WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.520 All right, I'm David Pinsoff. 00:00:01.680 --> 00:00:02.800 I'm David Petrozowski. 00:00:02.960 --> 00:00:08.080 This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, which is a podcast about actual evolutionary 00:00:08.080 --> 00:00:10.880 psychology by actual evolutionary psychologists. 00:00:11.760 --> 00:00:12.640 Enjoy. 00:00:26.550 --> 00:00:30.390 David, today we have uh somebody who needs no introduction, Lita Cosmodes. 00:00:30.790 --> 00:00:31.030 Yes. 00:00:31.270 --> 00:00:37.030 Lita Cosmodes uh together with John Tuby invented 00:00:37.030 --> 00:00:42.150 the field of evolutionary psychology, which is the name of this podcast, in fact, in case 00:00:42.150 --> 00:00:43.030 you you didn't know that. 00:00:44.860 --> 00:00:48.700 so it was uh a real treat to talk to Leda. 00:00:49.420 --> 00:00:52.860 Um we kind of wanted to save her for a while. 00:00:52.940 --> 00:00:54.940 I mean we we're almost a year now, I think, since we started. 00:00:55.500 --> 00:00:56.140 Almost a year, yeah. 00:00:56.220 --> 00:00:59.500 I was gonna cut the number of guests, but yeah, I think we're getting getting up on a year, 00:00:59.580 --> 00:00:59.740 yeah. 00:01:00.060 --> 00:01:05.500 Yeah, but we wanted to like get a lot of practice before we we invited Leda on to like, you 00:01:05.500 --> 00:01:08.430 know, figure out how to do this podcasting thing. 00:01:08.750 --> 00:01:09.070 That's right. 00:01:09.150 --> 00:01:13.790 We wanted to go from JV to V varsity or at least from like kindergarten to elementary 00:01:13.790 --> 00:01:14.190 school. 00:01:14.430 --> 00:01:20.430 Um although we're we're probably just not even at the we're just at the crawling to the 00:01:20.430 --> 00:01:21.950 cruising stage here. 00:01:22.350 --> 00:01:22.590 Yeah. 00:01:22.670 --> 00:01:28.420 But anyway, I mean like it was just uh a fantastic conversation, just a 00:01:28.420 --> 00:01:34.420 total delight talking to Leda and just learning like a really interesting history and 00:01:34.420 --> 00:01:40.420 sociology of science and like how this thing got off the ground and there are a lot 00:01:40.420 --> 00:01:43.540 of fun human stories that emerged. 00:01:43.700 --> 00:01:48.740 Um and uh yeah it was it was a very reflective episode about how evolutionary psychology 00:01:48.740 --> 00:01:52.730 got going, uh where it's headed, w whether there are any regrets. 00:01:52.890 --> 00:01:58.090 Uh we we we talked a bit about economics and rationality and stuff, but mainly it was just 00:01:58.090 --> 00:02:03.370 kind of um it was kind of a sweeping retrospective of of how we got here. 00:02:03.690 --> 00:02:03.930 Yeah. 00:02:04.010 --> 00:02:06.490 I it's an important part of the scientific record. 00:02:06.570 --> 00:02:10.970 And I think, you know, when you're talking about at the level of Lita or John, we're just 00:02:10.970 --> 00:02:14.410 sort of part of the messengers of getting this in the scientific record. 00:02:14.490 --> 00:02:19.210 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. 00:02:19.370 --> 00:02:24.320 But yeah, without further ado, here is sort of uh episode one of Lita on Evolutionary 00:02:24.320 --> 00:02:25.920 Psychology, the podcast. 00:02:26.320 --> 00:02:27.120 Enjoy. 00:02:30.720 --> 00:02:36.480 Lita, it is um well overdue for us to have you on um uh about 00:02:36.720 --> 00:02:39.120 uh a podcast about evolutionary psychology. 00:02:39.360 --> 00:02:45.030 Um uh I actually on purpose wanted to not have you on right away though, because I also 00:02:45.190 --> 00:02:51.190 we also wanted to have people who are sort of younger doing the work um uh in uh 00:02:51.190 --> 00:02:54.470 um in their earlier career stages on. 00:02:54.710 --> 00:03:00.310 Many of them we asked how they got into it and uh into EpSec or into evolutionary 00:03:00.390 --> 00:03:06.380 approaches to behavior, and um almost invariably somebody read a 00:03:06.380 --> 00:03:09.500 book or a paper that inspired them. 00:03:09.740 --> 00:03:15.340 Uh probably, I don't know, David, you tell me, but like I think 30 to 75 percent of those 00:03:15.340 --> 00:03:18.380 was a paper by or book by you and John. 00:03:18.780 --> 00:03:23.820 Um paper or even a conversation or a c class they sat in on a class or whatever. 00:03:24.140 --> 00:03:24.540 Exactly. 00:03:24.620 --> 00:03:24.780 Yes. 00:03:25.180 --> 00:03:30.150 Except for Ed Hagen, who apparently did not like John's class and disagreed with John while 00:03:30.150 --> 00:03:32.390 he was sitting in the class, which to me was hilarious. 00:03:32.550 --> 00:03:35.910 Like I I would have loved to talk to Ed Hagen back then. 00:03:35.990 --> 00:03:41.590 Um uh but uh but but but but this is all a lead-in to um your 00:03:41.910 --> 00:03:47.830 story about how you got into evolutionary psychology cannot be I read myself and therefore 00:03:47.910 --> 00:03:49.750 I was inspired to do it. 00:03:49.990 --> 00:03:55.780 Um so so this this begs the question of uh how does 00:03:55.780 --> 00:04:01.780 a uh a younger uh or very young Lita Cosmodes um you know uh 00:04:02.420 --> 00:04:07.460 start moving towards taking an evolutionary approach to psychology. 00:04:07.700 --> 00:04:10.420 And that's obviously a big, a big question. 00:04:10.580 --> 00:04:15.540 Um and we don't have to the whole it's not okay, then if if we 00:04:16.020 --> 00:04:21.460 please if I remember correctly, Dave, you were one of the people that you found the adapted 00:04:21.460 --> 00:04:23.460 mind in your college library. 00:04:23.780 --> 00:04:24.340 Right. 00:04:24.590 --> 00:04:28.190 Which makes the uh pain of putting it together worth it. 00:04:28.350 --> 00:04:28.670 Right. 00:04:28.990 --> 00:04:29.390 Exactly. 00:04:29.550 --> 00:04:34.830 It was it was uh human universals, and then human universals led me to the the 00:04:34.830 --> 00:04:40.750 index of human universals, and then it was to um uh a 00:04:40.750 --> 00:04:42.830 bunch of your papers and then the adapted mind. 00:04:43.070 --> 00:04:43.710 Yeah. 00:04:44.750 --> 00:04:50.140 Um uh well okay well this will sound 00:04:50.140 --> 00:04:54.220 odd, um, but um I 00:04:56.140 --> 00:05:01.900 I was uh a child during the late 60s and 00:05:02.140 --> 00:05:08.140 um everybody everything seemed everybody seemed to be angry at one another and 00:05:08.380 --> 00:05:14.350 I lived in a suburb of Washington DC and there were protests that 00:05:14.350 --> 00:05:20.270 was the daily news, which huge protest was happening and it was during 00:05:20.270 --> 00:05:26.190 the Vietnam era and um just and then there was the 00:05:26.190 --> 00:05:31.710 youth culture and the generation gap and everybody just seemed angry all the time. 00:05:32.830 --> 00:05:38.760 And I kept thinking there has to be a better way for people 00:05:38.760 --> 00:05:39.640 to live. 00:05:39.960 --> 00:05:45.960 And then I kept thinking about that through junior high and high school, especially high 00:05:45.960 --> 00:05:46.520 school. 00:05:46.920 --> 00:05:52.440 And then I and thinking about that, then I thought, yeah, but how would you know what that 00:05:52.440 --> 00:05:55.480 was unless you knew something about human nature? 00:05:56.040 --> 00:06:01.070 So I thought, okay, well then I gotta I I need to understand human nature. 00:06:01.310 --> 00:06:06.190 And um and it was sort of in a in a vague sense. 00:06:06.270 --> 00:06:11.950 I mean I I I read in in tenth and eleventh grade, uh read and then reread 00:06:12.110 --> 00:06:13.950 um uh B. 00:06:14.030 --> 00:06:14.110 F. 00:06:14.270 --> 00:06:19.790 Skinner's Walden 2, which is his you it was a very famous book that almost nobody knows 00:06:19.790 --> 00:06:20.270 anymore. 00:06:20.430 --> 00:06:26.190 Um it would it's uh it's his utopian uh novel in which a behaviorist, 00:06:26.350 --> 00:06:32.220 basically him, is uh running society and 00:06:32.220 --> 00:06:33.020 running a community. 00:06:33.260 --> 00:06:37.020 Walden is uh it's it's as a Walden Pun, but this is Walden two. 00:06:37.500 --> 00:06:43.180 Um and uh he's running it based on uh behaviorist 00:06:43.340 --> 00:06:47.740 principles and of of positive and negative reinforcement. 00:06:47.900 --> 00:06:53.340 And it was very clear that he thought that the mind was a blank 00:06:53.340 --> 00:06:59.030 slate, that everything people do is because of positive and negative reinforcement, 00:06:59.990 --> 00:07:05.750 which is sometimes called the equipotentiality assumption that any stimulus has an equal 00:07:05.750 --> 00:07:08.950 potential for reinforcing any response. 00:07:09.830 --> 00:07:12.390 And I thought that was just wrong. 00:07:13.030 --> 00:07:14.550 I thought it was really wrong. 00:07:14.710 --> 00:07:20.380 It made no sense to me because life is too various. 00:07:20.540 --> 00:07:26.380 Um, so sitting in a boring suburb of Washington, DC, you know, I thought, well, if that 00:07:26.460 --> 00:07:30.300 if what he's saying was true, you'd see people like swinging from the chandeliers. 00:07:30.540 --> 00:07:34.460 I mean, you wouldn't everybody was basically behaving the same way, you know. 00:07:34.860 --> 00:07:40.850 And I just thought you'd see a hugely more beh variation between people if everything 00:07:40.850 --> 00:07:43.330 that you did was because of a history of reinforcement. 00:07:43.490 --> 00:07:46.690 And also, like, how consistent can that history of reinforcement be? 00:07:46.770 --> 00:07:48.050 It made no sense to me. 00:07:48.210 --> 00:07:53.490 Plus, it was, you know, he was basically arguing things like, you know, that you could, 00:07:53.570 --> 00:07:58.210 through the right history of reinforcement, you could make, you know, a mother just as 00:07:58.210 --> 00:08:03.650 happy to be nursing somebody else's child as her own child, or that you could make 00:08:04.450 --> 00:08:10.020 somebody deliriously happy to walk in on their spouse having sex with somebody else um, 00:08:10.260 --> 00:08:14.820 and and just with the right history of reinforcement, they'd be thrilled by that. 00:08:15.060 --> 00:08:19.060 Um, and that just didn't seem that didn't make sense to me either. 00:08:19.460 --> 00:08:25.220 So when I um I mean, it always my dad was a psychopharmacologist, an early 00:08:25.300 --> 00:08:30.820 psychopharmacologist, and used to pound the table about the importance of interdisciplinary 00:08:30.820 --> 00:08:36.630 research, which as a child I always thought uh obviously, why why is he 00:08:37.030 --> 00:08:38.630 why why is he pounding the table? 00:08:38.790 --> 00:08:41.350 Sometimes it would be about the Freudians because they were very much against 00:08:41.350 --> 00:08:42.390 psychopharmacology. 00:08:42.470 --> 00:08:45.830 And but it was he was at NIH and he was always pounding the table. 00:08:45.990 --> 00:08:47.350 I was like, why do you have to pound the table? 00:08:47.430 --> 00:08:51.030 I don't understand this table pounding about this because this is obvious. 00:08:51.270 --> 00:08:56.390 And uh, you know, when I grew up, I realized it it was not obvious to most people. 00:08:56.870 --> 00:09:01.860 And I guess also in that environment, the idea of taking a more of a some sort of 00:09:01.860 --> 00:09:04.660 biological approach to understanding human nature made sense to me. 00:09:04.820 --> 00:09:10.580 But at the time, by the time I was a senior in college and ready to start uh 00:09:10.820 --> 00:09:16.740 college, uh the only thing like that that I knew about um was uh 00:09:17.060 --> 00:09:18.820 was psychobiology. 00:09:19.190 --> 00:09:24.790 But in my freshman year, I realized I don't like psychobio. 00:09:25.030 --> 00:09:26.790 I mean, I'm glad people do it. 00:09:27.270 --> 00:09:30.070 I'm glad people study neurons and hormones. 00:09:30.710 --> 00:09:35.670 But it wasn't telling me anything even remotely like what I wanted to know. 00:09:37.830 --> 00:09:39.510 It was not what I wanted to know. 00:09:39.750 --> 00:09:44.920 And I was by the end of my freshman year, I was having kind of a crisis because I didn't 00:09:44.920 --> 00:09:46.040 know what to major in. 00:09:46.120 --> 00:09:47.800 I I hated the process. 00:09:47.880 --> 00:09:50.920 Like I would have gone nuts doing that research. 00:09:51.080 --> 00:09:55.480 I'm glad there's people that do that research, to be clear, but it shouldn't be me. 00:09:55.640 --> 00:09:57.000 And I thought, how can I do? 00:09:57.320 --> 00:10:01.720 I still want to understand human nature, but how can I do that if I don't feel like I'm 00:10:01.720 --> 00:10:06.840 getting any answers and if the process is not something, it is something that I hate, you 00:10:06.840 --> 00:10:07.160 know. 00:10:07.480 --> 00:10:11.830 And so that summer I did a lot of things that summer. 00:10:11.990 --> 00:10:16.230 Among them, among the things that I I read, just because they were on my parents' shelf, 00:10:16.390 --> 00:10:21.670 uh, I I read Conrad Lorenz's On Aggression and Robert Ardry's territorial imperative. 00:10:21.910 --> 00:10:24.630 And this is this was basically ethology. 00:10:25.110 --> 00:10:29.670 Um and if you think about it, ethology kind of is cognitive psychology. 00:10:29.830 --> 00:10:35.660 Uh um Not with the full trappings of an 00:10:35.660 --> 00:10:39.260 information processing revolution that happened in the next few years. 00:10:39.420 --> 00:10:45.420 But it is, it is trying to understand the design of the mind of non human organisms in 00:10:45.420 --> 00:10:46.460 their natural environment. 00:10:46.620 --> 00:10:47.980 And I thought that was very interesting. 00:10:48.060 --> 00:10:53.020 I wasn't aware of the things about group selection versus not group selection and in in 00:10:53.020 --> 00:10:55.260 Conrad Lorentz's on aggression and so on. 00:10:55.340 --> 00:10:59.260 But but I thought those were interesting, but I still had no idea what what I had to 00:10:59.260 --> 00:11:00.540 declare a major. 00:11:01.650 --> 00:11:07.330 And um so when I I got back to school like a week early or something, 00:11:07.570 --> 00:11:12.930 and so I thought freshman week, they had 00:11:13.490 --> 00:11:19.410 the year before, the a year before, they had they had told us to get two these two books 00:11:19.650 --> 00:11:24.450 to read before we got there because freshman week there were going to be and it's gonna be 00:11:24.450 --> 00:11:26.290 these two different lectures for us. 00:11:26.610 --> 00:11:29.490 And uh one of them was E.O. 00:11:29.570 --> 00:11:32.540 Wilson and the book was The Ant Society. 00:11:32.780 --> 00:11:35.100 And I thought that lecture was really interesting. 00:11:35.260 --> 00:11:36.940 I thought I thought it was really interesting. 00:11:37.180 --> 00:11:42.940 So not knowing what to do, I thought, I'll talk to Professor 00:11:42.940 --> 00:11:43.740 Wilson about this. 00:11:43.900 --> 00:11:45.900 He seemed like an interesting guy. 00:11:46.140 --> 00:11:48.780 You know, I'll see see what he says about this. 00:11:49.020 --> 00:11:54.670 And so I went to um I made an appointment with him and he was 00:11:54.990 --> 00:11:57.870 important for the rest of my life, five minutes late. 00:11:58.110 --> 00:12:03.790 And um that was important because on the cork board next to his door, there was the 00:12:03.790 --> 00:12:06.590 fly leaf of his new book that had just come out. 00:12:06.750 --> 00:12:09.230 This is this is fall of 1976. 00:12:09.470 --> 00:12:13.310 Uh, his new book, Sociobiology, which I'd never heard of before. 00:12:13.470 --> 00:12:18.590 And on the fly leaf, on the back fly leaf, it said, This field is it's not about 00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:21.200 how organisms do things. 00:12:21.280 --> 00:12:22.960 It's about why they do things. 00:12:23.040 --> 00:12:25.520 You know, why do they behave this way rather than that way? 00:12:25.600 --> 00:12:26.720 Why why? 00:12:26.960 --> 00:12:29.040 And it said it applied to humans too. 00:12:29.120 --> 00:12:31.040 And I thought, why? 00:12:31.600 --> 00:12:34.320 That's what I that's what I want to know. 00:12:34.560 --> 00:12:35.120 Why? 00:12:35.440 --> 00:12:38.000 Why do we behave the way that we do? 00:12:38.320 --> 00:12:43.590 So uh with the hubris of a 19 year old, um 00:12:44.150 --> 00:12:49.990 when he he showed up, I said, okay, Professor Wilson, this sociobiology thing that you 00:12:49.990 --> 00:12:50.550 wrote about. 00:12:51.510 --> 00:12:53.190 That's what I want to major in. 00:12:53.430 --> 00:12:54.470 That's what I want to do. 00:12:54.550 --> 00:12:55.750 I want to understand human nature. 00:12:55.830 --> 00:12:57.830 I want to do it from this perspective, what should I do? 00:12:57.910 --> 00:12:59.190 What should I major in? 00:12:59.430 --> 00:13:04.310 And and he said very sensibly, he said, well you could either major in psychology or in 00:13:04.310 --> 00:13:04.950 biology. 00:13:05.200 --> 00:13:09.440 He said, if you later decide to go to graduate school in evolutionary biology, that would 00:13:09.440 --> 00:13:11.920 be hard to do if you majored in psychology as an undergraduate. 00:13:12.080 --> 00:13:17.040 On the other hand, if you've got a good foundation in evolutionary biology, then 00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:21.600 you would probably still be able to go to graduate school in psychology if you wanted. 00:13:21.840 --> 00:13:24.800 So I said, okay, I'll do that. 00:13:25.600 --> 00:13:30.400 And then he said, and then uh, well, this had good and bad consequences. 00:13:30.480 --> 00:13:35.890 But he says, and um, you should get this uh younger professor, Robert Trivers, to be your 00:13:35.890 --> 00:13:36.690 advisor. 00:13:37.010 --> 00:13:38.770 And so I said, okay. 00:13:39.570 --> 00:13:45.010 And uh so so that that's how, well, but see the thing, 00:13:45.730 --> 00:13:48.290 I still wanted to understand human nature. 00:13:48.530 --> 00:13:53.420 And that's more than the questions about ultimate causation. 00:13:53.500 --> 00:13:54.940 That's more than why. 00:13:55.180 --> 00:13:58.140 It's it's how, but it's how on a cognitive level. 