WEBVTT 00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:01.520 I'm David Petrozewski. 00:00:01.840 --> 00:00:02.960 I'm David Pinsov. 00:00:03.280 --> 00:00:05.840 This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 00:00:06.240 --> 00:00:08.080 Actual Evolutionary Psychology. 00:00:08.400 --> 00:00:11.760 By Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. 00:00:22.880 --> 00:00:27.680 David, did you know that Jean Nicot was a French philosopher and logician, best known for 00:00:27.680 --> 00:00:30.430 his work on propositional logic and induction. 00:00:30.990 --> 00:00:32.350 I actually did not know that. 00:00:32.430 --> 00:00:33.070 That's very interesting. 00:00:33.470 --> 00:00:35.630 And what makes you bring up Jean Nicode? 00:00:35.950 --> 00:00:38.190 Uh well, I mean, that was just from Wikipedia. 00:00:38.270 --> 00:00:42.190 Um, but I brought up Jean Nicode because our guest today is Dan Nettle. 00:00:42.590 --> 00:00:44.190 No relation to Jean Nicode. 00:00:44.510 --> 00:00:50.510 However, no relation, uh, he works at the Jean Nicode Institute in Paris. 00:00:51.040 --> 00:00:51.520 That's right. 00:00:51.600 --> 00:00:55.120 It's a wonderful institution uh and a a cool place to live. 00:00:55.200 --> 00:00:56.240 I love going to Paris. 00:00:56.400 --> 00:01:00.880 But even more than going to Paris, I love talking to Dan Nettle because this guy is just an 00:01:00.880 --> 00:01:03.200 encyclopedia of fascinating information. 00:01:03.360 --> 00:01:06.880 Uh we had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation. 00:01:07.040 --> 00:01:12.640 Uh we talked about uh evolutionary behavioral science in general, what it's doing right, 00:01:12.800 --> 00:01:17.650 what it's doing wrong, how we could change it, evolutionary mismatch, uh, obesity, 00:01:17.970 --> 00:01:21.010 poverty, uh, lots of really interesting stuff. 00:01:21.330 --> 00:01:26.290 Yeah, if you think if you have an opinion about minimal uh or basic income, uh you should 00:01:26.290 --> 00:01:27.410 listen to this episode. 00:01:27.650 --> 00:01:32.370 You know, I actually found this episode almost frustrating because there's so much more I 00:01:32.370 --> 00:01:35.730 want to talk to Daniel about that we didn't get to. 00:01:35.970 --> 00:01:38.690 So um, I mean, that's a really good problem to have. 00:01:38.770 --> 00:01:44.290 Um, but yeah, it the Daniel is just um, you know, in the ratio of sort of like 00:01:44.540 --> 00:01:47.420 how broadly known is he and how much stuff he has. 00:01:47.580 --> 00:01:52.540 This is another, like, really, Daniel is just a treasure trove of incredible work and is 00:01:52.540 --> 00:01:57.340 doing so much good, important work about really important things like poverty, social 00:01:57.340 --> 00:02:03.100 processes, um, and really putting his finger on um how of psych and psychology 00:02:03.100 --> 00:02:06.860 generally can sort of help us in all of our social ills or not. 00:02:07.610 --> 00:02:08.650 Yeah, no, absolutely. 00:02:08.730 --> 00:02:11.130 It was it was really uh fantastic conversation. 00:02:11.210 --> 00:02:12.250 I think I'll enjoy it. 00:02:12.410 --> 00:02:14.810 And without further ado, Dan Eddle. 00:02:15.450 --> 00:02:20.170 Dean, you are at the uh Jean Nicode Institute in Paris, is that right? 00:02:20.410 --> 00:02:21.130 That's correct. 00:02:21.210 --> 00:02:21.370 Yeah. 00:02:21.610 --> 00:02:21.930 Okay. 00:02:22.090 --> 00:02:26.410 Um, and this is a completely beside the point question, but are you a runner? 00:02:26.810 --> 00:02:27.210 Yeah. 00:02:27.450 --> 00:02:27.770 Yeah? 00:02:27.930 --> 00:02:28.090 Yeah. 00:02:28.330 --> 00:02:30.330 What can you talk a little bit about that? 00:02:31.210 --> 00:02:35.680 Well, I've just been I've been a runner for fifteen years or so, and I'm for I have a 00:02:35.680 --> 00:02:41.600 really unfortunate uh um distinction as a runner that the only events that 00:02:41.600 --> 00:02:46.320 I'm any good at are the eight hundred meters and the hundred kilometer ultramarathon. 00:02:46.480 --> 00:02:46.880 Oh wow. 00:02:47.040 --> 00:02:49.600 And there is no rational training for these two events. 00:02:50.400 --> 00:02:52.480 And I d you know, what the hell? 00:02:52.640 --> 00:02:57.360 In fact, I did my big best performance on the two of them within five days of each other. 00:02:57.520 --> 00:02:57.760 Wow. 00:02:57.920 --> 00:03:01.770 So for those of you who are curious, I did the eight hundred meters first and the hundred 00:03:01.930 --> 00:03:02.650 kilometers second. 00:03:02.730 --> 00:03:03.930 I think that's the way around to do it. 00:03:04.090 --> 00:03:07.690 That's and so anyway, I'm just like I'm really mediocre. 00:03:07.770 --> 00:03:13.050 I have a really I have a flat surface of mediocrity and then islands of ability which are 00:03:13.050 --> 00:03:13.930 very far apart. 00:03:14.330 --> 00:03:14.810 Amazing. 00:03:15.530 --> 00:03:17.450 I don't know what I don't know how to solve this problem. 00:03:17.530 --> 00:03:19.130 You know I'm like I'm just yeah. 00:03:19.530 --> 00:03:24.580 But uh but you doing a hundred K uh is uh is an accomplishment in and of itself. 00:03:24.980 --> 00:03:27.060 It involves a lot of tea, you know. 00:03:27.380 --> 00:03:27.620 Okay. 00:03:27.780 --> 00:03:28.180 It's good. 00:03:28.420 --> 00:03:33.220 Yeah, that's basically put that on a that's this is this this is just like how to do a 00:03:33.220 --> 00:03:33.940 hundred K. 00:03:34.260 --> 00:03:39.460 Yeah, it's just it's do just tea do the do the first twenty K, have some tea, 00:03:40.010 --> 00:03:42.650 and do the other 80k, add some more tea. 00:03:42.730 --> 00:03:42.810 Yeah. 00:03:43.210 --> 00:03:46.810 Have you considered writing a book about well, it would be a short book, you know? 00:03:47.050 --> 00:03:48.010 Yeah, just tea. 00:03:48.250 --> 00:03:51.770 Yeah, it would be it would really be a greeting card. 00:03:51.850 --> 00:03:55.050 It would be some airport running 100k. 00:03:55.210 --> 00:03:56.330 We just have tea on the inside. 00:03:57.930 --> 00:03:58.410 Exactly. 00:03:58.650 --> 00:04:04.010 Um, I I I feel like whenever we talk to anybody, any part of the conversation is a 00:04:04.010 --> 00:04:06.170 microcosm of the person's research. 00:04:06.250 --> 00:04:10.720 And I actually feel like that what we just did is also a microcosm of your work, Dan, which 00:04:10.720 --> 00:04:15.520 is that you cover even a large flat surface of mediocre occasional islands. 00:04:16.240 --> 00:04:17.280 Yeah, thanks a lot, guys. 00:04:17.440 --> 00:04:18.000 Yeah, you're welcome. 00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:19.600 Okay, we can good night. 00:04:19.680 --> 00:04:20.000 We'll be here. 00:04:20.480 --> 00:04:21.360 We'll be here all week. 00:04:21.440 --> 00:04:22.720 Yes, exactly. 00:04:23.280 --> 00:04:24.640 We'll go island topic. 00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:25.040 It's okay. 00:04:25.280 --> 00:04:25.840 Yeah, exactly. 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:28.480 So all of Dan's work is in greeting card format. 00:04:28.560 --> 00:04:33.810 And um, no, but what I was gonna say, uh to it's going to be a long, long walk to get to 00:04:33.810 --> 00:04:34.690 this, but uh no. 00:04:34.770 --> 00:04:40.610 What I was gonna say is that um you cover a lot of different topics um in 00:04:40.610 --> 00:04:46.450 a way that it's not mediocre, but it's actually from an evolutionary perspective, and it 00:04:46.450 --> 00:04:50.450 covers a lot of things that I think are things that aren't traditionally thought about. 00:04:50.610 --> 00:04:53.730 So, for example, one thing is like income inequality. 00:04:53.890 --> 00:04:57.730 Um, and that's a really important social thing. 00:04:58.200 --> 00:05:04.040 And we've talked a bit about on the podcast before about you can take a very reductive 00:05:04.040 --> 00:05:08.440 approach to something like resources from an evolutionary perspective. 00:05:08.760 --> 00:05:14.200 And one of the reasons we even started this podcast was because a lot of what was in the 00:05:14.200 --> 00:05:20.040 podcast or popular zeitgeist of evolutionary psychology was this very 00:05:20.040 --> 00:05:25.650 reductive stuff where it's sort of like if it's not basically like caveman hitting each 00:05:25.650 --> 00:05:29.010 other over clubs, that runs counter to human nature. 00:05:29.250 --> 00:05:35.170 Um, and so one of the things I love about your work is that it's very diverse, but 00:05:35.170 --> 00:05:41.010 it hits to the heart of what are the what are the evolved psychological mechanisms 00:05:41.330 --> 00:05:47.330 underlying this really important swath of human nature and often covering stuff that 00:05:47.330 --> 00:05:53.220 isn't what I would consider sort of like the easy stuff to tackle, like income 00:05:53.220 --> 00:05:54.260 inequality. 00:05:54.500 --> 00:06:00.180 Um, and so you know, one of the places to start out then is sort of from a 00:06:00.180 --> 00:06:06.100 topical perspective, um, and this is maybe like the 800-meter and 100k 00:06:06.100 --> 00:06:11.590 thing, is that do you do you think about like sort of what what does the research program 00:06:11.590 --> 00:06:13.430 that you've done have in common? 00:06:13.590 --> 00:06:18.470 Um, are there certain things that you're trying to tackle when it comes to topics 00:06:19.510 --> 00:06:22.150 that that there's some principle behind? 00:06:22.230 --> 00:06:27.190 Um, and I mean this like not in a like defend it, but just sort of I'm curious because I 00:06:27.190 --> 00:06:31.190 often find you covering things where I think, oh, I wish somebody had been doing that. 00:06:31.350 --> 00:06:34.950 And I didn't even realize I wished somebody had been doing it until Dan Nettle started 00:06:34.950 --> 00:06:35.350 doing it. 00:06:35.510 --> 00:06:39.270 So I'm just curious, like what your what your process has been for picking topics. 00:06:39.760 --> 00:06:45.760 Well, I think that the actual the actual sort of ex-ante-causal 00:06:45.760 --> 00:06:47.120 sequence is a bit random. 00:06:47.280 --> 00:06:51.520 I mean one works on things that just seem interesting and one hears about and thinks, oh, 00:06:51.600 --> 00:06:52.880 there might be something to say about this. 00:06:53.040 --> 00:06:57.760 But I think ex post I can definitely say that there's a there's a common theme for most of 00:06:57.760 --> 00:07:03.200 most of my work uh anyway, which is trying to understand a kind of 00:07:03.200 --> 00:07:08.550 articulation between social science questions and 00:07:08.550 --> 00:07:14.310 focus and evolutionary psychology, because I think evolutionary psychology 00:07:14.310 --> 00:07:19.110 is, you know, broadly speaking, correct in its claims about the mind, in the sense that, 00:07:19.270 --> 00:07:22.710 you know, clearly we have minds and they have structure, and those structures have to do 00:07:22.710 --> 00:07:27.670 with something, you know, something to do with fundamental uh um adaptive problems that 00:07:27.670 --> 00:07:31.590 that the mind has solved to do with you know mating and choosing social partners and 00:07:31.590 --> 00:07:34.630 getting the eating the right stuff and you know all of those things. 00:07:35.240 --> 00:07:40.920 But I think a lot of the evolutionary psychology literature sort of it 00:07:40.920 --> 00:07:46.760 sees this very simple world in which there's no real social structure or 00:07:46.760 --> 00:07:48.200 economic structure when that's happening. 00:07:48.280 --> 00:07:52.360 It's like, oh I'm here, you know, I'm choosing my mate, I'm choosing my social partners, 00:07:52.520 --> 00:07:57.750 I'm choosing the thing to eat, I'm you know avoiding this, I'm avoiding this snake whilst 00:07:57.990 --> 00:07:59.830 you know taking this ripe fruit. 00:08:00.070 --> 00:08:05.830 As if uh as if sort of ever every individual w were kind of just facing up to nature and 00:08:05.830 --> 00:08:09.590 there was all the stuff up there and there were no social constraints, no social structure, 00:08:09.750 --> 00:08:15.670 no no cultural expectations, no distribution of resources and power relations, all the 00:08:15.670 --> 00:08:18.710 stuff that social science has been really good about talking about. 00:08:18.950 --> 00:08:24.540 So I mean for me it's just interesting to think about can those two meet up in 00:08:25.100 --> 00:08:27.340 a mutually beneficial way. 00:08:27.580 --> 00:08:33.180 I mean it's also good, I think it's it's good for evolutionary psychology because in a way 00:08:34.620 --> 00:08:40.060 we we s we're very good at solving the sort of easy problems that no one felt needed 00:08:40.060 --> 00:08:40.780 solving. 00:08:40.940 --> 00:08:46.590 Like, you know, men like pretty women, people don't like people who cheat, 00:08:46.830 --> 00:08:50.510 you know, people think snakes and spiders are kind of yucky. 00:08:50.590 --> 00:08:53.310 I mean, great, you know, it's not wrong. 00:08:53.390 --> 00:08:53.550 Yeah. 00:08:53.790 --> 00:08:57.790 But it no one really in the in society is saying that's the problem that needs solving, 00:08:57.870 --> 00:08:58.030 guys. 00:08:58.110 --> 00:09:03.870 You know, that's really what's so uh in a way, it would be nice to ally the undoubted 00:09:03.870 --> 00:09:08.430 explanatory power of our approach to kind of hard problems that people actually want 00:09:08.430 --> 00:09:11.150 solving, which I think where the solutions are difficult. 00:09:11.630 --> 00:09:16.860 Um so, in a way that the evolved mind is one set of the shears and then the act the the 00:09:16.860 --> 00:09:20.860 social structural or or the linguistic environment or the socio-cultural context or 00:09:20.860 --> 00:09:23.820 economic context or whatever is the other set of the shears, and then somewhere in between 00:09:23.820 --> 00:09:24.780 is human action. 00:09:24.940 --> 00:09:25.180 Right. 00:09:25.340 --> 00:09:25.500 Right. 00:09:25.580 --> 00:09:26.860 And so what can we do? 00:09:26.940 --> 00:09:29.820 Uh what can we do when we bring those two things together? 00:09:30.060 --> 00:09:30.540 Yeah. 00:09:30.780 --> 00:09:33.180 I mean, maybe maybe just make it concrete. 00:09:33.260 --> 00:09:37.500 I mean, one question I had for you and I thought was really interesting was about 00:09:37.660 --> 00:09:42.870 inequality and income inequality, and sort of, you know, there's been work on sort of, you 00:09:42.870 --> 00:09:46.630 know, as you said, like cheater detection or people feeling like what's the flow of 00:09:46.630 --> 00:09:47.590 resources. 00:09:47.990 --> 00:09:53.990 Um, and there's starting to be some work on this, like um in your work, Pascal Boyer 00:09:54.150 --> 00:09:57.030 has some work on sort of ownership and how it's also social. 00:09:57.510 --> 00:10:02.870 Like what you deem is owned is also a function of sort of who you deem as sort of worthy of 00:10:02.870 --> 00:10:08.390 future interaction, which I think is a deeply interesting and kind of weird way to think 00:10:08.390 --> 00:10:09.270 about ownership. 00:10:09.480 --> 00:10:10.520 that's probably right. 00:10:10.680 --> 00:10:12.360 That comes from an evolutionary perspective. 00:10:12.440 --> 00:10:18.360 And so um can you maybe talk about how do you do this very difficult thing of taking the 00:10:18.360 --> 00:10:22.840 evolved software of which we don't know much, and then take an important social problem 00:10:22.840 --> 00:10:24.040 like inequality. 00:10:24.200 --> 00:10:29.160 How do you how do you get those get a hold of those big scissors and bring those two blades 00:10:29.160 --> 00:10:29.640 together? 00:10:30.120 --> 00:10:33.800 Well, I mean I I think there are lots of different ways and and it's not always easy. 00:10:33.880 --> 00:10:39.690 But I think w so one way to think about it, I suppose, is to say, well, 00:10:39.770 --> 00:10:44.890 what are the stylized facts of which social science is quite good at establishing that, you 00:10:44.890 --> 00:10:48.490 know, pl places high in income inequality tend to have certain kinds of problems. 00:10:48.810 --> 00:10:53.770 I mean it's debated all of this, of course, but um so you could say, Well, what what do we 00:10:53.770 --> 00:10:54.010 know? 00:10:54.250 --> 00:10:59.960 And then you could think, well, okay, well what might be 00:11:00.840 --> 00:11:04.120 that's a macro, that's a macro level of generalization. 00:11:04.440 --> 00:11:09.080 Societies with uh high income inequality have certain features and actually are more 00:11:09.080 --> 00:11:12.360 susceptible to certain kinds of bad outcomes, which is interesting. 00:11:12.600 --> 00:11:16.760 But then you might say, well, from the micro point of view, of the individual agent who's 00:11:16.760 --> 00:11:21.330 coming into an ecology trying to figure out what's going on, trying to satisfy their their 00:11:21.650 --> 00:11:24.610 needs, what might be the problem they're trying to solve? 00:11:24.690 --> 00:11:28.770 And are there ways in which having a whole population of people trying to do that and 00:11:28.770 --> 00:11:34.690 interacting with one another are going to generate, for example, you know, uh uh my 00:11:34.690 --> 00:11:39.970 PhD should PhD student Benoît de Corson has worked on uh uh 00:11:40.130 --> 00:11:44.700 inequality and crime and particularly violent crime, sort of there's a big literature 00:11:44.700 --> 00:11:47.260 arguing that the more unequal places generate more violent crime. 00:11:47.420 --> 00:11:48.060 Well why would that be? 00:11:48.140 --> 00:11:49.980 You know, it's not immediately obvious. 00:11:50.220 --> 00:11:54.460 When you start to think, well, okay, that people have have goals, which is to have uh you 00:11:54.460 --> 00:12:00.060 know adequate resources and to be able to defend them, and uh that's easier when resources 00:12:00.060 --> 00:12:03.340 are more evenly spread out so no one finds themselves too far down at the bottom of the 00:12:03.340 --> 00:12:03.580 pile. 00:12:03.740 --> 00:12:06.780 I mean then you can start to build up an account of how that might work. 00:12:07.180 --> 00:12:12.970 Now you might say, well, does it actually explain anything we didn't already know, and I 00:12:12.970 --> 00:12:16.490 think the jury's out, but I think very plausibly it does, right? 00:12:16.570 --> 00:12:22.410 It generates new predictions, or at least it it generates a feed-through from the 00:12:22.410 --> 00:12:28.250 individual decision maker to these more macroscopic things, patterns of inequality 00:12:28.330 --> 00:12:28.970 and so on. 00:12:29.130 --> 00:12:31.290 And of course that's that's cyclical, right? 00:12:31.370 --> 00:12:37.360 Because the the output of my behavior um and yours, you 00:12:37.360 --> 00:12:42.480 know, is the input to the behavior of other people who are in our in our society, in in our 00:12:42.480 --> 00:12:43.120 social network. 00:12:43.200 --> 00:12:43.280 Right? 00:12:43.360 --> 00:12:49.200 They have to take what for me is is the the ecology of my decisions becomes for other 00:12:49.200 --> 00:12:50.640 people the input into their decisions. 00:12:50.720 --> 00:12:54.720 So there's this you know, that's how you can kind of get these macroscopic things going. 00:12:55.120 --> 00:13:00.890 Um so I think I think you know this is more 00:13:00.890 --> 00:13:04.410 than evolutionary psychology can look at things that social scientists already know and go, 00:13:04.650 --> 00:13:05.850 here might be a reason for that. 00:13:06.010 --> 00:13:10.730 I think at the best we can do a better job of saying, okay, at the individual level, what's 00:13:10.730 --> 00:13:11.050 going on? 00:13:11.130 --> 00:13:14.090 What's going, you know, what's going on for the people involved, what they might be picking 00:13:14.090 --> 00:13:15.210 up on, what are they trying to do? 00:13:15.290 --> 00:13:16.410 What are their goals? 00:13:16.570 --> 00:13:19.690 What are the emotions that are getting triggered in them, the reactions, and so on. 00:13:19.770 --> 00:13:24.010 And how might that feed up to some of the stuff we you know that we know happens at the 00:13:24.010 --> 00:13:24.890 population level? 