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David, this is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

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Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologist.

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You're David Pinsoff.

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I'm Dave Petrozowski.

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Do you have anything to say?

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Wow, you got it all by yourself.

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I didn't even need to help you in any way.

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All right.

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Well, you can do the next part.

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All right.

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Uh enjoy listening.

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We have a very special guest, the amazing Clark Barrett, professor of

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anthropology at UCLA.

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I interacted uh a lot with him while I was at UCLA.

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Uh he was on my dissertation committee.

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Wonderful, brilliant thinker, uh really insightful guy.

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I think he's perhaps the best at integrating and merging different uh perspectives

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within the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

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Uh, you know, his book, How mental adaptations are sorry, The Shape of Thought, How Mental

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Adaptations Evolve, uh, is uh a a wonderful text in terms of integrating

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evolutionary psychology with cultural evolution, uh, with human behavioral ecology, uh,

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showing how um we're all studying the same thing and uh we can all just get along.

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Yeah.

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Clark is sort of, I I, in my view, is sort of the um second wave evpsy

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person, one of the main second wave evpsych people in the sense of after the initial

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generation of psych people, to just sort of say, look, here is what the mature science

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looks like.

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Here's the boundaries of it.

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And let's avoid the unnecessary arguments and baggage.

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And let's do what what can we do generatively going forward?

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And um and I think this conversation is a good example of Clark's philosophy of

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respecting the insights of lots of different diverse uh viewpoints and then

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steel manning them as you as you put it in this episode.

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Yes.

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And then we we cover a lot of really interesting topics, uh spirituality, uh social

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cognition.

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Uh we get into ayahuasca, we get into ghost murders, drugs and rock and roll.

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Drugs and rock and roll, um, you name it.

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And and just the future of evolutionary social science uh and how we can create a bigger

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tent and be more welcoming to lots of different people and uh lots of different cultures.

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Uh so um this was a wonderful just wide ranging conversation with a really great

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thinker and I think you'll enjoy it.

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And fish with two jaws.

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Yeah, we even get into fish.

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Yeah he was a fish guy.

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You'll hear all about that soon.

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So enjoy.

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So we can just get right into it.

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Clark, you don't have to answer this, but one thing I don't know about you, or the or maybe

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the beginning of the story, is you are a a younger Clark Barrett is on a boat

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studying fish.

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Can you paint us that picture?

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And how did you get there?

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And how did you get to where you are now from there?

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Yeah.

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Well, I can't guarantee that that ever happened, but I do have some

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memories to that effect.

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Okay.

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Um it might have been implanted in you.

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Yeah.

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But you did you studied like fish, right?

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Yes, I I um I my early dream was to be a

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marine biologist, um, influenced by childhood viewings

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of Jacques Cousteau, and also um my dad had a a

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business um boat business, and uh we were on boats a lot, and including in

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the Caribbean, and so there I learned how to snorkel and then later scuba dive.

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When I was in an undergraduate, I actually was a bio major and I did an honors thesis at

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Harvard on reproductive seasonality in rainforest stream fish, and

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which would not technically be marine biology because those are freshwater fish.

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But um yeah, I was a fish guy.

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And uh then I started grad school at UCSB

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um for a year or two working in the biodepartment and

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um you know didn't really hadn't really selected a project or anything like that but I did

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go and um you know help some of the other graduate students who were doing their research

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down in St.

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Croix.

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And at that point I realized that um humans might be my thing uh

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more than fish even though studying and learning about fish definitely informed

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um lots of lots of what I do including you know the fish behavior stuff but also my

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undergrad mentor at um at Harvard was Carl Leem who's a functional morphologist

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And his claim to fame was trying to understand why cichlid fish have

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two jaws, an inner and an outer jaw.

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And that played a role in their diversification.

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I don't know if you know that cichlids are one of the most diverse family of freshwater

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fish.

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And they um, because they can specialize their inner and outer jaws separately, um, there's

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many niches that they can occupy.

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Um so it kind of preadapts them for diversification or adaptive radiation.

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That was his that was his hypothesis anyway.

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So that's cool.

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You know, there was a connection there with functional morphology, which then, you know,

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thinking about adaptationism in the context of evolutionary psychology, I feel like I was

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already kind of ready to start thinking about that.

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Sort of like a Swiss army jaw.

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It can sort of be that's cool.

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Yes.

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In addition to a uh uh jaw muscular adaptation.

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Yes, and and it's and it's kind of interesting to think about what the phenomenology of

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these fish is when they're controlling their inner and outer jaw separately and and and um

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you know cool.

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Uh they also you know that the they're one of the fish um that are mouth uh they they

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breed their they protect their young inside their mouth.

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Oh, cool.

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So um the babies hatch out of the eggs.

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And then I mean, sometimes you can see this in aquarium stores.

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They'll all like run into the mother's mouth um when it's danger time.

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And so there's also got to be a lot of circuitry there to decide, you know, when to start

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chewing or not.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And avoid swimming into the wrong mouth.

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That's right.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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The baby design can't be swim into the nearest fish's mouth when you get in feel danger.

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Yeah, that's not that's a dead end.

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Yeah.

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Yep.

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Interesting.

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And then you and then from there, so you decided people.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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And I, you know, I'd always I had always been interested in um also as an undergraduate, I

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I really wanted to double major in biology and philosophy because I was always interested

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in philosophy of mind, um, interested in questions about consciousness and free will.

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And I think, you know, early on, I had a strong intuition that evolution

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could tell us about some of those things.

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But as an undergraduate, with, you know, it wasn't really feasible to do

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to double major in those things and do an honors thesis that would encompass both.

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And so I really doubled down on the biology side.

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And I think when I got to graduate school and started getting a sense of what is possible

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in a PhD, um, I realized that there was a more open set of

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possibilities than you know what you can study as an undergrad, at least at that time.

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And so yeah, that's when I switched over within UCSB to work with um Tubi

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and Cosmodies.

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How did you find them?

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The phone book.

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Okay.

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So paint a picture for the kids that are.

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Did you know that is that like Facebook?

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Like what is the phone book?

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Like No, this is the this is this is the strange thing.

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It was it was um it was uh some sort of reverse

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landing um where I did not know what evolutionary psychology was at that time, uh at least

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to the best of my recollection.

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Um you know, I was I was familiar with um that there was that there were evolutionary

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approaches to human behavior, um including you know Io Wilson and um Stephen Jay

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Gould and others that I interacted with at Harvard.

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So I was familiar with that, but I I just didn't know I didn't know John and Lita and I

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didn't know that they were at UCSB.

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And I just started looking around.

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You know, this was nineteen ninety.

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Yeah, it's the early days of John and Lita, yeah.

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One, ninety two, something like that.

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So um there wasn't you know the same kind of um was there even an internet then i can't

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remember um i mean what what luck maybe enormous luck people are using

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so so it's like yeah I'm looking in the directory of these different departments for which

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for the faculty and you know what their specializations are and uh yeah and I actually

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called John's um you know landline.

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Um did you pick up?

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No.

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It was in his lab and and one of the students picked up.

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But you know, eventually I ended up meeting with them and and um yeah, moved over to to

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start working with them in the anthro department.

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You just happened to be at the epicenter of evolutionary psychology right at the moment

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that it was being born.

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Yes.

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Like I said, you know, that's the that's my personal mythology, whether I'm remembering it

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wrong.

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Exactly.

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But I'm pretty sure that's how I'm pretty sure that's how that's how it happened.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And then um I love your uh your dissertation work is on predator prey stuff.

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Yes.

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And I think because you've done so many wonderful things since then, um, but at least for

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me, there's a very special place in my heart for the predator prey work.

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You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.

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Like I know everybody feels differently about their dissertation work.

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But um it was that um part of your

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figuring out how to take an evolutionary approach to people?

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Like was that addressing the interest that you had?

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Like what how did you get on that topic?

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Yeah, I mean, it it did end up going in that direction.

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So it was a a way to you know it was a way to unify my background and

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knowledge in biology and ecology um with an interest in

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how we how we humans think about the mind.

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And so um, you know, the I the idea was to kind of look at how

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What kinds of models, if you will, people have of animal of animal minds and animal

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behavior?

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Um, and it was, you know, honestly, a lot of it was John

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Tuby's idea.

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Um, both John and Lita, you know, they they kind of pushed me to that.

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When I came, I I I was, you know, I mentioned that I had this interest in free will and

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consciousness, and um, you know, I wanted to go straight for the jugular on that.

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And they they did the right thing as advisors and said, that's too big of a bite to to you

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know to attempt for a PhD.

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And so go for go for something more tractable.

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And um, and so I, you know, I ended up doing the predator prey stuff and turned it into um,

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you know, something that actually did steer towards this direction of like models of the

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mind, how we think about free will and consciousness and and you know, agency, I guess, is

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the better concept there.

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Um, and I and I still am interested in this idea of you know, I

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think part of the key, I Dave, I know you you've you've you've done some stuff also on free

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will and and that topic.

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And you know, I think one of the sources of evidence about it that we should attend to is

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how and why people think about free will.

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Um, you know, when we attribute choice to others, when do we do that?

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Why do we do that?

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Um, and I'm actually in the camp that thinks, you know, yes,

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we may be mistaken sometimes, but human social cognition is so good

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that I think that when people make a distinction between, you know, voluntarily chosen

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action and something else, they're onto something.

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And I do think that there are mysteries there.

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But to me, that's an angle that we should pursue more.

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And I think hasn't been pursued as much because people in neuroscience and psychology, when

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they look at these questions, they they tend to think of it more like, you know, let's get

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inside the box and see what's in there, as opposed to um why do humans

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attribute uh these kinds of properties and processes to other organisms and when and what

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use does it do to them uh for them and so on.

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And that that kind of led to my interest in moral cognition and this question of, you know,

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culpability, which is can be closely linked to um our models of you know how

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much control we have over our own behavior and things like that.

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Cool.

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Yeah.

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I mean, it and you've done cross-cultural work so on sort of like intention and things like

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that.

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And that's another thing we can um maybe talk about.

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But what but what I'm hearing you say is that the one mistake or a difference between

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evolutionary approaches and non, or at least the kind that you're doing,

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is is sort of taking a step back and saying why would an

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organism think this way, or what's the sense that it would make?

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But that that also sort of assumes that um our introspection about it isn't

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the the end all and be all, which I think you get from an evolutionary approach.

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Right.

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I agree with that totally.

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Yeah.

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And you know, and and we do in know, psychologists,

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anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, we do understand broadly that you know

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people are some of the best source of evidence about.

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I mean, if we're, you know, we look, we get data from how people think about things, right?

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Um, but maybe it's not so common

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to take those data as actually telling you a little bit about the things that they're

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about, the targets of those cog of that cognition.

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I mean, to me, I think in in in, you know, so so when we look at say intuitive physics, to

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take an example that people talk about, like nobody would really well, maybe they would,

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but it seems unlikely that somebody would study the actual ontological reality of the

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physical world by looking at how people think about it.

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Although I guess maybe right.

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Yeah.

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But it's different in a domain like morality or the understanding of human behavior, right?

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Because, well, certainly morality is one where it's very complicated, but the object itself

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may be entirely a construction of the human mind.

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So if you want to understand it, you know, you should be looking at how people think about

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it.

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Um, which is not how it's always done, or it's not always how it has been

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done in philosophy, because a lot of times it's from the armchair and thinking about

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metaphysics and things like that and not taking human data seriously.

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So morality is a good domain to think about it.

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Um humans as a source of understanding the phenomenon itself.

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Yeah.

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And, you know, thinking how how people think about the mind is kind of in between, right?

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Because you know, um, the mind is a biological physical object, and there

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are truths about how the brain operates.

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And obviously, there's going to be some truths that we're going to end up knowing about

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what free will actually is or isn't eventually, um, that you know human

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intuitions can't tell us completely about, but I think it's an untapped source of of

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insight into um into it.

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I mean, having done a lot of cross-cultural work on people's intuitions about the

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importance of, say, intentions in uh moral transgressions, um, the

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role of uh knowledge in informing a person's choices, um,

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and even in uh to a certain extent in terms of uh people's moral judgments.

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Do you see um a universality in the structure of

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moral cognition and uh and mind reading for lack of a better term that uh uh around

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the world people carve up the social world in roughly similar ways and make inferences

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in roughly similar ways or um is it do you take more of a view that uh this is really

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um uh open-ended and and profoundly shaped by culture such that there aren't really uh

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universal organizing principles.

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Um I know I'm I'm painting a character of two extreme positions and presumably you lie

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somewhere in between, but I'm curious how you've been thinking about this, having gathered

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a lot of cross-cultural data on these questions, w what do you see as the universal people

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to use um a a term that that Dave and I like from Don Brown?

283
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Is there a universal people and what do those people look like?

284
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Well, that is the the million-dollar question right there.

285
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Um, which, you know, if I could answer that succinctly, I would be done with my research

286
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project.

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But um I I think the answer to what, so I mean, the answer to the to the first question you

288
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asked is in this continuum of how much commonality versus difference is

289
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there in how people think about the mind and how it's related to ideas about morality

290
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around the world, I think there's a lot more similarity or universality than

291
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um than some anthropologists might think, um, for example.

292
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Although I'm also also reluctant to attribute these beliefs to anthropologists.

293
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Um, you know, oftentimes in this sort of divide between psychology and anthropology, the

294
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psychologists are seen as the universalists and the anthropologists are the cultural

295
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relativists.

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And, you know, I I I've spent a lot of time recently um, you know, in communities of

297
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cultural anthropologists, and I'm I'm not at all convinced that that's that that's the

298
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right, um, that's the right description of the distinction.

299
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Anyway, that said, you know, there's no question that you you, you know, there there's a

300
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perfectly plausible intuition that um our views about

301
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the mind are radically different across cultures.

302
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And my my intuitive sense is is no.

303
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Um, in the cases where you know I've done what what I can do in terms of a deep dive into

304
00:19:02,500 --> 00:19:08,090
models of the mind that different cultures have, you do see a lot of commonality.

305
00:19:09,050 --> 00:19:14,890
And you would expect it to be that way, given that to the extent

306
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that there are universal properties of the mind, then you would hope that folk models of

307
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the mind or cultural models of the mind would converge in a lot of ways.

308
00:19:27,450 --> 00:19:33,440
And it's, you know, so there are these classic questions in, for example, you know,

309
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the questions about uh language and thought, about how different languages carve up mental

310
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state terms, emotion terms.

311
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Um, you see differences there.

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Um I think some people maybe amplify those different differences

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too much.

314
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I think um, you know, the um

315
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One way that you can think about it is that there's, you know, the these different sort of

316
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cultural models of the mind have different kinds of vibes or flavors to them, something

317
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like that.

318
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Um, that they may emphasize.

319
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Um, you know, so so just to take one example, philosophical models of the mind

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in the West, which I take as one sort of cultural lineage, you know, the one stretching

321
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back to the Greeks and Aristotle and Plato and stretching up into kind of European

322
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philosophy of mind in the 19th century and so on, are very oriented towards

323
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rationality and conscious thought processes and processes of

324
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inference and deduction.

325
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Philosophers have been obsessed with this stuff, and people in cognitive science as well,

326
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right?

327
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But I and I think you know, everywhere in the world people can understand those kinds of

328
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processes.

329
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But I think there are other kinds of cultural models of the mind that see

330
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those aspects of cognition as being a pretty small slice of the pie compared to things

331
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like embodied physical knowledge and skill that come out through the way that you move your

332
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body and the way that you sense the world that is sort of

333
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not heavily rational or um maybe you know more on the intuitive end of

334
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things, right?

335
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And you know, all models of the mind are capable of dealing with those different kinds of

336
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things.

337
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But I think it's interesting, even when you, I mean, I've written a little bit about this

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lately.

339
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I mean, even when you look at the history of cognitive science, um, the the focus on

340
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rationality and processes of um explicit conscious inference and stuff like that has really

341
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driven the model of the mind that cognitive science has had for quite a while.

342
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And it it's weird that the embodiment turn in cognitive science and things like four E

343
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cognition, you know, are pretty recent things.

344
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I mean, you can find them there throughout the history of um just what are the four E's for

345
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those four E's or embodied.

346
00:22:05,430 --> 00:22:05,910
What is it?

347
00:22:05,990 --> 00:22:11,910
When have you got a it's it's embodied,

348
00:22:12,070 --> 00:22:17,440
enacted um probably environments in there, maybe.

349
00:22:17,600 --> 00:22:17,920
I don't know.

350
00:22:18,080 --> 00:22:19,120
Actually don't ecology.

351
00:22:19,200 --> 00:22:22,000
I don't I actually don't extend it, that's it.

352
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Extended, right?

353
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Because the idea is that you have prostheses of your mind um acting in the world.

354
00:22:28,160 --> 00:22:31,280
Um so kind of like the extended phenotype kind of view.

355
00:22:31,840 --> 00:22:32,240
I got it.

356
00:22:32,400 --> 00:22:34,160
Embodied, embedded, and active.

357
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Embedded.

358
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And extended.

359
00:22:36,400 --> 00:22:36,800
Extended.

360
00:22:36,880 --> 00:22:37,520
There you go.

361
00:22:38,370 --> 00:22:40,370
I'm not surprised we didn't remember.

362
00:22:41,410 --> 00:22:42,930
It's not a super um.

363
00:22:43,410 --> 00:22:48,530
Well, and it's you know, yeah to be fair, you know, ac academia loves acronyms.

364
00:22:48,610 --> 00:22:52,450
And so finding four E's in a row is a is a real is a real coup.

365
00:22:56,050 --> 00:22:57,730
It's an egregious yeah, no, sorry.

366
00:22:58,130 --> 00:23:01,090
That said, it is, I mean, every E there matters, right?

367
00:23:01,170 --> 00:23:05,250
And for an evolutionary psychologist, we can understand every single one of those, right?

368
00:23:05,730 --> 00:23:10,200
Um And so anyway, the the point is

369
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when I said there's sort of flavors or vibes of different approaches to the mind, I think

370
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that that that's true.

371
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And then and the way that we see the mind kind of highlights or plays down different

372
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kinds of aspects that change over time and across cultures.

373
00:23:29,480 --> 00:23:32,030
And you know, they're not necessarily wrong.

374
00:23:32,190 --> 00:23:35,790
I mean, even somebody like Freud, if you go back and read Freud's stuff, of course he he

375
00:23:35,790 --> 00:23:41,070
got some stuff wrong, but actually it's you know, his his books are like packed with

376
00:23:41,070 --> 00:23:43,550
insights um about how the mind works.

377
00:23:43,710 --> 00:23:46,110
And yeah, that you know, there's he had a particular model.

378
00:23:46,190 --> 00:23:49,710
We were just talking um, you know, before we started recording about id and ego and all

379
00:23:49,710 --> 00:23:52,670
these things, which are terms that we don't use anymore, but they were referring to

380
00:23:52,670 --> 00:23:54,350
something that's intelligible.

381
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And um anyway, so that's I think that's the interesting space when we think about

382
00:24:00,020 --> 00:24:02,900
linguistic and cultural differences involved in the mind.

383
00:24:02,980 --> 00:24:07,620
And the argument that I would make is just that we should um when there are these

384
00:24:07,620 --> 00:24:12,980
different, you know, slightly different varieties or flavors of mental state terms, um,

385
00:24:13,220 --> 00:24:19,130
ways of carving up the space of the mind and the body um around the

386
00:24:19,130 --> 00:24:23,610
world and and they're ones that have been around for a long time, they probably contain

387
00:24:23,610 --> 00:24:28,410
some useful insights about the mind that we should pay attention to.

388
00:24:28,810 --> 00:24:29,130
Yeah.

389
00:24:29,370 --> 00:24:30,490
No, it's it's interesting.

390
00:24:30,570 --> 00:24:35,530
Even there, so I I certainly agree that in Western culture, this view of the autonomous, uh

391
00:24:35,770 --> 00:24:40,890
rational agent that's disconnected from uh his surroundings, and it's usually a he uh and

392
00:24:40,970 --> 00:24:45,850
and and you know exerting these top-down principles to uh manipulate the the environment

393
00:24:45,930 --> 00:24:49,180
and it's all conscious uh and calculated.

394
00:24:49,980 --> 00:24:54,700
It's certainly, you know, a rough sketch of a potential cultural difference you might see

395
00:24:54,700 --> 00:24:56,780
between the West the West and the rest.

396
00:24:57,020 --> 00:25:01,100
Um but even there, like I still get the other view.

397
00:25:01,260 --> 00:25:05,580
I still get the idea of just feeling things out and like using your intuition and feeling

398
00:25:05,580 --> 00:25:07,900
the vibes and like feeling it in your body.

399
00:25:08,060 --> 00:25:14,010
Like if you think about one of the most uh culturally impactful uh cinematic universe

400
00:25:14,010 --> 00:25:14,570
is Star Wars.

401
00:25:14,650 --> 00:25:17,850
So my daughter is obsessed with Star Wars, so I've been watching a lot of it, so that's on

402
00:25:17,850 --> 00:25:19,050
my on my mind.

403
00:25:19,850 --> 00:25:24,970
The force is very much the opposite of like a conscious, rational manipulation of the

404
00:25:24,970 --> 00:25:25,210
world.

405
00:25:25,370 --> 00:25:30,170
It's just feeling it out, feeling your connection to to the rest of the world.

406
00:25:30,330 --> 00:25:34,090
You know, Yoda is always delivering these lines about you're you're overthinking it, Luke.

407
00:25:34,170 --> 00:25:36,890
You know, you gotta you there is no there is no try.

408
00:25:36,970 --> 00:25:38,730
You either do it or you don't.

409
00:25:40,240 --> 00:25:46,080
and uh that to me is uh uh very reminiscent of the types of things you're

410
00:25:46,080 --> 00:25:46,480
talking about.

411
00:25:46,720 --> 00:25:49,760
You you sort of learn to to just feel it as opposed to think it.

412
00:25:50,000 --> 00:25:53,760
Um and I think a lot of people understand that on a gut level.

413
00:25:54,160 --> 00:25:57,680
Certainly our culture might be you know biased toward one end of the continuum, but I think

414
00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:02,240
the flavors, you could think about it to use your your analogy of flavors, you know, we all

415
00:26:02,240 --> 00:26:06,510
have tongues with certain uh taste buds, And we have, you know, the conscious rationality

416
00:26:06,510 --> 00:26:10,270
taste bud, but we also have the embodied vibes based taste bud.

417
00:26:10,670 --> 00:26:14,350
And uh, you know, maybe the Western palette, you know, is more geared toward, you know, the

418
00:26:14,350 --> 00:26:16,590
rational conscious taste bud, but we still have that other taste bud.

419
00:26:16,830 --> 00:26:17,870
We still know what it is.

420
00:26:18,030 --> 00:26:22,590
Uh and it might be that other cultures, their their palette is is more geared toward uh the

421
00:26:22,590 --> 00:26:23,950
the embodied taste bud.

422
00:26:24,350 --> 00:26:29,470
So even there I think there's there's more universality than it might seem on on its face.

423
00:26:29,950 --> 00:26:30,510
Yeah.

424
00:26:30,760 --> 00:26:31,960
I I I agree with that.

425
00:26:32,040 --> 00:26:34,200
I mean that that is that is right.

426
00:26:34,360 --> 00:26:40,120
And that's also a classic kind of insight for um when you learn

427
00:26:40,120 --> 00:26:42,760
a term that is present in another language and not your own.

428
00:26:42,840 --> 00:26:47,480
I mean, the classic one is when we all learn what Schadenfreude is and we hear that term

429
00:26:47,480 --> 00:26:53,080
that we didn't know when we were kids, and um when we speak English, and it makes perfect

430
00:26:53,080 --> 00:26:56,680
sense because we felt it or or or seen someone else feel it.

431
00:26:56,840 --> 00:27:02,810
Um and so yeah, I think that all of the the palette of or the um the flavor

432
00:27:02,810 --> 00:27:04,970
profile is available to everyone.

433
00:27:05,530 --> 00:27:11,530
Um for for for for science and for other kinds of things,

434
00:27:11,770 --> 00:27:17,450
you know, the question is um you know what are the what are the

435
00:27:17,450 --> 00:27:19,770
consequences of the variations that are there?

436
00:27:19,930 --> 00:27:25,180
And so one of the things that I think for sciences, you know,

437
00:27:25,820 --> 00:27:31,820
we may not, because of the fish and water issue of the kinds of cultural models

438
00:27:31,820 --> 00:27:36,780
that we've been brought up in, you know, when we're trying to create a universal sort of

439
00:27:36,780 --> 00:27:42,700
theory of human cognition, we may not notice that our

440
00:27:43,020 --> 00:27:47,500
theories are kind of heavy in certain areas or biased towards certain areas and kind of

441
00:27:47,500 --> 00:27:49,100
light on other areas.

442
00:27:52,870 --> 00:27:58,710
so with the kind of um, you know, in in in the West, also when we talk about these

443
00:27:58,710 --> 00:28:03,910
processes of rationality and deliberation, right, these are not just parts of models of the

444
00:28:03,910 --> 00:28:04,070
mind.

445
00:28:04,230 --> 00:28:05,670
Again, that everyone can understand.

446
00:28:05,750 --> 00:28:09,190
There's no there's no question there, but they're not just parts of models of the mind.

447
00:28:09,270 --> 00:28:14,960
They actually end up having, well, I would argue, they end up having moral and ethical

448
00:28:14,960 --> 00:28:15,200
force.

449
00:28:15,600 --> 00:28:16,560
They become values.