00:13:58.380 --> 00:14:03.660 And and and cognitive thinking was it was on the newer side at that time. 00:14:03.900 --> 00:14:09.900 And um but um it it w it 00:14:09.900 --> 00:14:15.750 was clear that that was necessary, that that was a necessary level of explanation is 00:14:15.750 --> 00:14:20.390 uh and what what information are you processing what do you what's the design of the mind 00:14:20.470 --> 00:14:25.590 um uh and that wasn't what was happening in 00:14:27.350 --> 00:14:33.030 so there was a very there was there was Irvine Voer 00:14:33.270 --> 00:14:38.360 uh who's an anthropologist who was 00:14:39.320 --> 00:14:45.080 part of several different revolutions was at Harvard and he had um something called the 00:14:45.080 --> 00:14:46.280 Simeon Seminar. 00:14:46.520 --> 00:14:52.280 And um the Simeon Seminar met like four or five times a semester, and uh 00:14:52.520 --> 00:14:58.200 it was in Herb DeVore's living room, and some of those famous people in the 00:14:58.200 --> 00:15:03.990 field came through and talked at at that, and including um John Maynard 00:15:04.150 --> 00:15:06.790 Smith, the great evolutionary biologist. 00:15:08.070 --> 00:15:10.310 Richard Dawkins did, W. 00:15:10.470 --> 00:15:10.550 D. 00:15:10.710 --> 00:15:11.670 Hamilton. 00:15:12.470 --> 00:15:16.310 Irv had a lot of graduate students who were primatologists and doing field work in 00:15:16.310 --> 00:15:17.110 primatology. 00:15:17.190 --> 00:15:21.590 And so it was it it was it was like his lab group in a way. 00:15:22.150 --> 00:15:25.080 But with the people coming through, just astonishing. 00:15:25.240 --> 00:15:29.800 Joseph Sheffer, who did the red light of incest, who did the Kabot studies on incest, all 00:15:29.800 --> 00:15:32.440 these people were coming through living room. 00:15:32.680 --> 00:15:38.600 Um, and that was phenomenal and a and and and a really good background 00:15:38.600 --> 00:15:44.280 in evolutionary biology and some thinking and uh by people who were approaching 00:15:44.280 --> 00:15:47.400 behavior from an evolutionary point of view, but very broadly. 00:15:47.640 --> 00:15:53.310 So a lot of what they were doing was um Noting 00:15:53.310 --> 00:15:57.950 correspondences that were kind of loose between selection pressures and social 00:15:58.270 --> 00:15:58.910 organization. 00:15:59.470 --> 00:16:05.230 So, yes, kin selection implies that kinship will be a very 00:16:05.230 --> 00:16:11.230 important part of uh of of human life and who we help 00:16:11.390 --> 00:16:12.350 and so on. 00:16:12.750 --> 00:16:18.560 Um And yes, anthropologically, you see that many societies 00:16:19.680 --> 00:16:24.000 are organized along kin lines, although in complicated ways. 00:16:24.160 --> 00:16:27.360 But it was too it was too loose of a correspondence. 00:16:27.520 --> 00:16:29.920 It was it was really it was there was a missing level. 00:16:30.000 --> 00:16:34.800 There was selection pressures, and then there was manifest social organization. 00:16:35.230 --> 00:16:39.710 but the thing that's connecting them is missing because there has to be a mind that of 00:16:39.870 --> 00:16:43.870 people have to have minds that are making decisions and wanting to do some things and not 00:16:43.870 --> 00:16:44.270 other things. 00:16:44.350 --> 00:16:45.950 I mean that's the human nature part. 00:16:46.350 --> 00:16:51.070 And so in those in the Simeon seminars that that was largely missing. 00:16:51.710 --> 00:16:56.750 And um and and people would also engage in fitness 00:16:56.750 --> 00:17:00.000 teleology, um, including by the way, Trivers. 00:17:00.400 --> 00:17:03.040 Um what is yeah, go ahead. 00:17:03.200 --> 00:17:03.600 Yeah, sorry. 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 00:17:09.760 --> 00:17:15.280 doing things to spread their genes, as if they have a motive to spread their genes, as if 00:17:15.280 --> 00:17:19.920 it's as if it's a depth psychology, and that whatever you may be thinking on the surface, 00:17:20.080 --> 00:17:23.920 deep down you have you want to spread your genes. 00:17:24.320 --> 00:17:30.230 And and uh without people really exactly 00:17:30.230 --> 00:17:33.430 understanding that there were psychological implications to what they were saying. 00:17:33.590 --> 00:17:39.510 And so they'd say, so they'd say things like, well, these monks, medieval monks 00:17:39.590 --> 00:17:44.550 who are are being celibate, how are they, they must be doing that to increase their 00:17:44.550 --> 00:17:45.430 inclusive fitness. 00:17:45.510 --> 00:17:48.710 How is that how is that increasing their inclusive fitness? 00:17:48.790 --> 00:17:54.720 Oh well maybe they're helping their their siblings, you know, maybe it's a helpers at 00:17:54.720 --> 00:17:56.320 the nest kind of phenomenon. 00:17:56.880 --> 00:18:01.920 No, you have a psychology, it's leading you in different environments to do certain things. 00:18:02.080 --> 00:18:05.040 And it's not because deep down you're trying to spread your genes. 00:18:05.120 --> 00:18:09.760 I don't think it makes any sense to say that a celibate monk is choosing to be a celibate 00:18:09.760 --> 00:18:13.120 monk instead of having a family to spread his genes. 00:18:13.280 --> 00:18:18.560 It just that that's that that's not what natural selection is about. 00:18:18.960 --> 00:18:24.830 Natural selection is a it's it's an account, it's a 00:18:24.830 --> 00:18:28.030 causal account of how you come to have the phenotype that you have. 00:18:28.190 --> 00:18:30.270 And in this case, it's a cognitive phenotype. 00:18:30.430 --> 00:18:34.990 In this case, it's how do you come to have the psychological mechanisms that you have. 00:18:35.230 --> 00:18:35.550 Okay. 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 00:18:42.110 --> 00:18:44.430 down she wants to spread her genes. 00:18:44.670 --> 00:18:46.350 That has nothing to do with it. 00:18:46.510 --> 00:18:52.340 It's that ma mammal mothers who had psychological 00:18:52.340 --> 00:18:56.580 mechanisms that caused them to care for their children, to provision their children, to 00:18:56.580 --> 00:18:58.900 make sure they're safe, had more children. 00:18:59.140 --> 00:19:02.580 They had more offspring than those that neglected their offspring. 00:19:02.740 --> 00:19:08.580 And that's why selection favored maternal psychologies that cause you to 00:19:08.580 --> 00:19:10.420 big take care of your children. 00:19:10.660 --> 00:19:13.460 Um it's not adept psychology. 00:19:13.670 --> 00:19:17.830 And um, so a lot of that's what I mean by fitness teleology. 00:19:17.910 --> 00:19:23.030 People are acting as if you have a deep down motive to spread your genes. 00:19:23.270 --> 00:19:25.510 And and that's a forward-looking thing. 00:19:25.670 --> 00:19:27.590 That's that's it's perspective. 00:19:27.750 --> 00:19:33.750 It's it's it's assuming that here I am, there are various things I could do right now, 00:19:33.990 --> 00:19:38.800 and I will choose them based on which one is going to my genes the most. 00:19:39.040 --> 00:19:42.000 And also, natural selection is not about spreading your genes in general. 00:19:42.160 --> 00:19:47.760 It's about why one genes underlying one design feature outcompete those 00:19:47.760 --> 00:19:49.360 underlying another design feature. 00:19:49.520 --> 00:19:53.520 So this whole level of design was missing in how people were talking about it. 00:19:53.680 --> 00:19:58.560 Except, of course, from George Williams and adaptation to natural selection, which many of 00:19:58.560 --> 00:19:59.840 us uh had read. 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:02.320 But when people read, it's like a Rorschach test. 00:20:02.400 --> 00:20:07.650 When people read, anybody watching this, if you haven't read George Williams' 1966 00:20:07.650 --> 00:20:10.690 adaptation, natural selection, do it now. 00:20:11.090 --> 00:20:14.130 It's still it's it's still a it's still a classic. 00:20:14.290 --> 00:20:14.770 Yes. 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 00:20:20.370 --> 00:20:20.690 test. 00:20:20.930 --> 00:20:23.090 Um, because it's two components of it. 00:20:23.170 --> 00:20:25.410 One is the gene is a unit of selection. 00:20:25.570 --> 00:20:29.810 And he's very clear, and he talks about the 00:20:31.100 --> 00:20:34.700 subtitle is a critique of some current evolutionary thought. 00:20:34.940 --> 00:20:40.780 And so he brings up a Scottish biologist named Wynne Edwards, who 00:20:40.780 --> 00:20:46.620 proposed that the reason why in populations of deer there'll be like 00:20:47.340 --> 00:20:52.940 the weaker, the 90-pound weaklings will well, and hard winters will not try to 00:20:52.940 --> 00:20:53.580 reproduce. 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 00:20:58.700 --> 00:20:59.420 the group. 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 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 00:21:09.970 --> 00:21:13.730 to have have sex if it's safe to do so. 00:21:13.970 --> 00:21:18.290 Um that that's going to be favored over this restraint and so on. 00:21:18.450 --> 00:21:22.050 So one part of George Williams is the gene as a unit of selection. 00:21:23.250 --> 00:21:26.930 And this is actually the first book of evolutionary biology I read, which is because 00:21:27.090 --> 00:21:28.850 Selfish Gene wasn't out yet. 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 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:39.640 hard going for that to be your first reality. 00:21:39.800 --> 00:21:43.640 Um but the second half of George Williams was about adaptationism. 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 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 00:21:53.960 --> 00:21:59.490 talking about is not more uh parsimoniously explained as a byproduct of another 00:21:59.490 --> 00:22:03.570 adaptation or as a byproduct of just physical law. 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 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, 00:22:13.570 --> 00:22:15.170 that's gravity, right? 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. 00:22:21.420 --> 00:22:24.620 Um, although I suppose there could be different ways you could land back in. 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 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 00:22:33.820 --> 00:22:38.780 selection out of it, and it's as if they're having seen the adaptation part. 00:22:39.020 --> 00:22:44.060 So George Williams had both, and his emphasis was on design. 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 00:22:48.670 --> 00:22:52.910 saying he says the question is not reproduction per se, the question is designed for 00:22:52.910 --> 00:22:53.710 reproduction. 00:22:54.750 --> 00:23:00.270 And so I I only took two 00:23:00.270 --> 00:23:03.150 psychology courses as a biology major. 00:23:03.310 --> 00:23:08.750 I took um I took my first freshman year a social psychology course. 00:23:08.910 --> 00:23:10.030 It was it was okay. 00:23:10.190 --> 00:23:15.940 Um it was um uh but then um I took a 00:23:16.100 --> 00:23:22.020 behaviorist course uh called Motivation in Action that was taught by Richard Hernstein, who 00:23:22.020 --> 00:23:28.020 was um, you know, uh a complicated person, but a very brilliant but 00:23:28.020 --> 00:23:28.820 complicated person. 00:23:28.980 --> 00:23:32.500 And it's from him that I actually learned about the equitentiality assumption. 00:23:32.660 --> 00:23:33.860 I learned that there was a name. 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. 00:23:38.100 --> 00:23:43.870 The thing to realize is that Hernstein was Skinner's star pupil and 00:23:43.870 --> 00:23:47.550 basically took over the Skinner labs at Harvard. 00:23:47.790 --> 00:23:53.310 And um they only had two major disputes in their 00:23:53.310 --> 00:23:53.950 life. 00:23:54.270 --> 00:23:59.790 Um one was that Skinner wanted to believe, because he he was very utopian in his 00:23:59.790 --> 00:24:04.830 thinking, and he wanted to believe that punishment doesn't work, that 00:24:05.150 --> 00:24:10.380 causing pain uh does not work in terms of operate conditioning, but it c 00:24:10.540 --> 00:24:11.580 clearly does. 00:24:11.820 --> 00:24:17.180 And um, I mean, Skinner thought of Mao's China as sort of a 00:24:17.180 --> 00:24:19.740 large-scale experiment in Weldon II. 00:24:19.820 --> 00:24:23.340 Um, and at the time that it was a very closed society. 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 00:24:30.060 --> 00:24:33.180 if you wanted to not know, you could not know. 00:24:33.500 --> 00:24:39.050 And so one of their big arguments was about that, because Skinner didn't want to 00:24:39.050 --> 00:24:40.730 acknowledge that that was a thing. 00:24:40.970 --> 00:24:46.250 But the other one was about the equipotentiality assumption, because Hernstein knew that 00:24:46.250 --> 00:24:47.370 that was false. 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. 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 00:24:59.080 --> 00:25:03.000 sometimes people will say, Well, what is the most important experiment of the 20th century 00:25:03.000 --> 00:25:04.040 in psychology? 00:25:04.200 --> 00:25:06.840 Um, I would say the Garcia's experiments. 00:25:07.080 --> 00:25:12.600 This is where about learned taste aversions, and he's um showing that he had 00:25:12.600 --> 00:25:18.120 rats that are simultaneously, they they they taste an unusual 00:25:18.120 --> 00:25:18.920 flavor. 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 00:25:24.360 --> 00:25:24.680 on. 00:25:25.170 --> 00:25:30.690 Then what happens is one set of the rats, their feet are shocked two seconds later. 00:25:30.850 --> 00:25:36.530 The other set of rats, they're dosed with um X-rays, or 00:25:36.530 --> 00:25:40.530 sometimes it was a chemical, that makes them nauseated, that nauseates them. 00:25:40.690 --> 00:25:44.290 Rats don't actually vomit uh, but they become nauseated. 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 00:25:49.970 --> 00:25:55.720 presented with the option to drink to go to unflavored water with the 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 00:26:01.320 --> 00:26:02.520 go to either one? 00:26:02.680 --> 00:26:05.160 And the answer is not at all. 00:26:05.560 --> 00:26:11.480 The ones who were nauseated avoided the flavored water, the 00:26:11.480 --> 00:26:12.840 unusually flavored water. 00:26:13.000 --> 00:26:15.320 And they were fine going to where the light and sound was. 00:26:15.400 --> 00:26:17.240 They were lapping up the water. 00:26:17.720 --> 00:26:20.200 His graph is actually laps per minute. 00:26:21.010 --> 00:26:24.530 They were happy to drink the unflavored water with the light and sound. 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 00:26:29.970 --> 00:26:30.210 water. 00:26:30.290 --> 00:26:32.210 They did not avoid the flavored water. 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 00:26:39.170 --> 00:26:41.010 any stimulus with any response. 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 00:26:47.140 --> 00:26:48.980 with the electric shock to the feet. 00:26:49.060 --> 00:26:50.580 They just don't buy it. 00:26:50.900 --> 00:26:56.740 And you can very easily pair the electric shock to the feet with the light and 00:26:56.740 --> 00:27:02.260 sound, but they they don't they they don't avoid at all the the 00:27:02.660 --> 00:27:03.620 flavored water. 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 00:27:08.580 --> 00:27:11.030 this negative, this negative outcome. 00:27:11.270 --> 00:27:16.710 There couldn't be a more clear refutation of the 00:27:16.710 --> 00:27:22.710 equipentiality assumption, and using the same methods that 00:27:22.710 --> 00:27:25.270 behaviors typically use. 00:27:25.590 --> 00:27:31.590 And it was so disturbing to the behaviors community that he couldn't get it 00:27:31.590 --> 00:27:33.190 published for a really long time. 00:27:34.020 --> 00:27:39.220 Journalists say, well, he must have done something wrong because this violates the other 00:27:39.220 --> 00:27:39.220 thing. 00:27:39.380 --> 00:27:41.220 Well, at least they were following their logic, right? 00:27:41.380 --> 00:27:42.980 If they understood, understood the inhalements. 00:27:43.220 --> 00:27:46.420 So Hernstein was what there was was a disagreement with Skinner. 00:27:46.580 --> 00:27:49.860 Did Skinner or did Hernstein communicate what Skinner thought about this? 00:27:50.260 --> 00:27:51.300 Oh yeah. 00:27:51.380 --> 00:27:52.660 So oh yeah. 00:27:53.060 --> 00:27:55.940 So Hernstein wrote this great paper. 00:27:56.020 --> 00:28:00.340 It's still a great paper, and it's an American psychologist in 1978. 00:28:00.910 --> 00:28:04.670 And the title it ended up with is The Evolution of Behaviorism. 00:28:04.830 --> 00:28:05.150 Okay. 00:28:05.390 --> 00:28:07.470 But that was not its initial title. 00:28:08.270 --> 00:28:12.110 It's a paper that's saying why the equal potentiality assumption is false. 00:28:12.270 --> 00:28:12.590 Okay. 00:28:13.150 --> 00:28:18.030 And it goes through Garcia and it goes through the Breland and Breland expense, their 00:28:18.190 --> 00:28:23.840 animal trainers that were trying to they just couldn't get the raccoons in their commercial 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 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 00:28:32.400 --> 00:28:36.720 was eliciting a species typical behavior where raccoons rub something and dip it and 00:28:36.720 --> 00:28:39.840 anyway, something they were not being reforced reinforced to do. 00:28:39.920 --> 00:28:43.510 Um and um I can't remember which other things were in it. 00:28:43.750 --> 00:28:47.910 It also had the observation that when it comes to similarity, psychological similarity, 00:28:48.070 --> 00:28:52.790 it's not, we don't construe similarity along simple physical dimensions like skinner or 00:28:52.790 --> 00:28:53.350 thought. 00:28:53.830 --> 00:28:59.510 If you think about similarity of colors in terms of wavelength, red is the longest 00:28:59.510 --> 00:29:02.470 wavelength and blue is the shortest wavelength. 