00:13:25.300 --> 00:13:25.540 Right. 00:13:25.700 --> 00:13:30.740 So it's a it's an exercise just to make sure, or to just restate it, it's reverse 00:13:30.900 --> 00:13:36.820 engineering not just any old particular phenomenon, but phenomena that in 00:13:36.900 --> 00:13:42.900 especially involves sort of important social dynamics and not just accepting 00:13:42.900 --> 00:13:48.510 sort of the naive idea of like, well, of course, uh, low, low 00:13:48.590 --> 00:13:51.070 income or high inequality areas have high crime. 00:13:51.150 --> 00:13:56.430 And there's just sort of a cartoonish arrow from that to like bad person who's cackling. 00:13:56.590 --> 00:14:02.110 But it's taking seriously and respecting every agent is an evolved 00:14:02.110 --> 00:14:08.030 being who, if we have some sort of high-level theory about what their goals or motivations 00:14:08.030 --> 00:14:12.350 might be and why those might make sense, if we can respect those and reverse engineer 00:14:12.350 --> 00:14:18.280 those, it might give us purchase into thinking about what are some of the highest 00:14:18.280 --> 00:14:20.600 probability interventions or changes. 00:14:20.760 --> 00:14:26.360 So if this is why it makes sense for somebody to do crime, then if we 00:14:26.360 --> 00:14:29.880 understand that, then we know how to intervene on that or what to change. 00:14:30.040 --> 00:14:31.480 Is that sort of a fair characteristic? 00:14:31.720 --> 00:14:31.880 Yes. 00:14:32.680 --> 00:14:33.240 Absolutely. 00:14:33.400 --> 00:14:37.000 I mean, and I think there's a couple of aspects to the, I mean, I agree with everything you 00:14:37.000 --> 00:14:38.200 said, but I think you can go further. 00:14:38.360 --> 00:14:43.750 So one is um, you know, a lot of the things people come up with in public policy are pretty 00:14:43.750 --> 00:14:44.310 silly. 00:14:45.110 --> 00:14:50.630 You know, just put put put put put uh 00:14:50.950 --> 00:14:54.630 traffic light labeling on food and obesities, you know, get solved or something like that. 00:14:54.790 --> 00:14:56.470 They're really silly when you think about it. 00:14:56.550 --> 00:15:01.910 And only if you had quite an impoverished notion of what might really be going on would you 00:15:02.150 --> 00:15:04.870 would you really think, oh, that's how we're going to solve it, right? 00:15:05.110 --> 00:15:09.520 Yeah, and um now social scientists make this point very frequently, but what they tend to 00:15:09.520 --> 00:15:14.560 say is, well, that's because policymakers often individualise what's really a social 00:15:14.560 --> 00:15:15.760 structural phenomenon. 00:15:16.720 --> 00:15:22.320 But I mean that sort of right to a point, but kind of obscure because it's like, well, 00:15:22.400 --> 00:15:23.680 where does social structure come from? 00:15:23.760 --> 00:15:27.200 And yeah, what how does that impinge causally on individuals? 00:15:27.440 --> 00:15:31.280 But they're right to point out that a lot of the remedies people come up with are pretty 00:15:31.280 --> 00:15:31.680 silly. 00:15:31.760 --> 00:15:35.290 So so you know y y that's a way in which we can do better. 00:15:35.450 --> 00:15:40.570 But secondly, to say about the reverse engineering thing, I think there's sort of two 00:15:40.570 --> 00:15:46.250 levels of reverse engineering that happen in evolutionary social science, if you want to 00:15:46.250 --> 00:15:46.810 call it that. 00:15:47.050 --> 00:15:49.050 There's the reverse engineering of the mind itself. 00:15:49.130 --> 00:15:52.010 You know, what computational problems it's trying to solve and why is it solved them that 00:15:52.010 --> 00:15:57.880 way when it, you know, why why was that the way that that that uh you know w 00:15:58.040 --> 00:16:02.920 what's the adaptive logic of the kinds of mechanisms that exist in the individual mind but 00:16:02.920 --> 00:16:08.680 then there's if you have some aggregate pattern how does that arise from individuals 00:16:08.840 --> 00:16:13.240 and I I don't think that's the same reverse engineering problem and it's you know it is 00:16:13.240 --> 00:16:19.080 somewhat mysterious right we can all um we can all agree that 00:16:19.080 --> 00:16:24.910 we need to have an effective, you know, we all desire an effective mechanism for 00:16:24.910 --> 00:16:29.870 coordinating our behavior, you know, in some if we're going to be interacting socially. 00:16:30.270 --> 00:16:35.230 But we might still end up with a really odd mechanism for doing that, that's kind of, you 00:16:35.230 --> 00:16:41.070 know, somehow a byproduct of you know weird founder effects and who got there first and 00:16:41.070 --> 00:16:44.910 compromises between different people at different times and just frozen accidents of 00:16:44.910 --> 00:16:45.630 various kinds. 00:16:45.790 --> 00:16:51.720 So you can't look at aggregate human institutions, for example, and say, Oh, well, that's 00:16:51.720 --> 00:16:55.640 because in every mind there's a little kind of homunculus that's wanted that institution 00:16:55.640 --> 00:16:58.040 and was an involved motivation to have it, right? 00:16:58.280 --> 00:17:02.440 There's a whole so there's another reverse engineering, which is I don't even know if 00:17:02.440 --> 00:17:04.440 reverse engineering is the right term. 00:17:04.600 --> 00:17:05.480 I suppose it is, right? 00:17:05.560 --> 00:17:09.480 Which is to say, well, how did the cloud get from the individual drops? 00:17:09.640 --> 00:17:14.390 And you don't see in the individual drops a little you know picture of the cloud going, I 00:17:14.390 --> 00:17:16.950 want to be a cloud, you know, when I get together with some other people, I want to be a 00:17:16.950 --> 00:17:17.190 cloud. 00:17:17.350 --> 00:17:23.030 So I think that that that has been a slight, you know, I'm I'm a great admirer of a lot of 00:17:23.030 --> 00:17:27.110 the EbSight work, for example, on law, the psychology of law, you know, why do laws think 00:17:27.590 --> 00:17:32.630 why do legal codes see certain things as bad and other things as not so bad? 00:17:32.710 --> 00:17:37.990 And why is intent important in some cases, but perhaps not in others, and you know 00:17:38.470 --> 00:17:42.070 why are certain punishments seem you know judged to be suitable and so on. 00:17:42.300 --> 00:17:43.660 You know, I really like the program. 00:17:43.980 --> 00:17:47.740 It makes sense that we would come up with institutions that broadly make intuitive sense to 00:17:47.740 --> 00:17:47.900 us. 00:17:48.140 --> 00:17:53.660 But just because you, you know, the three of us here agree on, 00:17:54.460 --> 00:17:59.020 you know, that there should be incentives, there should be penalties for people for doing 00:17:59.020 --> 00:18:02.540 bad stuff, and we don't want it to happen, that doesn't make it a legal system. 00:18:03.180 --> 00:18:07.820 For it to become a legal system, a whole lot of other stuff, a load of social processes 00:18:07.820 --> 00:18:08.460 need to happen. 00:18:08.620 --> 00:18:12.890 And it might end up being a system that is not the system that any of us quite envisaged at 00:18:12.890 --> 00:18:13.290 the outset. 00:18:13.530 --> 00:18:13.770 Right. 00:18:14.010 --> 00:18:14.170 Right. 00:18:14.330 --> 00:18:16.650 And it might even be counterintuitive to all of us. 00:18:16.730 --> 00:18:19.210 Uh to some Yeah, we might say, how did we end up here? 00:18:19.770 --> 00:18:19.930 Yeah. 00:18:20.250 --> 00:18:22.730 Like what we how did things get so shitty? 00:18:22.810 --> 00:18:22.970 Yeah. 00:18:23.130 --> 00:18:23.210 Yeah. 00:18:23.450 --> 00:18:23.610 Yeah. 00:18:23.930 --> 00:18:24.090 Yeah. 00:18:24.250 --> 00:18:30.170 So I mean it just it it will be counterintuitive to a point, but I think social 00:18:30.330 --> 00:18:33.770 scientists overstate this point and they're going to say well cultures can involve all 00:18:33.770 --> 00:18:37.130 kinds of weird stuff that don't even, you know, they just sort of supervene on all the 00:18:37.130 --> 00:18:38.650 individual minds involved. 00:18:38.900 --> 00:18:43.140 If if even the three of us couldn't figure out how our own legal system worked, you know, 00:18:43.220 --> 00:18:45.380 that would cause it to change, I think. 00:18:45.700 --> 00:18:45.940 Right. 00:18:46.180 --> 00:18:50.100 You know, it might not be it might not be the one that any of us would have bite dreamed up 00:18:50.100 --> 00:18:53.620 on their own, but it it would ha it would be somehow constrained by the individual minds. 00:18:53.860 --> 00:18:54.020 Yeah. 00:18:54.100 --> 00:18:54.260 Right. 00:18:54.340 --> 00:18:59.300 It it it it's just to me that that reverse engineering is not quite the right word because 00:18:59.540 --> 00:19:03.850 with reverse engineering it implies that there is there's design, uh and there and there is 00:19:03.850 --> 00:19:07.210 a an efficiency and an elegance in the design to serve a particular purpose. 00:19:07.370 --> 00:19:11.130 And when we're talking about systems in the mind, I think that is a valid perspective to 00:19:11.130 --> 00:19:11.370 take. 00:19:11.450 --> 00:19:12.570 There often is design. 00:19:12.650 --> 00:19:16.970 There we uh natural selection often does hit on efficient, elegant solutions to solving 00:19:16.970 --> 00:19:17.850 adaptive problems. 00:19:18.010 --> 00:19:22.410 Uh but when it comes to institutions, um, there often is no uh design. 00:19:22.570 --> 00:19:25.320 It often does not serve any larger purpose. 00:19:25.480 --> 00:19:27.320 Uh shit happens, right? 00:19:27.640 --> 00:19:33.560 Um and and and culture and history uh is uh often just, you know, path dependent and 00:19:33.560 --> 00:19:36.120 depending on whatever random shit happened before it. 00:19:36.280 --> 00:19:41.160 And if if if you can rewind the tape and it you know the and and the institution might come 00:19:41.160 --> 00:19:44.040 out differently if if you replay the events of history. 00:19:44.280 --> 00:19:50.150 Um and so uh it's not so much of a reverse engineering as it is just sort of tracing 00:19:50.150 --> 00:19:51.510 back the causal steps. 00:19:51.750 --> 00:19:51.910 Yeah. 00:19:52.070 --> 00:19:55.350 Uh no, I mean it's what in economics they call micro foundations, right? 00:19:55.430 --> 00:19:57.110 Yeah, things like inflation. 00:19:57.830 --> 00:20:00.630 It's not it's not no one designed inflation. 00:20:02.790 --> 00:20:03.910 Inflation doesn't have a function. 00:20:04.070 --> 00:20:06.310 Well, no, depending on what yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:20:06.710 --> 00:20:11.110 I mean i i it it's a law-like product of actors that have interests. 00:20:11.270 --> 00:20:11.510 Right. 00:20:11.830 --> 00:20:12.070 Right. 00:20:12.230 --> 00:20:18.200 But I agree that the design stance isn't really quite right when it comes to societal 00:20:18.280 --> 00:20:18.680 level things. 00:20:18.760 --> 00:20:23.080 And social science gets itself, and actually including evolutionary models, get themselves 00:20:23.080 --> 00:20:25.480 into all kinds of muddles, you know, in this way, right? 00:20:25.560 --> 00:20:28.440 They say things like, what's the function of ritual? 00:20:28.520 --> 00:20:30.840 And what's the function of religion and so on? 00:20:30.920 --> 00:20:34.520 I'm not sure those are even I'm not sure those are even coherent questions. 00:20:34.600 --> 00:20:39.850 So there's a sort of there is a there is a coherent psychological question in there, which 00:20:39.850 --> 00:20:43.130 is why do people enjoy rituals and find them satisfying? 00:20:43.370 --> 00:20:49.210 Or you know what what keeps people going back to a particular kind of 00:20:49.210 --> 00:20:53.370 rin religious institution, or moving away from one and towards another that they find more 00:20:53.370 --> 00:20:54.090 attractive in some way. 00:20:54.170 --> 00:20:58.970 And I think that's you know, Manvia Salinger Singh has talked about selective subjective 00:20:58.970 --> 00:21:00.970 selection, and I think that's you know that's useful. 00:21:01.050 --> 00:21:03.050 And there are other ways of thinking about this. 00:21:03.370 --> 00:21:09.000 So I I think the design stance is the wrong stance, but there isn't there's no doubt a 00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:11.080 causal flow from the mind to those things. 00:21:11.160 --> 00:21:17.000 And that, you know we recreate them and reimagine them and and reinterpret them and 00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:21.320 and do stuff purposely that sort of feeds into their evolution. 00:21:21.560 --> 00:21:22.600 So I completely agree. 00:21:22.680 --> 00:21:26.920 I think reverse engineering, you know, I think that the a really bad way to do social 00:21:26.920 --> 00:21:30.600 scientist is say, look, there's this group of people who are, you know, all all doing 00:21:30.600 --> 00:21:33.290 something, maybe it's good for their group that they do that. 00:21:33.450 --> 00:21:36.650 You know, I just you know, or maybe it has a function at the group level. 00:21:36.730 --> 00:21:41.370 I I don't really think I I think informally that can sometimes be right. 00:21:41.450 --> 00:21:45.450 Like, you know, we all agree we want to have a convention about which side of the road we 00:21:45.450 --> 00:21:46.090 drive. 00:21:46.890 --> 00:21:51.930 So we it's all in our interest to uphold that and to be annoyed with people who who depart 00:21:51.930 --> 00:21:52.410 from it. 00:21:52.570 --> 00:21:57.100 So you could, I guess, informally say this convention about all driving on the same as the 00:21:57.260 --> 00:22:01.660 you know has a function for the for society, but it's not it's not it's it doesn't have a 00:22:01.660 --> 00:22:03.420 function the same way that the eye does. 00:22:03.660 --> 00:22:06.860 That's just saying all of the people kind of agree that this is a good idea and then we 00:22:06.860 --> 00:22:07.740 really ought to stick for it. 00:22:07.820 --> 00:22:11.420 And there's very uh few people arguing that we should give up this convention, you know. 00:22:11.820 --> 00:22:12.140 Mm-hmm. 00:22:12.300 --> 00:22:12.460 Yeah. 00:22:12.700 --> 00:22:17.270 I mean it this does depart from at least some traditions or ways of thinking about culture. 00:22:17.430 --> 00:22:21.670 So there there are some scholars who do think that the design stance uh is often 00:22:21.670 --> 00:22:24.150 appropriate to take toward culture. 00:22:24.310 --> 00:22:28.790 Um this is these would be people uh you know like uh Joe Henrik and colleagues who argue 00:22:28.790 --> 00:22:32.710 that uh cultural group selection might explain a lot of cultural phenomena. 00:22:32.870 --> 00:22:35.510 They've made this argument uh regarding uh monogamy. 00:22:35.750 --> 00:22:41.110 There are other scholars who think that uh maybe this explains religion, um maybe this 00:22:41.110 --> 00:22:46.680 explains the the ways in which uh groups around the world have tools and subsistence 00:22:46.680 --> 00:22:52.440 strategies uh that are uh well suited to their ecology, that uh, you know, over time their 00:22:52.440 --> 00:22:57.720 culture has evolved to adapt them to their particular um uh climate. 00:22:57.960 --> 00:23:01.800 Um so do you depart from these approaches? 00:23:01.960 --> 00:23:06.120 Do you think that they are overstating or or or or how where do you where do you fit in? 00:23:06.440 --> 00:23:10.130 So I think I think they capture a a a correct intuition, right? 00:23:10.210 --> 00:23:15.570 Which is that um, you know, we we but we all agreed that social 00:23:15.810 --> 00:23:20.130 processes can be path dependent and then get stuck in various kinds of sticky equilibria 00:23:20.290 --> 00:23:20.690 and so on. 00:23:20.770 --> 00:23:26.290 And if they're you know, if if they're awful for people, if they cause people to not be 00:23:26.290 --> 00:23:31.970 able to subsist or uh you know experience excessively high levels of 00:23:31.970 --> 00:23:35.010 conflict, then people are going to seek available alternatives, right? 00:23:35.090 --> 00:23:37.970 So you will get a flow away from the institutions that work. 00:23:38.450 --> 00:23:42.780 Um now uh so I I don't sort of disagree with the phenomenon. 00:23:42.940 --> 00:23:46.140 I just think that my causal interpretation of it will be rather different. 00:23:46.300 --> 00:23:51.820 I don't think this is at all like uh you know, natural selection produces 00:23:52.380 --> 00:23:56.460 genes by random mutation, and then some of them are good and you know for individual 00:23:56.460 --> 00:23:57.500 organisms and they stay around. 00:23:57.580 --> 00:23:58.380 But I don't think it's like that. 00:23:58.460 --> 00:24:03.610 I think it's much more like purposive agents Maybe say, God, you know, we're we're stuck in 00:24:03.610 --> 00:24:04.810 a really bad equilibrium here. 00:24:04.890 --> 00:24:06.650 You know, we're we're in cycles of retaliation. 00:24:06.730 --> 00:24:07.690 I'm just going to opt out of this. 00:24:07.770 --> 00:24:11.210 I'm going to walk away, or I'm going to go and you know join that coalition over there 00:24:11.290 --> 00:24:16.250 because it's, you know, that's that's a different causal account that is going to lead to 00:24:16.250 --> 00:24:22.160 the same observation that generally speaking, you know, societies Or 00:24:22.400 --> 00:24:28.320 i you know, institutions that are acceptable to enough of the people enough of the 00:24:28.320 --> 00:24:32.640 time are going to have a better chance of stabilizing than ones that, you know, i the 00:24:32.640 --> 00:24:38.400 reductio ad absurdum I I don't know, trying to wear fur 00:24:38.400 --> 00:24:39.680 coats in the desert or something, right? 00:24:39.760 --> 00:24:42.960 But I mean the the causal account of that is not that there were people there there's a 00:24:42.960 --> 00:24:46.400 whole societies of people who are wearing fur coats in the desert and they died out. 00:24:46.490 --> 00:24:50.490 You know, I don't think that's like I think people say, I want to take this coat off, I'm 00:24:50.490 --> 00:24:50.730 hot. 00:24:50.810 --> 00:24:54.170 You know, that's a different account of the causality. 00:24:54.810 --> 00:24:55.130 Right. 00:24:55.290 --> 00:24:55.530 Yeah. 00:24:55.610 --> 00:25:01.610 It it um uh viewing culture w with uh a design stance and 00:25:01.610 --> 00:25:07.460 in too monomaniacal of a way can cause you to forget the underlying agent um or the set of 00:25:07.460 --> 00:25:10.980 agents that are um contributing to the to the phenomenon. 00:25:11.140 --> 00:25:15.140 Uh and when you focus too much on the culture itself as a i as a kind of evolutionary 00:25:15.140 --> 00:25:19.700 process, you forget that there are agents involved who are making intelligent choices uh at 00:25:19.700 --> 00:25:20.740 every step of the way. 00:25:20.900 --> 00:25:26.740 Uh and it's often more insightful to foreground those agents uh in in the analysis to to 00:25:26.740 --> 00:25:30.410 figure out how the culture got to the the place it currently is. 00:25:30.730 --> 00:25:34.490 Yeah, I mean I think it th I completely agree with that, though I do think it depends 00:25:34.490 --> 00:25:36.330 slightly what question you're answering, right? 00:25:36.410 --> 00:25:42.010 So if you're asking, for example, a question in um developmental psychology, 00:25:42.250 --> 00:25:46.890 you know, the kid comes into a world in which there are particular types of social 00:25:46.890 --> 00:25:51.370 relations or particular linguistic conventions, for example, and pretty much, you know, 00:25:51.530 --> 00:25:53.050 just has to figure out what those are. 00:25:53.290 --> 00:25:58.540 I mean you know, we know that we we know that over generations 00:25:58.780 --> 00:26:04.700 actually, speakers and learners do exert a an influence on languages that change them, 00:26:04.860 --> 00:26:05.100 right? 00:26:05.180 --> 00:26:06.460 That's how languages change. 