Producing Belief with Pascal Boyer
2026-06-23 12:00:00.000 +00:00

This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. I'm David Pinsov. I'm David David Petrizowski. And this is Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By actual evolutionary psychologists. Yes, and while he needs no introduction, we should probably give you one anyway, just as a formality. Oh, I I totally forgot. I blinked. Yeah. Well, anyway, you have to listen to this delightful episode with Pascal Boyer about a word that Dad Dunan, I think it was Shirley, or something like that. Um I guess it wasn't minimally counterintuitive enough for me to remember it. Was it that was a reference to some of um Pascal's work? Um and Pascal, uh, for those who don't know, one of his early books was uh Religion Explained.

And David, didn't you say that that was really formative for you? It well, I mean, I'm I mean, basically everything he's written has been formative for me, but yeah, Religion Explains a fantastic book. Um, really great, crystal clear uh laying out of the logic of evolutionary cognitive thinking and how it can explain different facets of religious ideas. Uh, but what was interesting is he in in in large part has moved beyond that specific framework in terms of understanding cultural products in terms of the consumer of cultural items. And Religion Explained is very much about why certain ideas are attractive or sticky to the human mind. He is going in a different direction, which I think is really exciting and novel and

powerful, which is focusing on the production side of culture. So why do people produce uh cultural items like religious ideas, minimally counterintuitive context, concepts, uh shamanism, political ideas? We get into all of that. Yeah, it was a lovely conversation. I could listen to Pascal all day, and this is a sample of his wide-ranging um and just brilliant insights. And there's sometimes when I talk to people um and they're doing broad overviews, it feels like a million miles high, and we're not really dealing with bes specifics. And somehow Pascal manages to simultaneously cover a lot of ground, but be very concrete. Um, and there's just a lot of fun examples of mysteries. And I feel like this was a good episode where we were once again sort of tackling problems

that are very specific, and it was really fun. Yes. And as as always, we drift toward uh the incentive structures surrounding science toward the end of the episode. Which I guess what we always tend to do with every guest. Yes, exactly. But yeah, um, but yeah, yeah, it's so it is. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, and on that note, um uh enjoy this episode and hope everybody's having a good summer, um, which is officially upon us now. Yes, enjoy the summer and enjoy the episode. Pascal, what is your birthday? Oh, my birthday is on well, uh no, it is uh a delicate topic because I've realized, you know, I hate birthdays because I find it depressing to you know be one one year closer to death. And I wondered why people would want to um

to wish me a happy birthday. And then I realized that um there are beliefs in the human minds that you cannot change by explicit um argument and instruction. And uh so every year there are um people among whom are some of our friends who uh send me an email saying, Yeah, I know that you hate to um to have people with you wish you a happy birthday, and I know you find it depressing, but hey, you know why not? Okay, let's go happy birthday. It's a bit like and for me, it's so weird because it's a bit like you know, if I told people, you know, uh, this food makes me vomit, or this thing is hugely painful on my leg, and they would just say, Oh, yeah, let's carry on doing it. Yeah. So there are beliefs and motivations that you cannot erase from the mind, but if

that if that is the only example I have, it's not a great article to uh to write. So I'm trying to get some other examples. Who would have thought the answer to a simple question like happy birthday would be so interesting. Well no I mean I I have to follow up. So you you mentioned uh beliefs that are impervious to uh reason uh or that you you cannot talk someone out of the belief that we ought to celebrate people's birthdays, we ought to wish Pascal a happy birthday. What's going on with those types of beliefs? Seems rather strange from uh an adaptationist perspective. That's right. And there are so many I mean the thing is that this is more or less um my job. You know, I wouldn't have a job if uh beliefs were mostly um

amenable to to argument. And um it seems to me that there's such a great variety of situations where um we have a uh belief. So first of all we have motivated beliefs of course. And I'll tell you there's one thing that I find um I've found really interesting um over the years is um a great privilege if you live in the US and if you're American as I am, is to uh go to Europe and have people explain to you what's going on in the US. And they tell you with great detail, and then you tell them, Well, you know, it's not quite exactly like that and stuff like that. And they say, No, no, no, you don't know. Um, and and you've become American, you're naive, you believe in the propaganda, so flamba. So I give you one example, which is that uh, and I've heard that over the years quite a few

times, that people tell me, Well, yes, you know, there's uh there are so many problems in the US, but one of them is you know, if you know you know, your body is uh cut in two, or whatever, or something, and you show up at the hospital, they'll ask you if you have money. And if you don't have enough money, they'll tell you that's it. You know, we can't do anything for you. And over the years, I've tried to tell people that does not happen. That could not happen, that would be wildly illegal. Uh but anyway, it does not happen like that. It's true that there are problems about paying for your medical bills in the US. But the problem is not that you show up with, you know, your missing leg, you know, in your

arms, and people tell you, ah no, no, no, you know, show me your Visa card first. It's not like that. So I've told people that no, it's not like that, and they've told me, no, you're wrong. And there's worse than that. I had a cousin, and that's in England, a cousin to whom I explained with all the facts that it's not possible, it just doesn't work like that, etc. And she finally admitted, she said, Oh, yeah, okay, no, that must be one of those urban legends about the US. And a year later, or two years later, I see her and she tells me, Yeah, one of the problems about the US is that you know you go to a hospital and they'll tell you, you know, if you don't have the money, we can't treat you and so on.

So the belief had managed to come back and invade the sort of mental space. Um, despite this person's sort of sincere um uh agreement that um the belief had been based on some uh false um you know impressions or facts. But anyway, so if I um but since I I I uh studied beliefs that um other people have to think are not grounded in fact and argument like religious belief. And we have to think that because they are diverse enough that if one of them is true, the others are certainly false. And I've come to a sort of realization that the way we used to approach these things in the past. And I'm sorry if we have to get into the weeds of that kind of thing and straight away talk about cultural evolution and stuff like that.

But here's the here's the situation. It seems to me that uh for many, many years, when we talk about cultural evolution, about what you know, why why are there what Dance Berber would call attractors? That is, you know, the notion of a very powerful being who has a mind like ours, but has physics that is very much unlike ours. That's what Sperby would call an attractor, which is a region of conceptual space that is occupied more often than random distribution of concepts would predict. Um we thought about that and I did only in terms of consumption, so to speak. That is a sort of great variety of ideas sort of keep being churned out by people in their conversations or whatever. And some of them stick and the ones that stick are the ones we see as cultural trends.

So you could imagine in that picture that um every morning we start with a completely random sort of set of ideas and we all invent religions and stuff like that and by four PM we've settled on religions that have a you know a powerful um physically counterintuitive agent because that's the way the human minds work and they consume that stuff and the rest they just discard. That is a powerful um um um a powerful view uh but it has a certain there's a certain side of those um things that's missing and I think is more and more important and I more think more and more is is quite important and that is the production side rather than the consumption side that is why on earth would people produce those ideas?

I mean, why would I tell you that, oh, you know what happened? You know, there's this agent that you can't see, but you know, we can do stuff, etc. In and sort of trying to think why is it that we didn't think about that? Uh, because after all, the production of those things is not random. It is not a case the case that people start every morning and invent you know two million religions and then one of them makes it by 4 p.m. It's not really like that. And I can give you in a in a minute many examples of that. But why didn't we think about that? And the reason, because after all, we're adaptationists, so what people do should be of interest in terms of fitness, um, you know, possible fitness interests and stuff.

We didn't think about that because we were thinking of culture as analogous to genetic evolution and selection. And in genetic evolution or in evolution by natural selection, on the whole, you can say that the production is random because the production is mutations, and mutations are not really directed. So by analogy, people thought, well, maybe people have interests and they try to push certain religions or stuff. But it doesn't matter because even if it was random, the consumption sort of trends would mean that certain act attractors stabilize, that by 4 p.m. you have the religions we know. So it doesn't matter if it's not produced randomly. And I think I'm more, I'm more and more sort of inclined to think that this was a mistake.

