WEBVTT 00:00:00.400 --> 00:00:06.400 David, um do you know of any podcasts that um well actually I'll just leave it 00:00:06.400 --> 00:00:06.640 at that. 00:00:06.800 --> 00:00:08.320 Do you know of any podcasts? 00:00:08.720 --> 00:00:13.840 Uh I I know of one of them that is my personal favorite called Evolutionary Psychology the 00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:14.160 Podcast. 00:00:14.400 --> 00:00:16.480 That is not what I was expecting you to say at all. 00:00:17.600 --> 00:00:19.920 You were expecting me to say some other podcast? 00:00:20.160 --> 00:00:23.920 Well, I don't I mean you're on this one, so I I mean that's great that it's your favorite 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:24.240 too. 00:00:24.400 --> 00:00:25.280 Is that is that true? 00:00:25.440 --> 00:00:26.560 Is that really your favorite? 00:00:27.130 --> 00:00:30.810 I don't know if I'm an impartial uh I see source. 00:00:31.370 --> 00:00:34.010 Well, we'll we'll we'll talk about this offline. 00:00:34.090 --> 00:00:36.570 So um we'll circle back to that as they say. 00:00:36.730 --> 00:00:38.890 Um but uh what are we doing today? 00:00:39.210 --> 00:00:43.370 Uh well we're actual evolutionary psychologists, and we're talking to actual evolutionary 00:00:43.370 --> 00:00:45.770 psychologists who do actual evolutionary psychology. 00:00:45.850 --> 00:00:48.170 It's a not quite our tagline, but it's close enough. 00:00:48.570 --> 00:00:50.890 Uh isn't that I thought that was our tagline. 00:00:51.450 --> 00:00:55.940 Well, it's actual evolutionary psychology by evolution actual evolutionary psychologist. 00:00:56.260 --> 00:00:57.060 What did you what did you say? 00:00:57.220 --> 00:01:00.980 Should we change the I said something like I changed it slightly I think it was more had 00:01:00.980 --> 00:01:04.660 more than it well we'll check the transcript later. 00:01:04.740 --> 00:01:09.700 Okay anyway I'm sorry to uh keep going on and on uh without further ado here is our episode 00:01:21.430 --> 00:01:27.270 Okay, uh David, today we have a special guest who is uh where is where is David 00:01:28.230 --> 00:01:29.030 said David. 00:01:29.270 --> 00:01:31.270 Uh we should that's um that's we're laying it. 00:01:31.510 --> 00:01:33.110 Safe bet given all the Davids we interact with. 00:01:33.270 --> 00:01:35.270 Uh actually Dan, another another D name. 00:01:35.510 --> 00:01:40.700 It is uh and Dan Dan is uh our first philosopher that we've had on the podcast. 00:01:41.420 --> 00:01:46.220 Um and uh he's a a wonderful and brilliant thinker, uh philosopher at the University of 00:01:46.220 --> 00:01:50.220 Sussex, which I screwed up uh during the beginning of the interview I saw with Sheffield. 00:01:50.700 --> 00:01:55.020 And for those people at Sheffield, um we we really like Sheffield too. 00:01:55.100 --> 00:01:56.940 It's a wonderful institution. 00:01:57.660 --> 00:02:02.450 Yeah, it was it was a uh a complimentary mistake, and that I you know, it was you know It's 00:02:02.530 --> 00:02:03.730 a it's a wonderful institution. 00:02:03.890 --> 00:02:07.170 But also Sussex is a great institution as well, uh, so far as I'm aware. 00:02:07.330 --> 00:02:08.770 Well, at the very least, it has Dan Williams. 00:02:09.090 --> 00:02:10.930 So that it must be it must be a great institution. 00:02:12.130 --> 00:02:13.810 Uh anyway, who is Dan Williams? 00:02:13.890 --> 00:02:18.770 He's a philosopher, he studies um belief, misinformation, delusion, 00:02:19.490 --> 00:02:20.690 epistemology. 00:02:20.850 --> 00:02:22.690 Uh we get into all sorts of things. 00:02:22.850 --> 00:02:24.530 It was a really mind-bending conversation. 00:02:24.610 --> 00:02:26.050 What is the nature of belief? 00:02:26.210 --> 00:02:28.770 Uh what is the evolutionary psychology of belief? 00:02:28.930 --> 00:02:34.720 How do social forces uh and and uh social status how do they affect the 00:02:34.720 --> 00:02:39.680 things that we believe what is a delusion what does it mean to really believe something we 00:02:39.680 --> 00:02:43.280 even get into Jordan Peterson and whether we should think he's full of shit or not. 00:02:43.360 --> 00:02:45.280 Uh it was it was a really fun conversation. 00:02:45.680 --> 00:02:51.520 Yeah I think what people believe and why the science of that gets into sort of some deep 00:02:51.520 --> 00:02:55.280 waters too with people sort of feeling like being attacked too. 00:02:55.360 --> 00:02:56.720 And we talk about that a little bit too. 00:02:56.800 --> 00:03:01.710 So it's it's definitely a very interesting content in that sense too. 00:03:01.790 --> 00:03:06.910 Of you one starts to sort of step on uh political ideas that in the same way you do, David. 00:03:06.990 --> 00:03:09.470 And I think that was an interesting part of the conversation, too. 00:03:09.870 --> 00:03:10.190 Yeah. 00:03:10.430 --> 00:03:11.870 So super fun conversation. 00:03:11.950 --> 00:03:13.710 I think you'll have a good time listening to it. 00:03:14.110 --> 00:03:14.750 Sounds good. 00:03:14.830 --> 00:03:19.070 And uh yeah, listen for the uh everyone's opinion about Jordan Peterson. 00:03:21.470 --> 00:03:21.870 All right. 00:03:22.190 --> 00:03:22.830 All right, we're going. 00:03:25.620 --> 00:03:30.260 uh professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield and Sussex. 00:03:30.740 --> 00:03:31.540 Sorry, Sussex. 00:03:31.700 --> 00:03:32.660 Oh my god, I'm so sorry. 00:03:32.980 --> 00:03:36.500 No, that's what did I get that where where did I get Sheffield? 00:03:36.660 --> 00:03:37.380 Was that a display? 00:03:37.620 --> 00:03:38.420 It is a place in the US. 00:03:39.620 --> 00:03:40.180 Oh, okay. 00:03:40.260 --> 00:03:41.940 I must have mixed it up with a different place. 00:03:42.420 --> 00:03:44.900 I feel like someone else that's similar to you works there. 00:03:45.940 --> 00:03:47.700 David, you invited Dan on. 00:03:47.780 --> 00:03:50.100 Was there a different Dan Williams that you wanted to invite? 00:03:50.260 --> 00:03:50.820 Is this the case? 00:03:51.140 --> 00:03:51.700 Oh, you know what? 00:03:51.780 --> 00:03:52.980 There are a lot of Dan Williams. 00:03:53.300 --> 00:03:54.490 I think we got the wrong one. 00:03:54.730 --> 00:03:57.370 You know, we'll have to make do with this Dan Williams. 00:03:59.050 --> 00:04:05.050 Anyway, and you're also uh the writer of the popular substack Conspicuous Cognition, 00:04:05.130 --> 00:04:06.490 which is a wonderful substack. 00:04:06.730 --> 00:04:09.210 I recommend everyone subscribe to it. 00:04:09.610 --> 00:04:13.530 Um so Dan, you're our first philosopher on the show. 00:04:14.010 --> 00:04:14.410 Yeah, I know. 00:04:14.570 --> 00:04:16.010 That's a big lift. 00:04:16.090 --> 00:04:16.330 Yeah. 00:04:16.740 --> 00:04:16.980 Yeah. 00:04:17.060 --> 00:04:20.500 So you're gonna have to represent the entire discipline of of philosophy. 00:04:20.820 --> 00:04:23.140 Um I hope you're ready to take on that mantle. 00:04:23.460 --> 00:04:25.700 Yes, defend it on uh first principles. 00:04:25.860 --> 00:04:30.260 We were we were actually both saying how we have all sort of interacted online but never 00:04:30.260 --> 00:04:30.980 met in person. 00:04:31.220 --> 00:04:34.180 Um so I feel like this is sort of like meeting in person. 00:04:34.260 --> 00:04:38.500 Um, although we're we're still not I don't know, is this online or in person? 00:04:39.380 --> 00:04:40.180 It's both. 00:04:40.570 --> 00:04:40.810 Okay. 00:04:40.970 --> 00:04:42.410 That's the philosoph the philosophy. 00:04:42.730 --> 00:04:43.690 That's the definitive answer. 00:04:44.090 --> 00:04:44.250 Great. 00:04:44.330 --> 00:04:44.810 It's both. 00:04:44.970 --> 00:04:45.370 Good. 00:04:45.610 --> 00:04:49.210 Um, so uh so so Dan, really great to have you here. 00:04:49.450 --> 00:04:55.290 Um uh I know a lot of the work that you do um involves I kind of 00:04:55.290 --> 00:05:01.130 think about your work similar to to David's work, um, which is a compliment to 00:05:01.130 --> 00:05:01.690 David. 00:05:01.770 --> 00:05:03.210 Um uh sorry. 00:05:03.370 --> 00:05:09.370 Um, but uh uh but it's sort of in this category of there's a social 00:05:09.530 --> 00:05:15.060 logic to lots of stuff that's maybe hidden and hasn't been appreciated. 00:05:15.300 --> 00:05:18.900 Um, do you think that is a fair characterization of your work? 00:05:19.060 --> 00:05:24.100 And if so, can you maybe for people who haven't come across your work, sort of talk a 00:05:24.100 --> 00:05:29.300 little bit about how you view um, you know, if you're stuck in an elevator with somebody 00:05:29.300 --> 00:05:34.260 and they're they want to know more than a you're a philosopher informed by evolution, um 00:05:34.690 --> 00:05:38.450 How do you think about sort of what's the main line of what you do? 00:05:39.330 --> 00:05:40.930 Hmm, that's a good question. 00:05:41.090 --> 00:05:46.930 Um I suppose the overarching question that I'm interested in is why do people believe what 00:05:46.930 --> 00:05:52.530 they do, especially when they seem to believe things that are strange or irrational, um, 00:05:52.770 --> 00:05:54.930 outright bizarre, delusional. 00:05:55.170 --> 00:05:57.010 Um, that's a sort of overarching question. 00:05:57.170 --> 00:06:00.930 It's not the only question that I'm interested in, but it tends to be connected to many of 00:06:00.930 --> 00:06:02.770 the other things that I'm interested in. 00:06:03.100 --> 00:06:08.940 And there is this sort of view I have, which is very general, that human beings 00:06:08.940 --> 00:06:11.420 are these intensely social animals. 00:06:11.820 --> 00:06:17.420 And most of the features of human psychology and our behavior that 00:06:17.420 --> 00:06:22.780 seem otherwise sort of strange or self-defeating or irrational or 00:06:22.780 --> 00:06:28.220 paradoxical actually make a lot more sense once you situate that psychology within the 00:06:28.220 --> 00:06:30.540 context of the fact that we're social animals. 00:06:32.270 --> 00:06:37.790 competing for prestige, trying to cultivate a good reputation, trying to form 00:06:38.190 --> 00:06:41.390 alliances that would advance our interests, and so on. 00:06:41.630 --> 00:06:45.710 And I think that then is really important when it comes to understanding belief 00:06:45.710 --> 00:06:46.270 specifically. 00:06:46.430 --> 00:06:52.190 So I think that many of the sort of strange things that we believe in domains like 00:06:52.190 --> 00:06:58.120 religion and ideology, and often what's thought of in terms of self-deception, is sort 00:06:58.120 --> 00:07:03.080 of best illuminated by understanding the kinds of social goals that we have. 00:07:03.880 --> 00:07:08.520 And that's also where my sort of interest in evolutionary theory comes from, which I think 00:07:08.520 --> 00:07:13.960 is quite unusual for someone in academic philosophy and uh especially unusual in the sort 00:07:13.960 --> 00:07:15.400 of humanities more generally. 00:07:15.640 --> 00:07:20.360 Because I think evolutionary theory gives you a kind of important toolkit for thinking 00:07:20.360 --> 00:07:24.680 about the ways in which the fact that we're social animals has shaped the kinds of minds 00:07:24.680 --> 00:07:26.730 that we have and the kinds of motivations that we have. 00:07:26.970 --> 00:07:30.250 I guess at the most abstract level, that would be the kind of the kind of idea. 00:07:30.570 --> 00:07:31.690 That's that's fantastic. 00:07:31.930 --> 00:07:35.930 Um, you know, in you mentioned philosophy, and you mentioned belief. 00:07:36.250 --> 00:07:42.250 Um in my understanding, and I'm gonna like qualify everything I say with, you know, I'm 00:07:42.250 --> 00:07:48.010 an amateur philosopher, I'm a happy amateur um uh for philosophy, but uh 00:07:48.090 --> 00:07:54.040 belief, the idea of belief and what it is and how it works has been a longstanding thing in 00:07:54.040 --> 00:07:54.680 philosophy. 00:07:54.840 --> 00:08:00.520 Do you view taking an evolutionary approach in particularly what you just described as 00:08:00.760 --> 00:08:04.440 divert diverging in important and interesting ways? 00:08:04.600 --> 00:08:06.520 Maybe I'm leading by saying interesting. 00:08:07.400 --> 00:08:11.560 But do you think that's a different way of approaching the idea of belief and what it's for 00:08:11.640 --> 00:08:13.720 and its function in philosophy? 00:08:14.920 --> 00:08:16.280 It's difficult to say. 00:08:17.710 --> 00:08:23.710 I think that historically there hasn't been a sharp distinction between philosophy and 00:08:23.710 --> 00:08:26.270 psychology and and social theory. 00:08:26.430 --> 00:08:32.350 And historically, when I think many philosophers, psychologists, um, sociologists and so 00:08:32.350 --> 00:08:37.950 on have tried to understand the ways in which we form beliefs and why we form beliefs 00:08:38.190 --> 00:08:42.300 that we do, I don't think they've been sufficiently sensitive to the fact that we're social 00:08:42.300 --> 00:08:42.780 animals. 00:08:42.940 --> 00:08:48.780 Um, so in that sense, I think pushing this sort of social perspective is at 00:08:48.780 --> 00:08:53.900 odds with lots of theory both in philosophy and elsewhere when it comes to understanding 00:08:53.900 --> 00:08:54.540 belief. 00:08:54.780 --> 00:08:56.220 Um, but but it's difficult. 00:08:56.300 --> 00:08:59.820 I mean, lots of philosophy is often concerned with what you might think of as sort of 00:08:59.820 --> 00:09:03.420 conceptual questions or maybe metaphysical questions, depending on which way you look at 00:09:03.420 --> 00:09:03.660 it. 00:09:03.820 --> 00:09:06.300 Like, what even is it to believe something? 00:09:06.830 --> 00:09:10.430 And that's just this really deep and complex question. 00:09:10.590 --> 00:09:13.710 And I think in many ways we still don't have a particularly good answer to that. 00:09:14.350 --> 00:09:20.190 Because this term belief gets used to refer to lots of different things that are different 00:09:20.190 --> 00:09:22.430 from each other in very complex ways. 00:09:23.070 --> 00:09:26.350 And so, for example, you know, I believe I'm talking to you two. 00:09:26.500 --> 00:09:30.180 Um, I might also believe, let's say, that capitalism is an unjust system. 00:09:30.260 --> 00:09:34.100 You know, I might believe that there's a supernatural agent that monitors my behavior and 00:09:34.100 --> 00:09:35.300 punishes me for bad things. 00:09:35.380 --> 00:09:38.740 You know, we use belief to capture all of these different things. 00:09:39.060 --> 00:09:44.740 And it's not really at all obvious that they are the same thing, um, except insofar as 00:09:44.740 --> 00:09:47.460 there's a sincere commitment to the truth of a proposition. 00:09:47.630 --> 00:09:51.390 Um, but I think even there, I mean, we can we can we can get into this, and this is 00:09:51.390 --> 00:09:53.790 something, David, I know that you're really interested in as well. 00:09:54.110 --> 00:09:58.670 Even there, I think the fact that we're we're social animals competing for status and 00:09:58.670 --> 00:10:02.510 trying to you know boost our reputation and trying to influence other people in 00:10:02.510 --> 00:10:07.310 advantageous ways, that's relevant to understanding a lot of that complexity. 00:10:07.470 --> 00:10:13.340 Um, I think if we weren't social animals to the degree that that we are, then the 00:10:13.500 --> 00:10:17.740 concept of belief would be a lot less complicated and a lot more transparent. 00:10:17.820 --> 00:10:22.220 So I think when it comes to, you know, even chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas, I mean, 00:10:22.300 --> 00:10:26.940 these are social animals, although not social, I think, in the ways and to the degree that 00:10:26.940 --> 00:10:30.780 human beings are animals, they've got cognitive mechanisms that function to track their 00:10:30.780 --> 00:10:34.380 environment, their material and social environment in ways that help them achieve their 00:10:34.380 --> 00:10:35.260 goals and so on. 00:10:35.420 --> 00:10:36.380 And we've got that as well. 00:10:36.540 --> 00:10:40.810 I think that's the kind of the dominant thing that's going on when it comes to what we 00:10:40.810 --> 00:10:42.010 sometimes think of as belief. 00:10:42.090 --> 00:10:45.850 It's like modeling those aspects of the world which are relevant to our practical goals. 00:10:46.170 --> 00:10:52.090 But once you get into religion, politics, ideology, aspects of culture, there's something 00:10:52.090 --> 00:10:56.010 very different going on when it comes to talking about belief, which you're not going to be 00:10:56.010 --> 00:11:00.010 able to understand in terms of this sort of basic model which applies in almost every other 00:11:00.010 --> 00:11:02.730 case, which is forming beliefs to track how things are. 00:11:03.160 --> 00:11:03.400 Right. 00:11:03.480 --> 00:11:07.880 And so just to summarize, and then I'll let David, who's chomping at the bit here, I think, 00:11:08.280 --> 00:11:13.960 um, but if what I hear you're saying is that um there's almost been sort of this I there's 00:11:13.960 --> 00:11:19.960 this idea sort of philosophy counteracts this naive realist idea that's sort of like things 00:11:19.960 --> 00:11:21.720 just are the way they are or psychology does. 00:11:21.800 --> 00:11:26.810 So the idea of naive realism is that the world is the way it just appears to us and what we 00:11:26.810 --> 00:11:31.690 know from psychology and philosophy is that we have all this machinery mediating the 00:11:31.690 --> 00:11:33.930 relationship between the real world and what we experience. 00:11:34.090 --> 00:11:37.530 So visual illusions being a great example of that, that we see things that aren't 00:11:37.530 --> 00:11:38.650 objectively sort of there. 00:11:38.730 --> 00:11:40.730 It's a function of how our machinery works. 00:11:40.890 --> 00:11:46.650 And what I'm hearing you say is that both people, just every day, all of us sort of 00:11:46.650 --> 00:11:52.460 intuitively, but then also the scientific community has been sort of not maybe naive 00:11:52.460 --> 00:11:56.940 realism, but sort of socially naive in a sense, or we haven't appreciated the social 00:11:56.940 --> 00:12:01.180 complexity of the idea of belief, for example. 00:12:01.820 --> 00:12:02.540 I think that's right. 00:12:02.620 --> 00:12:02.780 Yeah. 00:12:02.860 --> 00:12:08.860 And I think that I think there are interesting questions about why theorists historically 00:12:09.020 --> 00:12:14.850 have not been sufficiently sensitive to the social sort of 00:12:14.850 --> 00:12:17.410 motivations that underpin a lot of what we believe. 00:12:17.570 --> 00:12:21.970 And also they haven't, I think, been sufficiently sensitive to the role of strategic social 00:12:21.970 --> 00:12:23.490 motivations in governing our behavior. 00:12:23.650 --> 00:12:28.610 I know that this is a big part of your work, uh David, thinking about cynicism and so on. 00:12:29.250 --> 00:12:34.850 So it's not as if I think it's just a sort of ordinary theoretical omission, the fact the 00:12:34.850 --> 00:12:40.320 fact that people have uh not been sensitive to the to the importance of things like social 00:12:40.320 --> 00:12:44.640 signaling and things like advocacy and propaganda when it comes to biasing how we view the 00:12:44.640 --> 00:12:48.160 world and giving rise to these sort of complexities when it comes to belief. 00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:52.560 It's not as if I think it's just an ordinary sort of you know gap in the knowledge with 00:12:52.560 --> 00:12:53.440 theoretical omission. 00:12:53.520 --> 00:12:57.360 I think there are probably interesting things to say about why it is that it's often a 00:12:57.360 --> 00:13:01.600 little bit awkward to acknowledge the the role of things like status competition and 00:13:01.600 --> 00:13:06.000 reputation management and propaganda in shaping this domain of belief. 00:13:08.170 --> 00:13:10.090 I couldn't agree more with with that. 00:13:10.250 --> 00:13:16.090 I think given that we are so uh fixated on signaling various things to one another 00:13:16.250 --> 00:13:21.850 about our identities, our loyalties, our traits, um, it is often in our interest to conceal 00:13:21.850 --> 00:13:24.170 the fact that we're signaling those things at all. 00:13:24.410 --> 00:13:29.210 Because signaling those things can itself become a cue of something bad about you, that 00:13:29.210 --> 00:13:35.040 you're narcissistic, you're selfish, um, you are insecure, um and 00:13:35.120 --> 00:13:40.160 and and needy of uh attention, for example, there are all sorts of inferences that we draw 00:13:40.160 --> 00:13:41.120 about each other. 00:13:41.280 --> 00:13:46.960 Um and the inferences that we draw about status seekers, about signalers, about attention 00:13:46.960 --> 00:13:49.200 seekers, those are often bad. 00:13:49.360 --> 00:13:54.880 Uh and so often the social games we play have to be played in the cover of darkness, or at 00:13:54.880 --> 00:13:58.400 least without becoming common knowledge among the players. 00:13:58.690 --> 00:14:04.370 And I think that might explain why it has taken so long for us to 00:14:04.690 --> 00:14:10.130 to realize the the social games we're playing is because one of the moves in those social 00:14:10.130 --> 00:14:12.450 games is trying to hide the fact that it's a game. 00:14:13.410 --> 00:14:18.530 In order to effectively compete for political power, you have to conceal the fact that your 00:14:18.530 --> 00:14:21.640 primary motive is, you raw power seeking. 00:14:21.880 --> 00:14:26.120 In order to compete for status, you have to conceal the fact that you're you're merely 00:14:26.120 --> 00:14:28.200 interested in status. 