00:26:06.620 --> 00:26:10.300 But sort of for the individual kid, it's as if you know it is as if the culture is out 00:26:10.300 --> 00:26:14.140 there and their their primary task is to, you know, just get hold of it. 00:26:14.300 --> 00:26:18.220 So d I think depending on the grain of analysis, uh sometimes I think you perhaps have to 00:26:18.540 --> 00:26:24.530 zoom in and out between uh you know, the agency approach and the kind of and the 00:26:24.530 --> 00:26:30.370 more um what is the existing social structure uh approach but there 00:26:30.450 --> 00:26:35.010 there's there's an interesting dynamic between those two things you know uh I I guess 00:26:35.010 --> 00:26:39.490 that's that's that's the the point to make sure yeah I mean I think even the example of 00:26:39.490 --> 00:26:44.770 sort of the person who walks away from the culture right I mean you can imagine uh 00:26:45.360 --> 00:26:48.960 a cultural institution that then comes up. 00:26:49.120 --> 00:26:54.400 So your example of sort of, you know, there's there's there's a situation that the culture 00:26:54.400 --> 00:26:57.360 has produced that's bad enough that people want to leave. 00:26:57.680 --> 00:27:03.600 Uh you can imagine then, if you're thinking scientifically, from a dynamics, I mean maybe 00:27:03.600 --> 00:27:08.560 dynamics are the right is the right language, but sort of um if there's a cultural 00:27:08.560 --> 00:27:12.510 institution, then that sort of prevents people from leaving, right? 00:27:12.590 --> 00:27:18.510 Or to the degree that structure exists, then that allows for a dynamic of sort of 00:27:18.510 --> 00:27:20.510 more exploitative culture. 00:27:20.750 --> 00:27:20.910 Right. 00:27:21.070 --> 00:27:26.990 Or so, so like even in that model, you can use, you can use the fact that there 00:27:26.990 --> 00:27:30.670 are people have motivations and it's not just random genes. 00:27:30.830 --> 00:27:36.700 But then you can actually import that people usually want to leave when things 00:27:36.700 --> 00:27:37.100 get bad. 00:27:37.260 --> 00:27:42.700 Therefore, you can kind of predict from a scientific perspective or a dynamics perspective 00:27:42.940 --> 00:27:48.700 that if, like, for example, the leadership in a culture wants to exploit 00:27:48.700 --> 00:27:53.180 the people, then there has to be some structure either already in the environment, like 00:27:53.180 --> 00:27:58.670 they're stranded in an island and they can't leave, or that they impose some way of 00:27:58.670 --> 00:28:01.070 constraining outside choices. 00:28:01.150 --> 00:28:05.950 And then you can sort of understand why that would exist, or when there's more constraint 00:28:06.030 --> 00:28:08.830 in outside options, why there's more exploitation. 00:28:09.310 --> 00:28:09.550 Yeah. 00:28:09.790 --> 00:28:10.030 Yeah. 00:28:10.110 --> 00:28:15.870 And I I mean, on that note, I think many people, many social 00:28:15.870 --> 00:28:21.520 scientists have argued that the central Um problem of social science is to do with power 00:28:21.520 --> 00:28:22.640 and power asymmetries. 00:28:23.120 --> 00:28:24.720 I don't know if this is necessarily right. 00:28:24.800 --> 00:28:28.400 You could probably argue the case, but and I think evolutionary psychology has a 00:28:28.400 --> 00:28:31.280 potentially quite a lot to say about that. 00:28:31.440 --> 00:28:31.680 Yeah. 00:28:31.840 --> 00:28:37.280 That that is kind of difficult to grasp from a more uh 00:28:37.280 --> 00:28:41.890 culturalist perspective, because you know, there are things that are sort of good for 00:28:41.890 --> 00:28:42.850 everyone and so on. 00:28:43.010 --> 00:28:47.250 But power and conflict is something evolutionary psychology sort of naturally lends itself 00:28:47.250 --> 00:28:52.770 to understanding because a basic thing about independently 00:28:52.770 --> 00:28:55.170 reproducing animals is that their interests are not aligned. 00:28:55.490 --> 00:28:58.450 The interests of men are not necessarily aligned to those of women, the interest of 00:28:58.450 --> 00:29:02.690 unrelated, even even of siblings is not actually perfectly aligned, even of parents and 00:29:02.690 --> 00:29:03.410 offspring, right? 00:29:03.650 --> 00:29:09.220 So you've got in the classes of individuals whose interests become aligned or are are just 00:29:09.220 --> 00:29:15.140 structurally more closely aligned as in members of family families, or become aligned uh th 00:29:15.380 --> 00:29:21.140 through shared reproduction, as in uh uh affinal relationships in laws, 00:29:21.540 --> 00:29:23.940 you know, or through in through situation, right? 00:29:24.020 --> 00:29:27.860 Which is, you know, w we collaborate, we are in a coalition, we go fishing together. 00:29:28.180 --> 00:29:32.020 But fund our fundamental Darwinian interests are not perfectly aligned, right? 00:29:32.100 --> 00:29:37.970 So that actually says conflict and attempts to influence the behavior of 00:29:37.970 --> 00:29:40.210 others will be fairly central to human existence. 00:29:40.530 --> 00:29:40.850 Yeah. 00:29:41.490 --> 00:29:45.810 And in a way you we we have quite a specific notion of that. 00:29:46.290 --> 00:29:50.050 And of course, you know, you don't you don't have to be a Marxist to also know that that's 00:29:50.050 --> 00:29:52.690 a huge theme in social science sciences, right? 00:29:52.850 --> 00:29:53.570 Conflict of interest. 00:29:53.730 --> 00:29:57.250 So I think we actually do quite a good job of getting hold of that. 00:29:57.760 --> 00:29:58.720 What are the complications? 00:29:59.040 --> 00:30:00.960 Why do people attempt to change the behavior of others? 00:30:01.120 --> 00:30:02.880 Why do others sometimes want to resist that? 00:30:03.040 --> 00:30:06.800 Whether they can succeed to do so or or not, of course depends. 00:30:06.960 --> 00:30:10.800 But um I I think I think there's we give quite a rich account of that. 00:30:10.960 --> 00:30:14.400 That maybe we don't give ourselves credit for how important an insight that is. 00:30:14.720 --> 00:30:15.600 Yeah, I like that. 00:30:15.760 --> 00:30:19.050 Yeah, and I mean I actually that reminds me, I mean, 'cause with we've David and I have 00:30:19.050 --> 00:30:19.690 been talking a lot. 00:30:19.770 --> 00:30:22.970 And I think like of David's work and Dan, I think your work too. 00:30:23.130 --> 00:30:28.410 And maybe you guys are representing a new shift in the evolutionary social sciences, which 00:30:28.410 --> 00:30:34.170 is sort of there's a difference between the surface level in David's terminology, 00:30:34.330 --> 00:30:40.200 propaganda of why we're doing what we're doing when a lot of it 00:30:40.200 --> 00:30:42.520 is about power and resources. 00:30:42.680 --> 00:30:47.160 And it's again respecting that there's this evolved design that really should care about 00:30:47.160 --> 00:30:47.320 this. 00:30:47.400 --> 00:30:48.040 It is important. 00:30:48.120 --> 00:30:50.120 It's like, does my kids starve or not? 00:30:50.200 --> 00:30:52.120 You know, and do I feel safe or not? 00:30:52.280 --> 00:30:57.320 Um, but then kind of laying bare that we're all using this power 00:30:57.560 --> 00:31:00.760 resource-focused evolved psychology. 00:31:00.840 --> 00:31:03.480 And that's what's really driving a lot of dynamics. 00:31:03.970 --> 00:31:05.890 So what do you mean by the surface level? 00:31:06.050 --> 00:31:10.850 You mean the the the the discussive justifications people give yeah exactly so like you 00:31:10.850 --> 00:31:16.690 know ideologies to sort of you know that that um uh I mean David's got 00:31:16.690 --> 00:31:20.930 probably 30 examples off the top of his head so maybe I'll just let him talk about it 00:31:21.010 --> 00:31:26.980 because uh yeah yeah so um when we when we discuss, you know, what what 00:31:26.980 --> 00:31:32.900 goes on in the political sphere um uh and we explain why we're uh pursuing 00:31:32.900 --> 00:31:36.740 various courses of action, why we want this particular policy or not, what what our 00:31:36.740 --> 00:31:42.660 political party is striving for, um we very rarely, if ever, uh frame things 00:31:42.660 --> 00:31:48.260 in a uh in a naked self-interest perspective or in a we just want power, we just want to uh 00:31:48.260 --> 00:31:53.330 monopolize resources for ourselves, we just want to grab goodies from the state. 00:31:54.770 --> 00:31:59.490 The way instead that we frame um our political activity is much more high-minded. 00:32:00.290 --> 00:32:02.290 We're pursuing these abstract ideals. 00:32:08.450 --> 00:32:13.090 And this isn't to say that those sometimes might have some truth to it, but uh there is an 00:32:13.090 --> 00:32:18.560 interest in um not being completely upfront about the agenda of any particular political 00:32:18.560 --> 00:32:19.040 coalition. 00:32:19.200 --> 00:32:23.600 If I come out and say as a politician, all I want is power, I'm just a power-hungry guy, no 00:32:23.600 --> 00:32:24.640 one's going to vote for me. 00:32:24.960 --> 00:32:30.160 And so there is an incentive built into the system where uh revealing the objectives of any 00:32:30.160 --> 00:32:34.320 of the agents within the system is counterproductive to those agents' objectives. 00:32:34.810 --> 00:32:39.930 And so often what you see is that the the verbal descriptions of the underlying phenomena 00:32:39.930 --> 00:32:44.250 will uh uh be out of sync with the the actual explanations that are driving things. 00:32:44.330 --> 00:32:48.650 And those uh discrepancies will will often be in the interests of many of the agents in the 00:32:48.650 --> 00:32:48.890 system. 00:32:49.210 --> 00:32:52.810 At least that's uh that's my my current way of thinking about it. 00:32:52.970 --> 00:32:58.250 I don't know if if that that's that's too cynical of a No, I think I think it's true, but I 00:32:58.250 --> 00:33:03.780 I do also think that abstract ideas do have some causal force, some 00:33:03.780 --> 00:33:05.220 causal sway over people. 00:33:05.300 --> 00:33:11.300 But I think even that also is um I think even that is is 00:33:11.300 --> 00:33:15.700 explicable within the within an evolutionary psychology framework in in something like the 00:33:15.700 --> 00:33:16.740 following way, right? 00:33:16.820 --> 00:33:22.580 That um in for for for highly cognitive beings that are 00:33:22.580 --> 00:33:26.660 figuring out in a really contingent way what to do in their environment and and often 00:33:26.980 --> 00:33:28.180 collaborating. 00:33:28.530 --> 00:33:33.490 Of course, I've immediately got a huge interest to cause you to do to coordinate my way or 00:33:33.490 --> 00:33:36.930 do the activity I, you know, that would be useful for me to be done. 00:33:37.330 --> 00:33:40.850 And there's various ways I can do that, but one of the obvious ways is actually persuading 00:33:40.850 --> 00:33:45.410 you that you know it's a good idea by making you see certain aspects of it that actually, 00:33:45.490 --> 00:33:50.610 you know, uh so that's that that's where that's where what you're describing 00:33:50.930 --> 00:33:51.890 comes about. 00:33:52.620 --> 00:33:57.900 but also I'm that you know, w we live in a partner choice ecology, or we're involved in 00:33:57.900 --> 00:34:00.460 partner choice ecologies where 00:34:03.100 --> 00:34:08.300 blatant self contradictions in my in my kind of characterizations of why we should do 00:34:08.300 --> 00:34:10.220 certain things are gonna show up. 00:34:10.540 --> 00:34:15.820 So there's a sense in which having you know used the argument that um 00:34:19.110 --> 00:34:24.950 everyone should uh uh everyone should have um butter with you, 00:34:25.110 --> 00:34:25.510 Dave. 00:34:25.670 --> 00:34:28.710 If I then say, but the other Dave shouldn't have butter, right? 00:34:29.110 --> 00:34:33.270 Which might be in my interest, immediately you say, Well, this this guy, you know, he 00:34:33.270 --> 00:34:34.790 doesn't make any cognitive sense, right? 00:34:34.870 --> 00:34:40.630 He's not so I I do actually think that ideas do acquire a causal force, even quite abstract 00:34:40.630 --> 00:34:45.500 ones and values and all of these things, but partly for reputational reasons, because you 00:34:45.500 --> 00:34:50.620 think, well, what would how persuasive would be someone who clearly doesn't, you know, 00:34:50.780 --> 00:34:55.100 argues one thing now and five minutes in five minutes' time would be arguing the opposite? 00:34:55.260 --> 00:34:59.820 I'll kind of know that there's no discursive reliability, and you know, that that says 00:34:59.820 --> 00:35:01.660 something about the interaction with that partner. 00:35:01.740 --> 00:35:07.570 So, in a strange way, you become kind of bound to uh quite abstract 00:35:07.570 --> 00:35:07.890 ideas. 00:35:07.970 --> 00:35:13.330 And this also goes for all sorts of things like um religious restrictions and moral 00:35:13.330 --> 00:35:15.090 restrictions of various kinds. 00:35:15.970 --> 00:35:21.650 And this is not to deny that people had resource and power 00:35:21.810 --> 00:35:24.530 interests for doing these things in the first place, but because otherwise you're seen 00:35:24.530 --> 00:35:28.050 immediately as someone who's kind of not credible, not reliable. 00:35:28.610 --> 00:35:34.600 So uh I I think that kind of relatively abstract ideas can 00:35:34.600 --> 00:35:40.520 become important causes of behaviour because we're evaluated according to our 00:35:41.000 --> 00:35:46.120 you know, and then you get this sort of strange tension where, as you say, many um 00:35:47.080 --> 00:35:52.290 political uh actors are an odd mixture of kind of 00:35:52.610 --> 00:35:58.450 genuine attempts at intellectual consistency and coherent worldview, and 00:35:58.930 --> 00:36:02.370 doing strategically whatever just suits their agenda the most. 00:36:02.450 --> 00:36:05.730 It's just a weird kind of hybrid between those two things. 00:36:06.210 --> 00:36:07.090 Yeah, absolutely. 00:36:07.570 --> 00:36:13.360 But but even there, there's still something of a d disconnect between the explicit uh 00:36:13.360 --> 00:36:17.440 narratives about why what's being done is being done and the actual processes underlying 00:36:17.440 --> 00:36:17.600 it. 00:36:17.840 --> 00:36:21.600 So the narrative is that I just want butter for all, and that's what's driving my behavior. 00:36:21.760 --> 00:36:26.080 In reality, what's driving my behavior is I want power and resources, uh, but uh in a in an 00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:29.360 environment where being spotted as a hypocrite is going to thwart that goal. 00:36:29.520 --> 00:36:34.290 And so I better say that we I want butter for all and I I better appear consistent uh uh 00:36:34.370 --> 00:36:37.810 about that as much as possible so as not to sabotage myself. 00:36:37.970 --> 00:36:39.970 Uh and that's the underlying. 00:36:40.290 --> 00:36:43.970 I can't privately be found depriving butter to my neighbor or something or you know, 00:36:44.370 --> 00:36:44.690 exactly. 00:36:44.930 --> 00:36:50.930 And so in pursuing my agenda for power or or status or whatever, uh and my calculations 00:36:50.930 --> 00:36:54.770 about the likely social reactions of different tactics and people and and being being 00:36:54.770 --> 00:36:59.140 worried that people will think I'm a hypocrite, that is what's leading to the the butter uh 00:36:59.380 --> 00:37:05.140 spreading behavior uh and not an intrinsic desire for spreading butter no 00:37:05.380 --> 00:37:10.900 to to use your your wonderful analogy yeah and and and then then that's also where I don't 00:37:10.900 --> 00:37:13.700 know if this dynamic word dynamics or selection comes in. 00:37:13.780 --> 00:37:18.820 So from your persp from anyone's perspective, if everybody finds the thing agre uh 00:37:18.820 --> 00:37:20.590 agreeable, then that's great, right? 00:37:20.670 --> 00:37:25.470 Like if if if if if I model that everybody, whatever kind of, you know, there's this 00:37:25.470 --> 00:37:28.590 metaphor of you just throw pasta on the wall until it sticks. 00:37:28.750 --> 00:37:33.310 If everybody sort of accepts this thing that I've calculated will benefit me and my 00:37:33.310 --> 00:37:38.830 extended interests, and everybody does, in fact, agree with it, that's wonderful. 00:37:39.070 --> 00:37:39.950 And that's great. 00:37:40.030 --> 00:37:44.030 And there might be sort of selection for those kinds of representations. 00:37:44.110 --> 00:37:46.350 But often people will be like, no, that sucks. 00:37:46.620 --> 00:37:47.660 I we lose out. 00:37:47.740 --> 00:37:50.460 And David, you know, in that example, David's like, I don't have butter. 00:37:50.620 --> 00:37:56.540 And then it just becomes a thing of sort of, well, are we are Dan and I in 00:37:56.540 --> 00:37:57.500 that example? 00:37:57.740 --> 00:38:02.700 Um, you know, we might go along with it because we have enough power and David doesn't have 00:38:02.700 --> 00:38:03.260 enough power. 00:38:03.500 --> 00:38:08.620 So we don't really care if if everybody goes along with with this narrative. 00:38:08.700 --> 00:38:10.860 It's just matters, do the right people go along with it? 00:38:11.020 --> 00:38:12.780 Do enough people agree with it? 00:38:12.990 --> 00:38:14.750 And you get all the above, right? 00:38:14.830 --> 00:38:18.430 So there's some things where, and Dave and I talked about this, where you would almost 00:38:18.430 --> 00:38:24.190 expect that the the putting it in an intuitive folk psychological way, 00:38:24.510 --> 00:38:29.230 that groups of people would find other groups' political ideas weird. 00:38:29.390 --> 00:38:35.150 And that's precisely because those ideas or the silliness of other groups' ideas don't 00:38:35.150 --> 00:38:40.030 occur to the group itself because they're all benefiting from sort of being in on the 00:38:40.030 --> 00:38:41.070 silliness, right? 00:38:41.320 --> 00:38:45.400 Like, like, you know, why even like a take a religious idea, right? 00:38:45.480 --> 00:38:51.320 Like it seems really silly if you're not in the actual buying into the benefits 00:38:51.320 --> 00:38:53.720 of that sort of group identity. 00:38:53.960 --> 00:38:58.840 But from the evolved psychological perspective of all the people who are in that group, um, 00:38:59.160 --> 00:39:04.840 there's nearly not motivation to like question that because this representation is working 00:39:04.840 --> 00:39:06.440 for me and I'm getting benefits out of it. 00:39:06.520 --> 00:39:12.170 So you'd almost predict that there'd be these kind of clines of sort of beliefs look weird 00:39:12.170 --> 00:39:17.850 to the degree that you are not in the kind of climb of benefits from that group 00:39:18.010 --> 00:39:23.450 precisely because it's when you get benefits from the group, there's sort of uh a benefit 00:39:23.450 --> 00:39:28.250 for everybody to sort of go along with what is inconsistency or what is silly. 00:39:28.410 --> 00:39:30.570 There's just no reason to sort of call it out. 00:39:31.050 --> 00:39:35.450 Well, not to call it out, but there's a difference between privately believing something 00:39:35.450 --> 00:39:36.730 and calling it out, right? 00:39:36.890 --> 00:39:42.820 And I actually think I think the internalization of uh social systems 00:39:42.820 --> 00:39:43.860 has been overstated. 00:39:44.020 --> 00:39:46.980 I think there's lots of evidence people kind of know that things are silly. 00:39:47.140 --> 00:39:47.380 Yeah. 00:39:47.540 --> 00:39:51.140 I there's lots of things I think are silly, but I'm not necessarily gonna stand up and say 00:39:51.140 --> 00:39:55.060 it because I you know, I I care about people's social reaction and I don't care, but I know 00:39:55.060 --> 00:39:57.140 the people I care about care and you know, all of that. 00:39:57.300 --> 00:40:03.090 So actually I I think you know that there are we woke the 00:40:03.250 --> 00:40:05.970 certain kinds of cultural things are incredibly sticky. 00:40:06.050 --> 00:40:08.370 Uh and that's very interesting. 