And that actually we can find out a lot about um cultural um material about its features and stuff like that. If we think what are the fitness interests that lead certain people to try and push these things on others, and in and also try to make them turn them into common knowledge That is, you know, it's not just that I'm trying to tell you that you, David and David, that there is a an omniscient agent that can do lots of stuff. It's also that I would like you guys to think that everyone knows that. That it's a sort of uh, you know, um what um John Tuby would have called the mutually registered kind of state of affairs. Okay, so that's um that's um that's one thing that I I over the last five or years or so I've been trying to to think of

domains where we could think in terms of production. And I must say that it's um it's very good that um some people around me have tr started thinking the same way and doing the same kind of thing especially those people that Kim Sternley called the Paris School of Evolutionary Psychology, like Jean-Baptiste André or Nicolas Beaumar and Olivier Morin, people like that. Which, by the way, was brilliant. It was brilliant. Not that there is a school, but it's brilliant to invent the idea of a school and that it has certain sort of a certain it's just it's a divergence or maybe a splinter from the Santa Barbara school, which itself is very far away from the LA school and stuff like that. This is fantastic because you know, let's face it, we often are 20

people talking to another sort of bunch of 10 people, and decided that we're massively more on the right side than they are. But if we're described as a school, you know, addressing our school, it all gives us an air of solidity to these little. Somebody shovel dirt to make our building possible, I feel so. Right, that's that's the sort of thing. So I've been really uh I've been quite reassured that this production idea is not too bad by the fact that um you know others have thought about it too. And um I was talking to uh no I was um emailing um another Cultural Revolution person today who's um Alberto Acerbi who does stuff on cultural evolution and lots of models of um and he himself told me that yes he's

very much thinking in terms of um trying to formalize this notion of um production models, you know, why do we force try to force certain ideas on other people? A good example I think was an article that came out in BBS a while ago by Leo Fiduci, who's working on morality, and had this Um this model of Puritanical morality, which is very much a um uh a model of that kind, in the sense that it's not just that puritanical morality has some aspects that make it good to think and possibly turn into a tractor, it's also that there are people who have something important at stake in making you behave in a way that conforms with that morality, especially if they themselves then have invested um in that kind of uh moral value.

So, you know, if I try to uh have a stable marriage and not sort of uh look around for um uh what we used to call uh short-term mating. Um if I don't do that, I have an interest in people around me not doing it either. Um because that's um otherwise, you know, most of what I invested in that strategy might be lost. Um so I think this idea is sort of um spreading in lots of people who used to think of um of cultural evolution only in terms of um uh consumption. So that's that's that's where I'm at. And that's um what I would like to talk about more. But um I'm sure you guys have you know widely diverse divergence. Oh yeah the another thing is that the this um uh podcast, since I have the two Davids here, I must say that I also um have

lots of things to ask you or to discuss about two things that you may be interested in. One is how groups get built and why they get built at all, and the other one is the uh psychology of politics in the modern world. I just finished a little book that's about uh politics. That's a kind of all you should know about the way F-Psych or evolutionary psychology can inform what we think about politics. And so, for example, in in uh one chapter I I talk about the um vehemence and the stridency of political beliefs and arguments and stuff like that. And that as I say, the obvious, obvious um uh model that explains that is some kind of alliance model of uh whereby you know uh what is at stake is so extremely um emotionally so strong and so important,

uh, because it concerns something vastly more important than uh what should we do about uh social security payments in the next 10 years. It's about who are you with and who are you accounts and you know uh how many people can I recruit to this or that coalition. So um this is again uh something that has to do with production in the sense that you know uh people one thing that I find really interesting about political opinions and I must say I I got that from when I was a child that I heard political discussions in my family and you know especially with the extended family where people would shout at each other constantly about those things. And it struck me even as a child, really, sort of 10-year-old, I thought, but if I thought that

whatever they were talking about, I don't know, sort of retirement should be abolished or unemployment should be, you know, this or that, If I if I really thought that I know the truth about that, why would I want to bother people with it? I mean, after all, I know the truth about whether you know Twizzlers are better than other kinds of candy, but I don't care if others have different kind of ideas about that. So um yes, and another component of this um um politics argument is about groups and how they um they get to um exist at all but that's something we can talk about in in a minute i don't want to uh stun you with a sort of barrage of arguments and ideas before um you get to actually ask questions fantastic i love it uh pascal had i i to re to to

paraphrase what i'm hearing uh in the past it was almost like people, I like to think a good analogy would be like buyers and sellers in a market. And cultural evolution had been, probably for methodological reasons, as you said, um, really focused on just the um the buyers, as if the the people who are the consumers, and so any model would just sort of predict this is what is going to happen, and it's all just focused on the the buyers. But of course, the sellers. If you you're not gonna have a good model of what's gonna happen in the market if you don't include the fact that um sellers can um collude or have an interest, and there's a there can be a conflicts of interest or not. Um yeah, yeah.

And and um I I think it's it's um it's very much the case in the in the domain where I you know, I used to work on religious stuff and um I did that for a while and then for about twenty years I tried to shed that and get rid of that, but you know, ki people kept telling me, yeah no no you should do this and you should. So um because I don't really have an existential interest in religion uh as such. And uh but um yes, I mean in that domain, true, and I I I it's true too. I I was I was talking about this puritanical stuff, but you can see it in other domains, and that's why I got really um interested in two other cases where it's it's it's quite clear. One of them is shamanism, in the sense that everyone,

and me included, you know, I'm not I'm not better than the other guys. Um, everyone sort of thought of shamanism in terms of consumption. So thinking once someone comes up with this idea that I put myself in a weird um mental state, so I start sort of spouting gibberish and stuff, there is a strong sort of impression from people that my mind is not directing what I'm saying anymore. Which leads to another sort of rather simple inference, which is maybe another mind is directing what's going on. And once you've got this trick, people will be fascinated and there will be a tremendous sort of cultural success for this kind of idea. But once again, the idea was, well, it's as if everyone in the morning

sort of started a bit of shamanism and uh stuff like that. But some versions work and some versions don't work. So by four PM we have shamanism as we know it. Uh but it's not like that. And um and there is a fitness interest in in getting other people to think that you have uh particular powers, and that's why we should um study that. Um the other one that I try and in the in this case it's not too complicated in the sense that you know uh people can um get prestige and some amount of of political power out of being recognized as uh thing. I was recently reading a review by Ed Hagan and um Zach Garfield and maybe someone else of the sort of criteria for um well the sort of trace that um make um chiefs or leaders uh um

convincing or accepted or appreciated in uh small-scale societies. And I was a bit surprised, they report they were surprised, I was a bit surprised too by the fact that uh we have the obvious ones that we would have thought about in um terms of leadership psychology, such as competence, the sort of the art of you know getting people to agree instead of conflict resolution, as people call it, and competence, like being a good hunter and being where things grow and stuff like that. But also the sort of more dominance-related trace in case there is an intergroup conflict. You want someone who is more dominant, even if they are less cooperative. That's fine, but they said that actually one of the proximal sort of traits that seem to be

very important is some kind of religious competence, like shamanism and things like that. So I don't know how that works exactly. But still, that means that, if anything, that means that there is a production aspect to offering shamanism to others, which may include some bid on political influence, uh political power. And um, so that should be um uh we should think about that when we make models of these uh things or when we try to explain their uh their cultural success. And another case that I found really interesting, and that's maybe something yeah, that's a bit more complicated, is uh was the question: why is it that um divination is such a successful uh cultural gadget? So almost everywhere in the world you'll have some um way

of so divination is simply having a technique that produces certain utterances and then having an assumption that the statements produced by that technique are different from the others and they're more likely to be true. Now there's there's um almost a century of anthropology of trying to ignore that question. You know, why do people think that's um a criterion of truth? You know, I sort of uh you know behead a chicken and see where it runs and sort of tell you, well, the way it runs tells me that your sister-in-law is trying to uh bewitch you or something. And people say, well, now that's the the chicken has said it, it's much more, you know, it's um we can all agree that that's what's going on and uh we have to do something about

it. And I was wondering why why not uh face this question? And um so I mean to it to cut a long story short, I mean the the thing is that one one feature of all those divination procedures is that the person who's doing this sort of technical stuff says, I have nothing to do with what this technique will produce. I don't know what it says. I mean, I can't predict what it will say. Sometimes it's not true, sometimes it's true, but that doesn't matter. The big thing is too, uh, the big argument is I have nothing to do with this utterance. So this utterance that says, for example, your sister-in-law is really trying to bewitch you, it's an utterance that's produced by no one. And there are lots of situations in which it's really vital to have a

description of the situation that is not anyone, anyone's description, anyone in particular. So, as I was saying, if you think that someone is bewitching you, like you know, you get sick, and you know, Um there may be all sorts of opinions on this thing. Um because the the the the the fact of the matter is inscrutable. I mean, even if you thought that witchcraft does produce um illness, well you wouldn't know who did it and stuff. So it's inscrutable. However, um opinions about that are not without their costs. And so if I say that it's your sister-in-law, it's it's uh I think it is, and that's my opinion. Okay. Well, your sister-in-law, she might have allies, she may have friends, um, and those people might not like this uh diagnosis, and they might, for example, think that I'm

saying that just to deflect my obvious involvement in this case, in which you know it's a bit suspicious that I go around sort of denouncing others and stuff like that. So, in this kind of situation, it's not that the practitioner has much of an interest in the statement being this, that, or the other. It's more that everyone around these people has a great interest in having a description of a situation that was not attributed to any person in particular. That makes consensus building much easier because you have consensus without allying with one particular coalition or group. So that could explain the success. And I think that's that may be one reason why people rediscover this kind of technique so often.