450
00:28:16,720 --> 00:28:20,960
So when you look at the way that Western education is targeted, it's very much targeted

451
00:28:20,960 --> 00:28:26,080
towards training our logical facilities and things like that.

452
00:28:26,800 --> 00:28:29,760
I mean, and we know that that doesn't have to be the way it is.

453
00:28:29,920 --> 00:28:35,280
You know, I mean, your example of Star Wars, um, you know, or other kinds of cases where

454
00:28:35,360 --> 00:28:39,520
um, and I think these are actually pretty common around the world, where the pinnacle of

455
00:28:39,520 --> 00:28:44,910
wisdom would be acting without um conscious

456
00:28:44,910 --> 00:28:46,430
deliberation, essentially.

457
00:28:46,590 --> 00:28:52,270
Um that you know, and it corresponds to this Bourdieu notion of habitus, right?

458
00:28:52,430 --> 00:28:56,030
Um, I I've so the book that I was mentioning to you guys, it's called Southern

459
00:28:56,030 --> 00:28:58,030
Epistemologies that's just coming out.

460
00:28:58,190 --> 00:29:03,310
Um it looks it's a collection of essays um

461
00:29:04,260 --> 00:29:07,860
On how people in the Andes and Amazon think about knowledge.

462
00:29:08,020 --> 00:29:13,380
And so I, as part of that, I've been taking a deep dive into the Quechua language, which I

463
00:29:13,380 --> 00:29:14,340
don't speak.

464
00:29:14,900 --> 00:29:18,740
But it has this very the way that it carves up knowledge, you know, the primary knowledge

465
00:29:18,740 --> 00:29:24,660
word is called yachai, which my understanding is it is it's embodied knowledge.

466
00:29:24,740 --> 00:29:29,940
So it's, you know, when you're walking on the path that you've walked your entire life,

467
00:29:30,180 --> 00:29:32,930
your body just sort of takes you along the path.

468
00:29:33,170 --> 00:29:38,850
And in this, in this sort of cultural setting, my understanding is, you know,

469
00:29:39,010 --> 00:29:44,930
the pinnacle of being an intelligent, rational, in some ways actor in the world, a wise

470
00:29:44,930 --> 00:29:50,290
actor is to, you know, basically have all of the

471
00:29:50,930 --> 00:29:56,210
important knowledge subsumed into a sort of subcognitive, if you will,

472
00:29:56,920 --> 00:29:58,760
space where you just act.

473
00:29:59,000 --> 00:30:01,880
Um, and so it's it's interesting, right?

474
00:30:02,120 --> 00:30:08,120
Because that is a cultural model of like it's there's a kind of virtue um ideology in

475
00:30:08,120 --> 00:30:13,560
there about what um being a truly knowing being is that's a little different than kind of

476
00:30:13,640 --> 00:30:19,130
maybe if you grew up in 19th century England or Germany, where it would be the

477
00:30:19,130 --> 00:30:25,050
ability to manipulate propositions in some way to generate um certain inferences or

478
00:30:25,050 --> 00:30:31,050
something like that using a logical calculus, which is also valid, but just different.

479
00:30:31,370 --> 00:30:32,090
Yeah, I love that.

480
00:30:32,410 --> 00:30:37,450
And I love that, you know, if you're watching like kids on YouTube or like I'm watching old

481
00:30:37,450 --> 00:30:43,450
Michael Jordan clips or um a musician or an athlete just do something really

482
00:30:43,450 --> 00:30:49,420
well and just sort of reveling in, man, this is just, it's, it's art, you

483
00:30:49,420 --> 00:30:55,180
know, it's just this, you're somebody has just nailed how to do this thing so beautifully.

484
00:30:55,420 --> 00:31:00,700
Um, again, I think it goes back to David's point, which is we can all understand it, but it

485
00:31:00,700 --> 00:31:05,980
goes back to your point too, Clark, that you don't value it, uh, or maybe it just gets

486
00:31:05,980 --> 00:31:09,340
compartmentalized to sort of like it's what the kids are doing on the playground, or it's

487
00:31:09,340 --> 00:31:14,620
the status scheme of like, yeah, I gotta learn logic, but I really want to be like the

488
00:31:14,620 --> 00:31:17,270
best, basketball player I can be.

489
00:31:17,430 --> 00:31:23,430
Um I certainly I think that model of the mind is more prevalent in the arts um

490
00:31:23,670 --> 00:31:28,950
than and perhaps in athletics um than it is in say the sciences or the hu or the

491
00:31:28,950 --> 00:31:32,390
humanities um or or even you know the business world.

492
00:31:32,550 --> 00:31:37,270
Um because there you that that's what you you need to do to be successful in your career is

493
00:31:37,270 --> 00:31:41,750
to cultivate that kind of embedded, embodied knowledge of your craft.

494
00:31:42,440 --> 00:31:48,280
But with a with a top-down uh uh discipline such as ours, that kind

495
00:31:48,280 --> 00:31:54,120
of knowledge and wisdom is is less desired because I can't prove it to you.

496
00:31:54,280 --> 00:31:59,240
I can't set it down on paper and and walk you through the propositional logic and have you

497
00:31:59,240 --> 00:32:00,600
say, ah, I get it.

498
00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:05,960
Whereas, you know, with art, the proof is in the pudding, it's in the painting, it's in the

499
00:32:05,960 --> 00:32:08,120
the feat uh of athleticism.

500
00:32:08,200 --> 00:32:13,650
But with uh a scientific discipline, um, we all need to agree

501
00:32:14,370 --> 00:32:16,050
on on what is correct.

502
00:32:16,290 --> 00:32:17,570
Um yeah, I don't know.

503
00:32:17,650 --> 00:32:19,730
Uh that's interesting, yeah.

504
00:32:19,970 --> 00:32:20,370
Clark.

505
00:32:20,690 --> 00:32:23,970
So I'm gonna say something sorry, Clark, you're gonna say something, yeah.

506
00:32:24,930 --> 00:32:27,010
No, I I think I think that's really insightful.

507
00:32:27,090 --> 00:32:33,010
I I think um yeah, it it you know, we maybe you know, those of us who are

508
00:32:33,090 --> 00:32:38,860
who are doing evolutionary psychology, you know, maybe we don't think

509
00:32:38,860 --> 00:32:43,900
enough about the fact that it's a it's essentially a verbal format that this that science

510
00:32:43,900 --> 00:32:49,260
that we do is is written and with pictures, um visual and verbal.

511
00:32:49,820 --> 00:32:54,860
And that um what part of part of what we're doing is rhetoric and persuasion.

512
00:32:55,020 --> 00:32:59,580
You know, and you have people like um Hugo Mercier and others, you know, who have argued

513
00:32:59,580 --> 00:33:04,460
that um, you know, these kinds of things are about changing other people's minds and so on.

514
00:33:04,620 --> 00:33:10,410
Um And, you know, it makes sense that we focus on these skills of rhetoric and

515
00:33:10,410 --> 00:33:11,690
debate and logic.

516
00:33:12,170 --> 00:33:14,810
It also makes me at least worry, right?

517
00:33:15,050 --> 00:33:20,650
Because if you believe somebody like like Mercier or others, you know, the

518
00:33:20,650 --> 00:33:24,170
target of those of those things is not necessarily the truth.

519
00:33:26,330 --> 00:33:29,520
And so we we do have to worry about that a little bit.

520
00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:30,000
Yeah.

521
00:33:30,640 --> 00:33:31,280
Absolutely.

522
00:33:32,000 --> 00:33:34,320
It it definitely worries me as well.

523
00:33:34,480 --> 00:33:39,440
I mean, it on the one hand, it is somewhat comforting in that the collective emergent

524
00:33:39,440 --> 00:33:43,760
result of all this arguing and debate among a scientific institution that has good

525
00:33:43,760 --> 00:33:48,400
incentives should, in theory, produce, you know, true beliefs or truer beliefs over time.

526
00:33:48,560 --> 00:33:48,800
Right?

527
00:33:48,880 --> 00:33:51,120
It has a kind of self corrective mechanism.

528
00:33:51,370 --> 00:33:56,250
But when you zoom in on any individual part of that apparatus, any individual scientists,

529
00:33:56,410 --> 00:33:59,850
they are very unlikely to have the whole truth inside of their head.

530
00:34:00,010 --> 00:34:04,170
And since I am an individual person, you know, within that apparatus, that's very worrying

531
00:34:04,250 --> 00:34:05,450
because I want to have the whole truth.

532
00:34:05,610 --> 00:34:07,050
I want to have the answers.

533
00:34:07,530 --> 00:34:12,570
And what Mercier and others' research has told me is that that is impossible and I need to

534
00:34:12,570 --> 00:34:14,730
give up give up hope.

535
00:34:15,290 --> 00:34:16,170
And that's worrying.

536
00:34:16,330 --> 00:34:16,490
Yeah.

537
00:34:16,890 --> 00:34:21,740
I wanna I want to pick your brain on another uh idea that came to me about

538
00:34:22,060 --> 00:34:27,900
spirituality and religiosity and supernatural concepts and the connection between this

539
00:34:27,900 --> 00:34:33,820
embodied, embedded uh model of the mind and spiritual and supernatural

540
00:34:33,820 --> 00:34:34,380
belief.

541
00:34:34,620 --> 00:34:36,220
Because it seems like there is a connection there.

542
00:34:36,300 --> 00:34:39,740
So when you know the force is a supernatural force in Star Wars.

543
00:34:39,820 --> 00:34:41,180
Like it's it's literally magic.

544
00:34:41,260 --> 00:34:45,590
You know, you're you're you have telekinesis, you're picking up objects with your mind.

545
00:34:45,670 --> 00:34:50,310
Uh and I and I find that when people who are who lean more on this flavor profile of

546
00:34:50,310 --> 00:34:55,430
intuitive, uh embedded, uh embodied knowledge, they tend to be more spiritual, or at least

547
00:34:55,510 --> 00:34:56,950
talk in more spiritual terms.

548
00:34:57,110 --> 00:35:02,710
And it it it may be that when something is opaque to us or unconscious, that we sort of

549
00:35:02,710 --> 00:35:05,990
fill in the gaps of our ignorance with supernatural concepts.

550
00:35:06,840 --> 00:35:12,520
and so that might be why you see a greater prevalence of of spiritual

551
00:35:12,520 --> 00:35:17,880
beliefs in cultures with a more uh intuitive embodied model of the mind.

552
00:35:18,040 --> 00:35:22,680
Because um because so much of the magic is coming from forces unknown.

553
00:35:22,840 --> 00:35:28,760
Uh and it just becomes very easy to just uh you know put those forces unknown into a

554
00:35:28,760 --> 00:35:29,640
supernatural bucket.

555
00:35:29,720 --> 00:35:32,840
It's the ancestors, it's a spirit, it's the force, it's whatever.

556
00:35:33,000 --> 00:35:35,000
I mean, do you buy that way of thinking?

557
00:35:36,450 --> 00:35:40,770
Um yeah, I think that

558
00:35:43,250 --> 00:35:45,730
yeah, that that that seems right.

559
00:35:45,890 --> 00:35:51,570
I mean I've never been a huge fan of the argument,

560
00:35:51,730 --> 00:35:57,250
the sort of God of the gaps type of argument.

561
00:35:57,410 --> 00:36:03,380
Um that that the that the function of sort of spirituality is to maybe comfort us

562
00:36:03,380 --> 00:36:04,900
or explain things that we don't know.

563
00:36:05,060 --> 00:36:07,620
But I don't I don't take you as saying that exactly.

564
00:36:07,780 --> 00:36:10,980
But I do, but I do think, you know, that there's this sense.

565
00:36:12,020 --> 00:36:17,620
So if you, if you, if you are someone who values and pays

566
00:36:17,620 --> 00:36:22,020
attention to your intuitions and the embodied feelings that you have as you're going

567
00:36:22,020 --> 00:36:27,460
through the world, and you try to develop a sense of um, you know, intuitive

568
00:36:27,460 --> 00:36:33,310
connection with your physical and sensory presence in the world, there's going to be stuff

569
00:36:33,310 --> 00:36:37,790
that pops out at you where it's it's gonna get your attention.

570
00:36:38,030 --> 00:36:38,350
Yeah.

571
00:36:38,670 --> 00:36:42,030
And um, and so I think that's one component of it, right?

572
00:36:42,190 --> 00:36:46,270
Because it, you know, if you look at I don't know, I feel like this in Los Angeles.

573
00:36:46,350 --> 00:36:49,230
I mean, I try to cultivate that side of myself.

574
00:36:49,390 --> 00:36:52,510
Um, but I also, you know, I go on hikes all the time.

575
00:36:52,590 --> 00:36:57,710
And I mean, people are out there walking, like literally reading a cell phone on a on a

576
00:36:57,710 --> 00:36:58,110
trail.

577
00:36:58,350 --> 00:36:59,660
Um yeah.

578
00:36:59,980 --> 00:37:04,300
And they're not in touch with as far as I can tell, they're they're you know they're

579
00:37:04,540 --> 00:37:05,660
they're micro learning, Clark.

580
00:37:05,740 --> 00:37:06,380
They're micro learning.

581
00:37:06,460 --> 00:37:09,980
Yeah, they're they're they're they're definitely they're choosing to devote their attention

582
00:37:09,980 --> 00:37:15,100
to something, but they but there has to be a a cost that they're not attending to what's

583
00:37:15,100 --> 00:37:16,460
going on around them.

584
00:37:16,540 --> 00:37:16,860
Right.

585
00:37:17,020 --> 00:37:22,540
And so um anyway that that's the kind of thing where I would say that you know that's gonna

586
00:37:22,590 --> 00:37:28,430
pull you away from some of these ineffable experiences that

587
00:37:28,430 --> 00:37:34,270
um lead to a sense of spiritual connectedness to the world and that there's stuff out there

588
00:37:34,430 --> 00:37:40,030
um that you know that beyond you that that that you can sense occasionally in the periphery

589
00:37:40,110 --> 00:37:41,550
or maybe even directly.

590
00:37:41,630 --> 00:37:46,340
Um, those all come connected with this kind of ya-chai embodied knowledge view.

591
00:37:46,420 --> 00:37:51,140
And I, you know, I also think that, you know, when you when we think about um that the the

592
00:37:51,140 --> 00:37:56,740
hyper rationalists of Europe, you know, Immanuel Kant and people like this, I mean, you

593
00:37:56,740 --> 00:38:02,580
know, some some of them were um believed in God and some of them were atheists, but

594
00:38:02,580 --> 00:38:08,420
there's no question that the sort of move towards excessive sort of rationality was part of

595
00:38:09,090 --> 00:38:15,010
know what Max Weber has called disenchantment, where um people argued

596
00:38:15,010 --> 00:38:17,490
their way out of God uh using logic.

597
00:38:17,650 --> 00:38:22,850
Um I mean there's some interesting cases to the contrary, like Descartes and others who

598
00:38:22,850 --> 00:38:27,170
tried to use um logic and introspection to prove that God exists.

599
00:38:27,330 --> 00:38:33,080
Um I never was persuaded by the argument that there has to be a perfect being because I've

600
00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:34,680
never experienced one through my senses.

601
00:38:34,760 --> 00:38:39,960
And so the only way that I could know this is if they existed and planted the idea in my

602
00:38:39,960 --> 00:38:40,200
mind.

603
00:38:40,280 --> 00:38:42,360
That seems like a weird kind of proof.

604
00:38:43,160 --> 00:38:48,920
But the point is, like when you get into that space of logic and

605
00:38:48,920 --> 00:38:54,520
rationality, it does lead you away from

606
00:38:54,840 --> 00:38:59,790
um, It can lead you away from a spiritual attitude about the world.

607
00:38:59,870 --> 00:39:01,390
So I think that's another component of it.

608
00:39:02,190 --> 00:39:02,670
That's cool.

609
00:39:02,830 --> 00:39:03,070
Yeah.

610
00:39:03,150 --> 00:39:07,710
It reminds me there's uh Conrad Lorenz, uh, it's called the Russian manuscript.

611
00:39:08,030 --> 00:39:10,110
Apparently, it was like post posthumous.

612
00:39:10,430 --> 00:39:15,390
Um, so Konrad Lorenz was in a Russian gulag during World War II because he fought for the

613
00:39:15,390 --> 00:39:16,030
Nazis.

614
00:39:16,110 --> 00:39:21,280
And um uh he wrote this with like bird beaks on like burlap sacks or whatever, but it was

615
00:39:21,280 --> 00:39:24,960
all these notes, and it came out in the 70s, like somebody found it in like some attic in

616
00:39:24,960 --> 00:39:25,600
the 70s.

617
00:39:25,760 --> 00:39:30,000
But what it's really amazing, like I think every evolutionary psychologist should read this

618
00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:34,560
um uh book, the uh Russian manuscript by Conrad Lorenz, but it basically talks about how

619
00:39:34,560 --> 00:39:40,450
Conrad Lorenz, they were doing the the ethology, and he was talking about the early 20th

620
00:39:40,450 --> 00:39:46,290
century fight between the vitalists and the mechanists of animal cognition.

621
00:39:46,450 --> 00:39:50,930
And what he was saying as an ethologist is even though he was on the side of the mechanists

622
00:39:50,930 --> 00:39:56,130
and not thinking there was some magical spirit, he was sort of like, the mechanists are all

623
00:39:56,130 --> 00:39:57,570
these people in the lab.

624
00:39:57,890 --> 00:40:02,050
Um, like I'm glossing over things, but basically it was sort of like there's no beauty or

625
00:40:02,050 --> 00:40:03,970
art or nature in the models.

626
00:40:04,050 --> 00:40:08,140
It and it reminded me of what you're saying, which is sort of like you, there's sort of, I

627
00:40:08,140 --> 00:40:12,540
think there was sort of a historical accident of like, well, if we're gonna be hard-nosed

628
00:40:12,540 --> 00:40:17,740
scientists about it, we're gonna study rats in a maze, and we're not gonna think about like

629
00:40:18,060 --> 00:40:21,260
nature or cool functions.

630
00:40:21,420 --> 00:40:24,300
And that was sort of what Conrad Lorenz was saying, too.

631
00:40:24,460 --> 00:40:30,250
And so like I think there was like a false choice between a rich environmental

632
00:40:30,490 --> 00:40:36,490
biological view and sort of but it was like vitalistic versus it was mechanical but it

633
00:40:36,490 --> 00:40:42,090
was like concrete and math and uh zeros and ones and like very

634
00:40:42,090 --> 00:40:42,970
sterile.

635
00:40:44,250 --> 00:40:45,290
Yeah that makes sense.

636
00:40:45,450 --> 00:40:51,050
I mean I also think that you know we're seeing in some ways I mean there are these cultural

637
00:40:51,040 --> 00:40:54,880
trends about how we think about the world and cognition and our place in the world?

638
00:40:54,960 --> 00:40:59,120
And there's a kind of um winding path.

639
00:40:59,520 --> 00:41:04,800
Like I mentioned, you know, um the importance of embodiment in in sort of the cognitive

640
00:41:04,800 --> 00:41:07,040
sciences, it kind of comes and goes.

641
00:41:07,360 --> 00:41:13,200
But um right now, uh, for example, in when we think about um animal rights

642
00:41:13,200 --> 00:41:18,190
and ethics, you know, there's this move towards rights of nature kind of perspectives,

643
00:41:18,350 --> 00:41:24,110
which view non-human beings as having a moral

644
00:41:24,110 --> 00:41:28,430
status and ethical status, partly due to the fact that they have internal lives and things

645
00:41:28,430 --> 00:41:28,910
like that.

646
00:41:29,230 --> 00:41:33,150
I mean, that actually fits very well with an evolutionary view.

647
00:41:33,310 --> 00:41:38,110
Um, it fits very well with a lot of indigenous perspectives on the relationship between

648
00:41:38,110 --> 00:41:40,190
humans and other non-human beings.

649
00:41:40,740 --> 00:41:45,380
It doesn't fit very well with the 19th century European view that only humans have

650
00:41:45,380 --> 00:41:45,940
rationality.

651
00:41:46,100 --> 00:41:48,580
That's what gives us our status as moral beings.

652
00:41:50,100 --> 00:41:54,500
You know, that's the source of a lot of of that disjuncture in a lot of ways.

653
00:41:54,580 --> 00:42:00,500
And I would say that the sort of um you know there's a parallel when we think about

654
00:42:00,500 --> 00:42:04,100
animal behavior where for a long, and I think Lorenz might have been talking about this,

655
00:42:04,260 --> 00:42:05,650
you know, for a long time.

656
00:42:05,890 --> 00:42:11,250
Um, it was sort of forbidden to anthropomorphize or what people would call anthropomorphize

657
00:42:11,250 --> 00:42:12,210
other species.

658
00:42:12,530 --> 00:42:14,690
Um, for understandable reasons, I guess.

659
00:42:14,850 --> 00:42:20,370
You could say, well, you know, you don't want to project human specific processes or values

660
00:42:20,370 --> 00:42:23,170
onto things that aren't human when they don't share them.

661
00:42:23,410 --> 00:42:27,650
But, you know, that extended that that was that went way overboard, right?

662
00:42:28,370 --> 00:42:31,730
To the point where, you know, now you have animal behaviorists.

663
00:42:31,890 --> 00:42:37,880
I mean, I remember, you know, an article within the last 10 years, you know, that

664
00:42:37,960 --> 00:42:43,560
uh that hit like the New York Times that announced that dogs feel pain um because they had

665
00:42:43,560 --> 00:42:48,280
managed to put a dog into an fMRI scanner and show that the pain areas in the dog's brain

666
00:42:48,280 --> 00:42:53,240
homologously, you know, were activated under conditions of pain in a way the same way that

667
00:42:53,240 --> 00:42:54,200
humans are.

668
00:42:54,970 --> 00:42:56,170
I mean, yeah.

669
00:42:56,410 --> 00:42:58,730
It is an interesting study, that's for sure.

670
00:42:59,050 --> 00:43:04,890
But, you know, in some sense, the pendulum has, you know, swung way

671
00:43:04,890 --> 00:43:10,410
too far in our um, you know, attempt to be hyper

672
00:43:10,410 --> 00:43:15,370
rationalistic about not attributing things to to to uh other other species.

673
00:43:15,450 --> 00:43:19,130
And now you you all probably know there's just really interesting stuff on plant cognition

674
00:43:19,210 --> 00:43:19,450
now.

675
00:43:19,610 --> 00:43:19,770
Yeah.

676
00:43:20,170 --> 00:43:24,660
A whole field of it that's that's pretty that's pretty interesting and very, very

677
00:43:24,660 --> 00:43:25,220
scientific.

678
00:43:25,300 --> 00:43:30,020
Um, it raises questions like what's going on, do is there consciousness?

679
00:43:30,180 --> 00:43:31,060
I mean, who knows?

680
00:43:31,300 --> 00:43:37,060
But um there's no question that there's like response to stimuli and um

681
00:43:37,300 --> 00:43:42,260
and and and you know, reacting at pretty quick timescales to things that are happening,

682
00:43:42,420 --> 00:43:43,700
touch and all that stuff.

683
00:43:43,870 --> 00:43:44,190
Yeah.

684
00:43:44,750 --> 00:43:47,790
But and I I don't want to go too far afield of the next topic.

685
00:43:47,870 --> 00:43:49,950
I actually wanted this reminded me, hunting magic.

686
00:43:50,030 --> 00:43:51,550
Can you talk a little bit about hunting magic?

687
00:43:51,630 --> 00:43:55,390
Because I think this is a great example of the embodied thing concretely.

688
00:43:55,550 --> 00:43:55,870
Yeah.

689
00:43:56,270 --> 00:43:56,590
Yeah.

690
00:43:56,750 --> 00:43:56,990
Yeah.

691
00:43:57,150 --> 00:44:03,070
So I actually have a um I finally um have a have a have a piece

692
00:44:03,070 --> 00:44:05,870
coming out on this in the in the edited volume.

693
00:44:06,280 --> 00:44:11,320
And um for those of for those audience members who speak Spanish, there already is a volume

694
00:44:11,320 --> 00:44:16,760
that came out in Spanish a couple years ago on

695
00:44:17,160 --> 00:44:21,240
Andean and Amazonian epistemologies, and a version of this chapter is in there in Spanish.

696
00:44:21,320 --> 00:44:23,720
But there's an English language one coming out in June.

697
00:44:23,960 --> 00:44:29,290
And you know, I in this in this chapter, I talk about a little bit of what I have learned

698
00:44:29,290 --> 00:44:34,650
in Schwar communities about some of these hunting practices that include

699
00:44:35,290 --> 00:44:39,290
the singing of certain kinds of songs that are involved in

700
00:44:40,490 --> 00:44:41,450
hunting.

701
00:44:42,090 --> 00:44:46,730
And in the chapter, I sort of talk about, based on some interviews that I've done,

702
00:44:47,900 --> 00:44:53,740
The range of possibilities for of like how people think about those songs,

703
00:44:53,900 --> 00:44:58,620
um, how they think that they might work, whether or not they think that they might work.

704
00:44:59,500 --> 00:45:03,900
And um, so this takes place before the hunt?

705
00:45:04,300 --> 00:45:05,100
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

706
00:45:05,260 --> 00:45:07,820
And so like immediately before or like the the previous year.

707
00:45:07,980 --> 00:45:08,700
Yeah, in the morning.

708
00:45:09,820 --> 00:45:13,980
People get up like ridiculously early, basically while it's still dark, go out hunt and go

709
00:45:14,460 --> 00:45:20,370
out, and they sing these songs, um, or they used to anyway, um,

710
00:45:20,610 --> 00:45:22,130
on the way, on the way out to the hunt.