00:40:08.610 --> 00:40:11.250 But there are also plenty of historical cases where they're not. 00:40:11.410 --> 00:40:14.610 You know, like Chinese footbinding, you know, dies out within a few decades. 00:40:14.770 --> 00:40:15.970 Everyone says, This is really silly. 00:40:16.050 --> 00:40:16.850 Why are we doing this? 00:40:16.930 --> 00:40:18.290 Yeah, I thought you wanted to do this. 00:40:18.690 --> 00:40:23.890 And and then it just so there's so I actually think people are 00:40:23.890 --> 00:40:24.770 tracking. 00:40:26.040 --> 00:40:31.080 I I d I think that we overstated the extent to which people have sort of internalized the 00:40:31.080 --> 00:40:31.880 social order. 00:40:32.120 --> 00:40:35.560 There's a real difference in saying, you know, I'm not gonna call that out. 00:40:35.640 --> 00:40:41.160 I'm gonna put my head above the parapet because I'm not 00:40:41.160 --> 00:40:42.360 dying from this. 00:40:47.330 --> 00:40:52.770 and other people look like they might be committed to it, then hey, you know, let's not 00:40:52.770 --> 00:40:53.410 rock the boat. 00:40:53.490 --> 00:40:55.890 I think people are risk averse and ambiguity averse. 00:40:55.970 --> 00:41:00.210 And if I start saying, well, the way we do things is just weird and bizarre and I'm not 00:41:00.210 --> 00:41:03.010 going to do it anymore, who knows what's going to happen, right? 00:41:03.090 --> 00:41:05.650 That's a risky scenario. 00:41:05.970 --> 00:41:11.570 Whereas the status quo might be weird, but it's a weirdness we all sort of find moderately 00:41:11.570 --> 00:41:12.370 predictable. 00:41:12.620 --> 00:41:12.860 Yeah. 00:41:13.100 --> 00:41:15.420 You know, it's it's stabilized somehow in interaction. 00:41:15.500 --> 00:41:21.180 So I think that the status quo has a kind of in fact I in in a in a in a way, 00:41:21.340 --> 00:41:26.540 you know, w we could debate about what culture is, but I would say that you know one 00:41:26.540 --> 00:41:31.980 definition of culture is the weird stuff that's got stabilized by its you know by its 00:41:31.980 --> 00:41:32.540 stability. 00:41:35.500 --> 00:41:40.770 The weird stuff we know, the weird stuff that is somehow kind of uh uh uh 00:41:41.330 --> 00:41:47.010 has congealed to the extent that uh it makes everyday 00:41:47.010 --> 00:41:50.050 life somewhat you know sufficiently predictable. 00:41:50.450 --> 00:41:55.250 May not be great, may not really correspond to what any of us would ideally want. 00:41:55.570 --> 00:41:59.090 But hey, you know, you think of the cost of trying to do something else, what who knows 00:41:59.090 --> 00:42:03.490 what would happen if I said, okay, I refuse to work in this way, I refuse to go along with 00:42:03.490 --> 00:42:05.330 these norms, I'm gonna do some other thing now. 00:42:05.410 --> 00:42:07.010 I have no idea how everyone would react. 00:42:07.250 --> 00:42:12.680 So there's a sense in which we we shouldn't 00:42:13.160 --> 00:42:18.360 I think we shouldn't we shouldn't assume that A every member of group X, you know, whatever 00:42:18.360 --> 00:42:23.320 group X means knows what the culture is and agrees completely on the values. 00:42:23.480 --> 00:42:25.640 And B everyone privately believes it's a good idea. 00:42:25.720 --> 00:42:28.360 I don't think I don't think either of those things is generally true. 00:42:30.090 --> 00:42:34.730 Yeah, that's a very it's a very grown up way to sort of think about culture and it's a very 00:42:34.730 --> 00:42:38.890 naive way to think about culture the other way, which is just sort of what you just said, 00:42:38.970 --> 00:42:44.810 you know, which I think is honestly probably a very um um natural way 00:42:44.810 --> 00:42:48.890 to think uh for exactly these reasons, is like the evolved psychology is sort of 00:42:48.890 --> 00:42:50.810 calculating am I gonna rock the boat? 00:42:50.890 --> 00:42:55.210 And to the extent I don't, you know, it's sort of a bunch of white lies because it's not 00:42:55.210 --> 00:42:58.570 hurting anybody, but it might be in an in the aggregate. 00:42:58.970 --> 00:42:59.290 Right. 00:42:59.370 --> 00:42:59.690 Yeah. 00:42:59.850 --> 00:43:00.010 Yeah. 00:43:00.180 --> 00:43:00.340 Yeah. 00:43:00.420 --> 00:43:05.380 I mean I for me, I think what this is reminding me of, uh it's a word I've been thinking 00:43:05.380 --> 00:43:05.780 about a lot. 00:43:05.860 --> 00:43:08.660 I feel I feel like it's an extremely underappreciated word. 00:43:08.740 --> 00:43:10.420 Uh Stephen Pinker wrote a book on it. 00:43:10.500 --> 00:43:11.620 It's called coordination. 00:43:11.780 --> 00:43:14.020 I think we're what we're talking about is coordination. 00:43:14.100 --> 00:43:18.740 Um and it is often preferable to coordinate on a suboptimal equilibrium than to not 00:43:18.740 --> 00:43:19.620 coordinate at all. 00:43:19.780 --> 00:43:20.100 Right. 00:43:20.180 --> 00:43:24.490 And so, you know, uh Thomas Schelling famously uh made this point where he said, you know, 00:43:24.570 --> 00:43:28.010 if two people are trying to meet up in New York and they have no way of communicating, they 00:43:28.010 --> 00:43:31.290 don't have cell phones, and they just need to meet at the same time and place, where are 00:43:31.290 --> 00:43:32.090 they going to meet up? 00:43:32.250 --> 00:43:36.010 Uh and he uh brought you know people into the lab and asked them this question, and the 00:43:36.010 --> 00:43:39.530 most common answer was Grand Central Station at noon, right? 00:43:39.770 --> 00:43:43.900 And it's not because Grand Central Station is the best place to meet in New York City. 00:43:43.980 --> 00:43:46.700 That's that's the most exciting place that they're gonna have the best time. 00:43:46.860 --> 00:43:51.100 And it's not that noon is the best time for people to meet, it's just that those two, you 00:43:51.100 --> 00:43:53.820 know, that time and that place is just the most salient to people. 00:43:53.980 --> 00:43:58.060 It's just a salient landmark, and and you can count on it being salient to the other 00:43:58.060 --> 00:44:01.340 person, and you can count on the other person knowing that it's going to be salient to you, 00:44:01.420 --> 00:44:06.460 and so on and so on down the the chain of of recursion, and that's why it's just a focal 00:44:06.460 --> 00:44:06.700 point. 00:44:06.910 --> 00:44:10.910 And we have all these our culture is made of these kinds of focal points. 00:44:11.070 --> 00:44:12.750 And many of them are just not ideal. 00:44:12.830 --> 00:44:15.950 It's just it just happens to be the case that these things are sailing and they work and 00:44:15.950 --> 00:44:20.030 getting us on the same page, uh, but they're not necessarily the best page, right? 00:44:20.510 --> 00:44:24.990 And and it's because coordinating on the best page is actually extremely hard, because 00:44:24.990 --> 00:44:27.070 coordinating at all is extremely hard. 00:44:27.200 --> 00:44:30.880 And so we're often lucky to coordinate on any page at all than we are to coordinate on on 00:44:30.880 --> 00:44:31.600 the best page. 00:44:31.840 --> 00:44:32.080 Yeah. 00:44:32.400 --> 00:44:36.240 And um so and sociology is good as a discipline about understanding this. 00:44:36.400 --> 00:44:41.600 Like there's lots of sociological theory where particularly the sort of micro 00:44:41.840 --> 00:44:46.640 expectations of everyday life, you know, how it is you go into an office, how it is you 00:44:47.120 --> 00:44:49.370 shop in a supermarket, whatever. 00:44:50.010 --> 00:44:54.250 I don't think anyone wants to say this is because it's, you know, economically rational to 00:44:54.250 --> 00:44:55.290 do this or it's optimal. 00:44:55.370 --> 00:44:58.970 It's just because life's full of uncertainty and you've got to know how to carry on. 00:44:59.130 --> 00:44:59.370 Right. 00:44:59.450 --> 00:45:02.010 And so i when in doubt, turn up at 9 a.m. 00:45:02.170 --> 00:45:02.650 and wear a tie. 00:45:02.730 --> 00:45:04.730 You know, I mean it's you know, because you otherwise you don't know. 00:45:04.890 --> 00:45:06.090 You don't know what's gonna happen. 00:45:06.250 --> 00:45:09.130 There might be a completely different way of doing this business. 00:45:09.370 --> 00:45:14.560 But I don't know what it is, and I didn't you know, but it's Grand Central doing f certain 00:45:14.560 --> 00:45:17.600 things, our Grand Central Station at midday. 00:45:17.760 --> 00:45:21.200 Yeah, I know that you know you can probably predict that I'll do it, I'll predict that 00:45:21.200 --> 00:45:21.840 you'll do it. 00:45:22.000 --> 00:45:25.600 We don't want to cause each other too much prediction error. 00:45:25.760 --> 00:45:31.360 And so that that's I I think a lot of the the stability of 00:45:31.600 --> 00:45:37.360 um of things that we observe is not 00:45:37.360 --> 00:45:43.210 necessarily that people have kind of are deeply internalized, you know, have 00:45:43.210 --> 00:45:46.650 some sort of adaptation to kind of internalize the norms of the environment and then just 00:45:46.650 --> 00:45:47.610 do them unquestionably. 00:45:47.690 --> 00:45:50.410 It's just it's kind of hard to see what the alternative is. 00:45:50.570 --> 00:45:52.810 That was there, that was mutually salient. 00:45:53.050 --> 00:45:54.490 It's not costing me so much. 00:45:54.650 --> 00:46:00.570 You can bet your life that, you know, if Grand Central Station was very dangerous for 00:46:00.570 --> 00:46:05.040 some reason or in you know enormously expensive to get to, I would do something else, or 00:46:05.040 --> 00:46:07.600 I'd just I'd give up on coordinating with you that day. 00:46:07.760 --> 00:46:12.160 So so you know, the strategic actor is still there, weighing their costs and benefits. 00:46:12.400 --> 00:46:18.240 But just a lot of the time, as you say, the the the cost is fairly small 00:46:19.040 --> 00:46:24.640 or uh and and the benefit well, the benefit structure is unknown, but it at least sort of 00:46:24.640 --> 00:46:26.800 being able to predictably proceed in some way. 00:46:26.960 --> 00:46:31.360 You know, people don't want to be alone, they don't want to be outcasts, they don't want to 00:46:31.360 --> 00:46:32.800 lack social support. 00:46:33.430 --> 00:46:36.950 So if you don't really know, you know, and we don't know what each other's thinking, right? 00:46:37.030 --> 00:46:38.950 We you know we have some idea, but we don't really know. 00:46:39.030 --> 00:46:41.270 I don't know what you might do tomorrow, where you might go. 00:46:41.350 --> 00:46:47.110 But so if I can just sort of pick up on simple salient coordination points like that, 00:46:47.350 --> 00:46:51.510 I'm gonna do it, you know, absent fairly strong incentives to do something else. 00:46:51.830 --> 00:46:51.990 Yeah. 00:46:52.150 --> 00:46:57.840 And then characterization of what people are experiencing on the ground, and maybe this is 00:46:57.840 --> 00:47:03.520 a transition to some of the work, is my understanding, uh, Daniel, 00:47:03.760 --> 00:47:09.440 is that your work is arguing look, even taking very 00:47:09.440 --> 00:47:15.280 basic assumptions about evolutionary approaches, we actually can maybe do a better job 00:47:15.280 --> 00:47:17.760 of sort of doing a few interventions. 00:47:17.920 --> 00:47:23.750 Like, for example, um, if if adopting the perspective you just had, I'm just sort of, 00:47:23.830 --> 00:47:28.870 you know, at we're, you know, showing up at nine with a tie, doing my best, getting 00:47:28.870 --> 00:47:31.190 groceries, feeding my kid, getting them to bed. 00:47:31.350 --> 00:47:36.310 And I'm like, you know, there is income inequality and there's poor people, and I don't 00:47:36.310 --> 00:47:37.750 quite understand why that works. 00:47:37.910 --> 00:47:43.830 And I can imagine either like leaving things the way they are, or punishing poor people, or 00:47:43.830 --> 00:47:45.430 giving poor people money. 00:47:45.640 --> 00:47:47.160 And those are three different options. 00:47:47.240 --> 00:47:49.960 And I have a no idea which one would be better. 00:47:50.200 --> 00:47:52.760 And that makes sense that I wouldn't know that. 00:47:52.920 --> 00:47:56.840 And it would just be like, you know, and and I would be sort of worried because I'm like, I 00:47:56.840 --> 00:47:57.080 don't know. 00:47:57.160 --> 00:47:59.400 I don't want to disrupt the stability of my thing. 00:47:59.640 --> 00:48:05.000 But but what I understand your and I think all of us, what we what we try to do 00:48:05.400 --> 00:48:11.170 is then step back and look at the dynamics that's unusual for a normal person because we 00:48:11.170 --> 00:48:15.330 have science and because we have data and we have theory, and then say something of like, 00:48:15.490 --> 00:48:21.410 look, of all those three options, even though it might run counter to somebody in 00:48:21.570 --> 00:48:25.810 this scenario, my thing of like it doesn't seem fair to give somebody like free groceries 00:48:25.890 --> 00:48:30.500 because I have to work for them, But maybe I wouldn't care if it turned out that that 00:48:30.500 --> 00:48:32.740 actually creates a better environment for all of us. 00:48:32.820 --> 00:48:34.500 And so including your kid, yeah. 00:48:34.660 --> 00:48:35.620 Yeah, including my kid. 00:48:35.700 --> 00:48:36.340 So right, yeah. 00:48:36.420 --> 00:48:38.340 Can you kind of so is that fair? 00:48:38.420 --> 00:48:39.460 And is that yeah? 00:48:39.540 --> 00:48:40.900 No, I think that is fair. 00:48:40.980 --> 00:48:42.420 Uh that is absolutely fair. 00:48:42.580 --> 00:48:47.540 And I mean, this is partly about sort of externalities and emergent effects, right? 00:48:47.620 --> 00:48:52.010 So, well, if everyone knew that they had groceries, they wouldn't have to take certain 00:48:52.010 --> 00:48:57.210 kinds of risks and then chunk that through, you know, multiply that by tens of millions of 00:48:57.210 --> 00:49:00.410 people, and you think, oh, well, actually, you know, down the line, what's going to be the 00:49:00.410 --> 00:49:01.290 consequence of that? 00:49:01.530 --> 00:49:04.170 So I absolutely I do think that. 00:49:04.490 --> 00:49:10.490 Um I I'd like to distinguish what I do from sort of nudging, which is 00:49:10.490 --> 00:49:10.810 popular. 00:49:12.330 --> 00:49:15.850 I mean, even though I'm, you know, I've I've contributed to the search myself, actually, 00:49:15.930 --> 00:49:20.320 but the there's a certain kind of oh well, the mine's kind of weird. 00:49:20.400 --> 00:49:22.560 It's you know, the its adaptations work in particular ways. 00:49:22.640 --> 00:49:26.320 So if you just get make make people, you know, sign their tax return at the top instead of 00:49:26.320 --> 00:49:28.640 the bottom, you know, it's gonna save billions of dollars and so on. 00:49:28.720 --> 00:49:29.840 And I yeah. 00:49:34.720 --> 00:49:35.680 Right approach. 00:49:36.000 --> 00:49:36.240 Yeah. 00:49:36.320 --> 00:49:40.470 It's uh a a friend of mine, and I think it's just to interrupt, it's they describe it as 00:49:40.470 --> 00:49:41.110 cheat codes. 00:49:41.270 --> 00:49:44.150 There used to be this thing when you play video games, you know, if you press up, down, 00:49:44.230 --> 00:49:48.150 left, right, A B, A, B in the right pattern, you can have like infinite lives and you can 00:49:48.150 --> 00:49:48.950 win a video game. 00:49:49.110 --> 00:49:49.270 Yeah. 00:49:49.590 --> 00:49:53.910 It's like the sort of like if you just sort of if you just put your body in the right way, 00:49:54.070 --> 00:49:55.110 you'll never feel pain again. 00:49:55.190 --> 00:49:59.190 You know, it's like a cheat code absurd, and and that that's sort of like power pose. 00:49:59.270 --> 00:50:00.150 That's that's the cheat code. 00:50:00.230 --> 00:50:03.350 Yeah, just do the power pose and then uh I'll win it live. 00:50:03.590 --> 00:50:03.990 Yeah. 00:50:04.230 --> 00:50:07.740 Well, yeah, but so I mean, it's but what is it that's different about that? 00:50:07.900 --> 00:50:10.620 I mean on the face of it, that's not very different from what you said, David. 00:50:10.700 --> 00:50:16.460 So I I suppose it's um if there's a difference, 00:50:17.100 --> 00:50:22.940 maybe it's the following that you that so i people's decision making, 00:50:23.020 --> 00:50:26.540 you have to understand both the structure of the agent, they've got certain motivations, 00:50:26.620 --> 00:50:32.330 they've got certain uh priorities, and the structure of their 00:50:32.330 --> 00:50:32.970 ecology. 00:50:33.210 --> 00:50:33.530 Right. 00:50:33.690 --> 00:50:37.290 And if you think, well, if their ecology is structured in a certain way, no wonder they're 00:50:37.290 --> 00:50:37.770 doing X. 00:50:38.250 --> 00:50:40.170 I think that's where our perspective is on putting it. 00:50:40.330 --> 00:50:40.970 No wonder they're doing X. 00:50:41.050 --> 00:50:42.810 No wonder they're very likely to do X. 00:50:42.890 --> 00:50:43.210 Yeah. 00:50:43.370 --> 00:50:43.610 Right. 00:50:43.690 --> 00:50:45.530 If they can't get enough to eat. 00:50:45.690 --> 00:50:45.930 Yeah. 00:50:46.170 --> 00:50:49.370 Or they don't know that they don't know that they're going to predict to be able to get 00:50:49.370 --> 00:50:49.850 enough to eat. 00:50:50.010 --> 00:50:50.570 Think about that. 00:50:50.730 --> 00:50:51.530 What's that going to do? 00:50:51.690 --> 00:50:56.890 And so so in in in a way I I to the extent that I talk about interventions, I don't really 00:50:56.890 --> 00:51:02.480 mean the the um you know the uh those 00:51:02.480 --> 00:51:04.800 classical nudge type things. 00:51:04.880 --> 00:51:08.480 I mean sure, you know, make your pension scheme opt-in rather than opt out, you know, what 00:51:08.800 --> 00:51:12.480 whatever, uh sorry, opt out rather than opt-in, then you're probably going to get more, you 00:51:12.480 --> 00:51:17.360 know, sure, I don't deny that that's true, but I think I think I think in a way we can go a 00:51:17.360 --> 00:51:21.200 bit further than that, which is to say this perspective gives you a principled 00:51:21.200 --> 00:51:26.240 understanding of why certain manipulations of the ecology or certain structurings of the 00:51:26.240 --> 00:51:31.870 ecology might lead probably to certain outcomes. 00:51:32.750 --> 00:51:38.750 I mean, just to sort of to to temper our enthusiasm 00:51:38.750 --> 00:51:41.070 for how great we are. 00:51:41.950 --> 00:51:43.630 It's not like evolutionary science. 00:51:44.190 --> 00:51:45.470 It doesn't work in the following way. 00:51:45.790 --> 00:51:48.190 We know how the mind works perfectly. 00:51:48.350 --> 00:51:52.190 And so we chunk forward and go, what's going to happen when these minds interact in 00:51:52.190 --> 00:51:52.590 ecology? 00:51:52.750 --> 00:51:55.870 In fact, it's much more iterative thing, or we kind of know a certain amount of what minds 00:51:55.870 --> 00:51:59.400 happen in ecology, and that makes us think, oh, let's peer down into the individual mind 00:51:59.400 --> 00:52:01.320 and try and figure out what the hell's going on. 00:52:01.480 --> 00:52:05.800 So it's you you almost described it as if you know we solve the problem of the individual 00:52:05.800 --> 00:52:07.960 mind and then we can go out into society. 00:52:08.120 --> 00:52:12.680 But in fact, we don't there's so much we don't know about the individual mind yet that we 00:52:13.080 --> 00:52:17.320 have it has to proceed more chaotically than that, in which we you know we know some things 00:52:17.320 --> 00:52:20.440 at the aggregate and then we go, I wonder how that works at the individual level, and that 00:52:20.920 --> 00:52:22.760 can strange our theorizing, you know. 00:52:22.840 --> 00:52:25.800 So we have to be humble about what we're doing, we haven't got it all figured out, you 00:52:25.800 --> 00:52:25.880 know. 00:52:26.120 --> 00:52:26.520 Yeah, for sure. 00:52:27.430 --> 00:52:32.390 But uh I think at the same time though, it a little bit of understanding of the mind uh 00:52:32.470 --> 00:52:33.670 does go a long way. 00:52:33.750 --> 00:52:36.470 Uh and it's certainly better than than no understanding. 