Evolutionary Social Sciences with Dan Nettle
2025-12-23 13:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Petrozewski. I'm David Pinsov. This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. David, did you know that Jean Nicot was a French philosopher and logician, best known for his work on propositional logic and induction. I actually did not know that. That's very interesting. And what makes you bring up Jean Nicode? Uh well, I mean, that was just from Wikipedia. Um, but I brought up Jean Nicode because our guest today is Dan Nettle. No relation to Jean Nicode. However, no relation, uh, he works at the Jean Nicode Institute in Paris. That's right. It's a wonderful institution uh and a a cool place to live. I love going to Paris.

But even more than going to Paris, I love talking to Dan Nettle because this guy is just an encyclopedia of fascinating information. Uh we had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation. Uh we talked about uh evolutionary behavioral science in general, what it's doing right, what it's doing wrong, how we could change it, evolutionary mismatch, uh, obesity, poverty, uh, lots of really interesting stuff. Yeah, if you think if you have an opinion about minimal uh or basic income, uh you should listen to this episode. You know, I actually found this episode almost frustrating because there's so much more I want to talk to Daniel about that we didn't get to. So um, I mean, that's a really good problem to have.

Um, but yeah, it the Daniel is just um, you know, in the ratio of sort of like how broadly known is he and how much stuff he has. This is another, like, really, Daniel is just a treasure trove of incredible work and is doing so much good, important work about really important things like poverty, social processes, um, and really putting his finger on um how of psych and psychology generally can sort of help us in all of our social ills or not. Yeah, no, absolutely. It was it was really uh fantastic conversation. I think I'll enjoy it. And without further ado, Dan Eddle. Dean, you are at the uh Jean Nicode Institute in Paris, is that right? That's correct. Yeah. Okay. Um, and this is a completely beside the point question, but are you a runner?

Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. What can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I've just been I've been a runner for fifteen years or so, and I'm for I have a really unfortunate uh um distinction as a runner that the only events that I'm any good at are the eight hundred meters and the hundred kilometer ultramarathon. Oh wow. And there is no rational training for these two events. And I d you know, what the hell? In fact, I did my big best performance on the two of them within five days of each other. Wow. So for those of you who are curious, I did the eight hundred meters first and the hundred kilometers second. I think that's the way around to do it. That's and so anyway, I'm just like I'm really mediocre.

I have a really I have a flat surface of mediocrity and then islands of ability which are very far apart. Amazing. I don't know what I don't know how to solve this problem. You know I'm like I'm just yeah. But uh but you doing a hundred K uh is uh is an accomplishment in and of itself. It involves a lot of tea, you know. Okay. It's good. Yeah, that's basically put that on a that's this is this this is just like how to do a hundred K. Yeah, it's just it's do just tea do the do the first twenty K, have some tea, and do the other 80k, add some more tea. Yeah. Have you considered writing a book about well, it would be a short book, you know? Yeah, just tea. Yeah, it would be it would really be a greeting card.

It would be some airport running 100k. We just have tea on the inside. Exactly. Um, I I I feel like whenever we talk to anybody, any part of the conversation is a microcosm of the person's research. And I actually feel like that what we just did is also a microcosm of your work, Dan, which is that you cover even a large flat surface of mediocre occasional islands. Yeah, thanks a lot, guys. Yeah, you're welcome. Okay, we can good night. We'll be here. We'll be here all week. Yes, exactly. We'll go island topic. It's okay. Yeah, exactly. So all of Dan's work is in greeting card format. And um, no, but what I was gonna say, uh to it's going to be a long, long walk to get to this, but uh no. What I was gonna say is that um you cover a lot of different topics um in

a way that it's not mediocre, but it's actually from an evolutionary perspective, and it covers a lot of things that I think are things that aren't traditionally thought about. So, for example, one thing is like income inequality. Um, and that's a really important social thing. And we've talked a bit about on the podcast before about you can take a very reductive approach to something like resources from an evolutionary perspective. And one of the reasons we even started this podcast was because a lot of what was in the podcast or popular zeitgeist of evolutionary psychology was this very reductive stuff where it's sort of like if it's not basically like caveman hitting each other over clubs, that runs counter to human nature.

Um, and so one of the things I love about your work is that it's very diverse, but it hits to the heart of what are the what are the evolved psychological mechanisms underlying this really important swath of human nature and often covering stuff that isn't what I would consider sort of like the easy stuff to tackle, like income inequality. Um, and so you know, one of the places to start out then is sort of from a topical perspective, um, and this is maybe like the 800-meter and 100k thing, is that do you do you think about like sort of what what does the research program that you've done have in common? Um, are there certain things that you're trying to tackle when it comes to topics that that there's some principle behind?

Um, and I mean this like not in a like defend it, but just sort of I'm curious because I often find you covering things where I think, oh, I wish somebody had been doing that. And I didn't even realize I wished somebody had been doing it until Dan Nettle started doing it. So I'm just curious, like what your what your process has been for picking topics. Well, I think that the actual the actual sort of ex-ante-causal sequence is a bit random. I mean one works on things that just seem interesting and one hears about and thinks, oh, there might be something to say about this. But I think ex post I can definitely say that there's a there's a common theme for most of most of my work uh anyway, which is trying to understand a kind of

articulation between social science questions and focus and evolutionary psychology, because I think evolutionary psychology is, you know, broadly speaking, correct in its claims about the mind, in the sense that, you know, clearly we have minds and they have structure, and those structures have to do with something, you know, something to do with fundamental uh um adaptive problems that that the mind has solved to do with you know mating and choosing social partners and getting the eating the right stuff and you know all of those things. But I think a lot of the evolutionary psychology literature sort of it sees this very simple world in which there's no real social structure or economic structure when that's happening.

It's like, oh I'm here, you know, I'm choosing my mate, I'm choosing my social partners, I'm choosing the thing to eat, I'm you know avoiding this, I'm avoiding this snake whilst you know taking this ripe fruit. As if uh as if sort of ever every individual w were kind of just facing up to nature and there was all the stuff up there and there were no social constraints, no social structure, no no cultural expectations, no distribution of resources and power relations, all the stuff that social science has been really good about talking about. So I mean for me it's just interesting to think about can those two meet up in a mutually beneficial way. I mean it's also good, I think it's it's good for evolutionary psychology because in a way

we we s we're very good at solving the sort of easy problems that no one felt needed solving. Like, you know, men like pretty women, people don't like people who cheat, you know, people think snakes and spiders are kind of yucky. I mean, great, you know, it's not wrong. Yeah. But it no one really in the in society is saying that's the problem that needs solving, guys. You know, that's really what's so uh in a way, it would be nice to ally the undoubted explanatory power of our approach to kind of hard problems that people actually want solving, which I think where the solutions are difficult. Um so, in a way that the evolved mind is one set of the shears and then the act the the social structural or or the linguistic environment or the socio-cultural context or

economic context or whatever is the other set of the shears, and then somewhere in between is human action. Right. Right. And so what can we do? Uh what can we do when we bring those two things together? Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe just make it concrete. I mean, one question I had for you and I thought was really interesting was about inequality and income inequality, and sort of, you know, there's been work on sort of, you know, as you said, like cheater detection or people feeling like what's the flow of resources. Um, and there's starting to be some work on this, like um in your work, Pascal Boyer has some work on sort of ownership and how it's also social. Like what you deem is owned is also a function of sort of who you deem as sort of worthy of

future interaction, which I think is a deeply interesting and kind of weird way to think about ownership. that's probably right. That comes from an evolutionary perspective. And so um can you maybe talk about how do you do this very difficult thing of taking the evolved software of which we don't know much, and then take an important social problem like inequality. How do you how do you get those get a hold of those big scissors and bring those two blades together? Well, I mean I I think there are lots of different ways and and it's not always easy. But I think w so one way to think about it, I suppose, is to say, well, what are the stylized facts of which social science is quite good at establishing that, you

know, pl places high in income inequality tend to have certain kinds of problems. I mean it's debated all of this, of course, but um so you could say, Well, what what do we know? And then you could think, well, okay, well what might be that's a macro, that's a macro level of generalization. Societies with uh high income inequality have certain features and actually are more susceptible to certain kinds of bad outcomes, which is interesting. But then you might say, well, from the micro point of view, of the individual agent who's coming into an ecology trying to figure out what's going on, trying to satisfy their their needs, what might be the problem they're trying to solve? And are there ways in which having a whole population of people trying to do that and

interacting with one another are going to generate, for example, you know, uh uh my PhD should PhD student Benoît de Corson has worked on uh uh inequality and crime and particularly violent crime, sort of there's a big literature arguing that the more unequal places generate more violent crime. Well why would that be? You know, it's not immediately obvious. When you start to think, well, okay, that people have have goals, which is to have uh you know adequate resources and to be able to defend them, and uh that's easier when resources are more evenly spread out so no one finds themselves too far down at the bottom of the pile. I mean then you can start to build up an account of how that might work.

Now you might say, well, does it actually explain anything we didn't already know, and I think the jury's out, but I think very plausibly it does, right? It generates new predictions, or at least it it generates a feed-through from the individual decision maker to these more macroscopic things, patterns of inequality and so on. And of course that's that's cyclical, right? Because the the output of my behavior um and yours, you know, is the input to the behavior of other people who are in our in our society, in in our social network. Right? They have to take what for me is is the the ecology of my decisions becomes for other people the input into their decisions. So there's this you know, that's how you can kind of get these macroscopic things going.