I mean, you know, sort of um uh there was one anthropologist in um so the whole thing is that that it's it's it's it's supposed to be unpredictable. There was one anthropologist in the 50s or 60s who tried to argue that um A great that divination was functional in the sense that if you randomize decisions about everything, you avoid the obvious biases and um and um other sort of um deviations from rationality that you have. So it's a bit like um if you you know if you choose your you know where to park. Yeah, I I had a friend who had a good um theory like that, which was uh a theory of superstition, which I think is completely it's it's obviously false. And he knew it. I mean he that was a joke theory.

The joke theory of uh superstition was a bit connected to this some idea that sometimes you need something that does not come from your own mind or from the minds of anyone. So he had a good theory, a great theory of superstition, which was like, you know, for example, you have to um you have to get them in the morning and you'll have to put one foot before the other on the ground. Now should we should it be your right foot or your left foot? Now if you are a perfect brain, you will consider one option and then the other and then the first one and the other until you can find one reason to do one rather than the other. And the thing is that there aren't any reasons. So you will spend your entire day in bed trying to work out how to get out of bed.

And this story is, you know, the story of Buridan's ass, you know, that's um that um medieval philosopher who had this story about a donkey that was in the field, is brought back by his owner to the farm, and the owner gave them a lot of food and a lot of drink, you know, a big bucket of water and a big bucket of hay. And the poor donkey cannot make up his mind whether he should start with a drink or start with a good munchie. And dies in the end because he can't decide, because his mind was perfect. That's what Buridan tried to explain. And if you have a perfect mind, you get stuck in a loop of uh you know decisions. Um so all you know uh that's a very different thing, but very often communities that resort to divination for important decisions are a bit in that predicament

that if you uh if you keep sort of polling people's people's opinions about a certain case, you'll get indefinitely many reasons to think that each of them is right or wrong. And on top of that, you'll get this problem of the fact that uttering certain diagnoses is itself costly. It's itself a coalitional sort of um move. Um so you you know um intuitively people would realize that having a kind of randomizing technique would be um would be good. But once again that means that it is a kind of production argument, you know, in the sense that people are motivated to have this kind of institution because it serves their interests. Okay, so that's that's all for production at the moment. I'm I'm I don't have anything further to say about that, except that

um yeah, I look forward to the School of Santa Barbara and the School of Paris to sort of propose their their views on that. Uh I I love this model of of divination. Um I I find it fascinating. There's one part of it that I don't quite understand. So for me, the way I intuitively understand it is, you know, let's say my wife and I, we want to go out to the movies and we want to be at the same movie, but I would rather see one movie and she would rather see a different movie. This is known in game theory as the Battle of the Sexes game. It's a coordination game, but there are two equilibria. One is better for me, one is better for my wife. Right. And we might settle that disagreement by, say, flipping a coin or playing rock, paper,

scissors, or whatever. And that to me is analogous to the argument you're making with regard to divination. It's the equivalent of flipping a coin or playing rock, paper, scissors, but instead of flipping the coin, you're decapitating the chicken and seeing which way it it runs, or you're reading the entrails or the tea leaves or whatever it is. Um But here's the the sticking point for me that I don't quite understand. When I flip a coin to settle a kind of Battle of the Sexes game, um, I don't believe that the coin is infused with supernatural powers. I I I just think it's a random thing. It's just a way of settling uh our our conflict. Um and yet when it comes to these societies who you who have these divination rituals, that

belief is there that this this ritual is infused with supernatural significance. It's telling you about some supernatural agent or s it has some cosmic justification. It's not just we're gonna do this random thing to settle the disagreement or to coordinate. It's it has a deeper significance. So where does that piece of it come from? Why do we need that in addition to the the divination practice itself? Well, um there are two aspects to that. One is that um if the process is Obviously and overtly random in that sense, like flipping a coin. It has very little persuasive power as something that anyone could should take seriously as opposed to anything else. But on the other hand, I want to say that divination does not necessarily

entail that the diagnosis that was not produced by the diviner or anyone else in the community is actually produced by some other entity. So I'll tell you why. First of all, because there are tons of examples of divination where our people think that the result could not have been different given the situation at hand. whereas, but they do not think that any agent was involved, like a god or a spirit or whatever, in transmitting it. So, for example, um, there are many cases of divination in the um in the Western world where people, you know, uh will draw cards or things like that, and they and the person who does it will tell you, well, the cards show the tarot shows that you know your sister-in-law is trying to bewitch you.

And there's no implication, and in most clients, there is absolutely no expectation that the cards say that because some external agent knows about the sister-in-law and made the cards do it. There are also thousands of omens that are recorded in the Mesopotamia, for example, where you know if a five legged sheep is born during full moon, then there'll be uh something else, you know, a huge storm in the uh in the in the region. And those things are not because they think that the sign was produced, the sign like the five-legged uh animal, was produced by an agent like the gods. So, what do they think? I mean, I my idea was that the um the one thing, the one ex assumption they have, that is a tacit assumption, obviously, it's not an

explicit theory, is that the divination uh diagnosis, like the way the chicken runs or whatever, is an index. It is caused by the situation that it describes. It's not a symbol, it's not a description of that situation, it's a result of that situation. So the idea is that given the state of your sister-in-law's witchcraft operations, there was no way the kitchen the chicken could go anywhere else. It's a causal claim. So, on the one hand, there is no pure randomization because that would be transparently not persuasive, but also there is no need for an agent to do it because this causal assumption can do the work, I think. And also, I must say that there is another dynamic that's very much a group dynamic or sort of coalitional dynamic there, which

is that all anthropologists who've studied divination in the field say that everyone says, yeah, no, no, it's it's you know it must be the sister in law because divination said it, so it's that's it, that's settled. And then you know, when you know, when you know you have uh a few drinks and you talk and you know uh between you, me and the gate post you can say, Well, you know, I I'm not really sure, I don't think so. I mean, you know, because the grandmother looks much more threatening than the sister in law. So people can have private doubts. However, again, since you had a great interest in having some description that comes from no one in particular, you have great interest in claiming that this description

is something you believe because it makes everyone agree that that's something you create a cascade, you know, of commitment that you know we all have to agree on that. And I think it's it's it's true that I think it's the it it could explain. So it's a kind of preference falsification. You know, it's easier to say that because that is clearly in our interest, than to uh discuss our private doubts about um about this situation. And I think it it it could be that because it really is the case that um anthropologists in many, many places report both the public confidence, you know, that if it was the uh the oracles said this, then that's the way it is. And then their private sort of doubts or you know they're not sure it's true or

um I I even knew people after a while in my own uh field that's a long long time ago but um who told me they were unsure about particular diagnosis and and then they told me, well, you know, between us, I'm not sure this stuff ever says anything terribly true. So but the guy was obviously not, you know, not trying to he well he was not gonna make a public statement about this kind of uh um uh opinion. But but yeah. So I think the the uh sort of um the the the interests of all the parties sort of conspire to make that situation very stable despite no one being a hundred percent committed to it being true. And that's something that's very much going back to these production arguments, one thing that we inherited from uh classical anthropology, and

sometimes it's not a good idea, is to think that um uh cultures come with their axioms and that the axioms are used deductively by people to generate impressions about uh particular case, particular situations. Like, for example, um you know that yes, divination works, divination reveals the truth, and they use divination today, so that means that that is the truth. It's very rarely what you observe. What you observe is more that people are faced with all sorts of theories, sorry, all sorts of instances, empirical cases, then uh, and for many of them, there's some sort of presumption that yes, that may be convincing, that may be what really happened, etc. This creates enough of an interest in claiming that

it's always true for people to do it despite their own private doubts and carry on like that. But anyway, there are many other examples of this kind of phenomenon in which what we think is deductively Um inferred from some cultural theory that people have in their minds. It actually inductively constructed little by little out of pieces of experience and salient cases. Yeah. Can I um Pascal, uh, can I push on David's question? And I'm gonna paraphrase to see if this also is what you're saying, Pascal and David. You can tell me if this is also addresses this. Is that the reason why it's not a random thing is it's sort of one step off of an army. There's an army behind it, but it's hidden for the reasons that Pascal described, which is