00:52:36.630 --> 00:52:41.190 And so for example, I remember seeing one of your talks um uh it was about some inter 00:52:41.430 --> 00:52:45.910 interventions that were tried to reduce levels of teen pregnancy. 00:52:46.070 --> 00:52:46.310 Yes. 00:52:46.470 --> 00:52:51.140 And the way of thinking was that if we just educate these people about contraception, you 00:52:51.140 --> 00:52:54.980 know, give them, you know, give them condoms, you know, tell them about all the ways that 00:52:54.980 --> 00:53:00.580 they can uh delay child rearing, like, you know, responsible adults like us, then uh we'll 00:53:00.580 --> 00:53:02.020 see teen pregnancy rates decline. 00:53:02.260 --> 00:53:03.940 It's just a big misunderstanding on their part. 00:53:04.100 --> 00:53:07.300 They're not understanding uh, you know, the the right things to do, which is just an 00:53:07.300 --> 00:53:08.900 education between sex and reproduction or whatever. 00:53:08.980 --> 00:53:09.380 Yeah, exactly. 00:53:09.460 --> 00:53:09.540 Yeah. 00:53:09.860 --> 00:53:10.900 It's just an education problem. 00:53:11.060 --> 00:53:15.140 And so they tried these programs where they're they were educating uh the these people uh 00:53:15.220 --> 00:53:16.420 and you know, no results. 00:53:16.580 --> 00:53:17.350 It didn't work. 00:53:17.590 --> 00:53:17.910 Right. 00:53:18.630 --> 00:53:24.070 And in that case, I think we have a pretty poor understanding of the mind, that these 00:53:24.070 --> 00:53:25.990 people are just misinformed or uneducated. 00:53:26.070 --> 00:53:30.150 I think you know that is uh one assumption about how a mind could be structured. 00:53:30.230 --> 00:53:32.390 It's a bad one, uh, and it turns out to be wrong. 00:53:32.550 --> 00:53:36.950 But even, you know, being a little bit better than that assumption can take you a long way. 00:53:37.030 --> 00:53:41.080 Even just trusting the fact that these people are making the best strategic decisions for 00:53:41.080 --> 00:53:46.280 themselves given their environment gets you uh much further and in a in a much smarter 00:53:46.280 --> 00:53:49.000 direction than let's just teach them about contraception. 00:53:49.560 --> 00:53:50.200 No, absolutely. 00:53:50.280 --> 00:53:51.480 And that is a good example. 00:53:51.720 --> 00:53:55.560 And also it's it's ironic as many people have pointed out that teen pregnancy rates have 00:53:55.560 --> 00:53:56.600 been falling for decades, actually. 00:53:56.680 --> 00:53:59.320 And it is a bit like Pinker talks about the decline of violence, right? 00:53:59.400 --> 00:54:05.170 This is a major, a major fact about human behaviour over the last hundred years is that 00:54:05.170 --> 00:54:08.610 people are having their first baby later and later and later, and that's a part of the 00:54:08.610 --> 00:54:10.930 decline in global fertility. 00:54:11.730 --> 00:54:16.450 So it's sort of funny that in the midst of this, this incredibly lawlike thing that as 00:54:16.450 --> 00:54:21.010 living standards become high, and particularly as women's opportunities become better, you 00:54:21.010 --> 00:54:22.690 know, they shift their reproduction later. 00:54:22.930 --> 00:54:26.210 And also as life expectancy increases, that's part of the the picture. 00:54:26.370 --> 00:54:31.420 And yet we say, oh but these people, these particular people, which is a basically working 00:54:31.500 --> 00:54:34.700 class people in an increasingly middle class society, they must just be wrong. 00:54:34.940 --> 00:54:36.220 They must have no idea what's going on. 00:54:36.460 --> 00:54:41.100 It's like humanity in general is pretty smart and tailors their behavior to ecology. 00:54:41.180 --> 00:54:45.260 So it's funny to spit out to single out a particular subgroup and except for those people, 00:54:45.340 --> 00:54:48.860 you know, who've just got no idea and we need to get give them some lessons. 00:54:49.020 --> 00:54:52.460 So yeah, I I think that is a nice example. 00:54:52.780 --> 00:54:57.950 Also, there's a strange bedfellow here, really, which is lots of social scientists, more 00:54:57.950 --> 00:55:02.670 people of a more qualitative interpretation of approach, had said, Look, you know, you 00:55:02.670 --> 00:55:06.190 should just talk to young people who have their babies young in deprived communities. 00:55:06.270 --> 00:55:09.630 And they'll say things like, you know, why wait? 00:55:09.710 --> 00:55:13.470 I don't see any point in waiting, you know, that this really is things aren't going to be 00:55:13.470 --> 00:55:17.630 better in ten years, or my mum's around to look after her now, but she might not be around 00:55:17.630 --> 00:55:18.510 in a while, you know. 00:55:18.990 --> 00:55:21.230 Quite realistic and sensible things, right? 00:55:21.310 --> 00:55:26.080 And so i i in my teenage pregnancy work, there was a strange sort of bedfellow thing that 00:55:26.080 --> 00:55:30.560 really critical social scientists who, you know, were all about giving voice to people from 00:55:30.560 --> 00:55:35.040 marginalized communities and very qualitative, and me with my kind of evolutionary models, 00:55:35.120 --> 00:55:38.160 who on the face of it you might think we might have nothing in common actually are saying 00:55:38.160 --> 00:55:39.120 much the same thing. 00:55:39.280 --> 00:55:39.680 Yeah. 00:55:39.920 --> 00:55:43.680 Which is these people are, you know, they've got sensible motivational structures, they're 00:55:43.680 --> 00:55:45.760 making sense of the ecology they find themselves in. 00:55:45.920 --> 00:55:49.760 It's sort of daft to look at them from a different ecology and say, Oh, those people are 00:55:49.760 --> 00:55:53.670 just getting it wrong without making any attempt to understand the real structure of 00:55:53.670 --> 00:55:54.790 decision making that's going on. 00:55:55.030 --> 00:56:00.470 Well, we all all of which is to say that I don't think there's any need 00:56:00.790 --> 00:56:06.470 for evolutionary psychology to have a big fight with social scientists who believe in the 00:56:06.470 --> 00:56:07.270 importance of context. 00:56:07.350 --> 00:56:09.270 I actually think it's very, very compatible. 00:56:09.510 --> 00:56:09.750 Yeah. 00:56:10.790 --> 00:56:11.910 You have to be careful. 00:56:11.990 --> 00:56:13.110 It's about levels of explanation. 00:56:13.190 --> 00:56:16.790 You know, evolutionary psychologists are really interested in mechanisms, types of 00:56:16.790 --> 00:56:21.560 psychological and cognitive mechanism, and social scientists are interested in how does 00:56:21.560 --> 00:56:25.240 that play out in a particular context, how does the environment shape you know the outputs 00:56:25.240 --> 00:56:25.800 of that. 00:56:25.960 --> 00:56:31.000 But I don't think we need to have a you know r reports of a sort of 00:56:31.000 --> 00:56:35.880 irreconcilable difference of perspective, I think, are much exaggerated actually. 00:56:36.280 --> 00:56:36.680 Yeah. 00:56:36.920 --> 00:56:37.240 Yeah. 00:56:37.400 --> 00:56:43.080 And I think, I mean, one one, you know, there there's the moralization part too. 00:56:43.160 --> 00:56:47.830 Like I think people, you know, it the coordination of sort of oh, let's all pick on the 00:56:47.830 --> 00:56:52.950 low-income early teen pregnancy people, you can see how that sort of gets moralized. 00:56:53.030 --> 00:56:59.030 It creates a market for people to sort of use that moral outrage to then 00:56:59.030 --> 00:57:00.310 profit from that. 00:57:00.790 --> 00:57:05.350 And I think one, what what you're saying, and what we're saying, is that taking an 00:57:05.350 --> 00:57:11.260 evolutionary perspective, if done well, in avoiding the moralization component, but just 00:57:11.260 --> 00:57:16.460 looking and saying, what are the sensible things that these actors are doing? 00:57:16.620 --> 00:57:22.620 Um, it sort of gives respect to what otherwise is sort of playing the 00:57:22.620 --> 00:57:27.260 moralization game, which is sort of not taking a far enough step back. 00:57:27.580 --> 00:57:33.180 Um, like I even think about this, you know, my son is now in kindergarten and the education 00:57:33.180 --> 00:57:37.910 system, and David has alluded to this, sort of, you can see how there were there's probably 00:57:37.910 --> 00:57:42.550 people who are sort of well intended, but sort of have this metaphor of if I'm the teacher, 00:57:42.710 --> 00:57:48.310 I need to come in and teach the children how to do things. 00:57:48.470 --> 00:57:51.670 And it's sort of a self-aggrandizing narrative. 00:57:52.070 --> 00:57:58.020 And you can imagine how that sort of gets selected for institutionally, but it's different 00:57:58.020 --> 00:58:02.020 than taking a step back and sort of saying, How do kids actually learn? 00:58:02.180 --> 00:58:08.020 You know, and it might actually involve teachers not feeling like they're critical for 00:58:08.020 --> 00:58:13.620 the child's education, or I if if it's not for me, you know, I'm gonna save this kid. 00:58:13.780 --> 00:58:15.860 It's just more of like, what does the kid need? 00:58:15.940 --> 00:58:17.060 And it might look very different. 00:58:17.140 --> 00:58:18.660 It might be more hands off. 00:58:18.740 --> 00:58:22.980 It might be letting kids fight, but none of that's moralized, right? 00:58:23.140 --> 00:58:24.580 Um, one way or the other. 00:58:24.970 --> 00:58:25.530 So I think that's a good thing. 00:58:37.450 --> 00:58:42.890 Well, what I mean is I think but right, because we are um social 00:58:43.210 --> 00:58:49.080 beings, when we see some people doing something, we've we have a strong prior that 00:58:49.720 --> 00:58:54.520 that's because they've got some set of beliefs and desires that's quite idiosyncratic. 00:58:54.680 --> 00:58:54.840 Right. 00:58:55.000 --> 00:58:59.320 So oh, these teenage mums, they must just believe something weird about the world, or they 00:58:59.320 --> 00:59:04.600 must have some really quite unfortunate set of desires that makes them selfish, or you 00:59:04.600 --> 00:59:05.880 know, these things. 00:59:07.240 --> 00:59:10.040 Yeah, or f you know, fat people are lazy. 00:59:10.200 --> 00:59:10.360 Right. 00:59:10.520 --> 00:59:11.480 Like it's another one. 00:59:11.640 --> 00:59:17.150 Oh, they've got this different body type or body state. 00:59:17.470 --> 00:59:23.310 Oh, it must be that they have some belief or desire or you know, kind of sort of theory of 00:59:23.310 --> 00:59:24.910 mind level propensity. 00:59:25.070 --> 00:59:25.310 Yeah. 00:59:25.550 --> 00:59:31.070 And so for and then you just that kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room. 00:59:31.230 --> 00:59:35.070 So rather than saying how do minds in general work, like how do minds in general just you 00:59:35.070 --> 00:59:40.960 know regulate energy intake and energy output, or indeed fertility decisions, any of these 00:59:40.960 --> 00:59:46.640 things, you kind of go, Well, this group of people, they must have some particular set of 00:59:47.200 --> 00:59:49.520 proclivities or beliefs or whatever. 00:59:49.840 --> 00:59:53.760 And then, I mean, first of all, I don't think that gets you terribly far. 00:59:53.840 --> 00:59:57.760 I think I think, I mean, other than as you say, you sort of stigmatize that group of 00:59:57.760 --> 01:00:00.800 people, or they've just got the wrong, they're too impulsive or something. 01:00:00.990 --> 01:00:05.710 But then also you go down this sort of really non-explanatory rabbit hole where they're 01:00:05.710 --> 01:00:09.230 presumed to be impulsive because that's their behavior, and their behavior is you know you 01:00:09.310 --> 01:00:13.550 explain because they're impulsive, and then you dream up, you know, we'll have a program at 01:00:13.550 --> 01:00:17.150 school in which you'll wait for two marshmallows and somehow you know, years later you're 01:00:17.150 --> 01:00:20.110 gonna it's gonna be you're gonna be revolutionarily different. 01:00:20.670 --> 01:00:24.590 None of which I think really probably works, you know. 01:00:24.750 --> 01:00:30.420 So um so what what 01:00:30.740 --> 01:00:36.420 what we need to be doing is looking at people as organisms with capacities. 01:00:36.500 --> 01:00:40.820 You know, when you look at birds migrating to Africa and stuff, you know, you you all 01:00:41.140 --> 01:00:41.700 you're in awe. 01:00:43.380 --> 01:00:43.940 They didn't know where to go. 01:00:44.420 --> 01:00:45.060 They didn't know where to go. 01:00:45.300 --> 01:00:45.700 They don't know where to go. 01:00:47.060 --> 01:00:47.780 What are they doing? 01:00:47.860 --> 01:00:50.260 You know, they're going to somewhere We need to teach them where to go. 01:00:50.660 --> 01:00:51.620 We need to teach them where to go. 01:00:51.700 --> 01:00:57.030 You know, you don't so you look at them and you say that's kind of a marvel of evolution 01:00:57.030 --> 01:01:00.150 plus sensory ecology, they're figuring out certain things. 01:01:00.310 --> 01:01:04.390 And but you don't go, oh, you know, those people, I really need to persuade them that you 01:01:04.390 --> 01:01:07.750 know they're I only need for those birds not to fly south of the winter. 01:01:07.910 --> 01:01:11.190 So it is a slightly different perspective, you know. 01:01:12.470 --> 01:01:17.910 It asks us to put aside a lot of our intuitive cognition about the reasons for people's 01:01:17.910 --> 01:01:22.470 actions, you know, which is to do with beliefs and mental states that they hold, and say, 01:01:22.630 --> 01:01:26.740 you know, hang on, just to think about sort of let's just think about them as organisms 01:01:26.740 --> 01:01:28.340 trying to solve problems. 01:01:28.900 --> 01:01:31.140 Uh so it's a different stance, in short. 01:01:31.460 --> 01:01:31.700 Yeah. 01:01:31.940 --> 01:01:34.980 I think that's really profound in a way that I mean, I'm not trying to be 01:01:34.980 --> 01:01:38.980 self-congratulatory, but I mean, until you get something like a theory of evolution or 01:01:38.980 --> 01:01:44.580 cognitive science or evolutionary psychology, I think it's really hard as people, if we are 01:01:44.580 --> 01:01:47.700 just trying to like design a society, what's the alternative? 01:01:47.860 --> 01:01:53.230 I mean, the idea that you sort of say, well, look, I'm gonna be treat them as organisms and 01:01:53.230 --> 01:01:58.350 start off not by immediately just latching onto this very natural thing of essentializing 01:01:58.350 --> 01:02:01.710 and using my folk psychology, but being more scientific about it. 01:02:01.870 --> 01:02:04.350 I mean, I think that's like a really profound shift. 01:02:04.510 --> 01:02:09.150 And I don't think it's one, as you say, that's sort of it's certainly not happening. 01:02:09.390 --> 01:02:15.390 Uh uh, I mean, maybe in small examples or small cases it is, but I think that's 01:02:15.390 --> 01:02:21.300 a real, I mean one could argue that's a real advance of s social science that when it 01:02:21.300 --> 01:02:27.060 does happen, um, you know, it would it's a very different way of integrating 01:02:27.060 --> 01:02:29.700 science into politics or social dynamics. 01:02:30.180 --> 01:02:33.780 I think yes, I mean I think it's possible economists would say that that's what they've 01:02:33.780 --> 01:02:34.980 been doing for a long time. 01:02:35.300 --> 01:02:35.460 Sure. 01:02:35.860 --> 01:02:41.690 Um I mean in the sense that they're you know that yeah they under and they under understand 01:02:41.690 --> 01:02:45.530 individuals to be strategic agents who are operating under constraints and they also 01:02:45.530 --> 01:02:51.530 understand the micro macro problems so yeah I'm actually you know I think I 01:02:51.530 --> 01:02:57.530 think in a way philosophically a lot of economics has got there even though I 01:02:57.530 --> 01:03:02.330 don't necessarily agree with all the detail but possibly just just their notion of the 01:03:02.330 --> 01:03:08.240 agent is quite impoverished right or or or rather actually just very kind of a bit 01:03:08.240 --> 01:03:09.200 content free. 01:03:09.520 --> 01:03:09.920 Yeah. 01:03:10.240 --> 01:03:14.320 Yeah, no, I I I think yeah, economics has has gotten part of the way there, and I think we 01:03:14.320 --> 01:03:18.000 have a lot to learn from economists and and there should be more integration, I think, 01:03:18.080 --> 01:03:20.720 between uh economic models and evolutionary psychology. 01:03:20.800 --> 01:03:23.840 But yeah, I think if if there's one problem there is that their their model of the 01:03:23.840 --> 01:03:28.960 strategic agent is either uh poorly specified, underspecified, or the details are wrong. 01:03:29.040 --> 01:03:31.630 The the goals that are being pursued aren't quite right. 01:03:31.790 --> 01:03:35.870 If you have a good, rich understanding of what the agent is actually pursuing and how they 01:03:35.870 --> 01:03:39.870 might rationally pursue it, then you can you really got a stew cook in in terms of uh 01:03:39.870 --> 01:03:41.310 explanatory power. 01:03:41.550 --> 01:03:46.590 Um speaking of stew, I really want to get your uh take on obesity. 01:03:46.990 --> 01:03:49.150 Uh this this this blew my mind. 01:03:49.230 --> 01:03:50.430 I I read something of yours. 01:03:50.510 --> 01:03:51.550 Uh you you were talking about this. 01:03:51.630 --> 01:03:56.340 So, my go-to example of evolutionary mismatch, and I think it's pretty much every time I 01:03:56.340 --> 01:03:59.700 hear an evolutionary psychologist talking about mismatch. 01:04:00.260 --> 01:04:00.820 I know what you're doing. 01:04:02.740 --> 01:04:06.180 So mismatch is this idea that the environment in which we evolved is very different from 01:04:06.180 --> 01:04:08.260 the environment that we now uh inhabit. 01:04:08.420 --> 01:04:13.940 Uh, and that can lead to uh various self-uh sabotaging behaviors in the modern environment 01:04:14.100 --> 01:04:18.420 because we weren't prepared for this, you know, new world of of junk food and and so forth. 01:04:18.500 --> 01:04:24.470 So the go-to example is that you know, uh high sugar, high-fat foods were really scarce in 01:04:24.470 --> 01:04:25.830 ancestral environments. 01:04:26.150 --> 01:04:29.510 And now we live in the modern world and they're everywhere and they're cheap and easy to 01:04:29.670 --> 01:04:29.990 eat. 01:04:30.070 --> 01:04:33.350 And we just gorge ourselves on these high fat, high sugar food. 01:04:33.430 --> 01:04:35.590 And as a result, we have, you know, we have all these diseases. 01:04:35.670 --> 01:04:38.550 We have diabetes and obesity and heart problems. 01:04:38.710 --> 01:04:41.190 And this is all just an example of mismatch. 01:04:41.430 --> 01:04:46.150 And as far as I'm aware, this is the most popular example that evolutionary psychologists 01:04:46.150 --> 01:04:47.750 give of mismatch. 01:04:48.470 --> 01:04:53.140 And you have come in and you have uh destroyed this example so now I have to think of a 01:04:53.140 --> 01:04:58.900 different example so well yeah I I think it I think the example you know it's still 01:04:58.900 --> 01:05:03.940 on its feet but it's a bit it's a bit different than the usual way it's presented right and 01:05:03.940 --> 01:05:09.620 it's a bit more nuanced so okay people find sweet foods palatable actually lots of mammals 01:05:09.620 --> 01:05:15.140 do bears do and you know sweet foods are palatable why it makes sense they higher in energy 01:05:15.140 --> 01:05:19.830 content you know easy to metabolize all of that so people love honey yeah Yeah. 01:05:19.910 --> 01:05:24.070 And actually, the idea that sweet foods were rare in the ancestral environment is not 01:05:24.070 --> 01:05:24.310 supported. 01:05:24.470 --> 01:05:26.230 Hunter-gatherers eat tons of honey. 01:05:26.390 --> 01:05:28.070 They eat tons and tons of honey. 01:05:28.310 --> 01:05:32.070 And so the particular version of the mismatch argument is 01:05:34.230 --> 01:05:40.150 that we didn't evolve a stop signal because there was never enough to need to stop. 01:05:40.320 --> 01:05:40.640 right? 