Status and Personality with Patrick Durkee
2026-02-24 13:00:00.000 +00:00

This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Uh I am co-host David Petrozuski. Almost forgot your last name there. Well, it wouldn't be it wouldn't be that difficult to forget my last name. Um I was gonna well it doesn't matter. I was gonna say David Pinsoff, but then I had already said my I'm so I yeah. So you're David Pinsoff. I'm David Petrozowski. And this is Actual Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast, Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. Enjoy David, today we have a wonderful guest, Patrick Durkey. Patrick does work confronting our folk intuitions about constructs like personality, for example. So he's done work with people like Aaron Lukashewski confronting the idea that as

psychologists had sort of traditionally assumed personality was just there existing in the mind, he's been doing work kind of thinking about well, what would an adaptationist approach to this be? And very much in the Michael Graziano point of sometimes the first step is the wrong step, and assuming naively that the intuitive constructs like personality exist in the mind is sort of the wrong step. And so this is a lovely example of confronting what is personality, or what else do we talk about? Status, like what is status? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you m you might think uh naively that status is a simple thing, and status seeking and status hierarchies are a simple thing. But in this episode, we really delve into the unfathomable complexity of what

status is and how it touches on virtually every aspect of our lives, how it interacts with our personalities, um, how we look for niches to fill in our social world, and how social ecologies can affect our status seeking strategies and how you know moral progress can change what status games we play. Um, we even get into inspiration and what it means to be inspired to pursue a particular endeavor. Uh, this was a really fun, uh, wide-ranging conversation. I think you like it a lot. It was an inspirational episode, and we even get into like what our emotions or personality. What is personality from the perspective of like is personality sort of in a weird way the opposite of what free will is? Like I like this very cool thing that we're getting into.

So by drilling down into the mechanistic details of the adaptations, we're also sort of making the familiar strange to use that lovely quote that John Alita used that was a quote from William James. So this is a lovely, inspiring, um, and and and nicely strange episode with Patrick Durkey. Agreed. Enjoy. Patrick Durkey, it's lovely to have you here. Um you are an expert in status, in personality, uh in different types of status and how personality traits might affect status acquisition and how good you are at seeking status. Um why don't we begin at the beginning and just try to define what status is. What exactly are we talking about? Oh Jesus, starting with or personality. The hardest possible problem, I guess.

Generally, that's or justice or truth, whichever one is easiest. Reality. Yeah. Well, I think if you like look in the literature, like the definition of status that I think you'd see most often is something like the average kind of differences in attention, deference, control over resources, basically, that people have within a group. Okay. And yeah, I think that generally, like that's kind of the definition I've I've been working with. Um, but maybe just because that's the definition that is out there in the literature. Okay. I think like really what like I've been trying to work towards is more like, yeah, what is status like within the mind in a computational sense, or is status even a thing in the mind per se, or is it an emergent kind of thing that comes out of the

computation is going on in the mind and what those computations actually look like, I guess. Hmm. So if if people pay attention to me and listen to what I say, and if I tell them to do things and they listen to me and they do it, and I have lots of stuff, then by your definition and by the definition in the academic literature, I have high status. Yeah. Okay. Um, and it seems to me that we also kind of need an explanation for why all those things go together, because in theory they could be decoupled. It could be that I have lots of stuff, but nobody listens to me or cares what I have to say. Um, it could be that everyone obeys my every command, but I'm very poor. Um so uh why do you think these things go together?

Um I guess they the behavioral outputs like deference, attention, like might be outputs of of similar systems or the same system that depend on the same inputs, I suppose, is one. And one of those inputs might be something like yeah, resource holding potential, which is you know, from the animal like ecology literature, like then organisms ability to take or defend resources from other organisms and oh and also willingness to to do that. Right. Okay. So the so I maybe, you know, if you have lots of stuff, maybe I'll listen to you because you have the power to give me some of that stuff. Uh and I'll obey your command because if I do, then then maybe you'll share your stuff with me. And if I'm rude to you or I don't listen to you, uh, then you're not gonna share your stuff

with me. Is that and so uh are there different types of status? Uh because I know a lot a lot of people in the literature think there are different types of status. Where do you fall uh in that debate? Yeah, I mean in the literature, you know, the biggest kind of popular distinction is between dominance on the one hand and prestige as different forms or different strategies or different routes to attaining status. And so, like, yeah, it gets a little dicey for me anyway, because I think really there's like one stat there's status. And they're I view dominance as prestige as different routes or different strategies to attaining status, at least that's in the literature. Um, but you I think it's also probably possible to think about these as completely like

distinct forms of status. Um and maybe they're not even leading to the same outcome as like having status as an outcome of these things. And I think that that's contributed to a lot of confusion maybe in literature and in my own mind about like what what it is we're actually talking about when we're talking about status and the role of dominance and prestige in human status hierarchies. Um I've been thinking a bit about status myself. Um and I kind of want to run a definition by you, or at least how I'm thinking about it and see if you agree with me or not. Yeah. Um so I've been thinking about status as uh common knowledge of a person's relative value as a social partner and its downstream consequences

on uh coalitions and alliances. Um, so this doesn't really assume that much because we already should have systems in the mind for evaluating uh the value of different social partners. Given that we are in a marketplace of partners, we're shopping around for potential friends, for potential mates, uh, for potential people to lead us in uh joint activities. Uh, we have some choice about who we're going to collaborate with. And in order to make good choices in that marketplace, we need to have some way of computing the value of different choices. Right. Um, and so if someone is just really valuable as a social partner, then it benefits me to pay attention to them and to try to uh be nice to them and form a relationship with them

just because they're higher value. Um, and then the common knowledge of it uh is important because uh if I think you're really awesome but everyone else thinks you suck, well then you're not actually very awesome because a big part of your awesomeness is uh common knowledge of that awesomeness. Because um uh if you have lots of people who will take your side or cooperate with you, you're gonna be a much more valuable partner. But if everybody hates you and I'm the only one on your side, that's gonna be really bad for me. Um so uh it's not just your value, it's also we all need to know that everyone knows that you're awesome or that you're superior as a social partner. Uh and once we all have common knowledge that you are a really good social partner, well,

it benefits us all to take your side in conflicts. Um and to try to form political alliances with you. Uh if there's some sort of political conflict where you're going to benefit and someone else is going to pay a cost, uh if you're the better partner, then it benefits everyone else to take your side. And if I know that everyone's going to take your side, then that benefits me even more if I'm going to take your side because I'm going to be in the majority. And so when there's common knowledge of your superior value, that creates a strong political incentive for all of us to have your back, to take your side, to oppose your enemies and support your friends. And to avoid ganging up on you and and gang up on your rivals, say, or

to imitate you to try to signal our loyalty to you. Uh so that's how I'm thinking of it. It's common knowledge of a person's relative social value and its political implications. What do you what do you think about that way of thinking of it? Aaron Powell Yeah, I like that a lot. I think it's closely aligned with like how, for example, Aaron Luchesky and I have kind of talked about it too, which is kind of thinking about it like status is or like your representation of somebody's status in your social world is kind of capturing like your assessment of the collective like welfare trade-off ratios that people have towards that person. Where but I like the way you put it too just recognizing somebody's like relative social

value as a cooperator or something like that. Um and yeah, because again, that helps you, like you said, to kind of figure out like what are some good strategic alliances to make, what who should I support in conflict, um, who should I defer to because they have XYZ people backing them up and that sort of thing. And that's very similar to, for example, like when I took a class with with John Patton back in the day, like right at the beginning of when I was getting into evolutionary psychology, it's very similar to how he viewed status as well as this kind of like marker of who's got the coalitional support behind them and who has more coalitional support. And again, that and that really does tie in with the biological literature in a lot of

ways, just with more individuals when it comes down to resource holding potential. It's if things came down to a in a conflict over a resource or a decision, um, who has more resource holding potential in order to win that that conflict. And it the thing that makes it trickier in humans, or apparently seemingly trickier in humans, is that the way you get more people on your side in the conflict is not by forcing them, probably, to fight for you. Maybe that works in some situations, but probably an easier thing is to have people just genuinely want you around and want you to continue to exist and want you to have things your way, either because that benefits them or because they actually value so value you so highly that they just want you to have uh things a certain

way. Uh that's yeah. Oh go ahead, David. Um I was just gonna maybe segue into where personality fits into this picture. Um do some personality traits lend themselves to status seeking or higher status? Um do we seek status in different ways based on our personality? Uh what do you think is the role between personality and status? Yeah, so I think it might help, yeah, to kind of back up into still stay in the maybe the status realm a little bit and figure out, yeah. So if you want to know like what personality traits might be useful for getting status, navigating style status hierarchies, maybe we should make a little bit more explicit, like what well, how do you get status in the first place?

Like, what is the currency of status? I think, and which we've already kind of been talking about a little bit with this like dominance versus prestige distinction and figuring out like what is status. So I guess if we were gonna work with like this definition that status is like this collective recognition of basically other people valuing you and being willing to come to your defense or your aid over in a conflict, then we have to figure out like how do you get people to increase their valuation of you is the key there. Just going back like to the logic of costs and benefits, right? That's something we've talked a lot a lot about. Is it should be generating benefits for people. So either you're really good at generating benefits for people, or at least you're willing

and and or you're willing to try to do those things. So this is actually a like a to be comment at one of my talks like as my first year of a PhD student. I was talking about some of my status work and talking about yeah like generating benefits versus generating costs. And he was basically like well shouldn't you split these into like ability and willingness to do these things? Cause maybe they don't always go together. You can be able to generate costs, but I mean able to yeah, able to inflict costs or able to generate benefits, but you're not particularly like willing to do any of those things. And that really changes the kind of calculus for me as a potential victim or beneficiary of those said costs or benefits.

To know, you know, are you willing to impose costs on me? Or are you just able to? Are you willing to generate benefits? Do you specifically want to generate benefits for me? Or are you just able to to do that? And also I would imagine if it's obligatory, like which is a weird way to think, but sort of just there's some things where I can't control it or you can take advantage of it. So if I just am really good at doing something, um, just for example, no, but yeah, like you know, like I don't know, like I'm I can build really good wells or something, uh something dumb example like that, but then you benefit, it's an externality, but I can't monopolize it, then my willingness doesn't matter in that context.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so it's it is like separable. They don't always have to go together. You don't have to be both able and willing, but both of those are aspects of the decision about like how much status or how much uh of another person value you. Um that's a really interesting point, Dave, that the there is an aspect of be of benefiting from someone that is independent of willingness. Like you could just benefit me by accident, you know? Yeah. Just by uh for example, building a well that maybe you're just building the well because you personally want water. Uh well, as soon as you build that well, um, it's available for me to use as well. And so you may hate me and you may not care about me at all, but you your mere ability to

build the well is a benefit to me in the same way that you know a a tree's existence is a benefit to me if I can sit in its shade. Uh the tree doesn't actually care about me, but its its existence uh is beneficial to me. So that's another aspect that you can think of as willingness, ability, and the externalities of the person's activities. Yeah, I I even wonder like some famous people sort of sometimes complain about people feeling or like feeling like people don't actually care about them. Um, and I wonder if that's like an example of this psychology where you're like, like if I'm buddies with Harrison Ford, I'm walking down the street, I get status just by virtue of like being around him, right?

From me as the hanger on, I'm just sort of looking at it as like I'm using Harrison Ford to get some status because just the knowledge that like I have a picture with him or I'm just next to him gives me status. Harrison Ford can't sort of control that. Um, right. And so I think that that expression that um that people aren't actually interested in me, um, because they're using me to get status in some other way suggests like that there's the psychology assessing whether it's obligatory or not. So it uh it's really complicated. Yeah. Willingness, ability, externality, these these are hard problems for the mind to solve. Um because it's not clear, you know, just by looking at someone's behavior, listening to

what they say, it's not clear how to carve that up into things they can do, things they're willing to do, things that are just happening by accident as an externality or as a byproduct of their activities. Do you have any inkling about how we solve these problems of how we figure figure out like who's capable of conferring benefits or who's willing or or whose uh activities are beneficial to us? Yeah, I think at like a certainly a a rough kind of level, it's something I've been thinking about. But I also like recognize like something I came to recently and doing some, I guess I call them agent-based models, like trying to figure out how an agent figure out like what things increase status, like what things like how much how important is cost infliction versus

benefit generation in getting status in my local community. And at least in the models that I've been working with, like I have to already imbue the agent with an idea of benefit versus cost. And obviously I have no idea how how that really works. Like how do we know whether something is is a benefit or or a cost? Like I guess Daniel Sneeser's work touches on the value. How do you figure out what the value of things are? And maybe some of that is over deep evolutionary time you can get some good priors going about certain things. But a lot of things related to status, I think are pretty culturally variable or variable across contexts or across time, about their relative usefulness or their relative

cost or benefit potential. And so it it would require, yeah, an agent to kind of figure out through an organism to figure out throughout development and like what are the relative values of different acts or characteristics or events? Like what events should I want to happen versus not want to happen? What are some characteristics that would be good to cultivate or skills that would be good to learn? Or what are some actions that are are good to do for status versus not good to do for status? So kind of the way I'm putting it together now is yeah, trying to say like if an agent is born in with some like rough, maybe some rough priors, that costs and benefits are a core dimension or two dimensions of accruing status in your local,

in your local social world, then how do you just figure out the relative importance of each? Yeah, like of all the things you could do, what's like the rank ordering of things that would be good for generating benefits and then what's like the rank order of things that would be good for inflicting costs or characteristics that would allow me to uh inflict costs versus generate benefits and then using those things try to basically bootstrap your way to an idea of what what is the status value of these things like if I were to do this act versus this act, how can I get a rank ordering of what skills would be good to cultivate or what events should I seek out or avoid and that that kind of stuff.

