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This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

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I'm David Pinsov.

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I'm David David Petrizowski.

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And this is Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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Yes, and while he needs no introduction, we should probably give you one anyway, just as a

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formality.

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Oh, I I totally forgot.

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I blinked.

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Yeah.

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Well, anyway, you have to listen to this delightful episode with Pascal Boyer about a word

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that Dad Dunan, I think it was Shirley, or something like that.

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Um I guess it wasn't minimally counterintuitive enough for me to remember it.

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Was it that was a reference to some of um Pascal's work?

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Um and Pascal, uh, for those who don't know, one of his early books was uh Religion

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Explained.

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And David, didn't you say that that was really formative for you?

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It well, I mean, I'm I mean, basically everything he's written has been formative for me,

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but yeah, Religion Explains a fantastic book.

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Um, really great, crystal clear uh laying out of the logic of evolutionary

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cognitive thinking and how it can explain different facets of religious ideas.

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Uh, but what was interesting is he in in in large part has moved beyond that specific

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framework in terms of understanding cultural products in terms of the consumer of cultural

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items.

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And Religion Explained is very much about why certain ideas are attractive or sticky to the

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human mind.

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He is going in a different direction, which I think is really exciting and novel and

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powerful, which is focusing on the production side of culture.

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So why do people produce uh cultural items like religious ideas, minimally counterintuitive

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context, concepts, uh shamanism, political ideas?

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We get into all of that.

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Yeah, it was a lovely conversation.

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I could listen to Pascal all day, and this is a sample of his wide-ranging

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um and just brilliant insights.

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And there's sometimes when I talk to people um and they're doing broad overviews, it

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feels like a million miles high, and we're not really dealing with bes specifics.

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And somehow Pascal manages to simultaneously cover a lot of ground, but be very concrete.

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Um, and there's just a lot of fun examples of mysteries.

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And I feel like this was a good episode where we were once again sort of tackling problems

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that are very specific, and it was really fun.

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Yes.

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And as as always, we drift toward uh the incentive structures surrounding science toward

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the end of the episode.

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Which I guess what we always tend to do with every guest.

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Yes, exactly.

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But yeah, um, but yeah, yeah, it's so it is.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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Well, and on that note, um uh enjoy this episode and hope everybody's having a

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good summer, um, which is officially upon us now.

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Yes, enjoy the summer and enjoy the episode.

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Pascal, what is your birthday?

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Oh, my birthday is on well, uh no, it is uh a delicate topic

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because I've realized, you know, I hate birthdays because I find it depressing to

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you know be one one year closer to death.

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And I wondered why people would want to um

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to wish me a happy birthday.

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And then I realized that um there are beliefs in the human minds that you cannot change

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by explicit um argument and instruction.

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And uh so every year there are um people among whom are some of

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our friends who uh send me an email saying, Yeah, I know that you hate to um

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to have people with you wish you a happy birthday, and I know you find it depressing, but

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hey, you know why not?

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Okay, let's go happy birthday.

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It's a bit like and for me, it's so weird because it's a bit like you know, if I told

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people, you know, uh, this food makes me vomit, or this thing is hugely painful on my

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leg, and they would just say, Oh, yeah, let's carry on doing it.

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Yeah.

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So there are beliefs and motivations that you cannot erase from the mind, but if

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that if that is the only example I have, it's not a great article to uh to write.

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So I'm trying to get some other examples.

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Who would have thought the answer to a simple question like happy birthday would be so

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interesting.

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Well no I mean I I have to follow up.

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So you you mentioned uh beliefs that are impervious to uh reason uh

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or that you you cannot talk someone out of the belief that we ought to celebrate people's

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birthdays, we ought to wish Pascal a happy birthday.

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What's going on with those types of beliefs?

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Seems rather strange from uh an adaptationist perspective.

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That's right.

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And there are so many I mean the thing is that this is more or less um my

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job.

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You know, I wouldn't have a job if uh beliefs were mostly um

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amenable to to argument.

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And um it seems to me that there's such a great variety of situations where

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um we have a uh belief.

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So first of all we have motivated beliefs of course.

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And I'll tell you there's one thing that I find um I've found really interesting um over

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the years is um a great privilege if you live in the US

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and if you're American as I am, is to uh go to Europe and have people explain

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to you what's going on in the US.

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And they tell you with great detail, and then you tell them, Well, you know, it's not quite

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exactly like that and stuff like that.

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And they say, No, no, no, you don't know.

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Um, and and you've become American, you're naive, you believe in the

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propaganda, so flamba.

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So I give you one example, which is that uh, and I've heard that over the years quite a few

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times, that people tell me, Well, yes, you know, there's uh there are so many problems in

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the US, but one of them is you know, if you know you know,

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your body is uh cut in two, or whatever, or something, and you show up at the hospital,

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they'll ask you if you have money.

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And if you don't have enough money, they'll tell you that's it.

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You know, we can't do anything for you.

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And over the years, I've tried to tell people that does not happen.

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That could not happen, that would be wildly illegal.

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Uh but anyway, it does not happen like that.

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It's true that there are problems about paying for your medical bills in the US.

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But the problem is not that you show up with, you know, your missing leg, you know, in your

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arms, and people tell you, ah no, no, no, you know, show me your Visa card first.

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It's not like that.

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So I've told people that no, it's not like that, and they've told me, no, you're wrong.

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And there's worse than that.

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I had a cousin, and that's in England, a cousin to whom I explained with all the facts that

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it's not possible, it just doesn't work like that, etc.

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And she finally admitted, she said, Oh, yeah, okay, no, that must be one of those urban

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legends about the US.

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And a year later, or two years later, I see her and she tells me, Yeah, one of the problems

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about the US is that you know you go to a hospital and they'll tell you, you know, if you

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don't have the money, we can't treat you and so on.

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So the belief had managed to come back and invade the sort of mental space.

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Um, despite this person's sort of sincere um

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uh agreement that um the belief had been based on some uh false um you know

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impressions or facts.

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But anyway, so if I um but since I I I

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uh studied beliefs that um other people have to think

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are not grounded in fact and argument like religious belief.

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And we have to think that because they are diverse enough that if one of them is true, the

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others are certainly false.

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And I've come to a sort of realization that the

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way we used to approach these things in the past.

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And I'm sorry if we have to get into the weeds of that kind of thing and straight away talk

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about cultural evolution and stuff like that.

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But here's the here's the situation.

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It seems to me that uh for many, many years, when we talk

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about cultural evolution, about what you know, why why are there what Dance Berber would

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call attractors?

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That is, you know, the notion of a very powerful being who has a

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mind like ours, but has physics that is very much unlike ours.

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That's what Sperby would call an attractor, which is a region of conceptual space that is

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occupied more often than random distribution of concepts would

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predict.

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Um we thought about that and I did only in terms of consumption,

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so to speak.

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That is a sort of great variety of ideas sort of keep being churned out by people in their

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conversations or whatever.

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And some of them stick and the ones that stick are the ones we see as cultural trends.

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So you could imagine in that picture that um every morning

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we start with a completely random sort of set of ideas and we all

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invent religions and stuff like that and by four PM we've settled on religions that

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have a you know a powerful um physically counterintuitive agent because that's

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the way the human minds work and they consume that stuff and the rest they just discard.

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That is a powerful um um um a

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powerful view uh but it has a certain there's a certain side of

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those um things that's missing and I think is more and more important and I more think more

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and more is is quite important and that is the production side rather than the consumption

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side that is why on earth would people produce those ideas?

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I mean, why would I tell you that, oh, you know what happened?

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You know, there's this agent that you can't see, but you know, we can do stuff, etc.

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In and sort of trying to think why is it that we didn't think about that?

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Uh, because after all, the production of those things is not random.

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It is not a case the case that people start every morning and invent you know two million

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religions and then one of them makes it by 4 p.m.

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It's not really like that.

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And I can give you in a in a minute many examples of that.

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But why didn't we think about that?

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And the reason, because after all, we're adaptationists, so what people do should be of

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interest in terms of fitness, um, you know, possible fitness interests and stuff.

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We didn't think about that because we were thinking of culture as

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analogous to genetic evolution and selection.

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And in genetic evolution or in evolution by natural selection, on the whole, you can say

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that the production is random because the production is mutations, and mutations are not

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really directed.

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So by analogy, people thought, well, maybe people have interests and they try

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to push certain religions or stuff.

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But it doesn't matter because even if it was random, the

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consumption sort of trends would mean that certain act attractors stabilize, that by 4

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p.m.

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you have the religions we know.

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So it doesn't matter if it's not produced randomly.

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And I think I'm more, I'm more and more sort of inclined to think that this was a mistake.

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And that actually we can find out a lot about um cultural

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um material about its features and stuff like that.

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If we think what are the fitness interests that lead certain people to try and

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push these things on others, and in and also try to make them turn them

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into common knowledge That is, you know, it's not just that I'm trying to

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tell you that you, David and David, that there is a

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an omniscient agent that can do lots of stuff.

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It's also that I would like you guys to think that everyone knows that.

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That it's a sort of uh, you know, um what um John Tuby would have called the mutually

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registered kind of state of affairs.

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Okay, so that's um that's um that's one thing that I I

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over the last five or years or so I've been trying to to think of

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domains where we could think in terms of production.

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And I must say that it's um it's very good that um some people

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around me have tr started thinking the same way and doing the same kind of thing

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especially those people that Kim Sternley

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called the Paris School of Evolutionary Psychology, like

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Jean-Baptiste André or Nicolas Beaumar and Olivier Morin, people like that.

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Which, by the way, was brilliant.

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It was brilliant.

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Not that there is a school, but it's brilliant to invent the idea of a school and that it

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has certain sort of a certain it's just it's a divergence or maybe a splinter from the

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Santa Barbara school, which itself is very far away from the LA school and stuff like that.

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This is fantastic because you know, let's face it, we often are 20

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people talking to another sort of bunch of 10 people, and decided that we're massively more

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on the right side than they are.

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But if we're described as a school, you know, addressing our school, it all gives us an

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air of solidity to these little.

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Somebody shovel dirt to make our building possible, I feel so.

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Right, that's that's the sort of thing.

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So I've been really uh I've been quite reassured that this production idea

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is not too bad by the fact that um you know others have thought about it

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too.

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And um I was talking to uh no I was um emailing um

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another Cultural Revolution person today who's um Alberto Acerbi who does

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stuff on cultural evolution and lots of models of um and he himself told me that yes he's

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very much thinking in terms of um trying to formalize this notion of

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um production models, you know, why do we force try to

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force certain ideas on other people?

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A good example I think was

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an article that came out in BBS a while ago by Leo Fiduci,

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who's working on morality, and had this Um this

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model of Puritanical morality, which is very much a um uh

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a model of that kind, in the sense that it's not just that puritanical morality has some

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aspects that make it good to think and possibly turn into a tractor, it's also that there

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are people who have something important at stake in making you behave in

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a way that conforms with that morality, especially if they themselves then have invested um

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in that kind of uh moral value.

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So, you know, if I try to uh have a stable marriage

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and not sort of uh look around for um uh what we used to

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call uh short-term mating.

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Um if I don't do that, I have an interest in people around me not doing it either.

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Um because that's um otherwise, you know, most of what I invested in that strategy might be

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lost.

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Um so I think this idea is sort of um spreading in lots of

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people who used to think of um of cultural evolution only in

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terms of um uh consumption.

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So that's that's that's where I'm at.

240
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And that's um what I would like to talk about more.

241
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But um I'm sure you guys have you know widely diverse divergence.

242
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Oh yeah the another thing is that the this um uh podcast, since I

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have the two Davids here, I must say that I also um have

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lots of things to ask you or to discuss about two things that you may be

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interested in.

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One is how groups get built and why they get built at all, and the other one is

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the uh psychology of politics in the modern world.

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I just finished a little book that's about uh politics.

249
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That's a kind of all you should know about

250
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the way F-Psych or evolutionary psychology can inform what we think about

251
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politics.

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And so, for example, in in uh one chapter I I talk about the

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um vehemence and the stridency of political beliefs and arguments and stuff

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like that.

255
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And that as I say, the obvious, obvious um uh model

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that explains that is some kind of alliance model of uh whereby you know uh

257
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what is at stake is so extremely um emotionally so strong and so important,

258
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uh, because it concerns something vastly more important than uh what should we do about uh

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social security payments in the next 10 years.

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It's about who are you with and who are you accounts and you know uh how many people can I

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recruit to this or that coalition.

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So um this is again uh something that has to do with production in the sense that you know

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uh people one thing that I find really interesting about political

264
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opinions and I must say I I got that from when I was a child that

265
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I heard political discussions in my family and you know especially with the extended family

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where people would shout at each other constantly about those things.

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And it struck me even as a child, really, sort of

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10-year-old, I thought, but if I thought that

269
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whatever they were talking about, I don't know, sort of retirement should be abolished

270
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or unemployment should be, you know, this or that, If I if I really thought that

271
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I know the truth about that, why would I want to bother people with it?

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I mean, after all, I know the truth about whether you know Twizzlers are better than other

273
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kinds of candy, but I don't care if others have different kind of ideas about that.

274
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So um yes, and another component of this um um

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politics argument is about groups and how they um they get to um exist

276
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at all but that's something we can talk about in in a minute i don't want to uh stun

277
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you with a sort of barrage of arguments and ideas before um you get

278
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to actually ask questions fantastic i love it uh pascal had i i to re to to

279
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paraphrase what i'm hearing uh in the past it was almost like people, I like to think a

280
00:21:04,280 --> 00:21:07,000
good analogy would be like buyers and sellers in a market.

281
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And cultural evolution had been, probably for methodological reasons, as you said,

282
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um, really focused on just the um the buyers, as if the the people who are the

283
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consumers, and so any model would just sort of predict this is what is going

284
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to happen, and it's all just focused on the the buyers.

285
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But of course, the sellers.

286
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If you you're not gonna have a good model of what's gonna happen in the market if you don't

287
00:21:33,190 --> 00:21:38,870
include the fact that um sellers can um collude or have an

288
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interest, and there's a there can be a conflicts of interest or not.

289
00:21:42,470 --> 00:21:43,510
Um yeah, yeah.

290
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And and um I I think it's it's um it's

291
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very much the case in the in the domain where I you know, I used to work

292
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on religious stuff and um I did that for a while and then for about

293
00:22:02,040 --> 00:22:07,320
twenty years I tried to shed that and get rid of that, but you know, ki people kept telling

294
00:22:07,320 --> 00:22:09,240
me, yeah no no you should do this and you should.

295
00:22:09,880 --> 00:22:15,810
So um because I don't really have an existential interest in religion uh as such.

296
00:22:15,890 --> 00:22:21,890
And uh but um yes, I mean in that domain,

297
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true, and I I I it's true too.

298
00:22:23,890 --> 00:22:28,770
I I was I was talking about this puritanical stuff, but you can see it in other domains,

299
00:22:28,850 --> 00:22:34,770
and that's why I got really um interested in two other cases

300
00:22:34,930 --> 00:22:36,770
where it's it's it's quite clear.

301
00:22:37,010 --> 00:22:42,680
One of them is shamanism, in the sense that everyone,

302
00:22:42,840 --> 00:22:46,760
and me included, you know, I'm not I'm not better than the other guys.

303
00:22:46,920 --> 00:22:50,520
Um, everyone sort of thought of shamanism in terms of consumption.

304
00:22:50,600 --> 00:22:56,200
So thinking once someone comes up with this idea that I put myself in a weird

305
00:22:56,760 --> 00:23:02,730
um mental state, so I start sort of spouting gibberish and stuff, there

306
00:23:02,730 --> 00:23:07,050
is a strong sort of impression from people that my mind is not

307
00:23:08,330 --> 00:23:10,890
directing what I'm saying anymore.

308
00:23:11,530 --> 00:23:16,730
Which leads to another sort of rather simple inference, which is maybe another mind is

309
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directing what's going on.

310
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And once you've got this trick, people will be fascinated and there will be a

311
00:23:24,330 --> 00:23:28,250
tremendous sort of cultural success for this kind of idea.

312
00:23:29,360 --> 00:23:35,280
But once again, the idea was, well, it's as if everyone in the morning

313
00:23:35,280 --> 00:23:38,960
sort of started a bit of shamanism and uh stuff like that.

314
00:23:39,360 --> 00:23:42,160
But some versions work and some versions don't work.

315
00:23:42,320 --> 00:23:45,280
So by four PM we have shamanism as we know it.

316
00:23:45,440 --> 00:23:46,960
Uh but it's not like that.

317
00:23:47,120 --> 00:23:53,120
And um and there is a fitness interest in in getting other people to

318
00:23:53,120 --> 00:23:58,590
think that you have uh particular powers, and that's why we should um

319
00:23:58,750 --> 00:23:59,710
study that.

320
00:24:00,510 --> 00:24:05,630
Um the other one that I try and in the in this case it's not too complicated in the sense

321
00:24:05,630 --> 00:24:09,790
that you know uh people can um get

322
00:24:10,750 --> 00:24:16,160
prestige and some amount of of political power out of being

323
00:24:16,160 --> 00:24:18,400
recognized as uh thing.

324
00:24:18,720 --> 00:24:24,240
I was recently reading a review by Ed Hagan and um Zach

325
00:24:24,400 --> 00:24:30,240
Garfield and maybe someone else of the sort of criteria

326
00:24:30,240 --> 00:24:35,520
for um well the sort of trace that um make

327
00:24:36,770 --> 00:24:41,730
um chiefs or leaders uh um

328
00:24:42,850 --> 00:24:47,570
convincing or accepted or appreciated in uh small-scale societies.