00:14:29.240 --> 00:14:34.360 So I think that that might be what's going on here, why uh it has taken us so long to 00:14:34.360 --> 00:14:39.880 explain our beliefs in in terms of uh of social motives. 00:14:40.040 --> 00:14:45.480 Um, because it it is often in our interest to conceal those motives, uh which often serves 00:14:45.480 --> 00:14:47.080 a deeper social motive. 00:14:47.890 --> 00:14:50.690 Yeah, I I think that's a massive part of what's going on. 00:14:50.850 --> 00:14:52.370 Um, but it but it's interesting. 00:14:52.450 --> 00:14:56.290 I mean, if you think about the sort of so so just to be concrete with an example, I mean, 00:14:56.370 --> 00:15:00.130 if you think about something like self-deception, you know, human beings often seem to be 00:15:00.130 --> 00:15:01.970 motivated to believe things. 00:15:02.210 --> 00:15:07.650 And, you know, we we we can get into this maybe in in more depth, but I think, you know, in 00:15:07.650 --> 00:15:11.570 in many cases that's boiling down to sort of one of two social motivations. 00:15:11.810 --> 00:15:13.650 Either it's sort of propaganda or advocacy. 00:15:13.730 --> 00:15:17.920 So we're sort of motivated to push particular claims and narratives, and then we end up 00:15:17.920 --> 00:15:19.360 kind of internalizing them. 00:15:19.680 --> 00:15:22.400 Or it's to do with social signaling and sort of reputation management. 00:15:22.480 --> 00:15:26.000 So we want to advertise certain kinds of qualities and allegiances that we've got. 00:15:26.880 --> 00:15:32.400 And then that bias is in the direction of certain kinds of beliefs, which are conducive to 00:15:32.400 --> 00:15:32.800 doing that. 00:15:32.960 --> 00:15:38.560 But what's interesting is, you know, throughout so much of uh the history of philosophy and 00:15:38.560 --> 00:15:42.400 also psychology, and then once you even when you get sort of Freudian psychoanalysis, which 00:15:42.400 --> 00:15:46.330 takes seriously this idea that there are these kind of hidden motives, So much of it is 00:15:46.330 --> 00:15:50.010 this sort of you can't handle the truth model of self-deception, right? 00:15:50.730 --> 00:15:54.330 It acknowledges the idea that we're sort of motivated to believe things for reasons 00:15:54.330 --> 00:15:59.290 independent of their truth, that there are these practical motivations and interests which 00:15:59.290 --> 00:16:02.090 shape and distort and bias what we believe. 00:16:02.410 --> 00:16:08.090 But there's even with sort of Freudianism and the sort of psychoanalytic tradition, 00:16:08.420 --> 00:16:12.420 even when there's this willingness to sort of you know dig deeper and look at these hidden 00:16:12.420 --> 00:16:17.700 motivations, it's all this sort of you know inward facing, intrapsychic, emotion 00:16:17.700 --> 00:16:21.220 regulation, um, the defense mechanisms of the ego and so on. 00:16:21.380 --> 00:16:24.980 So even when you've got what looks kind of ostensibly like a kind of a willingness to be 00:16:24.980 --> 00:16:30.180 quite cynical, there's not the willingness to be as cynical as I think is needed, which is 00:16:30.180 --> 00:16:31.300 to go one step further. 00:16:31.380 --> 00:16:35.270 And it's not about you know protecting your ego, and it's not about believing things that 00:16:35.270 --> 00:16:37.750 make you feel good and protect your self-esteem and so on. 00:16:37.830 --> 00:16:41.830 It's winning these, you know, social games, it's propaganda, it's it's it's advocacy. 00:16:41.990 --> 00:16:46.390 So I think there's definitely something to that, to that idea, David, that um, you know, 00:16:46.710 --> 00:16:49.990 that that there's something awkward about drawing attention to these things. 00:16:50.070 --> 00:16:54.550 So that even when you get these intellectual traditions, which uh on on the surface, you 00:16:54.550 --> 00:16:58.310 know, they they look like they're very cynical, they don't actually go the kind of whole 00:16:58.310 --> 00:17:04.160 way to draw attention to strategic social motivations as as a means of sort of biasing the 00:17:04.160 --> 00:17:05.440 way in which we think about the world. 00:17:05.920 --> 00:17:06.240 Yes. 00:17:06.400 --> 00:17:12.160 I I I love that distinction uh uh where the instead of saying that the goal is to impress 00:17:12.160 --> 00:17:16.640 you, the goal is inwardly focused, it's to feel good about myself. 00:17:17.360 --> 00:17:22.400 And what's interesting about that is we all we all we somehow for some reason view that as 00:17:22.400 --> 00:17:28.010 less problematic than to be concerned with impressing you or or being 00:17:28.010 --> 00:17:28.810 superior to you. 00:17:29.210 --> 00:17:33.290 If I'm doing it for me to feel good about myself, then it's like we can relate to that. 00:17:33.370 --> 00:17:34.250 It's it's not that bad. 00:17:34.330 --> 00:17:38.410 But if I'm doing it just to gain status or just to impress you, or just to look good in 00:17:38.410 --> 00:17:41.450 your eyes, then it becomes like even ickier. 00:17:41.690 --> 00:17:46.650 And so I I love that that point that, like, yes, we we are somewhat cynical and that we 00:17:46.650 --> 00:17:52.320 acknowledge that you know um we care about um, you know, advertising various 00:17:52.320 --> 00:17:56.880 features of ourselves, but we're not cynical enough because the uh the target of those 00:17:56.880 --> 00:18:01.840 signals is often ourselves, when really the the target should be other people, because that 00:18:01.920 --> 00:18:04.720 that is the adaptive target if we're thinking in evolutionary terms. 00:18:04.800 --> 00:18:08.000 That those are the things that that matter for our fitness, what you know, what other 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:12.610 people think of us was a huge um selection pressure for our ancestors. 00:18:12.770 --> 00:18:15.730 What we thought of ourselves was not necessarily a selection pressure. 00:18:15.970 --> 00:18:17.730 It's hard to imagine how it would be. 00:18:18.210 --> 00:18:20.290 So I really, I really love that distinction. 00:18:21.170 --> 00:18:25.410 You mentioned um self-deception. 00:18:25.890 --> 00:18:30.290 Um that is a huge topic both in in philosophy and psychology. 00:18:30.450 --> 00:18:33.680 Um I'm still struggling to wrap my head around it myself. 00:18:33.840 --> 00:18:37.920 I think I've I'm I'm starting to see how it works, but how are you thinking about 00:18:37.920 --> 00:18:39.520 self-deception these days? 00:18:39.680 --> 00:18:41.440 Are you are you skeptical of the term? 00:18:41.600 --> 00:18:43.280 Do you think it's a useful term? 00:18:44.480 --> 00:18:50.400 So I tend not to use the term, um, except for the fact that uh in the 00:18:50.400 --> 00:18:53.680 sort of ordinary discourse, uh, I think it captures something that people are quite 00:18:53.680 --> 00:18:55.440 familiar with, so it can be helpful in that way. 00:18:55.520 --> 00:18:58.970 You know, oh yeah, of course, self-deception, you know, you believe things for reasons 00:18:58.970 --> 00:19:02.890 independent of their truth, or you're sort of biased in how you view the world by practical 00:19:02.890 --> 00:19:04.490 interests and emotions and so on. 00:19:04.650 --> 00:19:09.450 But I think it does, you know, raises all of these, you know, traditional paradoxes. 00:19:09.530 --> 00:19:11.530 You know, how can you deceive yourself? 00:19:12.010 --> 00:19:14.650 What's playing the role of the deceiver, what's playing the role of the deceived? 00:19:14.810 --> 00:19:19.450 And often it comes with quite, you know, implausible psychological models as well. 00:19:19.690 --> 00:19:23.610 I mean, the the way that I prefer to think about it, as I mentioned, is we've got these 00:19:23.610 --> 00:19:29.340 sort of two uh motivations or or goals, which I think are uh highly 00:19:29.340 --> 00:19:34.700 relevant to understanding uh what's going on when we form these biased beliefs, when we 00:19:34.700 --> 00:19:37.580 form these strange uh belief systems and narratives and so on. 00:19:37.820 --> 00:19:41.900 One of these is, you know, you can call it propaganda or you can call it advocacy, but it's 00:19:41.900 --> 00:19:47.820 just the idea that we're motivated to spread ideas, claims, narratives 00:19:47.980 --> 00:19:51.310 such that if other people accept them, it will promote our interests. 00:19:51.390 --> 00:19:51.550 Right. 00:19:51.630 --> 00:19:55.710 So if I can convince you two that I'm this generous, you know, pro-social, kind, 00:19:55.790 --> 00:20:00.750 fair-minded person, I've got a sort of standing motivation to advocate for my interests in 00:20:00.750 --> 00:20:02.430 that way, to propagate that kind of message. 00:20:02.670 --> 00:20:06.350 And I think for reasons that that we can get into, and I think it's really fucking 00:20:06.350 --> 00:20:09.790 complicated exactly what's going on, we tend to internalize our propaganda. 00:20:09.950 --> 00:20:14.280 Um that's the way that I'd sort of preferred to put it, rather than saying we deceive 00:20:14.280 --> 00:20:17.480 ourselves, because I think that that is more confusing than just the idea that when we've 00:20:17.480 --> 00:20:21.720 got this standing motivation to propagate messages, we tend to internalize those. 00:20:22.120 --> 00:20:24.920 Although, even that I think is sort of subject to various constraints. 00:20:25.080 --> 00:20:29.000 And then similarly, I think we've we've got these motivations to engage in reputation 00:20:29.000 --> 00:20:34.200 management, to signal that we've got attractive qualities and allegiances, and that can 00:20:34.200 --> 00:20:35.480 shape our outward behavior. 00:20:35.960 --> 00:20:41.410 It can shape how we dress, how we talk, uh the the ways in which we conduct 00:20:41.410 --> 00:20:45.010 ourselves, um, what what teams we we cheer for, and so on. 00:20:45.170 --> 00:20:47.890 And I think that can also shape what what what beliefs we form. 00:20:47.970 --> 00:20:51.730 Um so I think these signaling motivations can also bias what beliefs we form. 00:20:51.970 --> 00:20:56.050 That's the way that I tend to talk about it these days, rather than thinking in terms of of 00:20:56.050 --> 00:20:56.930 self-deception. 00:20:57.090 --> 00:21:01.010 But if you're just using self-deception as this sort of catch all term for the idea that 00:21:01.010 --> 00:21:06.370 our practical philosophers might say non-epistemic motivations bias belief, then I'm happy 00:21:06.370 --> 00:21:06.610 with it. 00:21:06.940 --> 00:21:07.180 Yeah. 00:21:07.260 --> 00:21:08.220 There's like that joke. 00:21:08.300 --> 00:21:11.180 Uh, how did you think of something smart, you know, like a smart thing? 00:21:11.260 --> 00:21:15.100 And it was like, well, I thought of somebody smarter than me and I imagined what they would 00:21:15.100 --> 00:21:15.820 do, right? 00:21:15.900 --> 00:21:21.660 And that that has all the paradox of uh, you know, you can't exceed your own intelligence 00:21:21.660 --> 00:21:24.060 by thinking of somebody smarter than you, right? 00:21:24.140 --> 00:21:25.580 You are as smart as you are. 00:21:25.740 --> 00:21:31.270 And so the the criticism, the sophisticated criticism of self-deception, like Rob Kurzman 00:21:31.430 --> 00:21:33.350 paper a while ago, like there is no self, right? 00:21:33.430 --> 00:21:33.750 Like that. 00:21:34.150 --> 00:21:35.990 It's or what are you calling the self, right? 00:21:36.070 --> 00:21:40.950 And and I mean I think the sophisticated argument is there's like the talkie or PR part of 00:21:40.950 --> 00:21:43.430 the phenotype, the the body envelope. 00:21:43.590 --> 00:21:49.190 Um, but yeah, if you kind of exactly if you sort of unpack it or poke on it even a little 00:21:49.190 --> 00:21:55.110 bit, um, it it sort of it it it bears more unpacking than just the idea of 00:21:55.110 --> 00:21:57.110 self-deception, I think, historically. 00:21:57.190 --> 00:22:02.840 But so I think that's um uh people have had that similar sort of 00:22:02.840 --> 00:22:07.160 notion and uh and I think that would what you just said sort of would agree with that idea. 00:22:07.800 --> 00:22:07.960 Yeah. 00:22:08.040 --> 00:22:13.640 No, it's it's a great example of of how um folk psychology or our intuitive, naive 00:22:13.640 --> 00:22:19.240 ideas about the mind are um I think stymieing progress in academic psychology. 00:22:19.320 --> 00:22:23.320 And and Dave has written a lot about this, because we have this intuitive idea that there 00:22:23.320 --> 00:22:28.850 is a singular self in the head that thinks things, attends to things, remembers things, and 00:22:28.850 --> 00:22:30.050 these processes are unitary. 00:22:30.130 --> 00:22:32.930 We we had a whole episode on this uh a while back. 00:22:33.410 --> 00:22:38.370 Um this is what is leading to the to these paradoxes, that there is a singular self that 00:22:38.370 --> 00:22:39.570 can deceive itself. 00:22:39.730 --> 00:22:43.650 But we would never have gotten into this mess if we just stayed at the mechanistic level of 00:22:43.650 --> 00:22:47.810 what are the different mechanisms in the mind, which mechanisms have access to which kinds 00:22:47.810 --> 00:22:48.290 of information. 00:22:48.370 --> 00:22:51.810 Once we stay at that level, there are no paradoxes, uh, and it becomes much more 00:22:51.810 --> 00:22:52.370 intelligible. 00:22:52.620 --> 00:22:57.100 So I think it's a really good example of how we need to uh realize what level of analysis 00:22:57.100 --> 00:23:02.620 we're at when we're thinking about uh these issues and uh uh drop down to the mechanistic 00:23:02.620 --> 00:23:06.220 level to get a better and deeper understanding of what's going on. 00:23:06.460 --> 00:23:08.940 So you mentioned how you don't like the word self-deception. 00:23:09.100 --> 00:23:11.580 I agree, I don't, I'm not a fan of it either. 00:23:11.900 --> 00:23:16.990 But there has been a re-emergence of a different kind of distinction that's sort of related 00:23:16.990 --> 00:23:17.950 to self-deception. 00:23:18.110 --> 00:23:21.630 And it's the idea that there are two kinds of beliefs. 00:23:21.790 --> 00:23:24.110 And they've been referred to in different things in the literature. 00:23:24.190 --> 00:23:28.270 So uh Neil Van Leeuwen has referred to them as credences versus beliefs. 00:23:28.430 --> 00:23:33.310 Uh um Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have referred to the distinction between reflective 00:23:33.310 --> 00:23:34.830 beliefs and intuitive beliefs. 00:23:34.990 --> 00:23:40.590 I saw one philosopher refer to uh uh the latter kind as schm beliefs, as opposed to 00:23:40.590 --> 00:23:43.870 beliefs, as you know, they don't they're not real beliefs, they don't matter. 00:23:45.280 --> 00:23:49.760 And so there and we sort of intuitively recognize this. 00:23:49.920 --> 00:23:54.240 We refer to like, you know, he's a true believer, she's a true believer, versus, you know, 00:23:54.320 --> 00:23:56.000 they're just paying lip service. 00:23:56.320 --> 00:24:02.160 Um and uh you know Neil Van Leon gets into the idea that we we often recognize this 00:24:02.160 --> 00:24:07.250 distinction when we talk about um I think X versus I believe X. 00:24:07.570 --> 00:24:11.090 Think sort of implies a genuine belief that it's guiding your behavior. 00:24:11.330 --> 00:24:17.170 Believe X uh is more of a social connotation that maybe, you know, I I believe this uh to 00:24:17.410 --> 00:24:22.290 show what kind of person I am or what my values are or what group I belong to rather than 00:24:22.290 --> 00:24:25.730 it's like actually guiding my behavior in a in a concrete way. 00:24:26.210 --> 00:24:31.000 Um and so this I think is one of the most interesting and important distinctions that has 00:24:31.000 --> 00:24:32.680 come up uh in the in the last decade. 00:24:32.760 --> 00:24:35.640 And I'm still trying to grapple with it and what its implications are. 00:24:35.800 --> 00:24:41.400 Um, but do you buy this distinction that there are uh different kinds of belief and that 00:24:41.400 --> 00:24:45.560 some beliefs, you know, guide our behavior in day to day decisions and in in concrete ways, 00:24:45.640 --> 00:24:48.120 and some of them are kind of inert. 00:24:48.280 --> 00:24:53.550 They just kind of sit there and we we we may you know believe we believe them, we may think 00:24:53.550 --> 00:24:59.470 we believe them, uh, but they're not actually uh driving us in any real concrete way. 00:24:59.710 --> 00:25:01.150 Um do you buy that distinction? 00:25:01.310 --> 00:25:02.030 Do you think it's important? 00:25:02.190 --> 00:25:03.870 How are you uh approaching that topic? 00:25:04.430 --> 00:25:10.270 So what I think is true is that there are these um cases in which we're sincerely committed 00:25:10.270 --> 00:25:11.710 to the truth of a proposition. 00:25:11.870 --> 00:25:13.550 You know, God is always watching. 00:25:13.710 --> 00:25:19.360 Um Socialism will usher in a utopia. 00:25:20.080 --> 00:25:24.000 There's a crocodile spirit that will hunt me down if I don't share my meat with fellow 00:25:24.000 --> 00:25:25.120 members of the group. 00:25:25.440 --> 00:25:28.080 The belief that studied by Man Vir Singh. 00:25:28.480 --> 00:25:30.400 These are cases in which I think people are sincere. 00:25:30.640 --> 00:25:33.920 As you say, the belief is often very strangely compartmentalized. 00:25:34.000 --> 00:25:38.720 I mean, my favorite example of this is from Dan Dennett, where he points out that you know 00:25:38.800 --> 00:25:42.450 nobody would ever masturbate in front of their parents, right? 00:25:42.770 --> 00:25:46.610 But but but they'll say they think God is always watching, and they think God is this 00:25:46.610 --> 00:25:52.290 omnipotent, all seeing um agent who will send them to hell if they 00:25:52.290 --> 00:25:57.410 masturbate, and yet they'll happily you know masturbate when they think this uh uh God is 00:25:57.410 --> 00:26:01.250 always watching, which suggests that you know that that commitment that they've got is not 00:26:01.250 --> 00:26:03.490 really functioning as an ordinary world modeling belief. 00:26:03.570 --> 00:26:05.170 And I think there are so many examples of that. 00:26:05.330 --> 00:26:09.900 If you look at you know, conspiracy theories, when somebody sort of intuitively thinks that 00:26:09.900 --> 00:26:13.900 there's a conspiracy going on, you know, if you live in North Korea and the the elites in 00:26:13.900 --> 00:26:18.940 your society are just actually conspiring in really horrific ways against your interests, 00:26:19.100 --> 00:26:23.020 as Hugo Mercier points out, like under those conditions, you you typically don't want to go 00:26:23.020 --> 00:26:27.340 out and just advertise your commitment to this conspiracy theory because it's going to be 00:26:27.340 --> 00:26:29.020 incredibly detrimental to your interests. 00:26:29.100 --> 00:26:33.990 But in a country like the United States, you've got these sort of proponents of QAnon who 00:26:33.990 --> 00:26:38.070 who claim to believe that there's this sort of all-powerful deep state that will crush them 00:26:38.070 --> 00:26:43.030 if they um speak out against the regime, and yet they feel no sort of strangeness in the 00:26:43.030 --> 00:26:46.310 fact that they're advertising their commitment to the belief in that way. 00:26:46.470 --> 00:26:50.870 So these are these are so many cases like that where you've got a kind of sincere 00:26:50.870 --> 00:26:52.710 commitment to the truth of some idea. 00:26:52.870 --> 00:26:55.670 It's not as if I think people are lying in these cases for the most part. 00:26:56.070 --> 00:27:01.880 Um and yet it is just strangely compartmentalized from their sort of uh world 00:27:01.880 --> 00:27:05.960 model in general and and from the kinds of behaviors that that that they're undertaking. 00:27:06.200 --> 00:27:08.760 The question then is how do you make sense of that psychologically? 00:27:08.840 --> 00:27:13.320 And and you're right, different theorists have proposed different ways of of trying to to 00:27:13.320 --> 00:27:14.040 to understand that. 00:27:14.200 --> 00:27:19.000 So there's the kind of uh Sperber idea of uh I think it was at first sort of factual 00:27:19.000 --> 00:27:21.800 beliefs and symbolic beliefs and then it's intuitive and reflective beliefs. 00:27:21.960 --> 00:27:26.600 You've got Neil van Leeuwen's idea where he thinks this difference is between sort of 00:27:26.670 --> 00:27:30.750 factual beliefs and what I think he calls religious credences, and he thinks that's closer 00:27:30.750 --> 00:27:34.270 to imagining than a sort of ordinary world modeling belief. 00:27:34.430 --> 00:27:38.430 Um, my sense is we still don't fully understand exactly what's going on there. 00:27:38.590 --> 00:27:40.830 We know that there's something that needs to be explained. 00:27:40.990 --> 00:27:46.910 Um, but in terms of having a kind of really satisfactory mechanistic understanding of the 00:27:46.910 --> 00:27:51.310 actual psychological processes that drive that, I think it's just it's just really 00:27:51.310 --> 00:27:52.030 complicated. 00:27:52.190 --> 00:27:56.030 And another thing that complicates it is you know, it seems like with many of these 00:27:56.040 --> 00:28:00.920 beliefs, which you might call merely reflective beliefs, or what Lewin calls, um Van Luwen 00:28:01.000 --> 00:28:06.440 calls religious credences, it seems like internalization sort of comes in degrees in a way, 00:28:06.520 --> 00:28:07.320 which is also strange. 00:28:07.560 --> 00:28:13.400 So if you've got someone who's got a kind of identity-defining conviction, um, and you 00:28:13.400 --> 00:28:16.920 know, they're let's say that that they're a Christian, you know, they go to church every 00:28:16.920 --> 00:28:20.290 other week or something when they can remember, and They're going to hold these religious 00:28:20.290 --> 00:28:21.490 beliefs in a way that's kind of light. 