And at least in like, you know, my little cartoonish simulator world, you can kind of do this from some early observations, like throughout development, you can get a sense of when people have done this thing, either maybe I get through communications or gossip or whatever between other people, or just from observations of people's emotional reactions. You can maybe assign like that seems like more of a cost than this thing. People didn't like this as much as this thing, that kind of thing. And from there, you can kind of correlate, okay, what's like the like the value of these things with the status that I see out there in the world. And once you have that kind of correlation, then you can for a given act that you haven't

maybe you haven't seen the the status value of hunting a particular animal or something. You don't know. It's an empty slot in your mind, but you you know how much people like that thing or don't like the taste of it or whatever. Then you can use your predictive model that you've generated about like the lay of the land in terms of what's the association between value and status or benefit generation and status to like get an estimate of the status impact or the status value of hunting that thing that you've haven't hunted before. And if that is a higher status value than maybe alternative things that you could hunt or alternative actions you could take, then that's a pretty good way to kind of figure out

what should I do to try and increase my status. It's it seems like a a really important and underappreciated subsidiary problem is knowing what uh courses of action are even uh likely to achieve your goals. So like maybe I figure out that being a great basketball player is gonna get me lots of status. But whether I am capable of becoming a good basketball player is itself another problem I need to figure out. Maybe I'm never going to be a good basketball player and it's a waste of time and energy for me to try. Maybe I should try to do something else instead. So in addition to computing the value of being a basketball player, I need to estimate my own capability or my own likelihood of actually achieving that goal or how achievable or in

control that thing is. Maybe the things that give me high status or give people high status are completely out of my control. In which case, we know what do I do then? Or maybe it's totally in my control. Uh and and I'm, you know, I stand a really good chance of being a good basketball player and I should really invest in this. Um and so that that to me is another interesting problem. And I suspect um our the emotion of inspiration might have uh evolved to solve that problem. That if there's a really high likelihood that investing time and energy into this activity is going to pay off in the long term in terms of my status, I should feel really inspired and energized to invest in that activity.

But if if there's nothing I can do to become uh a good basketball player, I should feel the opposite of inspired. I should feel depressed. Or I should I should withdraw from that activity and look for other more inspiring uh uh investments. Uh, do you do you buy that way of thinking? Yeah, I like that. That's kind of like a direction I was kind of hoping to head next after like trying to lay out some groundwork for how the mind might solve the problem of just like what contributes to status? What are the things an organ an individual in my group or me could do? Or if somebody did this thing, how much status are they likely to get? And then from there figure out, okay, now how do I, as an individual, navigate the status

hierarchy? Um, what would be s a good thing for me to try to do? Because yeah, obviously there's some things that maybe wouldn't be a good route for you, like you said. Yeah, and I've kind of been thinking I haven't thought about inspiration per se, but I have one project that has been like languishing for far too long. It is I've been trying to like work out a distinction between two emotion programs for navigating hierarchies. I'm not gonna say the names of the emotions uh Because because yeah, I just feel like the the language, the full terminology of emotions can get in the way sometimes here. But basically, I think there's one like emotion program that is basically just trying to figure out who has status and coordinates behavior in an appropriate

way. You know, like don't get into con unnecessary conflicts with people who have higher status or you know, show deference, whatever, just by tracking who has status. Like the input is just somebody else's status or a status increasing characteristic that somebody has. It gets activated and you do appropriate behaviors, you know, the rough sketch of it. But there's another one kind of going along with what you're talking about, which is figuring, okay, like how do I get status? How do I learn the skills and characteristics that will allow me to get status? And there I think there's another emotion program which tracks other dimensions in addition to like, does this person have status? On top of that, it's also, yeah, like, is this does this person have status in the

domain or in an area that I am trying to get status in? So if I'm an academic, you know, are they also an academic? And also it's tracking things like, yeah, is this a skill that is, I don't know, cultivatable or practicable or something like that? You know, um, something that you could work on to improve versus oh that they're just tall and that get like, you know, that's not something you change. Um, and so there I think that's like the beginnings of a new kind of set of inputs and a new set of outputs that are designed to maybe try to emulate that person, learn from that person, you know, seek closeness to that person. And I think that's more of like uh yeah, a different kind of strategy for cultivating those

skills, finding basically like role models or people to emulate. And then just to go another step, because in that realm, if you're just based on those two inputs of um, you know, this person maybe is getting status or they have status, and they have skill in an area that I'm trying to get status in, basically. Then you could also run into this problem where you don't want to necessarily be emulating competitors. Or you don't want to maybe you can't like buddy buddy up with competitors, or maybe it would be like it would hurt your status to acknowledge that they have status. Um and in that case, I think then you also need to have this other input being tracked, which is like, is this a competitor?

And maybe there's lots of cues to that, like age or uh yeah, I don't know, age is one I'm thinking of right now. Uh but I don't can't think of others. Age, gender, that kind of stuff. Maybe or just like the nature of the thing, right? Where it's sort of like if you're a really good musician and I'm a good musician, but we play different instruments, just a stupid example, versus we play the same instrument and the kind of music we play is just rival. Like like you can there's only one lead guitar, you know, and that's what I want to do and that's what you do. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And so I think those there's like those three kinds of I don't know if they need to be entirely separate emotion programs, but the I think they can be they lead to different

outputs and they track some at different inputs, even if they have overlapping inputs. And I think, yeah, the way I've been thinking about it is like they're kind of what folk terminology of like respect versus admiration might be. Like respect is kind of like that baseline one that's just tracking like what do who has status? What are did you do something that's status worthy of like you know, respect, whatever? And then admiration, like who do I emulate? Um, and then maybe envy is more like that other one of like this you're competing in the same in the same area and you need a different set of of outputs in order to solve that problem. Yeah, I I like this. What what you're both saying is like this idea of status as a learning problem is super

cool. And David, I love this idea of um inspiration. I just looked up like what are inspiring movies, and one of them, the top on the list, is Rudy. And if anybody doesn't know the story of Rudy, you know, it's like this kid who's like small, doesn't think he's going to make it on college Notre Dame football, which is like the storied prestigious thing. He just works really, really hard at it. And just by virtue of being the underdog, it's this inspirational story of the underdog by means that are not traditional or were opaque and doesn't have like he's not strong, you know, like an underdog story is not like, well, my dad's a senator. I'm, you know, six foot five and, you know, super muscular and, you know, and like an and

I'm look and I'm playing on the Notre Dame football. Like that's a terrible movie, you know, but this is like he's he's a janitor, you know, and he's like, you know, cleaning the stands, but he loves this the team and his heart is in it, and he wants to be affiliated with the group. Um, and there's no guy, like you know, there's no guile. It's all just sort of I love the team, and he doesn't want his own status. And this is an inspirational story. Um, it suggests that the means, there's a system that always keeps the outcomes there that we might want. Like, you know, I I watch somebody I learn that uh being uh winning a fight is a good thing but I might be small you know and I can't actually do the same thing like I can't win the fight like the big guy I just saw it would

be a bad design to dump that as being a good thing even if I don't think I can do that now because maybe if I team up with four other small guys, we can still do it. Right. So I think like there's this really interesting, complicated compositional structure where there's sort of what are the expected reasonable means? What are the ones that I can probabilistically do? But then there's like some outcomes where it's like unlikely, but there's always interest and attention on if I discover unsurprising means, means that I didn't see, attend to that. And I think that's what like movies like Rudy or underdog movies in general, I think like why people watch them is because it's providing the input of this is an outcome that

people would want. But I'm there's a there's a scenario here of it's surprising given what the can preconditions are that this outcome happened. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of like like the motivational self-help industry is about trying to inspire people and making them think that they're more capable of achieving high status than they might have thought. Um and it's an interesting question why we're so vulnerable to to being uh misled about those like because a lot of people just really are you know, probably not gonna make it. Like not everyone can be a rock star, not everyone can play for the NBA. Like, you know, uh, you know, we we like to tell people, Oh, you can you can achieve your dreams, but like not everyone can achieve their dreams.

That's the sad fact of reality. But but but we love to hear that we can. Like w why? It seems like um we should be skeptical. We should want to you know know the truth about, you know, what our chances are and you know, you know, pursue activities where we have a good chance and abandon them when we don't have a good chance. But it seems like we we w we have these kind of we're prone to these kinds of delusions where we where we think we can be the best but we we actually can. That seems maladaptive, I I think it seems it's kind of mysterious. I don't know. It's it's like the Red Bull phenomenon where it's sort of like it even like there's a whole category of advertising, right? Which is sort of like you're a kid and you're like, this is an amazing like mountain biker

and he drinks Red Bull and it's like that has nothing to do, you know, but you're a kid and you're like this is a high status thing. Like he's an awesome skateboarder or he's like, you know, or somebody's a really good singer. what shoes do they wear? You know, like it doesn't matter, but the fact that there's leakage um of these things, um, which yeah, is interesting. And I mean, I obviously like I think there's probably I mean Patrick, you've probably thought about like this kind of thing. Like I what do you think? Is it like that the world is causally opaque and there's sort of an error erring on the side of you don't know if the shoes matter. So if you can get them, why not? Yeah. There's a couple things like, yeah, in those those threads.

Like one is like, yeah, like why are we so do we seem gullible to be like, oh yeah, I can attain like a lot of status. I can be a big shot. And like that, yeah, I guess I don't know how like culturally widespread that is. So that might be like a really just like a one of our quirks in the in the like the Western world. I don't know. But also if it's if it is really uh like a more culturally widespread thing then you know the first thing that comes to mind is like some kind of like if you you know you shoot for the stars at least you'll land a long on the moon or whatever kind of kind of thing like a a little bit of an error management maybe approach um to be like well you have to really like be trying for the top to hopefully that you land somewhere else

um in order to be motivated. That's like one potential thing. But then even as I'm saying it, I'm like, I could see that backfiring pretty hard. You know, people are just like, Yeah, that person really thinks they're hot shit, like they're not. And yeah, so I I I do think that's an interesting problem to to try and unpack. And I I don't have a a good answer for that one right now. Um, but then as f yeah, as far as like that phenomenon of like why the hell can pro athletes or you know other high status people basically like be used to advertise things that aren't actually like crucial to this success most likely. Like it's causally irrelevant. Like, yeah, it's it's along for the ride. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's kind of one of those problems that led me to think a little bit more about like, yeah, like what kinds of what problem is our mind trying to solve or capable of solving when we're when we're trying to tackle this problem of how do I get status? Because yeah, the world is causally opaque, and this is a pretty wicked like computational problem, like as a as a field, or I across all science, like the figuring out causes is is like one of the most difficult problems. Um and in psycho psychology, we do a pretty uh crappy job of it. Um and it is pretty crazy when you think about it. Like we have, you know, thousands of researchers working over decades trying to figure out this problem of like what is the cause of success?

Like that's the holy grail of the social sciences. Like, what causes the desirable outcomes that we're all seeking in life? And we've thrown so much time and money and manpower at this problem, and we still haven't figured it out. We're still confused as all hell. And yet, in order to survive and reproduce, our minds have to solve this problem. They have to figure out what is the causal process for getting status and resources. Because if our, you know, if if the mind didn't figure that out, well, we, you know, our minds are not going to be descended from the minds that failed to figure that out. We're going to be descended from the minds that figured out that problem. And so it suggests that our minds might actually be better at this, or our our intuitions

might actually be better than this than um legions of social scientists with uh millions of dollars uh to spend. Um yeah, I think that's definitely possible. Like I think that it's possible that our mind might have evolved to actually get at the causal effects of these things. That's one thing I'm trying to work out now. It's like the pretty early stages of this project, but trying to see like uh because in data science, right, there's this distinction between getting at causes, getting at causal effects, versus getting a really good predictive model of outcomes. And they're oftentimes, or most of the time, those models won't be the same. Like a good causal model that gives you like a good causal effect.