711
00:45:22,210 --> 00:45:26,850
And it's kind of a private event that you're singing to yourself and singing to the forest

712
00:45:26,930 --> 00:45:28,450
and singing to these animals.

713
00:45:28,850 --> 00:45:34,770
And the lyrics of the songs um, you know, often are things like requests or

714
00:45:34,770 --> 00:45:40,690
commands um to the animals, or just statements like today, I'm gonna kill this kind

715
00:45:40,690 --> 00:45:46,240
of animal, um, repeated with rhythm and and and music um

716
00:45:46,560 --> 00:45:47,200
melody.

717
00:45:47,360 --> 00:45:53,280
And so um, you know, one possibility that I discuss is, you know, that these could be

718
00:45:53,280 --> 00:45:58,000
kind of technologies of the self where they're basically getting you into getting the

719
00:45:58,000 --> 00:46:04,000
hunter into a particular kind of mental state and focus that may actually

720
00:46:04,000 --> 00:46:04,720
have some effects.

721
00:46:04,800 --> 00:46:09,150
And there there is some literature on this, like flow states and things like this in sports

722
00:46:09,230 --> 00:46:10,030
and the arts.

723
00:46:10,190 --> 00:46:12,350
Um, where like a warm-up activity.

724
00:46:12,510 --> 00:46:16,990
Yes, you know, like actors and athletes often have warm-up activities to sort of get

725
00:46:16,990 --> 00:46:19,230
themselves in the right mental state.

726
00:46:19,630 --> 00:46:20,590
Yes, exactly.

727
00:46:20,750 --> 00:46:21,710
Yeah, yeah.

728
00:46:21,950 --> 00:46:27,150
Um, yes, and and and and and focusing the mind on certain kinds of outcomes by

729
00:46:27,150 --> 00:46:28,270
visualizing them.

730
00:46:28,590 --> 00:46:31,150
Um things like that.

731
00:46:31,390 --> 00:46:37,340
Um and One thing that I you know,

732
00:46:37,420 --> 00:46:40,940
I I I could talk more about this if you have other things that you want to know about it,

733
00:46:41,020 --> 00:46:46,300
but but the thing that I do in this paper, so that the the the the chapter um is called The

734
00:46:46,300 --> 00:46:49,020
Uncertain Virtues of Incomplete Knowledge.

735
00:46:49,580 --> 00:46:55,580
And it's talking about how you know this this phenomenon where most of the things

736
00:46:55,580 --> 00:47:01,470
that we do, where we deploy some kind of technology, nobody knows everything about how

737
00:47:01,470 --> 00:47:02,910
the technology works.

738
00:47:03,150 --> 00:47:06,830
And um, and that's that's an interesting thing, right?

739
00:47:06,910 --> 00:47:08,510
It's ordinary actually.

740
00:47:08,750 --> 00:47:13,710
Um, most of the things that we do are in a state of incomplete knowledge.

741
00:47:13,790 --> 00:47:17,630
Um, and there's great work in cognitive science on this, people like Frank Kyle and others

742
00:47:17,630 --> 00:47:20,660
who've shown that nobody knows how a toilet works.

743
00:47:20,740 --> 00:47:22,340
I mean, the plumber does, right?

744
00:47:23,140 --> 00:47:26,020
But the plumber doesn't know how a helicopter works, right?

745
00:47:26,180 --> 00:47:26,980
Like that's right.

746
00:47:27,060 --> 00:47:27,220
Yeah.

747
00:47:27,380 --> 00:47:32,100
Um, and we don't, you know, people can't even really like reproduce a proper bicycle from

748
00:47:32,100 --> 00:47:35,620
memory because we don't have an accurate model of of what's going on.

749
00:47:35,700 --> 00:47:40,580
And of course, you'd use a cell phone, you have no idea how it works, but it does.

750
00:47:40,820 --> 00:47:43,370
And so, you know, you learn these procedures and you do them.

751
00:47:43,450 --> 00:47:48,570
And then the the idea is that if they're if the conditions of efficacy hold, you know, then

752
00:47:48,570 --> 00:47:50,010
what you're doing is going to work.

753
00:47:50,170 --> 00:47:52,410
And so you you can have limited knowledge.

754
00:47:52,570 --> 00:47:57,930
And the the case of Anant, these these particular songs in Schwar, you know, they're

755
00:47:58,010 --> 00:48:03,130
they're they've been around for a long time and um they're they're transmitted, you know,

756
00:48:03,450 --> 00:48:06,890
um, with great kind of respect um for this tradition.

757
00:48:07,050 --> 00:48:12,600
And so, you know, most people now don't really know how to use them, or um,

758
00:48:13,000 --> 00:48:17,560
but there's this view that you know these are kind of ancestral technologies that helped

759
00:48:17,560 --> 00:48:20,280
and did things, and there's a trust in that.

760
00:48:20,760 --> 00:48:25,560
Um and then and so in the chapter, what I compare it to is our use of statistics and

761
00:48:25,560 --> 00:48:31,320
science, you know, and this is kind of uh, you know, I I do a callback to my my um my

762
00:48:31,320 --> 00:48:36,040
postdoc that I did with Gerard Gigerenzer and Peter Todd at the MPI in Berlin, where you

763
00:48:36,040 --> 00:48:41,950
know, one of Gigerenzer's ideas was that we use statistical rituals in

764
00:48:41,950 --> 00:48:47,950
psychology and other fields, especially null null hypothesis significance testing, where,

765
00:48:48,190 --> 00:48:53,710
you know, people just you can plug something into an algorithm and you get some numbers

766
00:48:53,710 --> 00:48:57,790
out, and then people interpret those in a certain way, which is often wrong.

767
00:48:58,030 --> 00:49:01,470
And so, you know, there's two levels of kind of incomplete knowledge there.

768
00:49:01,630 --> 00:49:06,880
Sometimes people don't know, often people don't know the conditions of efficacy for the

769
00:49:06,880 --> 00:49:09,040
statistics to give the right answer.

770
00:49:09,520 --> 00:49:09,840
Right.

771
00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:14,640
And so we are trained that there have to be normal distributions and all these things, but

772
00:49:14,640 --> 00:49:16,560
often people ignore those.

773
00:49:16,960 --> 00:49:21,840
And there's other more technical stuff that people don't run the checks to make sure that

774
00:49:21,840 --> 00:49:24,240
the model is appropriate for that what they're doing.

775
00:49:24,320 --> 00:49:28,880
And then there's a second level, which is you know, they misunderstand what the p-value

776
00:49:28,880 --> 00:49:29,440
means.

777
00:49:31,690 --> 00:49:36,890
So in this piece, I'm kind of bringing those two together to say, isn't this an interesting

778
00:49:36,890 --> 00:49:37,210
comparison?

779
00:49:37,290 --> 00:49:42,330
Because usually when we think about something like uh indigenous hunting technology, you

780
00:49:42,330 --> 00:49:47,770
know, it's often viewed by anthropologists as superstition or um, you know,

781
00:49:48,010 --> 00:49:52,650
something that can't possibly have any effects in the world that matter.

782
00:49:52,810 --> 00:49:56,650
Um, but when you look at people's, what I'm focusing on is sort of people's attitudes

783
00:49:56,650 --> 00:50:00,440
towards them, which are very reminiscent of the attitudes that we have in science, where

784
00:50:00,440 --> 00:50:06,200
you trust some ancestors who were rigorous and made sure that this

785
00:50:06,200 --> 00:50:07,480
procedure works.

786
00:50:07,720 --> 00:50:10,680
And they tell us you can only do it under these circumstances.

787
00:50:10,760 --> 00:50:12,200
And if you do it this way, it'll work.

788
00:50:12,360 --> 00:50:13,560
And we trust that and we do it.

789
00:50:13,640 --> 00:50:17,880
And if everything is working right, I mean, if we're in some sort of equilibrium condition

790
00:50:17,960 --> 00:50:22,920
or where the efficacy conditions still hold, then we trust that the effects that we want

791
00:50:22,920 --> 00:50:23,800
are going to happen.

792
00:50:24,040 --> 00:50:29,730
And so that's that's kind of where I've been thinking in that space that you know science

793
00:50:29,730 --> 00:50:33,890
has more of that kind of stuff than we than we like to think.

794
00:50:34,450 --> 00:50:37,650
Um and it may make use and it may it makes use of social processes.

795
00:50:37,810 --> 00:50:41,170
I mean, many philosophers of science have talked about these social processes in science,

796
00:50:41,250 --> 00:50:46,130
that trust is critical, nobody can know everything, there's a cognitive division of labor.

797
00:50:46,530 --> 00:50:51,000
Um and um all those things are the all those things are true.

798
00:50:51,160 --> 00:50:54,600
Um and you know there's a double-edgedness to them.

799
00:50:55,000 --> 00:50:59,640
I'm I'm just imagining like um a group of scientists joining hands and dancing around uh a

800
00:50:59,640 --> 00:51:02,760
fire pit uh singing P is less than 0.05.

801
00:51:04,600 --> 00:51:05,000
Right.

802
00:51:08,840 --> 00:51:13,430
Is the point in in Clark is the point like I can imagine there's like a couple points.

803
00:51:13,510 --> 00:51:19,110
Like, is it is it to sort of humble scientific um chauvinism?

804
00:51:19,190 --> 00:51:23,430
Or like what what's the do or do you have a couple like what's the point, you know?

805
00:51:24,710 --> 00:51:28,150
Uh I think I think I think that's yes.

806
00:51:28,310 --> 00:51:34,000
I mean what yes, I mean what I have in mind is the um

807
00:51:34,640 --> 00:51:39,360
importance of reflecting on what it is that we that we don't know.

808
00:51:39,440 --> 00:51:42,400
So, yeah, something like humility.

809
00:51:42,640 --> 00:51:44,880
Um but um

810
00:51:48,480 --> 00:51:53,920
it's also intended, you know, the sort of

811
00:51:53,920 --> 00:51:59,520
ethnographic part is intended to be an intervention in this space in anthropology where

812
00:52:00,730 --> 00:52:05,290
Often people think when they think about something like a ritual, um

813
00:52:08,410 --> 00:52:13,770
that that that that the the the sort of view is well, this is a completely mindless

814
00:52:13,770 --> 00:52:18,330
repetition of certain kinds of procedures without any reflection on what they are or why

815
00:52:18,330 --> 00:52:18,810
they work.

816
00:52:19,210 --> 00:52:23,760
And my point is is you know, in in Schwar communities, in any other community where there's

817
00:52:23,760 --> 00:52:27,920
ritual, I mean, when you go into church as a Catholic and get communion as a kid, you're

818
00:52:27,920 --> 00:52:29,200
like, what the hell is this?

819
00:52:29,440 --> 00:52:29,600
Yeah.

820
00:52:29,760 --> 00:52:29,920
Right.

821
00:52:30,000 --> 00:52:32,960
And you're and you know, and I mean, everyone is essentially, right?

822
00:52:33,040 --> 00:52:39,040
Um and so that process of reflection is is ordinary, and sort of knowing that you don't

823
00:52:39,040 --> 00:52:40,320
know is ordinary.

824
00:52:40,480 --> 00:52:46,270
Um and so we we we should think about these practices that have

825
00:52:46,270 --> 00:52:50,510
happened historically in that way and then comparing it with what's going on in science is

826
00:52:50,510 --> 00:52:51,230
kind of interesting.

827
00:52:51,390 --> 00:52:55,790
And you know, right now I'm on a little bit of a journey of you know worrying about some of

828
00:52:55,790 --> 00:53:00,590
the features of science um that we don't attend to enough that could lead to to error.

829
00:53:00,750 --> 00:53:02,750
And so it's part of that as well.

830
00:53:02,910 --> 00:53:07,070
I mean, I talking back to scientists and saying, you know, don't be so confident that

831
00:53:09,240 --> 00:53:14,600
I think, for example, that the the the problem of overdoing statistics in um

832
00:53:14,760 --> 00:53:17,240
behavioral science is a is a real is a real problem.

833
00:53:17,400 --> 00:53:21,320
I mean you go through these papers that are just completely full of statistical models, and

834
00:53:21,320 --> 00:53:27,320
at the end it can be like, okay, but is that really

835
00:53:27,610 --> 00:53:30,810
true what you're claiming on the basis of all these graphs?

836
00:53:31,050 --> 00:53:34,250
Um and we tend to be bewildered by these things.

837
00:53:34,410 --> 00:53:38,650
I mean, they're they have a beguiling effect almost like magic.

838
00:53:39,610 --> 00:53:41,610
Do you think it's almost like intimidation?

839
00:53:41,770 --> 00:53:44,570
I mean, is that too too uh blunt?

840
00:53:44,650 --> 00:53:46,890
But is it sort of like people just get intimidated by it?

841
00:53:46,970 --> 00:53:48,890
And they're like, Well, this seems sciencey.

842
00:53:50,890 --> 00:53:51,530
Yeah.

843
00:53:51,940 --> 00:53:56,660
I definitely think there's a there's a there's a kind yeah, there's a rhetorical persuasive

844
00:53:56,660 --> 00:54:02,660
effect of like um the and and and if you question the

845
00:54:02,660 --> 00:54:08,420
conclusions then one kind of way of defending yourself say, okay, so show me where

846
00:54:08,420 --> 00:54:10,500
this model is wrong or something like that.

847
00:54:10,740 --> 00:54:11,140
It's like different.

848
00:54:11,540 --> 00:54:14,980
You know, we should we you know we should we should be able to do that, but there are

849
00:54:14,980 --> 00:54:20,810
plenty of times I feel like where I read a paper and I'm like, okay, yeah, but you

850
00:54:20,810 --> 00:54:25,450
know we s there's just fancier and fancier versions of doing things like mistaking

851
00:54:25,450 --> 00:54:26,650
correlation for causation.

852
00:54:26,730 --> 00:54:30,410
I mean it's all over the place in behavioral science.

853
00:54:30,970 --> 00:54:31,610
Yeah.

854
00:54:32,490 --> 00:54:38,250
Um this whole conversation is making me realize that a lot

855
00:54:38,250 --> 00:54:42,180
of our supernatural concepts are correct in a way.

856
00:54:42,420 --> 00:54:46,420
So if you think about it, if you if you have a kind of embodied and active intelligence

857
00:54:46,420 --> 00:54:51,940
where I'm say uh inferring your mental states, your beliefs and desires and intentions.

858
00:54:52,100 --> 00:54:56,500
And I have no idea how I do that because it's unconscious and it's just happening in an

859
00:54:56,500 --> 00:55:00,420
intuitive way, that is basically telepathy.

860
00:55:00,900 --> 00:55:05,380
I mean, or or at least the it's telepathy, but the causal process that allows allows it to

861
00:55:05,380 --> 00:55:07,300
emerge is just opaque to me, right?

862
00:55:07,470 --> 00:55:07,710
Yep.

863
00:55:07,950 --> 00:55:12,590
If I'm making an unconscious inference about what's going to happen next or tomorrow, and

864
00:55:12,590 --> 00:55:17,790
it does happen, that is a kind of precognition if I don't know the causal process that

865
00:55:17,790 --> 00:55:20,110
happens in between the inference and the event, right?

866
00:55:20,270 --> 00:55:20,670
Mm-hmm.

867
00:55:20,910 --> 00:55:26,270
Um, similarly, if I have a hunting technology that has uh

868
00:55:26,350 --> 00:55:31,070
evolved culturally uh down the generations and has been proven effective because of that

869
00:55:31,070 --> 00:55:35,580
cultural evolutionary process, and it helps me uh hunt um uh an animal.

870
00:55:35,740 --> 00:55:40,060
Um that literally is my ancestors helping me, right?

871
00:55:40,220 --> 00:55:44,460
It is, you know, you could think of it as the the ghost of my ancestors helping me uh uh

872
00:55:44,540 --> 00:55:45,500
catch this animal.

873
00:55:45,660 --> 00:55:50,460
Uh and and there's so so there is a a a way in which all of these concepts are correct, um

874
00:55:50,540 --> 00:55:54,140
if if certain parts of the causal process are up are opaque to you.

875
00:55:54,380 --> 00:55:57,260
And it may be that a lot of supernatural concepts are just shorthand.

876
00:55:57,420 --> 00:56:00,810
You know, that I'm just describing the way in which the ancestors have helped me.

877
00:56:00,890 --> 00:56:05,530
I'm describing the way in which uh i it seems to me that I can just read your thoughts or I

878
00:56:05,530 --> 00:56:07,290
can predict what's going to happen.

879
00:56:07,450 --> 00:56:09,930
Um these are kinds of magical things, literally.

880
00:56:10,010 --> 00:56:11,770
If you don't know how it works, it's just magic.

881
00:56:12,490 --> 00:56:13,850
Um I don't know.

882
00:56:14,010 --> 00:56:19,690
Uh uh uh uh do you do you buy that that way of thinking that this um the intuitiveness of a

883
00:56:19,690 --> 00:56:24,340
lot of these concepts just comes from the fact that the causal process is opaque and once

884
00:56:24,340 --> 00:56:29,620
you snip out the middle of the the causal sequence, it's indistinguishable from magic.

885
00:56:31,380 --> 00:56:34,660
Yes, definitely that I I definitely think there's something there.

886
00:56:34,740 --> 00:56:40,020
And I also agree with what you're saying about um the

887
00:56:40,660 --> 00:56:46,510
that so I mean I, you know, I I I was I was giving the I mentioned like

888
00:56:46,510 --> 00:56:50,030
Freud and the ego and the id and the you know there's these kinds of ways he had of

889
00:56:50,030 --> 00:56:50,830
dividing up the mind.

890
00:56:50,910 --> 00:56:55,230
And then there's this question of don't do those refer to anything at all?

891
00:56:55,790 --> 00:57:01,150
Um and one view would be no, those are just completely um hallucinated or whatever.

892
00:57:01,310 --> 00:57:04,830
But there's an analogy to what you're talking about, David, where you know there may be

893
00:57:04,830 --> 00:57:10,670
words for things, intuition, um, insights and things like this, which do refer to

894
00:57:10,670 --> 00:57:11,550
something real.

895
00:57:11,630 --> 00:57:17,480
Um, and but we don't have a grasp of them in psychology enough to

896
00:57:17,480 --> 00:57:23,320
be able to they have a flavor of they're not real or they're you know they're imagined, but

897
00:57:23,400 --> 00:57:29,320
um because maybe they're folk terms, um maybe you know we don't have a

898
00:57:29,320 --> 00:57:32,120
proper neural model of how it would work or something like that.

899
00:57:32,280 --> 00:57:36,840
Um but yeah, I think there's I think there's a lot of uh

900
00:57:38,120 --> 00:57:40,040
there can be a lot of things like that.

901
00:57:40,200 --> 00:57:46,190
Um I mean, even in LA there's a lot of um, you know, I'm I'm I'm in social networks

902
00:57:46,190 --> 00:57:48,670
that are, you know, sort of quasi-spiritual into astrology and stuff.

903
00:57:48,750 --> 00:57:51,230
And there are these people uh in LA, these intuitives.

904
00:57:51,390 --> 00:57:55,870
And basically what it is is you go, you go up to them and they just kinda

905
00:57:57,150 --> 00:58:01,310
listen to you and observe you and are just extremely attentive to every detail about you.

906
00:58:01,390 --> 00:58:05,390
And they just tell you stuff about yourself that might not have been apparent to you.

907
00:58:05,790 --> 00:58:06,030
Right?

908
00:58:06,110 --> 00:58:11,000
Your your your desires, your your character traits, your personality, what you want in

909
00:58:11,000 --> 00:58:11,400
life.

910
00:58:11,640 --> 00:58:16,040
And it seems to me that, you know, these people are just really good uh they're really good

911
00:58:16,040 --> 00:58:17,000
at social cognition.

912
00:58:17,160 --> 00:58:21,000
They're just really good at picking up on you know subtle cues of body language and dress

913
00:58:21,080 --> 00:58:25,240
and posture, and they just give you a readout of their intuitions about you.

914
00:58:25,320 --> 00:58:30,370
And t to a lot of people that can be really powerful, uh and and give them insights that

915
00:58:30,370 --> 00:58:32,050
they wouldn't have otherwise had.

916
00:58:32,210 --> 00:58:35,250
And because they don't know how it's happening, it feels like magic.

917
00:58:35,330 --> 00:58:36,690
It feels like a supernatural thing.

918
00:58:36,770 --> 00:58:39,890
It's just a it's just a a person who's just really socially intelligent.

919
00:58:39,970 --> 00:58:44,690
Uh and and and merely just being around someone who's socially intelligent can feel like

920
00:58:44,690 --> 00:58:45,090
magic.

921
00:58:45,170 --> 00:58:47,490
It can feel like a spiritual experience.

922
00:58:49,250 --> 00:58:50,450
Absolutely.

923
00:58:51,520 --> 00:58:53,840
Do they self-label as intuitive?

924
00:58:54,320 --> 00:58:55,360
I believe I believe they do, yeah.

925
00:58:55,680 --> 00:58:55,840
Okay.

926
00:58:56,160 --> 00:58:58,080
So Sherlock Holmes, yeah.

927
00:58:59,040 --> 00:59:02,960
Um I mean some of them uh are spiritualists or whatever, they're different words for it,

928
00:59:03,040 --> 00:59:05,280
but that's basically, you know, a lot of what it is.

929
00:59:05,360 --> 00:59:09,120
And I I imagine that's pretty common to all, you know, even tarot card readers or palm

930
00:59:09,120 --> 00:59:09,600
readers.

931
00:59:09,920 --> 00:59:14,030
I imagine a big part of what they're doing is just reading the body language and the and

932
00:59:14,030 --> 00:59:18,270
the dress and the mannerisms of the person and just weaving it into their uh their

933
00:59:18,270 --> 00:59:22,350
narratives about what the cards reveal or what the the lines on their palm reveal.

934
00:59:22,430 --> 00:59:26,670
Um I I would imagine that's a big part of how they pull off the the magic trick.

935
00:59:27,630 --> 00:59:28,030
Yeah.

936
00:59:28,510 --> 00:59:28,670
Yeah.

937
00:59:28,750 --> 00:59:34,590
I mean so an another kind of domain that I've been thinking about a lot is um

938
00:59:35,560 --> 00:59:40,760
so I I have this this this paper that came out pretty recently with um Alejandro Erut and

939
00:59:40,760 --> 00:59:44,200
Chris Smith Incognition called Lying About the Future.

940
00:59:44,520 --> 00:59:50,440
And it's it's it's um based on on vignette style interviews and

941
00:59:50,440 --> 00:59:55,240
stuff that we've done in Schwar communities um that originally

942
00:59:56,760 --> 01:00:01,560
were about trying to nail down what people think is a lie or put what people would consider

943
01:00:01,560 --> 01:00:02,600
to be a lie.

944
01:00:03,080 --> 01:00:06,170
Um and there's an interesting phenomenon in that paper.

945
01:00:06,250 --> 01:00:12,090
There's also some cross-cultural data that Schwar the Schwar people that we interviewed,

946
01:00:12,730 --> 01:00:17,690
there are many kinds of predictions about the future that they would consider to be a lie

947
01:00:18,490 --> 01:00:20,890
if the prediction doesn't come true.

948
01:00:21,530 --> 01:00:27,400
And ones that I would consider kind of strange from my

949
01:00:27,400 --> 01:00:29,080
cultural background.

950
01:00:31,080 --> 01:00:36,680
And, you know, things like doctors making a prognosis that turns out to be

951
01:00:36,680 --> 01:00:37,400
wrong.

952
01:00:39,240 --> 01:00:41,720
And, you know, that there's other examples too.

953
01:00:41,800 --> 01:00:45,400
And so in the paper, we kind of try to say, is it about the social identity of the person,

954
01:00:45,480 --> 01:00:47,480
that they're not trustworthy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

955
01:00:47,560 --> 01:00:51,800
And in the end, it seems to be that, you know, making a confident statement about the

956
01:00:51,800 --> 01:00:57,630
future um, when you don't know it's true, is considered a lie, which differs from

957
01:00:57,630 --> 01:00:59,950
commitments about the future where it's under your control.

958
01:01:00,190 --> 01:01:02,670
So people do there do seem to agree.

959
01:01:02,830 --> 01:01:08,750
If I promise that I'm gonna be on the Zoom call um at 9 a.m., but something happens to me

960
01:01:08,830 --> 01:01:13,120
and my, you know, the power goes out at my house or something, I didn't lie, right?

961
01:01:13,840 --> 01:01:17,600
Um, but there are things where I say, oh, this is going to happen tomorrow.

962
01:01:17,680 --> 01:01:20,320
And if it doesn't, that's considered a lie.

963
01:01:20,560 --> 01:01:24,640
I think there can be, I mean, that that's not necessarily so culturally strange, but but

964
01:01:24,640 --> 01:01:28,240
the reason I'm mentioning it is because there are really interesting views in this

965
01:01:28,240 --> 01:01:30,400
community about like knowing the future.

966
01:01:30,560 --> 01:01:36,480
And there are kind of um ideas that the future can be known through things

967
01:01:36,480 --> 01:01:42,290
like um using ayahuasca, but also dreams that dreams foretell the future.

968
01:01:42,690 --> 01:01:46,850
You know, and the reason the one reason I'm mentioning it is because you're talking about,

969
01:01:46,930 --> 01:01:52,690
you know, spirituality and and you know, could there be things, magical things that are

970
01:01:52,690 --> 01:01:55,170
real or whatever, that we don't quite understand?

971
01:01:55,410 --> 01:01:59,330
And so thinking about this started to get me thinking about well, you know, can you know

972
01:01:59,330 --> 01:02:00,770
something through a dream?