00:28:21.570 --> 00:28:24.850 It's not going to make much of a difference to their behavior and their decision making in 00:28:24.850 --> 00:28:25.170 general. 00:28:25.330 --> 00:28:30.770 But if you take someone who's in a really kind of close-knit, intense, hyper-cooperative 00:28:31.010 --> 00:28:36.450 cult where they're constantly monitoring signals of cult loyalty, coalitional allegiance, 00:28:36.530 --> 00:28:40.690 and so on, often you will find the beliefs much more internalized in terms of their 00:28:40.690 --> 00:28:41.170 behavior. 00:28:41.330 --> 00:28:45.010 You know, in some contexts, you get these cases of collective suicide in the cult where 00:28:45.010 --> 00:28:49.180 you've got these really what seem like incredibly internalized beliefs and narratives. 00:28:49.340 --> 00:28:53.580 And if you just have this idea that there are just two different kinds of mental states, 00:28:53.660 --> 00:28:58.140 you know, factual beliefs and religious credences, I wonder whether you can explain that 00:28:58.140 --> 00:28:59.820 kind of variability. 00:28:59.980 --> 00:29:01.180 I genuinely don't know. 00:29:01.340 --> 00:29:03.180 Um it's interesting. 00:29:03.340 --> 00:29:08.610 And even I think like, and this is getting to I think taking an evolutionary approach and a 00:29:08.610 --> 00:29:12.370 psychological approach is that we don't even know. 00:29:12.530 --> 00:29:15.090 Like, if I know, like David is bleeding, right? 00:29:15.250 --> 00:29:20.930 Like just that representation, even a mundane one, a lot of the psychology of the 00:29:20.930 --> 00:29:24.610 inferences that follow still aren't very well studied. 00:29:24.770 --> 00:29:30.210 So, like, you know, the fact that in us there's a representation of our 00:29:30.210 --> 00:29:35.000 relationship, the physical fact of the matter of I one of us should probably go do 00:29:35.000 --> 00:29:36.760 something to get to help David. 00:29:36.840 --> 00:29:37.960 He's bleeding. 00:29:38.120 --> 00:29:43.640 Um, there's representations of sort of like, you know, the schedule will be put on hold for 00:29:43.640 --> 00:29:46.120 what we're doing and what will the social consequences be? 00:29:46.280 --> 00:29:48.440 What if we don't intervene upon David? 00:29:48.680 --> 00:29:53.080 There's all these sort of what cognitive science call or scientists call inference engines, 00:29:53.160 --> 00:29:57.960 or computer scientists or AI researchers call these, like, um, or what Marvin Minsky called 00:29:57.960 --> 00:30:01.750 frames, where it's just sort of like an event representation. 00:30:02.070 --> 00:30:06.790 It almost sounds stilted to talk about it, but in order to actually build a computer, 00:30:06.950 --> 00:30:11.350 whether it's squishy or hard, to actually represent the current state of the world and 00:30:11.350 --> 00:30:16.150 future states of the world or what follows from a representation, we still don't know that 00:30:16.230 --> 00:30:22.150 even for something as normal and mundane as David's bleeding, let alone something like, 00:30:22.230 --> 00:30:26.790 you know, God is a spaghetti monster or we should all kill ourselves because, you know, the 00:30:26.960 --> 00:30:31.760 the space saucer is coming, and you know, we we're gonna have a better life elsewhere. 00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:36.080 So I don't think it's surprising that we still don't know a lot. 00:30:36.160 --> 00:30:41.040 Because I mean, as I read the literature, a lot of the point that you're making, Daniel, 00:30:41.280 --> 00:30:45.920 Dan, and and that I think we're all making, is that we just have to move from a you don't 00:30:46.080 --> 00:30:50.640 there's not enough structure in the world to tell these things apart, and we have to appeal 00:30:50.640 --> 00:30:52.720 to what is the underlying psychology. 00:30:52.800 --> 00:30:54.560 That's kind of what I'm hearing you say. 00:30:55.040 --> 00:30:56.390 Yeah, I think that's right. 00:30:56.470 --> 00:30:59.110 And I I think um I completely agree with that. 00:30:59.350 --> 00:31:05.190 I would just add that you know you can you can get far in some ways 00:31:05.350 --> 00:31:10.630 in thinking about you know high-level human behavior, thinking about broad uh 00:31:11.110 --> 00:31:15.990 patterns in behavior, how people interact, the sorts of things they do, the the narratives 00:31:15.990 --> 00:31:21.520 that they endorse, without having to um settle those questions about 00:31:21.520 --> 00:31:24.560 underlying mechanisms and how everything actually works. 00:31:24.800 --> 00:31:24.960 Right. 00:31:25.120 --> 00:31:29.520 So I think, you know, that I think there's very good reason to believe that that people um 00:31:30.080 --> 00:31:33.520 to some significant degree often internalise their propaganda. 00:31:33.600 --> 00:31:37.680 You know, they're motivated to advocate for a claim and that tends to to shift their their 00:31:37.680 --> 00:31:39.600 private beliefs in the direction of that claim. 00:31:39.760 --> 00:31:43.520 And similarly, you know, as we're saying, I think there are these cases where there's good 00:31:43.520 --> 00:31:48.310 reason to believe that that somebody's uh ideology, a narrative that they're committed to 00:31:48.470 --> 00:31:51.990 performs these social signaling functions and is sort of strangely compartmentalized in 00:31:51.990 --> 00:31:52.790 their mental life. 00:31:52.950 --> 00:31:56.630 We can say that, and I think that can be true and that can be important at the same time as 00:31:56.630 --> 00:32:00.070 we just put our hands up and say we don't fully understand exactly how that works in terms 00:32:00.070 --> 00:32:01.910 of the underlying psychology. 00:32:02.070 --> 00:32:06.150 And you're right, I mean, even when it comes to sort of ordinary inference, in and we're 00:32:06.150 --> 00:32:10.520 setting aside all of these complex social dynamics, so complicated to figure out exactly 00:32:10.520 --> 00:32:11.320 what's going on. 00:32:11.480 --> 00:32:15.880 But one of the things that makes it even more complicated in these social cases is, you 00:32:15.880 --> 00:32:20.680 know, even when these beliefs are sort of compartmentalized, because I think their function 00:32:20.680 --> 00:32:26.040 is very often social, you know, I believe this, I endorse this uh set of religious 00:32:26.040 --> 00:32:30.200 convictions because I want to signal that I'm a committed member of my group. 00:32:30.360 --> 00:32:36.230 There's some sense in which that comes about, and out of motivations to convince you that I 00:32:36.230 --> 00:32:37.030 really believe it. 00:32:37.110 --> 00:32:41.910 Um, which creates all of these extra additional worries when it comes to and and and and 00:32:41.910 --> 00:32:44.310 puzzles when it when it comes to explaining what's going on. 00:32:44.470 --> 00:32:48.550 Because there's some sense in which you know, you don't want to be transparent as the 00:32:48.550 --> 00:32:49.830 individual who's got that kind of belief. 00:32:50.070 --> 00:32:53.910 You're precisely acting in ways to convince other people that you really believe it. 00:32:54.070 --> 00:32:56.380 So it's just yeah so complicated, I think. 00:32:56.700 --> 00:33:01.980 Yeah, natural selection designed you to not to foil future psychologists, basically 00:33:02.140 --> 00:33:03.660 designed the mind in this respect. 00:33:03.740 --> 00:33:07.500 You you're taking on you're biting off a really hard part of human phenotype here. 00:33:07.980 --> 00:33:08.220 Yeah. 00:33:08.380 --> 00:33:14.060 How do you tell the difference between fake belief and real belief when often the agent is 00:33:14.060 --> 00:33:17.340 trying as hard as they can to convince you that it's real belief? 00:33:17.580 --> 00:33:22.470 And what what is the difference between trying really hard to convince you that I believe X 00:33:22.790 --> 00:33:28.710 and believing that you're going to scrutinize me uh for for that and truly believing 00:33:28.710 --> 00:33:28.870 X. 00:33:29.110 --> 00:33:33.270 They they seem to be pretty hard to empirically distinguish because both would lead to the 00:33:33.270 --> 00:33:38.630 same types of behavior that would be that would lend evidence to to the idea that I believe 00:33:38.630 --> 00:33:38.870 X. 00:33:39.190 --> 00:33:42.390 So it's a really thorny and difficult problem. 00:33:43.190 --> 00:33:49.000 Um the way I think of it is um in terms of uh 00:33:49.320 --> 00:33:54.440 cues and signals and how unstable the former are and how they can slide into the latter. 00:33:54.680 --> 00:33:59.480 So um for those who aren't familiar with the distinction, a cue is something that we use uh 00:33:59.640 --> 00:34:01.320 to to guide our behavior. 00:34:01.480 --> 00:34:03.640 Um it's you know X is correlated with Y. 00:34:03.720 --> 00:34:06.840 People who comb their hair are more organized and conscientious. 00:34:07.000 --> 00:34:10.630 So I'm going to hire the people who, you know, neatly comb their hair. 00:34:10.790 --> 00:34:11.910 Um so that's a cue. 00:34:11.990 --> 00:34:16.310 A signal is you're intending to convey information to to someone else. 00:34:16.470 --> 00:34:21.750 Or in in the case of biology, uh the organism is evolving to convey information. 00:34:21.910 --> 00:34:27.910 So one is uh the the information was not intended to to to be conveyed um and or or 00:34:27.910 --> 00:34:30.070 was not evolved to to be conveyed. 00:34:30.310 --> 00:34:34.310 And then the other uh the information uh is evolved or intended to be conveyed. 00:34:34.390 --> 00:34:35.270 That's a signal. 00:34:35.520 --> 00:34:40.640 Um, and so what's weird about our species is because we're so obsessed with getting inside 00:34:40.640 --> 00:34:46.240 each other's heads um and anticipating what other people are going to think we think, that 00:34:46.480 --> 00:34:48.080 cues are really unstable. 00:34:48.320 --> 00:34:53.200 As soon as I pick up on the cue that people with neatly combed hair are organized and 00:34:53.200 --> 00:34:58.290 conscientious, I now have a social strategic incentive to comb my hair because I think that 00:34:58.290 --> 00:35:00.850 you're going to think that I'm conscientious and organized. 00:35:01.250 --> 00:35:05.570 And all of a sudden, once I start doing that, then it the cue may no longer be valid. 00:35:05.650 --> 00:35:10.930 It may be that people who are really sloppy and dish and disorganized comb their hair to 00:35:11.650 --> 00:35:12.450 dupe people. 00:35:12.850 --> 00:35:17.890 And that can lead to a lot of dynamism and arms races between deceivers and deceived. 00:35:18.450 --> 00:35:23.650 It can lead to status games collapsing and re-emerging in antithetical forms. 00:35:24.160 --> 00:35:29.600 And so what I think might be going on with this distinction between belief and schmeleaf or 00:35:29.600 --> 00:35:35.600 whatever is that beliefs are really powerful cues that we try to 00:35:35.600 --> 00:35:41.040 use to anticipate others' behaviors, to anticipate others' allegiances and loyalties and 00:35:41.040 --> 00:35:41.680 traits. 00:35:42.560 --> 00:35:47.280 And because they're such powerful cues, there is thus a powerful incentive to transform 00:35:47.280 --> 00:35:52.910 them into signals, to imitate uh the The superficial 00:35:52.910 --> 00:35:58.910 features of belief, to convince others that we truly believe something, as you put it. 00:35:59.790 --> 00:36:05.630 And once I am motivated enough to really convince you that I believe 00:36:05.630 --> 00:36:11.230 something, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between true belief and what I 00:36:11.230 --> 00:36:12.590 might call pseudo belief. 00:36:12.750 --> 00:36:18.190 I think a lot of our beliefs are pseudo beliefs, and that the goal is to make it difficult 00:36:18.270 --> 00:36:21.620 to tell the difference between real belief and fake belief. 00:36:21.940 --> 00:36:25.860 And that is why it's so hard for psychologists to tell the difference, because that 00:36:25.860 --> 00:36:27.460 difficulty is by design. 00:36:28.500 --> 00:36:34.020 It's tantamount to other kinds of mimicry we see in the biological world, where um a uh a 00:36:34.020 --> 00:36:39.620 non-poisonous uh butterfly will will mimic the features of a poisonous butterfly to avoid 00:36:39.670 --> 00:36:40.310 predation. 00:36:40.550 --> 00:36:45.510 And just as it is very difficult for predators to tell the difference, um, it is often 00:36:45.510 --> 00:36:47.350 difficult for biologists to tell the difference. 00:36:47.430 --> 00:36:51.830 I think a similar phenomenon is happening with us where we have a kind of belief mimicry. 00:36:51.990 --> 00:36:56.950 Uh and that makes it really hard to tell the difference between true belief and and fake 00:36:56.950 --> 00:36:57.430 belief. 00:36:57.750 --> 00:37:00.550 What do you w and that's sort of sort how I how I've been thinking of it lately. 00:37:00.630 --> 00:37:01.750 I'm curious what you think about that. 00:37:01.990 --> 00:37:02.070 Yeah. 00:37:02.310 --> 00:37:02.710 That's great. 00:37:02.790 --> 00:37:02.950 Yeah. 00:37:03.030 --> 00:37:04.550 I love this term pseudo belief. 00:37:04.630 --> 00:37:05.430 Um I'm gonna steal that. 00:37:05.510 --> 00:37:06.020 Uh that's great. 00:37:06.260 --> 00:37:06.580 Oh, cool. 00:37:06.740 --> 00:37:09.700 Actually that's that's but that's better than the other ones in the literature, I think. 00:37:09.860 --> 00:37:10.980 Just just thinking out loud. 00:37:11.060 --> 00:37:16.100 I mean I guess so as you said there's going to be this this sort of puzzle of of what 00:37:16.100 --> 00:37:19.060 distinguishes you know someone who's just let's say just lying. 00:37:19.140 --> 00:37:22.820 You know they know what they privately think and they're just saying that they believe 00:37:22.820 --> 00:37:23.380 something. 00:37:24.660 --> 00:37:28.900 And you know maybe they don't even feel bad about the the discrepancy because they're in a 00:37:28.900 --> 00:37:32.020 social context where it's not like anyone's gonna like hold them accountable. 00:37:33.510 --> 00:37:37.990 so what what distinguishes that kind of case from my understanding of what you said is in 00:37:37.990 --> 00:37:40.150 the case of pseudo-beliefs, it's not quite that. 00:37:40.230 --> 00:37:43.590 It's not that someone is just deliberately misrepresenting what they think. 00:37:43.750 --> 00:37:49.270 There is a kind of psychological state there, um, which which is not just about um 00:37:49.910 --> 00:37:53.350 uh misrepresenting deliberately the state of one's own mind. 00:37:53.510 --> 00:37:58.420 And it does seem important to think that something like that is going on, not just because 00:37:58.500 --> 00:38:01.620 you know it often seems like people are sincere, because you might say, well, they could be 00:38:01.620 --> 00:38:02.260 faking that. 00:38:02.420 --> 00:38:07.220 But it does seem like in many of these contexts people are willing to act on these beliefs, 00:38:07.380 --> 00:38:09.220 at least in some ways, in some contexts. 00:38:09.380 --> 00:38:14.180 In some cases, they're willing to sort of incur costs as a consequence of acting upon them. 00:38:14.420 --> 00:38:14.740 Yeah. 00:38:14.900 --> 00:38:20.900 Um, and so th that that's why I think we need this sort of this construct, which 00:38:20.900 --> 00:38:26.180 is not quite a ordinary world-modelling belief, and it's not quite a mere 00:38:26.590 --> 00:38:28.110 performance or deception. 00:38:28.190 --> 00:38:30.350 It's sort of something in between. 00:38:30.510 --> 00:38:34.590 Um is is is is that what you're meaning by by pseudo-belief, something that kind of exists 00:38:34.590 --> 00:38:38.910 in between those two things or no, I I think so 00:38:40.510 --> 00:38:45.710 So even if I do something that's really costly to to demonstrate that I believe something, 00:38:45.870 --> 00:38:48.830 that could still be part of the signal. 00:38:49.040 --> 00:38:49.360 Right. 00:38:50.400 --> 00:38:53.040 In order to convince you that I truly believe something, I have to incur a cost. 00:38:53.280 --> 00:38:54.080 It could be an honest signal. 00:38:54.160 --> 00:38:55.520 I mean, I that's the thing though. 00:38:55.600 --> 00:38:58.080 It's not an honest signal because I don't truly believe it. 00:38:58.240 --> 00:39:03.360 But I think that those kinds of signal signals can still be stable if they are if if what 00:39:03.360 --> 00:39:09.280 I'm signaling to you uh is correlated with something that um uh is beneficial to you. 00:39:09.520 --> 00:39:14.400 So let's say I don't truly believe that the the spider god is is going to smite me if I 00:39:14.400 --> 00:39:16.000 steal from the group or whatever. 00:39:16.160 --> 00:39:21.310 Um, but my belief in that uh is correlated with my loyalty to the group. 00:39:21.950 --> 00:39:27.870 So in that case, deceiving you that I believe in the spider god, um, 00:39:28.110 --> 00:39:31.230 that is still going to benefit you, even though it's a deceptive signal. 00:39:31.470 --> 00:39:33.870 Because you're going to that's going to endear me to you. 00:39:33.950 --> 00:39:37.070 You're going to welcome me into the group, and and you'll be you'll be right to do so 00:39:37.150 --> 00:39:38.670 because I truly am more loyal. 00:39:38.830 --> 00:39:44.030 And so this the deceptive signal can survive uh because it is correlated with something 00:39:44.030 --> 00:39:47.800 else that makes the signaling system uh mutually beneficial. 00:39:47.960 --> 00:39:53.160 So I that's another piece to this that I'm continuing to think about is that a lot of the 00:39:53.160 --> 00:39:58.440 times a lot of the time deceptive signals uh don't necessarily need to fall apart if if 00:39:58.440 --> 00:40:01.000 they're correlated with something else that's true that's valuable. 00:40:02.600 --> 00:40:06.120 But but do you not think that there is a psychological difference? 00:40:06.600 --> 00:40:09.160 I mean just just think of sort of two cases. 00:40:09.240 --> 00:40:15.190 You know if I uh you know let's say I'm a spy, you know, trying to infiltrate some 00:40:15.190 --> 00:40:16.470 ideological community. 00:40:16.710 --> 00:40:20.870 And as part of that, I really need to convince other people in that community that I hold 00:40:20.870 --> 00:40:21.270 their beliefs. 00:40:21.590 --> 00:40:23.750 So it's like a group of neo Nazis or something like that. 00:40:23.990 --> 00:40:29.670 Um you're right that you know I might need to like pay costs uh to to to credibly signal to 00:40:29.670 --> 00:40:33.560 these other people in the community that that I hold the ideological convictions. 00:40:34.280 --> 00:40:37.880 But nevertheless, this is a case in which you know I'm I'm consciously aware of the fact 00:40:37.880 --> 00:40:39.160 that I don't that I don't really believe it. 00:40:39.480 --> 00:40:43.080 It's a kind of pretense, it's this kind of like active fiction which I'm maintaining. 00:40:43.240 --> 00:40:46.600 That seems very different from the psychology of someone who's actually in the community 00:40:46.600 --> 00:40:48.840 and is actually committed and loyal to the community. 00:40:49.000 --> 00:40:53.000 There, there seems to be a sense in which, even though I think these social incentives are 00:40:53.000 --> 00:40:58.200 playing an important role in regulating what they believe and and how they think about the 00:40:58.200 --> 00:41:04.170 world and the evidence that they seek out and so on, um It's not a self-conscious deception 00:41:04.250 --> 00:41:05.850 in a way that it would be if I if I were. 00:41:06.330 --> 00:41:09.610 I'm thinking out loud here, but that seems like an distinction that we want to capture. 00:41:10.090 --> 00:41:11.530 Yeah, definitely. 00:41:11.850 --> 00:41:17.770 I think what's going on there is that the spy is aware that they don't believe the 00:41:17.770 --> 00:41:18.570 beliefs. 00:41:18.810 --> 00:41:24.650 Um but I think often in our quest to convince others that we believe our 00:41:24.650 --> 00:41:27.180 beliefs, we convince ourselves as well. 00:41:27.420 --> 00:41:33.260 And so often we put ourselves in a state where we um believe that we believe X, 00:41:33.420 --> 00:41:38.700 but we don't actually believe X, because we're so zealous about convincing others that we 00:41:38.700 --> 00:41:40.220 believe that we believe X. 00:41:40.620 --> 00:41:44.380 Or sorry, that that we're we're zealous about convincing others that we believe X. 00:41:44.780 --> 00:41:48.460 Um, that we that we convince ourselves as as part of that process. 00:41:48.860 --> 00:41:53.180 Um, I think that is what that is what what might be going on. 00:41:53.340 --> 00:41:54.790 Um I don't know. 00:41:54.870 --> 00:41:57.990 Do you but I'm still this is obviously a very complicated topic. 00:41:58.070 --> 00:42:01.030 Uh um and you know I'm still kind of figuring it out. 00:42:01.190 --> 00:42:04.310 Um but yeah, what what do you think of of of that idea? 00:42:04.710 --> 00:42:08.630 So I I think that that's Dennett's idea about religion, that that in many of these cases 00:42:08.710 --> 00:42:10.870 you've got, as you say, you've got a kind of belief in belief. 00:42:10.950 --> 00:42:14.070 So it's like you don't believe it, but you sort of become convinced that you believe it. 00:42:14.150 --> 00:42:15.830 So there's this weird second order thing going on. 00:42:15.990 --> 00:42:16.070 Yeah. 00:42:16.230 --> 00:42:20.480 Yeah, I think that's that's that's one of the candidate explanations in this area, which 00:42:20.480 --> 00:42:22.640 really needs to be explored and tested. 