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This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

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I'm David Pinsov.

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I'm David David Petrizowski.

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And this is Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

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By actual evolutionary psychologists.

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

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formality.

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Oh, I I totally forgot.

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I blinked.

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Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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Explained.

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

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

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but yeah, Religion Explains a fantastic book.

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

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

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

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

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items.

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

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human mind.

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

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

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

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context, concepts, uh shamanism, political ideas?

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We get into all of that.

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Yeah, it was a lovely conversation.

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

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um and just brilliant insights.

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

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

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

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

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

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that are very specific, and it was really fun.

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Yes.

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

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the end of the episode.

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

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Yes, exactly.

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

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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

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

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Yes, enjoy the summer and enjoy the episode.

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Pascal, what is your birthday?

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

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

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you know be one one year closer to death.

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And I wondered why people would want to um

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to wish me a happy birthday.

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

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by explicit um argument and instruction.

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

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

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

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hey, you know why not?

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Okay, let's go happy birthday.

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

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

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

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Yeah.

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

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

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So I'm trying to get some other examples.

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

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interesting.

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Well no I mean I I have to follow up.

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

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

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birthdays, we ought to wish Pascal a happy birthday.

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What's going on with those types of beliefs?

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Seems rather strange from uh an adaptationist perspective.

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That's right.

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

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job.

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

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amenable to to argument.

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

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um we have a uh belief.

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So first of all we have motivated beliefs of course.

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

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

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

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to you what's going on in the US.

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

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exactly like that and stuff like that.

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

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

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propaganda, so flamba.

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

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

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

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

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they'll ask you if you have money.

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

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

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

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That could not happen, that would be wildly illegal.

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Uh but anyway, it does not happen like that.

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

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

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

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It's not like that.

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

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And there's worse than that.

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

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

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

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legends about the US.

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

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

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

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

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Um, despite this person's sort of sincere um

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

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impressions or facts.

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

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uh studied beliefs that um other people have to think

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are not grounded in fact and argument like religious belief.

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

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others are certainly false.

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

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way we used to approach these things in the past.

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

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about cultural evolution and stuff like that.

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But here's the here's the situation.

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

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

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call attractors?

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

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

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

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occupied more often than random distribution of concepts would

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predict.

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

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so to speak.

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

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conversations or whatever.

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

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So you could imagine in that picture that um every morning

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

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

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

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

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That is a powerful um um um a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It's not really like that.

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

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But why didn't we think about that?

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

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

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

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analogous to genetic evolution and selection.

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

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

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really directed.

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

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to push certain religions or stuff.

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

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

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p.m.

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you have the religions we know.

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

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

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

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um material about its features and stuff like that.

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

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

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

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

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an omniscient agent that can do lots of stuff.

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

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

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registered kind of state of affairs.

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

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

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domains where we could think in terms of production.

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

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

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especially those people that Kim Sternley

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called the Paris School of Evolutionary Psychology, like

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

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Which, by the way, was brilliant.

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It was brilliant.

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

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

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

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

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

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on the right side than they are.

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

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air of solidity to these little.

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

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

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

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

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too.

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

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

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

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

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

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force certain ideas on other people?

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A good example I think was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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in that kind of uh moral value.

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

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

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call uh short-term mating.

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

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

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lost.

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

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

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terms of um uh consumption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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interested in.

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

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the uh psychology of politics in the modern world.

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

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That's a kind of all you should know about

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

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politics.

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

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

00:18:47.780 --> 00:18:48.100
like that.

00:18:48.260 --> 00:18:54.250
And that as I say, the obvious, obvious um uh model

00:18:54.410 --> 00:19:00.410
that explains that is some kind of alliance model of uh whereby you know uh

00:19:00.570 --> 00:19:06.490
what is at stake is so extremely um emotionally so strong and so important,

00:19:07.050 --> 00:19:12.810
uh, because it concerns something vastly more important than uh what should we do about uh

00:19:12.810 --> 00:19:15.530
social security payments in the next 10 years.

00:19:15.690 --> 00:19:20.740
It's about who are you with and who are you accounts and you know uh how many people can I

00:19:20.740 --> 00:19:22.820
recruit to this or that coalition.

00:19:23.380 --> 00:19:28.900
So um this is again uh something that has to do with production in the sense that you know

00:19:29.060 --> 00:19:34.580
uh people one thing that I find really interesting about political

00:19:34.580 --> 00:19:40.420
opinions and I must say I I got that from when I was a child that

00:19:40.660 --> 00:19:46.340
I heard political discussions in my family and you know especially with the extended family

00:19:46.420 --> 00:19:50.730
where people would shout at each other constantly about those things.

00:19:51.130 --> 00:19:56.410
And it struck me even as a child, really, sort of

00:19:56.570 --> 00:20:01.530
10-year-old, I thought, but if I thought that

00:20:02.490 --> 00:20:08.330
whatever they were talking about, I don't know, sort of retirement should be abolished

00:20:08.490 --> 00:20:14.340
or unemployment should be, you know, this or that, If I if I really thought that

00:20:14.340 --> 00:20:18.100
I know the truth about that, why would I want to bother people with it?

00:20:18.340 --> 00:20:24.100
I mean, after all, I know the truth about whether you know Twizzlers are better than other

00:20:24.100 --> 00:20:28.660
kinds of candy, but I don't care if others have different kind of ideas about that.

00:20:29.060 --> 00:20:34.340
So um yes, and another component of this um um

00:20:34.580 --> 00:20:40.390
politics argument is about groups and how they um they get to um exist

00:20:40.470 --> 00:20:46.470
at all but that's something we can talk about in in a minute i don't want to uh stun

00:20:46.550 --> 00:20:52.470
you with a sort of barrage of arguments and ideas before um you get

00:20:52.470 --> 00:20:58.310
to actually ask questions fantastic i love it uh pascal had i i to re to to

00:20:58.310 --> 00:21:04.280
paraphrase what i'm hearing uh in the past it was almost like people, I like to think a

00:21:04.280 --> 00:21:07.000
good analogy would be like buyers and sellers in a market.

00:21:07.320 --> 00:21:13.240
And cultural evolution had been, probably for methodological reasons, as you said,

00:21:13.400 --> 00:21:19.240
um, really focused on just the um the buyers, as if the the people who are the

00:21:19.240 --> 00:21:25.110
consumers, and so any model would just sort of predict this is what is going

00:21:25.110 --> 00:21:28.310
to happen, and it's all just focused on the the buyers.

00:21:28.470 --> 00:21:29.830
But of course, the sellers.

00:21:29.990 --> 00:21:33.190
If you you're not gonna have a good model of what's gonna happen in the market if you don't

00:21:33.190 --> 00:21:38.870
include the fact that um sellers can um collude or have an

00:21:38.870 --> 00:21:42.310
interest, and there's a there can be a conflicts of interest or not.

00:21:42.470 --> 00:21:43.510
Um yeah, yeah.

00:21:44.200 --> 00:21:50.120
And and um I I think it's it's um it's

00:21:50.120 --> 00:21:56.120
very much the case in the in the domain where I you know, I used to work

00:21:56.120 --> 00:22:02.040
on religious stuff and um I did that for a while and then for about

00:22:02.040 --> 00:22:07.320
twenty years I tried to shed that and get rid of that, but you know, ki people kept telling

00:22:07.320 --> 00:22:09.240
me, yeah no no you should do this and you should.

00:22:09.880 --> 00:22:15.810
So um because I don't really have an existential interest in religion uh as such.

00:22:15.890 --> 00:22:21.890
And uh but um yes, I mean in that domain,

00:22:22.050 --> 00:22:23.810
true, and I I I it's true too.

00:22:23.890 --> 00:22:28.770
I I was I was talking about this puritanical stuff, but you can see it in other domains,

00:22:28.850 --> 00:22:34.770
and that's why I got really um interested in two other cases

00:22:34.930 --> 00:22:36.770
where it's it's it's quite clear.

00:22:37.010 --> 00:22:42.680
One of them is shamanism, in the sense that everyone,

00:22:42.840 --> 00:22:46.760
and me included, you know, I'm not I'm not better than the other guys.

00:22:46.920 --> 00:22:50.520
Um, everyone sort of thought of shamanism in terms of consumption.

00:22:50.600 --> 00:22:56.200
So thinking once someone comes up with this idea that I put myself in a weird

00:22:56.760 --> 00:23:02.730
um mental state, so I start sort of spouting gibberish and stuff, there

00:23:02.730 --> 00:23:07.050
is a strong sort of impression from people that my mind is not

00:23:08.330 --> 00:23:10.890
directing what I'm saying anymore.

00:23:11.530 --> 00:23:16.730
Which leads to another sort of rather simple inference, which is maybe another mind is

00:23:16.730 --> 00:23:18.170
directing what's going on.

00:23:18.410 --> 00:23:24.090
And once you've got this trick, people will be fascinated and there will be a

00:23:24.330 --> 00:23:28.250
tremendous sort of cultural success for this kind of idea.

00:23:29.360 --> 00:23:35.280
But once again, the idea was, well, it's as if everyone in the morning

00:23:35.280 --> 00:23:38.960
sort of started a bit of shamanism and uh stuff like that.

00:23:39.360 --> 00:23:42.160
But some versions work and some versions don't work.

00:23:42.320 --> 00:23:45.280
So by four PM we have shamanism as we know it.

00:23:45.440 --> 00:23:46.960
Uh but it's not like that.

00:23:47.120 --> 00:23:53.120
And um and there is a fitness interest in in getting other people to

00:23:53.120 --> 00:23:58.590
think that you have uh particular powers, and that's why we should um

00:23:58.750 --> 00:23:59.710
study that.

00:24:00.510 --> 00:24:05.630
Um the other one that I try and in the in this case it's not too complicated in the sense

00:24:05.630 --> 00:24:09.790
that you know uh people can um get

00:24:10.750 --> 00:24:16.160
prestige and some amount of of political power out of being

00:24:16.160 --> 00:24:18.400
recognized as uh thing.

00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:24.240
I was recently reading a review by Ed Hagan and um Zach

00:24:24.400 --> 00:24:30.240
Garfield and maybe someone else of the sort of criteria

00:24:30.240 --> 00:24:35.520
for um well the sort of trace that um make

00:24:36.770 --> 00:24:41.730
um chiefs or leaders uh um

00:24:42.850 --> 00:24:47.570
convincing or accepted or appreciated in uh small-scale societies.

00:24:47.810 --> 00:24:52.370
And I was a bit surprised, they report they were surprised, I was a bit surprised too by

00:24:52.370 --> 00:24:57.810
the fact that uh we have the obvious ones that we would have thought about in um terms of

00:24:57.810 --> 00:25:03.500
leadership psychology, such as competence, the sort of the art of you know

00:25:03.660 --> 00:25:09.100
getting people to agree instead of conflict

00:25:09.100 --> 00:25:14.060
resolution, as people call it, and competence, like being a good hunter and being where

00:25:14.060 --> 00:25:15.500
things grow and stuff like that.

00:25:16.060 --> 00:25:22.060
But also the sort of more dominance-related trace in case there is an intergroup

00:25:23.510 --> 00:25:24.150
conflict.

00:25:24.310 --> 00:25:28.710
You want someone who is more dominant, even if they are less cooperative.

00:25:29.590 --> 00:25:35.590
That's fine, but they said that actually one of the proximal sort of traits that seem to be

00:25:35.590 --> 00:25:41.030
very important is some kind of religious competence, like shamanism and things like that.

00:25:41.270 --> 00:25:44.950
So I don't know how that works exactly.

00:25:45.190 --> 00:25:50.870
But still, that means that, if anything, that means that there is

00:25:51.040 --> 00:25:56.960
a production aspect to offering shamanism to others, which may include

00:25:56.960 --> 00:26:02.320
some bid on political influence, uh political power.

00:26:02.720 --> 00:26:08.640
And um, so that should be um uh we should think about that when we

00:26:08.640 --> 00:26:14.400
make models of these uh things or when we try to explain their uh their cultural success.

00:26:15.410 --> 00:26:20.130
And another case that I found really interesting, and that's maybe something

00:26:23.170 --> 00:26:29.170
yeah, that's a bit more complicated, is uh was the question: why is

00:26:29.170 --> 00:26:35.090
it that um divination is such a successful uh cultural

00:26:35.090 --> 00:26:35.730
gadget?

00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:42.120
So almost everywhere in the world you'll have some um way

00:26:42.360 --> 00:26:47.960
of so divination is simply having a technique that produces certain utterances

00:26:48.200 --> 00:26:54.120
and then having an assumption that the statements produced by that technique are different

00:26:54.120 --> 00:26:56.600
from the others and they're more likely to be true.

00:26:58.030 --> 00:27:03.950
Now there's there's um almost a century of

00:27:03.950 --> 00:27:06.110
anthropology of trying to ignore that question.

00:27:06.190 --> 00:27:10.110
You know, why do people think that's um a criterion of truth?

00:27:10.190 --> 00:27:16.190
You know, I sort of uh you know behead a chicken and see where it runs and sort of tell

00:27:16.190 --> 00:27:21.390
you, well, the way it runs tells me that your sister-in-law is trying to uh bewitch you or

00:27:21.390 --> 00:27:21.550
something.

00:27:22.670 --> 00:27:27.880
And people say, well, now that's the the chicken has said it, it's much more, you know,

00:27:27.960 --> 00:27:33.400
it's um we can all agree that that's what's going on and uh we have to do something about

00:27:33.400 --> 00:27:33.720
it.

00:27:34.280 --> 00:27:39.080
And I was wondering why why not uh face this question?

00:27:39.560 --> 00:27:45.320
And um so I mean to it to cut a long story short, I mean the the thing is that

00:27:45.800 --> 00:27:50.930
one one feature of all those divination

00:27:51.090 --> 00:27:56.930
procedures is that the person who's doing this sort of technical stuff says, I have

00:27:56.930 --> 00:27:59.810
nothing to do with what this technique will produce.

00:27:59.970 --> 00:28:01.170
I don't know what it says.

00:28:01.330 --> 00:28:03.650
I mean, I can't predict what it will say.

00:28:04.130 --> 00:28:07.170
Sometimes it's not true, sometimes it's true, but that doesn't matter.

00:28:07.490 --> 00:28:11.970
The big thing is too, uh, the big argument is I have nothing to do with this utterance.

00:28:12.290 --> 00:28:16.960
So this utterance that says, for example, your sister-in-law is really trying to bewitch

00:28:16.960 --> 00:28:19.760
you, it's an utterance that's produced by no one.

00:28:20.320 --> 00:28:25.680
And there are lots of situations in which it's really vital to have a

00:28:25.680 --> 00:28:31.600
description of the situation that is not anyone, anyone's description, anyone in

00:28:31.600 --> 00:28:32.480
particular.

00:28:32.720 --> 00:28:37.520
So, as I was saying, if you think that someone is bewitching you, like you know, you get

00:28:37.520 --> 00:28:43.050
sick, and you know, Um there may be all sorts of opinions on this thing.

00:28:43.450 --> 00:28:48.010
Um because the the the the the fact of the matter is inscrutable.

00:28:48.170 --> 00:28:54.010
I mean, even if you thought that witchcraft does produce um illness, well you

00:28:54.010 --> 00:28:55.850
wouldn't know who did it and stuff.

00:28:56.090 --> 00:28:57.530
So it's inscrutable.

00:28:57.770 --> 00:29:02.650
However, um opinions about that are not without their costs.

00:29:03.400 --> 00:29:09.400
And so if I say that it's your sister-in-law, it's it's uh I think it is, and

00:29:09.400 --> 00:29:10.440
that's my opinion.

00:29:10.680 --> 00:29:11.000
Okay.

