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I'm David Petrozewski.

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I'm David Pinsov.

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This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

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Actual Evolutionary Psychology.

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By Actual Evolutionary Psychologists.

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David, did you know that Jean Nicot was a French philosopher and logician, best known for

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his work on propositional logic and induction.

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I actually did not know that.

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That's very interesting.

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And what makes you bring up Jean Nicode?

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Uh well, I mean, that was just from Wikipedia.

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Um, but I brought up Jean Nicode because our guest today is Dan Nettle.

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No relation to Jean Nicode.

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However, no relation, uh, he works at the Jean Nicode Institute in Paris.

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That's right.

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It's a wonderful institution uh and a a cool place to live.

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I love going to Paris.

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But even more than going to Paris, I love talking to Dan Nettle because this guy is just an

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encyclopedia of fascinating information.

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Uh we had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation.

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Uh we talked about uh evolutionary behavioral science in general, what it's doing right,

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what it's doing wrong, how we could change it, evolutionary mismatch, uh, obesity,

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poverty, uh, lots of really interesting stuff.

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Yeah, if you think if you have an opinion about minimal uh or basic income, uh you should

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listen to this episode.

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You know, I actually found this episode almost frustrating because there's so much more I

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want to talk to Daniel about that we didn't get to.

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So um, I mean, that's a really good problem to have.

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Um, but yeah, it the Daniel is just um, you know, in the ratio of sort of like

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how broadly known is he and how much stuff he has.

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This is another, like, really, Daniel is just a treasure trove of incredible work and is

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doing so much good, important work about really important things like poverty, social

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processes, um, and really putting his finger on um how of psych and psychology

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generally can sort of help us in all of our social ills or not.

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Yeah, no, absolutely.

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It was it was really uh fantastic conversation.

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I think I'll enjoy it.

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And without further ado, Dan Eddle.

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Dean, you are at the uh Jean Nicode Institute in Paris, is that right?

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That's correct.

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Yeah.

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Okay.

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Um, and this is a completely beside the point question, but are you a runner?

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Yeah.

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Yeah?

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Yeah.

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What can you talk a little bit about that?

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Well, I've just been I've been a runner for fifteen years or so, and I'm for I have a

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really unfortunate uh um distinction as a runner that the only events that

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I'm any good at are the eight hundred meters and the hundred kilometer ultramarathon.

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Oh wow.

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And there is no rational training for these two events.

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And I d you know, what the hell?

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In fact, I did my big best performance on the two of them within five days of each other.

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Wow.

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So for those of you who are curious, I did the eight hundred meters first and the hundred

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kilometers second.

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I think that's the way around to do it.

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That's and so anyway, I'm just like I'm really mediocre.

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I have a really I have a flat surface of mediocrity and then islands of ability which are

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very far apart.

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Amazing.

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I don't know what I don't know how to solve this problem.

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You know I'm like I'm just yeah.

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But uh but you doing a hundred K uh is uh is an accomplishment in and of itself.

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It involves a lot of tea, you know.

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Okay.

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It's good.

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Yeah, that's basically put that on a that's this is this this is just like how to do a

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hundred K.

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Yeah, it's just it's do just tea do the do the first twenty K, have some tea,

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and do the other 80k, add some more tea.

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Yeah.

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Have you considered writing a book about well, it would be a short book, you know?

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Yeah, just tea.

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Yeah, it would be it would really be a greeting card.

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It would be some airport running 100k.

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We just have tea on the inside.

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Exactly.

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Um, I I I feel like whenever we talk to anybody, any part of the conversation is a

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microcosm of the person's research.

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And I actually feel like that what we just did is also a microcosm of your work, Dan, which

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is that you cover even a large flat surface of mediocre occasional islands.

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Yeah, thanks a lot, guys.

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Yeah, you're welcome.

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Okay, we can good night.

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We'll be here.

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We'll be here all week.

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Yes, exactly.

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We'll go island topic.

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It's okay.

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Yeah, exactly.

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So all of Dan's work is in greeting card format.

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And um, no, but what I was gonna say, uh to it's going to be a long, long walk to get to

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this, but uh no.

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What I was gonna say is that um you cover a lot of different topics um in

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a way that it's not mediocre, but it's actually from an evolutionary perspective, and it

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covers a lot of things that I think are things that aren't traditionally thought about.

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So, for example, one thing is like income inequality.

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Um, and that's a really important social thing.

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And we've talked a bit about on the podcast before about you can take a very reductive

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approach to something like resources from an evolutionary perspective.

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And one of the reasons we even started this podcast was because a lot of what was in the

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podcast or popular zeitgeist of evolutionary psychology was this very

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reductive stuff where it's sort of like if it's not basically like caveman hitting each

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other over clubs, that runs counter to human nature.

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Um, and so one of the things I love about your work is that it's very diverse, but

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it hits to the heart of what are the what are the evolved psychological mechanisms

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underlying this really important swath of human nature and often covering stuff that

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isn't what I would consider sort of like the easy stuff to tackle, like income

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inequality.

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Um, and so you know, one of the places to start out then is sort of from a

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topical perspective, um, and this is maybe like the 800-meter and 100k

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thing, is that do you do you think about like sort of what what does the research program

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that you've done have in common?

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Um, are there certain things that you're trying to tackle when it comes to topics

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that that there's some principle behind?

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Um, and I mean this like not in a like defend it, but just sort of I'm curious because I

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often find you covering things where I think, oh, I wish somebody had been doing that.

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And I didn't even realize I wished somebody had been doing it until Dan Nettle started

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doing it.

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So I'm just curious, like what your what your process has been for picking topics.

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Well, I think that the actual the actual sort of ex-ante-causal

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sequence is a bit random.

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I mean one works on things that just seem interesting and one hears about and thinks, oh,

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there might be something to say about this.

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But I think ex post I can definitely say that there's a there's a common theme for most of

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most of my work uh anyway, which is trying to understand a kind of

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articulation between social science questions and

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focus and evolutionary psychology, because I think evolutionary psychology

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is, you know, broadly speaking, correct in its claims about the mind, in the sense that,

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you know, clearly we have minds and they have structure, and those structures have to do

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with something, you know, something to do with fundamental uh um adaptive problems that

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that the mind has solved to do with you know mating and choosing social partners and

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getting the eating the right stuff and you know all of those things.

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But I think a lot of the evolutionary psychology literature sort of it

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sees this very simple world in which there's no real social structure or

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economic structure when that's happening.

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It's like, oh I'm here, you know, I'm choosing my mate, I'm choosing my social partners,

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I'm choosing the thing to eat, I'm you know avoiding this, I'm avoiding this snake whilst

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you know taking this ripe fruit.

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As if uh as if sort of ever every individual w were kind of just facing up to nature and

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there was all the stuff up there and there were no social constraints, no social structure,

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no no cultural expectations, no distribution of resources and power relations, all the

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stuff that social science has been really good about talking about.

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So I mean for me it's just interesting to think about can those two meet up in

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a mutually beneficial way.

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I mean it's also good, I think it's it's good for evolutionary psychology because in a way

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we we s we're very good at solving the sort of easy problems that no one felt needed

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solving.

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Like, you know, men like pretty women, people don't like people who cheat,

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you know, people think snakes and spiders are kind of yucky.

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I mean, great, you know, it's not wrong.

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Yeah.

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But it no one really in the in society is saying that's the problem that needs solving,

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guys.

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You know, that's really what's so uh in a way, it would be nice to ally the undoubted

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explanatory power of our approach to kind of hard problems that people actually want

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solving, which I think where the solutions are difficult.

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Um so, in a way that the evolved mind is one set of the shears and then the act the the

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social structural or or the linguistic environment or the socio-cultural context or

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economic context or whatever is the other set of the shears, and then somewhere in between

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is human action.

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Right.

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Right.

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And so what can we do?

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Uh what can we do when we bring those two things together?

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Yeah.

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I mean, maybe maybe just make it concrete.

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I mean, one question I had for you and I thought was really interesting was about

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inequality and income inequality, and sort of, you know, there's been work on sort of, you

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know, as you said, like cheater detection or people feeling like what's the flow of

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resources.

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Um, and there's starting to be some work on this, like um in your work, Pascal Boyer

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has some work on sort of ownership and how it's also social.

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Like what you deem is owned is also a function of sort of who you deem as sort of worthy of

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future interaction, which I think is a deeply interesting and kind of weird way to think

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about ownership.

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that's probably right.

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That comes from an evolutionary perspective.

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And so um can you maybe talk about how do you do this very difficult thing of taking the

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evolved software of which we don't know much, and then take an important social problem

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like inequality.

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How do you how do you get those get a hold of those big scissors and bring those two blades

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together?

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Well, I mean I I think there are lots of different ways and and it's not always easy.

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But I think w so one way to think about it, I suppose, is to say, well,

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what are the stylized facts of which social science is quite good at establishing that, you

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know, pl places high in income inequality tend to have certain kinds of problems.

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I mean it's debated all of this, of course, but um so you could say, Well, what what do we

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know?

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And then you could think, well, okay, well what might be

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that's a macro, that's a macro level of generalization.

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Societies with uh high income inequality have certain features and actually are more

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susceptible to certain kinds of bad outcomes, which is interesting.

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But then you might say, well, from the micro point of view, of the individual agent who's

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coming into an ecology trying to figure out what's going on, trying to satisfy their their

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needs, what might be the problem they're trying to solve?

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And are there ways in which having a whole population of people trying to do that and

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interacting with one another are going to generate, for example, you know, uh uh my

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PhD should PhD student Benoît de Corson has worked on uh uh

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inequality and crime and particularly violent crime, sort of there's a big literature

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arguing that the more unequal places generate more violent crime.

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Well why would that be?

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You know, it's not immediately obvious.

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When you start to think, well, okay, that people have have goals, which is to have uh you

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know adequate resources and to be able to defend them, and uh that's easier when resources

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are more evenly spread out so no one finds themselves too far down at the bottom of the

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pile.

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I mean then you can start to build up an account of how that might work.

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Now you might say, well, does it actually explain anything we didn't already know, and I

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think the jury's out, but I think very plausibly it does, right?

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It generates new predictions, or at least it it generates a feed-through from the

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individual decision maker to these more macroscopic things, patterns of inequality

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and so on.

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And of course that's that's cyclical, right?

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Because the the output of my behavior um and yours, you

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know, is the input to the behavior of other people who are in our in our society, in in our

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social network.

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Right?

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They have to take what for me is is the the ecology of my decisions becomes for other

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people the input into their decisions.

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So there's this you know, that's how you can kind of get these macroscopic things going.

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Um so I think I think you know this is more

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than evolutionary psychology can look at things that social scientists already know and go,

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here might be a reason for that.

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I think at the best we can do a better job of saying, okay, at the individual level, what's

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going on?

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What's going, you know, what's going on for the people involved, what they might be picking

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up on, what are they trying to do?

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What are their goals?

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What are the emotions that are getting triggered in them, the reactions, and so on.

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And how might that feed up to some of the stuff we you know that we know happens at the

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population level?

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Right.

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So it's a it's an exercise just to make sure, or to just restate it, it's reverse

237
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engineering not just any old particular phenomenon, but phenomena that in

238
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especially involves sort of important social dynamics and not just accepting

239
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sort of the naive idea of like, well, of course, uh, low, low

240
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income or high inequality areas have high crime.

241
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And there's just sort of a cartoonish arrow from that to like bad person who's cackling.

242
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But it's taking seriously and respecting every agent is an evolved

243
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being who, if we have some sort of high-level theory about what their goals or motivations

244
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might be and why those might make sense, if we can respect those and reverse engineer

245
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those, it might give us purchase into thinking about what are some of the highest

246
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probability interventions or changes.

247
00:14:20,760 --> 00:14:26,360
So if this is why it makes sense for somebody to do crime, then if we

248
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understand that, then we know how to intervene on that or what to change.

249
00:14:30,040 --> 00:14:31,480
Is that sort of a fair characteristic?

250
00:14:31,720 --> 00:14:31,880
Yes.

251
00:14:32,680 --> 00:14:33,240
Absolutely.

252
00:14:33,400 --> 00:14:37,000
I mean, and I think there's a couple of aspects to the, I mean, I agree with everything you

253
00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:38,200
said, but I think you can go further.

254
00:14:38,360 --> 00:14:43,750
So one is um, you know, a lot of the things people come up with in public policy are pretty

255
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silly.

256
00:14:45,110 --> 00:14:50,630
You know, just put put put put put uh

257
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traffic light labeling on food and obesities, you know, get solved or something like that.

258
00:14:54,790 --> 00:14:56,470
They're really silly when you think about it.

259
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And only if you had quite an impoverished notion of what might really be going on would you

260
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would you really think, oh, that's how we're going to solve it, right?

261
00:15:05,110 --> 00:15:09,520
Yeah, and um now social scientists make this point very frequently, but what they tend to

262
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say is, well, that's because policymakers often individualise what's really a social

263
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structural phenomenon.

264
00:15:16,720 --> 00:15:22,320
But I mean that sort of right to a point, but kind of obscure because it's like, well,

265
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where does social structure come from?

266
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And yeah, what how does that impinge causally on individuals?

267
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But they're right to point out that a lot of the remedies people come up with are pretty

268
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silly.

269
00:15:31,760 --> 00:15:35,290
So so you know y y that's a way in which we can do better.

270
00:15:35,450 --> 00:15:40,570
But secondly, to say about the reverse engineering thing, I think there's sort of two

271
00:15:40,570 --> 00:15:46,250
levels of reverse engineering that happen in evolutionary social science, if you want to

272
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call it that.

273
00:15:47,050 --> 00:15:49,050
There's the reverse engineering of the mind itself.

274
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You know, what computational problems it's trying to solve and why is it solved them that

275
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way when it, you know, why why was that the way that that that uh you know w

276
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what's the adaptive logic of the kinds of mechanisms that exist in the individual mind but

277
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then there's if you have some aggregate pattern how does that arise from individuals

278
00:16:08,840 --> 00:16:13,240
and I I don't think that's the same reverse engineering problem and it's you know it is

279
00:16:13,240 --> 00:16:19,080
somewhat mysterious right we can all um we can all agree that

280
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we need to have an effective, you know, we all desire an effective mechanism for

281
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coordinating our behavior, you know, in some if we're going to be interacting socially.

282
00:16:30,270 --> 00:16:35,230
But we might still end up with a really odd mechanism for doing that, that's kind of, you

283
00:16:35,230 --> 00:16:41,070
know, somehow a byproduct of you know weird founder effects and who got there first and

284
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compromises between different people at different times and just frozen accidents of

285
00:16:44,910 --> 00:16:45,630
various kinds.

286
00:16:45,790 --> 00:16:51,720
So you can't look at aggregate human institutions, for example, and say, Oh, well, that's

287
00:16:51,720 --> 00:16:55,640
because in every mind there's a little kind of homunculus that's wanted that institution

288
00:16:55,640 --> 00:16:58,040
and was an involved motivation to have it, right?

289
00:16:58,280 --> 00:17:02,440
There's a whole so there's another reverse engineering, which is I don't even know if

290
00:17:02,440 --> 00:17:04,440
reverse engineering is the right term.

291
00:17:04,600 --> 00:17:05,480
I suppose it is, right?

292
00:17:05,560 --> 00:17:09,480
Which is to say, well, how did the cloud get from the individual drops?

293
00:17:09,640 --> 00:17:14,390
And you don't see in the individual drops a little you know picture of the cloud going, I

294
00:17:14,390 --> 00:17:16,950
want to be a cloud, you know, when I get together with some other people, I want to be a

295
00:17:16,950 --> 00:17:17,190
cloud.

296
00:17:17,350 --> 00:17:23,030
So I think that that that has been a slight, you know, I'm I'm a great admirer of a lot of

297
00:17:23,030 --> 00:17:27,110
the EbSight work, for example, on law, the psychology of law, you know, why do laws think

298
00:17:27,590 --> 00:17:32,630
why do legal codes see certain things as bad and other things as not so bad?

299
00:17:32,710 --> 00:17:37,990
And why is intent important in some cases, but perhaps not in others, and you know

300
00:17:38,470 --> 00:17:42,070
why are certain punishments seem you know judged to be suitable and so on.

301
00:17:42,300 --> 00:17:43,660
You know, I really like the program.

302
00:17:43,980 --> 00:17:47,740
It makes sense that we would come up with institutions that broadly make intuitive sense to

303
00:17:47,740 --> 00:17:47,900
us.

304
00:17:48,140 --> 00:17:53,660
But just because you, you know, the three of us here agree on,

305
00:17:54,460 --> 00:17:59,020
you know, that there should be incentives, there should be penalties for people for doing

306
00:17:59,020 --> 00:18:02,540
bad stuff, and we don't want it to happen, that doesn't make it a legal system.

307
00:18:03,180 --> 00:18:07,820
For it to become a legal system, a whole lot of other stuff, a load of social processes

308
00:18:07,820 --> 00:18:08,460
need to happen.

309
00:18:08,620 --> 00:18:12,890
And it might end up being a system that is not the system that any of us quite envisaged at

310
00:18:12,890 --> 00:18:13,290
the outset.

311
00:18:13,530 --> 00:18:13,770
Right.

312
00:18:14,010 --> 00:18:14,170
Right.

313
00:18:14,330 --> 00:18:16,650
And it might even be counterintuitive to all of us.

314
00:18:16,730 --> 00:18:19,210
Uh to some Yeah, we might say, how did we end up here?

315
00:18:19,770 --> 00:18:19,930
Yeah.

316
00:18:20,250 --> 00:18:22,730
Like what we how did things get so shitty?

317
00:18:22,810 --> 00:18:22,970
Yeah.

318
00:18:23,130 --> 00:18:23,210
Yeah.

319
00:18:23,450 --> 00:18:23,610
Yeah.

320
00:18:23,930 --> 00:18:24,090
Yeah.

321
00:18:24,250 --> 00:18:30,170
So I mean it just it it will be counterintuitive to a point, but I think social

322
00:18:30,330 --> 00:18:33,770
scientists overstate this point and they're going to say well cultures can involve all

323
00:18:33,770 --> 00:18:37,130
kinds of weird stuff that don't even, you know, they just sort of supervene on all the

324
00:18:37,130 --> 00:18:38,650
individual minds involved.

325
00:18:38,900 --> 00:18:43,140
If if even the three of us couldn't figure out how our own legal system worked, you know,

326
00:18:43,220 --> 00:18:45,380
that would cause it to change, I think.

327
00:18:45,700 --> 00:18:45,940
Right.

328
00:18:46,180 --> 00:18:50,100
You know, it might not be it might not be the one that any of us would have bite dreamed up

329
00:18:50,100 --> 00:18:53,620
on their own, but it it would ha it would be somehow constrained by the individual minds.

330
00:18:53,860 --> 00:18:54,020
Yeah.

331
00:18:54,100 --> 00:18:54,260
Right.

332
00:18:54,340 --> 00:18:59,300
It it it it's just to me that that reverse engineering is not quite the right word because

333
00:18:59,540 --> 00:19:03,850
with reverse engineering it implies that there is there's design, uh and there and there is

334
00:19:03,850 --> 00:19:07,210
a an efficiency and an elegance in the design to serve a particular purpose.

335
00:19:07,370 --> 00:19:11,130
And when we're talking about systems in the mind, I think that is a valid perspective to

336
00:19:11,130 --> 00:19:11,370
take.

337
00:19:11,450 --> 00:19:12,570
There often is design.

338
00:19:12,650 --> 00:19:16,970
There we uh natural selection often does hit on efficient, elegant solutions to solving

339
00:19:16,970 --> 00:19:17,850
adaptive problems.

340
00:19:18,010 --> 00:19:22,410
Uh but when it comes to institutions, um, there often is no uh design.

341
00:19:22,570 --> 00:19:25,320
It often does not serve any larger purpose.

342
00:19:25,480 --> 00:19:27,320
Uh shit happens, right?

343
00:19:27,640 --> 00:19:33,560
Um and and and culture and history uh is uh often just, you know, path dependent and

344
00:19:33,560 --> 00:19:36,120
depending on whatever random shit happened before it.

345
00:19:36,280 --> 00:19:41,160
And if if if you can rewind the tape and it you know the and and the institution might come

346
00:19:41,160 --> 00:19:44,040
out differently if if you replay the events of history.

347
00:19:44,280 --> 00:19:50,150
Um and so uh it's not so much of a reverse engineering as it is just sort of tracing

348
00:19:50,150 --> 00:19:51,510
back the causal steps.

349
00:19:51,750 --> 00:19:51,910
Yeah.

350
00:19:52,070 --> 00:19:55,350
Uh no, I mean it's what in economics they call micro foundations, right?