00:42:22.880 --> 00:42:27.200 Just as I think the kind of Van Leuen picture also needs to be be tested, and the spurber 00:42:27.360 --> 00:42:28.320 like Mercier one. 00:42:28.480 --> 00:42:33.360 This is what I mean when I say that there's something going on here, which I think lots of 00:42:33.360 --> 00:42:35.120 people are getting at in lots of different ways. 00:42:35.280 --> 00:42:39.520 And each of the different stories I think has their own kind of advantages, and there are 00:42:39.520 --> 00:42:40.880 certain kinds of puzzles they run into. 00:42:40.960 --> 00:42:45.440 And I think it's just gonna require more research to really definitively figure out what's 00:42:45.440 --> 00:42:45.840 going on. 00:42:46.080 --> 00:42:50.430 But I will add, I mean, I think another thing that really complic complicates this is 00:42:51.950 --> 00:42:56.590 in some cases, I think, you know, these pseudo-beliefs, let's call them, these things which 00:42:56.590 --> 00:43:02.270 we're forming for for social reasons, as part of that, we we bias how we we 00:43:02.270 --> 00:43:05.230 seek out and recall evidence, right? 00:43:05.470 --> 00:43:10.110 And as a consequence, we can end up becoming sincerely persuaded of that of that thing, 00:43:10.270 --> 00:43:10.510 right? 00:43:10.670 --> 00:43:15.880 So I think this is a lot of what happens when it comes to um Advocacy 00:43:16.120 --> 00:43:18.760 biasing what people actually take to be the case. 00:43:18.920 --> 00:43:24.680 You know, if I said to you, look, you've got five minutes, I'm going to give you $1,000 if 00:43:24.840 --> 00:43:29.800 you can make an incredibly persuasive case that Obama was the best president in US history, 00:43:29.880 --> 00:43:30.120 right? 00:43:30.360 --> 00:43:34.040 Well, in that time, you're going to be searching through memory, recalling all of this 00:43:34.040 --> 00:43:36.600 information you have, which is in line with that conclusion. 00:43:36.680 --> 00:43:39.000 You're going to be thinking up good arguments and so on. 00:43:39.270 --> 00:43:43.350 And after that process, even though you're sort of self-consciously, you know that you're 00:43:43.350 --> 00:43:48.950 advocating for something, you end up with all of this evidence which is in line with this 00:43:48.950 --> 00:43:52.390 conclusion, which can end up sincerely persuading you of that thing. 00:43:52.630 --> 00:43:58.630 And I think that's often what happens in these cases of uh internalizing our propaganda. 00:43:58.790 --> 00:44:03.670 It's not so much as like Trivers, Robert Trivers famously argued that we're sort of 00:44:03.670 --> 00:44:06.760 deceiving ourselves so that we can deceive others. 00:44:06.920 --> 00:44:08.680 That might be what's going on in some cases. 00:44:08.840 --> 00:44:13.720 But I think often in the process of trying to be a propagandist and advocate for something, 00:44:13.880 --> 00:44:18.600 we just end up almost accidentally becoming convinced of it because we're so biased in 00:44:18.600 --> 00:44:24.360 terms of the evidence and the arguments we recruit to argue for that for that case. 00:44:24.520 --> 00:44:29.970 So I think this is why in in in sort of um the case of lawyers, when they're that they know 00:44:29.970 --> 00:44:34.130 that they're being paid to advocate, let's say, for their client, or they know that it's 00:44:34.130 --> 00:44:36.850 their job to argue that the accused is guilty. 00:44:37.010 --> 00:44:42.210 But I think there's some evidence that they actually end up becoming sincerely convinced in 00:44:42.210 --> 00:44:44.370 the direction that they're incentivized to advocate. 00:44:44.530 --> 00:44:48.370 And the reason for that is just that, or I think at least one potential reason for that, 00:44:48.620 --> 00:44:53.420 which complicates this whole discussion, is even though it like in the first instance 00:44:53.500 --> 00:44:58.700 they've got this this purely practical, non-epistemic motivation, because it's going to 00:44:58.700 --> 00:45:03.340 bias the evidence that they end up with, they're going to end up becoming sort of 00:45:03.340 --> 00:45:07.500 intuitively convinced of a certain kind of view in a way that wouldn't have happened unless 00:45:07.500 --> 00:45:08.940 they had that practical motivation. 00:45:09.180 --> 00:45:11.020 Apologies if that wasn't particularly clear. 00:45:11.100 --> 00:45:11.820 That's me sort of thinking. 00:45:11.980 --> 00:45:13.580 No, no, that was that was perfectly clear. 00:45:13.660 --> 00:45:16.290 Um I I I get that story. 00:45:16.530 --> 00:45:22.530 I I still don't I don't quite buy it because it's kind of puzzling to me 00:45:22.850 --> 00:45:28.770 that if I have a strategic reason to convince you of X, um it's kind of 00:45:28.770 --> 00:45:33.490 puzzling to me that so that some part of the mind wouldn't recognize that and recognize 00:45:33.490 --> 00:45:39.400 that that uh my search for evidence is biased and take that into account when uh updating 00:45:39.400 --> 00:45:40.200 my actual beliefs. 00:45:40.520 --> 00:45:46.120 It seems like a well-designed system would uh when trying to convince others of X, uh 00:45:46.280 --> 00:45:51.000 recognize that fact and correct for that when updating its own internal beliefs. 00:45:51.240 --> 00:45:54.840 Or at least that's if if we're thinking like good ad adaptationists, I would expect there 00:45:54.840 --> 00:45:59.250 to be uh a design uh uh uh for for that end. 00:45:59.330 --> 00:46:03.650 Um so that you know in the same way that if you're if you're trying to fight someone else, 00:46:03.730 --> 00:46:06.530 um you don't want to accidentally hit yourself. 00:46:06.690 --> 00:46:10.370 Um if you're trying to persuade and deceive others, you don't want to accidentally persuade 00:46:10.370 --> 00:46:12.450 and deceive yourself as part of that objective. 00:46:12.610 --> 00:46:17.010 Or at least so that's why I find it a bit implausible that we because it sounds like what 00:46:17.010 --> 00:46:21.410 you're saying is, you know, when we're we're we're we're trying to fight other people, we 00:46:21.490 --> 00:46:26.140 we sometimes hit ourselves and hurt ourselves accidentally uh it seems like we should be we 00:46:26.140 --> 00:46:30.300 should have evolved to avoid doing that as much as possible right can i can i actually push 00:46:30.300 --> 00:46:35.660 on this a little bit i mean just uh and and um but i think to be good adaptationists too we 00:46:35.660 --> 00:46:41.340 have to include the what is the function of our own internalization of the belief and 00:46:41.500 --> 00:46:46.940 yes it might not be that it's just this propositional of what is true if the if the 00:46:46.940 --> 00:46:52.670 underlying design of the system is accept as a belief though uh 00:46:52.750 --> 00:46:58.670 when when there's a good argument available than uh if that's the underlying 00:46:58.670 --> 00:46:59.950 reason for it, right? 00:47:00.110 --> 00:47:05.550 So it's not that I'm I've punched myself, it's that the 00:47:05.550 --> 00:47:09.150 underlying structure is different than believe what's true, quote unquote. 00:47:09.230 --> 00:47:15.230 It's a much more operationalized thing of what's the logic for why I'm accepting 00:47:15.230 --> 00:47:15.870 a belief. 00:47:16.030 --> 00:47:21.480 And if the design of that system is when a good argument and a lot of evidence is 00:47:21.480 --> 00:47:27.400 provided uh represent that into quote unquote your beliefs, then you would 00:47:27.400 --> 00:47:28.680 get that as part of the design. 00:47:28.760 --> 00:47:31.800 And you I mean we one would have to be functionalist about why that would be. 00:47:31.960 --> 00:47:36.520 It could be true, you know, but I but I think that would be I think that's the part to push 00:47:36.520 --> 00:47:38.680 on that doesn't make it punching yourself. 00:47:38.760 --> 00:47:39.320 Dan, yeah. 00:47:39.480 --> 00:47:39.640 Sorry. 00:47:40.200 --> 00:47:40.440 I get that. 00:47:40.520 --> 00:47:40.840 I get that. 00:47:40.920 --> 00:47:46.280 But but wouldn't a better design be believe X when there are good arguments and evidence 00:47:46.570 --> 00:47:51.370 unless you have strategic reasons to present one-sided arguments and evidence for X, in 00:47:51.370 --> 00:47:53.610 which case don't believe X, or at least discount it. 00:47:53.770 --> 00:47:57.210 That that would be a better design system than than the former system. 00:47:57.690 --> 00:47:57.930 Yeah. 00:47:58.170 --> 00:47:59.210 I think it's complicated. 00:47:59.370 --> 00:48:04.090 I mean I think somewhere in Hugo Mercier's book Not Born Yesterday, you you know, he pushes 00:48:04.090 --> 00:48:07.290 back on that line of reasoning a little bit precisely for this sort of reason. 00:48:07.450 --> 00:48:11.300 Like if you actually come across a really good argument for something, even if your search 00:48:11.300 --> 00:48:15.460 has been biased by non-epistemic considerations, you're gonna take it into consideration. 00:48:15.700 --> 00:48:19.780 But I totally see the force of your point, David, which is that, well, you know, you should 00:48:19.780 --> 00:48:23.060 correct for the fact that the search is biased. 00:48:23.220 --> 00:48:27.460 Um so what what I'd say is I think you're right, there's a sort of maybe let's say like a 00:48:27.460 --> 00:48:33.250 prima facie um Adaptationist presumption against this being the case, 00:48:33.330 --> 00:48:36.850 maybe, although for the reasons we've talked about, it's complicated and I still don't know 00:48:36.850 --> 00:48:37.970 entirely what to think about that. 00:48:38.370 --> 00:48:41.090 But it could be that this is just a kind of clue-y aspect of the mind. 00:48:41.170 --> 00:48:42.290 I think you have to be open to that. 00:48:42.450 --> 00:48:47.810 And then it could be as well that um, you know, as people like as people like Trivers have 00:48:47.810 --> 00:48:52.300 have argued, there is in addition some sort of like positive uh value that that can 00:48:52.300 --> 00:48:54.140 sometimes come from internalizing it. 00:48:54.300 --> 00:48:58.780 So even though it can come with costs, it comes with benefits, and that complicates it. 00:48:58.860 --> 00:49:03.500 Like, for example, if you do sincerely internalize it, you become a more effective advocate 00:49:03.500 --> 00:49:05.660 for the position, um, etc. 00:49:06.300 --> 00:49:12.140 So, yeah, I I I totally take take the point that if it it seems like you wouldn't 00:49:12.140 --> 00:49:15.500 expect this to be the case if you've got this kind of adaptationist assumption, which I 00:49:15.500 --> 00:49:16.780 think is a really important point. 00:49:17.020 --> 00:49:21.110 Um, But again, it's what it's one of those, it's one of those, I've been thinking about 00:49:21.110 --> 00:49:23.910 this for a while now and I still I still don't know exactly what to think. 00:49:23.990 --> 00:49:27.910 Um because I think another thing that really complicates this is you know, my sense in so 00:49:28.070 --> 00:49:32.390 is that at least in some cases, people do kind of incur costs. 00:49:32.550 --> 00:49:37.670 Like it is somewhat maladaptive to internalize the views that they're advocating for, and 00:49:37.670 --> 00:49:38.550 yet they still do it. 00:49:38.630 --> 00:49:44.600 Um which makes me a little bit more receptive to the to the sort of this is a uh a klugy 00:49:44.760 --> 00:49:48.280 aspect of our psychology or a byproduct of other things or or something like that. 00:49:49.000 --> 00:49:53.800 Could it be that just argument is a service for coalitional entrepreneurship? 00:49:53.960 --> 00:49:59.320 So I mean just baked in intrinsically to a mental representation is if I've come up with a 00:49:59.320 --> 00:50:05.000 good argument um that's just sort of probabilistically this is 00:50:05.160 --> 00:50:10.850 a a social item that's gonna be a coalitional um 00:50:11.090 --> 00:50:11.650 opportunity. 00:50:11.810 --> 00:50:17.810 It might not go, but I mean that would be one explanation for it is kluge, but it's sort of 00:50:17.890 --> 00:50:19.330 it's intrinsically social. 00:50:19.650 --> 00:50:25.090 Um yeah so the uh the idea there is that is that truly 00:50:25.090 --> 00:50:30.610 believing something serves a useful uh coalitional purpose and that it 00:50:30.610 --> 00:50:36.280 helps coordinate the group and and uh or around say a shared goal is is that the idea 00:50:36.520 --> 00:50:42.040 it's a more of a David Pinsoth idea which is that um if I have come up if I have arranged 00:50:42.040 --> 00:50:47.480 arguments yeah that uh that I think are good and I model that will convince other people 00:50:48.040 --> 00:50:53.640 um that that whenever that is tripped that I have that representation I have that I've come 00:50:53.640 --> 00:50:59.240 up with it or I have access to that that is part of the 00:50:59.690 --> 00:51:05.210 um this is a status acquisition opportunity because there's such an 00:51:05.210 --> 00:51:10.970 interest in arguments as coordination devices um 00:51:11.610 --> 00:51:12.970 for social coordination. 00:51:13.050 --> 00:51:15.130 So this is a David Pins off idea. 00:51:15.210 --> 00:51:16.410 Um David. 00:51:16.730 --> 00:51:19.530 I think I understand what you're getting at. 00:51:19.690 --> 00:51:24.410 Uh let me see if I can repeat to you what I think you're getting at, which is that um 00:51:24.570 --> 00:51:30.360 there's one way to uh design a mind to believe things, which is just believe 00:51:30.360 --> 00:51:35.240 things that have the most evidence, uh, the best arguments, and if there are biases in in 00:51:35.240 --> 00:51:38.520 in the uh production of evidence and arguments, take that into account. 00:51:38.600 --> 00:51:41.320 Uh, and and that's like a one way to form beliefs. 00:51:41.560 --> 00:51:47.560 But another way to form beliefs is to think about what are the arguments 00:51:47.560 --> 00:51:52.280 and evidence that other people in your culture will find plausible and will be likely to be 00:51:52.280 --> 00:51:53.560 uh convinced of. 00:51:54.050 --> 00:51:59.810 Yeah, that's that's a way of believe whatever your social and cultural group will likely 00:51:59.810 --> 00:52:01.330 join you in believing. 00:52:01.970 --> 00:52:05.170 Um regardless of whether it has good evidence or good arguments for it. 00:52:05.250 --> 00:52:09.490 And the argument there would be there are adaptive benefits to coordination. 00:52:09.650 --> 00:52:13.970 And often it is more important to coordinate with other members of your group than it is to 00:52:13.970 --> 00:52:15.570 coordinate with reality. 00:52:15.810 --> 00:52:21.520 So if you see a belief that um it has strong intuitive appeal to other 00:52:21.520 --> 00:52:25.200 members of your cultural group, believe that because that's going to help you coordinate 00:52:25.200 --> 00:52:28.560 with other members of your group and perhaps give you status for having come up with that 00:52:28.560 --> 00:52:30.640 belief uh, you know, as the originator of it. 00:52:30.800 --> 00:52:31.920 Is that is that basically what I'm saying? 00:52:32.080 --> 00:52:32.400 Yeah, yeah. 00:52:32.480 --> 00:52:35.920 I mean, I think it includes other things, but I think like the existence of logical 00:52:35.920 --> 00:52:41.920 fallacies and arguments and what those are are descriptions of exactly when 00:52:42.560 --> 00:52:43.710 th those exist. 00:52:44.510 --> 00:52:50.350 The existence of an ad hominem attack, the existence of uh appealing to common 00:52:50.350 --> 00:52:55.870 knowledge or to the group, um, I think exit it precisely exists because this happens all 00:52:55.870 --> 00:52:56.190 the time. 00:52:56.350 --> 00:52:56.830 Yeah. 00:52:58.590 --> 00:52:59.230 Yeah. 00:52:59.470 --> 00:53:04.750 I I believe something if there are social benefits to believing it or social costs for 00:53:04.750 --> 00:53:05.470 disbelieving it. 00:53:05.790 --> 00:53:06.110 Right. 00:53:06.340 --> 00:53:09.540 It's like what Bacon called like the idols of the tribe, right? 00:53:09.620 --> 00:53:11.700 Or like, you know, he had like these idols, right? 00:53:11.780 --> 00:53:16.500 Where it was sort of like Francis Bacon had, you know, what why do people believe why do 00:53:16.500 --> 00:53:20.100 scientists or philosophers at the time or natural philosophers hold the beliefs that they 00:53:20.100 --> 00:53:20.500 hold? 00:53:20.660 --> 00:53:24.580 And he's like, it's stupid because like they're just going around like it's a status 00:53:24.580 --> 00:53:25.060 scheme, right? 00:53:25.140 --> 00:53:28.260 Or like it's because everybody believes it and they're just sort of like who's high status. 00:53:28.340 --> 00:53:34.210 And so there's this r beautiful like literature in the history of sort of people arguing 00:53:34.210 --> 00:53:39.810 for science above and beyond these status games, like logical fallacies, like Bacon's 00:53:39.810 --> 00:53:42.130 Idols of the Tribe or The Species or the Cave. 00:53:42.210 --> 00:53:45.650 I mean, there's like, you know, they're they're all different ones, but I think they all 00:53:45.650 --> 00:53:45.970 exist. 00:53:46.050 --> 00:53:51.010 They're they're a documentation informally of like the presence of this, of these 00:53:51.010 --> 00:53:52.210 adaptations, right? 00:53:53.840 --> 00:53:54.240 Yeah. 00:53:54.480 --> 00:54:00.320 It's almost like um an example is like um so I think Jordan Peterson is full of 00:54:00.320 --> 00:54:00.960 shit, right? 00:54:01.200 --> 00:54:02.320 But I haven't done my own. 00:54:03.040 --> 00:54:05.040 We're not gonna uh we're not gonna edit that out. 00:54:05.280 --> 00:54:06.080 We're not gonna edit that out. 00:54:06.480 --> 00:54:09.280 Uh so but but like it's a totally unjustified belief. 00:54:09.360 --> 00:54:10.640 I haven't actually read the guy. 00:54:10.800 --> 00:54:15.040 I haven't like, you know, done my homework in terms of figuring out if he's actually like 00:54:15.120 --> 00:54:17.360 saying interesting or legitimate things or not. 00:54:17.600 --> 00:54:23.250 It's just kind of I know um Can I say can I say yeah can I say everybody 00:54:23.250 --> 00:54:29.090 should find somebody to marry them who thinks about them like Jordan Peterson 00:54:29.250 --> 00:54:30.770 thinks about himself. 00:54:31.650 --> 00:54:33.570 That's what I'll say about Jordan Peterson. 00:54:33.650 --> 00:54:33.810 Okay. 00:54:34.130 --> 00:54:34.370 Yeah. 00:54:34.450 --> 00:54:40.290 So like that get like it's so deeply uncool in our in my cultural social group to be into 00:54:40.290 --> 00:54:41.650 Jordan Peterson, right? 00:54:41.940 --> 00:54:46.660 Um and that uncoolness has sort of inf infected my my epistemology. 00:54:47.060 --> 00:54:51.060 Like I I truly believe that he's he's full of shit, but I have no I don't think I have like 00:54:51.060 --> 00:54:55.940 legitimate reasons other than that I just feel that he's so deeply uncool uh in my in my 00:54:55.940 --> 00:54:56.260 group. 00:54:56.500 --> 00:54:56.740 Right. 00:54:56.900 --> 00:55:00.340 Um I think I think you're being I think you're being hard on yourself. 00:55:00.820 --> 00:55:05.380 Yeah I find that I find I think I think this is a case where you've got sufficient 00:55:05.700 --> 00:55:07.140 epistemic justification. 00:55:07.220 --> 00:55:10.980 I mean I'm assuming that you've you've read some things you've seen some things that he 00:55:10.980 --> 00:55:11.140 said. 00:55:11.300 --> 00:55:15.470 I'm assuming it's not one of those cases where like you've never come across any of his 00:55:15.470 --> 00:55:16.350 intellectual output. 00:55:16.430 --> 00:55:18.830 Um and you're probably seen like sure. 00:55:18.910 --> 00:55:22.830 I've maybe seen like one or two clips of his, but like that's not really sufficient 00:55:22.830 --> 00:55:25.470 evidence to judge an entire person's work and output. 00:55:26.510 --> 00:55:28.990 You know, like that's that might not be a representative sample. 00:55:29.310 --> 00:55:32.830 Surely it was shaped by people's, you know, a desire to make him look bad. 00:55:32.910 --> 00:55:34.670 You know, take maybe it was taken out of context. 00:55:34.750 --> 00:55:35.390 Like, I don't know. 00:55:35.470 --> 00:55:40.030 I I really I feel like I don't have enough evidence to be confident one way or another, and 00:55:40.030 --> 00:55:40.910 yet I'm confident. 00:55:41.120 --> 00:55:41.440 I don't know. 00:55:41.520 --> 00:55:43.760 It's a weird schizophrenia in my in myself. 00:55:44.000 --> 00:55:44.240 Yeah. 00:55:46.720 --> 00:55:48.160 Just just really quickly on that. 00:55:48.720 --> 00:55:53.680 I mean, you might say you've got kind of higher order evidence, in as much as the people 00:55:53.680 --> 00:55:54.960 who you trust who think that. 00:55:56.000 --> 00:55:57.760 And often that's how we form beliefs. 00:55:57.840 --> 00:56:02.480 You know, even if you take it take away these sort of uh impression management concerns and 00:56:02.480 --> 00:56:07.070 status competition, You know, we we don't have first hand experience of of most of the 00:56:07.070 --> 00:56:08.270 things that we form beliefs about. 00:56:08.350 --> 00:56:11.790 And so we just rely upon people that that we trust to be good information sources. 00:56:12.030 --> 00:56:15.550 And if you're in a I'm I'm not saying this is necessarily what's going on in your case. 00:56:15.630 --> 00:56:19.790 It could just be pure, you know, this guy's uncool within your kind of prestige economy, 00:56:19.870 --> 00:56:22.590 but but it could also be the case that, you know, you're surrounded by people that you 00:56:22.590 --> 00:56:28.430 think are smart and generally sort of thoughtful when it comes to evaluating whether 00:56:28.430 --> 00:56:32.140 people are intellectually worthwhile you trust those people. 00:56:32.300 --> 00:56:36.380 And I think those sorts of explanations are often quite difficult to tease apart. 00:56:36.460 --> 00:56:40.780 You know, the the case in which you form a belief for its social benefits because it's 00:56:40.780 --> 00:56:45.100 going to make you look good, because that's the kind of the socially enforced orthodoxy 00:56:45.100 --> 00:56:46.540 within your reference network. 