Belief with Dan Williams
2025-09-23 12:00:00.000 +00:00

David, um do you know of any podcasts that um well actually I'll just leave it at that. Do you know of any podcasts? Uh I I know of one of them that is my personal favorite called Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. That is not what I was expecting you to say at all. You were expecting me to say some other podcast? Well, I don't I mean you're on this one, so I I mean that's great that it's your favorite too. Is that is that true? Is that really your favorite? I don't know if I'm an impartial uh I see source. Well, we'll we'll we'll talk about this offline. So um we'll circle back to that as they say. Um but uh what are we doing today? Uh well we're actual evolutionary psychologists, and we're talking to actual evolutionary

psychologists who do actual evolutionary psychology. It's a not quite our tagline, but it's close enough. Uh isn't that I thought that was our tagline. Well, it's actual evolutionary psychology by evolution actual evolutionary psychologist. What did you what did you say? Should we change the I said something like I changed it slightly I think it was more had more than it well we'll check the transcript later. Okay anyway I'm sorry to uh keep going on and on uh without further ado here is our episode Okay, uh David, today we have a special guest who is uh where is where is David said David. Uh we should that's um that's we're laying it. Safe bet given all the Davids we interact with. Uh actually Dan, another another D name.

It is uh and Dan Dan is uh our first philosopher that we've had on the podcast. Um and uh he's a a wonderful and brilliant thinker, uh philosopher at the University of Sussex, which I screwed up uh during the beginning of the interview I saw with Sheffield. And for those people at Sheffield, um we we really like Sheffield too. It's a wonderful institution. Yeah, it was it was a uh a complimentary mistake, and that I you know, it was you know It's a it's a wonderful institution. But also Sussex is a great institution as well, uh, so far as I'm aware. Well, at the very least, it has Dan Williams. So that it must be it must be a great institution. Uh anyway, who is Dan Williams? He's a philosopher, he studies um belief, misinformation, delusion,

epistemology. Uh we get into all sorts of things. It was a really mind-bending conversation. What is the nature of belief? Uh what is the evolutionary psychology of belief? How do social forces uh and and uh social status how do they affect the things that we believe what is a delusion what does it mean to really believe something we even get into Jordan Peterson and whether we should think he's full of shit or not. Uh it was it was a really fun conversation. Yeah I think what people believe and why the science of that gets into sort of some deep waters too with people sort of feeling like being attacked too. And we talk about that a little bit too. So it's it's definitely a very interesting content in that sense too.

Of you one starts to sort of step on uh political ideas that in the same way you do, David. And I think that was an interesting part of the conversation, too. Yeah. So super fun conversation. I think you'll have a good time listening to it. Sounds good. And uh yeah, listen for the uh everyone's opinion about Jordan Peterson. All right. All right, we're going. uh professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield and Sussex. Sorry, Sussex. Oh my god, I'm so sorry. No, that's what did I get that where where did I get Sheffield? Was that a display? It is a place in the US. Oh, okay. I must have mixed it up with a different place. I feel like someone else that's similar to you works there. David, you invited Dan on.

Was there a different Dan Williams that you wanted to invite? Is this the case? Oh, you know what? There are a lot of Dan Williams. I think we got the wrong one. You know, we'll have to make do with this Dan Williams. Anyway, and you're also uh the writer of the popular substack Conspicuous Cognition, which is a wonderful substack. I recommend everyone subscribe to it. Um so Dan, you're our first philosopher on the show. Yeah, I know. That's a big lift. Yeah. Yeah. So you're gonna have to represent the entire discipline of of philosophy. Um I hope you're ready to take on that mantle. Yes, defend it on uh first principles. We were we were actually both saying how we have all sort of interacted online but never

met in person. Um so I feel like this is sort of like meeting in person. Um, although we're we're still not I don't know, is this online or in person? It's both. Okay. That's the philosoph the philosophy. That's the definitive answer. Great. It's both. Good. Um, so uh so so Dan, really great to have you here. Um uh I know a lot of the work that you do um involves I kind of think about your work similar to to David's work, um, which is a compliment to David. Um uh sorry. Um, but uh uh but it's sort of in this category of there's a social logic to lots of stuff that's maybe hidden and hasn't been appreciated. Um, do you think that is a fair characterization of your work? And if so, can you maybe for people who haven't come across your work, sort of talk a

little bit about how you view um, you know, if you're stuck in an elevator with somebody and they're they want to know more than a you're a philosopher informed by evolution, um How do you think about sort of what's the main line of what you do? Hmm, that's a good question. Um I suppose the overarching question that I'm interested in is why do people believe what they do, especially when they seem to believe things that are strange or irrational, um, outright bizarre, delusional. Um, that's a sort of overarching question. It's not the only question that I'm interested in, but it tends to be connected to many of the other things that I'm interested in. And there is this sort of view I have, which is very general, that human beings

are these intensely social animals. And most of the features of human psychology and our behavior that seem otherwise sort of strange or self-defeating or irrational or paradoxical actually make a lot more sense once you situate that psychology within the context of the fact that we're social animals. competing for prestige, trying to cultivate a good reputation, trying to form alliances that would advance our interests, and so on. And I think that then is really important when it comes to understanding belief specifically. So I think that many of the sort of strange things that we believe in domains like religion and ideology, and often what's thought of in terms of self-deception, is sort of best illuminated by understanding the kinds of social goals that we have.

And that's also where my sort of interest in evolutionary theory comes from, which I think is quite unusual for someone in academic philosophy and uh especially unusual in the sort of humanities more generally. Because I think evolutionary theory gives you a kind of important toolkit for thinking about the ways in which the fact that we're social animals has shaped the kinds of minds that we have and the kinds of motivations that we have. I guess at the most abstract level, that would be the kind of the kind of idea. That's that's fantastic. Um, you know, in you mentioned philosophy, and you mentioned belief. Um in my understanding, and I'm gonna like qualify everything I say with, you know, I'm

an amateur philosopher, I'm a happy amateur um uh for philosophy, but uh belief, the idea of belief and what it is and how it works has been a longstanding thing in philosophy. Do you view taking an evolutionary approach in particularly what you just described as divert diverging in important and interesting ways? Maybe I'm leading by saying interesting. But do you think that's a different way of approaching the idea of belief and what it's for and its function in philosophy? It's difficult to say. I think that historically there hasn't been a sharp distinction between philosophy and psychology and and social theory. And historically, when I think many philosophers, psychologists, um, sociologists and so

on have tried to understand the ways in which we form beliefs and why we form beliefs that we do, I don't think they've been sufficiently sensitive to the fact that we're social animals. Um, so in that sense, I think pushing this sort of social perspective is at odds with lots of theory both in philosophy and elsewhere when it comes to understanding belief. Um, but but it's difficult. I mean, lots of philosophy is often concerned with what you might think of as sort of conceptual questions or maybe metaphysical questions, depending on which way you look at it. Like, what even is it to believe something? And that's just this really deep and complex question. And I think in many ways we still don't have a particularly good answer to that.

Because this term belief gets used to refer to lots of different things that are different from each other in very complex ways. And so, for example, you know, I believe I'm talking to you two. Um, I might also believe, let's say, that capitalism is an unjust system. You know, I might believe that there's a supernatural agent that monitors my behavior and punishes me for bad things. You know, we use belief to capture all of these different things. And it's not really at all obvious that they are the same thing, um, except insofar as there's a sincere commitment to the truth of a proposition. Um, but I think even there, I mean, we can we can we can get into this, and this is something, David, I know that you're really interested in as well.

Even there, I think the fact that we're we're social animals competing for status and trying to you know boost our reputation and trying to influence other people in advantageous ways, that's relevant to understanding a lot of that complexity. Um, I think if we weren't social animals to the degree that that we are, then the concept of belief would be a lot less complicated and a lot more transparent. So I think when it comes to, you know, even chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas, I mean, these are social animals, although not social, I think, in the ways and to the degree that human beings are animals, they've got cognitive mechanisms that function to track their environment, their material and social environment in ways that help them achieve their

goals and so on. And we've got that as well. I think that's the kind of the dominant thing that's going on when it comes to what we sometimes think of as belief. It's like modeling those aspects of the world which are relevant to our practical goals. But once you get into religion, politics, ideology, aspects of culture, there's something very different going on when it comes to talking about belief, which you're not going to be able to understand in terms of this sort of basic model which applies in almost every other case, which is forming beliefs to track how things are. Right. And so just to summarize, and then I'll let David, who's chomping at the bit here, I think, um, but if what I hear you're saying is that um there's almost been sort of this I there's

this idea sort of philosophy counteracts this naive realist idea that's sort of like things just are the way they are or psychology does. So the idea of naive realism is that the world is the way it just appears to us and what we know from psychology and philosophy is that we have all this machinery mediating the relationship between the real world and what we experience. So visual illusions being a great example of that, that we see things that aren't objectively sort of there. It's a function of how our machinery works. And what I'm hearing you say is that both people, just every day, all of us sort of intuitively, but then also the scientific community has been sort of not maybe naive realism, but sort of socially naive in a sense, or we haven't appreciated the social

complexity of the idea of belief, for example. I think that's right. Yeah. And I think that I think there are interesting questions about why theorists historically have not been sufficiently sensitive to the social sort of motivations that underpin a lot of what we believe. And also they haven't, I think, been sufficiently sensitive to the role of strategic social motivations in governing our behavior. I know that this is a big part of your work, uh David, thinking about cynicism and so on. So it's not as if I think it's just a sort of ordinary theoretical omission, the fact the fact that people have uh not been sensitive to the to the importance of things like social signaling and things like advocacy and propaganda when it comes to biasing how we view the

world and giving rise to these sort of complexities when it comes to belief. It's not as if I think it's just an ordinary sort of you know gap in the knowledge with theoretical omission. I think there are probably interesting things to say about why it is that it's often a little bit awkward to acknowledge the the role of things like status competition and reputation management and propaganda in shaping this domain of belief. I couldn't agree more with with that. I think given that we are so uh fixated on signaling various things to one another about our identities, our loyalties, our traits, um, it is often in our interest to conceal the fact that we're signaling those things at all. Because signaling those things can itself become a cue of something bad about you, that

you're narcissistic, you're selfish, um, you are insecure, um and and and needy of uh attention, for example, there are all sorts of inferences that we draw about each other. Um and the inferences that we draw about status seekers, about signalers, about attention seekers, those are often bad. Uh and so often the social games we play have to be played in the cover of darkness, or at least without becoming common knowledge among the players. And I think that might explain why it has taken so long for us to to realize the the social games we're playing is because one of the moves in those social games is trying to hide the fact that it's a game. In order to effectively compete for political power, you have to conceal the fact that your

primary motive is, you raw power seeking. In order to compete for status, you have to conceal the fact that you're you're merely interested in status. So I think that that might be what's going on here, why uh it has taken us so long to explain our beliefs in in terms of uh of social motives. Um, because it it is often in our interest to conceal those motives, uh which often serves a deeper social motive. Yeah, I I think that's a massive part of what's going on. Um, but it but it's interesting. I mean, if you think about the sort of so so just to be concrete with an example, I mean, if you think about something like self-deception, you know, human beings often seem to be motivated to believe things.