351
00:19:55,430 --> 00:19:57,110
Yeah, things like inflation.

352
00:19:57,830 --> 00:20:00,630
It's not it's not no one designed inflation.

353
00:20:02,790 --> 00:20:03,910
Inflation doesn't have a function.

354
00:20:04,070 --> 00:20:06,310
Well, no, depending on what yeah, yeah, yeah.

355
00:20:06,710 --> 00:20:11,110
I mean i i it it's a law-like product of actors that have interests.

356
00:20:11,270 --> 00:20:11,510
Right.

357
00:20:11,830 --> 00:20:12,070
Right.

358
00:20:12,230 --> 00:20:18,200
But I agree that the design stance isn't really quite right when it comes to societal

359
00:20:18,280 --> 00:20:18,680
level things.

360
00:20:18,760 --> 00:20:23,080
And social science gets itself, and actually including evolutionary models, get themselves

361
00:20:23,080 --> 00:20:25,480
into all kinds of muddles, you know, in this way, right?

362
00:20:25,560 --> 00:20:28,440
They say things like, what's the function of ritual?

363
00:20:28,520 --> 00:20:30,840
And what's the function of religion and so on?

364
00:20:30,920 --> 00:20:34,520
I'm not sure those are even I'm not sure those are even coherent questions.

365
00:20:34,600 --> 00:20:39,850
So there's a sort of there is a there is a coherent psychological question in there, which

366
00:20:39,850 --> 00:20:43,130
is why do people enjoy rituals and find them satisfying?

367
00:20:43,370 --> 00:20:49,210
Or you know what what keeps people going back to a particular kind of

368
00:20:49,210 --> 00:20:53,370
rin religious institution, or moving away from one and towards another that they find more

369
00:20:53,370 --> 00:20:54,090
attractive in some way.

370
00:20:54,170 --> 00:20:58,970
And I think that's you know, Manvia Salinger Singh has talked about selective subjective

371
00:20:58,970 --> 00:21:00,970
selection, and I think that's you know that's useful.

372
00:21:01,050 --> 00:21:03,050
And there are other ways of thinking about this.

373
00:21:03,370 --> 00:21:09,000
So I I think the design stance is the wrong stance, but there isn't there's no doubt a

374
00:21:09,000 --> 00:21:11,080
causal flow from the mind to those things.

375
00:21:11,160 --> 00:21:17,000
And that, you know we recreate them and reimagine them and and reinterpret them and

376
00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:21,320
and do stuff purposely that sort of feeds into their evolution.

377
00:21:21,560 --> 00:21:22,600
So I completely agree.

378
00:21:22,680 --> 00:21:26,920
I think reverse engineering, you know, I think that the a really bad way to do social

379
00:21:26,920 --> 00:21:30,600
scientist is say, look, there's this group of people who are, you know, all all doing

380
00:21:30,600 --> 00:21:33,290
something, maybe it's good for their group that they do that.

381
00:21:33,450 --> 00:21:36,650
You know, I just you know, or maybe it has a function at the group level.

382
00:21:36,730 --> 00:21:41,370
I I don't really think I I think informally that can sometimes be right.

383
00:21:41,450 --> 00:21:45,450
Like, you know, we all agree we want to have a convention about which side of the road we

384
00:21:45,450 --> 00:21:46,090
drive.

385
00:21:46,890 --> 00:21:51,930
So we it's all in our interest to uphold that and to be annoyed with people who who depart

386
00:21:51,930 --> 00:21:52,410
from it.

387
00:21:52,570 --> 00:21:57,100
So you could, I guess, informally say this convention about all driving on the same as the

388
00:21:57,260 --> 00:22:01,660
you know has a function for the for society, but it's not it's not it's it doesn't have a

389
00:22:01,660 --> 00:22:03,420
function the same way that the eye does.

390
00:22:03,660 --> 00:22:06,860
That's just saying all of the people kind of agree that this is a good idea and then we

391
00:22:06,860 --> 00:22:07,740
really ought to stick for it.

392
00:22:07,820 --> 00:22:11,420
And there's very uh few people arguing that we should give up this convention, you know.

393
00:22:11,820 --> 00:22:12,140
Mm-hmm.

394
00:22:12,300 --> 00:22:12,460
Yeah.

395
00:22:12,700 --> 00:22:17,270
I mean it this does depart from at least some traditions or ways of thinking about culture.

396
00:22:17,430 --> 00:22:21,670
So there there are some scholars who do think that the design stance uh is often

397
00:22:21,670 --> 00:22:24,150
appropriate to take toward culture.

398
00:22:24,310 --> 00:22:28,790
Um this is these would be people uh you know like uh Joe Henrik and colleagues who argue

399
00:22:28,790 --> 00:22:32,710
that uh cultural group selection might explain a lot of cultural phenomena.

400
00:22:32,870 --> 00:22:35,510
They've made this argument uh regarding uh monogamy.

401
00:22:35,750 --> 00:22:41,110
There are other scholars who think that uh maybe this explains religion, um maybe this

402
00:22:41,110 --> 00:22:46,680
explains the the ways in which uh groups around the world have tools and subsistence

403
00:22:46,680 --> 00:22:52,440
strategies uh that are uh well suited to their ecology, that uh, you know, over time their

404
00:22:52,440 --> 00:22:57,720
culture has evolved to adapt them to their particular um uh climate.

405
00:22:57,960 --> 00:23:01,800
Um so do you depart from these approaches?

406
00:23:01,960 --> 00:23:06,120
Do you think that they are overstating or or or or how where do you where do you fit in?

407
00:23:06,440 --> 00:23:10,130
So I think I think they capture a a a correct intuition, right?

408
00:23:10,210 --> 00:23:15,570
Which is that um, you know, we we but we all agreed that social

409
00:23:15,810 --> 00:23:20,130
processes can be path dependent and then get stuck in various kinds of sticky equilibria

410
00:23:20,290 --> 00:23:20,690
and so on.

411
00:23:20,770 --> 00:23:26,290
And if they're you know, if if they're awful for people, if they cause people to not be

412
00:23:26,290 --> 00:23:31,970
able to subsist or uh you know experience excessively high levels of

413
00:23:31,970 --> 00:23:35,010
conflict, then people are going to seek available alternatives, right?

414
00:23:35,090 --> 00:23:37,970
So you will get a flow away from the institutions that work.

415
00:23:38,450 --> 00:23:42,780
Um now uh so I I don't sort of disagree with the phenomenon.

416
00:23:42,940 --> 00:23:46,140
I just think that my causal interpretation of it will be rather different.

417
00:23:46,300 --> 00:23:51,820
I don't think this is at all like uh you know, natural selection produces

418
00:23:52,380 --> 00:23:56,460
genes by random mutation, and then some of them are good and you know for individual

419
00:23:56,460 --> 00:23:57,500
organisms and they stay around.

420
00:23:57,580 --> 00:23:58,380
But I don't think it's like that.

421
00:23:58,460 --> 00:24:03,610
I think it's much more like purposive agents Maybe say, God, you know, we're we're stuck in

422
00:24:03,610 --> 00:24:04,810
a really bad equilibrium here.

423
00:24:04,890 --> 00:24:06,650
You know, we're we're in cycles of retaliation.

424
00:24:06,730 --> 00:24:07,690
I'm just going to opt out of this.

425
00:24:07,770 --> 00:24:11,210
I'm going to walk away, or I'm going to go and you know join that coalition over there

426
00:24:11,290 --> 00:24:16,250
because it's, you know, that's that's a different causal account that is going to lead to

427
00:24:16,250 --> 00:24:22,160
the same observation that generally speaking, you know, societies Or

428
00:24:22,400 --> 00:24:28,320
i you know, institutions that are acceptable to enough of the people enough of the

429
00:24:28,320 --> 00:24:32,640
time are going to have a better chance of stabilizing than ones that, you know, i the

430
00:24:32,640 --> 00:24:38,400
reductio ad absurdum I I don't know, trying to wear fur

431
00:24:38,400 --> 00:24:39,680
coats in the desert or something, right?

432
00:24:39,760 --> 00:24:42,960
But I mean the the causal account of that is not that there were people there there's a

433
00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:46,400
whole societies of people who are wearing fur coats in the desert and they died out.

434
00:24:46,490 --> 00:24:50,490
You know, I don't think that's like I think people say, I want to take this coat off, I'm

435
00:24:50,490 --> 00:24:50,730
hot.

436
00:24:50,810 --> 00:24:54,170
You know, that's a different account of the causality.

437
00:24:54,810 --> 00:24:55,130
Right.

438
00:24:55,290 --> 00:24:55,530
Yeah.

439
00:24:55,610 --> 00:25:01,610
It it um uh viewing culture w with uh a design stance and

440
00:25:01,610 --> 00:25:07,460
in too monomaniacal of a way can cause you to forget the underlying agent um or the set of

441
00:25:07,460 --> 00:25:10,980
agents that are um contributing to the to the phenomenon.

442
00:25:11,140 --> 00:25:15,140
Uh and when you focus too much on the culture itself as a i as a kind of evolutionary

443
00:25:15,140 --> 00:25:19,700
process, you forget that there are agents involved who are making intelligent choices uh at

444
00:25:19,700 --> 00:25:20,740
every step of the way.

445
00:25:20,900 --> 00:25:26,740
Uh and it's often more insightful to foreground those agents uh in in the analysis to to

446
00:25:26,740 --> 00:25:30,410
figure out how the culture got to the the place it currently is.

447
00:25:30,730 --> 00:25:34,490
Yeah, I mean I think it th I completely agree with that, though I do think it depends

448
00:25:34,490 --> 00:25:36,330
slightly what question you're answering, right?

449
00:25:36,410 --> 00:25:42,010
So if you're asking, for example, a question in um developmental psychology,

450
00:25:42,250 --> 00:25:46,890
you know, the kid comes into a world in which there are particular types of social

451
00:25:46,890 --> 00:25:51,370
relations or particular linguistic conventions, for example, and pretty much, you know,

452
00:25:51,530 --> 00:25:53,050
just has to figure out what those are.

453
00:25:53,290 --> 00:25:58,540
I mean you know, we know that we we know that over generations

454
00:25:58,780 --> 00:26:04,700
actually, speakers and learners do exert a an influence on languages that change them,

455
00:26:04,860 --> 00:26:05,100
right?

456
00:26:05,180 --> 00:26:06,460
That's how languages change.

457
00:26:06,620 --> 00:26:10,300
But sort of for the individual kid, it's as if you know it is as if the culture is out

458
00:26:10,300 --> 00:26:14,140
there and their their primary task is to, you know, just get hold of it.

459
00:26:14,300 --> 00:26:18,220
So d I think depending on the grain of analysis, uh sometimes I think you perhaps have to

460
00:26:18,540 --> 00:26:24,530
zoom in and out between uh you know, the agency approach and the kind of and the

461
00:26:24,530 --> 00:26:30,370
more um what is the existing social structure uh approach but there

462
00:26:30,450 --> 00:26:35,010
there's there's an interesting dynamic between those two things you know uh I I guess

463
00:26:35,010 --> 00:26:39,490
that's that's that's the the point to make sure yeah I mean I think even the example of

464
00:26:39,490 --> 00:26:44,770
sort of the person who walks away from the culture right I mean you can imagine uh

465
00:26:45,360 --> 00:26:48,960
a cultural institution that then comes up.

466
00:26:49,120 --> 00:26:54,400
So your example of sort of, you know, there's there's there's a situation that the culture

467
00:26:54,400 --> 00:26:57,360
has produced that's bad enough that people want to leave.

468
00:26:57,680 --> 00:27:03,600
Uh you can imagine then, if you're thinking scientifically, from a dynamics, I mean maybe

469
00:27:03,600 --> 00:27:08,560
dynamics are the right is the right language, but sort of um if there's a cultural

470
00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:12,510
institution, then that sort of prevents people from leaving, right?

471
00:27:12,590 --> 00:27:18,510
Or to the degree that structure exists, then that allows for a dynamic of sort of

472
00:27:18,510 --> 00:27:20,510
more exploitative culture.

473
00:27:20,750 --> 00:27:20,910
Right.

474
00:27:21,070 --> 00:27:26,990
Or so, so like even in that model, you can use, you can use the fact that there

475
00:27:26,990 --> 00:27:30,670
are people have motivations and it's not just random genes.

476
00:27:30,830 --> 00:27:36,700
But then you can actually import that people usually want to leave when things

477
00:27:36,700 --> 00:27:37,100
get bad.

478
00:27:37,260 --> 00:27:42,700
Therefore, you can kind of predict from a scientific perspective or a dynamics perspective

479
00:27:42,940 --> 00:27:48,700
that if, like, for example, the leadership in a culture wants to exploit

480
00:27:48,700 --> 00:27:53,180
the people, then there has to be some structure either already in the environment, like

481
00:27:53,180 --> 00:27:58,670
they're stranded in an island and they can't leave, or that they impose some way of

482
00:27:58,670 --> 00:28:01,070
constraining outside choices.

483
00:28:01,150 --> 00:28:05,950
And then you can sort of understand why that would exist, or when there's more constraint

484
00:28:06,030 --> 00:28:08,830
in outside options, why there's more exploitation.

485
00:28:09,310 --> 00:28:09,550
Yeah.

486
00:28:09,790 --> 00:28:10,030
Yeah.

487
00:28:10,110 --> 00:28:15,870
And I I mean, on that note, I think many people, many social

488
00:28:15,870 --> 00:28:21,520
scientists have argued that the central Um problem of social science is to do with power

489
00:28:21,520 --> 00:28:22,640
and power asymmetries.

490
00:28:23,120 --> 00:28:24,720
I don't know if this is necessarily right.

491
00:28:24,800 --> 00:28:28,400
You could probably argue the case, but and I think evolutionary psychology has a

492
00:28:28,400 --> 00:28:31,280
potentially quite a lot to say about that.

493
00:28:31,440 --> 00:28:31,680
Yeah.

494
00:28:31,840 --> 00:28:37,280
That that is kind of difficult to grasp from a more uh

495
00:28:37,280 --> 00:28:41,890
culturalist perspective, because you know, there are things that are sort of good for

496
00:28:41,890 --> 00:28:42,850
everyone and so on.

497
00:28:43,010 --> 00:28:47,250
But power and conflict is something evolutionary psychology sort of naturally lends itself

498
00:28:47,250 --> 00:28:52,770
to understanding because a basic thing about independently

499
00:28:52,770 --> 00:28:55,170
reproducing animals is that their interests are not aligned.

500
00:28:55,490 --> 00:28:58,450
The interests of men are not necessarily aligned to those of women, the interest of

501
00:28:58,450 --> 00:29:02,690
unrelated, even even of siblings is not actually perfectly aligned, even of parents and

502
00:29:02,690 --> 00:29:03,410
offspring, right?

503
00:29:03,650 --> 00:29:09,220
So you've got in the classes of individuals whose interests become aligned or are are just

504
00:29:09,220 --> 00:29:15,140
structurally more closely aligned as in members of family families, or become aligned uh th

505
00:29:15,380 --> 00:29:21,140
through shared reproduction, as in uh uh affinal relationships in laws,

506
00:29:21,540 --> 00:29:23,940
you know, or through in through situation, right?

507
00:29:24,020 --> 00:29:27,860
Which is, you know, w we collaborate, we are in a coalition, we go fishing together.

508
00:29:28,180 --> 00:29:32,020
But fund our fundamental Darwinian interests are not perfectly aligned, right?

509
00:29:32,100 --> 00:29:37,970
So that actually says conflict and attempts to influence the behavior of

510
00:29:37,970 --> 00:29:40,210
others will be fairly central to human existence.

511
00:29:40,530 --> 00:29:40,850
Yeah.

512
00:29:41,490 --> 00:29:45,810
And in a way you we we have quite a specific notion of that.

513
00:29:46,290 --> 00:29:50,050
And of course, you know, you don't you don't have to be a Marxist to also know that that's

514
00:29:50,050 --> 00:29:52,690
a huge theme in social science sciences, right?

515
00:29:52,850 --> 00:29:53,570
Conflict of interest.

516
00:29:53,730 --> 00:29:57,250
So I think we actually do quite a good job of getting hold of that.

517
00:29:57,760 --> 00:29:58,720
What are the complications?

518
00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:00,960
Why do people attempt to change the behavior of others?

519
00:30:01,120 --> 00:30:02,880
Why do others sometimes want to resist that?

520
00:30:03,040 --> 00:30:06,800
Whether they can succeed to do so or or not, of course depends.

521
00:30:06,960 --> 00:30:10,800
But um I I think I think there's we give quite a rich account of that.

522
00:30:10,960 --> 00:30:14,400
That maybe we don't give ourselves credit for how important an insight that is.

523
00:30:14,720 --> 00:30:15,600
Yeah, I like that.

524
00:30:15,760 --> 00:30:19,050
Yeah, and I mean I actually that reminds me, I mean, 'cause with we've David and I have

525
00:30:19,050 --> 00:30:19,690
been talking a lot.

526
00:30:19,770 --> 00:30:22,970
And I think like of David's work and Dan, I think your work too.

527
00:30:23,130 --> 00:30:28,410
And maybe you guys are representing a new shift in the evolutionary social sciences, which

528
00:30:28,410 --> 00:30:34,170
is sort of there's a difference between the surface level in David's terminology,

529
00:30:34,330 --> 00:30:40,200
propaganda of why we're doing what we're doing when a lot of it

530
00:30:40,200 --> 00:30:42,520
is about power and resources.

531
00:30:42,680 --> 00:30:47,160
And it's again respecting that there's this evolved design that really should care about

532
00:30:47,160 --> 00:30:47,320
this.

533
00:30:47,400 --> 00:30:48,040
It is important.

534
00:30:48,120 --> 00:30:50,120
It's like, does my kids starve or not?

535
00:30:50,200 --> 00:30:52,120
You know, and do I feel safe or not?

536
00:30:52,280 --> 00:30:57,320
Um, but then kind of laying bare that we're all using this power

537
00:30:57,560 --> 00:31:00,760
resource-focused evolved psychology.

538
00:31:00,840 --> 00:31:03,480
And that's what's really driving a lot of dynamics.

539
00:31:03,970 --> 00:31:05,890
So what do you mean by the surface level?

540
00:31:06,050 --> 00:31:10,850
You mean the the the the discussive justifications people give yeah exactly so like you

541
00:31:10,850 --> 00:31:16,690
know ideologies to sort of you know that that um uh I mean David's got

542
00:31:16,690 --> 00:31:20,930
probably 30 examples off the top of his head so maybe I'll just let him talk about it

543
00:31:21,010 --> 00:31:26,980
because uh yeah yeah so um when we when we discuss, you know, what what

544
00:31:26,980 --> 00:31:32,900
goes on in the political sphere um uh and we explain why we're uh pursuing

545
00:31:32,900 --> 00:31:36,740
various courses of action, why we want this particular policy or not, what what our

546
00:31:36,740 --> 00:31:42,660
political party is striving for, um we very rarely, if ever, uh frame things

547
00:31:42,660 --> 00:31:48,260
in a uh in a naked self-interest perspective or in a we just want power, we just want to uh

548
00:31:48,260 --> 00:31:53,330
monopolize resources for ourselves, we just want to grab goodies from the state.

549
00:31:54,770 --> 00:31:59,490
The way instead that we frame um our political activity is much more high-minded.

550
00:32:00,290 --> 00:32:02,290
We're pursuing these abstract ideals.

551
00:32:08,450 --> 00:32:13,090
And this isn't to say that those sometimes might have some truth to it, but uh there is an

552
00:32:13,090 --> 00:32:18,560
interest in um not being completely upfront about the agenda of any particular political

553
00:32:18,560 --> 00:32:19,040
coalition.

554
00:32:19,200 --> 00:32:23,600
If I come out and say as a politician, all I want is power, I'm just a power-hungry guy, no

555
00:32:23,600 --> 00:32:24,640
one's going to vote for me.

556
00:32:24,960 --> 00:32:30,160
And so there is an incentive built into the system where uh revealing the objectives of any

557
00:32:30,160 --> 00:32:34,320
of the agents within the system is counterproductive to those agents' objectives.

558
00:32:34,810 --> 00:32:39,930
And so often what you see is that the the verbal descriptions of the underlying phenomena

559
00:32:39,930 --> 00:32:44,250
will uh uh be out of sync with the the actual explanations that are driving things.

560
00:32:44,330 --> 00:32:48,650
And those uh discrepancies will will often be in the interests of many of the agents in the

561
00:32:48,650 --> 00:32:48,890
system.

562
00:32:49,210 --> 00:32:52,810
At least that's uh that's my my current way of thinking about it.

