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Uh, I'm David Pinsov.

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I'm David Petrozowski.

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And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast actually evolutionary psychology.

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That's right by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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That's right.

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So yeah.

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Enjoy.

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David, uh today we have another episode of this podcast.

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Yes, and it is about the thing that we are doing right now, which is communicating.

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Oh right.

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It's uh uh I'm aware that I'm communicating to other people and I am behaving in a certain

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way because I'm aware that other people will well yeah, it gets complicated.

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Yeah, yeah.

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I mean you're doing a poor job of it, but um normally w humans do a good job of this thing

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called communication.

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Uh and we you know we we evaluate the things that other people say based on how relevant it

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is to the goals that we're pursuing, and it's about shaping what's inside your head uh

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based on what I think you think, uh I think.

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It gets very complicated very quickly, but thankfully we have um a wonderful guest.

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Yes, yes, Tom Scott Phillips.

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Yeah, who really knows a lot about communication.

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And I like I think he it is like an Alice in Wonderland situation where I think I

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understand language and what it is, or like how grammar works.

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And then Tom comes and says sort of things, and I'm like, whoa, that's very different the

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way I think.

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And you know, by the end, I'm sort of convinced that uh there's uh one needs to sort of

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understand things quite a bit differently.

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And so we talk about all kinds of interesting things like art, art and how that works, um,

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what grammar is, whether or not grammar or language is sort of quote unquote innate, ate

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all kinds of different things.

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Yep.

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And we even get into uh dancing at toward the end and also whether non-evolutionary

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psychology is possible.

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Oh right.

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Yeah.

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And uh Lindy Hop.

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Fans of Lindy Hop, or if you feel things about the Lindy Hop uh or dancing in general, stay

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tuned.

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You could even dance to the episode if if you feel so inclined.

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Oh yeah.

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Or for the next little uh segment of music.

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Yeah, dance dance to the music.

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It's pretty danceable.

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It's got a beat.

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It does, yeah.

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Okay.

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Sounds good.

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All right.

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We'll see you in a second.

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See ya.

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Today we have uh very wonderful, very special guest, Tom Scott Phillips.

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Um, really nice to have you here.

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Um, and Tom, uh we uh you know i've been thinking a lot about what to say

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about you as a guest um but i actually wanted to start with uh with one thing

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which is uh this paper called expression unleashed um that you did with christoph um

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heinz and the this paper and then i think you have another paper

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that's about museums is that right or ostensive communication.

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I have a paper about uh it's called the art experience.

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Oh right.

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Experience of going to modern art museums and how it's evolutionary and so communication.

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Yeah.

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And so there's uh for me, you know, like I have a running list of like um in actually David

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is one of these people, like people who have actually like taught me something, um, uh

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which is sort of meta because a lot of your work is about like people should say relevant

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things and they learn something.

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And if you if they say something that you learn from, you'll listen to them.

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Um so hopefully you're listening to this podcast because you're learning something too.

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And if not, I'm sorry, and you should listen to something else.

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I shouldn't have said that, we should cut that out.

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But um, but uh but I think like this expression release paper and this art paper um really

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taught me something about the life and the world.

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And like whenever we have somebody on, I think about what I think about the person.

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And for me, I have a little cartoon bubble, which is like ostensive communication for you.

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Um, and for those, I think what you study is really interesting, but it's also

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really subtle.

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It's kind of like theory of mind.

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Like the first time I heard theory of mind, I was like, why do you even need a system for

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that?

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Because it's so obvious we attribute mental states, the idea there's a mechanism for that.

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And I think communication, and especially like ostensive communication is so obvious

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it's so baked into us and who we are that there's so much instinct blindness and Dave and I

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talked about instinct blindness.

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Can you talk about uh and can you like dis dis um disabuse us of our

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instinct blindness?

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What is ostensive communication?

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Um and just sort of just as a bedrock here of sort of why do we need something like that?

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Yeah.

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So there's many ways to answer this question.

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And if you let me talk, I'll probably talk for two hours.

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So you have to stop me at some point.

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That's great.

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Yeah.

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So the way here here's how I think about it these days.

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Uh I think the useful analogy is with locomotion.

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So locomotion is a super basic biological task.

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Uh maybe not all, but almost all organisms have to do it in one way or another.

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But there's more than one way of doing it in the world.

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So some organisms swim, some walk, some fly, some crawl, and so on.

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You can and you can taxonomise those different ways, those different modes in a few

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different ways, arguably.

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Um, we take communication to be a basic, you know, it's communication.

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It's an uncontroversial concept.

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We don't have to say anything more.

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Um, I don't think that's true.

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I think communication comes in more than one variety.

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Um And I think in particular, what humans do is a

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distinctive variety.

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I mean, all species have things that they do that are distinctive by definition, otherwise,

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they wouldn't be species.

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And one of the things that humans do is they communicate in a particular way, which the

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jargon is, as you say, ostensive communication.

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And what that means in particular is that human communication is predicated

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on expressing and uh recognizing mental states.

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So the naive notion of communication is you know what computers do.

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So you sometimes call the code model or a conduit metaphor.

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You've got some information, you put it in a box, you send it along a channel, maybe

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there's some information loss, and you've got a decoding mechanism.

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And as long as the encoding and the decoding mechanisms are calibrated to one another, then

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you can unpack it at the other end and so on.

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That's what computers do.

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Um and sometimes clarify like all the information is in that packet, sort of right.

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Yeah, I mean, even the word information is useful because information is not a physical

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thing that you can put in anything.

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But uh, but yeah, uh it's all there, and there there are benefits

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that's a simplified that clearly that's not in everything to say about you know language

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use, just to take the most obvious example.

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But it's sometimes useful to think about human communication in those terms, but it also

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has its limits because it's a metaphor, and it you know, humans are not just you know

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encoding decoding machines, right?

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Uh, and thinking about what humans do as expressing and recognizing mental states, and then

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seeing all the stuff, whether it's gestures or pointing or pantomime or language use as

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ways of doing ways of expressing and recognizing mental states.

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That's that's the sort of the inversion that I think the evolutionary perspective brings to

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light.

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Right.

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And just to make it concrete, like I would just imagine like a mother and a child at the

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zoo, and they walk up to a cage, and the mother points and says, There.

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Yeah.

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Right.

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And if you take like this very if you built a robot and it was just sort of like it it

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encoded the word there, that's just an information about like a location, right?

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Absolutely.

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There's no, there's nothing more about that.

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And so reading in the natural thing we all do, which is that um there is the animal the

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reason why we're here is to see animals.

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I'm pointing there.

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And the most relevant reason to point to a location is that there's an animal and you don't

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know where it is.

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Um, you know, and so like all of the all that stuff that we so effortlessly read into, if

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you try to build a robot to do it, is really, really hard.

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Absolutely.

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And and then also that means that what language is, if I understand what you're saying,

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Tom, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is like the real thing about communication is the

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thing that people actually say is super sparse.

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Like you've ever read a like a um uh transcript of communication, it's like almost

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impossible to understand what's being talked about, especially if there's no context or

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pragmatic cues.

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And so it's such minimal information, but it's just enough to tip and activate all the

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mental state attribution and intention.

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Is that sort of what you're saying?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I mean, that's one way of glossing what I'm saying.

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I mean, there's there's much more under the surface, but yes.

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Right.

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Yeah.

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I mean, it's uh oh, good you good you go, David.

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Yeah.

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Is is what you're saying basically that um human communication requires a

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sophisticated theory of mind or ability to model others' mental states.

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And communication uh to to some extent, or at least human-style communication cannot

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occur without a recognition of mental states.

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And maybe communication takes place um in other organisms and maybe they don't have the

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requisite theory of mind, and that would be a different kind of communication.

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But human communication is always embedded in a set of representations about what you're

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thinking, what you're intending, what I'm thinking, that you're thinking, that I'm

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thinking, and so forth.

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Um, and you cannot understand language uh uh outside of that uh socially uh

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situated context.

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I think that's absolutely right.

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Um one common objection to the, I mean let's raise and

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deal with a common objection to this way of thinking about what's going on with human

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communication, which is surely you don't think that David's example, mother goes to the zoo

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and the small child, and you think that the child is inferring what the mother might be

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intending about the child's mental states.

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And actually, when we get into the details, it's even more complicated than that.

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These many layers.

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Um I think that that objection is misplaced.

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So in a in another recent paper, um, Christoph found this.

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My co-author, he found this beautiful uh quote um going back a few hundred years to

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do with Descartes and Berkeley and theory of vision.

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So around that time, you know, they've got this idea of light waves uh you know going

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through the lens and hitting the back of the eye, and people saying, Well, okay, that's

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makes some sense, but then how could you see distance if that's how vision is working,

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right?

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How does depth perception work?

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And Descartes' answer is you don't have one perspective, you have two perspectives, right?

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You have two eyes, and with two eyes, you can triangulate Descartes' banger, as David would

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say, banger philosopher.

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Yeah.

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He says you've got you've got two perspectives and you can triangulate between them.

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And his contemporaries, there's a quote from George Berkeley, who's a pretty well-known uh

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philosopher of the time, that says, this is madness because there's no way you're telling

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me that ordinary people are doing trigonometry in their heads just every time they look

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around the world.

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Like maybe educated people can do this, but the man on the street cannot do this.

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Yeah.

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That was the argument, the counter-argument to Descartes at the time.

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Yeah.

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And I think what's going on, you know, as you started this conversation, you know,

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descriptively what's going on in human communication is hugely complex.

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Vision science is complex.

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The study of human communication is complex.

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But phenomenologically, it's utterly trivial.

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Yeah.

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And that's, you know, that's a that's an interesting fact.

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But I I don't think the fact that it's phenomenal phenomenologically simple means that we

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need to have simple explanations of the underlying cognitive processes.

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Yeah, that's like basically the summary of like why cognitive science and psychology have

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sort of struggled, is super strong priors that the way it feels

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corresponds to how it works.

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And we've talked a lot about that on this podcast.

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And yeah, no, for sure.

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Uh Marvin Minsky had this, you know, thing where he talked about the history of AI.

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And it AI started with what seemed like really difficult things like college level math.

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Like and the AI was doing great on this and chess and checkers and they're like okay good

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buckle up everybody we're gonna have robots in like a day and then they started to do

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things like vision and just seeing blocks and just how hard that was and how when the

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blocks were rotated or the lighting was different it became really really hard and even to

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this day like with as good as like all these like you know robots that are being built for

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hopefully not killing people but probably mainly mainly are uh uh, you know, the

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they're still not very good at like even object recognition and the things that like

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basically his argument was that the things that feel easy are really hard and the things

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that seem hard are easy, uh in terms of like the mechanics, because the difference

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between sort of like building blocks or like walking around and navigating the world, these

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are things that have had a super long evolutionary history.

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there's a ton of RD from natural selection.

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And then the little bit of variation, like, can you do math better than me?

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It's actually computationally trivial, but it's just something we didn't evolve to do.

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And so, like the things that we take for granted, like communication, like walking around

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and seeing and recognizing objects, finding a joke funny, like, like, you know, like

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actually requires a lot of common sense knowledge about the world and like per David's

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theory of humor.

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And so, um, so no, that's exactly right.

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I think like what you're describing like summarizes the history of like why we failed is

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we've we've not allowed there to be enough space and room for theories of complexity and

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things that feel simple.

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Speculating a little bit on the examples you just gave, it strikes me that the ones

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that the that AI finds easy are ones which involve a degree of abstraction from the

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physical and the social world.

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Yeah.

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Mathematics.

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Um, Uh but the things that involve navigating a physical world

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or even harder, navigating a social world with bodies in it, that is that is a really

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complicated task.

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And we're we're you know, we're at the beginning, frankly.

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Totally.

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Um one one um wonderful way that you have changed my perspective uh is on the nature

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of grammar and language acquisition.

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So um I sort of saw myself as a Chomskyan just kind of by default because oh

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I'm a l evolutionary psychologist.

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The Chomskyan view is that, you know, language is an adaptation and it must be innate to

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some degree.

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You know, I bought into the the the pinker uh language instinct argument.

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I just assume, yeah, obviously, you know, we have innate hardware, we have an innate

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grammar, and um and and that allows us to to speak language.

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But um reading you um disabused me of that perspective and made me

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realize that no, uh grammar doesn't have to be innate.

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Uh it probably isn't.

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It's probably better understood as a byproduct.

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And language itself may not even be that clearly delineated as an adaptation in

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its own right, as opposed to lying on a continuum with other kinds of social conventions

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and social norms and social cognition more broadly.

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And so that was a really cool perspective shift for me.

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I'm curious where where you stand on the perennial debate, you know, between Chomsky and

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the others.

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How quote unquote innate is language?

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Do you do you know take that to be a serious question or not?

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Where do you uh situate yourself in the linguistics debate?

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Definitely a serious question.

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It's an enormous one that's taken up the time of many, many careers.

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So I'll try and do it in a few minutes.

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You have two minutes, Tom.

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Two minutes.

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So Chomsky has the you know a well-known view uh that um he would say language, it might

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be better characterized as um syntactic structure of some kind or another is innate.

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Uh and Pinker, uh, along with Paul Bloom, who was a relatively junior colleague at the time

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in 1990, they published a very influential paper, Natural Language and Natural Selection.

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Um, where they dis well, I should have given a bit more context.

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Chomsky believes there's something innate, but he's pretty hostile to adaptationist

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perspectives on the mind in general, and he speculated through the 80s

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uh, that you know, perhaps it's you know incidental transmutation, we can't really know too

293
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much about it.

294
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There's not much point to the speculation.

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And Pinker being on the one hand a Chomskyan, but on the other hand, an evolutionary

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psychologist, publishes this paper that says, no, there's no contradiction here.

297
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You can believe both things at the same time.

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Uh and yeah, so I I and I started my when I started my PhD 15 years

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after that, um, I was definitely an adaptationist.

300
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My part of my origin story, I've I've listened to other podcasts, and part of my origin

301
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story is you know involves some similar stories.

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And I was an adaptationist because partly because of Pinker, partly because of other

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popularizers.

304
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It's a very, very slippery concept.

305
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What is this thing that is supposed to have to be designed in some way or another?

306
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And I ended up being I ended up actually finding you know adaptationist perspectives of uh

307
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to be of use when thinking more broadly about communication.

308
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And so for many years, like 15 years really, I was agnostic about the questions you're

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asking me about, David, like the nature of grammar.

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And I was writing, thinking, researching much more on communication and its many

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manifestations.

312
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You know, there's aspects of children's development, this connects to things like

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commitment to art theory, it connects to lots of domains.

314
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Um, and but only recently, last five years or so, I've started thinking more about grammar.

315
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uh, and I've been persuaded by the arguments of those who disagree with the Chomskis and

316
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the Pinkers of the world.

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Um so now I'm gonna oversimplify, and many linguists are gonna hate this

318
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oversimplification.

319
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But um on the one side you can put um what you could all call words and rules approaches,

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which is what generative grammar would be.

321
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So you have a you have words and you have rules for combining them and you have some

322
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awareness of which rules you know allowed and which ones are not and so on.

323
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And the other side is an is an approach some commonly called construction grammar.

324
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It's a lot more under the surface, but the basic idea is that there's a single unit that is

325
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a foundation of languages, which is called constructions.

326
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And constructions can be concrete, they can be words, but they can also be quite abstract.

327
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So my my go-to example is like what's X doing Y?

328
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What's Tom doing with that girl?

329
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What's this fly doing in my soup?

330
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What's David doing chatting to John, right?

331
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And you can put another construction inside the empty slots, inside the X and the Y.

332
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And by doing that construction allows you to ask for a resolution of some incongruity.

333
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It has a function.

334
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So all constructions are mappings between a form and a function, some communicative

335
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function.

336
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And in that way, you can you using language is throwing constructions together and

337
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throwing all these micro convention the these micro functions together.

338
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One quick question is that Minsky had this idea of frames.

339
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Is that sort of related to that?

340
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Maybe.

341
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Can I come to that in a moment?

342
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Please, yeah, sorry.

343
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So because I'm I'm gonna come back around to David's question.

344
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So that way of that constructionist approach, the work I've done recently pairs

345
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that with the adaptationist approach to communication.

346
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And I the the argument I'm developing is that constructions are conventions for doing the

347
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adaptive task that human communication is designed to do, which is expressing and revealing

348
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intentions.

349
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So all this stuff in grammar are cultural conventions that we've built as communities that

350
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allow us to do the expression and recognition of mental states much more easily, much more

351
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efficaciously, much more micro precision than we otherwise would do.

352
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Otherwise, we'd be pointing at some, but we can be able to do that.

353
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I want to unpack just the the depth of that idea because I see it as kind of a mind-blowing

354
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idea.

355
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This idea that um grammar um is not innate, but is a set

356
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of social conventions.

357
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So uh where we situate the verb and the noun and the adjective, the these are social

358
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conventions that are essentially no different from driving on the same side of the road, or

359
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you know, saying bless you when a person sneezes, uh working from nine to five using the

360
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metric system.

361
00:20:07,470 --> 00:20:13,470
These are all part of the same category of social conventions that allow us to uh

362
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uh mutually benefit uh from interacting with each other.

363
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Uh uh and um in the same way that uh social conventions differ uh across

364
00:20:23,320 --> 00:20:26,280
cultures, grammars might differ across cultures.

365
00:20:26,440 --> 00:20:29,400
Uh is that is that is that basically the idea that you're proposing?

366
00:20:29,880 --> 00:20:30,120
Yes.

367
00:20:30,280 --> 00:20:35,240
Uh the the short answer is yes, the longer answer is yes, but so uh so so yes, that's all

368
00:20:35,240 --> 00:20:35,400
right.

369
00:20:35,480 --> 00:20:36,920
There's a there is a key difference.

370
00:20:37,000 --> 00:20:42,810
Um, and that is that by using these conventions in this communicative

371
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way, uh, it's so, it's so this is a Pinker-esque thing to say, it's so obviously powerful,

372
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useful, it completely changes the nature of an organ, you know, that species' existence.

373
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That you, you know, it's not a surprise that there'll be downstream adaptations to do this

374
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more efficaciously.

375
00:20:59,690 --> 00:21:03,450
Now, those downstream adaptations don't need to be the structure of syntax.

376
00:21:03,530 --> 00:21:07,980
There's no particular, I don't see any particular reason for that, but they will be an

377
00:21:07,980 --> 00:21:09,500
enhanced memory for constructions.

378
00:21:09,580 --> 00:21:15,340
We all know to know a language is to know a vast number of constructions, um, all sorts of

379
00:21:15,340 --> 00:21:21,340
computational um capacities that enable us to use them very far, you know, to pick

380
00:21:21,340 --> 00:21:26,140
up on them, to produce them extremely fast, instantaneously, and also things involved in

381
00:21:26,140 --> 00:21:30,390
interaction like fine-grained precision or fine-grained sensitivity to timing and

382
00:21:30,390 --> 00:21:31,750
contingency and interaction.

383
00:21:31,830 --> 00:21:33,910
There's pauses, all that sort of stuff.

384
00:21:34,230 --> 00:21:37,750
Maybe even the white slare of the eye so you can catch people's attention more easily.

385
00:21:38,150 --> 00:21:43,510
Fine-grained control of the motor motor apparatus of hands and the mouth.

386
00:21:43,750 --> 00:21:46,790
There's lots of stuff that enables us to do these tasks.

387
00:21:46,950 --> 00:21:49,910
Well, once we're doing it, once we're doing it linguistically, we'll then do it

388
00:21:49,910 --> 00:21:52,840
linguistically in a very um finely designed way.