00:29:02.800 --> 00:29:04.160 green is intermediate. 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 00:29:09.280 --> 00:29:09.600 is. 00:29:09.840 --> 00:29:11.520 But that's not at all true. 00:29:11.760 --> 00:29:15.520 Through purple, it's like the color circle, it's better, the color spectrum is 00:29:15.920 --> 00:29:18.160 electromagnetic spectrum bent like this. 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 00:29:24.400 --> 00:29:25.200 the color circle. 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 00:29:29.930 --> 00:29:33.370 of view, the similarity space that we have, it's not simple physical dimensions. 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 00:29:39.210 --> 00:29:41.530 comes an octave above than it does to D. 00:29:41.930 --> 00:29:47.050 Anyway, the the thing was the initial title of the paper was 00:29:47.530 --> 00:29:49.770 post-scanarian behaviorism. 00:29:50.980 --> 00:29:56.740 And he said Skinner found it on his desk, saw that on his desk 00:29:56.900 --> 00:29:58.260 and hit the roof. 00:29:58.500 --> 00:30:02.500 Um, and uh I was very, very upset. 00:30:02.900 --> 00:30:07.700 And uh, which is why he changed it to you know, the evolution of behaviorism. 00:30:07.780 --> 00:30:09.380 Um that a draft? 00:30:09.540 --> 00:30:10.900 I mean it was a draft. 00:30:11.300 --> 00:30:13.380 Okay, because I mean it was Skinner, so who knows? 00:30:13.460 --> 00:30:17.460 Maybe it could have gotten published and re re uh redacted to the different title. 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 00:30:23.270 --> 00:30:26.790 he right but it's a bet evolution behavior is a better title anyway. 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 00:30:33.110 --> 00:30:34.470 postgenarian behaviorism. 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 00:30:40.470 --> 00:30:40.870 is wrong. 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 00:30:45.440 --> 00:30:46.560 domain-specific mechanism. 00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:48.240 He called that botanizing drives. 00:30:48.320 --> 00:30:49.360 He really didn't like that. 00:30:49.680 --> 00:30:51.920 Um, he continued to not like that. 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 00:30:57.760 --> 00:31:01.760 years earlier that he had with me about this kind of thing. 00:31:02.000 --> 00:31:04.160 Um, but anyway, uh 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 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 00:31:19.730 --> 00:31:20.290 idiot. 00:31:20.530 --> 00:31:26.450 Um I was doing my research like uh uh what like 00:31:26.610 --> 00:31:32.420 um uh senior thesis research, but I I started it earlier um on 00:31:32.500 --> 00:31:38.340 um with pigeons on mental rotation in pigeons and and the reason that I 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 00:31:42.340 --> 00:31:42.820 office hours. 00:31:42.900 --> 00:31:47.540 There were certain professors that I uh were very interesting to go to office hours and 00:31:47.540 --> 00:31:47.940 talk to. 00:31:48.020 --> 00:31:50.660 And so I would I was a big office hour grower. 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 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 00:32:01.010 --> 00:32:03.570 office hours every week and nobody ever comes. 00:32:03.810 --> 00:32:05.250 And I'm just sitting there bored. 00:32:05.410 --> 00:32:07.490 And so I thought, I'll come. 00:32:07.970 --> 00:32:11.330 So I sort of I st that's how I became an office hour goer. 00:32:11.570 --> 00:32:15.010 But um uh he um 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 00:32:23.660 --> 00:32:28.380 Shepard had done the mental rotation studies that came out, the Shepherd and Metzler 00:32:28.540 --> 00:32:30.620 studies in 1971. 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 00:32:35.420 --> 00:32:41.180 put himself, they had there were research and training groups in the psychology department, 00:32:41.340 --> 00:32:47.110 um, and uh Rather than areas, so that a person could be on 00:32:47.110 --> 00:32:48.790 several research and training groups. 00:32:48.950 --> 00:32:53.430 And, you know, Kernstein had always been on the behaviorist one, but it was the Roger 00:32:53.430 --> 00:32:58.150 Shepherd's mental rotation experiments that caused him to put himself on the cognitive one 00:32:58.150 --> 00:32:58.710 as well. 00:32:59.270 --> 00:33:04.630 Because it was very clear that the most parsimonious explanation for those results was that 00:33:04.630 --> 00:33:10.240 there's that there's mental representations and that that people are 00:33:10.240 --> 00:33:13.920 imagining with these blocks that you can't tell by their features. 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 00:33:20.080 --> 00:33:22.160 left handed, one's right handed, and so on. 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 00:33:27.040 --> 00:33:29.040 up doing a postdoc with Roger Shepherd later. 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 00:33:33.690 --> 00:33:36.250 hole at some point uh was passing by. 00:33:36.330 --> 00:33:41.530 He he's very mysteriously said that this would be an interesting topic, mental rotations in 00:33:41.530 --> 00:33:46.250 pigeons, because he's he said very mysteriously, because it would show whether pigeons have 00:33:46.490 --> 00:33:47.130 a mind. 00:33:47.930 --> 00:33:53.200 And I thought, oh it doesn't in any way. 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 00:33:59.440 --> 00:34:01.120 research on mental imagery. 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 00:34:07.280 --> 00:34:12.960 thing on mental rotation because in does it if does the how if they if they 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? 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. 00:34:23.030 --> 00:34:23.350 Nothing. 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 00:34:28.790 --> 00:34:29.990 said, read this. 00:34:30.470 --> 00:34:34.950 And it's like a it sounds like a cartoon, but it's real, right? 00:34:35.110 --> 00:34:36.870 Like it's the parody of academia, right? 00:34:37.350 --> 00:34:38.390 I read it and he was right. 00:34:38.470 --> 00:34:39.510 It had nothing to do with it. 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 00:34:45.350 --> 00:34:45.830 talking to. 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. 00:34:50.880 --> 00:34:52.560 Um that's just how they are. 00:34:52.880 --> 00:34:58.880 Some professors are grumpy because they figure you're only gonna come back and talk to 00:34:58.880 --> 00:35:01.600 them if you really, really want to know stuff. 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. 00:35:05.760 --> 00:35:07.920 And so I get it. 00:35:08.160 --> 00:35:11.600 So the heuristic is the grumpier the person, the more likely they are to be right. 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 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 00:35:23.270 --> 00:35:24.470 was kind of a strategy of his. 00:35:24.790 --> 00:35:29.750 People really wanted to know something and were really interested, they he'd weed out the 00:35:29.750 --> 00:35:32.550 ones that didn't care by being grumpy at first. 00:35:32.950 --> 00:35:33.430 Yes. 00:35:33.750 --> 00:35:39.600 Anyway, anyway and and and and so anyway, at the Simeon seminar, people 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 00:35:43.600 --> 00:35:45.280 psychological level of explanation. 00:35:45.440 --> 00:35:48.640 I'm saying all this much more clearly than I would have at the time. 00:35:48.880 --> 00:35:49.360 Sure. 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, 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 00:36:03.870 --> 00:36:09.630 time when the um Who Said What paradigm, uh, when the uh 00:36:09.790 --> 00:36:15.710 the that great paper that Shelly Taylor, Susan Fisk, I thought Van Rutterman paper came 00:36:15.710 --> 00:36:17.310 out, that came out in 1978. 00:36:17.630 --> 00:36:22.110 And it had this really cool method where you could see how people were categorizing things, 00:36:22.270 --> 00:36:26.990 which you know, and somehow I heard about that and I thought that's really neat. 00:36:27.220 --> 00:36:31.060 You get you can do experiments that are gonna reveal something about 00:36:33.380 --> 00:36:34.580 how the mind works. 00:36:34.820 --> 00:36:38.820 And I thought, okay, these cognitive psychologists, um, because they were doing they were 00:36:38.820 --> 00:36:44.020 early social cognition people, these cognitive psychologists, they've got methods, no, they 00:36:44.020 --> 00:36:46.020 know how to ask questions about how the mind works. 00:36:46.100 --> 00:36:49.300 So I should go to graduate school and cognitive psychology. 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 00:36:56.130 --> 00:37:00.690 these discussions and they were sort of off from the point of view, they're really 00:37:00.690 --> 00:37:02.770 interesting, but off from this point of view. 00:37:02.930 --> 00:37:08.930 And then there was this uh undergraduates never uh are shy 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 00:37:14.530 --> 00:37:17.330 be this polite undergraduate raising my hand. 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 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 00:37:24.440 --> 00:37:30.280 worst graduate students yeah yeah no it's like but 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 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 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 00:37:46.680 --> 00:37:50.070 point Sometimes it was about the philosophy of science, lots of different things. 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 00:37:54.950 --> 00:37:56.470 exactly what I was thinking. 00:37:56.710 --> 00:37:57.670 Exactly. 00:37:57.910 --> 00:38:00.550 And I was like, who is this person? 00:38:00.790 --> 00:38:02.230 Like this is really weird. 00:38:02.390 --> 00:38:05.430 Why is this one person saying exact I was a little bit hurt? 00:38:05.750 --> 00:38:08.470 Like, because this is a pattern that kept happening. 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. 00:38:13.900 --> 00:38:15.820 That's how I became aware of John's existence. 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 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 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 00:38:33.100 --> 00:38:37.570 say, and that were not even close to what other people were saying. 00:38:37.890 --> 00:38:41.090 Um and that's how I ended up talking to John about things. 00:38:41.250 --> 00:38:45.010 John all he came to this in a from a different path. 00:38:45.170 --> 00:38:48.210 He was actually originally planning to be a physics, a physicist. 00:38:48.450 --> 00:38:53.970 And um he his he had as as a as a 00:38:53.970 --> 00:38:59.090 teenager read a lot of Poole Anderson books, a science fiction writer who often imagined 00:38:59.090 --> 00:39:03.490 other worlds, other planets, and where evolution had gone differently and the the the 00:39:04.940 --> 00:39:10.620 intelligent beings from these other planets thought and felt very differently than humans. 00:39:11.820 --> 00:39:13.820 But he was going to be a physicist. 00:39:14.060 --> 00:39:20.060 And then his freshman year, he took a class by Eric Warner, who 00:39:20.060 --> 00:39:21.580 was a psycholinguist. 00:39:21.900 --> 00:39:26.620 And Eric Warner was showing how these experiments and they can use reaction time and you 00:39:26.620 --> 00:39:30.460 can find out where phrase boundaries are in a person's head. 00:39:30.700 --> 00:39:35.490 And John was like, oh my God, you could actually have a science of the mind. 00:39:35.730 --> 00:39:41.570 And so he thought, this is thing go, that that that they're okay without me. 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 00:39:47.730 --> 00:39:52.290 really this is really important and interesting. 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, 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 00:40:01.680 --> 00:40:07.600 because of the Schrdinger, what is life and about life being the only anti-antropic, you 00:40:07.600 --> 00:40:08.560 know, process. 00:40:09.920 --> 00:40:14.080 And so John signed up to be a psychology major. 00:40:14.640 --> 00:40:19.520 But then all the cognitive psychologists in the Harvard Department of Psychology and Social 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 00:40:24.450 --> 00:40:26.610 the behaviorists and psychophysicists. 00:40:26.690 --> 00:40:32.450 So John was left in the midst of um behaviorism and 00:40:32.530 --> 00:40:38.050 uh and uh he he john's five years older than me so this was 00:40:38.050 --> 00:40:41.010 happening before uh before I was there. 00:40:41.250 --> 00:40:47.060 Um so he he wrote he was writing a senior thesis um but 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 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 00:40:58.820 --> 00:41:04.660 behaviorism was just wrong and why you had to take an evolutionary approach to psychology 00:41:05.140 --> 00:41:10.980 um and skinner had a famous book called the behavior of the the behavior 00:41:10.980 --> 00:41:15.290 of organisms And uh 00:41:16.730 --> 00:41:22.490 and John's thesis, I don't remember what he told me that he called it, 00:41:22.570 --> 00:41:26.730 but it started out saying because most of the behaviors work was with rats and pigeons, 00:41:26.970 --> 00:41:27.290 right? 00:41:27.610 --> 00:41:32.730 And it started out saying organisms applies to more than rats and pigeons. 00:41:32.810 --> 00:41:38.650 It includes orchids and you know and a list of other kinds 00:41:38.650 --> 00:41:41.210 of of uh animals etc. 00:41:41.680 --> 00:41:44.480 Um, and he wrote 300 pages apparently. 00:41:44.960 --> 00:41:50.160 Um and whoever was giving it a look before uh he turned it in. 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 00:41:55.360 --> 00:41:58.000 um it it just wouldn't fly. 00:41:58.240 --> 00:42:04.080 Uh this this is why it at at Harvard you have to turn in 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 00:42:09.870 --> 00:42:12.670 degree is in, you know, in this case in psychology. 00:42:12.910 --> 00:42:16.430 And otherwise your your bachelor's degree is in general studies. 00:42:16.590 --> 00:42:21.150 So John's technically in general studies because after writing 300 pages of this 00:42:21.150 --> 00:42:24.510 dissertation, he took the guy's advice and didn't turn it in. 00:42:24.590 --> 00:42:26.670 So it's not technically in psychology. 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 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 00:42:40.140 --> 00:42:46.060 uh so um it's not some antique 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 00:42:52.220 --> 00:42:56.690 that was dominating yeah Almost all the thinking at the time. 00:42:56.930 --> 00:43:00.530 Enough so that, you know, they made Jerome Bruner left. 00:43:00.610 --> 00:43:02.210 He had been doing cognitive development. 00:43:02.290 --> 00:43:08.130 And just they they they just made it uncomfortable for uh anybody who was doing 00:43:08.130 --> 00:43:09.250 cognitive stuff. 00:43:09.490 --> 00:43:14.770 Um so so anyway, that's that's and then I I started talking to John 00:43:15.010 --> 00:43:17.890 sometime in the middle of my senior year. 00:43:18.050 --> 00:43:21.410 We started talking and discovered that we were thinking about things in the same way. 00:43:21.720 --> 00:43:26.840 in many domains of life, but including about psychology. 00:43:27.320 --> 00:43:27.640 Yeah. 00:43:27.880 --> 00:43:33.080 Where do the thinking does thinking at that sort of computational middle level, is that 00:43:33.080 --> 00:43:36.120 something you just felt like was the way you always thought? 00:43:36.280 --> 00:43:37.240 Or was that? 00:43:45.090 --> 00:43:49.730 I I I don't know how to answer the question. 00:43:49.970 --> 00:43:50.690 Yeah, it's fair. 00:43:50.770 --> 00:43:51.010 Yeah, yeah. 00:43:51.250 --> 00:43:54.770 If you know that the equipotentiality assumption is wrong, then you know that there's such 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 00:43:58.690 --> 00:44:04.290 something there's some cognitive mechanism that is making it the 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 00:44:10.050 --> 00:44:11.410 ate than something else. 00:44:12.100 --> 00:44:14.340 And I I do believe I I thought about it. 00:44:14.500 --> 00:44:16.580 Yeah, no, I I did think about it. 00:44:17.060 --> 00:44:20.900 I did think about it as a cognitive level of of explanation. 00:44:21.140 --> 00:44:25.380 Um because I was kind of obsessed with certain topics. 00:44:25.540 --> 00:44:27.300 I was a bit obsessed with Quine. 00:44:28.020 --> 00:44:33.060 And uh uh Kline had arguments that 00:44:33.710 --> 00:44:39.310 that I took to be why um equipotentiality is wrong. 00:44:39.470 --> 00:44:41.310 Although I don't think that Klein meant them that way. 00:44:41.470 --> 00:44:44.750 No, he was because he was like a pretty rabid behaviorist. 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 00:44:49.550 --> 00:44:52.350 also per your recommendations I've looked at that. 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, 00:44:56.750 --> 00:44:59.310 being a great Gabagai problem is really, really important. 00:44:59.390 --> 00:45:01.790 And I teach that to all of my students always. 00:45:01.920 --> 00:45:02.160 Yeah. 00:45:02.320 --> 00:45:08.320 Um the the the indet indeterminacy problem that that that without some structure to 00:45:08.320 --> 00:45:09.600 the mind you're never going to learn anything. 00:45:09.920 --> 00:45:10.080 Yeah. 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 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 00:45:20.160 --> 00:45:24.480 where you cannot assume that they have the same cognition as you do. 00:45:24.720 --> 00:45:25.200 Yeah. 