563
00:32:52,970 --> 00:32:58,250
I don't know if if that that's that's too cynical of a No, I think I think it's true, but I

564
00:32:58,250 --> 00:33:03,780
I do also think that abstract ideas do have some causal force, some

565
00:33:03,780 --> 00:33:05,220
causal sway over people.

566
00:33:05,300 --> 00:33:11,300
But I think even that also is um I think even that is is

567
00:33:11,300 --> 00:33:15,700
explicable within the within an evolutionary psychology framework in in something like the

568
00:33:15,700 --> 00:33:16,740
following way, right?

569
00:33:16,820 --> 00:33:22,580
That um in for for for highly cognitive beings that are

570
00:33:22,580 --> 00:33:26,660
figuring out in a really contingent way what to do in their environment and and often

571
00:33:26,980 --> 00:33:28,180
collaborating.

572
00:33:28,530 --> 00:33:33,490
Of course, I've immediately got a huge interest to cause you to do to coordinate my way or

573
00:33:33,490 --> 00:33:36,930
do the activity I, you know, that would be useful for me to be done.

574
00:33:37,330 --> 00:33:40,850
And there's various ways I can do that, but one of the obvious ways is actually persuading

575
00:33:40,850 --> 00:33:45,410
you that you know it's a good idea by making you see certain aspects of it that actually,

576
00:33:45,490 --> 00:33:50,610
you know, uh so that's that that's where that's where what you're describing

577
00:33:50,930 --> 00:33:51,890
comes about.

578
00:33:52,620 --> 00:33:57,900
but also I'm that you know, w we live in a partner choice ecology, or we're involved in

579
00:33:57,900 --> 00:34:00,460
partner choice ecologies where

580
00:34:03,100 --> 00:34:08,300
blatant self contradictions in my in my kind of characterizations of why we should do

581
00:34:08,300 --> 00:34:10,220
certain things are gonna show up.

582
00:34:10,540 --> 00:34:15,820
So there's a sense in which having you know used the argument that um

583
00:34:19,110 --> 00:34:24,950
everyone should uh uh everyone should have um butter with you,

584
00:34:25,110 --> 00:34:25,510
Dave.

585
00:34:25,670 --> 00:34:28,710
If I then say, but the other Dave shouldn't have butter, right?

586
00:34:29,110 --> 00:34:33,270
Which might be in my interest, immediately you say, Well, this this guy, you know, he

587
00:34:33,270 --> 00:34:34,790
doesn't make any cognitive sense, right?

588
00:34:34,870 --> 00:34:40,630
He's not so I I do actually think that ideas do acquire a causal force, even quite abstract

589
00:34:40,630 --> 00:34:45,500
ones and values and all of these things, but partly for reputational reasons, because you

590
00:34:45,500 --> 00:34:50,620
think, well, what would how persuasive would be someone who clearly doesn't, you know,

591
00:34:50,780 --> 00:34:55,100
argues one thing now and five minutes in five minutes' time would be arguing the opposite?

592
00:34:55,260 --> 00:34:59,820
I'll kind of know that there's no discursive reliability, and you know, that that says

593
00:34:59,820 --> 00:35:01,660
something about the interaction with that partner.

594
00:35:01,740 --> 00:35:07,570
So, in a strange way, you become kind of bound to uh quite abstract

595
00:35:07,570 --> 00:35:07,890
ideas.

596
00:35:07,970 --> 00:35:13,330
And this also goes for all sorts of things like um religious restrictions and moral

597
00:35:13,330 --> 00:35:15,090
restrictions of various kinds.

598
00:35:15,970 --> 00:35:21,650
And this is not to deny that people had resource and power

599
00:35:21,810 --> 00:35:24,530
interests for doing these things in the first place, but because otherwise you're seen

600
00:35:24,530 --> 00:35:28,050
immediately as someone who's kind of not credible, not reliable.

601
00:35:28,610 --> 00:35:34,600
So uh I I think that kind of relatively abstract ideas can

602
00:35:34,600 --> 00:35:40,520
become important causes of behaviour because we're evaluated according to our

603
00:35:41,000 --> 00:35:46,120
you know, and then you get this sort of strange tension where, as you say, many um

604
00:35:47,080 --> 00:35:52,290
political uh actors are an odd mixture of kind of

605
00:35:52,610 --> 00:35:58,450
genuine attempts at intellectual consistency and coherent worldview, and

606
00:35:58,930 --> 00:36:02,370
doing strategically whatever just suits their agenda the most.

607
00:36:02,450 --> 00:36:05,730
It's just a weird kind of hybrid between those two things.

608
00:36:06,210 --> 00:36:07,090
Yeah, absolutely.

609
00:36:07,570 --> 00:36:13,360
But but even there, there's still something of a d disconnect between the explicit uh

610
00:36:13,360 --> 00:36:17,440
narratives about why what's being done is being done and the actual processes underlying

611
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:17,600
it.

612
00:36:17,840 --> 00:36:21,600
So the narrative is that I just want butter for all, and that's what's driving my behavior.

613
00:36:21,760 --> 00:36:26,080
In reality, what's driving my behavior is I want power and resources, uh, but uh in a in an

614
00:36:26,080 --> 00:36:29,360
environment where being spotted as a hypocrite is going to thwart that goal.

615
00:36:29,520 --> 00:36:34,290
And so I better say that we I want butter for all and I I better appear consistent uh uh

616
00:36:34,370 --> 00:36:37,810
about that as much as possible so as not to sabotage myself.

617
00:36:37,970 --> 00:36:39,970
Uh and that's the underlying.

618
00:36:40,290 --> 00:36:43,970
I can't privately be found depriving butter to my neighbor or something or you know,

619
00:36:44,370 --> 00:36:44,690
exactly.

620
00:36:44,930 --> 00:36:50,930
And so in pursuing my agenda for power or or status or whatever, uh and my calculations

621
00:36:50,930 --> 00:36:54,770
about the likely social reactions of different tactics and people and and being being

622
00:36:54,770 --> 00:36:59,140
worried that people will think I'm a hypocrite, that is what's leading to the the butter uh

623
00:36:59,380 --> 00:37:05,140
spreading behavior uh and not an intrinsic desire for spreading butter no

624
00:37:05,380 --> 00:37:10,900
to to use your your wonderful analogy yeah and and and then then that's also where I don't

625
00:37:10,900 --> 00:37:13,700
know if this dynamic word dynamics or selection comes in.

626
00:37:13,780 --> 00:37:18,820
So from your persp from anyone's perspective, if everybody finds the thing agre uh

627
00:37:18,820 --> 00:37:20,590
agreeable, then that's great, right?

628
00:37:20,670 --> 00:37:25,470
Like if if if if if I model that everybody, whatever kind of, you know, there's this

629
00:37:25,470 --> 00:37:28,590
metaphor of you just throw pasta on the wall until it sticks.

630
00:37:28,750 --> 00:37:33,310
If everybody sort of accepts this thing that I've calculated will benefit me and my

631
00:37:33,310 --> 00:37:38,830
extended interests, and everybody does, in fact, agree with it, that's wonderful.

632
00:37:39,070 --> 00:37:39,950
And that's great.

633
00:37:40,030 --> 00:37:44,030
And there might be sort of selection for those kinds of representations.

634
00:37:44,110 --> 00:37:46,350
But often people will be like, no, that sucks.

635
00:37:46,620 --> 00:37:47,660
I we lose out.

636
00:37:47,740 --> 00:37:50,460
And David, you know, in that example, David's like, I don't have butter.

637
00:37:50,620 --> 00:37:56,540
And then it just becomes a thing of sort of, well, are we are Dan and I in

638
00:37:56,540 --> 00:37:57,500
that example?

639
00:37:57,740 --> 00:38:02,700
Um, you know, we might go along with it because we have enough power and David doesn't have

640
00:38:02,700 --> 00:38:03,260
enough power.

641
00:38:03,500 --> 00:38:08,620
So we don't really care if if everybody goes along with with this narrative.

642
00:38:08,700 --> 00:38:10,860
It's just matters, do the right people go along with it?

643
00:38:11,020 --> 00:38:12,780
Do enough people agree with it?

644
00:38:12,990 --> 00:38:14,750
And you get all the above, right?

645
00:38:14,830 --> 00:38:18,430
So there's some things where, and Dave and I talked about this, where you would almost

646
00:38:18,430 --> 00:38:24,190
expect that the the putting it in an intuitive folk psychological way,

647
00:38:24,510 --> 00:38:29,230
that groups of people would find other groups' political ideas weird.

648
00:38:29,390 --> 00:38:35,150
And that's precisely because those ideas or the silliness of other groups' ideas don't

649
00:38:35,150 --> 00:38:40,030
occur to the group itself because they're all benefiting from sort of being in on the

650
00:38:40,030 --> 00:38:41,070
silliness, right?

651
00:38:41,320 --> 00:38:45,400
Like, like, you know, why even like a take a religious idea, right?

652
00:38:45,480 --> 00:38:51,320
Like it seems really silly if you're not in the actual buying into the benefits

653
00:38:51,320 --> 00:38:53,720
of that sort of group identity.

654
00:38:53,960 --> 00:38:58,840
But from the evolved psychological perspective of all the people who are in that group, um,

655
00:38:59,160 --> 00:39:04,840
there's nearly not motivation to like question that because this representation is working

656
00:39:04,840 --> 00:39:06,440
for me and I'm getting benefits out of it.

657
00:39:06,520 --> 00:39:12,170
So you'd almost predict that there'd be these kind of clines of sort of beliefs look weird

658
00:39:12,170 --> 00:39:17,850
to the degree that you are not in the kind of climb of benefits from that group

659
00:39:18,010 --> 00:39:23,450
precisely because it's when you get benefits from the group, there's sort of uh a benefit

660
00:39:23,450 --> 00:39:28,250
for everybody to sort of go along with what is inconsistency or what is silly.

661
00:39:28,410 --> 00:39:30,570
There's just no reason to sort of call it out.

662
00:39:31,050 --> 00:39:35,450
Well, not to call it out, but there's a difference between privately believing something

663
00:39:35,450 --> 00:39:36,730
and calling it out, right?

664
00:39:36,890 --> 00:39:42,820
And I actually think I think the internalization of uh social systems

665
00:39:42,820 --> 00:39:43,860
has been overstated.

666
00:39:44,020 --> 00:39:46,980
I think there's lots of evidence people kind of know that things are silly.

667
00:39:47,140 --> 00:39:47,380
Yeah.

668
00:39:47,540 --> 00:39:51,140
I there's lots of things I think are silly, but I'm not necessarily gonna stand up and say

669
00:39:51,140 --> 00:39:55,060
it because I you know, I I care about people's social reaction and I don't care, but I know

670
00:39:55,060 --> 00:39:57,140
the people I care about care and you know, all of that.

671
00:39:57,300 --> 00:40:03,090
So actually I I think you know that there are we woke the

672
00:40:03,250 --> 00:40:05,970
certain kinds of cultural things are incredibly sticky.

673
00:40:06,050 --> 00:40:08,370
Uh and that's very interesting.

674
00:40:08,610 --> 00:40:11,250
But there are also plenty of historical cases where they're not.

675
00:40:11,410 --> 00:40:14,610
You know, like Chinese footbinding, you know, dies out within a few decades.

676
00:40:14,770 --> 00:40:15,970
Everyone says, This is really silly.

677
00:40:16,050 --> 00:40:16,850
Why are we doing this?

678
00:40:16,930 --> 00:40:18,290
Yeah, I thought you wanted to do this.

679
00:40:18,690 --> 00:40:23,890
And and then it just so there's so I actually think people are

680
00:40:23,890 --> 00:40:24,770
tracking.

681
00:40:26,040 --> 00:40:31,080
I I d I think that we overstated the extent to which people have sort of internalized the

682
00:40:31,080 --> 00:40:31,880
social order.

683
00:40:32,120 --> 00:40:35,560
There's a real difference in saying, you know, I'm not gonna call that out.

684
00:40:35,640 --> 00:40:41,160
I'm gonna put my head above the parapet because I'm not

685
00:40:41,160 --> 00:40:42,360
dying from this.

686
00:40:47,330 --> 00:40:52,770
and other people look like they might be committed to it, then hey, you know, let's not

687
00:40:52,770 --> 00:40:53,410
rock the boat.

688
00:40:53,490 --> 00:40:55,890
I think people are risk averse and ambiguity averse.

689
00:40:55,970 --> 00:41:00,210
And if I start saying, well, the way we do things is just weird and bizarre and I'm not

690
00:41:00,210 --> 00:41:03,010
going to do it anymore, who knows what's going to happen, right?

691
00:41:03,090 --> 00:41:05,650
That's a risky scenario.

692
00:41:05,970 --> 00:41:11,570
Whereas the status quo might be weird, but it's a weirdness we all sort of find moderately

693
00:41:11,570 --> 00:41:12,370
predictable.

694
00:41:12,620 --> 00:41:12,860
Yeah.

695
00:41:13,100 --> 00:41:15,420
You know, it's it's stabilized somehow in interaction.

696
00:41:15,500 --> 00:41:21,180
So I think that the status quo has a kind of in fact I in in a in a in a way,

697
00:41:21,340 --> 00:41:26,540
you know, w we could debate about what culture is, but I would say that you know one

698
00:41:26,540 --> 00:41:31,980
definition of culture is the weird stuff that's got stabilized by its you know by its

699
00:41:31,980 --> 00:41:32,540
stability.

700
00:41:35,500 --> 00:41:40,770
The weird stuff we know, the weird stuff that is somehow kind of uh uh uh

701
00:41:41,330 --> 00:41:47,010
has congealed to the extent that uh it makes everyday

702
00:41:47,010 --> 00:41:50,050
life somewhat you know sufficiently predictable.

703
00:41:50,450 --> 00:41:55,250
May not be great, may not really correspond to what any of us would ideally want.

704
00:41:55,570 --> 00:41:59,090
But hey, you know, you think of the cost of trying to do something else, what who knows

705
00:41:59,090 --> 00:42:03,490
what would happen if I said, okay, I refuse to work in this way, I refuse to go along with

706
00:42:03,490 --> 00:42:05,330
these norms, I'm gonna do some other thing now.

707
00:42:05,410 --> 00:42:07,010
I have no idea how everyone would react.

708
00:42:07,250 --> 00:42:12,680
So there's a sense in which we we shouldn't

709
00:42:13,160 --> 00:42:18,360
I think we shouldn't we shouldn't assume that A every member of group X, you know, whatever

710
00:42:18,360 --> 00:42:23,320
group X means knows what the culture is and agrees completely on the values.

711
00:42:23,480 --> 00:42:25,640
And B everyone privately believes it's a good idea.

712
00:42:25,720 --> 00:42:28,360
I don't think I don't think either of those things is generally true.

713
00:42:30,090 --> 00:42:34,730
Yeah, that's a very it's a very grown up way to sort of think about culture and it's a very

714
00:42:34,730 --> 00:42:38,890
naive way to think about culture the other way, which is just sort of what you just said,

715
00:42:38,970 --> 00:42:44,810
you know, which I think is honestly probably a very um um natural way

716
00:42:44,810 --> 00:42:48,890
to think uh for exactly these reasons, is like the evolved psychology is sort of

717
00:42:48,890 --> 00:42:50,810
calculating am I gonna rock the boat?

718
00:42:50,890 --> 00:42:55,210
And to the extent I don't, you know, it's sort of a bunch of white lies because it's not

719
00:42:55,210 --> 00:42:58,570
hurting anybody, but it might be in an in the aggregate.

720
00:42:58,970 --> 00:42:59,290
Right.

721
00:42:59,370 --> 00:42:59,690
Yeah.

722
00:42:59,850 --> 00:43:00,010
Yeah.

723
00:43:00,180 --> 00:43:00,340
Yeah.

724
00:43:00,420 --> 00:43:05,380
I mean I for me, I think what this is reminding me of, uh it's a word I've been thinking

725
00:43:05,380 --> 00:43:05,780
about a lot.

726
00:43:05,860 --> 00:43:08,660
I feel I feel like it's an extremely underappreciated word.

727
00:43:08,740 --> 00:43:10,420
Uh Stephen Pinker wrote a book on it.

728
00:43:10,500 --> 00:43:11,620
It's called coordination.

729
00:43:11,780 --> 00:43:14,020
I think we're what we're talking about is coordination.

730
00:43:14,100 --> 00:43:18,740
Um and it is often preferable to coordinate on a suboptimal equilibrium than to not

731
00:43:18,740 --> 00:43:19,620
coordinate at all.

732
00:43:19,780 --> 00:43:20,100
Right.

733
00:43:20,180 --> 00:43:24,490
And so, you know, uh Thomas Schelling famously uh made this point where he said, you know,

734
00:43:24,570 --> 00:43:28,010
if two people are trying to meet up in New York and they have no way of communicating, they

735
00:43:28,010 --> 00:43:31,290
don't have cell phones, and they just need to meet at the same time and place, where are

736
00:43:31,290 --> 00:43:32,090
they going to meet up?

737
00:43:32,250 --> 00:43:36,010
Uh and he uh brought you know people into the lab and asked them this question, and the

738
00:43:36,010 --> 00:43:39,530
most common answer was Grand Central Station at noon, right?

739
00:43:39,770 --> 00:43:43,900
And it's not because Grand Central Station is the best place to meet in New York City.

740
00:43:43,980 --> 00:43:46,700
That's that's the most exciting place that they're gonna have the best time.

741
00:43:46,860 --> 00:43:51,100
And it's not that noon is the best time for people to meet, it's just that those two, you

742
00:43:51,100 --> 00:43:53,820
know, that time and that place is just the most salient to people.

743
00:43:53,980 --> 00:43:58,060
It's just a salient landmark, and and you can count on it being salient to the other

744
00:43:58,060 --> 00:44:01,340
person, and you can count on the other person knowing that it's going to be salient to you,

745
00:44:01,420 --> 00:44:06,460
and so on and so on down the the chain of of recursion, and that's why it's just a focal

746
00:44:06,460 --> 00:44:06,700
point.

747
00:44:06,910 --> 00:44:10,910
And we have all these our culture is made of these kinds of focal points.

748
00:44:11,070 --> 00:44:12,750
And many of them are just not ideal.

749
00:44:12,830 --> 00:44:15,950
It's just it just happens to be the case that these things are sailing and they work and

750
00:44:15,950 --> 00:44:20,030
getting us on the same page, uh, but they're not necessarily the best page, right?

751
00:44:20,510 --> 00:44:24,990
And and it's because coordinating on the best page is actually extremely hard, because

752
00:44:24,990 --> 00:44:27,070
coordinating at all is extremely hard.

753
00:44:27,200 --> 00:44:30,880
And so we're often lucky to coordinate on any page at all than we are to coordinate on on

754
00:44:30,880 --> 00:44:31,600
the best page.

755
00:44:31,840 --> 00:44:32,080
Yeah.

756
00:44:32,400 --> 00:44:36,240
And um so and sociology is good as a discipline about understanding this.

757
00:44:36,400 --> 00:44:41,600
Like there's lots of sociological theory where particularly the sort of micro

758
00:44:41,840 --> 00:44:46,640
expectations of everyday life, you know, how it is you go into an office, how it is you

759
00:44:47,120 --> 00:44:49,370
shop in a supermarket, whatever.

760
00:44:50,010 --> 00:44:54,250
I don't think anyone wants to say this is because it's, you know, economically rational to

761
00:44:54,250 --> 00:44:55,290
do this or it's optimal.

762
00:44:55,370 --> 00:44:58,970
It's just because life's full of uncertainty and you've got to know how to carry on.

763
00:44:59,130 --> 00:44:59,370
Right.

764
00:44:59,450 --> 00:45:02,010
And so i when in doubt, turn up at 9 a.m.

765
00:45:02,170 --> 00:45:02,650
and wear a tie.

766
00:45:02,730 --> 00:45:04,730
You know, I mean it's you know, because you otherwise you don't know.

767
00:45:04,890 --> 00:45:06,090
You don't know what's gonna happen.

768
00:45:06,250 --> 00:45:09,130
There might be a completely different way of doing this business.

769
00:45:09,370 --> 00:45:14,560
But I don't know what it is, and I didn't you know, but it's Grand Central doing f certain

770
00:45:14,560 --> 00:45:17,600
things, our Grand Central Station at midday.

771
00:45:17,760 --> 00:45:21,200
Yeah, I know that you know you can probably predict that I'll do it, I'll predict that

772
00:45:21,200 --> 00:45:21,840
you'll do it.

773
00:45:22,000 --> 00:45:25,600
We don't want to cause each other too much prediction error.