329
00:24:47,810 --> 00:24:52,370
And I was a bit surprised, they report they were surprised, I was a bit surprised too by

330
00:24:52,370 --> 00:24:57,810
the fact that uh we have the obvious ones that we would have thought about in um terms of

331
00:24:57,810 --> 00:25:03,500
leadership psychology, such as competence, the sort of the art of you know

332
00:25:03,660 --> 00:25:09,100
getting people to agree instead of conflict

333
00:25:09,100 --> 00:25:14,060
resolution, as people call it, and competence, like being a good hunter and being where

334
00:25:14,060 --> 00:25:15,500
things grow and stuff like that.

335
00:25:16,060 --> 00:25:22,060
But also the sort of more dominance-related trace in case there is an intergroup

336
00:25:23,510 --> 00:25:24,150
conflict.

337
00:25:24,310 --> 00:25:28,710
You want someone who is more dominant, even if they are less cooperative.

338
00:25:29,590 --> 00:25:35,590
That's fine, but they said that actually one of the proximal sort of traits that seem to be

339
00:25:35,590 --> 00:25:41,030
very important is some kind of religious competence, like shamanism and things like that.

340
00:25:41,270 --> 00:25:44,950
So I don't know how that works exactly.

341
00:25:45,190 --> 00:25:50,870
But still, that means that, if anything, that means that there is

342
00:25:51,040 --> 00:25:56,960
a production aspect to offering shamanism to others, which may include

343
00:25:56,960 --> 00:26:02,320
some bid on political influence, uh political power.

344
00:26:02,720 --> 00:26:08,640
And um, so that should be um uh we should think about that when we

345
00:26:08,640 --> 00:26:14,400
make models of these uh things or when we try to explain their uh their cultural success.

346
00:26:15,410 --> 00:26:20,130
And another case that I found really interesting, and that's maybe something

347
00:26:23,170 --> 00:26:29,170
yeah, that's a bit more complicated, is uh was the question: why is

348
00:26:29,170 --> 00:26:35,090
it that um divination is such a successful uh cultural

349
00:26:35,090 --> 00:26:35,730
gadget?

350
00:26:36,600 --> 00:26:42,120
So almost everywhere in the world you'll have some um way

351
00:26:42,360 --> 00:26:47,960
of so divination is simply having a technique that produces certain utterances

352
00:26:48,200 --> 00:26:54,120
and then having an assumption that the statements produced by that technique are different

353
00:26:54,120 --> 00:26:56,600
from the others and they're more likely to be true.

354
00:26:58,030 --> 00:27:03,950
Now there's there's um almost a century of

355
00:27:03,950 --> 00:27:06,110
anthropology of trying to ignore that question.

356
00:27:06,190 --> 00:27:10,110
You know, why do people think that's um a criterion of truth?

357
00:27:10,190 --> 00:27:16,190
You know, I sort of uh you know behead a chicken and see where it runs and sort of tell

358
00:27:16,190 --> 00:27:21,390
you, well, the way it runs tells me that your sister-in-law is trying to uh bewitch you or

359
00:27:21,390 --> 00:27:21,550
something.

360
00:27:22,670 --> 00:27:27,880
And people say, well, now that's the the chicken has said it, it's much more, you know,

361
00:27:27,960 --> 00:27:33,400
it's um we can all agree that that's what's going on and uh we have to do something about

362
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:33,720
it.

363
00:27:34,280 --> 00:27:39,080
And I was wondering why why not uh face this question?

364
00:27:39,560 --> 00:27:45,320
And um so I mean to it to cut a long story short, I mean the the thing is that

365
00:27:45,800 --> 00:27:50,930
one one feature of all those divination

366
00:27:51,090 --> 00:27:56,930
procedures is that the person who's doing this sort of technical stuff says, I have

367
00:27:56,930 --> 00:27:59,810
nothing to do with what this technique will produce.

368
00:27:59,970 --> 00:28:01,170
I don't know what it says.

369
00:28:01,330 --> 00:28:03,650
I mean, I can't predict what it will say.

370
00:28:04,130 --> 00:28:07,170
Sometimes it's not true, sometimes it's true, but that doesn't matter.

371
00:28:07,490 --> 00:28:11,970
The big thing is too, uh, the big argument is I have nothing to do with this utterance.

372
00:28:12,290 --> 00:28:16,960
So this utterance that says, for example, your sister-in-law is really trying to bewitch

373
00:28:16,960 --> 00:28:19,760
you, it's an utterance that's produced by no one.

374
00:28:20,320 --> 00:28:25,680
And there are lots of situations in which it's really vital to have a

375
00:28:25,680 --> 00:28:31,600
description of the situation that is not anyone, anyone's description, anyone in

376
00:28:31,600 --> 00:28:32,480
particular.

377
00:28:32,720 --> 00:28:37,520
So, as I was saying, if you think that someone is bewitching you, like you know, you get

378
00:28:37,520 --> 00:28:43,050
sick, and you know, Um there may be all sorts of opinions on this thing.

379
00:28:43,450 --> 00:28:48,010
Um because the the the the the fact of the matter is inscrutable.

380
00:28:48,170 --> 00:28:54,010
I mean, even if you thought that witchcraft does produce um illness, well you

381
00:28:54,010 --> 00:28:55,850
wouldn't know who did it and stuff.

382
00:28:56,090 --> 00:28:57,530
So it's inscrutable.

383
00:28:57,770 --> 00:29:02,650
However, um opinions about that are not without their costs.

384
00:29:03,400 --> 00:29:09,400
And so if I say that it's your sister-in-law, it's it's uh I think it is, and

385
00:29:09,400 --> 00:29:10,440
that's my opinion.

386
00:29:10,680 --> 00:29:11,000
Okay.

387
00:29:11,800 --> 00:29:17,560
Well, your sister-in-law, she might have allies, she may have friends, um, and

388
00:29:17,560 --> 00:29:22,440
those people might not like this uh diagnosis, and they might, for example, think that I'm

389
00:29:22,440 --> 00:29:27,910
saying that just to deflect my obvious involvement in this case, in which you know it's a

390
00:29:27,910 --> 00:29:31,990
bit suspicious that I go around sort of denouncing others and stuff like that.

391
00:29:32,230 --> 00:29:37,030
So, in this kind of situation, it's not that the practitioner has much of an interest in

392
00:29:37,030 --> 00:29:39,350
the statement being this, that, or the other.

393
00:29:39,590 --> 00:29:45,350
It's more that everyone around these people has a great interest in having

394
00:29:45,510 --> 00:29:51,420
a description of a situation that was not attributed to any person in

395
00:29:51,420 --> 00:29:52,380
particular.

396
00:29:53,420 --> 00:29:58,700
That makes consensus building much easier because you have consensus without

397
00:29:58,700 --> 00:30:02,620
allying with one particular coalition or group.

398
00:30:03,980 --> 00:30:07,260
So that could explain the success.

399
00:30:07,740 --> 00:30:13,690
And I think that's that may be one reason why people rediscover this

400
00:30:13,690 --> 00:30:15,530
kind of technique so often.

401
00:30:15,610 --> 00:30:21,210
I mean, you know, sort of um uh there was one anthropologist in

402
00:30:21,370 --> 00:30:26,650
um so the whole thing is that that it's it's it's it's supposed to be

403
00:30:26,650 --> 00:30:28,010
unpredictable.

404
00:30:28,650 --> 00:30:34,170
There was one anthropologist in the 50s or 60s who tried to argue that

405
00:30:35,130 --> 00:30:40,960
um A great that divination was functional

406
00:30:40,960 --> 00:30:46,880
in the sense that if you randomize decisions about everything, you avoid

407
00:30:46,880 --> 00:30:52,400
the obvious biases and um and um other sort of um

408
00:30:52,400 --> 00:30:55,040
deviations from rationality that you have.

409
00:30:55,200 --> 00:31:01,120
So it's a bit like um if you you know if you choose your you know

410
00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:02,480
where to park.

411
00:31:02,630 --> 00:31:08,630
Yeah, I I had a friend who had a good um theory like that, which was uh a theory of

412
00:31:08,630 --> 00:31:13,350
superstition, which I think is completely it's it's obviously false.

413
00:31:13,510 --> 00:31:14,390
And he knew it.

414
00:31:14,470 --> 00:31:16,390
I mean he that was a joke theory.

415
00:31:16,630 --> 00:31:22,150
The joke theory of uh superstition was a bit connected to this some idea that

416
00:31:22,150 --> 00:31:27,350
sometimes you need something that does not come from your own mind or from the minds of

417
00:31:27,350 --> 00:31:27,990
anyone.

418
00:31:28,820 --> 00:31:33,300
So he had a good theory, a great theory of superstition, which was like, you know, for

419
00:31:33,300 --> 00:31:39,140
example, you have to um you have to get them in the morning and you'll have to

420
00:31:39,140 --> 00:31:42,100
put one foot before the other on the ground.

421
00:31:42,340 --> 00:31:46,100
Now should we should it be your right foot or your left foot?

422
00:31:46,340 --> 00:31:51,620
Now if you are a perfect brain, you will consider one option and then the other and then

423
00:31:51,620 --> 00:31:56,660
the first one and the other until you can find one reason to do one rather than the other.

424
00:31:56,870 --> 00:31:58,870
And the thing is that there aren't any reasons.

425
00:31:59,030 --> 00:32:05,030
So you will spend your entire day in bed trying to work out how to get out of bed.

426
00:32:05,590 --> 00:32:11,270
And this story is, you know, the story of Buridan's ass, you know, that's

427
00:32:11,350 --> 00:32:17,270
um that um medieval philosopher who had this story about a donkey that was in the field, is

428
00:32:17,430 --> 00:32:23,160
brought back by his owner to the farm, and the owner gave them a lot of food and a lot of

429
00:32:23,160 --> 00:32:26,840
drink, you know, a big bucket of water and a big bucket of hay.

430
00:32:27,400 --> 00:32:33,320
And the poor donkey cannot make up his mind whether he should start with a drink or start

431
00:32:33,320 --> 00:32:35,000
with a good munchie.

432
00:32:35,160 --> 00:32:39,400
And dies in the end because he can't decide, because his mind was perfect.

433
00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:41,950
That's what Buridan tried to explain.

434
00:32:42,670 --> 00:32:48,190
And if you have a perfect mind, you get stuck in a loop of uh you know decisions.

435
00:32:48,430 --> 00:32:54,030
Um so all you know uh that's a very different thing, but very often

436
00:32:54,190 --> 00:32:58,830
communities that resort to divination for important decisions are a bit in that predicament

437
00:32:58,910 --> 00:33:04,510
that if you uh if you keep sort of polling people's people's opinions about a certain case,

438
00:33:04,590 --> 00:33:10,040
you'll get indefinitely many reasons to think that each of them is right or wrong.

439
00:33:10,200 --> 00:33:16,040
And on top of that, you'll get this problem of the fact that

440
00:33:16,040 --> 00:33:19,960
uttering certain diagnoses is itself costly.

441
00:33:20,280 --> 00:33:24,280
It's itself a coalitional sort of um move.

442
00:33:24,760 --> 00:33:30,520
Um so you you know um intuitively people would realize

443
00:33:30,520 --> 00:33:35,470
that having a kind of randomizing technique would be um would be good.

444
00:33:35,630 --> 00:33:39,870
But once again that means that it is a kind of production argument, you know, in the sense

445
00:33:39,870 --> 00:33:44,590
that people are motivated to have this kind of institution because it serves their

446
00:33:44,590 --> 00:33:45,550
interests.

447
00:33:47,470 --> 00:33:50,430
Okay, so that's that's all for production at the moment.

448
00:33:50,510 --> 00:33:56,260
I'm I'm I don't have anything further to say about that, except that

449
00:33:56,340 --> 00:34:02,260
um yeah, I look forward to the School of Santa Barbara and the School of Paris to

450
00:34:02,260 --> 00:34:05,220
sort of propose their their views on that.

451
00:34:07,460 --> 00:34:10,740
Uh I I love this model of of divination.

452
00:34:10,820 --> 00:34:12,820
Um I I find it fascinating.

453
00:34:13,060 --> 00:34:15,460
There's one part of it that I don't quite understand.

454
00:34:16,030 --> 00:34:20,190
So for me, the way I intuitively understand it is, you know, let's say my wife and I, we

455
00:34:20,190 --> 00:34:24,030
want to go out to the movies and we want to be at the same movie, but I would rather see

456
00:34:24,030 --> 00:34:25,630
one movie and she would rather see a different movie.

457
00:34:25,710 --> 00:34:28,110
This is known in game theory as the Battle of the Sexes game.

458
00:34:28,190 --> 00:34:30,190
It's a coordination game, but there are two equilibria.

459
00:34:30,430 --> 00:34:32,350
One is better for me, one is better for my wife.

460
00:34:32,510 --> 00:34:32,750
Right.

461
00:34:33,070 --> 00:34:36,430
And we might settle that disagreement by, say, flipping a coin or playing rock, paper,

462
00:34:36,590 --> 00:34:37,710
scissors, or whatever.

463
00:34:37,920 --> 00:34:42,080
And that to me is analogous to the argument you're making with regard to divination.

464
00:34:42,160 --> 00:34:46,080
It's the equivalent of flipping a coin or playing rock, paper, scissors, but instead of

465
00:34:46,080 --> 00:34:50,160
flipping the coin, you're decapitating the chicken and seeing which way it it runs, or

466
00:34:50,160 --> 00:34:53,280
you're reading the entrails or the tea leaves or whatever it is.

467
00:34:53,520 --> 00:34:57,440
Um But here's the the sticking point for me that I don't quite understand.

468
00:34:57,760 --> 00:35:03,750
When I flip a coin to settle a kind of Battle of the Sexes game, um, I don't believe

469
00:35:03,750 --> 00:35:06,870
that the coin is infused with supernatural powers.

470
00:35:07,110 --> 00:35:08,630
I I I just think it's a random thing.

471
00:35:08,710 --> 00:35:11,430
It's just a way of settling uh our our conflict.

472
00:35:11,670 --> 00:35:17,510
Um and yet when it comes to these societies who you who have these divination rituals, that

473
00:35:17,510 --> 00:35:21,670
belief is there that this this ritual is infused with supernatural significance.

474
00:35:21,830 --> 00:35:25,990
It's telling you about some supernatural agent or s it has some cosmic justification.

475
00:35:26,070 --> 00:35:29,820
It's not just we're gonna do this random thing to settle the disagreement or to coordinate.

476
00:35:30,300 --> 00:35:31,660
It's it has a deeper significance.

477
00:35:31,820 --> 00:35:33,900
So where does that piece of it come from?

478
00:35:34,060 --> 00:35:37,980
Why do we need that in addition to the the divination practice itself?

479
00:35:38,620 --> 00:35:41,100
Well, um there are two aspects to that.

480
00:35:41,340 --> 00:35:46,300
One is that um if the process is

481
00:35:47,350 --> 00:35:53,190
Obviously and overtly random in that sense, like flipping a

482
00:35:53,190 --> 00:35:53,830
coin.

483
00:35:54,150 --> 00:35:59,510
It has very little persuasive power as something that anyone could should take seriously as

484
00:35:59,510 --> 00:36:01,190
opposed to anything else.

485
00:36:01,750 --> 00:36:07,430
But on the other hand, I want to say that divination does not necessarily

486
00:36:07,430 --> 00:36:13,400
entail that the diagnosis that was not produced by the diviner or anyone

487
00:36:13,400 --> 00:36:18,520
else in the community is actually produced by some other entity.

488
00:36:19,000 --> 00:36:20,760
So I'll tell you why.

489
00:36:20,920 --> 00:36:26,440
First of all, because there are tons of examples of divination where our people

490
00:36:26,760 --> 00:36:32,440
think that the result could not have been

491
00:36:32,440 --> 00:36:36,680
different given the situation at hand.

492
00:36:37,310 --> 00:36:43,230
whereas, but they do not think that any agent was involved, like a god or a spirit

493
00:36:43,310 --> 00:36:45,310
or whatever, in transmitting it.

494
00:36:45,470 --> 00:36:50,910
So, for example, um, there are many cases of divination in the um

495
00:36:51,550 --> 00:36:57,230
in the Western world where people, you know, uh will draw cards or things like that,

496
00:36:57,390 --> 00:37:03,280
and they and the person who does it will tell you, well, the cards show the

497
00:37:03,280 --> 00:37:08,080
tarot shows that you know your sister-in-law is trying to bewitch you.

498
00:37:08,720 --> 00:37:14,000
And there's no implication, and in most clients, there is absolutely no

499
00:37:14,000 --> 00:37:19,680
expectation that the cards say that because some external agent

500
00:37:19,680 --> 00:37:23,760
knows about the sister-in-law and made the cards do it.

501
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:29,990
There are also thousands of omens that are recorded in

502
00:37:30,310 --> 00:37:35,590
the Mesopotamia, for example, where you know if a five legged sheep is born

503
00:37:36,950 --> 00:37:42,950
during full moon, then there'll be uh something else, you know, a huge storm in the

504
00:37:42,950 --> 00:37:44,310
uh in the in the region.

505
00:37:44,950 --> 00:37:50,900
And those things are not because they think that the sign

506
00:37:50,900 --> 00:37:56,820
was produced, the sign like the five-legged uh animal, was produced by an agent

507
00:37:56,900 --> 00:37:58,180
like the gods.

508
00:37:58,420 --> 00:37:59,380
So, what do they think?

509
00:37:59,460 --> 00:38:05,380
I mean, I my idea was that the um the one thing,

510
00:38:05,700 --> 00:38:10,420
the one ex assumption they have, that is a tacit assumption, obviously, it's not an

511
00:38:10,420 --> 00:38:16,420
explicit theory, is that the divination uh diagnosis, like the

512
00:38:16,420 --> 00:38:20,390
way the chicken runs or whatever, is an index.