389
00:21:52,920 --> 00:21:54,840
You know, you know, it's a very Darwinian thing to say.

390
00:21:55,080 --> 00:21:55,160
Yeah.

391
00:21:55,240 --> 00:21:58,680
So sort of that's not true of driving on the left-hand side of the road.

392
00:21:58,840 --> 00:21:59,000
Right.

393
00:21:59,080 --> 00:22:01,000
That's yeah.

394
00:22:01,160 --> 00:22:05,160
And so just like to understand it's the idea is that sort of like the fact that it's

395
00:22:07,160 --> 00:22:08,760
there's open parameters.

396
00:22:08,920 --> 00:22:14,440
So it could be that um that it could be like, for example, this is how you get sign

397
00:22:14,440 --> 00:22:15,320
language, right?

398
00:22:15,640 --> 00:22:20,930
Where the the fact that it's with our hands, the machinery for sort of these are the

399
00:22:20,930 --> 00:22:26,210
conventions or these are the this the things that stand for this communicative attent

400
00:22:26,450 --> 00:22:28,450
intent, that's an open parameter.

401
00:22:28,530 --> 00:22:30,610
So it's not specific to like one modality.

402
00:22:30,690 --> 00:22:36,530
And that openness is itself evidence, if I understand the claim, that it's this

403
00:22:36,530 --> 00:22:41,490
higher level sort of point system that then has concomitant adaptations.

404
00:22:41,650 --> 00:22:42,770
Is that fair?

405
00:22:43,250 --> 00:22:45,260
That I don't know if I completely follow that.

406
00:22:45,420 --> 00:22:48,140
Maybe that may be a good gloss of what I'm saying.

407
00:22:48,300 --> 00:22:51,580
Um, I'll try and put it in different words and you can tell me if it's similar or not.

408
00:22:51,820 --> 00:22:57,340
So humans, when they communicate, they can use any any like anything they have, right?

409
00:22:57,420 --> 00:23:00,460
I could use I could use this banana if I wanted to make a certain point.

410
00:23:00,540 --> 00:23:01,980
I I am actually or it's code.

411
00:23:02,060 --> 00:23:04,060
We could tap on yeah, we could tap on a desk.

412
00:23:04,300 --> 00:23:07,100
We can use our bodies, we can point, we can and we can do it in an improvised way.

413
00:23:07,180 --> 00:23:10,460
If my mouth is full because I'm chewing and I and my arms are full, I might point with my

414
00:23:10,460 --> 00:23:10,940
nose or something.

415
00:23:11,020 --> 00:23:11,660
We you know we can't.

416
00:23:11,820 --> 00:23:13,850
You're describing my time in Germany not speaking Germany.

417
00:23:14,090 --> 00:23:14,890
There we go, exactly.

418
00:23:15,290 --> 00:23:18,890
I mean, my mouth was full of uh pretzels and sausage when I was in Germany, so yeah.

419
00:23:20,490 --> 00:23:21,530
We can use anything.

420
00:23:21,610 --> 00:23:26,090
Um, it just so happens that the the if you share a language with someone, then the most

421
00:23:26,090 --> 00:23:31,130
convenient thing to use uh isn't a part of my body, it's it's shared knowledge of a

422
00:23:31,130 --> 00:23:34,650
convention, um or a whole world of conventions.

423
00:23:35,290 --> 00:23:38,810
Uh and that that's just what we happen to have to hand, but it can be, um, you know, and

424
00:23:38,810 --> 00:23:42,860
those conventions, if you're using spoken language, those conventions are spoken, but they

425
00:23:42,860 --> 00:23:45,340
can be gestured as well if you're using sign language.

426
00:23:45,660 --> 00:23:47,260
Yeah, let me can I just like push on this?

427
00:23:47,340 --> 00:23:49,340
Because I think people might have like uh questions.

428
00:23:49,500 --> 00:23:51,420
And so let me just sort of push on this a little bit.

429
00:23:51,580 --> 00:23:57,420
So like one question is sort of what work is is the idea of constructions doing?

430
00:23:57,580 --> 00:23:59,100
So what exactly does that mean?

431
00:23:59,180 --> 00:24:05,100
And if there is design for basically what people might intuitively think

432
00:24:05,100 --> 00:24:10,330
of as like language in the downstream, does that amount to the same claim that that

433
00:24:10,330 --> 00:24:12,090
language is an adaptation?

434
00:24:12,250 --> 00:24:15,610
Um, and then what is up with over like things like over-regularization?

435
00:24:15,690 --> 00:24:18,970
Like kids say goad and nobody has taught them to do that.

436
00:24:19,050 --> 00:24:22,490
So this is part of this argument that kids are learning rules of grammar.

437
00:24:22,890 --> 00:24:23,130
Yeah.

438
00:24:23,290 --> 00:24:26,410
So a construction is, I mean, it's a very odd idea in language science.

439
00:24:26,490 --> 00:24:28,330
It's blossomed in the last 30 years or so.

440
00:24:28,410 --> 00:24:29,530
But it's an old idea.

441
00:24:29,690 --> 00:24:32,330
Um, it's a mapping between a form and a function.

442
00:24:33,860 --> 00:24:38,500
And as I said earlier, I gave gave a few examples, words and what's X doing Y.

443
00:24:38,660 --> 00:24:40,260
It can be even more abstract.

444
00:24:40,340 --> 00:24:44,900
So subject, verb, object, transitive actions.

445
00:24:44,980 --> 00:24:46,660
And you just plug other things in.

446
00:24:46,740 --> 00:24:51,140
And the complic complicated sentences have all sorts of constructions plugged into one

447
00:24:51,140 --> 00:24:53,060
another and interacting with one another.

448
00:24:53,220 --> 00:24:53,540
Right.

449
00:24:53,860 --> 00:24:55,780
And their functions are complementary.

450
00:24:55,860 --> 00:25:00,100
The functions are working with it of the each individual construction is working together

451
00:25:00,100 --> 00:25:02,990
to build up the meaning right sentence.

452
00:25:03,310 --> 00:25:07,390
Now is the idea that those construction systems evolve for other functions and that's why

453
00:25:07,390 --> 00:25:08,670
language is not an adaptation.

454
00:25:09,230 --> 00:25:13,630
So those those those those that those constructions are all conventions.

455
00:25:15,230 --> 00:25:19,550
The word banana is j it's nothing more than a conventional way that you and I have to ref

456
00:25:19,870 --> 00:25:21,790
to raise the salience of objects like this.

457
00:25:22,110 --> 00:25:22,350
Right.

458
00:25:22,430 --> 00:25:26,990
But the st what I mean is like the machinery for sorry like like the example you gave where

459
00:25:26,990 --> 00:25:30,620
there's sort of like why like why X is X or something like that.

460
00:25:30,780 --> 00:25:31,500
What's X doing Y?

461
00:25:31,820 --> 00:25:32,860
What's X doing Y?

462
00:25:33,180 --> 00:25:39,180
The machinery that represents that is the idea that that machinery was

463
00:25:39,180 --> 00:25:40,460
for some other function.

464
00:25:40,860 --> 00:25:44,940
It evolved because you you need them in that machinery in order for all that content to get

465
00:25:44,940 --> 00:25:45,340
plugged in.

466
00:25:45,660 --> 00:25:51,260
Yeah, I'm suggesting that the machinery to um host form function pairs and to indeed not

467
00:25:51,260 --> 00:25:55,180
just to host some but a vast number of them and to plug them together.

468
00:25:55,370 --> 00:25:59,530
Yeah, that to me is most plausibly explained as an adaptation to the fact that humans are a

469
00:25:59,530 --> 00:26:00,810
linguistic species.

470
00:26:01,130 --> 00:26:05,930
So we become a communicative species.

471
00:26:06,250 --> 00:26:08,490
Humans they develop conventions super fast.

472
00:26:09,050 --> 00:26:13,210
Once they're using conventions regularly, they're gonna, you know, the the world, the

473
00:26:13,210 --> 00:26:15,370
ecology, the social ecology has changed.

474
00:26:15,530 --> 00:26:19,610
There's going to be selectional pressure on using those conventions quickly, easily,

475
00:26:19,770 --> 00:26:20,810
fine-grained manner.

476
00:26:20,970 --> 00:26:25,780
So you you get selection for the capacity to host uh enormous number.

477
00:26:26,180 --> 00:26:26,500
Right.

478
00:26:26,660 --> 00:26:32,340
So there are the idea is that the language communication system, there are

479
00:26:32,340 --> 00:26:38,260
evolved structures, but they're much more compositional than this old view.

480
00:26:39,140 --> 00:26:40,820
The word composition was a tricky one.

481
00:26:41,540 --> 00:26:44,900
So there's a sense in which what you're saying is true, but it composed composition was a

482
00:26:44,900 --> 00:26:46,660
tricky word with within linguistics.

483
00:26:46,740 --> 00:26:50,740
It has a bunch of overlapping and not all overlapping and not all the same meanings.

484
00:26:50,900 --> 00:26:51,140
Okay.

485
00:26:51,380 --> 00:26:54,390
So I'm a bit I I can hear the linguists in the background.

486
00:26:54,790 --> 00:26:55,510
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

487
00:26:55,590 --> 00:26:56,710
Yeah, there's all the audiences.

488
00:26:56,950 --> 00:26:57,030
Yeah.

489
00:26:57,270 --> 00:26:57,430
Yeah.

490
00:26:57,590 --> 00:26:58,710
But roughly, yes.

491
00:26:58,950 --> 00:26:59,190
Okay.

492
00:26:59,590 --> 00:26:59,830
Yeah.

493
00:26:59,910 --> 00:27:05,350
I mean I th the way I sort of think of your work is is s situated in a larger trend where

494
00:27:05,350 --> 00:27:10,390
we've sort of gone from this view as as man the rational animal, that we're solitary,

495
00:27:10,630 --> 00:27:14,550
intelligent thinkers, that we just puzzle things out individually in our heads.

496
00:27:14,710 --> 00:27:20,160
Uh and um so, you know, uh it used to be thought that the the reason why human brains were

497
00:27:20,160 --> 00:27:24,640
so big is is so that we could reason and use tools and and figure things out.

498
00:27:24,800 --> 00:27:29,920
Um and increasingly the uh a more popular and I think more more plausible given the

499
00:27:29,920 --> 00:27:35,920
evidence view is that uh really we're it's it's better to think of of humans not

500
00:27:35,920 --> 00:27:39,360
as the rational animal or as the intelligent animal, but as the social animal.

501
00:27:39,520 --> 00:27:44,870
Um and so one of the biggest predictors of uh primate brain size is not

502
00:27:45,270 --> 00:27:47,910
whether they use tools or something like that.

503
00:27:48,070 --> 00:27:53,190
It's how big their group is, what the social challenges uh there are in the primate's

504
00:27:53,190 --> 00:27:53,830
environment.

505
00:27:53,990 --> 00:27:59,990
Um and humans have extremely large uh groups, extremely complicated social environments.

506
00:28:00,230 --> 00:28:05,190
Probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, causes of human brain expansion was just

507
00:28:05,190 --> 00:28:08,310
the immensely complicated social lives that we have to navigate.

508
00:28:08,470 --> 00:28:13,320
There's of course recent work by uh Hugo Mercier arguing that reason, reasoning, our

509
00:28:13,320 --> 00:28:19,000
ability to think through uh syllogisms, if P then Q, uh that this uh uh

510
00:28:19,080 --> 00:28:24,360
faculty did not evolve for helping us make better decisions or or uh uh think more

511
00:28:24,360 --> 00:28:25,160
rationally.

512
00:28:25,400 --> 00:28:26,840
It evolved in a social context.

513
00:28:26,920 --> 00:28:31,320
It evolved to help us convince other people who we might uh have conflicts of interest with

514
00:28:31,480 --> 00:28:35,950
and justify uh our behaviors in a way that might defend our our reputations.

515
00:28:36,110 --> 00:28:40,510
And so even, you know, reasoning, this sort of quintessentially uh a solitary, rational

516
00:28:40,510 --> 00:28:42,750
thing, is actually a deeply social uh thing.

517
00:28:42,830 --> 00:28:46,110
And I th and I see what you're doing with language is is is very much analogous.

518
00:28:46,270 --> 00:28:51,630
Where it used to be believed that, you know, um language is about transmitting a a piece of

519
00:28:51,710 --> 00:28:56,360
uh of information from one head to another so that we could all understand the world uh

520
00:28:56,360 --> 00:28:57,400
more accurately.

521
00:28:57,480 --> 00:29:03,320
And so I'm sending you the code, you have to decode my code so that you understand uh uh uh

522
00:29:03,320 --> 00:29:04,840
the world around us.

523
00:29:05,080 --> 00:29:09,640
But you're basically taking that view and saying, no, um, we have to understand this as

524
00:29:09,640 --> 00:29:15,320
being situated within our social niche and uh uh and view it as

525
00:29:15,480 --> 00:29:19,990
as not necessarily transmitting information, but trying to get inside another person's

526
00:29:19,990 --> 00:29:20,470
head.

527
00:29:20,630 --> 00:29:23,750
Um and get inside their head getting inside your head.

528
00:29:23,830 --> 00:29:29,670
And in many ways, trying to uh manipulate what's inside their head uh for your advantage,

529
00:29:29,830 --> 00:29:34,790
uh uh or or to mutually manipulate the contents of each other's head for for mutual

530
00:29:34,790 --> 00:29:35,190
advantage.

531
00:29:35,350 --> 00:29:38,310
Um so that's sort of how I see your work.

532
00:29:38,470 --> 00:29:41,830
Would you buy that that overarching uh framework?

533
00:29:42,070 --> 00:29:42,230
Yeah.

534
00:29:42,470 --> 00:29:43,430
Yes, absolutely.

535
00:29:43,590 --> 00:29:48,280
So um, you know, uh well, if I can find the time and the space to do it, one of my

536
00:29:48,280 --> 00:29:53,560
ambitions for the future is to, you know, maybe a special issue, maybe that I mean I think

537
00:29:53,560 --> 00:29:57,160
there's much work to do getting the people, the sorts of names you just mentioned together,

538
00:29:57,320 --> 00:30:00,360
and articulating in detail the idea of social mind.

539
00:30:00,520 --> 00:30:04,840
So it's I mean, you mentioned Hugo Mercier and his work on reasoning.

540
00:30:04,920 --> 00:30:09,160
Um, there's plenty of work these days on emotions as well, some of emotions which were

541
00:30:09,160 --> 00:30:12,200
historically called self-um, what are they called?

542
00:30:12,280 --> 00:30:13,400
Uh self-conscious.

543
00:30:13,650 --> 00:30:14,610
Self-conscious, thank you.

544
00:30:14,690 --> 00:30:18,610
Yeah, self-conscious emotions, having rethought as social adaptations.

545
00:30:18,770 --> 00:30:23,570
Um there's a guy who did his PhD at CEU at Central European University called Johannes Maa,

546
00:30:23,890 --> 00:30:26,050
and he's done work on um episodic memory.

547
00:30:26,210 --> 00:30:31,810
So rem remembering events and making arguments a lot to the effect that that is we we do

548
00:30:31,810 --> 00:30:35,810
that not in order to sort of recall the past for our own internal purposes, but so that we

549
00:30:35,810 --> 00:30:41,020
can act well in in future cases of persuasion and argumentation and and managing social

550
00:30:41,020 --> 00:30:41,660
relations.

551
00:30:41,900 --> 00:30:47,100
Um I think yeah I I do think that most I don't know if it's all but certainly a very large

552
00:30:47,100 --> 00:30:51,180
amount of what's distinctive about our species comes down to the complexity and the size of

553
00:30:51,180 --> 00:30:52,700
our of our social groups.

554
00:30:52,940 --> 00:30:53,180
Yeah.

555
00:30:54,060 --> 00:30:58,540
Let me just try one more uh a different tack to make sure I understand.

556
00:30:58,700 --> 00:31:03,580
So one of the bringing back to Minsky, one of Minsky's criticisms of Chomsky.

557
00:31:03,660 --> 00:31:08,030
So Chomsky this sort of narrative is you know sort of started the cognitive revolution.

558
00:31:08,110 --> 00:31:09,630
And I'm a big fan of Chomsky.

559
00:31:09,710 --> 00:31:14,430
I mean, everybody, you know, huge contribution and arguing that this is part of our natural

560
00:31:14,430 --> 00:31:14,990
endowment.

561
00:31:15,070 --> 00:31:18,510
It's part of our species, typical, readily developing stuff.

562
00:31:18,750 --> 00:31:22,510
It's just part of our biological endowment, like a trunk or a trunk and an elephant or

563
00:31:22,510 --> 00:31:22,990
something.

564
00:31:23,310 --> 00:31:25,070
And that was really controversial, really important.

565
00:31:25,150 --> 00:31:31,020
But Minsky's argument was Chomsky by sort of starting the cognitive revolution

566
00:31:31,180 --> 00:31:33,020
in contrast to the behaviorists, right?

567
00:31:33,180 --> 00:31:34,620
Chomsky was arguing with Skinner.

568
00:31:34,780 --> 00:31:39,980
It was a great that that review is a great thing to read, by the way, Chomsky's criticism

569
00:31:39,980 --> 00:31:40,780
of Skinner.

570
00:31:42,620 --> 00:31:46,220
Minsky's argument is that what Skinner did was actually behaviorism.

571
00:31:46,460 --> 00:31:51,030
Because what uh Chomsky was doing still at the end of the day was sort of giving people

572
00:31:51,030 --> 00:31:53,990
sentences and asking them to say, is this grammatical or not?

573
00:31:54,230 --> 00:31:59,910
And it was sort of the the latent structure of what theories are

574
00:31:59,910 --> 00:32:04,470
necessary to explain the behavior of people saying this is grammatical or not.

575
00:32:04,710 --> 00:32:10,310
And and Minsky's argument is that that that misses the entire hard problem

576
00:32:11,200 --> 00:32:14,000
of whether it's grammatical, it doesn't matter at all.

577
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:18,400
What matters is exactly what you're describing, Tom, which is sort of the communication.

578
00:32:18,560 --> 00:32:22,640
And I think like the Minsky's frames, and this is why I'm like, you know, thinking about

579
00:32:22,640 --> 00:32:27,120
this is like Minsky's idea about frames, which is like from the 70s, which was just that

580
00:32:27,360 --> 00:32:31,920
these are different sort of like cribs or ontologies for sort of like it's almost like this

581
00:32:31,920 --> 00:32:37,120
form structure thing where it'd be sort of like there's a frame for sort of like physical

582
00:32:37,120 --> 00:32:37,920
transitions.

583
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:40,050
So like an occlusion event, right?

584
00:32:40,450 --> 00:32:45,730
That um that uh when occlusion is detected, there's a there's a system for

585
00:32:45,730 --> 00:32:51,170
representing what happens, you know, like it's and there's cues for detecting occlusion.

586
00:32:51,330 --> 00:32:55,570
Uh there's clue there's there's an there's frames for temporal changes.

587
00:32:55,810 --> 00:33:01,490
And so Minsky's claim is that we have all of these frames that are sort of what make our

588
00:33:01,490 --> 00:33:04,300
ability to do things like navigate a room.

589
00:33:04,380 --> 00:33:07,340
Like if you don't represent occlusion, all of a sudden you're just like, oh my God, like,

590
00:33:07,420 --> 00:33:08,460
you know, the hallway is not out there.

591
00:33:08,620 --> 00:33:09,980
I would never go to the hallway, right?