973
01:02:01,480 --> 01:02:05,000
I think the, I mean, I think the conventional answer would be no.

974
01:02:06,840 --> 01:02:11,800
But the more I started to think about that, the more I realize actually, there's plenty of

975
01:02:11,800 --> 01:02:15,800
cases where I have a dream and I wake up in the morning and I'm like, wait a second.

976
01:02:16,040 --> 01:02:17,320
And I realize something.

977
01:02:17,400 --> 01:02:20,600
I mean, do you know that you know from the dream?

978
01:02:20,760 --> 01:02:24,520
You know, think things like where a dream will tell you something about how you feel about

979
01:02:24,520 --> 01:02:25,810
another person, right?

980
01:02:25,890 --> 01:02:26,050
Yeah.

981
01:02:26,210 --> 01:02:30,050
And you wake up and you're like, I didn't realize that's how I saw that person, that

982
01:02:30,050 --> 01:02:32,530
they're a threat to me or whatever it might be, right?

983
01:02:32,770 --> 01:02:33,010
Yeah.

984
01:02:33,250 --> 01:02:38,450
And um so I do I do I know for sure that you can know things through dreams?

985
01:02:38,530 --> 01:02:42,770
I don't know, but I do think it's something that's been dismissed um, you know, quite a bit

986
01:02:42,930 --> 01:02:48,740
because you know dream interpretation is considered kind of a A lot of artists and

987
01:02:48,740 --> 01:02:52,500
musicians have personal accounts of they dream up a melody in their sleep and it becomes

988
01:02:52,580 --> 01:02:53,300
like their hit song.

989
01:02:53,380 --> 01:02:57,700
Like Paul McCartney famously, I believe, dreamt up the melody of might have been yesterday,

990
01:02:57,780 --> 01:02:58,180
I forget.

991
01:02:58,340 --> 01:03:00,740
Uh one of his like most famous songs just came to him in a dream.

992
01:03:00,820 --> 01:03:03,300
He just woke up and it was in his head and he just wrote it down.

993
01:03:03,460 --> 01:03:07,140
Um but a lot of other artists have stories like that where like they have creative insights

994
01:03:07,590 --> 01:03:08,710
while they're dreaming.

995
01:03:08,870 --> 01:03:12,790
Um and it could be that there's something about the unconscious churning that happens when

996
01:03:12,790 --> 01:03:16,950
you're dreaming, it just it it can sometimes give you insights that you wouldn't have

997
01:03:16,950 --> 01:03:18,870
otherwise had when you're awake.

998
01:03:19,030 --> 01:03:19,910
I mean, this happens all the time.

999
01:03:19,990 --> 01:03:23,750
If I'm you know, sometimes I'll have a realization that happens to me like unconsciously

1000
01:03:23,750 --> 01:03:24,950
while I'm not thinking about it.

1001
01:03:25,190 --> 01:03:28,950
Like sometimes thinking about something is a bad way to figure it out, and and the solution

1002
01:03:28,950 --> 01:03:30,790
will come to you when you're not thinking about it.

1003
01:03:31,110 --> 01:03:35,190
And it could be that dreaming is a similar kind of process where it's just kind of scanning

1004
01:03:35,190 --> 01:03:40,200
the space of your cognition for possible solutions in a way that's more distributed and

1005
01:03:40,200 --> 01:03:42,520
decentralized than conscious thought.

1006
01:03:42,920 --> 01:03:47,720
And oftentimes that kind of uh, you know, trawling the space for solutions is a more

1007
01:03:47,720 --> 01:03:51,000
effective way to arrive at an insight than conscious deliberation.

1008
01:03:52,040 --> 01:03:53,640
Um absolutely.

1009
01:03:54,600 --> 01:03:54,760
Yeah.

1010
01:03:55,000 --> 01:04:00,200
John Cleese has a great short YouTube video about creativity and it or how do you be funny

1011
01:04:00,200 --> 01:04:00,600
all the time.

1012
01:04:00,680 --> 01:04:05,630
And it's exactly this point, David, that um it's you have to do a lot of conscious work,

1013
01:04:05,710 --> 01:04:11,310
but then you have to just sort of shut that off and let entrust the non-conscious walk away

1014
01:04:11,310 --> 01:04:13,390
from it process happen.

1015
01:04:13,550 --> 01:04:18,750
But it's effortful to sort of like throw it into the um you kind of you kind of cook it in

1016
01:04:18,750 --> 01:04:21,630
an oven and you don't know what's going on subconsciously.

1017
01:04:21,710 --> 01:04:25,390
And I I get this experience, I don't know if you guys get it, even when I'm writing, you

1018
01:04:25,390 --> 01:04:29,980
know, like I'll work and work at like, or like how am I going to articulate this thing and

1019
01:04:29,980 --> 01:04:33,500
then I just can't do it, but then I walk away, but then I'm doing something else.

1020
01:04:33,580 --> 01:04:37,020
Like I'm going for a walk, and all of a sudden I'm like, oh no, this is the way to do it.

1021
01:04:37,180 --> 01:04:42,940
So clearly that thing was just sort of going on in a way that quote

1022
01:04:43,020 --> 01:04:47,740
unquote I wasn't controlling, but I but I did all the effort to sort of load up all the

1023
01:04:47,740 --> 01:04:50,540
ingredients and then just throw it into the subconscious.

1024
01:04:50,620 --> 01:04:50,860
Yeah.

1025
01:04:51,180 --> 01:04:51,340
Right.

1026
01:04:51,500 --> 01:04:53,340
You know, there's a there's a cool theory of dreaming.

1027
01:04:53,420 --> 01:04:56,300
Uh I I forgot I'm blanking on the guy who who thought of it.

1028
01:04:56,380 --> 01:05:02,270
Um, but the idea is that um we're constantly building predictive models

1029
01:05:02,270 --> 01:05:03,310
of the world around us.

1030
01:05:03,630 --> 01:05:09,630
And in the same way that AIs often overfit, they uh they overgeneralize from

1031
01:05:09,630 --> 01:05:15,230
uh local patterns uh and and make rules that don't apply more broadly, um the human mind

1032
01:05:15,230 --> 01:05:19,870
can overfit uh based on the data of of a transient experience or a local experience.

1033
01:05:20,030 --> 01:05:25,950
Um and the idea is in the same way that you often uh AI uh technicians will often

1034
01:05:25,950 --> 01:05:30,360
uh just feed a bunch of random noise into a predictive model so that it doesn't overfit and

1035
01:05:30,360 --> 01:05:32,520
overgeneralize from one data set.

1036
01:05:32,680 --> 01:05:37,080
Uh the idea is that dreaming is the same serves the same function, that it prevents us from

1037
01:05:37,080 --> 01:05:40,600
overfitting and just by feeding random noise into our predictive models.

1038
01:05:40,680 --> 01:05:42,600
Uh and that's a big part of the function of dreaming.

1039
01:05:42,680 --> 01:05:45,960
And that and that goes along with this idea that, yeah, maybe, maybe you can arrive at some

1040
01:05:46,120 --> 01:05:49,800
some insights through dreaming and maybe maybe it's not all bullshit.

1041
01:05:49,960 --> 01:05:55,930
Um, you know, maybe the the part of it that that is giving you real insights is the part of

1042
01:05:55,930 --> 01:05:59,370
it that lends itself to these cultural belief systems.

1043
01:05:59,610 --> 01:05:59,930
Yeah.

1044
01:06:00,250 --> 01:06:00,490
Yeah.

1045
01:06:00,570 --> 01:06:04,410
And Clark, you mentioned like uh uh drugs or hallucinogens.

1046
01:06:04,490 --> 01:06:09,530
I mean, uh, this is a weird question, maybe a weird direction, but is there any cognitive

1047
01:06:09,530 --> 01:06:15,500
science sort of I mean people seem to use that and find it personally meaningful in some

1048
01:06:15,500 --> 01:06:18,700
contexts, you know, or sort of like insight is gained.

1049
01:06:18,940 --> 01:06:24,860
And I can imagine sort of a story of it's sort of mixing ontologies that aren't typically

1050
01:06:24,860 --> 01:06:27,180
mixed or systems that aren't usually talking to each other.

1051
01:06:27,500 --> 01:06:29,020
Do you have have you thought about that?

1052
01:06:29,180 --> 01:06:32,380
I mean you mentioned that a little bit like what what's going on with that?

1053
01:06:33,580 --> 01:06:38,620
Yeah, I mean I have I I don't have thought about it, but I um and I do know that there is,

1054
01:06:39,070 --> 01:06:45,070
you know, especially um with um things like ayahuasca, which is a

1055
01:06:45,070 --> 01:06:50,190
mix of several different plants, it's a kind of tea made of several different plants that

1056
01:06:50,190 --> 01:06:56,190
has DMT is one of the main ingredients, but there's there's many psychoactive

1057
01:06:56,190 --> 01:07:02,140
ingredients in there, um and monoamine oxidase inhibitors and many other

1058
01:07:02,140 --> 01:07:02,380
things.

1059
01:07:02,540 --> 01:07:08,220
And um so it's a kind of technology that alters your mental states.

1060
01:07:08,540 --> 01:07:12,620
And um there's been a lot of interest in it for all kinds of reasons.

1061
01:07:12,700 --> 01:07:17,660
I mean, I I think the number of people who have tried this has gone way, way up in in

1062
01:07:17,660 --> 01:07:22,540
places like California and Europe and other places, but also, you know, interest in those

1063
01:07:22,540 --> 01:07:24,620
things for therapies and other kinds of things.

1064
01:07:24,700 --> 01:07:30,510
And I do I think that there's some um there's some research on it, but

1065
01:07:30,510 --> 01:07:36,110
I I also think that I I know that there's a huge problem

1066
01:07:36,430 --> 01:07:37,710
with using those things.

1067
01:07:37,870 --> 01:07:43,790
You can't do kind of like blind randomized assignment because people know when

1068
01:07:43,790 --> 01:07:46,590
they've been given the stuff that is psychoactic.

1069
01:07:46,910 --> 01:07:47,870
Yeah, you can't be blind.

1070
01:07:48,110 --> 01:07:49,070
Yeah, you can't be blind.

1071
01:07:49,550 --> 01:07:53,470
And and so, you know, because there have been attempts to do, you know, these sort of

1072
01:07:53,470 --> 01:07:57,960
randomized control trials and see what effects they have on various things like definitely

1073
01:07:57,960 --> 01:07:59,080
things like depression.

1074
01:07:59,160 --> 01:08:03,400
Um, it's been talked about for breaking out of alcoholism and other kinds of addictions,

1075
01:08:03,560 --> 01:08:05,320
but also the cognitive effects.

1076
01:08:05,480 --> 01:08:07,400
Um so there is research.

1077
01:08:07,480 --> 01:08:08,440
I'm not, I I don't know.

1078
01:08:08,520 --> 01:08:09,880
I'm not an expert on it though.

1079
01:08:09,960 --> 01:08:14,760
Um just it's just an interesting, it just reminded me sort of this this other thing of

1080
01:08:14,760 --> 01:08:19,240
where it it reminded me of David's point about dreaming, just that you know, there's

1081
01:08:20,630 --> 01:08:26,470
there's a phenomenon there of people sort of using a technology to

1082
01:08:26,470 --> 01:08:32,230
ult to just sort of yeah it it's sort of consuming this is a

1083
01:08:32,230 --> 01:08:38,150
weird thing I'm experiencing and using that as a tool essentially

1084
01:08:38,630 --> 01:08:44,240
yes putting yourself into a different mental state um and

1085
01:08:44,720 --> 01:08:48,400
making yourself out of like overly rigid priors that have developed because you know in

1086
01:08:48,400 --> 01:08:52,320
Bayesian learning sometimes you can get stuck in a rut where if you're if your prior is too

1087
01:08:52,320 --> 01:08:56,480
high and you know every piece of evidence you find can confirm the prior and then you get

1088
01:08:56,480 --> 01:08:57,360
stuck in this rut.

1089
01:08:57,520 --> 01:09:03,440
Sometimes a dream or a a psychedelic experience can s can shake you out of that rut

1090
01:09:03,680 --> 01:09:07,440
by giving you some new stimuli that you wouldn't have otherwise experienced.

1091
01:09:07,680 --> 01:09:08,240
Yeah.

1092
01:09:08,560 --> 01:09:09,200
You know.

1093
01:09:10,000 --> 01:09:10,880
It's interesting.

1094
01:09:11,330 --> 01:09:11,570
Cool.

1095
01:09:11,810 --> 01:09:13,090
Yeah, don't do drugs.

1096
01:09:13,650 --> 01:09:16,050
Uh so speaking of spirits spirits and ghosts.

1097
01:09:26,690 --> 01:09:30,130
For some reason I I love these stories of uh of ghosts killing people.

1098
01:09:30,370 --> 01:09:34,130
So we we had an episode with Brenda Bowser and she told a story about there was a murder

1099
01:09:34,210 --> 01:09:38,940
and there was like blood all over the walls and uh the village council came in and they

1100
01:09:38,940 --> 01:09:43,420
investigated the crime scene and they determined that the murder was caused by a phantasm

1101
01:09:43,420 --> 01:09:44,060
or ghost.

1102
01:09:44,540 --> 01:09:49,420
Um and we and we really uh got into the details of what was going on there and and what

1103
01:09:49,420 --> 01:09:53,260
kinds of social functions that narrative was serving or whether they they truly believed

1104
01:09:53,260 --> 01:09:56,860
that it was a ghost or whether they were doing it to sort of stem the cycle of violence

1105
01:09:56,860 --> 01:09:59,420
that would have resulted if they had pinned it on a particular person.

1106
01:09:59,580 --> 01:09:59,740
Right.

1107
01:10:00,860 --> 01:10:06,630
You told a similar story about um I believe two guys they they uh

1108
01:10:07,430 --> 01:10:11,670
maybe two or three I forget they would they went off to the river or something and then

1109
01:10:11,670 --> 01:10:14,390
they came back and one of them one of them didn't come back.

1110
01:10:14,550 --> 01:10:15,990
Could you recount that story?

1111
01:10:16,070 --> 01:10:18,230
Because it has haunted me all these years.

1112
01:10:18,950 --> 01:10:24,400
Well yeah it wa it was a case um where someone someone died.

1113
01:10:24,560 --> 01:10:27,520
I mean, the body ended up being found in the river.

1114
01:10:28,000 --> 01:10:31,360
And um it was on a hunting trip.

1115
01:10:31,920 --> 01:10:36,960
Uh and if yeah, I I believe that there were three people and two two came back.

1116
01:10:37,040 --> 01:10:38,320
There may have, there may have been more.

1117
01:10:38,400 --> 01:10:39,360
I wasn't I wasn't there.

1118
01:10:39,520 --> 01:10:43,680
I don't all I know is, you know, that this event ended up being kind of debated and

1119
01:10:43,680 --> 01:10:48,910
discussed in a similar kind of way to what you're referring to in the community where

1120
01:10:48,910 --> 01:10:51,710
Brenda was working, which I believe was Canambo.

1121
01:10:52,110 --> 01:10:56,270
And so where I was, this was a this was a Chevillar community in the late 90s.

1122
01:10:56,510 --> 01:11:02,110
And the thing is with these hunting trips, it actually was probably a fishing trip, if I

1123
01:11:02,110 --> 01:11:02,750
remember right.

1124
01:11:02,910 --> 01:11:08,110
So the way that the fishing works there is they use this plant poison called

1125
01:11:08,110 --> 01:11:10,830
Barbosco, which is a kind of vine.

1126
01:11:11,470 --> 01:11:16,700
Actually, one of the it contains one of the first things that was extracted from plants in

1127
01:11:16,700 --> 01:11:19,100
a commercial way to use as a pesticide.

1128
01:11:19,340 --> 01:11:25,180
Um the the active material basically binds with uh hemoglobin, and so it it

1129
01:11:25,180 --> 01:11:27,580
suffocates, um, it suffocates you.

1130
01:11:28,140 --> 01:11:32,380
And um, it's actually also a great technology because you you put it in the river, it's

1131
01:11:32,380 --> 01:11:37,100
kind of this milky substance, it kills the fish, but it's perfectly safe to eat the fish

1132
01:11:37,740 --> 01:11:40,670
because the fish have basically been suffocated.

1133
01:11:40,830 --> 01:11:46,350
Um, but all of the chemicals have bound inside the fish and it it doesn't hurt you.

1134
01:11:46,430 --> 01:11:51,230
If you drank it yourself, that is a way that you can, you know, poison someone or commit

1135
01:11:51,230 --> 01:11:51,710
suicide.

1136
01:11:51,870 --> 01:11:57,630
But in any case, the way that you do it is, you know, one person goes upstream, um,

1137
01:11:57,790 --> 01:12:01,790
or one or more people will go upstream with a big basket of this stuff and like pound it

1138
01:12:01,790 --> 01:12:07,720
with with you know, pound it um To kind of pulp out the this

1139
01:12:07,800 --> 01:12:10,120
this white stuff into the water.

1140
01:12:10,200 --> 01:12:13,080
And then people the fish start to float downstream.

1141
01:12:13,160 --> 01:12:17,720
And so people are positioned at different places along the river to sort of collect the

1142
01:12:17,720 --> 01:12:19,720
fish as they as they're floating downstream.

1143
01:12:19,880 --> 01:12:23,320
And so there's this point where people separate and they separated.

1144
01:12:23,400 --> 01:12:29,050
And when they came back together, the claim was that they just found this guy floating in

1145
01:12:29,050 --> 01:12:29,450
the river.

1146
01:12:29,530 --> 01:12:34,810
And so that it had been yeah, a non-human spiritual being that

1147
01:12:34,810 --> 01:12:36,330
killed this guy.

1148
01:12:37,210 --> 01:12:43,130
And then yeah, a debate ensued about whether that was not true, and it was

1149
01:12:43,130 --> 01:12:46,410
an excuse that that wasn't actually a it was actually a murder and so on.

1150
01:12:46,570 --> 01:12:52,080
Um and so that you know that is the kind that yeah, That's how that was

1151
01:12:52,080 --> 01:12:52,720
framed.

1152
01:12:53,280 --> 01:12:57,520
And I I remember there was a piece of dialogue you recounted that stuck with me in the

1153
01:12:57,520 --> 01:13:01,680
ensuing debate, where they were debating whether it was a murder or whether it was a

1154
01:13:01,680 --> 01:13:02,080
spirit.

1155
01:13:02,160 --> 01:13:07,680
And one of the parties who was there, uh, one of the three guys who came back, I believe he

1156
01:13:07,680 --> 01:13:13,680
said something like Um, It was a spirit, and if you don't believe me, there's going to be

1157
01:13:13,680 --> 01:13:14,320
a problem.

1158
01:13:15,270 --> 01:13:16,310
Was it something like that?

1159
01:13:16,390 --> 01:13:17,110
Do you remember it?

1160
01:13:17,350 --> 01:13:17,510
Yes.

1161
01:13:17,670 --> 01:13:17,910
Yes.

1162
01:13:18,070 --> 01:13:18,390
That's right.

1163
01:13:18,870 --> 01:13:19,030
Yeah.

1164
01:13:19,110 --> 01:13:20,150
That you yes.

1165
01:13:20,310 --> 01:13:21,910
You remember it better than me now.

1166
01:13:22,070 --> 01:13:24,230
Um but uh that that's right.

1167
01:13:24,470 --> 01:13:30,470
Basically they they um in the in the context of the argument or debate, it was

1168
01:13:30,470 --> 01:13:33,670
like this, you know, this is what happened, case closed.

1169
01:13:34,390 --> 01:13:37,350
Um there'll be no more discussion of this.

1170
01:13:37,510 --> 01:13:42,220
Um so a kind of authoritative Yeah.

1171
01:13:44,540 --> 01:13:50,460
And in that, David, like to just unpack it, is it that the it's a threat, but

1172
01:13:50,460 --> 01:13:54,860
because there's ambiguity whether or not the threat's coming from the spirit versus me?

1173
01:13:55,100 --> 01:13:59,980
Is that the sort of technology or the social strategy there?

1174
01:14:01,180 --> 01:14:06,710
It was it was um For one of the

1175
01:14:06,710 --> 01:14:12,710
families or one of the yeah, one of the parties, it was better for

1176
01:14:12,710 --> 01:14:18,150
them in the social situation to have you know to have that be the the story, basically.

1177
01:14:18,310 --> 01:14:21,270
And so they're basically saying this is what happened.

1178
01:14:21,510 --> 01:14:21,910
I think.

1179
01:14:22,310 --> 01:14:22,550
Yeah.

1180
01:14:22,790 --> 01:14:27,750
And did they and presumably they had the social and political authority to to make a print

1181
01:14:28,070 --> 01:14:32,760
like presumably that family would was high status enough and had enough allies and support

1182
01:14:32,760 --> 01:14:35,880
that they could say that and and make the threat and have it be heated.

1183
01:14:36,200 --> 01:14:36,520
Mm-hmm.

1184
01:14:36,680 --> 01:14:37,320
That's right.

1185
01:14:37,480 --> 01:14:37,800
Yep.

1186
01:14:38,280 --> 01:14:39,160
It's fascinating.

1187
01:14:39,400 --> 01:14:39,640
Yeah.

1188
01:14:39,880 --> 01:14:40,520
Yeah.

1189
01:14:41,080 --> 01:14:41,560
Yeah.

1190
01:14:42,360 --> 01:14:46,760
So I mean it's a it's it's a it's a case of yeah, it's a case of kind of in a s in a in a

1191
01:14:46,760 --> 01:14:52,360
relatively small community of kind of like, yeah, use of numerical strength or or whatever

1192
01:14:52,520 --> 01:14:54,280
to to push one's case through.

1193
01:14:54,360 --> 01:14:58,970
But that, you know, it doesn't mean that the other people, I mean, we know all kinds of

1194
01:14:58,970 --> 01:15:00,650
cases of this from politics, right?

1195
01:15:00,970 --> 01:15:05,930
Where um, you know, someone strong says, this is the way it is.

1196
01:15:06,330 --> 01:15:06,490
Yeah.

1197
01:15:06,890 --> 01:15:11,450
And I don't want to hear any other discussion of this going forward, right?

1198
01:15:11,690 --> 01:15:17,690
Doesn't mean that the other parties don't continue to hold the representation that

1199
01:15:17,690 --> 01:15:18,810
it wasn't that way.

1200
01:15:19,130 --> 01:15:19,450
Right.

1201
01:15:19,850 --> 01:15:25,600
And so, you know, this was a case of a kind of beef that lasted for multiple

1202
01:15:25,600 --> 01:15:30,480
years and um there there you know it it didn't extinguish the idea that this was a murder,

1203
01:15:30,640 --> 01:15:36,400
although it did definitely um you know make it so that that had to

1204
01:15:36,400 --> 01:15:42,240
not really be discussed in in or at least not op out of the open and you know

1205
01:15:42,560 --> 01:15:42,960
that's right.

1206
01:15:43,120 --> 01:15:43,360
Yeah.

1207
01:15:43,990 --> 01:15:48,310
Clark, Clark, there's a I have this reminds me of a question, which is those of us

1208
01:15:48,310 --> 01:15:53,270
evolutionary behavioral scientists who don't go to the field, um, we have gotten to a

1209
01:15:53,270 --> 01:15:57,270
tradition where we tell students that in um

1210
01:15:57,910 --> 01:16:03,670
non-weird cultures, if there's somebody in the community that really

1211
01:16:03,910 --> 01:16:08,790
is problematic and like really problematic, occasionally they'll there'll be a hunting

1212
01:16:08,790 --> 01:16:09,350
accident.

1213
01:16:10,360 --> 01:16:13,320
Is this tr is this is this a urban legend?

1214
01:16:13,480 --> 01:16:14,360
Is this true?

1215
01:16:14,600 --> 01:16:20,360
Uh I I have never actually asked a um uh credible um uh

1216
01:16:20,600 --> 01:16:25,560
anthro person and I feel like you are uh are one of the best to ask that does does has that

1217
01:16:25,560 --> 01:16:31,080
actually happened or is this sort of an urban legend that's got spun a little bit well

1218
01:16:31,720 --> 01:16:33,810
I can't really say beyond my own.

1219
01:16:33,970 --> 01:16:38,770
I mean, I I have obviously read some ethnography from some other places.

1220
01:16:38,930 --> 01:16:43,570
Um, but I but I think yeah, yeah, I mean

1221
01:16:53,460 --> 01:16:59,380
I would say, yeah, I I would say that um yeah, in in in in

1222
01:16:59,380 --> 01:17:05,140
all kinds of places, rural places, it might be easier to maybe kill somebody

1223
01:17:05,460 --> 01:17:06,580
or have you disappear.

1224
01:17:06,820 --> 01:17:07,060
Yeah.

1225
01:17:07,220 --> 01:17:09,380
Um happens in cities too, though.

1226
01:17:09,460 --> 01:17:09,620
Yeah.

1227
01:17:09,780 --> 01:17:15,460
And I mean, it's not necessarily always that it's a kind of community um

1228
01:17:15,620 --> 01:17:16,820
punishment of someone.

1229
01:17:16,900 --> 01:17:18,820
I I think that it probably mostly isn't.

1230
01:17:18,900 --> 01:17:23,010
It's more like a personal um, this person is inconvenient to me.

1231
01:17:23,090 --> 01:17:25,490
And so I'm going to get rid of them.

1232
01:17:25,650 --> 01:17:31,570
And so, I mean, if you're a fan of the true crime podcast genre, um, you can find any

1233
01:17:31,570 --> 01:17:37,570
number of those things happening in the US, um, you know, now where people like

1234
01:17:37,730 --> 01:17:43,490
suddenly, you know, this person left left the house and they didn't come back and we don't

1235
01:17:43,490 --> 01:17:44,530
know what happened to them.