that if we all want, um, let's say, um, I was gonna use Lita as an example, so I'll just do it. I'll just use Lita. So let's say we're on a village with Lita and we want Lita to do something differently. Um, if we all say that there's going to be some random process um uh that's gonna lead to telling Lita what to do, and we want to enforce that. Lita can just say, if she doesn't want to do it, she's just gonna say, Well, it's a random process, so why would you do that? But if we say, no, it's a causal process, that's sort of, you know, the then then then uh what that explicit narrative provides us is exactly what Pascal described, which is that it takes the responsibility off me telling Lita what I think she should do, but we enforce it as a causal process

because if Lita questions it, every one of us will enforce the um what what what the what the what the process says. So let's just say it's like a stuffed animal, right? So if Lita questions the stuffed animal, every one of us will uh will enforce that the stuffed animal is right, but it's opaque with respect to Lita. So none of us incur the cost of telling Lita what to do directly. Lita doesn't attack us. But so it kind of moves like there's an army behind the idea. There's an army behind the stuffed animal. Um but it it it it works or it exists as a causal thing as opposed to a random thing precisely because of this dynamic of uh we're gonna back up the um uh we're gonna back up that there's a we're gonna enforce this

and and the causation is sort of confabulation around the idea that I I need some reasonable reason to say that I want to enforce this when Lita goes against the stuffed animals will. But the real reason is because we all want Lita to do something different. Does That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. David, does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's it's um i i uh it's always um it's always an interesting experience that you know uh uh for me that I try to explain something in terms that seem to me pure crystal. There's no clearer way of saying it. And then someone re-explains them in a way that's actually much clearer. And I think, oh wow, okay. So that was that and that happens.

That happens quite a bit. But anyway, I I um uh another sort of set of issues, I mean, unless you you guys are so intuitiveness, you want to do um a lot of that. But that that's um uh another sort of set of things I I got really interested in that I I thought should be a new direction for evolutionary psychology, and for obvious reasons we don't want to get there, is modern politics. And um uh but since we don't want to go there, you know whether there is, you we we want to go somewhere else, which is more the explanation or the analytics of um of modern politics. And um I become more and more interested in this sort of idea that um that politics really sort of is an illusion in the sense that um i in the sense that uh

Most political discussions and things are not about their real um point. They're about coalitional alignment and sort of fine grained calibration of where you stand and where I stand and stuff like that. But then the mystery is how people manage to um yes get all this coalitional sort of um um this coalitional effects um out of ideas that seem really unrelated to the coalitions in particular and here i'm i'm i'm thinking about um obviously uh this part of the stuff I did on um in the little politics book is pure sort of pins off kind of stuff because the idea is well um why would you have those um uh strange alliances, you know, strange bad fellows like you know, some party decided that deciding that they're

all absolutely for women, but really not for mothers. Or, you know, for poor people, but only if they're in cities, not if they're in the in Appalachia. And I want to ask you guys what you think, because I I I find the Alliance sort of um framework to think about that. Uh obviously the the the the best way to to approach that. And then I still have questions. And one of those questions is that there is another way of describing the sort of, for example, the liberal conservative sort of dispute in modern Western politics. And that is the one that comes from Thomas Sowell. And that says that, well, there are different visions, and um and he describes that in very intellectual terms because he he's talking about intellectual history.

He's not talking about the actual movements. But still, so basically there's an unconstrained vision where you know there are problems and they get to have solutions, and um mankind is not limited, and mankind can be shaped to be different, And so is society, and so is the environment, and so is everything. And there's a constrained vision where all we can hope for are trade-offs. Because you know, that's a crooked timber of humanity, and you know, we we know that incentives matter, and everything happens in scarcity and stuff like that. So that's more of a conservative vision where yes, all you can hope for is a trade-off that's less uh costly than another trade-off. Now it seems to me that those two visions really are different visions.

And I must say that talking with people over the years or more being talked at because I don't want to engage in political discussions, but people don't care if you don't want to engage, they will engage for you. It seems to me that that difference is quite let's say I recognize it, I see it, and then I think, well, there's a lot of evidence that political attitudes are largely heritable. And I think, well, maybe there is something, a sort of disposition to be an unconstrained person or a constrained person. So my question is: how do you s how do we square that with an alliance theory? Because the alliance theory, if we leave it there, would say, well, it's all uh for grabs, you know, you just choose your your groups, then you tailor the beliefs to whatever uh the

groups are. But that's not what the visions model would say, which is no, no, no, you you have to have beliefs that kind of chime in chime with the uh general orientation towards constrained or unconstrained vision. Um so I don't know if it's done to ask the podcast people what they would do about us because I really don't know what to do about that. Yeah. well the first thing to say is that uh at the end of the day, it's an empirical question. And if you know these visions are the primary variables that are explaining people's political coalitions and political beliefs, then we ought to be able to see that empirically. We ought to have a good measure of these visions and show that they're powerfully

predictive of coalitional alignment. And we got to make sure that our measurements actually are good and not, you know, indirectly measuring the thing that we're trying to predict, which is, I think, a big problem in political psychology, where the outcome variable is often baked into the predictor variable. Yep. So if we're going to actually try to test this uh conflict of visions model, we want to actually have a good measure to see if number one, these visions actually exist consistently. Because I can think of a lot of exceptions to the rule of, say, liberals supporting an unconstrained, sorry, yeah, an unconstrained vision. For example, they might think that wealthy business people are self-interested, greedy,

they need to be reined in by strong incentives, and that's why we need to regulate them and why we need to tax them. Similarly, I could think of exceptions where, you know, uh people on the right Christians will will have an uh an unconstrained vision where uh where we can rebuild people to in God's image and and train them to be, you know, apostles of of Jesus or or or whatever, where, you know, uh we can raise people to be to have these Christian values and these Christian norms or or to love their country or or whatever. So I'm personally skeptical that if we do a good empirical test, that that will turn out to be the case, that these visions will number one, be held consistently across a variety of

concrete instances, and number two, be strongly predictive of coalitional uh alignment. But then you know it's an empirical question. We we got to run the test. Uh and and I'm and I'm involved in a in a few studies right now that are attempting to run such tests. So the first thing I would say is that empirically I don't think the case is very strong. Number one, that these sort of abstract worldviews or dispositions exist coherently and are consistent. And number two, even if they did exist, there's not strong evidence that they have a powerful effect on political beliefs or coalitional alignment. That isn't to say that there aren't heritable dispositions or psychological traits that matter politically.

But I think if we want to understand how and why they matter, we have to understand them as things that predispose one toward aligning with a particular coalition or particular group relative to another. I mean, for example, there's huge um educational polarization in the United States, such that people with college or graduate degrees tend to lean to the Democratic Party, uh, people without a college degree, uh particularly white men and uh and uh rural men tend to lean to the Republican coalition. So there's uh this powerful educational component to the political alliance structure. But whether or not I go to college or get a graduate degree or become sort of an intellectually curious person is going to uh depend strongly on my heritable dispositions,

my level of intellectual curiosity, my openness to new experiences, my willingness to say move out of my small town and move into a city if that's where my university is. Exactly. So all of these uh uh uh dispositions might ultimately lead to the outcome of me getting an education or not. And then if you look at the analysis, you'll find a correlation between all those dispositions, you know, openness to experience, curiosity, and liberalism. But what we're missing is that there's this big thing in between, which is education and how that it fits into the political alliance structure. And you can make similar arguments for what might predispose you to join a religious community or leave a religious community.

There's interesting work showing that your sexual attitudes and dispositions play a powerful role in shaping whether you join or leave a religious group. So I do think heritable dispositions and psychological traits matter politically, but they matter indirectly via the sorts of groups that you uh join or leave and and via the the sorts of groups that you view as either threatening you or or uh uh facilitating your interests. So that's that's that would be my answer to your question. And you know curious if you find that to be a satisfying answer. No, that that that sounds very uh very plausible, especially as as you said, the the the we have a problem, and that's the problem we have in psychology

and um we'll talk about that at some point, which is that we tend to think that the sort of mental idiom in which certain things are represented and computed has to be coterminous and more or less a copy of the explicit mental contents that are expressed. So, for example, when people look at those dispositions, and you know, of course, it's it's easy to do. I mean, it's easy. Uh it's easy for some people to do um uh behavioral genetics of political uh orientation. Well, what do you test? You test whether they're liberal or conservative. Because that's the end you know variable, and that's it. And in a way, uh so it could be that in terms of um neural processes, you know, a uh the actual neural disposition that is inherited has nothing to do with any of these terms but has to

do with something completely different. Not even personality variables, which themselves could be a sort of explicit vocabulary. And I think that's that's um a common um problem we have. It's true that um so um so for example to some degree, when we talk about coalitional alignments in in politics, for example, we're using the terms that people themselves could use if they want to reflect on the situation and say, no, I don't want to be with these guys because they're weak, and look, there's only 10 of them and there's uh 50 of us. But there's also a a sort of deeper level level at which computations are done, like you know, for example, um Why is it that certain actions are outrageous? I remember that John to be had you know a great model of those things.