592
00:33:10,060 --> 00:33:11,740
Like if I never thought it was still there.

593
00:33:11,980 --> 00:33:17,900
And so all this machinery for representing things like the passage of time, what happens

594
00:33:17,900 --> 00:33:21,660
when an event, a physical event happens, what happens when a social event happens, in his

595
00:33:21,660 --> 00:33:27,590
argument was the hard part of communication, and what communication really

596
00:33:27,590 --> 00:33:33,590
is is the communication or getting people coordinated about the content and frames that are

597
00:33:33,590 --> 00:33:34,470
being activated.

598
00:33:34,630 --> 00:33:38,950
And it almost sounds like maybe Tom Scott Phillips is sort of picking up the Chomsky or

599
00:33:39,190 --> 00:33:39,830
sorry, the Minsky.

600
00:33:39,910 --> 00:33:40,790
I meant Minsky.

601
00:33:41,110 --> 00:33:42,070
The Minsky claim.

602
00:33:42,150 --> 00:33:43,430
Is that is that sort of fair?

603
00:33:43,910 --> 00:33:44,310
May maybe.

604
00:33:44,390 --> 00:33:46,470
I have not read Minsky since I was a grad student.

605
00:33:46,870 --> 00:33:49,350
Some time some many years ago now.

606
00:33:49,510 --> 00:33:53,400
Um maybe, but you you uh you've persuaded me that I I should go back to that exactly.

607
00:33:53,560 --> 00:33:53,880
Okay, great.

608
00:33:54,200 --> 00:33:58,760
But what you're saying sounds um a lot uh yes similar lines to what I'm saying.

609
00:33:59,240 --> 00:33:59,480
Fantastic.

610
00:33:59,560 --> 00:34:00,600
Okay, so now I understand it.

611
00:34:00,680 --> 00:34:00,920
Thank you.

612
00:34:01,080 --> 00:34:03,880
Sorry for yeah, it's it's uh it's wonderful.

613
00:34:03,960 --> 00:34:05,800
So uh I mean it it may be the case.

614
00:34:05,880 --> 00:34:10,280
So I I I'd need to do my reading to check, but it may be that one can understand a

615
00:34:10,280 --> 00:34:14,890
construction uh as a my as a frame of a of a very specified kind.

616
00:34:15,370 --> 00:34:15,930
Exactly.

617
00:34:16,090 --> 00:34:16,330
Yeah.

618
00:34:16,410 --> 00:34:16,890
And yeah.

619
00:34:16,970 --> 00:34:21,210
And I think this is just this is a good example of science where like what do different

620
00:34:21,210 --> 00:34:22,650
scientists mean by different words?

621
00:34:22,810 --> 00:34:26,650
We even you and I, as close as we are, Tom, like, you know, there's just d we have

622
00:34:26,650 --> 00:34:27,770
different reading histories.

623
00:34:27,850 --> 00:34:29,930
And so yeah, this this is this is great.

624
00:34:30,010 --> 00:34:30,650
Yeah.

625
00:34:32,010 --> 00:34:32,250
Good.

626
00:34:32,650 --> 00:34:33,530
Should we get into art?

627
00:34:33,930 --> 00:34:34,170
Please.

628
00:34:34,520 --> 00:34:34,840
Oh, sure.

629
00:34:35,800 --> 00:34:35,880
Yeah.

630
00:34:35,960 --> 00:34:36,120
Yeah.

631
00:34:36,200 --> 00:34:36,680
Yeah.

632
00:34:37,160 --> 00:34:38,680
Um, my my thing with art.

633
00:34:38,760 --> 00:34:41,640
So this thing, let me just like fill this in and you please talk about it.

634
00:34:41,800 --> 00:34:43,400
It's like I always found it weird.

635
00:34:43,640 --> 00:34:47,800
Like you go into a a place and there's like nothing on the walls.

636
00:34:47,960 --> 00:34:50,920
And then there's like an object in a glass case, you know?

637
00:34:51,080 --> 00:34:56,120
And being an anthropologist about like human existence, I was always like, that's weird,

638
00:34:56,200 --> 00:34:58,600
and it really makes this thing seem like important.

639
00:34:58,920 --> 00:35:02,360
And I would always like, you know, and this idea of like, you know, you pop a urinal to

640
00:35:02,360 --> 00:35:02,840
make the point.

641
00:35:03,000 --> 00:35:07,390
Um, But it always struck me as sort of weird, but I never went further than that.

642
00:35:07,550 --> 00:35:10,030
And then this paper on art was amazing to me.

643
00:35:10,350 --> 00:35:13,870
Can you sort of tell people who haven't read the paper or even who have?

644
00:35:14,030 --> 00:35:17,470
Can you remind them sort of like what is this thing about art?

645
00:35:17,550 --> 00:35:17,950
Yeah.

646
00:35:18,430 --> 00:35:18,670
Yeah.

647
00:35:18,750 --> 00:35:21,550
So well, the paper itself is called The Art Experience.

648
00:35:21,630 --> 00:35:24,910
And I, you know, I should immediately give credit to the first author, Kate McCallum.

649
00:35:25,470 --> 00:35:27,310
You know, she definitely led the work.

650
00:35:28,350 --> 00:35:34,320
So I work with mostly not entirely, but um, when I think about human communication, I

651
00:35:34,320 --> 00:35:36,880
work with a framework that's commonly called relevance theory.

652
00:35:36,960 --> 00:35:42,960
Uh, and the central idea, one of the central ideas in relevance theory um is that what

653
00:35:43,040 --> 00:35:47,680
audiences do when they pick up on a communicative stimulus, uh technically an ostensive

654
00:35:47,680 --> 00:35:50,960
stimulus, as we talked about earlier, when they pick up on an ostensive stimulus, well,

655
00:35:51,200 --> 00:35:54,410
your basic problem is how what is this, what does this thing mean?

656
00:35:54,490 --> 00:35:55,690
What is this thing doing in the world?

657
00:35:55,770 --> 00:35:59,050
How can you know there's an infinite number of things someone might mean by this?

658
00:35:59,450 --> 00:36:02,970
And what you uh and the answer to that question is you you assume that it's the most

659
00:36:02,970 --> 00:36:06,890
relevant thing that the communicator could have done, given what they want to do to your

660
00:36:06,890 --> 00:36:09,450
mind and given all the communicative tools available to them.

661
00:36:09,610 --> 00:36:14,970
And that's there's a lot packed into that, but uh that that the the essential idea is um

662
00:36:17,160 --> 00:36:19,000
we are predisposed as audience.

663
00:36:19,080 --> 00:36:24,120
Well, when we pick up on the fact that some something, some agent has re has raised bought

664
00:36:24,120 --> 00:36:29,640
our attention to some stimulus in the world, then we presume that it's especially

665
00:36:29,640 --> 00:36:32,520
relevant for us, given what they want to do.

666
00:36:32,600 --> 00:36:36,680
And our our job is essentially as as audiences, and we do it, you know, it's spontaneous.

667
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:38,520
You can't turn it off even if you want to.

668
00:36:38,600 --> 00:36:41,960
So if you think about film spoilers, someone can tell you they're about to spoil the film

669
00:36:41,960 --> 00:36:45,630
that you don't want them to spoil, and you can't turn off your comprehension process.

670
00:36:45,710 --> 00:36:49,710
You will assume, you will interpret on the basis of a presumption of relevance, even though

671
00:36:49,710 --> 00:36:50,670
you don't want to.

672
00:36:50,830 --> 00:36:54,350
Um, and what we think is that that's what essentially what's going on in certainly

673
00:36:54,350 --> 00:36:55,550
contemporary art galleries.

674
00:36:55,630 --> 00:37:01,070
So they're these white cubes, these white walls, high ceilings, and so on, quite commonly.

675
00:37:01,150 --> 00:37:05,390
And then as you say, something is presented, it draws your attention, it's there for a

676
00:37:05,390 --> 00:37:07,870
reason, it's there for you in some sense.

677
00:37:08,030 --> 00:37:13,860
And so by being there for you, uh, it uh it triggers that that search for

678
00:37:13,940 --> 00:37:18,100
for some notion of some interpretations that are worth processing.

679
00:37:18,580 --> 00:37:23,060
The interesting thing about art, so think the think of a continuum.

680
00:37:23,220 --> 00:37:26,500
Language is somewhere in the middle or maybe slightly towards one side.

681
00:37:28,260 --> 00:37:30,340
Even further down, more even more precise.

682
00:37:30,500 --> 00:37:34,100
We use these constructions in very precise ways, for example, when we do mathematics,

683
00:37:34,180 --> 00:37:34,420
right?

684
00:37:34,500 --> 00:37:40,450
It's hyper precise and we yeah that's what at the other extreme you can you you can raise

685
00:37:40,450 --> 00:37:45,410
expectations of relevance but not provide much guidance right about exactly what it is your

686
00:37:45,410 --> 00:37:46,530
audience should take away.

687
00:37:46,610 --> 00:37:48,210
And I think that's what good artists do.

688
00:37:48,290 --> 00:37:52,930
They produce stimuli that if the they're put on the white wall and then if you engage with

689
00:37:52,930 --> 00:37:56,450
them, presuming that they're relevant in some way and you search for some interpretation,

690
00:37:56,610 --> 00:38:00,400
what I take away may be very different to what you take away, but whoever whoever it is

691
00:38:00,400 --> 00:38:02,880
that comes into contact with it takes something away.

692
00:38:02,960 --> 00:38:05,040
And that's the skill of a modern artist, right?

693
00:38:05,200 --> 00:38:09,520
To produce something that when it's engaged within those terms, uh produces something

694
00:38:09,520 --> 00:38:11,360
worthwhile for the audience.

695
00:38:12,240 --> 00:38:12,800
That's interesting.

696
00:38:12,960 --> 00:38:16,960
I mean, could w would you view it as sort of analogous to a game?

697
00:38:17,120 --> 00:38:21,430
So we can think of games as sort of practicing our our cognitive skills.

698
00:38:21,590 --> 00:38:25,350
Um, you know, if you're doing a word search, you're practicing your visual search

699
00:38:25,350 --> 00:38:25,990
abilities.

700
00:38:26,070 --> 00:38:29,830
Um, if you're playing, you know, a a physical sport, you're you're practicing how to

701
00:38:29,830 --> 00:38:33,110
maneuver your body through space or throw a projectile or or or whatever.

702
00:38:33,190 --> 00:38:37,030
And these are pr presumably, you know, useful school uh useful skills to be able to

703
00:38:37,030 --> 00:38:37,430
practice.

704
00:38:37,510 --> 00:38:40,950
If you play wrestling, that's going to be really important for in the future if you if you

705
00:38:40,950 --> 00:38:41,830
get into a fight.

706
00:38:42,070 --> 00:38:47,030
Um so um it could be that, you know, since language is is such an important skill for us to

707
00:38:47,030 --> 00:38:50,320
master that we get pleasure from practicing it.

708
00:38:50,640 --> 00:38:56,240
And it could be that art is one way of practicing the skill of trying to

709
00:38:56,240 --> 00:39:01,200
infer someone's intentions when they might might otherwise be opaque or uncertain.

710
00:39:01,440 --> 00:39:05,200
So you could think of art as a kind of challenge where like the artist is presenting you

711
00:39:05,200 --> 00:39:09,040
with something, uh, you know that they're presenting with you with something, and you know

712
00:39:09,040 --> 00:39:12,720
that it's going to be relevant in some way, otherwise they wouldn't be putting it in front

713
00:39:12,720 --> 00:39:13,040
of you.

714
00:39:13,270 --> 00:39:15,670
And the puzzle that you're trying to solve is, well, why?

715
00:39:15,750 --> 00:39:17,190
Why are they putting this in front of me?

716
00:39:17,350 --> 00:39:18,870
What are they trying to tell me?

717
00:39:19,110 --> 00:39:23,510
And there's a kind of pleasure we get in playing that game and practicing our ability to do

718
00:39:23,510 --> 00:39:27,990
that kind of detective work of, you know, what what is the meaning of this stimulus?

719
00:39:28,150 --> 00:39:30,950
Um would you buy that uh uh lens?

720
00:39:31,350 --> 00:39:31,990
Yeah, I like that.

721
00:39:32,150 --> 00:39:37,240
I haven't thought about um about art in terms of of puzzles and games, but I quite like

722
00:39:37,240 --> 00:39:37,320
that.

723
00:39:37,400 --> 00:39:42,120
And it reminds me of um if you read, you know, uh a popular book that's sort of how how to

724
00:39:42,120 --> 00:39:46,600
navigate an art gallery, you know, it's plenty of people interested and find the world a

725
00:39:46,600 --> 00:39:47,320
bit opaque.

726
00:39:47,480 --> 00:39:52,040
And it's very common advice to almost verbalize for yourself, what do I see?

727
00:39:52,200 --> 00:39:56,600
And I remember doing this myself, well, you know, in my early 20s and looking at uh going

728
00:39:56,600 --> 00:40:00,440
to big art galleries and being a bit confused, but just trying to like say to myself, okay,

729
00:40:00,520 --> 00:40:06,170
that's there, that's there, this is connected to that, and and by by doing that, I suppose

730
00:40:06,250 --> 00:40:11,690
as practice in a way, I I found I enjoyed modern art more and more than what I did that.

731
00:40:11,770 --> 00:40:13,850
So that that meshes with what you're saying, yeah.

732
00:40:14,250 --> 00:40:19,450
And and it's a it's a beautiful illustration of the fact that language is on a continuum

733
00:40:19,690 --> 00:40:22,170
with many different kinds of communication.

734
00:40:22,410 --> 00:40:27,450
So just as the words I'm saying can can communicate information about my intentions and

735
00:40:27,450 --> 00:40:31,960
motives and beliefs, you know, the paintings on my wall are are are also a similar are are

736
00:40:32,200 --> 00:40:36,600
directly analogous to the words coming out of my mouth and in terms of it's trying to you

737
00:40:36,600 --> 00:40:39,560
know send certain signals to you about the kind of person I am.

738
00:40:39,720 --> 00:40:45,720
Um and and and so uh viewing you know looking at a painting uh as

739
00:40:45,880 --> 00:40:51,000
you know kind of linguistic in in terms of the exercise, I think is a is a is an insightful

740
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:56,450
way of understanding what what communication is and that it's not just uh uh words and

741
00:40:56,450 --> 00:41:00,850
their direct uh meanings, but it's it's much more uh nuanced and rich than that.

742
00:41:01,250 --> 00:41:02,370
Yeah, and there's two things to say.

743
00:41:02,450 --> 00:41:04,930
So one is that when we wrote the paper, Kate was very keen.

744
00:41:05,090 --> 00:41:09,410
Whenever we came close to saying anything like what you did, to be careful, because there's

745
00:41:09,410 --> 00:41:13,970
a history of people saying, Oh, you know, art is like a language and that that history

746
00:41:13,970 --> 00:41:17,570
involves people talking too much about codes and thinking the meanings are encoded in the

747
00:41:17,570 --> 00:41:18,050
artwork.

748
00:41:18,210 --> 00:41:22,980
And that is that you know that's not a well received view in um in art theory.

749
00:41:23,060 --> 00:41:26,260
And as you know, we have a different take on what's going on in language.

750
00:41:26,340 --> 00:41:28,260
And as you say, there's a continuum.

751
00:41:28,340 --> 00:41:30,100
I mean, it's clearly a multidimensional space.

752
00:41:30,260 --> 00:41:34,180
Humans have cognitive adaptations to express and recognize intentions.

753
00:41:34,260 --> 00:41:35,540
And they do this in all sorts of ways.

754
00:41:35,700 --> 00:41:38,660
By far the most salient is language use, but there's many others.

755
00:41:38,740 --> 00:41:43,700
And taxonomizing that space of the different ways we do things, um, that's work that hasn't

756
00:41:43,700 --> 00:41:43,940
been done.

757
00:41:44,180 --> 00:41:45,060
I'd love to do it.

758
00:41:45,140 --> 00:41:51,110
Um and maybe just useful to even just to zoom in on language, you can see the take a

759
00:41:51,110 --> 00:41:53,510
word uh a word like uh seven, right?

760
00:41:53,590 --> 00:41:57,670
That's a pretty pre it's not a completely precise, but it's pretty precise as a notion.

761
00:41:57,830 --> 00:42:03,510
Like it's quite hard to um, you know, maybe in some context we'll use it atypically, but

762
00:42:03,510 --> 00:42:04,790
seven's moderately precise.

763
00:42:04,870 --> 00:42:07,350
Then you take a word like effervescence or love.

764
00:42:07,750 --> 00:42:09,910
Like these are much more open-ended.

765
00:42:09,990 --> 00:42:15,680
Um, and I I in some ways what I'm saying, what you've just glossed, is we can push beyond

766
00:42:15,680 --> 00:42:16,800
language to extremes.

767
00:42:16,880 --> 00:42:20,640
I think if we push beyond the precision, we get towards mathematics, which is hyper

768
00:42:20,800 --> 00:42:21,360
precise.

769
00:42:21,440 --> 00:42:24,000
And if we go the other way, we get towards modern art.

770
00:42:25,200 --> 00:42:27,920
And as I say, I think there's more than one dimension there.

771
00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:30,240
But that the essential idea is there's a big space.

772
00:42:30,640 --> 00:42:30,800
Yeah.

773
00:42:30,880 --> 00:42:35,840
And then just uh what what given that it's communicative, it's also then interesting to the

774
00:42:35,840 --> 00:42:41,250
extent that you're interested in what's being communicated, if that's your interpretation.

775
00:42:41,410 --> 00:42:47,330
So for me, for example, you know, if I go to art museum in Berlin and it's about like

776
00:42:47,410 --> 00:42:52,370
1930s Berlin before the Third Reich, it's communicative, but it's communicative about like

777
00:42:52,370 --> 00:42:55,330
a past time that's really interesting for me to think about.

778
00:42:55,490 --> 00:43:00,610
Because then you're thinking about what is the artist um communicating and what what

779
00:43:00,610 --> 00:43:01,090
content.

780
00:43:01,170 --> 00:43:05,340
And that's a way to sort of time travel to a different time or place.

781
00:43:05,580 --> 00:43:09,260
So all the things that function for communication, right?

782
00:43:09,420 --> 00:43:14,140
Of this is a different human with a different experience talking about or describing a

783
00:43:14,140 --> 00:43:19,980
different time or experience, those things are opened up

784
00:43:19,980 --> 00:43:22,700
to the extent that that's what you and how you interpret it.

785
00:43:23,020 --> 00:43:24,700
Yeah, that I agree with that.

786
00:43:24,780 --> 00:43:25,900
But you can go further.

787
00:43:25,980 --> 00:43:31,500
Um, and you can include not just the painter of those paintings as an expressive agent, but

788
00:43:31,500 --> 00:43:33,020
also the curator of the exhibition.

789
00:43:33,470 --> 00:43:36,990
And they're two, they're both expressive agents with their own goals who are trying to

790
00:43:36,990 --> 00:43:40,750
raise the manifestness of certain representations and ideas and histories for you.

791
00:43:40,910 --> 00:43:41,070
Yeah.

792
00:43:41,390 --> 00:43:45,150
And even just the actual, and not even the current, but everyone who is producing the

793
00:43:45,150 --> 00:43:45,390
thing.

794
00:43:45,470 --> 00:43:50,190
Like, you know, the Michelangelo David, like the story about like the granite stone, you

795
00:43:50,190 --> 00:43:52,670
know, or like even any artifact, right?