774
00:45:25,760 --> 00:45:31,360
And so that that's I I think a lot of the the stability of

775
00:45:31,600 --> 00:45:37,360
um of things that we observe is not

776
00:45:37,360 --> 00:45:43,210
necessarily that people have kind of are deeply internalized, you know, have

777
00:45:43,210 --> 00:45:46,650
some sort of adaptation to kind of internalize the norms of the environment and then just

778
00:45:46,650 --> 00:45:47,610
do them unquestionably.

779
00:45:47,690 --> 00:45:50,410
It's just it's kind of hard to see what the alternative is.

780
00:45:50,570 --> 00:45:52,810
That was there, that was mutually salient.

781
00:45:53,050 --> 00:45:54,490
It's not costing me so much.

782
00:45:54,650 --> 00:46:00,570
You can bet your life that, you know, if Grand Central Station was very dangerous for

783
00:46:00,570 --> 00:46:05,040
some reason or in you know enormously expensive to get to, I would do something else, or

784
00:46:05,040 --> 00:46:07,600
I'd just I'd give up on coordinating with you that day.

785
00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:12,160
So so you know, the strategic actor is still there, weighing their costs and benefits.

786
00:46:12,400 --> 00:46:18,240
But just a lot of the time, as you say, the the the cost is fairly small

787
00:46:19,040 --> 00:46:24,640
or uh and and the benefit well, the benefit structure is unknown, but it at least sort of

788
00:46:24,640 --> 00:46:26,800
being able to predictably proceed in some way.

789
00:46:26,960 --> 00:46:31,360
You know, people don't want to be alone, they don't want to be outcasts, they don't want to

790
00:46:31,360 --> 00:46:32,800
lack social support.

791
00:46:33,430 --> 00:46:36,950
So if you don't really know, you know, and we don't know what each other's thinking, right?

792
00:46:37,030 --> 00:46:38,950
We you know we have some idea, but we don't really know.

793
00:46:39,030 --> 00:46:41,270
I don't know what you might do tomorrow, where you might go.

794
00:46:41,350 --> 00:46:47,110
But so if I can just sort of pick up on simple salient coordination points like that,

795
00:46:47,350 --> 00:46:51,510
I'm gonna do it, you know, absent fairly strong incentives to do something else.

796
00:46:51,830 --> 00:46:51,990
Yeah.

797
00:46:52,150 --> 00:46:57,840
And then characterization of what people are experiencing on the ground, and maybe this is

798
00:46:57,840 --> 00:47:03,520
a transition to some of the work, is my understanding, uh, Daniel,

799
00:47:03,760 --> 00:47:09,440
is that your work is arguing look, even taking very

800
00:47:09,440 --> 00:47:15,280
basic assumptions about evolutionary approaches, we actually can maybe do a better job

801
00:47:15,280 --> 00:47:17,760
of sort of doing a few interventions.

802
00:47:17,920 --> 00:47:23,750
Like, for example, um, if if adopting the perspective you just had, I'm just sort of,

803
00:47:23,830 --> 00:47:28,870
you know, at we're, you know, showing up at nine with a tie, doing my best, getting

804
00:47:28,870 --> 00:47:31,190
groceries, feeding my kid, getting them to bed.

805
00:47:31,350 --> 00:47:36,310
And I'm like, you know, there is income inequality and there's poor people, and I don't

806
00:47:36,310 --> 00:47:37,750
quite understand why that works.

807
00:47:37,910 --> 00:47:43,830
And I can imagine either like leaving things the way they are, or punishing poor people, or

808
00:47:43,830 --> 00:47:45,430
giving poor people money.

809
00:47:45,640 --> 00:47:47,160
And those are three different options.

810
00:47:47,240 --> 00:47:49,960
And I have a no idea which one would be better.

811
00:47:50,200 --> 00:47:52,760
And that makes sense that I wouldn't know that.

812
00:47:52,920 --> 00:47:56,840
And it would just be like, you know, and and I would be sort of worried because I'm like, I

813
00:47:56,840 --> 00:47:57,080
don't know.

814
00:47:57,160 --> 00:47:59,400
I don't want to disrupt the stability of my thing.

815
00:47:59,640 --> 00:48:05,000
But but what I understand your and I think all of us, what we what we try to do

816
00:48:05,400 --> 00:48:11,170
is then step back and look at the dynamics that's unusual for a normal person because we

817
00:48:11,170 --> 00:48:15,330
have science and because we have data and we have theory, and then say something of like,

818
00:48:15,490 --> 00:48:21,410
look, of all those three options, even though it might run counter to somebody in

819
00:48:21,570 --> 00:48:25,810
this scenario, my thing of like it doesn't seem fair to give somebody like free groceries

820
00:48:25,890 --> 00:48:30,500
because I have to work for them, But maybe I wouldn't care if it turned out that that

821
00:48:30,500 --> 00:48:32,740
actually creates a better environment for all of us.

822
00:48:32,820 --> 00:48:34,500
And so including your kid, yeah.

823
00:48:34,660 --> 00:48:35,620
Yeah, including my kid.

824
00:48:35,700 --> 00:48:36,340
So right, yeah.

825
00:48:36,420 --> 00:48:38,340
Can you kind of so is that fair?

826
00:48:38,420 --> 00:48:39,460
And is that yeah?

827
00:48:39,540 --> 00:48:40,900
No, I think that is fair.

828
00:48:40,980 --> 00:48:42,420
Uh that is absolutely fair.

829
00:48:42,580 --> 00:48:47,540
And I mean, this is partly about sort of externalities and emergent effects, right?

830
00:48:47,620 --> 00:48:52,010
So, well, if everyone knew that they had groceries, they wouldn't have to take certain

831
00:48:52,010 --> 00:48:57,210
kinds of risks and then chunk that through, you know, multiply that by tens of millions of

832
00:48:57,210 --> 00:49:00,410
people, and you think, oh, well, actually, you know, down the line, what's going to be the

833
00:49:00,410 --> 00:49:01,290
consequence of that?

834
00:49:01,530 --> 00:49:04,170
So I absolutely I do think that.

835
00:49:04,490 --> 00:49:10,490
Um I I'd like to distinguish what I do from sort of nudging, which is

836
00:49:10,490 --> 00:49:10,810
popular.

837
00:49:12,330 --> 00:49:15,850
I mean, even though I'm, you know, I've I've contributed to the search myself, actually,

838
00:49:15,930 --> 00:49:20,320
but the there's a certain kind of oh well, the mine's kind of weird.

839
00:49:20,400 --> 00:49:22,560
It's you know, the its adaptations work in particular ways.

840
00:49:22,640 --> 00:49:26,320
So if you just get make make people, you know, sign their tax return at the top instead of

841
00:49:26,320 --> 00:49:28,640
the bottom, you know, it's gonna save billions of dollars and so on.

842
00:49:28,720 --> 00:49:29,840
And I yeah.

843
00:49:34,720 --> 00:49:35,680
Right approach.

844
00:49:36,000 --> 00:49:36,240
Yeah.

845
00:49:36,320 --> 00:49:40,470
It's uh a a friend of mine, and I think it's just to interrupt, it's they describe it as

846
00:49:40,470 --> 00:49:41,110
cheat codes.

847
00:49:41,270 --> 00:49:44,150
There used to be this thing when you play video games, you know, if you press up, down,

848
00:49:44,230 --> 00:49:48,150
left, right, A B, A, B in the right pattern, you can have like infinite lives and you can

849
00:49:48,150 --> 00:49:48,950
win a video game.

850
00:49:49,110 --> 00:49:49,270
Yeah.

851
00:49:49,590 --> 00:49:53,910
It's like the sort of like if you just sort of if you just put your body in the right way,

852
00:49:54,070 --> 00:49:55,110
you'll never feel pain again.

853
00:49:55,190 --> 00:49:59,190
You know, it's like a cheat code absurd, and and that that's sort of like power pose.

854
00:49:59,270 --> 00:50:00,150
That's that's the cheat code.

855
00:50:00,230 --> 00:50:03,350
Yeah, just do the power pose and then uh I'll win it live.

856
00:50:03,590 --> 00:50:03,990
Yeah.

857
00:50:04,230 --> 00:50:07,740
Well, yeah, but so I mean, it's but what is it that's different about that?

858
00:50:07,900 --> 00:50:10,620
I mean on the face of it, that's not very different from what you said, David.

859
00:50:10,700 --> 00:50:16,460
So I I suppose it's um if there's a difference,

860
00:50:17,100 --> 00:50:22,940
maybe it's the following that you that so i people's decision making,

861
00:50:23,020 --> 00:50:26,540
you have to understand both the structure of the agent, they've got certain motivations,

862
00:50:26,620 --> 00:50:32,330
they've got certain uh priorities, and the structure of their

863
00:50:32,330 --> 00:50:32,970
ecology.

864
00:50:33,210 --> 00:50:33,530
Right.

865
00:50:33,690 --> 00:50:37,290
And if you think, well, if their ecology is structured in a certain way, no wonder they're

866
00:50:37,290 --> 00:50:37,770
doing X.

867
00:50:38,250 --> 00:50:40,170
I think that's where our perspective is on putting it.

868
00:50:40,330 --> 00:50:40,970
No wonder they're doing X.

869
00:50:41,050 --> 00:50:42,810
No wonder they're very likely to do X.

870
00:50:42,890 --> 00:50:43,210
Yeah.

871
00:50:43,370 --> 00:50:43,610
Right.

872
00:50:43,690 --> 00:50:45,530
If they can't get enough to eat.

873
00:50:45,690 --> 00:50:45,930
Yeah.

874
00:50:46,170 --> 00:50:49,370
Or they don't know that they don't know that they're going to predict to be able to get

875
00:50:49,370 --> 00:50:49,850
enough to eat.

876
00:50:50,010 --> 00:50:50,570
Think about that.

877
00:50:50,730 --> 00:50:51,530
What's that going to do?

878
00:50:51,690 --> 00:50:56,890
And so so in in in a way I I to the extent that I talk about interventions, I don't really

879
00:50:56,890 --> 00:51:02,480
mean the the um you know the uh those

880
00:51:02,480 --> 00:51:04,800
classical nudge type things.

881
00:51:04,880 --> 00:51:08,480
I mean sure, you know, make your pension scheme opt-in rather than opt out, you know, what

882
00:51:08,800 --> 00:51:12,480
whatever, uh sorry, opt out rather than opt-in, then you're probably going to get more, you

883
00:51:12,480 --> 00:51:17,360
know, sure, I don't deny that that's true, but I think I think I think in a way we can go a

884
00:51:17,360 --> 00:51:21,200
bit further than that, which is to say this perspective gives you a principled

885
00:51:21,200 --> 00:51:26,240
understanding of why certain manipulations of the ecology or certain structurings of the

886
00:51:26,240 --> 00:51:31,870
ecology might lead probably to certain outcomes.

887
00:51:32,750 --> 00:51:38,750
I mean, just to sort of to to temper our enthusiasm

888
00:51:38,750 --> 00:51:41,070
for how great we are.

889
00:51:41,950 --> 00:51:43,630
It's not like evolutionary science.

890
00:51:44,190 --> 00:51:45,470
It doesn't work in the following way.

891
00:51:45,790 --> 00:51:48,190
We know how the mind works perfectly.

892
00:51:48,350 --> 00:51:52,190
And so we chunk forward and go, what's going to happen when these minds interact in

893
00:51:52,190 --> 00:51:52,590
ecology?

894
00:51:52,750 --> 00:51:55,870
In fact, it's much more iterative thing, or we kind of know a certain amount of what minds

895
00:51:55,870 --> 00:51:59,400
happen in ecology, and that makes us think, oh, let's peer down into the individual mind

896
00:51:59,400 --> 00:52:01,320
and try and figure out what the hell's going on.

897
00:52:01,480 --> 00:52:05,800
So it's you you almost described it as if you know we solve the problem of the individual

898
00:52:05,800 --> 00:52:07,960
mind and then we can go out into society.

899
00:52:08,120 --> 00:52:12,680
But in fact, we don't there's so much we don't know about the individual mind yet that we

900
00:52:13,080 --> 00:52:17,320
have it has to proceed more chaotically than that, in which we you know we know some things

901
00:52:17,320 --> 00:52:20,440
at the aggregate and then we go, I wonder how that works at the individual level, and that

902
00:52:20,920 --> 00:52:22,760
can strange our theorizing, you know.

903
00:52:22,840 --> 00:52:25,800
So we have to be humble about what we're doing, we haven't got it all figured out, you

904
00:52:25,800 --> 00:52:25,880
know.

905
00:52:26,120 --> 00:52:26,520
Yeah, for sure.

906
00:52:27,430 --> 00:52:32,390
But uh I think at the same time though, it a little bit of understanding of the mind uh

907
00:52:32,470 --> 00:52:33,670
does go a long way.

908
00:52:33,750 --> 00:52:36,470
Uh and it's certainly better than than no understanding.

909
00:52:36,630 --> 00:52:41,190
And so for example, I remember seeing one of your talks um uh it was about some inter

910
00:52:41,430 --> 00:52:45,910
interventions that were tried to reduce levels of teen pregnancy.

911
00:52:46,070 --> 00:52:46,310
Yes.

912
00:52:46,470 --> 00:52:51,140
And the way of thinking was that if we just educate these people about contraception, you

913
00:52:51,140 --> 00:52:54,980
know, give them, you know, give them condoms, you know, tell them about all the ways that

914
00:52:54,980 --> 00:53:00,580
they can uh delay child rearing, like, you know, responsible adults like us, then uh we'll

915
00:53:00,580 --> 00:53:02,020
see teen pregnancy rates decline.

916
00:53:02,260 --> 00:53:03,940
It's just a big misunderstanding on their part.

917
00:53:04,100 --> 00:53:07,300
They're not understanding uh, you know, the the right things to do, which is just an

918
00:53:07,300 --> 00:53:08,900
education between sex and reproduction or whatever.

919
00:53:08,980 --> 00:53:09,380
Yeah, exactly.

920
00:53:09,460 --> 00:53:09,540
Yeah.

921
00:53:09,860 --> 00:53:10,900
It's just an education problem.

922
00:53:11,060 --> 00:53:15,140
And so they tried these programs where they're they were educating uh the these people uh

923
00:53:15,220 --> 00:53:16,420
and you know, no results.

924
00:53:16,580 --> 00:53:17,350
It didn't work.

925
00:53:17,590 --> 00:53:17,910
Right.

926
00:53:18,630 --> 00:53:24,070
And in that case, I think we have a pretty poor understanding of the mind, that these

927
00:53:24,070 --> 00:53:25,990
people are just misinformed or uneducated.

928
00:53:26,070 --> 00:53:30,150
I think you know that is uh one assumption about how a mind could be structured.

929
00:53:30,230 --> 00:53:32,390
It's a bad one, uh, and it turns out to be wrong.

930
00:53:32,550 --> 00:53:36,950
But even, you know, being a little bit better than that assumption can take you a long way.

931
00:53:37,030 --> 00:53:41,080
Even just trusting the fact that these people are making the best strategic decisions for

932
00:53:41,080 --> 00:53:46,280
themselves given their environment gets you uh much further and in a in a much smarter

933
00:53:46,280 --> 00:53:49,000
direction than let's just teach them about contraception.

934
00:53:49,560 --> 00:53:50,200
No, absolutely.

935
00:53:50,280 --> 00:53:51,480
And that is a good example.

936
00:53:51,720 --> 00:53:55,560
And also it's it's ironic as many people have pointed out that teen pregnancy rates have

937
00:53:55,560 --> 00:53:56,600
been falling for decades, actually.

938
00:53:56,680 --> 00:53:59,320
And it is a bit like Pinker talks about the decline of violence, right?

939
00:53:59,400 --> 00:54:05,170
This is a major, a major fact about human behaviour over the last hundred years is that

940
00:54:05,170 --> 00:54:08,610
people are having their first baby later and later and later, and that's a part of the

941
00:54:08,610 --> 00:54:10,930
decline in global fertility.

942
00:54:11,730 --> 00:54:16,450
So it's sort of funny that in the midst of this, this incredibly lawlike thing that as

943
00:54:16,450 --> 00:54:21,010
living standards become high, and particularly as women's opportunities become better, you

944
00:54:21,010 --> 00:54:22,690
know, they shift their reproduction later.

945
00:54:22,930 --> 00:54:26,210
And also as life expectancy increases, that's part of the the picture.

946
00:54:26,370 --> 00:54:31,420
And yet we say, oh but these people, these particular people, which is a basically working

947
00:54:31,500 --> 00:54:34,700
class people in an increasingly middle class society, they must just be wrong.

948
00:54:34,940 --> 00:54:36,220
They must have no idea what's going on.

949
00:54:36,460 --> 00:54:41,100
It's like humanity in general is pretty smart and tailors their behavior to ecology.

950
00:54:41,180 --> 00:54:45,260
So it's funny to spit out to single out a particular subgroup and except for those people,

951
00:54:45,340 --> 00:54:48,860
you know, who've just got no idea and we need to get give them some lessons.

952
00:54:49,020 --> 00:54:52,460
So yeah, I I think that is a nice example.

953
00:54:52,780 --> 00:54:57,950
Also, there's a strange bedfellow here, really, which is lots of social scientists, more

954
00:54:57,950 --> 00:55:02,670
people of a more qualitative interpretation of approach, had said, Look, you know, you

955
00:55:02,670 --> 00:55:06,190
should just talk to young people who have their babies young in deprived communities.

956
00:55:06,270 --> 00:55:09,630
And they'll say things like, you know, why wait?

957
00:55:09,710 --> 00:55:13,470
I don't see any point in waiting, you know, that this really is things aren't going to be

958
00:55:13,470 --> 00:55:17,630
better in ten years, or my mum's around to look after her now, but she might not be around

959
00:55:17,630 --> 00:55:18,510
in a while, you know.

960
00:55:18,990 --> 00:55:21,230
Quite realistic and sensible things, right?

961
00:55:21,310 --> 00:55:26,080
And so i i in my teenage pregnancy work, there was a strange sort of bedfellow thing that

962
00:55:26,080 --> 00:55:30,560
really critical social scientists who, you know, were all about giving voice to people from

963
00:55:30,560 --> 00:55:35,040
marginalized communities and very qualitative, and me with my kind of evolutionary models,

964
00:55:35,120 --> 00:55:38,160
who on the face of it you might think we might have nothing in common actually are saying

965
00:55:38,160 --> 00:55:39,120
much the same thing.

966
00:55:39,280 --> 00:55:39,680
Yeah.

967
00:55:39,920 --> 00:55:43,680
Which is these people are, you know, they've got sensible motivational structures, they're

968
00:55:43,680 --> 00:55:45,760
making sense of the ecology they find themselves in.

969
00:55:45,920 --> 00:55:49,760
It's sort of daft to look at them from a different ecology and say, Oh, those people are

970
00:55:49,760 --> 00:55:53,670
just getting it wrong without making any attempt to understand the real structure of

971
00:55:53,670 --> 00:55:54,790
decision making that's going on.

972
00:55:55,030 --> 00:56:00,470
Well, we all all of which is to say that I don't think there's any need

973
00:56:00,790 --> 00:56:06,470
for evolutionary psychology to have a big fight with social scientists who believe in the

974
00:56:06,470 --> 00:56:07,270
importance of context.

975
00:56:07,350 --> 00:56:09,270
I actually think it's very, very compatible.

976
00:56:09,510 --> 00:56:09,750
Yeah.

977
00:56:10,790 --> 00:56:11,910
You have to be careful.

978
00:56:11,990 --> 00:56:13,110
It's about levels of explanation.

979
00:56:13,190 --> 00:56:16,790
You know, evolutionary psychologists are really interested in mechanisms, types of

980
00:56:16,790 --> 00:56:21,560
psychological and cognitive mechanism, and social scientists are interested in how does

981
00:56:21,560 --> 00:56:25,240
that play out in a particular context, how does the environment shape you know the outputs

982
00:56:25,240 --> 00:56:25,800
of that.

983
00:56:25,960 --> 00:56:31,000
But I don't think we need to have a you know r reports of a sort of

984
00:56:31,000 --> 00:56:35,880
irreconcilable difference of perspective, I think, are much exaggerated actually.

985
00:56:36,280 --> 00:56:36,680
Yeah.

986
00:56:36,920 --> 00:56:37,240
Yeah.

987
00:56:37,400 --> 00:56:43,080
And I think, I mean, one one, you know, there there's the moralization part too.

988
00:56:43,160 --> 00:56:47,830
Like I think people, you know, it the coordination of sort of oh, let's all pick on the

989
00:56:47,830 --> 00:56:52,950
low-income early teen pregnancy people, you can see how that sort of gets moralized.

