Language and Communication with Thom Scott-Phillips
2025-09-09 12:01:00.000 +00:00

Uh, I'm David Pinsov. I'm David Petrozowski. And this is Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast actually evolutionary psychology. That's right by actual evolutionary psychologists. That's right. So yeah. Enjoy. David, uh today we have another episode of this podcast. Yes, and it is about the thing that we are doing right now, which is communicating. Oh right. It's uh uh I'm aware that I'm communicating to other people and I am behaving in a certain way because I'm aware that other people will well yeah, it gets complicated. Yeah, yeah. I mean you're doing a poor job of it, but um normally w humans do a good job of this thing called communication. Uh and we you know we we evaluate the things that other people say based on how relevant it

is to the goals that we're pursuing, and it's about shaping what's inside your head uh based on what I think you think, uh I think. It gets very complicated very quickly, but thankfully we have um a wonderful guest. Yes, yes, Tom Scott Phillips. Yeah, who really knows a lot about communication. And I like I think he it is like an Alice in Wonderland situation where I think I understand language and what it is, or like how grammar works. And then Tom comes and says sort of things, and I'm like, whoa, that's very different the way I think. And you know, by the end, I'm sort of convinced that uh there's uh one needs to sort of understand things quite a bit differently. And so we talk about all kinds of interesting things like art, art and how that works, um,

what grammar is, whether or not grammar or language is sort of quote unquote innate, ate all kinds of different things. Yep. And we even get into uh dancing at toward the end and also whether non-evolutionary psychology is possible. Oh right. Yeah. And uh Lindy Hop. Fans of Lindy Hop, or if you feel things about the Lindy Hop uh or dancing in general, stay tuned. You could even dance to the episode if if you feel so inclined. Oh yeah. Or for the next little uh segment of music. Yeah, dance dance to the music. It's pretty danceable. It's got a beat. It does, yeah. Okay. Sounds good. All right. We'll see you in a second. See ya. Today we have uh very wonderful, very special guest, Tom Scott Phillips.

Um, really nice to have you here. Um, and Tom, uh we uh you know i've been thinking a lot about what to say about you as a guest um but i actually wanted to start with uh with one thing which is uh this paper called expression unleashed um that you did with christoph um heinz and the this paper and then i think you have another paper that's about museums is that right or ostensive communication. I have a paper about uh it's called the art experience. Oh right. Experience of going to modern art museums and how it's evolutionary and so communication. Yeah. And so there's uh for me, you know, like I have a running list of like um in actually David is one of these people, like people who have actually like taught me something, um, uh

which is sort of meta because a lot of your work is about like people should say relevant things and they learn something. And if you if they say something that you learn from, you'll listen to them. Um so hopefully you're listening to this podcast because you're learning something too. And if not, I'm sorry, and you should listen to something else. I shouldn't have said that, we should cut that out. But um, but uh but I think like this expression release paper and this art paper um really taught me something about the life and the world. And like whenever we have somebody on, I think about what I think about the person. And for me, I have a little cartoon bubble, which is like ostensive communication for you.

Um, and for those, I think what you study is really interesting, but it's also really subtle. It's kind of like theory of mind. Like the first time I heard theory of mind, I was like, why do you even need a system for that? Because it's so obvious we attribute mental states, the idea there's a mechanism for that. And I think communication, and especially like ostensive communication is so obvious it's so baked into us and who we are that there's so much instinct blindness and Dave and I talked about instinct blindness. Can you talk about uh and can you like dis dis um disabuse us of our instinct blindness? What is ostensive communication? Um and just sort of just as a bedrock here of sort of why do we need something like that?

Yeah. So there's many ways to answer this question. And if you let me talk, I'll probably talk for two hours. So you have to stop me at some point. That's great. Yeah. So the way here here's how I think about it these days. Uh I think the useful analogy is with locomotion. So locomotion is a super basic biological task. Uh maybe not all, but almost all organisms have to do it in one way or another. But there's more than one way of doing it in the world. So some organisms swim, some walk, some fly, some crawl, and so on. You can and you can taxonomise those different ways, those different modes in a few different ways, arguably. Um, we take communication to be a basic, you know, it's communication.

It's an uncontroversial concept. We don't have to say anything more. Um, I don't think that's true. I think communication comes in more than one variety. Um And I think in particular, what humans do is a distinctive variety. I mean, all species have things that they do that are distinctive by definition, otherwise, they wouldn't be species. And one of the things that humans do is they communicate in a particular way, which the jargon is, as you say, ostensive communication. And what that means in particular is that human communication is predicated on expressing and uh recognizing mental states. So the naive notion of communication is you know what computers do. So you sometimes call the code model or a conduit metaphor.

You've got some information, you put it in a box, you send it along a channel, maybe there's some information loss, and you've got a decoding mechanism. And as long as the encoding and the decoding mechanisms are calibrated to one another, then you can unpack it at the other end and so on. That's what computers do. Um and sometimes clarify like all the information is in that packet, sort of right. Yeah, I mean, even the word information is useful because information is not a physical thing that you can put in anything. But uh, but yeah, uh it's all there, and there there are benefits that's a simplified that clearly that's not in everything to say about you know language use, just to take the most obvious example.

But it's sometimes useful to think about human communication in those terms, but it also has its limits because it's a metaphor, and it you know, humans are not just you know encoding decoding machines, right? Uh, and thinking about what humans do as expressing and recognizing mental states, and then seeing all the stuff, whether it's gestures or pointing or pantomime or language use as ways of doing ways of expressing and recognizing mental states. That's that's the sort of the inversion that I think the evolutionary perspective brings to light. Right. And just to make it concrete, like I would just imagine like a mother and a child at the zoo, and they walk up to a cage, and the mother points and says, There.

Yeah. Right. And if you take like this very if you built a robot and it was just sort of like it it encoded the word there, that's just an information about like a location, right? Absolutely. There's no, there's nothing more about that. And so reading in the natural thing we all do, which is that um there is the animal the reason why we're here is to see animals. I'm pointing there. And the most relevant reason to point to a location is that there's an animal and you don't know where it is. Um, you know, and so like all of the all that stuff that we so effortlessly read into, if you try to build a robot to do it, is really, really hard. Absolutely. And and then also that means that what language is, if I understand what you're saying,

Tom, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is like the real thing about communication is the thing that people actually say is super sparse. Like you've ever read a like a um uh transcript of communication, it's like almost impossible to understand what's being talked about, especially if there's no context or pragmatic cues. And so it's such minimal information, but it's just enough to tip and activate all the mental state attribution and intention. Is that sort of what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's one way of glossing what I'm saying. I mean, there's there's much more under the surface, but yes. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's uh oh, good you good you go, David. Yeah. Is is what you're saying basically that um human communication requires a

sophisticated theory of mind or ability to model others' mental states. And communication uh to to some extent, or at least human-style communication cannot occur without a recognition of mental states. And maybe communication takes place um in other organisms and maybe they don't have the requisite theory of mind, and that would be a different kind of communication. But human communication is always embedded in a set of representations about what you're thinking, what you're intending, what I'm thinking, that you're thinking, that I'm thinking, and so forth. Um, and you cannot understand language uh uh outside of that uh socially uh situated context. I think that's absolutely right. Um one common objection to the, I mean let's raise and

deal with a common objection to this way of thinking about what's going on with human communication, which is surely you don't think that David's example, mother goes to the zoo and the small child, and you think that the child is inferring what the mother might be intending about the child's mental states. And actually, when we get into the details, it's even more complicated than that. These many layers. Um I think that that objection is misplaced. So in a in another recent paper, um, Christoph found this. My co-author, he found this beautiful uh quote um going back a few hundred years to do with Descartes and Berkeley and theory of vision. So around that time, you know, they've got this idea of light waves uh you know going