796
00:43:52,750 --> 00:43:57,440
Like just thinking about like I like the idea of like learning about like where, you know,

797
00:43:57,520 --> 00:44:00,400
like I have this like ceramic coffee mug like made in France.

798
00:44:00,480 --> 00:44:05,520
And like the idea that it was like made in some foundry with like a salts or sand cast in

799
00:44:05,520 --> 00:44:05,760
France.

800
00:44:05,920 --> 00:44:08,480
Like and just thinking about that makes me appreciate this cup more.

801
00:44:08,640 --> 00:44:13,040
Like there's something about our as a species, like, you know, to represent an artifact is

802
00:44:13,040 --> 00:44:15,760
like the causal history of what led to it.

803
00:44:19,120 --> 00:44:19,440
Yeah.

804
00:44:19,770 --> 00:44:25,370
I mean I'm I'm wondering if if the um the uh

805
00:44:25,850 --> 00:44:31,290
vagueness for lack of a better term, or the the the difficulty of of figuring out the

806
00:44:31,530 --> 00:44:34,650
meaning of a of a work of art is is kind of a design feature.

807
00:44:34,890 --> 00:44:39,370
That if it were all very upfront and on the surface and easy to to decipher, then like

808
00:44:39,450 --> 00:44:41,450
there would be no pleasure in looking at it.

809
00:44:41,610 --> 00:44:47,580
That the the joy is is is trying to solve the puzzle um uh and and maybe maybe there

810
00:44:47,660 --> 00:44:51,820
isn't a correct answer and that maybe that's part of um the the pleasure we we get out of

811
00:44:51,820 --> 00:44:54,860
it i don't know do you uh do you think that there's something about the mis the

812
00:44:54,860 --> 00:44:58,860
mysteriousness of a work of art that that is appealing to us i don't know about if

813
00:44:58,860 --> 00:45:03,180
mysteriousness is the right word but openness definitely yeah yeah there there there there

814
00:45:03,180 --> 00:45:07,500
needn't be a definitive interpretation and this connects to I mean maybe I should I think I

815
00:45:07,500 --> 00:45:12,890
should have said this already but um well one of the one of the innovations, KK's

816
00:45:12,890 --> 00:45:18,650
innovations in this paper is to connect this uh cognitive approach to human communication

817
00:45:18,810 --> 00:45:24,570
with ideas that come from classical art theory, very famously Danto and Dickey, and the

818
00:45:24,570 --> 00:45:29,610
idea that what is art is nothing more than making the

819
00:45:30,650 --> 00:45:33,130
I forget exactly who it is, but making special.

820
00:45:33,300 --> 00:45:35,860
I think that may be dissonant as an anthropologist.

821
00:45:35,940 --> 00:45:39,940
But in this, there's the anthropology, there's the art theory, and there's also the

822
00:45:39,940 --> 00:45:42,580
cognitive approaches to relevance and communication.

823
00:45:42,740 --> 00:45:47,460
All of them are saying you make something in some way attention grabbing, or you raise

824
00:45:47,460 --> 00:45:52,820
expectations of relevance of if you engage with this, you'll get something back out of it.

825
00:45:53,060 --> 00:45:57,470
That's what we do in ordinary communication, but it's also what's distinctive about art.

826
00:45:57,550 --> 00:46:00,670
It's what distinct arguably what distinguishes art from aesthetics.

827
00:46:00,830 --> 00:46:03,630
It's saying this is worth engaging with in some way.

828
00:46:03,790 --> 00:46:07,710
And but exactly what a given audience takes away, obviously in the case of art, I think it

829
00:46:07,710 --> 00:46:09,950
can be very open and can be very different across different people.

830
00:46:10,030 --> 00:46:11,310
And that's totally fine.

831
00:46:11,630 --> 00:46:11,870
Right.

832
00:46:12,030 --> 00:46:16,750
And and something that's really understudy about this is the immense social consequences

833
00:46:16,750 --> 00:46:20,180
that occur if you violate these principles of relevance.

834
00:46:20,340 --> 00:46:23,940
So if I'm chatting with you and I say something that's completely irrelevant or

835
00:46:24,340 --> 00:46:29,220
indecipherable, you're going to view me as a bad social partner.

836
00:46:29,380 --> 00:46:30,580
You're probably not going to like me very much.

837
00:46:30,660 --> 00:46:32,260
You're not going to want to hang out with me again.

838
00:46:33,060 --> 00:46:38,740
In a highly interdependent species such as Homo sapiens, that would be an immense cost.

839
00:46:39,140 --> 00:46:44,500
If I'm bad at language or bad at communicating or bad at reading between the lines, that's

840
00:46:44,610 --> 00:46:47,250
pretty close to a death sentence for me.

841
00:46:47,410 --> 00:46:53,010
Um, so what I what I like about tying language to to uh these social challenges is that it

842
00:46:53,010 --> 00:46:57,970
really raises the salience of of the the fitness implications of being able to do this

843
00:46:57,970 --> 00:46:59,890
stuff well versus doing it poorly.

844
00:46:59,970 --> 00:47:03,890
And you could imagine um this also mattering from a sexual selection perspective.

845
00:47:03,970 --> 00:47:08,450
You know, a huge part of mating is just talking with someone and seeing if you vibe and if

846
00:47:08,450 --> 00:47:11,490
you're if you're good at communicating and coordinating with one another.

847
00:47:11,650 --> 00:47:16,340
Like people say that sense of humor is like a really important part of what they're looking

848
00:47:16,340 --> 00:47:17,380
for in a mate.

849
00:47:17,540 --> 00:47:22,100
Um, if you if you talk to someone and the conversation isn't good, like that's that's over,

850
00:47:22,180 --> 00:47:23,220
that's it, right?

851
00:47:23,620 --> 00:47:29,060
Um and so you could imagine this stuff having you know huge uh uh Darwinian implications.

852
00:47:29,220 --> 00:47:32,580
Um so I'm wondering if if if you thought about that aspect of your work, if you've if

853
00:47:32,580 --> 00:47:37,060
you've maybe thought about uh trying to uh test some of those implications uh socially.

854
00:47:37,380 --> 00:47:42,340
Yeah, so so the uh the Darwinian

855
00:47:43,220 --> 00:47:44,010
a key insight.

856
00:47:44,090 --> 00:47:49,050
So in the expression on each paper, which we talked about earlier, um one of Christoph's

857
00:47:49,050 --> 00:47:53,130
key insights, contributions to that paper is is to oversimplify a bit.

858
00:47:53,290 --> 00:47:57,290
Every time you try and communicate, every time you behave ostensibly, you draw someone's

859
00:47:57,290 --> 00:48:01,530
attention, you are making a commitment, and you're making a commitment to the relevance, to

860
00:48:01,530 --> 00:48:04,810
the worthwhile of engagement with for the other person.

861
00:48:05,220 --> 00:48:09,380
Like to draw someone's attention is to announce that it's worth their engaging with.

862
00:48:09,540 --> 00:48:13,540
And if it turns out that they engage with it and they don't get anything out of it, then

863
00:48:13,540 --> 00:48:16,340
that's gonna, as you say, come with social costs for you.

864
00:48:16,500 --> 00:48:21,700
And and that that fact is uh we think a very important selection pressure in the evolution

865
00:48:21,700 --> 00:48:23,940
of the cognitive capacities that we're talking about.

866
00:48:24,340 --> 00:48:30,050
That's why modern humans I say I don't I don't mean modernity, I think since the eighteen

867
00:48:30,050 --> 00:48:31,970
hundreds, I mean I mean living humans.

868
00:48:32,370 --> 00:48:33,330
Sixty thousand, yeah.

869
00:48:33,490 --> 00:48:34,370
Yeah, exactly.

870
00:48:34,530 --> 00:48:40,450
Uh they we we just presume that what others do is optimally relevant because it had

871
00:48:40,450 --> 00:48:41,970
to have been in the in the distant past.

872
00:48:42,050 --> 00:48:45,170
And so our cognitive apparatus have been selected to just take it that way.

873
00:48:45,330 --> 00:48:49,330
And of course, that can then be exploited or things can go wrong by people who say things

874
00:48:49,330 --> 00:48:51,650
which aren't worth paying any attention to, and so on.

875
00:48:51,810 --> 00:48:56,280
Um, but uh that I don't I don't think you can understand the design of human communication

876
00:48:56,280 --> 00:49:01,000
without um without that perspective that you know it there there's a commitment to it to

877
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:03,480
relevance on behalf of everybody who ever talks.

878
00:49:03,640 --> 00:49:08,520
Um yeah there's a passage I mean I actually like it's it will this is from the paper.

879
00:49:08,680 --> 00:49:14,120
Um it will hence be an informer's uh own interest to actually be relevant for their

880
00:49:14,120 --> 00:49:19,240
audience because those who intentionally attract attention but fail to do so in ways that

881
00:49:19,240 --> 00:49:24,830
are useful or relevant will in time incur costs to their reputation and lose their

882
00:49:24,830 --> 00:49:28,030
capacity to manipulate their conspecifics' attention.

883
00:49:28,190 --> 00:49:32,030
In other words, there will be selection for behaviors that intentionally attract others'

884
00:49:32,190 --> 00:49:36,830
attention only when it is likely to be worthwhile for the audience to indeed pay attention.

885
00:49:37,230 --> 00:49:37,710
Precisely.

886
00:49:37,870 --> 00:49:38,110
Yep.

887
00:49:38,270 --> 00:49:38,510
Yeah.

888
00:49:38,910 --> 00:49:39,550
That's fascinating.

889
00:49:39,790 --> 00:49:45,580
Have you thought much about like this idea of being an attention seeker and why

890
00:49:45,580 --> 00:49:47,660
we view that negatively.

891
00:49:48,300 --> 00:49:52,060
And and just in general, the idea of intention as a limited resource that we often compete

892
00:49:52,060 --> 00:49:52,220
over.

893
00:49:52,300 --> 00:49:55,500
I mean, you could think, you know, cognitive scientists tell us we can only keep like seven

894
00:49:55,500 --> 00:49:57,900
or so things in working memory at a time.

895
00:49:58,140 --> 00:49:59,820
That is in effect a limited resource.

896
00:49:59,900 --> 00:50:04,060
And you could imagine other people in the social world competing for uh access to those

897
00:50:04,060 --> 00:50:05,260
seven slots and they're limited.

898
00:50:05,340 --> 00:50:07,660
If I'm paying attention to you, I'm not paying attention to someone else.

899
00:50:07,820 --> 00:50:09,900
If I'm helping you, I'm not helping someone else.

900
00:50:10,060 --> 00:50:12,350
Um if I'm listening to you, I'm not listening to someone else.

901
00:50:12,430 --> 00:50:16,830
And so attention really is a is an evolutionarily relevant resource that you could imagine

902
00:50:16,830 --> 00:50:17,630
competition over.

903
00:50:17,710 --> 00:50:23,070
And you could imagine um, you know, huge reputational costs if I try to greedily hoard

904
00:50:23,230 --> 00:50:27,550
attention uh without providing anything of value in in in return.

905
00:50:27,870 --> 00:50:31,630
Because if I grab other people's attention, I'm I'm preventing people from paying attention

906
00:50:31,630 --> 00:50:32,350
to other things.

907
00:50:32,830 --> 00:50:35,710
And so have you have you thought about that uh aspect of of your work?

908
00:50:36,110 --> 00:50:36,270
Yeah.

909
00:50:36,350 --> 00:50:39,640
So so attention is is plainly super, super basic.

910
00:50:39,800 --> 00:50:41,960
All organisms have to do it in some way, right?

911
00:50:42,200 --> 00:50:47,960
Um it's very important, I think, to distinguish um so so the questions that I've been most

912
00:50:47,960 --> 00:50:51,560
engaged with, and certainly the work we've been talking about so far, is concerned with, is

913
00:50:52,040 --> 00:50:56,680
um how communication even works in the first place, which does turn on attention and

914
00:50:56,680 --> 00:50:58,360
relevance and commitments and so on.

915
00:50:58,600 --> 00:51:02,200
Once it's up, you know, once it's working and it's running and everybody has these basic

916
00:51:02,200 --> 00:51:06,710
cognitive capacities, it's part of the ordinary, ordinarily developing phenotype of humans.

917
00:51:06,870 --> 00:51:07,430
It's true.

918
00:51:07,510 --> 00:51:10,630
Some people draw attention and just too much.

919
00:51:11,030 --> 00:51:13,910
Some people actually do the opposite and they draw attention too little.

920
00:51:14,550 --> 00:51:16,230
Not as many of them, but there are a few.

921
00:51:21,190 --> 00:51:22,230
Possibly so, yeah.

922
00:51:22,390 --> 00:51:23,510
Speak up, speak up.

923
00:51:23,670 --> 00:51:29,600
Um I don I don't think I have too much uh insightful to say about uh about

924
00:51:29,760 --> 00:51:35,360
the personalities that that that demand too much attention relative to what they actually

925
00:51:35,360 --> 00:51:35,920
have to offer.

926
00:51:36,080 --> 00:51:39,920
I think that's a slightly I mean that's clearly an interesting question, but that's it's a

927
00:51:39,920 --> 00:51:42,160
slightly different one to the ones I've been focused on.

928
00:51:42,240 --> 00:51:42,400
Yeah.

929
00:51:42,800 --> 00:51:42,960
Sure.

930
00:51:43,200 --> 00:51:46,470
I mean you could imagine there are there are trade-offs there which would create, you know,

931
00:51:46,550 --> 00:51:50,230
uh balancing selection or you know, a variety of different phenotypes that hit different

932
00:51:50,230 --> 00:51:51,030
ends of the trade-off.

933
00:51:51,430 --> 00:51:51,750
Absolutely.

934
00:51:51,830 --> 00:51:55,430
It strikes strikes me as much as anything about per as a personality question rather than a

935
00:51:55,670 --> 00:51:57,190
cognition of communication question.

936
00:51:57,830 --> 00:51:58,310
That makes sense.

937
00:51:58,550 --> 00:52:03,510
One one question, and then I just thought of this is like there's a uh um kids are often go

938
00:52:03,510 --> 00:52:06,550
through a transition period of becoming very shy.

939
00:52:06,790 --> 00:52:11,190
Um, and I was just thinking through like, you know, I think one of the claims of this is

940
00:52:11,190 --> 00:52:16,900
that the systems involved should sort of intrinsically understand that attention

941
00:52:17,220 --> 00:52:23,140
is important and of value, and drawing attention without it paying

942
00:52:23,140 --> 00:52:29,060
off for the other is a is a will be a cost to you and to be careful about

943
00:52:29,060 --> 00:52:29,860
drawing attention.

944
00:52:30,020 --> 00:52:31,460
I mean, there's other things too, right?

945
00:52:31,540 --> 00:52:37,460
Like, um, but that's I wonder, I'm just thinking out loud about um, you know, the

946
00:52:37,700 --> 00:52:43,250
the the the idea that part of shyness or not wanting to seek

947
00:52:43,250 --> 00:52:48,610
attention is in some sense an acknowledgement kind of baked into the system that

948
00:52:48,770 --> 00:52:54,290
attention is a really powerful but also sort of dangerous thing to elicit in

949
00:52:54,290 --> 00:52:55,090
others.

950
00:52:55,810 --> 00:52:56,530
Yeah, I agree.

951
00:52:56,690 --> 00:53:00,530
I think that's part of the same box of personality questions.

952
00:53:01,490 --> 00:53:02,130
Yeah.

953
00:53:02,370 --> 00:53:02,610
Yeah.

954
00:53:02,840 --> 00:53:03,800
No, I mean I love that idea.

955
00:53:03,880 --> 00:53:08,040
I've been thinking about that a lot because I've been thinking about alliances and how uh

956
00:53:08,040 --> 00:53:12,120
witch hunts are a kind of alliance where we form an alliance to accuse someone else of

957
00:53:12,120 --> 00:53:16,280
witchcraft which um gets the which which deflects blame off of us.

958
00:53:16,440 --> 00:53:19,640
And so that's the benefit we gain from participating in in the witch hunt.

959
00:53:19,800 --> 00:53:24,050
Um but you could you know you but if we're in the middle of a witch hunt, you definitely do

960
00:53:24,050 --> 00:53:25,810
not want to be the center of everyone's attention.

961
00:53:25,970 --> 00:53:31,090
Because if you are, you that creates a really uh nice focal point for everyone else to

962
00:53:31,090 --> 00:53:33,730
target you uh uh in in the witch hunt.

963
00:53:33,970 --> 00:53:34,050
Right.

964
00:53:34,210 --> 00:53:37,810
Uh and so you could imagine there being benefits to being the center of attention, but also

965
00:53:37,810 --> 00:53:40,050
really big potential costs, really big risks.

966
00:53:40,210 --> 00:53:41,490
It's a kind of risky strategy.

967
00:53:41,650 --> 00:53:41,810
Yeah.

968
00:53:41,970 --> 00:53:46,530
Um Yeah, Aaron Lukashevsky, uh like the costs and benefits of extroversion, right?

969
00:53:46,610 --> 00:53:49,730
Like this is an early HB paper from a bit ago.

970
00:53:49,810 --> 00:53:50,290
Yeah.

971
00:53:51,010 --> 00:53:51,650
Yeah.

972
00:53:52,220 --> 00:53:58,060
Um well I want to transition into uh one of my favorite papers of yours, um, which is uh Is

973
00:53:58,220 --> 00:54:00,620
non-evolutionary psychology possible?

974
00:54:01,420 --> 00:54:01,660
Yeah.

975
00:54:01,820 --> 00:54:02,540
With Dan Nettle.

976
00:54:02,700 --> 00:54:06,140
Um with Dan Nettle, uh who's uh we should also probably have on at some point.

977
00:54:06,220 --> 00:54:07,420
He's does great work.

978
00:54:07,580 --> 00:54:11,820
Um so I will just ask you the question is non-evolutionary psychology possible?

979
00:54:12,140 --> 00:54:13,260
Not really, no.

980
00:54:14,780 --> 00:54:17,020
Um I again I should give credit where it's due.

981
00:54:17,420 --> 00:54:22,550
I mean it's that Daniel's paper first, and he invited me on um to join uh because he

982
00:54:22,550 --> 00:54:26,230
thought I had some useful things to say about about Bayesianism and other approaches to

983
00:54:26,230 --> 00:54:32,070
doing psychology, which um are sometimes contrasted with evolutionary psychology.

984
00:54:32,230 --> 00:54:37,990
Um but yet seem it seems to me certainly to have similar

985
00:54:37,990 --> 00:54:39,510
goals to evolutionary psychology.

986
00:54:40,710 --> 00:54:45,340
And so yeah, as you say, the question okay, the I mean it's a very Daniel thing to do to

987
00:54:45,340 --> 00:54:46,060
sort of invert the world.

988
00:54:46,140 --> 00:54:48,780
Everybody says, Well, evolutionary psychology, is that is that a good idea?

989
00:54:48,860 --> 00:54:49,500
Do I believe in that?

990
00:54:49,580 --> 00:54:50,060
Blah, blah, blah.

991
00:54:50,220 --> 00:54:52,700
And you've talked about that in some of your past podcast episodes.

992
00:54:52,940 --> 00:54:57,340
We can invert the question and say, Well, is anybody doing non-evolutionary psychology?

993
00:54:57,500 --> 00:54:58,700
Is that even possible?

994
00:54:58,860 --> 00:55:03,500
Um, and to answer that, we sort of delineate different commitments of different types of

995
00:55:03,500 --> 00:55:04,460
psychology.

996
00:55:04,700 --> 00:55:08,270
Um, And it's true, there are different varieties of evolutionary psychology.

