WEBVTT 00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:02.960 David, this is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 00:00:03.120 --> 00:00:05.920 Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologist. 00:00:06.080 --> 00:00:07.200 You're David Pinsoff. 00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:08.720 I'm Dave Petrozowski. 00:00:09.040 --> 00:00:10.160 Do you have anything to say? 00:00:10.560 --> 00:00:12.080 Wow, you got it all by yourself. 00:00:12.160 --> 00:00:14.000 I didn't even need to help you in any way. 00:00:14.240 --> 00:00:14.480 All right. 00:00:14.560 --> 00:00:15.920 Well, you can do the next part. 00:00:16.240 --> 00:00:16.640 All right. 00:00:16.720 --> 00:00:18.320 Uh enjoy listening. 00:00:31.930 --> 00:00:37.290 We have a very special guest, the amazing Clark Barrett, professor of 00:00:37.290 --> 00:00:39.130 anthropology at UCLA. 00:00:39.450 --> 00:00:42.090 I interacted uh a lot with him while I was at UCLA. 00:00:42.170 --> 00:00:43.530 Uh he was on my dissertation committee. 00:00:43.770 --> 00:00:46.890 Wonderful, brilliant thinker, uh really insightful guy. 00:00:47.050 --> 00:00:52.780 I think he's perhaps the best at integrating and merging different uh perspectives 00:00:52.780 --> 00:00:55.020 within the evolutionary behavioral sciences. 00:00:55.180 --> 00:00:59.660 Uh, you know, his book, How mental adaptations are sorry, The Shape of Thought, How Mental 00:00:59.660 --> 00:01:05.180 Adaptations Evolve, uh, is uh a a wonderful text in terms of integrating 00:01:05.180 --> 00:01:09.820 evolutionary psychology with cultural evolution, uh, with human behavioral ecology, uh, 00:01:09.900 --> 00:01:15.500 showing how um we're all studying the same thing and uh we can all just get along. 00:01:15.900 --> 00:01:16.060 Yeah. 00:01:16.460 --> 00:01:22.370 Clark is sort of, I I, in my view, is sort of the um second wave evpsy 00:01:22.690 --> 00:01:28.130 person, one of the main second wave evpsych people in the sense of after the initial 00:01:28.130 --> 00:01:33.250 generation of psych people, to just sort of say, look, here is what the mature science 00:01:33.250 --> 00:01:33.570 looks like. 00:01:33.730 --> 00:01:35.170 Here's the boundaries of it. 00:01:35.330 --> 00:01:38.930 And let's avoid the unnecessary arguments and baggage. 00:01:39.010 --> 00:01:42.610 And let's do what what can we do generatively going forward? 00:01:42.690 --> 00:01:47.570 And um and I think this conversation is a good example of Clark's philosophy of 00:01:47.890 --> 00:01:53.760 respecting the insights of lots of different diverse uh viewpoints and then 00:01:53.760 --> 00:01:56.800 steel manning them as you as you put it in this episode. 00:01:57.200 --> 00:01:57.520 Yes. 00:01:57.680 --> 00:02:03.040 And then we we cover a lot of really interesting topics, uh spirituality, uh social 00:02:03.280 --> 00:02:04.080 cognition. 00:02:04.240 --> 00:02:08.560 Uh we get into ayahuasca, we get into ghost murders, drugs and rock and roll. 00:02:09.040 --> 00:02:11.730 Drugs and rock and roll, um, you name it. 00:02:11.890 --> 00:02:17.650 And and just the future of evolutionary social science uh and how we can create a bigger 00:02:17.650 --> 00:02:22.930 tent and be more welcoming to lots of different people and uh lots of different cultures. 00:02:23.090 --> 00:02:28.850 Uh so um this was a wonderful just wide ranging conversation with a really great 00:02:28.850 --> 00:02:30.210 thinker and I think you'll enjoy it. 00:02:30.610 --> 00:02:31.890 And fish with two jaws. 00:02:32.530 --> 00:02:33.890 Yeah, we even get into fish. 00:02:34.050 --> 00:02:35.330 Yeah he was a fish guy. 00:02:35.460 --> 00:02:36.980 You'll hear all about that soon. 00:02:37.140 --> 00:02:38.100 So enjoy. 00:02:39.860 --> 00:02:41.540 So we can just get right into it. 00:02:41.860 --> 00:02:47.460 Clark, you don't have to answer this, but one thing I don't know about you, or the or maybe 00:02:47.460 --> 00:02:53.380 the beginning of the story, is you are a a younger Clark Barrett is on a boat 00:02:53.540 --> 00:02:54.740 studying fish. 00:02:56.250 --> 00:02:57.770 Can you paint us that picture? 00:02:57.930 --> 00:02:59.130 And how did you get there? 00:02:59.210 --> 00:03:01.930 And how did you get to where you are now from there? 00:03:02.330 --> 00:03:02.970 Yeah. 00:03:03.370 --> 00:03:09.130 Well, I can't guarantee that that ever happened, but I do have some 00:03:09.770 --> 00:03:11.290 memories to that effect. 00:03:11.450 --> 00:03:11.770 Okay. 00:03:12.010 --> 00:03:14.330 Um it might have been implanted in you. 00:03:15.210 --> 00:03:15.450 Yeah. 00:03:15.690 --> 00:03:17.690 But you did you studied like fish, right? 00:03:17.930 --> 00:03:23.520 Yes, I I um I my early dream was to be a 00:03:23.520 --> 00:03:29.520 marine biologist, um, influenced by childhood viewings 00:03:29.520 --> 00:03:35.440 of Jacques Cousteau, and also um my dad had a a 00:03:35.440 --> 00:03:41.440 business um boat business, and uh we were on boats a lot, and including in 00:03:41.440 --> 00:03:45.280 the Caribbean, and so there I learned how to snorkel and then later scuba dive. 00:03:45.490 --> 00:03:50.930 When I was in an undergraduate, I actually was a bio major and I did an honors thesis at 00:03:50.930 --> 00:03:56.290 Harvard on reproductive seasonality in rainforest stream fish, and 00:03:57.090 --> 00:04:01.250 which would not technically be marine biology because those are freshwater fish. 00:04:01.490 --> 00:04:03.650 But um yeah, I was a fish guy. 00:04:03.970 --> 00:04:09.810 And uh then I started grad school at UCSB 00:04:10.290 --> 00:04:15.280 um for a year or two working in the biodepartment and 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:21.600 um you know didn't really hadn't really selected a project or anything like that but I did 00:04:21.600 --> 00:04:26.240 go and um you know help some of the other graduate students who were doing their research 00:04:26.240 --> 00:04:26.800 down in St. 00:04:26.960 --> 00:04:27.520 Croix. 00:04:27.840 --> 00:04:33.730 And at that point I realized that um humans might be my thing uh 00:04:33.810 --> 00:04:39.410 more than fish even though studying and learning about fish definitely informed 00:04:39.730 --> 00:04:45.650 um lots of lots of what I do including you know the fish behavior stuff but also my 00:04:45.650 --> 00:04:51.090 undergrad mentor at um at Harvard was Carl Leem who's a functional morphologist 00:04:51.940 --> 00:04:57.860 And his claim to fame was trying to understand why cichlid fish have 00:04:57.860 --> 00:05:00.340 two jaws, an inner and an outer jaw. 00:05:00.580 --> 00:05:03.140 And that played a role in their diversification. 00:05:03.300 --> 00:05:07.300 I don't know if you know that cichlids are one of the most diverse family of freshwater 00:05:07.300 --> 00:05:07.780 fish. 00:05:07.940 --> 00:05:13.620 And they um, because they can specialize their inner and outer jaws separately, um, there's 00:05:13.620 --> 00:05:15.540 many niches that they can occupy. 00:05:15.670 --> 00:05:20.070 Um so it kind of preadapts them for diversification or adaptive radiation. 00:05:20.150 --> 00:05:23.590 That was his that was his hypothesis anyway. 00:05:23.750 --> 00:05:24.550 So that's cool. 00:05:24.710 --> 00:05:28.790 You know, there was a connection there with functional morphology, which then, you know, 00:05:28.870 --> 00:05:33.190 thinking about adaptationism in the context of evolutionary psychology, I feel like I was 00:05:33.190 --> 00:05:36.230 already kind of ready to start thinking about that. 00:05:36.620 --> 00:05:38.220 Sort of like a Swiss army jaw. 00:05:38.460 --> 00:05:40.140 It can sort of be that's cool. 00:05:40.380 --> 00:05:40.620 Yes. 00:05:53.180 --> 00:05:57.660 In addition to a uh uh jaw muscular adaptation. 00:05:58.220 --> 00:06:02.950 Yes, and and it's and it's kind of interesting to think about what the phenomenology of 00:06:02.950 --> 00:06:07.990 these fish is when they're controlling their inner and outer jaw separately and and and um 00:06:08.710 --> 00:06:09.750 you know cool. 00:06:09.990 --> 00:06:15.590 Uh they also you know that the they're one of the fish um that are mouth uh they they 00:06:15.590 --> 00:06:19.030 breed their they protect their young inside their mouth. 00:06:19.350 --> 00:06:20.310 Oh, cool. 00:06:20.600 --> 00:06:23.400 So um the babies hatch out of the eggs. 00:06:23.480 --> 00:06:26.280 And then I mean, sometimes you can see this in aquarium stores. 00:06:26.360 --> 00:06:30.120 They'll all like run into the mother's mouth um when it's danger time. 00:06:30.280 --> 00:06:35.640 And so there's also got to be a lot of circuitry there to decide, you know, when to start 00:06:35.640 --> 00:06:36.600 chewing or not. 00:06:36.840 --> 00:06:37.000 Yeah. 00:06:37.160 --> 00:06:37.320 Yeah. 00:06:37.480 --> 00:06:39.160 And avoid swimming into the wrong mouth. 00:06:39.720 --> 00:06:40.040 That's right. 00:06:40.120 --> 00:06:40.360 Yes. 00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:40.920 Yeah. 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:45.560 The baby design can't be swim into the nearest fish's mouth when you get in feel danger. 00:06:45.640 --> 00:06:47.480 Yeah, that's not that's a dead end. 00:06:47.800 --> 00:06:48.200 Yeah. 00:06:48.440 --> 00:06:48.920 Yep. 00:06:49.190 --> 00:06:49.750 Interesting. 00:06:49.910 --> 00:06:53.750 And then you and then from there, so you decided people. 00:06:55.510 --> 00:06:55.910 Yes. 00:06:56.150 --> 00:06:56.390 Yeah. 00:06:56.550 --> 00:07:01.910 And I, you know, I'd always I had always been interested in um also as an undergraduate, I 00:07:01.910 --> 00:07:06.550 I really wanted to double major in biology and philosophy because I was always interested 00:07:06.550 --> 00:07:12.070 in philosophy of mind, um, interested in questions about consciousness and free will. 00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:19.000 And I think, you know, early on, I had a strong intuition that evolution 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:21.080 could tell us about some of those things. 00:07:21.400 --> 00:07:27.400 But as an undergraduate, with, you know, it wasn't really feasible to do 00:07:27.480 --> 00:07:31.640 to double major in those things and do an honors thesis that would encompass both. 00:07:32.040 --> 00:07:36.920 And so I really doubled down on the biology side. 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:42.690 And I think when I got to graduate school and started getting a sense of what is possible 00:07:42.690 --> 00:07:48.130 in a PhD, um, I realized that there was a more open set of 00:07:48.130 --> 00:07:51.810 possibilities than you know what you can study as an undergrad, at least at that time. 00:07:51.970 --> 00:07:57.810 And so yeah, that's when I switched over within UCSB to work with um Tubi 00:07:57.970 --> 00:07:58.690 and Cosmodies. 00:07:59.170 --> 00:08:00.610 How did you find them? 00:08:01.650 --> 00:08:02.930 The phone book. 00:08:03.360 --> 00:08:03.680 Okay. 00:08:04.640 --> 00:08:06.320 So paint a picture for the kids that are. 00:08:06.720 --> 00:08:08.800 Did you know that is that like Facebook? 00:08:08.880 --> 00:08:09.680 Like what is the phone book? 00:08:09.760 --> 00:08:12.000 Like No, this is the this is this is the strange thing. 00:08:12.240 --> 00:08:17.360 It was it was um it was uh some sort of reverse 00:08:17.680 --> 00:08:23.440 landing um where I did not know what evolutionary psychology was at that time, uh at least 00:08:23.520 --> 00:08:25.200 to the best of my recollection. 00:08:25.440 --> 00:08:30.910 Um you know, I was I was familiar with um that there was that there were evolutionary 00:08:30.910 --> 00:08:36.510 approaches to human behavior, um including you know Io Wilson and um Stephen Jay 00:08:36.510 --> 00:08:38.510 Gould and others that I interacted with at Harvard. 00:08:38.670 --> 00:08:42.830 So I was familiar with that, but I I just didn't know I didn't know John and Lita and I 00:08:42.830 --> 00:08:44.830 didn't know that they were at UCSB. 00:08:45.230 --> 00:08:47.070 And I just started looking around. 00:08:47.230 --> 00:08:48.670 You know, this was nineteen ninety. 00:08:49.230 --> 00:08:50.990 Yeah, it's the early days of John and Lita, yeah. 00:08:51.390 --> 00:08:53.070 One, ninety two, something like that. 00:08:53.310 --> 00:08:58.300 So um there wasn't you know the same kind of um was there even an internet then i can't 00:08:58.300 --> 00:09:03.820 remember um i mean what what luck maybe enormous luck people are using 00:09:04.220 --> 00:09:08.540 so so it's like yeah I'm looking in the directory of these different departments for which 00:09:08.700 --> 00:09:13.420 for the faculty and you know what their specializations are and uh yeah and I actually 00:09:13.420 --> 00:09:16.270 called John's um you know landline. 00:09:16.670 --> 00:09:18.270 Um did you pick up? 00:09:18.510 --> 00:09:18.830 No. 00:09:19.070 --> 00:09:21.550 It was in his lab and and one of the students picked up. 00:09:21.630 --> 00:09:26.430 But you know, eventually I ended up meeting with them and and um yeah, moved over to to 00:09:26.430 --> 00:09:28.350 start working with them in the anthro department. 00:09:28.750 --> 00:09:33.230 You just happened to be at the epicenter of evolutionary psychology right at the moment 00:09:33.230 --> 00:09:34.750 that it was being born. 00:09:35.150 --> 00:09:35.550 Yes. 00:09:36.020 --> 00:09:39.540 Like I said, you know, that's the that's my personal mythology, whether I'm remembering it 00:09:39.540 --> 00:09:39.780 wrong. 00:09:40.340 --> 00:09:40.500 Exactly. 00:09:41.140 --> 00:09:44.020 But I'm pretty sure that's how I'm pretty sure that's how that's how it happened. 00:09:44.100 --> 00:09:44.260 Yeah. 00:09:44.340 --> 00:09:44.580 Yeah. 00:09:44.820 --> 00:09:50.500 And then um I love your uh your dissertation work is on predator prey stuff. 00:09:50.660 --> 00:09:50.900 Yes. 00:09:51.060 --> 00:09:56.890 And I think because you've done so many wonderful things since then, um, but at least for 00:09:56.890 --> 00:10:00.650 me, there's a very special place in my heart for the predator prey work. 00:10:00.970 --> 00:10:03.050 You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. 00:10:03.130 --> 00:10:06.170 Like I know everybody feels differently about their dissertation work. 00:10:06.410 --> 00:10:11.690 But um it was that um part of your 00:10:12.250 --> 00:10:15.050 figuring out how to take an evolutionary approach to people? 00:10:15.210 --> 00:10:18.490 Like was that addressing the interest that you had? 00:10:18.890 --> 00:10:21.290 Like what how did you get on that topic? 00:10:22.810 --> 00:10:27.440 Yeah, I mean, it it did end up going in that direction. 00:10:27.520 --> 00:10:33.280 So it was a a way to you know it was a way to unify my background and 00:10:33.280 --> 00:10:38.960 knowledge in biology and ecology um with an interest in 00:10:39.920 --> 00:10:42.640 how we how we humans think about the mind. 00:10:42.880 --> 00:10:47.680 And so um, you know, the I the idea was to kind of look at how 00:10:49.450 --> 00:10:54.010 What kinds of models, if you will, people have of animal of animal minds and animal 00:10:54.010 --> 00:10:54.650 behavior? 00:10:54.810 --> 00:11:00.810 Um, and it was, you know, honestly, a lot of it was John 00:11:00.970 --> 00:11:02.250 Tuby's idea. 00:11:02.490 --> 00:11:06.810 Um, both John and Lita, you know, they they kind of pushed me to that. 00:11:07.050 --> 00:11:11.850 When I came, I I I was, you know, I mentioned that I had this interest in free will and 00:11:11.850 --> 00:11:17.500 consciousness, and um, you know, I wanted to go straight for the jugular on that. 00:11:17.660 --> 00:11:23.580 And they they did the right thing as advisors and said, that's too big of a bite to to you 00:11:23.580 --> 00:11:27.100 know to attempt for a PhD. 00:11:27.180 --> 00:11:30.060 And so go for go for something more tractable. 00:11:30.300 --> 00:11:35.740 And um, and so I, you know, I ended up doing the predator prey stuff and turned it into um, 00:11:36.140 --> 00:11:41.500 you know, something that actually did steer towards this direction of like models of the 00:11:41.500 --> 00:11:46.570 mind, how we think about free will and consciousness and and you know, agency, I guess, is 00:11:46.570 --> 00:11:47.930 the better concept there. 00:11:48.010 --> 00:11:53.770 Um, and I and I still am interested in this idea of you know, I 00:11:53.770 --> 00:11:59.610 think part of the key, I Dave, I know you you've you've you've done some stuff also on free 00:11:59.610 --> 00:12:00.890 will and and that topic. 00:12:00.970 --> 00:12:06.650 And you know, I think one of the sources of evidence about it that we should attend to is 00:12:07.440 --> 00:12:11.520 how and why people think about free will. 00:12:11.680 --> 00:12:16.560 Um, you know, when we attribute choice to others, when do we do that? 00:12:16.720 --> 00:12:18.000 Why do we do that? 00:12:18.240 --> 00:12:24.080 Um, and I'm actually in the camp that thinks, you know, yes, 00:12:24.160 --> 00:12:29.840 we may be mistaken sometimes, but human social cognition is so good 00:12:30.530 --> 00:12:35.730 that I think that when people make a distinction between, you know, voluntarily chosen 00:12:35.730 --> 00:12:38.290 action and something else, they're onto something. 00:12:39.090 --> 00:12:41.250 And I do think that there are mysteries there. 00:12:41.330 --> 00:12:45.330 But to me, that's an angle that we should pursue more. 00:12:45.410 --> 00:12:51.010 And I think hasn't been pursued as much because people in neuroscience and psychology, when 00:12:51.010 --> 00:12:55.240 they look at these questions, they they tend to think of it more like, you know, let's get 00:12:55.240 --> 00:13:00.600 inside the box and see what's in there, as opposed to um why do humans 00:13:00.600 --> 00:13:06.120 attribute uh these kinds of properties and processes to other organisms and when and what 00:13:06.120 --> 00:13:08.680 use does it do to them uh for them and so on. 00:13:08.840 --> 00:13:12.920 And that that kind of led to my interest in moral cognition and this question of, you know, 00:13:13.160 --> 00:13:19.080 culpability, which is can be closely linked to um our models of you know how 00:13:19.080 --> 00:13:22.040 much control we have over our own behavior and things like that. 00:13:22.360 --> 00:13:22.680 Cool. 00:13:22.890 --> 00:13:23.130 Yeah. 00:13:23.290 --> 00:13:29.290 I mean, it and you've done cross-cultural work so on sort of like intention and things like 00:13:29.290 --> 00:13:29.530 that. 00:13:29.610 --> 00:13:32.410 And that's another thing we can um maybe talk about. 00:13:32.570 --> 00:13:38.170 But what but what I'm hearing you say is that the one mistake or a difference between 00:13:38.170 --> 00:13:43.610 evolutionary approaches and non, or at least the kind that you're doing, 00:13:44.010 --> 00:13:49.360 is is sort of taking a step back and saying why would an 00:13:49.520 --> 00:13:53.120 organism think this way, or what's the sense that it would make? 00:13:53.360 --> 00:13:59.200 But that that also sort of assumes that um our introspection about it isn't 00:13:59.200 --> 00:14:03.440 the the end all and be all, which I think you get from an evolutionary approach. 00:14:03.920 --> 00:14:04.400 Right. 00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:06.080 I agree with that totally. 00:14:06.160 --> 00:14:06.800 Yeah. 00:14:07.200 --> 00:14:12.430 And you know, and and we do in know, psychologists, 00:14:12.510 --> 00:14:18.510 anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, we do understand broadly that you know 00:14:18.830 --> 00:14:21.550 people are some of the best source of evidence about. 00:14:21.630 --> 00:14:26.510 I mean, if we're, you know, we look, we get data from how people think about things, right? 00:14:26.910 --> 00:14:32.830 Um, but maybe it's not so common 00:14:32.830 --> 00:14:38.270 to take those data as actually telling you a little bit about the things that they're 00:14:38.270 --> 00:14:40.590 about, the targets of those cog of that cognition. 00:14:41.040 --> 00:14:46.080 I mean, to me, I think in in in, you know, so so when we look at say intuitive physics, to 00:14:46.080 --> 00:14:51.200 take an example that people talk about, like nobody would really well, maybe they would, 00:14:51.280 --> 00:14:56.560 but it seems unlikely that somebody would study the actual ontological reality of the 00:14:56.560 --> 00:14:59.360 physical world by looking at how people think about it. 00:14:59.440 --> 00:15:01.600 Although I guess maybe right. 00:15:01.840 --> 00:15:02.160 Yeah. 00:15:02.630 --> 00:15:07.110 But it's different in a domain like morality or the understanding of human behavior, right? 