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 00:45:31.170 --> 00:45:32.850 that Gabagae could refer to. 00:45:33.010 --> 00:45:33.330 Right. 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 00:45:39.490 --> 00:45:45.490 no in the alien language, um and you point it he points this as 00:45:45.650 --> 00:45:51.570 Gabagai, then you can you have to ask, Well, is this Gabagai pointing to 00:45:51.570 --> 00:45:52.050 fur? 00:45:52.320 --> 00:45:52.640 No. 00:45:52.800 --> 00:45:53.920 Is this God guy? 00:45:54.000 --> 00:45:55.360 But then there's an infinite number of these things. 00:45:55.440 --> 00:45:57.040 It could be rabbit or light bulb. 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 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 00:46:06.320 --> 00:46:08.800 problem because it's a combinatorial explosion problem. 00:46:09.040 --> 00:46:09.120 Yeah. 00:46:09.200 --> 00:46:12.000 And I think Hume actually did uh land there. 00:46:12.080 --> 00:46:14.720 Like as much as he was an empiricist he did he? 00:46:14.960 --> 00:46:15.120 Yeah. 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 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 00:46:24.690 --> 00:46:26.290 think he was a fellow traveler. 00:46:26.370 --> 00:46:29.090 Like he definitely has there's human nature in there. 00:46:29.170 --> 00:46:29.890 So yeah. 00:46:30.290 --> 00:46:32.770 There it's it's really funny. 00:46:33.970 --> 00:46:38.530 John thinks that I have a very peculiar sense of humor because uh uh 00:46:40.180 --> 00:46:45.940 As a joke in my, I think it was my dissertation, I have a little 00:46:45.940 --> 00:46:48.580 quote from Hume at the beginning of one of the chapters. 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 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 00:47:00.180 --> 00:47:05.630 quality of bread that you know that it's it it can nurture your body. 00:47:06.910 --> 00:47:08.270 It's not detectable. 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 00:47:17.230 --> 00:47:20.270 assume that that you can live by eating bread. 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 00:47:26.380 --> 00:47:26.940 empiricist. 00:47:27.020 --> 00:47:27.100 Yeah. 00:47:27.260 --> 00:47:32.540 Yet here he was saying that there's something the mind is predisposed to to know. 00:47:32.940 --> 00:47:35.980 I mean I I understand it's a joke to me. 00:47:36.140 --> 00:47:36.380 Yeah. 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 00:47:40.220 --> 00:47:43.900 my dissertation on why there have to be domain-specific mechanisms. 00:47:43.980 --> 00:47:44.220 Yeah. 00:47:44.460 --> 00:47:49.810 Um uh yeah, I think Hume got uh re-revised uh by the 00:47:49.810 --> 00:47:50.530 behaviorists. 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 00:47:55.970 --> 00:47:56.610 I would argue. 00:47:56.690 --> 00:47:57.330 Yeah. 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 00:48:03.810 --> 00:48:08.210 people that he was arguing with where the the argument had to do with 00:48:09.720 --> 00:48:12.040 the church and the Yeah. 00:48:12.360 --> 00:48:13.080 It's the Don Sim. 00:48:13.480 --> 00:48:14.920 You have to know who somebody's arguing with, right? 00:48:15.000 --> 00:48:15.240 Exactly. 00:48:15.320 --> 00:48:15.480 Yes. 00:48:15.800 --> 00:48:16.360 Even Descartes. 00:48:16.520 --> 00:48:16.840 Yeah, yeah. 00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:17.240 Same thing. 00:48:17.320 --> 00:48:17.640 Yeah, yeah. 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. 00:48:21.480 --> 00:48:22.200 I apologize. 00:48:22.360 --> 00:48:25.720 Um so yeah, I think I was unfair to Hume. 00:48:26.360 --> 00:48:26.760 It's okay. 00:48:29.560 --> 00:48:30.040 He's dead. 00:48:30.120 --> 00:48:30.760 He'll for he'll forget. 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 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 00:48:42.670 --> 00:48:48.350 even capable of perceiving had to be something that was part of human nature and so 00:48:48.590 --> 00:48:52.270 yeah I actually was guided to Quine by Hernstein. 00:48:52.430 --> 00:48:57.200 Um yeah so I got to meet Quine before I left graduate school. 00:48:57.440 --> 00:48:57.840 That's cool. 00:48:58.560 --> 00:48:59.760 It was it was very cool. 00:48:59.920 --> 00:49:03.920 I was telling him about uh he used to teach the logic course. 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 00:49:07.840 --> 00:49:08.640 unfortunately. 00:49:09.120 --> 00:49:12.000 Because I would have I really wanted to take it something from him. 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 00:49:18.670 --> 00:49:23.710 social change and cheetah detection and how people weren't using logical reasoning to do 00:49:23.710 --> 00:49:23.790 it. 00:49:24.030 --> 00:49:25.150 He thought that was very cool. 00:49:25.790 --> 00:49:28.510 I thought it was very cool that Klein thought it was cool. 00:49:28.670 --> 00:49:28.990 Yeah. 00:49:29.150 --> 00:49:31.070 But it's very cool. 00:49:32.030 --> 00:49:36.270 Another version of this question, because I mean, independent of how you think you you got 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 00:49:41.120 --> 00:49:46.720 evolutionary and the cognitive people or the psychologists are being sort of 00:49:46.720 --> 00:49:49.360 blind to this level of description. 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 00:49:55.200 --> 00:49:58.560 your the writings Oh the evolutionary people were definitely blind to this level of 00:49:58.560 --> 00:49:58.800 description. 00:49:59.120 --> 00:49:59.200 Yeah. 00:49:59.280 --> 00:50:00.960 And so not not not all of them. 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 00:50:05.590 --> 00:50:10.390 Martin on actually so oh great great they were always you know they were trained as 00:50:10.390 --> 00:50:14.630 comparative psychologists so they were studying the psychology of non human animals yeah um 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 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 00:50:22.390 --> 00:50:24.860 often funny amalgams of of things Yeah. 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 00:50:30.940 --> 00:50:36.940 um landscape of missing this, the a lot of the papers were about 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 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 00:50:48.570 --> 00:50:51.450 wasn't they're missing the entire level of explanation. 00:50:51.610 --> 00:50:51.770 Yeah. 00:50:52.010 --> 00:50:53.210 So you have to understand something. 00:50:53.370 --> 00:50:58.650 In the sociobiology community at Harvard and elsewhere, 00:51:00.250 --> 00:51:05.850 what was valorized was ultimate level explanations, theories about selection pressures. 00:51:06.100 --> 00:51:10.180 You know, of course, Trivers valorized whatever Trivers did, and that was theories about 00:51:10.180 --> 00:51:10.900 selection pressures. 00:51:10.980 --> 00:51:12.420 That was social theory. 00:51:12.900 --> 00:51:18.260 And um and then theories about like psychology, for example, that was mere 00:51:18.500 --> 00:51:20.020 proximate mechanisms. 00:51:20.740 --> 00:51:25.860 It wasn't like that's important, proximate mechanisms are actually that which 00:51:25.860 --> 00:51:28.900 Darwinism was designed to explain. 00:51:29.130 --> 00:51:29.450 that. 00:51:29.850 --> 00:51:30.810 Right, the phenotype. 00:51:31.210 --> 00:51:32.170 The phenotype of organism. 00:51:32.330 --> 00:51:33.850 It's so little, it's just the phenotype. 00:51:34.330 --> 00:51:35.610 That's the explanandum. 00:51:35.690 --> 00:51:41.530 That's what natural selection's trying to explain how you get complex functional design in 00:51:41.530 --> 00:51:43.930 organisms without there being a creator. 00:51:44.330 --> 00:51:50.090 Um but at the time it was being treated as something trivial 00:51:50.600 --> 00:51:56.120 because what what the people with vision wanted to understand was the 00:51:56.120 --> 00:51:57.080 selection pressures. 00:51:57.160 --> 00:51:58.440 And I love selection pressures. 00:52:00.600 --> 00:52:06.120 But because that was being valorized at the expense of the approximate 00:52:06.120 --> 00:52:07.240 mechanisms. 00:52:07.560 --> 00:52:12.040 And and and in fairness, people like a lot of research on 00:52:13.450 --> 00:52:17.050 approximate mechanisms wasn't necessarily that interesting at the time. 00:52:17.290 --> 00:52:20.650 Because it was before the cognitive revolution was just sort of starting. 00:52:20.730 --> 00:52:24.490 It wasn't in full it wasn't in full bloom. 00:52:24.730 --> 00:52:28.970 So a whole cognitive level explanation was not known to most people. 00:52:29.610 --> 00:52:30.250 Yeah. 00:52:30.650 --> 00:52:36.260 Um I mean it was obvious to John because he when he was in high school, 00:52:36.420 --> 00:52:41.380 he he programmed in Fortran and he knew how to program and so forth. 00:52:41.540 --> 00:52:47.540 Um uh but yeah, I guess I did yes, I I I 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 00:52:53.220 --> 00:52:54.660 slate and things like this. 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 00:53:00.810 --> 00:53:04.170 could be some domain. 00:53:04.490 --> 00:53:06.890 This is just as an undergraduate, this is not after. 00:53:07.290 --> 00:53:11.610 I thought that there were surely had to be lots of domain-specific psychological 00:53:11.610 --> 00:53:13.050 mechanisms, or else. 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 00:53:20.010 --> 00:53:24.120 domain-specific mechanism that tracked fitness. 00:53:24.520 --> 00:53:29.240 And I hadn't fully realized that that's computationally impossible. 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 00:53:34.760 --> 00:53:36.440 to be empirically adjudicated. 00:53:36.600 --> 00:53:36.920 Right. 00:53:37.080 --> 00:53:37.400 Right. 00:53:37.640 --> 00:53:42.920 And it was in talking, John invited me my last semester of uh of college. 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, 00:53:48.040 --> 00:53:48.920 very interesting. 00:53:49.160 --> 00:53:54.890 Um But so I it it 00:53:54.970 --> 00:54:00.730 it that was it was I don't know it was 00:54:00.730 --> 00:54:05.850 then or later that I realized that this the the computational impossibility of a completely 00:54:05.850 --> 00:54:11.770 domain general system causing behavior that would have tracked fitness ancestrally. 00:54:12.140 --> 00:54:17.420 Um so I was on all on board about the importance of domain-specific mechanisms. 00:54:17.580 --> 00:54:23.580 Um but yeah, the so my 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, 00:54:29.500 --> 00:54:35.260 and that you you guys were there, could see that the computational 00:54:35.260 --> 00:54:41.100 level was uh there enough that if we connect up psychology with evolution, 00:54:41.370 --> 00:54:46.730 that that's um uh fireworks happen in a way that is kind of rare 00:54:46.730 --> 00:54:47.450 scientifically. 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 00:54:51.210 --> 00:54:52.010 together. 00:54:52.650 --> 00:54:53.290 Yes. 00:54:54.010 --> 00:54:59.210 It's not that people hadn't previously thought that evolution could illuminate 00:54:59.370 --> 00:55:00.250 psychology. 00:55:00.490 --> 00:55:02.010 Darwin thought that. 00:55:02.440 --> 00:55:02.760 Right. 00:55:03.000 --> 00:55:08.440 I mean, and um Darwin thought that there had been various 00:55:08.440 --> 00:55:14.280 attempts uh to take on psychology with an evolutionary lens. 00:55:14.360 --> 00:55:16.280 I mean, William James thought that. 00:55:16.600 --> 00:55:20.040 Um Sean Bowlby certainly thought that. 00:55:20.120 --> 00:55:24.360 I mean, John Bowlby was, I consider him an early evolutionary psychologist with attachment 00:55:24.360 --> 00:55:24.680 theory. 00:55:24.760 --> 00:55:30.050 He he started with like primate behavior and he thought that that 00:55:30.530 --> 00:55:36.530 clearly there were mechanisms that kept an infant monkey staying within range of his 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. 00:55:41.970 --> 00:55:44.210 He thought he thought that was an evolved mechanism. 00:55:44.370 --> 00:55:49.820 Um but there wasn't uh um there wasn't a 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 00:55:53.820 --> 00:55:59.420 psychologists, they were still doing things before cognitive psychology was really much of 00:55:59.420 --> 00:56:00.060 a thing. 00:56:00.300 --> 00:56:05.660 And so they're they're grasping towards um 00:56:05.980 --> 00:56:07.180 explanations. 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 00:56:11.740 --> 00:56:17.410 I think I think it's because they lack a more of fuller throated language of 00:56:17.410 --> 00:56:18.690 information processing. 00:56:18.850 --> 00:56:19.170 Yeah. 00:56:20.050 --> 00:56:25.730 And so yes, the this this 00:56:25.970 --> 00:56:29.010 this cognitive revolution was happening around the same time. 00:56:29.170 --> 00:56:30.130 It was full of revolution. 00:56:31.890 --> 00:56:37.890 And but people, this is why like that there's an 00:56:37.890 --> 00:56:39.490 87 paper that we wrote. 00:56:39.650 --> 00:56:45.170 It's actually based on the fourth chapter of my dissertation because I I had to 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 00:56:51.420 --> 00:56:56.220 why you would take an evolutionary perspective to cognition in the first place. 00:56:57.660 --> 00:57:00.620 And what what would that lead you to think differently? 00:57:01.020 --> 00:57:05.740 And so there's a whole chapter about why you would expect domain-specific mechanisms, since 00:57:05.740 --> 00:57:10.270 the empirical work was about a domain-specific reasoning mechanism for detecting cheaters, 00:57:10.350 --> 00:57:10.590 right? 00:57:11.390 --> 00:57:15.950 And um so we worked that chapter into this 1987 paper. 00:57:16.030 --> 00:57:20.990 And the title of it is From Evolution to Behavior, Evolutionary Psychology as the Missing 00:57:20.990 --> 00:57:21.550 Link. 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 00:57:26.830 --> 00:57:32.220 sociobiology community, because this was a missing link in their 00:57:32.540 --> 00:57:33.180 thinking. 00:57:34.220 --> 00:57:40.220 Um so yeah, that wasn't that that paper wasn't even aimed particularly at psychologists. 00:57:40.380 --> 00:57:44.940 It was aimed at the people who were just going straight from selection pressures to 00:57:44.940 --> 00:57:49.020 behavior without a pit stop on how the wine works. 00:57:49.260 --> 00:57:49.580 Yeah. 00:57:49.740 --> 00:57:50.140 Yeah. 00:57:51.420 --> 00:57:54.380 Uh I mean, David, uh jump, feel free to jump in. 00:57:54.460 --> 00:57:56.060 Um, fast forwarding. 00:57:56.220 --> 00:58:01.790 Um, so there there's people are missing this cognitive or 00:58:01.790 --> 00:58:03.310 computational level. 00:58:03.710 --> 00:58:06.430 Um, what is your opinion now? 00:58:06.590 --> 00:58:09.550 So we were doing history and we can kind of go back and forth. 00:58:09.790 --> 00:58:15.390 Um, what is your take on to the extent to which people uh do 00:58:15.390 --> 00:58:21.150 understand that level, or the extent to which it's still not adequately understood, 00:58:21.230 --> 00:58:24.830 either in psychology or even in evolutionary psychology? 00:58:26.960 --> 00:58:31.120 Um not adequately understood. 00:58:31.920 --> 00:58:35.440 A little understood, but um 00:58:38.880 --> 00:58:41.840 less supplied than than it could be. 00:58:42.240 --> 00:58:48.000 Um and and and a lot of people, even in evolutionary psychology, 00:58:48.160 --> 00:58:53.870 are not fully adaptationist in the sense of looking for evidence of special 00:58:53.870 --> 00:58:54.510 design. 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. 00:59:03.070 --> 00:59:07.630 I mean, there was just nothing in psychology. 00:59:08.750 --> 00:59:09.470 Nothing. 00:59:09.630 --> 00:59:14.430 You wouldn't even come across the word natural selection or evolution in a psychology 00:59:14.430 --> 00:59:20.300 article ever, let alone have any, let alone have hypotheses that were derived from 00:59:20.300 --> 00:59:22.540 evolutionary principles. 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 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 00:59:33.740 --> 00:59:34.300 hypothesis. 00:59:34.700 --> 00:59:36.460 It was because of the source of the hypothesis. 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 00:59:41.420 --> 00:59:42.140 been okay. 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 00:59:47.930 --> 00:59:53.690 evolution of reciprocal altruism uh selection pressures was what was 00:59:53.690 --> 00:59:55.530 making it not okay. 00:59:55.850 --> 01:00:01.690 Um uh yeah no it was yeah Lita some future historian of science will use that 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 01:00:07.450 --> 01:00:12.140 21st century psychology theory I'm sure It could be. 01:00:12.300 --> 01:00:15.500 I think it's not the easiest thing in the world to think computationally. 01:00:15.900 --> 01:00:16.220 No. 01:00:16.460 --> 01:00:18.380 Uh I could just work on it myself. 01:00:18.460 --> 01:00:19.180 Um Yeah. 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 01:00:24.060 --> 01:00:29.420 the all levels of evolutionary psychologists, or even just getting students, I do sometimes 01:00:29.420 --> 01:00:33.660 wonder that if the psychology part of evolutionary psychology is the harder one than the 01:00:33.660 --> 01:00:34.700 evolutionary part. 01:00:34.780 --> 01:00:35.180 Yeah. 01:00:35.500 --> 01:00:36.940 Oh, I think it absolutely is. 01:00:37.100 --> 01:00:37.420 Yeah. 01:00:37.580 --> 01:00:37.900 Yeah. 01:00:38.140 --> 01:00:39.100 I I do think it is. 01:00:39.260 --> 01:00:39.740 Yes. 01:00:40.010 --> 01:00:40.650 Yes, absolutely. 01:00:41.050 --> 01:00:46.890 I mean in part because we have such a rich folk psychology system that 01:00:46.890 --> 01:00:49.530 we lean on for explaining people. 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. 01:00:55.450 --> 01:00:55.770 Right. 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. 