And, you know, we we we can get into this maybe in in more depth, but I think, you know, in in many cases that's boiling down to sort of one of two social motivations. Either it's sort of propaganda or advocacy. So we're sort of motivated to push particular claims and narratives, and then we end up kind of internalizing them. Or it's to do with social signaling and sort of reputation management. So we want to advertise certain kinds of qualities and allegiances that we've got. And then that bias is in the direction of certain kinds of beliefs, which are conducive to doing that. But what's interesting is, you know, throughout so much of uh the history of philosophy and also psychology, and then once you even when you get sort of Freudian psychoanalysis, which

takes seriously this idea that there are these kind of hidden motives, So much of it is this sort of you can't handle the truth model of self-deception, right? It acknowledges the idea that we're sort of motivated to believe things for reasons independent of their truth, that there are these practical motivations and interests which shape and distort and bias what we believe. But there's even with sort of Freudianism and the sort of psychoanalytic tradition, even when there's this willingness to sort of you know dig deeper and look at these hidden motivations, it's all this sort of you know inward facing, intrapsychic, emotion regulation, um, the defense mechanisms of the ego and so on. So even when you've got what looks kind of ostensibly like a kind of a willingness to be

quite cynical, there's not the willingness to be as cynical as I think is needed, which is to go one step further. And it's not about you know protecting your ego, and it's not about believing things that make you feel good and protect your self-esteem and so on. It's winning these, you know, social games, it's propaganda, it's it's it's advocacy. So I think there's definitely something to that, to that idea, David, that um, you know, that that there's something awkward about drawing attention to these things. So that even when you get these intellectual traditions, which uh on on the surface, you know, they they look like they're very cynical, they don't actually go the kind of whole way to draw attention to strategic social motivations as as a means of sort of biasing the

way in which we think about the world. Yes. I I I love that distinction uh uh where the instead of saying that the goal is to impress you, the goal is inwardly focused, it's to feel good about myself. And what's interesting about that is we all we all we somehow for some reason view that as less problematic than to be concerned with impressing you or or being superior to you. If I'm doing it for me to feel good about myself, then it's like we can relate to that. It's it's not that bad. But if I'm doing it just to gain status or just to impress you, or just to look good in your eyes, then it becomes like even ickier. And so I I love that that point that, like, yes, we we are somewhat cynical and that we

acknowledge that you know um we care about um, you know, advertising various features of ourselves, but we're not cynical enough because the uh the target of those signals is often ourselves, when really the the target should be other people, because that that is the adaptive target if we're thinking in evolutionary terms. That those are the things that that matter for our fitness, what you know, what other people think of us was a huge um selection pressure for our ancestors. What we thought of ourselves was not necessarily a selection pressure. It's hard to imagine how it would be. So I really, I really love that distinction. You mentioned um self-deception. Um that is a huge topic both in in philosophy and psychology.

Um I'm still struggling to wrap my head around it myself. I think I've I'm I'm starting to see how it works, but how are you thinking about self-deception these days? Are you are you skeptical of the term? Do you think it's a useful term? So I tend not to use the term, um, except for the fact that uh in the sort of ordinary discourse, uh, I think it captures something that people are quite familiar with, so it can be helpful in that way. You know, oh yeah, of course, self-deception, you know, you believe things for reasons independent of their truth, or you're sort of biased in how you view the world by practical interests and emotions and so on. But I think it does, you know, raises all of these, you know, traditional paradoxes.

You know, how can you deceive yourself? What's playing the role of the deceiver, what's playing the role of the deceived? And often it comes with quite, you know, implausible psychological models as well. I mean, the the way that I prefer to think about it, as I mentioned, is we've got these sort of two uh motivations or or goals, which I think are uh highly relevant to understanding uh what's going on when we form these biased beliefs, when we form these strange uh belief systems and narratives and so on. One of these is, you know, you can call it propaganda or you can call it advocacy, but it's just the idea that we're motivated to spread ideas, claims, narratives such that if other people accept them, it will promote our interests.

Right. So if I can convince you two that I'm this generous, you know, pro-social, kind, fair-minded person, I've got a sort of standing motivation to advocate for my interests in that way, to propagate that kind of message. And I think for reasons that that we can get into, and I think it's really fucking complicated exactly what's going on, we tend to internalize our propaganda. Um that's the way that I'd sort of preferred to put it, rather than saying we deceive ourselves, because I think that that is more confusing than just the idea that when we've got this standing motivation to propagate messages, we tend to internalize those. Although, even that I think is sort of subject to various constraints.

And then similarly, I think we've we've got these motivations to engage in reputation management, to signal that we've got attractive qualities and allegiances, and that can shape our outward behavior. It can shape how we dress, how we talk, uh the the ways in which we conduct ourselves, um, what what teams we we cheer for, and so on. And I think that can also shape what what what beliefs we form. Um so I think these signaling motivations can also bias what beliefs we form. That's the way that I tend to talk about it these days, rather than thinking in terms of of self-deception. But if you're just using self-deception as this sort of catch all term for the idea that our practical philosophers might say non-epistemic motivations bias belief, then I'm happy

with it. Yeah. There's like that joke. Uh, how did you think of something smart, you know, like a smart thing? And it was like, well, I thought of somebody smarter than me and I imagined what they would do, right? And that that has all the paradox of uh, you know, you can't exceed your own intelligence by thinking of somebody smarter than you, right? You are as smart as you are. And so the the criticism, the sophisticated criticism of self-deception, like Rob Kurzman paper a while ago, like there is no self, right? Like that. It's or what are you calling the self, right? And and I mean I think the sophisticated argument is there's like the talkie or PR part of the phenotype, the the body envelope.

Um, but yeah, if you kind of exactly if you sort of unpack it or poke on it even a little bit, um, it it sort of it it it bears more unpacking than just the idea of self-deception, I think, historically. But so I think that's um uh people have had that similar sort of notion and uh and I think that would what you just said sort of would agree with that idea. Yeah. No, it's it's a great example of of how um folk psychology or our intuitive, naive ideas about the mind are um I think stymieing progress in academic psychology. And and Dave has written a lot about this, because we have this intuitive idea that there is a singular self in the head that thinks things, attends to things, remembers things, and

these processes are unitary. We we had a whole episode on this uh a while back. Um this is what is leading to the to these paradoxes, that there is a singular self that can deceive itself. But we would never have gotten into this mess if we just stayed at the mechanistic level of what are the different mechanisms in the mind, which mechanisms have access to which kinds of information. Once we stay at that level, there are no paradoxes, uh, and it becomes much more intelligible. So I think it's a really good example of how we need to uh realize what level of analysis we're at when we're thinking about uh these issues and uh uh drop down to the mechanistic level to get a better and deeper understanding of what's going on.

So you mentioned how you don't like the word self-deception. I agree, I don't, I'm not a fan of it either. But there has been a re-emergence of a different kind of distinction that's sort of related to self-deception. And it's the idea that there are two kinds of beliefs. And they've been referred to in different things in the literature. So uh Neil Van Leeuwen has referred to them as credences versus beliefs. Uh um Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have referred to the distinction between reflective beliefs and intuitive beliefs. I saw one philosopher refer to uh uh the latter kind as schm beliefs, as opposed to beliefs, as you know, they don't they're not real beliefs, they don't matter. And so there and we sort of intuitively recognize this.

We refer to like, you know, he's a true believer, she's a true believer, versus, you know, they're just paying lip service. Um and uh you know Neil Van Leon gets into the idea that we we often recognize this distinction when we talk about um I think X versus I believe X. Think sort of implies a genuine belief that it's guiding your behavior. Believe X uh is more of a social connotation that maybe, you know, I I believe this uh to show what kind of person I am or what my values are or what group I belong to rather than it's like actually guiding my behavior in a in a concrete way. Um and so this I think is one of the most interesting and important distinctions that has come up uh in the in the last decade.

And I'm still trying to grapple with it and what its implications are. Um, but do you buy this distinction that there are uh different kinds of belief and that some beliefs, you know, guide our behavior in day to day decisions and in in concrete ways, and some of them are kind of inert. They just kind of sit there and we we we may you know believe we believe them, we may think we believe them, uh, but they're not actually uh driving us in any real concrete way. Um do you buy that distinction? Do you think it's important? How are you uh approaching that topic? So what I think is true is that there are these um cases in which we're sincerely committed to the truth of a proposition. You know, God is always watching.

Um Socialism will usher in a utopia. There's a crocodile spirit that will hunt me down if I don't share my meat with fellow members of the group. The belief that studied by Man Vir Singh. These are cases in which I think people are sincere. As you say, the belief is often very strangely compartmentalized. I mean, my favorite example of this is from Dan Dennett, where he points out that you know nobody would ever masturbate in front of their parents, right? But but but they'll say they think God is always watching, and they think God is this omnipotent, all seeing um agent who will send them to hell if they masturbate, and yet they'll happily you know masturbate when they think this uh uh God is

always watching, which suggests that you know that that commitment that they've got is not really functioning as an ordinary world modeling belief. And I think there are so many examples of that. If you look at you know, conspiracy theories, when somebody sort of intuitively thinks that there's a conspiracy going on, you know, if you live in North Korea and the the elites in your society are just actually conspiring in really horrific ways against your interests, as Hugo Mercier points out, like under those conditions, you you typically don't want to go out and just advertise your commitment to this conspiracy theory because it's going to be incredibly detrimental to your interests. But in a country like the United States, you've got these sort of proponents of QAnon who

who claim to believe that there's this sort of all-powerful deep state that will crush them if they um speak out against the regime, and yet they feel no sort of strangeness in the fact that they're advertising their commitment to the belief in that way. So these are these are so many cases like that where you've got a kind of sincere commitment to the truth of some idea. It's not as if I think people are lying in these cases for the most part. Um and yet it is just strangely compartmentalized from their sort of uh world model in general and and from the kinds of behaviors that that that they're undertaking. The question then is how do you make sense of that psychologically? And and you're right, different theorists have proposed different ways of of trying to to

to understand that. So there's the kind of uh Sperber idea of uh I think it was at first sort of factual beliefs and symbolic beliefs and then it's intuitive and reflective beliefs. You've got Neil van Leeuwen's idea where he thinks this difference is between sort of factual beliefs and what I think he calls religious credences, and he thinks that's closer to imagining than a sort of ordinary world modeling belief. Um, my sense is we still don't fully understand exactly what's going on there. We know that there's something that needs to be explained. Um, but in terms of having a kind of really satisfactory mechanistic understanding of the actual psychological processes that drive that, I think it's just it's just really

complicated. And another thing that complicates it is you know, it seems like with many of these beliefs, which you might call merely reflective beliefs, or what Lewin calls, um Van Luwen calls religious credences, it seems like internalization sort of comes in degrees in a way, which is also strange. So if you've got someone who's got a kind of identity-defining conviction, um, and you know, they're let's say that that they're a Christian, you know, they go to church every other week or something when they can remember, and They're going to hold these religious beliefs in a way that's kind of light. It's not going to make much of a difference to their behavior and their decision making in general.