997
00:55:08,350 --> 00:55:12,270
There are especially strong forms that have particular commitments to certain architecture

998
00:55:12,270 --> 00:55:12,990
of the mind.

999
00:55:13,470 --> 00:55:16,910
But to be properly non-evolutionary, you don't just have to drop that, you have to drop

1000
00:55:16,910 --> 00:55:19,150
notions of mechanism and notions of function.

1001
00:55:19,310 --> 00:55:25,070
And you end up with something that's so diluted that it's very hard to imagine anyone could

1002
00:55:25,070 --> 00:55:26,350
possibly believe in it.

1003
00:55:27,230 --> 00:55:31,790
You know to be, I mean, yeah.

1004
00:55:33,260 --> 00:55:38,540
I think my I I I am one of my go-to examples for a lot of thinking about evolution is

1005
00:55:38,860 --> 00:55:39,740
vision science.

1006
00:55:39,900 --> 00:55:43,980
Um some people say vision science is an evolutionary psychology, and I would say yes it is,

1007
00:55:44,060 --> 00:55:48,860
um, because vision scientists all have a fun have an assumption about the function of the

1008
00:55:48,860 --> 00:55:49,500
mechanisms.

1009
00:55:49,660 --> 00:55:54,220
I mean, they assume that the mechanisms exist, that there are aspects of the mind that do

1010
00:55:54,220 --> 00:55:57,980
certain jobs, and they make an assumption about the function of those mechanisms, or maybe

1011
00:55:57,980 --> 00:55:59,740
they think there's byproducts or whatever.

1012
00:55:59,900 --> 00:56:03,050
Um, to do non evolutionary psychology is to drop those assumptions.

1013
00:56:03,130 --> 00:56:06,250
And it's hard to know how I could even study vision if I didn't have those assumptions, or

1014
00:56:06,250 --> 00:56:10,650
for that matter, personality or language, or whatever else it is that you want to study.

1015
00:56:11,610 --> 00:56:13,450
And yeah, so we worked through a few examples.

1016
00:56:13,610 --> 00:56:15,610
Bayesian cognitive science is one.

1017
00:56:16,570 --> 00:56:22,570
Daniel went, you know, went and read some sociology of famous sociologists called Anthony

1018
00:56:22,570 --> 00:56:27,300
Giddens, uh, who's got a sort of tacit theory of psychology on which he builds his

1019
00:56:27,300 --> 00:56:28,660
sociological theories.

1020
00:56:28,820 --> 00:56:33,540
And you know, we make the argument that even here, this tacit theory, it has to have, it

1021
00:56:33,540 --> 00:56:38,900
does have basic notions that that in some sense make it evolutionary because they assume

1022
00:56:38,900 --> 00:56:39,620
functions.

1023
00:56:39,860 --> 00:56:45,540
And to our mind, the only, you know, the the the only the only innovation of Tubian

1024
00:56:45,620 --> 00:56:49,940
Cosmedis and other evolutionary psychologists is to say, well, when we think about these

1025
00:56:49,940 --> 00:56:55,410
topics, we should take this the evolutionary ecologies of humans, and we should take that

1026
00:56:55,410 --> 00:56:55,890
in mind.

1027
00:56:56,050 --> 00:56:59,810
That's part of theorizing properly about functions and mechanisms.

1028
00:56:59,970 --> 00:57:03,090
That's the innovative that's that's to my mind the basic innovation of evolutionary

1029
00:57:03,090 --> 00:57:03,490
psychology.

1030
00:57:03,570 --> 00:57:04,930
And I think it's got to be right.

1031
00:57:05,090 --> 00:57:08,450
Um, and there's an important sense in which all psychologists are evolutionary

1032
00:57:08,450 --> 00:57:09,330
psychologists.

1033
00:57:09,730 --> 00:57:09,970
Yeah.

1034
00:57:10,050 --> 00:57:14,450
I mean, maybe one argument, maybe to to put it is, and you can tell me if this is right, is

1035
00:57:14,450 --> 00:57:19,100
that there everything is implicitly evolutionary psychology, and what what practically

1036
00:57:19,180 --> 00:57:21,900
evolutionary psychology has been is been doing it explicitly.

1037
00:57:22,220 --> 00:57:22,700
That's true.

1038
00:57:22,780 --> 00:57:23,020
Yep.

1039
00:57:23,180 --> 00:57:23,580
Right.

1040
00:57:23,820 --> 00:57:24,140
Yeah.

1041
00:57:24,300 --> 00:57:24,620
Right.

1042
00:57:25,020 --> 00:57:25,260
Yeah.

1043
00:57:25,420 --> 00:57:31,340
So like a a big um way of thinking that's popular in social psychology and even even

1044
00:57:31,420 --> 00:57:36,540
uh other branches of psychology is to view the functions of the mind uh in terms of the

1045
00:57:36,540 --> 00:57:38,540
pursuit of hedonic state.

1046
00:57:38,860 --> 00:57:39,900
So the pursuit of happiness.

1047
00:57:40,060 --> 00:57:42,300
So the function of this is to make us feel good.

1048
00:57:42,460 --> 00:57:48,370
Or it's to uh avoid negative feelings, to avoid feelings of uncertainty or anxiety or or

1049
00:57:48,370 --> 00:57:53,650
whatever, or to pursue uh feelings of happiness or meaning or self-esteem or self-worth.

1050
00:57:53,810 --> 00:57:58,610
And so you could think of a a large part of current psychological research as making the

1051
00:57:58,770 --> 00:58:04,290
implicit claim that the mind is designed to seek out certain hedonic states.

1052
00:58:04,450 --> 00:58:10,000
Um and m I can get on my soapbox now, but if you if you think about that functional

1053
00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:15,120
claim uh f for even a brief moment in terms of natural selection, it makes absolutely no

1054
00:58:15,120 --> 00:58:15,440
sense.

1055
00:58:15,680 --> 00:58:20,400
Why would why would the mind be designed to seek out something inside itself?

1056
00:58:21,120 --> 00:58:24,720
What you know, wh why why do why do brains want stuff inside our brains?

1057
00:58:24,800 --> 00:58:30,350
We we we should have evolved to seek stuff in the world that um uh mattered for uh

1058
00:58:30,350 --> 00:58:32,990
ancestral survival and and reproduction.

1059
00:58:33,070 --> 00:58:37,870
And we should care about the deg the degree to which our our beliefs about those things are

1060
00:58:37,870 --> 00:58:40,270
correct or not correct, right?

1061
00:58:40,430 --> 00:58:42,510
We shouldn't want to just feel good for its own sake.

1062
00:58:42,590 --> 00:58:46,750
We should want to get the sorts of things that would have enhanced survival and

1063
00:58:46,750 --> 00:58:52,670
reproduction, like food, sex, status, uh uh group uh cohesion, things of

1064
00:58:52,670 --> 00:58:58,260
that sort, um, that that that have a uh a real uh covariance with with biological

1065
00:58:58,260 --> 00:59:04,180
fitness um but uh uh uh uh uh seeking out happiness itself is not a very

1066
00:59:04,180 --> 00:59:05,300
plausible functional claim.

1067
00:59:05,380 --> 00:59:09,140
And so you could think of a huge part of psychology as making this implicit evolutionary

1068
00:59:09,140 --> 00:59:11,620
theory that we have evolved to seek happiness.

1069
00:59:11,700 --> 00:59:14,980
Uh and that theory is just uh it shouldn't have ever left the gate.

1070
00:59:15,060 --> 00:59:17,620
It's just a a completely implausible theory on its face.

1071
00:59:17,700 --> 00:59:22,770
Uh and if and if psychologists had taken a a brief moment to evaluate the evolutionary

1072
00:59:22,770 --> 00:59:26,770
plausibility of their theory, they would realize that it should never have left the gate.

1073
00:59:27,090 --> 00:59:33,090
And it has uh, in my opinion, led to a lot of really um uh uh uh uh bad

1074
00:59:33,170 --> 00:59:37,650
um, for lack of a better term, research, or a lot of a lot of um going down blind alleys

1075
00:59:37,650 --> 00:59:41,730
and in wrong directions and thinking about the mind in in exactly the wrong way.

1076
00:59:41,890 --> 00:59:44,930
You know, there's a leading theory of conspiracy theories that they're designed to make us

1077
00:59:44,930 --> 00:59:50,920
feel better, to assuage feelings of uncertainty about the world, which makes absolutely

1078
00:59:50,920 --> 00:59:51,480
no sense.

1079
00:59:51,640 --> 00:59:55,480
Uh especially, you know, considering that most conspiracy theories are quite horrifying,

1080
00:59:55,560 --> 00:59:59,320
and that would seem to serve the function of making you feel better quite poorly.

1081
00:59:59,560 --> 01:00:05,400
Um, and so what I love about your paper is that it it tells anyone

1082
01:00:05,400 --> 01:00:08,520
who's studying the mind that you're already doing evolutionary psychology.

1083
01:00:08,680 --> 01:00:10,440
You're studying an evolved organ.

1084
01:00:10,950 --> 01:00:15,190
You know, if you believe in the theory of evolution, if you believe that the human uh uh

1085
01:00:15,350 --> 01:00:21,350
brainslash mind is a product of evolution and you're studying it, um uh what else

1086
01:00:21,350 --> 01:00:23,430
are you doing but studying an evolved organ?

1087
01:00:23,510 --> 01:00:26,790
And and if you're making claims about that evolved organ, you are necessarily making

1088
01:00:26,790 --> 01:00:28,870
evolutionary psychological claims.

1089
01:00:29,110 --> 01:00:32,950
And so if you're going to be making those claims, you might as well do your homework and

1090
01:00:32,950 --> 01:00:38,230
think about how evolution works, think about the uh evolutionary history of Homo sapiens

1091
01:00:38,390 --> 01:00:40,940
and and and do the job well.

1092
01:00:41,500 --> 01:00:46,700
Um so I mean no I can't disagree obviously I mean that I agree with all that.

1093
01:00:46,860 --> 01:00:49,500
There's a point in that paper that's worth making in this context though.

1094
01:00:50,460 --> 01:00:50,620
No.

1095
01:00:50,940 --> 01:00:56,140
I I think that um evolutionary psychology, the field has been misnamed from the beginning.

1096
01:00:56,380 --> 01:01:01,740
I think um I I think the name mislead so a lot of people think oh no uh you know you you're

1097
01:01:01,740 --> 01:01:07,230
m as or more familiar than I am with um the the many criticisms and misunderstandings um of

1098
01:01:07,230 --> 01:01:08,670
evolutionary psychology.

1099
01:01:08,990 --> 01:01:11,710
Um what it really is is adaptationist cognitive science.

1100
01:01:11,870 --> 01:01:12,030
Yeah.

1101
01:01:12,270 --> 01:01:18,190
So cognitive adaptationism in my mind is actually

1102
01:01:18,190 --> 01:01:18,590
what it is.

1103
01:01:18,750 --> 01:01:22,030
Cognitive adaptationism is is my actual word for it.

1104
01:01:22,110 --> 01:01:22,510
Yeah.

1105
01:01:22,990 --> 01:01:27,950
To to to think seriously about the evolutionary ecology of human minds, as you were just

1106
01:01:27,950 --> 01:01:33,200
saying, David, um uh in you know, in our framing of our hypotheses about how the mind

1107
01:01:33,200 --> 01:01:35,760
works, that is to be an adaptationist about cognitive science.

1108
01:01:35,840 --> 01:01:38,960
And hence why I think it's best understood as adaptationist cognitive science.

1109
01:01:39,120 --> 01:01:43,040
It's called evolutionary psychology, and I think that leads people to think that we're, you

1110
01:01:43,040 --> 01:01:47,200
know, we evolutionary psychologists are trying to recreate the evolutionary history of

1111
01:01:47,200 --> 01:01:47,760
humans.

1112
01:01:48,000 --> 01:01:52,400
Um, you know, we're we're interested in the phylogeny question, which certainly is an

1113
01:01:52,400 --> 01:01:56,160
interesting question, um, but it's not the defining question of the field, I think, which

1114
01:01:56,160 --> 01:02:01,590
is which is an adaptation on functionalist and the function and mechanism questions.

1115
01:02:01,910 --> 01:02:07,590
Um and I think, you know, uh yeah, it and it and I suppose the evolutionary

1116
01:02:07,590 --> 01:02:13,590
psychology framing also sort of places a places an emphasis and can

1117
01:02:13,670 --> 01:02:19,190
for some readers place an emphasis on basic biological things and leading to the contrast

1118
01:02:19,190 --> 01:02:21,270
with culture, leading to the contrast with learned.

1119
01:02:21,430 --> 01:02:25,600
You've talked in other podcast episodes about how those are false dichotomies.

1120
01:02:25,680 --> 01:02:28,800
But then the I don't think the name does us any favors in that respect.

1121
01:02:29,120 --> 01:02:29,280
Right.

1122
01:02:29,360 --> 01:02:29,520
Yeah.

1123
01:02:29,600 --> 01:02:33,760
And it's also, I mean, everything is sort of a it's a co it's a convention, right?

1124
01:02:33,840 --> 01:02:35,440
And sort of a function of its time.

1125
01:02:35,600 --> 01:02:39,520
And even on this podcast, you know, like we will actually have a ton of anthropologists on,

1126
01:02:39,600 --> 01:02:41,600
not all of whom are cognitive adaptationists.

1127
01:02:41,680 --> 01:02:44,720
And the evolutionary behavioral sciences are a bit different than just cognitive

1128
01:02:44,720 --> 01:02:45,280
adaptationism.

1129
01:02:45,440 --> 01:02:50,210
And of course, you know, you want to understand what is if you want if you're doing an

1130
01:02:50,210 --> 01:02:55,090
adaptationism of like what does this organism or organ need, what does this brain need,

1131
01:02:55,250 --> 01:02:59,650
understanding the natural ecology, understanding selection pressures and game theory, d

1132
01:02:59,810 --> 01:03:02,610
evolutionary game theory, these are all related tools.

1133
01:03:02,690 --> 01:03:04,930
And so I think there I I totally agree with you, Tom.

1134
01:03:05,090 --> 01:03:09,490
And I I think like even just the language of sort of like, well, is evolutionary psychology

1135
01:03:09,570 --> 01:03:13,940
or like the overarching thing, or is that evolutionary behavioral sciences, or what does

1136
01:03:13,940 --> 01:03:14,580
that even mean?

1137
01:03:14,740 --> 01:03:17,380
And then, like, you know, what where do all these things fit in?

1138
01:03:17,460 --> 01:03:20,980
And you know, like lots of people like Dan Conroy Beam does like agent-based modeling

1139
01:03:21,060 --> 01:03:25,620
selection dynamics, but then also is a cognitive adaptationist, but like then does the

1140
01:03:25,620 --> 01:03:28,260
modeling stuff actually is that cognitive adaptationism?

1141
01:03:28,420 --> 01:03:33,220
Well, no, but it's part of the toolkit of being that, you know, so it's it's all yeah, it's

1142
01:03:33,220 --> 01:03:34,580
a sort of a fuzzy set.

1143
01:03:34,660 --> 01:03:34,980
Yeah.

1144
01:03:35,370 --> 01:03:35,690
Yeah.

1145
01:03:36,010 --> 01:03:39,610
Another reason you should get Daniel Nestlon is I know he's done empirical work getting

1146
01:03:39,610 --> 01:03:42,730
people's folk intuitions about what explains human behavior.

1147
01:03:42,890 --> 01:03:48,090
And he constantly gets this division between evolution and biology on one side and cultural

1148
01:03:48,170 --> 01:03:48,570
on the other side.

1149
01:03:48,970 --> 01:03:49,130
Yeah.

1150
01:03:49,210 --> 01:03:53,370
And that's part of this difference detecting mechanisms, which is part of like my idea,

1151
01:03:53,530 --> 01:03:54,970
like thinking my thinking too.

1152
01:03:55,130 --> 01:04:00,890
I want to push on this idea that uh and we can transition maybe to something else which is

1153
01:04:00,890 --> 01:04:06,580
related to what we were just talking about, which is that um, you know, cognitive science

1154
01:04:06,580 --> 01:04:11,700
or areas of psychology that are already sort of implicitly evolutionary, but they're

1155
01:04:11,860 --> 01:04:13,300
they're doing this thing.

1156
01:04:13,460 --> 01:04:17,060
And I'm going to characterize this thing, and I'm going to be slightly uncharitable, but

1157
01:04:17,060 --> 01:04:22,980
it's something I think all three of us have have for been kind of brushed against, or it

1158
01:04:23,060 --> 01:04:24,660
has been kind of ground us down.

1159
01:04:24,820 --> 01:04:26,020
And I think it's worth talking about.

1160
01:04:26,100 --> 01:04:31,470
And it's it's basically to put it in a really uncharitable brief way, is that one of the

1161
01:04:31,470 --> 01:04:37,070
problems of our science is, and it goes back to this Chomsky thing,

1162
01:04:37,310 --> 01:04:40,430
is the data is really important.

1163
01:04:40,590 --> 01:04:45,550
And the exercise of a science of psychology, because the like Marvin Minsky talked about is

1164
01:04:45,630 --> 01:04:46,670
like physics envy.

1165
01:04:48,190 --> 01:04:51,950
You know, which is, and even Chomsky was like, you know, calling a behavioral science like

1166
01:04:51,950 --> 01:04:55,630
the science of behavior, it's like this calling physics or you know the science of meter

1167
01:04:55,710 --> 01:04:56,110
reading, right?

1168
01:04:56,190 --> 01:04:57,310
It's not the data don't matter.

1169
01:04:57,390 --> 01:04:58,990
It's what you're making a theory about.

1170
01:04:59,420 --> 01:05:04,540
I think there's such incognitive science in social psychology and a lot of areas.

1171
01:05:04,700 --> 01:05:06,700
And I think F-Psych isn't is an exception.

1172
01:05:06,860 --> 01:05:12,700
There are other exceptions broadly, but there are generally, it's this idea that if

1173
01:05:12,700 --> 01:05:15,900
you're doing good science, you're producing lots of data.

1174
01:05:16,220 --> 01:05:22,060
And then maybe as a secondary thing, you describe the data or characterize the data.

1175
01:05:22,300 --> 01:05:27,950
And what you're really not allowed to do is really say very much to the

1176
01:05:27,950 --> 01:05:30,110
extent that you don't have data.

1177
01:05:31,230 --> 01:05:36,750
And I think that even this point about like what David described as sort of like people are

1178
01:05:36,750 --> 01:05:40,830
motivated to be happy, it's typically like what's done.

1179
01:05:41,070 --> 01:05:45,630
And David, you can tell me if this is incorrect, but this is my assessment, is that in all

1180
01:05:45,630 --> 01:05:51,230
of these areas that we sort of think aren't going very well, I believe that the bottom line

1181
01:05:51,230 --> 01:05:56,760
thing is not appreciation of like theory-first approaches or thinking about what should we

1182
01:05:56,760 --> 01:05:58,600
expect to find what data is important.

1183
01:05:58,680 --> 01:06:04,360
And instead, it's saying, I'm gonna study people's satisfaction or self-esteem or

1184
01:06:04,360 --> 01:06:07,080
happiness about this important, interesting thing of life.

1185
01:06:07,160 --> 01:06:08,840
Like I'm gonna look people as social media use.

1186
01:06:09,080 --> 01:06:12,120
Do people who use social media, are they happy or less happy?