990
00:56:53,030 --> 00:56:59,030
It creates a market for people to sort of use that moral outrage to then

991
00:56:59,030 --> 00:57:00,310
profit from that.

992
00:57:00,790 --> 00:57:05,350
And I think one, what what you're saying, and what we're saying, is that taking an

993
00:57:05,350 --> 00:57:11,260
evolutionary perspective, if done well, in avoiding the moralization component, but just

994
00:57:11,260 --> 00:57:16,460
looking and saying, what are the sensible things that these actors are doing?

995
00:57:16,620 --> 00:57:22,620
Um, it sort of gives respect to what otherwise is sort of playing the

996
00:57:22,620 --> 00:57:27,260
moralization game, which is sort of not taking a far enough step back.

997
00:57:27,580 --> 00:57:33,180
Um, like I even think about this, you know, my son is now in kindergarten and the education

998
00:57:33,180 --> 00:57:37,910
system, and David has alluded to this, sort of, you can see how there were there's probably

999
00:57:37,910 --> 00:57:42,550
people who are sort of well intended, but sort of have this metaphor of if I'm the teacher,

1000
00:57:42,710 --> 00:57:48,310
I need to come in and teach the children how to do things.

1001
00:57:48,470 --> 00:57:51,670
And it's sort of a self-aggrandizing narrative.

1002
00:57:52,070 --> 00:57:58,020
And you can imagine how that sort of gets selected for institutionally, but it's different

1003
00:57:58,020 --> 00:58:02,020
than taking a step back and sort of saying, How do kids actually learn?

1004
00:58:02,180 --> 00:58:08,020
You know, and it might actually involve teachers not feeling like they're critical for

1005
00:58:08,020 --> 00:58:13,620
the child's education, or I if if it's not for me, you know, I'm gonna save this kid.

1006
00:58:13,780 --> 00:58:15,860
It's just more of like, what does the kid need?

1007
00:58:15,940 --> 00:58:17,060
And it might look very different.

1008
00:58:17,140 --> 00:58:18,660
It might be more hands off.

1009
00:58:18,740 --> 00:58:22,980
It might be letting kids fight, but none of that's moralized, right?

1010
00:58:23,140 --> 00:58:24,580
Um, one way or the other.

1011
00:58:24,970 --> 00:58:25,530
So I think that's a good thing.

1012
00:58:37,450 --> 00:58:42,890
Well, what I mean is I think but right, because we are um social

1013
00:58:43,210 --> 00:58:49,080
beings, when we see some people doing something, we've we have a strong prior that

1014
00:58:49,720 --> 00:58:54,520
that's because they've got some set of beliefs and desires that's quite idiosyncratic.

1015
00:58:54,680 --> 00:58:54,840
Right.

1016
00:58:55,000 --> 00:58:59,320
So oh, these teenage mums, they must just believe something weird about the world, or they

1017
00:58:59,320 --> 00:59:04,600
must have some really quite unfortunate set of desires that makes them selfish, or you

1018
00:59:04,600 --> 00:59:05,880
know, these things.

1019
00:59:07,240 --> 00:59:10,040
Yeah, or f you know, fat people are lazy.

1020
00:59:10,200 --> 00:59:10,360
Right.

1021
00:59:10,520 --> 00:59:11,480
Like it's another one.

1022
00:59:11,640 --> 00:59:17,150
Oh, they've got this different body type or body state.

1023
00:59:17,470 --> 00:59:23,310
Oh, it must be that they have some belief or desire or you know, kind of sort of theory of

1024
00:59:23,310 --> 00:59:24,910
mind level propensity.

1025
00:59:25,070 --> 00:59:25,310
Yeah.

1026
00:59:25,550 --> 00:59:31,070
And so for and then you just that kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

1027
00:59:31,230 --> 00:59:35,070
So rather than saying how do minds in general work, like how do minds in general just you

1028
00:59:35,070 --> 00:59:40,960
know regulate energy intake and energy output, or indeed fertility decisions, any of these

1029
00:59:40,960 --> 00:59:46,640
things, you kind of go, Well, this group of people, they must have some particular set of

1030
00:59:47,200 --> 00:59:49,520
proclivities or beliefs or whatever.

1031
00:59:49,840 --> 00:59:53,760
And then, I mean, first of all, I don't think that gets you terribly far.

1032
00:59:53,840 --> 00:59:57,760
I think I think, I mean, other than as you say, you sort of stigmatize that group of

1033
00:59:57,760 --> 01:00:00,800
people, or they've just got the wrong, they're too impulsive or something.

1034
01:00:00,990 --> 01:00:05,710
But then also you go down this sort of really non-explanatory rabbit hole where they're

1035
01:00:05,710 --> 01:00:09,230
presumed to be impulsive because that's their behavior, and their behavior is you know you

1036
01:00:09,310 --> 01:00:13,550
explain because they're impulsive, and then you dream up, you know, we'll have a program at

1037
01:00:13,550 --> 01:00:17,150
school in which you'll wait for two marshmallows and somehow you know, years later you're

1038
01:00:17,150 --> 01:00:20,110
gonna it's gonna be you're gonna be revolutionarily different.

1039
01:00:20,670 --> 01:00:24,590
None of which I think really probably works, you know.

1040
01:00:24,750 --> 01:00:30,420
So um so what what

1041
01:00:30,740 --> 01:00:36,420
what we need to be doing is looking at people as organisms with capacities.

1042
01:00:36,500 --> 01:00:40,820
You know, when you look at birds migrating to Africa and stuff, you know, you you all

1043
01:00:41,140 --> 01:00:41,700
you're in awe.

1044
01:00:43,380 --> 01:00:43,940
They didn't know where to go.

1045
01:00:44,420 --> 01:00:45,060
They didn't know where to go.

1046
01:00:45,300 --> 01:00:45,700
They don't know where to go.

1047
01:00:47,060 --> 01:00:47,780
What are they doing?

1048
01:00:47,860 --> 01:00:50,260
You know, they're going to somewhere We need to teach them where to go.

1049
01:00:50,660 --> 01:00:51,620
We need to teach them where to go.

1050
01:00:51,700 --> 01:00:57,030
You know, you don't so you look at them and you say that's kind of a marvel of evolution

1051
01:00:57,030 --> 01:01:00,150
plus sensory ecology, they're figuring out certain things.

1052
01:01:00,310 --> 01:01:04,390
And but you don't go, oh, you know, those people, I really need to persuade them that you

1053
01:01:04,390 --> 01:01:07,750
know they're I only need for those birds not to fly south of the winter.

1054
01:01:07,910 --> 01:01:11,190
So it is a slightly different perspective, you know.

1055
01:01:12,470 --> 01:01:17,910
It asks us to put aside a lot of our intuitive cognition about the reasons for people's

1056
01:01:17,910 --> 01:01:22,470
actions, you know, which is to do with beliefs and mental states that they hold, and say,

1057
01:01:22,630 --> 01:01:26,740
you know, hang on, just to think about sort of let's just think about them as organisms

1058
01:01:26,740 --> 01:01:28,340
trying to solve problems.

1059
01:01:28,900 --> 01:01:31,140
Uh so it's a different stance, in short.

1060
01:01:31,460 --> 01:01:31,700
Yeah.

1061
01:01:31,940 --> 01:01:34,980
I think that's really profound in a way that I mean, I'm not trying to be

1062
01:01:34,980 --> 01:01:38,980
self-congratulatory, but I mean, until you get something like a theory of evolution or

1063
01:01:38,980 --> 01:01:44,580
cognitive science or evolutionary psychology, I think it's really hard as people, if we are

1064
01:01:44,580 --> 01:01:47,700
just trying to like design a society, what's the alternative?

1065
01:01:47,860 --> 01:01:53,230
I mean, the idea that you sort of say, well, look, I'm gonna be treat them as organisms and

1066
01:01:53,230 --> 01:01:58,350
start off not by immediately just latching onto this very natural thing of essentializing

1067
01:01:58,350 --> 01:02:01,710
and using my folk psychology, but being more scientific about it.

1068
01:02:01,870 --> 01:02:04,350
I mean, I think that's like a really profound shift.

1069
01:02:04,510 --> 01:02:09,150
And I don't think it's one, as you say, that's sort of it's certainly not happening.

1070
01:02:09,390 --> 01:02:15,390
Uh uh, I mean, maybe in small examples or small cases it is, but I think that's

1071
01:02:15,390 --> 01:02:21,300
a real, I mean one could argue that's a real advance of s social science that when it

1072
01:02:21,300 --> 01:02:27,060
does happen, um, you know, it would it's a very different way of integrating

1073
01:02:27,060 --> 01:02:29,700
science into politics or social dynamics.

1074
01:02:30,180 --> 01:02:33,780
I think yes, I mean I think it's possible economists would say that that's what they've

1075
01:02:33,780 --> 01:02:34,980
been doing for a long time.

1076
01:02:35,300 --> 01:02:35,460
Sure.

1077
01:02:35,860 --> 01:02:41,690
Um I mean in the sense that they're you know that yeah they under and they under understand

1078
01:02:41,690 --> 01:02:45,530
individuals to be strategic agents who are operating under constraints and they also

1079
01:02:45,530 --> 01:02:51,530
understand the micro macro problems so yeah I'm actually you know I think I

1080
01:02:51,530 --> 01:02:57,530
think in a way philosophically a lot of economics has got there even though I

1081
01:02:57,530 --> 01:03:02,330
don't necessarily agree with all the detail but possibly just just their notion of the

1082
01:03:02,330 --> 01:03:08,240
agent is quite impoverished right or or or rather actually just very kind of a bit

1083
01:03:08,240 --> 01:03:09,200
content free.

1084
01:03:09,520 --> 01:03:09,920
Yeah.

1085
01:03:10,240 --> 01:03:14,320
Yeah, no, I I I think yeah, economics has has gotten part of the way there, and I think we

1086
01:03:14,320 --> 01:03:18,000
have a lot to learn from economists and and there should be more integration, I think,

1087
01:03:18,080 --> 01:03:20,720
between uh economic models and evolutionary psychology.

1088
01:03:20,800 --> 01:03:23,840
But yeah, I think if if there's one problem there is that their their model of the

1089
01:03:23,840 --> 01:03:28,960
strategic agent is either uh poorly specified, underspecified, or the details are wrong.

1090
01:03:29,040 --> 01:03:31,630
The the goals that are being pursued aren't quite right.

1091
01:03:31,790 --> 01:03:35,870
If you have a good, rich understanding of what the agent is actually pursuing and how they

1092
01:03:35,870 --> 01:03:39,870
might rationally pursue it, then you can you really got a stew cook in in terms of uh

1093
01:03:39,870 --> 01:03:41,310
explanatory power.

1094
01:03:41,550 --> 01:03:46,590
Um speaking of stew, I really want to get your uh take on obesity.

1095
01:03:46,990 --> 01:03:49,150
Uh this this this blew my mind.

1096
01:03:49,230 --> 01:03:50,430
I I read something of yours.

1097
01:03:50,510 --> 01:03:51,550
Uh you you were talking about this.

1098
01:03:51,630 --> 01:03:56,340
So, my go-to example of evolutionary mismatch, and I think it's pretty much every time I

1099
01:03:56,340 --> 01:03:59,700
hear an evolutionary psychologist talking about mismatch.

1100
01:04:00,260 --> 01:04:00,820
I know what you're doing.

1101
01:04:02,740 --> 01:04:06,180
So mismatch is this idea that the environment in which we evolved is very different from

1102
01:04:06,180 --> 01:04:08,260
the environment that we now uh inhabit.

1103
01:04:08,420 --> 01:04:13,940
Uh, and that can lead to uh various self-uh sabotaging behaviors in the modern environment

1104
01:04:14,100 --> 01:04:18,420
because we weren't prepared for this, you know, new world of of junk food and and so forth.

1105
01:04:18,500 --> 01:04:24,470
So the go-to example is that you know, uh high sugar, high-fat foods were really scarce in

1106
01:04:24,470 --> 01:04:25,830
ancestral environments.

1107
01:04:26,150 --> 01:04:29,510
And now we live in the modern world and they're everywhere and they're cheap and easy to

1108
01:04:29,670 --> 01:04:29,990
eat.

1109
01:04:30,070 --> 01:04:33,350
And we just gorge ourselves on these high fat, high sugar food.

1110
01:04:33,430 --> 01:04:35,590
And as a result, we have, you know, we have all these diseases.

1111
01:04:35,670 --> 01:04:38,550
We have diabetes and obesity and heart problems.

1112
01:04:38,710 --> 01:04:41,190
And this is all just an example of mismatch.

1113
01:04:41,430 --> 01:04:46,150
And as far as I'm aware, this is the most popular example that evolutionary psychologists

1114
01:04:46,150 --> 01:04:47,750
give of mismatch.

1115
01:04:48,470 --> 01:04:53,140
And you have come in and you have uh destroyed this example so now I have to think of a

1116
01:04:53,140 --> 01:04:58,900
different example so well yeah I I think it I think the example you know it's still

1117
01:04:58,900 --> 01:05:03,940
on its feet but it's a bit it's a bit different than the usual way it's presented right and

1118
01:05:03,940 --> 01:05:09,620
it's a bit more nuanced so okay people find sweet foods palatable actually lots of mammals

1119
01:05:09,620 --> 01:05:15,140
do bears do and you know sweet foods are palatable why it makes sense they higher in energy

1120
01:05:15,140 --> 01:05:19,830
content you know easy to metabolize all of that so people love honey yeah Yeah.

1121
01:05:19,910 --> 01:05:24,070
And actually, the idea that sweet foods were rare in the ancestral environment is not

1122
01:05:24,070 --> 01:05:24,310
supported.

1123
01:05:24,470 --> 01:05:26,230
Hunter-gatherers eat tons of honey.

1124
01:05:26,390 --> 01:05:28,070
They eat tons and tons of honey.

1125
01:05:28,310 --> 01:05:32,070
And so the particular version of the mismatch argument is

1126
01:05:34,230 --> 01:05:40,150
that we didn't evolve a stop signal because there was never enough to need to stop.

1127
01:05:40,320 --> 01:05:40,640
right?

1128
01:05:40,880 --> 01:05:42,080
And we just know that's wrong.

1129
01:05:42,400 --> 01:05:46,640
There's loads of animal physiology showing that of course animals have stop signals.

1130
01:05:46,800 --> 01:05:47,360
Of course they do.

1131
01:05:47,680 --> 01:05:49,440
It's daft to think that they wouldn't, right?

1132
01:05:49,600 --> 01:05:50,400
You know, yeah.

1133
01:05:51,440 --> 01:05:54,480
Carnivores find huge carcasses.

1134
01:05:54,640 --> 01:05:57,120
Well, they're gonna do you know, eat them until their stomachs explode.

1135
01:05:57,280 --> 01:05:58,640
Of course they're not going to, you know.

1136
01:06:00,080 --> 01:06:03,870
Small birds can can't fly if they if they're too full, right?

1137
01:06:03,950 --> 01:06:05,310
So of course we have stop signals.

1138
01:06:05,390 --> 01:06:07,150
It's a daft idea that we didn't.

1139
01:06:07,390 --> 01:06:13,310
Um we do pe people you know across the world do find sweet foods very palatable and that

1140
01:06:13,310 --> 01:06:13,950
is a thing.

1141
01:06:14,030 --> 01:06:15,870
You know, I'm not disputing nuts.

1142
01:06:16,030 --> 01:06:21,470
But the idea that there's kind of no regulation mechanism there, I think is you know is

1143
01:06:21,630 --> 01:06:22,190
simplistic.

1144
01:06:22,350 --> 01:06:26,270
Now there is something to the mismatch argument in the sense that there's a huge ride rise

1145
01:06:26,270 --> 01:06:29,470
in global obesity in the last few decades.

1146
01:06:30,720 --> 01:06:34,880
And it isn't, by the way, reliably linked to an increase in calorie consumption.

1147
01:06:34,960 --> 01:06:38,800
So it's really clear that average calorie consumption decline and people still get fatter.

1148
01:06:40,080 --> 01:06:45,440
But um yeah, that's well repeat that's a really fascinating counterintuitive.

1149
01:06:45,840 --> 01:06:51,840
Like in the UK in the last 40 years, um, the average BMI has got bigger.

1150
01:06:52,080 --> 01:06:56,080
There's no real evidence that the average person is eating more calories.

1151
01:06:56,730 --> 01:06:58,250
But now here's the but.

1152
01:06:58,970 --> 01:06:59,370
Yeah.

1153
01:06:59,610 --> 01:07:04,330
Those caloric measurements are made in the bomb calorimeter, so you burn the food.

1154
01:07:04,570 --> 01:07:09,370
So, you know, nuts and things like that turn out to have millions of calories on this.

1155
01:07:09,450 --> 01:07:15,130
But we actually know that if you ate an isocaloric dose, you know, dose of hazelnuts or

1156
01:07:15,130 --> 01:07:19,050
chocolate, you know, or chocolate bar, you would actually extract more calories from the

1157
01:07:19,050 --> 01:07:19,530
chocolate bar.

1158
01:07:19,770 --> 01:07:25,450
So, in other words, there's no increase in the number of calories people are eating,

1159
01:07:25,840 --> 01:07:31,440
the potential number of calories if you had a metabolism that could fully extract those.

1160
01:07:31,680 --> 01:07:36,480
What we do know is that foods become in as b uh as food processing becomes industrialized,

1161
01:07:37,440 --> 01:07:40,960
more of that calorie content becomes bioavailable.

1162
01:07:41,360 --> 01:07:46,080
So there's a change in the you know, the foods we have now, particularly the kind of so

1163
01:07:46,160 --> 01:07:48,880
called ultra processed foods, they're super soft.

1164
01:07:49,440 --> 01:07:53,370
Um, you know, they have various kind of palatability fixes.

1165
01:07:53,450 --> 01:07:56,810
They're technologies for getting people to consume more of them and that they do a good job

1166
01:07:56,810 --> 01:07:57,050
with that.

1167
01:07:57,130 --> 01:08:02,890
So although you don't you don't eat any more calories uh in

1168
01:08:02,890 --> 01:08:08,650
a day, you know, potential calories than your ancestors of a hundred years ago, but

1169
01:08:09,130 --> 01:08:12,490
what you're eating them in, the way it's been engineered is really different.

1170
01:08:12,650 --> 01:08:16,250
So that that is a sense in which the mismatch is true.

1171
01:08:18,420 --> 01:08:23,940
So, but our but the idea, you know, I think that I think people do have a sophisticated

1172
01:08:23,940 --> 01:08:27,060
psychology of satiety and food choice and so on.

1173
01:08:27,140 --> 01:08:32,420
And also, it's just not the case that everyone just eats sweet foods all the time.

1174
01:08:32,500 --> 01:08:33,220
I mean, clearly they don't.

1175
01:08:33,700 --> 01:08:35,620
Lots of people don't have much of a sweet tooth.

1176
01:08:35,700 --> 01:08:39,190
I mean, generally speaking, on average, people find sweet food.

1177
01:08:39,270 --> 01:08:42,310
But you know, you don't eat cookie bars all all day, I take it.

1178
01:08:42,790 --> 01:08:43,430
I usually could.

1179
01:08:43,510 --> 01:08:47,910
I could go to the supermarket and buy lots of uh cookies and just eat cookies all the time.

1180
01:08:48,230 --> 01:08:49,590
Well, just try it for one day.

1181
01:08:49,830 --> 01:08:50,950
Try it for one day.

1182
01:08:51,110 --> 01:08:54,630
Yeah, you'll be absolutely sick of it by three in the afternoon.

1183
01:08:54,790 --> 01:08:55,350
You'll hate it.

1184
01:08:55,430 --> 01:08:56,150
You know, you'll hate it.

1185
01:08:56,230 --> 01:08:57,510
And then you won't do it the next day, right?

1186
01:08:57,590 --> 01:09:01,830
So clearly you've got a mind in there that kind of knows that this doesn't make you feel

1187
01:09:01,830 --> 01:09:02,310
that good.

1188
01:09:02,470 --> 01:09:02,710
Yeah.

1189
01:09:02,870 --> 01:09:06,620
Um, so but our our point about obesity was more that um

1190
01:09:09,260 --> 01:09:15,260
the the the decision, if we can call it that the physiological decision to store fat is

1191
01:09:15,260 --> 01:09:16,860
not always a maladaptive one.

1192
01:09:18,060 --> 01:09:23,420
So there is there are adaptations whose function it is to increase your adipose

1193
01:09:23,740 --> 01:09:29,250
stores under certain kinds of conditions, like unpredictability of future access,

1194
01:09:29,410 --> 01:09:29,890
obviously.