Um so I think I think you know this is more than evolutionary psychology can look at things that social scientists already know and go, here might be a reason for that. I think at the best we can do a better job of saying, okay, at the individual level, what's going on? What's going, you know, what's going on for the people involved, what they might be picking up on, what are they trying to do? What are their goals? What are the emotions that are getting triggered in them, the reactions, and so on. And how might that feed up to some of the stuff we you know that we know happens at the population level? Right. So it's a it's an exercise just to make sure, or to just restate it, it's reverse engineering not just any old particular phenomenon, but phenomena that in

especially involves sort of important social dynamics and not just accepting sort of the naive idea of like, well, of course, uh, low, low income or high inequality areas have high crime. And there's just sort of a cartoonish arrow from that to like bad person who's cackling. But it's taking seriously and respecting every agent is an evolved being who, if we have some sort of high-level theory about what their goals or motivations might be and why those might make sense, if we can respect those and reverse engineer those, it might give us purchase into thinking about what are some of the highest probability interventions or changes. So if this is why it makes sense for somebody to do crime, then if we

understand that, then we know how to intervene on that or what to change. Is that sort of a fair characteristic? Yes. Absolutely. I mean, and I think there's a couple of aspects to the, I mean, I agree with everything you said, but I think you can go further. So one is um, you know, a lot of the things people come up with in public policy are pretty silly. You know, just put put put put put uh traffic light labeling on food and obesities, you know, get solved or something like that. They're really silly when you think about it. And only if you had quite an impoverished notion of what might really be going on would you would you really think, oh, that's how we're going to solve it, right? Yeah, and um now social scientists make this point very frequently, but what they tend to

say is, well, that's because policymakers often individualise what's really a social structural phenomenon. But I mean that sort of right to a point, but kind of obscure because it's like, well, where does social structure come from? And yeah, what how does that impinge causally on individuals? But they're right to point out that a lot of the remedies people come up with are pretty silly. So so you know y y that's a way in which we can do better. But secondly, to say about the reverse engineering thing, I think there's sort of two levels of reverse engineering that happen in evolutionary social science, if you want to call it that. There's the reverse engineering of the mind itself. You know, what computational problems it's trying to solve and why is it solved them that

way when it, you know, why why was that the way that that that uh you know w what's the adaptive logic of the kinds of mechanisms that exist in the individual mind but then there's if you have some aggregate pattern how does that arise from individuals and I I don't think that's the same reverse engineering problem and it's you know it is somewhat mysterious right we can all um we can all agree that we need to have an effective, you know, we all desire an effective mechanism for coordinating our behavior, you know, in some if we're going to be interacting socially. But we might still end up with a really odd mechanism for doing that, that's kind of, you know, somehow a byproduct of you know weird founder effects and who got there first and

compromises between different people at different times and just frozen accidents of various kinds. So you can't look at aggregate human institutions, for example, and say, Oh, well, that's because in every mind there's a little kind of homunculus that's wanted that institution and was an involved motivation to have it, right? There's a whole so there's another reverse engineering, which is I don't even know if reverse engineering is the right term. I suppose it is, right? Which is to say, well, how did the cloud get from the individual drops? And you don't see in the individual drops a little you know picture of the cloud going, I want to be a cloud, you know, when I get together with some other people, I want to be a

cloud. So I think that that that has been a slight, you know, I'm I'm a great admirer of a lot of the EbSight work, for example, on law, the psychology of law, you know, why do laws think why do legal codes see certain things as bad and other things as not so bad? And why is intent important in some cases, but perhaps not in others, and you know why are certain punishments seem you know judged to be suitable and so on. You know, I really like the program. It makes sense that we would come up with institutions that broadly make intuitive sense to us. But just because you, you know, the three of us here agree on, you know, that there should be incentives, there should be penalties for people for doing

bad stuff, and we don't want it to happen, that doesn't make it a legal system. For it to become a legal system, a whole lot of other stuff, a load of social processes need to happen. And it might end up being a system that is not the system that any of us quite envisaged at the outset. Right. Right. And it might even be counterintuitive to all of us. Uh to some Yeah, we might say, how did we end up here? Yeah. Like what we how did things get so shitty? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean it just it it will be counterintuitive to a point, but I think social scientists overstate this point and they're going to say well cultures can involve all kinds of weird stuff that don't even, you know, they just sort of supervene on all the

individual minds involved. If if even the three of us couldn't figure out how our own legal system worked, you know, that would cause it to change, I think. Right. You know, it might not be it might not be the one that any of us would have bite dreamed up on their own, but it it would ha it would be somehow constrained by the individual minds. Yeah. Right. It it it it's just to me that that reverse engineering is not quite the right word because with reverse engineering it implies that there is there's design, uh and there and there is a an efficiency and an elegance in the design to serve a particular purpose. And when we're talking about systems in the mind, I think that is a valid perspective to

take. There often is design. There we uh natural selection often does hit on efficient, elegant solutions to solving adaptive problems. Uh but when it comes to institutions, um, there often is no uh design. It often does not serve any larger purpose. Uh shit happens, right? Um and and and culture and history uh is uh often just, you know, path dependent and depending on whatever random shit happened before it. And if if if you can rewind the tape and it you know the and and the institution might come out differently if if you replay the events of history. Um and so uh it's not so much of a reverse engineering as it is just sort of tracing back the causal steps. Yeah. Uh no, I mean it's what in economics they call micro foundations, right?

Yeah, things like inflation. It's not it's not no one designed inflation. Inflation doesn't have a function. Well, no, depending on what yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean i i it it's a law-like product of actors that have interests. Right. Right. But I agree that the design stance isn't really quite right when it comes to societal level things. And social science gets itself, and actually including evolutionary models, get themselves into all kinds of muddles, you know, in this way, right? They say things like, what's the function of ritual? And what's the function of religion and so on? I'm not sure those are even I'm not sure those are even coherent questions. So there's a sort of there is a there is a coherent psychological question in there, which

is why do people enjoy rituals and find them satisfying? Or you know what what keeps people going back to a particular kind of rin religious institution, or moving away from one and towards another that they find more attractive in some way. And I think that's you know, Manvia Salinger Singh has talked about selective subjective selection, and I think that's you know that's useful. And there are other ways of thinking about this. So I I think the design stance is the wrong stance, but there isn't there's no doubt a causal flow from the mind to those things. And that, you know we recreate them and reimagine them and and reinterpret them and and do stuff purposely that sort of feeds into their evolution.

So I completely agree. I think reverse engineering, you know, I think that the a really bad way to do social scientist is say, look, there's this group of people who are, you know, all all doing something, maybe it's good for their group that they do that. You know, I just you know, or maybe it has a function at the group level. I I don't really think I I think informally that can sometimes be right. Like, you know, we all agree we want to have a convention about which side of the road we drive. So we it's all in our interest to uphold that and to be annoyed with people who who depart from it. So you could, I guess, informally say this convention about all driving on the same as the you know has a function for the for society, but it's not it's not it's it doesn't have a

function the same way that the eye does. That's just saying all of the people kind of agree that this is a good idea and then we really ought to stick for it. And there's very uh few people arguing that we should give up this convention, you know. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean it this does depart from at least some traditions or ways of thinking about culture. So there there are some scholars who do think that the design stance uh is often appropriate to take toward culture. Um this is these would be people uh you know like uh Joe Henrik and colleagues who argue that uh cultural group selection might explain a lot of cultural phenomena. They've made this argument uh regarding uh monogamy. There are other scholars who think that uh maybe this explains religion, um maybe this

explains the the ways in which uh groups around the world have tools and subsistence strategies uh that are uh well suited to their ecology, that uh, you know, over time their culture has evolved to adapt them to their particular um uh climate. Um so do you depart from these approaches? Do you think that they are overstating or or or or how where do you where do you fit in? So I think I think they capture a a a correct intuition, right? Which is that um, you know, we we but we all agreed that social processes can be path dependent and then get stuck in various kinds of sticky equilibria and so on. And if they're you know, if if they're awful for people, if they cause people to not be able to subsist or uh you know experience excessively high levels of

conflict, then people are going to seek available alternatives, right? So you will get a flow away from the institutions that work. Um now uh so I I don't sort of disagree with the phenomenon. I just think that my causal interpretation of it will be rather different. I don't think this is at all like uh you know, natural selection produces genes by random mutation, and then some of them are good and you know for individual organisms and they stay around. But I don't think it's like that. I think it's much more like purposive agents Maybe say, God, you know, we're we're stuck in a really bad equilibrium here. You know, we're we're in cycles of retaliation. I'm just going to opt out of this. I'm going to walk away, or I'm going to go and you know join that coalition over there

because it's, you know, that's that's a different causal account that is going to lead to the same observation that generally speaking, you know, societies Or i you know, institutions that are acceptable to enough of the people enough of the time are going to have a better chance of stabilizing than ones that, you know, i the reductio ad absurdum I I don't know, trying to wear fur coats in the desert or something, right? But I mean the the causal account of that is not that there were people there there's a whole societies of people who are wearing fur coats in the desert and they died out. You know, I don't think that's like I think people say, I want to take this coat off, I'm hot. You know, that's a different account of the causality.

Right. Yeah. It it um uh viewing culture w with uh a design stance and in too monomaniacal of a way can cause you to forget the underlying agent um or the set of agents that are um contributing to the to the phenomenon. Uh and when you focus too much on the culture itself as a i as a kind of evolutionary process, you forget that there are agents involved who are making intelligent choices uh at every step of the way. Uh and it's often more insightful to foreground those agents uh in in the analysis to to figure out how the culture got to the the place it currently is. Yeah, I mean I think it th I completely agree with that, though I do think it depends slightly what question you're answering, right?