What's the effect of buying the shoe on my status? that to get that model, that causal effect estimate correct, your statistical model or your model of of the world will be pretty different than just a giant like predictive model of status. And because of in data science, at least the way statistics work, you know, a good predictive model can have totally biased causal effects. And they would be totally wrong if you were to take them at face value. But it can help you really well predict an outcome that you want to predict. I see. So for example, like let's say great white shark attacks are always on the fore in my mind. So just like if you're like, well, are they selling ice cream that day? And maybe that like correlates really well.

So it's really predictive of whether or not, because like, for example, that's like when the sharks are, when it's weather's warm. When weather's warm, people buy ice cream. So, like, probabilistically, predictively, it's really good to put in the model, but it has no effect causally. Like the person selling ice cream and buying ice cream is no causal relation, but it's just it's a good predictor. Because it could be, especially if you for some reason, you know, you you can't observe how many people there are on the beach that day. Exactly. So that's your information about that, then that's going to help you give get a good predictive model. But then yeah, like increasing or de artificially decreasing the number of ice cream sales,

closing the ice cream shop will change the Exactly. So yeah, we know that when people buy more when there's a really high number of ice cream cones sold, there's shark attacks. So we should prevent shark attacks by reducing, we should stop people buying ice cream. And that that's silly. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But uh like the thing that kind of what I'm trying to get out of this project is to look at like w in under what circumstances, under what like causal structures of the world will a predictive model be like good enough? Like because that's what like that's what we're really looking for, right? We're looking for like what might be good enough to work for an organism. It might not be the most optimal thing.

Like I agree, the most optimal thing would be like a good causal model or some magical system that figures out the causal structure of the world. And for some problems, that might be totally feasible to do, but for other problems, it might it might not be feasible to do that. And I kind of this I'm working on some simulations now, which hopefully I'll talk about at HBest this year, which is kind of showing that at least under some circumstances which might look similar to how at least I think of the causal structure of status, like a predictive model could be pretty decent, could get you pretty far. And if if we have like these mechanisms that are kind of just following predictive models, then you might actually expect that people will just pick up on these erroneous cues and

use them. Like what shoes do people wear? You know, what watch do they do they wear? That that that kind of stuff that isn't actually causally relevant. But it's just because you have this predictive model, it's gonna pick up on those things. And maybe that's like an an an outcome of the something weird about our our world or something that there are the all these like extra erroneous cues that actually like aren't part of the causal structure. Uh, but yeah, that's another kind of empirical question, I guess. Yeah, can we make it concrete just so like you know, just so sort of like uh there's an example, like let's say the this problem of learning. I'm a kid and I see somebody fishing, and they get a lot of fish, a lot

more than I've ever seen before, and everyone's really happy about that. Um, so that's like the event. And there's lots of things, lots of ways to carve that event up. And is the idea sort of what you're saying that um there might be privileged categories. So, like the lesson I could draw from that is like providing people with a lot of fish is a good thing, or providing people with a lot of resources is a good thing, or um things that are hard to catch that people like is a good thing. You know, that's one issue. Another issue is like, well, how do they catch a lot of fish? Like I could try to fish there another day when they're not there. I might look at all the things they're using, like the physical accoutrements, and then say

copy what they do. And maybe that's where like the sneakers and the watch kind of parasitize on because we're sort of like, I don't know why they caught a lot of fish. If I did, I wouldn't catch a lot of fish myself. So I don't know. So maybe I should just emulate everything. So I'm gonna wear the same, you know. So like I'm gonna wear the same shirt color, even though I don't know if that's relevant. So I'm gonna overimitate in a way. So is the idea that there's these sort of pre-privileged structures that are part of the predictive model. Is that sort of what you're saying? In the in the context of this sort of fishing example? Yeah. Like for the fishing example, right? Like I'm just gonna imagine there's like it's cold weather that day.

And I don't know if this is true about fish, but let's say when it's cold, like the fish are more active, they're like near the surface or something, they're hungrier, whatever. And when it's cold, people are more like want to wear a jacket or wear some fur or something, you know. And so you have this confound of of weather that's leading to this new cue of like, what is this fisher who's who's going to catch more fish than usual? Like, oh, he's wearing something different than typical, or well, you know, whatever, and he catches more fish. And so you have the confound there, the weather. So you don't if you if you don't have a pre-built system that like kind of removes or holds constant weather in figuring this stuff out um or controls for it basically

like you're you won't be able to you might mis uh apply the correlation between like the sweater wearing and the fish as a causal effect, thinking that you can wear a sweater and that's gonna let you get more fish. Right. Right. yeah. And then Hume's problem of induction, right? Like every time that you see, and this is like famously like uh philosophically in language learning, that any one instance, there's an infinite number of things you could sort of learn from that instance. Like the person was successful because it was a Tuesday, the person was successful because they were wearing a fur coat, the person was successful because it was a Tuesday and they were wearing a fur coat, like all kinds of crazy stuff.

And what you're saying is without some built-in ways of narrowing that down in this context of learning about status or maybe status inner inner inter um interpenetrated with uh like event cognition, you know. So sort of like what leads to catching fish, or what are the things that plausibly might do that? Without that, it's you're really out of luck. Yeah. And obviously, that's like a whole nother like research area people I'm sure are are looking into and and like but the status problem is that there's like hundreds of things that people are doing and even figuring out like you know which of those things actually change their status is is another like a level of that problem. Um and so yeah again this is like um really early in trying to even like define

like this problem in like little statistical models. Uh so I don't know how much more I can really say about it, but it it like it seems like there will be some problems that are intractable, like you can't solve them as an organism with your experiences. Um, especially if you can't do the interventions yourself because they're too costly or they're too inefficient, like you would have to do, you know, hundreds of these interventions yourself to really know the causal effect or whatever. And in that case, like the you know, the better than nothing system to evolve might be a just a prediction model that makes some mistakes, but it's right often enough in getting the relative, like it might be wrong for every actual causal effect,

but about figuring out the relative which things tend to be better than other things out of a hundred things, it could be useful for getting like a rough estimate of that And helping you rank order that in your head. I think considerable insight can be made here by dividing this into two different problems that are intimately related. So the first problem is just how do I get status? How do I intervene on the world to get status? And with that, uh uh prediction is not enough. I need causality. I need to know what causal processes are going to increase my status. But there is a second problem that I think is too often overlooked and is extremely important, and that is a coordination problem. And that is how do I reach agreement with my community about who is high status and who is

low status? And for that problem, I don't necessarily need to know the causal structure of the world to solve that problem. I just need to know how to predict who people are going to listen to and pay attention to, who people are going to side with and who they're not going to side with. And for that, correlation is enough. If people who wear fancy suits and use big words are high status, uh, it doesn't matter if the fancy suits or the big words cause the high status. As long as everyone thinks that everyone else thinks that those are high status traits, then it benefits me to go along with the group and assuming that these are high status things. And as soon as you have that coordination that we've all coordinated on, the people who use

big words, the people who wear fancy clothes, these people are high status. Well, all of a sudden, I can take advantage of that by imitating those high status words, by wearing the fancy clothes and tricking other people into thinking that I'm high status because they've already coordinated on the fact that that thing is high status. Right. Um and so it it may be it's it may be not merely that um uh the causal problem is is too hard to solve and therefore we just settle for the the you know the correlates. It may be that the correlates in some cases are enough because of this important aspect of coordination uh that is at the at the heart of it. And and when you have when coordination enters the picture, you can have um a

self-fulfilling process where people are high status for being high status, where they don't actually have any special ability to generate benefits. But because everyone thinks that everyone else thinks that they have those abilities, they have high status. And and in cases like that, the status bubble can burst uh once we all gain common knowledge that the person isn't all they're cracked up to be. And so um I I think it's another aspect where where coordination, common knowledge, is a really uh overlooked and important part of the of the process here with with status. Yeah. Yeah, I like that that extension. Like I have been thinking about it as a yeah, there are like these purely predictive

problems, or could be purely predictive problems, which is just like, oh, of my peer group without knowing anything about causal structure of status, can I predict who's gonna be sta higher status in the future? Like that's just a good predictive model to have. And so there, yeah, you but then uh also the causal structure stuff, which is like what can I do? How do I intervene on the world to get status? Um, but I hadn't that thought too much about this, like the self-fulfilling prophecy on top of the predictive models then becomes part of the causal structure of the world, actually. And I I like that, I like that take. Yeah. And then of course you're kind of like the coordination games that we play when we're

competing for status, you know, they change a lot and they fall apart. Uh when it becomes common knowledge that we are competing for status. Um yeah, cool. Yeah, I'll definitely have to think, yeah, what happens at like the I guess that's like the second order effects of having these prediction models working and trying to predict what other people think about this the hierarchy and stuff like that. I I'll I like that. Yeah. And homage to Catalonia, George L. Orwell, it's his story about joining uh the Franco uh fighting against the fascists in Spain in 1930s and he's with the anarchists and the um but he talks about when he moves to when he goes to Spain in the beginning um because it's sort of like a a class based

revolution uh he was wearing like a suit and a tie and a collar and he's on the train to Spain and everyone's like you can't wear that like you're gonna be like ostracized Um, and so like he he quickly picks up on like that the local ecology is like the more working class you look, the higher status you're granted. And then months later, when he's actually like fleeing Spain after the um he like fights in the war and sort of the the class-based revolution didn't pan out, it flips again. And now he actually escapes and isn't even questioned on the train out of Spain by sort of dressing up and looking kind of bougie bougie bougie. Um, and so like that was an example of it's exactly this thing of what

counts as given status completely flipped. And he was able to sort of from the local ecology pick that up and it flipped like within the course of a year or something like that. Yeah. And my example that I often think of of with this is at least from my memory of the COVID 19 like early days pandemic, which could be could be flawed, and this isn't like a value judgment or anything. But I just remember early on the the narrative was you know uh N95 masks were scarce, and so you know, we should be saving those for healthcare workers. And and so yeah, I think like implicitly maybe I was like, if I saw somebody wearing an N95 mask, maybe I might have thought they were a little selfish or or something like that, you

know. But then later on, as uh I don't know, supply chains or whatever caught up with those d those demands, you know, it became like people should be wearing an N95 mask. And they're totally flipped. Then if you're not wearing one, I'm like, what are you doing? Don't you know like those cloth masks? Maybe they don't do maybe they don't do like anything at all. I don't know, whatever I thought at the time. But but yeah, you can see those kinds of dynamics changing all the time. The the value of the same action changes not just in our lifetimes, but yeah, over weeks or months or yeah, minutes. Yeah, this is this is awesome. And I can imagine too, like it's a weird question. Again, it's instinct blindness.

We're sort of like obviously like high status, that's obvious. Like, why would we even need to study that? I think it's really to your credit, but I imagine it's difficult. Um, and I don't know what the reception of this work has been outside of Evan Evolutionary Approach, but like one of the things taking an evolutionary approach or cognitive science approach gives you is this outs kicking you out of your instinct blindness. But this really strikes me as like uh something that hasn't been studied outside of like a very narrow set of people. Status like I don't know. There's not a cognitive science of status, is there? Yeah, it's big in social psychology for sure. Um especially looking at more like surface level things of like, yeah, what what

personality characteristics are associated with status. And but it's not so much, at least in in my view, it's not so much of like how does status work at a deep like kind of computational level? How do we given that this navigating status hierarchies is probably like a fundamental problem that our ancestors had to solve? Like, how do you solve this? Because it's not like it's not like every other adaptive problem, it's not like the problem of finding mates. I don't think it's it's it's different. So you need different machinery to to solve that, even if it helps you find mates and stuff like that, right? And and to also just clarify, like, you're not thinking about this from the perspective of

status seeking the way we usually think about it in a folk way, which is I think like a lot of people are like, oh, there's somebody who's just trying to seek status. They're not actually like interested in like their job or like their mate, or they're not serious. They're really in it for the status. And I mean, I think that is a real evolved entry, but I think you're you're talking about just no below the surface, there's just evolve software for you look out and you're like, okay, I gotta eat, I gotta have like social support. How can I not be an asshole? What do people like? And what can I do so that I have support and that people don't think I'm an asshole? So I think like a lot of bad things get thrown under the rubric of like status seeking, but

I imagine a lot of good things, like as just kids learn up of like when you're mean, other pu kids don't want to play with you. Like that's part of figuring out like what to invest in for status. And I don't think it often gets framed that way. Is that consistent with how you're thinking about it? Like that yeah, that caveat that it's not the folk category status seeking. Yeah. If in fact I think I've in my head, at least like implicitly, maybe not explicitly, like pretty much framed it as just like you're just trying not to lose status. You're not trying to go down. Like many people might not really care that much about the going up and up and up and up, like becoming like the you know, top of the hierarchy or whatever.