01:05:40.880 --> 01:05:42.080 And we just know that's wrong. 01:05:42.400 --> 01:05:46.640 There's loads of animal physiology showing that of course animals have stop signals. 01:05:46.800 --> 01:05:47.360 Of course they do. 01:05:47.680 --> 01:05:49.440 It's daft to think that they wouldn't, right? 01:05:49.600 --> 01:05:50.400 You know, yeah. 01:05:51.440 --> 01:05:54.480 Carnivores find huge carcasses. 01:05:54.640 --> 01:05:57.120 Well, they're gonna do you know, eat them until their stomachs explode. 01:05:57.280 --> 01:05:58.640 Of course they're not going to, you know. 01:06:00.080 --> 01:06:03.870 Small birds can can't fly if they if they're too full, right? 01:06:03.950 --> 01:06:05.310 So of course we have stop signals. 01:06:05.390 --> 01:06:07.150 It's a daft idea that we didn't. 01:06:07.390 --> 01:06:13.310 Um we do pe people you know across the world do find sweet foods very palatable and that 01:06:13.310 --> 01:06:13.950 is a thing. 01:06:14.030 --> 01:06:15.870 You know, I'm not disputing nuts. 01:06:16.030 --> 01:06:21.470 But the idea that there's kind of no regulation mechanism there, I think is you know is 01:06:21.630 --> 01:06:22.190 simplistic. 01:06:22.350 --> 01:06:26.270 Now there is something to the mismatch argument in the sense that there's a huge ride rise 01:06:26.270 --> 01:06:29.470 in global obesity in the last few decades. 01:06:30.720 --> 01:06:34.880 And it isn't, by the way, reliably linked to an increase in calorie consumption. 01:06:34.960 --> 01:06:38.800 So it's really clear that average calorie consumption decline and people still get fatter. 01:06:40.080 --> 01:06:45.440 But um yeah, that's well repeat that's a really fascinating counterintuitive. 01:06:45.840 --> 01:06:51.840 Like in the UK in the last 40 years, um, the average BMI has got bigger. 01:06:52.080 --> 01:06:56.080 There's no real evidence that the average person is eating more calories. 01:06:56.730 --> 01:06:58.250 But now here's the but. 01:06:58.970 --> 01:06:59.370 Yeah. 01:06:59.610 --> 01:07:04.330 Those caloric measurements are made in the bomb calorimeter, so you burn the food. 01:07:04.570 --> 01:07:09.370 So, you know, nuts and things like that turn out to have millions of calories on this. 01:07:09.450 --> 01:07:15.130 But we actually know that if you ate an isocaloric dose, you know, dose of hazelnuts or 01:07:15.130 --> 01:07:19.050 chocolate, you know, or chocolate bar, you would actually extract more calories from the 01:07:19.050 --> 01:07:19.530 chocolate bar. 01:07:19.770 --> 01:07:25.450 So, in other words, there's no increase in the number of calories people are eating, 01:07:25.840 --> 01:07:31.440 the potential number of calories if you had a metabolism that could fully extract those. 01:07:31.680 --> 01:07:36.480 What we do know is that foods become in as b uh as food processing becomes industrialized, 01:07:37.440 --> 01:07:40.960 more of that calorie content becomes bioavailable. 01:07:41.360 --> 01:07:46.080 So there's a change in the you know, the foods we have now, particularly the kind of so 01:07:46.160 --> 01:07:48.880 called ultra processed foods, they're super soft. 01:07:49.440 --> 01:07:53.370 Um, you know, they have various kind of palatability fixes. 01:07:53.450 --> 01:07:56.810 They're technologies for getting people to consume more of them and that they do a good job 01:07:56.810 --> 01:07:57.050 with that. 01:07:57.130 --> 01:08:02.890 So although you don't you don't eat any more calories uh in 01:08:02.890 --> 01:08:08.650 a day, you know, potential calories than your ancestors of a hundred years ago, but 01:08:09.130 --> 01:08:12.490 what you're eating them in, the way it's been engineered is really different. 01:08:12.650 --> 01:08:16.250 So that that is a sense in which the mismatch is true. 01:08:18.420 --> 01:08:23.940 So, but our but the idea, you know, I think that I think people do have a sophisticated 01:08:23.940 --> 01:08:27.060 psychology of satiety and food choice and so on. 01:08:27.140 --> 01:08:32.420 And also, it's just not the case that everyone just eats sweet foods all the time. 01:08:32.500 --> 01:08:33.220 I mean, clearly they don't. 01:08:33.700 --> 01:08:35.620 Lots of people don't have much of a sweet tooth. 01:08:35.700 --> 01:08:39.190 I mean, generally speaking, on average, people find sweet food. 01:08:39.270 --> 01:08:42.310 But you know, you don't eat cookie bars all all day, I take it. 01:08:42.790 --> 01:08:43.430 I usually could. 01:08:43.510 --> 01:08:47.910 I could go to the supermarket and buy lots of uh cookies and just eat cookies all the time. 01:08:48.230 --> 01:08:49.590 Well, just try it for one day. 01:08:49.830 --> 01:08:50.950 Try it for one day. 01:08:51.110 --> 01:08:54.630 Yeah, you'll be absolutely sick of it by three in the afternoon. 01:08:54.790 --> 01:08:55.350 You'll hate it. 01:08:55.430 --> 01:08:56.150 You know, you'll hate it. 01:08:56.230 --> 01:08:57.510 And then you won't do it the next day, right? 01:08:57.590 --> 01:09:01.830 So clearly you've got a mind in there that kind of knows that this doesn't make you feel 01:09:01.830 --> 01:09:02.310 that good. 01:09:02.470 --> 01:09:02.710 Yeah. 01:09:02.870 --> 01:09:06.620 Um, so but our our point about obesity was more that um 01:09:09.260 --> 01:09:15.260 the the the decision, if we can call it that the physiological decision to store fat is 01:09:15.260 --> 01:09:16.860 not always a maladaptive one. 01:09:18.060 --> 01:09:23.420 So there is there are adaptations whose function it is to increase your adipose 01:09:23.740 --> 01:09:29.250 stores under certain kinds of conditions, like unpredictability of future access, 01:09:29.410 --> 01:09:29.890 obviously. 01:09:29.970 --> 01:09:32.450 We know this is true, it's true in lots of animals. 01:09:32.690 --> 01:09:37.890 So if you have people who are living under conditions of you know, cues of 01:09:37.890 --> 01:09:43.890 unpredictability of access, also that the foods that are cheap, which is 01:09:43.890 --> 01:09:49.890 true under modernity, you know, uh the foods that are cheap and easy to get are these kind 01:09:49.890 --> 01:09:53.180 of hyper palatable industrialized foods and so on. 01:09:53.340 --> 01:09:59.100 You know, you've got a cocktail of things that uh that that that you know some of which are 01:09:59.260 --> 01:10:03.020 evolutionarily novel that lead to some very high BMIs. 01:10:03.100 --> 01:10:06.300 But it's not like everyone over consumes all of the time. 01:10:06.540 --> 01:10:07.660 Clearly that's not true. 01:10:07.820 --> 01:10:10.780 You know um so I don't know if that sort of answered the question. 01:10:10.860 --> 01:10:14.700 I think you there's some mismatch in there, but the story needs to be much more nuanced. 01:10:15.660 --> 01:10:17.790 Yeah No, it's it's it's fascinating stuff. 01:10:17.950 --> 01:10:23.710 I I I continue to to think that obesity is is such an interesting unsolved 01:10:23.710 --> 01:10:24.350 mystery. 01:10:24.510 --> 01:10:28.590 Um and I think the current way of thinking about it is wrong in so many ways. 01:10:28.830 --> 01:10:33.070 Um just the mere fact that we we think about the way to solve it is just by counting 01:10:33.070 --> 01:10:37.470 calories and reducing calories, that that seems to be the wrong way to go about it. 01:10:37.630 --> 01:10:41.880 Uh and and the way to solve, you know, the obesity crisis and say, you know, poor 01:10:41.880 --> 01:10:44.120 communities, the way to do that is just educate them. 01:10:44.280 --> 01:10:46.360 Teach them, they just don't know what what the healthy foods are. 01:10:46.440 --> 01:10:50.360 Let's put let's put calorie uh numbers, let's put uh nutrition labels on the foods. 01:10:50.520 --> 01:10:51.720 Surely that'll solve the problem. 01:10:51.880 --> 01:10:53.320 No, it didn't solve the problem. 01:10:53.480 --> 01:10:58.680 Um it's yet again another example of us not giving people credit for making uh sound 01:10:58.680 --> 01:11:01.000 decisions in the environment in which they find themselves. 01:11:01.240 --> 01:11:06.750 If if you are in a an unpredictable food insecure environment, it actually makes sense that 01:11:06.750 --> 01:11:11.470 you are physiologically storing fat uh in preparation for food scarcity. 01:11:11.550 --> 01:11:11.710 Right? 01:11:11.870 --> 01:11:15.230 If you're in a more stable, predictable environment, uh, it makes sense that you would not 01:11:15.230 --> 01:11:16.270 be storing as much fat. 01:11:16.430 --> 01:11:20.830 So I think that's a really uh important insight that that your way of thinking has 01:11:20.830 --> 01:11:21.630 revealed. 01:11:21.870 --> 01:11:27.840 Um but um Yeah, I I think I might have to 01:11:27.840 --> 01:11:29.600 come up with a different example for mismatch. 01:11:29.680 --> 01:11:34.720 Now, I'm I'm honestly these days I'm I'm thinking that this idea of evolutionary mismatch 01:11:34.720 --> 01:11:36.000 is kind of overrated. 01:11:36.320 --> 01:11:42.240 That um increasingly I'm the the examples that have been brought uh to 01:11:42.240 --> 01:11:46.080 illustrate the phenomenon have become challenged, you know, one after the other. 01:11:46.240 --> 01:11:49.680 And now I'm beginning to think that we just put too many of our eggs in that mismatch 01:11:49.680 --> 01:11:50.000 basket. 01:11:50.560 --> 01:11:50.800 Yeah. 01:11:50.960 --> 01:11:56.630 And I think also that the you know, as a mode of explanation, it's a bit sort of 01:11:58.310 --> 01:12:04.310 you know what it was very popular um sort of a a number of decades 01:12:04.310 --> 01:12:09.270 ago, and it it kind of constrains our explanatory resources quite a lot. 01:12:09.430 --> 01:12:13.670 If you say, Oh well, the thing is people kind of have these very fixed preferences for 01:12:13.670 --> 01:12:15.590 certain kinds of things, and then you put them in different environments. 01:12:15.670 --> 01:12:17.910 We we're a hugely generalist species. 01:12:18.150 --> 01:12:18.470 Yeah. 01:12:18.790 --> 01:12:24.240 Um so we're very good, and this has been true for many thousands of years. 01:12:24.400 --> 01:12:27.120 We're very good at living in different kinds of places that offer different kinds of 01:12:27.120 --> 01:12:28.240 resources and different challenges. 01:12:28.400 --> 01:12:30.240 So we're super good at learning stuff. 01:12:30.400 --> 01:12:36.400 You know, we that it cannot be the case that that very 01:12:36.400 --> 01:12:42.320 specific schedules of behaviors or preferences are highly canalized, you know, just 01:12:42.320 --> 01:12:43.920 impervious to change. 01:12:44.290 --> 01:12:48.530 On the other hand, uh you know, so that's definitely true. 01:12:48.610 --> 01:12:54.130 So we shouldn't over um we shouldn't overdo the 01:12:54.130 --> 01:12:58.370 mismatch thing and we shouldn't make it sound like that's the only rabbit that we can pull 01:12:58.370 --> 01:12:58.850 out of the hat. 01:12:59.010 --> 01:13:03.970 Oh why do we illusion cycle just explain any ill they just pull the mismatch rabbit out of 01:13:03.970 --> 01:13:04.450 the hat. 01:13:04.770 --> 01:13:09.010 But on the other hand you have to admit when you go and see a horror movie and you know the 01:13:09.010 --> 01:13:14.480 the guys come at you with the axe and that's scary the evolved function of those mechanisms 01:13:14.480 --> 01:13:16.960 of fear is not to watch horror movies. 01:13:17.040 --> 01:13:18.720 I mean, that we must agree on that, right? 01:13:18.800 --> 01:13:22.640 That that that in a sense the people who make horror movies, you know, understand it's a 01:13:22.640 --> 01:13:25.840 regular property of humans that if you show them monsters and you show them, you know, 01:13:26.000 --> 01:13:30.720 assailants, they're gonna have a sort of a certain uh emotional reaction to that, and you 01:13:30.720 --> 01:13:32.240 can kind of play with that in interesting ways. 01:13:32.530 --> 01:13:36.690 Even even there though, I mean we we we had we had Colton Scrivener on a few episodes ago 01:13:36.770 --> 01:13:40.610 and he talked about how morbid curiosity and how actually learning about dangerous things 01:13:40.610 --> 01:13:45.090 in a safe context is actually uh uh really adaptive and you know plenty of animals have 01:13:45.090 --> 01:13:47.090 this kind of curiosity about scary things. 01:13:47.490 --> 01:13:52.050 And y so and so there even there, I think it's it's not really a clear case of us being 01:13:52.050 --> 01:13:52.770 exploited. 01:13:52.930 --> 01:13:57.090 It could be that we're we're learning valuable things about dangerous situations. 01:13:57.330 --> 01:14:01.080 I mean, maybe not not the best learning opportunity in the world, but yeah, yeah. 01:14:01.400 --> 01:14:03.160 There's a levels of analysis thing, right? 01:14:03.240 --> 01:14:09.160 That the propensity to have that curiosity, I agree, could well 01:14:09.160 --> 01:14:09.720 be adaptive. 01:14:09.880 --> 01:14:12.120 But the individual horror movie is not adaptive, right? 01:14:12.200 --> 01:14:18.120 The individual you know, that that's well Well I don't know, maybe maybe we could get into 01:14:18.280 --> 01:14:19.160 a quibble about what adapted. 01:14:19.400 --> 01:14:23.080 I mean he's he's got data showing that people uh do better uh in terms of mental health 01:14:23.160 --> 01:14:26.040 during the pandemic if they watched the movie pandemic. 01:14:26.360 --> 01:14:28.790 So like yeah I don't know. 01:14:29.430 --> 01:14:33.190 That's possible that yeah Josh, it's funny because Josh Tiber came up to me at the last HS, 01:14:33.350 --> 01:14:36.070 but we have to have Josh on soon uh about and he had this exact point. 01:14:36.150 --> 01:14:41.990 He's like, I he's like, I think he's got he has a uh a ready to go rant against uh the 01:14:41.990 --> 01:14:43.110 uh mismatch thing. 01:14:43.190 --> 01:14:45.350 So we should have him on soon to channel this too. 01:14:45.590 --> 01:14:50.150 But I think I like for me at least, I understood the mismatch thing is a lot of the uh 01:14:50.150 --> 01:14:55.780 early of psych stuff was just sort of provisional in the point of in service of sort of 01:14:55.780 --> 01:14:59.940 making an argument, and in probably isn't the right or most sophisticated way to put it, 01:15:00.100 --> 01:15:04.660 but it was it was sort of doing this the important necessary service for where people were 01:15:04.660 --> 01:15:10.180 at, which is just sort of acknowledging that um people's intuitions about what would be a 01:15:10.180 --> 01:15:14.180 good idea or would make sense on the view that people are rational, it's just sort of 01:15:14.180 --> 01:15:19.170 saying, Well, look, there's a mismatch then between like what the current environment is 01:15:19.170 --> 01:15:20.210 like and a past environment. 01:15:20.370 --> 01:15:22.050 It's like sperm banks are a great example. 01:15:22.210 --> 01:15:25.730 So if you take the idea that like people are just maximizing their reproductive success, 01:15:25.890 --> 01:15:28.210 why don't men line up in front of sperm banks? 01:15:28.370 --> 01:15:32.290 You know, if you're having that argument, then you're, you know, you're saying, well, the 01:15:32.290 --> 01:15:37.970 North Star isn't uh maximum reproductive success because look, men aren't lining up in 01:15:37.970 --> 01:15:41.010 front of sperm banks because they could just have as many kids as possible. 01:15:41.250 --> 01:15:47.040 Um, I think once you start taking a design stance perspective on the 01:15:47.040 --> 01:15:47.600 psychology. 01:15:47.680 --> 01:15:53.120 And once you start thinking about inputs and and that, and if that's the range of discourse 01:15:53.120 --> 01:15:58.960 you're having, then yeah, I think the mismatch thing probably starts to break down 01:15:58.960 --> 01:15:59.360 a bit. 01:15:59.520 --> 01:16:05.200 Um, because then you're you're already kind of past the point of there's a 01:16:05.200 --> 01:16:08.720 homunculus who's just maximizing their reproductive success. 01:16:09.750 --> 01:16:13.430 And then and then you're having just a sophisticated discussion about well, well, the 01:16:13.430 --> 01:16:18.550 evolved psychology clearly the input isn't just like, you know, have I ejaculated? 01:16:18.630 --> 01:16:22.950 It's that I have a partner and like I need to raise the child because we're a social 01:16:22.950 --> 01:16:23.590 species. 01:16:23.750 --> 01:16:27.430 And there's concern about what resources that child will have because we're ultra 01:16:27.430 --> 01:16:28.150 competitive. 01:16:28.310 --> 01:16:32.280 You know, and you're having this discussion, and that's not that's not mismatch anymore. 01:16:32.360 --> 01:16:36.360 That's just saying, look, there's more software than just have I ejaculated, right? 01:16:36.520 --> 01:16:41.640 Um and and I don't think you need the mismatch in that more sophisticated second version. 01:16:42.280 --> 01:16:42.600 Yes. 01:16:42.840 --> 01:16:48.120 I mean well in a way you could also get at the same point through um through the 01:16:48.120 --> 01:16:49.880 demographic transition itself, right? 01:16:49.960 --> 01:16:55.400 Which is the the fertility if people as people got more resources, you know, they 01:16:55.400 --> 01:16:57.810 didn't have more births. 01:16:57.970 --> 01:16:59.730 In fact, the opposite exactly. 01:16:59.810 --> 01:17:00.290 Yes, exactly. 01:17:00.690 --> 01:17:03.730 And in quite a law-like way, which is extremely interesting. 01:17:04.850 --> 01:17:09.730 So clearly what approximately is driving people cannot be, oh, I've got to have as many 01:17:09.730 --> 01:17:11.250 kids as I can possibly raise. 01:17:11.410 --> 01:17:11.650 Yeah. 01:17:11.810 --> 01:17:12.130 Survival. 01:17:12.370 --> 01:17:16.370 You know, that that that cannot be the an account of the you know, you need to build in 01:17:16.370 --> 01:17:22.300 these other motivations and these other concerns about the the fate 01:17:22.300 --> 01:17:25.100 of the offspring that you produce, not just their number, you know, and all that. 01:17:25.340 --> 01:17:26.220 So absolutely. 01:17:26.540 --> 01:17:26.620 Yeah. 01:17:26.700 --> 01:17:30.060 And I think honestly, even this podcast, David, you tell me too, but like in in 01:17:30.060 --> 01:17:34.460 interviewing every person who's sort of an expert in their area, I feel like the narrative 01:17:34.460 --> 01:17:40.380 has been even the early of psych work oversimplified how many considerations or design 01:17:40.380 --> 01:17:41.500 features there were. 01:17:41.660 --> 01:17:46.810 So like the early mating work was sort of like very oversimplified, or the early parenting 01:17:46.810 --> 01:17:50.010 work to the extent there was any, or you know, reproductive investment. 01:17:50.170 --> 01:17:53.850 And it wasn't explaining things like the demographic transition, or it wasn't explaining 01:17:53.850 --> 01:17:58.250 things like mate preferences adequately, and then adding the sophistication in. 01:17:58.330 --> 01:18:04.080 It's almost always that there's more systems that make more sense, but there are just there 01:18:04.240 --> 01:18:09.680 it's the integration of a lot more sort of decision making, cost benefit 01:18:09.680 --> 01:18:10.480 analysis. 01:18:10.640 --> 01:18:15.440 And these systems are much smarter than we even give them credit as evolutionary 01:18:15.440 --> 01:18:16.320 psychologists. 01:18:16.880 --> 01:18:18.720 Yeah, and I think that's probably right. 01:18:18.800 --> 01:18:24.690 And and I think that um the sort of one cue, one Q, one thing. 01:18:26.130 --> 01:18:31.730 But do you worry at all that in a way then F site becomes unidentifiable? 01:18:31.890 --> 01:18:36.210 It just says the mind's pretty complex, people have got lots of different motivations, they 01:18:36.210 --> 01:18:37.890 take lots of things into account. 01:18:38.210 --> 01:18:43.970 I don't think that's wrong, but i in a way i 01:18:44.130 --> 01:18:48.520 that there's a sort of cultural incentive to come up with something more eye-catching than 01:18:48.520 --> 01:18:48.680 that. 01:18:48.760 --> 01:18:53.000 Like people only really want one thing, you know, or the people that we're cave we're 01:18:53.000 --> 01:18:53.720 cavemen and walking. 