1195
01:09:29,970 --> 01:09:32,450
We know this is true, it's true in lots of animals.

1196
01:09:32,690 --> 01:09:37,890
So if you have people who are living under conditions of you know, cues of

1197
01:09:37,890 --> 01:09:43,890
unpredictability of access, also that the foods that are cheap, which is

1198
01:09:43,890 --> 01:09:49,890
true under modernity, you know, uh the foods that are cheap and easy to get are these kind

1199
01:09:49,890 --> 01:09:53,180
of hyper palatable industrialized foods and so on.

1200
01:09:53,340 --> 01:09:59,100
You know, you've got a cocktail of things that uh that that that you know some of which are

1201
01:09:59,260 --> 01:10:03,020
evolutionarily novel that lead to some very high BMIs.

1202
01:10:03,100 --> 01:10:06,300
But it's not like everyone over consumes all of the time.

1203
01:10:06,540 --> 01:10:07,660
Clearly that's not true.

1204
01:10:07,820 --> 01:10:10,780
You know um so I don't know if that sort of answered the question.

1205
01:10:10,860 --> 01:10:14,700
I think you there's some mismatch in there, but the story needs to be much more nuanced.

1206
01:10:15,660 --> 01:10:17,790
Yeah No, it's it's it's fascinating stuff.

1207
01:10:17,950 --> 01:10:23,710
I I I continue to to think that obesity is is such an interesting unsolved

1208
01:10:23,710 --> 01:10:24,350
mystery.

1209
01:10:24,510 --> 01:10:28,590
Um and I think the current way of thinking about it is wrong in so many ways.

1210
01:10:28,830 --> 01:10:33,070
Um just the mere fact that we we think about the way to solve it is just by counting

1211
01:10:33,070 --> 01:10:37,470
calories and reducing calories, that that seems to be the wrong way to go about it.

1212
01:10:37,630 --> 01:10:41,880
Uh and and the way to solve, you know, the obesity crisis and say, you know, poor

1213
01:10:41,880 --> 01:10:44,120
communities, the way to do that is just educate them.

1214
01:10:44,280 --> 01:10:46,360
Teach them, they just don't know what what the healthy foods are.

1215
01:10:46,440 --> 01:10:50,360
Let's put let's put calorie uh numbers, let's put uh nutrition labels on the foods.

1216
01:10:50,520 --> 01:10:51,720
Surely that'll solve the problem.

1217
01:10:51,880 --> 01:10:53,320
No, it didn't solve the problem.

1218
01:10:53,480 --> 01:10:58,680
Um it's yet again another example of us not giving people credit for making uh sound

1219
01:10:58,680 --> 01:11:01,000
decisions in the environment in which they find themselves.

1220
01:11:01,240 --> 01:11:06,750
If if you are in a an unpredictable food insecure environment, it actually makes sense that

1221
01:11:06,750 --> 01:11:11,470
you are physiologically storing fat uh in preparation for food scarcity.

1222
01:11:11,550 --> 01:11:11,710
Right?

1223
01:11:11,870 --> 01:11:15,230
If you're in a more stable, predictable environment, uh, it makes sense that you would not

1224
01:11:15,230 --> 01:11:16,270
be storing as much fat.

1225
01:11:16,430 --> 01:11:20,830
So I think that's a really uh important insight that that your way of thinking has

1226
01:11:20,830 --> 01:11:21,630
revealed.

1227
01:11:21,870 --> 01:11:27,840
Um but um Yeah, I I think I might have to

1228
01:11:27,840 --> 01:11:29,600
come up with a different example for mismatch.

1229
01:11:29,680 --> 01:11:34,720
Now, I'm I'm honestly these days I'm I'm thinking that this idea of evolutionary mismatch

1230
01:11:34,720 --> 01:11:36,000
is kind of overrated.

1231
01:11:36,320 --> 01:11:42,240
That um increasingly I'm the the examples that have been brought uh to

1232
01:11:42,240 --> 01:11:46,080
illustrate the phenomenon have become challenged, you know, one after the other.

1233
01:11:46,240 --> 01:11:49,680
And now I'm beginning to think that we just put too many of our eggs in that mismatch

1234
01:11:49,680 --> 01:11:50,000
basket.

1235
01:11:50,560 --> 01:11:50,800
Yeah.

1236
01:11:50,960 --> 01:11:56,630
And I think also that the you know, as a mode of explanation, it's a bit sort of

1237
01:11:58,310 --> 01:12:04,310
you know what it was very popular um sort of a a number of decades

1238
01:12:04,310 --> 01:12:09,270
ago, and it it kind of constrains our explanatory resources quite a lot.

1239
01:12:09,430 --> 01:12:13,670
If you say, Oh well, the thing is people kind of have these very fixed preferences for

1240
01:12:13,670 --> 01:12:15,590
certain kinds of things, and then you put them in different environments.

1241
01:12:15,670 --> 01:12:17,910
We we're a hugely generalist species.

1242
01:12:18,150 --> 01:12:18,470
Yeah.

1243
01:12:18,790 --> 01:12:24,240
Um so we're very good, and this has been true for many thousands of years.

1244
01:12:24,400 --> 01:12:27,120
We're very good at living in different kinds of places that offer different kinds of

1245
01:12:27,120 --> 01:12:28,240
resources and different challenges.

1246
01:12:28,400 --> 01:12:30,240
So we're super good at learning stuff.

1247
01:12:30,400 --> 01:12:36,400
You know, we that it cannot be the case that that very

1248
01:12:36,400 --> 01:12:42,320
specific schedules of behaviors or preferences are highly canalized, you know, just

1249
01:12:42,320 --> 01:12:43,920
impervious to change.

1250
01:12:44,290 --> 01:12:48,530
On the other hand, uh you know, so that's definitely true.

1251
01:12:48,610 --> 01:12:54,130
So we shouldn't over um we shouldn't overdo the

1252
01:12:54,130 --> 01:12:58,370
mismatch thing and we shouldn't make it sound like that's the only rabbit that we can pull

1253
01:12:58,370 --> 01:12:58,850
out of the hat.

1254
01:12:59,010 --> 01:13:03,970
Oh why do we illusion cycle just explain any ill they just pull the mismatch rabbit out of

1255
01:13:03,970 --> 01:13:04,450
the hat.

1256
01:13:04,770 --> 01:13:09,010
But on the other hand you have to admit when you go and see a horror movie and you know the

1257
01:13:09,010 --> 01:13:14,480
the guys come at you with the axe and that's scary the evolved function of those mechanisms

1258
01:13:14,480 --> 01:13:16,960
of fear is not to watch horror movies.

1259
01:13:17,040 --> 01:13:18,720
I mean, that we must agree on that, right?

1260
01:13:18,800 --> 01:13:22,640
That that that in a sense the people who make horror movies, you know, understand it's a

1261
01:13:22,640 --> 01:13:25,840
regular property of humans that if you show them monsters and you show them, you know,

1262
01:13:26,000 --> 01:13:30,720
assailants, they're gonna have a sort of a certain uh emotional reaction to that, and you

1263
01:13:30,720 --> 01:13:32,240
can kind of play with that in interesting ways.

1264
01:13:32,530 --> 01:13:36,690
Even even there though, I mean we we we had we had Colton Scrivener on a few episodes ago

1265
01:13:36,770 --> 01:13:40,610
and he talked about how morbid curiosity and how actually learning about dangerous things

1266
01:13:40,610 --> 01:13:45,090
in a safe context is actually uh uh really adaptive and you know plenty of animals have

1267
01:13:45,090 --> 01:13:47,090
this kind of curiosity about scary things.

1268
01:13:47,490 --> 01:13:52,050
And y so and so there even there, I think it's it's not really a clear case of us being

1269
01:13:52,050 --> 01:13:52,770
exploited.

1270
01:13:52,930 --> 01:13:57,090
It could be that we're we're learning valuable things about dangerous situations.

1271
01:13:57,330 --> 01:14:01,080
I mean, maybe not not the best learning opportunity in the world, but yeah, yeah.

1272
01:14:01,400 --> 01:14:03,160
There's a levels of analysis thing, right?

1273
01:14:03,240 --> 01:14:09,160
That the propensity to have that curiosity, I agree, could well

1274
01:14:09,160 --> 01:14:09,720
be adaptive.

1275
01:14:09,880 --> 01:14:12,120
But the individual horror movie is not adaptive, right?

1276
01:14:12,200 --> 01:14:18,120
The individual you know, that that's well Well I don't know, maybe maybe we could get into

1277
01:14:18,280 --> 01:14:19,160
a quibble about what adapted.

1278
01:14:19,400 --> 01:14:23,080
I mean he's he's got data showing that people uh do better uh in terms of mental health

1279
01:14:23,160 --> 01:14:26,040
during the pandemic if they watched the movie pandemic.

1280
01:14:26,360 --> 01:14:28,790
So like yeah I don't know.

1281
01:14:29,430 --> 01:14:33,190
That's possible that yeah Josh, it's funny because Josh Tiber came up to me at the last HS,

1282
01:14:33,350 --> 01:14:36,070
but we have to have Josh on soon uh about and he had this exact point.

1283
01:14:36,150 --> 01:14:41,990
He's like, I he's like, I think he's got he has a uh a ready to go rant against uh the

1284
01:14:41,990 --> 01:14:43,110
uh mismatch thing.

1285
01:14:43,190 --> 01:14:45,350
So we should have him on soon to channel this too.

1286
01:14:45,590 --> 01:14:50,150
But I think I like for me at least, I understood the mismatch thing is a lot of the uh

1287
01:14:50,150 --> 01:14:55,780
early of psych stuff was just sort of provisional in the point of in service of sort of

1288
01:14:55,780 --> 01:14:59,940
making an argument, and in probably isn't the right or most sophisticated way to put it,

1289
01:15:00,100 --> 01:15:04,660
but it was it was sort of doing this the important necessary service for where people were

1290
01:15:04,660 --> 01:15:10,180
at, which is just sort of acknowledging that um people's intuitions about what would be a

1291
01:15:10,180 --> 01:15:14,180
good idea or would make sense on the view that people are rational, it's just sort of

1292
01:15:14,180 --> 01:15:19,170
saying, Well, look, there's a mismatch then between like what the current environment is

1293
01:15:19,170 --> 01:15:20,210
like and a past environment.

1294
01:15:20,370 --> 01:15:22,050
It's like sperm banks are a great example.

1295
01:15:22,210 --> 01:15:25,730
So if you take the idea that like people are just maximizing their reproductive success,

1296
01:15:25,890 --> 01:15:28,210
why don't men line up in front of sperm banks?

1297
01:15:28,370 --> 01:15:32,290
You know, if you're having that argument, then you're, you know, you're saying, well, the

1298
01:15:32,290 --> 01:15:37,970
North Star isn't uh maximum reproductive success because look, men aren't lining up in

1299
01:15:37,970 --> 01:15:41,010
front of sperm banks because they could just have as many kids as possible.

1300
01:15:41,250 --> 01:15:47,040
Um, I think once you start taking a design stance perspective on the

1301
01:15:47,040 --> 01:15:47,600
psychology.

1302
01:15:47,680 --> 01:15:53,120
And once you start thinking about inputs and and that, and if that's the range of discourse

1303
01:15:53,120 --> 01:15:58,960
you're having, then yeah, I think the mismatch thing probably starts to break down

1304
01:15:58,960 --> 01:15:59,360
a bit.

1305
01:15:59,520 --> 01:16:05,200
Um, because then you're you're already kind of past the point of there's a

1306
01:16:05,200 --> 01:16:08,720
homunculus who's just maximizing their reproductive success.

1307
01:16:09,750 --> 01:16:13,430
And then and then you're having just a sophisticated discussion about well, well, the

1308
01:16:13,430 --> 01:16:18,550
evolved psychology clearly the input isn't just like, you know, have I ejaculated?

1309
01:16:18,630 --> 01:16:22,950
It's that I have a partner and like I need to raise the child because we're a social

1310
01:16:22,950 --> 01:16:23,590
species.

1311
01:16:23,750 --> 01:16:27,430
And there's concern about what resources that child will have because we're ultra

1312
01:16:27,430 --> 01:16:28,150
competitive.

1313
01:16:28,310 --> 01:16:32,280
You know, and you're having this discussion, and that's not that's not mismatch anymore.

1314
01:16:32,360 --> 01:16:36,360
That's just saying, look, there's more software than just have I ejaculated, right?

1315
01:16:36,520 --> 01:16:41,640
Um and and I don't think you need the mismatch in that more sophisticated second version.

1316
01:16:42,280 --> 01:16:42,600
Yes.

1317
01:16:42,840 --> 01:16:48,120
I mean well in a way you could also get at the same point through um through the

1318
01:16:48,120 --> 01:16:49,880
demographic transition itself, right?

1319
01:16:49,960 --> 01:16:55,400
Which is the the fertility if people as people got more resources, you know, they

1320
01:16:55,400 --> 01:16:57,810
didn't have more births.

1321
01:16:57,970 --> 01:16:59,730
In fact, the opposite exactly.

1322
01:16:59,810 --> 01:17:00,290
Yes, exactly.

1323
01:17:00,690 --> 01:17:03,730
And in quite a law-like way, which is extremely interesting.

1324
01:17:04,850 --> 01:17:09,730
So clearly what approximately is driving people cannot be, oh, I've got to have as many

1325
01:17:09,730 --> 01:17:11,250
kids as I can possibly raise.

1326
01:17:11,410 --> 01:17:11,650
Yeah.

1327
01:17:11,810 --> 01:17:12,130
Survival.

1328
01:17:12,370 --> 01:17:16,370
You know, that that that cannot be the an account of the you know, you need to build in

1329
01:17:16,370 --> 01:17:22,300
these other motivations and these other concerns about the the fate

1330
01:17:22,300 --> 01:17:25,100
of the offspring that you produce, not just their number, you know, and all that.

1331
01:17:25,340 --> 01:17:26,220
So absolutely.

1332
01:17:26,540 --> 01:17:26,620
Yeah.

1333
01:17:26,700 --> 01:17:30,060
And I think honestly, even this podcast, David, you tell me too, but like in in

1334
01:17:30,060 --> 01:17:34,460
interviewing every person who's sort of an expert in their area, I feel like the narrative

1335
01:17:34,460 --> 01:17:40,380
has been even the early of psych work oversimplified how many considerations or design

1336
01:17:40,380 --> 01:17:41,500
features there were.

1337
01:17:41,660 --> 01:17:46,810
So like the early mating work was sort of like very oversimplified, or the early parenting

1338
01:17:46,810 --> 01:17:50,010
work to the extent there was any, or you know, reproductive investment.

1339
01:17:50,170 --> 01:17:53,850
And it wasn't explaining things like the demographic transition, or it wasn't explaining

1340
01:17:53,850 --> 01:17:58,250
things like mate preferences adequately, and then adding the sophistication in.

1341
01:17:58,330 --> 01:18:04,080
It's almost always that there's more systems that make more sense, but there are just there

1342
01:18:04,240 --> 01:18:09,680
it's the integration of a lot more sort of decision making, cost benefit

1343
01:18:09,680 --> 01:18:10,480
analysis.

1344
01:18:10,640 --> 01:18:15,440
And these systems are much smarter than we even give them credit as evolutionary

1345
01:18:15,440 --> 01:18:16,320
psychologists.

1346
01:18:16,880 --> 01:18:18,720
Yeah, and I think that's probably right.

1347
01:18:18,800 --> 01:18:24,690
And and I think that um the sort of one cue, one Q, one thing.

1348
01:18:26,130 --> 01:18:31,730
But do you worry at all that in a way then F site becomes unidentifiable?

1349
01:18:31,890 --> 01:18:36,210
It just says the mind's pretty complex, people have got lots of different motivations, they

1350
01:18:36,210 --> 01:18:37,890
take lots of things into account.

1351
01:18:38,210 --> 01:18:43,970
I don't think that's wrong, but i in a way i

1352
01:18:44,130 --> 01:18:48,520
that there's a sort of cultural incentive to come up with something more eye-catching than

1353
01:18:48,520 --> 01:18:48,680
that.

1354
01:18:48,760 --> 01:18:53,000
Like people only really want one thing, you know, or the people that we're cave we're

1355
01:18:53,000 --> 01:18:53,720
cavemen and walking.

1356
01:18:54,120 --> 01:18:55,240
We're cavemen or something, you know.

1357
01:18:55,480 --> 01:19:01,400
Because if you say difficult decisions like who to marry, you know, a lot of stuff that

1358
01:19:01,480 --> 01:19:02,200
comes into it.

1359
01:19:02,280 --> 01:19:02,680
Yeah.

1360
01:19:02,920 --> 01:19:05,080
You know great.

1361
01:19:05,480 --> 01:19:11,080
I mean I don't think I I I don't think the situation is that bad because I think you could

1362
01:19:11,080 --> 01:19:15,850
have models of how these things get integrated now people might uh weight them differently

1363
01:19:15,850 --> 01:19:17,450
according to the different circumstances and so on.

1364
01:19:17,530 --> 01:19:22,170
So I I think it's fine, but is there a danger that it just becomes

1365
01:19:23,290 --> 01:19:29,290
so uh you know so sort of amorphous that the the

1366
01:19:29,450 --> 01:19:34,810
the that there isn't really a there isn't something uh a kind of cool new uh

1367
01:19:36,010 --> 01:19:38,640
secret weapon there anymore.

1368
01:19:39,040 --> 01:19:39,440
Yeah.

1369
01:19:39,840 --> 01:19:45,840
I mean I I think yes w it it makes us more

1370
01:19:46,000 --> 01:19:50,640
similar to other kinds of cognitive science and social science and that we're saying yeah

1371
01:19:50,720 --> 01:19:54,480
stuff's complicated there's lots of inputs and lots of complicated processes and lots of

1372
01:19:54,480 --> 01:19:55,680
complicated outputs.

1373
01:19:55,840 --> 01:20:00,470
But the unique thing that we bring to the table is we have a a theory that can make

1374
01:20:00,470 --> 01:20:04,550
predictions about what those inputs and outputs and processes are going to be.

1375
01:20:04,790 --> 01:20:09,750
And we have uh a uh a framework for making those predictions that is actually grounded in

1376
01:20:09,750 --> 01:20:14,470
evolutionary science and is concilient with the rest of our knowledge of how reality works.

1377
01:20:14,710 --> 01:20:18,390
But if I'm just coming in and making predictions about those inputs and processes and

1378
01:20:18,390 --> 01:20:22,710
outputs, and I in and in and my theorizing is completely disconnected from the natural

1379
01:20:22,710 --> 01:20:26,340
sciences, well, my theories are just gonna be more likely to be wrong, right?

1380
01:20:26,500 --> 01:20:30,820
Why not avail myself of our rich body of knowledge about how reality works that we've

1381
01:20:30,820 --> 01:20:35,940
accumulated over the past few centuries, that we've accumulated in evolutionary biology,

1382
01:20:36,180 --> 01:20:41,940
uh, ethology, uh, paleontology, and even physics to a certain extent is is relevant in

1383
01:20:41,940 --> 01:20:47,460
insofar as we are, you know, anti-entropic beings, and that all else equal, the expectation

1384
01:20:47,460 --> 01:20:50,340
for any phenomenon is gonna be randomness and entropy.

1385
01:20:50,420 --> 01:20:54,890
And insofar as we see deviations from that, that requires uh an explanation that is

1386
01:20:54,890 --> 01:21:00,570
grounded uh in in the nature of natural selection or or of some kind of selective process.

1387
01:21:00,810 --> 01:21:03,850
Um so that would be my answer to what what we're providing.

1388
01:21:03,930 --> 01:21:07,050
And in any case, I don't think we should care that much about marketing ourselves and and

1389
01:21:07,050 --> 01:21:11,130
advertising making sure that like we have a brand that's easily differentiable different

1390
01:21:11,370 --> 01:21:12,810
from other you know social sciences.

1391
01:21:12,970 --> 01:21:14,170
I I think that stuff's bullshit.

1392
01:21:14,250 --> 01:21:15,370
I think we just gotta do good science.

1393
01:21:15,450 --> 01:21:18,090
And you know I can I completely agree with you.

1394
01:21:18,250 --> 01:21:20,330
I completely agree with you uh on that.

1395
01:21:20,490 --> 01:21:23,720
And I and and I also think I don't think we are a separate brand.

1396
01:21:23,800 --> 01:21:27,640
I mean I really hope that evolutionary psychology ceased to exist because it because it

1397
01:21:27,640 --> 01:21:33,640
comes becomes uncontroversial that you start from a knowledge that that of course you would

1398
01:21:33,640 --> 01:21:37,000
start from what kind of organisms you're dealing with and you know what they're if we were

1399
01:21:37,000 --> 01:21:42,440
dealing with flying organisms or or s solo living organisms or you know

1400
01:21:42,600 --> 01:21:47,910
organisms that were deep in the ocean, everything would look different, right?