But if you take someone who's in a really kind of close-knit, intense, hyper-cooperative cult where they're constantly monitoring signals of cult loyalty, coalitional allegiance, and so on, often you will find the beliefs much more internalized in terms of their behavior. You know, in some contexts, you get these cases of collective suicide in the cult where you've got these really what seem like incredibly internalized beliefs and narratives. And if you just have this idea that there are just two different kinds of mental states, you know, factual beliefs and religious credences, I wonder whether you can explain that kind of variability. I genuinely don't know. Um it's interesting. And even I think like, and this is getting to I think taking an evolutionary approach and a

psychological approach is that we don't even know. Like, if I know, like David is bleeding, right? Like just that representation, even a mundane one, a lot of the psychology of the inferences that follow still aren't very well studied. So, like, you know, the fact that in us there's a representation of our relationship, the physical fact of the matter of I one of us should probably go do something to get to help David. He's bleeding. Um, there's representations of sort of like, you know, the schedule will be put on hold for what we're doing and what will the social consequences be? What if we don't intervene upon David? There's all these sort of what cognitive science call or scientists call inference engines,

or computer scientists or AI researchers call these, like, um, or what Marvin Minsky called frames, where it's just sort of like an event representation. It almost sounds stilted to talk about it, but in order to actually build a computer, whether it's squishy or hard, to actually represent the current state of the world and future states of the world or what follows from a representation, we still don't know that even for something as normal and mundane as David's bleeding, let alone something like, you know, God is a spaghetti monster or we should all kill ourselves because, you know, the the space saucer is coming, and you know, we we're gonna have a better life elsewhere. So I don't think it's surprising that we still don't know a lot.

Because I mean, as I read the literature, a lot of the point that you're making, Daniel, Dan, and and that I think we're all making, is that we just have to move from a you don't there's not enough structure in the world to tell these things apart, and we have to appeal to what is the underlying psychology. That's kind of what I'm hearing you say. Yeah, I think that's right. And I I think um I completely agree with that. I would just add that you know you can you can get far in some ways in thinking about you know high-level human behavior, thinking about broad uh patterns in behavior, how people interact, the sorts of things they do, the the narratives that they endorse, without having to um settle those questions about

underlying mechanisms and how everything actually works. Right. So I think, you know, that I think there's very good reason to believe that that people um to some significant degree often internalise their propaganda. You know, they're motivated to advocate for a claim and that tends to to shift their their private beliefs in the direction of that claim. And similarly, you know, as we're saying, I think there are these cases where there's good reason to believe that that somebody's uh ideology, a narrative that they're committed to performs these social signaling functions and is sort of strangely compartmentalized in their mental life. We can say that, and I think that can be true and that can be important at the same time as

we just put our hands up and say we don't fully understand exactly how that works in terms of the underlying psychology. And you're right, I mean, even when it comes to sort of ordinary inference, in and we're setting aside all of these complex social dynamics, so complicated to figure out exactly what's going on. But one of the things that makes it even more complicated in these social cases is, you know, even when these beliefs are sort of compartmentalized, because I think their function is very often social, you know, I believe this, I endorse this uh set of religious convictions because I want to signal that I'm a committed member of my group. There's some sense in which that comes about, and out of motivations to convince you that I

really believe it. Um, which creates all of these extra additional worries when it comes to and and and and puzzles when it when it comes to explaining what's going on. Because there's some sense in which you know, you don't want to be transparent as the individual who's got that kind of belief. You're precisely acting in ways to convince other people that you really believe it. So it's just yeah so complicated, I think. Yeah, natural selection designed you to not to foil future psychologists, basically designed the mind in this respect. You you're taking on you're biting off a really hard part of human phenotype here. Yeah. How do you tell the difference between fake belief and real belief when often the agent is

trying as hard as they can to convince you that it's real belief? And what what is the difference between trying really hard to convince you that I believe X and believing that you're going to scrutinize me uh for for that and truly believing X. They they seem to be pretty hard to empirically distinguish because both would lead to the same types of behavior that would be that would lend evidence to to the idea that I believe X. So it's a really thorny and difficult problem. Um the way I think of it is um in terms of uh cues and signals and how unstable the former are and how they can slide into the latter. So um for those who aren't familiar with the distinction, a cue is something that we use uh

to to guide our behavior. Um it's you know X is correlated with Y. People who comb their hair are more organized and conscientious. So I'm going to hire the people who, you know, neatly comb their hair. Um so that's a cue. A signal is you're intending to convey information to to someone else. Or in in the case of biology, uh the organism is evolving to convey information. So one is uh the the information was not intended to to to be conveyed um and or or was not evolved to to be conveyed. And then the other uh the information uh is evolved or intended to be conveyed. That's a signal. Um, and so what's weird about our species is because we're so obsessed with getting inside each other's heads um and anticipating what other people are going to think we think, that

cues are really unstable. As soon as I pick up on the cue that people with neatly combed hair are organized and conscientious, I now have a social strategic incentive to comb my hair because I think that you're going to think that I'm conscientious and organized. And all of a sudden, once I start doing that, then it the cue may no longer be valid. It may be that people who are really sloppy and dish and disorganized comb their hair to dupe people. And that can lead to a lot of dynamism and arms races between deceivers and deceived. It can lead to status games collapsing and re-emerging in antithetical forms. And so what I think might be going on with this distinction between belief and schmeleaf or

whatever is that beliefs are really powerful cues that we try to use to anticipate others' behaviors, to anticipate others' allegiances and loyalties and traits. And because they're such powerful cues, there is thus a powerful incentive to transform them into signals, to imitate uh the The superficial features of belief, to convince others that we truly believe something, as you put it. And once I am motivated enough to really convince you that I believe something, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between true belief and what I might call pseudo belief. I think a lot of our beliefs are pseudo beliefs, and that the goal is to make it difficult to tell the difference between real belief and fake belief.

And that is why it's so hard for psychologists to tell the difference, because that difficulty is by design. It's tantamount to other kinds of mimicry we see in the biological world, where um a uh a non-poisonous uh butterfly will will mimic the features of a poisonous butterfly to avoid predation. And just as it is very difficult for predators to tell the difference, um, it is often difficult for biologists to tell the difference. I think a similar phenomenon is happening with us where we have a kind of belief mimicry. Uh and that makes it really hard to tell the difference between true belief and and fake belief. What do you w and that's sort of sort how I how I've been thinking of it lately.

I'm curious what you think about that. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. I love this term pseudo belief. Um I'm gonna steal that. Uh that's great. Oh, cool. Actually that's that's but that's better than the other ones in the literature, I think. Just just thinking out loud. I mean I guess so as you said there's going to be this this sort of puzzle of of what distinguishes you know someone who's just let's say just lying. You know they know what they privately think and they're just saying that they believe something. And you know maybe they don't even feel bad about the the discrepancy because they're in a social context where it's not like anyone's gonna like hold them accountable. so what what distinguishes that kind of case from my understanding of what you said is in

the case of pseudo-beliefs, it's not quite that. It's not that someone is just deliberately misrepresenting what they think. There is a kind of psychological state there, um, which which is not just about um uh misrepresenting deliberately the state of one's own mind. And it does seem important to think that something like that is going on, not just because you know it often seems like people are sincere, because you might say, well, they could be faking that. But it does seem like in many of these contexts people are willing to act on these beliefs, at least in some ways, in some contexts. In some cases, they're willing to sort of incur costs as a consequence of acting upon them. Yeah. Um, and so th that that's why I think we need this sort of this construct, which

is not quite a ordinary world-modelling belief, and it's not quite a mere performance or deception. It's sort of something in between. Um is is is is that what you're meaning by by pseudo-belief, something that kind of exists in between those two things or no, I I think so So even if I do something that's really costly to to demonstrate that I believe something, that could still be part of the signal. Right. In order to convince you that I truly believe something, I have to incur a cost. It could be an honest signal. I mean, I that's the thing though. It's not an honest signal because I don't truly believe it. But I think that those kinds of signal signals can still be stable if they are if if what

I'm signaling to you uh is correlated with something that um uh is beneficial to you. So let's say I don't truly believe that the the spider god is is going to smite me if I steal from the group or whatever. Um, but my belief in that uh is correlated with my loyalty to the group. So in that case, deceiving you that I believe in the spider god, um, that is still going to benefit you, even though it's a deceptive signal. Because you're going to that's going to endear me to you. You're going to welcome me into the group, and and you'll be you'll be right to do so because I truly am more loyal. And so this the deceptive signal can survive uh because it is correlated with something else that makes the signaling system uh mutually beneficial.

So I that's another piece to this that I'm continuing to think about is that a lot of the times a lot of the time deceptive signals uh don't necessarily need to fall apart if if they're correlated with something else that's true that's valuable. But but do you not think that there is a psychological difference? I mean just just think of sort of two cases. You know if I uh you know let's say I'm a spy, you know, trying to infiltrate some ideological community. And as part of that, I really need to convince other people in that community that I hold their beliefs. So it's like a group of neo Nazis or something like that. Um you're right that you know I might need to like pay costs uh to to to credibly signal to

these other people in the community that that I hold the ideological convictions. But nevertheless, this is a case in which you know I'm I'm consciously aware of the fact that I don't that I don't really believe it. It's a kind of pretense, it's this kind of like active fiction which I'm maintaining. That seems very different from the psychology of someone who's actually in the community and is actually committed and loyal to the community. There, there seems to be a sense in which, even though I think these social incentives are playing an important role in regulating what they believe and and how they think about the world and the evidence that they seek out and so on, um It's not a self-conscious deception

in a way that it would be if I if I were. I'm thinking out loud here, but that seems like an distinction that we want to capture. Yeah, definitely. I think what's going on there is that the spy is aware that they don't believe the beliefs. Um but I think often in our quest to convince others that we believe our beliefs, we convince ourselves as well. And so often we put ourselves in a state where we um believe that we believe X, but we don't actually believe X, because we're so zealous about convincing others that we believe that we believe X. Or sorry, that that we're we're zealous about convincing others that we believe X. Um, that we that we convince ourselves as as part of that process. Um, I think that is what that is what what might be going on.