through the lens and hitting the back of the eye, and people saying, Well, okay, that's makes some sense, but then how could you see distance if that's how vision is working, right? How does depth perception work? And Descartes' answer is you don't have one perspective, you have two perspectives, right? You have two eyes, and with two eyes, you can triangulate Descartes' banger, as David would say, banger philosopher. Yeah. He says you've got you've got two perspectives and you can triangulate between them. And his contemporaries, there's a quote from George Berkeley, who's a pretty well-known uh philosopher of the time, that says, this is madness because there's no way you're telling me that ordinary people are doing trigonometry in their heads just every time they look

around the world. Like maybe educated people can do this, but the man on the street cannot do this. Yeah. That was the argument, the counter-argument to Descartes at the time. Yeah. And I think what's going on, you know, as you started this conversation, you know, descriptively what's going on in human communication is hugely complex. Vision science is complex. The study of human communication is complex. But phenomenologically, it's utterly trivial. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's a that's an interesting fact. But I I don't think the fact that it's phenomenal phenomenologically simple means that we need to have simple explanations of the underlying cognitive processes. Yeah, that's like basically the summary of like why cognitive science and psychology have

sort of struggled, is super strong priors that the way it feels corresponds to how it works. And we've talked a lot about that on this podcast. And yeah, no, for sure. Uh Marvin Minsky had this, you know, thing where he talked about the history of AI. And it AI started with what seemed like really difficult things like college level math. Like and the AI was doing great on this and chess and checkers and they're like okay good buckle up everybody we're gonna have robots in like a day and then they started to do things like vision and just seeing blocks and just how hard that was and how when the blocks were rotated or the lighting was different it became really really hard and even to this day like with as good as like all these like you know robots that are being built for

hopefully not killing people but probably mainly mainly are uh uh, you know, the they're still not very good at like even object recognition and the things that like basically his argument was that the things that feel easy are really hard and the things that seem hard are easy, uh in terms of like the mechanics, because the difference between sort of like building blocks or like walking around and navigating the world, these are things that have had a super long evolutionary history. there's a ton of RD from natural selection. And then the little bit of variation, like, can you do math better than me? It's actually computationally trivial, but it's just something we didn't evolve to do. And so, like the things that we take for granted, like communication, like walking around

and seeing and recognizing objects, finding a joke funny, like, like, you know, like actually requires a lot of common sense knowledge about the world and like per David's theory of humor. And so, um, so no, that's exactly right. I think like what you're describing like summarizes the history of like why we failed is we've we've not allowed there to be enough space and room for theories of complexity and things that feel simple. Speculating a little bit on the examples you just gave, it strikes me that the ones that the that AI finds easy are ones which involve a degree of abstraction from the physical and the social world. Yeah. Mathematics. Um, Uh but the things that involve navigating a physical world

or even harder, navigating a social world with bodies in it, that is that is a really complicated task. And we're we're you know, we're at the beginning, frankly. Totally. Um one one um wonderful way that you have changed my perspective uh is on the nature of grammar and language acquisition. So um I sort of saw myself as a Chomskyan just kind of by default because oh I'm a l evolutionary psychologist. The Chomskyan view is that, you know, language is an adaptation and it must be innate to some degree. You know, I bought into the the the pinker uh language instinct argument. I just assume, yeah, obviously, you know, we have innate hardware, we have an innate grammar, and um and and that allows us to to speak language.

But um reading you um disabused me of that perspective and made me realize that no, uh grammar doesn't have to be innate. Uh it probably isn't. It's probably better understood as a byproduct. And language itself may not even be that clearly delineated as an adaptation in its own right, as opposed to lying on a continuum with other kinds of social conventions and social norms and social cognition more broadly. And so that was a really cool perspective shift for me. I'm curious where where you stand on the perennial debate, you know, between Chomsky and the others. How quote unquote innate is language? Do you do you know take that to be a serious question or not? Where do you uh situate yourself in the linguistics debate?

Definitely a serious question. It's an enormous one that's taken up the time of many, many careers. So I'll try and do it in a few minutes. You have two minutes, Tom. Two minutes. So Chomsky has the you know a well-known view uh that um he would say language, it might be better characterized as um syntactic structure of some kind or another is innate. Uh and Pinker, uh, along with Paul Bloom, who was a relatively junior colleague at the time in 1990, they published a very influential paper, Natural Language and Natural Selection. Um, where they dis well, I should have given a bit more context. Chomsky believes there's something innate, but he's pretty hostile to adaptationist perspectives on the mind in general, and he speculated through the 80s

uh, that you know, perhaps it's you know incidental transmutation, we can't really know too much about it. There's not much point to the speculation. And Pinker being on the one hand a Chomskyan, but on the other hand, an evolutionary psychologist, publishes this paper that says, no, there's no contradiction here. You can believe both things at the same time. Uh and yeah, so I I and I started my when I started my PhD 15 years after that, um, I was definitely an adaptationist. My part of my origin story, I've I've listened to other podcasts, and part of my origin story is you know involves some similar stories. And I was an adaptationist because partly because of Pinker, partly because of other

popularizers. It's a very, very slippery concept. What is this thing that is supposed to have to be designed in some way or another? And I ended up being I ended up actually finding you know adaptationist perspectives of uh to be of use when thinking more broadly about communication. And so for many years, like 15 years really, I was agnostic about the questions you're asking me about, David, like the nature of grammar. And I was writing, thinking, researching much more on communication and its many manifestations. You know, there's aspects of children's development, this connects to things like commitment to art theory, it connects to lots of domains. Um, and but only recently, last five years or so, I've started thinking more about grammar.

uh, and I've been persuaded by the arguments of those who disagree with the Chomskis and the Pinkers of the world. Um so now I'm gonna oversimplify, and many linguists are gonna hate this oversimplification. But um on the one side you can put um what you could all call words and rules approaches, which is what generative grammar would be. So you have a you have words and you have rules for combining them and you have some awareness of which rules you know allowed and which ones are not and so on. And the other side is an is an approach some commonly called construction grammar. It's a lot more under the surface, but the basic idea is that there's a single unit that is a foundation of languages, which is called constructions.

And constructions can be concrete, they can be words, but they can also be quite abstract. So my my go-to example is like what's X doing Y? What's Tom doing with that girl? What's this fly doing in my soup? What's David doing chatting to John, right? And you can put another construction inside the empty slots, inside the X and the Y. And by doing that construction allows you to ask for a resolution of some incongruity. It has a function. So all constructions are mappings between a form and a function, some communicative function. And in that way, you can you using language is throwing constructions together and throwing all these micro convention the these micro functions together. One quick question is that Minsky had this idea of frames.

Is that sort of related to that? Maybe. Can I come to that in a moment? Please, yeah, sorry. So because I'm I'm gonna come back around to David's question. So that way of that constructionist approach, the work I've done recently pairs that with the adaptationist approach to communication. And I the the argument I'm developing is that constructions are conventions for doing the adaptive task that human communication is designed to do, which is expressing and revealing intentions. So all this stuff in grammar are cultural conventions that we've built as communities that allow us to do the expression and recognition of mental states much more easily, much more efficaciously, much more micro precision than we otherwise would do.