1187
01:06:12,280 --> 01:06:16,040
And then, like the idea that's sort of like implicit in it is like there's a mechanism

1188
01:06:16,040 --> 01:06:21,960
that's motivated to like be happy is sort of incidental because the implicit game is

1189
01:06:22,370 --> 01:06:24,770
I get status by presenting data.

1190
01:06:24,850 --> 01:06:28,930
And the more hard it is, the more interesting it, quote unquote interesting it is.

1191
01:06:29,090 --> 01:06:34,370
And the the more, the bigger the end, the bigger the sample size, the more

1192
01:06:34,370 --> 01:06:36,130
geographically diverse it is.

1193
01:06:36,290 --> 01:06:38,690
That gets me a science or nature paper.

1194
01:06:38,930 --> 01:06:43,490
And really the theory or the inference about the mind is very much secondary.

1195
01:06:43,650 --> 01:06:48,300
So I would even I would say it's even worse than like implicit of psych it's almost like

1196
01:06:48,300 --> 01:06:53,260
there's no psychology at all like I the Virginia Wolf thing is like why are psychologists

1197
01:06:53,260 --> 01:06:58,380
afraid to do psychology I will I will say this like I'm I really feel like there's so much

1198
01:06:58,380 --> 01:07:02,140
of psychology that's afraid to like make climbs claims about what's in the mind.

1199
01:07:02,300 --> 01:07:06,220
I'm curious what you guys think about that as sort of being a problem.

1200
01:07:07,820 --> 01:07:10,140
You want me to go or do you want to go David?

1201
01:07:10,620 --> 01:07:15,970
Go for it Tom I mean uh yeah there's there there's there's so much to say.

1202
01:07:16,130 --> 01:07:20,450
I mean in some ways I think uh your your characterization of the of the current landscape

1203
01:07:20,530 --> 01:07:22,210
is a sociology of science point you're making.

1204
01:07:22,290 --> 01:07:25,970
And your characterisation, um, I I basically agree with.

1205
01:07:26,050 --> 01:07:31,250
Um I haven't put it I haven't thought about it quite in those terms, why psychologists are

1206
01:07:31,250 --> 01:07:34,050
afraid to do psychology, but I do rather like that.

1207
01:07:34,200 --> 01:07:38,360
Um, one thing that I've I've written about recently, as you know, is that um if you call

1208
01:07:38,360 --> 01:07:43,080
yourself a theoretical psychologist, it's extremely hard um to get a job to the extent I

1209
01:07:43,080 --> 01:07:45,400
mean psychologists don't know what that is.

1210
01:07:45,560 --> 01:07:47,720
Like that category doesn't exist in the world.

1211
01:07:47,800 --> 01:07:49,640
They say a junk of philosophy.

1212
01:07:49,800 --> 01:07:55,790
And there's so you know, there's there's one group of people who never ask me

1213
01:07:55,790 --> 01:07:56,990
that question, and that's philosophers.

1214
01:07:57,070 --> 01:08:00,270
They don't confuse the sort of work I do for philosophy.

1215
01:08:00,510 --> 01:08:04,270
Um but but psychologists often call me a philosopher, interestingly.

1216
01:08:04,510 --> 01:08:09,710
Um I think, I mean, exactly what is going on, why things are the way they are and how they

1217
01:08:09,710 --> 01:08:12,750
might change, that's almost a question for historians.

1218
01:08:12,910 --> 01:08:18,860
So I I think it actually ties to ties in with the way we fund science,

1219
01:08:18,940 --> 01:08:22,780
the way we fund universities even, and the way that you know and and the accountancy of

1220
01:08:22,780 --> 01:08:28,460
universities and therefore the way that grants are incentivized and treated.

1221
01:08:29,020 --> 01:08:34,700
And I think as the the prioritization of data, data, data, I mean clearly data is huge, you

1222
01:08:34,700 --> 01:08:36,140
know, obviously it's important.

1223
01:08:37,580 --> 01:08:43,510
But um to but you know, as you say, arguably it goes so far that we don't actually

1224
01:08:43,510 --> 01:08:44,230
do psychology.

1225
01:08:44,390 --> 01:08:49,670
And why that's the case, I think is that's a really complicated sociological question.

1226
01:08:51,430 --> 01:08:51,670
Yeah.

1227
01:08:51,830 --> 01:08:55,190
No, I think the physics envy is probably a big part of it.

1228
01:08:55,350 --> 01:09:00,310
That we we want to try to mimic the superficial features of a rigorous science without uh

1229
01:09:00,390 --> 01:09:03,740
you know getting to the core of what good science actually is.

1230
01:09:04,060 --> 01:09:07,420
Then it's it's not just about the superficial appearances, the numbers, the data, the

1231
01:09:07,420 --> 01:09:07,900
graphs.

1232
01:09:08,140 --> 01:09:10,780
It's about actual insight, actual understanding.

1233
01:09:11,020 --> 01:09:13,020
Um and and I think we've lost sight of that.

1234
01:09:13,180 --> 01:09:17,100
Um you know it it is interesting how you you can get a job as a theoretical physicist.

1235
01:09:17,260 --> 01:09:20,060
A theoretical physicist makes sense as a profession.

1236
01:09:20,220 --> 01:09:24,700
There are plenty of theoretical physicists who make a living doing that, but the idea of a

1237
01:09:24,700 --> 01:09:26,380
theoretical psychologist is unheard of.

1238
01:09:27,030 --> 01:09:30,710
I wonder if we got a theoretical if we spoke to theoretical physicists and what they would

1239
01:09:30,710 --> 01:09:35,110
say about the funding landscape and therefore the job landscape for theoretical physicists.

1240
01:09:35,350 --> 01:09:39,510
They definitely don't category, but I wouldn't be surprised if they it's uh the that they

1241
01:09:39,510 --> 01:09:42,150
complain about the challenges of that's true.

1242
01:09:42,230 --> 01:09:46,150
Yeah, it may be a problem in physics too, but it but it at least is probably less of a

1243
01:09:46,150 --> 01:09:47,910
problem for them than it is for us.

1244
01:09:47,990 --> 01:09:52,940
It's even it's even worse uh in psychology, which uh I think it gets it exactly backwards

1245
01:09:53,020 --> 01:09:53,420
of anything.

1246
01:09:53,500 --> 01:09:56,780
We need more theory in psychology because the our object of study is so much more

1247
01:09:56,780 --> 01:09:59,660
complicated with so many different interacting variables.

1248
01:09:59,820 --> 01:10:04,140
Um that you there's just an even greater need uh for theory to make sense of it because

1249
01:10:04,220 --> 01:10:08,700
there's just an endless variety of empirical tests and hypotheses that you can test, and

1250
01:10:08,700 --> 01:10:12,620
just winnowing down that space of possibilities to imaginable number is just way more

1251
01:10:12,620 --> 01:10:16,380
important in psychology because there the the I just the possibility of going down blind

1252
01:10:16,380 --> 01:10:18,220
alleys is just so much greater.

1253
01:10:18,460 --> 01:10:19,610
Um so yeah.

1254
01:10:19,850 --> 01:10:20,410
Yeah, that's right.

1255
01:10:20,490 --> 01:10:23,530
I mean, you can collect it's not antithetic antithetical to data.

1256
01:10:23,610 --> 01:10:27,770
It's that it tells you what data to collect.

1257
01:10:28,010 --> 01:10:33,930
And it it what it does theory, what it avoids is collecting data, which

1258
01:10:33,930 --> 01:10:39,770
is a really expensive, time-consuming thing that doesn't buy you

1259
01:10:39,770 --> 01:10:40,650
anything, you know.

1260
01:10:40,730 --> 01:10:46,680
And so in the in the in the efficacy of sort of you know, even what science

1261
01:10:46,680 --> 01:10:52,280
is, like even from like a Pauperian perspective, like it's it's an idea that's falsifiable

1262
01:10:52,440 --> 01:10:56,760
in the sense of it's not just you recognize this thing, right?

1263
01:10:56,920 --> 01:11:00,840
Like that, oh yeah, this is an instant, like cognitive dissonance is a great example.

1264
01:11:00,920 --> 01:11:05,080
Like if you can't falsify the idea, it's not a really good testable prediction.

1265
01:11:05,160 --> 01:11:09,400
And so if you you can you can probably cash out cognitive dissonance mechanistically, so

1266
01:11:09,400 --> 01:11:11,640
it's like a falsifiable version of it.

1267
01:11:11,800 --> 01:11:17,490
Um, but if you don't have theory to sort of cache all that out, to then set

1268
01:11:17,490 --> 01:11:18,530
up the data.

1269
01:11:18,690 --> 01:11:23,730
Like it would be a very different world if psychologists were all coordinated about what

1270
01:11:23,730 --> 01:11:29,250
data needed to be collected and which data would test between these very clear alternative

1271
01:11:29,250 --> 01:11:29,890
ideas.

1272
01:11:30,450 --> 01:11:32,930
And then we eventually do the data, right?

1273
01:11:33,010 --> 01:11:34,930
Like that's not what it looks like at all.

1274
01:11:35,090 --> 01:11:39,260
Right now it's sort of just like, here's some data, and here's maybe what it means, right?

1275
01:11:39,420 --> 01:11:41,980
And I feel like that we've kind of kicked the can down the road.

1276
01:11:42,060 --> 01:11:45,980
And I think I do think like there's a ton of papers about the theory crisis.

1277
01:11:46,220 --> 01:11:52,220
But Tom, I think like you are a good example of if people's people's intentions, like the

1278
01:11:52,220 --> 01:11:58,060
one thing we know about evolution is that, or just you know, the the logic of

1279
01:11:58,220 --> 01:12:04,060
selective regimes is that it you everybody can have a certain intention,

1280
01:12:04,270 --> 01:12:04,590
right?

1281
01:12:04,830 --> 01:12:10,830
Like I want to do something that's great, but all that matters is the selective

1282
01:12:10,830 --> 01:12:11,310
regime.

1283
01:12:11,470 --> 01:12:17,470
So if like if I as a faculty member want people who do slow quality science, but

1284
01:12:17,470 --> 01:12:21,310
my hiring committee chooses candidates based on the number of publications.

1285
01:12:21,470 --> 01:12:25,950
And if the number of publications is a function of like the what we talked about, just like

1286
01:12:25,950 --> 01:12:31,380
data and just you know how hard it was to collect the data, Your selective regime is

1287
01:12:31,380 --> 01:12:36,900
selecting for a particular kind of science that has nothing to do with what your explicit

1288
01:12:36,900 --> 01:12:37,940
intentions are.

1289
01:12:38,180 --> 01:12:41,700
And so I've heard a lot of people say we should have theory.

1290
01:12:41,860 --> 01:12:45,460
I've heard a lot of people say we should have interdisciplinarity.

1291
01:12:46,420 --> 01:12:49,220
But is this the selective regime we've created yet?

1292
01:12:49,540 --> 01:12:50,020
No, yeah.

1293
01:12:50,100 --> 01:12:50,980
So there's a lot to say.

1294
01:12:51,140 --> 01:12:55,460
So the the short answer to that question is no, but if things will change if and when job

1295
01:12:55,460 --> 01:13:00,830
panels and grant panels um Prioritize the sort of work that you're talking about.

1296
01:13:00,990 --> 01:13:02,830
I mean, that that's you're quite right.

1297
01:13:02,910 --> 01:13:05,150
You know, it can be selected for.

1298
01:13:05,870 --> 01:13:09,310
And I that's in some ways, that's why I say it's a question almost for historians or maybe

1299
01:13:09,310 --> 01:13:10,190
sociologists.

1300
01:13:10,350 --> 01:13:13,950
You know, there are certain dynamics on grant panels and job panels.

1301
01:13:14,030 --> 01:13:18,350
There's even you know the way universities are funded and their resources, most most

1302
01:13:18,510 --> 01:13:22,270
recruitment happens at department level, but the university wants interdisciplinarity.

1303
01:13:22,430 --> 01:13:25,950
That's an inherent tension, and it's very hard to tell a department we're going to do the

1304
01:13:25,950 --> 01:13:29,760
recruitment for you for reason old reasons of academic freedom.

1305
01:13:29,840 --> 01:13:33,840
So there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of inter interacting factors that are um

1306
01:13:33,840 --> 01:13:36,960
creating barriers to the sort of selective regimes you're talking about.

1307
01:13:37,120 --> 01:13:41,760
Um I wanna I want to also um go back a couple of minutes to something you were saying

1308
01:13:41,760 --> 01:13:42,000
there.

1309
01:13:42,080 --> 01:13:47,440
Um and while I definitely agree with the spirit um of what you're saying, I I'm gonna sort

1310
01:13:47,440 --> 01:13:50,160
of speak on behalf of my friends who do the empirical science.

1311
01:13:50,240 --> 01:13:52,880
Um yeah, I do I do empirical stuff too, for sure.

1312
01:13:53,040 --> 01:13:58,430
Yeah, yeah, well of course, of course, but um there are people who are collecting data for

1313
01:13:58,430 --> 01:14:02,750
the purposes of description, and I think that particularly in the human science, it was in

1314
01:14:02,750 --> 01:14:08,510
the human sciences, just you know, good quality like data that describes what humans do

1315
01:14:08,510 --> 01:14:09,390
at scale.

1316
01:14:09,550 --> 01:14:14,670
Um it needn't always have I mean it needn't always just saying

1317
01:14:16,110 --> 01:14:17,310
what humans do, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1318
01:14:17,390 --> 01:14:20,670
Yeah, and I just and I'm uh I know you agree, but I just wanted to No, it's worth saying

1319
01:14:20,670 --> 01:14:20,990
out loud.

1320
01:14:21,070 --> 01:14:22,590
Yeah, yeah, this is pushback.

1321
01:14:22,750 --> 01:14:23,550
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1322
01:14:23,710 --> 01:14:27,120
Description is important, But unfortunately we get the worst of both worlds because we

1323
01:14:27,120 --> 01:14:28,880
don't get good theory and we don't get good description.

1324
01:14:28,960 --> 01:14:30,080
We just get bad theory.

1325
01:14:30,320 --> 01:14:30,560
Right.

1326
01:14:30,720 --> 01:14:30,960
Right.

1327
01:14:31,120 --> 01:14:31,280
Right.

1328
01:14:31,440 --> 01:14:35,840
So I I would love if we just had description that was just clear about the fact that it was

1329
01:14:35,840 --> 01:14:38,480
description and they weren't trying to make theoretical claims.

1330
01:14:38,560 --> 01:14:43,040
It was just trying to get as clear a picture of possible as as of like what is going on,

1331
01:14:43,280 --> 01:14:44,880
what are the facts on the ground.

1332
01:14:44,960 --> 01:14:47,840
I think ethnography is really valuable for those purposes.

1333
01:14:47,920 --> 01:14:51,920
You know, we've had a a few anthropologists on the podcast who've been in incredibly

1334
01:14:51,920 --> 01:14:52,640
illuminating.

1335
01:14:52,790 --> 01:14:55,750
So yeah, I agree that um description is is very valuable.

1336
01:14:55,830 --> 01:14:59,190
It's just you have to be clear about what what your your goal is.

1337
01:14:59,990 --> 01:15:00,790
And yeah.

1338
01:15:00,870 --> 01:15:01,110
Yeah.

1339
01:15:01,590 --> 01:15:02,870
Yeah, I I completely agree.

1340
01:15:02,950 --> 01:15:06,950
And it the the sad thing is that it's quite it will be quite hard to get published in a

1341
01:15:06,950 --> 01:15:11,430
high profile psychology journal saying, here's an interesting thing about humans, here's

1342
01:15:11,430 --> 01:15:15,670
what they do, um or here's what they don't do, or whatever it is, full stop um

1343
01:15:15,940 --> 01:15:18,420
neurotactives to wrap that in theory.

1344
01:15:18,580 --> 01:15:21,380
Um right, or theory, and then in also data.

1345
01:15:21,540 --> 01:15:26,580
So it's just sort of like it's almost like, you know, I appreciate Tom your point, and I

1346
01:15:26,580 --> 01:15:28,260
completely agree, and it's worth saying out loud.

1347
01:15:28,340 --> 01:15:32,020
The argument isn't that like it should only be what I'm describing, it's just that there's

1348
01:15:32,020 --> 01:15:34,740
a there should be a role for this kind of thing.

1349
01:15:35,060 --> 01:15:39,620
Like there's no physics is not just theoretical physics, it's also experimental, and it

1350
01:15:39,620 --> 01:15:41,300
should not lose that part either, right?

1351
01:15:41,380 --> 01:15:47,110
I mean, yeah, And so the argument is like these different entities should be allowed to

1352
01:15:47,110 --> 01:15:48,630
exist on their own.

1353
01:15:48,870 --> 01:15:52,470
And the argument we're making is against the backdrop of this doesn't even exist.

1354
01:15:52,630 --> 01:15:54,550
Not that it should be the only thing for sure.

1355
01:15:54,710 --> 01:15:55,430
A hundred percent.

1356
01:15:55,590 --> 01:15:56,070
Yeah.

1357
01:15:57,190 --> 01:15:57,830
Yeah.

1358
01:15:58,150 --> 01:16:02,630
So uh so Tom, this kind of might lead into, I mean, I don't know how much you want to go

1359
01:16:02,630 --> 01:16:08,580
into this, but but I'll open this up of like, I know you you do a lot of theoretical work.

1360
01:16:08,740 --> 01:16:10,660
You're very interdisciplinary.

1361
01:16:10,820 --> 01:16:15,700
Um, and I know you've sort of struggled a bit um in terms of finding positions, which I

1362
01:16:15,700 --> 01:16:16,980
think is just insane.

1363
01:16:17,220 --> 01:16:22,260
Um, and you have this recent uh post about sort of your experience of that, and maybe we

1364
01:16:22,260 --> 01:16:24,580
can link that in this episode notes.

1365
01:16:24,740 --> 01:16:29,220
Um, you know, if at all, and you, you know, if you don't want to, we can even just cut this

1366
01:16:29,220 --> 01:16:29,300
out.

1367
01:16:29,380 --> 01:16:32,020
But what, you know, is there anything you want to say sort of about that?

1368
01:16:32,100 --> 01:16:33,540
Um, you know, at this point?

1369
01:16:34,070 --> 01:16:39,990
I mean, I uh I I w I spent probably more time than I should have writing that that essay.

1370
01:16:40,150 --> 01:16:43,110
Um so uh you know what what I have to say is there in a way.

1371
01:16:43,270 --> 01:16:48,630
Um uh you know I or maybe i I mean maybe one thing to say then is just sort of like for

1372
01:16:48,630 --> 01:16:54,070
people who haven't seen it or sort of what service you think it might provide more broadly,

1373
01:16:54,230 --> 01:16:58,310
aside from maybe your specifics, just sort of like, you know, especially I think for people

1374
01:16:58,310 --> 01:17:04,240
listening who don't know everything we know about what it's like to be in this field

1375
01:17:04,240 --> 01:17:05,280
and like these issues.

1376
01:17:05,440 --> 01:17:10,720
Like what what's the communicative relevance at a broader level for you know it it's one

1377
01:17:10,720 --> 01:17:13,520
human story of the realities of contemporary academia?

1378
01:17:13,680 --> 01:17:17,520
You know, I mean there are as many human stories as there are academics.

1379
01:17:17,680 --> 01:17:23,230
Uh and everybody knows that there, you know, the the way the sector is structured um,

1380
01:17:23,470 --> 01:17:26,190
creates profound uncertainty at certain career stages.

1381
01:17:26,350 --> 01:17:28,830
And that plays out in all sorts of different ways for different people.