00:56:46.780 --> 00:56:50.540 Distinguishing that from cases in which, no, you are trying to get at the truth, but you're 00:56:50.540 --> 00:56:54.380 just forced to rely upon kind of the higher order evidence of what people in your social 00:56:54.380 --> 00:56:55.900 network take to be the case. 00:56:56.060 --> 00:56:59.740 Um, I think disentangling those two things is quite difficult in in some cases. 00:56:59.990 --> 00:57:00.150 Yeah. 00:57:00.390 --> 00:57:00.710 Yeah. 00:57:01.350 --> 00:57:01.670 Totally. 00:57:02.710 --> 00:57:07.670 Dan, one question we've asked people and to sort of maybe move things in a slightly 00:57:07.670 --> 00:57:13.670 different direction, just for a little bit at least, is how did you get interested in this? 00:57:14.870 --> 00:57:20.470 Many people we've talked to have sort of had an origin story, either with taking an 00:57:20.470 --> 00:57:25.030 evolutionary approach, but then also sort of a reason for why they study what they study. 00:57:25.190 --> 00:57:30.620 And I'm imagining people sort of wondering you know, you're interested in belief and its 00:57:30.620 --> 00:57:36.460 social strategic function, um, and you know, not to psychoanalyze you or yourself, 00:57:36.540 --> 00:57:40.620 but I mean, have you thought about sort of what when you're thinking about the these 00:57:40.620 --> 00:57:46.460 phenomena, is there do you either have like a life experience or was there something about, 00:57:46.540 --> 00:57:51.730 you know, you looked out in the world and you're like, this is weird or unjust or just 00:57:51.730 --> 00:57:52.370 strange? 00:57:52.610 --> 00:57:53.890 Like what what do you know? 00:57:53.970 --> 00:57:59.970 Do you have some notion of sort of why this particular thing and not study some something 00:57:59.970 --> 00:58:00.610 else? 00:58:01.650 --> 00:58:02.210 Hmm. 00:58:02.450 --> 00:58:08.370 Um so I mean I guess one part of that is why am I interested in 00:58:08.370 --> 00:58:13.650 the application of evolutionary ideas to psychology and behavior, which I think is quite um 00:58:13.890 --> 00:58:17.250 let's say unusual for a humanities academic. 00:58:18.260 --> 00:58:22.980 And and there, I mean, I mean who knows what the actual causes are, but the the kind of the 00:58:23.140 --> 00:58:29.060 the boring story which strikes me as uh plausible is just that when I was a teenager, I 00:58:29.060 --> 00:58:33.860 read books by you know Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, a little bit later on, Dan Dennett. 00:58:34.340 --> 00:58:39.300 And since the the the minute I came across these ideas, the moment I came across these 00:58:39.300 --> 00:58:44.990 ideas, I just found them incredibly almost obviously compelling in a way that's never 00:58:44.990 --> 00:58:47.710 really been replicated in other areas of intellectual inquiry. 00:58:47.870 --> 00:58:53.230 Um, learning about evolution by natural selection, uh, just this sort of profound 00:58:53.230 --> 00:58:55.630 transformation in how I understood the world. 00:58:55.790 --> 00:59:01.070 And then also, more specifically, the idea that you know, applying uh uh 00:59:01.120 --> 00:59:05.200 evolutionary theory to understanding our minds and our behavior and our societies, that 00:59:05.200 --> 00:59:06.320 that would be fruitful. 00:59:06.480 --> 00:59:11.040 Um, again, just struck me as obvious from the the moment I came across this. 00:59:11.120 --> 00:59:12.480 Um, but that was young. 00:59:12.640 --> 00:59:18.480 And then I went into sort of university and eventually did a PhD and went into academia in 00:59:18.480 --> 00:59:19.200 the humanities. 00:59:19.280 --> 00:59:23.200 And there's this strange thing where you know I assumed learning this stuff as a teenager, 00:59:23.520 --> 00:59:29.280 that this is just like what our you know, uncontroversial picture of what human beings 00:59:29.280 --> 00:59:34.130 um uh Alike, inasmuch as we're products of evolution by natural selection, and that fact is 00:59:34.210 --> 00:59:36.050 relevant understanding of behavior. 00:59:36.210 --> 00:59:40.850 I assume that was just the kind of consensus view among all smart people for the most part, 00:59:40.930 --> 00:59:42.370 with some exceptions here and there. 00:59:42.530 --> 00:59:47.890 And then when I went into academia as someone in the humanities, I mean you'll both know 00:59:47.890 --> 00:59:53.650 this very well, it was this shock to me that evolutionary psychology, even understood in a 00:59:53.650 --> 00:59:57.580 really broad sense, is incredibly stigmatized. 00:59:57.660 --> 01:00:03.580 People are actively hostile to it, which I found 01:00:03.580 --> 01:00:06.860 just baffling and continue to find uh really baffling. 01:00:07.260 --> 01:00:12.300 Um, and so so that's sort of the origin story of how I got into evolutionary psychology in 01:00:12.300 --> 01:00:15.260 a way that I think is kind of unusual for a humanities academic. 01:00:15.340 --> 01:00:19.930 I just came across these ideas really early on, and before I could have been up 01:00:19.930 --> 01:00:24.730 indoctrinated, I think, by the kind of you know humanities style view of evolutionary 01:00:24.730 --> 01:00:25.530 psychology. 01:00:26.010 --> 01:00:30.010 Um and then in terms of my like specific research interests, I don't know. 01:00:30.090 --> 01:00:34.090 I feel like the the truth there is just really boring and mundane, which is that certain 01:00:34.090 --> 01:00:35.290 things I found interesting. 01:00:35.450 --> 01:00:37.930 I read certain people, I found their arguments persuasive. 01:00:38.090 --> 01:00:38.250 Yeah. 01:00:38.490 --> 01:00:44.140 Um and also, you know, yeah, yeah With within academia, it's this you know, sort of status 01:00:44.140 --> 01:00:47.820 game to come up with kind of interesting and engaging ideas. 01:00:47.980 --> 01:00:51.500 And so you you try to find those aspects of the literature that you think are most 01:00:51.500 --> 01:00:56.300 promising for generating new ideas, and especially if you've got a kind of rich theoretical 01:00:56.300 --> 01:00:58.940 framework that you can use to generate a few different ideas. 01:00:59.180 --> 01:01:03.630 Um, and and again, in that context, I've found you know, kind of evolutionary cognitive 01:01:03.630 --> 01:01:07.550 science, social science in the broadest possible sense of those terms, just incredibly 01:01:07.550 --> 01:01:08.190 fruitful. 01:01:08.510 --> 01:01:08.750 Yeah. 01:01:08.910 --> 01:01:09.070 Yeah. 01:01:09.310 --> 01:01:10.110 So that's the story. 01:01:10.350 --> 01:01:11.150 Yeah, no, thanks. 01:01:11.230 --> 01:01:11.550 That's great. 01:01:11.630 --> 01:01:16.350 And I mean, I think one of the other things that people might be listening, especially 01:01:16.350 --> 01:01:21.070 people who aren't familiar with your work, you know, we've talked about evolution not being 01:01:21.230 --> 01:01:26.700 just so story, and we have talked about examples of taking an approach and generating, have 01:01:26.700 --> 01:01:31.340 an idea of like the underlying function of this phenomenon is X, that makes additional 01:01:31.340 --> 01:01:31.820 predictions. 01:01:31.980 --> 01:01:33.100 We can test that. 01:01:33.580 --> 01:01:39.500 Um, do you have an example of when you talk about this to people or of your work 01:01:40.060 --> 01:01:45.740 where that functionalist approach that's saying that the underlying function of this weird 01:01:45.740 --> 01:01:48.220 thing is this other thing? 01:01:48.470 --> 01:01:53.830 And when we think about that and understand that, um, it makes predictions or gives us 01:01:53.830 --> 01:01:54.150 insight. 01:01:54.230 --> 01:01:58.710 Do you have an example of that for people who might not know your work that well? 01:01:59.270 --> 01:02:03.910 So I think what we've been talking about in terms of um you know motivated reasoning, what 01:02:03.910 --> 01:02:09.350 gets called self-deception and so on, with with within philosophy, um philosophy of mind, 01:02:09.510 --> 01:02:13.030 there's still this, I think, quite strong commitment to the, you know, you can't handle the 01:02:13.030 --> 01:02:18.380 truth model of Of these sorts of beliefs, that we believe things that 01:02:18.940 --> 01:02:23.340 we want to be true, that protect our self-esteem, that help us regulate our emotions and so 01:02:23.340 --> 01:02:23.660 on. 01:02:24.060 --> 01:02:27.980 And, you know, I've been pushing for a long time, you know, this is not really original, 01:02:28.060 --> 01:02:31.980 this is drawing on the work of, you know, David and Robert Trivers and Robert Wright and 01:02:31.980 --> 01:02:33.740 Richard Alexander and so on. 01:02:34.460 --> 01:02:38.300 Firstly, the idea that, as we've already talked about, that's just very implausible from an 01:02:38.300 --> 01:02:39.340 evolutionary perspective. 01:02:39.500 --> 01:02:40.940 And that I think should count against it. 01:02:41.020 --> 01:02:46.090 It doesn't rule it out definitively, um, because we do do things to regulate our emotions 01:02:46.090 --> 01:02:48.330 and sort of hedonic self-manipulation and so on. 01:02:48.490 --> 01:02:52.330 But at the very least, in terms of thinking about things in a careful, sort of rigorous 01:02:52.330 --> 01:02:57.450 way, theoretically, it's sort of mark against it, in as much as this is very bizarre as a 01:02:57.450 --> 01:02:59.610 view from an evolutionary perspective. 01:03:00.250 --> 01:03:06.250 But then also if you take a a kind of a a a a goal which makes a lot more evolutionary 01:03:06.250 --> 01:03:12.160 sense, as we've been talking about something like advocacy or propaganda, where the goal 01:03:12.160 --> 01:03:16.320 is not to adjust your own psychological state, but to influence other agents and their 01:03:16.320 --> 01:03:18.320 mental states in advantageous ways. 01:03:18.880 --> 01:03:24.880 I think if you then understand lots of these biased beliefs as being wrapped up with 01:03:24.880 --> 01:03:28.800 these motivations towards advocacy, that can then not only does it have this sort of 01:03:28.800 --> 01:03:33.760 evolutionary plausibility, I think it explains a whole suite of patterns that we see that 01:03:33.760 --> 01:03:38.710 you don't get from the I can't handle the truth model of self-deception. 01:03:38.950 --> 01:03:42.470 Um, one of them, and you've written about this, I can't remember exactly where, David, but 01:03:42.550 --> 01:03:46.790 but it's the fact that you know often we we're biased to believe things that we don't want 01:03:46.790 --> 01:03:48.790 to be true in a way that's very confusing. 01:03:48.870 --> 01:03:52.310 If you've got this, you know, you can't handle the truth model of self-deception, like 01:03:52.390 --> 01:03:56.950 believing that there are witches engaging in these like audiastic gatherings, you know, 01:03:57.030 --> 01:03:59.110 under cover of night against the community. 01:03:59.270 --> 01:04:02.230 That's not something people believe for reasons of emotional comfort. 01:04:02.310 --> 01:04:05.900 Um, believing in hell, you know, it's not the kind of thing people believe, so it makes 01:04:05.900 --> 01:04:07.020 them feel good about the world. 01:04:07.260 --> 01:04:11.820 Believing that the rival group is this incredibly threatening, malevolent force, it's not 01:04:11.820 --> 01:04:13.340 gonna, you know, make you sleep better at night. 01:04:13.500 --> 01:04:15.260 These are often quite distressing beliefs. 01:04:15.340 --> 01:04:15.420 Yeah. 01:04:15.660 --> 01:04:19.100 But in each of those cases, they serve these sort of propagandistic purposes, right? 01:04:19.180 --> 01:04:23.180 If you can demonize someone as a witch, you send a signal about your intentions towards 01:04:23.180 --> 01:04:25.260 them, you you you denigrate their reputation. 01:04:25.490 --> 01:04:29.250 If you can portray a rival group as being incredibly threatening and dangerous, well, 01:04:29.330 --> 01:04:30.450 that's useful propaganda. 01:04:30.610 --> 01:04:34.530 So it makes sense that we'll be biased towards those kinds of beliefs, even if it's not 01:04:34.530 --> 01:04:36.290 something that would like to be true. 01:04:36.530 --> 01:04:41.970 And I also think it explains why we sort of touched on this a little bit already, but why 01:04:42.050 --> 01:04:47.010 when it comes to sort of motivated cognition, these cases where our practical motivations 01:04:47.010 --> 01:04:52.530 bias our beliefs, there seems to be this sort of rationalization constraint where, you 01:04:52.530 --> 01:04:57.060 know, generally we're only going to internalize something in as much as we can find sort of 01:04:57.060 --> 01:05:02.180 epistemic justifications for it, if we can find evidence and arguments that that that uh 01:05:02.260 --> 01:05:06.820 are consistent with that with that idea, even if they're not good, judge objectively. 01:05:06.980 --> 01:05:10.820 And again, I think that kind of makes sense on a sort of propagandistic, you know, uh uh 01:05:11.060 --> 01:05:11.940 rationale. 01:05:12.100 --> 01:05:16.900 Um, if the goal of these beliefs is to be spread and to persuade and to propagandise, then 01:05:16.900 --> 01:05:20.660 it makes sense that you would try to recruit selectively evidence and arguments in favor of 01:05:20.660 --> 01:05:20.820 them. 01:05:20.980 --> 01:05:25.650 Whereas if the goal is merely to indulge in this sort of you know masturbatory wishful 01:05:25.650 --> 01:05:29.650 thinking, it's very unclear why you would need to recruit these these forms of evidence and 01:05:29.650 --> 01:05:30.210 arguments. 01:05:30.450 --> 01:05:34.050 So off the top of my head, I mean that that sort of those arguments in different places 01:05:34.050 --> 01:05:38.690 have been made before, but I think it's a really clear case where um, you know, taking a 01:05:38.690 --> 01:05:42.210 kind of evolutionary perspective that says, look, here's this striking thing about human 01:05:42.210 --> 01:05:46.690 psychology, let's try to explain it in terms of the goals that would actually make sense 01:05:46.690 --> 01:05:50.530 from an evolutionary perspective, including the perspective of what are the actual 01:05:50.530 --> 01:05:54.200 selection pressures that we confronted ancestrally, which had to do with playing these 01:05:54.200 --> 01:05:55.320 complex social games. 01:05:55.560 --> 01:05:59.800 So start with that as your kind of your guiding set of priors. 01:06:00.200 --> 01:06:05.320 And then building on that, show how it illuminates many aspects of this phenomenon that 01:06:05.320 --> 01:06:07.000 would otherwise be be quite puzzling. 01:06:07.240 --> 01:06:11.400 That's something that sort of jumps to mind as a really good case. 01:06:11.560 --> 01:06:17.550 Um where I think, you know, taking this broad evolutionary perspective really helps to 01:06:17.550 --> 01:06:22.030 eliminate something which is sort of central to the human condition and I think widely 01:06:22.030 --> 01:06:25.470 misunderstood by people who don't bother with the evolutionary perspective at all. 01:06:25.790 --> 01:06:26.110 Yeah. 01:06:26.990 --> 01:06:30.910 For and you know, when you think about beliefs, right, you know, I think we've talked, 01:06:31.390 --> 01:06:37.150 David and I have talked a bit about cynical approaches to ourselves. 01:06:37.310 --> 01:06:41.640 And in some sense, it's sort of humbling because it applies to ourselves, right? 01:06:41.720 --> 01:06:44.360 And it's sort of being like, well, what am I? 01:06:44.760 --> 01:06:46.040 What do I believe? 01:06:46.280 --> 01:06:51.320 And you know, I think all of us who take an evolutionary approach as professionals, I mean, 01:06:51.400 --> 01:06:55.080 to varying degrees, we sort of have our work hat and life hat. 01:06:55.240 --> 01:07:00.120 But I'm wondering, like, for you, and I'm sort of for for people listening, and and David, 01:07:00.200 --> 01:07:04.280 this question is for you too, because I think you you guys both are sort of the world um 01:07:04.280 --> 01:07:05.800 experts on this. 01:07:06.120 --> 01:07:11.130 Um, When you're thinking about social biases or propagandistic biases, or even if we get 01:07:11.130 --> 01:07:15.210 rid of the word bias, and just say, like, you know, the reason why we do these things is 01:07:15.210 --> 01:07:16.570 for these reasons. 01:07:16.970 --> 01:07:22.650 Um, do you find yourself like in a day-to-day way, sort of like, is it helpful? 01:07:22.810 --> 01:07:26.410 Like I think some people might think it's sort of oppressive and cynical. 01:07:26.570 --> 01:07:31.360 Do you actually find it liberating or a nice check on sort of just double checking your 01:07:31.360 --> 01:07:31.760 assumptions? 01:07:31.920 --> 01:07:37.760 Like David is gonna go and read two hours worth of Jordan Peterson after this, I'm sure. 01:07:38.240 --> 01:07:43.520 Um you know, like that kind of like, you know, are there for people listening who might 01:07:43.520 --> 01:07:47.680 just think it's all cynical and and sort of you're just trying to say people are stupid? 01:07:47.840 --> 01:07:51.200 Like what I'm not saying you're saying that, or either of you, you know, and I I know you 01:07:51.200 --> 01:07:53.920 guys both are very explicit about the opposite point. 01:07:54.080 --> 01:07:55.760 Um, but yeah, do you know what I'm getting at? 01:07:55.840 --> 01:08:01.770 Like, do you how do you think about, you know what's the what tools does this give you in 01:08:01.770 --> 01:08:05.610 your day-to-day existence that people might want to pick up? 01:08:06.650 --> 01:08:10.010 Yeah, I mean I'd really interested in in David's view on this as well, because obviously 01:08:10.090 --> 01:08:12.890 it's something he's he's thought a massive amount uh about. 01:08:13.050 --> 01:08:18.170 So I guess there's a question of um what do we gain from this sort of perspective on belief 01:08:18.250 --> 01:08:22.250 specifically, and then what might we gain from a sort of more cynical view of human 01:08:22.250 --> 01:08:23.850 motivation in general? 01:08:24.090 --> 01:08:29.820 Um What I would say is, I mean, this is a framework for thinking about our psychology and 01:08:29.820 --> 01:08:34.700 our behavior that is, you know, part of a the the scientific project. 01:08:35.580 --> 01:08:40.140 So, you know, it needn't be the case that the things we learn in science would benefit us 01:08:40.140 --> 01:08:43.020 in the ordinary interactions we're we're having with each other. 01:08:43.100 --> 01:08:46.140 There's no a priori reason why why that should be the case. 01:08:46.370 --> 01:08:51.570 Um, and it's not obvious to me that that you know, you do kind of benefit from having these 01:08:51.570 --> 01:08:56.690 sorts of like understanding of the the the deeper causes of your beliefs and and and the 01:08:56.690 --> 01:08:59.810 way in which you think and reason in terms of just ordinary social life. 01:08:59.890 --> 01:09:04.850 You know, if I think about like would would my mum benefit from having uh uh an 01:09:04.850 --> 01:09:06.690 understanding of socially adaptive beliefs? 01:09:06.900 --> 01:09:07.780 Almost certainly not. 01:09:08.100 --> 01:09:11.540 I don't think she'd like positively benefit in her practical life. 01:09:11.940 --> 01:09:14.420 It might even be disadvantageous in various ways. 01:09:14.660 --> 01:09:18.500 But in the scientific project, we're trying to understand the way that the world really is. 01:09:18.660 --> 01:09:22.820 And that's important because sometimes it really matters to understand the way that the 01:09:22.820 --> 01:09:23.700 world really is. 01:09:24.020 --> 01:09:26.180 And this is something maybe, maybe we can get into. 01:09:26.260 --> 01:09:30.500 But you know, the reason I think it's important is when it comes to stepping back and 01:09:30.500 --> 01:09:35.410 thinking about society, thinking about social organization, thinking about the kinds of 01:09:35.410 --> 01:09:39.170 political projects that are likely to work, thinking more reflectively about the human 01:09:39.170 --> 01:09:39.650 condition. 01:09:39.890 --> 01:09:43.090 Those are cases in which I think it's really important to have an accurate understanding of 01:09:43.570 --> 01:09:44.530 what's going on. 01:09:44.770 --> 01:09:48.370 And that's where I would place the value of this kind of perspective. 01:09:48.610 --> 01:09:53.410 It might have value in terms of making us more reflective about our own biases and so on, 01:09:53.490 --> 01:09:55.940 but um, I think that's a slightly more complex case. 01:09:56.020 --> 01:10:00.580 And I, you know, I wouldn't assume that there there must be a practical value in knowing 01:10:00.580 --> 01:10:04.900 the truth, given that the whole point is actually we often advance our interests by not 01:10:04.900 --> 01:10:06.660 following the truth in a disinterested way. 01:10:06.820 --> 01:10:08.020 So that's the first thing that comes to mind. 01:10:08.100 --> 01:10:09.940 But I'm interested in your views, David, as well. 01:10:10.420 --> 01:10:12.420 Yeah, that was really well put, Dan. 01:10:12.580 --> 01:10:14.740 Um I agree with 100% of it. 01:10:14.820 --> 01:10:18.260 Um, and I'm inclined to say um the exact same things. 