1236
01:17:44,770 --> 01:17:49,260
So I think, yeah, it's those are the kinds of things in the case that we're talking about

1237
01:17:49,260 --> 01:17:50,300
here was something like that.

1238
01:17:50,380 --> 01:17:54,860
There was some there was some kind of well, one interpretation is there's some kind of beef

1239
01:17:55,420 --> 01:18:01,340
um that was extreme enough that somebody wanted to basically kill another

1240
01:18:01,340 --> 01:18:01,580
person.

1241
01:18:01,820 --> 01:18:02,060
Yeah.

1242
01:18:02,220 --> 01:18:07,500
And and that's the corollary of the suspects are the people who are in deep r uh engaged

1243
01:18:07,500 --> 01:18:08,700
relationships with the person.

1244
01:18:08,780 --> 01:18:10,940
It's likely probabilistically not a stranger.

1245
01:18:11,020 --> 01:18:15,330
So the initial suspects are right, you know, and it's for this reason where it's the the

1246
01:18:15,330 --> 01:18:21,090
motivation behind doing it is this person's continually imposing a cost on me and I I need

1247
01:18:21,090 --> 01:18:22,130
to do something about it.

1248
01:18:22,450 --> 01:18:22,770
Yeah.

1249
01:18:22,930 --> 01:18:23,570
Yeah.

1250
01:18:23,970 --> 01:18:24,610
Yeah.

1251
01:18:24,930 --> 01:18:26,610
Um yeah.

1252
01:18:27,010 --> 01:18:33,010
And and or you know and some sort of possibly perception or calculation of that, whether

1253
01:18:33,010 --> 01:18:35,300
that's really true or not.

1254
01:18:35,620 --> 01:18:40,100
Um, but also, you know, at whatever what they call acts of passion or something like that.

1255
01:18:40,180 --> 01:18:40,820
You know, who knows?

1256
01:18:40,900 --> 01:18:42,740
Some of those things may also be that kind of thing.

1257
01:18:43,060 --> 01:18:43,300
Yeah.

1258
01:18:43,460 --> 01:18:43,700
Yeah.

1259
01:18:43,860 --> 01:18:45,700
So we're covering drugs and murder.

1260
01:18:45,860 --> 01:18:47,460
We we haven't hit rock and roll yet.

1261
01:18:47,540 --> 01:18:48,980
Maybe we'll have Greg on.

1262
01:18:49,460 --> 01:18:50,260
Oh, how's the music?

1263
01:18:50,420 --> 01:18:51,620
Schwarz music.

1264
01:18:52,740 --> 01:18:54,020
Schwarz music is great.

1265
01:18:54,100 --> 01:18:59,730
It's it's um and there's there's a there's a um there's quite a big

1266
01:18:59,730 --> 01:19:05,170
music scene there, um, which is uh which is which is great.

1267
01:19:05,250 --> 01:19:11,090
I mean the the sort of um indigenous music scene in South America is burgeoning and

1268
01:19:11,090 --> 01:19:11,730
really good.

1269
01:19:12,850 --> 01:19:13,490
Do didn't we?

1270
01:19:13,650 --> 01:19:15,090
What what kind of music is it?

1271
01:19:15,170 --> 01:19:19,890
Is it like drumming or well now you know now there's all there's I mean, you know, now

1272
01:19:19,890 --> 01:19:25,840
there's just all of these like hybrid forms of um so you know um there's a lot

1273
01:19:25,840 --> 01:19:30,400
of schwar artists, you know, and people who sing in other indigenous languages who are

1274
01:19:30,400 --> 01:19:35,120
using things like cumbia, technocumbia, regatone, um,

1275
01:19:36,000 --> 01:19:38,720
hip-hop, other kinds of formats like that.

1276
01:19:39,280 --> 01:19:42,800
The traditional schwar instrumentation is is is like drums.

1277
01:19:42,960 --> 01:19:45,840
They also have a there's a kind of violin type of thing.

1278
01:19:46,080 --> 01:19:48,670
People play guitars, flutes.

1279
01:19:49,070 --> 01:19:54,110
Um, but yeah, the the the young kids have been transforming this, you know, as they as as

1280
01:19:54,110 --> 01:19:57,150
music does everywhere in the world, just taking all the ingredients.

1281
01:19:57,230 --> 01:20:03,150
And, you know, it's I sometimes um I get I

1282
01:20:03,470 --> 01:20:07,070
I'm an old man, I get grumpy about how music and film are going.

1283
01:20:07,150 --> 01:20:12,910
I don't want movies made with AI um or music made with AI, but at the same time, we know

1284
01:20:12,910 --> 01:20:18,080
that the technologies are becoming available are you know really create this like level

1285
01:20:18,240 --> 01:20:23,040
leveling of the playing field for people to make music and that's happening in in a lot of

1286
01:20:23,040 --> 01:20:28,560
rural communities around the world you just get these you know kids who are just like yeah

1287
01:20:28,640 --> 01:20:33,040
I'm gonna I got I'm gonna get a keyboard and and then they they do their thing and it's

1288
01:20:33,040 --> 01:20:33,280
great.

1289
01:20:33,600 --> 01:20:35,840
Yeah they have an orchestra at their fingertips.

1290
01:20:36,480 --> 01:20:37,600
Yeah super cool.

1291
01:20:38,000 --> 01:20:43,370
Yeah music seems to me like one of the outstanding mysteries in the

1292
01:20:43,370 --> 01:20:45,290
evolutionary social science.

1293
01:20:45,370 --> 01:20:47,370
Uh and aesthetics in general, I think.

1294
01:20:47,530 --> 01:20:47,770
Yep.

1295
01:20:48,090 --> 01:20:49,690
But but music in particular.

1296
01:20:49,850 --> 01:20:55,370
Um, there are just a lot of really mysterious aspects to it, like how it just sticks in

1297
01:20:55,370 --> 01:20:59,770
your memory so clearly, and how in particular it sticks in your memory like during your

1298
01:20:59,770 --> 01:21:00,170
youth.

1299
01:21:00,330 --> 01:21:04,010
You know, like during my teenage and 20s, like all the songs that I heard at that time are

1300
01:21:04,010 --> 01:21:05,130
just burned into my memory.

1301
01:21:05,290 --> 01:21:09,370
And when I listen to a song now, it just doesn't have the same sticking power, it doesn't

1302
01:21:09,420 --> 01:21:13,020
have the same intensity the m same emotional intensity as it did.

1303
01:21:13,340 --> 01:21:13,900
That's right.

1304
01:21:14,060 --> 01:21:19,660
Um and um we're just awash in music and the and it just has such such a

1305
01:21:19,660 --> 01:21:23,580
hugely uh powerful emotional effect on us.

1306
01:21:23,820 --> 01:21:27,820
Um I feel like there there's so many aspects of it that are really mysterious and s and

1307
01:21:27,820 --> 01:21:29,420
still have yet to be explained.

1308
01:21:29,500 --> 01:21:34,780
I mean I know Ed Hagen has some ideas about what might be going on about coordination and

1309
01:21:34,780 --> 01:21:36,470
signaling group cohesion.

1310
01:21:36,630 --> 01:21:38,390
I don't know if I quite buy that as the whole story.

1311
01:21:38,470 --> 01:21:43,350
Like it does like I want an explanation of music that explains like why a minor third has a

1312
01:21:43,350 --> 01:21:47,990
different vibe than a minor fifth and like why the mathematical properties of a melody are

1313
01:21:47,990 --> 01:21:48,870
the way they are.

1314
01:21:49,030 --> 01:21:50,390
Like what what is going on there?

1315
01:21:50,550 --> 01:21:51,830
I I have no idea.

1316
01:21:51,990 --> 01:21:54,070
Um We have to have a Greg on, maybe.

1317
01:21:54,310 --> 01:21:57,190
Yeah, maybe we'll have Greg on and see if he can dispel the mystery.

1318
01:21:57,380 --> 01:22:00,900
I mean, do you do you view it as as still an outstanding mystery or do you do you find some

1319
01:22:00,980 --> 01:22:01,140
like a few years?

1320
01:22:01,460 --> 01:22:01,700
Definitely.

1321
01:22:01,780 --> 01:22:05,140
I mean, I you know, it's it's it's some it's one of those it's one of those things where I

1322
01:22:05,380 --> 01:22:10,340
you know, I think calling back to your your conversation that I was listening to with

1323
01:22:10,340 --> 01:22:14,420
Daniel Nettle, you know, he was making the point, which I agree with that sometimes for for

1324
01:22:14,420 --> 01:22:20,420
complex phenomena like like that, um you know, there's this tendency to want to s assign

1325
01:22:20,740 --> 01:22:24,260
someone function um that's maybe overdoing it.

1326
01:22:24,430 --> 01:22:29,870
Um, and so I think there's a lot of cases like this with phenomena like music, aesthetics,

1327
01:22:29,950 --> 01:22:35,870
um, fiction, um, you know, religion, other kinds of things like this, uh,

1328
01:22:36,030 --> 01:22:41,870
even morality, where um it's a kind of uh, you

1329
01:22:41,870 --> 01:22:47,870
know, complex, emergent thing that definitely is the result of

1330
01:22:47,870 --> 01:22:49,390
a lot of functional stuff.

1331
01:22:49,720 --> 01:22:55,080
but to say that music has a function is or one function um

1332
01:22:55,880 --> 01:23:01,080
seems to me un unlikely um even even though even though some of you know some of these

1333
01:23:01,080 --> 01:23:06,840
things that music can do is correct i mean music can coordinate people um music

1334
01:23:06,840 --> 01:23:12,600
can um change your emotions it can uplift you it can um do

1335
01:23:12,600 --> 01:23:18,170
all these things but um yeah, it's it's a

1336
01:23:19,930 --> 01:23:21,130
it's it's it's strange.

1337
01:23:21,210 --> 01:23:25,930
And and and that the particular the the the the the things that you're alluding to, David,

1338
01:23:26,010 --> 01:23:31,450
like melody and um chordal structure and stuff like that, I mean I I

1339
01:23:31,690 --> 01:23:36,650
agree completely that there's a mystery there and it's you know somewhere in the vein of

1340
01:23:36,650 --> 01:23:42,620
also the mystery of mathematics, which you know has really intrigued me

1341
01:23:42,620 --> 01:23:48,540
for a long time that you have this symbolic system um that has aesthetic properties

1342
01:23:48,540 --> 01:23:52,620
that people find very, very appealing and they discover new forms of mathematics through

1343
01:23:52,620 --> 01:23:54,300
aesthetics in some way.

1344
01:23:55,260 --> 01:23:58,540
And they end up corresponding to the world.

1345
01:24:00,750 --> 01:24:02,110
Absolutely bizarre.

1346
01:24:02,430 --> 01:24:03,550
How do we explain that?

1347
01:24:03,710 --> 01:24:06,670
You know, imaginary numbers were forbidden by Pythagoras.

1348
01:24:06,750 --> 01:24:10,830
And then once they were allowed into mathematics, it turned out that they explained a bunch

1349
01:24:10,830 --> 01:24:16,510
of natural phenomena through entertaining the square root of a negative number, right?

1350
01:24:16,830 --> 01:24:19,550
And so what's going on there?

1351
01:24:19,710 --> 01:24:23,800
Um it actually reminds me of like it's almost like what we were talking about before is

1352
01:24:23,800 --> 01:24:25,160
like articulating an intuition.

1353
01:24:25,240 --> 01:24:29,800
So sort of like respecting the uh the nonlinear thing we were talking about like the

1354
01:24:29,800 --> 01:24:32,440
mathematics or like the the the supernatural stuff.

1355
01:24:32,600 --> 01:24:38,600
Like uh because David you were even saying before that um you know in the the the Western

1356
01:24:39,240 --> 01:24:44,120
canon the the sort of embodied stuff we don't really respect.

1357
01:24:44,440 --> 01:24:48,950
And I agree with that, especially like at universities and schools, but like when you get

1358
01:24:48,950 --> 01:24:53,110
to the highest level, like I don't know about you guys, but like when you talk to like the

1359
01:24:53,110 --> 01:24:56,310
best scientists, a lot of it is like creativity and art.

1360
01:24:56,470 --> 01:24:59,830
And you're just sort of like, oh, that person is just really good at this thing, and I

1361
01:24:59,830 --> 01:25:00,550
don't know how they do it.

1362
01:25:00,630 --> 01:25:02,150
And they might not even know how they do it.

1363
01:25:02,230 --> 01:25:06,150
So I think like anybody who's at like a really high level, or when you get to that really

1364
01:25:06,150 --> 01:25:11,670
high level, um, that that sort of assignment of like this is art or creativity or

1365
01:25:11,670 --> 01:25:13,430
imagination or aesthetic.

1366
01:25:13,590 --> 01:25:19,460
Um, like when I for me at least, whenever I hear anybody who's really, really good at what

1367
01:25:19,460 --> 01:25:22,020
they do, a lot of it isn't explicit.

1368
01:25:22,100 --> 01:25:27,220
And it I think it just comes back to like it's articulating or it's it's a placeholder for

1369
01:25:27,220 --> 01:25:28,340
this intuition.

1370
01:25:29,380 --> 01:25:30,900
Yeah, for sure.

1371
01:25:31,140 --> 01:25:35,620
Yeah, a lot of it is you you've absorbed a lot of good ideas and you're you're good at

1372
01:25:35,620 --> 01:25:39,220
distinguishing the good ideas from the bad ideas, and you've just stored them in your

1373
01:25:39,380 --> 01:25:42,670
unconscious and have made them available whenever they're needed.

1374
01:25:42,830 --> 01:25:46,670
And when you talk to like a smart person and they can just pull the the perfect concept at

1375
01:25:46,670 --> 01:25:52,670
the perfect time and they and they've just uh like that feels like a kind of art form.

1376
01:25:52,830 --> 01:25:53,070
Yeah.

1377
01:25:53,150 --> 01:25:57,230
Uh analogous to you know, someone riffing on the guitar.

1378
01:25:57,630 --> 01:25:58,430
Yeah, exactly.

1379
01:25:58,670 --> 01:25:58,830
Yeah.

1380
01:25:58,990 --> 01:25:59,230
Exactly.

1381
01:25:59,390 --> 01:26:02,430
Yeah, like I don't know how you felt, Clark, but like when I would sit in at the Center for

1382
01:26:02,430 --> 01:26:06,510
Evolutionary Psychology and listen to like John Orlita, you know, it was sort of as a s

1383
01:26:06,590 --> 01:26:11,220
young student of theirs, and and David you might have had a similar experience at UCLA

1384
01:26:11,300 --> 01:26:16,820
where it's sort of it's very much that experience right like where it's sort of oh this is

1385
01:26:16,820 --> 01:26:22,500
a uh it's it's an apprenticeship in a way yeah yeah and you know

1386
01:26:22,580 --> 01:26:26,580
I think something to think about for our field is um

1387
01:26:28,850 --> 01:26:34,850
You know so a a topic that I I wanted to possibly return to if it's okay, or just to

1388
01:26:34,850 --> 01:26:39,170
insert as something to, you know, is the importance of diversity of ideas, diversity of

1389
01:26:39,170 --> 01:26:43,810
people, diversity of ideas um in science, which you know is a contested thing right now.

1390
01:26:43,970 --> 01:26:49,650
Um but um you know, one of the ways one of the reasons that we can

1391
01:26:49,890 --> 01:26:55,890
once you become um steeped in a tradition of thinking about the mind and

1392
01:26:55,890 --> 01:27:01,440
the body, I mean, the the the number of sources that we have to think about these things

1393
01:27:01,520 --> 01:27:05,120
and the number of concepts that we have to draw on is incredible.

1394
01:27:05,360 --> 01:27:10,960
I mean, when you think about um all the all the things that we've all the things we've

1395
01:27:10,960 --> 01:27:15,040
talked been talking about, when you're in evolutionary science, you have you all we've we

1396
01:27:15,040 --> 01:27:20,240
also have certain kinds of concepts that are incredibly generative, like

1397
01:27:20,400 --> 01:27:21,200
mismatch.

1398
01:27:21,360 --> 01:27:26,400
I mean, I think people can be wrong about mismatch and it's overused perhaps.

1399
01:27:26,690 --> 01:27:29,170
But that is something that comes out of evolutionary thinking.

1400
01:27:29,250 --> 01:27:34,930
That is, I mean, once you know what that is, it's incredibly generative, right?

1401
01:27:35,330 --> 01:27:37,650
And there's and there's different kinds of mismatch, right?

1402
01:27:37,730 --> 01:27:42,290
I mean, there's um sort of deep time evolutionary mismatch, there's historical mismatch,

1403
01:27:42,450 --> 01:27:44,690
there's even personal experience mismatch.

1404
01:27:44,770 --> 01:27:46,210
I mean, I'm not a digital native.

1405
01:27:46,290 --> 01:27:49,330
I grew up before I didn't have an email account or whatever.

1406
01:27:49,410 --> 01:27:53,250
And so I have a mismatch in my own life with the way things are right now.

1407
01:27:53,520 --> 01:27:55,120
What a useful, what a useful concept.

1408
01:27:55,200 --> 01:27:59,280
I mean, it comes from dynamical systems and it interfaces with these other areas.

1409
01:27:59,360 --> 01:28:01,360
Um, and that's just to take one.

1410
01:28:01,520 --> 01:28:04,000
I mean, there's just so, so, so many.

1411
01:28:04,240 --> 01:28:09,680
And, you know, when we when um one tradition that I've been looking at quite a bit lately

1412
01:28:09,680 --> 01:28:14,720
is, you know, the phenomenology tradition, Husserl Heidegger, Merlo-Ponty, people like

1413
01:28:14,720 --> 01:28:19,680
that, you know, where it, I mean, if you look at that, they have really, really interesting

1414
01:28:19,680 --> 01:28:25,470
um Views about sort of how we engage with

1415
01:28:25,470 --> 01:28:30,430
the world at a kind of non representational level through direct interaction with other

1416
01:28:30,430 --> 01:28:30,670
people.

1417
01:28:31,390 --> 01:28:35,790
And so there's a bunch of words and concepts from that field that are useful.

1418
01:28:36,350 --> 01:28:40,990
If we were to expand this out to the rest of the kind of systems in the world that exist

1419
01:28:40,990 --> 01:28:44,830
for thinking about minds and bodies and all the other kinds of things we want to talk

1420
01:28:44,830 --> 01:28:49,100
about, I mean, it can only benefit, it can only benefit evolutionary science.

1421
01:28:49,260 --> 01:28:54,940
Some of the things may end up being wrong or we may have to modify them in some way.

1422
01:28:56,380 --> 01:29:01,740
But one of my things right now is to make a pitch that

1423
01:29:02,940 --> 01:29:07,500
our field, because we are telling the story of all humans,

1424
01:29:09,410 --> 01:29:14,530
when you actually look at the way the field is composed, it is not being told by all humans

1425
01:29:14,530 --> 01:29:17,570
or by a representative sample of all humans.

1426
01:29:17,730 --> 01:29:22,850
And I and um there's various reasons why that might or might not be.

1427
01:29:22,930 --> 01:29:27,410
I have my own feelings about it, but I I do think that one of the things is that we're not

1428
01:29:27,490 --> 01:29:33,160
um that there's something about evolutionary science where it is not creating a kind of

1429
01:29:33,160 --> 01:29:38,600
welcoming space for a lot of people to come in from other cultural traditions and other

1430
01:29:38,600 --> 01:29:40,360
kinds of backgrounds to a certain extent.

1431
01:29:40,440 --> 01:29:45,560
I don't want to go too far in that direction, but I but I think that it will benefit us as

1432
01:29:45,560 --> 01:29:49,640
a field to think about how do we bring in people from these other traditions?

1433
01:29:49,880 --> 01:29:53,640
Because when you start to look, I mean, you know, one thing I have to say from working in

1434
01:29:53,640 --> 01:29:59,030
South American indigenous communities like the idea of evolution is not a problem for most

1435
01:29:59,270 --> 01:29:59,510
people.

1436
01:29:59,990 --> 01:30:05,590
In fact, you know, the idea that humans are one species among many and that we're related

1437
01:30:05,590 --> 01:30:11,190
to everything else through kinship, essentially, is a deeply

1438
01:30:11,990 --> 01:30:14,550
reverberating idea in indigenous communities.

1439
01:30:14,630 --> 01:30:20,550
In fact, it's way makes way more sense to people growing up in those

1440
01:30:20,550 --> 01:30:24,870
traditions than it does to people raised, for example, in a religious European tradition

1441
01:30:25,430 --> 01:30:27,600
where humans are special and separate.

1442
01:30:27,840 --> 01:30:33,040
So there's all kinds of reasons why bringing in people from outside of the traditions that

1443
01:30:33,040 --> 01:30:38,880
we are normally in is are going to help evolutionary science and give us this sort of

1444
01:30:38,880 --> 01:30:41,200
broader palette of ideas we can think of.

1445
01:30:41,680 --> 01:30:46,720
So that you know, when I think about the sort of how much we have internalized and

1446
01:30:47,360 --> 01:30:53,200
embedded in our own thoughts these ways of thinking that are really generative, I think

1447
01:30:53,200 --> 01:30:56,850
we can expand it even further.

1448
01:30:57,650 --> 01:31:03,570
Is the argument that uh evolutionary behavioral sciences is still born out

1449
01:31:03,570 --> 01:31:06,530
of behavioral sciences, psychology?

1450
01:31:06,770 --> 01:31:11,650
And it's more maybe cross-cultural, just to sort of be reductive about it, but it's more

1451
01:31:11,650 --> 01:31:13,490
cross-cultural than a lot of that stuff.

1452
01:31:13,650 --> 01:31:13,970
Yes.

1453
01:31:14,130 --> 01:31:19,810
But we can still do better in the sense of because there's a theory,

1454
01:31:20,050 --> 01:31:25,100
because we already are coming from things in a very different way, we have a way to look

1455
01:31:25,100 --> 01:31:30,700
around at even more stuff and say, look, here's the sense in which this is a

1456
01:31:30,700 --> 01:31:31,900
helpful tool.

1457
01:31:32,220 --> 01:31:34,620
We can understand why this makes sense.

1458
01:31:34,860 --> 01:31:39,660
Whereas traditional scientists might just poo poo this idea or think it's unsophisticated,

1459
01:31:39,820 --> 01:31:41,420
like in the example of magic.

1460
01:31:41,900 --> 01:31:42,140
Right.

1461
01:31:42,300 --> 01:31:46,540
You know, where you're just sort of like physicists are like, that's garbage, or like, you

1462
01:31:46,540 --> 01:31:52,110
know, just to be super um unfair, but like cognitive

1463
01:31:52,110 --> 01:31:54,190
scientists might be that's just garbage, right?

1464
01:31:54,270 --> 01:31:55,070
Like it's not real.

1465
01:31:55,230 --> 01:31:56,030
We don't study that.

1466
01:31:56,110 --> 01:32:00,350
We're we're we're sophisticated psychologists and we study deduction.

1467
01:32:00,830 --> 01:32:06,590
We have this unique thing of we have we have the the secret tool

1468
01:32:06,590 --> 01:32:12,360
to understand the way in which everything can be science and

1469
01:32:12,360 --> 01:32:17,480
we're not doing as good of a job, or we could always do a better job of just going out and

1470
01:32:17,480 --> 01:32:22,440
going to all the places where people have sort of been not taken seriously and take them

1471
01:32:22,440 --> 01:32:23,080
seriously.

1472
01:32:24,680 --> 01:32:25,240
Definitely.

1473
01:32:25,400 --> 01:32:29,880
Um, you know, uh the the other thing that I would say, just to kind of uh make what I'm

1474
01:32:29,880 --> 01:32:34,200
saying even a little bit more explicit, is I think that that evolutionary science has

1475
01:32:35,410 --> 01:32:41,410
Heated most evolutionary scientists have read the weird paper, you know, the the idea

1476
01:32:41,570 --> 01:32:42,770
from Henrik et al.

1477
01:32:43,010 --> 01:32:48,370
that you know we're our research participants are coming from an unrepresentative sample of

1478
01:32:48,370 --> 01:32:48,770
humanity.

1479
01:32:48,930 --> 01:32:52,690
Like I don't think we've actually fixed that problem, but most evolutionary scientists are

1480
01:32:52,690 --> 01:32:54,850
aware of it and I think would agree.

1481
01:32:55,170 --> 01:33:01,100
Um, but that is still seeing that that's that is still making essentially

1482
01:33:01,100 --> 01:33:04,380
an argument that we need to get data from other places.

1483
01:33:05,020 --> 01:33:09,420
And I think there's an additional step, which is that the people doing the science have to

1484
01:33:09,420 --> 01:33:12,300
be um from all from all walks of life.

1485
01:33:12,460 --> 01:33:12,700
Right.

1486
01:33:12,860 --> 01:33:18,620
And that um in so you know in in the in the area that I work in morality,

1487
01:33:19,030 --> 01:33:24,950
it's become increasingly obvious to me, you know, that we have these

1488
01:33:25,750 --> 01:33:31,670
theories of what morality is or might be that might be a subset

1489
01:33:31,670 --> 01:33:32,870
of possible theories.

1490
01:33:32,950 --> 01:33:38,150
And when we de when we develop these kind of methods for testing them, which I've done

1491
01:33:38,150 --> 01:33:38,710
myself as well.