00:15:07.270 --> 00:15:12.390 Because, well, certainly morality is one where it's very complicated, but the object itself 00:15:12.950 --> 00:15:15.110 may be entirely a construction of the human mind. 00:15:15.270 --> 00:15:20.470 So if you want to understand it, you know, you should be looking at how people think about 00:15:20.470 --> 00:15:20.710 it. 00:15:20.870 --> 00:15:26.760 Um, which is not how it's always done, or it's not always how it has been 00:15:26.760 --> 00:15:31.080 done in philosophy, because a lot of times it's from the armchair and thinking about 00:15:31.080 --> 00:15:35.240 metaphysics and things like that and not taking human data seriously. 00:15:35.400 --> 00:15:37.800 So morality is a good domain to think about it. 00:15:37.880 --> 00:15:42.040 Um humans as a source of understanding the phenomenon itself. 00:15:42.360 --> 00:15:42.680 Yeah. 00:15:42.840 --> 00:15:47.730 And, you know, thinking how how people think about the mind is kind of in between, right? 00:15:47.970 --> 00:15:53.730 Because you know, um, the mind is a biological physical object, and there 00:15:53.730 --> 00:15:57.010 are truths about how the brain operates. 00:15:57.170 --> 00:16:00.290 And obviously, there's going to be some truths that we're going to end up knowing about 00:16:00.290 --> 00:16:05.810 what free will actually is or isn't eventually, um, that you know human 00:16:05.810 --> 00:16:09.970 intuitions can't tell us completely about, but I think it's an untapped source of of 00:16:09.970 --> 00:16:12.850 insight into um into it. 00:16:14.020 --> 00:16:19.300 I mean, having done a lot of cross-cultural work on people's intuitions about the 00:16:19.300 --> 00:16:25.140 importance of, say, intentions in uh moral transgressions, um, the 00:16:25.140 --> 00:16:30.660 role of uh knowledge in informing a person's choices, um, 00:16:31.140 --> 00:16:35.140 and even in uh to a certain extent in terms of uh people's moral judgments. 00:16:35.460 --> 00:16:40.790 Do you see um a universality in the structure of 00:16:41.110 --> 00:16:47.110 moral cognition and uh and mind reading for lack of a better term that uh uh around 00:16:47.110 --> 00:16:53.110 the world people carve up the social world in roughly similar ways and make inferences 00:16:53.110 --> 00:16:58.710 in roughly similar ways or um is it do you take more of a view that uh this is really 00:16:58.870 --> 00:17:04.620 um uh open-ended and and profoundly shaped by culture such that there aren't really uh 00:17:04.860 --> 00:17:07.500 universal organizing principles. 00:17:07.660 --> 00:17:12.380 Um I know I'm I'm painting a character of two extreme positions and presumably you lie 00:17:12.380 --> 00:17:15.580 somewhere in between, but I'm curious how you've been thinking about this, having gathered 00:17:15.580 --> 00:17:21.180 a lot of cross-cultural data on these questions, w what do you see as the universal people 00:17:21.580 --> 00:17:26.300 to use um a a term that that Dave and I like from Don Brown? 00:17:26.590 --> 00:17:30.110 Is there a universal people and what do those people look like? 00:17:31.950 --> 00:17:35.710 Well, that is the the million-dollar question right there. 00:17:36.030 --> 00:17:41.310 Um, which, you know, if I could answer that succinctly, I would be done with my research 00:17:41.310 --> 00:17:41.710 project. 00:17:41.870 --> 00:17:46.190 But um I I think the answer to what, so I mean, the answer to the to the first question you 00:17:46.190 --> 00:17:52.000 asked is in this continuum of how much commonality versus difference is 00:17:52.000 --> 00:17:56.560 there in how people think about the mind and how it's related to ideas about morality 00:17:56.560 --> 00:18:02.480 around the world, I think there's a lot more similarity or universality than 00:18:02.960 --> 00:18:08.000 um than some anthropologists might think, um, for example. 00:18:08.240 --> 00:18:13.130 Although I'm also also reluctant to attribute these beliefs to anthropologists. 00:18:13.210 --> 00:18:17.690 Um, you know, oftentimes in this sort of divide between psychology and anthropology, the 00:18:17.690 --> 00:18:21.050 psychologists are seen as the universalists and the anthropologists are the cultural 00:18:21.050 --> 00:18:21.770 relativists. 00:18:21.850 --> 00:18:27.210 And, you know, I I I've spent a lot of time recently um, you know, in communities of 00:18:27.210 --> 00:18:31.530 cultural anthropologists, and I'm I'm not at all convinced that that's that that's the 00:18:31.530 --> 00:18:34.650 right, um, that's the right description of the distinction. 00:18:35.380 --> 00:18:40.340 Anyway, that said, you know, there's no question that you you, you know, there there's a 00:18:40.340 --> 00:18:46.260 perfectly plausible intuition that um our views about 00:18:46.260 --> 00:18:49.780 the mind are radically different across cultures. 00:18:52.100 --> 00:18:56.020 And my my intuitive sense is is no. 00:18:56.420 --> 00:19:02.180 Um, in the cases where you know I've done what what I can do in terms of a deep dive into 00:19:02.500 --> 00:19:08.090 models of the mind that different cultures have, you do see a lot of commonality. 00:19:09.050 --> 00:19:14.890 And you would expect it to be that way, given that to the extent 00:19:14.890 --> 00:19:20.730 that there are universal properties of the mind, then you would hope that folk models of 00:19:20.730 --> 00:19:24.650 the mind or cultural models of the mind would converge in a lot of ways. 00:19:27.450 --> 00:19:33.440 And it's, you know, so there are these classic questions in, for example, you know, 00:19:33.600 --> 00:19:38.400 the questions about uh language and thought, about how different languages carve up mental 00:19:38.400 --> 00:19:40.560 state terms, emotion terms. 00:19:41.040 --> 00:19:42.960 Um, you see differences there. 00:19:43.120 --> 00:19:48.640 Um I think some people maybe amplify those different differences 00:19:49.280 --> 00:19:50.080 too much. 00:19:50.240 --> 00:19:55.520 I think um, you know, the um 00:20:00.430 --> 00:20:05.150 One way that you can think about it is that there's, you know, the these different sort of 00:20:05.150 --> 00:20:10.030 cultural models of the mind have different kinds of vibes or flavors to them, something 00:20:10.030 --> 00:20:10.670 like that. 00:20:11.070 --> 00:20:13.390 Um, that they may emphasize. 00:20:13.550 --> 00:20:19.230 Um, you know, so so just to take one example, philosophical models of the mind 00:20:20.040 --> 00:20:24.760 in the West, which I take as one sort of cultural lineage, you know, the one stretching 00:20:24.760 --> 00:20:29.160 back to the Greeks and Aristotle and Plato and stretching up into kind of European 00:20:29.160 --> 00:20:34.680 philosophy of mind in the 19th century and so on, are very oriented towards 00:20:34.680 --> 00:20:40.280 rationality and conscious thought processes and processes of 00:20:40.280 --> 00:20:41.880 inference and deduction. 00:20:42.840 --> 00:20:47.560 Philosophers have been obsessed with this stuff, and people in cognitive science as well, 00:20:47.720 --> 00:20:47.960 right? 00:20:48.360 --> 00:20:51.870 But I and I think you know, everywhere in the world people can understand those kinds of 00:20:51.870 --> 00:20:52.430 processes. 00:20:52.510 --> 00:20:57.310 But I think there are other kinds of cultural models of the mind that see 00:20:58.590 --> 00:21:04.430 those aspects of cognition as being a pretty small slice of the pie compared to things 00:21:04.430 --> 00:21:09.950 like embodied physical knowledge and skill that come out through the way that you move your 00:21:09.950 --> 00:21:15.630 body and the way that you sense the world that is sort of 00:21:17.300 --> 00:21:23.060 not heavily rational or um maybe you know more on the intuitive end of 00:21:23.060 --> 00:21:23.940 things, right? 00:21:25.620 --> 00:21:29.540 And you know, all models of the mind are capable of dealing with those different kinds of 00:21:29.540 --> 00:21:29.780 things. 00:21:29.940 --> 00:21:32.660 But I think it's interesting, even when you, I mean, I've written a little bit about this 00:21:32.660 --> 00:21:32.980 lately. 00:21:33.060 --> 00:21:38.980 I mean, even when you look at the history of cognitive science, um, the the focus on 00:21:38.980 --> 00:21:44.500 rationality and processes of um explicit conscious inference and stuff like that has really 00:21:44.500 --> 00:21:49.110 driven the model of the mind that cognitive science has had for quite a while. 00:21:49.190 --> 00:21:55.030 And it it's weird that the embodiment turn in cognitive science and things like four E 00:21:55.190 --> 00:21:58.470 cognition, you know, are pretty recent things. 00:21:58.550 --> 00:22:03.830 I mean, you can find them there throughout the history of um just what are the four E's for 00:22:03.830 --> 00:22:05.270 those four E's or embodied. 00:22:05.430 --> 00:22:05.910 What is it? 00:22:05.990 --> 00:22:11.910 When have you got a it's it's embodied, 00:22:12.070 --> 00:22:17.440 enacted um probably environments in there, maybe. 00:22:17.600 --> 00:22:17.920 I don't know. 00:22:18.080 --> 00:22:19.120 Actually don't ecology. 00:22:19.200 --> 00:22:22.000 I don't I actually don't extend it, that's it. 00:22:22.400 --> 00:22:23.040 Extended, right? 00:22:23.120 --> 00:22:28.000 Because the idea is that you have prostheses of your mind um acting in the world. 00:22:28.160 --> 00:22:31.280 Um so kind of like the extended phenotype kind of view. 00:22:31.840 --> 00:22:32.240 I got it. 00:22:32.400 --> 00:22:34.160 Embodied, embedded, and active. 00:22:34.400 --> 00:22:35.040 Embedded. 00:22:35.200 --> 00:22:36.080 And extended. 00:22:36.400 --> 00:22:36.800 Extended. 00:22:36.880 --> 00:22:37.520 There you go. 00:22:38.370 --> 00:22:40.370 I'm not surprised we didn't remember. 00:22:41.410 --> 00:22:42.930 It's not a super um. 00:22:43.410 --> 00:22:48.530 Well, and it's you know, yeah to be fair, you know, ac academia loves acronyms. 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. 00:22:56.050 --> 00:22:57.730 It's an egregious yeah, no, sorry. 00:22:58.130 --> 00:23:01.090 That said, it is, I mean, every E there matters, right? 00:23:01.170 --> 00:23:05.250 And for an evolutionary psychologist, we can understand every single one of those, right? 00:23:05.730 --> 00:23:10.200 Um And so anyway, the the point is 00:23:12.680 --> 00:23:17.240 when I said there's sort of flavors or vibes of different approaches to the mind, I think 00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:18.520 that that that's true. 00:23:18.680 --> 00:23:24.440 And then and the way that we see the mind kind of highlights or plays down different 00:23:24.440 --> 00:23:29.240 kinds of aspects that change over time and across cultures. 00:23:29.480 --> 00:23:32.030 And you know, they're not necessarily wrong. 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 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 00:23:41.070 --> 00:23:43.550 insights um about how the mind works. 00:23:43.710 --> 00:23:46.110 And yeah, that you know, there's he had a particular model. 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 00:23:49.710 --> 00:23:52.670 these things, which are terms that we don't use anymore, but they were referring to 00:23:52.670 --> 00:23:54.350 something that's intelligible. 00:23:54.670 --> 00:24:00.020 And um anyway, so that's I think that's the interesting space when we think about 00:24:00.020 --> 00:24:02.900 linguistic and cultural differences involved in the mind. 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 00:24:07.620 --> 00:24:12.980 different, you know, slightly different varieties or flavors of mental state terms, um, 00:24:13.220 --> 00:24:19.130 ways of carving up the space of the mind and the body um around the 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 00:24:23.610 --> 00:24:28.410 some useful insights about the mind that we should pay attention to. 00:24:28.810 --> 00:24:29.130 Yeah. 00:24:29.370 --> 00:24:30.490 No, it's it's interesting. 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 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 00:24:40.970 --> 00:24:45.850 and and you know exerting these top-down principles to uh manipulate the the environment 00:24:45.930 --> 00:24:49.180 and it's all conscious uh and calculated. 00:24:49.980 --> 00:24:54.700 It's certainly, you know, a rough sketch of a potential cultural difference you might see 00:24:54.700 --> 00:24:56.780 between the West the West and the rest. 00:24:57.020 --> 00:25:01.100 Um but even there, like I still get the other view. 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 00:25:05.580 --> 00:25:07.900 the vibes and like feeling it in your body. 00:25:08.060 --> 00:25:14.010 Like if you think about one of the most uh culturally impactful uh cinematic universe 00:25:14.010 --> 00:25:14.570 is Star Wars. 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 00:25:17.850 --> 00:25:19.050 my on my mind. 00:25:19.850 --> 00:25:24.970 The force is very much the opposite of like a conscious, rational manipulation of the 00:25:24.970 --> 00:25:25.210 world. 00:25:25.370 --> 00:25:30.170 It's just feeling it out, feeling your connection to to the rest of the world. 00:25:30.330 --> 00:25:34.090 You know, Yoda is always delivering these lines about you're you're overthinking it, Luke. 00:25:34.170 --> 00:25:36.890 You know, you gotta you there is no there is no try. 00:25:36.970 --> 00:25:38.730 You either do it or you don't. 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 00:25:46.080 --> 00:25:46.480 talking about. 00:25:46.720 --> 00:25:49.760 You you sort of learn to to just feel it as opposed to think it. 00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:53.760 Um and I think a lot of people understand that on a gut level. 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 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 00:26:02.240 --> 00:26:06.510 have tongues with certain uh taste buds, And we have, you know, the conscious rationality 00:26:06.510 --> 00:26:10.270 taste bud, but we also have the embodied vibes based taste bud. 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 00:26:14.350 --> 00:26:16.590 rational conscious taste bud, but we still have that other taste bud. 00:26:16.830 --> 00:26:17.870 We still know what it is. 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 00:26:22.590 --> 00:26:23.950 the embodied taste bud. 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. 00:26:29.950 --> 00:26:30.510 Yeah. 00:26:30.760 --> 00:26:31.960 I I I agree with that. 00:26:32.040 --> 00:26:34.200 I mean that that is that is right. 00:26:34.360 --> 00:26:40.120 And that's also a classic kind of insight for um when you learn 00:26:40.120 --> 00:26:42.760 a term that is present in another language and not your own. 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 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 00:26:53.080 --> 00:26:56.680 sense because we felt it or or or seen someone else feel it. 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 00:27:02.810 --> 00:27:04.970 profile is available to everyone. 00:27:05.530 --> 00:27:11.530 Um for for for for science and for other kinds of things, 00:27:11.770 --> 00:27:17.450 you know, the question is um you know what are the what are the 00:27:17.450 --> 00:27:19.770 consequences of the variations that are there? 00:27:19.930 --> 00:27:25.180 And so one of the things that I think for sciences, you know, 00:27:25.820 --> 00:27:31.820 we may not, because of the fish and water issue of the kinds of cultural models 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 00:27:36.780 --> 00:27:42.700 theory of human cognition, we may not notice that our 00:27:43.020 --> 00:27:47.500 theories are kind of heavy in certain areas or biased towards certain areas and kind of 00:27:47.500 --> 00:27:49.100 light on other areas. 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 00:27:58.710 --> 00:28:03.910 processes of rationality and deliberation, right, these are not just parts of models of the 00:28:03.910 --> 00:28:04.070 mind. 00:28:04.230 --> 00:28:05.670 Again, that everyone can understand. 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. 00:28:09.270 --> 00:28:14.960 They actually end up having, well, I would argue, they end up having moral and ethical 00:28:14.960 --> 00:28:15.200 force. 00:28:15.600 --> 00:28:16.560 They become values. 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 00:28:20.960 --> 00:28:26.080 towards training our logical facilities and things like that. 00:28:26.800 --> 00:28:29.760 I mean, and we know that that doesn't have to be the way it is. 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 00:28:35.360 --> 00:28:39.520 um, and I think these are actually pretty common around the world, where the pinnacle of 00:28:39.520 --> 00:28:44.910 wisdom would be acting without um conscious 00:28:44.910 --> 00:28:46.430 deliberation, essentially. 00:28:46.590 --> 00:28:52.270 Um that you know, and it corresponds to this Bourdieu notion of habitus, right? 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 00:28:56.030 --> 00:28:58.030 Epistemologies that's just coming out. 00:28:58.190 --> 00:29:03.310 Um it looks it's a collection of essays um 00:29:04.260 --> 00:29:07.860 On how people in the Andes and Amazon think about knowledge. 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 00:29:13.380 --> 00:29:14.340 don't speak. 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 00:29:18.740 --> 00:29:24.660 word is called yachai, which my understanding is it is it's embodied knowledge. 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, 00:29:30.180 --> 00:29:32.930 your body just sort of takes you along the path. 00:29:33.170 --> 00:29:38.850 And in this, in this sort of cultural setting, my understanding is, you know, 00:29:39.010 --> 00:29:44.930 the pinnacle of being an intelligent, rational, in some ways actor in the world, a wise 00:29:44.930 --> 00:29:50.290 actor is to, you know, basically have all of the 00:29:50.930 --> 00:29:56.210 important knowledge subsumed into a sort of subcognitive, if you will, 00:29:56.920 --> 00:29:58.760 space where you just act. 00:29:59.000 --> 00:30:01.880 Um, and so it's it's interesting, right? 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 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 00:30:13.640 --> 00:30:19.130 maybe if you grew up in 19th century England or Germany, where it would be the 00:30:19.130 --> 00:30:25.050 ability to manipulate propositions in some way to generate um certain inferences or 00:30:25.050 --> 00:30:31.050 something like that using a logical calculus, which is also valid, but just different. 00:30:31.370 --> 00:30:32.090 Yeah, I love that. 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 00:30:37.450 --> 00:30:43.450 Michael Jordan clips or um a musician or an athlete just do something really 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 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. 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 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 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 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 00:31:14.620 --> 00:31:17.270 best, basketball player I can be. 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 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 00:31:28.950 --> 00:31:32.390 humanities um or or even you know the business world. 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 00:31:37.270 --> 00:31:41.750 to cultivate that kind of embedded, embodied knowledge of your craft. 00:31:42.440 --> 00:31:48.280 But with a with a top-down uh uh discipline such as ours, that kind 00:31:48.280 --> 00:31:54.120 of knowledge and wisdom is is less desired because I can't prove it to you. 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 00:31:59.240 --> 00:32:00.600 say, ah, I get it. 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 00:32:05.960 --> 00:32:08.120 the feat uh of athleticism. 00:32:08.200 --> 00:32:13.650 But with uh a scientific discipline, um, we all need to agree 00:32:14.370 --> 00:32:16.050 on on what is correct. 00:32:16.290 --> 00:32:17.570 Um yeah, I don't know. 00:32:17.650 --> 00:32:19.730 Uh that's interesting, yeah. 00:32:19.970 --> 00:32:20.370 Clark. 00:32:20.690 --> 00:32:23.970 So I'm gonna say something sorry, Clark, you're gonna say something, yeah. 00:32:24.930 --> 00:32:27.010 No, I I think I think that's really insightful. 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 00:32:33.090 --> 00:32:38.860 who are doing evolutionary psychology, you know, maybe we don't think 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 00:32:43.900 --> 00:32:49.260 that we do is is written and with pictures, um visual and verbal. 