So if you're asking, for example, a question in um developmental psychology, you know, the kid comes into a world in which there are particular types of social relations or particular linguistic conventions, for example, and pretty much, you know, just has to figure out what those are. I mean you know, we know that we we know that over generations actually, speakers and learners do exert a an influence on languages that change them, right? That's how languages change. But sort of for the individual kid, it's as if you know it is as if the culture is out there and their their primary task is to, you know, just get hold of it. So d I think depending on the grain of analysis, uh sometimes I think you perhaps have to

zoom in and out between uh you know, the agency approach and the kind of and the more um what is the existing social structure uh approach but there there's there's an interesting dynamic between those two things you know uh I I guess that's that's that's the the point to make sure yeah I mean I think even the example of sort of the person who walks away from the culture right I mean you can imagine uh a cultural institution that then comes up. So your example of sort of, you know, there's there's there's a situation that the culture has produced that's bad enough that people want to leave. Uh you can imagine then, if you're thinking scientifically, from a dynamics, I mean maybe dynamics are the right is the right language, but sort of um if there's a cultural

institution, then that sort of prevents people from leaving, right? Or to the degree that structure exists, then that allows for a dynamic of sort of more exploitative culture. Right. Or so, so like even in that model, you can use, you can use the fact that there are people have motivations and it's not just random genes. But then you can actually import that people usually want to leave when things get bad. Therefore, you can kind of predict from a scientific perspective or a dynamics perspective that if, like, for example, the leadership in a culture wants to exploit the people, then there has to be some structure either already in the environment, like they're stranded in an island and they can't leave, or that they impose some way of

constraining outside choices. And then you can sort of understand why that would exist, or when there's more constraint in outside options, why there's more exploitation. Yeah. Yeah. And I I mean, on that note, I think many people, many social scientists have argued that the central Um problem of social science is to do with power and power asymmetries. I don't know if this is necessarily right. You could probably argue the case, but and I think evolutionary psychology has a potentially quite a lot to say about that. Yeah. That that is kind of difficult to grasp from a more uh culturalist perspective, because you know, there are things that are sort of good for everyone and so on. But power and conflict is something evolutionary psychology sort of naturally lends itself

to understanding because a basic thing about independently reproducing animals is that their interests are not aligned. The interests of men are not necessarily aligned to those of women, the interest of unrelated, even even of siblings is not actually perfectly aligned, even of parents and offspring, right? So you've got in the classes of individuals whose interests become aligned or are are just structurally more closely aligned as in members of family families, or become aligned uh th through shared reproduction, as in uh uh affinal relationships in laws, you know, or through in through situation, right? Which is, you know, w we collaborate, we are in a coalition, we go fishing together. But fund our fundamental Darwinian interests are not perfectly aligned, right?

So that actually says conflict and attempts to influence the behavior of others will be fairly central to human existence. Yeah. And in a way you we we have quite a specific notion of that. And of course, you know, you don't you don't have to be a Marxist to also know that that's a huge theme in social science sciences, right? Conflict of interest. So I think we actually do quite a good job of getting hold of that. What are the complications? Why do people attempt to change the behavior of others? Why do others sometimes want to resist that? Whether they can succeed to do so or or not, of course depends. But um I I think I think there's we give quite a rich account of that. That maybe we don't give ourselves credit for how important an insight that is.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, and I mean I actually that reminds me, I mean, 'cause with we've David and I have been talking a lot. And I think like of David's work and Dan, I think your work too. And maybe you guys are representing a new shift in the evolutionary social sciences, which is sort of there's a difference between the surface level in David's terminology, propaganda of why we're doing what we're doing when a lot of it is about power and resources. And it's again respecting that there's this evolved design that really should care about this. It is important. It's like, does my kids starve or not? You know, and do I feel safe or not? Um, but then kind of laying bare that we're all using this power

resource-focused evolved psychology. And that's what's really driving a lot of dynamics. So what do you mean by the surface level? You mean the the the the discussive justifications people give yeah exactly so like you know ideologies to sort of you know that that um uh I mean David's got probably 30 examples off the top of his head so maybe I'll just let him talk about it because uh yeah yeah so um when we when we discuss, you know, what what goes on in the political sphere um uh and we explain why we're uh pursuing various courses of action, why we want this particular policy or not, what what our political party is striving for, um we very rarely, if ever, uh frame things in a uh in a naked self-interest perspective or in a we just want power, we just want to uh

monopolize resources for ourselves, we just want to grab goodies from the state. The way instead that we frame um our political activity is much more high-minded. We're pursuing these abstract ideals. And this isn't to say that those sometimes might have some truth to it, but uh there is an interest in um not being completely upfront about the agenda of any particular political coalition. If I come out and say as a politician, all I want is power, I'm just a power-hungry guy, no one's going to vote for me. And so there is an incentive built into the system where uh revealing the objectives of any of the agents within the system is counterproductive to those agents' objectives. And so often what you see is that the the verbal descriptions of the underlying phenomena

will uh uh be out of sync with the the actual explanations that are driving things. And those uh discrepancies will will often be in the interests of many of the agents in the system. At least that's uh that's my my current way of thinking about it. 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 I do also think that abstract ideas do have some causal force, some causal sway over people. But I think even that also is um I think even that is is explicable within the within an evolutionary psychology framework in in something like the following way, right? That um in for for for highly cognitive beings that are figuring out in a really contingent way what to do in their environment and and often

collaborating. Of course, I've immediately got a huge interest to cause you to do to coordinate my way or do the activity I, you know, that would be useful for me to be done. And there's various ways I can do that, but one of the obvious ways is actually persuading you that you know it's a good idea by making you see certain aspects of it that actually, you know, uh so that's that that's where that's where what you're describing comes about. but also I'm that you know, w we live in a partner choice ecology, or we're involved in partner choice ecologies where blatant self contradictions in my in my kind of characterizations of why we should do certain things are gonna show up. So there's a sense in which having you know used the argument that um

everyone should uh uh everyone should have um butter with you, Dave. If I then say, but the other Dave shouldn't have butter, right? Which might be in my interest, immediately you say, Well, this this guy, you know, he doesn't make any cognitive sense, right? He's not so I I do actually think that ideas do acquire a causal force, even quite abstract ones and values and all of these things, but partly for reputational reasons, because you think, well, what would how persuasive would be someone who clearly doesn't, you know, argues one thing now and five minutes in five minutes' time would be arguing the opposite? I'll kind of know that there's no discursive reliability, and you know, that that says

something about the interaction with that partner. So, in a strange way, you become kind of bound to uh quite abstract ideas. And this also goes for all sorts of things like um religious restrictions and moral restrictions of various kinds. And this is not to deny that people had resource and power interests for doing these things in the first place, but because otherwise you're seen immediately as someone who's kind of not credible, not reliable. So uh I I think that kind of relatively abstract ideas can become important causes of behaviour because we're evaluated according to our you know, and then you get this sort of strange tension where, as you say, many um political uh actors are an odd mixture of kind of

genuine attempts at intellectual consistency and coherent worldview, and doing strategically whatever just suits their agenda the most. It's just a weird kind of hybrid between those two things. Yeah, absolutely. But but even there, there's still something of a d disconnect between the explicit uh narratives about why what's being done is being done and the actual processes underlying it. So the narrative is that I just want butter for all, and that's what's driving my behavior. In reality, what's driving my behavior is I want power and resources, uh, but uh in a in an environment where being spotted as a hypocrite is going to thwart that goal. And so I better say that we I want butter for all and I I better appear consistent uh uh

about that as much as possible so as not to sabotage myself. Uh and that's the underlying. I can't privately be found depriving butter to my neighbor or something or you know, exactly. And so in pursuing my agenda for power or or status or whatever, uh and my calculations about the likely social reactions of different tactics and people and and being being worried that people will think I'm a hypocrite, that is what's leading to the the butter uh spreading behavior uh and not an intrinsic desire for spreading butter no to to use your your wonderful analogy yeah and and and then then that's also where I don't know if this dynamic word dynamics or selection comes in. So from your persp from anyone's perspective, if everybody finds the thing agre uh

agreeable, then that's great, right? Like if if if if if I model that everybody, whatever kind of, you know, there's this metaphor of you just throw pasta on the wall until it sticks. If everybody sort of accepts this thing that I've calculated will benefit me and my extended interests, and everybody does, in fact, agree with it, that's wonderful. And that's great. And there might be sort of selection for those kinds of representations. But often people will be like, no, that sucks. I we lose out. And David, you know, in that example, David's like, I don't have butter. And then it just becomes a thing of sort of, well, are we are Dan and I in that example? Um, you know, we might go along with it because we have enough power and David doesn't have

enough power. So we don't really care if if everybody goes along with with this narrative. It's just matters, do the right people go along with it? Do enough people agree with it? And you get all the above, right? So there's some things where, and Dave and I talked about this, where you would almost expect that the the putting it in an intuitive folk psychological way, that groups of people would find other groups' political ideas weird. And that's precisely because those ideas or the silliness of other groups' ideas don't occur to the group itself because they're all benefiting from sort of being in on the silliness, right? Like, like, you know, why even like a take a religious idea, right? Like it seems really silly if you're not in the actual buying into the benefits

of that sort of group identity. But from the evolved psychological perspective of all the people who are in that group, um, there's nearly not motivation to like question that because this representation is working for me and I'm getting benefits out of it. So you'd almost predict that there'd be these kind of clines of sort of beliefs look weird to the degree that you are not in the kind of climb of benefits from that group precisely because it's when you get benefits from the group, there's sort of uh a benefit for everybody to sort of go along with what is inconsistency or what is silly. There's just no reason to sort of call it out. Well, not to call it out, but there's a difference between privately believing something

and calling it out, right? And I actually think I think the internalization of uh social systems has been overstated. I think there's lots of evidence people kind of know that things are silly. Yeah. I there's lots of things I think are silly, but I'm not necessarily gonna stand up and say it because I you know, I I care about people's social reaction and I don't care, but I know the people I care about care and you know, all of that. So actually I I think you know that there are we woke the certain kinds of cultural things are incredibly sticky. Uh and that's very interesting. But there are also plenty of historical cases where they're not. You know, like Chinese footbinding, you know, dies out within a few decades.