Otherwise, we'd be pointing at some, but we can be able to do that. I want to unpack just the the depth of that idea because I see it as kind of a mind-blowing idea. This idea that um grammar um is not innate, but is a set of social conventions. So uh where we situate the verb and the noun and the adjective, the these are social conventions that are essentially no different from driving on the same side of the road, or you know, saying bless you when a person sneezes, uh working from nine to five using the metric system. These are all part of the same category of social conventions that allow us to uh uh mutually benefit uh from interacting with each other. Uh uh and um in the same way that uh social conventions differ uh across

cultures, grammars might differ across cultures. Uh is that is that is that basically the idea that you're proposing? Yes. Uh the the short answer is yes, the longer answer is yes, but so uh so so yes, that's all right. There's a there is a key difference. Um, and that is that by using these conventions in this communicative way, uh, it's so, it's so this is a Pinker-esque thing to say, it's so obviously powerful, useful, it completely changes the nature of an organ, you know, that species' existence. That you, you know, it's not a surprise that there'll be downstream adaptations to do this more efficaciously. Now, those downstream adaptations don't need to be the structure of syntax. There's no particular, I don't see any particular reason for that, but they will be an

enhanced memory for constructions. We all know to know a language is to know a vast number of constructions, um, all sorts of computational um capacities that enable us to use them very far, you know, to pick up on them, to produce them extremely fast, instantaneously, and also things involved in interaction like fine-grained precision or fine-grained sensitivity to timing and contingency and interaction. There's pauses, all that sort of stuff. Maybe even the white slare of the eye so you can catch people's attention more easily. Fine-grained control of the motor motor apparatus of hands and the mouth. There's lots of stuff that enables us to do these tasks. Well, once we're doing it, once we're doing it linguistically, we'll then do it

linguistically in a very um finely designed way. You know, you know, it's a very Darwinian thing to say. Yeah. So sort of that's not true of driving on the left-hand side of the road. Right. That's yeah. And so just like to understand it's the idea is that sort of like the fact that it's there's open parameters. So it could be that um that it could be like, for example, this is how you get sign language, right? Where the the fact that it's with our hands, the machinery for sort of these are the conventions or these are the this the things that stand for this communicative attent intent, that's an open parameter. So it's not specific to like one modality. And that openness is itself evidence, if I understand the claim, that it's this

higher level sort of point system that then has concomitant adaptations. Is that fair? That I don't know if I completely follow that. Maybe that may be a good gloss of what I'm saying. Um, I'll try and put it in different words and you can tell me if it's similar or not. So humans, when they communicate, they can use any any like anything they have, right? I could use I could use this banana if I wanted to make a certain point. I I am actually or it's code. We could tap on yeah, we could tap on a desk. We can use our bodies, we can point, we can and we can do it in an improvised way. If my mouth is full because I'm chewing and I and my arms are full, I might point with my nose or something. We you know we can't.

You're describing my time in Germany not speaking Germany. There we go, exactly. I mean, my mouth was full of uh pretzels and sausage when I was in Germany, so yeah. We can use anything. Um, it just so happens that the the if you share a language with someone, then the most convenient thing to use uh isn't a part of my body, it's it's shared knowledge of a convention, um or a whole world of conventions. Uh and that that's just what we happen to have to hand, but it can be, um, you know, and those conventions, if you're using spoken language, those conventions are spoken, but they can be gestured as well if you're using sign language. Yeah, let me can I just like push on this? Because I think people might have like uh questions.

And so let me just sort of push on this a little bit. So like one question is sort of what work is is the idea of constructions doing? So what exactly does that mean? And if there is design for basically what people might intuitively think of as like language in the downstream, does that amount to the same claim that that language is an adaptation? Um, and then what is up with over like things like over-regularization? Like kids say goad and nobody has taught them to do that. So this is part of this argument that kids are learning rules of grammar. Yeah. So a construction is, I mean, it's a very odd idea in language science. It's blossomed in the last 30 years or so. But it's an old idea. Um, it's a mapping between a form and a function.

And as I said earlier, I gave gave a few examples, words and what's X doing Y. It can be even more abstract. So subject, verb, object, transitive actions. And you just plug other things in. And the complic complicated sentences have all sorts of constructions plugged into one another and interacting with one another. Right. And their functions are complementary. The functions are working with it of the each individual construction is working together to build up the meaning right sentence. Now is the idea that those construction systems evolve for other functions and that's why language is not an adaptation. So those those those those that those constructions are all conventions. The word banana is j it's nothing more than a conventional way that you and I have to ref

to raise the salience of objects like this. Right. But the st what I mean is like the machinery for sorry like like the example you gave where there's sort of like why like why X is X or something like that. What's X doing Y? What's X doing Y? The machinery that represents that is the idea that that machinery was for some other function. It evolved because you you need them in that machinery in order for all that content to get plugged in. Yeah, I'm suggesting that the machinery to um host form function pairs and to indeed not just to host some but a vast number of them and to plug them together. Yeah, that to me is most plausibly explained as an adaptation to the fact that humans are a linguistic species.

So we become a communicative species. Humans they develop conventions super fast. Once they're using conventions regularly, they're gonna, you know, the the world, the ecology, the social ecology has changed. There's going to be selectional pressure on using those conventions quickly, easily, fine-grained manner. So you you get selection for the capacity to host uh enormous number. Right. So there are the idea is that the language communication system, there are evolved structures, but they're much more compositional than this old view. The word composition was a tricky one. So there's a sense in which what you're saying is true, but it composed composition was a tricky word with within linguistics.

It has a bunch of overlapping and not all overlapping and not all the same meanings. Okay. So I'm a bit I I can hear the linguists in the background. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, there's all the audiences. Yeah. Yeah. But roughly, yes. Okay. Yeah. I mean I th the way I sort of think of your work is is s situated in a larger trend where we've sort of gone from this view as as man the rational animal, that we're solitary, intelligent thinkers, that we just puzzle things out individually in our heads. Uh and um so, you know, uh it used to be thought that the the reason why human brains were so big is is so that we could reason and use tools and and figure things out. Um and increasingly the uh a more popular and I think more more plausible given the

evidence view is that uh really we're it's it's better to think of of humans not as the rational animal or as the intelligent animal, but as the social animal. Um and so one of the biggest predictors of uh primate brain size is not whether they use tools or something like that. It's how big their group is, what the social challenges uh there are in the primate's environment. Um and humans have extremely large uh groups, extremely complicated social environments. Probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, causes of human brain expansion was just the immensely complicated social lives that we have to navigate. There's of course recent work by uh Hugo Mercier arguing that reason, reasoning, our

ability to think through uh syllogisms, if P then Q, uh that this uh uh faculty did not evolve for helping us make better decisions or or uh uh think more rationally. It evolved in a social context. It evolved to help us convince other people who we might uh have conflicts of interest with and justify uh our behaviors in a way that might defend our our reputations. And so even, you know, reasoning, this sort of quintessentially uh a solitary, rational thing, is actually a deeply social uh thing. And I th and I see what you're doing with language is is is very much analogous. Where it used to be believed that, you know, um language is about transmitting a a piece of uh of information from one head to another so that we could all understand the world uh

more accurately. And so I'm sending you the code, you have to decode my code so that you understand uh uh uh the world around us. But you're basically taking that view and saying, no, um, we have to understand this as being situated within our social niche and uh uh and view it as as not necessarily transmitting information, but trying to get inside another person's head. Um and get inside their head getting inside your head. And in many ways, trying to uh manipulate what's inside their head uh for your advantage, uh uh or or to mutually manipulate the contents of each other's head for for mutual advantage. Um so that's sort of how I see your work. Would you buy that that overarching uh framework?