01:18:54.120 --> 01:18:55.240 We're cavemen or something, you know. 01:18:55.480 --> 01:19:01.400 Because if you say difficult decisions like who to marry, you know, a lot of stuff that 01:19:01.480 --> 01:19:02.200 comes into it. 01:19:02.280 --> 01:19:02.680 Yeah. 01:19:02.920 --> 01:19:05.080 You know great. 01:19:05.480 --> 01:19:11.080 I mean I don't think I I I don't think the situation is that bad because I think you could 01:19:11.080 --> 01:19:15.850 have models of how these things get integrated now people might uh weight them differently 01:19:15.850 --> 01:19:17.450 according to the different circumstances and so on. 01:19:17.530 --> 01:19:22.170 So I I think it's fine, but is there a danger that it just becomes 01:19:23.290 --> 01:19:29.290 so uh you know so sort of amorphous that the the 01:19:29.450 --> 01:19:34.810 the that there isn't really a there isn't something uh a kind of cool new uh 01:19:36.010 --> 01:19:38.640 secret weapon there anymore. 01:19:39.040 --> 01:19:39.440 Yeah. 01:19:39.840 --> 01:19:45.840 I mean I I think yes w it it makes us more 01:19:46.000 --> 01:19:50.640 similar to other kinds of cognitive science and social science and that we're saying yeah 01:19:50.720 --> 01:19:54.480 stuff's complicated there's lots of inputs and lots of complicated processes and lots of 01:19:54.480 --> 01:19:55.680 complicated outputs. 01:19:55.840 --> 01:20:00.470 But the unique thing that we bring to the table is we have a a theory that can make 01:20:00.470 --> 01:20:04.550 predictions about what those inputs and outputs and processes are going to be. 01:20:04.790 --> 01:20:09.750 And we have uh a uh a framework for making those predictions that is actually grounded in 01:20:09.750 --> 01:20:14.470 evolutionary science and is concilient with the rest of our knowledge of how reality works. 01:20:14.710 --> 01:20:18.390 But if I'm just coming in and making predictions about those inputs and processes and 01:20:18.390 --> 01:20:22.710 outputs, and I in and in and my theorizing is completely disconnected from the natural 01:20:22.710 --> 01:20:26.340 sciences, well, my theories are just gonna be more likely to be wrong, right? 01:20:26.500 --> 01:20:30.820 Why not avail myself of our rich body of knowledge about how reality works that we've 01:20:30.820 --> 01:20:35.940 accumulated over the past few centuries, that we've accumulated in evolutionary biology, 01:20:36.180 --> 01:20:41.940 uh, ethology, uh, paleontology, and even physics to a certain extent is is relevant in 01:20:41.940 --> 01:20:47.460 insofar as we are, you know, anti-entropic beings, and that all else equal, the expectation 01:20:47.460 --> 01:20:50.340 for any phenomenon is gonna be randomness and entropy. 01:20:50.420 --> 01:20:54.890 And insofar as we see deviations from that, that requires uh an explanation that is 01:20:54.890 --> 01:21:00.570 grounded uh in in the nature of natural selection or or of some kind of selective process. 01:21:00.810 --> 01:21:03.850 Um so that would be my answer to what what we're providing. 01:21:03.930 --> 01:21:07.050 And in any case, I don't think we should care that much about marketing ourselves and and 01:21:07.050 --> 01:21:11.130 advertising making sure that like we have a brand that's easily differentiable different 01:21:11.370 --> 01:21:12.810 from other you know social sciences. 01:21:12.970 --> 01:21:14.170 I I think that stuff's bullshit. 01:21:14.250 --> 01:21:15.370 I think we just gotta do good science. 01:21:15.450 --> 01:21:18.090 And you know I can I completely agree with you. 01:21:18.250 --> 01:21:20.330 I completely agree with you uh on that. 01:21:20.490 --> 01:21:23.720 And I and and I also think I don't think we are a separate brand. 01:21:23.800 --> 01:21:27.640 I mean I really hope that evolutionary psychology ceased to exist because it because it 01:21:27.640 --> 01:21:33.640 comes becomes uncontroversial that you start from a knowledge that that of course you would 01:21:33.640 --> 01:21:37.000 start from what kind of organisms you're dealing with and you know what they're if we were 01:21:37.000 --> 01:21:42.440 dealing with flying organisms or or s solo living organisms or you know 01:21:42.600 --> 01:21:47.910 organisms that were deep in the ocean, everything would look different, right? 01:21:47.990 --> 01:21:49.750 They're social science would look, of course it would, right? 01:21:49.830 --> 01:21:51.270 So we must start from. 01:21:51.990 --> 01:21:55.990 So I I mean I completely agree with you, but I think there's been a recurrent tendency in 01:21:55.990 --> 01:21:59.910 in F-Syc because of the incentive structure of academia to say, you know, everyone was 01:21:59.910 --> 01:22:04.870 wrong, they said all this stupid stuff for years, but now you know, now having read 01:22:04.870 --> 01:22:10.310 Hamilton 1964 and Trivers 1972, I can uniquely you know predict that 01:22:10.420 --> 01:22:14.500 parents will love their children and you know, siblings will be kind of close to each other 01:22:14.580 --> 01:22:18.900 off and fight and this is revolutionary and you know, but so let's let's not exaggerate 01:22:18.900 --> 01:22:19.380 here, guys. 01:22:19.460 --> 01:22:20.660 You know, that's the thing. 01:22:21.700 --> 01:22:23.060 Yeah, no, I think that's right. 01:22:23.140 --> 01:22:26.260 And I think it comes back to like what's your goal in doing this. 01:22:26.420 --> 01:22:31.700 And I think, you know, honestly, I think even in the early in any science you have people 01:22:31.700 --> 01:22:35.620 who are just like, I'm a scientist, I just want to figure out how stuff works. 01:22:35.890 --> 01:22:37.410 And that's sort of the North Star. 01:22:37.490 --> 01:22:41.090 And you can just watch there's certain people's careers that that's just consistent with 01:22:41.090 --> 01:22:41.730 what they did. 01:22:41.970 --> 01:22:46.130 There's other and there's other people who sort of want to be famous or popular. 01:22:46.210 --> 01:22:47.410 And that's their north star. 01:22:47.650 --> 01:22:48.210 And you know what? 01:22:48.370 --> 01:22:52.770 You can tell that because the way that their career or their trajectory or what they study 01:22:52.850 --> 01:22:54.290 or how they study it goes. 01:22:54.450 --> 01:22:55.330 So yeah, I know. 01:22:55.410 --> 01:23:01.300 I think, you know, um, I think any any new area of science is selects for certain 01:23:01.300 --> 01:23:02.020 kinds of people. 01:23:02.100 --> 01:23:07.940 I think evpsy uh self uh self awarely people would always say 01:23:07.940 --> 01:23:12.980 it's selected for people who were sort of contrarian uh in the early days because it was 01:23:12.980 --> 01:23:15.700 contrary to a lot of the accepted work. 01:23:15.860 --> 01:23:21.540 I think more and more the later generations are less contrarian, uh just because it's more 01:23:21.540 --> 01:23:22.020 accepted. 01:23:22.550 --> 01:23:25.910 Well, I think actually there's a really interesting dynamic, but I think the early stuff 01:23:25.910 --> 01:23:29.670 was contrary contrarian within the academy, right? 01:23:29.910 --> 01:23:34.150 But common sense within the broader population. 01:23:35.030 --> 01:23:35.190 Yeah. 01:23:35.510 --> 01:23:35.670 Right. 01:23:35.830 --> 01:23:40.870 You know, when b certain messages about, you know, why men life you know wants 01:23:41.670 --> 01:23:46.070 want status and why they're you know interested in pretty younger women and all that sort 01:23:46.070 --> 01:23:46.310 of stuff. 01:23:46.550 --> 01:23:46.710 Right. 01:23:47.420 --> 01:23:51.580 In the academy, you know, social science had developed a very different account of those 01:23:51.580 --> 01:23:52.060 processes. 01:23:53.100 --> 01:23:59.100 But your uncle who doesn't work in the academy, who doesn't think about this, 01:23:59.260 --> 01:24:00.620 goes, well, that makes sense to me. 01:24:02.700 --> 01:24:08.220 So there was this kind of weird thing that it became an almost a sort of um flanking 01:24:08.220 --> 01:24:13.270 maneuver that within the academy it's you know seemed kind of simplistic, but outside the 01:24:13.270 --> 01:24:17.190 Academy it got an awful lot of airtime, almost disproportionate to its methodological 01:24:17.190 --> 01:24:17.990 contributions. 01:24:18.230 --> 01:24:22.790 And I think now we're coming up with something which is probably doesn't fly so much 01:24:22.790 --> 01:24:26.470 outside the academy because it's doesn't have those very simple messages. 01:24:26.710 --> 01:24:27.030 Right. 01:24:27.430 --> 01:24:31.110 But uh but uh but within the academy has m less need to be contrarian. 01:24:31.270 --> 01:24:31.590 Yeah. 01:24:31.720 --> 01:24:31.960 Right. 01:24:32.280 --> 01:24:32.680 That's true. 01:24:32.840 --> 01:24:34.520 That's a really summary. 01:24:34.760 --> 01:24:34.920 Yeah. 01:24:35.000 --> 01:24:39.320 It's almost like there was like a populist phase of evolutionary psychology where like we 01:24:39.320 --> 01:24:43.320 were speaking to the common man and you know, the folk wisdom from grandma and grandpa 01:24:43.320 --> 01:24:47.080 about how people really worked and men in their wandering eye or whatever, where everyone 01:24:47.080 --> 01:24:51.960 in the academy was, you know, blabbing about these abst these verbose, you know, 01:24:52.440 --> 01:24:57.630 abstruse theories about, you know, cultural Marxism or whatever social roles, right, right. 01:24:57.870 --> 01:25:00.350 And the and we were speaking to the man and speaking their language. 01:25:00.590 --> 01:25:04.430 But now like we've gotten to the point where like, okay, like we get it, you know, men like 01:25:04.430 --> 01:25:06.670 pretty women, you know, parents love their kids. 01:25:06.830 --> 01:25:11.790 Like can we can we move beyond that and actually like, you know, make some additional 01:25:11.790 --> 01:25:12.190 insights? 01:25:12.350 --> 01:25:16.030 The problem, of course, is that once you move beyond that, you start getting into really 01:25:16.220 --> 01:25:19.740 nuanced, complicated territory about how software works. 01:25:19.900 --> 01:25:23.500 And that does not speak to the common man because that's just really hard to wrap your head 01:25:23.500 --> 01:25:23.980 around. 01:25:24.060 --> 01:25:29.020 Uh, and so we sort of you know run out of runway in terms of our ability to, you know, 01:25:29.180 --> 01:25:32.220 resonate with people's intuitive psychology. 01:25:32.300 --> 01:25:33.660 And honestly, I think that's a good thing. 01:25:33.740 --> 01:25:37.340 You know, we should move beyond our intuitions, just as physics has moved beyond folk 01:25:37.340 --> 01:25:40.030 physics and biology has moved beyond folk biology. 01:25:40.110 --> 01:25:43.070 I think evolutionary psychology needs to move beyond folk psychology. 01:25:43.230 --> 01:25:46.190 I know Dave has done really wonderful work making that argument. 01:25:46.270 --> 01:25:48.430 And I think, you know, that's that's the direction we should be headed. 01:25:48.670 --> 01:25:48.830 Yeah. 01:25:48.910 --> 01:25:53.630 And I don't think all the PR, like I don't think um, I mean, in some sense, I agree with 01:25:53.630 --> 01:25:55.870 David that like we should just not worry about what people think. 01:25:55.950 --> 01:25:56.990 Obviously, I think that's true. 01:25:57.550 --> 01:26:01.630 I think there's another sense in which, and even this conversation, or even like the 01:26:01.630 --> 01:26:07.150 throughput of all all everyone's work here, is being respectful of people 01:26:07.480 --> 01:26:09.880 and it is a virtue still. 01:26:10.200 --> 01:26:10.360 Right. 01:26:10.440 --> 01:26:14.680 And sort of not saying people are idiots, but like respecting and understanding why people 01:26:14.680 --> 01:26:17.800 are doing what they're doing as a first step. 01:26:18.120 --> 01:26:22.680 Uh, I think that point, even if people don't understand, like, you know, if I'm talking to 01:26:22.680 --> 01:26:26.760 my uncle and I'm like, we got to understand, like, you know, the design stance and your 01:26:27.400 --> 01:26:28.840 robot and their software, it's like, what? 01:26:28.920 --> 01:26:29.560 What are you talking about? 01:26:29.640 --> 01:26:31.560 Like, yeah, like I'm not gonna win that. 01:26:31.640 --> 01:26:33.000 Like, that's not helpful, right? 01:26:33.080 --> 01:26:36.120 Like, you know, because that's just cognitive science and that's boring or whatever. 01:26:36.200 --> 01:26:36.920 That's in the weeds. 01:26:37.570 --> 01:26:41.890 But if but if I say something like, you know, most politicians 01:26:43.570 --> 01:26:45.570 are just, you know, people already know. 01:26:45.650 --> 01:26:48.050 Like people politicians are just doing their best. 01:26:48.210 --> 01:26:52.690 And some are more or less corrupt or more or less in a corrupt system. 01:26:52.770 --> 01:26:55.650 And they're just doing their best, but also self-incentivized. 01:26:55.730 --> 01:26:56.450 People know that. 01:26:56.610 --> 01:27:01.650 And people know that science is trying to figure stuff out, but there's more or less like 01:27:01.650 --> 01:27:06.290 ulterior motives in science too, and like their status and other things. 01:27:06.450 --> 01:27:11.740 And sometimes scientists are like, you know, what that that very sort of like patronizing, 01:27:11.820 --> 01:27:13.900 like people are bad and moralizing. 01:27:14.060 --> 01:27:19.580 And I do think like one of the things that Evpsych does when it does it well, done 01:27:19.580 --> 01:27:25.180 properly, is it does force you out of that like knee-jerk moralization that like the unwed 01:27:25.180 --> 01:27:30.860 mother, the sugar eating person, like there's there's you have to 01:27:30.860 --> 01:27:33.100 respect why that's happening. 01:27:33.340 --> 01:27:38.690 It doesn't you can also respect like why a genocide is happening or like why somebody's 01:27:38.690 --> 01:27:42.770 doing that and not it not not say it's good but if you want to do something about it boy 01:27:42.850 --> 01:27:44.450 you better understand why it's happening. 01:27:44.690 --> 01:27:50.610 I do think and so I just think that point we still get I think we should 01:27:50.610 --> 01:27:56.450 still get some uh laurels for that or at least like say that like this is one 01:27:56.450 --> 01:28:02.450 thing about this approach is it forces you to sort of take that appreciate the logic 01:28:02.450 --> 01:28:06.080 of a of a thing step for what it's worth. 01:28:06.160 --> 01:28:06.480 Yeah. 01:28:06.880 --> 01:28:07.040 Yeah. 01:28:07.440 --> 01:28:12.160 And in many in many ways, yeah, I think we're reuniting with the you know standard social 01:28:12.160 --> 01:28:16.400 science model that we originally criticized, which is, you know, that was very much uh a 01:28:16.560 --> 01:28:20.880 norm in that model where we're gonna look at another culture without judgment and without 01:28:20.880 --> 01:28:24.720 moralization, and we're just gonna try to understand it and and appreciate the culture and 01:28:24.880 --> 01:28:27.810 why people are doing what they're doing uh in that society. 01:28:27.970 --> 01:28:33.730 I think taking that same non-judgmental stance, I think, that you know has been 01:28:33.730 --> 01:28:38.850 taken by anthropologists is a really valuable stance to take across the board, and um we 01:28:38.850 --> 01:28:40.370 should continue taking it. 01:28:40.770 --> 01:28:46.050 Yeah, and I think that the also the standard social science model was always somewhat of a 01:28:46.050 --> 01:28:48.690 straw man that for me conflated several issues, right? 01:28:48.850 --> 01:28:54.740 So one is to do with One was a kind of implied, oh, 01:28:55.300 --> 01:29:00.660 people have sort of lumped all of the members of some social category like you know, Hadza, 01:29:00.900 --> 01:29:01.460 together. 01:29:01.700 --> 01:29:02.100 Yeah. 01:29:02.340 --> 01:29:05.300 Rather than differentiating that different Hadza might be doing different things for 01:29:05.300 --> 01:29:05.860 different reasons. 01:29:05.940 --> 01:29:08.740 And so there's that's a sort of lumping that happens. 01:29:08.980 --> 01:29:14.610 Um, the other is the particular claim that the you know groups differ kind of arbitrarily 01:29:14.610 --> 01:29:20.130 and without a assignable limit because of a you know a kind of extreme fluid to fluidity or 01:29:20.130 --> 01:29:24.610 or or or or you know lack of priors of the mechanisms involved. 01:29:24.690 --> 01:29:29.650 And there's a few different pieces to that, to what the standard social science which some 01:29:29.650 --> 01:29:34.050 of which I think you know you do need to r retain and and made a lot of sense and some of 01:29:34.050 --> 01:29:39.970 which not, but it I think it was always somewhat of a rhetorical foil to say we want to 01:29:39.970 --> 01:29:41.170 do something different from that. 01:29:41.660 --> 01:29:45.740 You know, but there's different, you know, there's do we care about the cognition of 01:29:45.740 --> 01:29:50.140 individuals, or do we just lump them all together and you know and say it's social 01:29:50.140 --> 01:29:51.660 processes that matter? 01:29:52.140 --> 01:29:54.540 Do you distinguish between individuals and groups? 01:29:54.620 --> 01:29:59.180 There's very there's different pieces to what the so-called standard social science model 01:29:59.180 --> 01:29:59.340 is. 01:29:59.580 --> 01:30:02.700 I don't think it was ever a terribly coherent notion, in fact. 01:30:03.210 --> 01:30:05.130 Nor does nor do I think that it exists. 01:30:05.210 --> 01:30:10.170 And I think you know social scientists vary enormously on their in their explanatory 01:30:10.170 --> 01:30:10.810 emphases. 01:30:10.970 --> 01:30:15.610 And so the idea that there's a standard one is it kind of doesn't make a whole lot of 01:30:15.610 --> 01:30:15.850 sense. 01:30:16.170 --> 01:30:16.330 Yeah. 01:30:16.730 --> 01:30:19.690 So Daniel, so you a lot of your work is on power. 01:30:19.930 --> 01:30:25.450 Is is an evolutionary psychological approach to power and resources subversive in any way? 01:30:25.610 --> 01:30:29.450 Like is it subversive to certain status quo? 01:30:29.610 --> 01:30:35.340 Or you know, are there um, you know, if you're if you're saying, look, I'm a 01:30:35.340 --> 01:30:40.300 scientist, I'm gonna try to respect the phenomenon of inequality, here's the proposal. 01:30:40.860 --> 01:30:46.700 Um, you know, there's a version of science where sort of all the stakeholders are like, all 01:30:46.700 --> 01:30:48.780 right, we're just gonna listen to what the scientist says. 01:30:48.940 --> 01:30:53.580 There's another version that sort of says the reason why the status quo is is some people 01:30:53.580 --> 01:30:55.100 are winning and some people are losing. 01:30:55.180 --> 01:31:00.110 And when a scientist comes in and says, here, here's a way to make the losers lose less. 01:31:00.350 --> 01:31:01.790 Some people don't like it. 01:31:02.030 --> 01:31:06.910 Um, you know, either, I mean, what do you think abstractly, or like what has the reaction 01:31:06.910 --> 01:31:12.110 been to like your work where you're saying, look, here's here are objectively, or at least 01:31:12.190 --> 01:31:16.910 like objective is too strong, but sort of like data-backed ways to like make everybody's 01:31:16.910 --> 01:31:19.150 life better and raise all boats. 01:31:19.630 --> 01:31:24.380 You know, imagine I imagine some people, at least intuitively, like don't like that idea, 01:31:24.460 --> 01:31:28.460 like a basic No, that the they they they they they don't. 01:31:28.620 --> 01:31:28.780 Yeah. 01:31:28.940 --> 01:31:34.860 But I mean in a way the idea that you sort of persuade people you know 01:31:34.940 --> 01:31:40.460 in in a one step process, you know, people whose salaries depend on not being persuaded was 01:31:40.460 --> 01:31:43.180 is probably too much to hope for. 01:31:43.340 --> 01:31:48.150 But what you might hope for is there are some people who think you know who think for indep 01:31:48.630 --> 01:31:52.390 on independent grounds you know believe in some of the things that I think would be a good 01:31:52.390 --> 01:31:52.870 idea. 01:31:53.110 --> 01:31:58.470 And if I give them more coherent argumentative justifications, then they're gonna go into 01:31:58.470 --> 01:32:04.470 their particular marketplace of ideas in which they exist better armed and better better 01:32:04.470 --> 01:32:06.870 equipped with arguments and counterarguments. 