01:01:01.850 --> 01:01:07.850 Um, to use your sort of um folk mechanics mechanism to think about minds. 01:01:08.010 --> 01:01:10.560 That's it's really tricky for people to do. 01:01:10.720 --> 01:01:13.840 Um I think it's your artifact. 01:01:13.920 --> 01:01:16.560 Yeah, uh I think it's yeah, yeah. 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 01:01:22.480 --> 01:01:24.720 are intuitively accustomed to. 01:01:24.880 --> 01:01:28.640 Uh and and and it comes more naturally to some people than others, for sure. 01:01:28.800 --> 01:01:31.170 But yeah, I I sometimes have a hard time doing that. 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 01:01:36.450 --> 01:01:40.370 seeking, you know, mental substances of good vibes and bad vibes, you know. 01:01:40.690 --> 01:01:41.970 Yes, yes, uh yes. 01:01:42.210 --> 01:01:42.610 Yeah. 01:01:42.930 --> 01:01:48.050 Well, I that's why when I teach undergraduates, I teach it completely from the artifact 01:01:48.050 --> 01:01:52.770 module point of view, the design stance that we're looking for machines that are designed 01:01:52.770 --> 01:01:54.210 to perform functions. 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 01:02:00.640 --> 01:02:03.760 this perspective is to think about them as particles of design. 01:02:04.000 --> 01:02:04.320 Yeah. 01:02:04.720 --> 01:02:09.040 That they're the means by which a design replicates itself through generations. 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 01:02:14.160 --> 01:02:15.280 is the extended phenotype. 01:02:15.360 --> 01:02:15.520 Yeah. 01:02:15.680 --> 01:02:18.240 And he's got these necker cubes on the front of it. 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 01:02:24.000 --> 01:02:29.650 the necker cube about the perspective you're taking, that talking about individual 01:02:29.650 --> 01:02:33.250 reproduction versus inclusive fitness is a Neckercube shift. 01:02:33.490 --> 01:02:39.090 And so if you think about um Hamilton and Ken selection uh 01:02:39.090 --> 01:02:44.850 theory, that's actually starting from the that's seeing it from the perspective of the 01:02:44.850 --> 01:02:47.680 reproduction of an individual, right? 01:02:47.840 --> 01:02:53.040 That the individual is trading off some of the individual's own reproduction to 01:02:53.680 --> 01:02:58.880 help um increase the reproduction of say a sibling. 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 01:03:04.960 --> 01:03:09.120 for designs that promote their own product reproduction are going to be selected for uh 01:03:09.280 --> 01:03:11.120 regardless of who they're in, right? 01:03:11.280 --> 01:03:16.730 I mean, um and so part of the point of the extended phenotype is he was 01:03:16.730 --> 01:03:22.490 gently saying, you know, you can do this gestalt switch uh to a 01:03:22.490 --> 01:03:26.970 gene's eye view, in which case things look kind of different. 01:03:27.210 --> 01:03:31.050 Um so yeah, no, I I I teach entirely from it. 01:03:31.530 --> 01:03:35.850 When we were in graduate school, John used to say, you know, when we understand enough 01:03:35.850 --> 01:03:40.820 about the mind, we'll understand more about how to explain this. 01:03:41.060 --> 01:03:42.100 Yeah, exactly. 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 01:03:48.900 --> 01:03:54.740 idea that we have mechanisms that are for understanding tools and that tools have 01:03:54.740 --> 01:03:57.140 functions or design for functions and so forth. 01:03:57.300 --> 01:03:58.980 Um I found that helpful. 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. 01:04:04.740 --> 01:04:06.900 And I think there's probably things that we miss. 01:04:08.420 --> 01:04:09.770 I shouldn't say we. 01:04:10.490 --> 01:04:15.850 People like me who did not have uh training in 01:04:16.330 --> 01:04:18.170 you know computer programming. 01:04:18.330 --> 01:04:24.010 I think there's things that we miss about how how 01:04:24.090 --> 01:04:29.130 psychological mechanisms need to be designed, or what are good ways to design them. 01:04:29.370 --> 01:04:33.210 And I I that's sort of you know distressing sometimes. 01:04:33.290 --> 01:04:34.890 I feel like I have to go back to school. 01:04:35.050 --> 01:04:37.770 There's lots of things I have to go back to school to learn. 01:04:38.620 --> 01:04:41.500 Um well, but I think that's to your credit though. 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 01:04:47.180 --> 01:04:49.500 should hang your spurs up, right? 01:04:49.580 --> 01:04:55.260 I think that's the um uh that engineering approach to things 01:04:55.420 --> 01:05:00.540 and um that you know there are people like Don Simons or Martin and Margot. 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 01:05:05.710 --> 01:05:06.350 original question. 01:05:06.430 --> 01:05:10.510 I'm always just m mystified like where people like that come from who are just 01:05:10.510 --> 01:05:15.070 design-minded, um, and and they're sort of fellow travelers. 01:05:15.470 --> 01:05:18.830 Um the the can you continue the story then? 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? 01:05:24.990 --> 01:05:26.830 Well, first we discovered Daly and Wilson. 01:05:27.390 --> 01:05:33.300 And that was simple because uh Martinal Daly Margot Wilson uh spent a sabbatical year 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 01:05:38.820 --> 01:05:39.060 time. 01:05:39.220 --> 01:05:44.420 Well even before that it it there was a psychology um 01:05:44.820 --> 01:05:50.420 wide seminar that people actually came to um um but the 01:05:50.420 --> 01:05:56.390 speakers were actually chosen by graduate students and so um I was on 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 01:06:02.230 --> 01:06:08.150 that I suggested and so Martin spoke but then they came they came I can't 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 01:06:12.630 --> 01:06:16.660 four 82, 83, around that time. 01:06:16.820 --> 01:06:18.740 Um, they spent the whole year there. 01:06:18.820 --> 01:06:19.220 It was great. 01:06:19.300 --> 01:06:20.420 We talked many times. 01:06:20.900 --> 01:06:26.900 Um, and then Don um Don came 01:06:26.900 --> 01:06:32.020 to all of this in a different way, Don Simons. 01:06:32.420 --> 01:06:37.940 Um he he was doing, I think he was a psychology major as an undergraduate. 01:06:38.770 --> 01:06:43.090 But then he went to graduate school in biological anthropology. 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 01:06:48.930 --> 01:06:49.970 at Berkeley. 01:06:50.290 --> 01:06:56.210 And Don's dissertation was on um 01:06:56.530 --> 01:06:59.010 uh aggression and play in Rhesus monkeys. 01:06:59.090 --> 01:07:04.610 And it was an adaptationist analysis where he was saying, look, if you look carefully at 01:07:04.610 --> 01:07:10.280 how Rhesus monkeys play, it has features a special design for calibrating your 01:07:10.280 --> 01:07:12.200 ability to fight. 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 01:07:18.280 --> 01:07:20.440 they'll switch and the other one will be on top. 01:07:20.520 --> 01:07:23.400 There's a play face that signals this isn't true aggression. 01:07:23.560 --> 01:07:25.320 This is we're just practicing. 01:07:25.480 --> 01:07:31.080 Um, he went through various features of design from his watching the in the field 01:07:31.160 --> 01:07:36.770 watching um the Rhesus monkeys and so he was Don I don't know Don 01:07:37.410 --> 01:07:40.450 was always an adaptationist and 01:07:43.330 --> 01:07:47.970 I don't know how that came to be yeah 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 01:07:54.850 --> 01:07:59.570 and he wasn't in the middle of this sociobiology thing because he's um 01:08:03.180 --> 01:08:05.340 I think he's 15 years older than me. 01:08:06.220 --> 01:08:06.860 Yeah. 01:08:07.180 --> 01:08:13.020 And and uh but when it came to the evolution of human 01:08:13.020 --> 01:08:18.620 sexuality, his book that came out in 1979, um he 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 01:08:24.540 --> 01:08:24.860 time. 01:08:25.020 --> 01:08:30.950 And from an evolutionary point of view And and um I don't know 01:08:30.950 --> 01:08:32.230 how he came to study that. 01:08:32.550 --> 01:08:35.270 Don always said that he liked to study things that he liked. 01:08:35.430 --> 01:08:37.110 And sex was one of those things he liked. 01:08:37.910 --> 01:08:39.110 Totally straightforward, yeah. 01:08:39.350 --> 01:08:40.870 He said he liked he liked to sleep. 01:08:40.950 --> 01:08:46.950 He wrote a very cool uh paper about dreaming called The Stuff Dreams Are Not 01:08:46.950 --> 01:08:47.270 Made of. 01:08:47.510 --> 01:08:47.830 That's correct. 01:08:47.990 --> 01:08:49.830 Um that was published in Cognition. 01:08:49.990 --> 01:08:55.580 He thought about he loved e eating in interesting things and he would have blind 01:08:56.140 --> 01:08:57.660 blind taste tests of different things. 01:08:57.980 --> 01:08:58.220 That's great. 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 01:09:02.220 --> 01:09:04.700 literature on that already and he didn't want to go through all that. 01:09:04.860 --> 01:09:05.100 Yeah. 01:09:05.180 --> 01:09:06.620 Um very reasonable. 01:09:07.020 --> 01:09:13.020 He thought he thought about doing uh uh laughter and humor but then when he started 01:09:13.020 --> 01:09:17.820 reading about humor he found all everything he found about humor was so humor humorless he 01:09:17.820 --> 01:09:18.940 couldn't stand it. 01:09:19.710 --> 01:09:20.590 Yes, exactly. 01:09:20.670 --> 01:09:22.350 Although he did get his float article, right? 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. 01:09:26.990 --> 01:09:27.230 Yeah. 01:09:28.270 --> 01:09:29.550 Didn't he always say there wasn't enough? 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. 01:09:33.630 --> 01:09:35.390 Uh probably. 01:09:35.550 --> 01:09:36.190 I don't know. 01:09:36.350 --> 01:09:42.350 Um but so he he he well since Don can't speak for himself since 01:09:42.350 --> 01:09:45.710 he uh died in in 2024. 01:09:46.190 --> 01:09:51.920 Um the people watching this might might or might not know about the famous 01:09:51.920 --> 01:09:55.280 bet that was made between Don Simons and Don Brown. 01:09:55.520 --> 01:09:58.560 Um Don Brown, who later wrote Human Universals. 01:09:58.880 --> 01:10:00.240 Yeah, which was the book that got me. 01:10:00.320 --> 01:10:01.600 Yeah, the book that got me. 01:10:01.680 --> 01:10:01.760 Yeah. 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 01:10:09.600 --> 01:10:10.560 human sexuality. 01:10:10.800 --> 01:10:14.400 And he said, I think there's gonna be some universals of human sexuality. 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 01:10:19.070 --> 01:10:20.830 evolutionary point of view, etc. 01:10:21.310 --> 01:10:26.910 And Don Brown, who was uh trained as a political anthropologist, uh, Don Brown 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. 01:10:33.630 --> 01:10:36.030 And Simon says, I don't think so. 01:10:36.190 --> 01:10:38.190 And Brown says, I'm sure I will be able to. 01:10:38.270 --> 01:10:41.080 So they made a bet about that. 01:10:41.400 --> 01:10:43.640 And they bet a pitcher of beer. 01:10:43.880 --> 01:10:49.800 Um and um after Simons wrote what he wrote and 01:10:49.800 --> 01:10:54.600 did his research, Brown couldn't find any exceptions to the things that Simons said. 01:10:55.000 --> 01:10:59.240 And so acknowledged that Simons clearly had won the bet. 01:10:59.930 --> 01:11:05.530 And then Brown started asking himself, why was I so sure? 01:11:05.850 --> 01:11:07.690 Why was I so sure? 01:11:08.090 --> 01:11:14.010 Because there had been a tradition in anthropology of looking both at universals and at 01:11:14.010 --> 01:11:18.810 things that varied from culture to culture, but the field had sort of changed more into 01:11:18.810 --> 01:11:21.210 being interested only in variation. 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? 01:11:25.280 --> 01:11:31.040 And he um in the course that I started reading more of the history of 01:11:31.040 --> 01:11:36.640 anthropology, and that's where why he wrote Human Universals, which he dedicated to 01:11:36.640 --> 01:11:37.280 Simus. 01:11:37.760 --> 01:11:41.600 Um, so that's where the book that got you into this field came from. 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 01:11:46.790 --> 01:11:47.030 place. 01:11:47.430 --> 01:11:51.830 And and and and actually they hadn't done the official um 01:11:53.350 --> 01:11:59.350 uh picture of beer um thing yet and and so in uh in our 01:11:59.350 --> 01:12:03.510 first or second year uh here at UCSB um there was an 01:12:03.510 --> 01:12:09.300 anthrotic picnic party at um in the hills where Don Brown and 01:12:09.300 --> 01:12:10.660 Don Simons lived. 01:12:10.820 --> 01:12:16.740 And there was a ceremonial uh giving of the pitcher of beer from Brown to 01:12:16.740 --> 01:12:17.300 Sassman. 01:12:17.460 --> 01:12:18.740 So I got to I got to see that. 01:12:18.980 --> 01:12:20.100 That's fantastic. 01:12:21.860 --> 01:12:23.220 It was historically. 01:12:26.820 --> 01:12:27.460 Yeah. 01:12:28.430 --> 01:12:29.390 Such a lovely story. 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. 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 01:12:40.190 --> 01:12:42.430 when the data come in and and you're wrong. 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. 01:12:46.910 --> 01:12:50.910 I wish that you know we had more of that kind of thing happening. 01:12:50.990 --> 01:12:54.990 I think we should bet more pictures of beer on various pictures of beer. 01:12:55.070 --> 01:12:56.350 Yeah no I know I know. 01:12:56.510 --> 01:12:57.070 Yeah. 01:12:59.160 --> 01:13:02.280 Actually care about what's true. 01:13:02.760 --> 01:13:05.240 And I'm not always clear that people do. 01:13:05.400 --> 01:13:09.560 I I've had a an informal bet like that that I've completely lost. 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 01:13:15.800 --> 01:13:21.470 and am continuing with uh Ricardo Guzman in in Chile, um, I had been too 01:13:21.470 --> 01:13:23.630 influenced by Tversky and Kahneman. 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 01:13:28.830 --> 01:13:34.750 and John and Garrett Renzer had done research showing that when you put the same 01:13:35.310 --> 01:13:41.310 um probability problems, when you express them in frequencies and absolute frequencies, 01:13:41.710 --> 01:13:43.790 natural frequencies, that people do very well. 01:13:43.950 --> 01:13:48.720 So I knew that Tversky and Kahneman were they're not wrong about the phenomena. 01:13:48.880 --> 01:13:53.200 If you don't do that, people will be bad at conditional probabilities. 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 01:13:57.520 --> 01:13:58.560 statistical reasoning. 01:13:58.640 --> 01:14:01.040 You just have to give it information in the right format. 01:14:01.280 --> 01:14:06.400 But still, they had made other claims as well, like that people 01:14:06.560 --> 01:14:12.170 violate the principles of rational choice all the time, and that people wouldn't 01:14:12.170 --> 01:14:18.170 possibly be able to that they they're not capable of of being transitive uh like 01:14:18.170 --> 01:14:22.410 having transitive preferences which which people always explain as if you like a better 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 01:14:26.570 --> 01:14:32.180 of putting it because a b and c are not things like 01:14:32.740 --> 01:14:35.540 John's taller than Nike and Nike's taller than Lita. 01:14:35.700 --> 01:14:38.020 So John's they're bundles of goods. 01:14:38.420 --> 01:14:44.260 Like you know, five avocados and three tomatoes and twenty tomatoes and five avocados. 01:14:45.060 --> 01:14:46.420 A, B, and C are bundle of goods. 01:14:46.500 --> 01:14:50.500 So it's very not communicated well to people who are not in economists. 01:14:50.580 --> 01:14:50.980 But anyway. 01:14:51.390 --> 01:14:51.550 Right. 01:14:51.630 --> 01:14:55.310 And the alternatives also give you information about the nature of the sample that it that 01:14:55.310 --> 01:14:56.270 is being drawn from. 01:14:56.510 --> 01:15:00.110 And you're going to make different inferences if the alternatives are different, right? 01:15:00.670 --> 01:15:01.070 Yes. 01:15:01.230 --> 01:15:01.550 Yes. 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. 01:15:07.870 --> 01:15:08.670 Oh interesting. 01:15:08.910 --> 01:15:09.230 Yeah. 01:15:09.390 --> 01:15:12.430 I I I'm I'm blanking on his name right. 01:15:12.510 --> 01:15:16.830 He's at at he's at the business school at at the at um UCSD. 01:15:16.990 --> 01:15:22.900 And I came across his pay this guy's paper in a in 01:15:22.900 --> 01:15:25.380 a journal that had economics in the title. 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. 01:15:30.180 --> 01:15:32.500 Anyway, I'll find it and send it to you. 01:15:34.660 --> 01:15:38.260 But he he he not only makes that argument, he demonstrates it. 01:15:39.060 --> 01:15:44.980 So anyway, I I I had I but I had believed them about that people would 01:15:45.330 --> 01:15:49.170 you know, not be able to have transitive reasoning. 01:15:49.330 --> 01:15:53.650 I thought that their prospect theory and other things were, I thought that had been shown. 01:15:53.970 --> 01:15:58.850 And Ricardo was one, my my colleague said, no, no, no. 01:15:59.170 --> 01:16:05.090 I I think that people will be rational in the 01:16:05.090 --> 01:16:06.530 sense of rational choice. 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 01:16:12.660 --> 01:16:18.420 like that, you know, either you're being utilitarian and using your domain general 01:16:18.420 --> 01:16:23.380 reasoning, deliberative reasoning system, or you have these crude uh 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 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 01:16:34.100 --> 01:16:35.460 that's that that's not gonna be true. 01:16:35.620 --> 01:16:41.390 People are gonna be able to make trade offs between different kinds of uh moral values. 