And the thing is that it's not that those things are specially outrageous. Yes, they did, you know, poison little kids or whatever stuff like that, but that's something we've seen a million times and we didn't react. It's just that at this point that thing shows that we can be pushed around. And and if we don't react, that uh opens the case for more. Now that computation is not done in an idiom that people could easily express. It's some sort of language of coalitional thought that has its own logic. And I'm always a bit surprised, and I I don't want to be the that guy, so to speak, to say that people don't um take that into account. In some sectors of psychology, it's quite understood. If I have a s uh a syntactic theory, it will be in terms of operators like you know, uh

govern or uh things like that, that have nothing to do with what people are aware of when they um when they produce utterances. And if they want to think about them, that's not the principles they would find. So I'm perfectly fine with the fact that there is a principles, uh call it government, agreement, uh you know, move alpha or whatever in your link in your syntactic theory, that are not um anything like the um overt vocabulary we use. But surely, and here I'm using, you know, that Daniel Dennett sort of said that when someone says surely with a comma, it means they're about to say something that's absolutely not certain and does not follow from what they just said. But surely, uh, if it works for syntax, it's it should work for other domains of cognition.

That's you know, our theory of mind may not work the way we think in terms of little images of people having thoughts about other images. It may be in an idiom that's quite different. So, a forgery for complex things like politics. It may not be that people have this vision that man is unconstrained. It may be something vastly different. That leads to finding that proposition very obvious when you see it in political theory, but also of thinking of particular political programs as especially compelling. Um so I don't know. I mean I I I I'm um I think we're still in the same state that uh people were in chemistry before Galton or something like that. So, you know, we're we're sort of groping. And um I remember having this uh When I was at school, that's

a long, long time ago, in high school, that our chemistry teacher told us that if you think in obvious properties, you'll never get anywhere. Because look at this acid, you know, like chloridric acid, it burns you. Look at this caustic soda, it burns you. Well, if you combine them, you have water and well, salty water. So that's uh that's an obvious example. But it might be that um yes we're we're very often shackled by this sort of um uh yes this everyday talk or this uh common sense folk psychology talk um that stops us from thinking about uh about actual cognitive processes. I've seen that in politics quite a lot. I mean in in terms of you know uh people thinking and I'm not naming names and I will not name names, but I mean people saying, well, it's obvious that

this um kind of uh chief or leader has power because of their prestige, and then you think, what the heck is prestige? You know, how do you make uh and there again I'm like Dennett, I get all these sort of objections like how do you make a computer made of meat that has this concept of prestige? So um and if you don't think that's a question, that's that's weird because it is a very important question, or it's uh it's an obvious one. But anyway, I don't want to go on about that because you know uh it's easy to turn this a mild complaint about the state of affairs into a rant about you know, fools, damn fools and stuff. I I I do think yeah, uh yeah it's a great point that our folk psychology, our

folk intuitions, our folk economics. I know you've written a lot about uh how our our our intuitions about economics uh in many ways are misleading. Um, and that colors our political attitudes to to various various degrees. Um, but I think it's important when we're thinking about our our folk intuitions and in in which cases they might be leading us astray, it's important to think about incentives. Because if there's one group of people that has overrided their folk psychology, sorry, their folk economics, it's economists. And the reason they have overrided their folk economics is because they have professional and career incentives for doing that and for being right and for changing their minds when

the empirical data points in a certain direction and for changing their minds when a compelling logical or mathematical argument is presented. And so we have to explain why economists uh have successfully overrided their folk economic intuitions and get it right, in addition to why uh the average voter has not overrided these intuitions. Right. And I think the way to explain it is to point at the incentives. Economists have strong incentives for getting it right and overriding their intuitions. When it comes to the individual voter, uh what are their incentives for getting the facts right? Well, personally, their vote, they you know, analyses suggest they have maybe a one in sixty million chance of of shaping the outcome of a national election.

That is a very weak incentive for them to get it right, right? They face very little costs if they are wrong about uh political facts or political realities. And they face potentially big costs if they fail to fit in with people in their community or if they sh signal that they're on the wrong side of an issue or they're not on the team of the people around them. So when you think about the incentives that an actual voter faces, it's actually it doesn't seem um irrational at all for them to not really develop expertise in economics and not really bother to correct their primitive intuitions because they face no costs for those uh primitive intuitions being wrong. No, that's true. And there is a um a path for argument for the rationality of ignoring

all the stuff and just trusting that your side might be right. But it's quite interesting to see why it happen in scientific debates. And I must say, I'm struck by that. I was the other day I was reading something on the web, someone who described styles of conversations and discussion, and have you know from the worst to the best. And you have the best. The best is well, you say something and then you try to think what could be wrong about this argument. And others tell you, no, no, some stuff is good, but you know, some of it might not work, and stuff. And you gradually elaborate with them a better thing. And the other one, the the nadir of uh uh of uh human discussion is political discussions, like we know, but then political conversations.

Okay, so that person says that. And some and one of the uh people who commented on this post said, well, but that's first style you describe when you try to find the best of the argument and the other in the other person's argument. I do that every day. Because uh in my department of mathematics, when we want to talk about something, we put it on the blackboard, and others try to tell us, yeah, yeah, it could work because it does this, and we ourselves say, No, no, I think there's a problem here. And they say, Oh, maybe, but you know, we'll see. So the question is, of course, you know, why isn't it always like that? And that's I remember that uh John Tuby always had this uh complaint that, you know, why

don't we get science at the speed of thought? Uh by which he meant, of course, the speed of that kind of conversation. and it's um so as you say for econom economists it's the same sort of thing so how do you create an incentive um to to to get things a bit more right that overrides the incentive to be um you know to be uh in the right coalition And I must say that there was that piece by John, which must be the last piece he published that was on the evolutionary psychology as the crystallizing core of a social science or something like that. In which he describes this sort of dynamic whereby it's not just that there are coalitions and camps, it's also that if there are two powerful descriptions of

something, uh, then there's a powerful argument for some sort of happy medium being probably right. And he says that the cosmology of Tychobray didn't make any sense and was full of holes and stuff and that, but it was exactly between Galileo and the Ptolemaic version. It was sort of a little bit of one and a little bit of the other. So everyone thought that is fantastic. You know, if we can have a cosmology that offends no one in particular. Um, so how do we escape from that? And when I tell um people here about that, they tell me, well, it's because we don't have the right theory. Biologists got the right uh model that's natural selection. And see, they agree on most things. Not on theory very often, but on uh on most of the empirical stuff.

So, for culture and uh politics and things like that, maybe we have to have the right model. And one is tempted to say no, it's much worse than you think, because there are powerful incentives in never having the right model. Yeah. Um, so I I don't know to what extent that's the case. At some point, I wanted to um you know, when you're invited to give a talk and you have no great idea what to what to say. I or no sort of uh I I you think of provocative things and uh once I I thought one talk could be the impossibility of social sciences. So that's you know, it's the the stack you know, it's overwhelmingly stacked against there being uh social science. In the sense that I'll give you just one example, which of course affected me because it's

about stuff that I do. So I'm right, and these fools will not admit it and stuff like that. So we're in that uh dynamic. Um but it's it's at some point I thought, well, it's quite clear that we can't really talk about the cultural success of religious um um ideas, you know, representations, behaviors, etc. As one thing, because there are two very, very different varieties of that stuff. And there is one that I used to call white religion or folk religion that is like shamanism and stuff like that. It's mostly about solving practical problems. And there's one that's the doctrinal religion, where you have large organizations that have priests and stuff like that that get political power and diffuse the doctrine and stuff.