00:29:11.800 --> 00:29:17.560
Well, your sister-in-law, she might have allies, she may have friends, um, and

00:29:17.560 --> 00:29:22.440
those people might not like this uh diagnosis, and they might, for example, think that I'm

00:29:22.440 --> 00:29:27.910
saying that just to deflect my obvious involvement in this case, in which you know it's a

00:29:27.910 --> 00:29:31.990
bit suspicious that I go around sort of denouncing others and stuff like that.

00:29:32.230 --> 00:29:37.030
So, in this kind of situation, it's not that the practitioner has much of an interest in

00:29:37.030 --> 00:29:39.350
the statement being this, that, or the other.

00:29:39.590 --> 00:29:45.350
It's more that everyone around these people has a great interest in having

00:29:45.510 --> 00:29:51.420
a description of a situation that was not attributed to any person in

00:29:51.420 --> 00:29:52.380
particular.

00:29:53.420 --> 00:29:58.700
That makes consensus building much easier because you have consensus without

00:29:58.700 --> 00:30:02.620
allying with one particular coalition or group.

00:30:03.980 --> 00:30:07.260
So that could explain the success.

00:30:07.740 --> 00:30:13.690
And I think that's that may be one reason why people rediscover this

00:30:13.690 --> 00:30:15.530
kind of technique so often.

00:30:15.610 --> 00:30:21.210
I mean, you know, sort of um uh there was one anthropologist in

00:30:21.370 --> 00:30:26.650
um so the whole thing is that that it's it's it's it's supposed to be

00:30:26.650 --> 00:30:28.010
unpredictable.

00:30:28.650 --> 00:30:34.170
There was one anthropologist in the 50s or 60s who tried to argue that

00:30:35.130 --> 00:30:40.960
um A great that divination was functional

00:30:40.960 --> 00:30:46.880
in the sense that if you randomize decisions about everything, you avoid

00:30:46.880 --> 00:30:52.400
the obvious biases and um and um other sort of um

00:30:52.400 --> 00:30:55.040
deviations from rationality that you have.

00:30:55.200 --> 00:31:01.120
So it's a bit like um if you you know if you choose your you know

00:31:01.280 --> 00:31:02.480
where to park.

00:31:02.630 --> 00:31:08.630
Yeah, I I had a friend who had a good um theory like that, which was uh a theory of

00:31:08.630 --> 00:31:13.350
superstition, which I think is completely it's it's obviously false.

00:31:13.510 --> 00:31:14.390
And he knew it.

00:31:14.470 --> 00:31:16.390
I mean he that was a joke theory.

00:31:16.630 --> 00:31:22.150
The joke theory of uh superstition was a bit connected to this some idea that

00:31:22.150 --> 00:31:27.350
sometimes you need something that does not come from your own mind or from the minds of

00:31:27.350 --> 00:31:27.990
anyone.

00:31:28.820 --> 00:31:33.300
So he had a good theory, a great theory of superstition, which was like, you know, for

00:31:33.300 --> 00:31:39.140
example, you have to um you have to get them in the morning and you'll have to

00:31:39.140 --> 00:31:42.100
put one foot before the other on the ground.

00:31:42.340 --> 00:31:46.100
Now should we should it be your right foot or your left foot?

00:31:46.340 --> 00:31:51.620
Now if you are a perfect brain, you will consider one option and then the other and then

00:31:51.620 --> 00:31:56.660
the first one and the other until you can find one reason to do one rather than the other.

00:31:56.870 --> 00:31:58.870
And the thing is that there aren't any reasons.

00:31:59.030 --> 00:32:05.030
So you will spend your entire day in bed trying to work out how to get out of bed.

00:32:05.590 --> 00:32:11.270
And this story is, you know, the story of Buridan's ass, you know, that's

00:32:11.350 --> 00:32:17.270
um that um medieval philosopher who had this story about a donkey that was in the field, is

00:32:17.430 --> 00:32:23.160
brought back by his owner to the farm, and the owner gave them a lot of food and a lot of

00:32:23.160 --> 00:32:26.840
drink, you know, a big bucket of water and a big bucket of hay.

00:32:27.400 --> 00:32:33.320
And the poor donkey cannot make up his mind whether he should start with a drink or start

00:32:33.320 --> 00:32:35.000
with a good munchie.

00:32:35.160 --> 00:32:39.400
And dies in the end because he can't decide, because his mind was perfect.

00:32:39.480 --> 00:32:41.950
That's what Buridan tried to explain.

00:32:42.670 --> 00:32:48.190
And if you have a perfect mind, you get stuck in a loop of uh you know decisions.

00:32:48.430 --> 00:32:54.030
Um so all you know uh that's a very different thing, but very often

00:32:54.190 --> 00:32:58.830
communities that resort to divination for important decisions are a bit in that predicament

00:32:58.910 --> 00:33:04.510
that if you uh if you keep sort of polling people's people's opinions about a certain case,

00:33:04.590 --> 00:33:10.040
you'll get indefinitely many reasons to think that each of them is right or wrong.

00:33:10.200 --> 00:33:16.040
And on top of that, you'll get this problem of the fact that

00:33:16.040 --> 00:33:19.960
uttering certain diagnoses is itself costly.

00:33:20.280 --> 00:33:24.280
It's itself a coalitional sort of um move.

00:33:24.760 --> 00:33:30.520
Um so you you know um intuitively people would realize

00:33:30.520 --> 00:33:35.470
that having a kind of randomizing technique would be um would be good.

00:33:35.630 --> 00:33:39.870
But once again that means that it is a kind of production argument, you know, in the sense

00:33:39.870 --> 00:33:44.590
that people are motivated to have this kind of institution because it serves their

00:33:44.590 --> 00:33:45.550
interests.

00:33:47.470 --> 00:33:50.430
Okay, so that's that's all for production at the moment.

00:33:50.510 --> 00:33:56.260
I'm I'm I don't have anything further to say about that, except that

00:33:56.340 --> 00:34:02.260
um yeah, I look forward to the School of Santa Barbara and the School of Paris to

00:34:02.260 --> 00:34:05.220
sort of propose their their views on that.

00:34:07.460 --> 00:34:10.740
Uh I I love this model of of divination.

00:34:10.820 --> 00:34:12.820
Um I I find it fascinating.

00:34:13.060 --> 00:34:15.460
There's one part of it that I don't quite understand.

00:34:16.030 --> 00:34:20.190
So for me, the way I intuitively understand it is, you know, let's say my wife and I, we

00:34:20.190 --> 00:34:24.030
want to go out to the movies and we want to be at the same movie, but I would rather see

00:34:24.030 --> 00:34:25.630
one movie and she would rather see a different movie.

00:34:25.710 --> 00:34:28.110
This is known in game theory as the Battle of the Sexes game.

00:34:28.190 --> 00:34:30.190
It's a coordination game, but there are two equilibria.

00:34:30.430 --> 00:34:32.350
One is better for me, one is better for my wife.

00:34:32.510 --> 00:34:32.750
Right.

00:34:33.070 --> 00:34:36.430
And we might settle that disagreement by, say, flipping a coin or playing rock, paper,

00:34:36.590 --> 00:34:37.710
scissors, or whatever.

00:34:37.920 --> 00:34:42.080
And that to me is analogous to the argument you're making with regard to divination.

00:34:42.160 --> 00:34:46.080
It's the equivalent of flipping a coin or playing rock, paper, scissors, but instead of

00:34:46.080 --> 00:34:50.160
flipping the coin, you're decapitating the chicken and seeing which way it it runs, or

00:34:50.160 --> 00:34:53.280
you're reading the entrails or the tea leaves or whatever it is.

00:34:53.520 --> 00:34:57.440
Um But here's the the sticking point for me that I don't quite understand.

00:34:57.760 --> 00:35:03.750
When I flip a coin to settle a kind of Battle of the Sexes game, um, I don't believe

00:35:03.750 --> 00:35:06.870
that the coin is infused with supernatural powers.

00:35:07.110 --> 00:35:08.630
I I I just think it's a random thing.

00:35:08.710 --> 00:35:11.430
It's just a way of settling uh our our conflict.

00:35:11.670 --> 00:35:17.510
Um and yet when it comes to these societies who you who have these divination rituals, that

00:35:17.510 --> 00:35:21.670
belief is there that this this ritual is infused with supernatural significance.

00:35:21.830 --> 00:35:25.990
It's telling you about some supernatural agent or s it has some cosmic justification.

00:35:26.070 --> 00:35:29.820
It's not just we're gonna do this random thing to settle the disagreement or to coordinate.

00:35:30.300 --> 00:35:31.660
It's it has a deeper significance.

00:35:31.820 --> 00:35:33.900
So where does that piece of it come from?

00:35:34.060 --> 00:35:37.980
Why do we need that in addition to the the divination practice itself?

00:35:38.620 --> 00:35:41.100
Well, um there are two aspects to that.

00:35:41.340 --> 00:35:46.300
One is that um if the process is

00:35:47.350 --> 00:35:53.190
Obviously and overtly random in that sense, like flipping a

00:35:53.190 --> 00:35:53.830
coin.

00:35:54.150 --> 00:35:59.510
It has very little persuasive power as something that anyone could should take seriously as

00:35:59.510 --> 00:36:01.190
opposed to anything else.

00:36:01.750 --> 00:36:07.430
But on the other hand, I want to say that divination does not necessarily

00:36:07.430 --> 00:36:13.400
entail that the diagnosis that was not produced by the diviner or anyone

00:36:13.400 --> 00:36:18.520
else in the community is actually produced by some other entity.

00:36:19.000 --> 00:36:20.760
So I'll tell you why.

00:36:20.920 --> 00:36:26.440
First of all, because there are tons of examples of divination where our people

00:36:26.760 --> 00:36:32.440
think that the result could not have been

00:36:32.440 --> 00:36:36.680
different given the situation at hand.

00:36:37.310 --> 00:36:43.230
whereas, but they do not think that any agent was involved, like a god or a spirit

00:36:43.310 --> 00:36:45.310
or whatever, in transmitting it.

00:36:45.470 --> 00:36:50.910
So, for example, um, there are many cases of divination in the um

00:36:51.550 --> 00:36:57.230
in the Western world where people, you know, uh will draw cards or things like that,

00:36:57.390 --> 00:37:03.280
and they and the person who does it will tell you, well, the cards show the

00:37:03.280 --> 00:37:08.080
tarot shows that you know your sister-in-law is trying to bewitch you.

00:37:08.720 --> 00:37:14.000
And there's no implication, and in most clients, there is absolutely no

00:37:14.000 --> 00:37:19.680
expectation that the cards say that because some external agent

00:37:19.680 --> 00:37:23.760
knows about the sister-in-law and made the cards do it.

00:37:24.320 --> 00:37:29.990
There are also thousands of omens that are recorded in

00:37:30.310 --> 00:37:35.590
the Mesopotamia, for example, where you know if a five legged sheep is born

00:37:36.950 --> 00:37:42.950
during full moon, then there'll be uh something else, you know, a huge storm in the

00:37:42.950 --> 00:37:44.310
uh in the in the region.

00:37:44.950 --> 00:37:50.900
And those things are not because they think that the sign

00:37:50.900 --> 00:37:56.820
was produced, the sign like the five-legged uh animal, was produced by an agent

00:37:56.900 --> 00:37:58.180
like the gods.

00:37:58.420 --> 00:37:59.380
So, what do they think?

00:37:59.460 --> 00:38:05.380
I mean, I my idea was that the um the one thing,

00:38:05.700 --> 00:38:10.420
the one ex assumption they have, that is a tacit assumption, obviously, it's not an

00:38:10.420 --> 00:38:16.420
explicit theory, is that the divination uh diagnosis, like the

00:38:16.420 --> 00:38:20.390
way the chicken runs or whatever, is an index.

00:38:20.550 --> 00:38:24.470
It is caused by the situation that it describes.

00:38:24.950 --> 00:38:30.310
It's not a symbol, it's not a description of that situation, it's a result of that

00:38:30.310 --> 00:38:30.710
situation.

00:38:30.870 --> 00:38:36.470
So the idea is that given the state of your sister-in-law's witchcraft

00:38:37.590 --> 00:38:42.790
operations, there was no way the kitchen the chicken could go anywhere else.

00:38:43.160 --> 00:38:45.240
It's a causal claim.

00:38:46.280 --> 00:38:51.320
So, on the one hand, there is no pure randomization because that would be

00:38:51.320 --> 00:38:57.160
transparently not persuasive, but also there is no need for an

00:38:57.160 --> 00:39:02.760
agent to do it because this causal assumption can do the work,

00:39:02.920 --> 00:39:03.560
I think.

00:39:04.520 --> 00:39:10.250
And also, I must say that there is another

00:39:10.250 --> 00:39:16.090
dynamic that's very much a group dynamic or sort of coalitional dynamic there, which

00:39:16.090 --> 00:39:21.930
is that all anthropologists who've studied divination in the

00:39:21.930 --> 00:39:27.770
field say that everyone says, yeah, no, no, it's it's you know it must be the

00:39:27.770 --> 00:39:31.850
sister in law because divination said it, so it's that's it, that's settled.

00:39:32.090 --> 00:39:37.880
And then you know, when you know, when you know you have uh a few drinks and you talk and

00:39:37.960 --> 00:39:43.000
you know uh between you, me and the gate post you can say, Well, you know, I I'm not really

00:39:43.000 --> 00:39:44.280
sure, I don't think so.

00:39:44.440 --> 00:39:49.240
I mean, you know, because the grandmother looks much more threatening than the sister in

00:39:49.400 --> 00:39:49.880
law.

00:39:50.200 --> 00:39:52.280
So people can have private doubts.

00:39:52.440 --> 00:39:58.310
However, again, since you had a great interest in having some description that

00:39:58.310 --> 00:40:03.750
comes from no one in particular, you have great interest in claiming that this description

00:40:03.750 --> 00:40:08.550
is something you believe because it makes everyone agree that that's something you create a

00:40:08.550 --> 00:40:13.990
cascade, you know, of commitment that you know we all have to agree on that.

00:40:14.630 --> 00:40:20.630
And I think it's it's it's true that I think it's the it it could explain.

00:40:20.780 --> 00:40:22.940
So it's a kind of preference falsification.

00:40:23.020 --> 00:40:28.860
You know, it's easier to say that because that is clearly in our interest, than to uh

00:40:28.860 --> 00:40:32.940
discuss our private doubts about um about this situation.

00:40:33.900 --> 00:40:39.180
And I think it it it could be that because it really is the case that um

00:40:39.500 --> 00:40:44.380
anthropologists in many, many places report both the public

00:40:45.020 --> 00:40:50.970
confidence, you know, that if it was the uh the oracles said this,

00:40:51.210 --> 00:40:52.970
then that's the way it is.

00:40:53.530 --> 00:40:58.730
And then their private sort of doubts or you know they're not sure it's true or

00:40:59.290 --> 00:41:05.050
um I I even knew people after a while in my own uh

00:41:05.050 --> 00:41:10.810
field that's a long long time ago but um who told me they were unsure about particular

00:41:10.810 --> 00:41:16.220
diagnosis and and then they told me, well, you know, between us, I'm not sure this stuff

00:41:16.220 --> 00:41:19.020
ever says anything terribly true.

00:41:19.180 --> 00:41:24.620
So but the guy was obviously not, you know, not trying to he well he was not gonna make a

00:41:24.620 --> 00:41:29.260
public statement about this kind of uh um uh opinion.

00:41:29.420 --> 00:41:30.700
But but yeah.

00:41:30.940 --> 00:41:36.540
So I think the the uh sort of um the the the interests of all the parties

00:41:37.290 --> 00:41:43.210
sort of conspire to make that situation very stable

00:41:43.370 --> 00:41:49.210
despite no one being a hundred percent committed to it being true.