513
00:38:20,550 --> 00:38:24,470
It is caused by the situation that it describes.

514
00:38:24,950 --> 00:38:30,310
It's not a symbol, it's not a description of that situation, it's a result of that

515
00:38:30,310 --> 00:38:30,710
situation.

516
00:38:30,870 --> 00:38:36,470
So the idea is that given the state of your sister-in-law's witchcraft

517
00:38:37,590 --> 00:38:42,790
operations, there was no way the kitchen the chicken could go anywhere else.

518
00:38:43,160 --> 00:38:45,240
It's a causal claim.

519
00:38:46,280 --> 00:38:51,320
So, on the one hand, there is no pure randomization because that would be

520
00:38:51,320 --> 00:38:57,160
transparently not persuasive, but also there is no need for an

521
00:38:57,160 --> 00:39:02,760
agent to do it because this causal assumption can do the work,

522
00:39:02,920 --> 00:39:03,560
I think.

523
00:39:04,520 --> 00:39:10,250
And also, I must say that there is another

524
00:39:10,250 --> 00:39:16,090
dynamic that's very much a group dynamic or sort of coalitional dynamic there, which

525
00:39:16,090 --> 00:39:21,930
is that all anthropologists who've studied divination in the

526
00:39:21,930 --> 00:39:27,770
field say that everyone says, yeah, no, no, it's it's you know it must be the

527
00:39:27,770 --> 00:39:31,850
sister in law because divination said it, so it's that's it, that's settled.

528
00:39:32,090 --> 00:39:37,880
And then you know, when you know, when you know you have uh a few drinks and you talk and

529
00:39:37,960 --> 00:39:43,000
you know uh between you, me and the gate post you can say, Well, you know, I I'm not really

530
00:39:43,000 --> 00:39:44,280
sure, I don't think so.

531
00:39:44,440 --> 00:39:49,240
I mean, you know, because the grandmother looks much more threatening than the sister in

532
00:39:49,400 --> 00:39:49,880
law.

533
00:39:50,200 --> 00:39:52,280
So people can have private doubts.

534
00:39:52,440 --> 00:39:58,310
However, again, since you had a great interest in having some description that

535
00:39:58,310 --> 00:40:03,750
comes from no one in particular, you have great interest in claiming that this description

536
00:40:03,750 --> 00:40:08,550
is something you believe because it makes everyone agree that that's something you create a

537
00:40:08,550 --> 00:40:13,990
cascade, you know, of commitment that you know we all have to agree on that.

538
00:40:14,630 --> 00:40:20,630
And I think it's it's it's true that I think it's the it it could explain.

539
00:40:20,780 --> 00:40:22,940
So it's a kind of preference falsification.

540
00:40:23,020 --> 00:40:28,860
You know, it's easier to say that because that is clearly in our interest, than to uh

541
00:40:28,860 --> 00:40:32,940
discuss our private doubts about um about this situation.

542
00:40:33,900 --> 00:40:39,180
And I think it it it could be that because it really is the case that um

543
00:40:39,500 --> 00:40:44,380
anthropologists in many, many places report both the public

544
00:40:45,020 --> 00:40:50,970
confidence, you know, that if it was the uh the oracles said this,

545
00:40:51,210 --> 00:40:52,970
then that's the way it is.

546
00:40:53,530 --> 00:40:58,730
And then their private sort of doubts or you know they're not sure it's true or

547
00:40:59,290 --> 00:41:05,050
um I I even knew people after a while in my own uh

548
00:41:05,050 --> 00:41:10,810
field that's a long long time ago but um who told me they were unsure about particular

549
00:41:10,810 --> 00:41:16,220
diagnosis and and then they told me, well, you know, between us, I'm not sure this stuff

550
00:41:16,220 --> 00:41:19,020
ever says anything terribly true.

551
00:41:19,180 --> 00:41:24,620
So but the guy was obviously not, you know, not trying to he well he was not gonna make a

552
00:41:24,620 --> 00:41:29,260
public statement about this kind of uh um uh opinion.

553
00:41:29,420 --> 00:41:30,700
But but yeah.

554
00:41:30,940 --> 00:41:36,540
So I think the the uh sort of um the the the interests of all the parties

555
00:41:37,290 --> 00:41:43,210
sort of conspire to make that situation very stable

556
00:41:43,370 --> 00:41:49,210
despite no one being a hundred percent committed to it being true.

557
00:41:49,370 --> 00:41:54,090
And that's something that's very much going back to these production arguments,

558
00:41:56,490 --> 00:42:02,180
one thing that we inherited from uh classical anthropology, and

559
00:42:02,180 --> 00:42:07,540
sometimes it's not a good idea, is to think that um uh

560
00:42:07,780 --> 00:42:13,380
cultures come with their axioms and that the axioms are used deductively by people to

561
00:42:13,620 --> 00:42:17,620
generate impressions about uh particular case, particular situations.

562
00:42:17,780 --> 00:42:23,540
Like, for example, um you know that yes, divination works, divination reveals the

563
00:42:23,540 --> 00:42:29,470
truth, and they use divination today, so that means that that is the truth.

564
00:42:29,790 --> 00:42:31,550
It's very rarely what you observe.

565
00:42:31,710 --> 00:42:37,630
What you observe is more that people are faced with all sorts of theories, sorry,

566
00:42:37,870 --> 00:42:43,870
all sorts of instances, empirical cases, then uh, and for many of

567
00:42:43,870 --> 00:42:49,470
them, there's some sort of presumption that yes, that may be convincing, that may be what

568
00:42:49,470 --> 00:42:50,750
really happened, etc.

569
00:42:51,150 --> 00:42:57,000
This creates enough of an interest in claiming that

570
00:42:57,000 --> 00:43:01,960
it's always true for people to do it despite their own private doubts and carry on like

571
00:43:01,960 --> 00:43:02,280
that.

572
00:43:03,560 --> 00:43:08,600
But anyway, there are many other examples of this kind of phenomenon in which

573
00:43:09,560 --> 00:43:15,210
what we think is deductively Um inferred from some

574
00:43:15,210 --> 00:43:17,850
cultural theory that people have in their minds.

575
00:43:18,010 --> 00:43:23,770
It actually inductively constructed little by little out of pieces of experience and

576
00:43:23,770 --> 00:43:24,970
salient cases.

577
00:43:25,290 --> 00:43:25,450
Yeah.

578
00:43:26,170 --> 00:43:29,130
Can I um Pascal, uh, can I push on David's question?

579
00:43:29,210 --> 00:43:33,850
And I'm gonna paraphrase to see if this also is what you're saying, Pascal and David.

580
00:43:33,930 --> 00:43:37,050
You can tell me if this is also addresses this.

581
00:43:37,290 --> 00:43:42,410
Is that the reason why it's not a random thing is it's sort of one step off of an army.

582
00:43:42,600 --> 00:43:47,320
There's an army behind it, but it's hidden for the reasons that Pascal described, which is

583
00:43:47,320 --> 00:43:52,840
that if we all want, um, let's say, um,

584
00:43:53,160 --> 00:43:55,720
I was gonna use Lita as an example, so I'll just do it.

585
00:43:55,800 --> 00:43:56,520
I'll just use Lita.

586
00:43:56,680 --> 00:44:00,440
So let's say we're on a village with Lita and we want Lita to do something differently.

587
00:44:01,000 --> 00:44:06,600
Um, if we all say that there's going to be some random process um

588
00:44:06,920 --> 00:44:12,450
uh that's gonna lead to telling Lita what to do, and we want to enforce that.

589
00:44:12,610 --> 00:44:16,210
Lita can just say, if she doesn't want to do it, she's just gonna say, Well, it's a random

590
00:44:16,210 --> 00:44:17,890
process, so why would you do that?

591
00:44:18,130 --> 00:44:23,650
But if we say, no, it's a causal process, that's sort of, you know, the then then then

592
00:44:24,370 --> 00:44:30,370
uh what that explicit narrative provides us is exactly what

593
00:44:30,370 --> 00:44:36,370
Pascal described, which is that it takes the responsibility off me telling Lita

594
00:44:36,530 --> 00:44:42,240
what I think she should do, but we enforce it as a causal process

595
00:44:42,400 --> 00:44:48,400
because if Lita questions it, every one of us will enforce

596
00:44:48,560 --> 00:44:53,120
the um what what what the what the what the process says.

597
00:44:53,280 --> 00:44:55,280
So let's just say it's like a stuffed animal, right?

598
00:44:55,360 --> 00:45:00,880
So if Lita questions the stuffed animal, every one of us will uh will

599
00:45:01,120 --> 00:45:05,920
enforce that the stuffed animal is right, but it's opaque with respect to Lita.

600
00:45:06,430 --> 00:45:10,190
So none of us incur the cost of telling Lita what to do directly.

601
00:45:10,430 --> 00:45:12,270
Lita doesn't attack us.

602
00:45:12,430 --> 00:45:15,790
But so it kind of moves like there's an army behind the idea.

603
00:45:15,950 --> 00:45:18,190
There's an army behind the stuffed animal.

604
00:45:18,350 --> 00:45:24,350
Um but it it it it works or it exists as a causal thing as opposed to a random

605
00:45:24,350 --> 00:45:30,040
thing precisely because of this dynamic of uh we're gonna back

606
00:45:30,280 --> 00:45:36,120
up the um uh we're gonna back up that there's a we're gonna enforce this

607
00:45:36,280 --> 00:45:41,960
and and the causation is sort of confabulation around the idea that I I need some

608
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:46,520
reasonable reason to say that I want to enforce this when Lita goes against the stuffed

609
00:45:46,520 --> 00:45:47,240
animals will.

610
00:45:47,480 --> 00:45:50,280
But the real reason is because we all want Lita to do something different.

611
00:45:50,440 --> 00:45:52,570
Does That makes sense.

612
00:45:52,650 --> 00:45:53,130
That makes sense.

613
00:45:53,210 --> 00:45:53,370
Yeah.

614
00:45:53,450 --> 00:45:53,530
Yeah.

615
00:45:53,850 --> 00:45:54,650
David, does that make sense?

616
00:45:54,970 --> 00:45:55,370
Yeah, yeah.

617
00:45:55,770 --> 00:46:01,130
You know, it's it's um i i uh it's always

618
00:46:01,530 --> 00:46:07,530
um it's always an interesting experience that you know uh uh for me that I

619
00:46:07,530 --> 00:46:11,700
try to explain something in terms that seem to me pure crystal.

620
00:46:11,940 --> 00:46:13,940
There's no clearer way of saying it.

621
00:46:14,100 --> 00:46:17,860
And then someone re-explains them in a way that's actually much clearer.

622
00:46:18,260 --> 00:46:20,260
And I think, oh wow, okay.

623
00:46:20,500 --> 00:46:23,860
So that was that and that happens.

624
00:46:24,100 --> 00:46:25,140
That happens quite a bit.

625
00:46:25,380 --> 00:46:31,220
But anyway, I I um uh another sort of set of issues, I mean, unless

626
00:46:31,300 --> 00:46:36,090
you you guys are so intuitiveness, you want to do um a lot of that.

627
00:46:36,250 --> 00:46:41,850
But that that's um uh another sort of set of things I I got really

628
00:46:41,850 --> 00:46:47,610
interested in that I I thought should be a new direction for evolutionary

629
00:46:47,610 --> 00:46:52,810
psychology, and for obvious reasons we don't want to get there, is modern

630
00:46:52,810 --> 00:46:53,770
politics.

631
00:46:54,090 --> 00:47:00,060
And um uh but since we don't want to go there, you know whether there is, you

632
00:47:00,220 --> 00:47:05,420
we we want to go somewhere else, which is more the explanation or the analytics of um

633
00:47:07,020 --> 00:47:08,620
of modern politics.

634
00:47:08,940 --> 00:47:14,460
And um I become more and more interested in this sort of

635
00:47:14,460 --> 00:47:20,460
idea that um that politics really sort of is

636
00:47:20,460 --> 00:47:25,580
an illusion in the sense that um i in the sense that uh

637
00:47:27,470 --> 00:47:32,270
Most political discussions and things are not about their real

638
00:47:33,390 --> 00:47:34,670
um point.

639
00:47:36,670 --> 00:47:42,510
They're about coalitional alignment and sort of fine grained calibration of where

640
00:47:42,510 --> 00:47:45,230
you stand and where I stand and stuff like that.

641
00:47:47,870 --> 00:47:52,110
But then the mystery is how people manage to

642
00:47:53,560 --> 00:47:58,200
um yes get all this coalitional sort of um

643
00:48:00,440 --> 00:48:05,560
um this coalitional effects um

644
00:48:06,520 --> 00:48:11,800
out of ideas that seem really unrelated to the coalitions in particular and here i'm i'm

645
00:48:11,880 --> 00:48:17,430
i'm thinking about um obviously uh this part of the stuff I did on um

646
00:48:17,670 --> 00:48:23,270
in the little politics book is pure sort of pins off kind of stuff because the idea is

647
00:48:23,430 --> 00:48:29,350
well um why would you have those um uh strange alliances,

648
00:48:29,430 --> 00:48:35,270
you know, strange bad fellows like you know, some party decided that deciding that they're

649
00:48:35,270 --> 00:48:39,830
all absolutely for women, but really not for mothers.

650
00:48:40,320 --> 00:48:45,200
Or, you know, for poor people, but only if they're in cities, not if they're in the in

651
00:48:45,200 --> 00:48:46,080
Appalachia.

652
00:48:47,680 --> 00:48:53,680
And I want to ask you guys what you think, because I I

653
00:48:53,680 --> 00:48:59,680
I find the Alliance sort of um framework

654
00:48:59,680 --> 00:49:00,880
to think about that.

655
00:49:01,680 --> 00:49:07,440
Uh obviously the the the the best way to to

656
00:49:07,440 --> 00:49:08,480
approach that.

657
00:49:10,010 --> 00:49:13,050
And then I still have questions.

658
00:49:13,850 --> 00:49:17,210
And one of those questions is that

659
00:49:19,770 --> 00:49:25,770
there is another way of describing the sort of, for example, the liberal conservative sort

660
00:49:25,770 --> 00:49:29,770
of dispute in modern Western politics.

661
00:49:30,120 --> 00:49:33,640
And that is the one that comes from Thomas Sowell.

662
00:49:34,280 --> 00:49:39,240
And that says that, well, there are different visions, and um and he describes that in very

663
00:49:39,240 --> 00:49:42,520
intellectual terms because he he's talking about intellectual history.

664
00:49:42,600 --> 00:49:44,600
He's not talking about the actual movements.

665
00:49:44,920 --> 00:49:50,760
But still, so basically there's an unconstrained vision where you know there are

666
00:49:50,760 --> 00:49:56,440
problems and they get to have solutions, and um mankind is not limited, and

667
00:49:56,440 --> 00:50:02,410
mankind can be shaped to be different, And so is society, and so is the

668
00:50:02,410 --> 00:50:04,170
environment, and so is everything.

669
00:50:04,330 --> 00:50:08,890
And there's a constrained vision where all we can hope for are trade-offs.

670
00:50:09,690 --> 00:50:15,210
Because you know, that's a crooked timber of humanity, and you know, we we know that

671
00:50:16,490 --> 00:50:20,090
incentives matter, and everything happens in scarcity and stuff like that.

672
00:50:20,170 --> 00:50:25,520
So that's more of a conservative vision where yes, all you can hope for is a trade-off

673
00:50:25,520 --> 00:50:29,600
that's less uh costly than another trade-off.

674
00:50:29,840 --> 00:50:34,160
Now it seems to me that those two visions really are different visions.

675
00:50:34,800 --> 00:50:40,240
And I must say that talking with people over the

676
00:50:40,240 --> 00:50:45,840
years or more being talked at because I don't want to

677
00:50:46,490 --> 00:50:51,290
engage in political discussions, but people don't care if you don't want to engage, they

678
00:50:51,290 --> 00:50:52,650
will engage for you.

679
00:50:54,570 --> 00:51:00,330
It seems to me that that difference is quite let's say I recognize it,

680
00:51:00,490 --> 00:51:06,170
I see it, and then I think, well, there's a lot of evidence that

681
00:51:07,690 --> 00:51:11,530
political attitudes are largely heritable.

682
00:51:12,380 --> 00:51:17,340
And I think, well, maybe there is something, a sort of disposition to be an unconstrained

683
00:51:17,340 --> 00:51:19,420
person or a constrained person.

684
00:51:19,980 --> 00:51:25,500
So my question is: how do you s how do we square that with an alliance

685
00:51:25,500 --> 00:51:26,060
theory?

686
00:51:26,300 --> 00:51:32,140
Because the alliance theory, if we leave it there, would say, well, it's all uh for grabs,

687
00:51:32,300 --> 00:51:37,740
you know, you just choose your your groups, then you tailor the beliefs to whatever uh the

688
00:51:37,740 --> 00:51:38,860
groups are.

689
00:51:40,130 --> 00:51:45,490
But that's not what the visions model would say, which is no, no, no, you you have to have

690
00:51:45,490 --> 00:51:51,010
beliefs that kind of chime in chime with the uh general orientation towards

691
00:51:51,010 --> 00:51:53,330
constrained or unconstrained vision.

692
00:51:53,970 --> 00:51:59,970
Um so I don't know if it's done to ask the podcast

693
00:51:59,970 --> 00:52:05,730
people what they would do about us because I really don't know what to do about that.

694
00:52:06,290 --> 00:52:06,690
Yeah.

695
00:52:07,960 --> 00:52:11,800
well the first thing to say is that uh at the end of the day, it's an empirical question.