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 01:16:46.830 --> 01:16:51.070 because nobody even gives you the opportunity to, because you only have either push the guy 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 01:16:56.270 --> 01:16:57.070 let the five people die. 01:16:57.230 --> 01:16:58.670 There's only two options there. 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 01:17:03.230 --> 01:17:06.190 only be able to make trade-offs, but they'll make rational trade-offs. 01:17:06.350 --> 01:17:08.360 And I said, but there's all this stuff in psychology. 01:17:08.440 --> 01:17:10.360 He says, no, no, that's what's going to happen. 01:17:10.520 --> 01:17:12.680 And he he he was completely right. 01:17:13.320 --> 01:17:18.680 He was gloriously right, to my surprise. 01:17:20.280 --> 01:17:26.280 So, you know, people behaved exactly as if they're doing what economists talk 01:17:26.280 --> 01:17:32.250 about when they talk about generating a utility function and then using whatever options 01:17:32.250 --> 01:17:35.370 are available to you, the costs and benefits of the options available to you to choose 01:17:35.370 --> 01:17:36.890 which is the best option. 01:17:38.170 --> 01:17:40.810 The economists are not psychological about it though. 01:17:41.290 --> 01:17:47.130 The economists they they they say that they are agnostic about the 01:17:47.130 --> 01:17:47.450 mind. 01:17:47.770 --> 01:17:53.520 So when they give theories like this about utility maximization, it's not about 01:17:53.520 --> 01:17:57.040 what's going on in an individual's mind, which is very interesting. 01:17:57.120 --> 01:18:00.560 Um it took me years to figure out what the hell they they were talking about. 01:18:00.720 --> 01:18:06.000 I would go to these um these behavioral economics workshops here that would happen once 01:18:06.080 --> 01:18:11.520 every every two years that Gary Charnes uh would would put on, who also 01:18:11.520 --> 01:18:12.960 died recently. 01:18:13.200 --> 01:18:15.520 Um everybody's dying all around me. 01:18:15.600 --> 01:18:19.040 It's really frustrating um and upsetting. 01:18:19.280 --> 01:18:25.050 But I would go to these and when I could and people would there would 01:18:25.050 --> 01:18:30.970 be these 40-minute talks, the first 20 minutes would be a beautiful experiment, like 01:18:30.970 --> 01:18:32.890 some sort of behavioral economics experiment. 01:18:33.050 --> 01:18:36.490 It might be in the lab, it might be in the field with gorgeous results. 01:18:36.650 --> 01:18:41.130 And anybody I know in psychology would have been thrilled to have done these experiments 01:18:41.130 --> 01:18:41.610 themselves. 01:18:42.900 --> 01:18:45.060 Very interpretable results. 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. 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, 01:18:56.660 --> 01:18:59.380 what is this utility function? 01:18:59.540 --> 01:19:00.500 What is it? 01:19:02.180 --> 01:19:03.860 Is this a theory of the computation? 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 01:19:09.860 --> 01:19:12.580 what problem the mind is trying to solve? 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 01:19:18.910 --> 01:19:24.670 this economist who is friendly to psychology, and so was he said, no, it has nothing 01:19:24.670 --> 01:19:26.590 to do with the human mind. 01:19:27.630 --> 01:19:32.190 And I said, But you do think that individuals are making the decisions in these 01:19:32.190 --> 01:19:32.910 experiments? 01:19:33.150 --> 01:19:34.440 He said, Yes, of course. 01:19:34.680 --> 01:19:37.320 And I said, You do think it has something to do with their brains? 01:19:37.480 --> 01:19:40.040 And he said, Yes, of course. 01:19:40.440 --> 01:19:43.400 And he said, But the utility function has nothing to do with that. 01:19:43.800 --> 01:19:44.360 Yeah. 01:19:44.680 --> 01:19:46.760 I was like, what is it? 01:19:47.000 --> 01:19:48.600 And actually, it turns out he's right. 01:19:48.680 --> 01:19:49.880 And that is the traditional view. 01:19:49.960 --> 01:19:52.040 And it has nothing to do with what's going on in the mind. 01:19:52.120 --> 01:19:53.640 In the way economists think about it. 01:19:53.800 --> 01:19:56.200 The way economists think about it, their problem is different. 01:19:56.360 --> 01:19:58.840 Their problem is usually understanding a market. 01:19:59.250 --> 01:20:05.090 and markets have millions of anonymous people trading in them and the utility 01:20:05.090 --> 01:20:11.010 function is an input output device um where that takes quantities like uh like 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 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 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 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 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 01:20:38.880 --> 01:20:39.440 a market. 01:20:39.600 --> 01:20:45.490 Now it's it happens that some behavioral economists um have made 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 01:20:51.250 --> 01:20:56.930 economists are usually very careful to say that people are behaving as if 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 01:21:02.850 --> 01:21:08.770 then the even more precisely there are theorems that show um uh there are theorems 01:21:08.770 --> 01:21:13.780 that show that in this measure of GARP that we use. 01:21:13.940 --> 01:21:14.420 It doesn't matter. 01:21:14.500 --> 01:21:18.980 It's a measure of whether people are making transitive choices. 01:21:19.300 --> 01:21:24.900 That if people's responses respect GARP, then there 01:21:24.900 --> 01:21:30.420 exists at least one utility function that, if rationalized, could explain the data. 01:21:30.660 --> 01:21:30.980 Right. 01:21:31.220 --> 01:21:32.900 That's the way they say qualified, yes. 01:21:33.460 --> 01:21:35.380 Because then they they can prove that. 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, 01:21:40.310 --> 01:21:45.830 look, the most parsimonious explanation for our results is that people are behaving as if 01:21:45.830 --> 01:21:50.870 they're maximizing this function because that is what their mind is doing. 01:21:51.030 --> 01:21:53.830 It's maximize, it's it's it's built a function. 01:21:54.150 --> 01:21:56.790 We called it a right dysfunction because it was about moral rightness. 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 01:22:02.780 --> 01:22:07.980 one that has the maximum brightness and it and it has machinery for doing that. 01:22:08.140 --> 01:22:12.540 And so it's not just that they're behaving as if they are, they are. 01:22:13.260 --> 01:22:19.260 Because that that really is the simplest explanation for for our our moral trade off data. 01:22:19.340 --> 01:22:19.820 Um yeah. 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 01:22:25.210 --> 01:22:26.570 are performing these computations. 01:22:26.650 --> 01:22:28.970 Like why don't you just say that they're actually doing the computations? 01:22:29.050 --> 01:22:31.450 Like that's a much simpler I I I know. 01:22:31.610 --> 01:22:31.850 I know. 01:22:32.010 --> 01:22:35.850 But see, but but everybody's interested in different questions and the economists are not 01:22:35.850 --> 01:22:37.530 interested in individual minds, right? 01:22:37.610 --> 01:22:37.770 Yeah. 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 01:22:43.850 --> 01:22:46.890 in on that community for nine and a half years. 01:22:46.970 --> 01:22:47.210 Yeah. 01:22:47.530 --> 01:22:47.930 Yes. 01:22:48.090 --> 01:22:48.250 Yeah. 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 01:22:54.480 --> 01:22:58.400 that's sort of funny because like even the term behavioral economics versus experimental 01:22:58.400 --> 01:23:04.160 economics they have different flavors to them because the person who who who really 01:23:04.480 --> 01:23:08.960 invented behavioral experimental economics where you have people bring people an experiment 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 01:23:12.720 --> 01:23:17.730 different games that was Vernon Smith and his colleagues He did it with Charlie Plott and 01:23:17.730 --> 01:23:18.370 various other people. 01:23:18.450 --> 01:23:24.130 He had a very uh great group around him, you know, uh Kevin 01:23:24.130 --> 01:23:29.890 McCabe, Elizabeth Hoffman, um uh I think Bart Wilson was part of that group. 01:23:30.210 --> 01:23:35.890 And Vernon Smith, when he learned about evolutionary psychology, he he he 01:23:36.050 --> 01:23:40.930 and Elizabeth Hoffman, etc., they they realized that a lot of the they were finding in 01:23:40.930 --> 01:23:46.700 their lab that people did not behave as if their preferences were homo economicus 01:23:46.780 --> 01:23:47.340 preferences. 01:23:47.580 --> 01:23:51.820 Rational choice doesn't mean that you're always choosing the thing that has the highest 01:23:51.820 --> 01:23:53.020 monetary payoff. 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 01:23:58.460 --> 01:24:02.060 your given how you weight various things. 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 01:24:09.170 --> 01:24:13.090 preferences and people call that homo economicus economic man. 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 01:24:19.330 --> 01:24:25.330 very early, that if you have 27 people in a lab and they're interacting 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 01:24:31.010 --> 01:24:31.650 profits. 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 01:24:37.440 --> 01:24:41.520 repeated interactions, whether, you know, even if you no matter what you tell them. 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, 01:24:47.280 --> 01:24:51.520 where they were reinterpreting all of their results in light of, you know, evolutionary 01:24:51.520 --> 01:24:55.760 psychology and theory of mind and things like this, and saying, look, there's something 01:24:55.760 --> 01:24:59.920 different that's going on in small groups than what you see in mass markets. 01:25:03.190 --> 01:25:09.030 So the experimental economics people kind of went, at least some of them, 01:25:09.110 --> 01:25:11.190 in more of an F-Sype direction. 01:25:11.510 --> 01:25:16.950 Whereas the people influenced more by Tversky and Kahneman went into this 01:25:17.510 --> 01:25:19.670 heuristics and prices direction. 01:25:20.390 --> 01:25:26.360 And that really, when people say behavioral economics, now they use it 01:25:26.360 --> 01:25:27.880 to refer to all of it, right? 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 01:25:32.280 --> 01:25:37.000 economics community was more the heuristics and biases, um uh 01:25:38.520 --> 01:25:44.310 decision-making, cognition, decision-making people and the experimental economic and 01:25:44.310 --> 01:25:46.710 experimental economics had more to do with these. 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 01:25:52.870 --> 01:25:54.630 Smith and his colleagues took. 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 01:25:59.910 --> 01:26:05.750 work and how looking at these games as having to do with interactions of people 01:26:05.910 --> 01:26:11.840 and you know as being produced by programs that evolved for a different kind of 01:26:12.160 --> 01:26:16.800 social world where people did know each other and there were repeated interactions. 01:26:17.200 --> 01:26:21.120 So I I always find the history of these different disciplines really interesting. 01:26:21.360 --> 01:26:21.680 Yeah. 01:26:22.000 --> 01:26:26.320 Because it's part of the Simons principle that you can't understand something unless you 01:26:26.320 --> 01:26:27.840 know who they're arguing with. 01:26:28.320 --> 01:26:31.200 And unless you know what kind of question they're trying to answer. 01:26:31.360 --> 01:26:35.790 I mean, once I realized how they thought about how the economists thought about utility 01:26:35.790 --> 01:26:39.230 functions, I realized that's completely sane. 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 01:26:43.550 --> 01:26:44.510 is completely sane. 01:26:44.590 --> 01:26:50.190 So they they have utility functions that represent, you know, a household, 01:26:50.430 --> 01:26:54.750 what they think of as a consumption bundle for a typical household. 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. 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 01:27:02.620 --> 01:27:03.580 you're trying to do. 01:27:03.820 --> 01:27:04.140 Yeah. 01:27:04.300 --> 01:27:07.500 Sometimes they have a completely different question in mind. 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, 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 01:27:17.830 --> 01:27:20.310 contemporary historian of science. 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 01:27:25.510 --> 01:27:29.670 landscape and the ability to sort of articulate, well, here is this group of people, and 01:27:29.670 --> 01:27:33.830 here's what the assumptions they're making, here's what their goal is. 01:27:34.310 --> 01:27:40.230 Uh that is surprisingly rare, you know, to do it at any time and especially concurrently 01:27:40.310 --> 01:27:46.120 because there are status games And it takes courage to sort of speak up when 01:27:46.280 --> 01:27:49.080 when the real flesh and blood stuff is happening. 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, 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 01:28:00.040 --> 01:28:01.160 did so well. 01:28:01.240 --> 01:28:07.110 Um is just our You have to be willing to 01:28:07.110 --> 01:28:08.150 listen to people. 01:28:08.790 --> 01:28:09.430 Yeah. 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 01:28:16.070 --> 01:28:16.710 something. 01:28:17.030 --> 01:28:18.630 And that's fine. 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. 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 01:28:26.630 --> 01:28:29.430 probably have reasons why they're doing that. 01:28:29.590 --> 01:28:31.900 And it would be good to know what those reasons are. 01:28:32.060 --> 01:28:35.900 So in psychological foundations of culture, in the beginning of it about the standard 01:28:35.900 --> 01:28:41.900 social science model, that is um uh that that deconstruction of that 01:28:41.980 --> 01:28:47.740 is John's trying to say, um, what are the good reasons why people 01:28:48.060 --> 01:28:51.820 adopted this notion of the standard social science model? 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 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 01:29:02.070 --> 01:29:04.310 assumptions, and you got to know what those assumptions are. 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 01:29:08.070 --> 01:29:09.350 they're trying to answer. 01:29:09.910 --> 01:29:12.150 And you have to not get frustrated. 01:29:12.390 --> 01:29:13.750 This is really hard. 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 01:29:19.910 --> 01:29:24.070 them, or when they're using them in a way that you find to be fuzzy. 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 01:29:30.060 --> 01:29:33.260 that ways that other people think are fuzzy and you don't realize it too. 01:29:33.420 --> 01:29:37.980 Um but it can take a lot of time and patience sometimes. 01:29:38.140 --> 01:29:44.060 Uh me being able to get into an economist's head uh was a long 01:29:44.220 --> 01:29:49.870 process and it was helped by conversations with both Ricardo and Ryan 01:29:50.030 --> 01:29:56.030 Opria, my colleague here at UCSV who just left for Berkeley, abandoned us 01:29:56.030 --> 01:29:58.110 for Berkeley to my distress. 01:29:59.150 --> 01:30:00.990 I would ask them these different questions. 01:30:01.070 --> 01:30:06.270 And Ryan actually had he had been the second to last student of Vernon Smith's. 01:30:06.510 --> 01:30:12.380 And he actually shared an office with Rob Kurzman at one point chat at at 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 01:30:17.820 --> 01:30:23.420 evolutionary psychology um since he was a graduate student so Ryan is is good at 01:30:23.420 --> 01:30:28.380 translating between disciplines and Ricardo had this background in computer science and 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 01:30:33.660 --> 01:30:37.180 the part that most people have trouble with with evolutionary psychology but for him that 01:30:37.180 --> 01:30:42.730 was like obvious um and so i would ask them questions separately and 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 01:30:49.130 --> 01:30:53.690 both but from very different perspectives 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 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 01:31:03.450 --> 01:31:08.320 historical background of why but they would always have the exact same it was funny because 01:31:08.400 --> 01:31:14.320 their their conclusion about what it is that economists think and why they think it would 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 01:31:20.320 --> 01:31:26.320 hearing an um uh an an outlandish uh 01:31:26.560 --> 01:31:27.200 view. 01:31:27.600 --> 01:31:32.070 Um So, but it takes a long, it can take a long time. 01:31:32.230 --> 01:31:35.030 People you people use the term rationality differently. 01:31:35.270 --> 01:31:35.590 Yeah. 01:31:35.830 --> 01:31:36.150 Right? 01:31:36.310 --> 01:31:40.950 I mean, the term rationality is used in completely different ways in different fields. 01:31:41.270 --> 01:31:47.190 In psychology, you know, starting with um, well, especially with diversity and 01:31:47.270 --> 01:31:48.150 economy, but not just them. 01:31:48.230 --> 01:31:51.830 Yeah, Peter Wyson was interested in logical reasoning, right? 01:31:52.070 --> 01:31:57.040 And he's he's the father of the study of reasoning and psychology, a wonderful 01:31:57.040 --> 01:31:57.920 psychologist. 01:31:58.080 --> 01:32:03.840 Um, and Versky and Kahneman, they they use rationality to mean judgments that 01:32:03.840 --> 01:32:09.520 conform to principles to either uh principles of logic or um 01:32:10.320 --> 01:32:16.320 mathematical theorems about probability, or the savage axioms, you know, which is about 01:32:17.120 --> 01:32:18.400 which is relevant to that. 