But I would wager that like nobody is like, yeah, like I want to go down in status, like nobody. And so I think that's really what it's more about. It's about like avoiding the problems of that come with yeah, losing social support, uh like ostracism and yeah, defensive and the conflict, and about yeah, mediating these kind of conflicts. So, I mean, that's one of the hypotheses from the animal literature about like what is what are hierarchies before, you know, what if hierarchies have a function, what is it? And it's to maybe stabilize like intergroup conflict over resources. And so if you're pushing, you know, I don't think many people are just gonna keep pushing and pushing like for uh I think this probably well calibrated to kind of figure out like

what seems reasonable and just don't wanna be losing status 'cause that's where, you know, you'll lose you'll get a lot of costs, I guess. Yeah. No, that's a great point. I think um the folk concept of status, I think, ties much more to the offensive version of status or the being superior to others rather than uh the avoidance of being inferior. And I think that's why we often see status seekers as assholes, is because it's much more of a threat to me if you're trying to be better than me, if you're trying to outdo me. Because if you're trying to outdo me, then my status is going to fall uh as a result of your pursuit. But if you're just trying to avoid looking worse than me, You're just trying to avoid

getting ostracized or ganged up on. That's much less of a threat to me. And it's, you know, more understandable and sympathetic. And so the problem is that our folk concept of status is mainly framed in terms of superiority. And that's why we often lose status for overtly seeking status, is because people interpret it as a threat to them and they interpret it as uh as as a kind of selfishness, because if I'm trying to be better than you or to others, then that benefits me and it hurts others, and the benefit to me is smaller than the cost to others, and so that gets framed as a kind of selfishness. Um and that uh unfortunately, um because you can lose status for overtly seeking status, that creates a kind of you know volatility where if we all gain common knowledge

that that we're all just trying to be better than each other, then we all look worse than each other. Uh, and we have to do something else to gain status. Or at least I've I've written a lot about that, and I think that might underlie a lot of the the arbitrariness and volatility of our of our status symbols. And I can get you know status for for these weird random things like powdered wigs or you know uh wearing a certain type of clothing, you know, baggy clothing versus you know tight-fitting clothing. Um What's weird about powdered wigs, David? Well, it's interesting. I was reading about this. It is I find powdered wigs so funny. It's it's I mean, I think the fact that we find them funny is like it's it's the remnants

of that status game collapsing. I think status games collapse once we realize that they're just funny, that they're just ridiculous. Um, you know, as historians have written about this with dueling. Like dueling used to be taken very seriously, but now we just find it funny. Like it's just kind of hilarious. The Looney Tunes like engage in dueling. It's just a it's just a macho pissing contest that's like this stupid thing. But like at the time, people took it very seriously. And if you were to laugh at it, that would be uh a huge, you know, hugely taboo. Um, and so I think these status games collapse when we all just realize that they're ridiculous pissing contests. And probably many of our current status games are likely to collapse at some point in the

future when we realize that they're ridiculous pissing contests. Um, and uh predicting which status games are likely to be stable and persistent to the future versus which ones are likely to collapse, I think that is also part of the adaptive problem of inspiration. It's not merely um, you know, what kinds of status um uh are likely to pay off or or are worth investing in. It's also like, is this status game going to be stable into the future or is it gonna turn into a laughing stock next year or in five years, right? It's it's gonna suck if I try to invest in being good at dueling, if dueling is just gonna be funny and stupid uh next year, right? Um, and so I think another part of inspiration is is the status game around something

that isn't uh framed as status? Like is it is it the pursuit of something higher and noble or altruistic? Uh and that is a cue that it's gonna be stable into the future. And so I think what inspires us is a person who um invests a lot of time and energy into a status game without caring about status, and then gets showered with status. Right. That's really inspiring. Because it suggests that yeah. Yeah, or shows us like how to do it. Or like it's like you can do it too. Or like you see a avenue of like, you know, a great teacher, a book inspired me. And your claim is the readout. That's the readout of I see a path towards doing this thing that has these positive attributes. Right. Exactly. Um so yeah, no, that's I've I've been just thinking about this this stuff a lot

lately. Um and I I think inspiration is a really interesting topic that's underappreciated evolutionary science. Yeah, especially if it like as a way of separating it from maybe admiration and envy and and respect, even though it's maybe a hierarchy navigating emotion, like yeah, the the outputs might not involve emulating people. They're just like a motivation to do a particular thing. Or yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A teacher inspired me, a book inspired me. I like that. Like that explains that that it's all I I I like this what you're both saying is and again, it's very counter instinct blindness where it's it's it's the deep structure of is this a way to make a living in the world? Sort of, you know, and I think like people recognize that at some level.

Like you kind of have to be like, I want to do something that excites me, that inspires me. And I think what people mean by that is they detect a possibility of doing well and being able to do well such that there will be rewards greater than the default expected rewards, right? Like it's sort of this thing of like, oh, I discovered something that I might be better at than m most people or that I thought, and then I might get more out of than most people or that I thought. If you really reduce it down. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. And I think another cue to you know this status game being worth investing in, um, and being stable over the long run is has it been stable in centuries past? Have my ancestors been playing this status game for generations?

If so, that's a really good one to invest in. Because you know, if it's lasted for generations, then it's not going to become a laughing stock next year. Right. Uh and so that should be inspiring. If if I'm doing the same thing that, you know, my ancestors have done for generation after generation, you know, um uh it still gets to me. I was watching Moana with my daughter, and there's this scene where sh where uh Moana discovers that her ancestors were explorers for generations, and you know, the whole movie they were telling her that she shouldn't go out and explore because it's too dangerous, and then she realized that the things that she really wants to do, like her ancestors have been doing it for generations.

It was really beautiful, like it moves me when I when I see that. Um and um so I I think another part of it, you know, is is doing something that has been done um for for many generations into the past. Um anyway, I'm I'm just uh going off on on my thinking on this topic but I'm curious. I like that especially as like a like a storytelling, cultural storytelling as a kind of way of you know, teaching or helping our status navigation systems learn what are good status games that are worth coordinating around. Because I mean and there might even be, yeah, some cultural evolution to that too, where you're like, yeah, like we don't want our next generations coordinating over stupid status games that lead to conflict or harm our our culture or our group.

And so kind of like I don't know, inoculating them or yeah, trying to get that implanted in them early on, kind of like with storytelling about what your ancestors have done could be like one of those kind of cultural technologies to help prevent some of these like pointless status games and try to push them towards ones that like s seem to have been beneficial generation after generation kind of thing. Yeah. I mean no no one gets inspired about wearing baggy pants because those are going to go out of style uh in a few years anyway. But people might get inspired about like wearing the religious garb of their ancestors that the their ancestors have been wearing for for generations. I mean there is on the baggy pants thing right like this is going to be embarrassing to to

admit, but like I think you know, as somebody I grew up wearing like really tight skinny jeans, right? Yeah. And I used to put on like baggy pants or whatever, like I got bought a pair of pants from somebody by somebody else or whatever. And I'd be like, the aesthetics of these are like I hated them. They were they were all wrong and stuff. And since that trend has changed, like the aesthetic sensibility that I have has changed. And I I like the baggy silhouette. Now something that I would have felt totally uncomfortable in before. So yeah, like I even though even knowing that it will change, I was still inspired by that. You could view that as inspired by that new aesthetic to enjoy it. And embarrassingly, like I've got some wide pants on.

Like you know. Yeah. I mean, it's all it's kind of embarrassing to like look at the silly things that people used to wear in in previous genera. I know sometimes like when I look at pictures of people wearing bell bottoms in the 70s, like they're so ridiculous. Like I can't believe people thought that was cool. And and yet people did. I'm sure at the time, like it felt like really cool, but now it's not cool. Um yeah. I our our sense of aesthetics is so interestingly blended with with status and hard to tease apart from status. Yeah, I feel like you all talked about this maybe on like another episode. Yeah, and I I feel like if I'm remembering your kind of intuition of the explanation, right?

I think I think I liked it. It's like then in a sense, like keeping up with these like changing aesthetics is oh yeah it was David it was David's wife saying that you've lost it is yeah it yeah it is it is kind of like there's a skill like it is maybe showing like that you're I don't know still trying to impress somebody or you're trying to be relevant. I'm not saying this is necessarily the thing that you should be striving for, but it is communicating maybe something if you're still trying to keep up with some trends even if they are things that will collapse soon. That you're sa socially savvy enough to be aware of the trends. Because they're often pretty subtle and hard to you know notice um and pick up on.

And if you can pick up on those trends, then you're going to be pretty socially competent. And picking up on other subtle cues and avoiding embarrassing yourself, like that's that's a good skill to have. I think it's it's a kind of social coordination ability. Um that's another dimension of status. Yeah. And I think a lot of stuff uh is explained by understanding this issue that it's about the audience and that there may not be a uniform audience. So like kids are signaling and negotiating status with themselves at some level. So, you know, like the like the old man, like these kids in their baggy pants, you know, it's like and the kids don't care. The kids are doing stuff to piss off the older adults, or they or the older adults just

like it's not part of their status scheme. Um, and so I I think the idea that this is all about status is with respect to an audience, and that audience may or may not be as many people as possible, right? Um, and I this also comes back to this definition because the definition is like sort of how do others listen to you or defer to you? And there's two paths to do that. One is everybody, but another one is you really commit to like a narrow subset. Right. So you can imagine sort of like I'm generally like well respected, like take it back to Pat and like Kanambo, like in the village, and everybody listens to me. Or maybe like, you know, I'm just really like I'm a very partisan person and like the the this particular group, like half of them hate me, but the other half really

like me. Those are two different ways of having status. One averages out to zero, but but still might be pursued, you know. And I think like, have you thought about that too? Like how status um it's not it's not maybe universal uh in the sense of who the audience is for either. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I I I think this is kind of also in line with with what you're saying, but yeah, like as far as you know, we're talking about like value to some number of other people and ultimately those other people, the people who you're trying to be valuable to, or to have them have a high welfare trade-off ratio so that they'll back you in a conflict, like that group, I think only needs to be as big as or the right people

to be stronger than the opposing coalition. And in some cases, probably in a lot of cases, for like at least ancestral contexts of human human groups, like you probably just want the most people. But especially in I don't know, our world, if there's one group of people that has a lot of guns, and the other group people, and the rest of people don't really have a lot of guns, you can pretty easily have more resource holding potential by just trying to get those people who have a lot of guns to really like you and want to defend you, you know, even if there are way more people in the other group. Right. So I think there probably is some of this, like you can or like more simply, right? If there's like a few warriors and a bunch of people who are not warriors, they

don't fight, then like mono monopolizing the warrior group can get you status, even if as a whole, the rest of the group doesn't value any value you and wouldn't come to your aid in a conflict, as long as you at the group, the inter, like, yeah, your little coalitional level, you have more power, then I think that can be a stable way of of getting status by you know dominating another group. But really the way you're getting these group of people to come to your aid is probably through benefit generation. For them, for for the for the stronger coalition. Yeah. And that's why I think like defining groups, which is something that like obviously, you know, you're working on for me, like I got to kind of that point and I was like, I don't

know what a group is. So I don't know how to define like yeah, these things. And I think that's we need a definition of how do we carve up these different groups, how do we know like who is our coalition versus the other coalitions. Yeah. And and yeah, I think it's an inference within that software. Like I don't yeah, I don't think it's like a thing out in the world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let me add another layer of complication to this already hugely complicated mess, where you know it's hard enough to figure out what the status landscape is now. And that's an important part of the adaptive problem. But another hugely important part of the adaptive problem is forecasting what the status landscape is likely going to be in the future.

So it may be that the people with the guns have all the status, or at least they they have all the power now because they have guns and we don't. But um, if I can forecast that that situation is actually precarious, because those people with guns are actually resented by everyone in the community, And they're viewed as predatory and selfish. And there's an uprising of people. And though they're small now, they seem to have morality on their side. And morality is itself a kind of focal point for coordination. And so it might be better off for me teaming up with the band of rebels who right now are weaker and right now have lower status. But because they have the moral high ground, I can forecast that the status landscape is

going to change if I team up with these people who have the moral high ground. And so that adds another aspect of this of choosing the status game that is that has more moral gravity, um, because that is a good sign that that status game is going to grow and be more stable into the future than ones that um are more fragile, are more um, you know, selfish seeming, are more likely to collapse, um, etcetera. Of course, so you now get now you gotta throw morality into the whole picture, which is its old you know whole nother complicated mess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's a lot of things. What sucks is that it's like the status is just connected to literally every issue in the evolutionary social sciences.