Everyone says, This is really silly. Why are we doing this? Yeah, I thought you wanted to do this. And and then it just so there's so I actually think people are tracking. I I d I think that we overstated the extent to which people have sort of internalized the social order. There's a real difference in saying, you know, I'm not gonna call that out. I'm gonna put my head above the parapet because I'm not dying from this. and other people look like they might be committed to it, then hey, you know, let's not rock the boat. I think people are risk averse and ambiguity averse. And if I start saying, well, the way we do things is just weird and bizarre and I'm not going to do it anymore, who knows what's going to happen, right?

That's a risky scenario. Whereas the status quo might be weird, but it's a weirdness we all sort of find moderately predictable. Yeah. You know, it's it's stabilized somehow in interaction. So I think that the status quo has a kind of in fact I in in a in a in a way, you know, w we could debate about what culture is, but I would say that you know one definition of culture is the weird stuff that's got stabilized by its you know by its stability. The weird stuff we know, the weird stuff that is somehow kind of uh uh uh has congealed to the extent that uh it makes everyday life somewhat you know sufficiently predictable. May not be great, may not really correspond to what any of us would ideally want.

But hey, you know, you think of the cost of trying to do something else, what who knows what would happen if I said, okay, I refuse to work in this way, I refuse to go along with these norms, I'm gonna do some other thing now. I have no idea how everyone would react. So there's a sense in which we we shouldn't I think we shouldn't we shouldn't assume that A every member of group X, you know, whatever group X means knows what the culture is and agrees completely on the values. And B everyone privately believes it's a good idea. I don't think I don't think either of those things is generally true. Yeah, that's a very it's a very grown up way to sort of think about culture and it's a very naive way to think about culture the other way, which is just sort of what you just said,

you know, which I think is honestly probably a very um um natural way to think uh for exactly these reasons, is like the evolved psychology is sort of calculating am I gonna rock the boat? And to the extent I don't, you know, it's sort of a bunch of white lies because it's not hurting anybody, but it might be in an in the aggregate. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I for me, I think what this is reminding me of, uh it's a word I've been thinking about a lot. I feel I feel like it's an extremely underappreciated word. Uh Stephen Pinker wrote a book on it. It's called coordination. I think we're what we're talking about is coordination. Um and it is often preferable to coordinate on a suboptimal equilibrium than to not

coordinate at all. Right. And so, you know, uh Thomas Schelling famously uh made this point where he said, you know, if two people are trying to meet up in New York and they have no way of communicating, they don't have cell phones, and they just need to meet at the same time and place, where are they going to meet up? Uh and he uh brought you know people into the lab and asked them this question, and the most common answer was Grand Central Station at noon, right? And it's not because Grand Central Station is the best place to meet in New York City. That's that's the most exciting place that they're gonna have the best time. And it's not that noon is the best time for people to meet, it's just that those two, you

know, that time and that place is just the most salient to people. It's just a salient landmark, and and you can count on it being salient to the other person, and you can count on the other person knowing that it's going to be salient to you, and so on and so on down the the chain of of recursion, and that's why it's just a focal point. And we have all these our culture is made of these kinds of focal points. And many of them are just not ideal. It's just it just happens to be the case that these things are sailing and they work and getting us on the same page, uh, but they're not necessarily the best page, right? And and it's because coordinating on the best page is actually extremely hard, because

coordinating at all is extremely hard. And so we're often lucky to coordinate on any page at all than we are to coordinate on on the best page. Yeah. And um so and sociology is good as a discipline about understanding this. Like there's lots of sociological theory where particularly the sort of micro expectations of everyday life, you know, how it is you go into an office, how it is you shop in a supermarket, whatever. I don't think anyone wants to say this is because it's, you know, economically rational to do this or it's optimal. It's just because life's full of uncertainty and you've got to know how to carry on. Right. And so i when in doubt, turn up at 9 a.m. and wear a tie. You know, I mean it's you know, because you otherwise you don't know.

You don't know what's gonna happen. There might be a completely different way of doing this business. But I don't know what it is, and I didn't you know, but it's Grand Central doing f certain things, our Grand Central Station at midday. Yeah, I know that you know you can probably predict that I'll do it, I'll predict that you'll do it. We don't want to cause each other too much prediction error. And so that that's I I think a lot of the the stability of um of things that we observe is not necessarily that people have kind of are deeply internalized, you know, have some sort of adaptation to kind of internalize the norms of the environment and then just do them unquestionably. It's just it's kind of hard to see what the alternative is.

That was there, that was mutually salient. It's not costing me so much. You can bet your life that, you know, if Grand Central Station was very dangerous for some reason or in you know enormously expensive to get to, I would do something else, or I'd just I'd give up on coordinating with you that day. So so you know, the strategic actor is still there, weighing their costs and benefits. But just a lot of the time, as you say, the the the cost is fairly small or uh and and the benefit well, the benefit structure is unknown, but it at least sort of being able to predictably proceed in some way. You know, people don't want to be alone, they don't want to be outcasts, they don't want to lack social support.

So if you don't really know, you know, and we don't know what each other's thinking, right? We you know we have some idea, but we don't really know. I don't know what you might do tomorrow, where you might go. But so if I can just sort of pick up on simple salient coordination points like that, I'm gonna do it, you know, absent fairly strong incentives to do something else. Yeah. And then characterization of what people are experiencing on the ground, and maybe this is a transition to some of the work, is my understanding, uh, Daniel, is that your work is arguing look, even taking very basic assumptions about evolutionary approaches, we actually can maybe do a better job of sort of doing a few interventions.

Like, for example, um, if if adopting the perspective you just had, I'm just sort of, you know, at we're, you know, showing up at nine with a tie, doing my best, getting groceries, feeding my kid, getting them to bed. And I'm like, you know, there is income inequality and there's poor people, and I don't quite understand why that works. And I can imagine either like leaving things the way they are, or punishing poor people, or giving poor people money. And those are three different options. And I have a no idea which one would be better. And that makes sense that I wouldn't know that. And it would just be like, you know, and and I would be sort of worried because I'm like, I don't know. I don't want to disrupt the stability of my thing.

But but what I understand your and I think all of us, what we what we try to do is then step back and look at the dynamics that's unusual for a normal person because we have science and because we have data and we have theory, and then say something of like, look, of all those three options, even though it might run counter to somebody in this scenario, my thing of like it doesn't seem fair to give somebody like free groceries because I have to work for them, But maybe I wouldn't care if it turned out that that actually creates a better environment for all of us. And so including your kid, yeah. Yeah, including my kid. So right, yeah. Can you kind of so is that fair? And is that yeah? No, I think that is fair.

Uh that is absolutely fair. And I mean, this is partly about sort of externalities and emergent effects, right? So, well, if everyone knew that they had groceries, they wouldn't have to take certain kinds of risks and then chunk that through, you know, multiply that by tens of millions of people, and you think, oh, well, actually, you know, down the line, what's going to be the consequence of that? So I absolutely I do think that. Um I I'd like to distinguish what I do from sort of nudging, which is popular. I mean, even though I'm, you know, I've I've contributed to the search myself, actually, but the there's a certain kind of oh well, the mine's kind of weird. It's you know, the its adaptations work in particular ways.

So if you just get make make people, you know, sign their tax return at the top instead of the bottom, you know, it's gonna save billions of dollars and so on. And I yeah. Right approach. Yeah. It's uh a a friend of mine, and I think it's just to interrupt, it's they describe it as cheat codes. There used to be this thing when you play video games, you know, if you press up, down, left, right, A B, A, B in the right pattern, you can have like infinite lives and you can win a video game. Yeah. It's like the sort of like if you just sort of if you just put your body in the right way, you'll never feel pain again. You know, it's like a cheat code absurd, and and that that's sort of like power pose.

That's that's the cheat code. Yeah, just do the power pose and then uh I'll win it live. Yeah. Well, yeah, but so I mean, it's but what is it that's different about that? I mean on the face of it, that's not very different from what you said, David. So I I suppose it's um if there's a difference, maybe it's the following that you that so i people's decision making, you have to understand both the structure of the agent, they've got certain motivations, they've got certain uh priorities, and the structure of their ecology. Right. And if you think, well, if their ecology is structured in a certain way, no wonder they're doing X. I think that's where our perspective is on putting it. No wonder they're doing X.

No wonder they're very likely to do X. Yeah. Right. If they can't get enough to eat. Yeah. Or they don't know that they don't know that they're going to predict to be able to get enough to eat. Think about that. What's that going to do? And so so in in in a way I I to the extent that I talk about interventions, I don't really mean the the um you know the uh those classical nudge type things. I mean sure, you know, make your pension scheme opt-in rather than opt out, you know, what whatever, uh sorry, opt out rather than opt-in, then you're probably going to get more, you know, sure, I don't deny that that's true, but I think I think I think in a way we can go a bit further than that, which is to say this perspective gives you a principled

understanding of why certain manipulations of the ecology or certain structurings of the ecology might lead probably to certain outcomes. I mean, just to sort of to to temper our enthusiasm for how great we are. It's not like evolutionary science. It doesn't work in the following way. We know how the mind works perfectly. And so we chunk forward and go, what's going to happen when these minds interact in ecology? In fact, it's much more iterative thing, or we kind of know a certain amount of what minds happen in ecology, and that makes us think, oh, let's peer down into the individual mind and try and figure out what the hell's going on. So it's you you almost described it as if you know we solve the problem of the individual

mind and then we can go out into society. But in fact, we don't there's so much we don't know about the individual mind yet that we have it has to proceed more chaotically than that, in which we you know we know some things at the aggregate and then we go, I wonder how that works at the individual level, and that can strange our theorizing, you know. So we have to be humble about what we're doing, we haven't got it all figured out, you know. Yeah, for sure. But uh I think at the same time though, it a little bit of understanding of the mind uh does go a long way. Uh and it's certainly better than than no understanding. And so for example, I remember seeing one of your talks um uh it was about some inter