And I thought, yes, I mean these things are so have such different social dynamics and cultural paths to transmission that really we shouldn't um we shouldn't think of them as being one phenomenon. And then, you know, people tell me, Yeah, yeah, no, that's very interesting, super interesting. So, what's your theory of religion? And that's it. People want a theory of religion. And and you know, if you start having this sort of thing, no, no, no, actually, you know, protons are not neutrons. Oh, so you don't have a theory of the nucleus. You know, you uh so you see what I mean? It's it's sort of very frustrating, but at the same time, um it's worse than the coalitional argument because the the coalitional argument would be well,

people try to um to to side with a a particular camp and then you know that's it. But this one is more like um there is a whole level of discourse where for for example um politics is about social groups, and social groups are real and they're you know, the uh prime, the primeval object, they're the starting point, they're there. Um so that's what happens in politics. There's a very strong incentive to think like that because it makes all sorts of moves you want to do relative to other people, etc., much easier. So if you have you know uh uh people who say, well, why on earth would human minds think of groups as opposed to other things? Well, I'm sorry to say, I mean I'm sorry to say that they but you know yeah,

it's kind of great. Yeah, exactly. It's it's not that's not gonna work. Simply because um it's I mean it it it will work and and I t I'm touching wood. I I I certainly hope it will. But but the thing is that there seems to be an almost unsurmountable um obstacle, which is that um there's too much benefit in running our you know folk politics the way we do. And because of that, there's initially a sort of loss in uh oh now I have to think of groups as things that minds imagine out of interactive, etc. That seems very um yes, that we've lost something, Oh, and therefore that's not a promising sort of thing. I don't know what you think about that, but you know, I'm sorry to sort of No, it's great.

I actually I actually think, Pascal, I think the title of your talk is Science as Divination, right? Where it's actually I think it brings David's point about incentives, because it is about groups, but it's incentives. But it's the science is word you're what you're describing, Pascal, is that we're back to the lead a stuffed animal example where there's a bunch of people who have an incentive to say the stuffed animal is the level of discourse, is the correct level of concepts. And unless you have a moral strategic incentive game, I actually think of the weird paper, like the Joe Henrik Weird paper. There there were papers, and Pascal, you would know better than both both David and I forever about we shouldn't just have uh we we shouldn't just have um non

Western samples. But I think what the acronym did was it was a coordination device to moralize that. And all of a sudden it's it's people want don't want to be accused of having weird. Like it's it's it's so I think it's like a it was a perfect example of a stuffed animal of a coordination point. Um and and I think that's why it was successful. And I think that's what what you're both saying, yeah. Yeah. And it uh in this case it adds that it there was a valid point, you know, in the sense that's true. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Oh no, no, no, no. I'm only gonna I'm gonna test, you know, Western because I don't care for the others. But it but I think like the yeah, but I think the point of like why aren't we why aren't

people listening to us, all three of us, right? Like why is everybody stupid and why are we so smart? Um it's but I think there's also just yeah, like what are the incentives um to have to choose a different stuffed animal to push the metaphor. You know, and unless there's something like the weird thing or uh cult like for maybe economics, maybe the the the cost benefit structure is boy, banks really want to have a good policy. Nobody is like that for social science yet or for psychology. Um, and so you there's just m less of a selection institutionally to get it right. And consequently, it can just be more of these arbitrary um status games, maybe. Yes, status games. And and uh I think the uh that's true and um

it's quite c clear that um another thing that's okay, so okay, now instead of you know this sort of uh doom and and gloom, uh we we should look at possible sort of positive developments. And the the the what I uh what I'm sometimes I'm impressed by the fact that certain projects that are useful and valuable projects disappear in the discipline. But they reappear someone else somewhere else. And you know, I was thinking about the the project of cultural anthropology, like, you know, um decades ago, was um many decades ago, was um to try and understand, have some sort of entry into what mankind is like through the interesting prism of cultural differences. So you would and you you would have to study one culture that was not yours

because precisely it gave you some of that insight that, well, uh there has something to that there has to be something that constructs the obviousness of certain things, like you know, my religion, my social group, or things like that. So that's a project that came with a kind of special method, which is to stay in a place for a long time, to learn people's language, to get into the minutiae of who marries whom and when and how and stuff like that. So that project is gone from cultural anthropology, at least in the US and in most of the Western world. However, we were talking about Joe Henrik. I was at a conference a few years back where he and some of his students were, and I realized that all these people did long term field work in some places.

They learned the language, they knew all the minutiae of who marries whom and stuff like that. And okay, so out of that they were also getting data for you know possibly cultural group selection kind of uh models, etc. But that's not the the interesting point here. The the interesting point is that the whole baggage of how to do it and with what project had transferred without you know anyone realizing it from the anthropology departments to some other places. So it may be the case that understanding social groups, um, understanding politics and how it works are things that will migrate out of disciplines into places where they can be uh done. Done seriously by people who actually had no um coalitional

interests in maintaining a particular theory of social groups or a particular theory of politics. You see what I mean? Um and uh one thing that makes us think that that makes me think that that might be the case is also that um many of the disciplines that um like traditional political science or traditional anthropology or sociology um are not really terribly persuasive. They don't really create anything that the general public finds very interesting. So, in a way, there's an opportunity for people in other places to do it for them, as it were. I think so. I mean, I that that that may be widely optimistic, uh, but I think it's possible. Can you just unpack that? Do it for them. So can you just Well that's for example, you know, it's um okay, so

Dave, you are a brave man, so you say, Oh, I have a theory of uh that starts with a question. How could minds think of groups and why do they do that? Okay. And you go to the sociology department where they say we have to reprogram you entirely because groups are the you know, the alpha and the omega, they're the beginning and the end, uh the starting point. There is no individual, there is a group, and then you have a blah blah blah. Yeah, you you should feel. However, um that question um is a perfectly legitimate question that I think in some other disciplines or some other fields or some other places you could uh get people interested and uh and and and tell people, well, since these guys over there, whose job it is officially, don't want

to do it. Right. Oh, I see. Let's try to do it. And um just like um yes, I mean sort of uh linguistics escaped from philology in a sense at some point because the philologists were not terribly interested in question, you know, what makes the language work. Um and and um and people who are sort of weird people like Chomsky came from uh vaguely from an engineering background or stuff and thought, oh no, maybe we can do it. So I think it's possible. I mean, it is I don't want to be too pessimistic. So it's it's uh a variation of if you want something done right, do it yourself. It's uh if you want something done right, have somebody who doesn't do it for their profession when it with the caveat with the asterisk of um it's for

these situations where the incentive structure doesn't align with competence well that's the can of worms right but yeah yes it goes back to that famous saying which i end up repeating maybe twice a day which is that it's very hard to change someone's mind when when their salary depends on them not changing their minds exactly but I think I think I think Pascal like what you've been saying I think is really deep I think it all comes back to this production thing where I think if the science has been all about like, well, what are voters? Why are voters choosing the way they're doing? Oh, these stupid voters, oh, people. But if you look at public opinion polls, for example, often people are really smart.

Like there's actually a lot of agreement. It really turns to the like pay no attention to the man behind the mirror of what's the incentive of the producers. Um And I think that's a very subversive message scientifically, politically. And I think it's no accident that it's very convenient to worry about the consumers of science. Like, why doesn't the public like science? Not how is our institution not designed to reward merit? Because then we have to look at that. Or for politics, why are the voters so stupid is an easy, convenient thing. But then what are the incentives for the topics that become political, and who what's the money behind it? And you know, why do you have to have a lot of money to like win an election?

Like these kinds of things. Who's making money? So I think it's very subversive. Yeah. It's true that the the uh incentive structure for uh science as we know it uh is far from perfect, and that's an understatement. I I remember having a conversation with John Tuby about that. One day, where he said, and that was, you know, over dinner, he said, Well, yeah, I mean, you know, uh, if anyone wanted to stop scientific progress, they would design uh modern science exactly the way it is. And I thought it was to throw away a remark like that, and you know, okay, we can move on. And no, no, no, no. He went on for about 20 minutes to dissect every element from you know graduate training to publications to grants to this,

showing that all of them showing that there was not an actual conspiracy, but a set of conspiring factors, all of which converge to making uh scientific progress extraordinarily difficult and in fact miraculous. So it's sort of so I think yes, that's that that's right, but we mustn't let that sort of take us too far. Another consideration is that um uh now that's a puzzle. Uh no that's not a puzzle, but it's uh uh a sort of question I have. Um so one of my uh PhD um advisors was uh David Gellner. Uh sorry, uh Ernest Gellner, not his son David who's um an anthropologist too. But Ernest Garner had this theory of Muslim society that is inspired by Im Khaldun. And this the idea is that the society goes basically as like a pendulum.