01:32:06.950 --> 01:32:12.680 Now so it's not like I you know I ever expected or uh or or found it the case that 01:32:12.760 --> 01:32:18.440 um uh you know a lot of people said, Oh gosh, you know, now you point that out we'll we'll 01:32:18.520 --> 01:32:19.320 stop doing this more detail. 01:32:19.560 --> 01:32:21.720 Dan Nettle, the clearinghouse of social policy. 01:32:21.800 --> 01:32:21.960 Yes. 01:32:23.640 --> 01:32:23.960 That's right. 01:32:24.040 --> 01:32:27.800 You know, I I read that in you know, I read your paper in Human Nature, we're gonna, you 01:32:27.800 --> 01:32:31.640 know, we're gonna completely change uh um the way we're organizing things. 01:32:31.800 --> 01:32:36.270 No, but but what you can do, this is all that scientists really can ever do is that they 01:32:36.270 --> 01:32:41.630 can hope to have an input into a much broader social process of you know of exchange of 01:32:41.630 --> 01:32:47.630 arguments and uh in which people who want to do you know who ha have reasons to think 01:32:47.630 --> 01:32:52.030 like you kinda can find their positions buttressed or whatever. 01:32:52.110 --> 01:32:54.350 And also when it's complex, you know, we need to say that. 01:32:54.430 --> 01:32:59.550 Well we can't when it's the answer is it's complex, but at least you can try and lay out 01:32:59.550 --> 01:33:01.470 what some of the issues are and and so on. 01:33:01.550 --> 01:33:05.020 And I think that does have an effect. 01:33:05.180 --> 01:33:06.700 You know, it's pretty microscopic. 01:33:06.780 --> 01:33:10.780 It's not, I don't think there are probably many cases where someone sort of published, you 01:33:10.780 --> 01:33:15.500 know, absent things like the link between cancer and smoking and so on, you know, where 01:33:15.500 --> 01:33:18.540 there were quite a lot of people who's in who's interested not to believe it, but in the 01:33:18.540 --> 01:33:23.180 end, the epidemiology was absolutely convincing, and that has produced very major changes 01:33:23.180 --> 01:33:24.860 in public opinion and public policy. 01:33:25.020 --> 01:33:27.740 But I you know, there's not many cases like that. 01:33:27.900 --> 01:33:33.510 But you can expose issues, you know, present ways of thinking about things 01:33:33.590 --> 01:33:38.470 that people who whose whose activity it is to do this stuff are gonna go, Oh, that's 01:33:38.470 --> 01:33:39.270 actually useful, you know. 01:33:39.350 --> 01:33:45.270 I I see there's a continuous link from policy problem, you know, questions I'm working 01:33:45.270 --> 01:33:51.270 on to um to sort of behavioural science, which is infer that you know further linked to 01:33:51.270 --> 01:33:52.150 the science of the mind. 01:33:52.230 --> 01:33:56.500 And and so I I think we have a we make a difference, you know. 01:33:56.980 --> 01:34:00.660 Well I don't know if we make a difference or not, but there's at least a reasonable chance 01:34:00.660 --> 01:34:01.300 that we do. 01:34:01.620 --> 01:34:02.020 Yeah. 01:34:02.260 --> 01:34:07.060 Um can you I mean just re what do you have an elevator pitch for sort of income inequality 01:34:07.060 --> 01:34:09.060 and like uh universal basic income? 01:34:09.140 --> 01:34:14.420 I mean is that Well my elevator pitch pi my elevator pitch for universal basic income is 01:34:14.420 --> 01:34:18.470 not actually about inequality per se. 01:34:18.630 --> 01:34:22.950 So I think I think that the thing that matters psychologically is insufficiency. 01:34:23.510 --> 01:34:26.630 When you don't know if you can put food on the well actually the two things about it, the 01:34:26.710 --> 01:34:29.030 insufficiency and unpredictability. 01:34:31.030 --> 01:34:36.700 Either believing that I can't put food on the family table tomorrow or 01:34:37.020 --> 01:34:41.100 not knowing if I can do so and over what time scale I'm going to be able to do so either of 01:34:41.100 --> 01:34:46.860 those leads me to do some things that whilst justified by the 01:34:46.860 --> 01:34:50.780 situation cause negative externalities for others. 01:34:51.020 --> 01:34:51.660 Right? 01:34:51.900 --> 01:34:56.700 And so if you can say to people look I'm not going to solve all your problems but I'm going 01:34:56.700 --> 01:35:01.690 to take that particular thing away that has actually has big social knock-ons. 01:35:02.170 --> 01:35:03.450 Now we know that. 01:35:03.930 --> 01:35:06.090 We've known this for years in society. 01:35:06.170 --> 01:35:09.210 And so we have a whole patchwork of mechanisms. 01:35:09.290 --> 01:35:14.410 You know, in Europe, we have very complex but expensive welfare systems. 01:35:14.650 --> 01:35:17.930 Actually, even the US, which is characterized as having like less of a welfare system, 01:35:18.090 --> 01:35:19.530 actually spends billions of dollars. 01:35:19.690 --> 01:35:23.040 You know, 10% of the population, not at the moment because of the federal government 01:35:23.040 --> 01:35:26.000 shutdown, but in general gets uh the SNAP program. 01:35:26.320 --> 01:35:30.160 You know, there's unemployment insurance, there's a whole bunch of different mechanisms. 01:35:30.400 --> 01:35:36.080 Because we understand that we all lose if there's a big fraction of the population knocking 01:35:36.080 --> 01:35:39.840 around that either can't meet their basic needs or doesn't know if they can, they're gonna 01:35:39.920 --> 01:35:44.080 it's gonna lead them to make all kinds of trade-offs that we that is gonna cause an ex 01:35:44.240 --> 01:35:45.680 negative externality. 01:35:46.080 --> 01:35:50.240 So we sort of know this, but it's just that the way that we um 01:35:52.010 --> 01:35:58.010 Address this is currently, I mean, for for historical reasons, as a sort of patchwork of 01:35:58.010 --> 01:36:00.730 ways that we've done this, you know, there could be better ways. 01:36:00.810 --> 01:36:04.090 There could be better ways that would do a better job and wouldn't cost much more. 01:36:04.170 --> 01:36:09.050 Like they would just that they would, as it were, solve the problem a little bit further 01:36:09.050 --> 01:36:14.420 upstream by saying, Well, you always know you're going to have a certain income, rather 01:36:14.420 --> 01:36:17.700 than saying, well, wait until you find you haven't got some income and then we'll have, you 01:36:17.700 --> 01:36:20.260 know, then we'll have you go to somewhere and the bureaucrats will assess it. 01:36:20.340 --> 01:36:24.340 You'll claim, you know, think of the the complexities and the humiliations involved in 01:36:24.340 --> 01:36:24.500 that. 01:36:24.660 --> 01:36:30.180 When you say, well, no, you know, we're all we have a basic tier of 01:36:30.180 --> 01:36:32.420 stuff to which we all have access. 01:36:32.580 --> 01:36:36.420 And then beyond that, you know, it's up to people to sort of sort things sort things out 01:36:36.420 --> 01:36:37.060 for themselves. 01:36:37.300 --> 01:36:41.450 So I think you can pitch this as like this is kind of a no-brainer, it makes a lot of 01:36:41.450 --> 01:36:41.850 sense. 01:36:42.010 --> 01:36:45.530 Psychologically, it works for recipients, but it also works for people who have to pay for 01:36:45.530 --> 01:36:46.650 it through taxation. 01:36:46.730 --> 01:36:47.210 Yeah. 01:36:47.690 --> 01:36:53.130 Because what people don't like is transferring resource to a different category of person 01:36:53.130 --> 01:36:56.090 in which they do not themselves believe that they fit. 01:36:56.730 --> 01:36:57.130 Right? 01:36:57.370 --> 01:37:00.810 Whereas actually universal basic income, you know, you'll get it and I'll get it. 01:37:00.890 --> 01:37:03.370 And and we're so we're transferring resources to ourselves. 01:37:03.610 --> 01:37:07.050 We're all we're all deemed by the mechanism to be the same. 01:37:08.000 --> 01:37:12.640 There isn't a kind of, well, you know, you're a person of type X, and so you get resources 01:37:12.720 --> 01:37:14.720 where I'm a type of person of type Y, so I pay in. 01:37:14.880 --> 01:37:20.800 No, you know, it stuff goes into a pot, there's a share of it that's rationed 01:37:20.800 --> 01:37:21.040 out. 01:37:21.280 --> 01:37:24.080 Everyone who's in the country is part of this kind of mechanism. 01:37:24.240 --> 01:37:27.680 So there are reasons for thinking it's could be more accept, you know, could be more 01:37:27.680 --> 01:37:30.720 effective at solving the problems it's meant to solve. 01:37:31.270 --> 01:37:37.030 um more um more acceptable to the people who are 01:37:38.150 --> 01:37:42.470 who ultimately need to support it and also just you know there's a lot we spend a lot of 01:37:42.470 --> 01:37:46.950 money in society you know fixing out fif fixing out problems after they've happened 01:37:47.270 --> 01:37:52.790 depression anxiety you know various kinds of things you sort of it's not that we don't 01:37:52.790 --> 01:37:58.780 spend money on helping people We have lots of ways of doing that, but it's kind of messy 01:37:58.860 --> 01:38:00.940 and often after the harm has happened, you know. 01:38:01.020 --> 01:38:04.060 So it's that that's that's the pitch, you know, the short pitch. 01:38:04.300 --> 01:38:05.100 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:38:05.180 --> 01:38:05.980 No, that's great. 01:38:06.140 --> 01:38:12.140 I uh yeah, even just moving from Germany to the US, I feel like my perspective on 01:38:12.140 --> 01:38:17.420 the US was sort of we like to throw lots of money at problems too late, or we like 01:38:17.420 --> 01:38:19.420 artificially low numbers up front. 01:38:19.580 --> 01:38:22.700 So, like a good example of that would be like that's everywhere. 01:38:22.860 --> 01:38:27.790 Like in Germany, there's playgrounds everywhere and they spend a lot of money on 01:38:27.790 --> 01:38:28.430 playgrounds. 01:38:28.510 --> 01:38:32.270 You can travel, it's probably like a half a kilometer, a kilometer to like a playground, 01:38:32.430 --> 01:38:33.390 and they're really great. 01:38:33.550 --> 01:38:35.150 Kids spend tons of time there. 01:38:35.310 --> 01:38:39.870 And I remember somebody like an American like posting, oh, that sounds expensive. 01:38:40.190 --> 01:38:45.600 But if you think about all the knock-on consequences of not having that of 01:38:45.600 --> 01:38:51.040 obesity, of try traveling to go anywhere, of everybody having to buy crappy playground 01:38:51.120 --> 01:38:56.800 equipment that no one person can buy, even remotely as good as what's there, the anxiety 01:38:57.040 --> 01:39:02.240 or um sedentarianism of or like having to like pay for entertainment. 01:39:02.400 --> 01:39:06.400 Like there's all these knock on consequences that are sort of obscure. 01:39:06.710 --> 01:39:12.310 Um uh but uh and or like crime because kids are just bored and they're like, what the fuck 01:39:12.310 --> 01:39:13.110 am I gonna do? 01:39:13.270 --> 01:39:16.070 Um, you know, so like there's all these knock-on consequences. 01:39:16.230 --> 01:39:20.790 So like upfront costs, for me at least, like as an American, I was like, oh, it's the same 01:39:20.790 --> 01:39:22.790 thing as like not including tax on the numbers. 01:39:22.870 --> 01:39:24.950 Like, you know, in Germany the tax is included. 01:39:25.030 --> 01:39:28.710 In America, it's not, but it's like then you have to tip, like so at a restaurant, you know 01:39:28.710 --> 01:39:30.550 what you're gonna pay when you sit down. 01:39:30.710 --> 01:39:33.700 In America, it's like 50% more later. 01:39:33.780 --> 01:39:35.700 You know, we just like artificially low numbers. 01:39:35.780 --> 01:39:38.820 So, but I mean Americans pay a lot for their healthcare, right? 01:39:39.540 --> 01:39:41.700 No, we pay so much for really terrible health care. 01:39:42.260 --> 01:39:44.180 You really spend a lot of money on healthcare, right? 01:39:44.340 --> 01:39:47.700 And then there's no kind of, oh, you know, imagine the taxation it would be if you had a 01:39:47.700 --> 01:39:48.420 different medical system. 01:39:48.980 --> 01:39:49.860 No, you spend a lot of money. 01:39:50.740 --> 01:39:53.220 No, no, you could save money by yes, exactly. 01:39:53.860 --> 01:39:54.900 Probably probably, yes, probably. 01:39:55.220 --> 01:39:55.460 Exactly. 01:39:55.620 --> 01:40:01.390 But no, I think this just speaks to like this point of sort of uh the the idea that 01:40:01.470 --> 01:40:05.070 like you just explain why why a system might be better. 01:40:05.150 --> 01:40:08.670 Um and uh but yeah, uh yeah, anyway. 01:40:08.750 --> 01:40:08.830 Yeah. 01:40:09.230 --> 01:40:14.270 But there is a there's a particular difficulty about changing the I mean there is an 01:40:14.270 --> 01:40:15.710 evolutionary psychology literature on this. 01:40:15.790 --> 01:40:17.550 There's particular ways of allocating resources. 01:40:17.630 --> 01:40:21.710 Like some things you know we communally share, and some things, you know, I we we equality 01:40:21.710 --> 01:40:24.840 match, I get one, you get one, Dave gets one. 01:40:25.080 --> 01:40:26.680 Some things we do in other ways. 01:40:26.840 --> 01:40:32.760 And actually, shifting a resource from one of those to the other is super hard, I 01:40:32.760 --> 01:40:37.320 think, for reasons that we've talked about, which is because you're sort of I'm asking, I'm 01:40:37.320 --> 01:40:42.440 not, you know, I'm being required to use a different set of mental accounting principles, 01:40:43.240 --> 01:40:45.160 you know, for a certain resource. 01:40:45.320 --> 01:40:49.390 I used to think of it as like a privately owned resource, and now you're asking me to think 01:40:49.390 --> 01:40:50.350 about it a different way. 01:40:50.510 --> 01:40:53.150 And that's kind of an effortful cognitive shift. 01:40:53.310 --> 01:40:57.230 And also, but it will only work if you all everyone else also makes the shift and kind of 01:40:57.230 --> 01:40:58.190 buys into at the same time. 01:40:58.270 --> 01:41:00.590 So we have problems of first mover problems and those things. 01:41:00.670 --> 01:41:02.510 So that's why these things are politically difficult. 01:41:02.590 --> 01:41:02.750 Yeah. 01:41:02.910 --> 01:41:03.230 You know. 01:41:03.390 --> 01:41:03.550 Yeah. 01:41:03.710 --> 01:41:06.670 Quite aside from the arguments about, well, we'll be better off in the in the long run. 01:41:06.830 --> 01:41:10.980 Is the kind of well, that sounds a great idea, but how can we get everyone to agree on it? 01:41:11.060 --> 01:41:14.100 And how will you know the others will stick to their side of the deal and all that? 01:41:14.180 --> 01:41:14.740 So, you know. 01:41:14.980 --> 01:41:15.380 Right. 01:41:15.620 --> 01:41:16.020 Yeah. 01:41:16.260 --> 01:41:22.020 It comes it loops back to this thing of like institutions are just sort of aggregate uh 01:41:22.500 --> 01:41:24.660 as David says, shit happens. 01:41:25.140 --> 01:41:30.180 Yeah, and once they're in place, you know, hope you you can kind of hang on to them. 01:41:30.340 --> 01:41:30.500 Yeah. 01:41:30.980 --> 01:41:32.420 Getting them into place is really hard. 01:41:32.500 --> 01:41:32.740 You know. 01:41:32.980 --> 01:41:33.220 Yeah. 01:41:33.370 --> 01:41:33.610 right. 01:41:33.770 --> 01:41:34.250 Exactly. 01:41:34.410 --> 01:41:34.890 Yeah. 01:41:35.130 --> 01:41:38.890 As you said, like you don't know if you change something, it might go really wrong. 01:41:39.050 --> 01:41:39.530 Yeah. 01:41:39.850 --> 01:41:40.250 Yeah. 01:41:40.970 --> 01:41:41.530 Yeah. 01:41:42.570 --> 01:41:45.450 Well, I think we're approaching the end of our time here. 01:41:45.610 --> 01:41:48.330 We uh it's time to ask the the question we always ask. 01:41:48.410 --> 01:41:54.010 Uh is there anything we should have asked you that you you wish we got a chance to talk 01:41:54.010 --> 01:41:54.250 about? 01:41:54.970 --> 01:41:56.010 I don't think so. 01:41:56.250 --> 01:41:56.490 Yeah. 01:41:56.720 --> 01:41:56.880 Okay. 01:41:57.040 --> 01:41:59.920 Well, there is a ton of stuff I wish I we had more time to ask you about. 01:42:00.160 --> 01:42:00.320 Yes. 01:42:00.960 --> 01:42:02.080 I I wish that as well. 01:42:02.240 --> 01:42:02.400 Yeah. 01:42:02.640 --> 01:42:06.000 We'll have to bring you on a second time to to cover all the other stuff. 01:42:06.080 --> 01:42:08.160 But yeah, this was a really fun conversation. 01:42:08.240 --> 01:42:13.440 Uh I love how we got from the micro to the macro of like where we're going as a as as a 01:42:13.440 --> 01:42:17.920 field and uh what we what we might be getting wrong, where we should be headed, but also sp 01:42:18.080 --> 01:42:22.880 really cool specific things like inequality and obesity was a really fun conversation. 01:42:22.960 --> 01:42:26.750 I we appreciate you having uh uh appreciate you coming on. 01:42:27.070 --> 01:42:32.830 Yeah, and uh don't don't bother doing a 5k or 10k or half marathon, just do that 800 meter 01:42:32.910 --> 01:42:34.830 or I'm the uh the 800 meters. 01:42:35.310 --> 01:42:37.310 No, I just the eight hundred meters, that's all I've got time for. 01:42:38.110 --> 01:42:38.510 Okay, oh yeah. 01:42:38.830 --> 01:42:39.950 It takes too damn long, you know. 01:42:40.030 --> 01:42:40.990 It just takes yeah, yeah. 01:42:41.310 --> 01:42:41.630 Exactly. 01:42:41.710 --> 01:42:46.910 Yeah, no, you gotta how many I wonder how many eight hundred meters you could ru how long 01:42:46.910 --> 01:42:49.710 did it take you to do the hundred K or uh the hundreds? 01:42:51.720 --> 01:42:52.440 Yeah, yeah. 01:42:52.520 --> 01:42:53.240 That's a long time. 01:42:53.480 --> 01:42:54.120 That's long, you know. 01:42:54.200 --> 01:42:56.600 It's long you you the whole day's gone, you know. 01:42:56.680 --> 01:42:57.240 What can I say? 01:42:57.400 --> 01:42:58.120 No, exactly. 01:42:59.880 --> 01:43:00.520 Fantastic. 01:43:00.600 --> 01:43:00.840 All right. 01:43:00.920 --> 01:43:01.640 Well thank you, Dan. 01:43:01.800 --> 01:43:02.920 Thank you so much for coming on. 01:43:03.160 --> 01:43:03.400 Bye. 01:43:03.640 --> 01:43:04.120 You're right. 01:43:07.720 --> 01:43:11.320 David, the this was a wonderful episode. 01:43:11.930 --> 01:43:12.330 Yes. 01:43:12.650 --> 01:43:13.370 Fantastic. 01:43:14.090 --> 01:43:17.130 Roughly an hour and a half to two hours have gone by. 01:43:17.690 --> 01:43:20.650 And you're still listening, which means you must like what you're hearing. 01:43:20.970 --> 01:43:22.890 And if you do, uh don't be shy about it. 01:43:23.050 --> 01:43:23.930 Tell people about it. 01:43:24.010 --> 01:43:27.290 Uh leave us a kind review, support us on Patreon. 01:43:27.530 --> 01:43:32.970 And uh if you want, reach out to us with any ideas for topics uh or questions or uh 01:43:33.130 --> 01:43:34.090 ideas for guests. 01:43:34.490 --> 01:43:39.610 Yeah, we should um elicit uh like questions that we might answer with a guest. 01:43:39.770 --> 01:43:40.640 That would be a fun thing. 01:43:41.040 --> 01:43:41.360 That would be fun. 01:43:41.440 --> 01:43:45.920 Or maybe we should do like a an AMA where like we get a bunch of questions from people and 01:43:45.920 --> 01:43:48.160 we just spend an episode answering people's questions. 01:43:48.400 --> 01:43:49.360 What's AMA? 01:43:50.000 --> 01:43:51.280 Ask me anything. 01:43:51.600 --> 01:43:52.640 Oh, okay. 01:43:52.880 --> 01:43:54.320 Should I have known that? 01:43:54.640 --> 01:43:55.200 Probably. 01:43:55.440 --> 01:43:55.680 Okay. 01:43:55.840 --> 01:43:57.120 We'll we'll edit that out. 01:43:57.200 --> 01:43:57.440 Okay. 01:43:57.520 --> 01:43:58.960 Thanks everybody for listening. 01:43:59.200 --> 01:43:59.440 All right. 01:43:59.520 --> 01:44:00.320 See you next week.