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. So um, you know, uh well, if I can find the time and the space to do it, one of my ambitions for the future is to, you know, maybe a special issue, maybe that I mean I think there's much work to do getting the people, the sorts of names you just mentioned together, and articulating in detail the idea of social mind. So it's I mean, you mentioned Hugo Mercier and his work on reasoning. Um, there's plenty of work these days on emotions as well, some of emotions which were historically called self-um, what are they called? Uh self-conscious. Self-conscious, thank you. Yeah, self-conscious emotions, having rethought as social adaptations. Um there's a guy who did his PhD at CEU at Central European University called Johannes Maa,

and he's done work on um episodic memory. So rem remembering events and making arguments a lot to the effect that that is we we do that not in order to sort of recall the past for our own internal purposes, but so that we can act well in in future cases of persuasion and argumentation and and managing social relations. Um I think yeah I I do think that most I don't know if it's all but certainly a very large amount of what's distinctive about our species comes down to the complexity and the size of our of our social groups. Yeah. Let me just try one more uh a different tack to make sure I understand. So one of the bringing back to Minsky, one of Minsky's criticisms of Chomsky. So Chomsky this sort of narrative is you know sort of started the cognitive revolution.

And I'm a big fan of Chomsky. I mean, everybody, you know, huge contribution and arguing that this is part of our natural endowment. It's part of our species, typical, readily developing stuff. It's just part of our biological endowment, like a trunk or a trunk and an elephant or something. And that was really controversial, really important. But Minsky's argument was Chomsky by sort of starting the cognitive revolution in contrast to the behaviorists, right? Chomsky was arguing with Skinner. It was a great that that review is a great thing to read, by the way, Chomsky's criticism of Skinner. Minsky's argument is that what Skinner did was actually behaviorism. Because what uh Chomsky was doing still at the end of the day was sort of giving people

sentences and asking them to say, is this grammatical or not? And it was sort of the the latent structure of what theories are necessary to explain the behavior of people saying this is grammatical or not. And and Minsky's argument is that that that misses the entire hard problem of whether it's grammatical, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is exactly what you're describing, Tom, which is sort of the communication. And I think like the Minsky's frames, and this is why I'm like, you know, thinking about this is like Minsky's idea about frames, which is like from the 70s, which was just that these are different sort of like cribs or ontologies for sort of like it's almost like this form structure thing where it'd be sort of like there's a frame for sort of like physical

transitions. So like an occlusion event, right? That um that uh when occlusion is detected, there's a there's a system for representing what happens, you know, like it's and there's cues for detecting occlusion. Uh there's clue there's there's an there's frames for temporal changes. And so Minsky's claim is that we have all of these frames that are sort of what make our ability to do things like navigate a room. Like if you don't represent occlusion, all of a sudden you're just like, oh my God, like, you know, the hallway is not out there. I would never go to the hallway, right? Like if I never thought it was still there. And so all this machinery for representing things like the passage of time, what happens

when an event, a physical event happens, what happens when a social event happens, in his argument was the hard part of communication, and what communication really is is the communication or getting people coordinated about the content and frames that are being activated. And it almost sounds like maybe Tom Scott Phillips is sort of picking up the Chomsky or sorry, the Minsky. I meant Minsky. The Minsky claim. Is that is that sort of fair? May maybe. I have not read Minsky since I was a grad student. Some time some many years ago now. Um maybe, but you you uh you've persuaded me that I I should go back to that exactly. Okay, great. But what you're saying sounds um a lot uh yes similar lines to what I'm saying.

Fantastic. Okay, so now I understand it. Thank you. Sorry for yeah, it's it's uh it's wonderful. So uh I mean it it may be the case. So I I I'd need to do my reading to check, but it may be that one can understand a construction uh as a my as a frame of a of a very specified kind. Exactly. Yeah. And yeah. And I think this is just this is a good example of science where like what do different scientists mean by different words? We even you and I, as close as we are, Tom, like, you know, there's just d we have different reading histories. And so yeah, this this is this is great. Yeah. Good. Should we get into art? Please. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, my my thing with art. So this thing, let me just like fill this in and you please talk about it.

It's like I always found it weird. Like you go into a a place and there's like nothing on the walls. And then there's like an object in a glass case, you know? And being an anthropologist about like human existence, I was always like, that's weird, and it really makes this thing seem like important. And I would always like, you know, and this idea of like, you know, you pop a urinal to make the point. Um, But it always struck me as sort of weird, but I never went further than that. And then this paper on art was amazing to me. Can you sort of tell people who haven't read the paper or even who have? Can you remind them sort of like what is this thing about art? Yeah. Yeah. So well, the paper itself is called The Art Experience.

And I, you know, I should immediately give credit to the first author, Kate McCallum. You know, she definitely led the work. So I work with mostly not entirely, but um, when I think about human communication, I work with a framework that's commonly called relevance theory. Uh, and the central idea, one of the central ideas in relevance theory um is that what audiences do when they pick up on a communicative stimulus, uh technically an ostensive stimulus, as we talked about earlier, when they pick up on an ostensive stimulus, well, your basic problem is how what is this, what does this thing mean? What is this thing doing in the world? How can you know there's an infinite number of things someone might mean by this?

And what you uh and the answer to that question is you you assume that it's the most relevant thing that the communicator could have done, given what they want to do to your mind and given all the communicative tools available to them. And that's there's a lot packed into that, but uh that that the the essential idea is um we are predisposed as audience. Well, when we pick up on the fact that some something, some agent has re has raised bought our attention to some stimulus in the world, then we presume that it's especially relevant for us, given what they want to do. And our our job is essentially as as audiences, and we do it, you know, it's spontaneous. You can't turn it off even if you want to.

So if you think about film spoilers, someone can tell you they're about to spoil the film that you don't want them to spoil, and you can't turn off your comprehension process. You will assume, you will interpret on the basis of a presumption of relevance, even though you don't want to. Um, and what we think is that that's what essentially what's going on in certainly contemporary art galleries. So they're these white cubes, these white walls, high ceilings, and so on, quite commonly. And then as you say, something is presented, it draws your attention, it's there for a reason, it's there for you in some sense. And so by being there for you, uh, it uh it triggers that that search for for some notion of some interpretations that are worth processing.

The interesting thing about art, so think the think of a continuum. Language is somewhere in the middle or maybe slightly towards one side. Even further down, more even more precise. We use these constructions in very precise ways, for example, when we do mathematics, right? It's hyper precise and we yeah that's what at the other extreme you can you you can raise expectations of relevance but not provide much guidance right about exactly what it is your audience should take away. And I think that's what good artists do. They produce stimuli that if the they're put on the white wall and then if you engage with them, presuming that they're relevant in some way and you search for some interpretation,

what I take away may be very different to what you take away, but whoever whoever it is that comes into contact with it takes something away. And that's the skill of a modern artist, right? To produce something that when it's engaged within those terms, uh produces something worthwhile for the audience. That's interesting. I mean, could w would you view it as sort of analogous to a game? So we can think of games as sort of practicing our our cognitive skills. Um, you know, if you're doing a word search, you're practicing your visual search abilities. Um, if you're playing, you know, a a physical sport, you're you're practicing how to maneuver your body through space or throw a projectile or or or whatever.

And these are pr presumably, you know, useful school uh useful skills to be able to practice. If you play wrestling, that's going to be really important for in the future if you if you get into a fight. Um so um it could be that, you know, since language is is such an important skill for us to master that we get pleasure from practicing it. And it could be that art is one way of practicing the skill of trying to infer someone's intentions when they might might otherwise be opaque or uncertain. So you could think of art as a kind of challenge where like the artist is presenting you with something, uh, you know that they're presenting with you with something, and you know that it's going to be relevant in some way, otherwise they wouldn't be putting it in front

of you. And the puzzle that you're trying to solve is, well, why? Why are they putting this in front of me? What are they trying to tell me? And there's a kind of pleasure we get in playing that game and practicing our ability to do that kind of detective work of, you know, what what is the meaning of this stimulus? Um would you buy that uh uh lens? Yeah, I like that. I haven't thought about um about art in terms of of puzzles and games, but I quite like that. And it reminds me of um if you read, you know, uh a popular book that's sort of how how to navigate an art gallery, you know, it's plenty of people interested and find the world a bit opaque. And it's very common advice to almost verbalize for yourself, what do I see?