Um I don't know. Do you but I'm still this is obviously a very complicated topic. Uh um and you know I'm still kind of figuring it out. Um but yeah, what what do you think of of of that idea? So I I think that that's Dennett's idea about religion, that that in many of these cases you've got, as you say, you've got a kind of belief in belief. So it's like you don't believe it, but you sort of become convinced that you believe it. So there's this weird second order thing going on. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's that's that's one of the candidate explanations in this area, which really needs to be explored and tested. Just as I think the kind of Van Leuen picture also needs to be be tested, and the spurber

like Mercier one. This is what I mean when I say that there's something going on here, which I think lots of people are getting at in lots of different ways. And each of the different stories I think has their own kind of advantages, and there are certain kinds of puzzles they run into. And I think it's just gonna require more research to really definitively figure out what's going on. But I will add, I mean, I think another thing that really complic complicates this is in some cases, I think, you know, these pseudo-beliefs, let's call them, these things which we're forming for for social reasons, as part of that, we we bias how we we seek out and recall evidence, right? And as a consequence, we can end up becoming sincerely persuaded of that of that thing,

right? So I think this is a lot of what happens when it comes to um Advocacy biasing what people actually take to be the case. You know, if I said to you, look, you've got five minutes, I'm going to give you $1,000 if you can make an incredibly persuasive case that Obama was the best president in US history, right? Well, in that time, you're going to be searching through memory, recalling all of this information you have, which is in line with that conclusion. You're going to be thinking up good arguments and so on. And after that process, even though you're sort of self-consciously, you know that you're advocating for something, you end up with all of this evidence which is in line with this

conclusion, which can end up sincerely persuading you of that thing. And I think that's often what happens in these cases of uh internalizing our propaganda. It's not so much as like Trivers, Robert Trivers famously argued that we're sort of deceiving ourselves so that we can deceive others. That might be what's going on in some cases. But I think often in the process of trying to be a propagandist and advocate for something, we just end up almost accidentally becoming convinced of it because we're so biased in terms of the evidence and the arguments we recruit to argue for that for that case. So I think this is why in in in sort of um the case of lawyers, when they're that they know that they're being paid to advocate, let's say, for their client, or they know that it's

their job to argue that the accused is guilty. But I think there's some evidence that they actually end up becoming sincerely convinced in the direction that they're incentivized to advocate. And the reason for that is just that, or I think at least one potential reason for that, which complicates this whole discussion, is even though it like in the first instance they've got this this purely practical, non-epistemic motivation, because it's going to bias the evidence that they end up with, they're going to end up becoming sort of intuitively convinced of a certain kind of view in a way that wouldn't have happened unless they had that practical motivation. Apologies if that wasn't particularly clear.

That's me sort of thinking. No, no, that was that was perfectly clear. Um I I I get that story. I I still don't I don't quite buy it because it's kind of puzzling to me that if I have a strategic reason to convince you of X, um it's kind of puzzling to me that so that some part of the mind wouldn't recognize that and recognize that that uh my search for evidence is biased and take that into account when uh updating my actual beliefs. It seems like a well-designed system would uh when trying to convince others of X, uh recognize that fact and correct for that when updating its own internal beliefs. Or at least that's if if we're thinking like good ad adaptationists, I would expect there to be uh a design uh uh uh for for that end.

Um so that you know in the same way that if you're if you're trying to fight someone else, um you don't want to accidentally hit yourself. Um if you're trying to persuade and deceive others, you don't want to accidentally persuade and deceive yourself as part of that objective. Or at least so that's why I find it a bit implausible that we because it sounds like what you're saying is, you know, when we're we're we're we're trying to fight other people, we we sometimes hit ourselves and hurt ourselves accidentally uh it seems like we should be we should have evolved to avoid doing that as much as possible right can i can i actually push on this a little bit i mean just uh and and um but i think to be good adaptationists too we

have to include the what is the function of our own internalization of the belief and yes it might not be that it's just this propositional of what is true if the if the underlying design of the system is accept as a belief though uh when when there's a good argument available than uh if that's the underlying reason for it, right? So it's not that I'm I've punched myself, it's that the underlying structure is different than believe what's true, quote unquote. It's a much more operationalized thing of what's the logic for why I'm accepting a belief. And if the design of that system is when a good argument and a lot of evidence is provided uh represent that into quote unquote your beliefs, then you would

get that as part of the design. And you I mean we one would have to be functionalist about why that would be. It could be true, you know, but I but I think that would be I think that's the part to push on that doesn't make it punching yourself. Dan, yeah. Sorry. I get that. I get that. But but wouldn't a better design be believe X when there are good arguments and evidence unless you have strategic reasons to present one-sided arguments and evidence for X, in which case don't believe X, or at least discount it. That that would be a better design system than than the former system. Yeah. I think it's complicated. I mean I think somewhere in Hugo Mercier's book Not Born Yesterday, you you know, he pushes

back on that line of reasoning a little bit precisely for this sort of reason. Like if you actually come across a really good argument for something, even if your search has been biased by non-epistemic considerations, you're gonna take it into consideration. But I totally see the force of your point, David, which is that, well, you know, you should correct for the fact that the search is biased. Um so what what I'd say is I think you're right, there's a sort of maybe let's say like a prima facie um Adaptationist presumption against this being the case, maybe, although for the reasons we've talked about, it's complicated and I still don't know entirely what to think about that. But it could be that this is just a kind of clue-y aspect of the mind.

I think you have to be open to that. And then it could be as well that um, you know, as people like as people like Trivers have have argued, there is in addition some sort of like positive uh value that that can sometimes come from internalizing it. So even though it can come with costs, it comes with benefits, and that complicates it. Like, for example, if you do sincerely internalize it, you become a more effective advocate for the position, um, etc. So, yeah, I I I totally take take the point that if it it seems like you wouldn't expect this to be the case if you've got this kind of adaptationist assumption, which I think is a really important point. Um, But again, it's what it's one of those, it's one of those, I've been thinking about

this for a while now and I still I still don't know exactly what to think. Um because I think another thing that really complicates this is you know, my sense in so is that at least in some cases, people do kind of incur costs. Like it is somewhat maladaptive to internalize the views that they're advocating for, and yet they still do it. Um which makes me a little bit more receptive to the to the sort of this is a uh a klugy aspect of our psychology or a byproduct of other things or or something like that. Could it be that just argument is a service for coalitional entrepreneurship? So I mean just baked in intrinsically to a mental representation is if I've come up with a good argument um that's just sort of probabilistically this is

a a social item that's gonna be a coalitional um opportunity. It might not go, but I mean that would be one explanation for it is kluge, but it's sort of it's intrinsically social. Um yeah so the uh the idea there is that is that truly believing something serves a useful uh coalitional purpose and that it helps coordinate the group and and uh or around say a shared goal is is that the idea it's a more of a David Pinsoth idea which is that um if I have come up if I have arranged arguments yeah that uh that I think are good and I model that will convince other people um that that whenever that is tripped that I have that representation I have that I've come up with it or I have access to that that is part of the

um this is a status acquisition opportunity because there's such an interest in arguments as coordination devices um for social coordination. So this is a David Pins off idea. Um David. I think I understand what you're getting at. Uh let me see if I can repeat to you what I think you're getting at, which is that um there's one way to uh design a mind to believe things, which is just believe things that have the most evidence, uh, the best arguments, and if there are biases in in in the uh production of evidence and arguments, take that into account. Uh, and and that's like a one way to form beliefs. But another way to form beliefs is to think about what are the arguments and evidence that other people in your culture will find plausible and will be likely to be

uh convinced of. Yeah, that's that's a way of believe whatever your social and cultural group will likely join you in believing. Um regardless of whether it has good evidence or good arguments for it. And the argument there would be there are adaptive benefits to coordination. And often it is more important to coordinate with other members of your group than it is to coordinate with reality. So if you see a belief that um it has strong intuitive appeal to other members of your cultural group, believe that because that's going to help you coordinate with other members of your group and perhaps give you status for having come up with that belief uh, you know, as the originator of it. Is that is that basically what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it includes other things, but I think like the existence of logical fallacies and arguments and what those are are descriptions of exactly when th those exist. The existence of an ad hominem attack, the existence of uh appealing to common knowledge or to the group, um, I think exit it precisely exists because this happens all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I I believe something if there are social benefits to believing it or social costs for disbelieving it. Right. It's like what Bacon called like the idols of the tribe, right? Or like, you know, he had like these idols, right? Where it was sort of like Francis Bacon had, you know, what why do people believe why do scientists or philosophers at the time or natural philosophers hold the beliefs that they

hold? And he's like, it's stupid because like they're just going around like it's a status scheme, right? Or like it's because everybody believes it and they're just sort of like who's high status. And so there's this r beautiful like literature in the history of sort of people arguing for science above and beyond these status games, like logical fallacies, like Bacon's Idols of the Tribe or The Species or the Cave. I mean, there's like, you know, they're they're all different ones, but I think they all exist. They're they're a documentation informally of like the presence of this, of these adaptations, right? Yeah. It's almost like um an example is like um so I think Jordan Peterson is full of

shit, right? But I haven't done my own. We're not gonna uh we're not gonna edit that out. We're not gonna edit that out. Uh so but but like it's a totally unjustified belief. I haven't actually read the guy. I haven't like, you know, done my homework in terms of figuring out if he's actually like saying interesting or legitimate things or not. It's just kind of I know um Can I say can I say yeah can I say everybody should find somebody to marry them who thinks about them like Jordan Peterson thinks about himself. That's what I'll say about Jordan Peterson. Okay. Yeah. So like that get like it's so deeply uncool in our in my cultural social group to be into Jordan Peterson, right? Um and that uncoolness has sort of inf infected my my epistemology.

Like I I truly believe that he's he's full of shit, but I have no I don't think I have like legitimate reasons other than that I just feel that he's so deeply uncool uh in my in my group. Right. Um I think I think you're being I think you're being hard on yourself. Yeah I find that I find I think I think this is a case where you've got sufficient epistemic justification. I mean I'm assuming that you've you've read some things you've seen some things that he said. I'm assuming it's not one of those cases where like you've never come across any of his intellectual output. Um and you're probably seen like sure. I've maybe seen like one or two clips of his, but like that's not really sufficient evidence to judge an entire person's work and output.