1401
01:21:47,990 --> 01:21:49,750
They're social science would look, of course it would, right?

1402
01:21:49,830 --> 01:21:51,270
So we must start from.

1403
01:21:51,990 --> 01:21:55,990
So I I mean I completely agree with you, but I think there's been a recurrent tendency in

1404
01:21:55,990 --> 01:21:59,910
in F-Syc because of the incentive structure of academia to say, you know, everyone was

1405
01:21:59,910 --> 01:22:04,870
wrong, they said all this stupid stuff for years, but now you know, now having read

1406
01:22:04,870 --> 01:22:10,310
Hamilton 1964 and Trivers 1972, I can uniquely you know predict that

1407
01:22:10,420 --> 01:22:14,500
parents will love their children and you know, siblings will be kind of close to each other

1408
01:22:14,580 --> 01:22:18,900
off and fight and this is revolutionary and you know, but so let's let's not exaggerate

1409
01:22:18,900 --> 01:22:19,380
here, guys.

1410
01:22:19,460 --> 01:22:20,660
You know, that's the thing.

1411
01:22:21,700 --> 01:22:23,060
Yeah, no, I think that's right.

1412
01:22:23,140 --> 01:22:26,260
And I think it comes back to like what's your goal in doing this.

1413
01:22:26,420 --> 01:22:31,700
And I think, you know, honestly, I think even in the early in any science you have people

1414
01:22:31,700 --> 01:22:35,620
who are just like, I'm a scientist, I just want to figure out how stuff works.

1415
01:22:35,890 --> 01:22:37,410
And that's sort of the North Star.

1416
01:22:37,490 --> 01:22:41,090
And you can just watch there's certain people's careers that that's just consistent with

1417
01:22:41,090 --> 01:22:41,730
what they did.

1418
01:22:41,970 --> 01:22:46,130
There's other and there's other people who sort of want to be famous or popular.

1419
01:22:46,210 --> 01:22:47,410
And that's their north star.

1420
01:22:47,650 --> 01:22:48,210
And you know what?

1421
01:22:48,370 --> 01:22:52,770
You can tell that because the way that their career or their trajectory or what they study

1422
01:22:52,850 --> 01:22:54,290
or how they study it goes.

1423
01:22:54,450 --> 01:22:55,330
So yeah, I know.

1424
01:22:55,410 --> 01:23:01,300
I think, you know, um, I think any any new area of science is selects for certain

1425
01:23:01,300 --> 01:23:02,020
kinds of people.

1426
01:23:02,100 --> 01:23:07,940
I think evpsy uh self uh self awarely people would always say

1427
01:23:07,940 --> 01:23:12,980
it's selected for people who were sort of contrarian uh in the early days because it was

1428
01:23:12,980 --> 01:23:15,700
contrary to a lot of the accepted work.

1429
01:23:15,860 --> 01:23:21,540
I think more and more the later generations are less contrarian, uh just because it's more

1430
01:23:21,540 --> 01:23:22,020
accepted.

1431
01:23:22,550 --> 01:23:25,910
Well, I think actually there's a really interesting dynamic, but I think the early stuff

1432
01:23:25,910 --> 01:23:29,670
was contrary contrarian within the academy, right?

1433
01:23:29,910 --> 01:23:34,150
But common sense within the broader population.

1434
01:23:35,030 --> 01:23:35,190
Yeah.

1435
01:23:35,510 --> 01:23:35,670
Right.

1436
01:23:35,830 --> 01:23:40,870
You know, when b certain messages about, you know, why men life you know wants

1437
01:23:41,670 --> 01:23:46,070
want status and why they're you know interested in pretty younger women and all that sort

1438
01:23:46,070 --> 01:23:46,310
of stuff.

1439
01:23:46,550 --> 01:23:46,710
Right.

1440
01:23:47,420 --> 01:23:51,580
In the academy, you know, social science had developed a very different account of those

1441
01:23:51,580 --> 01:23:52,060
processes.

1442
01:23:53,100 --> 01:23:59,100
But your uncle who doesn't work in the academy, who doesn't think about this,

1443
01:23:59,260 --> 01:24:00,620
goes, well, that makes sense to me.

1444
01:24:02,700 --> 01:24:08,220
So there was this kind of weird thing that it became an almost a sort of um flanking

1445
01:24:08,220 --> 01:24:13,270
maneuver that within the academy it's you know seemed kind of simplistic, but outside the

1446
01:24:13,270 --> 01:24:17,190
Academy it got an awful lot of airtime, almost disproportionate to its methodological

1447
01:24:17,190 --> 01:24:17,990
contributions.

1448
01:24:18,230 --> 01:24:22,790
And I think now we're coming up with something which is probably doesn't fly so much

1449
01:24:22,790 --> 01:24:26,470
outside the academy because it's doesn't have those very simple messages.

1450
01:24:26,710 --> 01:24:27,030
Right.

1451
01:24:27,430 --> 01:24:31,110
But uh but uh but within the academy has m less need to be contrarian.

1452
01:24:31,270 --> 01:24:31,590
Yeah.

1453
01:24:31,720 --> 01:24:31,960
Right.

1454
01:24:32,280 --> 01:24:32,680
That's true.

1455
01:24:32,840 --> 01:24:34,520
That's a really summary.

1456
01:24:34,760 --> 01:24:34,920
Yeah.

1457
01:24:35,000 --> 01:24:39,320
It's almost like there was like a populist phase of evolutionary psychology where like we

1458
01:24:39,320 --> 01:24:43,320
were speaking to the common man and you know, the folk wisdom from grandma and grandpa

1459
01:24:43,320 --> 01:24:47,080
about how people really worked and men in their wandering eye or whatever, where everyone

1460
01:24:47,080 --> 01:24:51,960
in the academy was, you know, blabbing about these abst these verbose, you know,

1461
01:24:52,440 --> 01:24:57,630
abstruse theories about, you know, cultural Marxism or whatever social roles, right, right.

1462
01:24:57,870 --> 01:25:00,350
And the and we were speaking to the man and speaking their language.

1463
01:25:00,590 --> 01:25:04,430
But now like we've gotten to the point where like, okay, like we get it, you know, men like

1464
01:25:04,430 --> 01:25:06,670
pretty women, you know, parents love their kids.

1465
01:25:06,830 --> 01:25:11,790
Like can we can we move beyond that and actually like, you know, make some additional

1466
01:25:11,790 --> 01:25:12,190
insights?

1467
01:25:12,350 --> 01:25:16,030
The problem, of course, is that once you move beyond that, you start getting into really

1468
01:25:16,220 --> 01:25:19,740
nuanced, complicated territory about how software works.

1469
01:25:19,900 --> 01:25:23,500
And that does not speak to the common man because that's just really hard to wrap your head

1470
01:25:23,500 --> 01:25:23,980
around.

1471
01:25:24,060 --> 01:25:29,020
Uh, and so we sort of you know run out of runway in terms of our ability to, you know,

1472
01:25:29,180 --> 01:25:32,220
resonate with people's intuitive psychology.

1473
01:25:32,300 --> 01:25:33,660
And honestly, I think that's a good thing.

1474
01:25:33,740 --> 01:25:37,340
You know, we should move beyond our intuitions, just as physics has moved beyond folk

1475
01:25:37,340 --> 01:25:40,030
physics and biology has moved beyond folk biology.

1476
01:25:40,110 --> 01:25:43,070
I think evolutionary psychology needs to move beyond folk psychology.

1477
01:25:43,230 --> 01:25:46,190
I know Dave has done really wonderful work making that argument.

1478
01:25:46,270 --> 01:25:48,430
And I think, you know, that's that's the direction we should be headed.

1479
01:25:48,670 --> 01:25:48,830
Yeah.

1480
01:25:48,910 --> 01:25:53,630
And I don't think all the PR, like I don't think um, I mean, in some sense, I agree with

1481
01:25:53,630 --> 01:25:55,870
David that like we should just not worry about what people think.

1482
01:25:55,950 --> 01:25:56,990
Obviously, I think that's true.

1483
01:25:57,550 --> 01:26:01,630
I think there's another sense in which, and even this conversation, or even like the

1484
01:26:01,630 --> 01:26:07,150
throughput of all all everyone's work here, is being respectful of people

1485
01:26:07,480 --> 01:26:09,880
and it is a virtue still.

1486
01:26:10,200 --> 01:26:10,360
Right.

1487
01:26:10,440 --> 01:26:14,680
And sort of not saying people are idiots, but like respecting and understanding why people

1488
01:26:14,680 --> 01:26:17,800
are doing what they're doing as a first step.

1489
01:26:18,120 --> 01:26:22,680
Uh, I think that point, even if people don't understand, like, you know, if I'm talking to

1490
01:26:22,680 --> 01:26:26,760
my uncle and I'm like, we got to understand, like, you know, the design stance and your

1491
01:26:27,400 --> 01:26:28,840
robot and their software, it's like, what?

1492
01:26:28,920 --> 01:26:29,560
What are you talking about?

1493
01:26:29,640 --> 01:26:31,560
Like, yeah, like I'm not gonna win that.

1494
01:26:31,640 --> 01:26:33,000
Like, that's not helpful, right?

1495
01:26:33,080 --> 01:26:36,120
Like, you know, because that's just cognitive science and that's boring or whatever.

1496
01:26:36,200 --> 01:26:36,920
That's in the weeds.

1497
01:26:37,570 --> 01:26:41,890
But if but if I say something like, you know, most politicians

1498
01:26:43,570 --> 01:26:45,570
are just, you know, people already know.

1499
01:26:45,650 --> 01:26:48,050
Like people politicians are just doing their best.

1500
01:26:48,210 --> 01:26:52,690
And some are more or less corrupt or more or less in a corrupt system.

1501
01:26:52,770 --> 01:26:55,650
And they're just doing their best, but also self-incentivized.

1502
01:26:55,730 --> 01:26:56,450
People know that.

1503
01:26:56,610 --> 01:27:01,650
And people know that science is trying to figure stuff out, but there's more or less like

1504
01:27:01,650 --> 01:27:06,290
ulterior motives in science too, and like their status and other things.

1505
01:27:06,450 --> 01:27:11,740
And sometimes scientists are like, you know, what that that very sort of like patronizing,

1506
01:27:11,820 --> 01:27:13,900
like people are bad and moralizing.

1507
01:27:14,060 --> 01:27:19,580
And I do think like one of the things that Evpsych does when it does it well, done

1508
01:27:19,580 --> 01:27:25,180
properly, is it does force you out of that like knee-jerk moralization that like the unwed

1509
01:27:25,180 --> 01:27:30,860
mother, the sugar eating person, like there's there's you have to

1510
01:27:30,860 --> 01:27:33,100
respect why that's happening.

1511
01:27:33,340 --> 01:27:38,690
It doesn't you can also respect like why a genocide is happening or like why somebody's

1512
01:27:38,690 --> 01:27:42,770
doing that and not it not not say it's good but if you want to do something about it boy

1513
01:27:42,850 --> 01:27:44,450
you better understand why it's happening.

1514
01:27:44,690 --> 01:27:50,610
I do think and so I just think that point we still get I think we should

1515
01:27:50,610 --> 01:27:56,450
still get some uh laurels for that or at least like say that like this is one

1516
01:27:56,450 --> 01:28:02,450
thing about this approach is it forces you to sort of take that appreciate the logic

1517
01:28:02,450 --> 01:28:06,080
of a of a thing step for what it's worth.

1518
01:28:06,160 --> 01:28:06,480
Yeah.

1519
01:28:06,880 --> 01:28:07,040
Yeah.

1520
01:28:07,440 --> 01:28:12,160
And in many in many ways, yeah, I think we're reuniting with the you know standard social

1521
01:28:12,160 --> 01:28:16,400
science model that we originally criticized, which is, you know, that was very much uh a

1522
01:28:16,560 --> 01:28:20,880
norm in that model where we're gonna look at another culture without judgment and without

1523
01:28:20,880 --> 01:28:24,720
moralization, and we're just gonna try to understand it and and appreciate the culture and

1524
01:28:24,880 --> 01:28:27,810
why people are doing what they're doing uh in that society.

1525
01:28:27,970 --> 01:28:33,730
I think taking that same non-judgmental stance, I think, that you know has been

1526
01:28:33,730 --> 01:28:38,850
taken by anthropologists is a really valuable stance to take across the board, and um we

1527
01:28:38,850 --> 01:28:40,370
should continue taking it.

1528
01:28:40,770 --> 01:28:46,050
Yeah, and I think that the also the standard social science model was always somewhat of a

1529
01:28:46,050 --> 01:28:48,690
straw man that for me conflated several issues, right?

1530
01:28:48,850 --> 01:28:54,740
So one is to do with One was a kind of implied, oh,

1531
01:28:55,300 --> 01:29:00,660
people have sort of lumped all of the members of some social category like you know, Hadza,

1532
01:29:00,900 --> 01:29:01,460
together.

1533
01:29:01,700 --> 01:29:02,100
Yeah.

1534
01:29:02,340 --> 01:29:05,300
Rather than differentiating that different Hadza might be doing different things for

1535
01:29:05,300 --> 01:29:05,860
different reasons.

1536
01:29:05,940 --> 01:29:08,740
And so there's that's a sort of lumping that happens.

1537
01:29:08,980 --> 01:29:14,610
Um, the other is the particular claim that the you know groups differ kind of arbitrarily

1538
01:29:14,610 --> 01:29:20,130
and without a assignable limit because of a you know a kind of extreme fluid to fluidity or

1539
01:29:20,130 --> 01:29:24,610
or or or or you know lack of priors of the mechanisms involved.

1540
01:29:24,690 --> 01:29:29,650
And there's a few different pieces to that, to what the standard social science which some

1541
01:29:29,650 --> 01:29:34,050
of which I think you know you do need to r retain and and made a lot of sense and some of

1542
01:29:34,050 --> 01:29:39,970
which not, but it I think it was always somewhat of a rhetorical foil to say we want to

1543
01:29:39,970 --> 01:29:41,170
do something different from that.

1544
01:29:41,660 --> 01:29:45,740
You know, but there's different, you know, there's do we care about the cognition of

1545
01:29:45,740 --> 01:29:50,140
individuals, or do we just lump them all together and you know and say it's social

1546
01:29:50,140 --> 01:29:51,660
processes that matter?

1547
01:29:52,140 --> 01:29:54,540
Do you distinguish between individuals and groups?

1548
01:29:54,620 --> 01:29:59,180
There's very there's different pieces to what the so-called standard social science model

1549
01:29:59,180 --> 01:29:59,340
is.

1550
01:29:59,580 --> 01:30:02,700
I don't think it was ever a terribly coherent notion, in fact.

1551
01:30:03,210 --> 01:30:05,130
Nor does nor do I think that it exists.

1552
01:30:05,210 --> 01:30:10,170
And I think you know social scientists vary enormously on their in their explanatory

1553
01:30:10,170 --> 01:30:10,810
emphases.

1554
01:30:10,970 --> 01:30:15,610
And so the idea that there's a standard one is it kind of doesn't make a whole lot of

1555
01:30:15,610 --> 01:30:15,850
sense.

1556
01:30:16,170 --> 01:30:16,330
Yeah.

1557
01:30:16,730 --> 01:30:19,690
So Daniel, so you a lot of your work is on power.

1558
01:30:19,930 --> 01:30:25,450
Is is an evolutionary psychological approach to power and resources subversive in any way?

1559
01:30:25,610 --> 01:30:29,450
Like is it subversive to certain status quo?

1560
01:30:29,610 --> 01:30:35,340
Or you know, are there um, you know, if you're if you're saying, look, I'm a

1561
01:30:35,340 --> 01:30:40,300
scientist, I'm gonna try to respect the phenomenon of inequality, here's the proposal.

1562
01:30:40,860 --> 01:30:46,700
Um, you know, there's a version of science where sort of all the stakeholders are like, all

1563
01:30:46,700 --> 01:30:48,780
right, we're just gonna listen to what the scientist says.

1564
01:30:48,940 --> 01:30:53,580
There's another version that sort of says the reason why the status quo is is some people

1565
01:30:53,580 --> 01:30:55,100
are winning and some people are losing.

1566
01:30:55,180 --> 01:31:00,110
And when a scientist comes in and says, here, here's a way to make the losers lose less.

1567
01:31:00,350 --> 01:31:01,790
Some people don't like it.

1568
01:31:02,030 --> 01:31:06,910
Um, you know, either, I mean, what do you think abstractly, or like what has the reaction

1569
01:31:06,910 --> 01:31:12,110
been to like your work where you're saying, look, here's here are objectively, or at least

1570
01:31:12,190 --> 01:31:16,910
like objective is too strong, but sort of like data-backed ways to like make everybody's

1571
01:31:16,910 --> 01:31:19,150
life better and raise all boats.

1572
01:31:19,630 --> 01:31:24,380
You know, imagine I imagine some people, at least intuitively, like don't like that idea,

1573
01:31:24,460 --> 01:31:28,460
like a basic No, that the they they they they they don't.

1574
01:31:28,620 --> 01:31:28,780
Yeah.

1575
01:31:28,940 --> 01:31:34,860
But I mean in a way the idea that you sort of persuade people you know

1576
01:31:34,940 --> 01:31:40,460
in in a one step process, you know, people whose salaries depend on not being persuaded was

1577
01:31:40,460 --> 01:31:43,180
is probably too much to hope for.

1578
01:31:43,340 --> 01:31:48,150
But what you might hope for is there are some people who think you know who think for indep

1579
01:31:48,630 --> 01:31:52,390
on independent grounds you know believe in some of the things that I think would be a good

1580
01:31:52,390 --> 01:31:52,870
idea.

1581
01:31:53,110 --> 01:31:58,470
And if I give them more coherent argumentative justifications, then they're gonna go into

1582
01:31:58,470 --> 01:32:04,470
their particular marketplace of ideas in which they exist better armed and better better

1583
01:32:04,470 --> 01:32:06,870
equipped with arguments and counterarguments.

1584
01:32:06,950 --> 01:32:12,680
Now so it's not like I you know I ever expected or uh or or found it the case that

1585
01:32:12,760 --> 01:32:18,440
um uh you know a lot of people said, Oh gosh, you know, now you point that out we'll we'll

1586
01:32:18,520 --> 01:32:19,320
stop doing this more detail.

1587
01:32:19,560 --> 01:32:21,720
Dan Nettle, the clearinghouse of social policy.

1588
01:32:21,800 --> 01:32:21,960
Yes.

1589
01:32:23,640 --> 01:32:23,960
That's right.

1590
01:32:24,040 --> 01:32:27,800
You know, I I read that in you know, I read your paper in Human Nature, we're gonna, you

1591
01:32:27,800 --> 01:32:31,640
know, we're gonna completely change uh um the way we're organizing things.

1592
01:32:31,800 --> 01:32:36,270
No, but but what you can do, this is all that scientists really can ever do is that they

1593
01:32:36,270 --> 01:32:41,630
can hope to have an input into a much broader social process of you know of exchange of

1594
01:32:41,630 --> 01:32:47,630
arguments and uh in which people who want to do you know who ha have reasons to think

1595
01:32:47,630 --> 01:32:52,030
like you kinda can find their positions buttressed or whatever.

1596
01:32:52,110 --> 01:32:54,350
And also when it's complex, you know, we need to say that.

1597
01:32:54,430 --> 01:32:59,550
Well we can't when it's the answer is it's complex, but at least you can try and lay out

1598
01:32:59,550 --> 01:33:01,470
what some of the issues are and and so on.

1599
01:33:01,550 --> 01:33:05,020
And I think that does have an effect.

1600
01:33:05,180 --> 01:33:06,700
You know, it's pretty microscopic.

1601
01:33:06,780 --> 01:33:10,780
It's not, I don't think there are probably many cases where someone sort of published, you

1602
01:33:10,780 --> 01:33:15,500
know, absent things like the link between cancer and smoking and so on, you know, where

1603
01:33:15,500 --> 01:33:18,540
there were quite a lot of people who's in who's interested not to believe it, but in the

1604
01:33:18,540 --> 01:33:23,180
end, the epidemiology was absolutely convincing, and that has produced very major changes

1605
01:33:23,180 --> 01:33:24,860
in public opinion and public policy.

1606
01:33:25,020 --> 01:33:27,740
But I you know, there's not many cases like that.