1492
01:33:38,790 --> 01:33:42,310
You know, we develop these vignettes and that have to do with like the importance of

1493
01:33:42,310 --> 01:33:43,110
intentions and so on.

1494
01:33:43,350 --> 01:33:48,160
We go out to these other societies, you know, it might be too going too far to say that

1495
01:33:48,160 --> 01:33:54,000
we're projecting something onto these places, but we're certainly choosing a

1496
01:33:54,000 --> 01:33:59,200
space in the moral landscape to look at very carefully because the theories that come from

1497
01:33:59,200 --> 01:34:04,480
Europe, for example, tell us this is the these are the important distinctions to make.

1498
01:34:04,800 --> 01:34:10,330
And if we had people, you know, um from other traditions to tell us, well,

1499
01:34:10,410 --> 01:34:14,890
morality is about more than this, or there there might be other kinds of things here.

1500
01:34:15,370 --> 01:34:18,090
I think we'd make real progress in that area.

1501
01:34:18,410 --> 01:34:18,650
Yeah.

1502
01:34:18,730 --> 01:34:22,330
No, for I mean we are making some progress, but I think we'll make it Yeah.

1503
01:34:22,410 --> 01:34:26,490
I mean from my point of view, I mean the literature and moral psychology is absolutely

1504
01:34:26,490 --> 01:34:32,220
saturated with Western philosophy, historical traditions, Kant and the categorical

1505
01:34:32,220 --> 01:34:37,420
imperative, utilitarianism and deontology, mensrea, and the whole legal system and legal

1506
01:34:37,420 --> 01:34:39,740
framework for thinking about crime and punishment.

1507
01:34:39,980 --> 01:34:45,740
Like all these ideas are absolutely, you know, at at the theoretical uh

1508
01:34:46,540 --> 01:34:51,100
center of our thinking in terms of moral cognition, moral psychology.

1509
01:34:51,260 --> 01:34:52,730
Um That isn't to say that's bad.

1510
01:34:52,810 --> 01:34:53,930
I mean, you gotta start somewhere.

1511
01:34:54,090 --> 01:34:54,330
Right.

1512
01:34:54,810 --> 01:34:59,770
But this is very different from the way that moral practices uh are conducted in different

1513
01:34:59,770 --> 01:35:00,250
cultures.

1514
01:35:00,410 --> 01:35:05,130
And that and the idea that these distinctions and these categories and these concepts are

1515
01:35:05,530 --> 01:35:10,810
shaping our theorizing about morality, um, I think i is bound to have a distortive

1516
01:35:10,810 --> 01:35:14,090
influence on what our our picture of morality is looking like.

1517
01:35:14,410 --> 01:35:14,890
Yep.

1518
01:35:15,260 --> 01:35:15,580
Yep.

1519
01:35:15,740 --> 01:35:19,740
And I think it goes back to, I mean, I think some of the the problems, I I agree with

1520
01:35:19,740 --> 01:35:20,940
everything that you just said there.

1521
01:35:21,100 --> 01:35:22,700
I mean, you got to start somewhere.

1522
01:35:22,780 --> 01:35:26,620
It's not like the work that exists is is is bad necessarily.

1523
01:35:27,100 --> 01:35:33,100
Um, but it's the kind of like, um, I mean, one as one one problem that that

1524
01:35:33,100 --> 01:35:36,550
can arise from this is that you, you know, you're looking for the keys under the street

1525
01:35:36,550 --> 01:35:38,790
light because the light is better there kind of problem.

1526
01:35:39,190 --> 01:35:39,350
Sure.

1527
01:35:39,510 --> 01:35:43,350
And then and then the other one I think which comes up with morality is the kind of flavor

1528
01:35:43,350 --> 01:35:44,710
thing that we're talking about.

1529
01:35:45,030 --> 01:35:49,990
Where um, so you know, my view of the problem with the sort of intentions versus outcomes

1530
01:35:49,990 --> 01:35:55,030
debate, which has really occupied most of the And so what is that, just to familiarize

1531
01:35:55,030 --> 01:35:55,990
people who don't know what that is?

1532
01:35:56,310 --> 01:36:01,830
It's it's it's it's the it's you know, there's an idea that I mean you mentioned mensrea.

1533
01:36:02,070 --> 01:36:07,980
I mean, there's an idea that comes from certain kinds of Western philosophy, deontology,

1534
01:36:08,060 --> 01:36:12,620
and other kinds of approaches that say it's the intention behind an act or the reason

1535
01:36:12,620 --> 01:36:16,140
behind an act that makes it morally good or bad.

1536
01:36:17,020 --> 01:36:22,860
And that is the basis for most, you know, Western law, um, at least criminal law, right?

1537
01:36:23,260 --> 01:36:29,210
But um the and then there's been a debate, you know, partly

1538
01:36:29,210 --> 01:36:33,210
because of a paper that I was part of in 2016 in PNAS, where we did a bunch of vignettes

1539
01:36:33,290 --> 01:36:38,810
around the world and showed that, you know, there seems to be blaming people for intent

1540
01:36:38,810 --> 01:36:39,450
versus outcome.

1541
01:36:39,610 --> 01:36:43,690
If you create scenarios where you can sort of play those off against each other, it's not

1542
01:36:43,690 --> 01:36:46,410
always the case that intent wins over outcome.

1543
01:36:46,570 --> 01:36:50,330
Outcome, you know, the the the fact that you cause harm, even if you didn't intend it, can

1544
01:36:50,330 --> 01:36:53,000
sometimes be very morally blameworthy.

1545
01:36:53,640 --> 01:36:56,920
And then there's a debate about why that is.

1546
01:36:57,160 --> 01:36:58,440
I've participated in that debate.

1547
01:36:58,520 --> 01:36:59,800
I think it's an important one.

1548
01:37:00,040 --> 01:37:05,080
But what has been missing and is starting to change a little bit in the moral literature is

1549
01:37:05,080 --> 01:37:10,920
that you know we're people that perspective, which is very much act focused, it's

1550
01:37:10,920 --> 01:37:12,280
focused on acts.

1551
01:37:15,250 --> 01:37:19,090
I mean, if you listen to what people say in communities around the world and you look more

1552
01:37:19,090 --> 01:37:23,970
at the literature on morality from cultural anthropology, relationships are extremely

1553
01:37:23,970 --> 01:37:24,290
important.

1554
01:37:25,890 --> 01:37:28,930
Everything is embedded in within relationships.

1555
01:37:29,010 --> 01:37:33,810
And the same act matters differently depending on what your relationship is.

1556
01:37:33,970 --> 01:37:38,960
It's not that that's something that evolutionary psychologists don't know, um, or or

1557
01:37:38,960 --> 01:37:42,080
cognitive scientists who are who are designing, you know, philosophers who are designing

1558
01:37:42,080 --> 01:37:43,200
these vignettes.

1559
01:37:43,680 --> 01:37:46,400
But it hasn't been foregrounded in this literature at all.

1560
01:37:46,640 --> 01:37:47,040
Right.

1561
01:37:47,280 --> 01:37:50,720
And, you know, that there's also this huge, you know, if you look at traditions, even

1562
01:37:50,720 --> 01:37:56,720
Aristotle and others, virtue, um, virtue ethics, right, you know, have to do with

1563
01:37:57,360 --> 01:38:00,720
um, there's many moralized things that aren't even acts.

1564
01:38:01,050 --> 01:38:06,570
you know, that I mean ways of being that are virtuous or vicious, um, that that don't

1565
01:38:06,570 --> 01:38:08,970
involve causing harm to another person, for example.

1566
01:38:09,210 --> 01:38:10,490
And ways of thinking.

1567
01:38:10,970 --> 01:38:11,930
And ways of thinking, yes.

1568
01:38:12,010 --> 01:38:13,610
We yeah, exactly.

1569
01:38:13,770 --> 01:38:15,610
Um, those are kind of those are kind of missing.

1570
01:38:15,770 --> 01:38:20,970
And so, you know, I think we're off to a good start, but I think um, you know, one of the

1571
01:38:20,970 --> 01:38:24,810
arguments I would make is that if we had brought if we if we if we had brought in some of

1572
01:38:24,810 --> 01:38:30,560
these perspectives from outside of the kind of theoretical traditions that we've had,

1573
01:38:31,120 --> 01:38:34,480
we would be making progress faster because there would be people from other traditions

1574
01:38:34,480 --> 01:38:38,480
saying, wait a second, yeah, okay, of course we care what the intention is, but really it's

1575
01:38:38,480 --> 01:38:42,880
about who is this and why are they, you know, who is person A and who is person B?

1576
01:38:43,040 --> 01:38:46,800
Um and it's funny, I realized that when I, you know, when I was doing those initial

1577
01:38:46,800 --> 01:38:49,680
studies, that's the number one thing that people would ask you.

1578
01:38:50,030 --> 01:38:51,470
when you're running these things in the field.

1579
01:38:51,550 --> 01:38:52,750
They're like, who is this guy?

1580
01:38:52,910 --> 01:38:54,990
And I'm like, Well, I it's just a guy.

1581
01:38:55,070 --> 01:38:55,630
It's just a guy.

1582
01:38:55,870 --> 01:38:56,350
It doesn't matter.

1583
01:38:56,430 --> 01:38:56,990
It doesn't matter.

1584
01:38:57,710 --> 01:38:57,950
Right.

1585
01:38:58,030 --> 01:39:00,030
And then as psychologists, we're kind of trained.

1586
01:39:00,110 --> 01:39:03,950
We want to remove everything from the framing that's considered a virtue, right?

1587
01:39:04,030 --> 01:39:04,990
In running the experiment.

1588
01:39:05,070 --> 01:39:05,950
It's just a random guy.

1589
01:39:06,030 --> 01:39:09,070
And they're like, Well, if it's just a random guy, I can't tell you whether it's bad or

1590
01:39:09,070 --> 01:39:09,230
good.

1591
01:39:09,630 --> 01:39:09,870
Yeah.

1592
01:39:10,350 --> 01:39:11,150
People would say that.

1593
01:39:11,230 --> 01:39:14,350
And I and it's like, oh yeah, duh.

1594
01:39:14,510 --> 01:39:14,750
Right.

1595
01:39:14,910 --> 01:39:18,350
I mean, that is a reasonable perspective.

1596
01:39:19,230 --> 01:39:19,550
Yeah.

1597
01:39:19,820 --> 01:39:21,260
Um yeah.

1598
01:39:22,060 --> 01:39:22,380
No.

1599
01:39:22,540 --> 01:39:26,460
Uh i it's it's a fascinating response that you know, we come up with these questionnaires

1600
01:39:26,700 --> 01:39:30,380
in our weird societies and then we bring them to a person uh living in a very different

1601
01:39:30,380 --> 01:39:34,620
culture and they ask us these these flabbergasting questions like who is this guy?

1602
01:39:34,780 --> 01:39:36,620
And if I don't know him, then it doesn't matter.

1603
01:39:36,780 --> 01:39:38,060
Like I don't know.

1604
01:39:38,140 --> 01:39:40,700
It's it's just such a shocking thing to be confronted with.

1605
01:39:40,860 --> 01:39:41,180
Yeah.

1606
01:39:41,340 --> 01:39:44,060
And and such a profound thing, you know.

1607
01:39:44,220 --> 01:39:49,150
Uh like obviously that should be of even from an evolutionary perspective, this should have

1608
01:39:49,150 --> 01:39:49,790
occurred to us.

1609
01:39:49,950 --> 01:39:54,350
That like obviously if the person is a member of your family versus your member of your

1610
01:39:54,350 --> 01:39:59,710
group or a a friend or an ally or an enemy that like uh or a stranger, that this should be

1611
01:39:59,710 --> 01:40:03,470
deeply I mean, it's evolutionarily in terms of the fitness implications of the act

1612
01:40:03,630 --> 01:40:04,430
incredibly relevant.

1613
01:40:04,670 --> 01:40:09,550
And this and the fact that this didn't occur to us, you know, in in crafting our theorizing

1614
01:40:09,550 --> 01:40:12,510
and our questionnaires, uh, you know, tells us that we are missing something.

1615
01:40:12,590 --> 01:40:13,870
We're missing a per a perspective.

1616
01:40:14,110 --> 01:40:14,430
Yeah.

1617
01:40:14,510 --> 01:40:15,080
Um Yeah.

1618
01:40:16,360 --> 01:40:16,840
I think that's right.

1619
01:40:16,920 --> 01:40:20,600
And, you know, I mean the one the other the I just one thing that I wanted to to to to

1620
01:40:20,600 --> 01:40:23,480
circle back to, David, that you said something about legal systems.

1621
01:40:23,720 --> 01:40:24,120
Yeah.

1622
01:40:24,600 --> 01:40:29,880
You know, I I I the more that I've done these these studies, you know, I think, you know,

1623
01:40:29,960 --> 01:40:33,880
and I and I'm working in the in this sort of field of experimental philosophy where you

1624
01:40:33,880 --> 01:40:39,470
take vignettes and it has this wonderful um feature where you can just vary like a tiny

1625
01:40:39,470 --> 01:40:43,950
thing in the vignette and then you're sort of doing a controlled comparison of well if we

1626
01:40:44,110 --> 01:40:47,870
and you can even do that for like I change the identity of the person it's a brother versus

1627
01:40:47,870 --> 01:40:49,230
a stranger or whatever.

1628
01:40:49,630 --> 01:40:50,750
And we are doing some of that.

1629
01:40:50,830 --> 01:40:53,310
We've been doing that in Geography Philosophy project.

1630
01:40:53,710 --> 01:40:59,390
But um you know I will say that I've I've also started to really entertain this the

1631
01:40:59,390 --> 01:41:03,950
possibility that you know our legal systems are basically built for

1632
01:41:04,510 --> 01:41:05,710
impersonality.

1633
01:41:05,920 --> 01:41:08,960
yeah, if that's a word, and um impartiality, right?

1634
01:41:09,120 --> 01:41:14,800
Obviously, they're supposed to be impartial, but also the jury-based legal system in the

1635
01:41:14,800 --> 01:41:18,480
US and other places is about strangers judging strangers.

1636
01:41:18,720 --> 01:41:20,240
That's the entire point of it, right?

1637
01:41:20,400 --> 01:41:24,640
You actually want the people to be strangers who are making the judgment.

1638
01:41:24,720 --> 01:41:27,680
And that is, you know, we have this value system where that's supposed to lead to

1639
01:41:27,680 --> 01:41:28,800
impartiality.

1640
01:41:28,880 --> 01:41:34,400
Um, and in order to do that, then we have developed this apparatus where evidence has to be

1641
01:41:34,400 --> 01:41:36,730
presented in a very strange way.

1642
01:41:37,450 --> 01:41:43,450
You um have to exclude things that you that are obvious about the person that would be

1643
01:41:43,450 --> 01:41:45,210
relevant to almost anybody.

1644
01:41:45,850 --> 01:41:46,170
Right.

1645
01:41:46,330 --> 01:41:48,570
I mean, I understand why that is.

1646
01:41:48,730 --> 01:41:50,090
We can understand why that is, right?

1647
01:41:50,170 --> 01:41:53,770
A lawyer can say, Well, we have to exclude this because it's not relevant to this case.

1648
01:41:54,010 --> 01:41:59,690
This is a bad person, but we're going to leave all of that out because it's not

1649
01:41:59,690 --> 01:42:01,480
relevant, et etc., etc., etc.

1650
01:42:01,800 --> 01:42:03,240
Many of these procedures that we have.

1651
01:42:03,400 --> 01:42:09,240
I I I my sense is that first of all, those are kind of unusual for moral systems,

1652
01:42:09,400 --> 01:42:14,920
and and and we definitely don't want to conflate morality and the law as identical, but um,

1653
01:42:15,080 --> 01:42:20,760
the law is this kind of way of adjudicating moral issues, um,

1654
01:42:21,080 --> 01:42:24,170
which has this strange, strange property.

1655
01:42:24,410 --> 01:42:30,090
And so when you when you make vignettes where you say, Oh, it's just a guy and he

1656
01:42:30,090 --> 01:42:33,850
punched another guy in the face or whatever, you can give that to a bunch of Americans or

1657
01:42:33,850 --> 01:42:36,810
Europeans or people trained or educated in that system.

1658
01:42:36,970 --> 01:42:38,730
And they'll say, Okay, I see what you mean.

1659
01:42:38,810 --> 01:42:43,850
I'm extracting out everything except that the that the act was intentional, and then I'm

1660
01:42:43,850 --> 01:42:46,890
gonna say that's one point worse on a liker scale than the other one, right?

1661
01:42:47,210 --> 01:42:52,660
People can do that, but in real life, it's this person perception

1662
01:42:52,820 --> 01:42:58,580
gestalt, like you have, you know, you have all this information and it and it's part of the

1663
01:42:58,580 --> 01:42:59,540
judgment.

1664
01:42:59,860 --> 01:43:04,660
And um, you know, people that study like legal cognition, I think there's a there's a

1665
01:43:04,660 --> 01:43:10,180
tendency to say that's irrational or bad to include all that information, but in fact

1666
01:43:11,540 --> 01:43:13,530
that might be the way it's done, right?

1667
01:43:13,610 --> 01:43:17,130
So that you'll, you know, and it leads to biases.

1668
01:43:17,210 --> 01:43:20,410
It leads to like in-group, outgroup biases and things like that, perhaps.

1669
01:43:20,650 --> 01:43:26,010
But um, it's also the functional way that you know it makes sense to say, I forgive you for

1670
01:43:26,010 --> 01:43:28,730
this, or no, this is unforgivable.

1671
01:43:28,970 --> 01:43:34,490
Um, and I think it's I think it's worth thinking about that when we

1672
01:43:34,490 --> 01:43:39,130
design these studies, because many of them are kind of really based in this legalistic,

1673
01:43:39,440 --> 01:43:42,880
hyper-rationalistic kind of framework for judging others.

1674
01:43:43,120 --> 01:43:48,160
And I think that some of the weird findings that we get when we bring some of these

1675
01:43:48,160 --> 01:43:53,760
vignettes to other places might come from that, that people are just like struggling with

1676
01:43:55,040 --> 01:43:56,240
how to figure these things out.

1677
01:43:56,400 --> 01:43:59,680
Including, you know, one of the biggest things that we see in some of the studies I've done

1678
01:43:59,760 --> 01:44:03,760
is that the effect sizes of the manipulations are just much smaller in other places than

1679
01:44:03,760 --> 01:44:04,320
they are.

1680
01:44:04,630 --> 01:44:09,270
And so the effect size of like intentional versus accidental can be much smaller in other

1681
01:44:09,270 --> 01:44:13,270
places sometimes than it is when you do it with like a college sample or a prolific sample.

1682
01:44:13,430 --> 01:44:19,430
And and you know, I think sometimes that's been taken as an actual meaningful

1683
01:44:19,430 --> 01:44:23,270
data point that these these other participants don't care about intentions as much.

1684
01:44:23,430 --> 01:44:28,360
But I'm what I'm trying to say is well, you just these manipulations that are supposed to

1685
01:44:28,360 --> 01:44:33,640
be highly salient to people who are used to thinking in this vignette-based way, they might

1686
01:44:33,640 --> 01:44:34,200
work there.

1687
01:44:34,360 --> 01:44:37,400
But for somebody else who's like, I don't, you're telling me this thing.

1688
01:44:37,480 --> 01:44:39,160
I have no idea what the background is here.

1689
01:44:39,240 --> 01:44:44,520
So I'm just gonna say it's a one on a Likert scale, and you just don't get any difference

1690
01:44:44,520 --> 01:44:45,400
across the conditions.

1691
01:44:45,480 --> 01:44:48,280
That that's that you know, that's something that can happen.

1692
01:44:48,810 --> 01:44:50,570
Do you do you think that's from going to the field?

1693
01:44:50,650 --> 01:44:54,730
I mean, like one of the themes of this podcast is anthropologist keeps us psychologists

1694
01:44:54,730 --> 01:44:55,050
honest.

1695
01:44:55,210 --> 01:44:57,930
Like I don't think that was I don't think that was grammatical, but you get the point.

1696
01:44:58,090 --> 01:44:58,730
Yeah.

1697
01:45:01,050 --> 01:45:01,530
Yeah.

1698
01:45:01,770 --> 01:45:02,170
Yeah.

1699
01:45:02,250 --> 01:45:08,010
I yeah, I mean the field and maybe just

1700
01:45:09,000 --> 01:45:14,680
outside of academia, um interacting with people and trying to get a sense of of

1701
01:45:14,760 --> 01:45:19,880
of what their cognition is like and what they're and what they're in the in the realm of

1702
01:45:19,880 --> 01:45:20,200
morality.

1703
01:45:20,280 --> 01:45:23,160
I mean I don't sorry there's people outside of the the academia.

1704
01:45:23,320 --> 01:45:23,960
Sorry what?

1705
01:45:24,520 --> 01:45:25,640
Who are where are these people?

1706
01:45:25,720 --> 01:45:26,360
Who are these people?

1707
01:45:26,600 --> 01:45:27,560
Outside the ivory tower.

1708
01:45:27,720 --> 01:45:27,800
Yeah.

1709
01:45:28,040 --> 01:45:31,800
You know, I mean we all have access to what's going on in the political world right now.

1710
01:45:31,960 --> 01:45:37,870
And I mean so uh I you know, I I find it interesting to talk to people who are on different

1711
01:45:37,870 --> 01:45:41,710
sides of the political spectrum and people who are outside of academia in it, it's you

1712
01:45:41,710 --> 01:45:47,310
know, to to figure out like what so why there's something that I think is bad morally and

1713
01:45:47,310 --> 01:45:49,630
somebody else thinks it's good morally.

1714
01:45:50,190 --> 01:45:52,110
Um, and then you know, why is that?

1715
01:45:52,270 --> 01:45:57,100
And I think it's actually not so hard to understand once you start looking into it.

1716
01:45:57,260 --> 01:46:00,540
Um, but it can be very perplexing to an academic, like, why?

1717
01:46:00,700 --> 01:46:03,900
You know, just for example, like somebody lies all the time.

1718
01:46:04,140 --> 01:46:05,340
Why are we tolerating this?

1719
01:46:05,420 --> 01:46:07,500
And it's like, well, I think there are reasons.

1720
01:46:07,580 --> 01:46:08,620
I think there can be reasons.

1721
01:46:08,700 --> 01:46:13,100
And I think it can even be understood that that there are lies, and people are just like,

1722
01:46:13,260 --> 01:46:17,500
Yeah, that's a lie, but I'm still on the side of this particular agenda.

1723
01:46:17,820 --> 01:46:18,060
Yeah.

1724
01:46:18,140 --> 01:46:23,250
I mean, uh, to to bring it back to this social embeddedness that it depends so much on who

1725
01:46:23,250 --> 01:46:27,570
is lying and why they're lying and what their relationship is to you socially.

1726
01:46:27,730 --> 01:46:31,250
Um I was just uh reading a really interesting book called Legal Systems, very different

1727
01:46:31,330 --> 01:46:37,250
from our own, and um there was a chapter on uh Romani uh legal systems and Romani uh

1728
01:46:37,410 --> 01:46:37,970
morality.

1729
01:46:38,130 --> 01:46:43,060
And what's interesting about them the Romani is that um they constantly lie to everyone who

1730
01:46:43,060 --> 01:46:47,620
is outside of the Romani, such that they often give fake names to people who are

1731
01:46:47,620 --> 01:46:52,100
interviewing them, researchers even, uh, and and and census takers in the countries they're

1732
01:46:52,100 --> 01:46:52,580
living in.

1733
01:46:52,740 --> 01:46:57,300
And because they have this cultural custom where they always lie to anyone who is not one

1734
01:46:57,300 --> 01:47:02,340
of them, it becomes very hard to even know how many Romani are living in a particular area

1735
01:47:02,500 --> 01:47:05,620
because people are giving, you know, the same names or they're not revealing any personal

1736
01:47:05,620 --> 01:47:06,020
information.

1737
01:47:06,180 --> 01:47:08,580
It makes it very difficult for the census takers.

1738
01:47:08,660 --> 01:47:13,890
Um, and so uh to them it's like it's totally okay to just lie to anyone and just not give

1739
01:47:13,890 --> 01:47:16,290
them any true information if they're not part of your group.

1740
01:47:16,450 --> 01:47:21,330
And perhaps it's it's born of centuries of of oppression and and mistrust toward outsiders,

1741
01:47:21,410 --> 01:47:24,690
that if you give outsiders true information, it could be a threat to the group.

1742
01:47:24,770 --> 01:47:26,690
Uh and there's that's that's the way it is.

1743
01:47:26,850 --> 01:47:29,330
And for them, like it could be it could be an ethical thing.

1744
01:47:29,490 --> 01:47:33,810
Like if we tell the truth to someone who's not a part of your group, that could be immoral.

1745
01:47:34,050 --> 01:47:34,290
Right.

1746
01:47:34,540 --> 01:47:34,780
Sure.

1747
01:47:35,020 --> 01:47:39,500
Because you're giving away information that could be a threat uh to members of the group.

1748
01:47:39,580 --> 01:47:44,460
And so and there it just it's another example of the profound importance of who is the

1749
01:47:44,460 --> 01:47:48,060
person, what their relationship is to you, what the full context is.

1750
01:47:48,220 --> 01:47:49,660
It's not just lying bad.

1751
01:47:49,740 --> 01:47:53,820
It's what's all this what's all the contextual information uh surrounding that.

1752
01:47:53,980 --> 01:47:54,940
Um yeah.

1753
01:47:55,500 --> 01:47:56,460
Super interesting.

1754
01:47:56,700 --> 01:47:57,260
Yeah.