00:32:49.820 --> 00:32:54.860 And that um what part of part of what we're doing is rhetoric and persuasion. 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 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. 00:33:04.620 --> 00:33:10.410 Um And, you know, it makes sense that we focus on these skills of rhetoric and 00:33:10.410 --> 00:33:11.690 debate and logic. 00:33:12.170 --> 00:33:14.810 It also makes me at least worry, right? 00:33:15.050 --> 00:33:20.650 Because if you believe somebody like like Mercier or others, you know, the 00:33:20.650 --> 00:33:24.170 target of those of those things is not necessarily the truth. 00:33:26.330 --> 00:33:29.520 And so we we do have to worry about that a little bit. 00:33:29.680 --> 00:33:30.000 Yeah. 00:33:30.640 --> 00:33:31.280 Absolutely. 00:33:32.000 --> 00:33:34.320 It it definitely worries me as well. 00:33:34.480 --> 00:33:39.440 I mean, it on the one hand, it is somewhat comforting in that the collective emergent 00:33:39.440 --> 00:33:43.760 result of all this arguing and debate among a scientific institution that has good 00:33:43.760 --> 00:33:48.400 incentives should, in theory, produce, you know, true beliefs or truer beliefs over time. 00:33:48.560 --> 00:33:48.800 Right? 00:33:48.880 --> 00:33:51.120 It has a kind of self corrective mechanism. 00:33:51.370 --> 00:33:56.250 But when you zoom in on any individual part of that apparatus, any individual scientists, 00:33:56.410 --> 00:33:59.850 they are very unlikely to have the whole truth inside of their head. 00:34:00.010 --> 00:34:04.170 And since I am an individual person, you know, within that apparatus, that's very worrying 00:34:04.250 --> 00:34:05.450 because I want to have the whole truth. 00:34:05.610 --> 00:34:07.050 I want to have the answers. 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 00:34:12.570 --> 00:34:14.730 give up give up hope. 00:34:15.290 --> 00:34:16.170 And that's worrying. 00:34:16.330 --> 00:34:16.490 Yeah. 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 00:34:22.060 --> 00:34:27.900 spirituality and religiosity and supernatural concepts and the connection between this 00:34:27.900 --> 00:34:33.820 embodied, embedded uh model of the mind and spiritual and supernatural 00:34:33.820 --> 00:34:34.380 belief. 00:34:34.620 --> 00:34:36.220 Because it seems like there is a connection there. 00:34:36.300 --> 00:34:39.740 So when you know the force is a supernatural force in Star Wars. 00:34:39.820 --> 00:34:41.180 Like it's it's literally magic. 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. 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 00:34:50.310 --> 00:34:55.430 intuitive, uh embedded, uh embodied knowledge, they tend to be more spiritual, or at least 00:34:55.510 --> 00:34:56.950 talk in more spiritual terms. 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 00:35:02.710 --> 00:35:05.990 fill in the gaps of our ignorance with supernatural concepts. 00:35:06.840 --> 00:35:12.520 and so that might be why you see a greater prevalence of of spiritual 00:35:12.520 --> 00:35:17.880 beliefs in cultures with a more uh intuitive embodied model of the mind. 00:35:18.040 --> 00:35:22.680 Because um because so much of the magic is coming from forces unknown. 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 00:35:28.760 --> 00:35:29.640 supernatural bucket. 00:35:29.720 --> 00:35:32.840 It's the ancestors, it's a spirit, it's the force, it's whatever. 00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:35.000 I mean, do you buy that way of thinking? 00:35:36.450 --> 00:35:40.770 Um yeah, I think that 00:35:43.250 --> 00:35:45.730 yeah, that that that seems right. 00:35:45.890 --> 00:35:51.570 I mean I've never been a huge fan of the argument, 00:35:51.730 --> 00:35:57.250 the sort of God of the gaps type of argument. 00:35:57.410 --> 00:36:03.380 Um that that the that the function of sort of spirituality is to maybe comfort us 00:36:03.380 --> 00:36:04.900 or explain things that we don't know. 00:36:05.060 --> 00:36:07.620 But I don't I don't take you as saying that exactly. 00:36:07.780 --> 00:36:10.980 But I do, but I do think, you know, that there's this sense. 00:36:12.020 --> 00:36:17.620 So if you, if you, if you are someone who values and pays 00:36:17.620 --> 00:36:22.020 attention to your intuitions and the embodied feelings that you have as you're going 00:36:22.020 --> 00:36:27.460 through the world, and you try to develop a sense of um, you know, intuitive 00:36:27.460 --> 00:36:33.310 connection with your physical and sensory presence in the world, there's going to be stuff 00:36:33.310 --> 00:36:37.790 that pops out at you where it's it's gonna get your attention. 00:36:38.030 --> 00:36:38.350 Yeah. 00:36:38.670 --> 00:36:42.030 And um, and so I think that's one component of it, right? 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. 00:36:46.350 --> 00:36:49.230 I mean, I try to cultivate that side of myself. 00:36:49.390 --> 00:36:52.510 Um, but I also, you know, I go on hikes all the time. 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 00:36:57.710 --> 00:36:58.110 trail. 00:36:58.350 --> 00:36:59.660 Um yeah. 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 00:37:04.540 --> 00:37:05.660 they're micro learning, Clark. 00:37:05.740 --> 00:37:06.380 They're micro learning. 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 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 00:37:15.100 --> 00:37:16.460 going on around them. 00:37:16.540 --> 00:37:16.860 Right. 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 00:37:22.590 --> 00:37:28.430 pull you away from some of these ineffable experiences that 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 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 00:37:40.110 --> 00:37:41.550 or maybe even directly. 00:37:41.630 --> 00:37:46.340 Um, those all come connected with this kind of ya-chai embodied knowledge view. 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 00:37:51.140 --> 00:37:56.740 hyper rationalists of Europe, you know, Immanuel Kant and people like this, I mean, you 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 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 00:38:09.090 --> 00:38:15.010 know what Max Weber has called disenchantment, where um people argued 00:38:15.010 --> 00:38:17.490 their way out of God uh using logic. 00:38:17.650 --> 00:38:22.850 Um I mean there's some interesting cases to the contrary, like Descartes and others who 00:38:22.850 --> 00:38:27.170 tried to use um logic and introspection to prove that God exists. 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 00:38:33.080 --> 00:38:34.680 never experienced one through my senses. 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 00:38:39.960 --> 00:38:40.200 mind. 00:38:40.280 --> 00:38:42.360 That seems like a weird kind of proof. 00:38:43.160 --> 00:38:48.920 But the point is, like when you get into that space of logic and 00:38:48.920 --> 00:38:54.520 rationality, it does lead you away from 00:38:54.840 --> 00:38:59.790 um, It can lead you away from a spiritual attitude about the world. 00:38:59.870 --> 00:39:01.390 So I think that's another component of it. 00:39:02.190 --> 00:39:02.670 That's cool. 00:39:02.830 --> 00:39:03.070 Yeah. 00:39:03.150 --> 00:39:07.710 It reminds me there's uh Conrad Lorenz, uh, it's called the Russian manuscript. 00:39:08.030 --> 00:39:10.110 Apparently, it was like post posthumous. 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 00:39:15.390 --> 00:39:16.030 Nazis. 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 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 00:39:24.960 --> 00:39:25.600 the 70s. 00:39:25.760 --> 00:39:30.000 But what it's really amazing, like I think every evolutionary psychologist should read this 00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:34.560 um uh book, the uh Russian manuscript by Conrad Lorenz, but it basically talks about how 00:39:34.560 --> 00:39:40.450 Conrad Lorenz, they were doing the the ethology, and he was talking about the early 20th 00:39:40.450 --> 00:39:46.290 century fight between the vitalists and the mechanists of animal cognition. 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 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 00:39:56.130 --> 00:39:57.570 these people in the lab. 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 00:40:02.050 --> 00:40:03.970 art or nature in the models. 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 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 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 00:40:18.060 --> 00:40:21.260 nature or cool functions. 00:40:21.420 --> 00:40:24.300 And that was sort of what Conrad Lorenz was saying, too. 00:40:24.460 --> 00:40:30.250 And so like I think there was like a false choice between a rich environmental 00:40:30.490 --> 00:40:36.490 biological view and sort of but it was like vitalistic versus it was mechanical but it 00:40:36.490 --> 00:40:42.090 was like concrete and math and uh zeros and ones and like very 00:40:42.090 --> 00:40:42.970 sterile. 00:40:44.250 --> 00:40:45.290 Yeah that makes sense. 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 00:40:51.040 --> 00:40:54.880 trends about how we think about the world and cognition and our place in the world? 00:40:54.960 --> 00:40:59.120 And there's a kind of um winding path. 00:40:59.520 --> 00:41:04.800 Like I mentioned, you know, um the importance of embodiment in in sort of the cognitive 00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:07.040 sciences, it kind of comes and goes. 00:41:07.360 --> 00:41:13.200 But um right now, uh, for example, in when we think about um animal rights 00:41:13.200 --> 00:41:18.190 and ethics, you know, there's this move towards rights of nature kind of perspectives, 00:41:18.350 --> 00:41:24.110 which view non-human beings as having a moral 00:41:24.110 --> 00:41:28.430 status and ethical status, partly due to the fact that they have internal lives and things 00:41:28.430 --> 00:41:28.910 like that. 00:41:29.230 --> 00:41:33.150 I mean, that actually fits very well with an evolutionary view. 00:41:33.310 --> 00:41:38.110 Um, it fits very well with a lot of indigenous perspectives on the relationship between 00:41:38.110 --> 00:41:40.190 humans and other non-human beings. 00:41:40.740 --> 00:41:45.380 It doesn't fit very well with the 19th century European view that only humans have 00:41:45.380 --> 00:41:45.940 rationality. 00:41:46.100 --> 00:41:48.580 That's what gives us our status as moral beings. 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. 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 00:42:00.500 --> 00:42:04.100 animal behavior where for a long, and I think Lorenz might have been talking about this, 00:42:04.260 --> 00:42:05.650 you know, for a long time. 00:42:05.890 --> 00:42:11.250 Um, it was sort of forbidden to anthropomorphize or what people would call anthropomorphize 00:42:11.250 --> 00:42:12.210 other species. 00:42:12.530 --> 00:42:14.690 Um, for understandable reasons, I guess. 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 00:42:20.370 --> 00:42:23.170 onto things that aren't human when they don't share them. 00:42:23.410 --> 00:42:27.650 But, you know, that extended that that was that went way overboard, right? 00:42:28.370 --> 00:42:31.730 To the point where, you know, now you have animal behaviorists. 00:42:31.890 --> 00:42:37.880 I mean, I remember, you know, an article within the last 10 years, you know, that 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 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 00:42:48.280 --> 00:42:53.240 homologously, you know, were activated under conditions of pain in a way the same way that 00:42:53.240 --> 00:42:54.200 humans are. 00:42:54.970 --> 00:42:56.170 I mean, yeah. 00:42:56.410 --> 00:42:58.730 It is an interesting study, that's for sure. 00:42:59.050 --> 00:43:04.890 But, you know, in some sense, the pendulum has, you know, swung way 00:43:04.890 --> 00:43:10.410 too far in our um, you know, attempt to be hyper 00:43:10.410 --> 00:43:15.370 rationalistic about not attributing things to to to uh other other species. 00:43:15.450 --> 00:43:19.130 And now you you all probably know there's just really interesting stuff on plant cognition 00:43:19.210 --> 00:43:19.450 now. 00:43:19.610 --> 00:43:19.770 Yeah. 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 00:43:24.660 --> 00:43:25.220 scientific. 00:43:25.300 --> 00:43:30.020 Um, it raises questions like what's going on, do is there consciousness? 00:43:30.180 --> 00:43:31.060 I mean, who knows? 00:43:31.300 --> 00:43:37.060 But um there's no question that there's like response to stimuli and um 00:43:37.300 --> 00:43:42.260 and and and you know, reacting at pretty quick timescales to things that are happening, 00:43:42.420 --> 00:43:43.700 touch and all that stuff. 00:43:43.870 --> 00:43:44.190 Yeah. 00:43:44.750 --> 00:43:47.790 But and I I don't want to go too far afield of the next topic. 00:43:47.870 --> 00:43:49.950 I actually wanted this reminded me, hunting magic. 00:43:50.030 --> 00:43:51.550 Can you talk a little bit about hunting magic? 00:43:51.630 --> 00:43:55.390 Because I think this is a great example of the embodied thing concretely. 00:43:55.550 --> 00:43:55.870 Yeah. 00:43:56.270 --> 00:43:56.590 Yeah. 00:43:56.750 --> 00:43:56.990 Yeah. 00:43:57.150 --> 00:44:03.070 So I actually have a um I finally um have a have a have a piece 00:44:03.070 --> 00:44:05.870 coming out on this in the in the edited volume. 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 00:44:11.320 --> 00:44:16.760 that came out in Spanish a couple years ago on 00:44:17.160 --> 00:44:21.240 Andean and Amazonian epistemologies, and a version of this chapter is in there in Spanish. 00:44:21.320 --> 00:44:23.720 But there's an English language one coming out in June. 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 00:44:29.290 --> 00:44:34.650 in Schwar communities about some of these hunting practices that include 00:44:35.290 --> 00:44:39.290 the singing of certain kinds of songs that are involved in 00:44:40.490 --> 00:44:41.450 hunting. 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, 00:44:47.900 --> 00:44:53.740 The range of possibilities for of like how people think about those songs, 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. 00:44:59.500 --> 00:45:03.900 And um, so this takes place before the hunt? 00:45:04.300 --> 00:45:05.100 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:45:05.260 --> 00:45:07.820 And so like immediately before or like the the previous year. 00:45:07.980 --> 00:45:08.700 Yeah, in the morning. 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 00:45:14.460 --> 00:45:20.370 out, and they sing these songs, um, or they used to anyway, um, 00:45:20.610 --> 00:45:22.130 on the way, on the way out to the hunt. 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 00:45:26.930 --> 00:45:28.450 and singing to these animals. 00:45:28.850 --> 00:45:34.770 And the lyrics of the songs um, you know, often are things like requests or 00:45:34.770 --> 00:45:40.690 commands um to the animals, or just statements like today, I'm gonna kill this kind 00:45:40.690 --> 00:45:46.240 of animal, um, repeated with rhythm and and and music um 00:45:46.560 --> 00:45:47.200 melody. 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 00:45:53.280 --> 00:45:58.000 kind of technologies of the self where they're basically getting you into getting the 00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:04.000 hunter into a particular kind of mental state and focus that may actually 00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:04.720 have some effects. 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 00:46:09.230 --> 00:46:10.030 and the arts. 00:46:10.190 --> 00:46:12.350 Um, where like a warm-up activity. 00:46:12.510 --> 00:46:16.990 Yes, you know, like actors and athletes often have warm-up activities to sort of get 00:46:16.990 --> 00:46:19.230 themselves in the right mental state. 00:46:19.630 --> 00:46:20.590 Yes, exactly. 00:46:20.750 --> 00:46:21.710 Yeah, yeah. 00:46:21.950 --> 00:46:27.150 Um, yes, and and and and and focusing the mind on certain kinds of outcomes by 00:46:27.150 --> 00:46:28.270 visualizing them. 00:46:28.590 --> 00:46:31.150 Um things like that. 00:46:31.390 --> 00:46:37.340 Um and One thing that I you know, 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, 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 00:46:46.300 --> 00:46:49.020 Uncertain Virtues of Incomplete Knowledge. 00:46:49.580 --> 00:46:55.580 And it's talking about how you know this this phenomenon where most of the things 00:46:55.580 --> 00:47:01.470 that we do, where we deploy some kind of technology, nobody knows everything about how 00:47:01.470 --> 00:47:02.910 the technology works. 00:47:03.150 --> 00:47:06.830 And um, and that's that's an interesting thing, right? 00:47:06.910 --> 00:47:08.510 It's ordinary actually. 00:47:08.750 --> 00:47:13.710 Um, most of the things that we do are in a state of incomplete knowledge. 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 00:47:17.630 --> 00:47:20.660 who've shown that nobody knows how a toilet works. 00:47:20.740 --> 00:47:22.340 I mean, the plumber does, right? 00:47:23.140 --> 00:47:26.020 But the plumber doesn't know how a helicopter works, right? 00:47:26.180 --> 00:47:26.980 Like that's right. 00:47:27.060 --> 00:47:27.220 Yeah. 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 00:47:32.100 --> 00:47:35.620 memory because we don't have an accurate model of of what's going on. 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. 00:47:40.820 --> 00:47:43.370 And so, you know, you learn these procedures and you do them. 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 00:47:48.570 --> 00:47:50.010 what you're doing is going to work. 00:47:50.170 --> 00:47:52.410 And so you you can have limited knowledge. 00:47:52.570 --> 00:47:57.930 And the the case of Anant, these these particular songs in Schwar, you know, they're 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, 00:48:03.450 --> 00:48:06.890 um, with great kind of respect um for this tradition. 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, 00:48:13.000 --> 00:48:17.560 but there's this view that you know these are kind of ancestral technologies that helped 00:48:17.560 --> 00:48:20.280 and did things, and there's a trust in that. 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 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 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 00:48:36.040 --> 00:48:41.950 know, one of Gigerenzer's ideas was that we use statistical rituals in 00:48:41.950 --> 00:48:47.950 psychology and other fields, especially null null hypothesis significance testing, where, 00:48:48.190 --> 00:48:53.710 you know, people just you can plug something into an algorithm and you get some numbers 00:48:53.710 --> 00:48:57.790 out, and then people interpret those in a certain way, which is often wrong. 00:48:58.030 --> 00:49:01.470 And so, you know, there's two levels of kind of incomplete knowledge there. 00:49:01.630 --> 00:49:06.880 Sometimes people don't know, often people don't know the conditions of efficacy for the 00:49:06.880 --> 00:49:09.040 statistics to give the right answer. 00:49:09.520 --> 00:49:09.840 Right. 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 00:49:14.640 --> 00:49:16.560 often people ignore those. 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 00:49:21.840 --> 00:49:24.240 the model is appropriate for that what they're doing. 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 00:49:28.880 --> 00:49:29.440 means. 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 00:49:36.890 --> 00:49:37.210 comparison? 00:49:37.290 --> 00:49:42.330 Because usually when we think about something like uh indigenous hunting technology, you 00:49:42.330 --> 00:49:47.770 know, it's often viewed by anthropologists as superstition or um, you know, 00:49:48.010 --> 00:49:52.650 something that can't possibly have any effects in the world that matter. 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 00:49:56.650 --> 00:50:00.440 towards them, which are very reminiscent of the attitudes that we have in science, where 00:50:00.440 --> 00:50:06.200 you trust some ancestors who were rigorous and made sure that this 00:50:06.200 --> 00:50:07.480 procedure works. 00:50:07.720 --> 00:50:10.680 And they tell us you can only do it under these circumstances. 00:50:10.760 --> 00:50:12.200 And if you do it this way, it'll work. 00:50:12.360 --> 00:50:13.560 And we trust that and we do it. 