interventions that were tried to reduce levels of teen pregnancy. Yes. And the way of thinking was that if we just educate these people about contraception, you know, give them, you know, give them condoms, you know, tell them about all the ways that they can uh delay child rearing, like, you know, responsible adults like us, then uh we'll see teen pregnancy rates decline. It's just a big misunderstanding on their part. They're not understanding uh, you know, the the right things to do, which is just an education between sex and reproduction or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's just an education problem. And so they tried these programs where they're they were educating uh the these people uh

and you know, no results. It didn't work. Right. And in that case, I think we have a pretty poor understanding of the mind, that these people are just misinformed or uneducated. I think you know that is uh one assumption about how a mind could be structured. It's a bad one, uh, and it turns out to be wrong. But even, you know, being a little bit better than that assumption can take you a long way. Even just trusting the fact that these people are making the best strategic decisions for themselves given their environment gets you uh much further and in a in a much smarter direction than let's just teach them about contraception. No, absolutely. And that is a good example. And also it's it's ironic as many people have pointed out that teen pregnancy rates have

been falling for decades, actually. And it is a bit like Pinker talks about the decline of violence, right? This is a major, a major fact about human behaviour over the last hundred years is that people are having their first baby later and later and later, and that's a part of the decline in global fertility. So it's sort of funny that in the midst of this, this incredibly lawlike thing that as living standards become high, and particularly as women's opportunities become better, you know, they shift their reproduction later. And also as life expectancy increases, that's part of the the picture. And yet we say, oh but these people, these particular people, which is a basically working class people in an increasingly middle class society, they must just be wrong.

They must have no idea what's going on. It's like humanity in general is pretty smart and tailors their behavior to ecology. So it's funny to spit out to single out a particular subgroup and except for those people, you know, who've just got no idea and we need to get give them some lessons. So yeah, I I think that is a nice example. Also, there's a strange bedfellow here, really, which is lots of social scientists, more people of a more qualitative interpretation of approach, had said, Look, you know, you should just talk to young people who have their babies young in deprived communities. And they'll say things like, you know, why wait? I don't see any point in waiting, you know, that this really is things aren't going to be

better in ten years, or my mum's around to look after her now, but she might not be around in a while, you know. Quite realistic and sensible things, right? And so i i in my teenage pregnancy work, there was a strange sort of bedfellow thing that really critical social scientists who, you know, were all about giving voice to people from marginalized communities and very qualitative, and me with my kind of evolutionary models, who on the face of it you might think we might have nothing in common actually are saying much the same thing. Yeah. Which is these people are, you know, they've got sensible motivational structures, they're making sense of the ecology they find themselves in. It's sort of daft to look at them from a different ecology and say, Oh, those people are

just getting it wrong without making any attempt to understand the real structure of decision making that's going on. Well, we all all of which is to say that I don't think there's any need for evolutionary psychology to have a big fight with social scientists who believe in the importance of context. I actually think it's very, very compatible. Yeah. You have to be careful. It's about levels of explanation. You know, evolutionary psychologists are really interested in mechanisms, types of psychological and cognitive mechanism, and social scientists are interested in how does that play out in a particular context, how does the environment shape you know the outputs of that. But I don't think we need to have a you know r reports of a sort of

irreconcilable difference of perspective, I think, are much exaggerated actually. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, one one, you know, there there's the moralization part too. Like I think people, you know, it the coordination of sort of oh, let's all pick on the low-income early teen pregnancy people, you can see how that sort of gets moralized. It creates a market for people to sort of use that moral outrage to then profit from that. And I think one, what what you're saying, and what we're saying, is that taking an evolutionary perspective, if done well, in avoiding the moralization component, but just looking and saying, what are the sensible things that these actors are doing? Um, it sort of gives respect to what otherwise is sort of playing the

moralization game, which is sort of not taking a far enough step back. Um, like I even think about this, you know, my son is now in kindergarten and the education system, and David has alluded to this, sort of, you can see how there were there's probably people who are sort of well intended, but sort of have this metaphor of if I'm the teacher, I need to come in and teach the children how to do things. And it's sort of a self-aggrandizing narrative. And you can imagine how that sort of gets selected for institutionally, but it's different than taking a step back and sort of saying, How do kids actually learn? You know, and it might actually involve teachers not feeling like they're critical for

the child's education, or I if if it's not for me, you know, I'm gonna save this kid. It's just more of like, what does the kid need? And it might look very different. It might be more hands off. It might be letting kids fight, but none of that's moralized, right? Um, one way or the other. So I think that's a good thing. Well, what I mean is I think but right, because we are um social beings, when we see some people doing something, we've we have a strong prior that that's because they've got some set of beliefs and desires that's quite idiosyncratic. Right. So oh, these teenage mums, they must just believe something weird about the world, or they must have some really quite unfortunate set of desires that makes them selfish, or you

know, these things. Yeah, or f you know, fat people are lazy. Right. Like it's another one. Oh, they've got this different body type or body state. Oh, it must be that they have some belief or desire or you know, kind of sort of theory of mind level propensity. Yeah. And so for and then you just that kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room. So rather than saying how do minds in general work, like how do minds in general just you know regulate energy intake and energy output, or indeed fertility decisions, any of these things, you kind of go, Well, this group of people, they must have some particular set of proclivities or beliefs or whatever. And then, I mean, first of all, I don't think that gets you terribly far.

I think I think, I mean, other than as you say, you sort of stigmatize that group of people, or they've just got the wrong, they're too impulsive or something. But then also you go down this sort of really non-explanatory rabbit hole where they're presumed to be impulsive because that's their behavior, and their behavior is you know you explain because they're impulsive, and then you dream up, you know, we'll have a program at school in which you'll wait for two marshmallows and somehow you know, years later you're gonna it's gonna be you're gonna be revolutionarily different. None of which I think really probably works, you know. So um so what what what we need to be doing is looking at people as organisms with capacities.

You know, when you look at birds migrating to Africa and stuff, you know, you you all you're in awe. They didn't know where to go. They didn't know where to go. They don't know where to go. What are they doing? You know, they're going to somewhere We need to teach them where to go. We need to teach them where to go. You know, you don't so you look at them and you say that's kind of a marvel of evolution plus sensory ecology, they're figuring out certain things. And but you don't go, oh, you know, those people, I really need to persuade them that you know they're I only need for those birds not to fly south of the winter. So it is a slightly different perspective, you know. It asks us to put aside a lot of our intuitive cognition about the reasons for people's

actions, you know, which is to do with beliefs and mental states that they hold, and say, you know, hang on, just to think about sort of let's just think about them as organisms trying to solve problems. Uh so it's a different stance, in short. Yeah. I think that's really profound in a way that I mean, I'm not trying to be self-congratulatory, but I mean, until you get something like a theory of evolution or cognitive science or evolutionary psychology, I think it's really hard as people, if we are just trying to like design a society, what's the alternative? I mean, the idea that you sort of say, well, look, I'm gonna be treat them as organisms and start off not by immediately just latching onto this very natural thing of essentializing

and using my folk psychology, but being more scientific about it. I mean, I think that's like a really profound shift. And I don't think it's one, as you say, that's sort of it's certainly not happening. Uh uh, I mean, maybe in small examples or small cases it is, but I think that's a real, I mean one could argue that's a real advance of s social science that when it does happen, um, you know, it would it's a very different way of integrating science into politics or social dynamics. I think yes, I mean I think it's possible economists would say that that's what they've been doing for a long time. Sure. Um I mean in the sense that they're you know that yeah they under and they under understand

individuals to be strategic agents who are operating under constraints and they also understand the micro macro problems so yeah I'm actually you know I think I think in a way philosophically a lot of economics has got there even though I don't necessarily agree with all the detail but possibly just just their notion of the agent is quite impoverished right or or or rather actually just very kind of a bit content free. Yeah. Yeah, no, I I I think yeah, economics has has gotten part of the way there, and I think we have a lot to learn from economists and and there should be more integration, I think, between uh economic models and evolutionary psychology. But yeah, I think if if there's one problem there is that their their model of the

strategic agent is either uh poorly specified, underspecified, or the details are wrong. The the goals that are being pursued aren't quite right. If you have a good, rich understanding of what the agent is actually pursuing and how they might rationally pursue it, then you can you really got a stew cook in in terms of uh explanatory power. Um speaking of stew, I really want to get your uh take on obesity. Uh this this this blew my mind. I I read something of yours. Uh you you were talking about this. So, my go-to example of evolutionary mismatch, and I think it's pretty much every time I hear an evolutionary psychologist talking about mismatch. I know what you're doing. So mismatch is this idea that the environment in which we evolved is very different from

the environment that we now uh inhabit. Uh, and that can lead to uh various self-uh sabotaging behaviors in the modern environment because we weren't prepared for this, you know, new world of of junk food and and so forth. So the go-to example is that you know, uh high sugar, high-fat foods were really scarce in ancestral environments. And now we live in the modern world and they're everywhere and they're cheap and easy to eat. And we just gorge ourselves on these high fat, high sugar food. And as a result, we have, you know, we have all these diseases. We have diabetes and obesity and heart problems. And this is all just an example of mismatch. And as far as I'm aware, this is the most popular example that evolutionary psychologists

give of mismatch. And you have come in and you have uh destroyed this example so now I have to think of a different example so well yeah I I think it I think the example you know it's still on its feet but it's a bit it's a bit different than the usual way it's presented right and it's a bit more nuanced so okay people find sweet foods palatable actually lots of mammals do bears do and you know sweet foods are palatable why it makes sense they higher in energy content you know easy to metabolize all of that so people love honey yeah Yeah. And actually, the idea that sweet foods were rare in the ancestral environment is not supported. Hunter-gatherers eat tons of honey. They eat tons and tons of honey.