And I remember doing this myself, well, you know, in my early 20s and looking at uh going to big art galleries and being a bit confused, but just trying to like say to myself, okay, that's there, that's there, this is connected to that, and and by by doing that, I suppose as practice in a way, I I found I enjoyed modern art more and more than what I did that. So that that meshes with what you're saying, yeah. And and it's a it's a beautiful illustration of the fact that language is on a continuum with many different kinds of communication. So just as the words I'm saying can can communicate information about my intentions and motives and beliefs, you know, the paintings on my wall are are are also a similar are are

directly analogous to the words coming out of my mouth and in terms of it's trying to you know send certain signals to you about the kind of person I am. Um and and and so uh viewing you know looking at a painting uh as you know kind of linguistic in in terms of the exercise, I think is a is a is an insightful way of understanding what what communication is and that it's not just uh uh words and their direct uh meanings, but it's it's much more uh nuanced and rich than that. Yeah, and there's two things to say. So one is that when we wrote the paper, Kate was very keen. Whenever we came close to saying anything like what you did, to be careful, because there's a history of people saying, Oh, you know, art is like a language and that that history

involves people talking too much about codes and thinking the meanings are encoded in the artwork. And that is that you know that's not a well received view in um in art theory. And as you know, we have a different take on what's going on in language. And as you say, there's a continuum. I mean, it's clearly a multidimensional space. Humans have cognitive adaptations to express and recognize intentions. And they do this in all sorts of ways. By far the most salient is language use, but there's many others. And taxonomizing that space of the different ways we do things, um, that's work that hasn't been done. I'd love to do it. Um and maybe just useful to even just to zoom in on language, you can see the take a

word uh a word like uh seven, right? That's a pretty pre it's not a completely precise, but it's pretty precise as a notion. Like it's quite hard to um, you know, maybe in some context we'll use it atypically, but seven's moderately precise. Then you take a word like effervescence or love. Like these are much more open-ended. Um, and I I in some ways what I'm saying, what you've just glossed, is we can push beyond language to extremes. I think if we push beyond the precision, we get towards mathematics, which is hyper precise. And if we go the other way, we get towards modern art. And as I say, I think there's more than one dimension there. But that the essential idea is there's a big space. Yeah.

And then just uh what what given that it's communicative, it's also then interesting to the extent that you're interested in what's being communicated, if that's your interpretation. So for me, for example, you know, if I go to art museum in Berlin and it's about like 1930s Berlin before the Third Reich, it's communicative, but it's communicative about like a past time that's really interesting for me to think about. Because then you're thinking about what is the artist um communicating and what what content. And that's a way to sort of time travel to a different time or place. So all the things that function for communication, right? Of this is a different human with a different experience talking about or describing a

different time or experience, those things are opened up to the extent that that's what you and how you interpret it. Yeah, that I agree with that. But you can go further. Um, and you can include not just the painter of those paintings as an expressive agent, but also the curator of the exhibition. And they're two, they're both expressive agents with their own goals who are trying to raise the manifestness of certain representations and ideas and histories for you. Yeah. And even just the actual, and not even the current, but everyone who is producing the thing. Like, you know, the Michelangelo David, like the story about like the granite stone, you know, or like even any artifact, right? Like just thinking about like I like the idea of like learning about like where, you know,

like I have this like ceramic coffee mug like made in France. And like the idea that it was like made in some foundry with like a salts or sand cast in France. Like and just thinking about that makes me appreciate this cup more. Like there's something about our as a species, like, you know, to represent an artifact is like the causal history of what led to it. Yeah. I mean I'm I'm wondering if if the um the uh vagueness for lack of a better term, or the the the difficulty of of figuring out the meaning of a of a work of art is is kind of a design feature. That if it were all very upfront and on the surface and easy to to decipher, then like there would be no pleasure in looking at it. That the the joy is is is trying to solve the puzzle um uh and and maybe maybe there

isn't a correct answer and that maybe that's part of um the the pleasure we we get out of it i don't know do you uh do you think that there's something about the mis the mysteriousness of a work of art that that is appealing to us i don't know about if mysteriousness is the right word but openness definitely yeah yeah there there there there needn't be a definitive interpretation and this connects to I mean maybe I should I think I should have said this already but um well one of the one of the innovations, KK's innovations in this paper is to connect this uh cognitive approach to human communication with ideas that come from classical art theory, very famously Danto and Dickey, and the idea that what is art is nothing more than making the

I forget exactly who it is, but making special. I think that may be dissonant as an anthropologist. But in this, there's the anthropology, there's the art theory, and there's also the cognitive approaches to relevance and communication. All of them are saying you make something in some way attention grabbing, or you raise expectations of relevance of if you engage with this, you'll get something back out of it. That's what we do in ordinary communication, but it's also what's distinctive about art. It's what distinct arguably what distinguishes art from aesthetics. It's saying this is worth engaging with in some way. And but exactly what a given audience takes away, obviously in the case of art, I think it

can be very open and can be very different across different people. And that's totally fine. Right. And and something that's really understudy about this is the immense social consequences that occur if you violate these principles of relevance. So if I'm chatting with you and I say something that's completely irrelevant or indecipherable, you're going to view me as a bad social partner. You're probably not going to like me very much. You're not going to want to hang out with me again. In a highly interdependent species such as Homo sapiens, that would be an immense cost. If I'm bad at language or bad at communicating or bad at reading between the lines, that's pretty close to a death sentence for me.

Um, so what I what I like about tying language to to uh these social challenges is that it really raises the salience of of the the fitness implications of being able to do this stuff well versus doing it poorly. And you could imagine um this also mattering from a sexual selection perspective. You know, a huge part of mating is just talking with someone and seeing if you vibe and if you're if you're good at communicating and coordinating with one another. Like people say that sense of humor is like a really important part of what they're looking for in a mate. Um, if you if you talk to someone and the conversation isn't good, like that's that's over, that's it, right? Um and so you could imagine this stuff having you know huge uh uh Darwinian implications.

Um so I'm wondering if if if you thought about that aspect of your work, if you've if you've maybe thought about uh trying to uh test some of those implications uh socially. Yeah, so so the uh the Darwinian a key insight. So in the expression on each paper, which we talked about earlier, um one of Christoph's key insights, contributions to that paper is is to oversimplify a bit. Every time you try and communicate, every time you behave ostensibly, you draw someone's attention, you are making a commitment, and you're making a commitment to the relevance, to the worthwhile of engagement with for the other person. Like to draw someone's attention is to announce that it's worth their engaging with.

And if it turns out that they engage with it and they don't get anything out of it, then that's gonna, as you say, come with social costs for you. And and that that fact is uh we think a very important selection pressure in the evolution of the cognitive capacities that we're talking about. That's why modern humans I say I don't I don't mean modernity, I think since the eighteen hundreds, I mean I mean living humans. Sixty thousand, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Uh they we we just presume that what others do is optimally relevant because it had to have been in the in the distant past. And so our cognitive apparatus have been selected to just take it that way. And of course, that can then be exploited or things can go wrong by people who say things

which aren't worth paying any attention to, and so on. Um, but uh that I don't I don't think you can understand the design of human communication without um without that perspective that you know it there there's a commitment to it to relevance on behalf of everybody who ever talks. Um yeah there's a passage I mean I actually like it's it will this is from the paper. Um it will hence be an informer's uh own interest to actually be relevant for their audience because those who intentionally attract attention but fail to do so in ways that are useful or relevant will in time incur costs to their reputation and lose their capacity to manipulate their conspecifics' attention. In other words, there will be selection for behaviors that intentionally attract others'

attention only when it is likely to be worthwhile for the audience to indeed pay attention. Precisely. Yep. Yeah. That's fascinating. Have you thought much about like this idea of being an attention seeker and why we view that negatively. And and just in general, the idea of intention as a limited resource that we often compete over. I mean, you could think, you know, cognitive scientists tell us we can only keep like seven or so things in working memory at a time. That is in effect a limited resource. And you could imagine other people in the social world competing for uh access to those seven slots and they're limited. If I'm paying attention to you, I'm not paying attention to someone else.