It reminds me again, this is the to be quote of like everything, the the canonical example of evolutionary psychology is high school social dynamics, which is you know, it's also this thing of like the the trope of like the high schooler who peaks during high school, you know, where you're sort of like, Well, what what genre of kid am I gonna be? Am I gonna be like a a nerd, you know, a theater kid, a music kid, a jock, or you know, popular, or and you know, you can imagine at some level there's machinery for sort of being like, you know, what are my proclivities? But then, like, what's future-proofing this? And you know, that the the kind of trope of, you know, oh man, high school was like the

best thing. And then, you know, the person whose life is sort of terrible and low status after high school. It's sort of we we sort of laugh about that, but I think it's the readout of the system of like, oh, they kind of either were a victim or judged incorrectly about how future-proof the status game was. You know, they thought like, you know, being the captain of the football team and being kind of a bully and like, you know, dating the the pretty girl was the way to get status, and that worked. But then, like, the nerd who was didn't have a lot of status and maybe got picked on in high school was like, Well, I'm really smart and like I'm gonna be fine once high school's over, you know, and like has a really good job and has a good life, but then like has high

status, quote unquote, according to other metrics. Um, you know, I think seeing that as as a trope, I think is a readout of this sort of like issue you're talking about, David, which is sort of like you can be wrong about which status scheme you sort of uh tie your fortunes to. Yeah. I I I think this this ties in a lot to moral progress as well. Cause a lot of a lot of moral discourse is about, you know, you know, in the next generation, our forebears are going to look back at us and and see that we were barbaric for, say, eating factory farmed meat or something like that. And a big part of you know the moral discourse game is finding issues that our forebears are going to look back at us and condemn.

And if we can find that now, then that's that's a forecast of the future status landscape. And that is a good investment to invest if invest in now. So if I see that, you know, this eating factory farm meat business, this isn't looking good. This this status game is gonna is gonna collapse pretty soon, and and the vegans are gonna end up looking morally superior to everyone else. So I better get in on this veganism business now. Um and I'm making kind of a moral status game forecast for the future. Um and I think you know that might be part of this as well. Um but before we get too wishy-washy into abstract theoretical stuff, I want to anchor us into empirical stuff, which you've done a lot of really cool empirical stuff, Patrick.

Um so um you've done work on how good people are at figuring out what is going to get them status and what isn't. So could you talk about your work on on that question and how how good are people at figuring this stuff out? Yeah, I was just gonna say this sounds like a good segue into like the personality stuff. Now we're talking about yeah, like all these differences and how well people are predicting future status games versus yeah, predicting all these things about status, right? Yeah, that's basically like so after doing or not after, but while doing the status kind of stuff, learning, trying to learn more about like how do these mechanisms work at like a species typical level, yeah. I kind of got sucked into like thinking about the individual differences in these things,

because there's so many spaces for these individual differences to creep in. Like, you know, we've hinted at a whole bunch of different little systems in the mind that all design are designed to like pick up on certain inputs and produce certain outputs or estimate different things. And any like differences there in any of those systems that creep in for whatever reason, either due to differences in developmental calibration or genetic noise or you know facultative calibration, whatever, like um they can produce differences in behavior. Like that's kind of the whole thing that we're talking about. Is like, are you going to pursue becoming a football player or an academic? Like somewhere your mind uh estimated one to be a better strategy than the

other, maybe. And maybe that was incorrect or or something, but it led to differences in behavior, a choice, that then will lead to other aspects of your everyday behaviors changing too, and the way you think and feel will be changing too over time. And so, really, like I think these kinds of things, obviously not just hierarchy navigation mechanisms, all the psychological mechanisms in our head and individual differences therein, like are the true personality generators, so to speak. Like these are the things that produce differences in behavior that over time accumulate into these, you know, tendencies or dispositions, uh, average differences in thoughts, feelings, and behavior, which is like what personality is,

according to personality psychologists. And yeah, so I started to just think about like how does differences in our ability to estimate the status impacts of different things, like how might that play into personality? And I this this is kind of like a first pass of trying to figure out like, can I measure these things? Can I measure differences in this like accuracy of the system? What would that look like? And then can I tie those parameters to broader traits like motivations um and hexaco traits is kind of where I was at there. And I I didn't make really big predictions beforehand, uh in part just because I view this work kind of as ex exploratory. Like I think the the theory is there in the thinking that there are psychological

mechanisms that pay attention to these inputs and these outputs and individual differences and how people map these inputs to outputs will lead to behavioral differences. And sometimes those behavioral differences might be obvious, but I think there's going to be a lot of like non-intuitive ways in which our personality terminology, like the words that we use to describe people, which is what like our personality scales are ultimately tapping into, they're gonna map onto those things in non obvious ways. Uh so that's kind of why I view this as exploratory, even though I think it's fundamentally rooted in in theory. Um and yeah, basically, like what we found is people who are better at or at least

have a closer assessment of the impact, status impacts to what other people say tend to be themselves like more motivated to get status. They're more status driven. And of course you can imagine different like causal structures at play here. Like it could be somewhere in your head there's a a motivational there, there's a motivation somehow representing how much you pay attention to status cr status information. And because you pay attention to more status information, that leads to more accurate estimates. And then that's why they're correlated. Or it could be maybe there's some other reasons why some people's status impact assessment systems or whatever are more accurate. And then as you're going through life, you know, you're getting feedback.

Like if you have a really accurate one, you're probably going to be rewarded more often with status. And so it kind of feeds this motivation for status, versus if you're inaccurate a lot of times, maybe you don't get that feedback. And so you you actually learn that maybe status seeking is not a good strategy for me. So you kind of don't have that motivation as strong. So and it could be both or you know, whatever. But I think there's multiple causal pathways that could lead to that. Um yeah. And then I was just gonna ask a clarifying question. How did you measure uh accuracy of assessment? Yeah. So basically we have like these lists of acts, characteristics, and events, like 240, whatever things that you could do or somebody else could do.

And you know, in this in this research, we're basically asking like a large group of people if somebody did this thing, would this increase or decrease their status in your eyes? Or sometimes it's in the eyes of others in your community, whatever the exact prompt is. So we use that or I use that as like the kind of criterion. So that's like as close to the ground truth as I think I'm going to get. And there's all kinds of issues with that, of course. Uh, but it's a way of estimating kind of the ground truth. What's the average status impact across different groups, let's say. And then I ask another group of people who are like the main subjects. They go in and I give them the same things. And I say, like, if this were if you did this thing or it happened to you, like what do you

think would happen to your status? And then you can basically, like, in a sense, get a sense of like what is the difference between the criteria and each person's estimate. And you can get a couple of different parameters. Like, one is do they tend to overestimate how beneficial things are? Do they tend to underestimate how beneficial things are? That's one parameter. Kind of like, yeah, a continuum. And then the another parameter is like, do they have the rank ordering right? Like how well correlated is their estimate of the world with the, you know, the objective criterion. And so with those two, you can kind of treat them as different parameters that index like the accuracy of the system. Or that's how I've been treating these parameters anyway.

So you could be like have a really good rank ordering of things, a good correlation between what you think and what most people think, but you just tend to think that things tend to be better than average, or you could tend to think that they're worse. Or you could have just like a you know, almost like messed up rank ordering of what things are better. You think this is like, you know, being good at basketball is better than being good at uh something else. I have no examples, but yeah, it could be totally flipped or whatever. And so basically I find that people who are have a better like rank ordering, a more true rank ordering or a rank ordering that corresponds more to other like the average rank

ordering of people tend to have higher motivations for status. And they also tend to think that things are better for status than they are. So they overestimate the status benefits of of acts. But it's still but the relative rank ordering about like which things are better than other things, they're still good at. So it's like in a way, it's like they're not inaccurate. They just kind of think like everything just seems better to them, you know? Hmm. Interesting. And how are you how you're measuring status motivations? That one's just like the standard kind of I used a couple different self-report scales. Like there's uh Kenrick has one in the fundamental uh motives, and then there's another one, I forget the the author, but they're like the standard kind of like

self-report, personality type uh motivation questions. Interesting. Because if if I recall, it seems uh I think that status motivation, depending on how you measure it, is correlated with like dark triad traits like narcissism, manipulativeness, um, psychopathy. Um, is that correct? It probably depends on on how you measure it. I don't remember off the top of my head what the correl because I do have like honesty humility in the in this study. I don't remember exactly what the correlation was. But it yeah. It probably depends on exactly the wording of like what goes into those status motivation questionnaires. Is it like I want to be better than other people, I want to be superior, I like to be in

charge. Or is it like I want others to value me and like you know, uh that kind of stuff. So because because yeah, like I do have the honesty humility scale, and that was another finding from that basically that study is that people who are low on honest humility, meaning like people who probably it that would correlate with the dark triad. If you're low on honesty humility, you'd be higher on dark triad traits because they're like, you know, super highly correlated. Um, they actually tended to be like less accurate in the rank ordering of things. So they tended to think that things mattered more for status than they actually did, but they were less accurate about what those things were exactly.

So you know, the story that I can kind of think about in my head or my way of interpret interpreting this is like, you know, your motive, you you think things are better for status than they are, and the things that you think are better for status are are actually not better than some other things. So maybe things like trying to be assertive or uh trying to be trying to always get your way or show that you're better than other people, like you might think that those are good, but they're most people think that they're not good. And so you do behaviors that other people interpret as being like Machiavellian or you know not humble, you know, and that filters into your your story of what your personality is.

Basically. So it suggests that assholes might be just bad at status seeking. They might not realize that being an asshole is low status. Yeah, I think some I think that might be some of what of what's going on here and we have an another study not looking at status things, but I think assholes, people, people that either other people think of assholes and then might think of themselves as assholes because other people think of them as assholes, like they might just be less accurate at estimating these important social things uh that go factor into these decisions and behaviors and things people say, and that influences that how people how much people think they're an asshole, you know? Uh to to defend assholes, which I don't want to do, but just from a purely scientific

perspective, it's sort of, I think there could be an argument that it's sort of similar to like being a criminal, which is sort of if you ask people like, would it be good to like rob somebody? Everyone would be like, That's terrible. Don't do it. But the the problem is you get the benefit from doing it to one person, you know. So like it might be a thing of uh somebody is like I think a thing is very common is women who sort of seem vulnerable, and like some asshole dude is like really manipulative or controlling of her. Most people would say that that's a bad thing, but the benefits that guy's getting are sort of flowing through her, and is he's sort of protecting himself from like the the rest of the social world.

So, in other words, like he's he's in he's a strategy getting a benefit from one particular person, even though most people would argue what he's doing is wrong. And that's where like the crime metaphor comes in, where it's sort of like the costs aren't always what everybody thinks. It might just be you're this this asshole is still getting a benefit because the way that they can exploit a small subset of the population. Or like in their group like their group of people, their peers, like the status game they're playing is actually that like you have maybe it is like you need to control, you know, your spouse or whatever, or it is that you need to control it. You're just you're uh you're things to be cool, you know, that's it.

You're in some sort of um uh um you know, I don't know, what what are these uh pickup artists, you know, or like your that's your that's your status community, right? And so you're just that's what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where I think my like the way I've empirically tried to do this anyway, it breaks down because it really I think we need to be at the level of like individual groups. Right. And the people in those groups and define the status criteria within those groups because a lot of what my work might be capturing is just deviations from like the average, whatever the average group is. So it's kind of not the exact comparison I want to be making, you know, but just trying to

delineate like how how do what do I model this? Because that's kind of where I'm trying to see my work or where I see my work heading is with individual differences, trying to like model the actual parameters within these psychological mechanisms. and you like getting an estimate, for example, of like uh how well is your situation detector for devaluation functioning? And then, you know, what is your set point for devaluation? What's your threshold for how much you'll tolerate be being devaluated? And then, like, what behaviors do you view as being having high utility for solving the problem of being devaluated? Like all of that within the shame s shame system, those could be different parameters.