It swings towards the sort of puritanical version of Islam that is typical of urban clerical kind of religious scholars, and then swings back to a kind of cult of the saints and miracles and stuff like that, which is more typical of tribal culture. And then sort of if it goes too far in one direction, it swings back. So at the moment in Islam, we're very much at the in the first sort of pendulum swing. But anyway, he also had this theory about academic fashions and said that it was the same because you know once you have a model, you want to explain to uh use it for lots of different stuff. And he said, yeah, no, when I was young, Wittgenstein was the big hero, and everyone was de facto a relativist because it's all language game and language determines the way you think

and so forth. But then it sort of swung back to another more rationalist position. And the reason for that, he said, was that the cultural transmission of relativism is really difficult because you have a first generation who say, well, everything is different in every culture. That's a great discovery because people used to think, no, I mean, there are common human interests, you know, like you know, survival, sex, mating. No, no, no, no, no. It's all completely different in different cultures. So you teach that. So you teach that to students and they go to various places. Now, those students they will never uh make much of a splash if they say, yeah, it's completely different here from everywhere else, like I was taught.

That's it. No, the only way they can get some uh attention is by saying, you know what? They actually do marry their cross cousin. Don't think Don Brown it. They they look like that. Yes, and they become the kind of Don Brown who says, Well they actually do it in exactly the way others others do it, etc. And after a while people get bored with this sort of rationalistic stuff and all that, and they think, No, no, no, there's a place down in a forest where everyone is very different. So there was that theory of pendulum swings, and I I know that another anthropologist, Claude Lewis-Strauss, he had another version of this pendulum theory, which was that relativism is what you what you have. This idea that people live in cultural worlds that are incommensurable.

Their thoughts are thoughts that you would not have if you are a you know here. That this idea uh uh depends crucially on not interacting with them very much. So intellectuals in Europe used to have this idea about peasants, that peasants were mired in some sort of intellectual universe that was impenetrable to uh educated people. So then they had it about Africans, but then they started colonizing Africans so they got to know them. And the Africans seem a bit, you know, much more reasonable once you know them. So now the only places, and that would have been in the 70s, I suppose, when Liv Straw said that, the only places about which people were real relativists were in the jungles of Papua New Guinea and in the jungles of the Amazon forests.

So places where you can't just go and check it for yourself And you know, you can't call a guy a shaman in Papua New Guinea and say, is it really true that you know your ontology is different from others? So you you keep those places, but of course that will that will be gone soon. So anyway, all this long development was just to say in lots of humanities and social sciences, it seems that we've got the pendulum swinging to one in one direction and then getting stuck. And then it's not swinging back. It's it's that everyone is stuck on some very poor equilibrium. Um and in anthropology in particular, very much in a sort of um uh all cultures are uh valuable and valid, except uh Western culture.

And also, we should all do field work, except we should not do field work because that would be invading others and imposing our presence. Therefore, we should be activists. And that's the sort of um, and and it seems that that is an equilibrium that seems to be um stable. Except by these sort of there may be external shocks, and you know, we all know that there may be uh strong external shocks these days. But um but yeah, I mean so I I don't know to what extent it's it's uh one should be optimistic about having a social science that's uh that really does dig into um the the causes of um behavior. Um it may happen, it may not happen. I don't know. I'm I I'm I'm a little more optimistic in the sense of I think like the opening anecdote

about the healthcare and like you lose a leg and you're refused service. Um because I was living in Germany for, you know, nine years and I'm back to US healthcare. I literally have my desk in front of me is flittered with like a healthcare uh paperwork because some somebody made a mistake. I would have never had to deal with this in Germany. But by my point is um the the anecdote about losing a leg and nobody paying for it is wrong. But it is a marker, it's a coordination marker of the problem, as you said. And I actually wonder too if this anthropology thing too is the same thing where it's it comes back to like there's a reason for a bit of hyperbole, or it's the superficial thing where um the the anthropology will continue.

It is the pendulum, but it's it but but it's dealing with these the it's butting up against there's no more wilderness to explore. Now I'm dealing with government agencies, powerful armies. Uh these the people here now have enough autonomy that I have to deal with their autonomy. So I think like a lot of the expression of you they won't serve you if you're unless your leg's cut off is valid, but it's not the right description of the problem. It's the it's what I mean. It's the um outrage description. And I think the anthropologists are doing the same thing for a different set of points, I think. Yeah. So I'm optimistic. Okay. Okay. I mean the thing is the the uh as I said, I mean in some cases you see the the the

sort of the the problems and the the approach and the ambitions, the project so speak, migrate from one place to another. So that's possible. Um yeah, we'll see. Yeah. I think I'm more collectively pessimistic, but personally optimistic. I th I think Ed Hagen made this remark once where yeah, you know, nobody's asking these foundational questions like uh, you know, w what is a group and why do we think in terms of groups, stuff like that, you know, basic scientific questions about human nature. But that's good because it's more for me. You know, I I get more juicy insights to myself. I get to make these big discoveries that nobody else is making or nobody else is paying attention to. And I kind of feel the same way.

Like I'm a kid in a candy store. I have all this low-hanging fruit that I get to pluck. Nobody else is plucking it. I get to, you know, ask these really fascinating foundational questions and actually make progress on answering them. Wow, lucky me. Like if science were better, then I would be in a crowded market and I would have nothing to contribute. And you know, I yeah, it's wicked. I I I agree with you, David. And I think like I mean, no, no smoke up your collective behinds. I mean, I think Haskell and David, you're doing incredible work of that type, but I think it's this the the reward for doing it is nobody listens to you, right? In the sense that I think like I mean, of course, smart um the this is

everyone's against us, uh right. So this is surfing but but but I mean a small number of people who are very smart are very interested. But this I think this idea of scientists who are like, well, if I'm right, lots of people should agree with me. And if lots of people, if I'm not popular, if I don't have a lot of attention on me, I'm doing something wrong and I have to correct what I'm doing to suss out what will receive the most eyeballs or the most attention. I think that is uh I completely agree with you, David. And I think that's the difference where I think if you accept that, if you're sort of like a Buddhist about life is life is social suffering in this sense as a scientist, then I think you'll be fine.

But I think it's harder, I think it's hard for everybody. Um uh for some of us, some of the days, some people all every day, and some people can't do it, and some people can. But I for me at least that's I think the big thing is I think if you think your ideas are gonna be popular, if they're scientifically right, that's a wrong assumption. Right. And well, I mean the thing is the um uh yeah, I mean yeah, you have to have some sort of um it's very difficult to uh to do good science without a community, so you know it's um that's the counterpart of that. That's um I'm glad that there is a Santa Barbara school and that it's not just two people and uh and I'm glad that there's a Paris school and a whatever school that's uh that's good because um that's

um yeah that is conducive to to to to to better sort of um discussions. Actually that that leads me to something else I wanted to tell you, but you know, um which is that um we should have more um cumulative science in what we do, and we tend to have an slight overproduction of foundational stuff that creates a new sub subfield by itself. And um that's kind of uh worrying, and I I think that to some degree, some of us sometimes, you see how political I've become, um, could be reinventing the wheel a little bit in our field. So um I thought of a solution to that, And so I have a megalomaniac plan for a solution to that, which is in analogy with something that happens in happened in mathematics

in the early 40s, 50s, 60s, which was a group that was called Bobacci group. And that was a group of mathematicians who realized that lots of foundational issues in mathematics. It's not that they were not understood, it's that there was a sort of proliferation of ways of thinking about it. And you know, what the heck is an integral? Well, people have various subtypes of it, but they don't know what a type is, and they don't care because they're working on some stuff. And this produced all sorts of um unclear sort of science. So they thought they would do it and they would uh create so they were called Bourbaki, which was an imaginary name, and they were a group of uh ten people or something with some

turnover, and they would publish those books which were in effect anonymous because they used the non-diplom uh Bourbaki. And their idea was that each of them would try to, for example, write a chapter on you know what uh what is an integral in said theory, in such in the vocabulary of said theory, because that was their foundational uh language. Um, and the others would just sort of say, no, no, it can be much better, or you know, we can do it differently, etc. And they published those books. So I thought we should have the equivalent for evolutionary social sciences. What is a social group? What are the questions about a social group? You know, why is politics not what you think? You know, what are kinship terms?