696
00:52:11,960 --> 00:52:17,080
And if you know these visions are the primary variables that are explaining people's

697
00:52:17,080 --> 00:52:20,760
political coalitions and political beliefs, then we ought to be able to see that

698
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:21,240
empirically.

699
00:52:21,320 --> 00:52:24,760
We ought to have a good measure of these visions and show that they're powerfully

700
00:52:24,760 --> 00:52:26,920
predictive of coalitional alignment.

701
00:52:27,080 --> 00:52:31,290
And we got to make sure that our measurements actually are good and not, you know,

702
00:52:31,690 --> 00:52:35,850
indirectly measuring the thing that we're trying to predict, which is, I think, a big

703
00:52:35,850 --> 00:52:39,850
problem in political psychology, where the outcome variable is often baked into the

704
00:52:39,850 --> 00:52:41,450
predictor variable.

705
00:52:41,930 --> 00:52:42,250
Yep.

706
00:52:42,490 --> 00:52:47,850
So if we're going to actually try to test this uh conflict of visions model, we want to

707
00:52:47,850 --> 00:52:51,930
actually have a good measure to see if number one, these visions actually exist

708
00:52:52,400 --> 00:52:53,200
consistently.

709
00:52:53,360 --> 00:52:57,840
Because I can think of a lot of exceptions to the rule of, say, liberals supporting an

710
00:52:57,840 --> 00:53:00,800
unconstrained, sorry, yeah, an unconstrained vision.

711
00:53:01,200 --> 00:53:05,760
For example, they might think that wealthy business people are self-interested, greedy,

712
00:53:06,000 --> 00:53:10,080
they need to be reined in by strong incentives, and that's why we need to regulate them and

713
00:53:10,240 --> 00:53:11,360
why we need to tax them.

714
00:53:11,600 --> 00:53:16,290
Similarly, I could think of exceptions where, you know, uh people on the right Christians

715
00:53:16,290 --> 00:53:21,570
will will have an uh an unconstrained vision where uh where we can rebuild people to in

716
00:53:21,570 --> 00:53:26,290
God's image and and train them to be, you know, apostles of of Jesus or or or whatever,

717
00:53:26,530 --> 00:53:31,730
where, you know, uh we can raise people to be to have these Christian values and these

718
00:53:31,730 --> 00:53:34,610
Christian norms or or to love their country or or whatever.

719
00:53:34,850 --> 00:53:40,280
So I'm personally skeptical that if we do a good empirical test, that that will turn out to

720
00:53:40,280 --> 00:53:45,160
be the case, that these visions will number one, be held consistently across a variety of

721
00:53:45,160 --> 00:53:50,200
concrete instances, and number two, be strongly predictive of coalitional uh alignment.

722
00:53:50,360 --> 00:53:51,800
But then you know it's an empirical question.

723
00:53:51,880 --> 00:53:53,080
We we got to run the test.

724
00:53:53,160 --> 00:53:57,800
Uh and and I'm and I'm involved in a in a few studies right now that are attempting to run

725
00:53:57,800 --> 00:53:58,680
such tests.

726
00:53:58,920 --> 00:54:02,760
So the first thing I would say is that empirically I don't think the case is very strong.

727
00:54:02,920 --> 00:54:08,120
Number one, that these sort of abstract worldviews or dispositions exist coherently and are

728
00:54:08,120 --> 00:54:08,600
consistent.

729
00:54:08,750 --> 00:54:13,070
And number two, even if they did exist, there's not strong evidence that they have a

730
00:54:13,070 --> 00:54:17,310
powerful effect on political beliefs or coalitional alignment.

731
00:54:17,470 --> 00:54:21,710
That isn't to say that there aren't heritable dispositions or psychological traits that

732
00:54:21,710 --> 00:54:23,150
matter politically.

733
00:54:23,390 --> 00:54:28,990
But I think if we want to understand how and why they matter, we have to understand them as

734
00:54:28,990 --> 00:54:34,110
things that predispose one toward aligning with a particular coalition or particular group

735
00:54:34,110 --> 00:54:35,470
relative to another.

736
00:54:35,710 --> 00:54:41,480
I mean, for example, there's huge um educational polarization in the United States, such

737
00:54:41,480 --> 00:54:45,720
that people with college or graduate degrees tend to lean to the Democratic Party, uh,

738
00:54:45,880 --> 00:54:51,480
people without a college degree, uh particularly white men and uh and uh rural men tend to

739
00:54:51,480 --> 00:54:53,000
lean to the Republican coalition.

740
00:54:53,160 --> 00:54:57,880
So there's uh this powerful educational component to the political alliance structure.

741
00:54:58,120 --> 00:55:02,870
But whether or not I go to college or get a graduate degree or become sort of an

742
00:55:02,870 --> 00:55:08,230
intellectually curious person is going to uh depend strongly on my heritable dispositions,

743
00:55:08,390 --> 00:55:13,110
my level of intellectual curiosity, my openness to new experiences, my willingness to say

744
00:55:13,270 --> 00:55:17,110
move out of my small town and move into a city if that's where my university is.

745
00:55:17,270 --> 00:55:17,590
Exactly.

746
00:55:17,750 --> 00:55:22,390
So all of these uh uh uh dispositions might ultimately lead to the outcome of me getting an

747
00:55:22,390 --> 00:55:23,350
education or not.

748
00:55:23,540 --> 00:55:27,140
And then if you look at the analysis, you'll find a correlation between all those

749
00:55:27,140 --> 00:55:30,740
dispositions, you know, openness to experience, curiosity, and liberalism.

750
00:55:31,060 --> 00:55:35,140
But what we're missing is that there's this big thing in between, which is education and

751
00:55:35,540 --> 00:55:38,260
how that it fits into the political alliance structure.

752
00:55:38,420 --> 00:55:43,140
And you can make similar arguments for what might predispose you to join a religious

753
00:55:43,140 --> 00:55:45,060
community or leave a religious community.

754
00:55:45,290 --> 00:55:50,250
There's interesting work showing that your sexual attitudes and dispositions play a

755
00:55:50,250 --> 00:55:53,130
powerful role in shaping whether you join or leave a religious group.

756
00:55:53,370 --> 00:55:57,930
So I do think heritable dispositions and psychological traits matter politically, but they

757
00:55:57,930 --> 00:56:03,770
matter indirectly via the sorts of groups that you uh join or leave and and via

758
00:56:03,770 --> 00:56:08,260
the the sorts of groups that you view as either threatening you or or uh uh facilitating

759
00:56:08,260 --> 00:56:08,900
your interests.

760
00:56:08,980 --> 00:56:11,220
So that's that's that would be my answer to your question.

761
00:56:11,620 --> 00:56:13,860
And you know curious if you find that to be a satisfying answer.

762
00:56:14,260 --> 00:56:20,020
No, that that that sounds very uh very plausible, especially as

763
00:56:20,180 --> 00:56:24,180
as you said, the the the we have a problem, and that's the problem we have in psychology

764
00:56:24,340 --> 00:56:30,180
and um we'll talk about that at some point, which is that we tend to

765
00:56:30,180 --> 00:56:36,050
think that the sort of mental idiom in which certain things are

766
00:56:36,050 --> 00:56:41,970
represented and computed has to be coterminous and more or

767
00:56:41,970 --> 00:56:47,170
less a copy of the explicit mental contents that are expressed.

768
00:56:47,330 --> 00:56:52,450
So, for example, when people look at those dispositions, and you know, of course, it's it's

769
00:56:52,450 --> 00:56:53,090
easy to do.

770
00:56:53,170 --> 00:56:54,130
I mean, it's easy.

771
00:56:54,210 --> 00:56:59,920
Uh it's easy for some people to do um uh behavioral genetics of political

772
00:57:00,320 --> 00:57:01,520
uh orientation.

773
00:57:01,680 --> 00:57:03,120
Well, what do you test?

774
00:57:03,200 --> 00:57:05,760
You test whether they're liberal or conservative.

775
00:57:06,560 --> 00:57:09,840
Because that's the end you know variable, and that's it.

776
00:57:10,000 --> 00:57:15,920
And in a way, uh so it could be that in terms of

777
00:57:15,920 --> 00:57:21,730
um neural processes, you know, a uh the actual

778
00:57:22,050 --> 00:57:27,410
neural disposition that is inherited has nothing to do with any of these terms but has to

779
00:57:27,410 --> 00:57:28,930
do with something completely different.

780
00:57:29,090 --> 00:57:35,090
Not even personality variables, which themselves could be a sort of explicit vocabulary.

781
00:57:35,250 --> 00:57:40,610
And I think that's that's um a common um problem we have.

782
00:57:41,330 --> 00:57:45,810
It's true that um so um

783
00:57:47,170 --> 00:57:53,140
so for example to some degree, when we talk about coalitional alignments in in

784
00:57:53,140 --> 00:57:58,820
politics, for example, we're using the terms that people themselves could use

785
00:57:59,780 --> 00:58:03,860
if they want to reflect on the situation and say, no, I don't want to be with these guys

786
00:58:03,940 --> 00:58:08,820
because they're weak, and look, there's only 10 of them and there's uh 50 of us.

787
00:58:09,460 --> 00:58:15,140
But there's also a a sort of deeper level level at which computations are done, like you

788
00:58:15,140 --> 00:58:20,810
know, for example, um Why is it that certain actions are

789
00:58:20,810 --> 00:58:21,610
outrageous?

790
00:58:21,770 --> 00:58:27,210
I remember that John to be had you know a great model of those things.

791
00:58:27,290 --> 00:58:31,530
And the thing is that it's not that those things are specially outrageous.

792
00:58:31,690 --> 00:58:36,010
Yes, they did, you know, poison little kids or whatever stuff like that, but that's

793
00:58:36,010 --> 00:58:39,210
something we've seen a million times and we didn't react.

794
00:58:39,370 --> 00:58:43,850
It's just that at this point that thing shows that we can be pushed around.

795
00:58:44,010 --> 00:58:47,770
And and if we don't react, that uh opens the case for more.

796
00:58:47,900 --> 00:58:53,500
Now that computation is not done in an idiom that people could

797
00:58:53,500 --> 00:58:55,020
easily express.

798
00:58:55,180 --> 00:59:01,180
It's some sort of language of coalitional thought that has its own

799
00:59:01,180 --> 00:59:01,820
logic.

800
00:59:02,300 --> 00:59:08,060
And I'm always a bit surprised, and I I don't want to be the that guy,

801
00:59:08,140 --> 00:59:12,350
so to speak, to say that people don't um take that into account.

802
00:59:12,510 --> 00:59:15,470
In some sectors of psychology, it's quite understood.

803
00:59:15,710 --> 00:59:21,710
If I have a s uh a syntactic theory, it will be in terms of operators like you know, uh

804
00:59:21,950 --> 00:59:27,470
govern or uh things like that, that have nothing to do with what people are aware of

805
00:59:27,710 --> 00:59:31,070
when they um when they produce utterances.

806
00:59:31,630 --> 00:59:35,100
And if they want to think about them, that's not the principles they would find.

807
00:59:35,180 --> 00:59:40,220
So I'm perfectly fine with the fact that there is a principles, uh call it government,

808
00:59:40,380 --> 00:59:45,820
agreement, uh you know, move alpha or whatever in your link in your syntactic theory, that

809
00:59:45,820 --> 00:59:50,860
are not um anything like the um overt vocabulary we use.

810
00:59:52,210 --> 00:59:57,890
But surely, and here I'm using, you know, that Daniel Dennett sort of said that when

811
00:59:57,890 --> 01:00:02,210
someone says surely with a comma, it means they're about to say something that's absolutely

812
01:00:02,210 --> 01:00:05,410
not certain and does not follow from what they just said.

813
01:00:05,570 --> 01:00:11,570
But surely, uh, if it works for syntax, it's it should work for other domains of cognition.

814
01:00:11,730 --> 01:00:17,520
That's you know, our theory of mind may not work the way we think in terms of

815
01:00:17,760 --> 01:00:21,440
little images of people having thoughts about other images.

816
01:00:22,560 --> 01:00:25,520
It may be in an idiom that's quite different.

817
01:00:26,560 --> 01:00:29,840
So, a forgery for complex things like politics.

818
01:00:29,920 --> 01:00:33,760
It may not be that people have this vision that man is unconstrained.

819
01:00:33,840 --> 01:00:36,480
It may be something vastly different.

820
01:00:36,640 --> 01:00:42,160
That leads to finding that proposition very obvious when you see it in

821
01:00:42,400 --> 01:00:47,970
political theory, but also of thinking of particular political programs as especially

822
01:00:47,970 --> 01:00:48,850
compelling.

823
01:00:49,090 --> 01:00:50,370
Um so I don't know.

824
01:00:50,530 --> 01:00:56,210
I mean I I I I'm um I think we're still in the same state that uh

825
01:00:57,010 --> 01:01:00,210
people were in chemistry before Galton or something like that.

826
01:01:00,370 --> 01:01:02,930
So, you know, we're we're sort of groping.

827
01:01:03,090 --> 01:01:08,940
And um I remember having this uh When I was at school, that's

828
01:01:08,940 --> 01:01:14,620
a long, long time ago, in high school, that our chemistry

829
01:01:14,620 --> 01:01:20,620
teacher told us that if you think in obvious properties, you'll never

830
01:01:20,620 --> 01:01:21,100
get anywhere.

831
01:01:21,260 --> 01:01:24,940
Because look at this acid, you know, like chloridric acid, it burns you.

832
01:01:25,100 --> 01:01:27,260
Look at this caustic soda, it burns you.

833
01:01:27,340 --> 01:01:31,660
Well, if you combine them, you have water and well, salty water.

834
01:01:32,860 --> 01:01:35,580
So that's uh that's an obvious example.

835
01:01:35,820 --> 01:01:41,150
But it might be that um yes we're we're very often

836
01:01:41,150 --> 01:01:46,990
shackled by this sort of um uh yes this everyday talk or

837
01:01:46,990 --> 01:01:52,670
this uh common sense folk psychology talk um that stops us from thinking about uh

838
01:01:52,830 --> 01:01:55,070
about actual cognitive processes.

839
01:01:55,390 --> 01:01:57,230
I've seen that in politics quite a lot.

840
01:01:57,310 --> 01:02:03,280
I mean in in terms of you know uh people thinking and I'm not

841
01:02:03,280 --> 01:02:08,560
naming names and I will not name names, but I mean people saying, well, it's obvious that

842
01:02:08,560 --> 01:02:14,560
this um kind of uh chief or leader has power

843
01:02:14,880 --> 01:02:20,080
because of their prestige, and then you think, what the heck is prestige?

844
01:02:20,240 --> 01:02:25,440
You know, how do you make uh and there again I'm like Dennett, I get all these sort of

845
01:02:25,490 --> 01:02:30,930
objections like how do you make a computer made of meat that has this concept of

846
01:02:30,930 --> 01:02:31,650
prestige?

847
01:02:31,810 --> 01:02:37,810
So um and if you don't think that's a question, that's that's weird because it is a

848
01:02:37,810 --> 01:02:40,770
very important question, or it's uh it's an obvious one.

849
01:02:41,010 --> 01:02:45,970
But anyway, I don't want to go on about that because you know uh it's easy to turn this a

850
01:02:45,970 --> 01:02:51,730
mild complaint about the state of affairs into a rant about you know, fools, damn fools and

851
01:02:51,730 --> 01:02:52,530
stuff.

852
01:02:54,210 --> 01:02:59,980
I I I do think yeah, uh yeah it's a great point that our folk psychology, our

853
01:02:59,980 --> 01:03:01,420
folk intuitions, our folk economics.

854
01:03:01,500 --> 01:03:05,980
I know you've written a lot about uh how our our our intuitions about economics uh in many

855
01:03:05,980 --> 01:03:07,340
ways are misleading.

856
01:03:07,500 --> 01:03:12,540
Um, and that colors our political attitudes to to various various degrees.

857
01:03:12,700 --> 01:03:17,740
Um, but I think it's important when we're thinking about our our folk intuitions and in in

858
01:03:17,740 --> 01:03:22,110
which cases they might be leading us astray, it's important to think about incentives.

859
01:03:22,590 --> 01:03:27,230
Because if there's one group of people that has overrided their folk psychology, sorry,

860
01:03:27,310 --> 01:03:29,790
their folk economics, it's economists.

861
01:03:30,190 --> 01:03:33,950
And the reason they have overrided their folk economics is because they have professional

862
01:03:33,950 --> 01:03:38,590
and career incentives for doing that and for being right and for changing their minds when

863
01:03:38,590 --> 01:03:43,310
the empirical data points in a certain direction and for changing their minds when a

864
01:03:43,310 --> 01:03:46,030
compelling logical or mathematical argument is presented.

865
01:03:46,270 --> 01:03:51,440
And so we have to explain why economists uh have successfully overrided their folk economic

866
01:03:51,440 --> 01:03:56,480
intuitions and get it right, in addition to why uh the average voter has not overrided

867
01:03:56,480 --> 01:03:57,280
these intuitions.

868
01:03:57,600 --> 01:03:57,760
Right.

869
01:03:58,560 --> 01:04:01,760
And I think the way to explain it is to point at the incentives.

870
01:04:01,840 --> 01:04:05,360
Economists have strong incentives for getting it right and overriding their intuitions.

871
01:04:05,520 --> 01:04:10,160
When it comes to the individual voter, uh what are their incentives for getting the facts

872
01:04:10,160 --> 01:04:10,320
right?

873
01:04:10,560 --> 01:04:15,550
Well, personally, their vote, they you know, analyses suggest they have maybe a one in

874
01:04:15,550 --> 01:04:19,070
sixty million chance of of shaping the outcome of a national election.