And I want to be able to measure those parameters somehow and then link them to the these traditional lexical concepts in personality to try and give us an explanatory account of what these lexical descriptive uh dimensions are, like the big five and hexaco. So, so to get so personality, because we're we're starting in on this, but I want to just make sure it's clear for everybody. So, one idea is that in a world where there are no differences between people, there's sort of just state-dependent paths where you just happen to be exposed to comic books, and David gets exposed to jokes and I get exposed to bike riding and we um we just start down the path of maybe this is a status game we'd like to pursue and the mystery of

personality is why are there stable differences or correlated differences among individuals? And I guess the idea is that at some level that's driven by a commitment to a particular strategy and an assessment of the cost of switching? So, for example, if you're down the path of comic books or bicycles or telling jokes, every moment you spend investing in that, there's more of a switch cost and an opportunity cost to switch to the next thing all SQL. So even on a world where there's no differences or proclivities, just by simply being exposed to like one kind of status game versus another, you might get just by virtue of this evolved design of calculating what are the switch costs, you might start to get stable

differences. But then in addition to that, and what I just said is oversimplified, you get this extra thing of there's an assessment of is this body envelope good at riding bikes versus telling jokes versus comic books? I mean, it's a dumb example, but you get the idea. And then that kind of somehow you sort of feel out how am I doing if I invest five units of effort in each three of these things, how many, how many cues of success or status do I get? And maybe that also affects things. So is that the way you're thinking about it? Is that really what personality is or the stable differences between people? And we haven't talked about like the personality types yet, because we can talk about that

in a second. But is this the idea that there's sort of an underlying sort of contingency rules in human beings and that leads them to invest in certain activities or have certain goals. And that is in a weird way that's part of personality. Is that the claim? Yeah, I think that's part of the part of the claim anyway. But really like I think mm the claim that I'm making, and I I think the like people that I've worked with on this also would agree with this is any any psychological system that we're talking about, whether it's shame or you know the status impact estimation system or your plant learning systems, um all of these things, you know, if we think about them like bits of code, they have more or less maybe some separable pieces.

So like I like I've been thinking a lot about emotions for this because I like how there's these different pieces. And in particular, I like this like cybernetic view, which is slightly different from like the typical view, but or the way we frame things typically in the evolutionary psychological sciences. But I don't think it's at odds. I think it's just like maybe a helpful analogy for this example. So like imagine just a thermostat, right? So a thermostat in a house, it has a few different components to it that allows it to do its job. Like one of those components is a uh like basically a temperature detector, like a thermometer or whatever. And that allows it to detect the ambient temperature.

And then there's also a set point, which is like the internal setting of like what the temperature should be set by the user or whatever. And basically the job of this comparator is to try using the ambient temperature index to determine is that above or below it, right? And then depending on whether it's above or below it, it will turn on uh like the air conditioning. It will do some kind of output or they call it a control element. And so if the temperature is higher than it ought to be, higher than the set point, then you turn on the control element and it should blow the cold air, not the hot air. But if it's lower, it should blow the hot air, right? So that's the way, like the species typical thermometer, that's the way it works.

But I think in the in the biological world, probably even in like the like machine-made world, there are problems that can creep into any point of those systems. Your ambient temperature detectant thing could be inaccurate. It could think it's two degrees hotter than it is always, or it could just be like kind of like randomly, unreliably wrong. And that, whatever that is, it's going to feed to the comparator. And the comparator could also be different from thermostat to thermostat. Some might have the desired temperature 78, some is 76, so on. And so both of those things, if they're different, which they could, you know, be different in different combinations across different thermostats or across different people, they're

going to lead to different behaviors in the thermostat, whereby like some thermostats you're going to be like, why is that thermostat going on all the time? Or why does it never go on at the times we need it to? Um, and you might be make some judgments or describe that thermostat in different ways, or just be like, I don't know, my house is too hot, or my house is too cold, or it's never the right temperature, or whatever. And I think that those folk judgments of like my thermostat isn't working correctly, or it's like always too hot or too cold. It those that's kind of like personality, the concepts of personality that we have. And then really, like I think if the if personality was a thing, like a real thing,

at the functional level, it would be the differences in those set in those components of the system. And so I think for things like emotions, for example, using that thermostat example, like you have situation detectors that are looking for and integrating cues of adaptive problems. Like what's the probability that I'm being devalued right now? That feeds to some comparator, like a set point of like what is an acceptable amount of devaluation. Like maybe for most people that's zero, but there could be some fluctuation in there due to genetic noise or who knows what, you know. And then that's gonna turn on the control elements that do stuff to fix the devaluation, right? And then just to complicate that that one component a little bit more is like obviously we

have more than just like turn on the hot air, turn on the cold air. You know, there's maybe there's like run away, there's lie, cover things up, fight people, like draw attention to yourself. Don't draw attention to yourself. This menu of control elements that themselves have some utility assigned to them, maybe that you've learned throughout development or have some strong priors for, or whatever. Um, and individual differences in those settings, in tandem with the individual differences in the set points and the uh the situation detecting mechanisms, like they're going to lead to differences in behavior. It might be strategic, but it could just be like there's a ton of differences out there in

the world. It's maybe random. Maybe they don't even really go together that much. And it's helpful for me as somebody interacting with a bunch of other thermostats or whatever to know what these differences tend to look like and just be able to describe them to other people and make predictions about like which thermostat I want in my house or you know which person I'd want to cooperate with, or you know, who's going to be good at this or not that. And I think that's what the difference detecting you know mechanisms are trying to do is label label things about people, recognize things about people conspecifics that is good to know for decisions about who to cooperate with, who to mate with, et

cetera. And because like obviously that was an oversimplified example of like how our psychological mechanisms would work using the thermostat example. But like already, that's a lot to try and track for I I would think for a brain. So like if you just have some summary variable that's like this thermostat is often wrong in this way, that could be enough to let you f make these decisions without having to know exactly like where in that system things are wrong. So so what is a uh a niche? What is niche diversity and how do niches contribute to personality variation? Yeah. Um well defining a niche is I think harder than I I gave it credit for. And this isn't my work, I I would say. Like this is, you know, uh Aaron Lukachewski, Mike Gervin, and and and

Chris von Ruden push who pushed this stuff forward. I just came along as a grad student and was like, look, I found this data, like, let's do it again. Uh and I do think that this work needs to be pushed on still quite a bit, but I guess the definition of a niche is like some segment of the social world that that that you're living in, that you make your living in. And it's the way in which you make your living within the within the social world. So like some birds they look for seeds on the ground, some dig for worms, some burrow into trees. Like those are different niches. They have different affordances and different things that would be useful for doing well in that niche versus not doing well.

They basically evoke different kinds of behaviors depending on what niche you're in. And because of that, they're going to lead to different traits being prominent in some niches versus others. So if you know, if you're in a world, let's say you're a bouncer at a club, like what are some traits that you think would be helpful for you to do your job to make money there? Yeah. It'd be like, I don't know, maybe being a little disagreeable, being strong and scary. Yeah. You know, being good with people, maybe, or versus a banker, like maybe you just have to be really detail oriented or not get bored very easily or something like that, you know? And so they're of course different people select into these things too, but then you're

still rewarded differently in these different niches for different behaviors. Right. And so the the argument is that this, depending on the niches people go into, especially if people were to sort randomly into niches, then once you go into a niche, you get pulled in these different directions. So like before I became an academic, maybe I didn't think all that deeply or spend all that much time reading, you know, of two kind of academic papers. But now then once I went into that niche, then I spent more time doing that. So it changed my behaviors, it changed my thoughts, how I feel about doing these things. And so that kind of pulls people's traits in different directions. So at like a simple kind of level, descriptive level, like that's what we would expect to

happen if people respond to the incentives of niches, which I think is kind of uncontroversial that people respond to incentives. And the the cool insight of of that work uh is that just with that simple process happening across different populations, if populations have more niches that are more unique, more different from one another, then you're gonna get more types of people, basically is is the take the takeaway that you're gonna get more personality dimensions, more different combinations of traits that go together in more different ways. And you know, there's simulations backing that up by Paul Smaldino, um, and then a couple empirical studies like at the country level, kind of giving some support for uh

correlations that you would expect to find if these processes were actually operating on human personality. And so the takeaway from this is that like these dominant personality models, like the big five hexco, these kind of low-dimensional models of personality, like they're not necessarily going to be human nature. Like they're not the human personality structure. They're an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the way the human psychology were, where even if it was so simple, all it does is respond to incentives. That interacting with environments, different environments will produce different combinations of traits, which then look like more or less personality dimensions, depending on how many different niches there are.

And so it's kind of pushing back against like the dominant view in psychology, which has become the dominant view since like the 80s, that the big five is what is what it is. Like that is human personality, and it's the same more or less everywhere. and that somehow it's in us. Like Costa McCray, like the biggest proponents of the five-factor model of personality. Like, I don't think it's uncharitable to say that they literally think there are like basic biological dimensions that correspond to extroversion and neuroticism and conscientiousness and openness and agreeableness. Um, whereas this view says, no, there's nothing resembling the big five in our biology. There's a whole bunch of little machines doing different tasks to solve different adaptive

problems. And we should figure out what those things are. But but they might produce patterns of behavior that look like the big five, and we need to figure out maybe why. Why did that why does that get produced? You know, part of the story might be this niche thing. Uh, but that's interesting. might be another story. Like I should point out, like uh Matt Zefferman, he has been doing some simulations related to this niche, uh kind of contradicting this uh niche diversity viewpoint, highly highlighting that some of what we find, or maybe even entirely what we find, could itself be a a measurement artifact of the of the problem with exporting, you know, these personality inventories developed for a particular population, like

in you know, US, European populations, to other places, you you're artificially like deflating the amount of uh personality variation that you see in these places. So that's totally uh I I looking at a simulation is like I think it's a convincing, convincing argument. And it's something we need to do a lot more work to tease apart. But I think the strength of the the niche diversity hypothesis and I mean Masswork is like personality structure probably doesn't look exactly the same everywhere. And there's no reason to expect that it should, because different minds will interact differently, or even a universal the universal human mind interacting with different environmental contexts and cultural contexts will produce different patterns of

covariation, which is what defines personality structure currently in personality science. Like this is a whole different discussion. Like that probably shouldn't be how we define personality structure, maybe. If we're looking for some like something more like deep part of human nature, we shouldn't be relying on like how do things tend to covary and how do we describe those covariations with our adjectives out there in the world. Maybe we should be thinking more about like what is the the design of the human mind? What parameters are in there? What parameters might have correlations among them or have causal dependencies on one another that creates these different patterns of covariation that we see out there

at the level of observable behavior? Very cool stuff. Yeah, I mean it suggests to me that we're too quick to reify personality dis uh differences that um exist in our particular cultural context but need not exist in the same way that if we were to go into a a jungle and try to map the the variation in turn and in subsistence strategies of all the different animals in that jungle, and maybe we have a nocturnal diurnal dimension or like specializes in eating fruit versus leaves versus other versus bugs dimension. And we say this these are the only dimensions by which animals vary. Well, uh, if we go into the Arctic or into a desert, uh, our map of the variation is gonna be completely different.

Right. It's not that these are uh inherent differences that all animals need to have, it depends on that particular ecology and what types of affordances are available to the different animals there. And I think the same is true of our cultural ecology, that there are different opportunities for different types of people. And that leads to covariance. So, like in an environment where I can make a lot of money as a bouncer, you know, uh physical strength and toughness and uh willingness to use force, like those things are going to intercorrelate on a questionnaire. Uh, but if I'm in a place where uh uh a bouncer does not exist as an occupation, um or w you know, in a place where if I'm strong, maybe that's going to enable me to be a

better hunter. And there's a norm that hunters have to share uh their meat, well then in that environment, maybe strength will correlate with generosity. Right. Uh and that's you know, uh that doesn't necessarily mean that um there's an inherent connection between strength and generosity on the one hand and strength and, you know, toughness and meanness on the other hand. This is just dependent on uh the affordances in the environment and what opportunities are available to different types of people. Yeah. I think that's a big part of the story of personality structure for sure. Yeah. I mean and it could be that the just one quick thing, like and it could be that there still is heritable variation in things like extroversion, openness, whatever.

Well we know that it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. And that could, you know, tip the scales. Like if I'm deciding what niche to pursue to to fill or what status game to play, like if I'm naturally a little more, say smart, maybe I'll I'll go into this particular niche. Or if I'm naturally a little more physically strong, maybe I'll go into this niche, or I'm naturally a little more extroverted and socially adept, maybe I'll go into this niche. So you'd still expect individual differences to matter and sort of pushing you into one niche or another that you might have a comparative advantage in. Um so that that still makes sense. But you know, once you enter that niche, it's going to create um a feedback loop where I

continue to cultivate those traits and and that's going to cause uh different types of of covariation. So maybe in an an initial maybe initially I'm like just a tiny bit more extroverted than average. But if I go into um say uh marketing or or or uh or a field that or networking, uh that's going to increase my extroversion even more because I I've specialized in that niche. And so what began as a very tiny difference uh uh gets magnified into a much larger difference as I uh continue to invest in that niche. Um but anyway, you were gonna say something, Dave. Uh oh, Patrick, do you want to respond to that before I go on to something? No, I mean I do think like even I think the behavioral genetics research backs this up.