You know, like that's that might not be a representative sample. Surely it was shaped by people's, you know, a desire to make him look bad. You know, take maybe it was taken out of context. Like, I don't know. I I really I feel like I don't have enough evidence to be confident one way or another, and yet I'm confident. I don't know. It's a weird schizophrenia in my in myself. Yeah. Just just really quickly on that. I mean, you might say you've got kind of higher order evidence, in as much as the people who you trust who think that. And often that's how we form beliefs. You know, even if you take it take away these sort of uh impression management concerns and status competition, You know, we we don't have first hand experience of of most of the

things that we form beliefs about. And so we just rely upon people that that we trust to be good information sources. And if you're in a I'm I'm not saying this is necessarily what's going on in your case. It could just be pure, you know, this guy's uncool within your kind of prestige economy, but but it could also be the case that, you know, you're surrounded by people that you think are smart and generally sort of thoughtful when it comes to evaluating whether people are intellectually worthwhile you trust those people. And I think those sorts of explanations are often quite difficult to tease apart. You know, the the case in which you form a belief for its social benefits because it's going to make you look good, because that's the kind of the socially enforced orthodoxy

within your reference network. Distinguishing that from cases in which, no, you are trying to get at the truth, but you're just forced to rely upon kind of the higher order evidence of what people in your social network take to be the case. Um, I think disentangling those two things is quite difficult in in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Dan, one question we've asked people and to sort of maybe move things in a slightly different direction, just for a little bit at least, is how did you get interested in this? Many people we've talked to have sort of had an origin story, either with taking an evolutionary approach, but then also sort of a reason for why they study what they study. And I'm imagining people sort of wondering you know, you're interested in belief and its

social strategic function, um, and you know, not to psychoanalyze you or yourself, but I mean, have you thought about sort of what when you're thinking about the these phenomena, is there do you either have like a life experience or was there something about, you know, you looked out in the world and you're like, this is weird or unjust or just strange? Like what what do you know? Do you have some notion of sort of why this particular thing and not study some something else? Hmm. Um so I mean I guess one part of that is why am I interested in the application of evolutionary ideas to psychology and behavior, which I think is quite um let's say unusual for a humanities academic. And and there, I mean, I mean who knows what the actual causes are, but the the kind of the

the boring story which strikes me as uh plausible is just that when I was a teenager, I read books by you know Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, a little bit later on, Dan Dennett. And since the the the minute I came across these ideas, the moment I came across these ideas, I just found them incredibly almost obviously compelling in a way that's never really been replicated in other areas of intellectual inquiry. Um, learning about evolution by natural selection, uh, just this sort of profound transformation in how I understood the world. And then also, more specifically, the idea that you know, applying uh uh evolutionary theory to understanding our minds and our behavior and our societies, that

that would be fruitful. Um, again, just struck me as obvious from the the moment I came across this. Um, but that was young. And then I went into sort of university and eventually did a PhD and went into academia in the humanities. And there's this strange thing where you know I assumed learning this stuff as a teenager, that this is just like what our you know, uncontroversial picture of what human beings um uh Alike, inasmuch as we're products of evolution by natural selection, and that fact is relevant understanding of behavior. I assume that was just the kind of consensus view among all smart people for the most part, with some exceptions here and there. And then when I went into academia as someone in the humanities, I mean you'll both know

this very well, it was this shock to me that evolutionary psychology, even understood in a really broad sense, is incredibly stigmatized. People are actively hostile to it, which I found just baffling and continue to find uh really baffling. Um, and so so that's sort of the origin story of how I got into evolutionary psychology in a way that I think is kind of unusual for a humanities academic. I just came across these ideas really early on, and before I could have been up indoctrinated, I think, by the kind of you know humanities style view of evolutionary psychology. Um and then in terms of my like specific research interests, I don't know. I feel like the the truth there is just really boring and mundane, which is that certain

things I found interesting. I read certain people, I found their arguments persuasive. Yeah. Um and also, you know, yeah, yeah With within academia, it's this you know, sort of status game to come up with kind of interesting and engaging ideas. And so you you try to find those aspects of the literature that you think are most promising for generating new ideas, and especially if you've got a kind of rich theoretical framework that you can use to generate a few different ideas. Um, and and again, in that context, I've found you know, kind of evolutionary cognitive science, social science in the broadest possible sense of those terms, just incredibly fruitful. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the story. Yeah, no, thanks.

That's great. And I mean, I think one of the other things that people might be listening, especially people who aren't familiar with your work, you know, we've talked about evolution not being just so story, and we have talked about examples of taking an approach and generating, have an idea of like the underlying function of this phenomenon is X, that makes additional predictions. We can test that. Um, do you have an example of when you talk about this to people or of your work where that functionalist approach that's saying that the underlying function of this weird thing is this other thing? And when we think about that and understand that, um, it makes predictions or gives us insight. Do you have an example of that for people who might not know your work that well?

So I think what we've been talking about in terms of um you know motivated reasoning, what gets called self-deception and so on, with with within philosophy, um philosophy of mind, there's still this, I think, quite strong commitment to the, you know, you can't handle the truth model of Of these sorts of beliefs, that we believe things that we want to be true, that protect our self-esteem, that help us regulate our emotions and so on. And, you know, I've been pushing for a long time, you know, this is not really original, this is drawing on the work of, you know, David and Robert Trivers and Robert Wright and Richard Alexander and so on. Firstly, the idea that, as we've already talked about, that's just very implausible from an

evolutionary perspective. And that I think should count against it. It doesn't rule it out definitively, um, because we do do things to regulate our emotions and sort of hedonic self-manipulation and so on. But at the very least, in terms of thinking about things in a careful, sort of rigorous way, theoretically, it's sort of mark against it, in as much as this is very bizarre as a view from an evolutionary perspective. But then also if you take a a kind of a a a a goal which makes a lot more evolutionary sense, as we've been talking about something like advocacy or propaganda, where the goal is not to adjust your own psychological state, but to influence other agents and their mental states in advantageous ways.

I think if you then understand lots of these biased beliefs as being wrapped up with these motivations towards advocacy, that can then not only does it have this sort of evolutionary plausibility, I think it explains a whole suite of patterns that we see that you don't get from the I can't handle the truth model of self-deception. Um, one of them, and you've written about this, I can't remember exactly where, David, but but it's the fact that you know often we we're biased to believe things that we don't want to be true in a way that's very confusing. If you've got this, you know, you can't handle the truth model of self-deception, like believing that there are witches engaging in these like audiastic gatherings, you know,

under cover of night against the community. That's not something people believe for reasons of emotional comfort. Um, believing in hell, you know, it's not the kind of thing people believe, so it makes them feel good about the world. Believing that the rival group is this incredibly threatening, malevolent force, it's not gonna, you know, make you sleep better at night. These are often quite distressing beliefs. Yeah. But in each of those cases, they serve these sort of propagandistic purposes, right? If you can demonize someone as a witch, you send a signal about your intentions towards them, you you you denigrate their reputation. If you can portray a rival group as being incredibly threatening and dangerous, well,

that's useful propaganda. So it makes sense that we'll be biased towards those kinds of beliefs, even if it's not something that would like to be true. And I also think it explains why we sort of touched on this a little bit already, but why when it comes to sort of motivated cognition, these cases where our practical motivations bias our beliefs, there seems to be this sort of rationalization constraint where, you know, generally we're only going to internalize something in as much as we can find sort of epistemic justifications for it, if we can find evidence and arguments that that that uh are consistent with that with that idea, even if they're not good, judge objectively. And again, I think that kind of makes sense on a sort of propagandistic, you know, uh uh

rationale. Um, if the goal of these beliefs is to be spread and to persuade and to propagandise, then it makes sense that you would try to recruit selectively evidence and arguments in favor of them. Whereas if the goal is merely to indulge in this sort of you know masturbatory wishful thinking, it's very unclear why you would need to recruit these these forms of evidence and arguments. So off the top of my head, I mean that that sort of those arguments in different places have been made before, but I think it's a really clear case where um, you know, taking a kind of evolutionary perspective that says, look, here's this striking thing about human psychology, let's try to explain it in terms of the goals that would actually make sense

from an evolutionary perspective, including the perspective of what are the actual selection pressures that we confronted ancestrally, which had to do with playing these complex social games. So start with that as your kind of your guiding set of priors. And then building on that, show how it illuminates many aspects of this phenomenon that would otherwise be be quite puzzling. That's something that sort of jumps to mind as a really good case. Um where I think, you know, taking this broad evolutionary perspective really helps to eliminate something which is sort of central to the human condition and I think widely misunderstood by people who don't bother with the evolutionary perspective at all.

Yeah. For and you know, when you think about beliefs, right, you know, I think we've talked, David and I have talked a bit about cynical approaches to ourselves. And in some sense, it's sort of humbling because it applies to ourselves, right? And it's sort of being like, well, what am I? What do I believe? And you know, I think all of us who take an evolutionary approach as professionals, I mean, to varying degrees, we sort of have our work hat and life hat. But I'm wondering, like, for you, and I'm sort of for for people listening, and and David, this question is for you too, because I think you you guys both are sort of the world um experts on this. Um, When you're thinking about social biases or propagandistic biases, or even if we get

rid of the word bias, and just say, like, you know, the reason why we do these things is for these reasons. Um, do you find yourself like in a day-to-day way, sort of like, is it helpful? Like I think some people might think it's sort of oppressive and cynical. Do you actually find it liberating or a nice check on sort of just double checking your assumptions? Like David is gonna go and read two hours worth of Jordan Peterson after this, I'm sure. Um you know, like that kind of like, you know, are there for people listening who might just think it's all cynical and and sort of you're just trying to say people are stupid? Like what I'm not saying you're saying that, or either of you, you know, and I I know you

guys both are very explicit about the opposite point. Um, but yeah, do you know what I'm getting at? Like, do you how do you think about, you know what's the what tools does this give you in your day-to-day existence that people might want to pick up? Yeah, I mean I'd really interested in in David's view on this as well, because obviously it's something he's he's thought a massive amount uh about. So I guess there's a question of um what do we gain from this sort of perspective on belief specifically, and then what might we gain from a sort of more cynical view of human motivation in general? Um What I would say is, I mean, this is a framework for thinking about our psychology and our behavior that is, you know, part of a the the scientific project.

So, you know, it needn't be the case that the things we learn in science would benefit us in the ordinary interactions we're we're having with each other. There's no a priori reason why why that should be the case. Um, and it's not obvious to me that that you know, you do kind of benefit from having these sorts of like understanding of the the the deeper causes of your beliefs and and and the way in which you think and reason in terms of just ordinary social life. You know, if I think about like would would my mum benefit from having uh uh an understanding of socially adaptive beliefs? Almost certainly not. I don't think she'd like positively benefit in her practical life. It might even be disadvantageous in various ways.

But in the scientific project, we're trying to understand the way that the world really is. And that's important because sometimes it really matters to understand the way that the world really is. And this is something maybe, maybe we can get into. But you know, the reason I think it's important is when it comes to stepping back and thinking about society, thinking about social organization, thinking about the kinds of political projects that are likely to work, thinking more reflectively about the human condition. Those are cases in which I think it's really important to have an accurate understanding of what's going on. And that's where I would place the value of this kind of perspective. It might have value in terms of making us more reflective about our own biases and so on,

but um, I think that's a slightly more complex case. And I, you know, I wouldn't assume that there there must be a practical value in knowing the truth, given that the whole point is actually we often advance our interests by not following the truth in a disinterested way. So that's the first thing that comes to mind. But I'm interested in your views, David, as well. Yeah, that was really well put, Dan. Um I agree with 100% of it. Um, and I'm inclined to say um the exact same things. Um yeah, I I I love the point that we shouldn't automatically assume that knowledge of the truth is going to be personally advantageous to us, especially if concealing the truth is often advantageous to us, as as we've been talking about pretty much this whole time.