00:41:49.370 --> 00:41:54.090
And that's something that's very much going back to these production arguments,

00:41:56.490 --> 00:42:02.180
one thing that we inherited from uh classical anthropology, and

00:42:02.180 --> 00:42:07.540
sometimes it's not a good idea, is to think that um uh

00:42:07.780 --> 00:42:13.380
cultures come with their axioms and that the axioms are used deductively by people to

00:42:13.620 --> 00:42:17.620
generate impressions about uh particular case, particular situations.

00:42:17.780 --> 00:42:23.540
Like, for example, um you know that yes, divination works, divination reveals the

00:42:23.540 --> 00:42:29.470
truth, and they use divination today, so that means that that is the truth.

00:42:29.790 --> 00:42:31.550
It's very rarely what you observe.

00:42:31.710 --> 00:42:37.630
What you observe is more that people are faced with all sorts of theories, sorry,

00:42:37.870 --> 00:42:43.870
all sorts of instances, empirical cases, then uh, and for many of

00:42:43.870 --> 00:42:49.470
them, there's some sort of presumption that yes, that may be convincing, that may be what

00:42:49.470 --> 00:42:50.750
really happened, etc.

00:42:51.150 --> 00:42:57.000
This creates enough of an interest in claiming that

00:42:57.000 --> 00:43:01.960
it's always true for people to do it despite their own private doubts and carry on like

00:43:01.960 --> 00:43:02.280
that.

00:43:03.560 --> 00:43:08.600
But anyway, there are many other examples of this kind of phenomenon in which

00:43:09.560 --> 00:43:15.210
what we think is deductively Um inferred from some

00:43:15.210 --> 00:43:17.850
cultural theory that people have in their minds.

00:43:18.010 --> 00:43:23.770
It actually inductively constructed little by little out of pieces of experience and

00:43:23.770 --> 00:43:24.970
salient cases.

00:43:25.290 --> 00:43:25.450
Yeah.

00:43:26.170 --> 00:43:29.130
Can I um Pascal, uh, can I push on David's question?

00:43:29.210 --> 00:43:33.850
And I'm gonna paraphrase to see if this also is what you're saying, Pascal and David.

00:43:33.930 --> 00:43:37.050
You can tell me if this is also addresses this.

00:43:37.290 --> 00:43:42.410
Is that the reason why it's not a random thing is it's sort of one step off of an army.

00:43:42.600 --> 00:43:47.320
There's an army behind it, but it's hidden for the reasons that Pascal described, which is

00:43:47.320 --> 00:43:52.840
that if we all want, um, let's say, um,

00:43:53.160 --> 00:43:55.720
I was gonna use Lita as an example, so I'll just do it.

00:43:55.800 --> 00:43:56.520
I'll just use Lita.

00:43:56.680 --> 00:44:00.440
So let's say we're on a village with Lita and we want Lita to do something differently.

00:44:01.000 --> 00:44:06.600
Um, if we all say that there's going to be some random process um

00:44:06.920 --> 00:44:12.450
uh that's gonna lead to telling Lita what to do, and we want to enforce that.

00:44:12.610 --> 00:44:16.210
Lita can just say, if she doesn't want to do it, she's just gonna say, Well, it's a random

00:44:16.210 --> 00:44:17.890
process, so why would you do that?

00:44:18.130 --> 00:44:23.650
But if we say, no, it's a causal process, that's sort of, you know, the then then then

00:44:24.370 --> 00:44:30.370
uh what that explicit narrative provides us is exactly what

00:44:30.370 --> 00:44:36.370
Pascal described, which is that it takes the responsibility off me telling Lita

00:44:36.530 --> 00:44:42.240
what I think she should do, but we enforce it as a causal process

00:44:42.400 --> 00:44:48.400
because if Lita questions it, every one of us will enforce

00:44:48.560 --> 00:44:53.120
the um what what what the what the what the process says.

00:44:53.280 --> 00:44:55.280
So let's just say it's like a stuffed animal, right?

00:44:55.360 --> 00:45:00.880
So if Lita questions the stuffed animal, every one of us will uh will

00:45:01.120 --> 00:45:05.920
enforce that the stuffed animal is right, but it's opaque with respect to Lita.

00:45:06.430 --> 00:45:10.190
So none of us incur the cost of telling Lita what to do directly.

00:45:10.430 --> 00:45:12.270
Lita doesn't attack us.

00:45:12.430 --> 00:45:15.790
But so it kind of moves like there's an army behind the idea.

00:45:15.950 --> 00:45:18.190
There's an army behind the stuffed animal.

00:45:18.350 --> 00:45:24.350
Um but it it it it works or it exists as a causal thing as opposed to a random

00:45:24.350 --> 00:45:30.040
thing precisely because of this dynamic of uh we're gonna back

00:45:30.280 --> 00:45:36.120
up the um uh we're gonna back up that there's a we're gonna enforce this

00:45:36.280 --> 00:45:41.960
and and the causation is sort of confabulation around the idea that I I need some

00:45:41.960 --> 00:45:46.520
reasonable reason to say that I want to enforce this when Lita goes against the stuffed

00:45:46.520 --> 00:45:47.240
animals will.

00:45:47.480 --> 00:45:50.280
But the real reason is because we all want Lita to do something different.

00:45:50.440 --> 00:45:52.570
Does That makes sense.

00:45:52.650 --> 00:45:53.130
That makes sense.

00:45:53.210 --> 00:45:53.370
Yeah.

00:45:53.450 --> 00:45:53.530
Yeah.

00:45:53.850 --> 00:45:54.650
David, does that make sense?

00:45:54.970 --> 00:45:55.370
Yeah, yeah.

00:45:55.770 --> 00:46:01.130
You know, it's it's um i i uh it's always

00:46:01.530 --> 00:46:07.530
um it's always an interesting experience that you know uh uh for me that I

00:46:07.530 --> 00:46:11.700
try to explain something in terms that seem to me pure crystal.

00:46:11.940 --> 00:46:13.940
There's no clearer way of saying it.

00:46:14.100 --> 00:46:17.860
And then someone re-explains them in a way that's actually much clearer.

00:46:18.260 --> 00:46:20.260
And I think, oh wow, okay.

00:46:20.500 --> 00:46:23.860
So that was that and that happens.

00:46:24.100 --> 00:46:25.140
That happens quite a bit.

00:46:25.380 --> 00:46:31.220
But anyway, I I um uh another sort of set of issues, I mean, unless

00:46:31.300 --> 00:46:36.090
you you guys are so intuitiveness, you want to do um a lot of that.

00:46:36.250 --> 00:46:41.850
But that that's um uh another sort of set of things I I got really

00:46:41.850 --> 00:46:47.610
interested in that I I thought should be a new direction for evolutionary

00:46:47.610 --> 00:46:52.810
psychology, and for obvious reasons we don't want to get there, is modern

00:46:52.810 --> 00:46:53.770
politics.

00:46:54.090 --> 00:47:00.060
And um uh but since we don't want to go there, you know whether there is, you

00:47:00.220 --> 00:47:05.420
we we want to go somewhere else, which is more the explanation or the analytics of um

00:47:07.020 --> 00:47:08.620
of modern politics.

00:47:08.940 --> 00:47:14.460
And um I become more and more interested in this sort of

00:47:14.460 --> 00:47:20.460
idea that um that politics really sort of is

00:47:20.460 --> 00:47:25.580
an illusion in the sense that um i in the sense that uh

00:47:27.470 --> 00:47:32.270
Most political discussions and things are not about their real

00:47:33.390 --> 00:47:34.670
um point.

00:47:36.670 --> 00:47:42.510
They're about coalitional alignment and sort of fine grained calibration of where

00:47:42.510 --> 00:47:45.230
you stand and where I stand and stuff like that.

00:47:47.870 --> 00:47:52.110
But then the mystery is how people manage to

00:47:53.560 --> 00:47:58.200
um yes get all this coalitional sort of um

00:48:00.440 --> 00:48:05.560
um this coalitional effects um

00:48:06.520 --> 00:48:11.800
out of ideas that seem really unrelated to the coalitions in particular and here i'm i'm

00:48:11.880 --> 00:48:17.430
i'm thinking about um obviously uh this part of the stuff I did on um

00:48:17.670 --> 00:48:23.270
in the little politics book is pure sort of pins off kind of stuff because the idea is

00:48:23.430 --> 00:48:29.350
well um why would you have those um uh strange alliances,

00:48:29.430 --> 00:48:35.270
you know, strange bad fellows like you know, some party decided that deciding that they're

00:48:35.270 --> 00:48:39.830
all absolutely for women, but really not for mothers.

00:48:40.320 --> 00:48:45.200
Or, you know, for poor people, but only if they're in cities, not if they're in the in

00:48:45.200 --> 00:48:46.080
Appalachia.

00:48:47.680 --> 00:48:53.680
And I want to ask you guys what you think, because I I

00:48:53.680 --> 00:48:59.680
I find the Alliance sort of um framework

00:48:59.680 --> 00:49:00.880
to think about that.

00:49:01.680 --> 00:49:07.440
Uh obviously the the the the best way to to

00:49:07.440 --> 00:49:08.480
approach that.

00:49:10.010 --> 00:49:13.050
And then I still have questions.

00:49:13.850 --> 00:49:17.210
And one of those questions is that

00:49:19.770 --> 00:49:25.770
there is another way of describing the sort of, for example, the liberal conservative sort

00:49:25.770 --> 00:49:29.770
of dispute in modern Western politics.

00:49:30.120 --> 00:49:33.640
And that is the one that comes from Thomas Sowell.

00:49:34.280 --> 00:49:39.240
And that says that, well, there are different visions, and um and he describes that in very

00:49:39.240 --> 00:49:42.520
intellectual terms because he he's talking about intellectual history.

00:49:42.600 --> 00:49:44.600
He's not talking about the actual movements.

00:49:44.920 --> 00:49:50.760
But still, so basically there's an unconstrained vision where you know there are

00:49:50.760 --> 00:49:56.440
problems and they get to have solutions, and um mankind is not limited, and

00:49:56.440 --> 00:50:02.410
mankind can be shaped to be different, And so is society, and so is the

00:50:02.410 --> 00:50:04.170
environment, and so is everything.

00:50:04.330 --> 00:50:08.890
And there's a constrained vision where all we can hope for are trade-offs.

00:50:09.690 --> 00:50:15.210
Because you know, that's a crooked timber of humanity, and you know, we we know that

00:50:16.490 --> 00:50:20.090
incentives matter, and everything happens in scarcity and stuff like that.

00:50:20.170 --> 00:50:25.520
So that's more of a conservative vision where yes, all you can hope for is a trade-off

00:50:25.520 --> 00:50:29.600
that's less uh costly than another trade-off.

00:50:29.840 --> 00:50:34.160
Now it seems to me that those two visions really are different visions.

00:50:34.800 --> 00:50:40.240
And I must say that talking with people over the

00:50:40.240 --> 00:50:45.840
years or more being talked at because I don't want to

00:50:46.490 --> 00:50:51.290
engage in political discussions, but people don't care if you don't want to engage, they

00:50:51.290 --> 00:50:52.650
will engage for you.

00:50:54.570 --> 00:51:00.330
It seems to me that that difference is quite let's say I recognize it,

00:51:00.490 --> 00:51:06.170
I see it, and then I think, well, there's a lot of evidence that

00:51:07.690 --> 00:51:11.530
political attitudes are largely heritable.

00:51:12.380 --> 00:51:17.340
And I think, well, maybe there is something, a sort of disposition to be an unconstrained

00:51:17.340 --> 00:51:19.420
person or a constrained person.

00:51:19.980 --> 00:51:25.500
So my question is: how do you s how do we square that with an alliance

00:51:25.500 --> 00:51:26.060
theory?

00:51:26.300 --> 00:51:32.140
Because the alliance theory, if we leave it there, would say, well, it's all uh for grabs,

00:51:32.300 --> 00:51:37.740
you know, you just choose your your groups, then you tailor the beliefs to whatever uh the

00:51:37.740 --> 00:51:38.860
groups are.

00:51:40.130 --> 00:51:45.490
But that's not what the visions model would say, which is no, no, no, you you have to have

00:51:45.490 --> 00:51:51.010
beliefs that kind of chime in chime with the uh general orientation towards

00:51:51.010 --> 00:51:53.330
constrained or unconstrained vision.

00:51:53.970 --> 00:51:59.970
Um so I don't know if it's done to ask the podcast

00:51:59.970 --> 00:52:05.730
people what they would do about us because I really don't know what to do about that.

00:52:06.290 --> 00:52:06.690
Yeah.

00:52:07.960 --> 00:52:11.800
well the first thing to say is that uh at the end of the day, it's an empirical question.

00:52:11.960 --> 00:52:17.080
And if you know these visions are the primary variables that are explaining people's

00:52:17.080 --> 00:52:20.760
political coalitions and political beliefs, then we ought to be able to see that

00:52:20.760 --> 00:52:21.240
empirically.

00:52:21.320 --> 00:52:24.760
We ought to have a good measure of these visions and show that they're powerfully

00:52:24.760 --> 00:52:26.920
predictive of coalitional alignment.

00:52:27.080 --> 00:52:31.290
And we got to make sure that our measurements actually are good and not, you know,

00:52:31.690 --> 00:52:35.850
indirectly measuring the thing that we're trying to predict, which is, I think, a big

00:52:35.850 --> 00:52:39.850
problem in political psychology, where the outcome variable is often baked into the

00:52:39.850 --> 00:52:41.450
predictor variable.

00:52:41.930 --> 00:52:42.250
Yep.

00:52:42.490 --> 00:52:47.850
So if we're going to actually try to test this uh conflict of visions model, we want to

00:52:47.850 --> 00:52:51.930
actually have a good measure to see if number one, these visions actually exist

00:52:52.400 --> 00:52:53.200
consistently.

00:52:53.360 --> 00:52:57.840
Because I can think of a lot of exceptions to the rule of, say, liberals supporting an

00:52:57.840 --> 00:53:00.800
unconstrained, sorry, yeah, an unconstrained vision.

00:53:01.200 --> 00:53:05.760
For example, they might think that wealthy business people are self-interested, greedy,

00:53:06.000 --> 00:53:10.080
they need to be reined in by strong incentives, and that's why we need to regulate them and

00:53:10.240 --> 00:53:11.360
why we need to tax them.

00:53:11.600 --> 00:53:16.290
Similarly, I could think of exceptions where, you know, uh people on the right Christians

00:53:16.290 --> 00:53:21.570
will will have an uh an unconstrained vision where uh where we can rebuild people to in

00:53:21.570 --> 00:53:26.290
God's image and and train them to be, you know, apostles of of Jesus or or or whatever,

00:53:26.530 --> 00:53:31.730
where, you know, uh we can raise people to be to have these Christian values and these

00:53:31.730 --> 00:53:34.610
Christian norms or or to love their country or or whatever.

00:53:34.850 --> 00:53:40.280
So I'm personally skeptical that if we do a good empirical test, that that will turn out to

00:53:40.280 --> 00:53:45.160
be the case, that these visions will number one, be held consistently across a variety of

00:53:45.160 --> 00:53:50.200
concrete instances, and number two, be strongly predictive of coalitional uh alignment.

00:53:50.360 --> 00:53:51.800
But then you know it's an empirical question.

00:53:51.880 --> 00:53:53.080
We we got to run the test.

00:53:53.160 --> 00:53:57.800
Uh and and I'm and I'm involved in a in a few studies right now that are attempting to run

00:53:57.800 --> 00:53:58.680
such tests.

00:53:58.920 --> 00:54:02.760
So the first thing I would say is that empirically I don't think the case is very strong.

00:54:02.920 --> 00:54:08.120
Number one, that these sort of abstract worldviews or dispositions exist coherently and are

00:54:08.120 --> 00:54:08.600
consistent.

00:54:08.750 --> 00:54:13.070
And number two, even if they did exist, there's not strong evidence that they have a

00:54:13.070 --> 00:54:17.310
powerful effect on political beliefs or coalitional alignment.