01:10:18.580 --> 01:10:24.490 Um yeah, I I I love the point that we shouldn't automatically assume that knowledge of 01:10:24.490 --> 01:10:30.170 the truth is going to be personally advantageous to us, especially if concealing the truth 01:10:30.170 --> 01:10:34.810 is often advantageous to us, as as we've been talking about pretty much this whole time. 01:10:35.130 --> 01:10:40.330 Um so yeah, has it been advantageous to me? 01:10:40.570 --> 01:10:46.500 Um I don't know that it has like leaked into my personal life enough for me to 01:10:46.500 --> 01:10:49.060 really say because I there are sort of two hats you can put on. 01:10:49.140 --> 01:10:53.780 You can put on your scientist hat, your philosopher hat and think about the human condition 01:10:53.780 --> 01:10:58.020 on an abstract level, and then you can just do your day day-to-day chores and live your 01:10:58.020 --> 01:11:03.860 day-to-day life and you know uh do the dishes or whatever and and um and and 01:11:03.940 --> 01:11:06.420 and then and that part of your brain is just turned off. 01:11:06.660 --> 01:11:10.770 Um so I don't know that it has affected my day-to-day life that much. 01:11:10.930 --> 01:11:16.450 Occasionally it like it gives me more insight into why people do things. 01:11:16.610 --> 01:11:22.050 Um, it helps me avoid bullshit, I think, better uh and and to better understand where it 01:11:22.050 --> 01:11:23.970 comes from and and how to avoid it. 01:11:24.130 --> 01:11:29.920 Um one thing I've noticed is that it makes me less surprised by 01:11:29.920 --> 01:11:34.560 things happening in the world, I think that's often a good way of checking whether your 01:11:34.560 --> 01:11:39.600 world model is accurate, is that if you're less surprised by things, because that that's a 01:11:39.600 --> 01:11:43.840 sign that your that your predictions are are uh are coming true a lot and you have good you 01:11:43.840 --> 01:11:44.720 have a good predictive model. 01:11:44.880 --> 01:11:48.080 If you're constantly surprised and taken aback by everything, that's a sign that you have a 01:11:48.080 --> 01:11:50.400 pretty crappy predictive model of how the world works. 01:11:51.280 --> 01:11:51.680 Yeah, exactly. 01:11:52.160 --> 01:11:53.200 Yeah, you're like a baby. 01:11:53.570 --> 01:11:58.850 Um so I f you know, I with with the political chaos surrounding uh the Trump stuff 01:11:58.850 --> 01:12:03.410 recently, you know, uh with the the uh the whipsawing between different views on the 01:12:03.410 --> 01:12:07.090 tariffs and different justifications that that the Republicans are are launching into. 01:12:07.170 --> 01:12:11.490 Like first the tariffs are are uh are great and you know, you don't have to worry about 01:12:11.490 --> 01:12:12.370 prices increasing. 01:12:12.450 --> 01:12:16.370 We should well consumerism is really just uh a bad thing, you know. 01:12:16.930 --> 01:12:22.260 These these crazy about faces that we're seeing um politically right now, people have come 01:12:22.260 --> 01:12:24.580 to me like, Wow, I can't believe this is happening. 01:12:24.740 --> 01:12:27.540 Like, isn't this such amazing evidence for alliance theory? 01:12:27.700 --> 01:12:30.020 I'm like, Oh yeah, I I I barely noticed it on it. 01:12:30.100 --> 01:12:31.700 Like it it it didn't surprise me at all. 01:12:31.860 --> 01:12:36.580 Like it just kind of w was part of the background radiation of my life because I it was 01:12:36.580 --> 01:12:41.380 just so expected to me that that that these kinds of propagandistic responses would uh 01:12:41.540 --> 01:12:42.420 would pop up. 01:12:42.820 --> 01:12:45.770 Uh and um so maybe that's a bad thing. 01:12:45.850 --> 01:12:47.850 Like maybe I should be more surprised by this. 01:12:48.010 --> 01:12:52.650 Um and you know maybe you know maybe that surprises doing something for people and like 01:12:52.650 --> 01:12:55.690 motivating them to uh engage in more political activism. 01:12:55.770 --> 01:12:56.730 I don't know. 01:12:56.890 --> 01:13:01.210 Um but that's one way in which it has affected me. 01:13:01.690 --> 01:13:04.410 Um yeah there's lots more to say on this topic. 01:13:04.490 --> 01:13:08.540 I don't know that I've said everything, but that's yeah that's what comes to the top of my 01:13:08.540 --> 01:13:08.700 head. 01:13:08.780 --> 01:13:08.860 Yeah. 01:13:09.100 --> 01:13:09.260 Yeah. 01:13:09.340 --> 01:13:13.660 And a real related question is sort of how, and Dan, this is more for you because you're 01:13:13.660 --> 01:13:18.220 the guest, but I am also interested in what David has to say, is how do people react to 01:13:18.220 --> 01:13:24.140 this, whether professionally, um, the people that you're you know arguing with um 01:13:24.300 --> 01:13:29.900 professionally or also just sort of day-to-day, um, you know, because you're telling them 01:13:29.900 --> 01:13:34.540 something that we're talking about is sort of intrinsically revealing, it's pulling the 01:13:34.540 --> 01:13:37.630 curtain back on on our on on us. 01:13:38.030 --> 01:13:42.270 And you know, as we've already talked about and alluded to, there there's probably good 01:13:42.270 --> 01:13:48.270 reasons uh for our evolved psychology to not like that revelation. 01:13:48.430 --> 01:13:54.350 So and again, you're kind of working you're basically on this theory, the 01:13:54.350 --> 01:13:57.870 science of doing this should be sort of aversive to people. 01:13:58.030 --> 01:14:00.510 Is that uh is that prediction borne out? 01:14:00.670 --> 01:14:05.860 Or are there enough people, maybe at least in your professional day-to-day, you know, that 01:14:05.940 --> 01:14:09.540 that they sort of they've trained themselves enough to sort of appreciate what you're 01:14:09.540 --> 01:14:09.780 doing? 01:14:09.860 --> 01:14:14.180 How what's the temperature on the street in terms of the reception to the work? 01:14:14.260 --> 01:14:17.300 Um I don't know. 01:14:17.380 --> 01:14:18.660 It's good good question. 01:14:18.900 --> 01:14:24.570 Um I think that um so you know my view is 01:14:24.650 --> 01:14:29.210 everyone is biased um when it comes to thinking about the world for for you know many of 01:14:29.210 --> 01:14:34.810 the reasons that we've talked about and um for me that's a kind of insight of modern 01:14:34.810 --> 01:14:40.330 science and um i mean that sounds like grandiose like but but I think on a certain 01:14:40.330 --> 01:14:45.260 interpretation of what it is to be biased um I think we we've got enough evidence now that 01:14:45.740 --> 01:14:48.380 scientists should sign on to that being the case. 01:14:49.020 --> 01:14:53.420 And yeah, there are whole parts of the sciences where if you suggest the possibility that 01:14:53.420 --> 01:14:57.820 like research might be subject to certain kinds of biases, there's this explosive reaction. 01:14:57.980 --> 01:15:01.980 So we haven't really talked about this today, but one of the areas I'm kind of interested 01:15:01.980 --> 01:15:07.910 in as a philosopher of science is modern misinformation research, where people 01:15:07.910 --> 01:15:13.830 try to study the nature, the causes, the sort of prevalence, the consequences of something 01:15:13.830 --> 01:15:17.350 called misinformation, and also things like disinformation and so on. 01:15:17.590 --> 01:15:21.750 And that's interesting because I think it kind of exists at two levels. 01:15:21.830 --> 01:15:25.750 You know, at one level there's the question of what we've been talking about, which is why 01:15:25.750 --> 01:15:29.110 do people believe what they believe, and why do people sometimes believe false things and 01:15:29.110 --> 01:15:30.710 things that aren't supported by the evidence? 01:15:30.870 --> 01:15:35.510 But you can also ask those questions about the people who are studying misinformation. 01:15:35.740 --> 01:15:40.700 Um and so I've pointed out various ways in which I think this field is often kind of biased 01:15:40.780 --> 01:15:45.580 in terms of the examples of misinformation it focuses on, how it focuses on the topic. 01:15:45.820 --> 01:15:51.820 And you know, there's been a pretty um negative reaction to some of that among people 01:15:51.980 --> 01:15:53.180 within that field. 01:15:53.340 --> 01:15:57.660 And I think that generalizes more broadly, I think lots of people in the social sciences, 01:15:57.820 --> 01:16:03.730 even though they're happy to um uh when they're describing, you know, the Hoi Paloi, 01:16:03.810 --> 01:16:08.050 the great unwash, the kind of ordinary people, to point at these various biases that sort 01:16:08.050 --> 01:16:11.330 of corrupt their cognitive processes and interfere with how they view the world. 01:16:11.570 --> 01:16:15.490 If there's the suggestion that they as researchers might also be human beings who are 01:16:15.490 --> 01:16:19.650 subject to these sorts of biases, there's often this incredibly kind of explosive reaction. 01:16:19.890 --> 01:16:24.680 So that's maybe one area where it has resulted in backlash. 01:16:24.840 --> 01:16:30.760 Um but I think there are also just people who um for whatever reason find these 01:16:30.760 --> 01:16:34.280 ideas interesting and um compelling. 01:16:34.360 --> 01:16:38.920 And and after all, like within the the social sciences, within intellectual inquiry, we are 01:16:38.920 --> 01:16:42.520 ostensibly playing this status game where we care about the truth and we care about you 01:16:42.520 --> 01:16:44.600 know what's supported by evidence and arguments. 01:16:44.840 --> 01:16:48.920 And like within that context I think it can often be you know quite alluring to come across 01:16:48.920 --> 01:16:52.670 these sorts of ideas which will better help illuminate certain kinds of phenomena. 01:16:52.830 --> 01:16:56.270 So those are the things kind of kind of that immediately jump jump to mind. 01:16:56.350 --> 01:16:59.950 But I mean you've you both also, I guess, must have encountered similar things. 01:17:00.110 --> 01:17:03.790 David, because you're an outright self-described cynic, and Dave because you're an 01:17:03.790 --> 01:17:07.230 evolutionary psychologist, which people often think of as as being cynical. 01:17:07.470 --> 01:17:09.310 So I'd be interested what what you two think as well. 01:17:09.470 --> 01:17:10.110 Yeah. 01:17:10.910 --> 01:17:15.680 For me, I think um the fact that I almost kind of play a character on everything is 01:17:15.680 --> 01:17:16.160 bullshit. 01:17:16.240 --> 01:17:20.160 I think that gives me some cover that like people know that it's kind of tongue in cheek 01:17:20.240 --> 01:17:23.520 and they and I and I get less backlash because of that. 01:17:23.680 --> 01:17:29.120 So I I found that that's a pretty good strategy uh in terms of avoiding backlash, just to 01:17:29.120 --> 01:17:31.040 sort of be playful about it. 01:17:31.200 --> 01:17:34.800 Um and and try to you know find the humor in it. 01:17:34.880 --> 01:17:40.000 I think that uh has been very helpful for me in sort of helping the medicine of this 01:17:40.000 --> 01:17:41.200 message go down. 01:17:41.680 --> 01:17:47.450 Um but um and also just writing versus saying it out loud is 01:17:47.450 --> 01:17:48.090 often helpful. 01:17:48.170 --> 01:17:52.010 Like if I say some of these things out loud, I often you know get you know dirty looks or 01:17:52.010 --> 01:17:52.250 whatever. 01:17:52.330 --> 01:17:56.410 But if I write them, you know, it's it's all of a sudden a different medium and I don't 01:17:56.410 --> 01:17:59.610 have to deal with people's facial expressions because I don't see them. 01:17:59.850 --> 01:18:01.130 Um yeah, I don't know. 01:18:01.290 --> 01:18:05.850 Um I mean, certainly, I mean, uh, you know, hostility against evolutionary approaches is is 01:18:05.850 --> 01:18:06.490 ubiquitous. 01:18:06.650 --> 01:18:10.090 It's had it's certainly gotten better in the past few decades, but it's still there. 01:18:10.250 --> 01:18:16.160 Um and uh and you know the hostility against evolution, hostility against cynicism, and 01:18:16.160 --> 01:18:18.400 when you combine them, you get double hostility. 01:18:18.640 --> 01:18:23.680 Um but um I don't know, par part of me kinda likes it though, like if if if everyone 01:18:23.680 --> 01:18:27.680 perfectly agrees with everything I say and and there's no disagreement and I'm not like 01:18:27.760 --> 01:18:29.360 challenging anything like it's just boring. 01:18:29.520 --> 01:18:33.680 So part of me kinda likes the thrill of of pushing back against the conventional wisdom. 01:18:33.760 --> 01:18:36.080 So you know, it's it's a it's a mixed bag, I'd say. 01:18:36.370 --> 01:18:36.690 don't know. 01:18:36.770 --> 01:18:37.490 What do you think, Dave? 01:18:37.810 --> 01:18:39.570 I I think I like that last part. 01:18:39.650 --> 01:18:43.730 And I think, you know, I I often I talk about this story of like, you know, I one of my 01:18:43.730 --> 01:18:47.810 good friends at the Mox Plunk when I first met him, he's like, I hate evolutionary 01:18:47.810 --> 01:18:48.370 psychology. 01:18:48.450 --> 01:18:49.410 And I was like, great. 01:18:49.570 --> 01:18:53.570 I sat down eagerly and was like, I pulled up a chair for him and I was like, tell me why 01:18:53.570 --> 01:18:54.210 you hate it. 01:18:54.370 --> 01:18:57.730 You know, because like I thought I hated it when I first encountered it too. 01:18:57.890 --> 01:19:02.180 And and and like it turns out that he he hated what I hated. 01:19:02.340 --> 01:19:04.500 And actually we agreed essentially. 01:19:04.580 --> 01:19:06.500 Like he had a misrepresentation. 01:19:06.660 --> 01:19:12.340 Um, and so for me, I sort of I maybe it's sort of like David's not surprised, where it's so 01:19:12.340 --> 01:19:13.300 much in the water. 01:19:13.540 --> 01:19:16.740 The default is it's gonna be misunderstood. 01:19:16.980 --> 01:19:22.890 Um, and so for me, it's sort of like I'm an anthropologist of sort of like, oh, do 01:19:22.890 --> 01:19:26.730 I understand this particular instance of the misunderstanding? 01:19:26.890 --> 01:19:32.730 And it's not that I'm sort of like um uh trying to 01:19:32.730 --> 01:19:37.690 convert everybody, but it's just sort of like trying to map, like, you know, like, does 01:19:37.690 --> 01:19:41.450 this person have a good faith effort trying to understand something and they're 01:19:41.450 --> 01:19:42.170 misinformed? 01:19:42.330 --> 01:19:46.420 Is it just that it's a status game and they just don't like the people. 01:19:46.580 --> 01:19:48.020 Do they have a good reason for that or not? 01:19:48.180 --> 01:19:50.580 You know, and that informs sort of like, do I try? 01:19:50.740 --> 01:19:55.300 Um, but for me, I just sort of view it as an interesting scientific enterprise, but I still 01:19:55.300 --> 01:19:56.580 do get like worked up. 01:19:56.660 --> 01:20:00.820 Um, although, as like we had a Deb Lieberman on, and she said, you know, as you get older 01:20:00.980 --> 01:20:04.500 and not everything is life or death, not every paper that's get rejected, you know, the 01:20:04.500 --> 01:20:08.100 beginning when you're a grad student and you're like, you think, okay, I have a really good 01:20:08.100 --> 01:20:08.580 argument. 01:20:08.740 --> 01:20:11.140 You know, it still hurts to get a paper rejected, you know. 01:20:11.220 --> 01:20:15.750 Like I know David and I just had, you know, we both had like really big important papers 01:20:15.750 --> 01:20:19.350 that we think are really important, get rejected for I think really dumb reasons. 01:20:19.510 --> 01:20:21.510 That always hurts no matter what your approach is. 01:20:21.590 --> 01:20:23.350 And so, you know, I think that always hurts. 01:20:23.590 --> 01:20:29.510 But, you know, as each one is less important than I think, you know, I just 01:20:29.510 --> 01:20:35.430 sort of it's just again, as David said, it's just sort of part of the expectation for me 01:20:35.510 --> 01:20:35.990 at least. 01:20:36.150 --> 01:20:36.550 Yeah. 01:20:36.870 --> 01:20:42.620 For the misinformation one, Dan, Do you think that it's because people think you are 01:20:42.780 --> 01:20:43.980 have an agenda? 01:20:44.540 --> 01:20:49.340 Um, and that like, you know, what do you have you thought about sort of why people are 01:20:49.340 --> 01:20:50.940 pushing back against it? 01:20:51.660 --> 01:20:52.860 Maybe I do have an agenda. 01:20:52.940 --> 01:20:58.060 I mean, maybe there is a set of motivations which I'm not motivated to acknowledge. 01:20:58.300 --> 01:21:00.220 Um it's it's complicated. 01:21:00.300 --> 01:21:05.980 I mean, a lot of it is it's yeah, I mean, that's such a complicated sort of can of worms to 01:21:05.980 --> 01:21:06.380 open. 01:21:06.460 --> 01:21:11.350 Um I mean, just just to focus on one part of it psychology and the social sciences 01:21:11.590 --> 01:21:17.270 overwhelmingly skewed towards the left, um, sort of liberal left 01:21:17.270 --> 01:21:17.990 politics. 01:21:18.310 --> 01:21:22.790 And um, you know, I think your your prior should be that if you've got an entire field 01:21:22.790 --> 01:21:28.070 where people share political allegiances, that's going to influence the ways in which they 01:21:28.070 --> 01:21:32.800 seek out, interpret, evaluate, process information and so on, conduct studies, 01:21:33.040 --> 01:21:35.760 operationalize things, how they measure things, etc. 01:21:36.080 --> 01:21:40.880 And then I think that should be your prior based on general models of human psychology. 01:21:41.040 --> 01:21:47.040 And then I think when you look at misinformation research, um just as you look at many 01:21:47.040 --> 01:21:51.360 aspects of the modern social sciences where they're studying sort of politically relevant 01:21:51.360 --> 01:21:55.920 things, I think you find lots of cases where these sorts of, you know, progressive ideas, 01:21:56.080 --> 01:22:00.910 values, partisan allegiances influence the kind of research that they're doing. 01:22:01.150 --> 01:22:06.510 And, you know, there's this sort of familiar set of coalitional dynamics where if you point 01:22:06.510 --> 01:22:10.510 that out, the inference people are going to draw on is you're not on the right team. 01:22:10.670 --> 01:22:16.110 Um so there there was an article in a uh Time magazine published recently um 01:22:16.590 --> 01:22:22.510 which links one of my my articles as an example of someone defending the authoritarian 01:22:22.510 --> 01:22:28.260 agenda, i.e., defending um Donald Trump and MAGA and so on and his attacks 01:22:28.260 --> 01:22:33.380 on institutions, which, you know, for anyone who knows anything about my political views, I 01:22:33.380 --> 01:22:35.300 find absolutely absurd. 01:22:35.460 --> 01:22:40.020 It's not at all a political coalition that I've got any sympathy for. 01:22:40.260 --> 01:22:44.500 Um, but but nevertheless, the idea is if you're criticizing, or or at least if you're even 01:22:44.500 --> 01:22:48.500 just pointing out that there is a kind of liberal bias in this research in such a heated, 01:22:48.750 --> 01:22:54.190 polarized political context, then familiar coalitional dynamics are going to kick in and 01:22:54.190 --> 01:22:57.150 it's going to be well, like you're either with us or you're against us, right? 01:22:57.230 --> 01:23:00.110 If you're criticizing us in this way, you must be trying to support the other team. 01:23:00.270 --> 01:23:00.750 Right, right. 01:23:00.910 --> 01:23:05.150 And I think that makes sense in the context of ordinary kind of partisan debate. 01:23:05.230 --> 01:23:08.430 I think it's unfortunate that even there for various reasons. 01:23:08.590 --> 01:23:13.790 But I think it's so destructive to science because science, you know, its esteem within 01:23:13.790 --> 01:23:18.260 society, which I think is, you know, deserved for the most part, is wrapped up with the 01:23:18.260 --> 01:23:22.020 fact that it's our best way of escaping these kinds of partisan biases. 01:23:22.180 --> 01:23:27.380 We try to institutionalize various procedures and we try to enforce various sorts of norms, 01:23:27.540 --> 01:23:32.660 which are gonna enable us to overcome these sorts of familiar forms of coalitional politics 01:23:32.740 --> 01:23:34.180 to try to get at the truth. 01:23:34.420 --> 01:23:39.940 And I think it's a real big problem for science, both in terms of its capacity to generate 01:23:39.940 --> 01:23:45.150 knowledge, but also in terms of its public reputation, if it's seen as being subject to the 01:23:45.150 --> 01:23:49.390 same forces that that apply when it comes to ordinary partisan politics. 01:23:49.630 --> 01:23:52.670 Um I've forgotten what the question is now, but that that's one case. 01:23:53.150 --> 01:23:53.550 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:23:53.630 --> 01:23:58.110 Just no, it was like sort of why or what yeah, why people do push put push back against it. 01:23:58.190 --> 01:24:03.040 And I mean, just to sort of follow up on that, I think like um if you're c if you're saying 01:24:03.040 --> 01:24:09.040 that like misinformation research is skewing in a particular way, one inference 01:24:09.040 --> 01:24:10.880 is like, well, you're for the other side. 01:24:11.040 --> 01:24:16.560 It's interesting that the the inference isn't, well, what are the ways in which our 01:24:16.560 --> 01:24:18.400 values we're not living up to? 01:24:18.480 --> 01:24:18.720 Right. 01:24:18.800 --> 01:24:22.640 Like, I mean, it would be nice if that was sort of the way people approach things. 01:24:22.720 --> 01:24:26.590 I mean, for reasons like David's studies, that that's typically not. 01:24:26.750 --> 01:24:30.670 It's rare, but I mean, you know, I think that would be the ideal, would be to sort of say, 01:24:30.750 --> 01:24:36.590 you know, if we really think if we really do hold these values, what would we predict 01:24:36.990 --> 01:24:42.270 in pointing out ways in which we're um we're not being consistent 01:24:42.830 --> 01:24:44.350 as David has documented? 01:24:44.430 --> 01:24:47.470 Well, it's sort of uh it's being coalitional. 01:24:47.550 --> 01:24:49.070 I think that's a good adjective, right? 01:24:49.150 --> 01:24:53.310 Is to sort of, and this is for me actually, for me, this is actually gets back to this 01:24:53.310 --> 01:24:56.840 question of like what what do I use my work for? 01:24:57.400 --> 01:25:01.080 And I often check myself just being, am I being coalitional about this? 01:25:01.160 --> 01:25:01.320 Right. 