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 00:50:17.960 --> 00:50:22.920 or where the efficacy conditions still hold, then we trust that the effects that we want 00:50:22.920 --> 00:50:23.800 are going to happen. 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 00:50:29.730 --> 00:50:33.890 has more of that kind of stuff than we than we like to think. 00:50:34.450 --> 00:50:37.650 Um and it may make use and it may it makes use of social processes. 00:50:37.810 --> 00:50:41.170 I mean, many philosophers of science have talked about these social processes in science, 00:50:41.250 --> 00:50:46.130 that trust is critical, nobody can know everything, there's a cognitive division of labor. 00:50:46.530 --> 00:50:51.000 Um and um all those things are the all those things are true. 00:50:51.160 --> 00:50:54.600 Um and you know there's a double-edgedness to them. 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 00:50:59.640 --> 00:51:02.760 fire pit uh singing P is less than 0.05. 00:51:04.600 --> 00:51:05.000 Right. 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. 00:51:13.510 --> 00:51:19.110 Like, is it is it to sort of humble scientific um chauvinism? 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? 00:51:24.710 --> 00:51:28.150 Uh I think I think I think that's yes. 00:51:28.310 --> 00:51:34.000 I mean what yes, I mean what I have in mind is the um 00:51:34.640 --> 00:51:39.360 importance of reflecting on what it is that we that we don't know. 00:51:39.440 --> 00:51:42.400 So, yeah, something like humility. 00:51:42.640 --> 00:51:44.880 Um but um 00:51:48.480 --> 00:51:53.920 it's also intended, you know, the sort of 00:51:53.920 --> 00:51:59.520 ethnographic part is intended to be an intervention in this space in anthropology where 00:52:00.730 --> 00:52:05.290 Often people think when they think about something like a ritual, um 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 00:52:13.770 --> 00:52:18.330 repetition of certain kinds of procedures without any reflection on what they are or why 00:52:18.330 --> 00:52:18.810 they work. 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 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 00:52:27.920 --> 00:52:29.200 like, what the hell is this? 00:52:29.440 --> 00:52:29.600 Yeah. 00:52:29.760 --> 00:52:29.920 Right. 00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:32.960 And you're and you know, and I mean, everyone is essentially, right? 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 00:52:39.040 --> 00:52:40.320 know is ordinary. 00:52:40.480 --> 00:52:46.270 Um and so we we we should think about these practices that have 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 00:52:50.510 --> 00:52:51.230 kind of interesting. 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 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. 00:53:00.750 --> 00:53:02.750 And so it's part of that as well. 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 00:53:09.240 --> 00:53:14.600 I think, for example, that the the the problem of overdoing statistics in um 00:53:14.760 --> 00:53:17.240 behavioral science is a is a real is a real problem. 00:53:17.400 --> 00:53:21.320 I mean you go through these papers that are just completely full of statistical models, and 00:53:21.320 --> 00:53:27.320 at the end it can be like, okay, but is that really 00:53:27.610 --> 00:53:30.810 true what you're claiming on the basis of all these graphs? 00:53:31.050 --> 00:53:34.250 Um and we tend to be bewildered by these things. 00:53:34.410 --> 00:53:38.650 I mean, they're they have a beguiling effect almost like magic. 00:53:39.610 --> 00:53:41.610 Do you think it's almost like intimidation? 00:53:41.770 --> 00:53:44.570 I mean, is that too too uh blunt? 00:53:44.650 --> 00:53:46.890 But is it sort of like people just get intimidated by it? 00:53:46.970 --> 00:53:48.890 And they're like, Well, this seems sciencey. 00:53:50.890 --> 00:53:51.530 Yeah. 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 00:53:56.660 --> 00:54:02.660 effect of like um the and and and if you question the 00:54:02.660 --> 00:54:08.420 conclusions then one kind of way of defending yourself say, okay, so show me where 00:54:08.420 --> 00:54:10.500 this model is wrong or something like that. 00:54:10.740 --> 00:54:11.140 It's like different. 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 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 00:54:20.810 --> 00:54:25.450 know we s there's just fancier and fancier versions of doing things like mistaking 00:54:25.450 --> 00:54:26.650 correlation for causation. 00:54:26.730 --> 00:54:30.410 I mean it's all over the place in behavioral science. 00:54:30.970 --> 00:54:31.610 Yeah. 00:54:32.490 --> 00:54:38.250 Um this whole conversation is making me realize that a lot 00:54:38.250 --> 00:54:42.180 of our supernatural concepts are correct in a way. 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 00:54:46.420 --> 00:54:51.940 where I'm say uh inferring your mental states, your beliefs and desires and intentions. 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 00:54:56.500 --> 00:55:00.420 intuitive way, that is basically telepathy. 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 00:55:05.380 --> 00:55:07.300 emerge is just opaque to me, right? 00:55:07.470 --> 00:55:07.710 Yep. 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 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 00:55:17.790 --> 00:55:20.110 happens in between the inference and the event, right? 00:55:20.270 --> 00:55:20.670 Mm-hmm. 00:55:20.910 --> 00:55:26.270 Um, similarly, if I have a hunting technology that has uh 00:55:26.350 --> 00:55:31.070 evolved culturally uh down the generations and has been proven effective because of that 00:55:31.070 --> 00:55:35.580 cultural evolutionary process, and it helps me uh hunt um uh an animal. 00:55:35.740 --> 00:55:40.060 Um that literally is my ancestors helping me, right? 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 00:55:44.540 --> 00:55:45.500 catch this animal. 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 00:55:50.540 --> 00:55:54.140 if if certain parts of the causal process are up are opaque to you. 00:55:54.380 --> 00:55:57.260 And it may be that a lot of supernatural concepts are just shorthand. 00:55:57.420 --> 00:56:00.810 You know, that I'm just describing the way in which the ancestors have helped me. 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 00:56:05.530 --> 00:56:07.290 can predict what's going to happen. 00:56:07.450 --> 00:56:09.930 Um these are kinds of magical things, literally. 00:56:10.010 --> 00:56:11.770 If you don't know how it works, it's just magic. 00:56:12.490 --> 00:56:13.850 Um I don't know. 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 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 00:56:24.340 --> 00:56:29.620 you snip out the middle of the the causal sequence, it's indistinguishable from magic. 00:56:31.380 --> 00:56:34.660 Yes, definitely that I I definitely think there's something there. 00:56:34.740 --> 00:56:40.020 And I also agree with what you're saying about um the 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 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 00:56:50.030 --> 00:56:50.830 dividing up the mind. 00:56:50.910 --> 00:56:55.230 And then there's this question of don't do those refer to anything at all? 00:56:55.790 --> 00:57:01.150 Um and one view would be no, those are just completely um hallucinated or whatever. 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 00:57:04.830 --> 00:57:10.670 words for things, intuition, um, insights and things like this, which do refer to 00:57:10.670 --> 00:57:11.550 something real. 00:57:11.630 --> 00:57:17.480 Um, and but we don't have a grasp of them in psychology enough to 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 00:57:23.400 --> 00:57:29.320 um because maybe they're folk terms, um maybe you know we don't have a 00:57:29.320 --> 00:57:32.120 proper neural model of how it would work or something like that. 00:57:32.280 --> 00:57:36.840 Um but yeah, I think there's I think there's a lot of uh 00:57:38.120 --> 00:57:40.040 there can be a lot of things like that. 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 00:57:46.190 --> 00:57:48.670 that are, you know, sort of quasi-spiritual into astrology and stuff. 00:57:48.750 --> 00:57:51.230 And there are these people uh in LA, these intuitives. 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 00:57:57.150 --> 00:58:01.310 listen to you and observe you and are just extremely attentive to every detail about you. 00:58:01.390 --> 00:58:05.390 And they just tell you stuff about yourself that might not have been apparent to you. 00:58:05.790 --> 00:58:06.030 Right? 00:58:06.110 --> 00:58:11.000 Your your your desires, your your character traits, your personality, what you want in 00:58:11.000 --> 00:58:11.400 life. 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 00:58:16.040 --> 00:58:17.000 at social cognition. 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 00:58:21.080 --> 00:58:25.240 and posture, and they just give you a readout of their intuitions about you. 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 00:58:30.370 --> 00:58:32.050 they wouldn't have otherwise had. 00:58:32.210 --> 00:58:35.250 And because they don't know how it's happening, it feels like magic. 00:58:35.330 --> 00:58:36.690 It feels like a supernatural thing. 00:58:36.770 --> 00:58:39.890 It's just a it's just a a person who's just really socially intelligent. 00:58:39.970 --> 00:58:44.690 Uh and and and merely just being around someone who's socially intelligent can feel like 00:58:44.690 --> 00:58:45.090 magic. 00:58:45.170 --> 00:58:47.490 It can feel like a spiritual experience. 00:58:49.250 --> 00:58:50.450 Absolutely. 00:58:51.520 --> 00:58:53.840 Do they self-label as intuitive? 00:58:54.320 --> 00:58:55.360 I believe I believe they do, yeah. 00:58:55.680 --> 00:58:55.840 Okay. 00:58:56.160 --> 00:58:58.080 So Sherlock Holmes, yeah. 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, 00:59:03.040 --> 00:59:05.280 but that's basically, you know, a lot of what it is. 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 00:59:09.120 --> 00:59:09.600 readers. 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 00:59:14.030 --> 00:59:18.270 the dress and the mannerisms of the person and just weaving it into their uh their 00:59:18.270 --> 00:59:22.350 narratives about what the cards reveal or what the the lines on their palm reveal. 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. 00:59:27.630 --> 00:59:28.030 Yeah. 00:59:28.510 --> 00:59:28.670 Yeah. 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 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 00:59:40.760 --> 00:59:44.200 Chris Smith Incognition called Lying About the Future. 00:59:44.520 --> 00:59:50.440 And it's it's it's um based on on vignette style interviews and 00:59:50.440 --> 00:59:55.240 stuff that we've done in Schwar communities um that originally 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 01:00:01.560 --> 01:00:02.600 to be a lie. 01:00:03.080 --> 01:00:06.170 Um and there's an interesting phenomenon in that paper. 01:00:06.250 --> 01:00:12.090 There's also some cross-cultural data that Schwar the Schwar people that we interviewed, 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 01:00:18.490 --> 01:00:20.890 if the prediction doesn't come true. 01:00:21.530 --> 01:00:27.400 And ones that I would consider kind of strange from my 01:00:27.400 --> 01:00:29.080 cultural background. 01:00:31.080 --> 01:00:36.680 And, you know, things like doctors making a prognosis that turns out to be 01:00:36.680 --> 01:00:37.400 wrong. 01:00:39.240 --> 01:00:41.720 And, you know, that there's other examples too. 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, 01:00:45.480 --> 01:00:47.480 that they're not trustworthy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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 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 01:00:57.630 --> 01:00:59.950 commitments about the future where it's under your control. 01:01:00.190 --> 01:01:02.670 So people do there do seem to agree. 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 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? 01:01:13.840 --> 01:01:17.600 Um, but there are things where I say, oh, this is going to happen tomorrow. 01:01:17.680 --> 01:01:20.320 And if it doesn't, that's considered a lie. 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 01:01:24.640 --> 01:01:28.240 the reason I'm mentioning it is because there are really interesting views in this 01:01:28.240 --> 01:01:30.400 community about like knowing the future. 01:01:30.560 --> 01:01:36.480 And there are kind of um ideas that the future can be known through things 01:01:36.480 --> 01:01:42.290 like um using ayahuasca, but also dreams that dreams foretell the future. 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, 01:01:46.930 --> 01:01:52.690 you know, spirituality and and you know, could there be things, magical things that are 01:01:52.690 --> 01:01:55.170 real or whatever, that we don't quite understand? 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 01:01:59.330 --> 01:02:00.770 something through a dream? 01:02:01.480 --> 01:02:05.000 I think the, I mean, I think the conventional answer would be no. 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 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. 01:02:16.040 --> 01:02:17.320 And I realize something. 01:02:17.400 --> 01:02:20.600 I mean, do you know that you know from the dream? 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 01:02:24.520 --> 01:02:25.810 another person, right? 01:02:25.890 --> 01:02:26.050 Yeah. 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 01:02:30.050 --> 01:02:32.530 they're a threat to me or whatever it might be, right? 01:02:32.770 --> 01:02:33.010 Yeah. 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? 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 01:02:42.930 --> 01:02:48.740 because you know dream interpretation is considered kind of a A lot of artists and 01:02:48.740 --> 01:02:52.500 musicians have personal accounts of they dream up a melody in their sleep and it becomes 01:02:52.580 --> 01:02:53.300 like their hit song. 01:02:53.380 --> 01:02:57.700 Like Paul McCartney famously, I believe, dreamt up the melody of might have been yesterday, 01:02:57.780 --> 01:02:58.180 I forget. 01:02:58.340 --> 01:03:00.740 Uh one of his like most famous songs just came to him in a dream. 01:03:00.820 --> 01:03:03.300 He just woke up and it was in his head and he just wrote it down. 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 01:03:07.590 --> 01:03:08.710 while they're dreaming. 01:03:08.870 --> 01:03:12.790 Um and it could be that there's something about the unconscious churning that happens when 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 01:03:16.950 --> 01:03:18.870 otherwise had when you're awake. 01:03:19.030 --> 01:03:19.910 I mean, this happens all the time. 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 01:03:23.750 --> 01:03:24.950 while I'm not thinking about it. 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 01:03:28.950 --> 01:03:30.790 will come to you when you're not thinking about it. 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 01:03:35.190 --> 01:03:40.200 the space of your cognition for possible solutions in a way that's more distributed and 01:03:40.200 --> 01:03:42.520 decentralized than conscious thought. 01:03:42.920 --> 01:03:47.720 And oftentimes that kind of uh, you know, trawling the space for solutions is a more 01:03:47.720 --> 01:03:51.000 effective way to arrive at an insight than conscious deliberation. 01:03:52.040 --> 01:03:53.640 Um absolutely. 01:03:54.600 --> 01:03:54.760 Yeah. 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 01:04:00.200 --> 01:04:00.600 all the time. 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, 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 01:04:11.310 --> 01:04:13.390 from it process happen. 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 01:04:18.750 --> 01:04:21.630 an oven and you don't know what's going on subconsciously. 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 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 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. 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. 01:04:37.180 --> 01:04:42.940 So clearly that thing was just sort of going on in a way that quote 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 01:04:47.740 --> 01:04:50.540 ingredients and then just throw it into the subconscious. 01:04:50.620 --> 01:04:50.860 Yeah. 01:04:51.180 --> 01:04:51.340 Right. 01:04:51.500 --> 01:04:53.340 You know, there's a there's a cool theory of dreaming. 01:04:53.420 --> 01:04:56.300 Uh I I forgot I'm blanking on the guy who who thought of it. 01:04:56.380 --> 01:05:02.270 Um, but the idea is that um we're constantly building predictive models 01:05:02.270 --> 01:05:03.310 of the world around us. 01:05:03.630 --> 01:05:09.630 And in the same way that AIs often overfit, they uh they overgeneralize from 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 01:05:15.230 --> 01:05:19.870 can overfit uh based on the data of of a transient experience or a local experience. 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 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 01:05:30.360 --> 01:05:32.520 overgeneralize from one data set. 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 01:05:37.080 --> 01:05:40.600 overfitting and just by feeding random noise into our predictive models. 01:05:40.680 --> 01:05:42.600 Uh and that's a big part of the function of dreaming. 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 01:05:46.120 --> 01:05:49.800 some insights through dreaming and maybe maybe it's not all bullshit. 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 01:05:55.930 --> 01:05:59.370 it that lends itself to these cultural belief systems. 01:05:59.610 --> 01:05:59.930 Yeah. 01:06:00.250 --> 01:06:00.490 Yeah. 01:06:00.570 --> 01:06:04.410 And Clark, you mentioned like uh uh drugs or hallucinogens. 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 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 01:06:15.500 --> 01:06:18.700 contexts, you know, or sort of like insight is gained. 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 01:06:24.860 --> 01:06:27.180 mixed or systems that aren't usually talking to each other. 01:06:27.500 --> 01:06:29.020 Do you have have you thought about that? 01:06:29.180 --> 01:06:32.380 I mean you mentioned that a little bit like what what's going on with that? 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, 01:06:39.070 --> 01:06:45.070 you know, especially um with um things like ayahuasca, which is a 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 01:06:50.190 --> 01:06:56.190 has DMT is one of the main ingredients, but there's there's many psychoactive 01:06:56.190 --> 01:07:02.140 ingredients in there, um and monoamine oxidase inhibitors and many other 01:07:02.140 --> 01:07:02.380 things. 01:07:02.540 --> 01:07:08.220 And um so it's a kind of technology that alters your mental states. 01:07:08.540 --> 01:07:12.620 And um there's been a lot of interest in it for all kinds of reasons. 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 01:07:17.660 --> 01:07:22.540 places like California and Europe and other places, but also, you know, interest in those 01:07:22.540 --> 01:07:24.620 things for therapies and other kinds of things. 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 01:07:30.510 --> 01:07:36.110 I I also think that I I know that there's a huge problem 01:07:36.430 --> 01:07:37.710 with using those things. 01:07:37.870 --> 01:07:43.790 You can't do kind of like blind randomized assignment because people know when 01:07:43.790 --> 01:07:46.590 they've been given the stuff that is psychoactic. 01:07:46.910 --> 01:07:47.870 Yeah, you can't be blind. 01:07:48.110 --> 01:07:49.070 Yeah, you can't be blind. 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 01:07:53.470 --> 01:07:57.960 randomized control trials and see what effects they have on various things like definitely 01:07:57.960 --> 01:07:59.080 things like depression. 01:07:59.160 --> 01:08:03.400 Um, it's been talked about for breaking out of alcoholism and other kinds of addictions, 01:08:03.560 --> 01:08:05.320 but also the cognitive effects. 01:08:05.480 --> 01:08:07.400 Um so there is research. 01:08:07.480 --> 01:08:08.440 I'm not, I I don't know. 01:08:08.520 --> 01:08:09.880 I'm not an expert on it though. 