Like a large chunk of personality variation in the population can be attributed to like truly like random. Like they don't, it's the non-shared environment. It's the gloomy paradox. We don't know what it is. It's just like randomness. Yeah. And then uh a big chunk of it is some genetic, you know, proclivities, or at least of just having genes in c in common, right? But that doesn't mean that that like there are extroversion genes or whatever, of course, right? Like the something being heritable doesn't make it or attribute to genetics doesn't make it like a a real entity. Um and then for personnel, it's like the the shared environment is super tiny. So I think a lot of it is like these small proclivities that maybe push you a little bit in

one direction, And then just like the snowballing effect of like a lot of non-shared kind of things adding up over time uh as a result of that. Yeah. Do you think my question was gonna be, do you think like so with the big five, like uh uh uh extra version, you should probably go through just for audience members who don't know like what the big five or hexico things are, which you could just like list what they are. But do you is this an accident? Like in the sense of are there other um common dimensions of variation that just haven't been stumbled upon? Um or or have they been stumbled upon because they are the most reliable dimensions of variation, whether or not they correspond to like the

little machines, like in the same way, like I think the computer metaphor, which like I know the Aaron, you know, so like just imagine laptops, like some laptops are heavier or lighter, some laptops are hotter or cooler. You can imagine like those that are deep dimensions of variation that are pretty orthogonal to, or like, you know, some may be faster, slower, or whatever, louder, or you know, so they're very indirectly related to the function, but they're pretty stable differences. And if you thought, well, the way that the laptop works is heaviness or lightness or fastness, you'd be wrong. Yeah. But you can see why those attributes hang together. Is that sort of um can you connect up this laptop metaphor to how you're thinking

about personality? And then this, and then the related question. Sorry, this is a complicated one, is just then what is is the question of like are what's up with these big five? And are there really big twelve and we haven't found the other seven or no one bothered to look for them? Or what do you think about that? Yeah, yeah. I'll take the that question first about like where how do we get here? Are these useful? Um and I I think like okay, so the history of this stuff is right, like Gordon Alport and whoever like looked in the dictionary, got a bunch of words that people used to describe people's tendencies, and then took those words. And over decades, researchers gave these all these different adjectives and asked people

how much does this describe you, or how much does it describe your best friend, or we all that stuff. So, like hundreds, thousands of words. I want to say like 4,000 or 6,000 words or something like that. All these ratings, from those ratings, they can get the correlations among all these adjectives, and they boil them down with factor analysis or principal components analysis into some lower number of dimensions. And I think the first one, yeah, let's say something like 16, but then they found some mistakes and then like literally decades of people redoing this, like all through the 50s, 60s to the 80s. People were doing this and debating over personality structure. And it they kept converging as I understand it.

And you can look back and see they just keep finding something like the big five, which is uh extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. And those describe the patterns of correlations that they that they found in those 6,000 adjectives, right? So it's a useful summary of all these different ways that people vary. And I don't think that's a mistake. Although the hexaco does highlight that. Because the the hexaco, the difference there is just like in 2000 or whatever, they went back to the dictionary. They started over. And they added just some words that weren't that were excluded from like the original lexical approaches because they didn't want words that had to do with like moral valuation

moral evaluations to be considered for personality. And as I understand it, you know, the hexago folks, they included those words, redid everything again, and lo and behold, they get another dimension that basically has to do with like morals. How big of an asshole you are. Yeah. So it's like, okay, yeah. So anything that we didn't include is not going to be there. If we included things like physical characteristics in that original word count, which some European personality psychologists probably would have wanted to do, or intelligence, like there's nothing about intelligence in there. Yeah, then we're missing those dimensions too. And the point is that they're as useful as they're gonna be for describing all the words

that you wanted to dis that you included as being worthy of describing in the first place. I see. And coordinated, musical, funny, those aren't all left out. Yeah, they're they're not really in there. Like they've no doubt they're gonna correlate with some of the big five anyway. But but uh yeah, I think these things are it just solves it solved the problem of like uh coordination for personality psychology. What traits are we gonna coordinate about studying? Because everybody originally was like studying their own random personality traits, give them their own random names. And at least this way we have some random names that everybody agrees on, and like we're gonna study those things. And the the problem, if which there is a problem with this stuff, is I think the sleight of

hand of reification, circular reasoning, which uh some people uh Simon Bogue, I think, has a really cool paper called like verbal magic. And it's this combination of circular reasoning and and reification where I think the field like to do the slide of hand, maybe completely unaware, but where it's just like these things which were originally descriptive constructs became the explanatory construct. They're the they they stand in place of like learning about what are the actual underlying mechanisms. So it's like it's it's going back to your computer analogy. It's like saying, Oh, we learned like the most important ways that computers are different from one another is that they differ in speed and functionality and size and

clarity of the screen. And therefore, like I know how to make the best computer. Like I know how to do it. And then you know, you sit down and you're like, Okay, I gotta just imbue this computer with speed and all these things. But you don't actually know how to do it. Yeah, exactly. You got no idea how to do it. And if you wanted to do that, you would need to understand like mechanistically how the things on the computer contribute to these emergent qualities of speed and functionality and size and clarity of the screen and and all these things. Um, and I think that's where we're we're at right now. Like we have a like a consumer guide to personality of like what are the main things that people that humans are paying attention to and labeling about other people, at least

in the Western world. Uh and then, but we don't have a good idea of like what are the underlying mechanisms driving those things, or how do those underlying mechanisms produce different dimensions that people care about in other cultural contexts. Yeah. There's also a meta science thing I've did I've noticed when I wrote the difference detecting paper, and maybe this happens in personality too, which is you also fight the data. We have data and therefore it's real. Yeah. Which is that if you have a ton of data for these personality characteristics, that magic uh inference of this is a real thing, that sort of it's not warranted in the same way you could say I have a ton of data that like some computers are

faster and slower. But that doesn't warrant the claim that like faster and slower is like how the machine works. Yeah. But people use that all the time to be like, of course, we've got tons of data. Like, look, people vary on, like, we have a ton of data. Like, how can you say it's not a mechanism? Yeah, totally. And I think there's actually a paper by uh Costa and McRae called like four, I don't know if it's four ways or five ways, the big five are basic, where they're basically saying, like, this is all the evidence that these are real things. Like it's heritable. We got all this cross-cultural stuff. And like I I feel like a paper needs to be written that just goes because none of them are

actually reasons to believe that those are real things. They're just convincing at an intu at like a in intuitive level, like, oh yeah, this must be like thing. You think of things are heritable, or there's lots of genetics supporting that that it's a real thing. But no, like educational attainment is is heritable, but like there isn't a educational attainment entertainment. Yeah. There's no weight is not a mechanism in a computer. Like it's just it's a weird category mistake, you know. It's just but it yeah, it's real in a different way than you mean it, and you're meaning real in a very specific way that doesn't follow. Yeah. That's actually something I kind of wanted to ask you. Like I was listening to the the podcast about free will, and um if I can, you know,

briefly summarize it, which hopefully this is right. You have two like your your explanation of what free will is as a concept, anyway, is that it's a it's like the placeholder or it's a marker of things that are levers that I could pull on or could be pulled on in order to change somebody's behavior. Yeah, that's how David put it actually. Is that fair? So yeah, that's that was David's characterization, which I thought was lovely. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And so that got me because I was like, oh, I like, yeah, what is free will as a concept? What is like personality as a concept? Why do we have that? And kind of like I I don't know if this is right, but my intuition is like almost like the flip side of that.

It's kind of like the things, if there's an equation of behavior, like free will is some of the variables that are open to be changed. You can put in a different number there, convince somebody to put a different number there. But personality as a concept, not like the individual personality dimensions, it's like a recognition of the things in there that are less able to be changed. I'm not going to say like totally unable to be changed, but it's like more like the constants in the equation or things that would take longer to to change than just like trying to, you know, change their minds, so to speak, or or whatever. That's awesome. I like that. And maybe like the I'm sure you thought like maybe then also like, you know, like uh sex

morph or age morphs would also go into that, right? Where it's sort of like you're not gonna convince a baby to start walking, you know, or like, yeah, or I'm not gonna convince a grumpy person to be cheerful. That's that's awesome. I love that. That's really cool. Yeah. So I was like, yeah, I've never even thought about like what what is it, what is it as a concept? What is this even for? Yeah, why do we have to do that? Yeah, why would an evolved organism think personality exists and why would it have that intuitive entry? But that's a really uh that's awesome. That's like a really clear functional reason why it would. I love this because it's a good it's a good psychology of psychology, which it it explains

why personality psychologists were less interested in uh physical variation and say variation in intelligence, right? Uh because these are physical, if I'm taller or shorter, or stronger, or weaker, or healthier, or sicker, or whatever, those aren't levers that I can really pull, right? Um and so it it's natural that when when we're thinking about personality, we're focusing on the stuff that we can't we can change, um, right? Are the the levers that we can pull. So we're not gonna be interested in in physical stuff. We're not gonna be interested in, you know, how quick witted or dim witted you are because that seems like it's harder to control. We're just gonna focus on the stuff that that or actually no, I'm am I getting it

backwards? I think it's a little bit backwards, but but not completely. Like I think it's it's a marker of what things are less changeable than the levers you could pull on in like an everyday interaction to change to get you to behave differently? Or like change the incentives. Like incentives can just be changed, I think, you know, or like I could try to change a belief that you have, that would then pretty in if I can change your belief like in the moment, it will have an impact on your behavior. Whereas I think personality is a stand-in for the things that are like less able to be changed. Maybe not totally unchangeable, but just a little bit more fixed. Like for example, how accurate your thermostat detection ambient temperature is,

or the the set point. Like maybe those are just a little bit harder to change. And as a human navigating the world, it's helpful to know that there are some things out there that are a little bit more fixed. And so if I'm gonna try to change somebody's behavior, it narrows the space of like what should I be trying to poke on in order to change their behavior. I should poke on the free will things, you know, not the God and then to your point, like it highlights some of this like the folk differences, the psychology of psychology. European personality psychologists included back in the day, from what I understand, intelligence was part of personality, height, physical stature, muscularity, athleticism,

these are personality traits for them. It's the American school, like Gordon Alport, I think, who kind of excluded that kind of stuff. So these folk intuitions about what counts as personality is itself like baked into our concepts of personality, or or no, our science of personality and our yeah, what we count. And it's possible, yeah. Like your height is less changeable than maybe some of your anger pronenessness, but maybe weight isn't or musculature isn't, you know. So anyway. That's interesting. So i it it it then would predict that domains of human variation that we intuitively think that we can change very easily, that those domains would be less likely to be considered personality traits, quote unquote.

I'm trying to think of a of a good example of something that we think can be easily changed. I don't know, like um uh your willingness to um make me a hot dog, right? Um that totally depends on my um whether I can give you ten dollars to to make me the hot dog if you're a hot dog stand or whatever. It's totally uh in my power to control, right? Uh that's not a personality trait. The fact that you that you have a hot dog stand is not a part of your personality, right? Um so I don't know, maybe maybe th that's a uh one way of thinking about it. The the stuff that is easy to to manipulate through, say, money, through you know, reciprocity, that those things will not be viewed as personality traits.

Um whereas people that can't things that can't be changed so easily, those will be more likely to be viewed as personality traits. Yeah, yeah. Or like in in that in that equation of how likely I am to make you a hot dog, or like will I make you a hot dog, right? Like there's some things that go into that equation. Like one of them is the incentive structure to motivate me, and and the other part is maybe some aspect of like how much I like helping people in general. And so like depending on that how much I like helping people, which maybe is a little harder to change, let's say, you know, like then you for you it'd be helpful to know like kind of where I stand on that personality trait of being willing to help people in order to

know how much you need to offer me or whether it's even possible to offer me enough to make you a hot dog, you know. So it's like a it helps, I think it could help guide decisions if you have these little kind of placeholders in this these equations of like other people's behavior to to figure out like what what are the levers I can pull on, how strong do I need to pull on those levers for different people out there out there in the world. Yeah. And I like that like emotions too might be different or another part or in between where it's sort of so personality is sort of differences, but then there's also emotions which are sort of universal and common but also really dictate behavior. Um, so you know, it might be like, well, you have a particular plan about hot dogs, and

like, you know, that's right, like really easy to push on the hot dog serving lever. Um, but then like, you know, if you see something that's objectively scary, like a explosion or somebody gets killed, for example, there's things that like whether we intend it or not, or plan it or not, our evolved psychology sort of takes over of like we're in a dangerous situation and we can predict our behavior, other people's behavior is like we're having this emotion of fear. And it's independent of like the that that's sort of like a universal lever. But then there's individual differences. Like maybe Patrick is like deathly afraid of like snails and he sees a snail and he like runs away. And he, you know, but David, you and I would only run away if like we saw somebody killed,

you know. And so so we can then we know that like that's like a personality difference attached to this universal. So I like this idea that it's all kind of compositional predicting behavior or interventions on future behavior, get to get back to the interventionism. Um so yeah, I like personality fitting within that or emotions fitting in that and why we would have these entries or and then also like free will. Like it's the planning. Like I this is a really that's cool. I hadn't thought of that. And I I like that kind of thing. Yeah, like you can almost kind of try to figure out like what are all these personality concepts or things that personality psychologists are studying. Yeah. Like how did we even create these things?