Why do we have kinship terms as opposed to pure genetic sort of relatedness? Why do we have, you know, all these things? And I think there's enough of a corpus of stuff that's been produced by people that we could produce these sort of uh authoritative, so to speak, sort of foundational texts that would say, well, if you're interested in evolutionary social sciences, you should go there. Um so um the idea is not that I would do it, the idea is that I would uh get tons of people to do it or I would ask tons of um AI to uh to synthesize stuff for me so that we can put that somewhere. But I think that would be a useful project because I realized that um uh when you go from one place to another, um uh this year I spent two months in

Toulouse at the Toulouse School of Economics, which is a place where they have brilliant social scientists. I mean, they've decided that they'd have a special department for not economists, which means in practice economists who work with you know various sort of questions of interest to anthropologists, for example, how does cooperation work, you know, and stuff like that. And I realized that many things I said in those conversations were pure Santa Barbara school dialect, which for me was transparent. And they would stop me at oh, so but what do you think by what do you mean by a signaling explanation of something? And I would have to say, Oh, hang on, what I think I think about that is blah blah blah

blah blah. And of course they would get it because these people are smart and they know about evolution and they know about stuff. But I realized that there was a whole lot of discourse that's where it would be great to have the common foundation that would be expressed somewhere. So you know the great advantage of this kind of megalmanic project is that it uh relies on other people doing tons of work. Uh so the best kind of project. The best kind of project. And uh so I'm not sure the uh it's uh it's likely to take off anytime soon, but it it's uh I think it's something that that that could be useful, especially as um yes, some of the there are foundational questions, but also simply sort of um questions that uh

students or you know outsiders could have, which is why do you use this tool to do this? You know, why would game theory be appropriate here and not there? Uh why do you use uh some sort of rational choice approximation of what people do when you explain this, but then you drop it sometimes? You know, that kind of question. Um, which would be great. It would be great progress if we could do that. Um, so anyway, you know, uh watch this space, so to speak. Um this is gonna happen. I mean, wouldn't how how would what you're describing be different from, say, the uh two-volume handbook of evolutionary psychology that David Buss put out? It's a bit different because um again the problem that these Bourbaki people had

in math was the juxtaposition of perfectly fine arguments without sometimes without much connection of those of their subparts to some uh common core. So uh I I've um I've read many chapters of the handbook and I've used them for uh teaching a lot. And sometimes I've been surprised that's at the sort of you know the implications of a certain argument being tacit, but also not being the ones that are implied by another chapter. It's you know there's a slightly different um angle there. But what is the difference between those angles? We don't know, and um so maybe that's um so there's an argument for not doing this, which is um the science develops if you do lots of good empirical work that explains stuff.

So this kind of foundational project is not is not good. Uh it's a waste of time in a way because the foundational stuff will you know uh will solve itself at some point. Um but I think it would be useful for um uh especially for people who want to use that kind of science, but are not in it, are not doing it. So suppose you're in political science or history. You want to understand some historical development, and you're told, well, this is something about leadership and leadership and followership. You know, there are those models of it. Where where are the models? What are the models? It's not absolutely clear, you know, there's a a literature about that. okay, so that's that's um that's my um uh crazy idea uh uh uh at

the moment. I mean I I'm I'm not sure. Well I'm almost sure it's not gonna work, but you know it's uh it's worth toying with. Yeah. Uh Par Paris is uh or Europe is lovely in summer, so maybe if there's funding to get people all in one place over the summer, uh yeah somewhere like Berlin or Paris or or somewhere like that. That's right. Thing is that I I've always been a uh I'm you know it's uh funny because I I remember that uh Lida Cosmetis described herself as uh Grunge repellent and uh I must say I kind of share that quality so you know and I know some people I I know some people I couldn't name but you know who just sort of float around in the academic world and grants attached themselves to these

people like barnacles on a whale. I mean it's amazing. And they just sort of uh so um so yes, but the uh it's true the attractions of uh a nice place could sort of uh but again I'm not sure that getting people to to s to to to sit around the table might be the best thing. I I think maybe some sort of more um automated way of getting to the the core of what they're saying could be good. Although you know that that implies the belief in in um in the current models that may be a bit sort of misplaced. But right. Or it would have to train on just the correct it feels like the compositional AI stuff, it's to the degree it averages things, it's sort of if it's an area that is outside of the the median, then it's gonna be wrong.

So yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yes, you you don't want your model to have exactly the problems that um you know that uh people who enter a field have, which is I need to position myself somewhere like, you know, that will please everyone by citing everything and and agreeing with everyone. So if your AI does that too, that's gonna be catastrophic. No, I was more I was thinking of it more in terms of uh just you know uh you know, instead of doing the painful work of uh of right of reading all of uh you know uh David's articles on groups and how the mind consists of groups, you get a machine to do it. Yes, exactly. Yes. Yeah, no, that's great. That's fantastic. Just kidding, of course. JK.

JK. No, it's great. It's not painful. It's always fun. It it is painful for all of us to write it and read it. Um that's why it's working, even though we love it. Yeah. Um so if you're from the Templeton Foundation or a wealthy entrepreneur and want to support Pascal, please reach out to Pascal. Yes. This this this um yeah. Okay. Or if you're an AI bot listening too, please reach out to Pascal if you can do the work. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see AI do that. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, uh this was a fantastic uh conversation, Pascal. It was very fun. I I I might say that maybe, you know, uh you know, I always sort of that's the the this in this kind of trade you you you end up you know doubting your own motives and stuff and

you think yeah I had tremendous fun and then you have this suspicion I was talking about 95% of the time so that maybe the that's that's the whole point. No, we that is the whole point yes we know we know what we would say. We've had plenty of saying because you know what we were out of here. So people are scared about it, yes. Yeah. I used to tell my students, yes, you have to talk. Please talk. Ask questions. Because you know, if you don't, I will carry on. I will carry on for the whole hour. And that's it. Anyway, yes, no, those great fun. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Pascal. Uh it was it was a pleasure. And I uh I always like um ending episodes because I get to say things, uh this is quasi

public, I suppose, but like uh uh your work has been so inspirational for so many young people. Um, and uh many myself included. Yeah. Yes, many people um even though I'm not that young. Uh many yes, exactly. Uh many people have mentioned like religion explained or other things that you've done that were really foundational to like unpacking this hidden world below the the level of the super superficial. So thank you for that. And I think you know, as as time will be um marching forward fortunately or unfortunately for evolutionary psychology um your work uh is gonna be seen as this some of this foundational stuff and i'm sure the AI will uh will understand. No no no no stop that stop that thank you for your service.

Yes thank you for your service. Okay David um you uh we should do an episode of um this podcast fr live from from Paris. Yeah. Yeah. I mean uh uh like us in Paris? Yeah, we should all get together in Paris and all go to Paris and do I mean that I mean I love Paris. I Paris is always a banger. Every time you go, it's just beautiful, the food is great, the music is great, like the architecture's great, like everything. It's just uh can't for those of you who like can't afford to travel to Paris, I understand how you're feeling because I was like you and then I moved to Europe and I could fly to Paris for f literally forty Euros. And so I can say no. Um almost every time I go to Paris it rains though.

I don't know why that is That's too bad. Yeah. But even when it's even when it rains, it's no, it's also it's so photogenic. I have like so many pictures of like beautiful cobble, you know, dark the bridges, yeah. So we should we should make that happen. So I would I mean I'm always down to go to Paris. That's yeah, so maybe if you're listening and you would like to help us do that, how can people help us do that? Well, you can give us lots of money for our current expedition on our Patreon page. And you can flag it for uh David for David and Dave to go to Paris. Yeah, exactly. Sounds good. I think that's enough. We would love to go to Paris on your dime. So please make that happen. Visit our Patreon page.

It's like what Pascal said the the idea is uh it's a good project when it's somebody involves somebody else's work. So but um That is true. Uh but we're really um oh David, we are um I looked up like lists of social science podcasts and somehow we're like in the and this says very this this reflects very poorly on the social science podcasts is somehow we're in the top hundred. Really? Social science podcasts. Yeah. Cool. I didn't even know there were a hundred of them. Yeah. Yeah exactly. That might it might just be a gimmick for like, you know, um I don't know, micro targeting marketing or something. Are we like number ninety nine or whatever? But you know, hey it's cool. I can brag about that next time.

People ask me about the podcast. Yeah, top one hundred. We're a top one hundred podcasts. Out of a hundred and five, Which is pretty impressive. Um, but uh but thank you all for listening. And um it was just lovely to talk to Pascal. Um one of my favorite things about this podcast is just chance to talk to these lovely people um that we don't always hear from. Yeah. Absolutely. So talk to somebody that you haven't talked to often that you love in your life this week, and we'll talk to you next week. Yeah, that's good advice. Call someone up that's awesome. Yeah. All right. Lori Lori Santos said use your phone as a phone, not as a computer. Yep. I like that advice. All right. Well get to it. Yeah.

See you next week. You can hang up do you hang up a podcast? You stop the podcast. Turn it off. Okay. Turn it off. Okay. Uh and uh and three two on Q manifort.