Um so yeah, has it been advantageous to me? Um I don't know that it has like leaked into my personal life enough for me to really say because I there are sort of two hats you can put on. You can put on your scientist hat, your philosopher hat and think about the human condition on an abstract level, and then you can just do your day day-to-day chores and live your day-to-day life and you know uh do the dishes or whatever and and um and and and then and that part of your brain is just turned off. Um so I don't know that it has affected my day-to-day life that much. Occasionally it like it gives me more insight into why people do things. Um, it helps me avoid bullshit, I think, better uh and and to better understand where it

comes from and and how to avoid it. Um one thing I've noticed is that it makes me less surprised by things happening in the world, I think that's often a good way of checking whether your world model is accurate, is that if you're less surprised by things, because that that's a sign that your that your predictions are are uh are coming true a lot and you have good you have a good predictive model. If you're constantly surprised and taken aback by everything, that's a sign that you have a pretty crappy predictive model of how the world works. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're like a baby. Um so I f you know, I with with the political chaos surrounding uh the Trump stuff recently, you know, uh with the the uh the whipsawing between different views on the

tariffs and different justifications that that the Republicans are are launching into. Like first the tariffs are are uh are great and you know, you don't have to worry about prices increasing. We should well consumerism is really just uh a bad thing, you know. These these crazy about faces that we're seeing um politically right now, people have come to me like, Wow, I can't believe this is happening. Like, isn't this such amazing evidence for alliance theory? I'm like, Oh yeah, I I I barely noticed it on it. Like it it it didn't surprise me at all. Like it just kind of w was part of the background radiation of my life because I it was just so expected to me that that that these kinds of propagandistic responses would uh

would pop up. Uh and um so maybe that's a bad thing. Like maybe I should be more surprised by this. Um and you know maybe you know maybe that surprises doing something for people and like motivating them to uh engage in more political activism. I don't know. Um but that's one way in which it has affected me. Um yeah there's lots more to say on this topic. I don't know that I've said everything, but that's yeah that's what comes to the top of my head. Yeah. Yeah. And a real related question is sort of how, and Dan, this is more for you because you're the guest, but I am also interested in what David has to say, is how do people react to this, whether professionally, um, the people that you're you know arguing with um

professionally or also just sort of day-to-day, um, you know, because you're telling them something that we're talking about is sort of intrinsically revealing, it's pulling the curtain back on on our on on us. And you know, as we've already talked about and alluded to, there there's probably good reasons uh for our evolved psychology to not like that revelation. So and again, you're kind of working you're basically on this theory, the science of doing this should be sort of aversive to people. Is that uh is that prediction borne out? Or are there enough people, maybe at least in your professional day-to-day, you know, that that they sort of they've trained themselves enough to sort of appreciate what you're

doing? How what's the temperature on the street in terms of the reception to the work? Um I don't know. It's good good question. Um I think that um so you know my view is everyone is biased um when it comes to thinking about the world for for you know many of the reasons that we've talked about and um for me that's a kind of insight of modern science and um i mean that sounds like grandiose like but but I think on a certain interpretation of what it is to be biased um I think we we've got enough evidence now that scientists should sign on to that being the case. And yeah, there are whole parts of the sciences where if you suggest the possibility that like research might be subject to certain kinds of biases, there's this explosive reaction.

So we haven't really talked about this today, but one of the areas I'm kind of interested in as a philosopher of science is modern misinformation research, where people try to study the nature, the causes, the sort of prevalence, the consequences of something called misinformation, and also things like disinformation and so on. And that's interesting because I think it kind of exists at two levels. You know, at one level there's the question of what we've been talking about, which is why do people believe what they believe, and why do people sometimes believe false things and things that aren't supported by the evidence? But you can also ask those questions about the people who are studying misinformation.

Um and so I've pointed out various ways in which I think this field is often kind of biased in terms of the examples of misinformation it focuses on, how it focuses on the topic. And you know, there's been a pretty um negative reaction to some of that among people within that field. And I think that generalizes more broadly, I think lots of people in the social sciences, even though they're happy to um uh when they're describing, you know, the Hoi Paloi, the great unwash, the kind of ordinary people, to point at these various biases that sort of corrupt their cognitive processes and interfere with how they view the world. If there's the suggestion that they as researchers might also be human beings who are

subject to these sorts of biases, there's often this incredibly kind of explosive reaction. So that's maybe one area where it has resulted in backlash. Um but I think there are also just people who um for whatever reason find these ideas interesting and um compelling. And and after all, like within the the social sciences, within intellectual inquiry, we are ostensibly playing this status game where we care about the truth and we care about you know what's supported by evidence and arguments. And like within that context I think it can often be you know quite alluring to come across these sorts of ideas which will better help illuminate certain kinds of phenomena. So those are the things kind of kind of that immediately jump jump to mind.

But I mean you've you both also, I guess, must have encountered similar things. David, because you're an outright self-described cynic, and Dave because you're an evolutionary psychologist, which people often think of as as being cynical. So I'd be interested what what you two think as well. Yeah. For me, I think um the fact that I almost kind of play a character on everything is bullshit. I think that gives me some cover that like people know that it's kind of tongue in cheek and they and I and I get less backlash because of that. So I I found that that's a pretty good strategy uh in terms of avoiding backlash, just to sort of be playful about it. Um and and try to you know find the humor in it.

I think that uh has been very helpful for me in sort of helping the medicine of this message go down. Um but um and also just writing versus saying it out loud is often helpful. Like if I say some of these things out loud, I often you know get you know dirty looks or whatever. But if I write them, you know, it's it's all of a sudden a different medium and I don't have to deal with people's facial expressions because I don't see them. Um yeah, I don't know. Um I mean, certainly, I mean, uh, you know, hostility against evolutionary approaches is is ubiquitous. It's had it's certainly gotten better in the past few decades, but it's still there. Um and uh and you know the hostility against evolution, hostility against cynicism, and

when you combine them, you get double hostility. Um but um I don't know, par part of me kinda likes it though, like if if if everyone perfectly agrees with everything I say and and there's no disagreement and I'm not like challenging anything like it's just boring. So part of me kinda likes the thrill of of pushing back against the conventional wisdom. So you know, it's it's a it's a mixed bag, I'd say. don't know. What do you think, Dave? I I think I like that last part. And I think, you know, I I often I talk about this story of like, you know, I one of my good friends at the Mox Plunk when I first met him, he's like, I hate evolutionary psychology. And I was like, great. I sat down eagerly and was like, I pulled up a chair for him and I was like, tell me why

you hate it. You know, because like I thought I hated it when I first encountered it too. And and and like it turns out that he he hated what I hated. And actually we agreed essentially. Like he had a misrepresentation. Um, and so for me, I sort of I maybe it's sort of like David's not surprised, where it's so much in the water. The default is it's gonna be misunderstood. Um, and so for me, it's sort of like I'm an anthropologist of sort of like, oh, do I understand this particular instance of the misunderstanding? And it's not that I'm sort of like um uh trying to convert everybody, but it's just sort of like trying to map, like, you know, like, does this person have a good faith effort trying to understand something and they're

misinformed? Is it just that it's a status game and they just don't like the people. Do they have a good reason for that or not? You know, and that informs sort of like, do I try? Um, but for me, I just sort of view it as an interesting scientific enterprise, but I still do get like worked up. Um, although, as like we had a Deb Lieberman on, and she said, you know, as you get older and not everything is life or death, not every paper that's get rejected, you know, the beginning when you're a grad student and you're like, you think, okay, I have a really good argument. You know, it still hurts to get a paper rejected, you know. Like I know David and I just had, you know, we both had like really big important papers

that we think are really important, get rejected for I think really dumb reasons. That always hurts no matter what your approach is. And so, you know, I think that always hurts. But, you know, as each one is less important than I think, you know, I just sort of it's just again, as David said, it's just sort of part of the expectation for me at least. Yeah. For the misinformation one, Dan, Do you think that it's because people think you are have an agenda? Um, and that like, you know, what do you have you thought about sort of why people are pushing back against it? Maybe I do have an agenda. I mean, maybe there is a set of motivations which I'm not motivated to acknowledge. Um it's it's complicated.

I mean, a lot of it is it's yeah, I mean, that's such a complicated sort of can of worms to open. Um I mean, just just to focus on one part of it psychology and the social sciences overwhelmingly skewed towards the left, um, sort of liberal left politics. And um, you know, I think your your prior should be that if you've got an entire field where people share political allegiances, that's going to influence the ways in which they seek out, interpret, evaluate, process information and so on, conduct studies, operationalize things, how they measure things, etc. And then I think that should be your prior based on general models of human psychology. And then I think when you look at misinformation research, um just as you look at many

aspects of the modern social sciences where they're studying sort of politically relevant things, I think you find lots of cases where these sorts of, you know, progressive ideas, values, partisan allegiances influence the kind of research that they're doing. And, you know, there's this sort of familiar set of coalitional dynamics where if you point that out, the inference people are going to draw on is you're not on the right team. Um so there there was an article in a uh Time magazine published recently um which links one of my my articles as an example of someone defending the authoritarian agenda, i.e., defending um Donald Trump and MAGA and so on and his attacks on institutions, which, you know, for anyone who knows anything about my political views, I

find absolutely absurd. It's not at all a political coalition that I've got any sympathy for. Um, but but nevertheless, the idea is if you're criticizing, or or at least if you're even just pointing out that there is a kind of liberal bias in this research in such a heated, polarized political context, then familiar coalitional dynamics are going to kick in and it's going to be well, like you're either with us or you're against us, right? If you're criticizing us in this way, you must be trying to support the other team. Right, right. And I think that makes sense in the context of ordinary kind of partisan debate. I think it's unfortunate that even there for various reasons. But I think it's so destructive to science because science, you know, its esteem within

society, which I think is, you know, deserved for the most part, is wrapped up with the fact that it's our best way of escaping these kinds of partisan biases. We try to institutionalize various procedures and we try to enforce various sorts of norms, which are gonna enable us to overcome these sorts of familiar forms of coalitional politics to try to get at the truth. And I think it's a real big problem for science, both in terms of its capacity to generate knowledge, but also in terms of its public reputation, if it's seen as being subject to the same forces that that apply when it comes to ordinary partisan politics. Um I've forgotten what the question is now, but that that's one case. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just no, it was like sort of why or what yeah, why people do push put push back against it. And I mean, just to sort of follow up on that, I think like um if you're c if you're saying that like misinformation research is skewing in a particular way, one inference is like, well, you're for the other side. It's interesting that the the inference isn't, well, what are the ways in which our values we're not living up to? Right. Like, I mean, it would be nice if that was sort of the way people approach things. I mean, for reasons like David's studies, that that's typically not. It's rare, but I mean, you know, I think that would be the ideal, would be to sort of say, you know, if we really think if we really do hold these values, what would we predict

in pointing out ways in which we're um we're not being consistent as David has documented? Well, it's sort of uh it's being coalitional. I think that's a good adjective, right? Is to sort of, and this is for me actually, for me, this is actually gets back to this question of like what what do I use my work for? And I often check myself just being, am I being coalitional about this? Right. Like it feels good to sort of defend my side, but then I'm like, but is this a situation where I'm taking sides as opposed to taking a principle? Right. And there's many times throughout, especially like if I look on social media or these things that are not just sort of dispassionate, like quote unquote boring scientific

issues, but these charged issues, they're very coalitional, of course. That's why they're charged. Um, that's where I often find myself sort of checking myself. And I do this thing of like, I almost flip the coalitional side where it's like, you know, if if the other political party that I support said this, what would I think? You know, or if it's something my political party says, I flip it into like try to simulate as best I can. If this was coming from the other side, what would I think? I think like that's a useful heuristic. Um, and so it's not surprising that when you're presenting something that is you're saying it's skewed, that there's a concern. I mean, you would predict it, right?