1607
01:33:27,900 --> 01:33:33,510
But you can expose issues, you know, present ways of thinking about things

1608
01:33:33,590 --> 01:33:38,470
that people who whose whose activity it is to do this stuff are gonna go, Oh, that's

1609
01:33:38,470 --> 01:33:39,270
actually useful, you know.

1610
01:33:39,350 --> 01:33:45,270
I I see there's a continuous link from policy problem, you know, questions I'm working

1611
01:33:45,270 --> 01:33:51,270
on to um to sort of behavioural science, which is infer that you know further linked to

1612
01:33:51,270 --> 01:33:52,150
the science of the mind.

1613
01:33:52,230 --> 01:33:56,500
And and so I I think we have a we make a difference, you know.

1614
01:33:56,980 --> 01:34:00,660
Well I don't know if we make a difference or not, but there's at least a reasonable chance

1615
01:34:00,660 --> 01:34:01,300
that we do.

1616
01:34:01,620 --> 01:34:02,020
Yeah.

1617
01:34:02,260 --> 01:34:07,060
Um can you I mean just re what do you have an elevator pitch for sort of income inequality

1618
01:34:07,060 --> 01:34:09,060
and like uh universal basic income?

1619
01:34:09,140 --> 01:34:14,420
I mean is that Well my elevator pitch pi my elevator pitch for universal basic income is

1620
01:34:14,420 --> 01:34:18,470
not actually about inequality per se.

1621
01:34:18,630 --> 01:34:22,950
So I think I think that the thing that matters psychologically is insufficiency.

1622
01:34:23,510 --> 01:34:26,630
When you don't know if you can put food on the well actually the two things about it, the

1623
01:34:26,710 --> 01:34:29,030
insufficiency and unpredictability.

1624
01:34:31,030 --> 01:34:36,700
Either believing that I can't put food on the family table tomorrow or

1625
01:34:37,020 --> 01:34:41,100
not knowing if I can do so and over what time scale I'm going to be able to do so either of

1626
01:34:41,100 --> 01:34:46,860
those leads me to do some things that whilst justified by the

1627
01:34:46,860 --> 01:34:50,780
situation cause negative externalities for others.

1628
01:34:51,020 --> 01:34:51,660
Right?

1629
01:34:51,900 --> 01:34:56,700
And so if you can say to people look I'm not going to solve all your problems but I'm going

1630
01:34:56,700 --> 01:35:01,690
to take that particular thing away that has actually has big social knock-ons.

1631
01:35:02,170 --> 01:35:03,450
Now we know that.

1632
01:35:03,930 --> 01:35:06,090
We've known this for years in society.

1633
01:35:06,170 --> 01:35:09,210
And so we have a whole patchwork of mechanisms.

1634
01:35:09,290 --> 01:35:14,410
You know, in Europe, we have very complex but expensive welfare systems.

1635
01:35:14,650 --> 01:35:17,930
Actually, even the US, which is characterized as having like less of a welfare system,

1636
01:35:18,090 --> 01:35:19,530
actually spends billions of dollars.

1637
01:35:19,690 --> 01:35:23,040
You know, 10% of the population, not at the moment because of the federal government

1638
01:35:23,040 --> 01:35:26,000
shutdown, but in general gets uh the SNAP program.

1639
01:35:26,320 --> 01:35:30,160
You know, there's unemployment insurance, there's a whole bunch of different mechanisms.

1640
01:35:30,400 --> 01:35:36,080
Because we understand that we all lose if there's a big fraction of the population knocking

1641
01:35:36,080 --> 01:35:39,840
around that either can't meet their basic needs or doesn't know if they can, they're gonna

1642
01:35:39,920 --> 01:35:44,080
it's gonna lead them to make all kinds of trade-offs that we that is gonna cause an ex

1643
01:35:44,240 --> 01:35:45,680
negative externality.

1644
01:35:46,080 --> 01:35:50,240
So we sort of know this, but it's just that the way that we um

1645
01:35:52,010 --> 01:35:58,010
Address this is currently, I mean, for for historical reasons, as a sort of patchwork of

1646
01:35:58,010 --> 01:36:00,730
ways that we've done this, you know, there could be better ways.

1647
01:36:00,810 --> 01:36:04,090
There could be better ways that would do a better job and wouldn't cost much more.

1648
01:36:04,170 --> 01:36:09,050
Like they would just that they would, as it were, solve the problem a little bit further

1649
01:36:09,050 --> 01:36:14,420
upstream by saying, Well, you always know you're going to have a certain income, rather

1650
01:36:14,420 --> 01:36:17,700
than saying, well, wait until you find you haven't got some income and then we'll have, you

1651
01:36:17,700 --> 01:36:20,260
know, then we'll have you go to somewhere and the bureaucrats will assess it.

1652
01:36:20,340 --> 01:36:24,340
You'll claim, you know, think of the the complexities and the humiliations involved in

1653
01:36:24,340 --> 01:36:24,500
that.

1654
01:36:24,660 --> 01:36:30,180
When you say, well, no, you know, we're all we have a basic tier of

1655
01:36:30,180 --> 01:36:32,420
stuff to which we all have access.

1656
01:36:32,580 --> 01:36:36,420
And then beyond that, you know, it's up to people to sort of sort things sort things out

1657
01:36:36,420 --> 01:36:37,060
for themselves.

1658
01:36:37,300 --> 01:36:41,450
So I think you can pitch this as like this is kind of a no-brainer, it makes a lot of

1659
01:36:41,450 --> 01:36:41,850
sense.

1660
01:36:42,010 --> 01:36:45,530
Psychologically, it works for recipients, but it also works for people who have to pay for

1661
01:36:45,530 --> 01:36:46,650
it through taxation.

1662
01:36:46,730 --> 01:36:47,210
Yeah.

1663
01:36:47,690 --> 01:36:53,130
Because what people don't like is transferring resource to a different category of person

1664
01:36:53,130 --> 01:36:56,090
in which they do not themselves believe that they fit.

1665
01:36:56,730 --> 01:36:57,130
Right?

1666
01:36:57,370 --> 01:37:00,810
Whereas actually universal basic income, you know, you'll get it and I'll get it.

1667
01:37:00,890 --> 01:37:03,370
And and we're so we're transferring resources to ourselves.

1668
01:37:03,610 --> 01:37:07,050
We're all we're all deemed by the mechanism to be the same.

1669
01:37:08,000 --> 01:37:12,640
There isn't a kind of, well, you know, you're a person of type X, and so you get resources

1670
01:37:12,720 --> 01:37:14,720
where I'm a type of person of type Y, so I pay in.

1671
01:37:14,880 --> 01:37:20,800
No, you know, it stuff goes into a pot, there's a share of it that's rationed

1672
01:37:20,800 --> 01:37:21,040
out.

1673
01:37:21,280 --> 01:37:24,080
Everyone who's in the country is part of this kind of mechanism.

1674
01:37:24,240 --> 01:37:27,680
So there are reasons for thinking it's could be more accept, you know, could be more

1675
01:37:27,680 --> 01:37:30,720
effective at solving the problems it's meant to solve.

1676
01:37:31,270 --> 01:37:37,030
um more um more acceptable to the people who are

1677
01:37:38,150 --> 01:37:42,470
who ultimately need to support it and also just you know there's a lot we spend a lot of

1678
01:37:42,470 --> 01:37:46,950
money in society you know fixing out fif fixing out problems after they've happened

1679
01:37:47,270 --> 01:37:52,790
depression anxiety you know various kinds of things you sort of it's not that we don't

1680
01:37:52,790 --> 01:37:58,780
spend money on helping people We have lots of ways of doing that, but it's kind of messy

1681
01:37:58,860 --> 01:38:00,940
and often after the harm has happened, you know.

1682
01:38:01,020 --> 01:38:04,060
So it's that that's that's the pitch, you know, the short pitch.

1683
01:38:04,300 --> 01:38:05,100
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1684
01:38:05,180 --> 01:38:05,980
No, that's great.

1685
01:38:06,140 --> 01:38:12,140
I uh yeah, even just moving from Germany to the US, I feel like my perspective on

1686
01:38:12,140 --> 01:38:17,420
the US was sort of we like to throw lots of money at problems too late, or we like

1687
01:38:17,420 --> 01:38:19,420
artificially low numbers up front.

1688
01:38:19,580 --> 01:38:22,700
So, like a good example of that would be like that's everywhere.

1689
01:38:22,860 --> 01:38:27,790
Like in Germany, there's playgrounds everywhere and they spend a lot of money on

1690
01:38:27,790 --> 01:38:28,430
playgrounds.

1691
01:38:28,510 --> 01:38:32,270
You can travel, it's probably like a half a kilometer, a kilometer to like a playground,

1692
01:38:32,430 --> 01:38:33,390
and they're really great.

1693
01:38:33,550 --> 01:38:35,150
Kids spend tons of time there.

1694
01:38:35,310 --> 01:38:39,870
And I remember somebody like an American like posting, oh, that sounds expensive.

1695
01:38:40,190 --> 01:38:45,600
But if you think about all the knock-on consequences of not having that of

1696
01:38:45,600 --> 01:38:51,040
obesity, of try traveling to go anywhere, of everybody having to buy crappy playground

1697
01:38:51,120 --> 01:38:56,800
equipment that no one person can buy, even remotely as good as what's there, the anxiety

1698
01:38:57,040 --> 01:39:02,240
or um sedentarianism of or like having to like pay for entertainment.

1699
01:39:02,400 --> 01:39:06,400
Like there's all these knock on consequences that are sort of obscure.

1700
01:39:06,710 --> 01:39:12,310
Um uh but uh and or like crime because kids are just bored and they're like, what the fuck

1701
01:39:12,310 --> 01:39:13,110
am I gonna do?

1702
01:39:13,270 --> 01:39:16,070
Um, you know, so like there's all these knock-on consequences.

1703
01:39:16,230 --> 01:39:20,790
So like upfront costs, for me at least, like as an American, I was like, oh, it's the same

1704
01:39:20,790 --> 01:39:22,790
thing as like not including tax on the numbers.

1705
01:39:22,870 --> 01:39:24,950
Like, you know, in Germany the tax is included.

1706
01:39:25,030 --> 01:39:28,710
In America, it's not, but it's like then you have to tip, like so at a restaurant, you know

1707
01:39:28,710 --> 01:39:30,550
what you're gonna pay when you sit down.

1708
01:39:30,710 --> 01:39:33,700
In America, it's like 50% more later.

1709
01:39:33,780 --> 01:39:35,700
You know, we just like artificially low numbers.

1710
01:39:35,780 --> 01:39:38,820
So, but I mean Americans pay a lot for their healthcare, right?

1711
01:39:39,540 --> 01:39:41,700
No, we pay so much for really terrible health care.

1712
01:39:42,260 --> 01:39:44,180
You really spend a lot of money on healthcare, right?

1713
01:39:44,340 --> 01:39:47,700
And then there's no kind of, oh, you know, imagine the taxation it would be if you had a

1714
01:39:47,700 --> 01:39:48,420
different medical system.

1715
01:39:48,980 --> 01:39:49,860
No, you spend a lot of money.

1716
01:39:50,740 --> 01:39:53,220
No, no, you could save money by yes, exactly.

1717
01:39:53,860 --> 01:39:54,900
Probably probably, yes, probably.

1718
01:39:55,220 --> 01:39:55,460
Exactly.

1719
01:39:55,620 --> 01:40:01,390
But no, I think this just speaks to like this point of sort of uh the the idea that

1720
01:40:01,470 --> 01:40:05,070
like you just explain why why a system might be better.

1721
01:40:05,150 --> 01:40:08,670
Um and uh but yeah, uh yeah, anyway.

1722
01:40:08,750 --> 01:40:08,830
Yeah.

1723
01:40:09,230 --> 01:40:14,270
But there is a there's a particular difficulty about changing the I mean there is an

1724
01:40:14,270 --> 01:40:15,710
evolutionary psychology literature on this.

1725
01:40:15,790 --> 01:40:17,550
There's particular ways of allocating resources.

1726
01:40:17,630 --> 01:40:21,710
Like some things you know we communally share, and some things, you know, I we we equality

1727
01:40:21,710 --> 01:40:24,840
match, I get one, you get one, Dave gets one.

1728
01:40:25,080 --> 01:40:26,680
Some things we do in other ways.

1729
01:40:26,840 --> 01:40:32,760
And actually, shifting a resource from one of those to the other is super hard, I

1730
01:40:32,760 --> 01:40:37,320
think, for reasons that we've talked about, which is because you're sort of I'm asking, I'm

1731
01:40:37,320 --> 01:40:42,440
not, you know, I'm being required to use a different set of mental accounting principles,

1732
01:40:43,240 --> 01:40:45,160
you know, for a certain resource.

1733
01:40:45,320 --> 01:40:49,390
I used to think of it as like a privately owned resource, and now you're asking me to think

1734
01:40:49,390 --> 01:40:50,350
about it a different way.

1735
01:40:50,510 --> 01:40:53,150
And that's kind of an effortful cognitive shift.

1736
01:40:53,310 --> 01:40:57,230
And also, but it will only work if you all everyone else also makes the shift and kind of

1737
01:40:57,230 --> 01:40:58,190
buys into at the same time.

1738
01:40:58,270 --> 01:41:00,590
So we have problems of first mover problems and those things.

1739
01:41:00,670 --> 01:41:02,510
So that's why these things are politically difficult.

1740
01:41:02,590 --> 01:41:02,750
Yeah.

1741
01:41:02,910 --> 01:41:03,230
You know.

1742
01:41:03,390 --> 01:41:03,550
Yeah.

1743
01:41:03,710 --> 01:41:06,670
Quite aside from the arguments about, well, we'll be better off in the in the long run.

1744
01:41:06,830 --> 01:41:10,980
Is the kind of well, that sounds a great idea, but how can we get everyone to agree on it?

1745
01:41:11,060 --> 01:41:14,100
And how will you know the others will stick to their side of the deal and all that?

1746
01:41:14,180 --> 01:41:14,740
So, you know.

1747
01:41:14,980 --> 01:41:15,380
Right.

1748
01:41:15,620 --> 01:41:16,020
Yeah.

1749
01:41:16,260 --> 01:41:22,020
It comes it loops back to this thing of like institutions are just sort of aggregate uh

1750
01:41:22,500 --> 01:41:24,660
as David says, shit happens.

1751
01:41:25,140 --> 01:41:30,180
Yeah, and once they're in place, you know, hope you you can kind of hang on to them.

1752
01:41:30,340 --> 01:41:30,500
Yeah.

1753
01:41:30,980 --> 01:41:32,420
Getting them into place is really hard.

1754
01:41:32,500 --> 01:41:32,740
You know.

1755
01:41:32,980 --> 01:41:33,220
Yeah.

1756
01:41:33,370 --> 01:41:33,610
right.

1757
01:41:33,770 --> 01:41:34,250
Exactly.

1758
01:41:34,410 --> 01:41:34,890
Yeah.

1759
01:41:35,130 --> 01:41:38,890
As you said, like you don't know if you change something, it might go really wrong.

1760
01:41:39,050 --> 01:41:39,530
Yeah.

1761
01:41:39,850 --> 01:41:40,250
Yeah.

1762
01:41:40,970 --> 01:41:41,530
Yeah.

1763
01:41:42,570 --> 01:41:45,450
Well, I think we're approaching the end of our time here.

1764
01:41:45,610 --> 01:41:48,330
We uh it's time to ask the the question we always ask.

1765
01:41:48,410 --> 01:41:54,010
Uh is there anything we should have asked you that you you wish we got a chance to talk

1766
01:41:54,010 --> 01:41:54,250
about?

1767
01:41:54,970 --> 01:41:56,010
I don't think so.

1768
01:41:56,250 --> 01:41:56,490
Yeah.

1769
01:41:56,720 --> 01:41:56,880
Okay.

1770
01:41:57,040 --> 01:41:59,920
Well, there is a ton of stuff I wish I we had more time to ask you about.

1771
01:42:00,160 --> 01:42:00,320
Yes.

1772
01:42:00,960 --> 01:42:02,080
I I wish that as well.

1773
01:42:02,240 --> 01:42:02,400
Yeah.

1774
01:42:02,640 --> 01:42:06,000
We'll have to bring you on a second time to to cover all the other stuff.

1775
01:42:06,080 --> 01:42:08,160
But yeah, this was a really fun conversation.

1776
01:42:08,240 --> 01:42:13,440
Uh I love how we got from the micro to the macro of like where we're going as a as as a

1777
01:42:13,440 --> 01:42:17,920
field and uh what we what we might be getting wrong, where we should be headed, but also sp

1778
01:42:18,080 --> 01:42:22,880
really cool specific things like inequality and obesity was a really fun conversation.

1779
01:42:22,960 --> 01:42:26,750
I we appreciate you having uh uh appreciate you coming on.

1780
01:42:27,070 --> 01:42:32,830
Yeah, and uh don't don't bother doing a 5k or 10k or half marathon, just do that 800 meter

1781
01:42:32,910 --> 01:42:34,830
or I'm the uh the 800 meters.

1782
01:42:35,310 --> 01:42:37,310
No, I just the eight hundred meters, that's all I've got time for.

1783
01:42:38,110 --> 01:42:38,510
Okay, oh yeah.

1784
01:42:38,830 --> 01:42:39,950
It takes too damn long, you know.

1785
01:42:40,030 --> 01:42:40,990
It just takes yeah, yeah.

1786
01:42:41,310 --> 01:42:41,630
Exactly.

1787
01:42:41,710 --> 01:42:46,910
Yeah, no, you gotta how many I wonder how many eight hundred meters you could ru how long

1788
01:42:46,910 --> 01:42:49,710
did it take you to do the hundred K or uh the hundreds?

1789
01:42:51,720 --> 01:42:52,440
Yeah, yeah.

1790
01:42:52,520 --> 01:42:53,240
That's a long time.

1791
01:42:53,480 --> 01:42:54,120
That's long, you know.

1792
01:42:54,200 --> 01:42:56,600
It's long you you the whole day's gone, you know.

1793
01:42:56,680 --> 01:42:57,240
What can I say?

1794
01:42:57,400 --> 01:42:58,120
No, exactly.

1795
01:42:59,880 --> 01:43:00,520
Fantastic.

1796
01:43:00,600 --> 01:43:00,840
All right.

1797
01:43:00,920 --> 01:43:01,640
Well thank you, Dan.

1798
01:43:01,800 --> 01:43:02,920
Thank you so much for coming on.

1799
01:43:03,160 --> 01:43:03,400
Bye.

1800
01:43:03,640 --> 01:43:04,120
You're right.

1801
01:43:07,720 --> 01:43:11,320
David, the this was a wonderful episode.

1802
01:43:11,930 --> 01:43:12,330
Yes.

1803
01:43:12,650 --> 01:43:13,370
Fantastic.

1804
01:43:14,090 --> 01:43:17,130
Roughly an hour and a half to two hours have gone by.

1805
01:43:17,690 --> 01:43:20,650
And you're still listening, which means you must like what you're hearing.

1806
01:43:20,970 --> 01:43:22,890
And if you do, uh don't be shy about it.

1807
01:43:23,050 --> 01:43:23,930
Tell people about it.

1808
01:43:24,010 --> 01:43:27,290
Uh leave us a kind review, support us on Patreon.

1809
01:43:27,530 --> 01:43:32,970
And uh if you want, reach out to us with any ideas for topics uh or questions or uh

1810
01:43:33,130 --> 01:43:34,090
ideas for guests.

1811
01:43:34,490 --> 01:43:39,610
Yeah, we should um elicit uh like questions that we might answer with a guest.

1812
01:43:39,770 --> 01:43:40,640
That would be a fun thing.

1813
01:43:41,040 --> 01:43:41,360
That would be fun.

1814
01:43:41,440 --> 01:43:45,920
Or maybe we should do like a an AMA where like we get a bunch of questions from people and

1815
01:43:45,920 --> 01:43:48,160
we just spend an episode answering people's questions.

1816
01:43:48,400 --> 01:43:49,360
What's AMA?

1817
01:43:50,000 --> 01:43:51,280
Ask me anything.

1818
01:43:51,600 --> 01:43:52,640
Oh, okay.

1819
01:43:52,880 --> 01:43:54,320
Should I have known that?

1820
01:43:54,640 --> 01:43:55,200
Probably.

1821
01:43:55,440 --> 01:43:55,680
Okay.

1822
01:43:55,840 --> 01:43:57,120
We'll we'll edit that out.

1823
01:43:57,200 --> 01:43:57,440
Okay.

1824
01:43:57,520 --> 01:43:58,960
Thanks everybody for listening.

1825
01:43:59,200 --> 01:43:59,440
All right.

1826
01:43:59,520 --> 01:44:00,320
See you next week.