1755
01:47:57,580 --> 01:48:01,810
Um I want to get I'm just personally curious.

1756
01:48:01,970 --> 01:48:07,090
What is your take on the intention outcome debate uh and its universality?

1757
01:48:07,250 --> 01:48:10,530
Whether whether this distinction between I intentionally wrong someone versus I

1758
01:48:10,530 --> 01:48:16,450
accidentally wronged someone, uh is that distinction uh un culturally universal or

1759
01:48:16,450 --> 01:48:17,250
something close to it?

1760
01:48:17,410 --> 01:48:21,010
If if I could just get a soundbite of what what is your summary, because you you you're an

1761
01:48:21,010 --> 01:48:24,690
expert in this in this area, and I'm just curious about what you've synthesized uh from

1762
01:48:24,770 --> 01:48:25,730
from your work on it.

1763
01:48:26,130 --> 01:48:31,940
Yeah, I would say so um I think that the

1764
01:48:32,500 --> 01:48:38,100
the distinction between intentional and and you know various forms of

1765
01:48:38,100 --> 01:48:39,940
accidental is universal.

1766
01:48:40,020 --> 01:48:41,620
I think everyone can understand that.

1767
01:48:41,860 --> 01:48:47,540
Um I think you know how it's used to assign blame

1768
01:48:47,700 --> 01:48:53,540
is complex and varies across situations within you know groups and and across

1769
01:48:53,540 --> 01:48:53,940
groups.

1770
01:48:54,020 --> 01:48:59,830
I mean I I have a I'm I'm a I'm a I'm skeptical of what I've called the cultural main

1771
01:48:59,830 --> 01:49:03,510
effects model of intentionality.

1772
01:49:03,670 --> 01:49:08,150
You know, so I have a paper on this with Rebecca Sachs, where we basically are arguing, you

1773
01:49:08,150 --> 01:49:11,750
know, there are there are lots of differences, but the idea that there's just some

1774
01:49:11,750 --> 01:49:16,070
dimension where some societies are more intention oriented and others aren't, um, is

1775
01:49:16,070 --> 01:49:18,310
something to be kind of skeptical of.

1776
01:49:18,630 --> 01:49:24,580
Um, and and that the methods that we have um can't even

1777
01:49:24,580 --> 01:49:30,100
really tell you that because there's no principled way to

1778
01:49:30,100 --> 01:49:35,940
generate like a range of scenarios that completely flatly surveys the

1779
01:49:35,940 --> 01:49:41,140
morality space to show that, say, Americans care more about intentions in assigning moral

1780
01:49:41,140 --> 01:49:46,340
blame than you know, someone in Fiji, for example, where you know there's this claim that

1781
01:49:46,340 --> 01:49:47,380
intentions matter less.

1782
01:49:47,540 --> 01:49:51,730
I'm not saying that there's not discourse in Fiji about how you can't know other people's

1783
01:49:51,730 --> 01:49:52,530
minds and so on.

1784
01:49:52,610 --> 01:49:56,210
There's this idea of mental opacity, I think, is very real and comes out through

1785
01:49:56,210 --> 01:49:57,490
ethnographic work.

1786
01:49:57,730 --> 01:50:03,730
But whether it's easily mapped onto sort of moral judgments about the role of

1787
01:50:03,730 --> 01:50:06,690
intentions and culpability is harder to say.

1788
01:50:07,170 --> 01:50:10,050
The other thing I'll mention is I, you know, and I don't want to spoil this too much

1789
01:50:10,130 --> 01:50:15,250
because I have unpublished data from geography and philosophy, but um, you know,

1790
01:50:16,210 --> 01:50:21,360
we so some of the stuff I've been talking about about relationships, we've been starting to

1791
01:50:21,360 --> 01:50:23,760
manipulate those and see how those affect judgments.

1792
01:50:23,920 --> 01:50:29,360
But the other kind of category that I think is important to keep in mind is there's a lot

1793
01:50:29,360 --> 01:50:32,720
of mistakes or accidents that are not good.

1794
01:50:33,680 --> 01:50:36,960
And we see, you know, and we see those in the news a lot.

1795
01:50:37,120 --> 01:50:42,000
And there is also, we have evidence from a pretty interesting cross-cultural study that

1796
01:50:42,350 --> 01:50:47,550
everywhere that we looked, um, people do make fine-grained distinctions between different

1797
01:50:47,550 --> 01:50:50,270
kinds of accident that are in the law.

1798
01:50:50,430 --> 01:50:53,630
So the classic one is between recklessness and negligence.

1799
01:50:53,950 --> 01:50:58,750
And we we use vignettes to show that that's a very fine-grained distinction.

1800
01:50:58,830 --> 01:51:01,390
And those words don't exist in every language.

1801
01:51:01,710 --> 01:51:07,150
But you can create scenarios where an actor does something knowing that harm might happen

1802
01:51:07,230 --> 01:51:10,190
and they don't care, which is recklessness, right?

1803
01:51:11,240 --> 01:51:16,200
Or they do something where they they just don't know what might happen, but they do it

1804
01:51:16,200 --> 01:51:17,640
anyway, which is kind of negligence.

1805
01:51:17,880 --> 01:51:20,840
I mean, there's those are not the legally technical terms, right?

1806
01:51:21,000 --> 01:51:25,800
But um, they're you know, recklessness is a little bit worse than negligence in the law,

1807
01:51:25,960 --> 01:51:26,280
right?

1808
01:51:26,840 --> 01:51:30,280
Because you know that there might be some bad effects of what you're doing, but you're

1809
01:51:30,280 --> 01:51:32,840
speeding anyway, or you're driving drunk, or whatever.

1810
01:51:33,080 --> 01:51:37,320
Um, everywhere that we looked, we found that people make those distinctions, and those are

1811
01:51:37,320 --> 01:51:38,760
not intentional harm.

1812
01:51:39,210 --> 01:51:45,210
So e so and the reason that that matters is that if you think so,

1813
01:51:45,290 --> 01:51:50,890
there's some kind of views of the sort of um society, you know, that that societies that

1814
01:51:50,890 --> 01:51:55,370
don't pay attention to intentions are just outcome-oriented and that they're kind of

1815
01:51:55,370 --> 01:51:57,290
mind-blind in their moral judgment.

1816
01:51:57,450 --> 01:52:02,410
I mean, these the this study shows that they're not actually, even for cases of accidental

1817
01:52:02,410 --> 01:52:07,370
harm, you're you're calculating or you can be calculating what the other person knew.

1818
01:52:07,610 --> 01:52:11,900
And this is a huge domain of morality, I think, is important that overlaps with

1819
01:52:11,900 --> 01:52:12,860
epistemology.

1820
01:52:13,020 --> 01:52:15,980
There's virtues and vices associated with knowledge.

1821
01:52:16,140 --> 01:52:16,380
Yeah.

1822
01:52:16,620 --> 01:52:16,860
Right.

1823
01:52:17,340 --> 01:52:23,340
And I mean, um, you know, a theme that you see across cultures is if you're

1824
01:52:23,340 --> 01:52:26,700
taking action, and you know, the lying about the future thing has something to do with this

1825
01:52:26,780 --> 01:52:26,940
too.

1826
01:52:27,100 --> 01:52:32,810
If you're if you're taking action that has some kind of

1827
01:52:32,810 --> 01:52:37,130
moral or ethical significance, your state of knowledge matters.

1828
01:52:37,290 --> 01:52:40,010
And there's many cases where I think it's almost universal.

1829
01:52:40,090 --> 01:52:43,370
People would say you shouldn't do that if you don't know certain things.

1830
01:52:44,650 --> 01:52:44,970
Right.

1831
01:52:45,210 --> 01:52:50,330
And so that so having the relevant knowledge is actually a prerequisite to acting as an

1832
01:52:50,970 --> 01:52:54,010
ethically virtuous individual, right?

1833
01:52:54,170 --> 01:52:59,520
I mean, and we would agree, nobody should say agree to do brain surgery unless you

1834
01:53:00,000 --> 01:53:02,240
you know, unless you know what you're doing.

1835
01:53:02,480 --> 01:53:06,640
I mean, the ex the the excuse, well, I'm sorry I messed up your frontal lobe.

1836
01:53:06,720 --> 01:53:11,600
I it was a mistake, you know, doesn't really work well if you're not a trained surgeon,

1837
01:53:11,680 --> 01:53:11,920
right?

1838
01:53:12,240 --> 01:53:12,400
Yeah.

1839
01:53:12,720 --> 01:53:12,880
Yeah.

1840
01:53:12,960 --> 01:53:15,680
Don't blow up the building if you don't know if somebody's in it, you know.

1841
01:53:15,760 --> 01:53:16,400
That's yeah.

1842
01:53:16,800 --> 01:53:22,010
So and so the and so these so that so that's a long way of saying, yes, I think not only do

1843
01:53:22,010 --> 01:53:27,850
intentions matter, but that actually people make really fine-grained distinctions about the

1844
01:53:27,850 --> 01:53:29,050
reasons for action.

1845
01:53:29,370 --> 01:53:34,490
And we do know that there are domains, and this is also true in Western law, where there

1846
01:53:34,490 --> 01:53:39,690
are things like strict liability domains where you basically are going to have to pay a

1847
01:53:39,690 --> 01:53:43,050
penalty regardless of what you did or didn't know.

1848
01:53:43,500 --> 01:53:49,020
I think those are special cases and they exist in all cultures, but but it makes sense to

1849
01:53:49,020 --> 01:53:54,940
have those in certain kinds of situations where it's just like a deterrent.

1850
01:53:55,420 --> 01:53:58,220
It's like basically.

1851
01:53:59,420 --> 01:54:04,380
But I think again that, you know, and Rebecca and I argue this in that paper about

1852
01:54:04,700 --> 01:54:08,270
mind-blind morality, you know, that doesn't mean that people aren't making more

1853
01:54:08,270 --> 01:54:09,950
fine-grained moral judgments underneath that.

1854
01:54:10,030 --> 01:54:13,470
They can be like, yes, you have to pay this fine or you have to go to jail for this period

1855
01:54:13,470 --> 01:54:14,670
of time because you did it.

1856
01:54:14,910 --> 01:54:18,590
But they they still may be, if they know details of the situation, they still may be like,

1857
01:54:18,750 --> 01:54:22,990
man, it's really unfortunate that we had to send so and so to jail or it's really

1858
01:54:22,990 --> 01:54:24,910
unfortunate that he had to pay this money.

1859
01:54:25,070 --> 01:54:30,270
But that's the way it is because we have that rule and it's there for some kind of reason.

1860
01:54:30,940 --> 01:54:34,220
So that's how I would sort of see the landscape.

1861
01:54:34,620 --> 01:54:34,780
Yeah.

1862
01:54:34,860 --> 01:54:39,020
So it's not this idea that certain cultures, you know, the mental states don't matter in

1863
01:54:39,020 --> 01:54:39,660
moral cognition.

1864
01:54:39,740 --> 01:54:42,780
That's actually couldn't be further from the truth because when you actually look into it,

1865
01:54:42,860 --> 01:54:46,460
it seems like mental states matter so much that they're, you know, teasing them apart with

1866
01:54:46,460 --> 01:54:46,940
a scalpel.

1867
01:54:47,340 --> 01:54:52,460
You know, that they're they're zooming in on these really nuanced distinctions about mental

1868
01:54:52,460 --> 01:54:54,620
states in terms of their moral evaluations.

1869
01:54:54,780 --> 01:55:00,730
I wonder if the cultural variation that we do see is a byproduct of variation in trust

1870
01:55:00,890 --> 01:55:03,290
and who the agent committing the act is.

1871
01:55:03,850 --> 01:55:09,210
So there's some interesting modeling work by Julian Lapenie, and he

1872
01:55:09,370 --> 01:55:15,290
argues that these kind of rigid all or nothing moral systems where there are no

1873
01:55:15,290 --> 01:55:20,650
excuses, you know, your mental states don't matter, that these tend to uh uh evolve uh

1874
01:55:20,650 --> 01:55:26,540
naturally in low trust settings, where sometimes the only information you get about

1875
01:55:26,540 --> 01:55:29,260
another person's mental states depends on testimony.

1876
01:55:29,580 --> 01:55:33,500
And if you don't trust that testimony, and people are constantly trying to make excuses and

1877
01:55:33,500 --> 01:55:39,260
wiggle out of paying the price for their transgressions, then you get these kind of rigid

1878
01:55:39,260 --> 01:55:40,620
rules where there are no excuses.

1879
01:55:41,500 --> 01:55:43,340
If the outcome is this, then you're punished.

1880
01:55:54,210 --> 01:56:00,210
when you don't trust the sources of information um that reveal mental states, then

1881
01:56:00,210 --> 01:56:06,130
you get this kind of uh uh seeming uh ignorant or seeming downplaying of the

1882
01:56:06,130 --> 01:56:09,570
importance of mental states just because the information about them is less reliable and

1883
01:56:09,570 --> 01:56:10,290
less trustworthy.

1884
01:56:10,450 --> 01:56:14,690
It's not that the intentions don't matter or that we're or that they don't factor into

1885
01:56:14,690 --> 01:56:19,170
morality, it's that we're actually very sensitive about the reliability of the information

1886
01:56:19,170 --> 01:56:22,370
sources that are uh telling us about mental states.

1887
01:56:22,690 --> 01:56:28,580
You know, do you I do.

1888
01:56:28,740 --> 01:56:31,780
I think I mean it also fits with um

1889
01:56:35,460 --> 01:56:41,300
the literature on mental opacity, for example, in the Pacific, um, in places like New

1890
01:56:41,300 --> 01:56:46,500
Guinea and and and Fiji and places like this, you know, it's a kind of um

1891
01:56:47,670 --> 01:56:53,350
Explicitly held value, or you know, it's something that's taught by parents to kids where

1892
01:56:53,350 --> 01:56:58,310
they say, Well, you can't really trust you can't really trust what people say.

1893
01:56:58,870 --> 01:57:04,310
Um and so, you know, just because somebody tells you that this is what they think or know

1894
01:57:04,390 --> 01:57:07,990
or or do, you know, or why they did something, you can't you can't really trust it, which

1895
01:57:07,990 --> 01:57:09,910
is pretty reasonable advice.

1896
01:57:10,150 --> 01:57:15,020
Um, and and you know, as we know, mental opacity is actually the norm.

1897
01:57:15,100 --> 01:57:18,060
And we don't you can't actually see into somebody else's mind.

1898
01:57:18,220 --> 01:57:20,140
So all those kinds of beliefs are sensible.

1899
01:57:20,300 --> 01:57:23,500
The that it would correlate with trust, yeah, makes sense.

1900
01:57:23,580 --> 01:57:26,940
I mean, I would want to know, yeah, a little bit more about like why there are some

1901
01:57:26,940 --> 01:57:29,020
societies that are high trust or low trust.

1902
01:57:29,100 --> 01:57:30,540
Um, for sure.

1903
01:57:30,940 --> 01:57:35,740
But um, you know, I think that also in the case of the mental opacity things, you know,

1904
01:57:35,820 --> 01:57:40,060
with testimony, I mean, there is the the some of the anthropology literature does say that

1905
01:57:40,140 --> 01:57:45,830
that it's these sort of um values about uh not um

1906
01:57:46,550 --> 01:57:50,230
that they're there's they're oriented towards testimony cases like you're saying like you

1907
01:57:50,230 --> 01:57:54,870
can't trust what people say but you know obviously we have many other ways to make

1908
01:57:54,870 --> 01:58:00,710
inferences about people's thoughts and so um you know one of the things that would be

1909
01:58:00,710 --> 01:58:06,700
useful in some of those places would be to have um you know to look

1910
01:58:06,700 --> 01:58:10,940
at how at people's just person perception whether that makes a difference when they judge

1911
01:58:11,020 --> 01:58:15,580
you know whether what somebody something somebody did was bad or good or on purpose or not.

1912
01:58:15,660 --> 01:58:21,660
Um because sometimes you can just tell from other cues besides what somebody's

1913
01:58:21,660 --> 01:58:21,980
saying.

1914
01:58:22,300 --> 01:58:26,140
Yeah I like that example David I but also I mean I also think that there's probably lots of

1915
01:58:26,140 --> 01:58:31,100
things because like for example if you're in a community with people and you're constantly

1916
01:58:31,100 --> 01:58:34,810
interacting with them like let's say I'm in a hunting relationship with somebody and

1917
01:58:34,810 --> 01:58:40,570
somebody doesn't mean to be loud in the forest, but they're scaring all the game

1918
01:58:40,570 --> 01:58:41,130
away.

1919
01:58:41,370 --> 01:58:47,370
You know, um, if we're just passing on the street for five seconds in a modern

1920
01:58:47,450 --> 01:58:52,010
large scale society and they just happen to be loud, and I'm like, well, they didn't mean

1921
01:58:52,010 --> 01:58:53,210
to be, I'll forgive them.

1922
01:58:53,450 --> 01:58:54,970
But I'm stuck with this guy.

1923
01:58:55,130 --> 01:58:55,850
He's loud.

1924
01:58:56,010 --> 01:59:00,890
And every time I go out with him, he's scaring away all the food for me and my family.

1925
01:59:01,130 --> 01:59:03,160
Yeah, I don't care if he means it or not.

1926
01:59:03,320 --> 01:59:05,240
Like I'm I'm dealing with the consequences.

1927
01:59:05,320 --> 01:59:06,280
I'm stuck with him.

1928
01:59:06,440 --> 01:59:12,440
So that's like another example where it's just like the the nature of the local ecology

1929
01:59:12,600 --> 01:59:17,720
is that whether he intends it or not, in one case, I'm minimally affected in the large

1930
01:59:17,800 --> 01:59:18,440
scale environment.

1931
01:59:18,520 --> 01:59:23,560
In the small scale environment, I am just I'm I'm really negatively impacted.

1932
01:59:23,640 --> 01:59:27,400
And so yeah, I'm not gonna care if he intends it or not, because even if it's unintended,

1933
01:59:27,480 --> 01:59:29,000
it still sucks for me.

1934
01:59:30,910 --> 01:59:33,310
Yeah, I mean I think we're face these days.

1935
01:59:33,470 --> 01:59:39,150
I don't know about about about you all, but like, you know, maybe it's always been this

1936
01:59:39,150 --> 01:59:41,710
way, but like there's so many changing norms in the world.

1937
01:59:41,790 --> 01:59:47,310
You know, can you have a FaceTime call, um, you know, with

1938
01:59:47,550 --> 01:59:50,110
volume loud on the screen next to somebody or whatever?

1939
01:59:50,430 --> 01:59:51,630
No, your phone, yeah, exactly.

1940
01:59:51,710 --> 01:59:51,950
Yeah.

1941
01:59:52,910 --> 01:59:56,990
And um, I you know, I don't know what's going on there, but there's a lot of cases where

1942
01:59:56,990 --> 01:59:59,960
I'm like making judgments about what other people are doing.

1943
02:00:00,120 --> 02:00:06,120
And then it, you know, you both have to fold in like the effect that they're having

1944
02:00:06,120 --> 02:00:09,080
on you, what they know and intend.

1945
02:00:09,240 --> 02:00:13,640
And then, you know, we all have some personal sort of set points of like how relativistic

1946
02:00:13,640 --> 02:00:14,280
are we going to be?

1947
02:00:14,360 --> 02:00:20,150
Like, I'm just being like, Well, okay, that's that person's um yeah, That's that's how that

1948
02:00:20,150 --> 02:00:25,590
person grew up, or that's it, and and then so I I let it let it ride or or or whatever.

1949
02:00:25,670 --> 02:00:29,590
But you know, we're faced with those kinds of nuanced situations all the time.

1950
02:00:29,910 --> 02:00:30,470
Yeah.

1951
02:00:30,790 --> 02:00:34,630
One one theme I feel like of this whole conversation as we're sort of wrapping up because

1952
02:00:34,710 --> 02:00:40,440
we're getting in, is that the theme has been like respect stuff that

1953
02:00:40,440 --> 02:00:43,960
hasn't been respected um adequately.

1954
02:00:44,120 --> 02:00:45,720
Um do would you agree with that?

1955
02:00:45,800 --> 02:00:51,640
That that's sort of maybe a a North Star for the evolutionary behavioral sciences is

1956
02:00:51,640 --> 02:00:56,520
to sort of double check that we're respecting um things um

1957
02:00:56,840 --> 02:01:01,810
adequately Respecting

1958
02:01:02,930 --> 02:01:07,330
well, like I mean, so an evolutionary psychologist who's like, oh yeah, no, magic, that's

1959
02:01:07,330 --> 02:01:12,850
dumb, or like free will, that's dumb, or you know, cultural anthropology, that's dumb, or

1960
02:01:12,850 --> 02:01:14,530
cultural theory, that's dumb.

1961
02:01:14,690 --> 02:01:18,530
And we're hard-nosed scientists, and so screw them, and we're better because we take a

1962
02:01:18,530 --> 02:01:19,810
gene's eye view.

1963
02:01:19,970 --> 02:01:24,930
That's one way to sort of just be like, we feel good about ourselves, but we're insulating

1964
02:01:24,930 --> 02:01:29,200
ourselves, versus like, you know, yeah, the cultural anthropologists, whether they're

1965
02:01:29,200 --> 02:01:34,480
spitting at us or or not, we go in and we're like, this is a

1966
02:01:34,480 --> 02:01:35,920
evolved organism.

1967
02:01:36,320 --> 02:01:41,040
There's gonna be some sense in which what they're saying is deeply insightful if we'll just

1968
02:01:41,040 --> 02:01:42,480
shut up and listen to it.

1969
02:01:42,640 --> 02:01:46,240
And that's a different way to approach the sociology of science, sort of.

1970
02:01:46,320 --> 02:01:46,480
Yeah.

1971
02:01:46,870 --> 02:01:50,710
i think that's right yeah i i definitely think that it's important to take seriously what

1972
02:01:50,790 --> 02:01:56,230
you know when when when people whether they're other theorists or um other

1973
02:01:56,870 --> 02:02:02,630
um you know people that we're interacting with as research um collaborators

1974
02:02:02,790 --> 02:02:06,950
or interlocutors or participants in our studies and when there's things that people take

1975
02:02:06,950 --> 02:02:12,710
seriously um we should take them seriously as well and and there's various ways you know

1976
02:02:12,790 --> 02:02:17,820
of of of dealing with that um or theorizing it or thinking about it.

1977
02:02:18,060 --> 02:02:23,980
Um but so you know, and people kick around this idea of humility,

1978
02:02:24,060 --> 02:02:25,100
scientific humility.

1979
02:02:25,180 --> 02:02:30,940
I mean, you know, I I do I do think that that's that's an important um trait,

1980
02:02:31,020 --> 02:02:36,450
but it's also kind of um I I I guess I would make I mean,

1981
02:02:36,610 --> 02:02:39,890
humility in some ways you could say, well, it's just like, I don't know, I don't know,

1982
02:02:39,970 --> 02:02:40,530
maybe I don't know.

1983
02:02:40,610 --> 02:02:41,410
And that that's fine.

1984
02:02:41,490 --> 02:02:45,570
But I think we can go beyond that to be more, I would call for reflexivity.

1985
02:02:45,810 --> 02:02:51,570
Like, look at what you're doing, look at, you know, um, take seriously

1986
02:02:51,570 --> 02:02:53,250
different pop different possibilities.

1987
02:02:53,410 --> 02:02:58,900
I mean, for example, I think a lot of evolutionary science is essentially

1988
02:02:58,900 --> 02:02:59,940
confirmatory.

1989
02:03:00,180 --> 02:03:04,420
I mean, people think of an idea and they're like, I'm gonna demonstrate the plausibility of

1990
02:03:04,420 --> 02:03:09,620
this idea, which I think we can all we can all agree that's a good first step, right?

1991
02:03:09,940 --> 02:03:15,140
Um, but you gotta go past that at a certain point.

1992
02:03:15,380 --> 02:03:19,460
And I and when you look at the the amount of stuff that's out there, like genuine

1993
02:03:19,460 --> 02:03:22,180
hypothesis testing is actually kind of rare, I think.

1994
02:03:22,420 --> 02:03:28,010
Um Putting one's own ideas in jeopardy or putting it up against a plausible alternative.

1995
02:03:28,330 --> 02:03:32,970
So that's the kind of thing where I think respect for other possibilities

1996
02:03:34,410 --> 02:03:36,650
is something we should have.

1997
02:03:36,810 --> 02:03:42,490
I mean, I just to take one example, you know, um the the

1998
02:03:42,650 --> 02:03:48,570
the the ideas um that to being cosmides, you know, my own PhD advisors, you

1999
02:03:48,570 --> 02:03:48,890
know.

2000
02:03:50,760 --> 02:03:56,600
in in the adapted mind in 1992, they they they they coined this idea of the

2001
02:03:56,600 --> 02:04:00,440
standard social science model, which is basically kind of a blank slate view of the mind.

2002
02:04:00,680 --> 02:04:05,400
And I think that that's an I mean I understand why they did that.

2003
02:04:05,560 --> 02:04:07,400
And I think that was an important move.

2004
02:04:07,480 --> 02:04:13,330
I think that it has caused some damage, however, because by being able to put everything

2005
02:04:13,330 --> 02:04:17,650
that's an alternative to your theory, whatever it might be as an evolutionary scientist,

2006
02:04:17,890 --> 02:04:23,890
into that folder, it means that no other kinds of theories are

2007
02:04:23,890 --> 02:04:25,090
ever given a fair shake.

2008
02:04:25,170 --> 02:04:29,570
Or it's just very rare for people to give other kinds of theories a fair shake when testing

2009
02:04:29,570 --> 02:04:31,490
an evolutionary hypothesis.