01:25:01.480 --> 01:25:07.160 Like it feels good to sort of defend my side, but then I'm like, but is this a 01:25:07.160 --> 01:25:11.560 situation where I'm taking sides as opposed to taking a principle? 01:25:11.720 --> 01:25:11.960 Right. 01:25:12.120 --> 01:25:17.960 And there's many times throughout, especially like if I look on social media or 01:25:18.280 --> 01:25:23.370 these things that are not just sort of dispassionate, like quote unquote boring scientific 01:25:23.370 --> 01:25:26.490 issues, but these charged issues, they're very coalitional, of course. 01:25:26.570 --> 01:25:28.410 That's why they're charged. 01:25:28.570 --> 01:25:32.090 Um, that's where I often find myself sort of checking myself. 01:25:32.170 --> 01:25:36.250 And I do this thing of like, I almost flip the coalitional side where it's like, you know, 01:25:36.330 --> 01:25:40.090 if if the other political party that I support said this, what would I think? 01:25:40.250 --> 01:25:45.540 You know, or if it's something my political party says, I flip it into like try to simulate 01:25:45.540 --> 01:25:46.340 as best I can. 01:25:46.500 --> 01:25:48.740 If this was coming from the other side, what would I think? 01:25:48.980 --> 01:25:51.380 I think like that's a useful heuristic. 01:25:51.700 --> 01:25:57.380 Um, and so it's not surprising that when you're presenting 01:25:57.380 --> 01:26:01.700 something that is you're saying it's skewed, that there's a concern. 01:26:01.860 --> 01:26:03.140 I mean, you would predict it, right? 01:26:03.220 --> 01:26:07.060 That there's a concern about like whose side are you on and what's your agenda. 01:26:07.220 --> 01:26:10.260 But it's but it's interesting that that it plays out that way. 01:26:12.470 --> 01:26:13.830 I'm curious, Dan. 01:26:13.990 --> 01:26:19.830 I feel like one stop on this train of examining our biases is 01:26:19.830 --> 01:26:22.070 uh a kind of epistemic nihilism. 01:26:22.470 --> 01:26:27.830 Uh and I don't mean epistemic nihilism in the sense that truth is impossible to 01:26:28.070 --> 01:26:28.950 achieve. 01:26:29.190 --> 01:26:34.710 Um, I don't mean epistemic nihilism in in that you know there aren't institutions that can 01:26:34.710 --> 01:26:37.910 more or less reliably produce true information. 01:26:38.220 --> 01:26:44.220 I mean epistemic nihilism in the sense that me personally, I, David Pinsov, have no hope of 01:26:44.220 --> 01:26:45.260 knowing what's true. 01:26:45.500 --> 01:26:45.900 Right. 01:26:46.300 --> 01:26:50.780 I I can wrap my head around the idea that as a society, if there are cultural evolutionary 01:26:50.780 --> 01:26:55.580 processes or incentives, that that will societally push us toward true beliefs, or maybe 01:26:55.580 --> 01:26:57.820 it'll push the institution of science toward true beliefs. 01:26:57.900 --> 01:26:59.020 I can get behind that. 01:26:59.260 --> 01:27:04.780 But everything we know about our own psychology and our epistemology suggests that truth, 01:27:04.940 --> 01:27:07.930 if it exists, is an emergent phenomenon. 01:27:08.330 --> 01:27:12.730 It emerges from uh cooperative groups and institutions that are well designed. 01:27:12.890 --> 01:27:15.290 It is not a product of any individual human. 01:27:15.450 --> 01:27:18.330 No individual human is likely to have all the answers. 01:27:18.650 --> 01:27:23.530 Most individual humans have their own biases, their own agendas, their own uh limitations. 01:27:23.850 --> 01:27:29.770 Um so when I reflect on that, the ultimate conclusion is that me, I, David Pinsoff, 01:27:30.120 --> 01:27:34.520 have no hope of achieving the thing that I want most, which is to know what's true. 01:27:35.160 --> 01:27:37.560 And that to me is really distressing. 01:27:38.280 --> 01:27:41.320 Um what do you think about that? 01:27:41.480 --> 01:27:42.840 Has that occurred to you? 01:27:43.000 --> 01:27:45.160 Uh how do you how do you deal with that? 01:27:45.480 --> 01:27:46.040 Soothe me. 01:27:46.360 --> 01:27:46.840 Yeah. 01:27:47.160 --> 01:27:48.600 I I can't soothe you, unfortunately. 01:27:48.680 --> 01:27:49.480 It's a great question. 01:27:49.640 --> 01:27:51.400 Watch some Jordan Peterson, David. 01:27:51.800 --> 01:27:53.720 Yeah, maybe he'll he's the answer to the robot. 01:27:54.360 --> 01:27:57.800 He'll disabuse you of this uh humility. 01:27:58.070 --> 01:28:00.150 Jordan Pearson knows what's true, yeah. 01:28:01.110 --> 01:28:04.790 Yeah, I I've yeah, I've I've written a few pieces sort of grappling with that, and I don't 01:28:04.790 --> 01:28:06.470 have a particularly satisfactory answer. 01:28:06.630 --> 01:28:09.750 Although interestingly, I'm not I'm not really bothered by it in the way that you seem to 01:28:09.750 --> 01:28:10.390 be bothered by it. 01:28:10.470 --> 01:28:15.350 So I think if I if I step back, I think yeah, I'm I'm biased in ways that you know some 01:28:15.350 --> 01:28:19.510 ways I'm probably uh vaguely aware of and some ways I'm less aware of. 01:28:19.670 --> 01:28:24.900 Um and it's almost certainly true that I've got a very selective and partial picture of the 01:28:24.900 --> 01:28:26.900 world and I'm fallible in all these different ways. 01:28:27.060 --> 01:28:30.500 So I do think a certain kind of skepticism is correct. 01:28:30.660 --> 01:28:36.340 You know, I do think we tend to be absurdly overconfident about our capacity to know the 01:28:36.340 --> 01:28:42.020 world, especially when it comes to these sort of heated social and political um phenomena. 01:28:42.580 --> 01:28:45.140 Um and I I think that's just that's just true. 01:28:45.220 --> 01:28:47.780 I think it's something you have to sort of face up to. 01:28:48.330 --> 01:28:51.770 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 01:28:51.770 --> 01:28:55.450 signal of the fact that you're more reflective about these sorts of things than the average 01:28:55.450 --> 01:28:55.770 person. 01:28:56.810 --> 01:29:02.330 And you know, one maybe small area where I disagree is you said that sort of knowledge is a 01:29:02.330 --> 01:29:06.730 is a consequence of not sort of individual level cognition, but these broader norms and 01:29:06.730 --> 01:29:07.290 institutions. 01:29:07.450 --> 01:29:08.570 And I think that's exactly right. 01:29:08.730 --> 01:29:12.650 But but I'll just add that I do think there are individual differences in in cognition. 01:29:12.810 --> 01:29:16.760 Often I think they're downstream of the social norms that get enforced in particular 01:29:16.760 --> 01:29:17.320 communities. 01:29:17.560 --> 01:29:21.640 Like if you're in a community where it's expected of you that you're going to provide 01:29:21.640 --> 01:29:25.880 evidence and arguments, at least of some kind, when you state a view, it's expected of you 01:29:25.880 --> 01:29:29.080 that you're going to acknowledge uncertainty if you want to win a good reputation and so 01:29:29.080 --> 01:29:29.320 on. 01:29:29.400 --> 01:29:33.880 You know, you're gonna end up with a I think more accurate understanding of topics than 01:29:33.880 --> 01:29:37.080 somebody who belongs to a community where those sorts of norms aren't enforced. 01:29:37.240 --> 01:29:41.370 So even though I think you're right that the the social is kind of primary, given that you 01:29:41.370 --> 01:29:45.530 inhabit a certain kind of social and institutional context, I think it can have sort of 01:29:45.530 --> 01:29:48.330 consequences in terms of your individual cognition. 01:29:48.570 --> 01:29:53.450 Um, but but but but I agree with the the basic point, which is yeah, if if you step back 01:29:53.450 --> 01:29:58.410 and you reflect on your epistemic situation to use the kind of pretentious philosophical 01:29:58.410 --> 01:30:02.650 term, but your you know your situation with respect to your ability to acquire knowledge 01:30:02.650 --> 01:30:05.530 about the world, you should embrace a kind of skepticism. 01:30:05.660 --> 01:30:08.700 Um, but you know what are you going to do with that? 01:30:08.780 --> 01:30:12.620 Um, you have to participate in this game of life, right? 01:30:12.700 --> 01:30:17.820 You have to make the best case you can in accordance with the the norms that that are in 01:30:17.820 --> 01:30:20.700 your environment, uh, for the kinds of views that you take to be true. 01:30:20.860 --> 01:30:25.900 You have to try to live up to the ideals that that are going to be relevant to seeming like 01:30:25.900 --> 01:30:28.860 a good member of your epistemic community, and so on. 01:30:29.020 --> 01:30:34.870 Um, and I think you can do those things even as you acknowledge that you're biased and 01:30:34.870 --> 01:30:38.710 probably wrong in various respects, and you don't exactly know what respects they're going 01:30:38.710 --> 01:30:38.950 to be. 01:30:39.110 --> 01:30:44.230 I mean, certainly when I write a blog post, I mean, I could write a 01:30:44.230 --> 01:30:48.710 50,000-word blog post, you know, adding all these qualifications about how I'm not, you 01:30:48.710 --> 01:30:50.550 know, maybe I'm biased here, you know. 01:30:50.950 --> 01:30:55.590 Of course, all of these different ways, I think, what I'm arguing for is going to be a 01:30:55.590 --> 01:31:00.020 selective and somewhat biased understanding of the world that I'm trying to present, But it 01:31:00.020 --> 01:31:03.780 doesn't really have much value in terms of injecting that into the conversation in many 01:31:03.780 --> 01:31:04.020 cases. 01:31:04.180 --> 01:31:08.500 You just sort of do your best in a relatively humble way to argue for certain kinds of 01:31:08.500 --> 01:31:10.340 viewpoints and see what the response is. 01:31:10.500 --> 01:31:14.580 That's not a very satisfying response to your question, but that's I guess currently how 01:31:14.580 --> 01:31:15.940 I'm thinking of things. 01:31:16.900 --> 01:31:18.740 Yeah, no, I I like that response. 01:31:18.900 --> 01:31:24.180 Um just remembering, I mean, you you had a wonderful, wonderful uh post uh called uh the 01:31:24.180 --> 01:31:30.110 everyone is biased bias about how it's it's possible to take these ideas about 01:31:30.110 --> 01:31:35.950 human bias too far, uh to a point where you're uh flattening human variation as you put it. 01:31:36.110 --> 01:31:41.070 Um it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that human variation is large and significant 01:31:41.070 --> 01:31:46.510 and important and that there are pretty large differences in epistemic character, 01:31:46.750 --> 01:31:51.870 differences in moral character, and um those differences matter and we should attend to 01:31:51.870 --> 01:31:52.190 them. 01:31:52.820 --> 01:31:56.900 And I think it's it's easy to lose sight of that when your focus is on human nature. 01:31:57.620 --> 01:32:00.180 It's easy to forget about human variation. 01:32:00.420 --> 01:32:02.980 Um, just because that's just not the thing that you're focusing. 01:32:03.140 --> 01:32:05.460 You're thinking about the stuff that we all share as humans. 01:32:05.700 --> 01:32:10.580 You necessarily will uh forget about the stuff that you know differs between people when 01:32:10.580 --> 01:32:12.100 you embark on that project. 01:32:12.260 --> 01:32:16.110 Um so I thought that was that was a really uh beautiful point. 01:32:16.190 --> 01:32:19.950 Uh and so I guess I can comfort myself with the knowledge that maybe, maybe I'm one of the 01:32:19.950 --> 01:32:24.110 better humans epistemically, and maybe, maybe I'm in one of the better cultures, which uh 01:32:24.110 --> 01:32:26.110 unfortunately sounds just as self serving. 01:32:26.910 --> 01:32:32.910 Well, or or maybe, maybe David, the the you're you're trying to be less uh you're doing 01:32:33.070 --> 01:32:35.950 you're in the path dependency that as we all are. 01:32:36.030 --> 01:32:38.750 You're just sort of like, What what looks to be the best? 01:32:38.990 --> 01:32:39.870 What looks better? 01:32:40.030 --> 01:32:41.230 What's what's less wrong? 01:32:41.390 --> 01:32:41.630 Right. 01:32:41.710 --> 01:32:42.590 Um That's true. 01:32:42.670 --> 01:32:42.910 Yeah. 01:32:43.150 --> 01:32:47.840 Taking the the you know the the marginal perspective and the relative looking at things uh 01:32:47.840 --> 01:32:51.120 relative to their alternatives rather rather than relative to perfection. 01:32:51.280 --> 01:32:51.520 Yeah. 01:32:51.680 --> 01:32:53.360 Is also a healthy way of looking at things. 01:32:53.600 --> 01:32:53.760 Yeah. 01:32:53.920 --> 01:32:58.240 At the risk of poking the mindfield, I do want to turn back one more time to the 01:32:58.240 --> 01:33:00.080 disinformation concern though, too. 01:33:00.240 --> 01:33:05.040 And this is again sort of for both of you, is uh Dan, I was reflecting on what you had said 01:33:05.040 --> 01:33:10.490 earlier in you talking about why people, people sort of thinking you might have an 01:33:10.490 --> 01:33:15.290 agenda for for pointing the these this thing out about the disinformation literature. 01:33:15.610 --> 01:33:21.530 Um the the idea that and you even mentioned some people did use what 01:33:21.530 --> 01:33:26.410 you said to argue for something you weren't espousing, um, right? 01:33:26.570 --> 01:33:32.040 Like that that people sort of picked up on it to s to make other uh to make arguments like 01:33:32.120 --> 01:33:36.040 this is an example of like support for these ideas that you don't hold, right? 01:33:36.120 --> 01:33:36.840 Um incorrectly. 01:33:37.080 --> 01:33:41.400 Uh that that was that that was the accusation that that I was uh publishing these works, 01:33:41.480 --> 01:33:41.800 defending. 01:33:42.120 --> 01:33:42.360 I don't know. 01:33:42.520 --> 01:33:44.760 I can't I mean no no evidence was provided. 01:33:44.920 --> 01:33:48.840 I mean, in a way, it's absurd the idea that you know you know Trump would be or anyone 01:33:48.840 --> 01:33:53.800 that's sort of in a faction would be looking at you know the obscure substack posts of an 01:33:53.880 --> 01:33:54.600 editing philosophy. 01:33:54.920 --> 01:33:58.280 Um so but I'm wondering, like, is that is that sort of like just to look at it as a 01:33:58.280 --> 01:34:03.250 scientific perspective, like do you think that that's do you think that's like the the 01:34:03.250 --> 01:34:05.410 rational concern, right? 01:34:05.650 --> 01:34:10.930 Is that um like if we're just scientists about this phenomenon, that like their evolved 01:34:10.930 --> 01:34:16.770 psychology is concerned that is like, what does this afford me in my interests, 01:34:17.010 --> 01:34:17.250 right? 01:34:17.410 --> 01:34:21.890 In and it could this be used against us, right? 01:34:21.970 --> 01:34:27.740 Like I did you think that that's um I mean, in some sense, that's almost, you know, 01:34:27.900 --> 01:34:33.340 the the the idea that at least, you know, you or David are sort of, you know, it's that 01:34:33.340 --> 01:34:37.980 there's a social, it's really being looked at in this social coalitional instrument 01:34:38.140 --> 01:34:39.500 instrumental way. 01:34:41.020 --> 01:34:44.620 Yeah, I'd I'd be really interested to hear what you two think about this as well, because 01:34:44.700 --> 01:34:47.980 I've been I've been thinking about this a lot recently, this idea of um 01:34:49.590 --> 01:34:55.590 objecting to a claim or an argument not on its merits, but on the 01:34:55.590 --> 01:35:00.070 basis that it might be weaponized in a in a way that people object to. 01:35:00.550 --> 01:35:00.870 Right. 01:35:01.430 --> 01:35:02.710 So which is a very common thing. 01:35:02.790 --> 01:35:07.590 You know, so at the moment that there are these, you know, in in the in the US, these 01:35:07.590 --> 01:35:13.430 attacks from uh the Trump administration on these uh elite universities like like 01:35:13.430 --> 01:35:14.150 Harvard. 01:35:14.310 --> 01:35:18.920 And you know, there are some people who have come out, or they've said this in the past, 01:35:19.000 --> 01:35:23.480 um, with arguments to the effect that look there are real problems with these institutions. 01:35:23.720 --> 01:35:27.720 Um, they do have certain kinds of political biases, um, there is certain forms of 01:35:27.720 --> 01:35:30.040 groupthink, etc., these sorts of arguments. 01:35:30.200 --> 01:35:34.200 And and one response to those arguments is to say, here's why they're wrong, right? 01:35:34.360 --> 01:35:40.040 Another response to those arguments is to say those criticisms of these institutions are 01:35:40.040 --> 01:35:45.830 being weaponized by this administration, which is engaging in these sorts of bad 01:35:45.830 --> 01:35:46.470 behaviors. 01:35:46.870 --> 01:35:48.950 And that's a reason not to make those arguments. 01:35:49.110 --> 01:35:50.310 Like I've seen loads of that. 01:35:50.710 --> 01:35:55.830 Stephen Pinker recently published an article in the New York Times and um where he sort of 01:35:55.830 --> 01:35:57.510 says, look, there are real problems with Harvard. 01:35:57.590 --> 01:36:00.070 He sort of talks about things that he's mentioned in the past. 01:36:00.550 --> 01:36:04.470 But nevertheless, he explicitly says he thinks what the Trump administration is doing is 01:36:04.710 --> 01:36:05.270 really bad. 01:36:05.430 --> 01:36:09.540 And lots of the criticisms I saw were it's like, well, you're kind of responsible for, or 01:36:09.700 --> 01:36:14.180 at least you've played a role in defending, or your arguments have been instrumentalized 01:36:14.180 --> 01:36:15.140 for this bad thing. 01:36:15.460 --> 01:36:19.860 Ergo, you know, that's something that you should be held accountable for. 01:36:20.180 --> 01:36:25.700 And, you know, I guess what you can say is if you step back, there is at least something to 01:36:25.700 --> 01:36:31.470 the idea that when you advance claims or arguments, you know, you probably 01:36:31.470 --> 01:36:35.550 should be, at least in some contexts, sensitive to the possibility that they're going to 01:36:35.550 --> 01:36:37.390 get weaponized in nefarious ways. 01:36:37.870 --> 01:36:41.150 In some contexts it would be reasonable to hold you accountable to that. 01:36:41.310 --> 01:36:47.230 Like if if if you set up a social media account and all it is is videos of like racial 01:36:47.230 --> 01:36:48.590 minorities committing crimes. 01:36:48.670 --> 01:36:48.830 Right. 01:36:48.990 --> 01:36:54.740 Even if every video is real, I think it would be reasonable to say you haven't 01:36:54.820 --> 01:36:58.340 gotted every eye on that line of inferences, but yeah, we know what you're saying. 01:36:58.500 --> 01:36:58.980 Yeah, exactly. 01:36:59.220 --> 01:36:59.300 Yeah. 01:36:59.540 --> 01:37:04.900 Um so I think in some context it's reasonable, but I also think the norm that says you 01:37:04.900 --> 01:37:09.860 shouldn't assert something that you take to be true or you shouldn't make an argument, lest 01:37:09.860 --> 01:37:15.700 it be used by the wrong side, lest it be uh instrumentalized in a nefarious way 01:37:15.780 --> 01:37:20.250 by people that you might disagree with and you might explicitly disagree with, is so 01:37:20.250 --> 01:37:25.770 corrosive in general to knowledge generation, to the pursuit of truth. 01:37:25.850 --> 01:37:28.170 It's such a recipe for groupthink. 01:37:28.330 --> 01:37:34.170 If whenever somebody criticizes your group, you can say you're just defending 01:37:34.170 --> 01:37:36.570 or supporting the other side. 01:37:36.730 --> 01:37:39.850 So I think it's I don't quite know what to think about it because I think if you really 01:37:39.850 --> 01:37:44.540 steel man these these arguments about weaponization, you can think of cases where they 01:37:44.540 --> 01:37:45.340 might have a point. 01:37:45.420 --> 01:37:49.260 But as a general norm, this idea that you should be able to criticize a claim or an 01:37:49.260 --> 01:37:54.140 argument not on its merits, but merely because you think it might be instrumentalized by 01:37:54.140 --> 01:37:58.860 the other side, seems to me it's like totally corrosive to the pursuit of truth and and the 01:37:58.860 --> 01:38:03.580 sorts of norms and procedures that we should care about in truth seeking institutions. 01:38:03.740 --> 01:38:06.530 That's my current thought, but I'll be interested what you two think about. 01:38:06.770 --> 01:38:10.130 I mean, just as a quick follow-up, I mean, do you think because I uh this sounds also very 01:38:10.130 --> 01:38:12.770 familiar in terms of like a conversation, right? 01:38:12.850 --> 01:38:18.690 Where like a lot of times a claim is made and what is implied, you know, is is 01:38:18.850 --> 01:38:22.930 it's almost it's it comes back to this thing of like inferences. 01:38:23.250 --> 01:38:28.280 There's a lot of inferences, but but based on any one thing we say, you know, like we still 01:38:28.280 --> 01:38:32.760 don't have an AI system that if you just if it actually represents a statement is like 01:38:32.920 --> 01:38:34.920 actually percolates all the correct inferences. 01:38:35.000 --> 01:38:39.720 It doesn't have the semantic common sense knowledge to to draw these inferences. 01:38:39.880 --> 01:38:45.640 And so in a conversation, if I say something often, so like Dan, you might be like, Well, 01:38:45.720 --> 01:38:46.840 did you mean this or this? 01:38:47.000 --> 01:38:49.800 And I'll be like, No, no, no, no, I don't actually agree with this thing. 01:38:49.960 --> 01:38:51.720 I'm just pointing out this other problem. 01:38:52.040 --> 01:38:57.970 And I wonder sometimes if like what you're describing is sort of the scaled up version 01:38:57.970 --> 01:39:02.050 of what ordinarily for our Valve psychology would be the right thing to do, which is sort 01:39:02.050 --> 01:39:07.330 of it's sort of like a conversation of like, okay, Dan, I hear you that I'm just gonna take 01:39:07.330 --> 01:39:12.050 the other side, the, the, the, the devil's advocate side of sort of, I hear you that, you 01:39:12.050 --> 01:39:17.650 know, there is there there is a objective skew in terms of like representation 01:39:17.650 --> 01:39:18.610 politically. 