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 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 01:08:20.630 --> 01:08:26.470 there's a phenomenon there of people sort of using a technology to 01:08:26.470 --> 01:08:32.230 ult to just sort of yeah it it's sort of consuming this is a 01:08:32.230 --> 01:08:38.150 weird thing I'm experiencing and using that as a tool essentially 01:08:38.630 --> 01:08:44.240 yes putting yourself into a different mental state um and 01:08:44.720 --> 01:08:48.400 making yourself out of like overly rigid priors that have developed because you know in 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 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 01:08:56.480 --> 01:08:57.360 stuck in this rut. 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 01:09:03.680 --> 01:09:07.440 by giving you some new stimuli that you wouldn't have otherwise experienced. 01:09:07.680 --> 01:09:08.240 Yeah. 01:09:08.560 --> 01:09:09.200 You know. 01:09:10.000 --> 01:09:10.880 It's interesting. 01:09:11.330 --> 01:09:11.570 Cool. 01:09:11.810 --> 01:09:13.090 Yeah, don't do drugs. 01:09:13.650 --> 01:09:16.050 Uh so speaking of spirits spirits and ghosts. 01:09:26.690 --> 01:09:30.130 For some reason I I love these stories of uh of ghosts killing people. 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 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 01:09:38.940 --> 01:09:43.420 investigated the crime scene and they determined that the murder was caused by a phantasm 01:09:43.420 --> 01:09:44.060 or ghost. 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 01:09:49.420 --> 01:09:53.260 kinds of social functions that narrative was serving or whether they they truly believed 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 01:09:56.860 --> 01:09:59.420 that would have resulted if they had pinned it on a particular person. 01:09:59.580 --> 01:09:59.740 Right. 01:10:00.860 --> 01:10:06.630 You told a similar story about um I believe two guys they they uh 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 01:10:11.670 --> 01:10:14.390 they came back and one of them one of them didn't come back. 01:10:14.550 --> 01:10:15.990 Could you recount that story? 01:10:16.070 --> 01:10:18.230 Because it has haunted me all these years. 01:10:18.950 --> 01:10:24.400 Well yeah it wa it was a case um where someone someone died. 01:10:24.560 --> 01:10:27.520 I mean, the body ended up being found in the river. 01:10:28.000 --> 01:10:31.360 And um it was on a hunting trip. 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. 01:10:37.040 --> 01:10:38.320 There may have, there may have been more. 01:10:38.400 --> 01:10:39.360 I wasn't I wasn't there. 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 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 01:10:48.910 --> 01:10:51.710 Brenda was working, which I believe was Canambo. 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. 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 01:11:02.110 --> 01:11:02.750 remember right. 01:11:02.910 --> 01:11:08.110 So the way that the fishing works there is they use this plant poison called 01:11:08.110 --> 01:11:10.830 Barbosco, which is a kind of vine. 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 01:11:16.700 --> 01:11:19.100 a commercial way to use as a pesticide. 01:11:19.340 --> 01:11:25.180 Um the the active material basically binds with uh hemoglobin, and so it it 01:11:25.180 --> 01:11:27.580 suffocates, um, it suffocates you. 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 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 01:11:37.740 --> 01:11:40.670 because the fish have basically been suffocated. 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. 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 01:11:51.230 --> 01:11:51.710 suicide. 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, 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 01:12:01.790 --> 01:12:07.720 with with you know, pound it um To kind of pulp out the this 01:12:07.800 --> 01:12:10.120 this white stuff into the water. 01:12:10.200 --> 01:12:13.080 And then people the fish start to float downstream. 01:12:13.160 --> 01:12:17.720 And so people are positioned at different places along the river to sort of collect the 01:12:17.720 --> 01:12:19.720 fish as they as they're floating downstream. 01:12:19.880 --> 01:12:23.320 And so there's this point where people separate and they separated. 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 01:12:29.050 --> 01:12:29.450 the river. 01:12:29.530 --> 01:12:34.810 And so that it had been yeah, a non-human spiritual being that 01:12:34.810 --> 01:12:36.330 killed this guy. 01:12:37.210 --> 01:12:43.130 And then yeah, a debate ensued about whether that was not true, and it was 01:12:43.130 --> 01:12:46.410 an excuse that that wasn't actually a it was actually a murder and so on. 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 01:12:52.080 --> 01:12:52.720 framed. 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 01:12:57.520 --> 01:13:01.680 ensuing debate, where they were debating whether it was a murder or whether it was a 01:13:01.680 --> 01:13:02.080 spirit. 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 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 01:13:13.680 --> 01:13:14.320 a problem. 01:13:15.270 --> 01:13:16.310 Was it something like that? 01:13:16.390 --> 01:13:17.110 Do you remember it? 01:13:17.350 --> 01:13:17.510 Yes. 01:13:17.670 --> 01:13:17.910 Yes. 01:13:18.070 --> 01:13:18.390 That's right. 01:13:18.870 --> 01:13:19.030 Yeah. 01:13:19.110 --> 01:13:20.150 That you yes. 01:13:20.310 --> 01:13:21.910 You remember it better than me now. 01:13:22.070 --> 01:13:24.230 Um but uh that that's right. 01:13:24.470 --> 01:13:30.470 Basically they they um in the in the context of the argument or debate, it was 01:13:30.470 --> 01:13:33.670 like this, you know, this is what happened, case closed. 01:13:34.390 --> 01:13:37.350 Um there'll be no more discussion of this. 01:13:37.510 --> 01:13:42.220 Um so a kind of authoritative Yeah. 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 01:13:50.460 --> 01:13:54.860 because there's ambiguity whether or not the threat's coming from the spirit versus me? 01:13:55.100 --> 01:13:59.980 Is that the sort of technology or the social strategy there? 01:14:01.180 --> 01:14:06.710 It was it was um For one of the 01:14:06.710 --> 01:14:12.710 families or one of the yeah, one of the parties, it was better for 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. 01:14:18.310 --> 01:14:21.270 And so they're basically saying this is what happened. 01:14:21.510 --> 01:14:21.910 I think. 01:14:22.310 --> 01:14:22.550 Yeah. 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 01:14:28.070 --> 01:14:32.760 like presumably that family would was high status enough and had enough allies and support 01:14:32.760 --> 01:14:35.880 that they could say that and and make the threat and have it be heated. 01:14:36.200 --> 01:14:36.520 Mm-hmm. 01:14:36.680 --> 01:14:37.320 That's right. 01:14:37.480 --> 01:14:37.800 Yep. 01:14:38.280 --> 01:14:39.160 It's fascinating. 01:14:39.400 --> 01:14:39.640 Yeah. 01:14:39.880 --> 01:14:40.520 Yeah. 01:14:41.080 --> 01:14:41.560 Yeah. 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 01:14:46.760 --> 01:14:52.360 relatively small community of kind of like, yeah, use of numerical strength or or whatever 01:14:52.520 --> 01:14:54.280 to to push one's case through. 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 01:14:58.970 --> 01:15:00.650 cases of this from politics, right? 01:15:00.970 --> 01:15:05.930 Where um, you know, someone strong says, this is the way it is. 01:15:06.330 --> 01:15:06.490 Yeah. 01:15:06.890 --> 01:15:11.450 And I don't want to hear any other discussion of this going forward, right? 01:15:11.690 --> 01:15:17.690 Doesn't mean that the other parties don't continue to hold the representation that 01:15:17.690 --> 01:15:18.810 it wasn't that way. 01:15:19.130 --> 01:15:19.450 Right. 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 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, 01:15:30.640 --> 01:15:36.400 although it did definitely um you know make it so that that had to 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 01:15:42.560 --> 01:15:42.960 that's right. 01:15:43.120 --> 01:15:43.360 Yeah. 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 01:15:48.310 --> 01:15:53.270 evolutionary behavioral scientists who don't go to the field, um, we have gotten to a 01:15:53.270 --> 01:15:57.270 tradition where we tell students that in um 01:15:57.910 --> 01:16:03.670 non-weird cultures, if there's somebody in the community that really 01:16:03.910 --> 01:16:08.790 is problematic and like really problematic, occasionally they'll there'll be a hunting 01:16:08.790 --> 01:16:09.350 accident. 01:16:10.360 --> 01:16:13.320 Is this tr is this is this a urban legend? 01:16:13.480 --> 01:16:14.360 Is this true? 01:16:14.600 --> 01:16:20.360 Uh I I have never actually asked a um uh credible um uh 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 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 01:16:31.720 --> 01:16:33.810 I can't really say beyond my own. 01:16:33.970 --> 01:16:38.770 I mean, I I have obviously read some ethnography from some other places. 01:16:38.930 --> 01:16:43.570 Um, but I but I think yeah, yeah, I mean 01:16:53.460 --> 01:16:59.380 I would say, yeah, I I would say that um yeah, in in in in 01:16:59.380 --> 01:17:05.140 all kinds of places, rural places, it might be easier to maybe kill somebody 01:17:05.460 --> 01:17:06.580 or have you disappear. 01:17:06.820 --> 01:17:07.060 Yeah. 01:17:07.220 --> 01:17:09.380 Um happens in cities too, though. 01:17:09.460 --> 01:17:09.620 Yeah. 01:17:09.780 --> 01:17:15.460 And I mean, it's not necessarily always that it's a kind of community um 01:17:15.620 --> 01:17:16.820 punishment of someone. 01:17:16.900 --> 01:17:18.820 I I think that it probably mostly isn't. 01:17:18.900 --> 01:17:23.010 It's more like a personal um, this person is inconvenient to me. 01:17:23.090 --> 01:17:25.490 And so I'm going to get rid of them. 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 01:17:31.570 --> 01:17:37.570 number of those things happening in the US, um, you know, now where people like 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 01:17:43.490 --> 01:17:44.530 know what happened to them. 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 01:17:49.260 --> 01:17:50.300 here was something like that. 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 01:17:55.420 --> 01:18:01.340 um that was extreme enough that somebody wanted to basically kill another 01:18:01.340 --> 01:18:01.580 person. 01:18:01.820 --> 01:18:02.060 Yeah. 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 01:18:07.500 --> 01:18:08.700 relationships with the person. 01:18:08.780 --> 01:18:10.940 It's likely probabilistically not a stranger. 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 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 01:18:21.090 --> 01:18:22.130 to do something about it. 01:18:22.450 --> 01:18:22.770 Yeah. 01:18:22.930 --> 01:18:23.570 Yeah. 01:18:23.970 --> 01:18:24.610 Yeah. 01:18:24.930 --> 01:18:26.610 Um yeah. 01:18:27.010 --> 01:18:33.010 And and or you know and some sort of possibly perception or calculation of that, whether 01:18:33.010 --> 01:18:35.300 that's really true or not. 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. 01:18:40.180 --> 01:18:40.820 You know, who knows? 01:18:40.900 --> 01:18:42.740 Some of those things may also be that kind of thing. 01:18:43.060 --> 01:18:43.300 Yeah. 01:18:43.460 --> 01:18:43.700 Yeah. 01:18:43.860 --> 01:18:45.700 So we're covering drugs and murder. 01:18:45.860 --> 01:18:47.460 We we haven't hit rock and roll yet. 01:18:47.540 --> 01:18:48.980 Maybe we'll have Greg on. 01:18:49.460 --> 01:18:50.260 Oh, how's the music? 01:18:50.420 --> 01:18:51.620 Schwarz music. 01:18:52.740 --> 01:18:54.020 Schwarz music is great. 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 01:18:59.730 --> 01:19:05.170 music scene there, um, which is uh which is which is great. 01:19:05.250 --> 01:19:11.090 I mean the the sort of um indigenous music scene in South America is burgeoning and 01:19:11.090 --> 01:19:11.730 really good. 01:19:12.850 --> 01:19:13.490 Do didn't we? 01:19:13.650 --> 01:19:15.090 What what kind of music is it? 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 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 01:19:25.840 --> 01:19:30.400 of schwar artists, you know, and people who sing in other indigenous languages who are 01:19:30.400 --> 01:19:35.120 using things like cumbia, technocumbia, regatone, um, 01:19:36.000 --> 01:19:38.720 hip-hop, other kinds of formats like that. 01:19:39.280 --> 01:19:42.800 The traditional schwar instrumentation is is is like drums. 01:19:42.960 --> 01:19:45.840 They also have a there's a kind of violin type of thing. 01:19:46.080 --> 01:19:48.670 People play guitars, flutes. 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 01:19:54.110 --> 01:19:57.150 music does everywhere in the world, just taking all the ingredients. 01:19:57.230 --> 01:20:03.150 And, you know, it's I sometimes um I get I 01:20:03.470 --> 01:20:07.070 I'm an old man, I get grumpy about how music and film are going. 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 01:20:12.910 --> 01:20:18.080 that the technologies are becoming available are you know really create this like level 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 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 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 01:20:33.040 --> 01:20:33.280 great. 01:20:33.600 --> 01:20:35.840 Yeah they have an orchestra at their fingertips. 01:20:36.480 --> 01:20:37.600 Yeah super cool. 01:20:38.000 --> 01:20:43.370 Yeah music seems to me like one of the outstanding mysteries in the 01:20:43.370 --> 01:20:45.290 evolutionary social science. 01:20:45.370 --> 01:20:47.370 Uh and aesthetics in general, I think. 01:20:47.530 --> 01:20:47.770 Yep. 01:20:48.090 --> 01:20:49.690 But but music in particular. 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 01:20:55.370 --> 01:20:59.770 your memory so clearly, and how in particular it sticks in your memory like during your 01:20:59.770 --> 01:21:00.170 youth. 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 01:21:04.010 --> 01:21:05.130 just burned into my memory. 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 01:21:09.420 --> 01:21:13.020 have the same intensity the m same emotional intensity as it did. 01:21:13.340 --> 01:21:13.900 That's right. 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 01:21:19.660 --> 01:21:23.580 hugely uh powerful emotional effect on us. 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 01:21:27.820 --> 01:21:29.420 still have yet to be explained. 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 01:21:34.780 --> 01:21:36.470 signaling group cohesion. 01:21:36.630 --> 01:21:38.390 I don't know if I quite buy that as the whole story. 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 01:21:43.350 --> 01:21:47.990 different vibe than a minor fifth and like why the mathematical properties of a melody are 01:21:47.990 --> 01:21:48.870 the way they are. 01:21:49.030 --> 01:21:50.390 Like what what is going on there? 01:21:50.550 --> 01:21:51.830 I I have no idea. 01:21:51.990 --> 01:21:54.070 Um We have to have a Greg on, maybe. 01:21:54.310 --> 01:21:57.190 Yeah, maybe we'll have Greg on and see if he can dispel the mystery. 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 01:22:00.980 --> 01:22:01.140 like a few years? 01:22:01.460 --> 01:22:01.700 Definitely. 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 01:22:05.380 --> 01:22:10.340 you know, I think calling back to your your conversation that I was listening to with 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 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 01:22:20.740 --> 01:22:24.260 someone function um that's maybe overdoing it. 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, 01:22:29.950 --> 01:22:35.870 um, fiction, um, you know, religion, other kinds of things like this, uh, 01:22:36.030 --> 01:22:41.870 even morality, where um it's a kind of uh, you 01:22:41.870 --> 01:22:47.870 know, complex, emergent thing that definitely is the result of 01:22:47.870 --> 01:22:49.390 a lot of functional stuff. 01:22:49.720 --> 01:22:55.080 but to say that music has a function is or one function um 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 01:23:01.080 --> 01:23:06.840 things that music can do is correct i mean music can coordinate people um music 01:23:06.840 --> 01:23:12.600 can um change your emotions it can uplift you it can um do 01:23:12.600 --> 01:23:18.170 all these things but um yeah, it's it's a 01:23:19.930 --> 01:23:21.130 it's it's it's strange. 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, 01:23:26.010 --> 01:23:31.450 like melody and um chordal structure and stuff like that, I mean I I 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 01:23:36.650 --> 01:23:42.620 also the mystery of mathematics, which you know has really intrigued me 01:23:42.620 --> 01:23:48.540 for a long time that you have this symbolic system um that has aesthetic properties 01:23:48.540 --> 01:23:52.620 that people find very, very appealing and they discover new forms of mathematics through 01:23:52.620 --> 01:23:54.300 aesthetics in some way. 01:23:55.260 --> 01:23:58.540 And they end up corresponding to the world. 01:24:00.750 --> 01:24:02.110 Absolutely bizarre. 01:24:02.430 --> 01:24:03.550 How do we explain that? 01:24:03.710 --> 01:24:06.670 You know, imaginary numbers were forbidden by Pythagoras. 01:24:06.750 --> 01:24:10.830 And then once they were allowed into mathematics, it turned out that they explained a bunch 01:24:10.830 --> 01:24:16.510 of natural phenomena through entertaining the square root of a negative number, right? 01:24:16.830 --> 01:24:19.550 And so what's going on there? 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 01:24:23.800 --> 01:24:25.160 like articulating an intuition. 01:24:25.240 --> 01:24:29.800 So sort of like respecting the uh the nonlinear thing we were talking about like the 01:24:29.800 --> 01:24:32.440 mathematics or like the the the supernatural stuff. 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 01:24:39.240 --> 01:24:44.120 canon the the sort of embodied stuff we don't really respect. 01:24:44.440 --> 01:24:48.950 And I agree with that, especially like at universities and schools, but like when you get 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 01:24:53.110 --> 01:24:56.310 best scientists, a lot of it is like creativity and art. 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 01:24:59.830 --> 01:25:00.550 don't know how they do it. 01:25:00.630 --> 01:25:02.150 And they might not even know how they do it. 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 01:25:06.150 --> 01:25:11.670 high level, um, that that sort of assignment of like this is art or creativity or 01:25:11.670 --> 01:25:13.430 imagination or aesthetic. 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 01:25:19.460 --> 01:25:22.020 they do, a lot of it isn't explicit. 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 01:25:27.220 --> 01:25:28.340 this intuition. 01:25:29.380 --> 01:25:30.900 Yeah, for sure. 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 01:25:35.620 --> 01:25:39.220 distinguishing the good ideas from the bad ideas, and you've just stored them in your 01:25:39.380 --> 01:25:42.670 unconscious and have made them available whenever they're needed. 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 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. 01:25:52.830 --> 01:25:53.070 Yeah. 01:25:53.150 --> 01:25:57.230 Uh analogous to you know, someone riffing on the guitar. 01:25:57.630 --> 01:25:58.430 Yeah, exactly. 01:25:58.670 --> 01:25:58.830 Yeah. 01:25:58.990 --> 01:25:59.230 Exactly. 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 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 01:26:06.590 --> 01:26:11.220 young student of theirs, and and David you might have had a similar experience at UCLA 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 01:26:16.820 --> 01:26:22.500 a uh it's it's an apprenticeship in a way yeah yeah and you know 01:26:22.580 --> 01:26:26.580 I think something to think about for our field is um 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 01:26:34.850 --> 01:26:39.170 insert as something to, you know, is the importance of diversity of ideas, diversity of 01:26:39.170 --> 01:26:43.810 people, diversity of ideas um in science, which you know is a contested thing right now. 01:26:43.970 --> 01:26:49.650 Um but um you know, one of the ways one of the reasons that we can 01:26:49.890 --> 01:26:55.890 once you become um steeped in a tradition of thinking about the mind and 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 01:27:01.520 --> 01:27:05.120 and the number of concepts that we have to draw on is incredible. 