1382
01:17:28,910 --> 01:17:34,910
It intersects with country, with family, planning, with you know, home buying, with uh

1383
01:17:35,070 --> 01:17:39,870
disciplines and departments, and um plays out in all sorts of different ways.

1384
01:17:39,950 --> 01:17:42,910
Uh in some respects I've been particularly unlucky.

1385
01:17:42,990 --> 01:17:45,230
Um I've been lucky in a couple of respects too.

1386
01:17:45,390 --> 01:17:50,030
Um uh but right now right now I'm at a quite difficult junction and so I just wanted to

1387
01:17:50,030 --> 01:17:55,960
share that story um and and you know put a properly human yeah edge edge to

1388
01:17:56,200 --> 01:17:59,080
I mean everybody understands in the abstract that there's a lot of uncertainty after your

1389
01:17:59,080 --> 01:18:03,000
PhD, but if you m if you make it human, then maybe that can help advance the the discourse.

1390
01:18:03,240 --> 01:18:05,720
Yeah, what's the feedback you've gotten from that, if any?

1391
01:18:05,960 --> 01:18:07,000
I mean very very supportive.

1392
01:18:07,080 --> 01:18:12,360
I mean a lot lot of people have have got in touch and said nice things and um

1393
01:18:12,760 --> 01:18:14,750
nobody's offered me a job.

1394
01:18:15,230 --> 01:18:15,630
Right.

1395
01:18:15,950 --> 01:18:20,910
Nobody responded to it saying, oh, well, here's an opportunity because Tom is a Tom is an

1396
01:18:20,910 --> 01:18:22,750
able scientist and it would be great to have him here.

1397
01:18:22,830 --> 01:18:23,630
Nobody's yet done that.

1398
01:18:23,710 --> 01:18:27,790
And let me make it completely clear to anybody listening that that is those those sorts of

1399
01:18:27,790 --> 01:18:29,550
approaches are absolutely welcome.

1400
01:18:30,350 --> 01:18:31,390
That hasn't happened.

1401
01:18:31,470 --> 01:18:35,150
But I've not really had any proper pushback on it at all.

1402
01:18:35,950 --> 01:18:40,110
Nobody's saying you're mischaracterizing the way things are um etc etc.

1403
01:18:40,440 --> 01:18:40,600
Yeah.

1404
01:18:40,840 --> 01:18:41,000
Yeah.

1405
01:18:41,160 --> 01:18:41,320
Yeah.

1406
01:18:41,400 --> 01:18:43,320
So to be explicit, we do this occasionally.

1407
01:18:43,400 --> 01:18:44,920
It's the only commercials we ever have.

1408
01:18:45,080 --> 01:18:49,000
If you want to support Tom, please reach out uh to Tom directly.

1409
01:18:49,160 --> 01:18:53,400
He uh it's uh don don't be um don't be reluctant, please.

1410
01:18:53,800 --> 01:18:57,080
I mean maybe just just just for those that haven't read the essay, the the the the short

1411
01:18:57,080 --> 01:19:00,520
version is I got my PhD in uh linguistics in two thousand and nine.

1412
01:19:01,270 --> 01:19:05,670
Uh, held fellowships in my own name and linguistics in Edinburgh for a while, then in

1413
01:19:05,670 --> 01:19:07,430
anthropology at Durham University.

1414
01:19:07,590 --> 01:19:12,230
Then in 2017, I moved to Budapest to work on a big uh European Research Council project in

1415
01:19:12,230 --> 01:19:15,270
a department of psychology on social minds.

1416
01:19:15,590 --> 01:19:18,390
Uh so and that took me to 2021.

1417
01:19:18,470 --> 01:19:20,470
So it's now 12 years after my PhD.

1418
01:19:20,710 --> 01:19:21,430
Great jobs.

1419
01:19:21,510 --> 01:19:25,990
Um I mean, I they were very good jobs, but they were always in the background was the fact

1420
01:19:25,990 --> 01:19:27,110
that they were temporary jobs.

1421
01:19:27,190 --> 01:19:33,180
Um I I achieved a lot, I think, um uh made some useful contributions, I hope.

1422
01:19:33,260 --> 01:19:38,220
Uh and then I got a post um uh in Spain and that did not work out for a number of reasons

1423
01:19:38,300 --> 01:19:42,700
that I go into in detail in well not detail actually but I outline in the essay.

1424
01:19:42,860 --> 01:19:47,660
Um uh and so you know it became clear I had to leave that job after a while.

1425
01:19:47,740 --> 01:19:52,460
Um so right now um you know I'm financially okay for the short term but I do need to work

1426
01:19:52,460 --> 01:19:52,860
again.

1427
01:19:52,940 --> 01:19:54,330
Um yeah.

1428
01:19:54,730 --> 01:19:58,410
Yeah, I'm back, you know, I'm back in my apartment with my partner, it's great here.

1429
01:19:59,530 --> 01:20:00,730
Just gotta work out what's next in life.

1430
01:20:00,890 --> 01:20:04,890
Yeah, and I just want to say because like I think, especially for people on the outside who

1431
01:20:04,890 --> 01:20:10,330
don't know, and I think I I'm sure this will be okay to say, like, even Lita Cosmedys and

1432
01:20:10,330 --> 01:20:16,300
John Tuby struggled financially in the beginning, and they are like one of the

1433
01:20:16,300 --> 01:20:17,420
founders of this field.

1434
01:20:17,500 --> 01:20:17,740
Right.

1435
01:20:17,820 --> 01:20:22,540
And so, like, I mean, Lita talked about this often where you and they were like down to one

1436
01:20:22,540 --> 01:20:22,860
salary.

1437
01:20:23,100 --> 01:20:25,260
Annie Wirtz and I were down to one salary at one point.

1438
01:20:25,340 --> 01:20:27,260
Like, people outside should just be clear.

1439
01:20:27,420 --> 01:20:33,340
Like, I want to be very clear that the difficulty of this that Tom is

1440
01:20:33,340 --> 01:20:38,940
experiencing is in no way an indication or is unique to, you know, it's not like, you know,

1441
01:20:39,020 --> 01:20:44,890
it's it's really like objectively, like the best people in the field went through

1442
01:20:44,890 --> 01:20:45,450
this same thing.

1443
01:20:45,610 --> 01:20:49,450
So it's really, I just want to like clarify that for people who might not know that and who

1444
01:20:49,450 --> 01:20:53,210
might be thinking, well, it sounds fair, but like really you wouldn't have this issue if

1445
01:20:53,210 --> 01:20:54,170
you were actually good.

1446
01:20:54,330 --> 01:20:56,730
And I can like no, like that's just not true.

1447
01:20:56,810 --> 01:20:56,970
Right.

1448
01:20:57,290 --> 01:20:58,010
You're very kind.

1449
01:20:58,090 --> 01:21:02,650
Um I think uh I I have two weaknesses in inverted commerce.

1450
01:21:02,730 --> 01:21:06,280
And I don't they aren't weaknesses, but that they they are in terms of science.

1451
01:21:06,360 --> 01:21:08,280
But I think they are weaknesses on the job market.

1452
01:21:08,600 --> 01:21:12,040
And that is that I'm not easily identifiable as a psychologist or a linguist or an

1453
01:21:12,040 --> 01:21:15,800
anthropologist, um, but I'm a bit of each of them, or even and even philosophy.

1454
01:21:15,880 --> 01:21:20,040
And also that I'm very theoretically minded for reasons we talked about five or ten minutes

1455
01:21:20,040 --> 01:21:20,360
ago.

1456
01:21:20,520 --> 01:21:26,110
Um those things together, the interdisciplinarity, the theoretical orientation, um, I think

1457
01:21:26,110 --> 01:21:31,870
that sort of work should be I mean, obviously I think this I'm biased, but I think that's

1458
01:21:31,870 --> 01:21:34,110
hugely useful and positive for science.

1459
01:21:34,190 --> 01:21:35,550
Um but it's not incentivized.

1460
01:21:35,630 --> 01:21:39,710
It's not necessarily it's not that individuals are out to get me or anti this agenda, but

1461
01:21:39,710 --> 01:21:44,190
it's not, but but it is the case that job panels and grant panels are not much incentivized

1462
01:21:44,190 --> 01:21:46,110
to um promote that sort of work.

1463
01:21:46,190 --> 01:21:50,110
And I was quite slow in my career to realise that this was this was the case.

1464
01:21:50,350 --> 01:21:51,820
Um but I think it is.

1465
01:21:52,220 --> 01:21:56,700
I mean, so maybe just one thing to say then to sh sh transition from like the the

1466
01:21:56,700 --> 01:22:01,820
negativity to just like without sort of I mean assuming things could just change, like

1467
01:22:01,900 --> 01:22:05,740
pretty simply, what would be some ways to sort of change the problem?

1468
01:22:06,220 --> 01:22:09,740
I mean, this this is a very big and complicated question, I think.

1469
01:22:10,540 --> 01:22:12,460
Just to throw out some utopian ideas.

1470
01:22:12,620 --> 01:22:18,110
I would love for there to be um so so many science labs, they have um they have permanent

1471
01:22:18,110 --> 01:22:21,070
staff who are administrators and technical staff.

1472
01:22:22,270 --> 01:22:23,950
Those people are given permanent contracts.

1473
01:22:24,110 --> 01:22:29,790
And of course the funding of that job is dependent on future funding streams for the

1474
01:22:29,790 --> 01:22:31,790
university, for the lab, from the PI, and so on.

1475
01:22:31,950 --> 01:22:34,350
But we don't give permanent jobs to scientists.

1476
01:22:35,710 --> 01:22:39,070
You have to take on a temporary job as a postdoc and then become the head of a lab

1477
01:22:39,070 --> 01:22:39,950
somewhere else.

1478
01:22:40,350 --> 01:22:44,860
What we don't have is just a permanent research scientist like a permanent administrator.

1479
01:22:45,020 --> 01:22:48,700
And I think there's a lot of people who have got their PhD and they're qualified and able

1480
01:22:48,700 --> 01:22:51,980
people who don't necessarily want to take on all the responsibilities of faculty.

1481
01:22:52,060 --> 01:22:55,260
They want a steady income and a steady job, and they want it over the long term, and they'd

1482
01:22:55,260 --> 01:22:55,820
be brilliant at it.

1483
01:22:55,900 --> 01:22:57,260
And that job literally doesn't exist.

1484
01:22:57,500 --> 01:22:57,660
Yeah.

1485
01:22:57,820 --> 01:23:01,900
Like I think the closest thing is Yeah, the Mox Planck Institute.

1486
01:23:01,980 --> 01:23:04,940
And it's a temporary the all but even then it's temporary.

1487
01:23:05,180 --> 01:23:06,220
Yeah, even though it's a long term.

1488
01:23:06,540 --> 01:23:06,940
No, that's right.

1489
01:23:07,020 --> 01:23:11,050
And we've talked, I mean, David and I have talked about how we the if you have a

1490
01:23:11,050 --> 01:23:15,930
theoretical perspective and you want to take that on, oftentimes there's just more data

1491
01:23:15,930 --> 01:23:19,690
than you can sort of collect, you know, like there, or there's just more predictions than

1492
01:23:19,690 --> 01:23:20,570
you can even test.

1493
01:23:20,810 --> 01:23:25,130
And so you've got this sort of tragedy of coordination, I feel like, in psychology,

1494
01:23:25,290 --> 01:23:29,530
especially where there's people with really great methods and data, but they're sort of

1495
01:23:29,530 --> 01:23:30,970
like in a holding pattern.

1496
01:23:31,130 --> 01:23:35,060
And I I mean, I will say this, like, you know, dear friends of mine do this work, but like

1497
01:23:35,140 --> 01:23:38,740
frankly at the end of the day, a lot of like these sophisticated methods, they're not

1498
01:23:38,740 --> 01:23:40,980
really testing particularly sophisticated theories.

1499
01:23:41,060 --> 01:23:44,580
There are exceptions, but it's sort of like they're just sort of refining methods.

1500
01:23:44,820 --> 01:23:50,420
And the so there's really just like a ton of people who are like good at doing methods, and

1501
01:23:50,420 --> 01:23:54,340
there's people who are doing a good theory, and there's this coordination problem of not

1502
01:23:54,340 --> 01:23:55,460
connecting up.

1503
01:23:56,660 --> 01:23:57,140
Yeah.

1504
01:23:57,460 --> 01:24:02,910
The other thing to say is um so this is this is in one some ways why I think the

1505
01:24:03,230 --> 01:24:08,110
issues uh you're raising are uh to do with you know economics um and accountancy to an

1506
01:24:08,110 --> 01:24:08,750
extent.

1507
01:24:08,910 --> 01:24:13,790
Um it's quite revealing to me that when people get big grants, they're very you know,

1508
01:24:13,870 --> 01:24:18,750
they're often celebrated, you know, meet in the common room and announcements are made.

1509
01:24:18,910 --> 01:24:22,510
Um and they're often you know very much in the foreground of people's CVs.

1510
01:24:22,590 --> 01:24:24,270
I don't know why my camera's doing that.

1511
01:24:24,510 --> 01:24:26,380
Um I have one of those too.

1512
01:24:26,460 --> 01:24:26,940
It's kind of weird.

1513
01:24:27,260 --> 01:24:28,300
Sometimes it just does that.

1514
01:24:28,380 --> 01:24:28,780
Yeah.

1515
01:24:30,460 --> 01:24:31,740
Grants are celebrated.

1516
01:24:31,820 --> 01:24:36,220
And to some extent I understand why, but another to another extent, I don't understand why.

1517
01:24:36,300 --> 01:24:37,980
Because that grants are the means.

1518
01:24:38,220 --> 01:24:39,580
The ends is the science.

1519
01:24:39,740 --> 01:24:41,580
The ends is the answers to questions.

1520
01:24:41,740 --> 01:24:43,260
And we don't celebrate that.

1521
01:24:43,660 --> 01:24:45,820
It doesn't seem to me institutionally to the same degree.

1522
01:24:45,980 --> 01:24:51,740
So scientists have internalized that grants are a goal, not a means, but a

1523
01:24:51,740 --> 01:24:52,140
goal.

1524
01:24:52,700 --> 01:24:57,170
And I think it see I I don't know why scientists well I I have a hypothesis about why

1525
01:24:57,170 --> 01:24:59,970
scientists have internalized that, and that's because it's incentivized at the career

1526
01:24:59,970 --> 01:25:03,570
level, because the university wants to grants, because the university needs the grants to

1527
01:25:03,570 --> 01:25:08,130
pay for the debt that was incurred when it built the building in which we're doing the

1528
01:25:08,130 --> 01:25:08,370
work.

1529
01:25:08,450 --> 01:25:08,610
Right.

1530
01:25:08,690 --> 01:25:14,370
So and I don't I don't have enough expertise in finance and accountancy and so on to

1531
01:25:14,440 --> 01:25:15,480
detail that argument.

1532
01:25:15,560 --> 01:25:19,400
But it does strike me that the way universities finance themselves and their infrastructure

1533
01:25:19,400 --> 01:25:23,080
feeds into the incentive structure that acts on academics, which means that they prioritize

1534
01:25:23,080 --> 01:25:24,760
grants rather than answers.

1535
01:25:25,240 --> 01:25:29,320
And that has a downstream effect that theoreticians are less valued than empiricists.

1536
01:25:29,560 --> 01:25:29,800
Yeah.

1537
01:25:29,960 --> 01:25:31,800
So theory is cheap.

1538
01:25:31,880 --> 01:25:35,000
So you would think cheap and brilliant would be valued, but it's not.

1539
01:25:35,080 --> 01:25:35,320
Right.

1540
01:25:35,480 --> 01:25:35,800
Right.

1541
01:25:36,150 --> 01:25:38,550
expensive and brilliant is what's most valued.

1542
01:25:39,270 --> 01:25:39,670
Yeah.

1543
01:25:39,910 --> 01:25:45,350
And there's also this weird thing of like, so when we if we want to make fun like

1544
01:25:45,350 --> 01:25:47,830
fundraising, we'll do a lottery, right?

1545
01:25:48,150 --> 01:25:53,030
Because the lottery is lots of people put their money in and only a small number of people

1546
01:25:53,030 --> 01:25:55,430
actually get the valued thing.

1547
01:25:55,990 --> 01:26:01,750
And so what that is is a really efficient way to sort of like multiply

1548
01:26:01,750 --> 01:26:06,900
the contribution of each individual and actually minimize the the

1549
01:26:07,700 --> 01:26:09,380
cost you have to incur.

1550
01:26:09,700 --> 01:26:11,140
Now flip that.

1551
01:26:11,940 --> 01:26:16,660
That is what writing grants and contract, like you know, applying for grants are.

1552
01:26:17,460 --> 01:26:22,420
And John Tubi once described this as, and I know there's empirical work on this, is like if

1553
01:26:22,420 --> 01:26:26,900
aliens wanted to design a system to waste scientist time as much as possible, what it

1554
01:26:26,900 --> 01:26:27,780
currently is would be.

1555
01:26:27,940 --> 01:26:30,820
He was like, this might be evidence of aliens who don't want us to learn anything.

1556
01:26:30,980 --> 01:26:35,330
Because it's exactly this thing of so you have a competition, which is like a lottery.

1557
01:26:35,570 --> 01:26:41,410
So a a ton of people all use their time to apply for something only a

1558
01:26:41,410 --> 01:26:42,450
small number of people have.

1559
01:26:42,530 --> 01:26:45,970
So you've multiplied the cost and you have a minimal benefit.

1560
01:26:46,050 --> 01:26:51,490
It's exactly the structure you would want to maximize the time cost of

1561
01:26:51,490 --> 01:26:54,050
scientists for minimal benefits.

1562
01:26:54,210 --> 01:26:59,890
It's it's exactly as an institutional structure, the exact worst way to uh

1563
01:27:00,540 --> 01:27:03,260
give resources to scientists.

1564
01:27:04,060 --> 01:27:08,380
I know there are some funding bodies that are experimenting with actual lotteries, and I'm

1565
01:27:08,540 --> 01:27:10,380
I find that quite an interesting innovation.

1566
01:27:10,700 --> 01:27:11,980
So it's much cheaper to enter.

1567
01:27:12,060 --> 01:27:14,700
You know, you you've got to pass the threshold, you've got to be a scientist of a certain

1568
01:27:14,700 --> 01:27:15,900
caliber, with a certain background.

1569
01:27:15,980 --> 01:27:16,060
Yeah.

1570
01:27:16,220 --> 01:27:17,580
So it's efficient expertise.

1571
01:27:17,740 --> 01:27:23,730
But after that, just yeah uh this is good enough and then we'll we'll throw out throw

1572
01:27:23,730 --> 01:27:28,130
out the lottery yeah and and some people get it and it if if that's available to all edible

1573
01:27:28,290 --> 01:27:32,290
eligible scientists we'll all get it once in once once in five, once in ten.

1574
01:27:32,610 --> 01:27:32,850
Right.

1575
01:27:32,930 --> 01:27:33,490
Uh yeah.

1576
01:27:33,890 --> 01:27:37,890
And there are other things like like I think like Templeton does a good job of like minimal

1577
01:27:38,130 --> 01:27:42,290
uh effort up front unless and so I like like there are sensible ways to do it.

1578
01:27:42,370 --> 01:27:46,200
But I've often thought like I wonder too like and I I kind of hate to say this, but I will

1579
01:27:46,200 --> 01:27:50,360
say this like, how much it is the ego of the funding agencies, where it's sort of like

1580
01:27:50,440 --> 01:27:56,200
people are coming to me and it feels really good, as opposed to really like, and I maybe

1581
01:27:56,200 --> 01:27:59,960
this could be gamed, but like funding agencies going out and like finding out like who do

1582
01:27:59,960 --> 01:28:01,160
people think is doing the best work?