If I'm helping you, I'm not helping someone else. Um if I'm listening to you, I'm not listening to someone else. And so attention really is a is an evolutionarily relevant resource that you could imagine competition over. And you could imagine um, you know, huge reputational costs if I try to greedily hoard attention uh without providing anything of value in in in return. Because if I grab other people's attention, I'm I'm preventing people from paying attention to other things. And so have you have you thought about that uh aspect of of your work? Yeah. So so attention is is plainly super, super basic. All organisms have to do it in some way, right? Um it's very important, I think, to distinguish um so so the questions that I've been most

engaged with, and certainly the work we've been talking about so far, is concerned with, is um how communication even works in the first place, which does turn on attention and relevance and commitments and so on. Once it's up, you know, once it's working and it's running and everybody has these basic cognitive capacities, it's part of the ordinary, ordinarily developing phenotype of humans. It's true. Some people draw attention and just too much. Some people actually do the opposite and they draw attention too little. Not as many of them, but there are a few. Possibly so, yeah. Speak up, speak up. Um I don I don't think I have too much uh insightful to say about uh about the personalities that that that demand too much attention relative to what they actually

have to offer. I think that's a slightly I mean that's clearly an interesting question, but that's it's a slightly different one to the ones I've been focused on. Yeah. Sure. I mean you could imagine there are there are trade-offs there which would create, you know, uh balancing selection or you know, a variety of different phenotypes that hit different ends of the trade-off. Absolutely. It strikes strikes me as much as anything about per as a personality question rather than a cognition of communication question. That makes sense. One one question, and then I just thought of this is like there's a uh um kids are often go through a transition period of becoming very shy. Um, and I was just thinking through like, you know, I think one of the claims of this is

that the systems involved should sort of intrinsically understand that attention is important and of value, and drawing attention without it paying off for the other is a is a will be a cost to you and to be careful about drawing attention. I mean, there's other things too, right? Like, um, but that's I wonder, I'm just thinking out loud about um, you know, the the the the idea that part of shyness or not wanting to seek attention is in some sense an acknowledgement kind of baked into the system that attention is a really powerful but also sort of dangerous thing to elicit in others. Yeah, I agree. I think that's part of the same box of personality questions. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I love that idea.

I've been thinking about that a lot because I've been thinking about alliances and how uh witch hunts are a kind of alliance where we form an alliance to accuse someone else of witchcraft which um gets the which which deflects blame off of us. And so that's the benefit we gain from participating in in the witch hunt. Um but you could you know you but if we're in the middle of a witch hunt, you definitely do not want to be the center of everyone's attention. Because if you are, you that creates a really uh nice focal point for everyone else to target you uh uh in in the witch hunt. Right. Uh and so you could imagine there being benefits to being the center of attention, but also really big potential costs, really big risks.

It's a kind of risky strategy. Yeah. Um Yeah, Aaron Lukashevsky, uh like the costs and benefits of extroversion, right? Like this is an early HB paper from a bit ago. Yeah. Yeah. Um well I want to transition into uh one of my favorite papers of yours, um, which is uh Is non-evolutionary psychology possible? Yeah. With Dan Nettle. Um with Dan Nettle, uh who's uh we should also probably have on at some point. He's does great work. Um so I will just ask you the question is non-evolutionary psychology possible? Not really, no. Um I again I should give credit where it's due. I mean it's that Daniel's paper first, and he invited me on um to join uh because he thought I had some useful things to say about about Bayesianism and other approaches to

doing psychology, which um are sometimes contrasted with evolutionary psychology. Um but yet seem it seems to me certainly to have similar goals to evolutionary psychology. And so yeah, as you say, the question okay, the I mean it's a very Daniel thing to do to sort of invert the world. Everybody says, Well, evolutionary psychology, is that is that a good idea? Do I believe in that? Blah, blah, blah. And you've talked about that in some of your past podcast episodes. We can invert the question and say, Well, is anybody doing non-evolutionary psychology? Is that even possible? Um, and to answer that, we sort of delineate different commitments of different types of psychology. Um, And it's true, there are different varieties of evolutionary psychology.

There are especially strong forms that have particular commitments to certain architecture of the mind. But to be properly non-evolutionary, you don't just have to drop that, you have to drop notions of mechanism and notions of function. And you end up with something that's so diluted that it's very hard to imagine anyone could possibly believe in it. You know to be, I mean, yeah. I think my I I I am one of my go-to examples for a lot of thinking about evolution is vision science. Um some people say vision science is an evolutionary psychology, and I would say yes it is, um, because vision scientists all have a fun have an assumption about the function of the mechanisms. I mean, they assume that the mechanisms exist, that there are aspects of the mind that do

certain jobs, and they make an assumption about the function of those mechanisms, or maybe they think there's byproducts or whatever. Um, to do non evolutionary psychology is to drop those assumptions. And it's hard to know how I could even study vision if I didn't have those assumptions, or for that matter, personality or language, or whatever else it is that you want to study. And yeah, so we worked through a few examples. Bayesian cognitive science is one. Daniel went, you know, went and read some sociology of famous sociologists called Anthony Giddens, uh, who's got a sort of tacit theory of psychology on which he builds his sociological theories. And you know, we make the argument that even here, this tacit theory, it has to have, it

does have basic notions that that in some sense make it evolutionary because they assume functions. And to our mind, the only, you know, the the the only the only innovation of Tubian Cosmedis and other evolutionary psychologists is to say, well, when we think about these topics, we should take this the evolutionary ecologies of humans, and we should take that in mind. That's part of theorizing properly about functions and mechanisms. That's the innovative that's that's to my mind the basic innovation of evolutionary psychology. And I think it's got to be right. Um, and there's an important sense in which all psychologists are evolutionary psychologists. Yeah. I mean, maybe one argument, maybe to to put it is, and you can tell me if this is right, is

that there everything is implicitly evolutionary psychology, and what what practically evolutionary psychology has been is been doing it explicitly. That's true. Yep. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So like a a big um way of thinking that's popular in social psychology and even even uh other branches of psychology is to view the functions of the mind uh in terms of the pursuit of hedonic state. So the pursuit of happiness. So the function of this is to make us feel good. Or it's to uh avoid negative feelings, to avoid feelings of uncertainty or anxiety or or whatever, or to pursue uh feelings of happiness or meaning or self-esteem or self-worth. And so you could think of a a large part of current psychological research as making the

implicit claim that the mind is designed to seek out certain hedonic states. Um and m I can get on my soapbox now, but if you if you think about that functional claim uh f for even a brief moment in terms of natural selection, it makes absolutely no sense. Why would why would the mind be designed to seek out something inside itself? What you know, wh why why do why do brains want stuff inside our brains? We we we should have evolved to seek stuff in the world that um uh mattered for uh ancestral survival and and reproduction. And we should care about the deg the degree to which our our beliefs about those things are correct or not correct, right? We shouldn't want to just feel good for its own sake.