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 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 01:27:15.040 --> 01:27:20.240 also have certain kinds of concepts that are incredibly generative, like 01:27:20.400 --> 01:27:21.200 mismatch. 01:27:21.360 --> 01:27:26.400 I mean, I think people can be wrong about mismatch and it's overused perhaps. 01:27:26.690 --> 01:27:29.170 But that is something that comes out of evolutionary thinking. 01:27:29.250 --> 01:27:34.930 That is, I mean, once you know what that is, it's incredibly generative, right? 01:27:35.330 --> 01:27:37.650 And there's and there's different kinds of mismatch, right? 01:27:37.730 --> 01:27:42.290 I mean, there's um sort of deep time evolutionary mismatch, there's historical mismatch, 01:27:42.450 --> 01:27:44.690 there's even personal experience mismatch. 01:27:44.770 --> 01:27:46.210 I mean, I'm not a digital native. 01:27:46.290 --> 01:27:49.330 I grew up before I didn't have an email account or whatever. 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. 01:27:53.520 --> 01:27:55.120 What a useful, what a useful concept. 01:27:55.200 --> 01:27:59.280 I mean, it comes from dynamical systems and it interfaces with these other areas. 01:27:59.360 --> 01:28:01.360 Um, and that's just to take one. 01:28:01.520 --> 01:28:04.000 I mean, there's just so, so, so many. 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 01:28:09.680 --> 01:28:14.720 is, you know, the phenomenology tradition, Husserl Heidegger, Merlo-Ponty, people like 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 01:28:19.680 --> 01:28:25.470 um Views about sort of how we engage with 01:28:25.470 --> 01:28:30.430 the world at a kind of non representational level through direct interaction with other 01:28:30.430 --> 01:28:30.670 people. 01:28:31.390 --> 01:28:35.790 And so there's a bunch of words and concepts from that field that are useful. 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 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 01:28:44.830 --> 01:28:49.100 about, I mean, it can only benefit, it can only benefit evolutionary science. 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. 01:28:56.380 --> 01:29:01.740 But one of my things right now is to make a pitch that 01:29:02.940 --> 01:29:07.500 our field, because we are telling the story of all humans, 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 01:29:14.530 --> 01:29:17.570 or by a representative sample of all humans. 01:29:17.730 --> 01:29:22.850 And I and um there's various reasons why that might or might not be. 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 01:29:27.490 --> 01:29:33.160 um that there's something about evolutionary science where it is not creating a kind of 01:29:33.160 --> 01:29:38.600 welcoming space for a lot of people to come in from other cultural traditions and other 01:29:38.600 --> 01:29:40.360 kinds of backgrounds to a certain extent. 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 01:29:45.560 --> 01:29:49.640 a field to think about how do we bring in people from these other traditions? 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 01:29:53.640 --> 01:29:59.030 South American indigenous communities like the idea of evolution is not a problem for most 01:29:59.270 --> 01:29:59.510 people. 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 01:30:05.590 --> 01:30:11.190 to everything else through kinship, essentially, is a deeply 01:30:11.990 --> 01:30:14.550 reverberating idea in indigenous communities. 01:30:14.630 --> 01:30:20.550 In fact, it's way makes way more sense to people growing up in those 01:30:20.550 --> 01:30:24.870 traditions than it does to people raised, for example, in a religious European tradition 01:30:25.430 --> 01:30:27.600 where humans are special and separate. 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 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 01:30:38.880 --> 01:30:41.200 broader palette of ideas we can think of. 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 01:30:47.360 --> 01:30:53.200 embedded in our own thoughts these ways of thinking that are really generative, I think 01:30:53.200 --> 01:30:56.850 we can expand it even further. 01:30:57.650 --> 01:31:03.570 Is the argument that uh evolutionary behavioral sciences is still born out 01:31:03.570 --> 01:31:06.530 of behavioral sciences, psychology? 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 01:31:11.650 --> 01:31:13.490 cross-cultural than a lot of that stuff. 01:31:13.650 --> 01:31:13.970 Yes. 01:31:14.130 --> 01:31:19.810 But we can still do better in the sense of because there's a theory, 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 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 01:31:30.700 --> 01:31:31.900 helpful tool. 01:31:32.220 --> 01:31:34.620 We can understand why this makes sense. 01:31:34.860 --> 01:31:39.660 Whereas traditional scientists might just poo poo this idea or think it's unsophisticated, 01:31:39.820 --> 01:31:41.420 like in the example of magic. 01:31:41.900 --> 01:31:42.140 Right. 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 01:31:46.540 --> 01:31:52.110 know, just to be super um unfair, but like cognitive 01:31:52.110 --> 01:31:54.190 scientists might be that's just garbage, right? 01:31:54.270 --> 01:31:55.070 Like it's not real. 01:31:55.230 --> 01:31:56.030 We don't study that. 01:31:56.110 --> 01:32:00.350 We're we're we're sophisticated psychologists and we study deduction. 01:32:00.830 --> 01:32:06.590 We have this unique thing of we have we have the the secret tool 01:32:06.590 --> 01:32:12.360 to understand the way in which everything can be science and 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 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 01:32:22.440 --> 01:32:23.080 seriously. 01:32:24.680 --> 01:32:25.240 Definitely. 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 01:32:29.880 --> 01:32:34.200 saying even a little bit more explicit, is I think that that evolutionary science has 01:32:35.410 --> 01:32:41.410 Heated most evolutionary scientists have read the weird paper, you know, the the idea 01:32:41.570 --> 01:32:42.770 from Henrik et al. 01:32:43.010 --> 01:32:48.370 that you know we're our research participants are coming from an unrepresentative sample of 01:32:48.370 --> 01:32:48.770 humanity. 01:32:48.930 --> 01:32:52.690 Like I don't think we've actually fixed that problem, but most evolutionary scientists are 01:32:52.690 --> 01:32:54.850 aware of it and I think would agree. 01:32:55.170 --> 01:33:01.100 Um, but that is still seeing that that's that is still making essentially 01:33:01.100 --> 01:33:04.380 an argument that we need to get data from other places. 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 01:33:09.420 --> 01:33:12.300 be um from all from all walks of life. 01:33:12.460 --> 01:33:12.700 Right. 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, 01:33:19.030 --> 01:33:24.950 it's become increasingly obvious to me, you know, that we have these 01:33:25.750 --> 01:33:31.670 theories of what morality is or might be that might be a subset 01:33:31.670 --> 01:33:32.870 of possible theories. 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 01:33:38.150 --> 01:33:38.710 myself as well. 01:33:38.790 --> 01:33:42.310 You know, we develop these vignettes and that have to do with like the importance of 01:33:42.310 --> 01:33:43.110 intentions and so on. 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 01:33:48.160 --> 01:33:54.000 we're projecting something onto these places, but we're certainly choosing a 01:33:54.000 --> 01:33:59.200 space in the moral landscape to look at very carefully because the theories that come from 01:33:59.200 --> 01:34:04.480 Europe, for example, tell us this is the these are the important distinctions to make. 01:34:04.800 --> 01:34:10.330 And if we had people, you know, um from other traditions to tell us, well, 01:34:10.410 --> 01:34:14.890 morality is about more than this, or there there might be other kinds of things here. 01:34:15.370 --> 01:34:18.090 I think we'd make real progress in that area. 01:34:18.410 --> 01:34:18.650 Yeah. 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. 01:34:22.410 --> 01:34:26.490 I mean from my point of view, I mean the literature and moral psychology is absolutely 01:34:26.490 --> 01:34:32.220 saturated with Western philosophy, historical traditions, Kant and the categorical 01:34:32.220 --> 01:34:37.420 imperative, utilitarianism and deontology, mensrea, and the whole legal system and legal 01:34:37.420 --> 01:34:39.740 framework for thinking about crime and punishment. 01:34:39.980 --> 01:34:45.740 Like all these ideas are absolutely, you know, at at the theoretical uh 01:34:46.540 --> 01:34:51.100 center of our thinking in terms of moral cognition, moral psychology. 01:34:51.260 --> 01:34:52.730 Um That isn't to say that's bad. 01:34:52.810 --> 01:34:53.930 I mean, you gotta start somewhere. 01:34:54.090 --> 01:34:54.330 Right. 01:34:54.810 --> 01:34:59.770 But this is very different from the way that moral practices uh are conducted in different 01:34:59.770 --> 01:35:00.250 cultures. 01:35:00.410 --> 01:35:05.130 And that and the idea that these distinctions and these categories and these concepts are 01:35:05.530 --> 01:35:10.810 shaping our theorizing about morality, um, I think i is bound to have a distortive 01:35:10.810 --> 01:35:14.090 influence on what our our picture of morality is looking like. 01:35:14.410 --> 01:35:14.890 Yep. 01:35:15.260 --> 01:35:15.580 Yep. 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 01:35:19.740 --> 01:35:20.940 everything that you just said there. 01:35:21.100 --> 01:35:22.700 I mean, you got to start somewhere. 01:35:22.780 --> 01:35:26.620 It's not like the work that exists is is is bad necessarily. 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 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 01:35:36.550 --> 01:35:38.790 light because the light is better there kind of problem. 01:35:39.190 --> 01:35:39.350 Sure. 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 01:35:43.350 --> 01:35:44.710 thing that we're talking about. 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 01:35:49.990 --> 01:35:55.030 debate, which has really occupied most of the And so what is that, just to familiarize 01:35:55.030 --> 01:35:55.990 people who don't know what that is? 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. 01:36:02.070 --> 01:36:07.980 I mean, there's an idea that comes from certain kinds of Western philosophy, deontology, 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 01:36:12.620 --> 01:36:16.140 behind an act that makes it morally good or bad. 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? 01:36:23.260 --> 01:36:29.210 But um the and then there's been a debate, you know, partly 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 01:36:33.290 --> 01:36:38.810 around the world and showed that, you know, there seems to be blaming people for intent 01:36:38.810 --> 01:36:39.450 versus outcome. 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 01:36:43.690 --> 01:36:46.410 always the case that intent wins over outcome. 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 01:36:50.330 --> 01:36:53.000 sometimes be very morally blameworthy. 01:36:53.640 --> 01:36:56.920 And then there's a debate about why that is. 01:36:57.160 --> 01:36:58.440 I've participated in that debate. 01:36:58.520 --> 01:36:59.800 I think it's an important one. 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 01:37:05.080 --> 01:37:10.920 that you know we're people that perspective, which is very much act focused, it's 01:37:10.920 --> 01:37:12.280 focused on acts. 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 01:37:19.090 --> 01:37:23.970 at the literature on morality from cultural anthropology, relationships are extremely 01:37:23.970 --> 01:37:24.290 important. 01:37:25.890 --> 01:37:28.930 Everything is embedded in within relationships. 01:37:29.010 --> 01:37:33.810 And the same act matters differently depending on what your relationship is. 01:37:33.970 --> 01:37:38.960 It's not that that's something that evolutionary psychologists don't know, um, or or 01:37:38.960 --> 01:37:42.080 cognitive scientists who are who are designing, you know, philosophers who are designing 01:37:42.080 --> 01:37:43.200 these vignettes. 01:37:43.680 --> 01:37:46.400 But it hasn't been foregrounded in this literature at all. 01:37:46.640 --> 01:37:47.040 Right. 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 01:37:50.720 --> 01:37:56.720 Aristotle and others, virtue, um, virtue ethics, right, you know, have to do with 01:37:57.360 --> 01:38:00.720 um, there's many moralized things that aren't even acts. 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 01:38:06.570 --> 01:38:08.970 involve causing harm to another person, for example. 01:38:09.210 --> 01:38:10.490 And ways of thinking. 01:38:10.970 --> 01:38:11.930 And ways of thinking, yes. 01:38:12.010 --> 01:38:13.610 We yeah, exactly. 01:38:13.770 --> 01:38:15.610 Um, those are kind of those are kind of missing. 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 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 01:38:24.810 --> 01:38:30.560 these perspectives from outside of the kind of theoretical traditions that we've had, 01:38:31.120 --> 01:38:34.480 we would be making progress faster because there would be people from other traditions 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 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? 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 01:38:46.800 --> 01:38:49.680 studies, that's the number one thing that people would ask you. 01:38:50.030 --> 01:38:51.470 when you're running these things in the field. 01:38:51.550 --> 01:38:52.750 They're like, who is this guy? 01:38:52.910 --> 01:38:54.990 And I'm like, Well, I it's just a guy. 01:38:55.070 --> 01:38:55.630 It's just a guy. 01:38:55.870 --> 01:38:56.350 It doesn't matter. 01:38:56.430 --> 01:38:56.990 It doesn't matter. 01:38:57.710 --> 01:38:57.950 Right. 01:38:58.030 --> 01:39:00.030 And then as psychologists, we're kind of trained. 01:39:00.110 --> 01:39:03.950 We want to remove everything from the framing that's considered a virtue, right? 01:39:04.030 --> 01:39:04.990 In running the experiment. 01:39:05.070 --> 01:39:05.950 It's just a random guy. 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 01:39:09.070 --> 01:39:09.230 good. 01:39:09.630 --> 01:39:09.870 Yeah. 01:39:10.350 --> 01:39:11.150 People would say that. 01:39:11.230 --> 01:39:14.350 And I and it's like, oh yeah, duh. 01:39:14.510 --> 01:39:14.750 Right. 01:39:14.910 --> 01:39:18.350 I mean, that is a reasonable perspective. 01:39:19.230 --> 01:39:19.550 Yeah. 01:39:19.820 --> 01:39:21.260 Um yeah. 01:39:22.060 --> 01:39:22.380 No. 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 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 01:39:30.380 --> 01:39:34.620 culture and they ask us these these flabbergasting questions like who is this guy? 01:39:34.780 --> 01:39:36.620 And if I don't know him, then it doesn't matter. 01:39:36.780 --> 01:39:38.060 Like I don't know. 01:39:38.140 --> 01:39:40.700 It's it's just such a shocking thing to be confronted with. 01:39:40.860 --> 01:39:41.180 Yeah. 01:39:41.340 --> 01:39:44.060 And and such a profound thing, you know. 01:39:44.220 --> 01:39:49.150 Uh like obviously that should be of even from an evolutionary perspective, this should have 01:39:49.150 --> 01:39:49.790 occurred to us. 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 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 01:39:59.710 --> 01:40:03.470 deeply I mean, it's evolutionarily in terms of the fitness implications of the act 01:40:03.630 --> 01:40:04.430 incredibly relevant. 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 01:40:09.550 --> 01:40:12.510 and our questionnaires, uh, you know, tells us that we are missing something. 01:40:12.590 --> 01:40:13.870 We're missing a per a perspective. 01:40:14.110 --> 01:40:14.430 Yeah. 01:40:14.510 --> 01:40:15.080 Um Yeah. 01:40:16.360 --> 01:40:16.840 I think that's right. 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 01:40:20.600 --> 01:40:23.480 circle back to, David, that you said something about legal systems. 01:40:23.720 --> 01:40:24.120 Yeah. 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, 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 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 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 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 01:40:47.870 --> 01:40:49.230 a stranger or whatever. 01:40:49.630 --> 01:40:50.750 And we are doing some of that. 01:40:50.830 --> 01:40:53.310 We've been doing that in Geography Philosophy project. 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 01:40:59.390 --> 01:41:03.950 possibility that you know our legal systems are basically built for 01:41:04.510 --> 01:41:05.710 impersonality. 01:41:05.920 --> 01:41:08.960 yeah, if that's a word, and um impartiality, right? 01:41:09.120 --> 01:41:14.800 Obviously, they're supposed to be impartial, but also the jury-based legal system in the 01:41:14.800 --> 01:41:18.480 US and other places is about strangers judging strangers. 01:41:18.720 --> 01:41:20.240 That's the entire point of it, right? 01:41:20.400 --> 01:41:24.640 You actually want the people to be strangers who are making the judgment. 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 01:41:27.680 --> 01:41:28.800 impartiality. 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 01:41:34.400 --> 01:41:36.730 presented in a very strange way. 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 01:41:43.450 --> 01:41:45.210 relevant to almost anybody. 01:41:45.850 --> 01:41:46.170 Right. 01:41:46.330 --> 01:41:48.570 I mean, I understand why that is. 01:41:48.730 --> 01:41:50.090 We can understand why that is, right? 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. 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 01:41:59.690 --> 01:42:01.480 relevant, et etc., etc., etc. 01:42:01.800 --> 01:42:03.240 Many of these procedures that we have. 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, 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, 01:42:15.080 --> 01:42:20.760 the law is this kind of way of adjudicating moral issues, um, 01:42:21.080 --> 01:42:24.170 which has this strange, strange property. 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 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 01:42:33.850 --> 01:42:36.810 Europeans or people trained or educated in that system. 01:42:36.970 --> 01:42:38.730 And they'll say, Okay, I see what you mean. 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 01:42:43.850 --> 01:42:46.890 gonna say that's one point worse on a liker scale than the other one, right? 01:42:47.210 --> 01:42:52.660 People can do that, but in real life, it's this person perception 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 01:42:58.580 --> 01:42:59.540 judgment. 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 01:43:04.660 --> 01:43:10.180 tendency to say that's irrational or bad to include all that information, but in fact 01:43:11.540 --> 01:43:13.530 that might be the way it's done, right? 01:43:13.610 --> 01:43:17.130 So that you'll, you know, and it leads to biases. 01:43:17.210 --> 01:43:20.410 It leads to like in-group, outgroup biases and things like that, perhaps. 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 01:43:26.010 --> 01:43:28.730 this, or no, this is unforgivable. 01:43:28.970 --> 01:43:34.490 Um, and I think it's I think it's worth thinking about that when we 01:43:34.490 --> 01:43:39.130 design these studies, because many of them are kind of really based in this legalistic, 01:43:39.440 --> 01:43:42.880 hyper-rationalistic kind of framework for judging others. 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 01:43:48.160 --> 01:43:53.760 vignettes to other places might come from that, that people are just like struggling with 01:43:55.040 --> 01:43:56.240 how to figure these things out. 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 01:43:59.760 --> 01:44:03.760 is that the effect sizes of the manipulations are just much smaller in other places than 01:44:03.760 --> 01:44:04.320 they are. 01:44:04.630 --> 01:44:09.270 And so the effect size of like intentional versus accidental can be much smaller in other 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. 