00:54:17.470 --> 00:54:21.710
That isn't to say that there aren't heritable dispositions or psychological traits that

00:54:21.710 --> 00:54:23.150
matter politically.

00:54:23.390 --> 00:54:28.990
But I think if we want to understand how and why they matter, we have to understand them as

00:54:28.990 --> 00:54:34.110
things that predispose one toward aligning with a particular coalition or particular group

00:54:34.110 --> 00:54:35.470
relative to another.

00:54:35.710 --> 00:54:41.480
I mean, for example, there's huge um educational polarization in the United States, such

00:54:41.480 --> 00:54:45.720
that people with college or graduate degrees tend to lean to the Democratic Party, uh,

00:54:45.880 --> 00:54:51.480
people without a college degree, uh particularly white men and uh and uh rural men tend to

00:54:51.480 --> 00:54:53.000
lean to the Republican coalition.

00:54:53.160 --> 00:54:57.880
So there's uh this powerful educational component to the political alliance structure.

00:54:58.120 --> 00:55:02.870
But whether or not I go to college or get a graduate degree or become sort of an

00:55:02.870 --> 00:55:08.230
intellectually curious person is going to uh depend strongly on my heritable dispositions,

00:55:08.390 --> 00:55:13.110
my level of intellectual curiosity, my openness to new experiences, my willingness to say

00:55:13.270 --> 00:55:17.110
move out of my small town and move into a city if that's where my university is.

00:55:17.270 --> 00:55:17.590
Exactly.

00:55:17.750 --> 00:55:22.390
So all of these uh uh uh dispositions might ultimately lead to the outcome of me getting an

00:55:22.390 --> 00:55:23.350
education or not.

00:55:23.540 --> 00:55:27.140
And then if you look at the analysis, you'll find a correlation between all those

00:55:27.140 --> 00:55:30.740
dispositions, you know, openness to experience, curiosity, and liberalism.

00:55:31.060 --> 00:55:35.140
But what we're missing is that there's this big thing in between, which is education and

00:55:35.540 --> 00:55:38.260
how that it fits into the political alliance structure.

00:55:38.420 --> 00:55:43.140
And you can make similar arguments for what might predispose you to join a religious

00:55:43.140 --> 00:55:45.060
community or leave a religious community.

00:55:45.290 --> 00:55:50.250
There's interesting work showing that your sexual attitudes and dispositions play a

00:55:50.250 --> 00:55:53.130
powerful role in shaping whether you join or leave a religious group.

00:55:53.370 --> 00:55:57.930
So I do think heritable dispositions and psychological traits matter politically, but they

00:55:57.930 --> 00:56:03.770
matter indirectly via the sorts of groups that you uh join or leave and and via

00:56:03.770 --> 00:56:08.260
the the sorts of groups that you view as either threatening you or or uh uh facilitating

00:56:08.260 --> 00:56:08.900
your interests.

00:56:08.980 --> 00:56:11.220
So that's that's that would be my answer to your question.

00:56:11.620 --> 00:56:13.860
And you know curious if you find that to be a satisfying answer.

00:56:14.260 --> 00:56:20.020
No, that that that sounds very uh very plausible, especially as

00:56:20.180 --> 00:56:24.180
as you said, the the the we have a problem, and that's the problem we have in psychology

00:56:24.340 --> 00:56:30.180
and um we'll talk about that at some point, which is that we tend to

00:56:30.180 --> 00:56:36.050
think that the sort of mental idiom in which certain things are

00:56:36.050 --> 00:56:41.970
represented and computed has to be coterminous and more or

00:56:41.970 --> 00:56:47.170
less a copy of the explicit mental contents that are expressed.

00:56:47.330 --> 00:56:52.450
So, for example, when people look at those dispositions, and you know, of course, it's it's

00:56:52.450 --> 00:56:53.090
easy to do.

00:56:53.170 --> 00:56:54.130
I mean, it's easy.

00:56:54.210 --> 00:56:59.920
Uh it's easy for some people to do um uh behavioral genetics of political

00:57:00.320 --> 00:57:01.520
uh orientation.

00:57:01.680 --> 00:57:03.120
Well, what do you test?

00:57:03.200 --> 00:57:05.760
You test whether they're liberal or conservative.

00:57:06.560 --> 00:57:09.840
Because that's the end you know variable, and that's it.

00:57:10.000 --> 00:57:15.920
And in a way, uh so it could be that in terms of

00:57:15.920 --> 00:57:21.730
um neural processes, you know, a uh the actual

00:57:22.050 --> 00:57:27.410
neural disposition that is inherited has nothing to do with any of these terms but has to

00:57:27.410 --> 00:57:28.930
do with something completely different.

00:57:29.090 --> 00:57:35.090
Not even personality variables, which themselves could be a sort of explicit vocabulary.

00:57:35.250 --> 00:57:40.610
And I think that's that's um a common um problem we have.

00:57:41.330 --> 00:57:45.810
It's true that um so um

00:57:47.170 --> 00:57:53.140
so for example to some degree, when we talk about coalitional alignments in in

00:57:53.140 --> 00:57:58.820
politics, for example, we're using the terms that people themselves could use

00:57:59.780 --> 00:58:03.860
if they want to reflect on the situation and say, no, I don't want to be with these guys

00:58:03.940 --> 00:58:08.820
because they're weak, and look, there's only 10 of them and there's uh 50 of us.

00:58:09.460 --> 00:58:15.140
But there's also a a sort of deeper level level at which computations are done, like you

00:58:15.140 --> 00:58:20.810
know, for example, um Why is it that certain actions are

00:58:20.810 --> 00:58:21.610
outrageous?

00:58:21.770 --> 00:58:27.210
I remember that John to be had you know a great model of those things.

00:58:27.290 --> 00:58:31.530
And the thing is that it's not that those things are specially outrageous.

00:58:31.690 --> 00:58:36.010
Yes, they did, you know, poison little kids or whatever stuff like that, but that's

00:58:36.010 --> 00:58:39.210
something we've seen a million times and we didn't react.

00:58:39.370 --> 00:58:43.850
It's just that at this point that thing shows that we can be pushed around.

00:58:44.010 --> 00:58:47.770
And and if we don't react, that uh opens the case for more.

00:58:47.900 --> 00:58:53.500
Now that computation is not done in an idiom that people could

00:58:53.500 --> 00:58:55.020
easily express.

00:58:55.180 --> 00:59:01.180
It's some sort of language of coalitional thought that has its own

00:59:01.180 --> 00:59:01.820
logic.

00:59:02.300 --> 00:59:08.060
And I'm always a bit surprised, and I I don't want to be the that guy,

00:59:08.140 --> 00:59:12.350
so to speak, to say that people don't um take that into account.

00:59:12.510 --> 00:59:15.470
In some sectors of psychology, it's quite understood.

00:59:15.710 --> 00:59:21.710
If I have a s uh a syntactic theory, it will be in terms of operators like you know, uh

00:59:21.950 --> 00:59:27.470
govern or uh things like that, that have nothing to do with what people are aware of

00:59:27.710 --> 00:59:31.070
when they um when they produce utterances.

00:59:31.630 --> 00:59:35.100
And if they want to think about them, that's not the principles they would find.

00:59:35.180 --> 00:59:40.220
So I'm perfectly fine with the fact that there is a principles, uh call it government,

00:59:40.380 --> 00:59:45.820
agreement, uh you know, move alpha or whatever in your link in your syntactic theory, that

00:59:45.820 --> 00:59:50.860
are not um anything like the um overt vocabulary we use.

00:59:52.210 --> 00:59:57.890
But surely, and here I'm using, you know, that Daniel Dennett sort of said that when

00:59:57.890 --> 01:00:02.210
someone says surely with a comma, it means they're about to say something that's absolutely

01:00:02.210 --> 01:00:05.410
not certain and does not follow from what they just said.

01:00:05.570 --> 01:00:11.570
But surely, uh, if it works for syntax, it's it should work for other domains of cognition.

01:00:11.730 --> 01:00:17.520
That's you know, our theory of mind may not work the way we think in terms of

01:00:17.760 --> 01:00:21.440
little images of people having thoughts about other images.

01:00:22.560 --> 01:00:25.520
It may be in an idiom that's quite different.

01:00:26.560 --> 01:00:29.840
So, a forgery for complex things like politics.

01:00:29.920 --> 01:00:33.760
It may not be that people have this vision that man is unconstrained.

01:00:33.840 --> 01:00:36.480
It may be something vastly different.

01:00:36.640 --> 01:00:42.160
That leads to finding that proposition very obvious when you see it in

01:00:42.400 --> 01:00:47.970
political theory, but also of thinking of particular political programs as especially

01:00:47.970 --> 01:00:48.850
compelling.

01:00:49.090 --> 01:00:50.370
Um so I don't know.

01:00:50.530 --> 01:00:56.210
I mean I I I I'm um I think we're still in the same state that uh

01:00:57.010 --> 01:01:00.210
people were in chemistry before Galton or something like that.

01:01:00.370 --> 01:01:02.930
So, you know, we're we're sort of groping.

01:01:03.090 --> 01:01:08.940
And um I remember having this uh When I was at school, that's

01:01:08.940 --> 01:01:14.620
a long, long time ago, in high school, that our chemistry

01:01:14.620 --> 01:01:20.620
teacher told us that if you think in obvious properties, you'll never

01:01:20.620 --> 01:01:21.100
get anywhere.

01:01:21.260 --> 01:01:24.940
Because look at this acid, you know, like chloridric acid, it burns you.

01:01:25.100 --> 01:01:27.260
Look at this caustic soda, it burns you.

01:01:27.340 --> 01:01:31.660
Well, if you combine them, you have water and well, salty water.

01:01:32.860 --> 01:01:35.580
So that's uh that's an obvious example.

01:01:35.820 --> 01:01:41.150
But it might be that um yes we're we're very often

01:01:41.150 --> 01:01:46.990
shackled by this sort of um uh yes this everyday talk or

01:01:46.990 --> 01:01:52.670
this uh common sense folk psychology talk um that stops us from thinking about uh

01:01:52.830 --> 01:01:55.070
about actual cognitive processes.

01:01:55.390 --> 01:01:57.230
I've seen that in politics quite a lot.

01:01:57.310 --> 01:02:03.280
I mean in in terms of you know uh people thinking and I'm not

01:02:03.280 --> 01:02:08.560
naming names and I will not name names, but I mean people saying, well, it's obvious that

01:02:08.560 --> 01:02:14.560
this um kind of uh chief or leader has power

01:02:14.880 --> 01:02:20.080
because of their prestige, and then you think, what the heck is prestige?

01:02:20.240 --> 01:02:25.440
You know, how do you make uh and there again I'm like Dennett, I get all these sort of

01:02:25.490 --> 01:02:30.930
objections like how do you make a computer made of meat that has this concept of

01:02:30.930 --> 01:02:31.650
prestige?

01:02:31.810 --> 01:02:37.810
So um and if you don't think that's a question, that's that's weird because it is a

01:02:37.810 --> 01:02:40.770
very important question, or it's uh it's an obvious one.

01:02:41.010 --> 01:02:45.970
But anyway, I don't want to go on about that because you know uh it's easy to turn this a

01:02:45.970 --> 01:02:51.730
mild complaint about the state of affairs into a rant about you know, fools, damn fools and

01:02:51.730 --> 01:02:52.530
stuff.

01:02:54.210 --> 01:02:59.980
I I I do think yeah, uh yeah it's a great point that our folk psychology, our

01:02:59.980 --> 01:03:01.420
folk intuitions, our folk economics.

01:03:01.500 --> 01:03:05.980
I know you've written a lot about uh how our our our intuitions about economics uh in many

01:03:05.980 --> 01:03:07.340
ways are misleading.

01:03:07.500 --> 01:03:12.540
Um, and that colors our political attitudes to to various various degrees.

01:03:12.700 --> 01:03:17.740
Um, but I think it's important when we're thinking about our our folk intuitions and in in

01:03:17.740 --> 01:03:22.110
which cases they might be leading us astray, it's important to think about incentives.

01:03:22.590 --> 01:03:27.230
Because if there's one group of people that has overrided their folk psychology, sorry,

01:03:27.310 --> 01:03:29.790
their folk economics, it's economists.

01:03:30.190 --> 01:03:33.950
And the reason they have overrided their folk economics is because they have professional

01:03:33.950 --> 01:03:38.590
and career incentives for doing that and for being right and for changing their minds when

01:03:38.590 --> 01:03:43.310
the empirical data points in a certain direction and for changing their minds when a

01:03:43.310 --> 01:03:46.030
compelling logical or mathematical argument is presented.

01:03:46.270 --> 01:03:51.440
And so we have to explain why economists uh have successfully overrided their folk economic

01:03:51.440 --> 01:03:56.480
intuitions and get it right, in addition to why uh the average voter has not overrided

01:03:56.480 --> 01:03:57.280
these intuitions.

01:03:57.600 --> 01:03:57.760
Right.

01:03:58.560 --> 01:04:01.760
And I think the way to explain it is to point at the incentives.

01:04:01.840 --> 01:04:05.360
Economists have strong incentives for getting it right and overriding their intuitions.

01:04:05.520 --> 01:04:10.160
When it comes to the individual voter, uh what are their incentives for getting the facts

01:04:10.160 --> 01:04:10.320
right?

01:04:10.560 --> 01:04:15.550
Well, personally, their vote, they you know, analyses suggest they have maybe a one in

01:04:15.550 --> 01:04:19.070
sixty million chance of of shaping the outcome of a national election.

01:04:19.230 --> 01:04:22.430
That is a very weak incentive for them to get it right, right?

01:04:22.590 --> 01:04:27.870
They face very little costs if they are wrong about uh political facts or political

01:04:27.870 --> 01:04:28.350
realities.

01:04:28.510 --> 01:04:32.830
And they face potentially big costs if they fail to fit in with people in their community

01:04:32.910 --> 01:04:37.390
or if they sh signal that they're on the wrong side of an issue or they're not on the team

01:04:37.390 --> 01:04:38.830
of the people around them.

01:04:39.180 --> 01:04:43.420
So when you think about the incentives that an actual voter faces, it's actually it doesn't

01:04:43.420 --> 01:04:48.940
seem um irrational at all for them to not really develop expertise in

01:04:48.940 --> 01:04:53.580
economics and not really bother to correct their primitive intuitions because they face no

01:04:53.580 --> 01:04:56.380
costs for those uh primitive intuitions being wrong.

01:04:56.860 --> 01:04:57.500
No, that's true.

01:04:57.580 --> 01:05:03.500
And there is a um a path for argument for the rationality of ignoring

01:05:03.500 --> 01:05:08.990
all the stuff and just trusting that your side might be right.

01:05:09.550 --> 01:05:14.990
But it's quite interesting to see why it happen in

01:05:15.230 --> 01:05:17.310
scientific debates.

01:05:17.470 --> 01:05:21.470
And I must say, I'm struck by that.

01:05:21.550 --> 01:05:27.150
I was the other day I was reading something on the web, someone who described

01:05:27.390 --> 01:05:32.590
styles of conversations and discussion, and have you know from the worst to the best.

01:05:32.990 --> 01:05:34.260
And you have the best.

01:05:34.420 --> 01:05:40.260
The best is well, you say something and then you try to think what could be

01:05:40.260 --> 01:05:41.540
wrong about this argument.

01:05:41.620 --> 01:05:46.580
And others tell you, no, no, some stuff is good, but you know, some of it might not work,

01:05:46.660 --> 01:05:47.060
and stuff.

01:05:47.140 --> 01:05:50.180
And you gradually elaborate with them a better thing.

01:05:50.420 --> 01:05:56.180
And the other one, the the nadir of uh uh of uh human discussion is

01:05:56.180 --> 01:05:59.940
political discussions, like we know, but then political conversations.

01:06:00.950 --> 01:06:02.790
Okay, so that person says that.