That there's a concern about like whose side are you on and what's your agenda. But it's but it's interesting that that it plays out that way. I'm curious, Dan. I feel like one stop on this train of examining our biases is uh a kind of epistemic nihilism. Uh and I don't mean epistemic nihilism in the sense that truth is impossible to achieve. Um, I don't mean epistemic nihilism in in that you know there aren't institutions that can more or less reliably produce true information. I mean epistemic nihilism in the sense that me personally, I, David Pinsov, have no hope of knowing what's true. Right. I I can wrap my head around the idea that as a society, if there are cultural evolutionary processes or incentives, that that will societally push us toward true beliefs, or maybe

it'll push the institution of science toward true beliefs. I can get behind that. But everything we know about our own psychology and our epistemology suggests that truth, if it exists, is an emergent phenomenon. It emerges from uh cooperative groups and institutions that are well designed. It is not a product of any individual human. No individual human is likely to have all the answers. Most individual humans have their own biases, their own agendas, their own uh limitations. Um so when I reflect on that, the ultimate conclusion is that me, I, David Pinsoff, have no hope of achieving the thing that I want most, which is to know what's true. And that to me is really distressing. Um what do you think about that?

Has that occurred to you? Uh how do you how do you deal with that? Soothe me. Yeah. I I can't soothe you, unfortunately. It's a great question. Watch some Jordan Peterson, David. Yeah, maybe he'll he's the answer to the robot. He'll disabuse you of this uh humility. Jordan Pearson knows what's true, yeah. Yeah, I I've yeah, I've I've written a few pieces sort of grappling with that, and I don't have a particularly satisfactory answer. Although interestingly, I'm not I'm not really bothered by it in the way that you seem to be bothered by it. So I think if I if I step back, I think yeah, I'm I'm biased in ways that you know some ways I'm probably uh vaguely aware of and some ways I'm less aware of.

Um and it's almost certainly true that I've got a very selective and partial picture of the world and I'm fallible in all these different ways. So I do think a certain kind of skepticism is correct. You know, I do think we tend to be absurdly overconfident about our capacity to know the world, especially when it comes to these sort of heated social and political um phenomena. Um and I I think that's just that's just true. I think it's something you have to sort of face up to. In a way, the fact that you're facing up to it, I think, is a, you know, it's a it's a good signal of the fact that you're more reflective about these sorts of things than the average person. And you know, one maybe small area where I disagree is you said that sort of knowledge is a

is a consequence of not sort of individual level cognition, but these broader norms and institutions. And I think that's exactly right. But but I'll just add that I do think there are individual differences in in cognition. Often I think they're downstream of the social norms that get enforced in particular communities. Like if you're in a community where it's expected of you that you're going to provide evidence and arguments, at least of some kind, when you state a view, it's expected of you that you're going to acknowledge uncertainty if you want to win a good reputation and so on. You know, you're gonna end up with a I think more accurate understanding of topics than somebody who belongs to a community where those sorts of norms aren't enforced.

So even though I think you're right that the the social is kind of primary, given that you inhabit a certain kind of social and institutional context, I think it can have sort of consequences in terms of your individual cognition. Um, but but but but I agree with the the basic point, which is yeah, if if you step back and you reflect on your epistemic situation to use the kind of pretentious philosophical term, but your you know your situation with respect to your ability to acquire knowledge about the world, you should embrace a kind of skepticism. Um, but you know what are you going to do with that? Um, you have to participate in this game of life, right? You have to make the best case you can in accordance with the the norms that that are in

your environment, uh, for the kinds of views that you take to be true. You have to try to live up to the ideals that that are going to be relevant to seeming like a good member of your epistemic community, and so on. Um, and I think you can do those things even as you acknowledge that you're biased and probably wrong in various respects, and you don't exactly know what respects they're going to be. I mean, certainly when I write a blog post, I mean, I could write a 50,000-word blog post, you know, adding all these qualifications about how I'm not, you know, maybe I'm biased here, you know. Of course, all of these different ways, I think, what I'm arguing for is going to be a selective and somewhat biased understanding of the world that I'm trying to present, But it

doesn't really have much value in terms of injecting that into the conversation in many cases. You just sort of do your best in a relatively humble way to argue for certain kinds of viewpoints and see what the response is. That's not a very satisfying response to your question, but that's I guess currently how I'm thinking of things. Yeah, no, I I like that response. Um just remembering, I mean, you you had a wonderful, wonderful uh post uh called uh the everyone is biased bias about how it's it's possible to take these ideas about human bias too far, uh to a point where you're uh flattening human variation as you put it. Um it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that human variation is large and significant

and important and that there are pretty large differences in epistemic character, differences in moral character, and um those differences matter and we should attend to them. And I think it's it's easy to lose sight of that when your focus is on human nature. It's easy to forget about human variation. Um, just because that's just not the thing that you're focusing. You're thinking about the stuff that we all share as humans. You necessarily will uh forget about the stuff that you know differs between people when you embark on that project. Um so I thought that was that was a really uh beautiful point. Uh and so I guess I can comfort myself with the knowledge that maybe, maybe I'm one of the better humans epistemically, and maybe, maybe I'm in one of the better cultures, which uh

unfortunately sounds just as self serving. Well, or or maybe, maybe David, the the you're you're trying to be less uh you're doing you're in the path dependency that as we all are. You're just sort of like, What what looks to be the best? What looks better? What's what's less wrong? Right. Um That's true. Yeah. Taking the the you know the the marginal perspective and the relative looking at things uh relative to their alternatives rather rather than relative to perfection. Yeah. Is also a healthy way of looking at things. Yeah. At the risk of poking the mindfield, I do want to turn back one more time to the disinformation concern though, too. And this is again sort of for both of you, is uh Dan, I was reflecting on what you had said

earlier in you talking about why people, people sort of thinking you might have an agenda for for pointing the these this thing out about the disinformation literature. Um the the idea that and you even mentioned some people did use what you said to argue for something you weren't espousing, um, right? Like that that people sort of picked up on it to s to make other uh to make arguments like this is an example of like support for these ideas that you don't hold, right? Um incorrectly. Uh that that was that that was the accusation that that I was uh publishing these works, defending. I don't know. I can't I mean no no evidence was provided. I mean, in a way, it's absurd the idea that you know you know Trump would be or anyone

that's sort of in a faction would be looking at you know the obscure substack posts of an editing philosophy. Um so but I'm wondering, like, is that is that sort of like just to look at it as a scientific perspective, like do you think that that's do you think that's like the the rational concern, right? Is that um like if we're just scientists about this phenomenon, that like their evolved psychology is concerned that is like, what does this afford me in my interests, right? In and it could this be used against us, right? Like I did you think that that's um I mean, in some sense, that's almost, you know, the the the idea that at least, you know, you or David are sort of, you know, it's that there's a social, it's really being looked at in this social coalitional instrument

instrumental way. Yeah, I'd I'd be really interested to hear what you two think about this as well, because I've been I've been thinking about this a lot recently, this idea of um objecting to a claim or an argument not on its merits, but on the basis that it might be weaponized in a in a way that people object to. Right. So which is a very common thing. You know, so at the moment that there are these, you know, in in the in the US, these attacks from uh the Trump administration on these uh elite universities like like Harvard. And you know, there are some people who have come out, or they've said this in the past, um, with arguments to the effect that look there are real problems with these institutions.

Um, they do have certain kinds of political biases, um, there is certain forms of groupthink, etc., these sorts of arguments. And and one response to those arguments is to say, here's why they're wrong, right? Another response to those arguments is to say those criticisms of these institutions are being weaponized by this administration, which is engaging in these sorts of bad behaviors. And that's a reason not to make those arguments. Like I've seen loads of that. Stephen Pinker recently published an article in the New York Times and um where he sort of says, look, there are real problems with Harvard. He sort of talks about things that he's mentioned in the past. But nevertheless, he explicitly says he thinks what the Trump administration is doing is

really bad. And lots of the criticisms I saw were it's like, well, you're kind of responsible for, or at least you've played a role in defending, or your arguments have been instrumentalized for this bad thing. Ergo, you know, that's something that you should be held accountable for. And, you know, I guess what you can say is if you step back, there is at least something to the idea that when you advance claims or arguments, you know, you probably should be, at least in some contexts, sensitive to the possibility that they're going to get weaponized in nefarious ways. In some contexts it would be reasonable to hold you accountable to that. Like if if if you set up a social media account and all it is is videos of like racial

minorities committing crimes. Right. Even if every video is real, I think it would be reasonable to say you haven't gotted every eye on that line of inferences, but yeah, we know what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um so I think in some context it's reasonable, but I also think the norm that says you shouldn't assert something that you take to be true or you shouldn't make an argument, lest it be used by the wrong side, lest it be uh instrumentalized in a nefarious way by people that you might disagree with and you might explicitly disagree with, is so corrosive in general to knowledge generation, to the pursuit of truth. It's such a recipe for groupthink. If whenever somebody criticizes your group, you can say you're just defending

or supporting the other side. So I think it's I don't quite know what to think about it because I think if you really steel man these these arguments about weaponization, you can think of cases where they might have a point. But as a general norm, this idea that you should be able to criticize a claim or an argument not on its merits, but merely because you think it might be instrumentalized by the other side, seems to me it's like totally corrosive to the pursuit of truth and and the sorts of norms and procedures that we should care about in truth seeking institutions. That's my current thought, but I'll be interested what you two think about. I mean, just as a quick follow-up, I mean, do you think because I uh this sounds also very

familiar in terms of like a conversation, right? Where like a lot of times a claim is made and what is implied, you know, is is it's almost it's it comes back to this thing of like inferences. There's a lot of inferences, but but based on any one thing we say, you know, like we still don't have an AI system that if you just if it actually represents a statement is like actually percolates all the correct inferences. It doesn't have the semantic common sense knowledge to to draw these inferences. And so in a conversation, if I say something often, so like Dan, you might be like, Well, did you mean this or this? And I'll be like, No, no, no, no, I don't actually agree with this thing. I'm just pointing out this other problem.

