the the amicability and and the friendliness of we're gonna have a beer over

1842
01:57:43,270 --> 01:57:48,230
this, but it's also like you're actually testing your idea against reality.

1843
01:57:48,550 --> 01:57:48,710
Yeah.

1844
01:57:49,430 --> 01:57:49,590
Yeah.

1845
01:57:50,580 --> 01:57:53,700
Yeah, it's standing side by side doing science.

1846
01:57:53,780 --> 01:57:55,380
Uh and yeah, exactly.

1847
01:57:55,540 --> 01:57:55,940
Yeah.

1848
01:57:56,100 --> 01:57:57,220
It's lovely.

1849
01:57:57,380 --> 01:58:01,540
Um, yeah, Lita, I mean, I think we know we'll definitely have you back on, but thank you

1850
01:58:01,540 --> 01:58:02,500
for being here.

1851
01:58:02,740 --> 01:58:08,420
Um, and on that last note, you know, I think uh I we often get to sort of like, you know,

1852
01:58:08,580 --> 01:58:12,340
on the way out of our episodes, we get to say something about people's influence.

1853
01:58:12,420 --> 01:58:17,710
And I think I don't even have to say your influence and John's influence on the field.

1854
01:58:17,870 --> 01:58:23,550
Um, but what I've I've come to love about uh what you and John embodied is that you

1855
01:58:23,550 --> 01:58:29,550
guys truly are scientists in this way of just respecting what's true and

1856
01:58:29,550 --> 01:58:31,390
trying to be respectful of people.

1857
01:58:31,630 --> 01:58:37,390
Um, and I didn't realize how rare that was until I continued in the

1858
01:58:37,390 --> 01:58:38,110
academy.

1859
01:58:38,190 --> 01:58:43,980
Um, and there really is a difference between uh academics and scientists, and not

1860
01:58:43,980 --> 01:58:48,460
every academic even aspires to be a scientist, so that's fine, and not everyone should be.

1861
01:58:48,540 --> 01:58:53,580
But there are many academics that purport to be scientists who are not um in this sort of

1862
01:58:53,580 --> 01:58:54,220
definition.

1863
01:58:54,460 --> 01:59:00,220
And um, you you and John um are very much scientists in ways that um

1864
01:59:00,220 --> 01:59:03,100
I still work hard to be like.

1865
01:59:03,260 --> 01:59:05,500
So well, that human nature thing, you know.

1866
01:59:05,830 --> 01:59:08,070
That human nature thing sometimes gets in the way.

1867
01:59:08,390 --> 01:59:11,910
Yeah, there's a lot of strong selection pressures to not be a scientist.

1868
01:59:13,430 --> 01:59:14,230
Exactly.

1869
01:59:14,390 --> 01:59:14,550
Yeah.

1870
01:59:15,110 --> 01:59:17,590
Well, thank you very much for for having me on.

1871
01:59:17,670 --> 01:59:18,710
I I appreciate it.

1872
01:59:18,790 --> 01:59:20,390
And I I think what you're doing is great.

1873
01:59:20,550 --> 01:59:23,270
I know a lot of people who listen to your podcasts.

1874
01:59:23,510 --> 01:59:25,270
Um That's great.

1875
01:59:25,510 --> 01:59:29,670
Uh you'll have to um uh um tell us who they are.

1876
01:59:31,280 --> 01:59:32,240
Probably know who they are.

1877
01:59:32,400 --> 01:59:33,600
But uh but thank you, Lita.

1878
01:59:33,840 --> 01:59:35,280
It was it was absolutely lovely.

1879
01:59:35,440 --> 01:59:39,360
And um yeah, I'm sure we'll um have have you on again.

1880
01:59:39,680 --> 01:59:40,160
Yeah.

1881
01:59:40,400 --> 01:59:40,800
All right.

1882
01:59:41,120 --> 01:59:42,000
Thanks so much.

1883
01:59:44,800 --> 01:59:46,880
Well, here you are, uh still listening.

1884
01:59:46,960 --> 01:59:52,800
You just listened to an episode with Leda Cosmodes, one of the founders of evolutionary

1885
01:59:52,800 --> 01:59:53,680
psychology.

1886
01:59:53,920 --> 01:59:58,710
So if you like that episode and you like what we're doing here on Evolutionary Psychology

1887
01:59:58,790 --> 02:00:00,390
the podcast, you can support us.

1888
02:00:00,550 --> 02:00:02,150
And how can people support us, Dave?

1889
02:00:02,390 --> 02:00:07,430
Uh read the 1987 um Missing Link paper by John and Alita.

1890
02:00:07,990 --> 02:00:08,630
Yep.

1891
02:00:09,350 --> 02:00:14,550
And uh read the Evpsych Primer on the CP website.

1892
02:00:14,870 --> 02:00:17,430
And um leave some reviews.

1893
02:00:17,590 --> 02:00:19,670
Send David a pan a fanny pack.

1894
02:00:19,910 --> 02:00:20,230
Yeah.

1895
02:00:20,470 --> 02:00:22,300
You still haven't gotten the fanny pack, I assume.

1896
02:00:22,540 --> 02:00:25,180
No, I'm still I'm really miffed about this.

1897
02:00:25,260 --> 02:00:26,780
No, no one's sending me a fanny pack.

1898
02:00:26,860 --> 02:00:27,900
I'm fanny packless.

1899
02:00:28,060 --> 02:00:28,220
Yeah.

1900
02:00:28,780 --> 02:00:31,260
Uh we haven't gotten any emails about t-shirts.

1901
02:00:31,340 --> 02:00:37,260
Uh if you run a t-shirt concern, please send us uh that we should start getting um gear.