01:44:13.430 --> 01:44:19.430 And and you know, I think sometimes that's been taken as an actual meaningful 01:44:19.430 --> 01:44:23.270 data point that these these other participants don't care about intentions as much. 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 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 01:44:33.640 --> 01:44:34.200 work there. 01:44:34.360 --> 01:44:37.400 But for somebody else who's like, I don't, you're telling me this thing. 01:44:37.480 --> 01:44:39.160 I have no idea what the background is here. 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 01:44:44.520 --> 01:44:45.400 across the conditions. 01:44:45.480 --> 01:44:48.280 That that's that you know, that's something that can happen. 01:44:48.810 --> 01:44:50.570 Do you do you think that's from going to the field? 01:44:50.650 --> 01:44:54.730 I mean, like one of the themes of this podcast is anthropologist keeps us psychologists 01:44:54.730 --> 01:44:55.050 honest. 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. 01:44:58.090 --> 01:44:58.730 Yeah. 01:45:01.050 --> 01:45:01.530 Yeah. 01:45:01.770 --> 01:45:02.170 Yeah. 01:45:02.250 --> 01:45:08.010 I yeah, I mean the field and maybe just 01:45:09.000 --> 01:45:14.680 outside of academia, um interacting with people and trying to get a sense of of 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 01:45:19.880 --> 01:45:20.200 morality. 01:45:20.280 --> 01:45:23.160 I mean I don't sorry there's people outside of the the academia. 01:45:23.320 --> 01:45:23.960 Sorry what? 01:45:24.520 --> 01:45:25.640 Who are where are these people? 01:45:25.720 --> 01:45:26.360 Who are these people? 01:45:26.600 --> 01:45:27.560 Outside the ivory tower. 01:45:27.720 --> 01:45:27.800 Yeah. 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. 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 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 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 01:45:47.310 --> 01:45:49.630 somebody else thinks it's good morally. 01:45:50.190 --> 01:45:52.110 Um, and then you know, why is that? 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. 01:45:57.260 --> 01:46:00.540 Um, but it can be very perplexing to an academic, like, why? 01:46:00.700 --> 01:46:03.900 You know, just for example, like somebody lies all the time. 01:46:04.140 --> 01:46:05.340 Why are we tolerating this? 01:46:05.420 --> 01:46:07.500 And it's like, well, I think there are reasons. 01:46:07.580 --> 01:46:08.620 I think there can be reasons. 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, 01:46:13.260 --> 01:46:17.500 Yeah, that's a lie, but I'm still on the side of this particular agenda. 01:46:17.820 --> 01:46:18.060 Yeah. 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 01:46:23.250 --> 01:46:27.570 is lying and why they're lying and what their relationship is to you socially. 01:46:27.730 --> 01:46:31.250 Um I was just uh reading a really interesting book called Legal Systems, very different 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 01:46:37.410 --> 01:46:37.970 morality. 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 01:46:43.060 --> 01:46:47.620 is outside of the Romani, such that they often give fake names to people who are 01:46:47.620 --> 01:46:52.100 interviewing them, researchers even, uh, and and and census takers in the countries they're 01:46:52.100 --> 01:46:52.580 living in. 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 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 01:47:02.500 --> 01:47:05.620 because people are giving, you know, the same names or they're not revealing any personal 01:47:05.620 --> 01:47:06.020 information. 01:47:06.180 --> 01:47:08.580 It makes it very difficult for the census takers. 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 01:47:13.890 --> 01:47:16.290 them any true information if they're not part of your group. 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, 01:47:21.410 --> 01:47:24.690 that if you give outsiders true information, it could be a threat to the group. 01:47:24.770 --> 01:47:26.690 Uh and there's that's that's the way it is. 01:47:26.850 --> 01:47:29.330 And for them, like it could be it could be an ethical thing. 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. 01:47:34.050 --> 01:47:34.290 Right. 01:47:34.540 --> 01:47:34.780 Sure. 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. 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 01:47:44.460 --> 01:47:48.060 person, what their relationship is to you, what the full context is. 01:47:48.220 --> 01:47:49.660 It's not just lying bad. 01:47:49.740 --> 01:47:53.820 It's what's all this what's all the contextual information uh surrounding that. 01:47:53.980 --> 01:47:54.940 Um yeah. 01:47:55.500 --> 01:47:56.460 Super interesting. 01:47:56.700 --> 01:47:57.260 Yeah. 01:47:57.580 --> 01:48:01.810 Um I want to get I'm just personally curious. 01:48:01.970 --> 01:48:07.090 What is your take on the intention outcome debate uh and its universality? 01:48:07.250 --> 01:48:10.530 Whether whether this distinction between I intentionally wrong someone versus I 01:48:10.530 --> 01:48:16.450 accidentally wronged someone, uh is that distinction uh un culturally universal or 01:48:16.450 --> 01:48:17.250 something close to it? 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 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 01:48:24.770 --> 01:48:25.730 from your work on it. 01:48:26.130 --> 01:48:31.940 Yeah, I would say so um I think that the 01:48:32.500 --> 01:48:38.100 the distinction between intentional and and you know various forms of 01:48:38.100 --> 01:48:39.940 accidental is universal. 01:48:40.020 --> 01:48:41.620 I think everyone can understand that. 01:48:41.860 --> 01:48:47.540 Um I think you know how it's used to assign blame 01:48:47.700 --> 01:48:53.540 is complex and varies across situations within you know groups and and across 01:48:53.540 --> 01:48:53.940 groups. 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 01:48:59.830 --> 01:49:03.510 effects model of intentionality. 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 01:49:08.150 --> 01:49:11.750 know, there are there are lots of differences, but the idea that there's just some 01:49:11.750 --> 01:49:16.070 dimension where some societies are more intention oriented and others aren't, um, is 01:49:16.070 --> 01:49:18.310 something to be kind of skeptical of. 01:49:18.630 --> 01:49:24.580 Um, and and that the methods that we have um can't even 01:49:24.580 --> 01:49:30.100 really tell you that because there's no principled way to 01:49:30.100 --> 01:49:35.940 generate like a range of scenarios that completely flatly surveys the 01:49:35.940 --> 01:49:41.140 morality space to show that, say, Americans care more about intentions in assigning moral 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 01:49:46.340 --> 01:49:47.380 intentions matter less. 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 01:49:51.730 --> 01:49:52.530 minds and so on. 01:49:52.610 --> 01:49:56.210 There's this idea of mental opacity, I think, is very real and comes out through 01:49:56.210 --> 01:49:57.490 ethnographic work. 01:49:57.730 --> 01:50:03.730 But whether it's easily mapped onto sort of moral judgments about the role of 01:50:03.730 --> 01:50:06.690 intentions and culpability is harder to say. 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 01:50:10.130 --> 01:50:15.250 because I have unpublished data from geography and philosophy, but um, you know, 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 01:50:21.360 --> 01:50:23.760 manipulate those and see how those affect judgments. 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 01:50:29.360 --> 01:50:32.720 of mistakes or accidents that are not good. 01:50:33.680 --> 01:50:36.960 And we see, you know, and we see those in the news a lot. 01:50:37.120 --> 01:50:42.000 And there is also, we have evidence from a pretty interesting cross-cultural study that 01:50:42.350 --> 01:50:47.550 everywhere that we looked, um, people do make fine-grained distinctions between different 01:50:47.550 --> 01:50:50.270 kinds of accident that are in the law. 01:50:50.430 --> 01:50:53.630 So the classic one is between recklessness and negligence. 01:50:53.950 --> 01:50:58.750 And we we use vignettes to show that that's a very fine-grained distinction. 01:50:58.830 --> 01:51:01.390 And those words don't exist in every language. 01:51:01.710 --> 01:51:07.150 But you can create scenarios where an actor does something knowing that harm might happen 01:51:07.230 --> 01:51:10.190 and they don't care, which is recklessness, right? 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 01:51:16.200 --> 01:51:17.640 anyway, which is kind of negligence. 01:51:17.880 --> 01:51:20.840 I mean, there's those are not the legally technical terms, right? 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, 01:51:25.960 --> 01:51:26.280 right? 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 01:51:30.280 --> 01:51:32.840 speeding anyway, or you're driving drunk, or whatever. 01:51:33.080 --> 01:51:37.320 Um, everywhere that we looked, we found that people make those distinctions, and those are 01:51:37.320 --> 01:51:38.760 not intentional harm. 01:51:39.210 --> 01:51:45.210 So e so and the reason that that matters is that if you think so, 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 01:51:50.890 --> 01:51:55.370 don't pay attention to intentions are just outcome-oriented and that they're kind of 01:51:55.370 --> 01:51:57.290 mind-blind in their moral judgment. 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 01:52:02.410 --> 01:52:07.370 harm, you're you're calculating or you can be calculating what the other person knew. 01:52:07.610 --> 01:52:11.900 And this is a huge domain of morality, I think, is important that overlaps with 01:52:11.900 --> 01:52:12.860 epistemology. 01:52:13.020 --> 01:52:15.980 There's virtues and vices associated with knowledge. 01:52:16.140 --> 01:52:16.380 Yeah. 01:52:16.620 --> 01:52:16.860 Right. 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 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 01:52:26.780 --> 01:52:26.940 too. 01:52:27.100 --> 01:52:32.810 If you're if you're taking action that has some kind of 01:52:32.810 --> 01:52:37.130 moral or ethical significance, your state of knowledge matters. 01:52:37.290 --> 01:52:40.010 And there's many cases where I think it's almost universal. 01:52:40.090 --> 01:52:43.370 People would say you shouldn't do that if you don't know certain things. 01:52:44.650 --> 01:52:44.970 Right. 01:52:45.210 --> 01:52:50.330 And so that so having the relevant knowledge is actually a prerequisite to acting as an 01:52:50.970 --> 01:52:54.010 ethically virtuous individual, right? 01:52:54.170 --> 01:52:59.520 I mean, and we would agree, nobody should say agree to do brain surgery unless you 01:53:00.000 --> 01:53:02.240 you know, unless you know what you're doing. 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. 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, 01:53:11.680 --> 01:53:11.920 right? 01:53:12.240 --> 01:53:12.400 Yeah. 01:53:12.720 --> 01:53:12.880 Yeah. 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. 01:53:15.760 --> 01:53:16.400 That's yeah. 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 01:53:22.010 --> 01:53:27.850 intentions matter, but that actually people make really fine-grained distinctions about the 01:53:27.850 --> 01:53:29.050 reasons for action. 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 01:53:34.490 --> 01:53:39.690 are things like strict liability domains where you basically are going to have to pay a 01:53:39.690 --> 01:53:43.050 penalty regardless of what you did or didn't know. 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 01:53:49.020 --> 01:53:54.940 have those in certain kinds of situations where it's just like a deterrent. 01:53:55.420 --> 01:53:58.220 It's like basically. 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 01:54:04.700 --> 01:54:08.270 mind-blind morality, you know, that doesn't mean that people aren't making more 01:54:08.270 --> 01:54:09.950 fine-grained moral judgments underneath that. 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 01:54:13.470 --> 01:54:14.670 of time because you did it. 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, 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 01:54:22.990 --> 01:54:24.910 unfortunate that he had to pay this money. 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. 01:54:30.940 --> 01:54:34.220 So that's how I would sort of see the landscape. 01:54:34.620 --> 01:54:34.780 Yeah. 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 01:54:39.020 --> 01:54:39.660 moral cognition. 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, 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 01:54:46.460 --> 01:54:46.940 a scalpel. 01:54:47.340 --> 01:54:52.460 You know, that they're they're zooming in on these really nuanced distinctions about mental 01:54:52.460 --> 01:54:54.620 states in terms of their moral evaluations. 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 01:55:00.890 --> 01:55:03.290 and who the agent committing the act is. 01:55:03.850 --> 01:55:09.210 So there's some interesting modeling work by Julian Lapenie, and he 01:55:09.370 --> 01:55:15.290 argues that these kind of rigid all or nothing moral systems where there are no 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 01:55:20.650 --> 01:55:26.540 naturally in low trust settings, where sometimes the only information you get about 01:55:26.540 --> 01:55:29.260 another person's mental states depends on testimony. 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 01:55:33.500 --> 01:55:39.260 wiggle out of paying the price for their transgressions, then you get these kind of rigid 01:55:39.260 --> 01:55:40.620 rules where there are no excuses. 01:55:41.500 --> 01:55:43.340 If the outcome is this, then you're punished. 01:55:54.210 --> 01:56:00.210 when you don't trust the sources of information um that reveal mental states, then 01:56:00.210 --> 01:56:06.130 you get this kind of uh uh seeming uh ignorant or seeming downplaying of the 01:56:06.130 --> 01:56:09.570 importance of mental states just because the information about them is less reliable and 01:56:09.570 --> 01:56:10.290 less trustworthy. 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 01:56:14.690 --> 01:56:19.170 morality, it's that we're actually very sensitive about the reliability of the information 01:56:19.170 --> 01:56:22.370 sources that are uh telling us about mental states. 01:56:22.690 --> 01:56:28.580 You know, do you I do. 01:56:28.740 --> 01:56:31.780 I think I mean it also fits with um 01:56:35.460 --> 01:56:41.300 the literature on mental opacity, for example, in the Pacific, um, in places like New 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 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 01:56:53.350 --> 01:56:58.310 they say, Well, you can't really trust you can't really trust what people say. 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 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 01:57:07.990 --> 01:57:09.910 is pretty reasonable advice. 01:57:10.150 --> 01:57:15.020 Um, and and you know, as we know, mental opacity is actually the norm. 01:57:15.100 --> 01:57:18.060 And we don't you can't actually see into somebody else's mind. 01:57:18.220 --> 01:57:20.140 So all those kinds of beliefs are sensible. 01:57:20.300 --> 01:57:23.500 The that it would correlate with trust, yeah, makes sense. 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 01:57:26.940 --> 01:57:29.020 societies that are high trust or low trust. 01:57:29.100 --> 01:57:30.540 Um, for sure. 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, 01:57:35.820 --> 01:57:40.060 with testimony, I mean, there is the the some of the anthropology literature does say that 01:57:40.140 --> 01:57:45.830 that it's these sort of um values about uh not um 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 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 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 01:58:00.710 --> 01:58:06.700 useful in some of those places would be to have um you know to look 01:58:06.700 --> 01:58:10.940 at how at people's just person perception whether that makes a difference when they judge 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. 01:58:15.660 --> 01:58:21.660 Um because sometimes you can just tell from other cues besides what somebody's 01:58:21.660 --> 01:58:21.980 saying. 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 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 01:58:31.100 --> 01:58:34.810 interacting with them like let's say I'm in a hunting relationship with somebody and 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 01:58:40.570 --> 01:58:41.130 away. 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 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 01:58:52.010 --> 01:58:53.210 to be, I'll forgive them. 01:58:53.450 --> 01:58:54.970 But I'm stuck with this guy. 01:58:55.130 --> 01:58:55.850 He's loud. 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. 01:59:01.130 --> 01:59:03.160 Yeah, I don't care if he means it or not. 01:59:03.320 --> 01:59:05.240 Like I'm I'm dealing with the consequences. 01:59:05.320 --> 01:59:06.280 I'm stuck with him. 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 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 01:59:17.800 --> 01:59:18.440 scale environment. 01:59:18.520 --> 01:59:23.560 In the small scale environment, I am just I'm I'm really negatively impacted. 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, 01:59:27.480 --> 01:59:29.000 it still sucks for me. 01:59:30.910 --> 01:59:33.310 Yeah, I mean I think we're face these days. 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 01:59:39.150 --> 01:59:41.710 way, but like there's so many changing norms in the world. 01:59:41.790 --> 01:59:47.310 You know, can you have a FaceTime call, um, you know, with 01:59:47.550 --> 01:59:50.110 volume loud on the screen next to somebody or whatever? 01:59:50.430 --> 01:59:51.630 No, your phone, yeah, exactly. 01:59:51.710 --> 01:59:51.950 Yeah. 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 01:59:56.990 --> 01:59:59.960 I'm like making judgments about what other people are doing. 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 02:00:06.120 --> 02:00:09.080 on you, what they know and intend. 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 02:00:13.640 --> 02:00:14.280 are we going to be? 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 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. 02:00:25.670 --> 02:00:29.590 But you know, we're faced with those kinds of nuanced situations all the time. 02:00:29.910 --> 02:00:30.470 Yeah. 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 02:00:34.710 --> 02:00:40.440 we're getting in, is that the theme has been like respect stuff that 02:00:40.440 --> 02:00:43.960 hasn't been respected um adequately. 02:00:44.120 --> 02:00:45.720 Um do would you agree with that? 02:00:45.800 --> 02:00:51.640 That that's sort of maybe a a North Star for the evolutionary behavioral sciences is 02:00:51.640 --> 02:00:56.520 to sort of double check that we're respecting um things um 02:00:56.840 --> 02:01:01.810 adequately Respecting 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 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 02:01:12.850 --> 02:01:14.530 cultural theory, that's dumb. 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 02:01:18.530 --> 02:01:19.810 gene's eye view. 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 02:01:24.930 --> 02:01:29.200 ourselves, versus like, you know, yeah, the cultural anthropologists, whether they're 02:01:29.200 --> 02:01:34.480 spitting at us or or not, we go in and we're like, this is a 02:01:34.480 --> 02:01:35.920 evolved organism. 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 02:01:41.040 --> 02:01:42.480 shut up and listen to it. 02:01:42.640 --> 02:01:46.240 And that's a different way to approach the sociology of science, sort of. 02:01:46.320 --> 02:01:46.480 Yeah. 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 02:01:50.790 --> 02:01:56.230 you know when when when people whether they're other theorists or um other 02:01:56.870 --> 02:02:02.630 um you know people that we're interacting with as research um collaborators 02:02:02.790 --> 02:02:06.950 or interlocutors or participants in our studies and when there's things that people take 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 02:02:12.790 --> 02:02:17.820 of of of dealing with that um or theorizing it or thinking about it. 02:02:18.060 --> 02:02:23.980 Um but so you know, and people kick around this idea of humility, 02:02:24.060 --> 02:02:25.100 scientific humility. 