And so the particular version of the mismatch argument is that we didn't evolve a stop signal because there was never enough to need to stop. right? And we just know that's wrong. There's loads of animal physiology showing that of course animals have stop signals. Of course they do. It's daft to think that they wouldn't, right? You know, yeah. Carnivores find huge carcasses. Well, they're gonna do you know, eat them until their stomachs explode. Of course they're not going to, you know. Small birds can can't fly if they if they're too full, right? So of course we have stop signals. It's a daft idea that we didn't. Um we do pe people you know across the world do find sweet foods very palatable and that

is a thing. You know, I'm not disputing nuts. But the idea that there's kind of no regulation mechanism there, I think is you know is simplistic. Now there is something to the mismatch argument in the sense that there's a huge ride rise in global obesity in the last few decades. And it isn't, by the way, reliably linked to an increase in calorie consumption. So it's really clear that average calorie consumption decline and people still get fatter. But um yeah, that's well repeat that's a really fascinating counterintuitive. Like in the UK in the last 40 years, um, the average BMI has got bigger. There's no real evidence that the average person is eating more calories. But now here's the but. Yeah.

Those caloric measurements are made in the bomb calorimeter, so you burn the food. So, you know, nuts and things like that turn out to have millions of calories on this. But we actually know that if you ate an isocaloric dose, you know, dose of hazelnuts or chocolate, you know, or chocolate bar, you would actually extract more calories from the chocolate bar. So, in other words, there's no increase in the number of calories people are eating, the potential number of calories if you had a metabolism that could fully extract those. What we do know is that foods become in as b uh as food processing becomes industrialized, more of that calorie content becomes bioavailable. So there's a change in the you know, the foods we have now, particularly the kind of so

called ultra processed foods, they're super soft. Um, you know, they have various kind of palatability fixes. They're technologies for getting people to consume more of them and that they do a good job with that. So although you don't you don't eat any more calories uh in a day, you know, potential calories than your ancestors of a hundred years ago, but what you're eating them in, the way it's been engineered is really different. So that that is a sense in which the mismatch is true. So, but our but the idea, you know, I think that I think people do have a sophisticated psychology of satiety and food choice and so on. And also, it's just not the case that everyone just eats sweet foods all the time.

I mean, clearly they don't. Lots of people don't have much of a sweet tooth. I mean, generally speaking, on average, people find sweet food. But you know, you don't eat cookie bars all all day, I take it. I usually could. I could go to the supermarket and buy lots of uh cookies and just eat cookies all the time. Well, just try it for one day. Try it for one day. Yeah, you'll be absolutely sick of it by three in the afternoon. You'll hate it. You know, you'll hate it. And then you won't do it the next day, right? So clearly you've got a mind in there that kind of knows that this doesn't make you feel that good. Yeah. Um, so but our our point about obesity was more that um the the the decision, if we can call it that the physiological decision to store fat is

not always a maladaptive one. So there is there are adaptations whose function it is to increase your adipose stores under certain kinds of conditions, like unpredictability of future access, obviously. We know this is true, it's true in lots of animals. So if you have people who are living under conditions of you know, cues of unpredictability of access, also that the foods that are cheap, which is true under modernity, you know, uh the foods that are cheap and easy to get are these kind of hyper palatable industrialized foods and so on. You know, you've got a cocktail of things that uh that that that you know some of which are evolutionarily novel that lead to some very high BMIs. But it's not like everyone over consumes all of the time.

Clearly that's not true. You know um so I don't know if that sort of answered the question. I think you there's some mismatch in there, but the story needs to be much more nuanced. Yeah No, it's it's it's fascinating stuff. I I I continue to to think that obesity is is such an interesting unsolved mystery. Um and I think the current way of thinking about it is wrong in so many ways. Um just the mere fact that we we think about the way to solve it is just by counting calories and reducing calories, that that seems to be the wrong way to go about it. Uh and and the way to solve, you know, the obesity crisis and say, you know, poor communities, the way to do that is just educate them. Teach them, they just don't know what what the healthy foods are.

Let's put let's put calorie uh numbers, let's put uh nutrition labels on the foods. Surely that'll solve the problem. No, it didn't solve the problem. Um it's yet again another example of us not giving people credit for making uh sound decisions in the environment in which they find themselves. If if you are in a an unpredictable food insecure environment, it actually makes sense that you are physiologically storing fat uh in preparation for food scarcity. Right? If you're in a more stable, predictable environment, uh, it makes sense that you would not be storing as much fat. So I think that's a really uh important insight that that your way of thinking has revealed. Um but um Yeah, I I think I might have to

come up with a different example for mismatch. Now, I'm I'm honestly these days I'm I'm thinking that this idea of evolutionary mismatch is kind of overrated. That um increasingly I'm the the examples that have been brought uh to illustrate the phenomenon have become challenged, you know, one after the other. And now I'm beginning to think that we just put too many of our eggs in that mismatch basket. Yeah. And I think also that the you know, as a mode of explanation, it's a bit sort of you know what it was very popular um sort of a a number of decades ago, and it it kind of constrains our explanatory resources quite a lot. If you say, Oh well, the thing is people kind of have these very fixed preferences for

certain kinds of things, and then you put them in different environments. We we're a hugely generalist species. Yeah. Um so we're very good, and this has been true for many thousands of years. We're very good at living in different kinds of places that offer different kinds of resources and different challenges. So we're super good at learning stuff. You know, we that it cannot be the case that that very specific schedules of behaviors or preferences are highly canalized, you know, just impervious to change. On the other hand, uh you know, so that's definitely true. So we shouldn't over um we shouldn't overdo the mismatch thing and we shouldn't make it sound like that's the only rabbit that we can pull

out of the hat. Oh why do we illusion cycle just explain any ill they just pull the mismatch rabbit out of the hat. But on the other hand you have to admit when you go and see a horror movie and you know the the guys come at you with the axe and that's scary the evolved function of those mechanisms of fear is not to watch horror movies. I mean, that we must agree on that, right? That that that in a sense the people who make horror movies, you know, understand it's a regular property of humans that if you show them monsters and you show them, you know, assailants, they're gonna have a sort of a certain uh emotional reaction to that, and you can kind of play with that in interesting ways. Even even there though, I mean we we we had we had Colton Scrivener on a few episodes ago

and he talked about how morbid curiosity and how actually learning about dangerous things in a safe context is actually uh uh really adaptive and you know plenty of animals have this kind of curiosity about scary things. And y so and so there even there, I think it's it's not really a clear case of us being exploited. It could be that we're we're learning valuable things about dangerous situations. I mean, maybe not not the best learning opportunity in the world, but yeah, yeah. There's a levels of analysis thing, right? That the propensity to have that curiosity, I agree, could well be adaptive. But the individual horror movie is not adaptive, right? The individual you know, that that's well Well I don't know, maybe maybe we could get into

a quibble about what adapted. I mean he's he's got data showing that people uh do better uh in terms of mental health during the pandemic if they watched the movie pandemic. So like yeah I don't know. That's possible that yeah Josh, it's funny because Josh Tiber came up to me at the last HS, but we have to have Josh on soon uh about and he had this exact point. He's like, I he's like, I think he's got he has a uh a ready to go rant against uh the uh mismatch thing. So we should have him on soon to channel this too. But I think I like for me at least, I understood the mismatch thing is a lot of the uh early of psych stuff was just sort of provisional in the point of in service of sort of making an argument, and in probably isn't the right or most sophisticated way to put it,

but it was it was sort of doing this the important necessary service for where people were at, which is just sort of acknowledging that um people's intuitions about what would be a good idea or would make sense on the view that people are rational, it's just sort of saying, Well, look, there's a mismatch then between like what the current environment is like and a past environment. It's like sperm banks are a great example. So if you take the idea that like people are just maximizing their reproductive success, why don't men line up in front of sperm banks? You know, if you're having that argument, then you're, you know, you're saying, well, the North Star isn't uh maximum reproductive success because look, men aren't lining up in

front of sperm banks because they could just have as many kids as possible. Um, I think once you start taking a design stance perspective on the psychology. And once you start thinking about inputs and and that, and if that's the range of discourse you're having, then yeah, I think the mismatch thing probably starts to break down a bit. Um, because then you're you're already kind of past the point of there's a homunculus who's just maximizing their reproductive success. And then and then you're having just a sophisticated discussion about well, well, the evolved psychology clearly the input isn't just like, you know, have I ejaculated? It's that I have a partner and like I need to raise the child because we're a social

species. And there's concern about what resources that child will have because we're ultra competitive. You know, and you're having this discussion, and that's not that's not mismatch anymore. That's just saying, look, there's more software than just have I ejaculated, right? Um and and I don't think you need the mismatch in that more sophisticated second version. Yes. I mean well in a way you could also get at the same point through um through the demographic transition itself, right? Which is the the fertility if people as people got more resources, you know, they didn't have more births. In fact, the opposite exactly. Yes, exactly. And in quite a law-like way, which is extremely interesting.