875
01:04:19,230 --> 01:04:22,430
That is a very weak incentive for them to get it right, right?

876
01:04:22,590 --> 01:04:27,870
They face very little costs if they are wrong about uh political facts or political

877
01:04:27,870 --> 01:04:28,350
realities.

878
01:04:28,510 --> 01:04:32,830
And they face potentially big costs if they fail to fit in with people in their community

879
01:04:32,910 --> 01:04:37,390
or if they sh signal that they're on the wrong side of an issue or they're not on the team

880
01:04:37,390 --> 01:04:38,830
of the people around them.

881
01:04:39,180 --> 01:04:43,420
So when you think about the incentives that an actual voter faces, it's actually it doesn't

882
01:04:43,420 --> 01:04:48,940
seem um irrational at all for them to not really develop expertise in

883
01:04:48,940 --> 01:04:53,580
economics and not really bother to correct their primitive intuitions because they face no

884
01:04:53,580 --> 01:04:56,380
costs for those uh primitive intuitions being wrong.

885
01:04:56,860 --> 01:04:57,500
No, that's true.

886
01:04:57,580 --> 01:05:03,500
And there is a um a path for argument for the rationality of ignoring

887
01:05:03,500 --> 01:05:08,990
all the stuff and just trusting that your side might be right.

888
01:05:09,550 --> 01:05:14,990
But it's quite interesting to see why it happen in

889
01:05:15,230 --> 01:05:17,310
scientific debates.

890
01:05:17,470 --> 01:05:21,470
And I must say, I'm struck by that.

891
01:05:21,550 --> 01:05:27,150
I was the other day I was reading something on the web, someone who described

892
01:05:27,390 --> 01:05:32,590
styles of conversations and discussion, and have you know from the worst to the best.

893
01:05:32,990 --> 01:05:34,260
And you have the best.

894
01:05:34,420 --> 01:05:40,260
The best is well, you say something and then you try to think what could be

895
01:05:40,260 --> 01:05:41,540
wrong about this argument.

896
01:05:41,620 --> 01:05:46,580
And others tell you, no, no, some stuff is good, but you know, some of it might not work,

897
01:05:46,660 --> 01:05:47,060
and stuff.

898
01:05:47,140 --> 01:05:50,180
And you gradually elaborate with them a better thing.

899
01:05:50,420 --> 01:05:56,180
And the other one, the the nadir of uh uh of uh human discussion is

900
01:05:56,180 --> 01:05:59,940
political discussions, like we know, but then political conversations.

901
01:06:00,950 --> 01:06:02,790
Okay, so that person says that.

902
01:06:02,870 --> 01:06:08,710
And some and one of the uh people who commented on this post said,

903
01:06:08,870 --> 01:06:13,910
well, but that's first style you describe when you try to find the best of the argument and

904
01:06:13,910 --> 01:06:15,510
the other in the other person's argument.

905
01:06:16,630 --> 01:06:18,630
I do that every day.

906
01:06:19,110 --> 01:06:24,870
Because uh in my department of mathematics, when we want to talk about something, we put it

907
01:06:24,870 --> 01:06:29,260
on the blackboard, and others try to tell us, yeah, yeah, it could work because it does

908
01:06:29,260 --> 01:06:32,700
this, and we ourselves say, No, no, I think there's a problem here.

909
01:06:32,780 --> 01:06:35,020
And they say, Oh, maybe, but you know, we'll see.

910
01:06:35,260 --> 01:06:38,540
So the question is, of course, you know, why isn't it always like that?

911
01:06:38,700 --> 01:06:44,140
And that's I remember that uh John Tuby always had this uh complaint that, you know, why

912
01:06:44,140 --> 01:06:46,300
don't we get science at the speed of thought?

913
01:06:46,460 --> 01:06:50,140
Uh by which he meant, of course, the speed of that kind of conversation.

914
01:06:50,910 --> 01:06:56,910
and it's um so as you say for econom economists it's the same sort of thing

915
01:06:57,070 --> 01:07:02,750
so how do you create an incentive um to to to get

916
01:07:02,750 --> 01:07:08,750
things a bit more right that overrides the incentive to be um you

917
01:07:08,750 --> 01:07:14,560
know to be uh in the right coalition And I must say that there was

918
01:07:14,560 --> 01:07:19,520
that piece by John, which must be the last piece he published that was on the

919
01:07:19,680 --> 01:07:25,680
evolutionary psychology as the crystallizing core of a social science or something

920
01:07:25,680 --> 01:07:26,320
like that.

921
01:07:27,520 --> 01:07:33,520
In which he describes this sort of dynamic whereby it's not just that there are coalitions

922
01:07:33,520 --> 01:07:38,880
and camps, it's also that if there are two powerful descriptions of

923
01:07:39,200 --> 01:07:44,730
something, uh, then there's a powerful argument for some sort of happy

924
01:07:44,730 --> 01:07:46,650
medium being probably right.

925
01:07:47,450 --> 01:07:53,210
And he says that the cosmology of Tychobray didn't make any sense and was full of holes and

926
01:07:53,210 --> 01:07:59,130
stuff and that, but it was exactly between Galileo and the Ptolemaic

927
01:07:59,130 --> 01:07:59,610
version.

928
01:07:59,770 --> 01:08:02,410
It was sort of a little bit of one and a little bit of the other.

929
01:08:02,570 --> 01:08:04,810
So everyone thought that is fantastic.

930
01:08:05,050 --> 01:08:09,800
You know, if we can have a cosmology that offends no one in particular.

931
01:08:10,040 --> 01:08:13,720
Um, so how do we escape from that?

932
01:08:13,960 --> 01:08:19,960
And when I tell um people here about that, they tell me, well,

933
01:08:20,120 --> 01:08:22,120
it's because we don't have the right theory.

934
01:08:22,280 --> 01:08:27,080
Biologists got the right uh model that's natural selection.

935
01:08:27,720 --> 01:08:30,680
And see, they agree on most things.

936
01:08:30,920 --> 01:08:36,120
Not on theory very often, but on uh on most of the empirical stuff.

937
01:08:36,790 --> 01:08:42,070
So, for culture and uh politics and things like that, maybe we have to have the right

938
01:08:42,070 --> 01:08:42,390
model.

939
01:08:43,270 --> 01:08:48,150
And one is tempted to say no, it's much worse than you think, because there are powerful

940
01:08:48,150 --> 01:08:50,550
incentives in never having the right model.

941
01:08:50,710 --> 01:08:51,030
Yeah.

942
01:08:51,510 --> 01:08:54,950
Um, so I I don't know to what extent that's the case.

943
01:08:55,110 --> 01:09:00,960
At some point, I wanted to um you know, when you're invited to give a talk and

944
01:09:00,960 --> 01:09:04,000
you have no great idea what to what to say.

945
01:09:04,640 --> 01:09:10,480
I or no sort of uh I I you think of provocative things and uh once I I thought

946
01:09:10,480 --> 01:09:14,240
one talk could be the impossibility of social sciences.

947
01:09:14,400 --> 01:09:20,000
So that's you know, it's the the stack you know, it's overwhelmingly stacked against there

948
01:09:20,000 --> 01:09:22,170
being uh social science.

949
01:09:22,250 --> 01:09:27,930
In the sense that I'll give you just one example, which of course affected me because it's

950
01:09:27,930 --> 01:09:28,970
about stuff that I do.

951
01:09:29,050 --> 01:09:32,810
So I'm right, and these fools will not admit it and stuff like that.

952
01:09:32,970 --> 01:09:35,290
So we're in that uh dynamic.

953
01:09:35,690 --> 01:09:41,690
Um but it's it's at some point I thought, well, it's quite clear

954
01:09:41,690 --> 01:09:47,450
that we can't really talk about the cultural success of religious

955
01:09:47,450 --> 01:09:53,000
um um ideas, you know, representations, behaviors, etc.

956
01:09:54,520 --> 01:09:58,840
As one thing, because there are two very, very different varieties of that stuff.

957
01:09:59,000 --> 01:10:04,280
And there is one that I used to call white religion or folk religion that is like

958
01:10:04,280 --> 01:10:05,720
shamanism and stuff like that.

959
01:10:05,960 --> 01:10:08,680
It's mostly about solving practical problems.

960
01:10:10,520 --> 01:10:15,090
And there's one that's the doctrinal religion, where you have large organizations that have

961
01:10:15,090 --> 01:10:20,690
priests and stuff like that that get political power and diffuse the doctrine and stuff.

962
01:10:20,930 --> 01:10:26,050
And I thought, yes, I mean these things are so have such different social dynamics and

963
01:10:26,050 --> 01:10:31,810
cultural paths to transmission that really we shouldn't

964
01:10:32,610 --> 01:10:36,850
um we shouldn't think of them as being one phenomenon.

965
01:10:37,600 --> 01:10:42,000
And then, you know, people tell me, Yeah, yeah, no, that's very interesting, super

966
01:10:42,240 --> 01:10:42,480
interesting.

967
01:10:42,640 --> 01:10:44,480
So, what's your theory of religion?

968
01:10:45,040 --> 01:10:45,840
And that's it.

969
01:10:45,920 --> 01:10:47,440
People want a theory of religion.

970
01:10:47,520 --> 01:10:52,560
And and you know, if you start having this sort of thing, no, no, no, actually, you know,

971
01:10:52,880 --> 01:10:54,560
protons are not neutrons.

972
01:10:54,640 --> 01:10:57,440
Oh, so you don't have a theory of the nucleus.

973
01:10:57,760 --> 01:10:59,680
You know, you uh so you see what I mean?

974
01:10:59,760 --> 01:11:05,690
It's it's sort of very frustrating, but at the same time, um it's

975
01:11:05,690 --> 01:11:09,450
worse than the coalitional argument because the the coalitional argument would be well,

976
01:11:09,770 --> 01:11:15,130
people try to um to to side with a a particular camp and then you know

977
01:11:15,210 --> 01:11:16,170
that's it.

978
01:11:17,050 --> 01:11:23,050
But this one is more like um there is a whole level of discourse where for for

979
01:11:23,050 --> 01:11:29,050
example um politics is about social groups, and social groups are real and

980
01:11:29,050 --> 01:11:34,860
they're you know, the uh prime, the primeval object, they're the starting point, they're

981
01:11:34,860 --> 01:11:35,180
there.

982
01:11:36,220 --> 01:11:41,020
Um so that's what happens in politics.

983
01:11:41,100 --> 01:11:46,860
There's a very strong incentive to think like that because it makes all sorts of moves you

984
01:11:46,860 --> 01:11:50,220
want to do relative to other people, etc., much easier.

985
01:11:50,620 --> 01:11:56,570
So if you have you know uh uh people who say, well, why

986
01:11:56,570 --> 01:12:01,370
on earth would human minds think of groups as opposed to other things?

987
01:12:01,610 --> 01:12:07,530
Well, I'm sorry to say, I mean I'm sorry to say that they but you know yeah,

988
01:12:07,610 --> 01:12:08,250
it's kind of great.

989
01:12:09,610 --> 01:12:09,930
Yeah, exactly.

990
01:12:10,170 --> 01:12:12,410
It's it's not that's not gonna work.

991
01:12:12,730 --> 01:12:18,560
Simply because um it's I mean it it it will work and and I t

992
01:12:18,640 --> 01:12:20,080
I'm touching wood.

993
01:12:20,320 --> 01:12:22,720
I I I certainly hope it will.

994
01:12:23,040 --> 01:12:28,320
But but the thing is that there seems to be an almost unsurmountable um

995
01:12:28,560 --> 01:12:34,400
obstacle, which is that um there's too much

996
01:12:34,400 --> 01:12:39,610
benefit in running our you know folk politics the way we do.

997
01:12:41,050 --> 01:12:47,050
And because of that, there's initially a sort of loss in uh oh now I have to think

998
01:12:47,050 --> 01:12:50,570
of groups as things that minds imagine out of interactive, etc.

999
01:12:51,370 --> 01:12:57,180
That seems very um yes, that we've lost something, Oh,

1000
01:12:57,260 --> 01:13:00,140
and therefore that's not a promising sort of thing.

1001
01:13:00,380 --> 01:13:04,300
I don't know what you think about that, but you know, I'm sorry to sort of No, it's great.

1002
01:13:04,460 --> 01:13:08,220
I actually I actually think, Pascal, I think the title of your talk is Science as

1003
01:13:08,220 --> 01:13:09,500
Divination, right?

1004
01:13:09,660 --> 01:13:14,140
Where it's actually I think it brings David's point about incentives, because it is about

1005
01:13:14,140 --> 01:13:15,100
groups, but it's incentives.

1006
01:13:15,260 --> 01:13:19,660
But it's the science is word you're what you're describing, Pascal, is that we're back to

1007
01:13:19,660 --> 01:13:25,020
the lead a stuffed animal example where there's a bunch of people who have an incentive to

1008
01:13:25,020 --> 01:13:30,870
say the stuffed animal is the level of discourse, is the correct level

1009
01:13:30,870 --> 01:13:31,670
of concepts.

1010
01:13:31,990 --> 01:13:37,990
And unless you have a moral strategic incentive game, I actually think of the

1011
01:13:37,990 --> 01:13:40,710
weird paper, like the Joe Henrik Weird paper.

1012
01:13:41,030 --> 01:13:45,430
There there were papers, and Pascal, you would know better than both both David and I

1013
01:13:45,750 --> 01:13:51,180
forever about we shouldn't just have uh we we shouldn't just have um non

1014
01:13:51,340 --> 01:13:52,780
Western samples.

1015
01:13:53,020 --> 01:13:58,700
But I think what the acronym did was it was a coordination device to moralize that.

1016
01:13:59,180 --> 01:14:04,060
And all of a sudden it's it's people want don't want to be accused of having weird.

1017
01:14:04,380 --> 01:14:09,900
Like it's it's it's so I think it's like a it was a perfect example of a stuffed animal of

1018
01:14:09,980 --> 01:14:11,260
a coordination point.

1019
01:14:11,420 --> 01:14:13,660
Um and and I think that's why it was successful.

1020
01:14:13,820 --> 01:14:15,980
And I think that's what what you're both saying, yeah.

1021
01:14:16,310 --> 01:14:16,630
Yeah.

1022
01:14:16,790 --> 01:14:20,550
And it uh in this case it adds that it there was a valid point, you know, in the sense

1023
01:14:20,630 --> 01:14:21,270
that's true.

1024
01:14:21,350 --> 01:14:21,670
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

1025
01:14:22,150 --> 01:14:22,950
Oh no, no, no, no.

1026
01:14:23,030 --> 01:14:27,110
I'm only gonna I'm gonna test, you know, Western because I don't care for the others.

1027
01:14:27,430 --> 01:14:31,990
But it but I think like the yeah, but I think the point of like why aren't we why aren't

1028
01:14:31,990 --> 01:14:34,470
people listening to us, all three of us, right?

1029
01:14:34,630 --> 01:14:37,110
Like why is everybody stupid and why are we so smart?

1030
01:14:37,270 --> 01:14:43,270
Um it's but I think there's also just yeah, like what are the incentives um to have to

1031
01:14:43,560 --> 01:14:46,440
choose a different stuffed animal to push the metaphor.

1032
01:14:46,600 --> 01:14:52,520
You know, and unless there's something like the weird thing or uh cult

1033
01:14:52,760 --> 01:14:58,440
like for maybe economics, maybe the the the cost benefit structure is boy,

1034
01:14:58,600 --> 01:15:00,360
banks really want to have a good policy.

1035
01:15:00,520 --> 01:15:04,440
Nobody is like that for social science yet or for psychology.

1036
01:15:04,680 --> 01:15:10,680
Um, and so you there's just m less of a selection institutionally to get it right.

1037
01:15:11,230 --> 01:15:17,150
And consequently, it can just be more of these arbitrary um status games, maybe.

1038
01:15:17,630 --> 01:15:18,830
Yes, status games.

1039
01:15:18,910 --> 01:15:24,910
And and uh I think the uh that's true and um

1040
01:15:25,870 --> 01:15:31,710
it's quite c clear that um another thing that's okay,

1041
01:15:31,950 --> 01:15:37,820
so okay, now instead of you know this sort of uh doom and and gloom,

1042
01:15:37,980 --> 01:15:42,860
uh we we should look at possible sort of positive

1043
01:15:44,060 --> 01:15:44,940
developments.

1044
01:15:45,100 --> 01:15:51,100
And the the the what I uh what I'm sometimes I'm impressed by the fact

1045
01:15:51,100 --> 01:15:56,940
that certain projects that are useful and valuable projects disappear in the discipline.

1046
01:15:57,250 --> 01:15:59,650
But they reappear someone else somewhere else.

1047
01:16:00,210 --> 01:16:06,210
And you know, I was thinking about the the project of cultural anthropology, like,

1048
01:16:06,370 --> 01:16:11,970
you know, um decades ago, was um

1049
01:16:12,130 --> 01:16:17,410
many decades ago, was um to try and understand, have some sort of

1050
01:16:18,050 --> 01:16:22,780
entry into what mankind is like

1051
01:16:23,340 --> 01:16:27,820
through the interesting prism of cultural differences.

1052
01:16:28,940 --> 01:16:34,620
So you would and you you would have to study one culture that was not yours

1053
01:16:34,860 --> 01:16:40,060
because precisely it gave you some of that insight that, well, uh there has something to

1054
01:16:40,140 --> 01:16:45,260
that there has to be something that constructs the obviousness of certain things, like you

1055
01:16:45,260 --> 01:16:48,670
know, my religion, my social group, or things like that.

1056
01:16:49,070 --> 01:16:54,910
So that's a project that came with a kind of special method, which is to

1057
01:16:54,910 --> 01:17:00,510
stay in a place for a long time, to learn people's language, to get into the minutiae of

1058
01:17:00,510 --> 01:17:03,310
who marries whom and when and how and stuff like that.