01:39:18.850 --> 01:39:24.640 Um, But you know, there's there's a concern that the this could be used for 01:39:24.640 --> 01:39:29.040 other other reasons that that are not advancing science at all. 01:39:29.280 --> 01:39:34.160 Are you are you backing that or are you making a point that advances science? 01:39:34.560 --> 01:39:39.520 And to the extent that, you know, the representation that should advance science, which m 01:39:39.840 --> 01:39:42.000 which I might even disagree with, is that the thing? 01:39:42.080 --> 01:39:45.920 Like, is your North Star science, or is it this other status game? 01:39:46.090 --> 01:39:50.010 in an interpersonal conversation, we can do that really quick. 01:39:50.330 --> 01:39:55.610 Um, and I sometimes wonder if things like social media or things where we can have a 01:39:55.610 --> 01:40:00.810 conversation back and forth, it perpetuates a thing where you you sort of feel like you're 01:40:00.810 --> 01:40:05.210 a bad guy because they don't understand where you're coming from and they haven't 01:40:05.210 --> 01:40:06.490 understood where you're coming from. 01:40:06.570 --> 01:40:10.320 And you may not understand that maybe this is some of their people, some people's 01:40:10.320 --> 01:40:12.000 motivation, and maybe some people's not. 01:40:12.080 --> 01:40:17.600 You know, I mean, we all know that there are people, even within our community, that 01:40:17.760 --> 01:40:21.920 they're like science, my personal status, like hold my beer. 01:40:22.000 --> 01:40:23.760 I'm gonna go with personal status, right? 01:40:23.840 --> 01:40:29.760 Like the people who are sort of trolls and like sort of advance their status on the backs 01:40:29.760 --> 01:40:33.470 of a correct understanding of even what we do. 01:40:33.550 --> 01:40:37.390 And we're like that, you know, we all know, like, we're like, oh, we hate those people, or 01:40:37.470 --> 01:40:41.470 like well, we like them interpersonally, but wish they wouldn't do that. 01:40:41.710 --> 01:40:47.710 Um and so I just, yeah, so that's my long-winded way of saying, like, I wonder sometimes if 01:40:47.710 --> 01:40:53.310 this is almost an example of almost a mismatch in terms of the communicative 01:40:53.950 --> 01:40:59.620 back and forth that in under more maybe sort of ecologically 01:40:59.620 --> 01:41:05.540 valid, sort of Grician, uh communicative, pragmatic ways would sort 01:41:05.540 --> 01:41:08.580 of quickly eliminate, like, what is your status game? 01:41:08.740 --> 01:41:12.180 You know, I think a lot of communication is sort of like figuring out like what's what's 01:41:12.180 --> 01:41:13.300 your game here, buddy? 01:41:13.460 --> 01:41:13.700 Right. 01:41:14.020 --> 01:41:15.540 And then it's sort of like, are you cool? 01:41:15.620 --> 01:41:16.020 I'm cool. 01:41:16.100 --> 01:41:16.500 You're cool. 01:41:16.580 --> 01:41:19.540 You know, like that's kind of what I did with the person who was like, I hate Ep Psych. 01:41:19.700 --> 01:41:21.690 I was like, okay, what's your game? 01:41:21.850 --> 01:41:23.610 You know, are you actually interested in what's true? 01:41:23.690 --> 01:41:27.770 Or are you just like interested in like shooting down something and making yourself feel 01:41:27.770 --> 01:41:28.090 better? 01:41:28.330 --> 01:41:33.050 And then the second that we both realized that we were both interested in just like a good 01:41:33.050 --> 01:41:34.890 faith effort, then we were cool. 01:41:34.970 --> 01:41:39.450 And it was like, you know, so I just I wonder sometimes if that's what goes on. 01:41:41.940 --> 01:41:45.780 Yeah, um I I think it's probably a large part of it. 01:41:45.940 --> 01:41:51.300 Um, but I think in these cases that I'm thinking of here, there's also this fact that it 01:41:51.300 --> 01:41:54.900 occurs in a highly polarized partisan conflict. 01:41:55.220 --> 01:42:00.500 Um and I I think you're right, you know, when you when you communicate anything, people are 01:42:00.500 --> 01:42:02.900 going to draw inferences about your motivations. 01:42:03.130 --> 01:42:08.970 Um and and for for me then the question should be, you know, what are the norms that 01:42:08.970 --> 01:42:11.930 we want in institutions like universities? 01:42:12.410 --> 01:42:18.090 What are going to be conducive to those universities performing their 01:42:18.090 --> 01:42:18.490 function? 01:42:18.650 --> 01:42:22.970 And I take the the sort of T los, the function of universities to be basically kind of 01:42:22.970 --> 01:42:26.940 epistemic, like to produce knowledge, understanding, truth and so on. 01:42:27.820 --> 01:42:32.460 And I think, and even when it comes to mainstream media, I think similarly, they also have 01:42:32.460 --> 01:42:34.940 kind of epistemic functions. 01:42:35.180 --> 01:42:40.860 And I think you know, you that there should be a strong presumption against 01:42:42.380 --> 01:42:48.380 criticizing claims or arguments, not based on the kind 01:42:48.380 --> 01:42:53.900 of merits of those claims or arguments, but because they might be used as 01:42:53.900 --> 01:42:57.470 ammunition by another political faction. 01:42:58.510 --> 01:43:04.510 It seems to me that's first of all, um I think there are going to be 01:43:04.510 --> 01:43:10.350 such strong motivations to uh uh criticize claims and arguments 01:43:10.670 --> 01:43:16.110 for mundane partisan reasons which should be frowned upon within the context of 01:43:16.110 --> 01:43:20.910 science um and mainstream media and and these other sort of epistemic institutions. 01:43:22.280 --> 01:43:27.640 And secondly, it just strikes me as a kind of recipe for 01:43:28.120 --> 01:43:30.360 groupthink and institutional decay. 01:43:30.440 --> 01:43:35.960 If people can't criticize these institutions without that being criticized because it might 01:43:35.960 --> 01:43:40.680 give ammunition to the wrong side in a political conflict, that seems like it's not going 01:43:40.680 --> 01:43:44.680 to be good for those institutions in terms of their function of seeking knowledge and so 01:43:44.680 --> 01:43:44.840 on. 01:43:45.000 --> 01:43:47.080 So I haven't fully thought things through. 01:43:47.240 --> 01:43:51.230 That's my kind of current intuition about these these cases, but but yeah. 01:43:51.470 --> 01:43:51.630 Yeah. 01:43:51.870 --> 01:43:57.150 It's it seems to me like what you're saying, Dan, is that the argument that we shouldn't 01:43:57.150 --> 01:44:02.510 promote ideas that can be weaponized, um, is itself a good argument. 01:44:02.830 --> 01:44:07.310 It's it's just that when you apply it to itself, it destroys itself. 01:44:08.110 --> 01:44:13.860 So the idea that um we shouldn't promote i ideas that can be weaponized, 01:44:14.020 --> 01:44:16.260 uh can itself be weaponized. 01:44:16.580 --> 01:44:21.700 And that when we should uh count on it to be weaponized because we're coalitional primates 01:44:21.700 --> 01:44:27.460 who have agendas, and if uh you know if we can defend our coalitions by criticizing any 01:44:27.460 --> 01:44:33.170 idea that could be conceivably construed as a as a weapon, then we can just dismiss 01:44:33.170 --> 01:44:35.970 anything that that challenges our coalitional narratives. 01:44:36.210 --> 01:44:39.330 Uh it's just it it's it's an unsustainable norm. 01:44:39.650 --> 01:44:45.570 Uh that it can be exploited in the same way that um allowing anyone to censor speech 01:44:45.650 --> 01:44:50.290 uh can be exploited by bad actors who will inevitably censor ideas that interfere with with 01:44:50.290 --> 01:44:51.170 their agendas. 01:44:51.410 --> 01:44:56.840 Um this idea that um we we should only promote ideas that have good consequences and avoid 01:44:56.840 --> 01:45:01.480 bad consequences or or that cannot be weaponized, like that itself can be weaponized and 01:45:01.480 --> 01:45:05.560 can be exploited by by bad actors to protect cherished narratives. 01:45:06.040 --> 01:45:11.480 So I think it's another example of how cynicism can be a good thing. 01:45:11.960 --> 01:45:17.800 When you start thinking uh at a broader level of what kinds of norms are sustainable 01:45:17.880 --> 01:45:23.610 given our cynical motives, given that we can count on you coalitional primates like us to 01:45:23.610 --> 01:45:29.370 abuse and exploit the power to censor or the power to dismiss ideas on the basis of their 01:45:29.370 --> 01:45:30.090 consequences. 01:45:30.250 --> 01:45:34.250 Given that we know this about us, what are what are the best norms that are sustainable and 01:45:34.250 --> 01:45:37.370 that are conducive to producing knowledge and truth? 01:45:37.530 --> 01:45:42.890 And as soon as we abandon this cynicism or apply it selectively to our rivals but not 01:45:42.890 --> 01:45:45.460 ourselves, then we get into a bad place. 01:45:45.620 --> 01:45:50.260 And so this is one area where I think cynicism can be a good thing when thinking about the 01:45:50.260 --> 01:45:54.980 broader social incentives and institutions and norms that we're designing. 01:45:55.620 --> 01:45:56.980 Yeah, great, great point. 01:45:57.140 --> 01:45:58.180 Can completely agree with that. 01:45:58.340 --> 01:46:04.340 And actually it sort of as you say gets back to this issue of when can a sort of 01:46:04.340 --> 01:46:09.860 sensitivity to the ways in which cognition can be biased, when can that be helpful? 01:46:10.100 --> 01:46:15.950 Well, when we are ostensibly constructing communities and institutions, the 01:46:15.950 --> 01:46:20.590 function of which is to generate knowledge, that's a specific context in which actually 01:46:20.670 --> 01:46:26.430 it's very useful to identify those cases in which certain 01:46:26.430 --> 01:46:31.230 kinds of motivations can bias how people think and reason about the world, so that we can 01:46:31.230 --> 01:46:37.070 flag them and then construct norms and institutional procedures which are designed either 01:46:37.070 --> 01:46:41.340 to sort of harness them in ways which generate collective knowledge, like pitting people's 01:46:41.340 --> 01:46:45.660 biases against each other, or that flag them so that you can develop norms that then sort 01:46:45.660 --> 01:46:47.020 of penalize them. 01:46:47.580 --> 01:46:50.620 And I think also that's that's important because when we're talking about the sort of 01:46:50.620 --> 01:46:56.620 practical advantages of you know socially motivated cognition and belief and so on, 01:46:56.700 --> 01:47:00.610 you know, it's practical advantages for the individual who's engaging in that kind of 01:47:00.610 --> 01:47:01.090 cognition. 01:47:01.250 --> 01:47:05.730 But in as much as we're cooperating on a on a project which is not about advancing the 01:47:05.730 --> 01:47:11.010 interests of specific individuals, but but generating something through intellectual 01:47:11.010 --> 01:47:16.770 collaboration, under those conditions, the the capacity to identify features of human 01:47:16.770 --> 01:47:21.250 psychology that will be threatening to that project, there I think it's really, really 01:47:21.250 --> 01:47:22.050 helpful. 01:47:22.580 --> 01:47:22.820 Yeah. 01:47:22.900 --> 01:47:28.500 And I and I think too, like one norm might be to also sort of, you know, there's a world of 01:47:28.500 --> 01:47:33.380 difference between somebody saying, like, you know, something you're factually saying 01:47:33.380 --> 01:47:38.660 about, you know, the political affiliation of people I don't want you to say that versus 01:47:38.660 --> 01:47:44.500 sort of like, will I accept it if you clarify that your interest is not 01:47:44.740 --> 01:47:47.460 another nefarious agenda, right? 01:47:47.620 --> 01:47:49.940 And I think that's like a good litmus test, right? 01:47:50.070 --> 01:47:52.070 Like what is the actual claim you're making, right? 01:47:52.230 --> 01:47:54.070 And what is the actual thing you're pushing? 01:47:54.230 --> 01:48:00.230 And I think that's where having this kind of conversation back 01:48:00.230 --> 01:48:02.470 and forth is really helpful. 01:48:02.630 --> 01:48:08.630 Um, because I think it kind of will tease apart, I'm gonna completely swat down 01:48:08.630 --> 01:48:14.460 your ability and censor you, versus this this idea that it's 01:48:14.460 --> 01:48:17.820 true is is perfectly fine and I will accept it. 01:48:18.060 --> 01:48:23.180 What are the other implicit or explicit inferences that you want to make or not? 01:48:23.340 --> 01:48:24.940 And let's debate those, right? 01:48:25.260 --> 01:48:30.060 Like I think that that's the kind of healthy conversation to have. 01:48:30.220 --> 01:48:36.170 So for example, if there is a political skew in academia, then what what of it, 01:48:36.250 --> 01:48:36.490 right? 01:48:36.570 --> 01:48:37.690 Like what's the consequence? 01:48:37.850 --> 01:48:40.410 And what, how does it impact science? 01:48:40.890 --> 01:48:44.010 Has the historical skew been the other way for a long time? 01:48:44.170 --> 01:48:46.730 And these are all kind of conversations to have. 01:48:46.810 --> 01:48:48.570 And there are other skews that we're ignoring. 01:48:48.650 --> 01:48:49.690 So that could be another thing. 01:48:49.770 --> 01:48:53.530 Like to say, look, you know, like we've talked about, David and I talked about like social 01:48:53.530 --> 01:48:57.210 classes at one area where like there's not a lot of people from low social classes that are 01:48:57.210 --> 01:48:58.090 in academia. 01:48:58.250 --> 01:49:00.940 That blinds the questions that are asked. 01:49:01.100 --> 01:49:03.020 You know, philosophy is a great example. 01:49:03.180 --> 01:49:09.180 Like I kind of laugh at, like, I look at people who are sort of of the like Quine or 01:49:09.180 --> 01:49:10.780 even Dennett generation. 01:49:11.020 --> 01:49:15.660 Philosophy is way overrepresented as the phenotypes of people who will give people the 01:49:15.660 --> 01:49:17.020 benefit of the doubt. 01:49:17.260 --> 01:49:23.020 It's often like, you know, uh deep voiced, uh, you know, a a posh accent, 01:49:23.420 --> 01:49:24.610 a white male, right? 01:49:24.690 --> 01:49:28.210 Like these are people who are like they stand up in a room and who has like the highest 01:49:28.210 --> 01:49:30.530 social bargaining power historically, right? 01:49:30.770 --> 01:49:35.490 Like that that has clearly influenced philosophy immensely, right? 01:49:35.650 --> 01:49:40.770 From a first principles perspective, there's lots of reasons why that's true, but that 01:49:40.770 --> 01:49:44.210 shouldn't be true to the extent that there's equal access to knowledge. 01:49:44.370 --> 01:49:48.370 Like the fact that, like, a smart brain who can do an analysis, who can come to new 01:49:48.370 --> 01:49:52.680 insights, it's probably going to be pretty orthogonal to like your social bargaining power. 01:49:52.760 --> 01:49:56.920 And it's kind of a problem that like the two sort of go hand in hand, right? 01:49:57.240 --> 01:50:02.840 Um, and so I think um these are all cases where sort of like having 01:50:02.840 --> 01:50:08.040 conversations about what's the representation of what people look like, or these other 01:50:08.040 --> 01:50:13.590 things that like we have these evolved primate brains that we care about, but are they 01:50:13.590 --> 01:50:15.750 getting in the way of good ideas or good science? 01:50:15.910 --> 01:50:17.990 Like that's a really good conversation to have. 01:50:18.150 --> 01:50:23.910 And I do think so much ink is spilled in not doing that. 01:50:24.150 --> 01:50:27.190 I sometimes wonder if people are actually interested in science. 01:50:27.270 --> 01:50:31.990 Like, like we talked about a lot of the internet trolls or for even in F-Psych. 01:50:32.640 --> 01:50:36.480 I sort of get angry at them because they're not arguing for adaptationism. 01:50:36.960 --> 01:50:40.160 They're not arguing for a task analysis. 01:50:40.320 --> 01:50:42.960 They're arguing political things, right? 01:50:43.040 --> 01:50:48.400 And I'm like, you really are using up our social capital that we we earned for like a 01:50:48.400 --> 01:50:49.520 mundane political thing. 01:50:49.600 --> 01:50:51.680 And it's sort of that's not science, right? 01:50:51.760 --> 01:50:55.760 Um, whether or not they have a point politically, which you know is a different issue. 01:50:55.920 --> 01:51:00.720 Um I I often wonder if a lot of this, so especially social media or these political things, 01:51:00.800 --> 01:51:06.110 it's almost like there's are you actually interested in the science or do you actually have 01:51:06.110 --> 01:51:06.590 an agenda? 01:51:06.670 --> 01:51:11.630 And the people's prior implicitly is so high that you have an agenda that you're not 01:51:11.630 --> 01:51:16.830 actually doing science that like it's a wonderful rare thing to find somebody who's a 01:51:16.830 --> 01:51:17.550 scientist. 01:51:17.630 --> 01:51:19.150 Um yeah. 01:51:19.310 --> 01:51:20.030 Yeah, yeah. 01:51:20.110 --> 01:51:20.990 That seems right. 01:51:21.550 --> 01:51:21.870 Yeah. 01:51:21.950 --> 01:51:27.920 I mean, good faith um conversation and debate where people care about 01:51:27.920 --> 01:51:33.840 arriving at the truth collaboratively is a very rare and precious flower that 01:51:33.840 --> 01:51:35.360 is hard to cultivate. 01:51:35.600 --> 01:51:40.560 Um and there are all sorts of forces arrayed against it, and even once you do get it, it 01:51:40.560 --> 01:51:44.320 can be infiltrated by mimics and copycats who try to exploit it. 01:51:44.450 --> 01:51:48.770 It is uh difficult to achieve, but when it happens, it's beautiful. 01:51:48.930 --> 01:51:52.290 I think it has happened in the past couple hours as we've been talking. 01:51:52.610 --> 01:51:58.450 Uh and uh it has happened uh on on our various episodes here, and I hope we can continue 01:51:58.450 --> 01:51:59.810 to nurture this flower. 01:51:59.970 --> 01:52:03.090 So thank you, Dan, for having this uh awesome conversation with us. 01:52:03.170 --> 01:52:06.130 I hope we can have you back to have another one at some point. 01:52:06.540 --> 01:52:07.420 And uh yeah. 01:52:07.900 --> 01:52:08.620 This sounds great. 01:52:08.700 --> 01:52:14.460 And David, I really look forward to hearing from you next time we talk about your deep 01:52:14.460 --> 01:52:15.980 dive into Jordan Peterson. 01:52:16.540 --> 01:52:19.660 I will I will I will give you a full report next time. 01:52:19.740 --> 01:52:24.940 Well, maybe we should just have a uh an entire uh episode devoted to to Jordan Peterson and 01:52:24.940 --> 01:52:26.700 his uh luminous uh insights. 01:52:27.100 --> 01:52:30.780 I I'm sure that there would be many people. 01:52:30.940 --> 01:52:33.550 Uh I actually I'm not I'm not even gonna finish that sentence. 01:52:33.630 --> 01:52:34.190 So yeah. 01:52:34.270 --> 01:52:36.990 Um but yeah, Dan, thank you so much. 01:52:37.150 --> 01:52:39.310 It was it was a fun uh conversation. 01:52:39.390 --> 01:52:44.590 And yeah, thank you for you know good faith effort into sort of uncovering what we all have 01:52:44.590 --> 01:52:47.950 as sort of these these social agendas and what we think and believe. 01:52:48.030 --> 01:52:52.750 So it was a fun and I think a a representation of it even in our conversation. 01:52:52.830 --> 01:52:53.950 So thanks so much. 01:52:54.440 --> 01:52:56.600 Thank you for the for the invitation to come on. 01:52:56.760 --> 01:52:57.720 Big fan of you both. 01:52:57.880 --> 01:52:59.000 Big fan of the podcast. 01:52:59.160 --> 01:53:00.520 Best of success in the future. 01:53:00.920 --> 01:53:01.560 Thank you so much. 01:53:01.640 --> 01:53:04.600 We'll we'll pay you after I turn off the recording. 01:53:08.680 --> 01:53:10.040 Whoa, what a fun conversation. 01:53:10.280 --> 01:53:10.920 I don't have no idea. 01:53:11.400 --> 01:53:11.960 That was great. 01:53:12.040 --> 01:53:12.440 Yeah. 01:53:13.080 --> 01:53:14.120 So we don't know what it what we do. 01:53:14.280 --> 01:53:14.600 We don't know it. 01:53:14.920 --> 01:53:16.600 No, we're breaking the fourth wall again, but that's okay. 01:53:16.680 --> 01:53:17.320 It's fun to do that. 01:53:17.480 --> 01:53:22.750 Um but uh really, David, I did appreciate your uh all of the all the things you said that 01:53:22.750 --> 01:53:24.030 during this episode as well. 01:53:24.430 --> 01:53:27.390 I I really appreciated all the things you said as well, Dave. 01:53:27.470 --> 01:53:30.110 Uh you you were really spot on in all the points you made. 01:53:30.270 --> 01:53:35.870 Um if you agree with my assessment of of Dave and Dave's assessment of me, uh please say so 01:53:35.870 --> 01:53:37.710 on social media, leave us a kind review. 01:53:37.790 --> 01:53:41.710 And if you feel so inclined, you can check out our Patreon page and support us. 01:53:41.870 --> 01:53:46.740 Uh your enthusiasm uh and support uh is the fuel that keeps us going. 01:53:46.980 --> 01:53:47.140 Yeah. 01:53:47.220 --> 01:53:50.340 So a couple of people have already said this is their favorite podcast. 01:53:50.580 --> 01:53:54.420 And even if it's just, you know, a couple people's favorite podcasts, that means a lot to 01:53:54.420 --> 01:53:54.500 us. 01:53:54.580 --> 01:53:55.140 So thank you. 01:53:55.380 --> 01:53:56.420 Yeah, absolutely. 01:53:56.660 --> 01:54:02.340 Uh and without uh further ado, we'll uh we'll end the episode here and then just wait for 01:54:02.340 --> 01:54:02.820 the next one. 01:54:02.900 --> 01:54:06.980 And if you're binge listening, um, you know, it'll be a few seconds and then we'll start 01:54:06.980 --> 01:54:07.620 back up. 01:54:07.950 --> 01:54:09.070 Yeah, cool. 01:54:09.390 --> 01:54:10.270 Thank you.