1583
01:28:01,320 --> 01:28:06,120
And I mean, that can be gamed, but but it's a very different way of sort of approaching it,

1584
01:28:06,200 --> 01:28:08,040
which is sort of like, I'm not gonna take up their time.

1585
01:28:08,120 --> 01:28:13,490
I'm gonna like observe this community and see who could use the funding as opposed to

1586
01:28:13,490 --> 01:28:15,250
having people come to me.

1587
01:28:15,410 --> 01:28:20,370
Um, and maybe that's naive, but that is that's a very different way to think about how to

1588
01:28:20,370 --> 01:28:23,170
uh send resources to um to people.

1589
01:28:23,490 --> 01:28:23,650
Yeah.

1590
01:28:23,970 --> 01:28:26,450
I'm certain that all sectors have challenges like this.

1591
01:28:26,770 --> 01:28:31,410
We just don't we're not privy to the ones that are going on in journalism or other sectors.

1592
01:28:31,890 --> 01:28:35,800
But I'm sure we know I mean the the the the gi everybody knows the dynamics are off.

1593
01:28:35,960 --> 01:28:37,240
Nobody has the perfect solution yet.

1594
01:28:37,480 --> 01:28:37,880
Yeah, yeah.

1595
01:28:37,960 --> 01:28:38,920
So anyway, yeah.

1596
01:28:39,000 --> 01:28:41,800
I mean, so uh is there anything we should have asked you?

1597
01:28:42,200 --> 01:28:44,360
Oh um you should ask me about the history of Lindy Hop.

1598
01:28:44,600 --> 01:28:45,000
Okay, yes.

1599
01:28:45,080 --> 01:28:46,680
I actually did want to so please, yes.

1600
01:28:46,760 --> 01:28:52,600
I in my cartoon bubble of view, ostensive communication and uh Lindy Hop are are are next

1601
01:28:52,600 --> 01:28:53,080
to each other.

1602
01:28:53,160 --> 01:28:53,960
So please tell us about that.

1603
01:28:54,280 --> 01:28:56,760
I've listened I've listened to your past podcast, so I knew this question was coming.

1604
01:28:57,000 --> 01:28:57,560
Okay, good, I know.

1605
01:28:57,640 --> 01:28:57,720
Yeah.

1606
01:28:57,960 --> 01:29:01,790
The first time I was like, I said to my partner, when he asked me that, I'm going to tell

1607
01:29:01,790 --> 01:29:03,070
him to ask me about the history of Lindy Hop.

1608
01:29:03,390 --> 01:29:03,710
Fantastic.

1609
01:29:03,790 --> 01:29:05,630
Okay, so please go ahead.

1610
01:29:06,030 --> 01:29:11,070
Uh Lindy Hop is a is a dance, is a swing dance, partner dance, uh created in

1611
01:29:11,070 --> 01:29:14,910
African-American communities in Harlem, well, in several places, but in particular Harlem,

1612
01:29:15,070 --> 01:29:17,550
New York, in the 1920s and 1930s.

1613
01:29:17,790 --> 01:29:22,270
And it has a fascinating history, um, both in that original era, and then fewer people are

1614
01:29:22,270 --> 01:29:25,150
dancing it through the 50s and the 60s and 70s, still some.

1615
01:29:25,280 --> 01:29:27,920
And then it globalizes in the 80s and 90s.

1616
01:29:28,000 --> 01:29:32,880
And today it's so it was, it was in it was you know all over America in the late 30s and

1617
01:29:32,880 --> 01:29:33,360
the 40s.

1618
01:29:33,440 --> 01:29:35,200
It was the first pop music essentially.

1619
01:29:35,360 --> 01:29:40,960
Um, and then as I say, other music uh you know, you know what music is like, it changes and

1620
01:29:40,960 --> 01:29:42,480
fashion fashions change and so on.

1621
01:29:42,560 --> 01:29:46,480
Um so it fades a bit more into the background, and then it globalizes in the 80s and 90s,

1622
01:29:46,640 --> 01:29:51,410
and now there are little communities all over the world um dancing the Lindy Hop by far,

1623
01:29:51,490 --> 01:29:54,610
the strangely, by far the biggest apparently is in Seoul in Korea.

1624
01:29:54,850 --> 01:29:57,170
There are large communities in random places.

1625
01:29:57,650 --> 01:30:01,170
And obviously, most big cities have sizable communities.

1626
01:30:02,530 --> 01:30:05,090
Yeah, and there's one in Budapest, and then I dance there.

1627
01:30:05,890 --> 01:30:09,810
I'm giving a talk this time next week, I think, on the history of Lindy Hop, where I will

1628
01:30:09,810 --> 01:30:15,650
talk much more about its origins in the 20s and 30s in New York in particular.

1629
01:30:16,420 --> 01:30:21,940
I think it's very much connected to the advent of modernity and the machine age and the way

1630
01:30:21,940 --> 01:30:26,020
that they transformed the landscape and the economic opportunities, particularly of African

1631
01:30:26,100 --> 01:30:26,820
Americans.

1632
01:30:27,060 --> 01:30:31,220
And what they do in response to that is a huge cultural moment that's sometimes called the

1633
01:30:31,220 --> 01:30:33,540
Holland Renaissance, which has many dimensions.

1634
01:30:33,700 --> 01:30:39,060
It's it's books, uh, it's theatre, it's poetry, it's um it's political activism, and it's

1635
01:30:39,060 --> 01:30:41,860
also music, and music leads to the dancing.

1636
01:30:42,050 --> 01:30:43,650
And there's much much to say about that.

1637
01:30:43,890 --> 01:30:44,050
Yeah.

1638
01:30:44,210 --> 01:30:48,610
I mean, just in a really short amount, like, is there something 'cause I obviously I think

1639
01:30:48,690 --> 01:30:54,450
like a lot of people think well like dancing uh you you like dancing and it's sort of

1640
01:30:54,450 --> 01:30:56,450
incidental that you chose this kind.

1641
01:30:56,770 --> 01:30:57,410
Is that true?

1642
01:30:57,490 --> 01:31:01,810
Or is there something about this kind that is what what it what and what is it about that

1643
01:31:01,890 --> 01:31:06,370
that I always I always wanted to dance, um, like partner dance.

1644
01:31:06,450 --> 01:31:08,860
I didn't know how to uh as a twenty 20-year-old say.

1645
01:31:09,020 --> 01:31:11,660
Um, and I tried a few salsa lessons that did not bite.

1646
01:31:11,740 --> 01:31:13,900
Um, and then I went to a dance class swing dance.

1647
01:31:13,980 --> 01:31:16,780
I did not know what swing dance was, um, but that did bite.

1648
01:31:16,860 --> 01:31:18,060
And I think it's not a coincidence.

1649
01:31:18,220 --> 01:31:24,220
If you understand uh the sociology of the dance, where it comes from, and what's

1650
01:31:24,220 --> 01:31:28,780
built, physically built into the technique of the dance, I think it's not a surprise that

1651
01:31:28,870 --> 01:31:33,190
today's dancers are liberals, is one thing to say.

1652
01:31:33,350 --> 01:31:36,790
I think it's not a surprise that they're um globalized individuals.

1653
01:31:36,870 --> 01:31:41,990
I mean, I think that those values are built into the physical apparatus of the dance.

1654
01:31:42,230 --> 01:31:46,790
Um and so I didn't know what I was going into when I went into it, but I found something

1655
01:31:46,790 --> 01:31:50,630
that very much fitted with my values and my and my identity, my self-identity.

1656
01:31:51,110 --> 01:31:54,870
And the fact that it's now globalized raises interesting and difficult questions.

1657
01:31:54,950 --> 01:32:00,720
Um, as I say a lot and very very educated, um you know the demographic uh has a

1658
01:32:00,720 --> 01:32:04,240
high degree of education relative to the general population that's not good or bad that's

1659
01:32:04,240 --> 01:32:10,080
just you know a fact fact of the matter um and so today most dancers are not African

1660
01:32:10,080 --> 01:32:15,120
Americans and that's a difficult fact for you know given its origins which is absolutely in

1661
01:32:15,120 --> 01:32:18,640
the African American communities and it comes I think it you know in some ways it goes back

1662
01:32:18,640 --> 01:32:24,270
to the experience of exiting slavery relatively recently, uh rural uh environments in the

1663
01:32:24,270 --> 01:32:29,390
South, and then suddenly the younger generation are in a completely a modern new modern

1664
01:32:29,390 --> 01:32:32,190
world in the northern cities after the Great Migration.

1665
01:32:32,830 --> 01:32:35,150
So and it's absolutely an African American story.

1666
01:32:35,230 --> 01:32:38,990
And yet today most people who dance it are highly educated white people.

1667
01:32:39,390 --> 01:32:44,830
I don't think that's inherently problematic, but it does um it does, you know, I think it

1668
01:32:45,100 --> 01:32:50,380
places responsibilities on us as contemporary dancers to new d to educate new dancers um

1669
01:32:50,460 --> 01:32:53,660
and to keep that history in mind because otherwise we you know I think you change the

1670
01:32:53,660 --> 01:32:57,020
dance, and then in some respects if you change the dance too much, you disrespect uh the

1671
01:32:57,020 --> 01:32:57,980
origins of the dance.

1672
01:32:58,620 --> 01:33:02,940
And just in terms of like itself compared to other things, it's just very acrobatic but

1673
01:33:02,940 --> 01:33:07,100
very coordinated in the sense, or like I don't know how would you characterize the So I

1674
01:33:07,100 --> 01:33:10,380
think the I mean there's a lot the the best thing to do is to Google it.

1675
01:33:10,460 --> 01:33:16,250
But uh the next thing, um so it's a dance that is two

1676
01:33:16,250 --> 01:33:16,810
things at once.

1677
01:33:16,970 --> 01:33:19,850
So you you do it together, but you also have individual freedom.

1678
01:33:20,170 --> 01:33:26,170
So it's uh I'd say somewhat unlike uh say the Foxtrot, for example, which is sort of

1679
01:33:26,170 --> 01:33:29,930
one four legged dance thing that's very coordinated, and the skill is being very

1680
01:33:29,930 --> 01:33:31,930
coordinated as a four legged dance thing.

1681
01:33:32,090 --> 01:33:35,610
In the Lindy Hop, you're still very you're very clearly dancing with someone else and

1682
01:33:35,610 --> 01:33:39,530
you're coordinated, but both individuals are encouraged to be self expressive at the same

1683
01:33:39,530 --> 01:33:39,690
time.

1684
01:33:39,980 --> 01:33:43,500
And doing both those things, coordinating and being self expressive is that that's an

1685
01:33:43,500 --> 01:33:44,220
advanced skill.

1686
01:33:44,300 --> 01:33:47,260
Um it's thrilling to do when it goes well, it's completely thrilling.

1687
01:33:47,420 --> 01:33:51,420
And in some respects I think it's true, you know, you you I don't know if it's taking the

1688
01:33:51,580 --> 01:33:57,500
point too far, but you can also see uh um you can almost see it as being, you know, true

1689
01:33:57,500 --> 01:34:00,540
to the values of of America in some respects.

1690
01:34:00,940 --> 01:34:04,550
Um you know, there's a there's a the there's an individual freedom, but there's also a

1691
01:34:04,550 --> 01:34:06,390
recognition of collective responsibility.

1692
01:34:06,550 --> 01:34:11,670
And you know, I mean I know um Winter Massalis, a very famous jazz musician, has spoken um

1693
01:34:11,670 --> 01:34:16,230
a fair bit and written a fair bit about how jazz uh embodies some of the principles of the

1694
01:34:16,230 --> 01:34:17,350
American constitution.

1695
01:34:17,510 --> 01:34:21,030
And I think uh and swing and in swing in particular embodies some of the principles of the

1696
01:34:21,030 --> 01:34:21,750
American Constitution.

1697
01:34:21,830 --> 01:34:23,590
And I think you see that in the dance itself.

1698
01:34:24,180 --> 01:34:25,140
That's fantastic.

1699
01:34:25,300 --> 01:34:25,780
That's great.

1700
01:34:26,020 --> 01:34:32,020
Well, um, I think you also, Tom, embody uh coordination but

1701
01:34:32,020 --> 01:34:33,060
also autonomy.

1702
01:34:33,300 --> 01:34:37,940
And uh and you know, I do think, I mean, this this might be slightly, but like, you know, I

1703
01:34:37,940 --> 01:34:42,180
think uh you know, the you said the Harlem Renaissance.

1704
01:34:42,260 --> 01:34:46,420
I do think there's sort of a scientific renaissance happening in the evolutionary

1705
01:34:46,420 --> 01:34:50,830
behavioral sciences, that's hope so or or or psychology behavioral sciences anyway.

1706
01:34:50,910 --> 01:34:55,950
And I do think Tom, for your part, you are one of the the people kind of, you know, doing

1707
01:34:55,950 --> 01:34:58,110
some of the work that's that's moving that.

1708
01:34:58,350 --> 01:35:03,550
And um, you know, I hope I hope number one, uh, you know, genuinely like you know, as David

1709
01:35:03,550 --> 01:35:09,550
said, like your work it it is relevant and you're we people have attention on

1710
01:35:09,550 --> 01:35:15,470
you and I hope that uh I hope that um you know the the story

1711
01:35:15,920 --> 01:35:21,360
you know, stories real life doesn't always work out, but uh but I hope this is an instance

1712
01:35:21,360 --> 01:35:22,720
where things do work out.

1713
01:35:23,040 --> 01:35:26,480
Um but I do want to say thank you and you know your work is really incredible.

1714
01:35:26,560 --> 01:35:27,600
Please keep doing what you're doing.

1715
01:35:27,680 --> 01:35:32,880
And yeah, if if people are listening, please um reach out to Tom and um support him.

1716
01:35:33,040 --> 01:35:34,720
Um it's my my pleasure to be here.

1717
01:35:34,800 --> 01:35:38,560
I was very thrilled when I saw the podcast uh you know that on the social media feeds and

1718
01:35:38,560 --> 01:35:39,760
that you guys are doing this.

1719
01:35:39,840 --> 01:35:42,050
Um people should like and subscribe, as they say.

1720
01:35:42,290 --> 01:35:42,930
Oh thanks.

1721
01:35:44,370 --> 01:35:45,490
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

1722
01:35:45,650 --> 01:35:48,050
David, David, do you have any uh final final thoughts?

1723
01:35:48,610 --> 01:35:51,170
Uh yeah, just yeah, really great to talk to you.

1724
01:35:51,250 --> 01:35:53,250
I uh hope to have you on again at some point.

1725
01:35:53,330 --> 01:35:59,010
And yeah, you've shaped my own thinking uh a lot about communication and and signaling and

1726
01:35:59,010 --> 01:36:03,570
given me some some mental tools um that uh that have been very useful.

1727
01:36:03,650 --> 01:36:04,850
Um so I appreciate that.

1728
01:36:04,930 --> 01:36:05,170
Yeah.

1729
01:36:05,660 --> 01:36:05,900
Yeah.

1730
01:36:05,980 --> 01:36:11,980
So if you are part of a a funding agency or academic uh coordination uh

1731
01:36:12,060 --> 01:36:15,020
in institution, think about things, maybe reach out to Tom.

1732
01:36:15,420 --> 01:36:18,380
And then and then everybody should go check out the Lindy Hub.

1733
01:36:18,940 --> 01:36:19,580
Yeah.

1734
01:36:19,980 --> 01:36:20,300
Yeah.

1735
01:36:20,620 --> 01:36:23,820
If you're and if you're in but I don't know when you're when you're releasing this to the

1736
01:36:23,820 --> 01:36:29,050
world, but if you're in Budapest on uh next Tuesday, is the eighth, I'm giving a talk about

1737
01:36:29,050 --> 01:36:30,730
the history of the Lindy Hop at 6 p.m.

1738
01:36:31,130 --> 01:36:32,490
We'll be we'll be well past that.

1739
01:36:33,130 --> 01:36:34,810
Oh no, but that's great.

1740
01:36:34,890 --> 01:36:39,130
Uh but yeah, but uh Tom we'll we'll we'll post post uh your your website and things like

1741
01:36:39,130 --> 01:36:39,290
that.

1742
01:36:39,370 --> 01:36:42,010
But thanks so much for being on and it was my pleasure.

1743
01:36:46,250 --> 01:36:51,690
Well, David, aside from looking into the Lindy Hop, what can people do then now that we're

1744
01:36:51,690 --> 01:36:52,970
done with this episode?

1745
01:36:53,050 --> 01:36:56,170
Um going forward, aside from listening to the next one.

1746
01:36:56,600 --> 01:37:02,280
Um well they can like us, they can subscribe to our podcast, they can leave us a kind

1747
01:37:02,280 --> 01:37:06,520
review, they can visit our Patreon page and support us there.

1748
01:37:06,680 --> 01:37:11,320
Uh they can say nice things about us at social on social media, they can mention to a

1749
01:37:11,320 --> 01:37:16,440
friend, hey, I'm listening to this cool podcast called Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

1750
01:37:16,600 --> 01:37:20,040
Uh those are just some of the things that uh people can do to support us.

1751
01:37:20,680 --> 01:37:22,760
Should we get should we get t shirts?

1752
01:37:23,410 --> 01:37:24,290
Yeah, sure.

1753
01:37:24,370 --> 01:37:27,010
I'd wear a t shirt, maybe a hat, maybe a fanny pack.

1754
01:37:27,250 --> 01:37:27,810
Mm.

1755
01:37:27,970 --> 01:37:28,210
Okay.

1756
01:37:28,530 --> 01:37:33,170
We we should think we should maybe we should uh we can um well yeah, if people have ideas

1757
01:37:33,170 --> 01:37:38,210
about swag to to put Yeah, if you have swag, yeah swag ideas, um we're open to feedback.

1758
01:37:38,690 --> 01:37:44,130
Uh maybe tell us if you'd prefer a fanny pack or a hat

1759
01:37:44,740 --> 01:37:46,340
or maybe some underwear.

1760
01:37:46,500 --> 01:37:47,940
Um the sky's the limit.

1761
01:37:48,260 --> 01:37:49,540
David, do you need a fanny pack?

1762
01:37:49,700 --> 01:37:51,220
Should somebody just send you a fanny pack?

1763
01:37:51,300 --> 01:37:52,660
It sounds like you need a fanny pack.

1764
01:37:52,980 --> 01:37:55,300
I could I could really use a fanny pack.

1765
01:37:55,460 --> 01:37:59,220
Um I've been looking uh far and wide for the best fanny pack.

1766
01:37:59,540 --> 01:38:01,140
I've been I've been reading fanny pack reviews.

1767
01:38:02,660 --> 01:38:04,340
I'm really trying to make a good purchase.

1768
01:38:04,660 --> 01:38:08,660
So if you if you know if you know of a good fanny pack, just you know, we'll send David an

1769
01:38:08,660 --> 01:38:11,540
email or the podcast we'll we'll send you the mailing address.

1770
01:38:11,860 --> 01:38:12,900
That would that would really help me out.

1771
01:38:13,220 --> 01:38:13,540
Fantastic.

1772
01:38:14,020 --> 01:38:14,260
Good.

1773
01:38:14,420 --> 01:38:16,190
Well we on that note.

1774
01:38:16,350 --> 01:38:17,310
We'll see you next week.

1775
01:38:17,710 --> 01:38:19,070
See you next week.