01:06:02.870 --> 01:06:08.710
And some and one of the uh people who commented on this post said,

01:06:08.870 --> 01:06:13.910
well, but that's first style you describe when you try to find the best of the argument and

01:06:13.910 --> 01:06:15.510
the other in the other person's argument.

01:06:16.630 --> 01:06:18.630
I do that every day.

01:06:19.110 --> 01:06:24.870
Because uh in my department of mathematics, when we want to talk about something, we put it

01:06:24.870 --> 01:06:29.260
on the blackboard, and others try to tell us, yeah, yeah, it could work because it does

01:06:29.260 --> 01:06:32.700
this, and we ourselves say, No, no, I think there's a problem here.

01:06:32.780 --> 01:06:35.020
And they say, Oh, maybe, but you know, we'll see.

01:06:35.260 --> 01:06:38.540
So the question is, of course, you know, why isn't it always like that?

01:06:38.700 --> 01:06:44.140
And that's I remember that uh John Tuby always had this uh complaint that, you know, why

01:06:44.140 --> 01:06:46.300
don't we get science at the speed of thought?

01:06:46.460 --> 01:06:50.140
Uh by which he meant, of course, the speed of that kind of conversation.

01:06:50.910 --> 01:06:56.910
and it's um so as you say for econom economists it's the same sort of thing

01:06:57.070 --> 01:07:02.750
so how do you create an incentive um to to to get

01:07:02.750 --> 01:07:08.750
things a bit more right that overrides the incentive to be um you

01:07:08.750 --> 01:07:14.560
know to be uh in the right coalition And I must say that there was

01:07:14.560 --> 01:07:19.520
that piece by John, which must be the last piece he published that was on the

01:07:19.680 --> 01:07:25.680
evolutionary psychology as the crystallizing core of a social science or something

01:07:25.680 --> 01:07:26.320
like that.

01:07:27.520 --> 01:07:33.520
In which he describes this sort of dynamic whereby it's not just that there are coalitions

01:07:33.520 --> 01:07:38.880
and camps, it's also that if there are two powerful descriptions of

01:07:39.200 --> 01:07:44.730
something, uh, then there's a powerful argument for some sort of happy

01:07:44.730 --> 01:07:46.650
medium being probably right.

01:07:47.450 --> 01:07:53.210
And he says that the cosmology of Tychobray didn't make any sense and was full of holes and

01:07:53.210 --> 01:07:59.130
stuff and that, but it was exactly between Galileo and the Ptolemaic

01:07:59.130 --> 01:07:59.610
version.

01:07:59.770 --> 01:08:02.410
It was sort of a little bit of one and a little bit of the other.

01:08:02.570 --> 01:08:04.810
So everyone thought that is fantastic.

01:08:05.050 --> 01:08:09.800
You know, if we can have a cosmology that offends no one in particular.

01:08:10.040 --> 01:08:13.720
Um, so how do we escape from that?

01:08:13.960 --> 01:08:19.960
And when I tell um people here about that, they tell me, well,

01:08:20.120 --> 01:08:22.120
it's because we don't have the right theory.

01:08:22.280 --> 01:08:27.080
Biologists got the right uh model that's natural selection.

01:08:27.720 --> 01:08:30.680
And see, they agree on most things.

01:08:30.920 --> 01:08:36.120
Not on theory very often, but on uh on most of the empirical stuff.

01:08:36.790 --> 01:08:42.070
So, for culture and uh politics and things like that, maybe we have to have the right

01:08:42.070 --> 01:08:42.390
model.

01:08:43.270 --> 01:08:48.150
And one is tempted to say no, it's much worse than you think, because there are powerful

01:08:48.150 --> 01:08:50.550
incentives in never having the right model.

01:08:50.710 --> 01:08:51.030
Yeah.

01:08:51.510 --> 01:08:54.950
Um, so I I don't know to what extent that's the case.

01:08:55.110 --> 01:09:00.960
At some point, I wanted to um you know, when you're invited to give a talk and

01:09:00.960 --> 01:09:04.000
you have no great idea what to what to say.

01:09:04.640 --> 01:09:10.480
I or no sort of uh I I you think of provocative things and uh once I I thought

01:09:10.480 --> 01:09:14.240
one talk could be the impossibility of social sciences.

01:09:14.400 --> 01:09:20.000
So that's you know, it's the the stack you know, it's overwhelmingly stacked against there

01:09:20.000 --> 01:09:22.170
being uh social science.

01:09:22.250 --> 01:09:27.930
In the sense that I'll give you just one example, which of course affected me because it's

01:09:27.930 --> 01:09:28.970
about stuff that I do.

01:09:29.050 --> 01:09:32.810
So I'm right, and these fools will not admit it and stuff like that.

01:09:32.970 --> 01:09:35.290
So we're in that uh dynamic.

01:09:35.690 --> 01:09:41.690
Um but it's it's at some point I thought, well, it's quite clear

01:09:41.690 --> 01:09:47.450
that we can't really talk about the cultural success of religious

01:09:47.450 --> 01:09:53.000
um um ideas, you know, representations, behaviors, etc.

01:09:54.520 --> 01:09:58.840
As one thing, because there are two very, very different varieties of that stuff.

01:09:59.000 --> 01:10:04.280
And there is one that I used to call white religion or folk religion that is like

01:10:04.280 --> 01:10:05.720
shamanism and stuff like that.

01:10:05.960 --> 01:10:08.680
It's mostly about solving practical problems.

01:10:10.520 --> 01:10:15.090
And there's one that's the doctrinal religion, where you have large organizations that have

01:10:15.090 --> 01:10:20.690
priests and stuff like that that get political power and diffuse the doctrine and stuff.

01:10:20.930 --> 01:10:26.050
And I thought, yes, I mean these things are so have such different social dynamics and

01:10:26.050 --> 01:10:31.810
cultural paths to transmission that really we shouldn't

01:10:32.610 --> 01:10:36.850
um we shouldn't think of them as being one phenomenon.

01:10:37.600 --> 01:10:42.000
And then, you know, people tell me, Yeah, yeah, no, that's very interesting, super

01:10:42.240 --> 01:10:42.480
interesting.

01:10:42.640 --> 01:10:44.480
So, what's your theory of religion?

01:10:45.040 --> 01:10:45.840
And that's it.

01:10:45.920 --> 01:10:47.440
People want a theory of religion.

01:10:47.520 --> 01:10:52.560
And and you know, if you start having this sort of thing, no, no, no, actually, you know,

01:10:52.880 --> 01:10:54.560
protons are not neutrons.

01:10:54.640 --> 01:10:57.440
Oh, so you don't have a theory of the nucleus.

01:10:57.760 --> 01:10:59.680
You know, you uh so you see what I mean?

01:10:59.760 --> 01:11:05.690
It's it's sort of very frustrating, but at the same time, um it's

01:11:05.690 --> 01:11:09.450
worse than the coalitional argument because the the coalitional argument would be well,

01:11:09.770 --> 01:11:15.130
people try to um to to side with a a particular camp and then you know

01:11:15.210 --> 01:11:16.170
that's it.

01:11:17.050 --> 01:11:23.050
But this one is more like um there is a whole level of discourse where for for

01:11:23.050 --> 01:11:29.050
example um politics is about social groups, and social groups are real and

01:11:29.050 --> 01:11:34.860
they're you know, the uh prime, the primeval object, they're the starting point, they're

01:11:34.860 --> 01:11:35.180
there.

01:11:36.220 --> 01:11:41.020
Um so that's what happens in politics.

01:11:41.100 --> 01:11:46.860
There's a very strong incentive to think like that because it makes all sorts of moves you

01:11:46.860 --> 01:11:50.220
want to do relative to other people, etc., much easier.

01:11:50.620 --> 01:11:56.570
So if you have you know uh uh people who say, well, why

01:11:56.570 --> 01:12:01.370
on earth would human minds think of groups as opposed to other things?

01:12:01.610 --> 01:12:07.530
Well, I'm sorry to say, I mean I'm sorry to say that they but you know yeah,

01:12:07.610 --> 01:12:08.250
it's kind of great.

01:12:09.610 --> 01:12:09.930
Yeah, exactly.

01:12:10.170 --> 01:12:12.410
It's it's not that's not gonna work.

01:12:12.730 --> 01:12:18.560
Simply because um it's I mean it it it will work and and I t

01:12:18.640 --> 01:12:20.080
I'm touching wood.

01:12:20.320 --> 01:12:22.720
I I I certainly hope it will.

01:12:23.040 --> 01:12:28.320
But but the thing is that there seems to be an almost unsurmountable um

01:12:28.560 --> 01:12:34.400
obstacle, which is that um there's too much

01:12:34.400 --> 01:12:39.610
benefit in running our you know folk politics the way we do.

01:12:41.050 --> 01:12:47.050
And because of that, there's initially a sort of loss in uh oh now I have to think

01:12:47.050 --> 01:12:50.570
of groups as things that minds imagine out of interactive, etc.

01:12:51.370 --> 01:12:57.180
That seems very um yes, that we've lost something, Oh,

01:12:57.260 --> 01:13:00.140
and therefore that's not a promising sort of thing.

01:13:00.380 --> 01:13:04.300
I don't know what you think about that, but you know, I'm sorry to sort of No, it's great.

01:13:04.460 --> 01:13:08.220
I actually I actually think, Pascal, I think the title of your talk is Science as

01:13:08.220 --> 01:13:09.500
Divination, right?

01:13:09.660 --> 01:13:14.140
Where it's actually I think it brings David's point about incentives, because it is about

01:13:14.140 --> 01:13:15.100
groups, but it's incentives.

01:13:15.260 --> 01:13:19.660
But it's the science is word you're what you're describing, Pascal, is that we're back to

01:13:19.660 --> 01:13:25.020
the lead a stuffed animal example where there's a bunch of people who have an incentive to

01:13:25.020 --> 01:13:30.870
say the stuffed animal is the level of discourse, is the correct level

01:13:30.870 --> 01:13:31.670
of concepts.

01:13:31.990 --> 01:13:37.990
And unless you have a moral strategic incentive game, I actually think of the

01:13:37.990 --> 01:13:40.710
weird paper, like the Joe Henrik Weird paper.

01:13:41.030 --> 01:13:45.430
There there were papers, and Pascal, you would know better than both both David and I

01:13:45.750 --> 01:13:51.180
forever about we shouldn't just have uh we we shouldn't just have um non

01:13:51.340 --> 01:13:52.780
Western samples.

01:13:53.020 --> 01:13:58.700
But I think what the acronym did was it was a coordination device to moralize that.

01:13:59.180 --> 01:14:04.060
And all of a sudden it's it's people want don't want to be accused of having weird.

01:14:04.380 --> 01:14:09.900
Like it's it's it's so I think it's like a it was a perfect example of a stuffed animal of

01:14:09.980 --> 01:14:11.260
a coordination point.

01:14:11.420 --> 01:14:13.660
Um and and I think that's why it was successful.

01:14:13.820 --> 01:14:15.980
And I think that's what what you're both saying, yeah.

01:14:16.310 --> 01:14:16.630
Yeah.

01:14:16.790 --> 01:14:20.550
And it uh in this case it adds that it there was a valid point, you know, in the sense

01:14:20.630 --> 01:14:21.270
that's true.

01:14:21.350 --> 01:14:21.670
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

01:14:22.150 --> 01:14:22.950
Oh no, no, no, no.

01:14:23.030 --> 01:14:27.110
I'm only gonna I'm gonna test, you know, Western because I don't care for the others.

01:14:27.430 --> 01:14:31.990
But it but I think like the yeah, but I think the point of like why aren't we why aren't

01:14:31.990 --> 01:14:34.470
people listening to us, all three of us, right?

01:14:34.630 --> 01:14:37.110
Like why is everybody stupid and why are we so smart?

01:14:37.270 --> 01:14:43.270
Um it's but I think there's also just yeah, like what are the incentives um to have to

01:14:43.560 --> 01:14:46.440
choose a different stuffed animal to push the metaphor.

01:14:46.600 --> 01:14:52.520
You know, and unless there's something like the weird thing or uh cult

01:14:52.760 --> 01:14:58.440
like for maybe economics, maybe the the the cost benefit structure is boy,

01:14:58.600 --> 01:15:00.360
banks really want to have a good policy.

01:15:00.520 --> 01:15:04.440
Nobody is like that for social science yet or for psychology.

01:15:04.680 --> 01:15:10.680
Um, and so you there's just m less of a selection institutionally to get it right.

01:15:11.230 --> 01:15:17.150
And consequently, it can just be more of these arbitrary um status games, maybe.

01:15:17.630 --> 01:15:18.830
Yes, status games.

01:15:18.910 --> 01:15:24.910
And and uh I think the uh that's true and um

01:15:25.870 --> 01:15:31.710
it's quite c clear that um another thing that's okay,

01:15:31.950 --> 01:15:37.820
so okay, now instead of you know this sort of uh doom and and gloom,

01:15:37.980 --> 01:15:42.860
uh we we should look at possible sort of positive

01:15:44.060 --> 01:15:44.940
developments.

01:15:45.100 --> 01:15:51.100
And the the the what I uh what I'm sometimes I'm impressed by the fact

01:15:51.100 --> 01:15:56.940
that certain projects that are useful and valuable projects disappear in the discipline.

01:15:57.250 --> 01:15:59.650
But they reappear someone else somewhere else.

01:16:00.210 --> 01:16:06.210
And you know, I was thinking about the the project of cultural anthropology, like,

01:16:06.370 --> 01:16:11.970
you know, um decades ago, was um

01:16:12.130 --> 01:16:17.410
many decades ago, was um to try and understand, have some sort of

01:16:18.050 --> 01:16:22.780
entry into what mankind is like

01:16:23.340 --> 01:16:27.820
through the interesting prism of cultural differences.

01:16:28.940 --> 01:16:34.620
So you would and you you would have to study one culture that was not yours

01:16:34.860 --> 01:16:40.060
because precisely it gave you some of that insight that, well, uh there has something to

01:16:40.140 --> 01:16:45.260
that there has to be something that constructs the obviousness of certain things, like you

01:16:45.260 --> 01:16:48.670
know, my religion, my social group, or things like that.

01:16:49.070 --> 01:16:54.910
So that's a project that came with a kind of special method, which is to

01:16:54.910 --> 01:17:00.510
stay in a place for a long time, to learn people's language, to get into the minutiae of

01:17:00.510 --> 01:17:03.310
who marries whom and when and how and stuff like that.

01:17:03.550 --> 01:17:08.750
So that project is gone from cultural anthropology, at least in the US and in most of the

01:17:09.070 --> 01:17:10.350
Western world.

01:17:11.470 --> 01:17:14.660
However, we were talking about Joe Henrik.

01:17:14.820 --> 01:17:20.100
I was at a conference a few years back where he and some of his students were,

01:17:20.580 --> 01:17:25.220
and I realized that all these people did long term field work in some places.

01:17:25.380 --> 01:17:29.860
They learned the language, they knew all the minutiae of who marries whom and stuff like

01:17:29.860 --> 01:17:30.180
that.

01:17:30.820 --> 01:17:36.420
And okay, so out of that they were also getting data for you know

01:17:37.750 --> 01:17:41.590
possibly cultural group selection kind of uh models, etc.

01:17:41.830 --> 01:17:44.390
But that's not the the interesting point here.

01:17:44.630 --> 01:17:49.910
The the interesting point is that the whole baggage of how to do it and with what

01:17:49.910 --> 01:17:55.910
project had transferred without you know anyone realizing it from the anthropology

01:17:55.910 --> 01:17:58.070
departments to some other places.

01:17:58.560 --> 01:18:04.240
So it may be the case that understanding social groups, um,

01:18:04.480 --> 01:18:10.160
understanding politics and how it works are things that will migrate out of

01:18:10.160 --> 01:18:14.240
disciplines into places where they can be uh done.