1902
02:00:37,340 --> 02:00:37,660
Yeah.

1903
02:00:37,900 --> 02:00:38,460
Some gear?

1904
02:00:38,620 --> 02:00:39,740
Yeah, maybe.

1905
02:00:40,060 --> 02:00:44,940
At least well I mean if you want gear then uh support us because that's the only way we're

1906
02:00:44,940 --> 02:00:46,700
going to be able to pay for the gear.

1907
02:00:47,340 --> 02:00:48,380
So yeah.

1908
02:00:48,620 --> 02:00:49,660
What gear?

1909
02:00:50,250 --> 02:00:54,890
Uh I mean T shirts and fanny packs for sure, maybe a hat.

1910
02:00:55,130 --> 02:00:59,610
Um might be cool to have evolutionary psychology shoes.

1911
02:01:02,010 --> 02:01:03,530
That's not what I was expecting.

1912
02:01:03,770 --> 02:01:05,130
What kind of shoes?

1913
02:01:06,250 --> 02:01:08,650
Like shoes with like, you know, kind of like brains on them.

1914
02:01:08,810 --> 02:01:09,290
I don't know.

1915
02:01:09,530 --> 02:01:11,610
Yeah, but uh no, well, yes, that part.

1916
02:01:11,690 --> 02:01:17,610
But I mean like what um uh if they aside from the logo, like what's genre of shoes?

1917
02:01:17,930 --> 02:01:19,850
Uh just like you know, sneakers.

1918
02:01:20,100 --> 02:01:25,860
okay I was thinking okay yeah so I'm imagining like you see you got a baseball cap a fanny

1919
02:01:26,020 --> 02:01:31,940
pack t-shirt and like kind of like um like 1950s gym shoes basically

1920
02:01:32,020 --> 02:01:37,460
chock I was thinking I was thinking more like air tubi okay all right like like air jordans

1921
02:01:37,780 --> 02:01:43,380
okay yeah air air cosmedies I don't know uh it's very like uh nineties

1922
02:01:43,780 --> 02:01:49,630
um in a in a nice like kind of throwback way yeah yeah so if you want any of that cool

1923
02:01:49,630 --> 02:01:51,950
gear, you gotta you gotta pony up on Patreon.

1924
02:01:52,110 --> 02:01:52,350
Okay.

1925
02:01:52,510 --> 02:01:53,950
Because uh this stuff ain't free.

1926
02:01:54,270 --> 02:01:55,230
Is this all black?

1927
02:01:55,310 --> 02:01:57,150
I'm imagining Yeah.

1928
02:01:57,310 --> 02:01:58,590
Yeah, it's black.

1929
02:01:59,470 --> 02:02:02,910
It's very it has a very cards against humanity aesthetic, actually.

1930
02:02:02,990 --> 02:02:05,230
I wasn't it wasn't what I was going for, but yeah.

1931
02:02:05,630 --> 02:02:07,150
That's true, it does, coincidentally.

1932
02:02:07,470 --> 02:02:09,230
I mean it's the ultimate aesthetic, really.

1933
02:02:09,550 --> 02:02:14,670
Do you guys ever uh uh the joke around about changing that to like a color?

1934
02:02:15,420 --> 02:02:16,460
Or is that locked in?

1935
02:02:16,540 --> 02:02:17,180
That's part of the brain.

1936
02:02:17,500 --> 02:02:18,460
Oh, it's it's locked in.

1937
02:02:18,540 --> 02:02:18,780
Yeah.

1938
02:02:18,940 --> 02:02:23,020
I mean it's it's kind of crazy that we were able to lock in, you know, black and white

1939
02:02:23,020 --> 02:02:23,580
Helvetica.

1940
02:02:24,620 --> 02:02:30,460
Like the two the the like the two most different possible colors in the most

1941
02:02:30,700 --> 02:02:33,340
widespread possible font to like we somehow own that now.

1942
02:02:33,660 --> 02:02:34,300
That's awesome.

1943
02:02:34,380 --> 02:02:35,020
Good for you guys.

1944
02:02:35,180 --> 02:02:35,420
Yeah.

1945
02:02:35,580 --> 02:02:37,740
Hey, that's that's that's when you yeah.

1946
02:02:37,930 --> 02:02:42,330
Um anyway, on that note, yeah, please uh support the podcast and also just you know leave

1947
02:02:42,330 --> 02:02:43,290
some positive reviews.

1948
02:02:43,450 --> 02:02:48,650
I can't tell you how wonderful it is to read um the comments and um and I'm really enjoying

1949
02:02:48,650 --> 02:02:52,090
the occasional offbeat criticism too, I have to say.

1950
02:02:52,170 --> 02:02:53,850
Um keep those coming as well.

1951
02:02:54,010 --> 02:02:58,250
Yeah, you know, we we love criticism just as much as praise, as long as it's given in a

1952
02:02:58,250 --> 02:03:00,090
respectful way, honestly.

1953
02:03:00,330 --> 02:03:05,450
Yeah, and if it isn't respect, and if it isn't, it's uh it's interesting and sometimes

1954
02:03:05,450 --> 02:03:05,930
funny.

1955
02:03:06,300 --> 02:03:06,860
That's true.

1956
02:03:06,940 --> 02:03:07,180
Yeah.

1957
02:03:07,340 --> 02:03:09,100
Either way, we're gonna be happy.

1958
02:03:09,260 --> 02:03:11,180
So uh yeah, please dish it out.

1959
02:03:11,580 --> 02:03:13,100
Everybody, thanks for listening, David.

1960
02:03:13,180 --> 02:03:15,340
Uh have a good week and I'll see you next week.

1961
02:03:15,580 --> 02:03:16,700
All right, see ya.