And I wonder sometimes if like what you're describing is sort of the scaled up version of what ordinarily for our Valve psychology would be the right thing to do, which is sort of it's sort of like a conversation of like, okay, Dan, I hear you that I'm just gonna take the other side, the, the, the, the devil's advocate side of sort of, I hear you that, you know, there is there there is a objective skew in terms of like representation politically. Um, But you know, there's there's a concern that the this could be used for other other reasons that that are not advancing science at all. Are you are you backing that or are you making a point that advances science? And to the extent that, you know, the representation that should advance science, which m

which I might even disagree with, is that the thing? Like, is your North Star science, or is it this other status game? in an interpersonal conversation, we can do that really quick. Um, and I sometimes wonder if things like social media or things where we can have a conversation back and forth, it perpetuates a thing where you you sort of feel like you're a bad guy because they don't understand where you're coming from and they haven't understood where you're coming from. And you may not understand that maybe this is some of their people, some people's motivation, and maybe some people's not. You know, I mean, we all know that there are people, even within our community, that they're like science, my personal status, like hold my beer.

I'm gonna go with personal status, right? Like the people who are sort of trolls and like sort of advance their status on the backs of a correct understanding of even what we do. And we're like that, you know, we all know, like, we're like, oh, we hate those people, or like well, we like them interpersonally, but wish they wouldn't do that. Um and so I just, yeah, so that's my long-winded way of saying, like, I wonder sometimes if this is almost an example of almost a mismatch in terms of the communicative back and forth that in under more maybe sort of ecologically valid, sort of Grician, uh communicative, pragmatic ways would sort of quickly eliminate, like, what is your status game? You know, I think a lot of communication is sort of like figuring out like what's what's

your game here, buddy? Right. And then it's sort of like, are you cool? I'm cool. You're cool. You know, like that's kind of what I did with the person who was like, I hate Ep Psych. I was like, okay, what's your game? You know, are you actually interested in what's true? Or are you just like interested in like shooting down something and making yourself feel better? And then the second that we both realized that we were both interested in just like a good faith effort, then we were cool. And it was like, you know, so I just I wonder sometimes if that's what goes on. Yeah, um I I think it's probably a large part of it. Um, but I think in these cases that I'm thinking of here, there's also this fact that it

occurs in a highly polarized partisan conflict. Um and I I think you're right, you know, when you when you communicate anything, people are going to draw inferences about your motivations. Um and and for for me then the question should be, you know, what are the norms that we want in institutions like universities? What are going to be conducive to those universities performing their function? And I take the the sort of T los, the function of universities to be basically kind of epistemic, like to produce knowledge, understanding, truth and so on. And I think, and even when it comes to mainstream media, I think similarly, they also have kind of epistemic functions. And I think you know, you that there should be a strong presumption against

criticizing claims or arguments, not based on the kind of merits of those claims or arguments, but because they might be used as ammunition by another political faction. It seems to me that's first of all, um I think there are going to be such strong motivations to uh uh criticize claims and arguments for mundane partisan reasons which should be frowned upon within the context of science um and mainstream media and and these other sort of epistemic institutions. And secondly, it just strikes me as a kind of recipe for groupthink and institutional decay. If people can't criticize these institutions without that being criticized because it might give ammunition to the wrong side in a political conflict, that seems like it's not going

to be good for those institutions in terms of their function of seeking knowledge and so on. So I haven't fully thought things through. That's my kind of current intuition about these these cases, but but yeah. Yeah. It's it seems to me like what you're saying, Dan, is that the argument that we shouldn't promote ideas that can be weaponized, um, is itself a good argument. It's it's just that when you apply it to itself, it destroys itself. So the idea that um we shouldn't promote i ideas that can be weaponized, uh can itself be weaponized. And that when we should uh count on it to be weaponized because we're coalitional primates who have agendas, and if uh you know if we can defend our coalitions by criticizing any

idea that could be conceivably construed as a as a weapon, then we can just dismiss anything that that challenges our coalitional narratives. Uh it's just it it's it's an unsustainable norm. Uh that it can be exploited in the same way that um allowing anyone to censor speech uh can be exploited by bad actors who will inevitably censor ideas that interfere with with their agendas. Um this idea that um we we should only promote ideas that have good consequences and avoid bad consequences or or that cannot be weaponized, like that itself can be weaponized and can be exploited by by bad actors to protect cherished narratives. So I think it's another example of how cynicism can be a good thing. When you start thinking uh at a broader level of what kinds of norms are sustainable

given our cynical motives, given that we can count on you coalitional primates like us to abuse and exploit the power to censor or the power to dismiss ideas on the basis of their consequences. Given that we know this about us, what are what are the best norms that are sustainable and that are conducive to producing knowledge and truth? And as soon as we abandon this cynicism or apply it selectively to our rivals but not ourselves, then we get into a bad place. And so this is one area where I think cynicism can be a good thing when thinking about the broader social incentives and institutions and norms that we're designing. Yeah, great, great point. Can completely agree with that. And actually it sort of as you say gets back to this issue of when can a sort of

sensitivity to the ways in which cognition can be biased, when can that be helpful? Well, when we are ostensibly constructing communities and institutions, the function of which is to generate knowledge, that's a specific context in which actually it's very useful to identify those cases in which certain kinds of motivations can bias how people think and reason about the world, so that we can flag them and then construct norms and institutional procedures which are designed either to sort of harness them in ways which generate collective knowledge, like pitting people's biases against each other, or that flag them so that you can develop norms that then sort of penalize them. And I think also that's that's important because when we're talking about the sort of

practical advantages of you know socially motivated cognition and belief and so on, you know, it's practical advantages for the individual who's engaging in that kind of cognition. But in as much as we're cooperating on a on a project which is not about advancing the interests of specific individuals, but but generating something through intellectual collaboration, under those conditions, the the capacity to identify features of human psychology that will be threatening to that project, there I think it's really, really helpful. Yeah. And I and I think too, like one norm might be to also sort of, you know, there's a world of difference between somebody saying, like, you know, something you're factually saying

about, you know, the political affiliation of people I don't want you to say that versus sort of like, will I accept it if you clarify that your interest is not another nefarious agenda, right? And I think that's like a good litmus test, right? Like what is the actual claim you're making, right? And what is the actual thing you're pushing? And I think that's where having this kind of conversation back and forth is really helpful. Um, because I think it kind of will tease apart, I'm gonna completely swat down your ability and censor you, versus this this idea that it's true is is perfectly fine and I will accept it. What are the other implicit or explicit inferences that you want to make or not?

And let's debate those, right? Like I think that that's the kind of healthy conversation to have. So for example, if there is a political skew in academia, then what what of it, right? Like what's the consequence? And what, how does it impact science? Has the historical skew been the other way for a long time? And these are all kind of conversations to have. And there are other skews that we're ignoring. So that could be another thing. Like to say, look, you know, like we've talked about, David and I talked about like social classes at one area where like there's not a lot of people from low social classes that are in academia. That blinds the questions that are asked. You know, philosophy is a great example.

Like I kind of laugh at, like, I look at people who are sort of of the like Quine or even Dennett generation. Philosophy is way overrepresented as the phenotypes of people who will give people the benefit of the doubt. It's often like, you know, uh deep voiced, uh, you know, a a posh accent, a white male, right? Like these are people who are like they stand up in a room and who has like the highest social bargaining power historically, right? Like that that has clearly influenced philosophy immensely, right? From a first principles perspective, there's lots of reasons why that's true, but that shouldn't be true to the extent that there's equal access to knowledge. Like the fact that, like, a smart brain who can do an analysis, who can come to new

insights, it's probably going to be pretty orthogonal to like your social bargaining power. And it's kind of a problem that like the two sort of go hand in hand, right? Um, and so I think um these are all cases where sort of like having conversations about what's the representation of what people look like, or these other things that like we have these evolved primate brains that we care about, but are they getting in the way of good ideas or good science? Like that's a really good conversation to have. And I do think so much ink is spilled in not doing that. I sometimes wonder if people are actually interested in science. Like, like we talked about a lot of the internet trolls or for even in F-Psych.

I sort of get angry at them because they're not arguing for adaptationism. They're not arguing for a task analysis. They're arguing political things, right? And I'm like, you really are using up our social capital that we we earned for like a mundane political thing. And it's sort of that's not science, right? Um, whether or not they have a point politically, which you know is a different issue. Um I I often wonder if a lot of this, so especially social media or these political things, it's almost like there's are you actually interested in the science or do you actually have an agenda? And the people's prior implicitly is so high that you have an agenda that you're not actually doing science that like it's a wonderful rare thing to find somebody who's a

scientist. Um yeah. Yeah, yeah. That seems right. Yeah. I mean, good faith um conversation and debate where people care about arriving at the truth collaboratively is a very rare and precious flower that is hard to cultivate. Um and there are all sorts of forces arrayed against it, and even once you do get it, it can be infiltrated by mimics and copycats who try to exploit it. It is uh difficult to achieve, but when it happens, it's beautiful. I think it has happened in the past couple hours as we've been talking. Uh and uh it has happened uh on on our various episodes here, and I hope we can continue to nurture this flower. So thank you, Dan, for having this uh awesome conversation with us. I hope we can have you back to have another one at some point.

And uh yeah. This sounds great. And David, I really look forward to hearing from you next time we talk about your deep dive into Jordan Peterson. I will I will I will give you a full report next time. Well, maybe we should just have a uh an entire uh episode devoted to to Jordan Peterson and his uh luminous uh insights. I I'm sure that there would be many people. Uh I actually I'm not I'm not even gonna finish that sentence. So yeah. Um but yeah, Dan, thank you so much. It was it was a fun uh conversation. And yeah, thank you for you know good faith effort into sort of uncovering what we all have as sort of these these social agendas and what we think and believe. So it was a fun and I think a a representation of it even in our conversation.

So thanks so much. Thank you for the for the invitation to come on. Big fan of you both. Big fan of the podcast. Best of success in the future. Thank you so much. We'll we'll pay you after I turn off the recording. Whoa, what a fun conversation. I don't have no idea. That was great. Yeah. So we don't know what it what we do. We don't know it. No, we're breaking the fourth wall again, but that's okay. It's fun to do that. Um but uh really, David, I did appreciate your uh all of the all the things you said that during this episode as well. I I really appreciated all the things you said as well, Dave. Uh you you were really spot on in all the points you made. Um if you agree with my assessment of of Dave and Dave's assessment of me, uh please say so

on social media, leave us a kind review. And if you feel so inclined, you can check out our Patreon page and support us. Uh your enthusiasm uh and support uh is the fuel that keeps us going. Yeah. So a couple of people have already said this is their favorite podcast. And even if it's just, you know, a couple people's favorite podcasts, that means a lot to us. So thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Uh and without uh further ado, we'll uh we'll end the episode here and then just wait for the next one. And if you're binge listening, um, you know, it'll be a few seconds and then we'll start back up. Yeah, cool. Thank you.