2010
02:04:31,970 --> 02:04:36,060
And so I, you know, I think that's something where we could do, we could do better.

2011
02:04:36,220 --> 02:04:41,820
I also think that the promise of adaptationism hasn't really

2012
02:04:42,300 --> 02:04:47,100
um been as fulfilled as we might have wanted it to be.

2013
02:04:47,260 --> 02:04:52,300
Um, you know, that one of the things that I was taught and you were both taught as being

2014
02:04:52,300 --> 02:04:56,300
part of the community of evolutionary psychologists is that the the standards of evidence

2015
02:04:56,300 --> 02:04:59,500
for adaptations, you know, should be high.

2016
02:04:59,690 --> 02:05:01,290
The bar should be high.

2017
02:05:01,530 --> 02:05:07,050
Um and when you actually look, I mean, you know, I don't want to harsh on our own field too

2018
02:05:07,050 --> 02:05:10,890
much, but I mean if you look out there, I feel like the bar is not high in a lot of the

2019
02:05:10,890 --> 02:05:12,090
studies that are out there.

2020
02:05:12,250 --> 02:05:17,930
Um, for for, you know, really confirming that we've discovered an a biologically

2021
02:05:17,930 --> 02:05:19,770
evolved adaptation in the mind.

2022
02:05:19,930 --> 02:05:24,250
Um, there's not as many cases that seem satisfying as you might think.

2023
02:05:24,330 --> 02:05:28,580
And there's a lot of cases where people say that they've discovered an adaptation, but the

2024
02:05:28,580 --> 02:05:30,900
evidence that they have is is pretty thin.

2025
02:05:31,060 --> 02:05:36,340
So I mean that would be another case where I think whatever the word is,

2026
02:05:36,580 --> 02:05:42,420
humility, respect for other alternatives, but also just active reflexivity of

2027
02:05:42,420 --> 02:05:46,260
trying to do better, I think would help us a lot.

2028
02:05:46,500 --> 02:05:48,950
Um yeah, cool.

2029
02:05:49,030 --> 02:05:51,510
Yeah, there's a Toms of evolutionary psychology, you know.

2030
02:05:51,750 --> 02:05:51,910
Yeah.

2031
02:05:51,990 --> 02:05:57,670
Tom Scott Phillips has a paper about um I think it won the um uh Don

2032
02:05:57,670 --> 02:06:03,030
Simons Award was about um arguing that something wasn't adaptation that people had been

2033
02:06:03,030 --> 02:06:07,510
talking about was and he sort of brought up this idea that adaptation is an onerous concept

2034
02:06:07,590 --> 02:06:10,630
as George Williams put it that right we should reserve it.

2035
02:06:10,790 --> 02:06:11,400
Um Yeah.

2036
02:06:11,480 --> 02:06:15,160
I mean, I I do want to appreciate, and you know, David and I do this, and Clark, you do

2037
02:06:15,160 --> 02:06:19,480
too, that like you have to speculate about adaptations to look for evidence to test whether

2038
02:06:19,480 --> 02:06:20,360
there is one.

2039
02:06:20,440 --> 02:06:25,960
Um, but that's a separate enterprise than assuming a way that it is an

2040
02:06:25,960 --> 02:06:28,600
adaptation and not being rigorous even down the road.

2041
02:06:28,680 --> 02:06:32,920
That those are two different things, you know, speculating or proposing one versus testing

2042
02:06:32,920 --> 02:06:34,200
it or assuming it.

2043
02:06:34,360 --> 02:06:36,760
These are different phases of science.

2044
02:06:36,840 --> 02:06:38,680
And I think we kind of smush them together.

2045
02:06:38,920 --> 02:06:39,560
Yeah.

2046
02:06:40,710 --> 02:06:41,430
That's right.

2047
02:06:41,590 --> 02:06:43,990
And you know, there's a bunch of kinds of things that we have.

2048
02:06:44,230 --> 02:06:48,710
I mean, the you know, two of the major kinds of evidence that that that you see in

2049
02:06:48,710 --> 02:06:52,310
evolutionary science papers are, you know, correlations.

2050
02:06:52,950 --> 02:06:58,790
So something, how you answer on some scale is correlated with how you behave in some

2051
02:06:58,790 --> 02:06:59,910
other context.

2052
02:07:00,660 --> 02:07:06,420
Because adaptation is often the explanation that's given, which could be, but

2053
02:07:06,580 --> 02:07:10,580
right, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons that you need to push harder than that.

2054
02:07:10,820 --> 02:07:15,300
And you know, the other the other kind of thing is kind of universal patterns, um, which

2055
02:07:15,300 --> 02:07:21,220
are of course really useful to know when it, but I mean, if

2056
02:07:21,220 --> 02:07:26,870
some if if you know 80% of people answer a question the same way around the

2057
02:07:26,870 --> 02:07:30,470
world, you know, it's a long way from that to adaptation.

2058
02:07:31,430 --> 02:07:37,190
Um obviously you need to have it coupled with a good theory and all that stuff, but um, and

2059
02:07:37,190 --> 02:07:38,070
that matters.

2060
02:07:38,230 --> 02:07:43,670
But um, the standards of evidence also, you know, often there's a big gap

2061
02:07:43,670 --> 02:07:49,190
between um the evidence and the claim that there's an adaptation underlying the

2062
02:07:49,190 --> 02:07:50,150
universality.

2063
02:07:51,110 --> 02:07:55,180
And I just say that because I think, you know, this is something that we, you know, this is

2064
02:07:55,260 --> 02:07:58,380
this is the this is the the kind of gold standard of our field.

2065
02:07:58,460 --> 02:08:00,460
Like you're mentioning George Williams, right?

2066
02:08:00,620 --> 02:08:03,100
I mean, to discover a correlation is great.

2067
02:08:03,260 --> 02:08:04,460
That could be a fact.

2068
02:08:04,700 --> 02:08:10,300
That how you answer on a scale is correlated with how close you stand to people in public

2069
02:08:10,380 --> 02:08:11,420
or something like that.

2070
02:08:11,660 --> 02:08:15,500
But to go that, you know, to say that there's an evolved adaptation that's responsible for

2071
02:08:15,500 --> 02:08:21,310
it in a particular mechanistic way is a whole other layer that needs that often we

2072
02:08:21,310 --> 02:08:26,750
don't go far enough to showing that or to ruling out other alternatives.

2073
02:08:27,150 --> 02:08:28,590
Yeah, agreed.

2074
02:08:28,750 --> 02:08:29,390
Yeah.

2075
02:08:29,950 --> 02:08:31,230
Agreed indeed.

2076
02:08:31,550 --> 02:08:31,950
All right.

2077
02:08:32,270 --> 02:08:36,830
Well, we uh uh anything we should ask you, Clark, as we wind down here.

2078
02:08:39,870 --> 02:08:45,700
Um no, I mean I think did you guys have any other topics you wanted to cover?

2079
02:08:46,020 --> 02:08:51,220
Probably probably a lot, including how does a double jawed fish uh um chew its food, but

2080
02:08:51,220 --> 02:08:55,060
maybe that is where it's I would love to have a whole episode about cichlids and their

2081
02:08:55,060 --> 02:08:55,700
double jaws.

2082
02:08:56,180 --> 02:08:57,620
Uh yeah.

2083
02:08:57,780 --> 02:08:58,260
Yeah.

2084
02:08:58,500 --> 02:08:58,820
Yeah.

2085
02:08:58,980 --> 02:09:01,300
Fish are fish are weird.

2086
02:09:01,620 --> 02:09:02,420
Fish are cool.

2087
02:09:02,740 --> 02:09:03,220
They are.

2088
02:09:03,770 --> 02:09:06,010
Well, Clark, but uh anyway, yeah.

2089
02:09:06,170 --> 02:09:07,930
So yeah, we'll definitely have you back on.

2090
02:09:08,090 --> 02:09:14,090
But I really want to uh say thank you for um for being on, but also being uh the

2091
02:09:14,170 --> 02:09:15,930
you know, being in this field.

2092
02:09:16,090 --> 02:09:20,650
There there are so many people that I talk to who outside of evolutionary psychology are

2093
02:09:20,730 --> 02:09:23,690
like, oh, I hate evolutionary psychologists, except for Clark Barrett.

2094
02:09:24,970 --> 02:09:26,810
Uh and he's okay.

2095
02:09:26,890 --> 02:09:30,720
Um, and actually, I mean, I think that's gotten less and less, but in part because I've

2096
02:09:30,880 --> 02:09:36,080
also heard many evolutionary scientists as I've grown up in this field also being like, I'm

2097
02:09:36,080 --> 02:09:37,920
gonna do the Clark way and just be nice.

2098
02:09:38,000 --> 02:09:39,760
Like you win more flies with honey.

2099
02:09:39,920 --> 02:09:45,520
Um, and so I think you've you've sort of made uh the evolutionary social sciences um a

2100
02:09:45,520 --> 02:09:50,000
kinder, um, more um uh welcoming place.

2101
02:09:50,400 --> 02:09:56,240
Um, and I think that that, as you say, only helps in the sense of uh getting more

2102
02:09:56,240 --> 02:09:58,830
people doing it because ultimately that's the point, right?

2103
02:09:58,910 --> 02:10:04,110
Is like we as we as David and I have said, and that we everyone has said, the goal of all

2104
02:10:04,110 --> 02:10:08,830
this is to make evolutionary psychology disappear because it's just part of the water that

2105
02:10:08,990 --> 02:10:12,590
all the scientific fish to bring it back to fish swim in.

2106
02:10:13,070 --> 02:10:16,670
And and we can do that by just you know being nice about it.

2107
02:10:17,470 --> 02:10:18,350
No, I appreciate that.

2108
02:10:18,430 --> 02:10:18,750
Thank you.

2109
02:10:18,910 --> 02:10:24,720
I mean I I think that you know also um a another way to

2110
02:10:24,720 --> 02:10:29,760
think about that, in addition to just being nice, which I think is a virtue, um, is that

2111
02:10:29,840 --> 02:10:34,640
you know, a lot of things that evolutionary psychologists think of as sort of zero sum

2112
02:10:34,960 --> 02:10:37,120
games or trade-offs really are not.

2113
02:10:37,280 --> 02:10:43,200
Um, and so, you know, as I said, this kind of this this that

2114
02:10:43,280 --> 02:10:48,320
this kind of conflict that's happened between evolutionary science and you know, other

2115
02:10:48,320 --> 02:10:52,160
branches of science, like certain kinds of anthropology and so on.

2116
02:10:52,320 --> 02:10:58,050
Um, sometimes both sides of that see it as a kind that

2117
02:10:58,050 --> 02:11:04,050
there's a conflict there but um my experience is that that's not true or it doesn't need

2118
02:11:04,050 --> 02:11:09,970
to be true uh and um you can have an evolutionary science

2119
02:11:09,970 --> 02:11:15,660
that takes cultural phenomena and and human diversity incredibly seriously And

2120
02:11:15,660 --> 02:11:19,340
everyone kind of should agree that it should, in order to be a proper revolutionary

2121
02:11:19,340 --> 02:11:20,060
science.

2122
02:11:20,860 --> 02:11:24,380
And so there's no, there's no loss to us from doing that.

2123
02:11:24,460 --> 02:11:25,980
There's only there's only gain.

2124
02:11:26,140 --> 02:11:31,740
And I I, you know, I do feel from you know having been involved with HBS and

2125
02:11:31,980 --> 02:11:37,900
other kinds of things in our community, I do notice that sometimes there are people who

2126
02:11:37,900 --> 02:11:42,620
feel not welcome in our community for various reasons because of the theoretical

2127
02:11:43,290 --> 02:11:46,730
Persuasion that they have, or or whatever it might be.

2128
02:11:47,530 --> 02:11:53,290
You know, not all of that is our fault, but it's worth reflecting on what parts of it, you

2129
02:11:53,290 --> 02:11:58,330
know, what what way in what ways can we make evolutionary science a more welcoming uh

2130
02:11:58,330 --> 02:11:58,810
community?

2131
02:11:58,970 --> 02:12:03,370
Including, you know, for people who might not be sure or not very know very much about

2132
02:12:03,370 --> 02:12:06,570
evolutionary theory, but they are interested in human behavior.

2133
02:12:06,730 --> 02:12:09,450
Um, and they and they might bring a lot to the table.

2134
02:12:09,610 --> 02:12:15,340
Um, I think there are things that we can do to make people

2135
02:12:15,340 --> 02:12:19,660
feel welcome who have just a curiosity about these things.

2136
02:12:19,900 --> 02:12:24,780
And you know, so part of that involves being nice, and part of that also involves, as you

2137
02:12:24,780 --> 02:12:30,620
said before, kind of respect for um for

2138
02:12:30,620 --> 02:12:34,710
people and and why, you know, why that we are we all have reasons for getting involved in

2139
02:12:34,710 --> 02:12:35,270
academia.

2140
02:12:35,350 --> 02:12:38,550
We all want to know something about ourselves or the mind or the world or whatever.

2141
02:12:38,630 --> 02:12:42,790
And I think if we expand the tent of evolutionary psychology, we can bring in a lot of

2142
02:12:42,790 --> 02:12:45,990
people who are fascinated by all the things that we're talking about.

2143
02:12:46,230 --> 02:12:46,470
Right.

2144
02:12:46,630 --> 02:12:52,150
To view the modus operandi of our discipline not as a a conquering mindset where we're

2145
02:12:52,230 --> 02:12:56,140
we're right and they're wrong and we're gonna conquer them and and bend them to our will,

2146
02:12:56,220 --> 02:13:01,500
but more of an absorbing mindset where, you know, we're taking the insights that they have

2147
02:13:01,500 --> 02:13:06,700
and absorbing it and into our framework uh and and welcoming people.

2148
02:13:06,860 --> 02:13:09,100
Um I think is a better way to think of it.

2149
02:13:09,340 --> 02:13:09,500
Yeah.

2150
02:13:09,580 --> 02:13:13,660
And I think being nice, like I want to really be clear, like nice is not like wishy-washy,

2151
02:13:13,740 --> 02:13:17,260
like, oh, there's some crappy theory, and we're like, well, maybe that's right too.

2152
02:13:17,490 --> 02:13:22,130
It's it's actually the opposite of that, which is sort of to say that crappy theory, here's

2153
02:13:22,130 --> 02:13:23,730
the smart translation of that.

2154
02:13:23,890 --> 02:13:29,730
So it's actually more rigorous to absorb than to just sort of do the mediocre thing of

2155
02:13:29,810 --> 02:13:31,250
like, well, that's a crap theory.

2156
02:13:31,330 --> 02:13:32,290
I'm gonna ignore it.

2157
02:13:32,450 --> 02:13:35,490
You're like, okay, what's what is the sense that that makes?

2158
02:13:35,650 --> 02:13:37,970
Why would a why how is it right?

2159
02:13:38,210 --> 02:13:42,980
Is a hard, harder question than saying it's not right, Right.

2160
02:13:43,060 --> 02:13:45,380
That's a different, and that's that's the argument I think.

2161
02:13:45,540 --> 02:13:45,620
Yeah.

2162
02:13:45,780 --> 02:13:45,860
Yeah.

2163
02:13:46,020 --> 02:13:49,220
No, there's this idea of you know steel manning, which is the opposite of straw manning,

2164
02:13:49,300 --> 02:13:53,460
where like making the best possible case for the for the view that you disagree with.

2165
02:13:53,540 --> 02:13:57,700
And, you know, bringing it back to the standard social science model, um, I you know it was

2166
02:13:57,700 --> 02:13:59,380
a helpful distinction at the time.

2167
02:13:59,460 --> 02:14:03,780
Um, but you know, there could have been a more steel manned position of what the standard

2168
02:14:03,780 --> 02:14:05,060
social science model is.

2169
02:14:05,220 --> 02:14:09,590
Uh and I think we should constantly be stri striving to frame alternative theories,

2170
02:14:09,750 --> 02:14:15,750
alternative models uh in in in the best possible light, and and you know, find out you know

2171
02:14:15,910 --> 02:14:17,830
what what insight there is there.

2172
02:14:17,910 --> 02:14:18,150
Yeah.

2173
02:14:18,310 --> 02:14:23,830
Or at least making it um as as rigorous as possible to combat the ever-tempting uh presence

2174
02:14:23,830 --> 02:14:26,230
of straw manning in our in our thinking.

2175
02:14:26,390 --> 02:14:26,790
You know?

2176
02:14:27,190 --> 02:14:28,630
So yeah, I agree with that.

2177
02:14:28,710 --> 02:14:34,200
And I think, you know, it's yeah, that that distinction that was made, you know, uh as you

2178
02:14:34,200 --> 02:14:35,560
said, might have been useful at the time.

2179
02:14:35,720 --> 02:14:41,000
I think it I think you know there's also a kind of r residual feeling of combativeness in

2180
02:14:41,000 --> 02:14:46,920
evolutionary psychology because when it originated it was, you know, people felt it was

2181
02:14:46,920 --> 02:14:47,320
combated.

2182
02:14:48,440 --> 02:14:48,680
Yes.

2183
02:14:48,840 --> 02:14:54,430
And and and and you know, but you know, I think eventually, whether now is the time, but I

2184
02:14:54,430 --> 02:14:59,710
think now is the time, we um it will benefit us and everyone else to move past that kind of

2185
02:14:59,710 --> 02:15:05,710
mindset and um also to realize that um, you know, if people come to

2186
02:15:05,710 --> 02:15:10,910
the table with an idea or a phenomenon or um a theory or whatever, if it's not

2187
02:15:10,910 --> 02:15:16,830
evolutionary um, quote unquote, uh in the sense that we would see it that way right off the

2188
02:15:16,830 --> 02:15:19,500
bat, um, that's not a reason to dismiss it.

2189
02:15:19,580 --> 02:15:25,580
That's not a reason to um, you know, it it should be allowed into the into the discussion.

2190
02:15:25,740 --> 02:15:31,180
And um and if possible, translated into our way of thinking, because a lot of

2191
02:15:31,180 --> 02:15:36,620
non-evolutionary theories often can be translated uh into an evolutionary framework quite

2192
02:15:36,620 --> 02:15:37,340
fruitfully.

2193
02:15:37,500 --> 02:15:37,660
Yeah.

2194
02:15:37,820 --> 02:15:41,350
Um, you know, they the the the theoretician who developed the idea might not have been

2195
02:15:41,350 --> 02:15:45,670
thinking about evolution, but you can integrate it with existing ideas uh and buttress it

2196
02:15:45,670 --> 02:15:48,470
with existing ideas that can often be very very helpful.

2197
02:15:48,630 --> 02:15:50,630
Um Yep, absolutely.

2198
02:15:50,950 --> 02:15:51,350
Yep.

2199
02:15:51,510 --> 02:15:54,790
So we should have called it the podcast.

2200
02:15:59,110 --> 02:16:02,440
Maybe that'll be our uh our last episode in you know 30 years.

2201
02:16:02,520 --> 02:16:05,400
We can we will change the name to the podcast and our our work will be done.

2202
02:16:05,880 --> 02:16:06,280
Very good.

2203
02:16:06,440 --> 02:16:06,600
Yeah.

2204
02:16:06,920 --> 02:16:08,200
Well Clark, this is great.

2205
02:16:08,280 --> 02:16:08,840
Thank you so much.

2206
02:16:08,920 --> 02:16:10,040
I'm sure we'll have you on again.

2207
02:16:10,120 --> 02:16:11,720
And uh yeah.

2208
02:16:12,120 --> 02:16:13,240
Thanks for the conversation.

2209
02:16:13,400 --> 02:16:16,200
And um thank you both for doing this podcast.

2210
02:16:16,280 --> 02:16:20,280
Um I've been listening to some of them and I've been really enjoying them and it's a great

2211
02:16:20,280 --> 02:16:25,960
format for kind of extended discussions and hearing things from um colleagues as well as

2212
02:16:26,040 --> 02:16:31,930
you know new voices that I haven't heard before um in this space and and I know it's some

2213
02:16:31,930 --> 02:16:33,050
work for you guys to do as well.

2214
02:16:33,130 --> 02:16:34,010
So I appreciate that.

2215
02:16:34,250 --> 02:16:34,410
Yeah.

2216
02:16:34,570 --> 02:16:34,890
Awesome.

2217
02:16:35,050 --> 02:16:35,210
Thanks.

2218
02:16:35,370 --> 02:16:35,770
Thanks so much.

2219
02:16:35,850 --> 02:16:36,010
Yeah.

2220
02:16:36,090 --> 02:16:38,250
And it's it's awesome to just get a chance to talk to you.

2221
02:16:38,330 --> 02:16:42,170
Like, you know, I see you a bunch and but I I don't I rarely get a chance to talk to you

2222
02:16:42,170 --> 02:16:42,730
this in depth.

2223
02:16:42,810 --> 02:16:45,690
So it's a treat for for both David and I.

2224
02:16:45,770 --> 02:16:47,450
I I assume David for you too.

2225
02:16:47,530 --> 02:16:49,210
But yes, absolutely.

2226
02:16:50,250 --> 02:16:50,810
All right guys.

2227
02:16:50,890 --> 02:16:51,370
Thanks so much.

2228
02:16:51,450 --> 02:16:52,730
Uh Eric, have a gun.

2229
02:16:52,970 --> 02:16:53,210
Thanks.

2230
02:16:53,690 --> 02:16:54,330
Take care.

2231
02:16:58,360 --> 02:17:01,720
Well, you're still listening, uh, which means you like what you're hearing.

2232
02:17:01,880 --> 02:17:05,960
Uh so what can you do to support us, Dave?

2233
02:17:06,360 --> 02:17:10,760
Um, you can go out and buy Clark Barrett's Shape of Thought book.

2234
02:17:11,160 --> 02:17:11,800
Wonderful book.

2235
02:17:11,880 --> 02:17:12,600
One of my favorites.

2236
02:17:12,760 --> 02:17:13,000
Yeah.

2237
02:17:13,320 --> 02:17:13,880
Bang Banger.

2238
02:17:14,200 --> 02:17:15,350
But uh banger.

2239
02:17:15,590 --> 02:17:18,630
Uh uh what what else what else can people do who are listening?

2240
02:17:18,950 --> 02:17:22,710
You know, we maybe we should have an evolutionary psychology of the podcast book.

2241
02:17:23,110 --> 02:17:24,230
Oh, that would be interesting.

2242
02:17:24,310 --> 02:17:27,910
Maybe like transcripts of uh of our some of our best interviews.

2243
02:17:28,710 --> 02:17:31,270
Yeah, maybe we can have a coffee table book of some kind.

2244
02:17:31,670 --> 02:17:35,110
Maybe just pictures of us uh just talking talking to people.

2245
02:17:35,430 --> 02:17:36,470
Yeah, I don't know.

2246
02:17:36,710 --> 02:17:37,320
I don't know.

2247
02:17:37,400 --> 02:17:39,560
I haven't really thought too much about it, obviously.

2248
02:17:39,640 --> 02:17:43,000
It's it's very apparent, but we can we can workshop that.

2249
02:17:43,080 --> 02:17:47,880
Let's let's let's circle back to that as they say in bureaucratic ease.

2250
02:17:48,200 --> 02:17:52,920
Um but anyway, uh we we have a job now, which is to end the episode.

2251
02:17:53,000 --> 02:17:58,520
And the way to end the episode is to remind you to please support the podcast by uh

2252
02:17:58,890 --> 02:18:04,170
visiting our Patreon page and maybe pitching in some money so that we can pay for a huge

2253
02:18:04,170 --> 02:18:06,330
print run of Evolutionary Psychology the Book.

2254
02:18:06,490 --> 02:18:08,490
Sorry, Evolutionary College the Podcast the Book.

2255
02:18:08,810 --> 02:18:09,290
Oh nice.

2256
02:18:09,530 --> 02:18:11,370
And then the coffee table book.

2257
02:18:11,850 --> 02:18:12,570
Coffee table book.

2258
02:18:12,650 --> 02:18:18,410
Maybe we should make evolutionary psychology the podcast, the book, the movie, the video

2259
02:18:18,410 --> 02:18:18,810
game.

2260
02:18:19,040 --> 02:18:21,760
But we should just go through the whole journey.

2261
02:18:22,160 --> 02:18:22,560
Nice.

2262
02:18:22,800 --> 02:18:25,280
And the last word is the uh thing it is.

2263
02:18:25,360 --> 02:18:31,120
So it would be a video game about a movie, about a book, about a podcast.

2264
02:18:31,440 --> 02:18:32,000
That's right.

2265
02:18:32,080 --> 02:18:32,320
Yeah.

2266
02:18:32,640 --> 02:18:32,960
Got it.

2267
02:18:33,040 --> 02:18:33,280
Yeah.

2268
02:18:33,360 --> 02:18:34,880
That's that was straightforward.

2269
02:18:35,280 --> 02:18:37,360
I think I think uh it's gonna be a real money maker.

2270
02:18:37,440 --> 02:18:37,840
Yeah, let's do it.

2271
02:18:37,920 --> 02:18:40,640
Anyway, if you want to make that happen, give us some money on Patreon.

2272
02:18:40,720 --> 02:18:46,110
Otherwise, leave us a kind review, send us an email, uh, say something nice about us on

2273
02:18:46,110 --> 02:18:46,910
social media.

2274
02:18:47,070 --> 02:18:51,150
Uh your support keeps us going, so please be generous with it.

2275
02:18:51,390 --> 02:18:53,310
And have a good week, and we'll see you next week.

2276
02:18:53,390 --> 02:18:54,670
See you next week, David.