1059
01:17:03,550 --> 01:17:08,750
So that project is gone from cultural anthropology, at least in the US and in most of the

1060
01:17:09,070 --> 01:17:10,350
Western world.

1061
01:17:11,470 --> 01:17:14,660
However, we were talking about Joe Henrik.

1062
01:17:14,820 --> 01:17:20,100
I was at a conference a few years back where he and some of his students were,

1063
01:17:20,580 --> 01:17:25,220
and I realized that all these people did long term field work in some places.

1064
01:17:25,380 --> 01:17:29,860
They learned the language, they knew all the minutiae of who marries whom and stuff like

1065
01:17:29,860 --> 01:17:30,180
that.

1066
01:17:30,820 --> 01:17:36,420
And okay, so out of that they were also getting data for you know

1067
01:17:37,750 --> 01:17:41,590
possibly cultural group selection kind of uh models, etc.

1068
01:17:41,830 --> 01:17:44,390
But that's not the the interesting point here.

1069
01:17:44,630 --> 01:17:49,910
The the interesting point is that the whole baggage of how to do it and with what

1070
01:17:49,910 --> 01:17:55,910
project had transferred without you know anyone realizing it from the anthropology

1071
01:17:55,910 --> 01:17:58,070
departments to some other places.

1072
01:17:58,560 --> 01:18:04,240
So it may be the case that understanding social groups, um,

1073
01:18:04,480 --> 01:18:10,160
understanding politics and how it works are things that will migrate out of

1074
01:18:10,160 --> 01:18:14,240
disciplines into places where they can be uh done.

1075
01:18:14,800 --> 01:18:20,480
Done seriously by people who actually had no um coalitional

1076
01:18:20,480 --> 01:18:24,480
interests in maintaining a particular theory of social groups or a particular theory of

1077
01:18:24,480 --> 01:18:24,800
politics.

1078
01:18:24,960 --> 01:18:25,920
You see what I mean?

1079
01:18:26,320 --> 01:18:32,230
Um and uh one thing that makes us think that that makes me

1080
01:18:32,230 --> 01:18:37,350
think that that might be the case is also that um

1081
01:18:38,790 --> 01:18:44,790
many of the disciplines that um like traditional

1082
01:18:44,790 --> 01:18:49,110
political science or traditional anthropology or sociology um

1083
01:18:50,760 --> 01:18:52,920
are not really terribly persuasive.

1084
01:18:53,000 --> 01:18:58,200
They don't really create anything that the general public finds very

1085
01:18:58,200 --> 01:18:59,160
interesting.

1086
01:18:59,400 --> 01:19:05,160
So, in a way, there's an opportunity for people in other places to do it for them, as it

1087
01:19:05,160 --> 01:19:05,320
were.

1088
01:19:05,880 --> 01:19:06,440
I think so.

1089
01:19:06,520 --> 01:19:11,320
I mean, I that that that may be widely optimistic, uh, but I think it's possible.

1090
01:19:11,720 --> 01:19:12,840
Can you just unpack that?

1091
01:19:13,000 --> 01:19:13,720
Do it for them.

1092
01:19:13,800 --> 01:19:18,670
So can you just Well that's for example, you know, it's um okay, so

1093
01:19:19,630 --> 01:19:24,430
Dave, you are a brave man, so you say, Oh, I have a theory of uh that starts with a

1094
01:19:24,430 --> 01:19:25,070
question.

1095
01:19:25,310 --> 01:19:29,470
How could minds think of groups and why do they do that?

1096
01:19:29,710 --> 01:19:29,950
Okay.

1097
01:19:30,750 --> 01:19:35,950
And you go to the sociology department where they say we have to reprogram you entirely

1098
01:19:36,110 --> 01:19:40,670
because groups are the you know, the alpha and the omega, they're the beginning and the

1099
01:19:40,670 --> 01:19:42,560
end, uh the starting point.

1100
01:19:42,800 --> 01:19:46,240
There is no individual, there is a group, and then you have a blah blah blah.

1101
01:19:46,400 --> 01:19:48,000
Yeah, you you should feel.

1102
01:19:49,360 --> 01:19:55,360
However, um that question um is a perfectly legitimate

1103
01:19:55,360 --> 01:20:01,360
question that I think in some other disciplines or some other fields or some other

1104
01:20:01,360 --> 01:20:07,280
places you could uh get people interested and uh and and

1105
01:20:07,360 --> 01:20:13,330
and tell people, well, since these guys over there, whose job it is officially, don't want

1106
01:20:13,330 --> 01:20:13,810
to do it.

1107
01:20:14,050 --> 01:20:14,210
Right.

1108
01:20:14,530 --> 01:20:14,930
Oh, I see.

1109
01:20:15,650 --> 01:20:16,610
Let's try to do it.

1110
01:20:16,770 --> 01:20:22,290
And um just like um yes, I mean sort of uh

1111
01:20:22,450 --> 01:20:27,650
linguistics escaped from philology in a sense at some point because the philologists were

1112
01:20:27,650 --> 01:20:31,570
not terribly interested in question, you know, what makes the language work.

1113
01:20:31,970 --> 01:20:37,720
Um and and um and people who are sort of weird

1114
01:20:37,720 --> 01:20:43,560
people like Chomsky came from uh vaguely from an engineering background or stuff and

1115
01:20:43,560 --> 01:20:45,240
thought, oh no, maybe we can do it.

1116
01:20:45,480 --> 01:20:46,520
So I think it's possible.

1117
01:20:46,600 --> 01:20:49,000
I mean, it is I don't want to be too pessimistic.

1118
01:20:49,560 --> 01:20:53,800
So it's it's uh a variation of if you want something done right, do it yourself.

1119
01:20:53,880 --> 01:20:57,400
It's uh if you want something done right, have somebody who doesn't do it for their

1120
01:20:57,400 --> 01:21:03,130
profession when it with the caveat with the asterisk of um it's for

1121
01:21:03,130 --> 01:21:07,210
these situations where the incentive structure doesn't align with competence well that's

1122
01:21:07,530 --> 01:21:12,010
the can of worms right but yeah yes it goes back to that famous saying which i end up

1123
01:21:12,010 --> 01:21:16,570
repeating maybe twice a day which is that it's very hard to change someone's mind when when

1124
01:21:16,570 --> 01:21:21,850
their salary depends on them not changing their minds exactly but I think I think I think

1125
01:21:22,010 --> 01:21:26,010
Pascal like what you've been saying I think is really deep I think it all comes back to

1126
01:21:26,010 --> 01:21:30,860
this production thing where I think if the science has been all about like, well, what are

1127
01:21:30,860 --> 01:21:31,340
voters?

1128
01:21:31,500 --> 01:21:33,500
Why are voters choosing the way they're doing?

1129
01:21:33,660 --> 01:21:35,820
Oh, these stupid voters, oh, people.

1130
01:21:36,300 --> 01:21:40,300
But if you look at public opinion polls, for example, often people are really smart.

1131
01:21:40,460 --> 01:21:42,460
Like there's actually a lot of agreement.

1132
01:21:42,700 --> 01:21:47,820
It really turns to the like pay no attention to the man behind the mirror of what's the

1133
01:21:47,820 --> 01:21:50,300
incentive of the producers.

1134
01:21:50,780 --> 01:21:56,350
Um And I think that's a very subversive message scientifically, politically.

1135
01:21:56,590 --> 01:22:02,350
And I think it's no accident that it's very convenient to worry about the

1136
01:22:02,350 --> 01:22:03,630
consumers of science.

1137
01:22:03,870 --> 01:22:06,190
Like, why doesn't the public like science?

1138
01:22:06,350 --> 01:22:10,590
Not how is our institution not designed to reward merit?

1139
01:22:10,750 --> 01:22:12,190
Because then we have to look at that.

1140
01:22:12,430 --> 01:22:16,670
Or for politics, why are the voters so stupid is an easy, convenient thing.

1141
01:22:16,910 --> 01:22:22,500
But then what are the incentives for the topics that become political, and who what's the

1142
01:22:22,500 --> 01:22:23,220
money behind it?

1143
01:22:23,300 --> 01:22:26,260
And you know, why do you have to have a lot of money to like win an election?

1144
01:22:26,340 --> 01:22:27,300
Like these kinds of things.

1145
01:22:27,460 --> 01:22:28,260
Who's making money?

1146
01:22:28,420 --> 01:22:29,940
So I think it's very subversive.

1147
01:22:30,020 --> 01:22:30,180
Yeah.

1148
01:22:30,820 --> 01:22:36,580
It's true that the the uh incentive structure for uh science as we know it

1149
01:22:37,060 --> 01:22:40,660
uh is far from perfect, and that's an understatement.

1150
01:22:40,820 --> 01:22:44,340
I I remember having a conversation with John Tuby about that.

1151
01:22:44,570 --> 01:22:49,290
One day, where he said, and that was, you know, over dinner, he said, Well, yeah, I mean,

1152
01:22:49,370 --> 01:22:54,890
you know, uh, if anyone wanted to stop scientific progress, they would design uh

1153
01:22:55,210 --> 01:22:56,810
modern science exactly the way it is.

1154
01:22:56,890 --> 01:23:01,050
And I thought it was to throw away a remark like that, and you know, okay, we can move on.

1155
01:23:01,210 --> 01:23:02,330
And no, no, no, no.

1156
01:23:02,490 --> 01:23:07,610
He went on for about 20 minutes to dissect every element

1157
01:23:08,330 --> 01:23:12,490
from you know graduate training to publications to grants to this,

1158
01:23:14,160 --> 01:23:19,840
showing that all of them showing that there was not an

1159
01:23:19,840 --> 01:23:25,120
actual conspiracy, but a set of conspiring factors, all of which converge

1160
01:23:25,680 --> 01:23:31,520
to making uh scientific progress extraordinarily difficult and

1161
01:23:31,680 --> 01:23:33,440
in fact miraculous.

1162
01:23:33,760 --> 01:23:39,520
So it's sort of so I think yes, that's that that's right, but we mustn't let that

1163
01:23:39,520 --> 01:23:42,800
sort of take us too far.

1164
01:23:43,570 --> 01:23:49,410
Another consideration is that um uh now that's a puzzle.

1165
01:23:49,490 --> 01:23:54,370
Uh no that's not a puzzle, but it's uh uh a sort of question I have.

1166
01:23:55,090 --> 01:24:00,690
Um so one of my uh PhD um advisors was uh David Gellner.

1167
01:24:00,850 --> 01:24:05,680
Uh sorry, uh Ernest Gellner, not his son David who's um an anthropologist too.

1168
01:24:05,760 --> 01:24:11,280
But Ernest Garner had this theory of Muslim

1169
01:24:11,280 --> 01:24:14,400
society that is inspired by Im Khaldun.

1170
01:24:14,480 --> 01:24:18,720
And this the idea is that the society goes basically as like a pendulum.

1171
01:24:18,880 --> 01:24:24,800
It swings towards the sort of puritanical version of Islam that is typical of urban

1172
01:24:24,960 --> 01:24:30,720
clerical kind of religious scholars, and then swings back to a

1173
01:24:30,720 --> 01:24:36,670
kind of cult of the saints and miracles and stuff like that, which is more typical

1174
01:24:36,670 --> 01:24:37,870
of tribal culture.

1175
01:24:37,950 --> 01:24:42,590
And then sort of if it goes too far in one direction, it swings back.

1176
01:24:43,150 --> 01:24:49,070
So at the moment in Islam, we're very much at the in the first sort of pendulum swing.

1177
01:24:49,790 --> 01:24:55,310
But anyway, he also had this theory about academic fashions and said that it was the same

1178
01:24:55,390 --> 01:24:59,230
because you know once you have a model, you want to explain to uh use it for lots of

1179
01:24:59,310 --> 01:25:00,190
different stuff.

1180
01:25:00,720 --> 01:25:06,560
And he said, yeah, no, when I was young, Wittgenstein was the big hero, and everyone was de

1181
01:25:06,560 --> 01:25:11,120
facto a relativist because it's all language game and language determines the way you think

1182
01:25:11,200 --> 01:25:11,840
and so forth.

1183
01:25:13,680 --> 01:25:17,920
But then it sort of swung back to another more rationalist position.

1184
01:25:18,000 --> 01:25:22,960
And the reason for that, he said, was that the cultural transmission of relativism is

1185
01:25:22,960 --> 01:25:27,920
really difficult because you have a first generation who say, well, everything is different

1186
01:25:27,920 --> 01:25:29,200
in every culture.

1187
01:25:29,810 --> 01:25:33,890
That's a great discovery because people used to think, no, I mean, there are common human

1188
01:25:33,890 --> 01:25:37,730
interests, you know, like you know, survival, sex, mating.

1189
01:25:38,130 --> 01:25:38,850
No, no, no, no, no.

1190
01:25:38,930 --> 01:25:40,690
It's all completely different in different cultures.

1191
01:25:40,770 --> 01:25:41,890
So you teach that.

1192
01:25:42,050 --> 01:25:45,650
So you teach that to students and they go to various places.

1193
01:25:45,810 --> 01:25:51,010
Now, those students they will never uh make much of a splash if they say, yeah, it's

1194
01:25:51,010 --> 01:25:53,890
completely different here from everywhere else, like I was taught.

1195
01:25:54,050 --> 01:25:54,680
That's it.

1196
01:25:55,000 --> 01:25:59,480
No, the only way they can get some uh attention is by saying, you know what?

1197
01:25:59,640 --> 01:26:01,880
They actually do marry their cross cousin.

1198
01:26:02,920 --> 01:26:04,440
Don't think Don Brown it.

1199
01:26:04,520 --> 01:26:05,480
They they look like that.

1200
01:26:05,640 --> 01:26:09,960
Yes, and they become the kind of Don Brown who says, Well they actually do it in exactly

1201
01:26:09,960 --> 01:26:12,200
the way others others do it, etc.

1202
01:26:13,080 --> 01:26:17,000
And after a while people get bored with this sort of rationalistic stuff and all that, and

1203
01:26:17,000 --> 01:26:21,960
they think, No, no, no, there's a place down in a forest where everyone is very different.

1204
01:26:22,270 --> 01:26:27,950
So there was that theory of pendulum swings, and I I know that another

1205
01:26:27,950 --> 01:26:33,710
anthropologist, Claude Lewis-Strauss, he had another version of this

1206
01:26:33,870 --> 01:26:39,070
pendulum theory, which was that relativism is what you what you have.

1207
01:26:39,230 --> 01:26:42,830
This idea that people live in cultural worlds that are incommensurable.

1208
01:26:43,070 --> 01:26:48,110
Their thoughts are thoughts that you would not have if you are a you know here.

1209
01:26:49,320 --> 01:26:55,320
That this idea uh uh depends crucially on not interacting with them very much.

1210
01:26:55,800 --> 01:27:01,480
So intellectuals in Europe used to have this idea about peasants, that peasants were mired

1211
01:27:01,560 --> 01:27:06,600
in some sort of intellectual universe that was impenetrable to uh educated people.

1212
01:27:06,760 --> 01:27:11,400
So then they had it about Africans, but then they started colonizing Africans so they got

1213
01:27:11,400 --> 01:27:12,280
to know them.

1214
01:27:12,680 --> 01:27:16,710
And the Africans seem a bit, you know, much more reasonable once you know them.

1215
01:27:16,870 --> 01:27:22,390
So now the only places, and that would have been in the 70s, I suppose, when Liv Straw said

1216
01:27:22,390 --> 01:27:27,910
that, the only places about which people were real relativists were in the jungles of Papua

1217
01:27:28,070 --> 01:27:31,670
New Guinea and in the jungles of the Amazon forests.

1218
01:27:31,830 --> 01:27:37,740
So places where you can't just go and check it for yourself And you know, you can't

1219
01:27:37,740 --> 01:27:42,700
call a guy a shaman in Papua New Guinea and say, is it really true that you know your

1220
01:27:42,700 --> 01:27:44,860
ontology is different from others?

1221
01:27:45,660 --> 01:27:49,740
So you you keep those places, but of course that will that will be gone soon.

1222
01:27:49,980 --> 01:27:53,580
So anyway, all this long development was just to say

1223
01:27:56,050 --> 01:28:01,330
in lots of humanities and social sciences, it seems that we've got the pendulum

1224
01:28:01,650 --> 01:28:06,210
swinging to one in one direction and then getting stuck.

1225
01:28:06,450 --> 01:28:08,130
And then it's not swinging back.

1226
01:28:08,290 --> 01:28:13,090
It's it's that everyone is stuck on some very poor equilibrium.

1227
01:28:13,650 --> 01:28:19,570
Um and in anthropology in particular, very much in a sort of um uh

1228
01:28:19,810 --> 01:28:25,320
all cultures are uh valuable and valid, except uh

1229
01:28:25,560 --> 01:28:26,840
Western culture.

1230
01:28:27,320 --> 01:28:32,840
And also, we should all do field work, except we should not do field work because that

1231
01:28:32,840 --> 01:28:36,360
would be invading others and imposing our presence.

1232
01:28:36,920 --> 01:28:39,080
Therefore, we should be activists.

1233
01:28:39,240 --> 01:28:45,240
And that's the sort of um, and and it seems that that is an equilibrium that seems to be

1234
01:28:45,240 --> 01:28:46,840
um stable.

1235
01:28:48,990 --> 01:28:54,670
Except by these sort of there may be external shocks, and you know, we all know that there

1236
01:28:54,670 --> 01:28:58,030
may be uh strong external shocks these days.