01:18:14.800 --> 01:18:20.480
Done seriously by people who actually had no um coalitional

01:18:20.480 --> 01:18:24.480
interests in maintaining a particular theory of social groups or a particular theory of

01:18:24.480 --> 01:18:24.800
politics.

01:18:24.960 --> 01:18:25.920
You see what I mean?

01:18:26.320 --> 01:18:32.230
Um and uh one thing that makes us think that that makes me

01:18:32.230 --> 01:18:37.350
think that that might be the case is also that um

01:18:38.790 --> 01:18:44.790
many of the disciplines that um like traditional

01:18:44.790 --> 01:18:49.110
political science or traditional anthropology or sociology um

01:18:50.760 --> 01:18:52.920
are not really terribly persuasive.

01:18:53.000 --> 01:18:58.200
They don't really create anything that the general public finds very

01:18:58.200 --> 01:18:59.160
interesting.

01:18:59.400 --> 01:19:05.160
So, in a way, there's an opportunity for people in other places to do it for them, as it

01:19:05.160 --> 01:19:05.320
were.

01:19:05.880 --> 01:19:06.440
I think so.

01:19:06.520 --> 01:19:11.320
I mean, I that that that may be widely optimistic, uh, but I think it's possible.

01:19:11.720 --> 01:19:12.840
Can you just unpack that?

01:19:13.000 --> 01:19:13.720
Do it for them.

01:19:13.800 --> 01:19:18.670
So can you just Well that's for example, you know, it's um okay, so

01:19:19.630 --> 01:19:24.430
Dave, you are a brave man, so you say, Oh, I have a theory of uh that starts with a

01:19:24.430 --> 01:19:25.070
question.

01:19:25.310 --> 01:19:29.470
How could minds think of groups and why do they do that?

01:19:29.710 --> 01:19:29.950
Okay.

01:19:30.750 --> 01:19:35.950
And you go to the sociology department where they say we have to reprogram you entirely

01:19:36.110 --> 01:19:40.670
because groups are the you know, the alpha and the omega, they're the beginning and the

01:19:40.670 --> 01:19:42.560
end, uh the starting point.

01:19:42.800 --> 01:19:46.240
There is no individual, there is a group, and then you have a blah blah blah.

01:19:46.400 --> 01:19:48.000
Yeah, you you should feel.

01:19:49.360 --> 01:19:55.360
However, um that question um is a perfectly legitimate

01:19:55.360 --> 01:20:01.360
question that I think in some other disciplines or some other fields or some other

01:20:01.360 --> 01:20:07.280
places you could uh get people interested and uh and and

01:20:07.360 --> 01:20:13.330
and tell people, well, since these guys over there, whose job it is officially, don't want

01:20:13.330 --> 01:20:13.810
to do it.

01:20:14.050 --> 01:20:14.210
Right.

01:20:14.530 --> 01:20:14.930
Oh, I see.

01:20:15.650 --> 01:20:16.610
Let's try to do it.

01:20:16.770 --> 01:20:22.290
And um just like um yes, I mean sort of uh

01:20:22.450 --> 01:20:27.650
linguistics escaped from philology in a sense at some point because the philologists were

01:20:27.650 --> 01:20:31.570
not terribly interested in question, you know, what makes the language work.

01:20:31.970 --> 01:20:37.720
Um and and um and people who are sort of weird

01:20:37.720 --> 01:20:43.560
people like Chomsky came from uh vaguely from an engineering background or stuff and

01:20:43.560 --> 01:20:45.240
thought, oh no, maybe we can do it.

01:20:45.480 --> 01:20:46.520
So I think it's possible.

01:20:46.600 --> 01:20:49.000
I mean, it is I don't want to be too pessimistic.

01:20:49.560 --> 01:20:53.800
So it's it's uh a variation of if you want something done right, do it yourself.

01:20:53.880 --> 01:20:57.400
It's uh if you want something done right, have somebody who doesn't do it for their

01:20:57.400 --> 01:21:03.130
profession when it with the caveat with the asterisk of um it's for

01:21:03.130 --> 01:21:07.210
these situations where the incentive structure doesn't align with competence well that's

01:21:07.530 --> 01:21:12.010
the can of worms right but yeah yes it goes back to that famous saying which i end up

01:21:12.010 --> 01:21:16.570
repeating maybe twice a day which is that it's very hard to change someone's mind when when

01:21:16.570 --> 01:21:21.850
their salary depends on them not changing their minds exactly but I think I think I think

01:21:22.010 --> 01:21:26.010
Pascal like what you've been saying I think is really deep I think it all comes back to

01:21:26.010 --> 01:21:30.860
this production thing where I think if the science has been all about like, well, what are

01:21:30.860 --> 01:21:31.340
voters?

01:21:31.500 --> 01:21:33.500
Why are voters choosing the way they're doing?

01:21:33.660 --> 01:21:35.820
Oh, these stupid voters, oh, people.

01:21:36.300 --> 01:21:40.300
But if you look at public opinion polls, for example, often people are really smart.

01:21:40.460 --> 01:21:42.460
Like there's actually a lot of agreement.

01:21:42.700 --> 01:21:47.820
It really turns to the like pay no attention to the man behind the mirror of what's the

01:21:47.820 --> 01:21:50.300
incentive of the producers.

01:21:50.780 --> 01:21:56.350
Um And I think that's a very subversive message scientifically, politically.

01:21:56.590 --> 01:22:02.350
And I think it's no accident that it's very convenient to worry about the

01:22:02.350 --> 01:22:03.630
consumers of science.

01:22:03.870 --> 01:22:06.190
Like, why doesn't the public like science?

01:22:06.350 --> 01:22:10.590
Not how is our institution not designed to reward merit?

01:22:10.750 --> 01:22:12.190
Because then we have to look at that.

01:22:12.430 --> 01:22:16.670
Or for politics, why are the voters so stupid is an easy, convenient thing.

01:22:16.910 --> 01:22:22.500
But then what are the incentives for the topics that become political, and who what's the

01:22:22.500 --> 01:22:23.220
money behind it?

01:22:23.300 --> 01:22:26.260
And you know, why do you have to have a lot of money to like win an election?

01:22:26.340 --> 01:22:27.300
Like these kinds of things.

01:22:27.460 --> 01:22:28.260
Who's making money?

01:22:28.420 --> 01:22:29.940
So I think it's very subversive.

01:22:30.020 --> 01:22:30.180
Yeah.

01:22:30.820 --> 01:22:36.580
It's true that the the uh incentive structure for uh science as we know it

01:22:37.060 --> 01:22:40.660
uh is far from perfect, and that's an understatement.

01:22:40.820 --> 01:22:44.340
I I remember having a conversation with John Tuby about that.

01:22:44.570 --> 01:22:49.290
One day, where he said, and that was, you know, over dinner, he said, Well, yeah, I mean,

01:22:49.370 --> 01:22:54.890
you know, uh, if anyone wanted to stop scientific progress, they would design uh

01:22:55.210 --> 01:22:56.810
modern science exactly the way it is.

01:22:56.890 --> 01:23:01.050
And I thought it was to throw away a remark like that, and you know, okay, we can move on.

01:23:01.210 --> 01:23:02.330
And no, no, no, no.

01:23:02.490 --> 01:23:07.610
He went on for about 20 minutes to dissect every element

01:23:08.330 --> 01:23:12.490
from you know graduate training to publications to grants to this,

01:23:14.160 --> 01:23:19.840
showing that all of them showing that there was not an

01:23:19.840 --> 01:23:25.120
actual conspiracy, but a set of conspiring factors, all of which converge

01:23:25.680 --> 01:23:31.520
to making uh scientific progress extraordinarily difficult and

01:23:31.680 --> 01:23:33.440
in fact miraculous.

01:23:33.760 --> 01:23:39.520
So it's sort of so I think yes, that's that that's right, but we mustn't let that

01:23:39.520 --> 01:23:42.800
sort of take us too far.

01:23:43.570 --> 01:23:49.410
Another consideration is that um uh now that's a puzzle.

01:23:49.490 --> 01:23:54.370
Uh no that's not a puzzle, but it's uh uh a sort of question I have.

01:23:55.090 --> 01:24:00.690
Um so one of my uh PhD um advisors was uh David Gellner.

01:24:00.850 --> 01:24:05.680
Uh sorry, uh Ernest Gellner, not his son David who's um an anthropologist too.

01:24:05.760 --> 01:24:11.280
But Ernest Garner had this theory of Muslim

01:24:11.280 --> 01:24:14.400
society that is inspired by Im Khaldun.

01:24:14.480 --> 01:24:18.720
And this the idea is that the society goes basically as like a pendulum.

01:24:18.880 --> 01:24:24.800
It swings towards the sort of puritanical version of Islam that is typical of urban

01:24:24.960 --> 01:24:30.720
clerical kind of religious scholars, and then swings back to a

01:24:30.720 --> 01:24:36.670
kind of cult of the saints and miracles and stuff like that, which is more typical

01:24:36.670 --> 01:24:37.870
of tribal culture.

01:24:37.950 --> 01:24:42.590
And then sort of if it goes too far in one direction, it swings back.

01:24:43.150 --> 01:24:49.070
So at the moment in Islam, we're very much at the in the first sort of pendulum swing.

01:24:49.790 --> 01:24:55.310
But anyway, he also had this theory about academic fashions and said that it was the same

01:24:55.390 --> 01:24:59.230
because you know once you have a model, you want to explain to uh use it for lots of

01:24:59.310 --> 01:25:00.190
different stuff.

01:25:00.720 --> 01:25:06.560
And he said, yeah, no, when I was young, Wittgenstein was the big hero, and everyone was de

01:25:06.560 --> 01:25:11.120
facto a relativist because it's all language game and language determines the way you think

01:25:11.200 --> 01:25:11.840
and so forth.

01:25:13.680 --> 01:25:17.920
But then it sort of swung back to another more rationalist position.

01:25:18.000 --> 01:25:22.960
And the reason for that, he said, was that the cultural transmission of relativism is

01:25:22.960 --> 01:25:27.920
really difficult because you have a first generation who say, well, everything is different

01:25:27.920 --> 01:25:29.200
in every culture.

01:25:29.810 --> 01:25:33.890
That's a great discovery because people used to think, no, I mean, there are common human

01:25:33.890 --> 01:25:37.730
interests, you know, like you know, survival, sex, mating.

01:25:38.130 --> 01:25:38.850
No, no, no, no, no.

01:25:38.930 --> 01:25:40.690
It's all completely different in different cultures.

01:25:40.770 --> 01:25:41.890
So you teach that.

01:25:42.050 --> 01:25:45.650
So you teach that to students and they go to various places.

01:25:45.810 --> 01:25:51.010
Now, those students they will never uh make much of a splash if they say, yeah, it's

01:25:51.010 --> 01:25:53.890
completely different here from everywhere else, like I was taught.

01:25:54.050 --> 01:25:54.680
That's it.

01:25:55.000 --> 01:25:59.480
No, the only way they can get some uh attention is by saying, you know what?

01:25:59.640 --> 01:26:01.880
They actually do marry their cross cousin.

01:26:02.920 --> 01:26:04.440
Don't think Don Brown it.

01:26:04.520 --> 01:26:05.480
They they look like that.

01:26:05.640 --> 01:26:09.960
Yes, and they become the kind of Don Brown who says, Well they actually do it in exactly

01:26:09.960 --> 01:26:12.200
the way others others do it, etc.

01:26:13.080 --> 01:26:17.000
And after a while people get bored with this sort of rationalistic stuff and all that, and

01:26:17.000 --> 01:26:21.960
they think, No, no, no, there's a place down in a forest where everyone is very different.

01:26:22.270 --> 01:26:27.950
So there was that theory of pendulum swings, and I I know that another

01:26:27.950 --> 01:26:33.710
anthropologist, Claude Lewis-Strauss, he had another version of this

01:26:33.870 --> 01:26:39.070
pendulum theory, which was that relativism is what you what you have.

01:26:39.230 --> 01:26:42.830
This idea that people live in cultural worlds that are incommensurable.

01:26:43.070 --> 01:26:48.110
Their thoughts are thoughts that you would not have if you are a you know here.

01:26:49.320 --> 01:26:55.320
That this idea uh uh depends crucially on not interacting with them very much.

01:26:55.800 --> 01:27:01.480
So intellectuals in Europe used to have this idea about peasants, that peasants were mired

01:27:01.560 --> 01:27:06.600
in some sort of intellectual universe that was impenetrable to uh educated people.

01:27:06.760 --> 01:27:11.400
So then they had it about Africans, but then they started colonizing Africans so they got

01:27:11.400 --> 01:27:12.280
to know them.

01:27:12.680 --> 01:27:16.710
And the Africans seem a bit, you know, much more reasonable once you know them.

01:27:16.870 --> 01:27:22.390
So now the only places, and that would have been in the 70s, I suppose, when Liv Straw said

01:27:22.390 --> 01:27:27.910
that, the only places about which people were real relativists were in the jungles of Papua

01:27:28.070 --> 01:27:31.670
New Guinea and in the jungles of the Amazon forests.

01:27:31.830 --> 01:27:37.740
So places where you can't just go and check it for yourself And you know, you can't

01:27:37.740 --> 01:27:42.700
call a guy a shaman in Papua New Guinea and say, is it really true that you know your

01:27:42.700 --> 01:27:44.860
ontology is different from others?

01:27:45.660 --> 01:27:49.740
So you you keep those places, but of course that will that will be gone soon.

01:27:49.980 --> 01:27:53.580
So anyway, all this long development was just to say

01:27:56.050 --> 01:28:01.330
in lots of humanities and social sciences, it seems that we've got the pendulum

01:28:01.650 --> 01:28:06.210
swinging to one in one direction and then getting stuck.

01:28:06.450 --> 01:28:08.130
And then it's not swinging back.

01:28:08.290 --> 01:28:13.090
It's it's that everyone is stuck on some very poor equilibrium.

01:28:13.650 --> 01:28:19.570
Um and in anthropology in particular, very much in a sort of um uh

01:28:19.810 --> 01:28:25.320
all cultures are uh valuable and valid, except uh

01:28:25.560 --> 01:28:26.840
Western culture.

01:28:27.320 --> 01:28:32.840
And also, we should all do field work, except we should not do field work because that

01:28:32.840 --> 01:28:36.360
would be invading others and imposing our presence.

01:28:36.920 --> 01:28:39.080
Therefore, we should be activists.

01:28:39.240 --> 01:28:45.240
And that's the sort of um, and and it seems that that is an equilibrium that seems to be

01:28:45.240 --> 01:28:46.840
um stable.

01:28:48.990 --> 01:28:54.670
Except by these sort of there may be external shocks, and you know, we all know that there

01:28:54.670 --> 01:28:58.030
may be uh strong external shocks these days.

01:28:58.110 --> 01:29:03.950
But um but yeah, I mean so I I don't know to what extent it's it's uh one should be

01:29:03.950 --> 01:29:09.630
optimistic about having a social science that's uh that really does

01:29:09.950 --> 01:29:14.350
dig into um the the causes of um behavior.

01:29:15.150 --> 01:29:18.220
Um it may happen, it may not happen.

01:29:18.300 --> 01:29:18.700
I don't know.

01:29:19.020 --> 01:29:24.060
I'm I I'm I'm a little more optimistic in the sense of I think like the opening anecdote

01:29:24.060 --> 01:29:29.020
about the healthcare and like you lose a leg and you're refused service.

01:29:29.100 --> 01:29:33.180
Um because I was living in Germany for, you know, nine years and I'm back to US healthcare.

01:29:33.260 --> 01:29:38.860
I literally have my desk in front of me is flittered with like a healthcare uh paperwork

01:29:39.020 --> 01:29:40.540
because some somebody made a mistake.

01:29:40.620 --> 01:29:42.140
I would have never had to deal with this in Germany.