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 01:32:23.430 --> 01:32:28.710 they kind of there are aspects that of their writing that misinterpret the economic 01:32:28.710 --> 01:32:32.710 perspective because for example when you're doing prospect theory that people think of as 01:32:32.710 --> 01:32:38.150 showing that people have preference reversals it's different groups of subjects 01:32:39.750 --> 01:32:45.480 you you can't actually test whether somebody is violating principles of 01:32:45.480 --> 01:32:50.600 rational choice unless you test the same person in different with different prices and 01:32:50.600 --> 01:32:51.880 different situations. 01:32:52.040 --> 01:32:57.800 You can't you can't have one group of subjects hearing about 01:32:57.880 --> 01:33:02.200 like in that disease problem that 600 people will die if you do nothing. 01:33:02.280 --> 01:33:03.320 And there's these two plans. 01:33:03.480 --> 01:33:09.110 One plan will definitely save 200 people, and the other plan will m has a 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 01:33:13.910 --> 01:33:16.550 have the same expected value of 200 lives. 01:33:16.790 --> 01:33:19.430 Um, you know, which plan do you prefer? 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 01:33:25.590 --> 01:33:27.110 two, definitely 200. 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 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 01:33:37.980 --> 01:33:39.420 of saving everybody. 01:33:39.660 --> 01:33:45.260 And um that doesn't show anything about preference reversals because you can't show 01:33:45.260 --> 01:33:50.700 anything about preference reversals unless you're doing that the same situation in the same 01:33:50.700 --> 01:33:51.020 person. 01:33:52.190 --> 01:33:58.110 It might arguably be testing some auxiliary auxiliary assumptions, but then you know 01:33:58.190 --> 01:34:04.190 Larry Fitch and Sandy Mishra did these 01:34:04.190 --> 01:34:09.150 beautiful experiments on that exact problem, showing that if you 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 01:34:15.710 --> 01:34:17.950 feel like I need to save at least 200 people? 01:34:18.030 --> 01:34:22.060 Or do I feel that I need to save at least 300 people. 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 01:34:27.820 --> 01:34:29.900 have zero chance of saving 300 people. 01:34:30.220 --> 01:34:31.500 You will save fewer than that. 01:34:31.580 --> 01:34:32.060 You must. 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 01:34:38.620 --> 01:34:39.900 framing doesn't make any difference. 01:34:39.980 --> 01:34:44.700 It doesn't matter what you put in lives lost, lives saves, it makes zero difference. 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 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 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 01:35:01.530 --> 01:35:07.530 versus gain frame um and you ask them afterwards um what was 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 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 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. 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 01:35:29.020 --> 01:35:33.340 was changing what people decided their need level was. 01:35:40.230 --> 01:35:45.830 theory, which came out of game theory and math and economics, 01:35:46.070 --> 01:35:49.750 has nothing to do with either logic or mathematics. 01:35:49.910 --> 01:35:50.070 Yeah. 01:35:50.390 --> 01:35:51.910 Nothing to do with either one. 01:35:52.150 --> 01:35:52.310 Yeah. 01:35:52.470 --> 01:35:56.550 And also and it also has to do with like the social dimension of it. 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 01:36:01.110 --> 01:36:04.870 people or whatever, like that's a linguistic phenomenon, and you have to draw inferences 01:36:04.870 --> 01:36:07.740 about what my intentions are based on that communicative act. 01:36:07.820 --> 01:36:11.500 And you're going to draw different inferences if I frame the situation differently. 01:36:11.660 --> 01:36:15.020 You're going to have different inferences about like what the social expectations are. 01:36:15.180 --> 01:36:18.220 And you're going to have different, and those expectations could be correct. 01:36:18.300 --> 01:36:22.140 You could be judged differently if you respond to the utterance framed in one way versus 01:36:22.140 --> 01:36:22.620 another way. 01:36:22.700 --> 01:36:27.630 And there's actually research showing that that if when people make the quote unquote 01:36:27.710 --> 01:36:33.230 irrational uh decision in those types of disease situations, people actually judge them uh 01:36:33.390 --> 01:36:37.710 morally as better uh if they make the irrational decision, quote unquote, than if they make 01:36:37.710 --> 01:36:38.350 the rational one. 01:36:38.510 --> 01:36:41.790 Because there's a social dimension to it where people are making inferences about your 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 01:36:46.270 --> 01:36:48.350 given a certain uh type of information. 01:36:48.590 --> 01:36:52.920 So uh that is another dimension that is often ignored in these in these problems. 01:36:53.160 --> 01:36:58.760 Just how fluid and and uh language is and how uh we have to infer 01:36:58.920 --> 01:37:04.120 so much about the informative intention of of of of the situation about the the person 01:37:04.120 --> 01:37:07.800 giving you the information and the likely social expectations about responding to that 01:37:07.800 --> 01:37:08.200 utterance. 01:37:08.280 --> 01:37:13.560 So anyway, that's another also an another thing like all this stuff about deliberative 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 01:37:18.790 --> 01:37:22.550 pointing out some aspect of the problem that you weren't thinking about. 01:37:22.950 --> 01:37:23.350 Yeah. 01:37:23.590 --> 01:37:29.510 So, you know, if somebody's talking about saving lives, um, it 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 01:37:34.630 --> 01:37:39.910 really you're not really thinking as much about the number of people that will die. 01:37:40.070 --> 01:37:45.080 I mean, so I think that most times when people are having um 01:37:45.720 --> 01:37:51.480 moral arguments or political arguments and so forth, one of the things that that 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 01:37:57.320 --> 01:38:00.600 problem of the issue that you just had not considered before. 01:38:00.920 --> 01:38:06.670 And so so So, like for example, 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 01:38:11.470 --> 01:38:13.870 is actually in in in part of his work. 01:38:13.950 --> 01:38:18.030 Um, because you know he talks about the moral dumbfounding and how people will have a 01:38:18.030 --> 01:38:20.750 reaction like that incest is gross. 01:38:21.070 --> 01:38:26.920 And then you challenge all the reasons that they give, and the reasons you could challenge 01:38:26.920 --> 01:38:28.760 them all and that has nothing to do with it. 01:38:29.000 --> 01:38:34.680 Um but and I and I I think that absolutely 01:38:34.680 --> 01:38:35.400 happens. 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 01:38:41.640 --> 01:38:43.880 brought out that you didn't think about before. 01:38:44.040 --> 01:38:50.040 Like, you know, if you're thinking about I uh an issue with um soldiers in 01:38:50.040 --> 01:38:56.030 war, won't it matter to you whether they were drafted against 01:38:56.030 --> 01:39:00.830 their will and miserable and want to return to their families as opposed to whether they 01:39:00.830 --> 01:39:03.950 were volunteers who were happy to fight for their country? 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 01:39:09.470 --> 01:39:13.470 make a difference to your judgment about it if somebody points out that these are people 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 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 01:39:23.800 --> 01:39:25.240 is not just a soldier, right? 01:39:25.960 --> 01:39:30.920 There's a difference in how you might think about it depending on whether they 01:39:31.400 --> 01:39:33.480 volunteered or they were drafted. 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 01:39:37.400 --> 01:39:37.640 about. 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 01:39:43.320 --> 01:39:45.080 of the problem you didn't think about before. 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 01:39:49.850 --> 01:39:50.490 reasoning. 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 01:39:54.010 --> 01:39:55.770 changing the way you frame the problem. 01:39:56.250 --> 01:39:56.650 Right? 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 01:40:01.450 --> 01:40:06.010 involve what these people expect from me and how they'll judge me. 01:40:06.250 --> 01:40:09.610 That can absolutely be part of the framing of the problem. 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 01:40:16.520 --> 01:40:18.760 defect affect what utility function I create. 01:40:18.920 --> 01:40:23.320 Because I think that the economists are wrong when they think you have a gigantic utility 01:40:23.320 --> 01:40:25.400 function that applies to all space and time. 01:40:26.760 --> 01:40:30.840 I think they generated on the fly in response to situations. 01:40:31.400 --> 01:40:33.640 I think that's more cognitively reasonable. 01:40:33.800 --> 01:40:38.520 And that we also showed it in in our in our moral trade-off uh studies. 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 01:40:44.410 --> 01:40:50.010 across disciplines and and um but it's not simple 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 01:40:56.170 --> 01:41:00.810 treating things that you might easily poo-poo or think are stupid with respect. 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 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 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 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 01:41:22.400 --> 01:41:27.200 happy about a talk that some of the early graduate students thought was quote unquote dumb. 01:41:27.360 --> 01:41:32.160 And it was because you were learning something that the graduate students were missing. 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 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 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 01:41:44.390 --> 01:41:44.630 right? 01:41:44.870 --> 01:41:48.310 Or like in what respect could it be correct and what insight is there? 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 01:41:52.710 --> 01:41:56.310 is kind of implicit, but Dave and I have talked about it, like in evolutionary psychology, 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 01:42:01.420 --> 01:42:01.740 happening. 01:42:01.900 --> 01:42:03.820 I like evolutionary approaches. 01:42:04.060 --> 01:42:04.700 It's easy. 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. 01:42:08.300 --> 01:42:09.820 And there was a sense in which it was. 01:42:09.900 --> 01:42:12.620 Like the things I I didn't like were wrong. 01:42:12.780 --> 01:42:15.500 I mean, this is, you know, what attracted me to Evpsych. 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 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 01:42:26.170 --> 01:42:30.170 way it was right, even though I didn't agree with it at the time. 01:42:30.330 --> 01:42:34.010 And I think that's an important mature way to approach science. 01:42:34.090 --> 01:42:34.490 Yeah. 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 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 01:42:45.130 --> 01:42:50.760 where there's nothing interesting in their data because you have your own mind 01:42:50.920 --> 01:42:52.920 and you have your own questions in mind. 01:42:53.000 --> 01:42:57.720 And sometimes their data is is telling you something or suggesting something very 01:42:57.720 --> 01:43:00.440 interesting with respect to your own what you're thinking. 01:43:00.600 --> 01:43:05.560 I mean, it's not that there's never a talk that I but 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 01:43:12.040 --> 01:43:15.270 thinking about from the talk that I'm that I'm hearing. 01:43:15.430 --> 01:43:18.630 I like hearing talks because I I I read really slowly. 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 01:43:23.590 --> 01:43:26.230 explaining what it what they're thinking and why they're doing what they're doing. 01:43:26.390 --> 01:43:28.070 I I I like that. 01:43:28.310 --> 01:43:31.830 Um and also people don't always explain that when they write a paper. 01:43:32.150 --> 01:43:32.630 Yes. 01:43:32.870 --> 01:43:33.110 Right? 01:43:33.190 --> 01:43:36.950 People don't always explain why they're asking the question that they are asking. 01:43:37.030 --> 01:43:38.870 And in a talk usually they do. 01:43:39.620 --> 01:43:39.780 Yeah. 01:43:39.940 --> 01:43:42.740 Papers are weird uh artifacts. 01:43:43.220 --> 01:43:44.020 Oh my god. 01:43:45.140 --> 01:43:46.500 To put it smiling. 01:43:47.540 --> 01:43:52.500 We should be submitting, you know, uh recorded monologues to journals and it should be 01:43:52.500 --> 01:43:53.460 audio journals. 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 01:44:01.030 --> 01:44:04.550 we don't have a research grant from the right European 01:44:06.950 --> 01:44:10.070 entity, but it's called uh Open Research Europe. 01:44:10.310 --> 01:44:11.270 Have you heard about this? 01:44:11.510 --> 01:44:16.310 It's doing things the way that John always had this notion about how publishing should 01:44:16.310 --> 01:44:16.550 work. 01:44:16.870 --> 01:44:19.190 And uh in many ways it's doing that. 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 01:44:25.110 --> 01:44:26.800 this it is in Europe. 01:44:27.360 --> 01:44:30.160 They want the data to be openly available. 01:44:30.320 --> 01:44:35.200 So when you write up the paper, it's it's it's published immediately. 01:44:35.520 --> 01:44:41.280 Then the editors ask people to be peer reviewers and 01:44:41.360 --> 01:44:43.840 and and signed peer reviewers. 01:44:44.000 --> 01:44:49.440 And so so often people are more careful when and how they say things. 01:44:49.600 --> 01:44:51.520 And those reviews will be posted. 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 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 01:45:03.270 --> 01:45:04.550 paper to see the light of day. 01:45:04.630 --> 01:45:10.150 I thought that was really interesting that somebody figured out a way of doing that. 01:45:10.230 --> 01:45:14.470 Unfortunately, it's not something that the three of us can submit anything to because we 01:45:14.470 --> 01:45:18.950 don't have the grant from the right agencies, or I assume not um in Europe. 01:45:19.030 --> 01:45:20.390 But I thought that was interesting. 01:45:20.710 --> 01:45:21.030 Yeah. 01:45:22.000 --> 01:45:22.320 Yeah. 01:45:22.800 --> 01:45:28.480 Insert joke about Elsevier here, but yeah, uh, that's that's another 01:45:28.480 --> 01:45:28.960 issue. 01:45:29.200 --> 01:45:33.200 Um yeah, um uh Lita, we're coming towards the end of our time. 01:45:33.280 --> 01:45:34.400 I'm sure we'll have you back on. 01:45:34.560 --> 01:45:36.640 Is there something that we should have asked you? 01:45:36.880 --> 01:45:41.120 No I'm sure there's like 40 things, but yeah. 01:45:41.680 --> 01:45:46.290 Um I I I don't know. 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, 01:45:52.130 --> 01:45:54.690 um I'm one of the oldest people left. 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 01:46:02.370 --> 01:46:07.920 with John uh this new way of thinking about human nature and human 01:46:07.920 --> 01:46:08.480 condition. 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 01:46:14.480 --> 01:46:17.200 uh and on intellectual life. 01:46:17.520 --> 01:46:23.280 Um are there any regrets you have about the way that you put those ideas 01:46:23.280 --> 01:46:24.800 forward, the way you framed them? 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? 01:46:29.360 --> 01:46:31.280 Um nope. 01:46:32.350 --> 01:46:32.670 Nope. 01:46:32.830 --> 01:46:35.870 And and also I'm I'm I'm I'm really okay. 01:46:36.110 --> 01:46:40.270 So I I'm usually the cheerier view and John's the darker view. 01:46:40.510 --> 01:46:46.190 Um uh but I'm amazed that how this kind of 01:46:46.190 --> 01:46:47.470 thinking has taken off. 01:46:47.710 --> 01:46:53.560 It's really it's hard to find in almost any domain that 01:46:53.560 --> 01:46:59.480 I'm interested in, um where people aren't now considering, well, what 01:47:00.120 --> 01:47:05.960 so you in if you're watching even if you're watching podcasts 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 01:47:11.240 --> 01:47:12.360 been eating ancestrally? 01:47:12.440 --> 01:47:13.400 What would that have been like? 01:47:13.560 --> 01:47:15.560 Maybe we're adapted to some of that. 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 01:47:21.390 --> 01:47:26.590 podcast by medical researchers, they'll be actually considering some something that they 01:47:26.590 --> 01:47:28.270 were never considering before. 01:47:28.430 --> 01:47:34.270 That doesn't mean that they're full-blown adaptationists, but 01:47:34.590 --> 01:47:40.270 they're they're I actually years ago, I was I was sitting, 01:47:40.430 --> 01:47:42.190 Dave, you remember Tupelo Junction? 01:47:42.270 --> 01:47:46.030 It used to be a lovely restaurant in Santa Barbara that I wish still existed. 01:47:46.110 --> 01:47:46.270 Yes. 01:47:46.510 --> 01:47:46.750 Yes. 01:47:46.990 --> 01:47:50.750 Well, it apparently it exists um down near where Aaron Lukashewski lives. 01:47:51.080 --> 01:47:53.000 Okay, so more towards LA, yeah. 01:47:53.240 --> 01:47:53.640 Yes. 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 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, 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 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 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. 