1237
01:28:58,110 --> 01:29:03,950
But um but yeah, I mean so I I don't know to what extent it's it's uh one should be

1238
01:29:03,950 --> 01:29:09,630
optimistic about having a social science that's uh that really does

1239
01:29:09,950 --> 01:29:14,350
dig into um the the causes of um behavior.

1240
01:29:15,150 --> 01:29:18,220
Um it may happen, it may not happen.

1241
01:29:18,300 --> 01:29:18,700
I don't know.

1242
01:29:19,020 --> 01:29:24,060
I'm I I'm I'm a little more optimistic in the sense of I think like the opening anecdote

1243
01:29:24,060 --> 01:29:29,020
about the healthcare and like you lose a leg and you're refused service.

1244
01:29:29,100 --> 01:29:33,180
Um because I was living in Germany for, you know, nine years and I'm back to US healthcare.

1245
01:29:33,260 --> 01:29:38,860
I literally have my desk in front of me is flittered with like a healthcare uh paperwork

1246
01:29:39,020 --> 01:29:40,540
because some somebody made a mistake.

1247
01:29:40,620 --> 01:29:42,140
I would have never had to deal with this in Germany.

1248
01:29:42,220 --> 01:29:48,070
But by my point is um the the anecdote about losing a leg and nobody

1249
01:29:48,070 --> 01:29:50,150
paying for it is wrong.

1250
01:29:50,470 --> 01:29:54,710
But it is a marker, it's a coordination marker of the problem, as you said.

1251
01:29:55,350 --> 01:29:59,990
And I actually wonder too if this anthropology thing too is the same thing where it's it

1252
01:29:59,990 --> 01:30:05,830
comes back to like there's a reason for a bit of hyperbole, or it's the superficial

1253
01:30:05,830 --> 01:30:10,790
thing where um the the anthropology will continue.

1254
01:30:11,190 --> 01:30:17,100
It is the pendulum, but it's it but but it's dealing with these the it's butting up against

1255
01:30:17,100 --> 01:30:19,980
there's no more wilderness to explore.

1256
01:30:20,140 --> 01:30:24,060
Now I'm dealing with government agencies, powerful armies.

1257
01:30:24,220 --> 01:30:29,180
Uh these the people here now have enough autonomy that I have to deal with their autonomy.

1258
01:30:29,340 --> 01:30:34,140
So I think like a lot of the expression of you they won't serve you if you're unless your

1259
01:30:34,220 --> 01:30:38,050
leg's cut off is valid, but it's not the right description of the problem.

1260
01:30:38,210 --> 01:30:39,650
It's the it's what I mean.

1261
01:30:39,890 --> 01:30:42,850
It's the um outrage description.

1262
01:30:43,010 --> 01:30:47,410
And I think the anthropologists are doing the same thing for a different set of points, I

1263
01:30:47,410 --> 01:30:47,570
think.

1264
01:30:47,730 --> 01:30:47,970
Yeah.

1265
01:30:48,450 --> 01:30:49,650
So I'm optimistic.

1266
01:30:50,370 --> 01:30:50,690
Okay.

1267
01:30:50,850 --> 01:30:51,010
Okay.

1268
01:30:51,490 --> 01:30:57,410
I mean the thing is the the uh as I said, I mean in some cases you see the the the

1269
01:30:57,490 --> 01:31:02,450
sort of the the problems and the the approach and the ambitions, the project so speak,

1270
01:31:02,940 --> 01:31:04,780
migrate from one place to another.

1271
01:31:04,860 --> 01:31:06,460
So that's possible.

1272
01:31:07,100 --> 01:31:10,300
Um yeah, we'll see.

1273
01:31:10,460 --> 01:31:10,780
Yeah.

1274
01:31:11,100 --> 01:31:14,860
I think I'm more collectively pessimistic, but personally optimistic.

1275
01:31:14,940 --> 01:31:20,220
I th I think Ed Hagen made this remark once where yeah, you know, nobody's asking these

1276
01:31:20,220 --> 01:31:24,140
foundational questions like uh, you know, w what is a group and why do we think in terms of

1277
01:31:24,140 --> 01:31:28,220
groups, stuff like that, you know, basic scientific questions about human nature.

1278
01:31:28,540 --> 01:31:30,690
But that's good because it's more for me.

1279
01:31:30,770 --> 01:31:33,170
You know, I I get more juicy insights to myself.

1280
01:31:33,250 --> 01:31:36,850
I get to make these big discoveries that nobody else is making or nobody else is paying

1281
01:31:36,850 --> 01:31:37,330
attention to.

1282
01:31:37,410 --> 01:31:38,530
And I kind of feel the same way.

1283
01:31:38,610 --> 01:31:39,890
Like I'm a kid in a candy store.

1284
01:31:39,970 --> 01:31:42,370
I have all this low-hanging fruit that I get to pluck.

1285
01:31:42,450 --> 01:31:43,650
Nobody else is plucking it.

1286
01:31:43,730 --> 01:31:48,450
I get to, you know, ask these really fascinating foundational questions and actually make

1287
01:31:48,450 --> 01:31:49,490
progress on answering them.

1288
01:31:49,650 --> 01:31:50,610
Wow, lucky me.

1289
01:31:50,770 --> 01:31:55,250
Like if science were better, then I would be in a crowded market and I would have nothing

1290
01:31:55,250 --> 01:31:55,810
to contribute.

1291
01:31:55,890 --> 01:31:58,460
And you know, I yeah, it's wicked.

1292
01:31:58,620 --> 01:31:59,820
I I I agree with you, David.

1293
01:31:59,900 --> 01:32:03,420
And I think like I mean, no, no smoke up your collective behinds.

1294
01:32:03,500 --> 01:32:08,700
I mean, I think Haskell and David, you're doing incredible work of that type, but I think

1295
01:32:08,700 --> 01:32:12,780
it's this the the reward for doing it is nobody listens to you, right?

1296
01:32:13,100 --> 01:32:18,860
In the sense that I think like I mean, of course, smart um the this is

1297
01:32:18,860 --> 01:32:20,300
everyone's against us, uh right.

1298
01:32:20,380 --> 01:32:25,830
So this is surfing but but but I mean a small number of people who are very smart are very

1299
01:32:25,830 --> 01:32:26,470
interested.

1300
01:32:26,630 --> 01:32:30,870
But this I think this idea of scientists who are like, well, if I'm right, lots of people

1301
01:32:30,870 --> 01:32:32,070
should agree with me.

1302
01:32:32,310 --> 01:32:37,110
And if lots of people, if I'm not popular, if I don't have a lot of attention on me, I'm

1303
01:32:37,110 --> 01:32:42,070
doing something wrong and I have to correct what I'm doing to suss out what will receive

1304
01:32:42,070 --> 01:32:44,310
the most eyeballs or the most attention.

1305
01:32:44,550 --> 01:32:48,440
I think that is uh I completely agree with you, David.

1306
01:32:48,520 --> 01:32:53,560
And I think that's the difference where I think if you accept that, if you're sort of like

1307
01:32:53,560 --> 01:32:59,320
a Buddhist about life is life is social suffering in this sense as a scientist, then I

1308
01:32:59,320 --> 01:33:00,040
think you'll be fine.

1309
01:33:00,120 --> 01:33:02,840
But I think it's harder, I think it's hard for everybody.

1310
01:33:03,080 --> 01:33:09,080
Um uh for some of us, some of the days, some people all every day, and some people can't do

1311
01:33:09,080 --> 01:33:10,200
it, and some people can.

1312
01:33:10,440 --> 01:33:15,390
But I for me at least that's I think the big thing is I think if you think your ideas are

1313
01:33:15,390 --> 01:33:20,430
gonna be popular, if they're scientifically right, that's a wrong assumption.

1314
01:33:21,470 --> 01:33:22,110
Right.

1315
01:33:22,350 --> 01:33:27,390
And well, I mean the thing is the um uh

1316
01:33:28,190 --> 01:33:33,710
yeah, I mean yeah, you have to have some sort of um it's very difficult to

1317
01:33:34,350 --> 01:33:39,790
uh to do good science without a community, so you know it's um that's the

1318
01:33:39,790 --> 01:33:40,990
counterpart of that.

1319
01:33:41,070 --> 01:33:46,900
That's um I'm glad that there is a Santa

1320
01:33:46,980 --> 01:33:52,500
Barbara school and that it's not just two people and uh and I'm glad that there's a Paris

1321
01:33:52,500 --> 01:33:58,260
school and a whatever school that's uh that's good because um that's

1322
01:33:58,500 --> 01:34:04,340
um yeah that is conducive to to to to to better sort of um

1323
01:34:04,580 --> 01:34:05,380
discussions.

1324
01:34:05,540 --> 01:34:11,140
Actually that that leads me to something else I wanted to tell you, but you know, um which

1325
01:34:11,380 --> 01:34:17,210
is that um we should have more um

1326
01:34:17,530 --> 01:34:23,370
cumulative science in what we do, and we tend to

1327
01:34:23,370 --> 01:34:29,050
have an slight overproduction of foundational stuff that creates a

1328
01:34:29,050 --> 01:34:31,370
new sub subfield by itself.

1329
01:34:32,540 --> 01:34:37,740
And um that's kind of uh worrying, and I I

1330
01:34:38,380 --> 01:34:44,300
think that to some degree, some of us sometimes, you see how political

1331
01:34:44,300 --> 01:34:50,060
I've become, um, could be reinventing the wheel a little bit in our

1332
01:34:50,060 --> 01:34:50,460
field.

1333
01:34:50,700 --> 01:34:55,770
So um I thought of a solution to that, And

1334
01:34:56,490 --> 01:35:02,490
so I have a megalomaniac plan for a solution to that, which is

1335
01:35:02,490 --> 01:35:08,410
in analogy with something that happens in happened in mathematics

1336
01:35:08,410 --> 01:35:14,330
in the early 40s, 50s, 60s, which was a group that

1337
01:35:14,330 --> 01:35:16,090
was called Bobacci group.

1338
01:35:16,330 --> 01:35:22,220
And that was a group of mathematicians who realized that lots of foundational issues

1339
01:35:22,220 --> 01:35:23,020
in mathematics.

1340
01:35:23,100 --> 01:35:27,260
It's not that they were not understood, it's that there was a sort of proliferation of ways

1341
01:35:27,260 --> 01:35:28,300
of thinking about it.

1342
01:35:28,380 --> 01:35:30,860
And you know, what the heck is an integral?

1343
01:35:31,020 --> 01:35:34,940
Well, people have various subtypes of it, but they don't know what a type is, and they

1344
01:35:34,940 --> 01:35:37,100
don't care because they're working on some stuff.

1345
01:35:37,260 --> 01:35:42,780
And this produced all sorts of um unclear sort of science.

1346
01:35:43,090 --> 01:35:47,570
So they thought they would do it and they would uh create so they were called Bourbaki,

1347
01:35:47,810 --> 01:35:53,090
which was an imaginary name, and they were a group of uh ten people or something with some

1348
01:35:53,090 --> 01:35:57,330
turnover, and they would publish those books which were in effect anonymous because they

1349
01:35:57,330 --> 01:35:59,650
used the non-diplom uh Bourbaki.

1350
01:36:01,730 --> 01:36:07,650
And their idea was that each of them would try to, for example, write

1351
01:36:07,650 --> 01:36:13,520
a chapter on you know what uh what is an integral in said theory, in such

1352
01:36:13,680 --> 01:36:17,920
in the vocabulary of said theory, because that was their foundational uh language.

1353
01:36:18,320 --> 01:36:22,480
Um, and the others would just sort of say, no, no, it can be much better, or you know, we

1354
01:36:22,480 --> 01:36:23,680
can do it differently, etc.

1355
01:36:23,920 --> 01:36:25,040
And they published those books.

1356
01:36:25,120 --> 01:36:28,800
So I thought we should have the equivalent for evolutionary social sciences.

1357
01:36:28,960 --> 01:36:30,080
What is a social group?

1358
01:36:30,160 --> 01:36:32,080
What are the questions about a social group?

1359
01:36:32,240 --> 01:36:35,120
You know, why is politics not what you think?

1360
01:36:35,930 --> 01:36:38,170
You know, what are kinship terms?

1361
01:36:38,650 --> 01:36:43,210
Why do we have kinship terms as opposed to pure genetic sort of relatedness?

1362
01:36:43,450 --> 01:36:45,610
Why do we have, you know, all these things?

1363
01:36:45,850 --> 01:36:50,890
And I think there's enough of a corpus of stuff that's been produced by people

1364
01:36:51,610 --> 01:36:56,890
that we could produce these sort of uh authoritative, so to speak, sort of foundational

1365
01:36:56,890 --> 01:37:01,210
texts that would say, well, if you're interested in evolutionary social sciences, you

1366
01:37:01,210 --> 01:37:02,250
should go there.

1367
01:37:02,810 --> 01:37:08,740
Um so um the idea is not that I would do it, the idea is

1368
01:37:08,740 --> 01:37:14,660
that I would uh get tons of people to do it or I would ask tons of um

1369
01:37:14,900 --> 01:37:20,420
AI to uh to synthesize stuff for me so that we can put that somewhere.

1370
01:37:20,660 --> 01:37:26,580
But I think that would be a useful project because I realized that um

1371
01:37:27,220 --> 01:37:33,050
uh when you go from one place to another, um uh this year I spent two months in

1372
01:37:33,050 --> 01:37:38,170
Toulouse at the Toulouse School of Economics, which is a place where they have brilliant

1373
01:37:38,170 --> 01:37:39,050
social scientists.

1374
01:37:39,130 --> 01:37:44,730
I mean, they've decided that they'd have a special department for not economists, which

1375
01:37:44,730 --> 01:37:49,850
means in practice economists who work with you know various sort of questions of interest

1376
01:37:49,850 --> 01:37:54,170
to anthropologists, for example, how does cooperation work, you know, and stuff like that.

1377
01:37:56,080 --> 01:38:01,840
And I realized that many things I said in those conversations were pure Santa Barbara

1378
01:38:01,840 --> 01:38:06,080
school dialect, which for me was transparent.

1379
01:38:06,480 --> 01:38:11,920
And they would stop me at oh, so but what do you think by what do you mean by a

1380
01:38:11,920 --> 01:38:13,920
signaling explanation of something?

1381
01:38:14,080 --> 01:38:18,400
And I would have to say, Oh, hang on, what I think I think about that is blah blah blah

1382
01:38:18,480 --> 01:38:18,800
blah blah.

1383
01:38:19,090 --> 01:38:22,930
And of course they would get it because these people are smart and they know about

1384
01:38:22,930 --> 01:38:24,610
evolution and they know about stuff.

1385
01:38:24,690 --> 01:38:28,850
But I realized that there was a whole lot of discourse

1386
01:38:30,450 --> 01:38:35,890
that's where it would be great to have the common

1387
01:38:35,890 --> 01:38:38,850
foundation that would be expressed somewhere.

1388
01:38:39,490 --> 01:38:45,480
So you know the great advantage of this kind of megalmanic

1389
01:38:45,640 --> 01:38:49,880
project is that it uh relies on other people doing tons of work.

1390
01:38:50,440 --> 01:38:53,240
Uh so the best kind of project.

1391
01:38:53,960 --> 01:38:55,800
The best kind of project.

1392
01:38:56,040 --> 01:39:02,040
And uh so I'm not sure the uh it's uh it's likely to take

1393
01:39:02,040 --> 01:39:07,880
off anytime soon, but it it's uh I think it's something that that that could be

1394
01:39:07,880 --> 01:39:13,370
useful, especially as um yes, some of the

1395
01:39:13,690 --> 01:39:19,450
there are foundational questions, but also simply sort of um questions that uh

1396
01:39:19,690 --> 01:39:25,450
students or you know outsiders could have, which is why do you use this

1397
01:39:25,450 --> 01:39:26,410
tool to do this?

1398
01:39:26,570 --> 01:39:30,330
You know, why would game theory be appropriate here and not there?

1399
01:39:30,970 --> 01:39:36,890
Uh why do you use uh some sort of rational choice approximation of what people do

1400
01:39:37,050 --> 01:39:39,770
when you explain this, but then you drop it sometimes?

1401
01:39:39,930 --> 01:39:41,700
You know, that kind of question.

1402
01:39:42,100 --> 01:39:43,780
Um, which would be great.

1403
01:39:43,940 --> 01:39:46,340
It would be great progress if we could do that.

1404
01:39:46,740 --> 01:39:50,820
Um, so anyway, you know, uh watch this space, so to speak.

1405
01:39:50,900 --> 01:39:51,940
Um this is gonna happen.

1406
01:39:52,340 --> 01:39:57,780
I mean, wouldn't how how would what you're describing be different from, say, the uh

1407
01:39:57,780 --> 01:40:01,220
two-volume handbook of evolutionary psychology that David Buss put out?

1408
01:40:01,590 --> 01:40:07,430
It's a bit different because um again the problem that these Bourbaki people had

1409
01:40:07,430 --> 01:40:12,390
in math was the juxtaposition of perfectly fine arguments

1410
01:40:13,190 --> 01:40:19,030
without sometimes without much connection of those of their subparts

1411
01:40:19,030 --> 01:40:21,510
to some uh common core.

1412
01:40:21,750 --> 01:40:27,590
So uh I I've um I've read many chapters of the handbook and

1413
01:40:27,590 --> 01:40:30,960
I've used them for uh teaching a lot.

1414
01:40:31,600 --> 01:40:37,600
And sometimes I've been surprised that's at the sort

1415
01:40:37,600 --> 01:40:43,600
of you know the implications of a certain argument being tacit, but also

1416
01:40:43,600 --> 01:40:47,840
not being the ones that are implied by another chapter.

1417
01:40:48,000 --> 01:40:50,880
It's you know there's a slightly different um angle there.