We should want to get the sorts of things that would have enhanced survival and reproduction, like food, sex, status, uh uh group uh cohesion, things of that sort, um, that that that have a uh a real uh covariance with with biological fitness um but uh uh uh uh uh seeking out happiness itself is not a very plausible functional claim. And so you could think of a huge part of psychology as making this implicit evolutionary theory that we have evolved to seek happiness. Uh and that theory is just uh it shouldn't have ever left the gate. It's just a a completely implausible theory on its face. Uh and if and if psychologists had taken a a brief moment to evaluate the evolutionary plausibility of their theory, they would realize that it should never have left the gate.

And it has uh, in my opinion, led to a lot of really um uh uh uh uh bad um, for lack of a better term, research, or a lot of a lot of um going down blind alleys and in wrong directions and thinking about the mind in in exactly the wrong way. You know, there's a leading theory of conspiracy theories that they're designed to make us feel better, to assuage feelings of uncertainty about the world, which makes absolutely no sense. Uh especially, you know, considering that most conspiracy theories are quite horrifying, and that would seem to serve the function of making you feel better quite poorly. Um, and so what I love about your paper is that it it tells anyone who's studying the mind that you're already doing evolutionary psychology.

You're studying an evolved organ. You know, if you believe in the theory of evolution, if you believe that the human uh uh brainslash mind is a product of evolution and you're studying it, um uh what else are you doing but studying an evolved organ? And and if you're making claims about that evolved organ, you are necessarily making evolutionary psychological claims. And so if you're going to be making those claims, you might as well do your homework and think about how evolution works, think about the uh evolutionary history of Homo sapiens and and and do the job well. Um so I mean no I can't disagree obviously I mean that I agree with all that. There's a point in that paper that's worth making in this context though.

No. I I think that um evolutionary psychology, the field has been misnamed from the beginning. I think um I I think the name mislead so a lot of people think oh no uh you know you you're m as or more familiar than I am with um the the many criticisms and misunderstandings um of evolutionary psychology. Um what it really is is adaptationist cognitive science. Yeah. So cognitive adaptationism in my mind is actually what it is. Cognitive adaptationism is is my actual word for it. Yeah. To to to think seriously about the evolutionary ecology of human minds, as you were just saying, David, um uh in you know, in our framing of our hypotheses about how the mind works, that is to be an adaptationist about cognitive science.

And hence why I think it's best understood as adaptationist cognitive science. It's called evolutionary psychology, and I think that leads people to think that we're, you know, we evolutionary psychologists are trying to recreate the evolutionary history of humans. Um, you know, we're we're interested in the phylogeny question, which certainly is an interesting question, um, but it's not the defining question of the field, I think, which is which is an adaptation on functionalist and the function and mechanism questions. Um and I think, you know, uh yeah, it and it and I suppose the evolutionary psychology framing also sort of places a places an emphasis and can for some readers place an emphasis on basic biological things and leading to the contrast

with culture, leading to the contrast with learned. You've talked in other podcast episodes about how those are false dichotomies. But then the I don't think the name does us any favors in that respect. Right. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, everything is sort of a it's a co it's a convention, right? And sort of a function of its time. And even on this podcast, you know, like we will actually have a ton of anthropologists on, not all of whom are cognitive adaptationists. And the evolutionary behavioral sciences are a bit different than just cognitive adaptationism. And of course, you know, you want to understand what is if you want if you're doing an adaptationism of like what does this organism or organ need, what does this brain need,

understanding the natural ecology, understanding selection pressures and game theory, d evolutionary game theory, these are all related tools. And so I think there I I totally agree with you, Tom. And I I think like even just the language of sort of like, well, is evolutionary psychology or like the overarching thing, or is that evolutionary behavioral sciences, or what does that even mean? And then, like, you know, what where do all these things fit in? And you know, like lots of people like Dan Conroy Beam does like agent-based modeling selection dynamics, but then also is a cognitive adaptationist, but like then does the modeling stuff actually is that cognitive adaptationism? Well, no, but it's part of the toolkit of being that, you know, so it's it's all yeah, it's

a sort of a fuzzy set. Yeah. Yeah. Another reason you should get Daniel Nestlon is I know he's done empirical work getting people's folk intuitions about what explains human behavior. And he constantly gets this division between evolution and biology on one side and cultural on the other side. Yeah. And that's part of this difference detecting mechanisms, which is part of like my idea, like thinking my thinking too. I want to push on this idea that uh and we can transition maybe to something else which is related to what we were just talking about, which is that um, you know, cognitive science or areas of psychology that are already sort of implicitly evolutionary, but they're they're doing this thing.

And I'm going to characterize this thing, and I'm going to be slightly uncharitable, but it's something I think all three of us have have for been kind of brushed against, or it has been kind of ground us down. And I think it's worth talking about. And it's it's basically to put it in a really uncharitable brief way, is that one of the problems of our science is, and it goes back to this Chomsky thing, is the data is really important. And the exercise of a science of psychology, because the like Marvin Minsky talked about is like physics envy. You know, which is, and even Chomsky was like, you know, calling a behavioral science like the science of behavior, it's like this calling physics or you know the science of meter

reading, right? It's not the data don't matter. It's what you're making a theory about. I think there's such incognitive science in social psychology and a lot of areas. And I think F-Psych isn't is an exception. There are other exceptions broadly, but there are generally, it's this idea that if you're doing good science, you're producing lots of data. And then maybe as a secondary thing, you describe the data or characterize the data. And what you're really not allowed to do is really say very much to the extent that you don't have data. And I think that even this point about like what David described as sort of like people are motivated to be happy, it's typically like what's done. And David, you can tell me if this is incorrect, but this is my assessment, is that in all

of these areas that we sort of think aren't going very well, I believe that the bottom line thing is not appreciation of like theory-first approaches or thinking about what should we expect to find what data is important. And instead, it's saying, I'm gonna study people's satisfaction or self-esteem or happiness about this important, interesting thing of life. Like I'm gonna look people as social media use. Do people who use social media, are they happy or less happy? And then, like the idea that's sort of like implicit in it is like there's a mechanism that's motivated to like be happy is sort of incidental because the implicit game is I get status by presenting data. And the more hard it is, the more interesting it, quote unquote interesting it is.

And the the more, the bigger the end, the bigger the sample size, the more geographically diverse it is. That gets me a science or nature paper. And really the theory or the inference about the mind is very much secondary. So I would even I would say it's even worse than like implicit of psych it's almost like there's no psychology at all like I the Virginia Wolf thing is like why are psychologists afraid to do psychology I will I will say this like I'm I really feel like there's so much of psychology that's afraid to like make climbs claims about what's in the mind. I'm curious what you guys think about that as sort of being a problem. You want me to go or do you want to go David? Go for it Tom I mean uh yeah there's there there's there's so much to say.