So clearly what approximately is driving people cannot be, oh, I've got to have as many kids as I can possibly raise. Yeah. Survival. You know, that that that cannot be the an account of the you know, you need to build in these other motivations and these other concerns about the the fate of the offspring that you produce, not just their number, you know, and all that. So absolutely. Yeah. And I think honestly, even this podcast, David, you tell me too, but like in in interviewing every person who's sort of an expert in their area, I feel like the narrative has been even the early of psych work oversimplified how many considerations or design features there were. So like the early mating work was sort of like very oversimplified, or the early parenting

work to the extent there was any, or you know, reproductive investment. And it wasn't explaining things like the demographic transition, or it wasn't explaining things like mate preferences adequately, and then adding the sophistication in. It's almost always that there's more systems that make more sense, but there are just there it's the integration of a lot more sort of decision making, cost benefit analysis. And these systems are much smarter than we even give them credit as evolutionary psychologists. Yeah, and I think that's probably right. And and I think that um the sort of one cue, one Q, one thing. But do you worry at all that in a way then F site becomes unidentifiable? It just says the mind's pretty complex, people have got lots of different motivations, they

take lots of things into account. I don't think that's wrong, but i in a way i that there's a sort of cultural incentive to come up with something more eye-catching than that. Like people only really want one thing, you know, or the people that we're cave we're cavemen and walking. We're cavemen or something, you know. Because if you say difficult decisions like who to marry, you know, a lot of stuff that comes into it. Yeah. You know great. I mean I don't think I I I don't think the situation is that bad because I think you could have models of how these things get integrated now people might uh weight them differently according to the different circumstances and so on. So I I think it's fine, but is there a danger that it just becomes

so uh you know so sort of amorphous that the the the that there isn't really a there isn't something uh a kind of cool new uh secret weapon there anymore. Yeah. I mean I I think yes w it it makes us more similar to other kinds of cognitive science and social science and that we're saying yeah stuff's complicated there's lots of inputs and lots of complicated processes and lots of complicated outputs. But the unique thing that we bring to the table is we have a a theory that can make predictions about what those inputs and outputs and processes are going to be. And we have uh a uh a framework for making those predictions that is actually grounded in evolutionary science and is concilient with the rest of our knowledge of how reality works.

But if I'm just coming in and making predictions about those inputs and processes and outputs, and I in and in and my theorizing is completely disconnected from the natural sciences, well, my theories are just gonna be more likely to be wrong, right? Why not avail myself of our rich body of knowledge about how reality works that we've accumulated over the past few centuries, that we've accumulated in evolutionary biology, uh, ethology, uh, paleontology, and even physics to a certain extent is is relevant in insofar as we are, you know, anti-entropic beings, and that all else equal, the expectation for any phenomenon is gonna be randomness and entropy. And insofar as we see deviations from that, that requires uh an explanation that is

grounded uh in in the nature of natural selection or or of some kind of selective process. Um so that would be my answer to what what we're providing. And in any case, I don't think we should care that much about marketing ourselves and and advertising making sure that like we have a brand that's easily differentiable different from other you know social sciences. I I think that stuff's bullshit. I think we just gotta do good science. And you know I can I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you uh on that. And I and and I also think I don't think we are a separate brand. I mean I really hope that evolutionary psychology ceased to exist because it because it comes becomes uncontroversial that you start from a knowledge that that of course you would

start from what kind of organisms you're dealing with and you know what they're if we were dealing with flying organisms or or s solo living organisms or you know organisms that were deep in the ocean, everything would look different, right? They're social science would look, of course it would, right? So we must start from. So I I mean I completely agree with you, but I think there's been a recurrent tendency in in F-Syc because of the incentive structure of academia to say, you know, everyone was wrong, they said all this stupid stuff for years, but now you know, now having read Hamilton 1964 and Trivers 1972, I can uniquely you know predict that parents will love their children and you know, siblings will be kind of close to each other

off and fight and this is revolutionary and you know, but so let's let's not exaggerate here, guys. You know, that's the thing. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think it comes back to like what's your goal in doing this. And I think, you know, honestly, I think even in the early in any science you have people who are just like, I'm a scientist, I just want to figure out how stuff works. And that's sort of the North Star. And you can just watch there's certain people's careers that that's just consistent with what they did. There's other and there's other people who sort of want to be famous or popular. And that's their north star. And you know what? You can tell that because the way that their career or their trajectory or what they study

or how they study it goes. So yeah, I know. I think, you know, um, I think any any new area of science is selects for certain kinds of people. I think evpsy uh self uh self awarely people would always say it's selected for people who were sort of contrarian uh in the early days because it was contrary to a lot of the accepted work. I think more and more the later generations are less contrarian, uh just because it's more accepted. Well, I think actually there's a really interesting dynamic, but I think the early stuff was contrary contrarian within the academy, right? But common sense within the broader population. Yeah. Right. You know, when b certain messages about, you know, why men life you know wants

want status and why they're you know interested in pretty younger women and all that sort of stuff. Right. In the academy, you know, social science had developed a very different account of those processes. But your uncle who doesn't work in the academy, who doesn't think about this, goes, well, that makes sense to me. So there was this kind of weird thing that it became an almost a sort of um flanking maneuver that within the academy it's you know seemed kind of simplistic, but outside the Academy it got an awful lot of airtime, almost disproportionate to its methodological contributions. And I think now we're coming up with something which is probably doesn't fly so much outside the academy because it's doesn't have those very simple messages.

Right. But uh but uh but within the academy has m less need to be contrarian. Yeah. Right. That's true. That's a really summary. Yeah. It's almost like there was like a populist phase of evolutionary psychology where like we were speaking to the common man and you know, the folk wisdom from grandma and grandpa about how people really worked and men in their wandering eye or whatever, where everyone in the academy was, you know, blabbing about these abst these verbose, you know, abstruse theories about, you know, cultural Marxism or whatever social roles, right, right. And the and we were speaking to the man and speaking their language. But now like we've gotten to the point where like, okay, like we get it, you know, men like

pretty women, you know, parents love their kids. Like can we can we move beyond that and actually like, you know, make some additional insights? The problem, of course, is that once you move beyond that, you start getting into really nuanced, complicated territory about how software works. And that does not speak to the common man because that's just really hard to wrap your head around. Uh, and so we sort of you know run out of runway in terms of our ability to, you know, resonate with people's intuitive psychology. And honestly, I think that's a good thing. You know, we should move beyond our intuitions, just as physics has moved beyond folk physics and biology has moved beyond folk biology.

I think evolutionary psychology needs to move beyond folk psychology. I know Dave has done really wonderful work making that argument. And I think, you know, that's that's the direction we should be headed. Yeah. And I don't think all the PR, like I don't think um, I mean, in some sense, I agree with David that like we should just not worry about what people think. Obviously, I think that's true. I think there's another sense in which, and even this conversation, or even like the throughput of all all everyone's work here, is being respectful of people and it is a virtue still. Right. And sort of not saying people are idiots, but like respecting and understanding why people are doing what they're doing as a first step.

Uh, I think that point, even if people don't understand, like, you know, if I'm talking to my uncle and I'm like, we got to understand, like, you know, the design stance and your robot and their software, it's like, what? What are you talking about? Like, yeah, like I'm not gonna win that. Like, that's not helpful, right? Like, you know, because that's just cognitive science and that's boring or whatever. That's in the weeds. But if but if I say something like, you know, most politicians are just, you know, people already know. Like people politicians are just doing their best. And some are more or less corrupt or more or less in a corrupt system. And they're just doing their best, but also self-incentivized.

People know that. And people know that science is trying to figure stuff out, but there's more or less like ulterior motives in science too, and like their status and other things. And sometimes scientists are like, you know, what that that very sort of like patronizing, like people are bad and moralizing. And I do think like one of the things that Evpsych does when it does it well, done properly, is it does force you out of that like knee-jerk moralization that like the unwed mother, the sugar eating person, like there's there's you have to respect why that's happening. It doesn't you can also respect like why a genocide is happening or like why somebody's doing that and not it not not say it's good but if you want to do something about it boy

you better understand why it's happening. I do think and so I just think that point we still get I think we should still get some uh laurels for that or at least like say that like this is one thing about this approach is it forces you to sort of take that appreciate the logic of a of a thing step for what it's worth. Yeah. Yeah. And in many in many ways, yeah, I think we're reuniting with the you know standard social science model that we originally criticized, which is, you know, that was very much uh a norm in that model where we're gonna look at another culture without judgment and without moralization, and we're just gonna try to understand it and and appreciate the culture and why people are doing what they're doing uh in that society.

I think taking that same non-judgmental stance, I think, that you know has been taken by anthropologists is a really valuable stance to take across the board, and um we should continue taking it. Yeah, and I think that the also the standard social science model was always somewhat of a straw man that for me conflated several issues, right? So one is to do with One was a kind of implied, oh, people have sort of lumped all of the members of some social category like you know, Hadza, together. Yeah. Rather than differentiating that different Hadza might be doing different things for different reasons. And so there's that's a sort of lumping that happens. Um, the other is the particular claim that the you know groups differ kind of arbitrarily

and without a assignable limit because of a you know a kind of extreme fluid to fluidity or or or or or you know lack of priors of the mechanisms involved. And there's a few different pieces to that, to what the standard social science which some of which I think you know you do need to r retain and and made a lot of sense and some of which not, but it I think it was always somewhat of a rhetorical foil to say we want to do something different from that. You know, but there's different, you know, there's do we care about the cognition of individuals, or do we just lump them all together and you know and say it's social processes that matter? Do you distinguish between individuals and groups? There's very there's different pieces to what the so-called standard social science model

is. I don't think it was ever a terribly coherent notion, in fact. Nor does nor do I think that it exists. And I think you know social scientists vary enormously on their in their explanatory emphases. And so the idea that there's a standard one is it kind of doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Yeah. So Daniel, so you a lot of your work is on power. Is is an evolutionary psychological approach to power and resources subversive in any way? Like is it subversive to certain status quo? Or you know, are there um, you know, if you're if you're saying, look, I'm a scientist, I'm gonna try to respect the phenomenon of inequality, here's the proposal. Um, you know, there's a version of science where sort of all the stakeholders are like, all

right, we're just gonna listen to what the scientist says. There's another version that sort of says the reason why the status quo is is some people are winning and some people are losing. And when a scientist comes in and says, here, here's a way to make the losers lose less. Some people don't like it. Um, you know, either, I mean, what do you think abstractly, or like what has the reaction been to like your work where you're saying, look, here's here are objectively, or at least like objective is too strong, but sort of like data-backed ways to like make everybody's life better and raise all boats. You know, imagine I imagine some people, at least intuitively, like don't like that idea, like a basic No, that the they they they they they don't.