1418
01:40:50,960 --> 01:40:52,800
But what is the difference between those angles?

1419
01:40:52,880 --> 01:40:58,390
We don't know, and um so maybe that's um so there's an argument for

1420
01:40:58,870 --> 01:41:04,870
not doing this, which is um the science develops if you do lots of good empirical work that

1421
01:41:04,870 --> 01:41:06,310
explains stuff.

1422
01:41:07,110 --> 01:41:10,710
So this kind of foundational project is not is not good.

1423
01:41:11,110 --> 01:41:16,870
Uh it's a waste of time in a way because the foundational stuff will you know uh will

1424
01:41:16,870 --> 01:41:18,710
solve itself at some point.

1425
01:41:19,030 --> 01:41:24,800
Um but I think it would be useful for um uh especially for people

1426
01:41:24,800 --> 01:41:30,720
who want to use that kind of science, but are not in it, are not doing it.

1427
01:41:31,040 --> 01:41:33,600
So suppose you're in political science or history.

1428
01:41:33,680 --> 01:41:38,160
You want to understand some historical development, and you're told, well, this is

1429
01:41:38,160 --> 01:41:40,880
something about leadership and leadership and followership.

1430
01:41:40,960 --> 01:41:42,480
You know, there are those models of it.

1431
01:41:42,640 --> 01:41:43,600
Where where are the models?

1432
01:41:43,760 --> 01:41:44,720
What are the models?

1433
01:41:44,960 --> 01:41:48,880
It's not absolutely clear, you know, there's a a literature about that.

1434
01:41:49,790 --> 01:41:55,710
okay, so that's that's um that's my um uh crazy idea uh uh uh at

1435
01:41:55,710 --> 01:41:56,270
the moment.

1436
01:41:56,350 --> 01:41:58,110
I mean I I'm I'm not sure.

1437
01:41:58,270 --> 01:42:04,030
Well I'm almost sure it's not gonna work, but you know it's uh it's worth toying with.

1438
01:42:04,990 --> 01:42:05,470
Yeah.

1439
01:42:05,710 --> 01:42:11,470
Uh Par Paris is uh or Europe is lovely in summer, so maybe if there's funding to

1440
01:42:11,470 --> 01:42:17,360
get people all in one place over the summer, uh yeah somewhere like Berlin or Paris

1441
01:42:17,360 --> 01:42:18,800
or or somewhere like that.

1442
01:42:18,960 --> 01:42:19,600
That's right.

1443
01:42:20,000 --> 01:42:25,920
Thing is that I I've always been a uh I'm you know it's uh funny because I

1444
01:42:25,920 --> 01:42:31,440
I remember that uh Lida Cosmetis described herself as uh Grunge

1445
01:42:31,440 --> 01:42:37,360
repellent and uh I must say I kind of share that quality so you

1446
01:42:37,360 --> 01:42:43,250
know and I know some people I I know some people I couldn't name but you know who

1447
01:42:43,250 --> 01:42:49,250
just sort of float around in the academic world and grants attached themselves to these

1448
01:42:49,250 --> 01:42:51,090
people like barnacles on a whale.

1449
01:42:51,170 --> 01:42:52,210
I mean it's amazing.

1450
01:42:52,290 --> 01:42:58,210
And they just sort of uh so um so yes, but the uh it's true

1451
01:42:58,290 --> 01:43:03,810
the attractions of uh a nice place could sort of uh but again I'm not sure that getting

1452
01:43:03,810 --> 01:43:08,770
people to to s to to to sit around the table might be the best thing.

1453
01:43:08,850 --> 01:43:14,380
I I think maybe some sort of more um automated way of

1454
01:43:14,380 --> 01:43:17,580
getting to the the core of what they're saying could be good.

1455
01:43:18,380 --> 01:43:24,220
Although you know that that implies the belief in in um in the current

1456
01:43:24,220 --> 01:43:26,460
models that may be a bit sort of misplaced.

1457
01:43:26,540 --> 01:43:27,260
But right.

1458
01:43:27,500 --> 01:43:33,420
Or it would have to train on just the correct it feels like the compositional AI stuff,

1459
01:43:33,580 --> 01:43:39,340
it's to the degree it averages things, it's sort of if it's an area that is outside

1460
01:43:39,340 --> 01:43:43,390
of the the median, then it's gonna be wrong.

1461
01:43:43,470 --> 01:43:44,670
So yeah, exactly.

1462
01:43:44,750 --> 01:43:45,150
Yeah, yeah.

1463
01:43:45,470 --> 01:43:46,030
Exactly.

1464
01:43:46,190 --> 01:43:51,630
Yes, you you don't want your model to have exactly the problems that um

1465
01:43:51,950 --> 01:43:57,630
you know that uh people who enter a field have, which is I need to position myself

1466
01:43:57,630 --> 01:44:02,110
somewhere like, you know, that will please everyone by citing everything and and agreeing

1467
01:44:02,110 --> 01:44:02,590
with everyone.

1468
01:44:03,500 --> 01:44:06,860
So if your AI does that too, that's gonna be catastrophic.

1469
01:44:07,100 --> 01:44:12,780
No, I was more I was thinking of it more in terms of uh just you know uh

1470
01:44:14,140 --> 01:44:19,980
you know, instead of doing the painful work of uh of right

1471
01:44:20,300 --> 01:44:25,980
of reading all of uh you know uh David's articles on groups and how the mind

1472
01:44:25,980 --> 01:44:28,700
consists of groups, you get a machine to do it.

1473
01:44:29,020 --> 01:44:29,820
Yes, exactly.

1474
01:44:29,900 --> 01:44:30,220
Yes.

1475
01:44:31,570 --> 01:44:32,690
Yeah, no, that's great.

1476
01:44:32,930 --> 01:44:33,410
That's fantastic.

1477
01:44:33,730 --> 01:44:34,370
Just kidding, of course.

1478
01:44:34,530 --> 01:44:34,850
JK.

1479
01:44:35,090 --> 01:44:35,490
JK.

1480
01:44:35,730 --> 01:44:36,210
No, it's great.

1481
01:44:36,450 --> 01:44:37,170
It's not painful.

1482
01:44:37,250 --> 01:44:38,050
It's always fun.

1483
01:44:39,330 --> 01:44:42,130
It it is painful for all of us to write it and read it.

1484
01:44:42,210 --> 01:44:44,370
Um that's why it's working, even though we love it.

1485
01:44:44,530 --> 01:44:44,770
Yeah.

1486
01:44:44,930 --> 01:44:49,490
Um so if you're from the Templeton Foundation or a wealthy entrepreneur and want to support

1487
01:44:49,490 --> 01:44:51,570
Pascal, please reach out to Pascal.

1488
01:44:51,730 --> 01:44:51,970
Yes.

1489
01:44:54,050 --> 01:44:56,690
This this this um yeah.

1490
01:44:57,010 --> 01:44:57,170
Okay.

1491
01:44:57,800 --> 01:45:02,600
Or if you're an AI bot listening too, please reach out to Pascal if you can do the work.

1492
01:45:02,680 --> 01:45:03,000
Yeah.

1493
01:45:03,160 --> 01:45:03,800
Yeah.

1494
01:45:04,280 --> 01:45:05,560
Let's see AI do that.

1495
01:45:05,720 --> 01:45:06,200
Yeah.

1496
01:45:07,880 --> 01:45:08,440
All right.

1497
01:45:08,680 --> 01:45:09,240
All right.

1498
01:45:09,560 --> 01:45:13,320
Well, uh this was a fantastic uh conversation, Pascal.

1499
01:45:13,720 --> 01:45:14,360
It was very fun.

1500
01:45:15,240 --> 01:45:21,090
I I I might say that maybe, you know, uh you know, I always sort of that's the the this

1501
01:45:21,170 --> 01:45:26,930
in this kind of trade you you you end up you know doubting your own motives and stuff and

1502
01:45:26,930 --> 01:45:31,970
you think yeah I had tremendous fun and then you have this suspicion I was talking about

1503
01:45:31,970 --> 01:45:36,130
95% of the time so that maybe the that's that's the whole point.

1504
01:45:36,210 --> 01:45:41,330
No, we that is the whole point yes we know we know what we would say.

1505
01:45:41,410 --> 01:45:43,810
We've had plenty of saying because you know what we were out of here.

1506
01:45:45,090 --> 01:45:47,890
So people are scared about it, yes.

1507
01:45:48,100 --> 01:45:48,260
Yeah.

1508
01:45:48,420 --> 01:45:50,820
I used to tell my students, yes, you have to talk.

1509
01:45:50,980 --> 01:45:51,540
Please talk.

1510
01:45:51,620 --> 01:45:52,180
Ask questions.

1511
01:45:52,260 --> 01:45:55,060
Because you know, if you don't, I will carry on.

1512
01:45:55,300 --> 01:45:58,180
I will carry on for the whole hour.

1513
01:45:58,260 --> 01:45:59,380
And that's it.

1514
01:45:59,780 --> 01:46:01,620
Anyway, yes, no, those great fun.

1515
01:46:01,700 --> 01:46:01,940
Thank you.

1516
01:46:02,500 --> 01:46:03,700
Yeah, thank you, Pascal.

1517
01:46:03,780 --> 01:46:04,900
Uh it was it was a pleasure.

1518
01:46:04,980 --> 01:46:10,180
And I uh I always like um ending episodes because I get to say things, uh this is quasi

1519
01:46:10,340 --> 01:46:16,180
public, I suppose, but like uh uh your work has been so inspirational for so many

1520
01:46:16,180 --> 01:46:17,060
young people.

1521
01:46:17,370 --> 01:46:20,330
Um, and uh many myself included.

1522
01:46:20,410 --> 01:46:20,570
Yeah.

1523
01:46:20,730 --> 01:46:23,050
Yes, many people um even though I'm not that young.

1524
01:46:23,290 --> 01:46:24,650
Uh many yes, exactly.

1525
01:46:24,730 --> 01:46:28,810
Uh many people have mentioned like religion explained or other things that you've done that

1526
01:46:28,810 --> 01:46:33,290
were really foundational to like unpacking this hidden world below the the level of the

1527
01:46:33,290 --> 01:46:34,570
super superficial.

1528
01:46:34,730 --> 01:46:35,610
So thank you for that.

1529
01:46:35,770 --> 01:46:41,400
And I think you know, as as time will be um marching forward fortunately or unfortunately

1530
01:46:41,480 --> 01:46:46,680
for evolutionary psychology um your work uh is gonna be seen as this some of this

1531
01:46:46,680 --> 01:46:50,120
foundational stuff and i'm sure the AI will uh will understand.

1532
01:46:50,440 --> 01:46:54,920
No no no no stop that stop that thank you for your service.

1533
01:46:55,160 --> 01:46:56,280
Yes thank you for your service.

1534
01:46:57,480 --> 01:47:03,240
Okay David

1535
01:47:03,320 --> 01:47:08,710
um you uh we should do an episode of um this

1536
01:47:08,710 --> 01:47:11,670
podcast fr live from from Paris.

1537
01:47:12,630 --> 01:47:13,270
Yeah.

1538
01:47:13,430 --> 01:47:13,750
Yeah.

1539
01:47:13,990 --> 01:47:16,230
I mean uh uh like us in Paris?

1540
01:47:16,470 --> 01:47:20,550
Yeah, we should all get together in Paris and all go to Paris and do I mean that I mean I

1541
01:47:20,550 --> 01:47:21,110
love Paris.

1542
01:47:21,190 --> 01:47:22,870
I Paris is always a banger.

1543
01:47:22,950 --> 01:47:27,420
Every time you go, it's just beautiful, the food is great, the music is great, like the

1544
01:47:27,420 --> 01:47:28,860
architecture's great, like everything.

1545
01:47:29,020 --> 01:47:33,420
It's just uh can't for those of you who like can't afford to travel to Paris, I understand

1546
01:47:33,420 --> 01:47:37,900
how you're feeling because I was like you and then I moved to Europe and I could fly to

1547
01:47:37,900 --> 01:47:39,820
Paris for f literally forty Euros.

1548
01:47:39,900 --> 01:47:41,500
And so I can say no.

1549
01:47:41,660 --> 01:47:44,140
Um almost every time I go to Paris it rains though.

1550
01:47:44,220 --> 01:47:46,450
I don't know why that is That's too bad.

1551
01:47:46,610 --> 01:47:46,770
Yeah.

1552
01:47:47,010 --> 01:47:50,450
But even when it's even when it rains, it's no, it's also it's so photogenic.

1553
01:47:50,530 --> 01:47:55,730
I have like so many pictures of like beautiful cobble, you know, dark the bridges, yeah.

1554
01:47:59,010 --> 01:48:00,770
So we should we should make that happen.

1555
01:48:00,930 --> 01:48:03,010
So I would I mean I'm always down to go to Paris.

1556
01:48:03,090 --> 01:48:09,090
That's yeah, so maybe if you're listening and you would like to

1557
01:48:09,090 --> 01:48:11,970
help us do that, how can people help us do that?

1558
01:48:12,660 --> 01:48:17,620
Well, you can give us lots of money for our current expedition on our Patreon page.

1559
01:48:17,700 --> 01:48:21,860
And you can flag it for uh David for David and Dave to go to Paris.

1560
01:48:22,100 --> 01:48:23,060
Yeah, exactly.

1561
01:48:23,300 --> 01:48:23,940
Sounds good.

1562
01:48:24,340 --> 01:48:25,140
I think that's enough.

1563
01:48:25,620 --> 01:48:27,620
We would love to go to Paris on your dime.

1564
01:48:27,700 --> 01:48:28,740
So please make that happen.

1565
01:48:28,820 --> 01:48:29,620
Visit our Patreon page.

1566
01:48:29,860 --> 01:48:34,580
It's like what Pascal said the the idea is uh it's a good project when it's somebody

1567
01:48:34,900 --> 01:48:36,100
involves somebody else's work.

1568
01:48:36,180 --> 01:48:37,700
So but um That is true.

1569
01:48:37,940 --> 01:48:43,930
Uh but we're really um oh David, we are um I looked up like lists of social science

1570
01:48:43,930 --> 01:48:49,690
podcasts and somehow we're like in the and this says very this this reflects very poorly on

1571
01:48:49,690 --> 01:48:52,650
the social science podcasts is somehow we're in the top hundred.

1572
01:48:53,290 --> 01:48:53,690
Really?

1573
01:48:54,010 --> 01:48:55,130
Social science podcasts.

1574
01:48:55,210 --> 01:48:55,530
Yeah.

1575
01:48:55,850 --> 01:48:56,170
Cool.

1576
01:48:56,250 --> 01:48:57,850
I didn't even know there were a hundred of them.

1577
01:48:59,050 --> 01:48:59,370
Yeah.

1578
01:48:59,610 --> 01:49:00,490
Yeah exactly.

1579
01:49:00,570 --> 01:49:05,380
That might it might just be a gimmick for like, you know, um I don't know, micro targeting

1580
01:49:05,380 --> 01:49:05,940
marketing or something.

1581
01:49:06,500 --> 01:49:08,340
Are we like number ninety nine or whatever?

1582
01:49:16,980 --> 01:49:18,500
But you know, hey it's cool.

1583
01:49:18,580 --> 01:49:19,860
I can brag about that next time.

1584
01:49:19,940 --> 01:49:20,820
People ask me about the podcast.

1585
01:49:22,260 --> 01:49:23,140
Yeah, top one hundred.

1586
01:49:23,220 --> 01:49:24,660
We're a top one hundred podcasts.

1587
01:49:24,980 --> 01:49:28,270
Out of a hundred and five, Which is pretty impressive.

1588
01:49:29,230 --> 01:49:31,470
Um, but uh but thank you all for listening.

1589
01:49:31,630 --> 01:49:34,270
And um it was just lovely to talk to Pascal.

1590
01:49:34,350 --> 01:49:38,910
Um one of my favorite things about this podcast is just chance to talk to these lovely

1591
01:49:38,910 --> 01:49:41,070
people um that we don't always hear from.

1592
01:49:41,390 --> 01:49:41,790
Yeah.

1593
01:49:42,030 --> 01:49:42,430
Absolutely.

1594
01:49:42,830 --> 01:49:47,550
So talk to somebody that you haven't talked to often that you love in your life this week,

1595
01:49:47,630 --> 01:49:49,070
and we'll talk to you next week.

1596
01:49:49,400 --> 01:49:50,520
Yeah, that's good advice.

1597
01:49:50,680 --> 01:49:51,880
Call someone up that's awesome.

1598
01:49:52,120 --> 01:49:52,280
Yeah.

1599
01:49:52,440 --> 01:49:52,600
All right.

1600
01:49:53,080 --> 01:49:56,440
Lori Lori Santos said use your phone as a phone, not as a computer.

1601
01:49:56,760 --> 01:49:57,160
Yep.

1602
01:49:57,320 --> 01:49:58,520
I like that advice.

1603
01:49:58,760 --> 01:49:59,160
All right.

1604
01:49:59,320 --> 01:50:00,680
Well get to it.

1605
01:50:00,760 --> 01:50:00,920
Yeah.

1606
01:50:01,240 --> 01:50:01,720
See you next week.

1607
01:50:01,960 --> 01:50:04,600
You can hang up do you hang up a podcast?

1608
01:50:04,760 --> 01:50:05,960
You stop the podcast.

1609
01:50:07,080 --> 01:50:07,720
Turn it off.

1610
01:50:07,960 --> 01:50:08,200
Okay.

1611
01:50:08,280 --> 01:50:08,840
Turn it off.

1612
01:50:08,920 --> 01:50:09,160
Okay.

1613
01:50:09,240 --> 01:50:11,890
Uh and uh and three two on Q manifort.