Why would we create these things with our evolved psychology? And I like the emotions one too. Like somebody I don't know who actually wrote this, but somebody once, an economist, was explaining like a game theoretic model of anger to me. And it was basically like the argument was something like anger is almost like a well, it's similar to Aaron Cells in this bargaining tactic, but it's it's like I'm in this new mode now. Yeah. The me that you know is gone. Exactly. And you're you're arguing with this thing now. Yeah. So you have to satisfy this thing. Yeah, bargaining. And having an emotion concept, maybe it like allows us to deal to navigate that and yeah, either use that or exploit it or navigate other people having those emotions, something

like that. Yeah, there's a classic paper Hirschlife or Emotions of Guarantee as guaranteers of threats and promises or something like that. Okay. From like the 80s or something. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think you could see this stuff like in like in personality, there's I'm not super infamiliar with this debate, but I know that there are some personality researchers like who differ in whether they think motivations should be included in the definition of personality or not. And I think this is again where like our folk psychology psychology is coming into play. If you feel like your motivations are like the things that you can pull on, change somebody's motivation in a given moment, versus you feel like motivations are more like

these basic drives. So depending on which one you think is like what people mean by motivations, then you're gonna be more or less likely to want to include that in the definition of personality. And at least these debates, or maybe we don't need to be having these debates, it's just like trying to figure out exactly what the thing is that we're trying to talk about in the first place. Yeah, like the essence of the nature, like somebody's lazy versus industrious versus um stingy versus lecherous versus gluttonous, like this. It feels very old-timey to have those be personality traits. But as you said, maybe that's it's predicated on like there's some essence essential human nature that if we include it, it's right.

And if we don't include it, it's wrong, as opposed to the right way to think about it, which is these are all like difference detecting systems. And there's no right or wrong. It's just we have these. Yeah. It it also maps onto our our discourse, like the way we talk about these traits. Like if I say Dave is lazy and that's why he's not uh showing up to the podcasts, you might say, no, he's not lazy, he's just not sufficiently motivated. You're not giving him a good enough reason to show up to these podcasts. You know, maybe maybe it's your fault, or maybe it's it's it's the listener's fault. They're not you know being generous enough on our Patreon page, and that's why he's not showing up. It's not that he's inherently lazy, it's just the situation that he's in.

And so the relative importance of the situation versus Dave's innate characteristic is going to determine whether Dave is quote unquote lazy or judged by us to be lazy. It's going to depend on the relative influence of different factors in determining his behavior. And a lot of our gossip, I think, is trying to pin down whether a person is inherently smart or lazy or shy or uh uh nervous or whatever, or or whether it's just a a product of the specific situation that they happen to be in. Yeah. That's really cool. Is is is the personality literature. I mean, David, that's so lovely. Is the is the personality literature Patrick acknowledging that all this is for predicting behavior? Is that or is that not a part of the I mean it's probably acknowledged in there, but I

wouldn't say it's the main take on what's going on. Like it's if anything, like the closest you're gonna get to that is just like recognition that it's descriptions of behavior. I see. Like the social cognitive theories of personality, for example, and thinking like Fleason. And like they recognize that like these traits that we talk about as traits, like they're descriptive summaries of behavior. And there's a trait, what they call trait explanatory side of things. But like maybe this is too harsh, but I think they're like basically agnostic andor lost about what those things are. Whereas that's the value I think the adaptationist evolutionary approach brings, is it tells us like what should we expect the things are that are explaining the personality

traits in the descriptive sense that we see. Because it tells us, well, there should be things in the head that solve all these different problems, and we can get a sense of how they might work and what their different parameters are by doing a task analysis of those things and figuring out how to robot solve that. And then you go and try to do that empirically and test, measure those little things, those parameters, and see if they do indeed link up to these descriptive uh labels that we give to people's personality traits. Uh but so much of the field, especially because like so many people who use personality scales, they're not they wouldn't, they probably wouldn't identify as personality psychologists.

They're just like using them because I don't know, correlations, p-values, whatever. And like it's just implicit in the way everybody thinks about these things and writes about them that they're that they're somehow causing things. but these descriptive things can't cause much. Like they they can probably have caused some things, maybe, like, but they're not I don't think they're the main causes of behavior because they're not real. They're you know, they're abstract summaries of average tendencies, so right, yeah, right. Like the faster computers uh can do the do this thing better. That might just be a good idea. It'll predict too it'll predict buying prices and stuff like that. But yeah. You don't want to mistake that for being causally relevant for like the performance itself.

Right. Right. Maybe one day we'll build a super fast computer that's faster than any computer before and will take over the world. I feel like that's a lot of the the um the arguments you hear about AI because it's reified. It's gonna be so fast. Yeah, exactly. It's gonna be so fast, it's gonna hit the threshold of fast so fast that it's gonna become human like. Yeah, exactly. That's actually the the the base logic of it. Yes, exactly. The base logic is it's gonna get so fast it's gonna become exactly like a human. Right. It's the the exact same thing where we're reifying intelligence as a real thing when um it's all it's a whole bunch of different things. And then we extrapolate that into like, oh, if we build an AI, it's gonna be super

intelligent and it's gonna do all the things that we can do, but better, it's just gonna be like a wish-granting genie that can do anything. Yeah. Um anyway. Although even without that, I've seen some arguments about like even just if we were to increase like the speed of things by a lot or and it could make copies of itself, you don't even need superintelligence. It but it could very it could take over the world. It could you know with just in increases in speed and productivity that go along with that, like somebody could use that to do a lot, a lot more, have huge impacts on the world, even without the computer being super intelligent. Oh yeah. No, exactly. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, I think the the I well, I mean, David's point, I think, right, is like we should be

worried about any technology for for the usual reasons of like humans using it to like coerce others and take stuff from them or hurt them, uh, and wield it that way, as opposed to like that there's some magical spirit that's all of a sudden gonna become curiously like a human but a superhuman. Um yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh Patrick, should we have asked you anything? Yeah. I mean, I did actually because I watched this or I listened to this, I did actually come prepared with one. It's not really a ask me something, but it's just like a hobby horse I want to get on for a second. So I said I don't know. Ask me how I feel about posters. Yeah. Posters like in a dorm room or posters on a scientific conference at a scientific

conference. Uh Patrick, how do you feel about posters at a scientific conference if I got the question right? Yeah, yeah. I think that we need to stop printing out fancy posters and going through all jumping through all these hoops. Just put up some pieces of paper, five pieces of paper. I've seen that. When I say formatted, I do this. Okay. Yeah, because I'm just like, why are we doing all this? Like, we don't need to have this extra random veneer. Like it can be just as legible. Don't need to jump through, carry a giant tube around on a plane. In part because like I'm lazy, I don't want to do a big poster. And and so I also don't like standing out. So I'd rather just everybody, you know, got get got on board with printing out pieces of

paper. You heard it here first. This is very tractable. I I think this is very important. I think it's tractable. It's the lowest costs for students and universities. But seeing then, Patrick, if we adopted this, it would be less of a compelling status signal. I know, I know, yeah. It wouldn't be it would be less costly of a signal, and then I couldn't use it to judge people based on you know how much time and energy they've put into it and then what do people I mean, because some people put them back up in their walls and like I mean if you really want to do it, fine. If you're gonna put them up somewhere. I've never put a poster up anywhere after it goes in the trash. Uh but they used to print cloth ones and you could use it like as a tablecloth.

I mean, a lot of it is like provisional data often, you know, so it's not even like the final word on the thing. Yeah. Yeah, I just mean I don't know. I like this. Okay. So yeah, you heard it here first. If you can so no sh what's the what's the like one sentence summary as like just no posters? Basically do a data blitz presentation. Put a bunch of graphs and tables. Put them up. No words. It can still be nice and aesthetic. It just we don't need to, you know, go to the phone. If you're gonna put words on a put on a poster, I might as well just read a paper, right? Yeah, you know some nice headers, you know, some headers and headers and captions on the on the figures. And then if I have questions about what the figures mean and what the charts mean, I can

ask the person and the person's right there and they can tell me in their own words what is happening. Right. I'm not sort of me just like awkwardly standing there and reading a paragraph that I was like when I could have just read that paragraph in the privacy of my own home on my own time. Yeah, yeah. I mean I'm not even getting into that side of the poster stuff that I'm gonna do. the social, the awkward social interaction. I'm gonna stand that way. I just mean just like the poster itself. Yeah, we gotta think of better ways of of communicating. Honestly, an interpretive dance would be better. Maybe we should have poetry slams for our for our projects. It would be more effective, I think, more memorable songs.

That can't be turned into a status game, right? There used to be an HBES, um, the human behavior evolutionary society back in the day, and I was a young graduate student while this was still happening. It was so um not um attended it was like there were not many people going to it early days that it wasn't very um competitive to get in and there would literally always be one or two posters done by I mean to just put it like bluntly like crazy people where there'd be like glowing like chakras coming around people. And so there was always, you know, like they were kind of referred to as like tinfoil hat like it would just be like this really weird like you know the seventh dimension harmonics are causing people to like act selfishly and then there was just like a so david it

reminded me of your just all pictures because those were often those posters stood out because they had usually very strange graphics um almost religious like um and you you know you could usually tell because either it'd be a hundred point font or a one point font, um, you know, with four words or ten thousand words on the poster and really interesting, um, really interesting pictures. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we haven't quite figured out the optimal way to have research conferences. Maybe this is the best we can do is the poster PowerPoint format. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. That's all I'm asking. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. And to just make it a meta science point while we're on it, is uh as a

PSA, like glossy, well published like really highly produced things are not uh a good proxy for truth either. Right. Like somebody writing something on cardboard, yeah, like that's one issue. But like some of my favorite papers, like John Patton papers, are like low, low production quality, you know, old school, black and white. And then like, you know, there's a lot of journals now that have like really pretty pictures, but that doesn't mean that it's better science. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, we're doing it. We should just hand draw hand drawn uh eight and a half by eleven. I don't know about that, but it rewards people with good legible writing, so and drawing. Right. And if you're starting a podcast, don't bother editing it and putting high in high

production values or exactly it's really self serving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The real podcasts, you know, don't edit anything out, and they just do real talk and they include all the ums and uhs and mistakes and they're boring sometimes. They're boring sometimes. There's no show notes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Those are the best kinds of podcasts. Yes, exactly. We should give a lot of status to those kinds of podcasts. A lot of funding. More funding is needed, as Daniel Speaker would say. Yes. Well, Patrick, um uh what are you what what are you working on really quickly next? What's your next big thing? Uh all these things still probably mainly trying to tie these parameters of emotions that I was kind of talking about, like situation detecting algorithm differences and set point

differences to these broader personality traits. And then the other one is kind of this more meta question that we kind of hinted at here. Uh trying to differentiate between, yeah, these more prediction based subtasks of adaptive problems, like the one uh that that David kind of mentioned, of like just trying to predict like who among my peers is gonna get status, or predict who will my peers tend to think is worthy of status, versus the causal side of things, which is how do I intervene on the world or how can the world be intervened on in order to bring about certain changes? And I think figuring out like the space of adaptive like the complexity of different adaptive problems and what kinds of cognitive machinery could solve those

problems. That's kind of like something I'm excited about, but also like honestly slowly, slow, very slowly getting into that. But yeah, anybody's interested in those things, like reach out. I'd love to talk and and chat. Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much for being on. We really appreciate it. It's great talking to you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And thanks for doing the podcast. Thank you for coming on. All right. David, you're still here. I'm still here. Are you still here? I am still let me check. Oh, yep, still here. Okay. Uh and you're still here. So um if you liked the episode, please subscribe. Um, you can click like, you can make comments on social media, um, preferably

neutral to good. And you know, we're on Patreon. Yeah. Call a friend. Yeah, neutral third party, disinterested, shout it in the streets, buy David a fanny pack, send him French fries. I think that's almost shouted from a mountaintop. Um, yell it to people on the street. Don't do anything, be kind to yourself, give yourself some time and space, take care of yourself. I think these are drugs. Yeah. Yeah. Um well and it depends on the drug and what the context is, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. Don't be arrogant. If you think you're arrogant, you're probably not. If you don't, you probably are. I think these are all things we've covered in outros. Yep. Yeah, maybe take it. Anything new? Anything new, Fanny Pack?

Uh no, not really. French fries. Okay. Uh I don't know. Watch Star Wars again. The old ones or the new ones? The old ones. The OG. Yeah, they're good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. Uh good. Well, see you next week, David. Yep, see you next week.