Yeah. But I mean in a way the idea that you sort of persuade people you know in in a one step process, you know, people whose salaries depend on not being persuaded was is probably too much to hope for. But what you might hope for is there are some people who think you know who think for indep on independent grounds you know believe in some of the things that I think would be a good idea. And if I give them more coherent argumentative justifications, then they're gonna go into their particular marketplace of ideas in which they exist better armed and better better equipped with arguments and counterarguments. Now so it's not like I you know I ever expected or uh or or found it the case that um uh you know a lot of people said, Oh gosh, you know, now you point that out we'll we'll

stop doing this more detail. Dan Nettle, the clearinghouse of social policy. Yes. That's right. You know, I I read that in you know, I read your paper in Human Nature, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna completely change uh um the way we're organizing things. No, but but what you can do, this is all that scientists really can ever do is that they can hope to have an input into a much broader social process of you know of exchange of arguments and uh in which people who want to do you know who ha have reasons to think like you kinda can find their positions buttressed or whatever. And also when it's complex, you know, we need to say that. Well we can't when it's the answer is it's complex, but at least you can try and lay out

what some of the issues are and and so on. And I think that does have an effect. You know, it's pretty microscopic. It's not, I don't think there are probably many cases where someone sort of published, you know, absent things like the link between cancer and smoking and so on, you know, where there were quite a lot of people who's in who's interested not to believe it, but in the end, the epidemiology was absolutely convincing, and that has produced very major changes in public opinion and public policy. But I you know, there's not many cases like that. But you can expose issues, you know, present ways of thinking about things that people who whose whose activity it is to do this stuff are gonna go, Oh, that's

actually useful, you know. I I see there's a continuous link from policy problem, you know, questions I'm working on to um to sort of behavioural science, which is infer that you know further linked to the science of the mind. And and so I I think we have a we make a difference, you know. Well I don't know if we make a difference or not, but there's at least a reasonable chance that we do. Yeah. Um can you I mean just re what do you have an elevator pitch for sort of income inequality and like uh universal basic income? I mean is that Well my elevator pitch pi my elevator pitch for universal basic income is not actually about inequality per se. So I think I think that the thing that matters psychologically is insufficiency.

When you don't know if you can put food on the well actually the two things about it, the insufficiency and unpredictability. Either believing that I can't put food on the family table tomorrow or not knowing if I can do so and over what time scale I'm going to be able to do so either of those leads me to do some things that whilst justified by the situation cause negative externalities for others. Right? And so if you can say to people look I'm not going to solve all your problems but I'm going to take that particular thing away that has actually has big social knock-ons. Now we know that. We've known this for years in society. And so we have a whole patchwork of mechanisms. You know, in Europe, we have very complex but expensive welfare systems.

Actually, even the US, which is characterized as having like less of a welfare system, actually spends billions of dollars. You know, 10% of the population, not at the moment because of the federal government shutdown, but in general gets uh the SNAP program. You know, there's unemployment insurance, there's a whole bunch of different mechanisms. Because we understand that we all lose if there's a big fraction of the population knocking around that either can't meet their basic needs or doesn't know if they can, they're gonna it's gonna lead them to make all kinds of trade-offs that we that is gonna cause an ex negative externality. So we sort of know this, but it's just that the way that we um

Address this is currently, I mean, for for historical reasons, as a sort of patchwork of ways that we've done this, you know, there could be better ways. There could be better ways that would do a better job and wouldn't cost much more. Like they would just that they would, as it were, solve the problem a little bit further upstream by saying, Well, you always know you're going to have a certain income, rather than saying, well, wait until you find you haven't got some income and then we'll have, you know, then we'll have you go to somewhere and the bureaucrats will assess it. You'll claim, you know, think of the the complexities and the humiliations involved in that. When you say, well, no, you know, we're all we have a basic tier of

stuff to which we all have access. And then beyond that, you know, it's up to people to sort of sort things sort things out for themselves. So I think you can pitch this as like this is kind of a no-brainer, it makes a lot of sense. Psychologically, it works for recipients, but it also works for people who have to pay for it through taxation. Yeah. Because what people don't like is transferring resource to a different category of person in which they do not themselves believe that they fit. Right? Whereas actually universal basic income, you know, you'll get it and I'll get it. And and we're so we're transferring resources to ourselves. We're all we're all deemed by the mechanism to be the same.

There isn't a kind of, well, you know, you're a person of type X, and so you get resources where I'm a type of person of type Y, so I pay in. No, you know, it stuff goes into a pot, there's a share of it that's rationed out. Everyone who's in the country is part of this kind of mechanism. So there are reasons for thinking it's could be more accept, you know, could be more effective at solving the problems it's meant to solve. um more um more acceptable to the people who are who ultimately need to support it and also just you know there's a lot we spend a lot of money in society you know fixing out fif fixing out problems after they've happened depression anxiety you know various kinds of things you sort of it's not that we don't

spend money on helping people We have lots of ways of doing that, but it's kind of messy and often after the harm has happened, you know. So it's that that's that's the pitch, you know, the short pitch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's great. I uh yeah, even just moving from Germany to the US, I feel like my perspective on the US was sort of we like to throw lots of money at problems too late, or we like artificially low numbers up front. So, like a good example of that would be like that's everywhere. Like in Germany, there's playgrounds everywhere and they spend a lot of money on playgrounds. You can travel, it's probably like a half a kilometer, a kilometer to like a playground, and they're really great.

Kids spend tons of time there. And I remember somebody like an American like posting, oh, that sounds expensive. But if you think about all the knock-on consequences of not having that of obesity, of try traveling to go anywhere, of everybody having to buy crappy playground equipment that no one person can buy, even remotely as good as what's there, the anxiety or um sedentarianism of or like having to like pay for entertainment. Like there's all these knock on consequences that are sort of obscure. Um uh but uh and or like crime because kids are just bored and they're like, what the fuck am I gonna do? Um, you know, so like there's all these knock-on consequences. So like upfront costs, for me at least, like as an American, I was like, oh, it's the same

thing as like not including tax on the numbers. Like, you know, in Germany the tax is included. In America, it's not, but it's like then you have to tip, like so at a restaurant, you know what you're gonna pay when you sit down. In America, it's like 50% more later. You know, we just like artificially low numbers. So, but I mean Americans pay a lot for their healthcare, right? No, we pay so much for really terrible health care. You really spend a lot of money on healthcare, right? And then there's no kind of, oh, you know, imagine the taxation it would be if you had a different medical system. No, you spend a lot of money. No, no, you could save money by yes, exactly. Probably probably, yes, probably.

Exactly. But no, I think this just speaks to like this point of sort of uh the the idea that like you just explain why why a system might be better. Um and uh but yeah, uh yeah, anyway. Yeah. But there is a there's a particular difficulty about changing the I mean there is an evolutionary psychology literature on this. There's particular ways of allocating resources. Like some things you know we communally share, and some things, you know, I we we equality match, I get one, you get one, Dave gets one. Some things we do in other ways. And actually, shifting a resource from one of those to the other is super hard, I think, for reasons that we've talked about, which is because you're sort of I'm asking, I'm

not, you know, I'm being required to use a different set of mental accounting principles, you know, for a certain resource. I used to think of it as like a privately owned resource, and now you're asking me to think about it a different way. And that's kind of an effortful cognitive shift. And also, but it will only work if you all everyone else also makes the shift and kind of buys into at the same time. So we have problems of first mover problems and those things. So that's why these things are politically difficult. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Quite aside from the arguments about, well, we'll be better off in the in the long run. Is the kind of well, that sounds a great idea, but how can we get everyone to agree on it?

And how will you know the others will stick to their side of the deal and all that? So, you know. Right. Yeah. It comes it loops back to this thing of like institutions are just sort of aggregate uh as David says, shit happens. Yeah, and once they're in place, you know, hope you you can kind of hang on to them. Yeah. Getting them into place is really hard. You know. Yeah. right. Exactly. Yeah. As you said, like you don't know if you change something, it might go really wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we're approaching the end of our time here. We uh it's time to ask the the question we always ask. Uh is there anything we should have asked you that you you wish we got a chance to talk about?

I don't think so. Yeah. Okay. Well, there is a ton of stuff I wish I we had more time to ask you about. Yes. I I wish that as well. Yeah. We'll have to bring you on a second time to to cover all the other stuff. But yeah, this was a really fun conversation. Uh I love how we got from the micro to the macro of like where we're going as a as as a field and uh what we what we might be getting wrong, where we should be headed, but also sp really cool specific things like inequality and obesity was a really fun conversation. I we appreciate you having uh uh appreciate you coming on. Yeah, and uh don't don't bother doing a 5k or 10k or half marathon, just do that 800 meter or I'm the uh the 800 meters.

No, I just the eight hundred meters, that's all I've got time for. Okay, oh yeah. It takes too damn long, you know. It just takes yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, no, you gotta how many I wonder how many eight hundred meters you could ru how long did it take you to do the hundred K or uh the hundreds? Yeah, yeah. That's a long time. That's long, you know. It's long you you the whole day's gone, you know. What can I say? No, exactly. Fantastic. All right. Well thank you, Dan. Thank you so much for coming on. Bye. You're right. David, the this was a wonderful episode. Yes. Fantastic. Roughly an hour and a half to two hours have gone by. And you're still listening, which means you must like what you're hearing.

And if you do, uh don't be shy about it. Tell people about it. Uh leave us a kind review, support us on Patreon. And uh if you want, reach out to us with any ideas for topics uh or questions or uh ideas for guests. Yeah, we should um elicit uh like questions that we might answer with a guest. That would be a fun thing. That would be fun. Or maybe we should do like a an AMA where like we get a bunch of questions from people and we just spend an episode answering people's questions. What's AMA? Ask me anything. Oh, okay. Should I have known that? Probably. Okay. We'll we'll edit that out. Okay. Thanks everybody for listening. All right. See you next week.