01:48:17.050 --> 01:48:22.170 I just remember laughing to myself because that is not something you would have heard, you 01:48:22.170 --> 01:48:24.250 know, five years before. 01:48:24.410 --> 01:48:26.730 And I now I hear this all over the place. 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. 01:48:32.330 --> 01:48:37.770 And the idea that there are that we have a psychology that that is shaped by 01:48:38.440 --> 01:48:43.560 those past circumstances is now part of how people think. 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 01:48:49.240 --> 01:48:51.000 have in mind and that they're considering. 01:48:51.320 --> 01:48:56.840 Do I wish that people were more cognitive or more computational in their thinking? 01:48:57.080 --> 01:48:57.720 Yes. 01:48:57.960 --> 01:49:00.680 But I mean, at least in psychology. 01:49:01.090 --> 01:49:04.370 But the situation is so much better than it ever was before. 01:49:04.450 --> 01:49:08.050 It's so much it's so much better than it ever was before. 01:49:08.210 --> 01:49:09.730 That I I think it's great. 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 01:49:15.970 --> 01:49:16.210 it. 01:49:16.450 --> 01:49:16.770 Yeah. 01:49:17.010 --> 01:49:21.650 Um so no no I I I stand I stand by it. 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 01:49:27.500 --> 01:49:33.180 wrote the journal personality article, the one about on the uh universality of human nature 01:49:33.180 --> 01:49:35.260 and the uniqueness of the individual. 01:49:35.900 --> 01:49:40.780 That and maybe also in 89, we used the term innate. 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 01:49:46.060 --> 01:49:48.610 Martin Daly and Marco Wilson and David Buss. 01:49:49.170 --> 01:49:52.930 Martin would yell at yell at us for using the term innate. 01:49:53.250 --> 01:49:55.570 And and and he was right. 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 01:50:00.930 --> 01:50:02.210 was the target of selection. 01:50:02.770 --> 01:50:05.090 Innate means a million things to a million people. 01:50:05.250 --> 01:50:07.010 Do you mean that it doesn't develop? 01:50:07.320 --> 01:50:08.840 No, you don't mean it doesn't develop. 01:50:08.920 --> 01:50:13.560 Do you mean that its development is not influenced by any environmental contingencies? 01:50:13.720 --> 01:50:15.000 No, you don't mean that. 01:50:15.240 --> 01:50:17.000 And he was completely right. 01:50:17.160 --> 01:50:22.040 I mean, I I usually it's longer, but I usually say reliably developing species typical 01:50:22.040 --> 01:50:27.560 mechanism, or I say an adaptation, by which I mean a reliably developing species typical 01:50:27.560 --> 01:50:29.720 mechanism that was designed by natural selection. 01:50:29.880 --> 01:50:34.440 Um uh Martin was completely, completely right about that. 01:50:34.680 --> 01:50:39.690 And um, I think the term innate does take people down the wrong paths. 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 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. 01:50:49.210 --> 01:50:53.930 Or there are lots of of of things that make no sense. 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. 01:50:58.490 --> 01:51:04.480 Um, you know, lots of things that are reliably developing features of phenotype were not 01:51:04.480 --> 01:51:06.080 present at birth. 01:51:07.040 --> 01:51:12.160 So that, but but no, sometimes people thought we were too harsh. 01:51:12.480 --> 01:51:14.400 I don't actually think we were ever too harsh. 01:51:14.560 --> 01:51:18.320 I think in in in psychological foundations of culture and talking about the standards 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 01:51:24.470 --> 01:51:25.190 that direction. 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 01:51:30.870 --> 01:51:33.590 that the alternative implies that you will be racist. 01:51:35.590 --> 01:51:39.110 The alternative does not mean that you are racist or sexist. 01:51:39.910 --> 01:51:44.550 The people were not understanding the difference between causes of individual differences 01:51:44.870 --> 01:51:48.950 and um universal aspects of human nature. 01:51:49.720 --> 01:51:52.840 So I don't think we were the least bit harsh. 01:51:53.000 --> 01:51:54.920 I think we were really sympathetic. 01:51:55.080 --> 01:51:57.160 We didn't say you're a bunch of bozos. 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. 01:52:04.360 --> 01:52:08.040 You take somebody from one continent, you raise them on another continent, they are, they 01:52:08.040 --> 01:52:10.120 behave like the people on the new continent. 01:52:10.200 --> 01:52:13.560 And we're we were, I think it was very sympathetic. 01:52:13.720 --> 01:52:18.440 People always think that you're like trying to take their tribe to task. 01:52:18.790 --> 01:52:24.310 and you know the universality of human nature and uniqueness of the individual paper. 01:52:24.550 --> 01:52:30.550 Like a lot of behavior geneticists were angry because they said we're that we're 01:52:30.550 --> 01:52:36.390 saying they're just studying noise, which is a genetic noise, which is not exactly what 01:52:36.390 --> 01:52:37.430 we were saying. 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 01:52:43.030 --> 01:52:45.430 differences are the products of adaptations. 01:52:46.790 --> 01:52:50.100 But but no, I don't I don't know. 01:52:50.980 --> 01:52:51.220 Yeah. 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 01:52:57.700 --> 01:53:01.300 uh based on the way in which it is misunderstood by people. 01:53:01.540 --> 01:53:05.860 I remember, you know, Richard Dawkins had regrets that he titled his book The Selfish Gene, 01:53:06.020 --> 01:53:10.500 because so many people misinterpreted it as implying that we're genetically selfish, right? 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, 01:53:14.660 --> 01:53:14.900 right? 01:53:15.540 --> 01:53:18.170 Um but I actually think he's wrong. 01:53:18.330 --> 01:53:20.890 I think it's it's correct to call it the self machine. 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 01:53:25.210 --> 01:53:25.610 describe it. 01:53:25.770 --> 01:53:30.730 Yes, some people have misunderstood it, but you cannot judge the utility of a metaphor or 01:53:30.890 --> 01:53:34.410 or framing based on the misunderstandings of people. 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 01:53:39.690 --> 01:53:39.930 it. 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 01:53:46.080 --> 01:53:51.280 regret using uh the term propaganda or propagandistic bias in in my paper on political 01:53:51.280 --> 01:53:51.760 belief systems. 01:53:52.160 --> 01:53:53.280 Yeah I disagree with that David. 01:53:53.360 --> 01:53:54.640 I think you should I think it's great. 01:53:54.720 --> 01:53:57.840 I think propaganda should be call that when it is yeah. 01:53:58.160 --> 01:53:58.320 Yeah. 01:53:58.480 --> 01:54:01.280 And and you're making me think that maybe I shouldn't like regret that. 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 01:54:05.280 --> 01:54:07.280 think it it's an insightful way of putting it. 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 01:54:12.850 --> 01:54:18.450 please everybody there's no thing you can write that will please everybody my whenever I 01:54:18.450 --> 01:54:24.290 get really frustrated uh and and and and feel attacked 01:54:24.610 --> 01:54:29.970 um my dad uh my dad said 01:54:31.000 --> 01:54:32.680 what are you talking about? 01:54:33.000 --> 01:54:35.560 Jesus Christ was crucified. 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 01:54:40.760 --> 01:54:41.800 object, right? 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 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 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 01:55:08.690 --> 01:55:10.770 want to read something super bland will not be happy. 01:55:10.930 --> 01:55:12.370 This is just not possible. 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 01:55:15.890 --> 01:55:16.130 possible. 01:55:16.290 --> 01:55:18.770 What you should aspire to is being clear. 01:55:19.020 --> 01:55:19.260 Yeah. 01:55:20.140 --> 01:55:23.020 Clear and also respectful. 01:55:23.260 --> 01:55:23.500 Yeah. 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. 01:55:29.580 --> 01:55:30.860 Yeah, I think that's right. 01:55:31.020 --> 01:55:36.940 I think um uh uh uh respecting the intelligence 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 01:55:43.420 --> 01:55:49.410 yes this is also why um when you ask questions in a 01:55:49.410 --> 01:55:53.090 talk of somebody, it should never be hostile. 01:55:53.250 --> 01:55:56.290 I mean it should never be asked in an angry way. 01:55:56.690 --> 01:55:57.090 Yes. 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 01:56:02.690 --> 01:56:03.570 call for being angry. 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 01:56:08.850 --> 01:56:09.890 what's right and what's wrong. 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 01:56:16.180 --> 01:56:22.020 important for science to be polite because in science people have to be willing 01:56:22.340 --> 01:56:24.660 to acknowledge when they were wrong about something. 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, 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. 01:56:37.770 --> 01:56:40.330 It's mean, but but more than that, it's bad for science. 01:56:40.410 --> 01:56:43.850 You just want to ask the question as clearly as as you can. 01:56:46.410 --> 01:56:50.010 And and and and not build a bad as censoring yourself. 01:56:50.090 --> 01:56:51.770 That's not censoring yourself. 01:56:52.010 --> 01:56:54.970 It's being clear and respecting the human being. 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 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 01:57:04.640 --> 01:57:06.800 laughing um together. 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 01:57:12.400 --> 01:57:12.880 happening? 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 01:57:17.120 --> 01:57:17.760 along. 01:57:19.200 --> 01:57:21.360 You know, bet the pitcher of beer. 01:57:21.520 --> 01:57:21.600 Yeah. 01:57:21.990 --> 01:57:23.030 Bet the pitcher of beer. 01:57:23.110 --> 01:57:23.350 Yeah. 01:57:23.510 --> 01:57:26.470 You know, it's the beer pitcher litmus test. 01:57:26.550 --> 01:57:29.830 If you can't, if it's not that level of civility, maybe don't yeah. 01:57:29.990 --> 01:57:30.310 That's right. 01:57:30.630 --> 01:57:35.430 Or specificity where you have a specific claim that you could learn from with an empirical 01:57:35.430 --> 01:57:35.670 test. 01:57:35.910 --> 01:57:37.750 Like that's also part of the beauty of that. 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 01:57:43.270 --> 01:57:48.230 this, but it's also like you're actually testing your idea against reality. 01:57:48.550 --> 01:57:48.710 Yeah. 01:57:49.430 --> 01:57:49.590 Yeah. 01:57:50.580 --> 01:57:53.700 Yeah, it's standing side by side doing science. 01:57:53.780 --> 01:57:55.380 Uh and yeah, exactly. 01:57:55.540 --> 01:57:55.940 Yeah. 01:57:56.100 --> 01:57:57.220 It's lovely. 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 01:58:01.540 --> 01:58:02.500 for being here. 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, 01:58:08.580 --> 01:58:12.340 on the way out of our episodes, we get to say something about people's influence. 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. 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 01:58:23.550 --> 01:58:29.550 guys truly are scientists in this way of just respecting what's true and 01:58:29.550 --> 01:58:31.390 trying to be respectful of people. 01:58:31.630 --> 01:58:37.390 Um, and I didn't realize how rare that was until I continued in the 01:58:37.390 --> 01:58:38.110 academy. 01:58:38.190 --> 01:58:43.980 Um, and there really is a difference between uh academics and scientists, and not 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. 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 01:58:53.580 --> 01:58:54.220 definition. 01:58:54.460 --> 01:59:00.220 And um, you you and John um are very much scientists in ways that um 01:59:00.220 --> 01:59:03.100 I still work hard to be like. 01:59:03.260 --> 01:59:05.500 So well, that human nature thing, you know. 01:59:05.830 --> 01:59:08.070 That human nature thing sometimes gets in the way. 01:59:08.390 --> 01:59:11.910 Yeah, there's a lot of strong selection pressures to not be a scientist. 01:59:13.430 --> 01:59:14.230 Exactly. 01:59:14.390 --> 01:59:14.550 Yeah. 01:59:15.110 --> 01:59:17.590 Well, thank you very much for for having me on. 01:59:17.670 --> 01:59:18.710 I I appreciate it. 01:59:18.790 --> 01:59:20.390 And I I think what you're doing is great. 01:59:20.550 --> 01:59:23.270 I know a lot of people who listen to your podcasts. 01:59:23.510 --> 01:59:25.270 Um That's great. 01:59:25.510 --> 01:59:29.670 Uh you'll have to um uh um tell us who they are. 01:59:31.280 --> 01:59:32.240 Probably know who they are. 01:59:32.400 --> 01:59:33.600 But uh but thank you, Lita. 01:59:33.840 --> 01:59:35.280 It was it was absolutely lovely. 01:59:35.440 --> 01:59:39.360 And um yeah, I'm sure we'll um have have you on again. 01:59:39.680 --> 01:59:40.160 Yeah. 01:59:40.400 --> 01:59:40.800 All right. 01:59:41.120 --> 01:59:42.000 Thanks so much. 01:59:44.800 --> 01:59:46.880 Well, here you are, uh still listening. 01:59:46.960 --> 01:59:52.800 You just listened to an episode with Leda Cosmodes, one of the founders of evolutionary 01:59:52.800 --> 01:59:53.680 psychology. 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 01:59:58.790 --> 02:00:00.390 the podcast, you can support us. 02:00:00.550 --> 02:00:02.150 And how can people support us, Dave? 02:00:02.390 --> 02:00:07.430 Uh read the 1987 um Missing Link paper by John and Alita. 02:00:07.990 --> 02:00:08.630 Yep. 02:00:09.350 --> 02:00:14.550 And uh read the Evpsych Primer on the CP website. 02:00:14.870 --> 02:00:17.430 And um leave some reviews. 02:00:17.590 --> 02:00:19.670 Send David a pan a fanny pack. 02:00:19.910 --> 02:00:20.230 Yeah. 02:00:20.470 --> 02:00:22.300 You still haven't gotten the fanny pack, I assume. 02:00:22.540 --> 02:00:25.180 No, I'm still I'm really miffed about this. 02:00:25.260 --> 02:00:26.780 No, no one's sending me a fanny pack. 02:00:26.860 --> 02:00:27.900 I'm fanny packless. 02:00:28.060 --> 02:00:28.220 Yeah. 02:00:28.780 --> 02:00:31.260 Uh we haven't gotten any emails about t-shirts. 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. 02:00:37.340 --> 02:00:37.660 Yeah. 02:00:37.900 --> 02:00:38.460 Some gear? 02:00:38.620 --> 02:00:39.740 Yeah, maybe. 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 02:00:44.940 --> 02:00:46.700 going to be able to pay for the gear. 02:00:47.340 --> 02:00:48.380 So yeah. 02:00:48.620 --> 02:00:49.660 What gear? 02:00:50.250 --> 02:00:54.890 Uh I mean T shirts and fanny packs for sure, maybe a hat. 02:00:55.130 --> 02:00:59.610 Um might be cool to have evolutionary psychology shoes. 02:01:02.010 --> 02:01:03.530 That's not what I was expecting. 02:01:03.770 --> 02:01:05.130 What kind of shoes? 02:01:06.250 --> 02:01:08.650 Like shoes with like, you know, kind of like brains on them. 02:01:08.810 --> 02:01:09.290 I don't know. 02:01:09.530 --> 02:01:11.610 Yeah, but uh no, well, yes, that part. 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? 02:01:17.930 --> 02:01:19.850 Uh just like you know, sneakers. 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 02:01:26.020 --> 02:01:31.940 pack t-shirt and like kind of like um like 1950s gym shoes basically 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 02:01:37.780 --> 02:01:43.380 okay yeah air air cosmedies I don't know uh it's very like uh nineties 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 02:01:49.630 --> 02:01:51.950 gear, you gotta you gotta pony up on Patreon. 02:01:52.110 --> 02:01:52.350 Okay. 02:01:52.510 --> 02:01:53.950 Because uh this stuff ain't free. 02:01:54.270 --> 02:01:55.230 Is this all black? 02:01:55.310 --> 02:01:57.150 I'm imagining Yeah. 02:01:57.310 --> 02:01:58.590 Yeah, it's black. 02:01:59.470 --> 02:02:02.910 It's very it has a very cards against humanity aesthetic, actually. 02:02:02.990 --> 02:02:05.230 I wasn't it wasn't what I was going for, but yeah. 02:02:05.630 --> 02:02:07.150 That's true, it does, coincidentally. 02:02:07.470 --> 02:02:09.230 I mean it's the ultimate aesthetic, really. 02:02:09.550 --> 02:02:14.670 Do you guys ever uh uh the joke around about changing that to like a color? 02:02:15.420 --> 02:02:16.460 Or is that locked in? 02:02:16.540 --> 02:02:17.180 That's part of the brain. 02:02:17.500 --> 02:02:18.460 Oh, it's it's locked in. 02:02:18.540 --> 02:02:18.780 Yeah. 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 02:02:23.020 --> 02:02:23.580 Helvetica. 02:02:24.620 --> 02:02:30.460 Like the two the the like the two most different possible colors in the most 02:02:30.700 --> 02:02:33.340 widespread possible font to like we somehow own that now. 02:02:33.660 --> 02:02:34.300 That's awesome. 02:02:34.380 --> 02:02:35.020 Good for you guys. 02:02:35.180 --> 02:02:35.420 Yeah. 02:02:35.580 --> 02:02:37.740 Hey, that's that's that's when you yeah. 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 02:02:42.330 --> 02:02:43.290 some positive reviews. 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 02:02:48.650 --> 02:02:52.090 the occasional offbeat criticism too, I have to say. 02:02:52.170 --> 02:02:53.850 Um keep those coming as well. 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 02:02:58.250 --> 02:03:00.090 respectful way, honestly. 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 02:03:05.450 --> 02:03:05.930 funny. 02:03:06.300 --> 02:03:06.860 That's true. 02:03:06.940 --> 02:03:07.180 Yeah. 02:03:07.340 --> 02:03:09.100 Either way, we're gonna be happy. 02:03:09.260 --> 02:03:11.180 So uh yeah, please dish it out. 02:03:11.580 --> 02:03:13.100 Everybody, thanks for listening, David. 02:03:13.180 --> 02:03:15.340 Uh have a good week and I'll see you next week. 02:03:15.580 --> 02:03:16.700 All right, see ya.