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, 02:02:31.020 --> 02:02:36.450 but it's also kind of um I I I guess I would make I mean, 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, 02:02:39.970 --> 02:02:40.530 maybe I don't know. 02:02:40.610 --> 02:02:41.410 And that that's fine. 02:02:41.490 --> 02:02:45.570 But I think we can go beyond that to be more, I would call for reflexivity. 02:02:45.810 --> 02:02:51.570 Like, look at what you're doing, look at, you know, um, take seriously 02:02:51.570 --> 02:02:53.250 different pop different possibilities. 02:02:53.410 --> 02:02:58.900 I mean, for example, I think a lot of evolutionary science is essentially 02:02:58.900 --> 02:02:59.940 confirmatory. 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 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? 02:03:09.940 --> 02:03:15.140 Um, but you gotta go past that at a certain point. 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 02:03:19.460 --> 02:03:22.180 hypothesis testing is actually kind of rare, I think. 02:03:22.420 --> 02:03:28.010 Um Putting one's own ideas in jeopardy or putting it up against a plausible alternative. 02:03:28.330 --> 02:03:32.970 So that's the kind of thing where I think respect for other possibilities 02:03:34.410 --> 02:03:36.650 is something we should have. 02:03:36.810 --> 02:03:42.490 I mean, I just to take one example, you know, um the the 02:03:42.650 --> 02:03:48.570 the the ideas um that to being cosmides, you know, my own PhD advisors, you 02:03:48.570 --> 02:03:48.890 know. 02:03:50.760 --> 02:03:56.600 in in the adapted mind in 1992, they they they they coined this idea of the 02:03:56.600 --> 02:04:00.440 standard social science model, which is basically kind of a blank slate view of the mind. 02:04:00.680 --> 02:04:05.400 And I think that that's an I mean I understand why they did that. 02:04:05.560 --> 02:04:07.400 And I think that was an important move. 02:04:07.480 --> 02:04:13.330 I think that it has caused some damage, however, because by being able to put everything 02:04:13.330 --> 02:04:17.650 that's an alternative to your theory, whatever it might be as an evolutionary scientist, 02:04:17.890 --> 02:04:23.890 into that folder, it means that no other kinds of theories are 02:04:23.890 --> 02:04:25.090 ever given a fair shake. 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 02:04:29.570 --> 02:04:31.490 an evolutionary hypothesis. 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. 02:04:36.220 --> 02:04:41.820 I also think that the promise of adaptationism hasn't really 02:04:42.300 --> 02:04:47.100 um been as fulfilled as we might have wanted it to be. 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 02:04:52.300 --> 02:04:56.300 part of the community of evolutionary psychologists is that the the standards of evidence 02:04:56.300 --> 02:04:59.500 for adaptations, you know, should be high. 02:04:59.690 --> 02:05:01.290 The bar should be high. 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 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 02:05:10.890 --> 02:05:12.090 studies that are out there. 02:05:12.250 --> 02:05:17.930 Um, for for, you know, really confirming that we've discovered an a biologically 02:05:17.930 --> 02:05:19.770 evolved adaptation in the mind. 02:05:19.930 --> 02:05:24.250 Um, there's not as many cases that seem satisfying as you might think. 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 02:05:28.580 --> 02:05:30.900 evidence that they have is is pretty thin. 02:05:31.060 --> 02:05:36.340 So I mean that would be another case where I think whatever the word is, 02:05:36.580 --> 02:05:42.420 humility, respect for other alternatives, but also just active reflexivity of 02:05:42.420 --> 02:05:46.260 trying to do better, I think would help us a lot. 02:05:46.500 --> 02:05:48.950 Um yeah, cool. 02:05:49.030 --> 02:05:51.510 Yeah, there's a Toms of evolutionary psychology, you know. 02:05:51.750 --> 02:05:51.910 Yeah. 02:05:51.990 --> 02:05:57.670 Tom Scott Phillips has a paper about um I think it won the um uh Don 02:05:57.670 --> 02:06:03.030 Simons Award was about um arguing that something wasn't adaptation that people had been 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 02:06:07.590 --> 02:06:10.630 as George Williams put it that right we should reserve it. 02:06:10.790 --> 02:06:11.400 Um Yeah. 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 02:06:15.160 --> 02:06:19.480 too, that like you have to speculate about adaptations to look for evidence to test whether 02:06:19.480 --> 02:06:20.360 there is one. 02:06:20.440 --> 02:06:25.960 Um, but that's a separate enterprise than assuming a way that it is an 02:06:25.960 --> 02:06:28.600 adaptation and not being rigorous even down the road. 02:06:28.680 --> 02:06:32.920 That those are two different things, you know, speculating or proposing one versus testing 02:06:32.920 --> 02:06:34.200 it or assuming it. 02:06:34.360 --> 02:06:36.760 These are different phases of science. 02:06:36.840 --> 02:06:38.680 And I think we kind of smush them together. 02:06:38.920 --> 02:06:39.560 Yeah. 02:06:40.710 --> 02:06:41.430 That's right. 02:06:41.590 --> 02:06:43.990 And you know, there's a bunch of kinds of things that we have. 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 02:06:48.710 --> 02:06:52.310 evolutionary science papers are, you know, correlations. 02:06:52.950 --> 02:06:58.790 So something, how you answer on some scale is correlated with how you behave in some 02:06:58.790 --> 02:06:59.910 other context. 02:07:00.660 --> 02:07:06.420 Because adaptation is often the explanation that's given, which could be, but 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. 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 02:07:15.300 --> 02:07:21.220 are of course really useful to know when it, but I mean, if 02:07:21.220 --> 02:07:26.870 some if if you know 80% of people answer a question the same way around the 02:07:26.870 --> 02:07:30.470 world, you know, it's a long way from that to adaptation. 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 02:07:37.190 --> 02:07:38.070 that matters. 02:07:38.230 --> 02:07:43.670 But um, the standards of evidence also, you know, often there's a big gap 02:07:43.670 --> 02:07:49.190 between um the evidence and the claim that there's an adaptation underlying the 02:07:49.190 --> 02:07:50.150 universality. 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 02:07:55.260 --> 02:07:58.380 this is the this is the the kind of gold standard of our field. 02:07:58.460 --> 02:08:00.460 Like you're mentioning George Williams, right? 02:08:00.620 --> 02:08:03.100 I mean, to discover a correlation is great. 02:08:03.260 --> 02:08:04.460 That could be a fact. 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 02:08:10.380 --> 02:08:11.420 or something like that. 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 02:08:15.500 --> 02:08:21.310 it in a particular mechanistic way is a whole other layer that needs that often we 02:08:21.310 --> 02:08:26.750 don't go far enough to showing that or to ruling out other alternatives. 02:08:27.150 --> 02:08:28.590 Yeah, agreed. 02:08:28.750 --> 02:08:29.390 Yeah. 02:08:29.950 --> 02:08:31.230 Agreed indeed. 02:08:31.550 --> 02:08:31.950 All right. 02:08:32.270 --> 02:08:36.830 Well, we uh uh anything we should ask you, Clark, as we wind down here. 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? 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 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 02:08:55.060 --> 02:08:55.700 double jaws. 02:08:56.180 --> 02:08:57.620 Uh yeah. 02:08:57.780 --> 02:08:58.260 Yeah. 02:08:58.500 --> 02:08:58.820 Yeah. 02:08:58.980 --> 02:09:01.300 Fish are fish are weird. 02:09:01.620 --> 02:09:02.420 Fish are cool. 02:09:02.740 --> 02:09:03.220 They are. 02:09:03.770 --> 02:09:06.010 Well, Clark, but uh anyway, yeah. 02:09:06.170 --> 02:09:07.930 So yeah, we'll definitely have you back on. 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 02:09:14.170 --> 02:09:15.930 you know, being in this field. 02:09:16.090 --> 02:09:20.650 There there are so many people that I talk to who outside of evolutionary psychology are 02:09:20.730 --> 02:09:23.690 like, oh, I hate evolutionary psychologists, except for Clark Barrett. 02:09:24.970 --> 02:09:26.810 Uh and he's okay. 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 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 02:09:36.080 --> 02:09:37.920 gonna do the Clark way and just be nice. 02:09:38.000 --> 02:09:39.760 Like you win more flies with honey. 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 02:09:45.520 --> 02:09:50.000 kinder, um, more um uh welcoming place. 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 02:09:56.240 --> 02:09:58.830 people doing it because ultimately that's the point, right? 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 02:10:04.110 --> 02:10:08.830 this is to make evolutionary psychology disappear because it's just part of the water that 02:10:08.990 --> 02:10:12.590 all the scientific fish to bring it back to fish swim in. 02:10:13.070 --> 02:10:16.670 And and we can do that by just you know being nice about it. 02:10:17.470 --> 02:10:18.350 No, I appreciate that. 02:10:18.430 --> 02:10:18.750 Thank you. 02:10:18.910 --> 02:10:24.720 I mean I I think that you know also um a another way to 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 02:10:29.840 --> 02:10:34.640 you know, a lot of things that evolutionary psychologists think of as sort of zero sum 02:10:34.960 --> 02:10:37.120 games or trade-offs really are not. 02:10:37.280 --> 02:10:43.200 Um, and so, you know, as I said, this kind of this this that 02:10:43.280 --> 02:10:48.320 this kind of conflict that's happened between evolutionary science and you know, other 02:10:48.320 --> 02:10:52.160 branches of science, like certain kinds of anthropology and so on. 02:10:52.320 --> 02:10:58.050 Um, sometimes both sides of that see it as a kind that 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 02:11:04.050 --> 02:11:09.970 to be true uh and um you can have an evolutionary science 02:11:09.970 --> 02:11:15.660 that takes cultural phenomena and and human diversity incredibly seriously And 02:11:15.660 --> 02:11:19.340 everyone kind of should agree that it should, in order to be a proper revolutionary 02:11:19.340 --> 02:11:20.060 science. 02:11:20.860 --> 02:11:24.380 And so there's no, there's no loss to us from doing that. 02:11:24.460 --> 02:11:25.980 There's only there's only gain. 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 02:11:31.980 --> 02:11:37.900 other kinds of things in our community, I do notice that sometimes there are people who 02:11:37.900 --> 02:11:42.620 feel not welcome in our community for various reasons because of the theoretical 02:11:43.290 --> 02:11:46.730 Persuasion that they have, or or whatever it might be. 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 02:11:53.290 --> 02:11:58.330 know, what what way in what ways can we make evolutionary science a more welcoming uh 02:11:58.330 --> 02:11:58.810 community? 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 02:12:03.370 --> 02:12:06.570 evolutionary theory, but they are interested in human behavior. 02:12:06.730 --> 02:12:09.450 Um, and they and they might bring a lot to the table. 02:12:09.610 --> 02:12:15.340 Um, I think there are things that we can do to make people 02:12:15.340 --> 02:12:19.660 feel welcome who have just a curiosity about these things. 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 02:12:24.780 --> 02:12:30.620 said before, kind of respect for um for 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 02:12:34.710 --> 02:12:35.270 academia. 02:12:35.350 --> 02:12:38.550 We all want to know something about ourselves or the mind or the world or whatever. 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 02:12:42.790 --> 02:12:45.990 people who are fascinated by all the things that we're talking about. 02:12:46.230 --> 02:12:46.470 Right. 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 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, 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 02:13:01.500 --> 02:13:06.700 and absorbing it and into our framework uh and and welcoming people. 02:13:06.860 --> 02:13:09.100 Um I think is a better way to think of it. 02:13:09.340 --> 02:13:09.500 Yeah. 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, 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. 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 02:13:22.130 --> 02:13:23.730 the smart translation of that. 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 02:13:29.810 --> 02:13:31.250 like, well, that's a crap theory. 02:13:31.330 --> 02:13:32.290 I'm gonna ignore it. 02:13:32.450 --> 02:13:35.490 You're like, okay, what's what is the sense that that makes? 02:13:35.650 --> 02:13:37.970 Why would a why how is it right? 02:13:38.210 --> 02:13:42.980 Is a hard, harder question than saying it's not right, Right. 02:13:43.060 --> 02:13:45.380 That's a different, and that's that's the argument I think. 02:13:45.540 --> 02:13:45.620 Yeah. 02:13:45.780 --> 02:13:45.860 Yeah. 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, 02:13:49.300 --> 02:13:53.460 where like making the best possible case for the for the view that you disagree with. 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 02:13:57.700 --> 02:13:59.380 a helpful distinction at the time. 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 02:14:03.780 --> 02:14:05.060 social science model is. 02:14:05.220 --> 02:14:09.590 Uh and I think we should constantly be stri striving to frame alternative theories, 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 02:14:15.910 --> 02:14:17.830 what what insight there is there. 02:14:17.910 --> 02:14:18.150 Yeah. 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 02:14:23.830 --> 02:14:26.230 of straw manning in our in our thinking. 02:14:26.390 --> 02:14:26.790 You know? 02:14:27.190 --> 02:14:28.630 So yeah, I agree with that. 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 02:14:34.200 --> 02:14:35.560 said, might have been useful at the time. 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 02:14:41.000 --> 02:14:46.920 evolutionary psychology because when it originated it was, you know, people felt it was 02:14:46.920 --> 02:14:47.320 combated. 02:14:48.440 --> 02:14:48.680 Yes. 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 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 02:14:59.710 --> 02:15:05.710 mindset and um also to realize that um, you know, if people come to 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 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 02:15:16.830 --> 02:15:19.500 bat, um, that's not a reason to dismiss it. 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. 02:15:25.740 --> 02:15:31.180 And um and if possible, translated into our way of thinking, because a lot of 02:15:31.180 --> 02:15:36.620 non-evolutionary theories often can be translated uh into an evolutionary framework quite 02:15:36.620 --> 02:15:37.340 fruitfully. 02:15:37.500 --> 02:15:37.660 Yeah. 02:15:37.820 --> 02:15:41.350 Um, you know, they the the the theoretician who developed the idea might not have been 02:15:41.350 --> 02:15:45.670 thinking about evolution, but you can integrate it with existing ideas uh and buttress it 02:15:45.670 --> 02:15:48.470 with existing ideas that can often be very very helpful. 02:15:48.630 --> 02:15:50.630 Um Yep, absolutely. 02:15:50.950 --> 02:15:51.350 Yep. 02:15:51.510 --> 02:15:54.790 So we should have called it the podcast. 02:15:59.110 --> 02:16:02.440 Maybe that'll be our uh our last episode in you know 30 years. 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. 02:16:05.880 --> 02:16:06.280 Very good. 02:16:06.440 --> 02:16:06.600 Yeah. 02:16:06.920 --> 02:16:08.200 Well Clark, this is great. 02:16:08.280 --> 02:16:08.840 Thank you so much. 02:16:08.920 --> 02:16:10.040 I'm sure we'll have you on again. 02:16:10.120 --> 02:16:11.720 And uh yeah. 02:16:12.120 --> 02:16:13.240 Thanks for the conversation. 02:16:13.400 --> 02:16:16.200 And um thank you both for doing this podcast. 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 02:16:20.280 --> 02:16:25.960 format for kind of extended discussions and hearing things from um colleagues as well as 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 02:16:31.930 --> 02:16:33.050 work for you guys to do as well. 02:16:33.130 --> 02:16:34.010 So I appreciate that. 02:16:34.250 --> 02:16:34.410 Yeah. 02:16:34.570 --> 02:16:34.890 Awesome. 02:16:35.050 --> 02:16:35.210 Thanks. 02:16:35.370 --> 02:16:35.770 Thanks so much. 02:16:35.850 --> 02:16:36.010 Yeah. 02:16:36.090 --> 02:16:38.250 And it's it's awesome to just get a chance to talk to you. 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 02:16:42.170 --> 02:16:42.730 this in depth. 02:16:42.810 --> 02:16:45.690 So it's a treat for for both David and I. 02:16:45.770 --> 02:16:47.450 I I assume David for you too. 02:16:47.530 --> 02:16:49.210 But yes, absolutely. 02:16:50.250 --> 02:16:50.810 All right guys. 02:16:50.890 --> 02:16:51.370 Thanks so much. 02:16:51.450 --> 02:16:52.730 Uh Eric, have a gun. 02:16:52.970 --> 02:16:53.210 Thanks. 02:16:53.690 --> 02:16:54.330 Take care. 02:16:58.360 --> 02:17:01.720 Well, you're still listening, uh, which means you like what you're hearing. 02:17:01.880 --> 02:17:05.960 Uh so what can you do to support us, Dave? 02:17:06.360 --> 02:17:10.760 Um, you can go out and buy Clark Barrett's Shape of Thought book. 02:17:11.160 --> 02:17:11.800 Wonderful book. 02:17:11.880 --> 02:17:12.600 One of my favorites. 02:17:12.760 --> 02:17:13.000 Yeah. 02:17:13.320 --> 02:17:13.880 Bang Banger. 02:17:14.200 --> 02:17:15.350 But uh banger. 02:17:15.590 --> 02:17:18.630 Uh uh what what else what else can people do who are listening? 02:17:18.950 --> 02:17:22.710 You know, we maybe we should have an evolutionary psychology of the podcast book. 02:17:23.110 --> 02:17:24.230 Oh, that would be interesting. 02:17:24.310 --> 02:17:27.910 Maybe like transcripts of uh of our some of our best interviews. 02:17:28.710 --> 02:17:31.270 Yeah, maybe we can have a coffee table book of some kind. 02:17:31.670 --> 02:17:35.110 Maybe just pictures of us uh just talking talking to people. 02:17:35.430 --> 02:17:36.470 Yeah, I don't know. 02:17:36.710 --> 02:17:37.320 I don't know. 02:17:37.400 --> 02:17:39.560 I haven't really thought too much about it, obviously. 02:17:39.640 --> 02:17:43.000 It's it's very apparent, but we can we can workshop that. 02:17:43.080 --> 02:17:47.880 Let's let's let's circle back to that as they say in bureaucratic ease. 02:17:48.200 --> 02:17:52.920 Um but anyway, uh we we have a job now, which is to end the episode. 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 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 02:18:04.170 --> 02:18:06.330 print run of Evolutionary Psychology the Book. 02:18:06.490 --> 02:18:08.490 Sorry, Evolutionary College the Podcast the Book. 02:18:08.810 --> 02:18:09.290 Oh nice. 02:18:09.530 --> 02:18:11.370 And then the coffee table book. 02:18:11.850 --> 02:18:12.570 Coffee table book. 02:18:12.650 --> 02:18:18.410 Maybe we should make evolutionary psychology the podcast, the book, the movie, the video 02:18:18.410 --> 02:18:18.810 game. 02:18:19.040 --> 02:18:21.760 But we should just go through the whole journey. 02:18:22.160 --> 02:18:22.560 Nice. 02:18:22.800 --> 02:18:25.280 And the last word is the uh thing it is. 02:18:25.360 --> 02:18:31.120 So it would be a video game about a movie, about a book, about a podcast. 02:18:31.440 --> 02:18:32.000 That's right. 02:18:32.080 --> 02:18:32.320 Yeah. 02:18:32.640 --> 02:18:32.960 Got it. 02:18:33.040 --> 02:18:33.280 Yeah. 02:18:33.360 --> 02:18:34.880 That's that was straightforward. 02:18:35.280 --> 02:18:37.360 I think I think uh it's gonna be a real money maker. 02:18:37.440 --> 02:18:37.840 Yeah, let's do it. 02:18:37.920 --> 02:18:40.640 Anyway, if you want to make that happen, give us some money on Patreon. 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 02:18:46.110 --> 02:18:46.910 social media. 02:18:47.070 --> 02:18:51.150 Uh your support keeps us going, so please be generous with it. 02:18:51.390 --> 02:18:53.310 And have a good week, and we'll see you next week. 02:18:53.390 --> 02:18:54.670 See you next week, David.