01:29:42.220 --> 01:29:48.070
But by my point is um the the anecdote about losing a leg and nobody

01:29:48.070 --> 01:29:50.150
paying for it is wrong.

01:29:50.470 --> 01:29:54.710
But it is a marker, it's a coordination marker of the problem, as you said.

01:29:55.350 --> 01:29:59.990
And I actually wonder too if this anthropology thing too is the same thing where it's it

01:29:59.990 --> 01:30:05.830
comes back to like there's a reason for a bit of hyperbole, or it's the superficial

01:30:05.830 --> 01:30:10.790
thing where um the the anthropology will continue.

01:30:11.190 --> 01:30:17.100
It is the pendulum, but it's it but but it's dealing with these the it's butting up against

01:30:17.100 --> 01:30:19.980
there's no more wilderness to explore.

01:30:20.140 --> 01:30:24.060
Now I'm dealing with government agencies, powerful armies.

01:30:24.220 --> 01:30:29.180
Uh these the people here now have enough autonomy that I have to deal with their autonomy.

01:30:29.340 --> 01:30:34.140
So I think like a lot of the expression of you they won't serve you if you're unless your

01:30:34.220 --> 01:30:38.050
leg's cut off is valid, but it's not the right description of the problem.

01:30:38.210 --> 01:30:39.650
It's the it's what I mean.

01:30:39.890 --> 01:30:42.850
It's the um outrage description.

01:30:43.010 --> 01:30:47.410
And I think the anthropologists are doing the same thing for a different set of points, I

01:30:47.410 --> 01:30:47.570
think.

01:30:47.730 --> 01:30:47.970
Yeah.

01:30:48.450 --> 01:30:49.650
So I'm optimistic.

01:30:50.370 --> 01:30:50.690
Okay.

01:30:50.850 --> 01:30:51.010
Okay.

01:30:51.490 --> 01:30:57.410
I mean the thing is the the uh as I said, I mean in some cases you see the the the

01:30:57.490 --> 01:31:02.450
sort of the the problems and the the approach and the ambitions, the project so speak,

01:31:02.940 --> 01:31:04.780
migrate from one place to another.

01:31:04.860 --> 01:31:06.460
So that's possible.

01:31:07.100 --> 01:31:10.300
Um yeah, we'll see.

01:31:10.460 --> 01:31:10.780
Yeah.

01:31:11.100 --> 01:31:14.860
I think I'm more collectively pessimistic, but personally optimistic.

01:31:14.940 --> 01:31:20.220
I th I think Ed Hagen made this remark once where yeah, you know, nobody's asking these

01:31:20.220 --> 01:31:24.140
foundational questions like uh, you know, w what is a group and why do we think in terms of

01:31:24.140 --> 01:31:28.220
groups, stuff like that, you know, basic scientific questions about human nature.

01:31:28.540 --> 01:31:30.690
But that's good because it's more for me.

01:31:30.770 --> 01:31:33.170
You know, I I get more juicy insights to myself.

01:31:33.250 --> 01:31:36.850
I get to make these big discoveries that nobody else is making or nobody else is paying

01:31:36.850 --> 01:31:37.330
attention to.

01:31:37.410 --> 01:31:38.530
And I kind of feel the same way.

01:31:38.610 --> 01:31:39.890
Like I'm a kid in a candy store.

01:31:39.970 --> 01:31:42.370
I have all this low-hanging fruit that I get to pluck.

01:31:42.450 --> 01:31:43.650
Nobody else is plucking it.

01:31:43.730 --> 01:31:48.450
I get to, you know, ask these really fascinating foundational questions and actually make

01:31:48.450 --> 01:31:49.490
progress on answering them.

01:31:49.650 --> 01:31:50.610
Wow, lucky me.

01:31:50.770 --> 01:31:55.250
Like if science were better, then I would be in a crowded market and I would have nothing

01:31:55.250 --> 01:31:55.810
to contribute.

01:31:55.890 --> 01:31:58.460
And you know, I yeah, it's wicked.

01:31:58.620 --> 01:31:59.820
I I I agree with you, David.

01:31:59.900 --> 01:32:03.420
And I think like I mean, no, no smoke up your collective behinds.

01:32:03.500 --> 01:32:08.700
I mean, I think Haskell and David, you're doing incredible work of that type, but I think

01:32:08.700 --> 01:32:12.780
it's this the the reward for doing it is nobody listens to you, right?

01:32:13.100 --> 01:32:18.860
In the sense that I think like I mean, of course, smart um the this is

01:32:18.860 --> 01:32:20.300
everyone's against us, uh right.

01:32:20.380 --> 01:32:25.830
So this is surfing but but but I mean a small number of people who are very smart are very

01:32:25.830 --> 01:32:26.470
interested.

01:32:26.630 --> 01:32:30.870
But this I think this idea of scientists who are like, well, if I'm right, lots of people

01:32:30.870 --> 01:32:32.070
should agree with me.

01:32:32.310 --> 01:32:37.110
And if lots of people, if I'm not popular, if I don't have a lot of attention on me, I'm

01:32:37.110 --> 01:32:42.070
doing something wrong and I have to correct what I'm doing to suss out what will receive

01:32:42.070 --> 01:32:44.310
the most eyeballs or the most attention.

01:32:44.550 --> 01:32:48.440
I think that is uh I completely agree with you, David.

01:32:48.520 --> 01:32:53.560
And I think that's the difference where I think if you accept that, if you're sort of like

01:32:53.560 --> 01:32:59.320
a Buddhist about life is life is social suffering in this sense as a scientist, then I

01:32:59.320 --> 01:33:00.040
think you'll be fine.

01:33:00.120 --> 01:33:02.840
But I think it's harder, I think it's hard for everybody.

01:33:03.080 --> 01:33:09.080
Um uh for some of us, some of the days, some people all every day, and some people can't do

01:33:09.080 --> 01:33:10.200
it, and some people can.

01:33:10.440 --> 01:33:15.390
But I for me at least that's I think the big thing is I think if you think your ideas are

01:33:15.390 --> 01:33:20.430
gonna be popular, if they're scientifically right, that's a wrong assumption.

01:33:21.470 --> 01:33:22.110
Right.

01:33:22.350 --> 01:33:27.390
And well, I mean the thing is the um uh

01:33:28.190 --> 01:33:33.710
yeah, I mean yeah, you have to have some sort of um it's very difficult to

01:33:34.350 --> 01:33:39.790
uh to do good science without a community, so you know it's um that's the

01:33:39.790 --> 01:33:40.990
counterpart of that.

01:33:41.070 --> 01:33:46.900
That's um I'm glad that there is a Santa

01:33:46.980 --> 01:33:52.500
Barbara school and that it's not just two people and uh and I'm glad that there's a Paris

01:33:52.500 --> 01:33:58.260
school and a whatever school that's uh that's good because um that's

01:33:58.500 --> 01:34:04.340
um yeah that is conducive to to to to to better sort of um

01:34:04.580 --> 01:34:05.380
discussions.

01:34:05.540 --> 01:34:11.140
Actually that that leads me to something else I wanted to tell you, but you know, um which

01:34:11.380 --> 01:34:17.210
is that um we should have more um

01:34:17.530 --> 01:34:23.370
cumulative science in what we do, and we tend to

01:34:23.370 --> 01:34:29.050
have an slight overproduction of foundational stuff that creates a

01:34:29.050 --> 01:34:31.370
new sub subfield by itself.

01:34:32.540 --> 01:34:37.740
And um that's kind of uh worrying, and I I

01:34:38.380 --> 01:34:44.300
think that to some degree, some of us sometimes, you see how political

01:34:44.300 --> 01:34:50.060
I've become, um, could be reinventing the wheel a little bit in our

01:34:50.060 --> 01:34:50.460
field.

01:34:50.700 --> 01:34:55.770
So um I thought of a solution to that, And

01:34:56.490 --> 01:35:02.490
so I have a megalomaniac plan for a solution to that, which is

01:35:02.490 --> 01:35:08.410
in analogy with something that happens in happened in mathematics

01:35:08.410 --> 01:35:14.330
in the early 40s, 50s, 60s, which was a group that

01:35:14.330 --> 01:35:16.090
was called Bobacci group.

01:35:16.330 --> 01:35:22.220
And that was a group of mathematicians who realized that lots of foundational issues

01:35:22.220 --> 01:35:23.020
in mathematics.

01:35:23.100 --> 01:35:27.260
It's not that they were not understood, it's that there was a sort of proliferation of ways

01:35:27.260 --> 01:35:28.300
of thinking about it.

01:35:28.380 --> 01:35:30.860
And you know, what the heck is an integral?

01:35:31.020 --> 01:35:34.940
Well, people have various subtypes of it, but they don't know what a type is, and they

01:35:34.940 --> 01:35:37.100
don't care because they're working on some stuff.

01:35:37.260 --> 01:35:42.780
And this produced all sorts of um unclear sort of science.

01:35:43.090 --> 01:35:47.570
So they thought they would do it and they would uh create so they were called Bourbaki,

01:35:47.810 --> 01:35:53.090
which was an imaginary name, and they were a group of uh ten people or something with some

01:35:53.090 --> 01:35:57.330
turnover, and they would publish those books which were in effect anonymous because they

01:35:57.330 --> 01:35:59.650
used the non-diplom uh Bourbaki.

01:36:01.730 --> 01:36:07.650
And their idea was that each of them would try to, for example, write

01:36:07.650 --> 01:36:13.520
a chapter on you know what uh what is an integral in said theory, in such

01:36:13.680 --> 01:36:17.920
in the vocabulary of said theory, because that was their foundational uh language.

01:36:18.320 --> 01:36:22.480
Um, and the others would just sort of say, no, no, it can be much better, or you know, we

01:36:22.480 --> 01:36:23.680
can do it differently, etc.

01:36:23.920 --> 01:36:25.040
And they published those books.

01:36:25.120 --> 01:36:28.800
So I thought we should have the equivalent for evolutionary social sciences.

01:36:28.960 --> 01:36:30.080
What is a social group?

01:36:30.160 --> 01:36:32.080
What are the questions about a social group?

01:36:32.240 --> 01:36:35.120
You know, why is politics not what you think?

01:36:35.930 --> 01:36:38.170
You know, what are kinship terms?

01:36:38.650 --> 01:36:43.210
Why do we have kinship terms as opposed to pure genetic sort of relatedness?

01:36:43.450 --> 01:36:45.610
Why do we have, you know, all these things?

01:36:45.850 --> 01:36:50.890
And I think there's enough of a corpus of stuff that's been produced by people

01:36:51.610 --> 01:36:56.890
that we could produce these sort of uh authoritative, so to speak, sort of foundational

01:36:56.890 --> 01:37:01.210
texts that would say, well, if you're interested in evolutionary social sciences, you

01:37:01.210 --> 01:37:02.250
should go there.

01:37:02.810 --> 01:37:08.740
Um so um the idea is not that I would do it, the idea is

01:37:08.740 --> 01:37:14.660
that I would uh get tons of people to do it or I would ask tons of um

01:37:14.900 --> 01:37:20.420
AI to uh to synthesize stuff for me so that we can put that somewhere.

01:37:20.660 --> 01:37:26.580
But I think that would be a useful project because I realized that um

01:37:27.220 --> 01:37:33.050
uh when you go from one place to another, um uh this year I spent two months in

01:37:33.050 --> 01:37:38.170
Toulouse at the Toulouse School of Economics, which is a place where they have brilliant

01:37:38.170 --> 01:37:39.050
social scientists.

01:37:39.130 --> 01:37:44.730
I mean, they've decided that they'd have a special department for not economists, which

01:37:44.730 --> 01:37:49.850
means in practice economists who work with you know various sort of questions of interest

01:37:49.850 --> 01:37:54.170
to anthropologists, for example, how does cooperation work, you know, and stuff like that.

01:37:56.080 --> 01:38:01.840
And I realized that many things I said in those conversations were pure Santa Barbara

01:38:01.840 --> 01:38:06.080
school dialect, which for me was transparent.

01:38:06.480 --> 01:38:11.920
And they would stop me at oh, so but what do you think by what do you mean by a

01:38:11.920 --> 01:38:13.920
signaling explanation of something?

01:38:14.080 --> 01:38:18.400
And I would have to say, Oh, hang on, what I think I think about that is blah blah blah

01:38:18.480 --> 01:38:18.800
blah blah.

01:38:19.090 --> 01:38:22.930
And of course they would get it because these people are smart and they know about

01:38:22.930 --> 01:38:24.610
evolution and they know about stuff.

01:38:24.690 --> 01:38:28.850
But I realized that there was a whole lot of discourse

01:38:30.450 --> 01:38:35.890
that's where it would be great to have the common

01:38:35.890 --> 01:38:38.850
foundation that would be expressed somewhere.

01:38:39.490 --> 01:38:45.480
So you know the great advantage of this kind of megalmanic

01:38:45.640 --> 01:38:49.880
project is that it uh relies on other people doing tons of work.

01:38:50.440 --> 01:38:53.240
Uh so the best kind of project.

01:38:53.960 --> 01:38:55.800
The best kind of project.

01:38:56.040 --> 01:39:02.040
And uh so I'm not sure the uh it's uh it's likely to take

01:39:02.040 --> 01:39:07.880
off anytime soon, but it it's uh I think it's something that that that could be

01:39:07.880 --> 01:39:13.370
useful, especially as um yes, some of the

01:39:13.690 --> 01:39:19.450
there are foundational questions, but also simply sort of um questions that uh

01:39:19.690 --> 01:39:25.450
students or you know outsiders could have, which is why do you use this

01:39:25.450 --> 01:39:26.410
tool to do this?

01:39:26.570 --> 01:39:30.330
You know, why would game theory be appropriate here and not there?

01:39:30.970 --> 01:39:36.890
Uh why do you use uh some sort of rational choice approximation of what people do

01:39:37.050 --> 01:39:39.770
when you explain this, but then you drop it sometimes?

01:39:39.930 --> 01:39:41.700
You know, that kind of question.

01:39:42.100 --> 01:39:43.780
Um, which would be great.

01:39:43.940 --> 01:39:46.340
It would be great progress if we could do that.

01:39:46.740 --> 01:39:50.820
Um, so anyway, you know, uh watch this space, so to speak.

01:39:50.900 --> 01:39:51.940
Um this is gonna happen.

01:39:52.340 --> 01:39:57.780
I mean, wouldn't how how would what you're describing be different from, say, the uh

01:39:57.780 --> 01:40:01.220
two-volume handbook of evolutionary psychology that David Buss put out?

01:40:01.590 --> 01:40:07.430
It's a bit different because um again the problem that these Bourbaki people had

01:40:07.430 --> 01:40:12.390
in math was the juxtaposition of perfectly fine arguments

01:40:13.190 --> 01:40:19.030
without sometimes without much connection of those of their subparts

01:40:19.030 --> 01:40:21.510
to some uh common core.

01:40:21.750 --> 01:40:27.590
So uh I I've um I've read many chapters of the handbook and

01:40:27.590 --> 01:40:30.960
I've used them for uh teaching a lot.

01:40:31.600 --> 01:40:37.600
And sometimes I've been surprised that's at the sort

01:40:37.600 --> 01:40:43.600
of you know the implications of a certain argument being tacit, but also

01:40:43.600 --> 01:40:47.840
not being the ones that are implied by another chapter.

01:40:48.000 --> 01:40:50.880
It's you know there's a slightly different um angle there.

01:40:50.960 --> 01:40:52.800
But what is the difference between those angles?

01:40:52.880 --> 01:40:58.390
We don't know, and um so maybe that's um so there's an argument for

01:40:58.870 --> 01:41:04.870
not doing this, which is um the science develops if you do lots of good empirical work that

01:41:04.870 --> 01:41:06.310
explains stuff.

01:41:07.110 --> 01:41:10.710
So this kind of foundational project is not is not good.

01:41:11.110 --> 01:41:16.870
Uh it's a waste of time in a way because the foundational stuff will you know uh will

01:41:16.870 --> 01:41:18.710
solve itself at some point.

01:41:19.030 --> 01:41:24.800
Um but I think it would be useful for um uh especially for people

01:41:24.800 --> 01:41:30.720
who want to use that kind of science, but are not in it, are not doing it.

01:41:31.040 --> 01:41:33.600
So suppose you're in political science or history.

01:41:33.680 --> 01:41:38.160
You want to understand some historical development, and you're told, well, this is

01:41:38.160 --> 01:41:40.880
something about leadership and leadership and followership.

01:41:40.960 --> 01:41:42.480
You know, there are those models of it.

01:41:42.640 --> 01:41:43.600
Where where are the models?

01:41:43.760 --> 01:41:44.720
What are the models?

01:41:44.960 --> 01:41:48.880
It's not absolutely clear, you know, there's a a literature about that.

01:41:49.790 --> 01:41:55.710
okay, so that's that's um that's my um uh crazy idea uh uh uh at

01:41:55.710 --> 01:41:56.270
the moment.

01:41:56.350 --> 01:41:58.110
I mean I I'm I'm not sure.

01:41:58.270 --> 01:42:04.030
Well I'm almost sure it's not gonna work, but you know it's uh it's worth toying with.

01:42:04.990 --> 01:42:05.470
Yeah.

01:42:05.710 --> 01:42:11.470
Uh Par Paris is uh or Europe is lovely in summer, so maybe if there's funding to

01:42:11.470 --> 01:42:17.360
get people all in one place over the summer, uh yeah somewhere like Berlin or Paris

01:42:17.360 --> 01:42:18.800
or or somewhere like that.

01:42:18.960 --> 01:42:19.600
That's right.

01:42:20.000 --> 01:42:25.920
Thing is that I I've always been a uh I'm you know it's uh funny because I

01:42:25.920 --> 01:42:31.440
I remember that uh Lida Cosmetis described herself as uh Grunge

01:42:31.440 --> 01:42:37.360
repellent and uh I must say I kind of share that quality so you

01:42:37.360 --> 01:42:43.250
know and I know some people I I know some people I couldn't name but you know who

01:42:43.250 --> 01:42:49.250
just sort of float around in the academic world and grants attached themselves to these

01:42:49.250 --> 01:42:51.090
people like barnacles on a whale.

01:42:51.170 --> 01:42:52.210
I mean it's amazing.

01:42:52.290 --> 01:42:58.210
And they just sort of uh so um so yes, but the uh it's true

01:42:58.290 --> 01:43:03.810
the attractions of uh a nice place could sort of uh but again I'm not sure that getting

01:43:03.810 --> 01:43:08.770
people to to s to to to sit around the table might be the best thing.

01:43:08.850 --> 01:43:14.380
I I think maybe some sort of more um automated way of

01:43:14.380 --> 01:43:17.580
getting to the the core of what they're saying could be good.

01:43:18.380 --> 01:43:24.220
Although you know that that implies the belief in in um in the current

01:43:24.220 --> 01:43:26.460
models that may be a bit sort of misplaced.

01:43:26.540 --> 01:43:27.260
But right.

01:43:27.500 --> 01:43:33.420
Or it would have to train on just the correct it feels like the compositional AI stuff,

01:43:33.580 --> 01:43:39.340
it's to the degree it averages things, it's sort of if it's an area that is outside

01:43:39.340 --> 01:43:43.390
of the the median, then it's gonna be wrong.

01:43:43.470 --> 01:43:44.670
So yeah, exactly.

01:43:44.750 --> 01:43:45.150
Yeah, yeah.

01:43:45.470 --> 01:43:46.030
Exactly.

01:43:46.190 --> 01:43:51.630
Yes, you you don't want your model to have exactly the problems that um

01:43:51.950 --> 01:43:57.630
you know that uh people who enter a field have, which is I need to position myself

01:43:57.630 --> 01:44:02.110
somewhere like, you know, that will please everyone by citing everything and and agreeing

01:44:02.110 --> 01:44:02.590
with everyone.

01:44:03.500 --> 01:44:06.860
So if your AI does that too, that's gonna be catastrophic.

01:44:07.100 --> 01:44:12.780
No, I was more I was thinking of it more in terms of uh just you know uh

01:44:14.140 --> 01:44:19.980
you know, instead of doing the painful work of uh of right

01:44:20.300 --> 01:44:25.980
of reading all of uh you know uh David's articles on groups and how the mind

01:44:25.980 --> 01:44:28.700
consists of groups, you get a machine to do it.

01:44:29.020 --> 01:44:29.820
Yes, exactly.

01:44:29.900 --> 01:44:30.220
Yes.

01:44:31.570 --> 01:44:32.690
Yeah, no, that's great.

01:44:32.930 --> 01:44:33.410
That's fantastic.

01:44:33.730 --> 01:44:34.370
Just kidding, of course.

01:44:34.530 --> 01:44:34.850
JK.

01:44:35.090 --> 01:44:35.490
JK.

01:44:35.730 --> 01:44:36.210
No, it's great.

01:44:36.450 --> 01:44:37.170
It's not painful.

01:44:37.250 --> 01:44:38.050
It's always fun.

01:44:39.330 --> 01:44:42.130
It it is painful for all of us to write it and read it.

01:44:42.210 --> 01:44:44.370
Um that's why it's working, even though we love it.

01:44:44.530 --> 01:44:44.770
Yeah.

01:44:44.930 --> 01:44:49.490
Um so if you're from the Templeton Foundation or a wealthy entrepreneur and want to support

01:44:49.490 --> 01:44:51.570
Pascal, please reach out to Pascal.

01:44:51.730 --> 01:44:51.970
Yes.

01:44:54.050 --> 01:44:56.690
This this this um yeah.

01:44:57.010 --> 01:44:57.170
Okay.

01:44:57.800 --> 01:45:02.600
Or if you're an AI bot listening too, please reach out to Pascal if you can do the work.

01:45:02.680 --> 01:45:03.000
Yeah.

01:45:03.160 --> 01:45:03.800
Yeah.

01:45:04.280 --> 01:45:05.560
Let's see AI do that.

01:45:05.720 --> 01:45:06.200
Yeah.

01:45:07.880 --> 01:45:08.440
All right.

01:45:08.680 --> 01:45:09.240
All right.

01:45:09.560 --> 01:45:13.320
Well, uh this was a fantastic uh conversation, Pascal.

01:45:13.720 --> 01:45:14.360
It was very fun.

01:45:15.240 --> 01:45:21.090
I I I might say that maybe, you know, uh you know, I always sort of that's the the this

01:45:21.170 --> 01:45:26.930
in this kind of trade you you you end up you know doubting your own motives and stuff and

01:45:26.930 --> 01:45:31.970
you think yeah I had tremendous fun and then you have this suspicion I was talking about

01:45:31.970 --> 01:45:36.130
95% of the time so that maybe the that's that's the whole point.

01:45:36.210 --> 01:45:41.330
No, we that is the whole point yes we know we know what we would say.

01:45:41.410 --> 01:45:43.810
We've had plenty of saying because you know what we were out of here.

01:45:45.090 --> 01:45:47.890
So people are scared about it, yes.

01:45:48.100 --> 01:45:48.260
Yeah.

01:45:48.420 --> 01:45:50.820
I used to tell my students, yes, you have to talk.

01:45:50.980 --> 01:45:51.540
Please talk.

01:45:51.620 --> 01:45:52.180
Ask questions.

01:45:52.260 --> 01:45:55.060
Because you know, if you don't, I will carry on.

01:45:55.300 --> 01:45:58.180
I will carry on for the whole hour.

01:45:58.260 --> 01:45:59.380
And that's it.

01:45:59.780 --> 01:46:01.620
Anyway, yes, no, those great fun.

01:46:01.700 --> 01:46:01.940
Thank you.

01:46:02.500 --> 01:46:03.700
Yeah, thank you, Pascal.

01:46:03.780 --> 01:46:04.900
Uh it was it was a pleasure.

01:46:04.980 --> 01:46:10.180
And I uh I always like um ending episodes because I get to say things, uh this is quasi

01:46:10.340 --> 01:46:16.180
public, I suppose, but like uh uh your work has been so inspirational for so many

01:46:16.180 --> 01:46:17.060
young people.

01:46:17.370 --> 01:46:20.330
Um, and uh many myself included.

01:46:20.410 --> 01:46:20.570
Yeah.

01:46:20.730 --> 01:46:23.050
Yes, many people um even though I'm not that young.

01:46:23.290 --> 01:46:24.650
Uh many yes, exactly.

01:46:24.730 --> 01:46:28.810
Uh many people have mentioned like religion explained or other things that you've done that

01:46:28.810 --> 01:46:33.290
were really foundational to like unpacking this hidden world below the the level of the

01:46:33.290 --> 01:46:34.570
super superficial.

01:46:34.730 --> 01:46:35.610
So thank you for that.

01:46:35.770 --> 01:46:41.400
And I think you know, as as time will be um marching forward fortunately or unfortunately

01:46:41.480 --> 01:46:46.680
for evolutionary psychology um your work uh is gonna be seen as this some of this

01:46:46.680 --> 01:46:50.120
foundational stuff and i'm sure the AI will uh will understand.

01:46:50.440 --> 01:46:54.920
No no no no stop that stop that thank you for your service.

01:46:55.160 --> 01:46:56.280
Yes thank you for your service.

01:46:57.480 --> 01:47:03.240
Okay David

01:47:03.320 --> 01:47:08.710
um you uh we should do an episode of um this

01:47:08.710 --> 01:47:11.670
podcast fr live from from Paris.

01:47:12.630 --> 01:47:13.270
Yeah.

01:47:13.430 --> 01:47:13.750
Yeah.

01:47:13.990 --> 01:47:16.230
I mean uh uh like us in Paris?

01:47:16.470 --> 01:47:20.550
Yeah, we should all get together in Paris and all go to Paris and do I mean that I mean I

01:47:20.550 --> 01:47:21.110
love Paris.

01:47:21.190 --> 01:47:22.870
I Paris is always a banger.

01:47:22.950 --> 01:47:27.420
Every time you go, it's just beautiful, the food is great, the music is great, like the

01:47:27.420 --> 01:47:28.860
architecture's great, like everything.

01:47:29.020 --> 01:47:33.420
It's just uh can't for those of you who like can't afford to travel to Paris, I understand

01:47:33.420 --> 01:47:37.900
how you're feeling because I was like you and then I moved to Europe and I could fly to

01:47:37.900 --> 01:47:39.820
Paris for f literally forty Euros.

01:47:39.900 --> 01:47:41.500
And so I can say no.

01:47:41.660 --> 01:47:44.140
Um almost every time I go to Paris it rains though.

01:47:44.220 --> 01:47:46.450
I don't know why that is That's too bad.

01:47:46.610 --> 01:47:46.770
Yeah.

01:47:47.010 --> 01:47:50.450
But even when it's even when it rains, it's no, it's also it's so photogenic.

01:47:50.530 --> 01:47:55.730
I have like so many pictures of like beautiful cobble, you know, dark the bridges, yeah.

01:47:59.010 --> 01:48:00.770
So we should we should make that happen.

01:48:00.930 --> 01:48:03.010
So I would I mean I'm always down to go to Paris.

01:48:03.090 --> 01:48:09.090
That's yeah, so maybe if you're listening and you would like to

01:48:09.090 --> 01:48:11.970
help us do that, how can people help us do that?

01:48:12.660 --> 01:48:17.620
Well, you can give us lots of money for our current expedition on our Patreon page.

01:48:17.700 --> 01:48:21.860
And you can flag it for uh David for David and Dave to go to Paris.

01:48:22.100 --> 01:48:23.060
Yeah, exactly.

01:48:23.300 --> 01:48:23.940
Sounds good.

01:48:24.340 --> 01:48:25.140
I think that's enough.

01:48:25.620 --> 01:48:27.620
We would love to go to Paris on your dime.

01:48:27.700 --> 01:48:28.740
So please make that happen.

01:48:28.820 --> 01:48:29.620
Visit our Patreon page.

01:48:29.860 --> 01:48:34.580
It's like what Pascal said the the idea is uh it's a good project when it's somebody

01:48:34.900 --> 01:48:36.100
involves somebody else's work.

01:48:36.180 --> 01:48:37.700
So but um That is true.

01:48:37.940 --> 01:48:43.930
Uh but we're really um oh David, we are um I looked up like lists of social science

01:48:43.930 --> 01:48:49.690
podcasts and somehow we're like in the and this says very this this reflects very poorly on

01:48:49.690 --> 01:48:52.650
the social science podcasts is somehow we're in the top hundred.

01:48:53.290 --> 01:48:53.690
Really?

01:48:54.010 --> 01:48:55.130
Social science podcasts.

01:48:55.210 --> 01:48:55.530
Yeah.

01:48:55.850 --> 01:48:56.170
Cool.

01:48:56.250 --> 01:48:57.850
I didn't even know there were a hundred of them.

01:48:59.050 --> 01:48:59.370
Yeah.

01:48:59.610 --> 01:49:00.490
Yeah exactly.

01:49:00.570 --> 01:49:05.380
That might it might just be a gimmick for like, you know, um I don't know, micro targeting

01:49:05.380 --> 01:49:05.940
marketing or something.

01:49:06.500 --> 01:49:08.340
Are we like number ninety nine or whatever?

01:49:16.980 --> 01:49:18.500
But you know, hey it's cool.

01:49:18.580 --> 01:49:19.860
I can brag about that next time.

01:49:19.940 --> 01:49:20.820
People ask me about the podcast.

01:49:22.260 --> 01:49:23.140
Yeah, top one hundred.

01:49:23.220 --> 01:49:24.660
We're a top one hundred podcasts.

01:49:24.980 --> 01:49:28.270
Out of a hundred and five, Which is pretty impressive.

01:49:29.230 --> 01:49:31.470
Um, but uh but thank you all for listening.

01:49:31.630 --> 01:49:34.270
And um it was just lovely to talk to Pascal.

01:49:34.350 --> 01:49:38.910
Um one of my favorite things about this podcast is just chance to talk to these lovely

01:49:38.910 --> 01:49:41.070
people um that we don't always hear from.

01:49:41.390 --> 01:49:41.790
Yeah.

01:49:42.030 --> 01:49:42.430
Absolutely.

01:49:42.830 --> 01:49:47.550
So talk to somebody that you haven't talked to often that you love in your life this week,

01:49:47.630 --> 01:49:49.070
and we'll talk to you next week.

01:49:49.400 --> 01:49:50.520
Yeah, that's good advice.

01:49:50.680 --> 01:49:51.880
Call someone up that's awesome.

01:49:52.120 --> 01:49:52.280
Yeah.

01:49:52.440 --> 01:49:52.600
All right.

01:49:53.080 --> 01:49:56.440
Lori Lori Santos said use your phone as a phone, not as a computer.

01:49:56.760 --> 01:49:57.160
Yep.

01:49:57.320 --> 01:49:58.520
I like that advice.

01:49:58.760 --> 01:49:59.160
All right.

01:49:59.320 --> 01:50:00.680
Well get to it.

01:50:00.760 --> 01:50:00.920
Yeah.

01:50:01.240 --> 01:50:01.720
See you next week.

01:50:01.960 --> 01:50:04.600
You can hang up do you hang up a podcast?

01:50:04.760 --> 01:50:05.960
You stop the podcast.

01:50:07.080 --> 01:50:07.720
Turn it off.

01:50:07.960 --> 01:50:08.200
Okay.

01:50:08.280 --> 01:50:08.840
Turn it off.

01:50:08.920 --> 01:50:09.160
Okay.

01:50:09.240 --> 01:50:11.890
Uh and uh and three two on Q manifort.