I mean in some ways I think uh your your characterization of the of the current landscape is a sociology of science point you're making. And your characterisation, um, I I basically agree with. Um I haven't put it I haven't thought about it quite in those terms, why psychologists are afraid to do psychology, but I do rather like that. Um, one thing that I've I've written about recently, as you know, is that um if you call yourself a theoretical psychologist, it's extremely hard um to get a job to the extent I mean psychologists don't know what that is. Like that category doesn't exist in the world. They say a junk of philosophy. And there's so you know, there's there's one group of people who never ask me

that question, and that's philosophers. They don't confuse the sort of work I do for philosophy. Um but but psychologists often call me a philosopher, interestingly. Um I think, I mean, exactly what is going on, why things are the way they are and how they might change, that's almost a question for historians. So I I think it actually ties to ties in with the way we fund science, the way we fund universities even, and the way that you know and and the accountancy of universities and therefore the way that grants are incentivized and treated. And I think as the the prioritization of data, data, data, I mean clearly data is huge, you know, obviously it's important. But um to but you know, as you say, arguably it goes so far that we don't actually

do psychology. And why that's the case, I think is that's a really complicated sociological question. Yeah. No, I think the physics envy is probably a big part of it. That we we want to try to mimic the superficial features of a rigorous science without uh you know getting to the core of what good science actually is. Then it's it's not just about the superficial appearances, the numbers, the data, the graphs. It's about actual insight, actual understanding. Um and and I think we've lost sight of that. Um you know it it is interesting how you you can get a job as a theoretical physicist. A theoretical physicist makes sense as a profession. There are plenty of theoretical physicists who make a living doing that, but the idea of a

theoretical psychologist is unheard of. I wonder if we got a theoretical if we spoke to theoretical physicists and what they would say about the funding landscape and therefore the job landscape for theoretical physicists. They definitely don't category, but I wouldn't be surprised if they it's uh the that they complain about the challenges of that's true. Yeah, it may be a problem in physics too, but it but it at least is probably less of a problem for them than it is for us. It's even it's even worse uh in psychology, which uh I think it gets it exactly backwards of anything. We need more theory in psychology because the our object of study is so much more complicated with so many different interacting variables.

Um that you there's just an even greater need uh for theory to make sense of it because there's just an endless variety of empirical tests and hypotheses that you can test, and just winnowing down that space of possibilities to imaginable number is just way more important in psychology because there the the I just the possibility of going down blind alleys is just so much greater. Um so yeah. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you can collect it's not antithetic antithetical to data. It's that it tells you what data to collect. And it it what it does theory, what it avoids is collecting data, which is a really expensive, time-consuming thing that doesn't buy you anything, you know. And so in the in the in the efficacy of sort of you know, even what science

is, like even from like a Pauperian perspective, like it's it's an idea that's falsifiable in the sense of it's not just you recognize this thing, right? Like that, oh yeah, this is an instant, like cognitive dissonance is a great example. Like if you can't falsify the idea, it's not a really good testable prediction. And so if you you can you can probably cash out cognitive dissonance mechanistically, so it's like a falsifiable version of it. Um, but if you don't have theory to sort of cache all that out, to then set up the data. Like it would be a very different world if psychologists were all coordinated about what data needed to be collected and which data would test between these very clear alternative

ideas. And then we eventually do the data, right? Like that's not what it looks like at all. Right now it's sort of just like, here's some data, and here's maybe what it means, right? And I feel like that we've kind of kicked the can down the road. And I think I do think like there's a ton of papers about the theory crisis. But Tom, I think like you are a good example of if people's people's intentions, like the one thing we know about evolution is that, or just you know, the the logic of selective regimes is that it you everybody can have a certain intention, right? Like I want to do something that's great, but all that matters is the selective regime. So if like if I as a faculty member want people who do slow quality science, but

my hiring committee chooses candidates based on the number of publications. And if the number of publications is a function of like the what we talked about, just like data and just you know how hard it was to collect the data, Your selective regime is selecting for a particular kind of science that has nothing to do with what your explicit intentions are. And so I've heard a lot of people say we should have theory. I've heard a lot of people say we should have interdisciplinarity. But is this the selective regime we've created yet? No, yeah. So there's a lot to say. So the the short answer to that question is no, but if things will change if and when job panels and grant panels um Prioritize the sort of work that you're talking about.

I mean, that that's you're quite right. You know, it can be selected for. And I that's in some ways, that's why I say it's a question almost for historians or maybe sociologists. You know, there are certain dynamics on grant panels and job panels. There's even you know the way universities are funded and their resources, most most recruitment happens at department level, but the university wants interdisciplinarity. That's an inherent tension, and it's very hard to tell a department we're going to do the recruitment for you for reason old reasons of academic freedom. So there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of inter interacting factors that are um creating barriers to the sort of selective regimes you're talking about.

Um I wanna I want to also um go back a couple of minutes to something you were saying there. Um and while I definitely agree with the spirit um of what you're saying, I I'm gonna sort of speak on behalf of my friends who do the empirical science. Um yeah, I do I do empirical stuff too, for sure. Yeah, yeah, well of course, of course, but um there are people who are collecting data for the purposes of description, and I think that particularly in the human science, it was in the human sciences, just you know, good quality like data that describes what humans do at scale. Um it needn't always have I mean it needn't always just saying what humans do, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I just and I'm uh I know you agree, but I just wanted to No, it's worth saying

out loud. Yeah, yeah, this is pushback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Description is important, But unfortunately we get the worst of both worlds because we don't get good theory and we don't get good description. We just get bad theory. Right. Right. Right. So I I would love if we just had description that was just clear about the fact that it was description and they weren't trying to make theoretical claims. It was just trying to get as clear a picture of possible as as of like what is going on, what are the facts on the ground. I think ethnography is really valuable for those purposes. You know, we've had a a few anthropologists on the podcast who've been in incredibly illuminating. So yeah, I agree that um description is is very valuable.

It's just you have to be clear about what what your your goal is. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I I completely agree. And it the the sad thing is that it's quite it will be quite hard to get published in a high profile psychology journal saying, here's an interesting thing about humans, here's what they do, um or here's what they don't do, or whatever it is, full stop um neurotactives to wrap that in theory. Um right, or theory, and then in also data. So it's just sort of like it's almost like, you know, I appreciate Tom your point, and I completely agree, and it's worth saying out loud. The argument isn't that like it should only be what I'm describing, it's just that there's a there should be a role for this kind of thing.

Like there's no physics is not just theoretical physics, it's also experimental, and it should not lose that part either, right? I mean, yeah, And so the argument is like these different entities should be allowed to exist on their own. And the argument we're making is against the backdrop of this doesn't even exist. Not that it should be the only thing for sure. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. So uh so Tom, this kind of might lead into, I mean, I don't know how much you want to go into this, but but I'll open this up of like, I know you you do a lot of theoretical work. You're very interdisciplinary. Um, and I know you've sort of struggled a bit um in terms of finding positions, which I think is just insane.

Um, and you have this recent uh post about sort of your experience of that, and maybe we can link that in this episode notes. Um, you know, if at all, and you, you know, if you don't want to, we can even just cut this out. But what, you know, is there anything you want to say sort of about that? Um, you know, at this point? I mean, I uh I I w I spent probably more time than I should have writing that that essay. Um so uh you know what what I have to say is there in a way. Um uh you know I or maybe i I mean maybe one thing to say then is just sort of like for people who haven't seen it or sort of what service you think it might provide more broadly, aside from maybe your specifics, just sort of like, you know, especially I think for people

listening who don't know everything we know about what it's like to be in this field and like these issues. Like what what's the communicative relevance at a broader level for you know it it's one human story of the realities of contemporary academia? You know, I mean there are as many human stories as there are academics. Uh and everybody knows that there, you know, the the way the sector is structured um, creates profound uncertainty at certain career stages. And that plays out in all sorts of different ways for different people. It intersects with country, with family, planning, with you know, home buying, with uh disciplines and departments, and um plays out in all sorts of different ways.

Uh in some respects I've been particularly unlucky. Um I've been lucky in a couple of respects too. Um uh but right now right now I'm at a quite difficult junction and so I just wanted to share that story um and and you know put a properly human yeah edge edge to I mean everybody understands in the abstract that there's a lot of uncertainty after your PhD, but if you m if you make it human, then maybe that can help advance the the discourse. Yeah, what's the feedback you've gotten from that, if any? I mean very very supportive. I mean a lot lot of people have have got in touch and said nice things and um nobody's offered me a job. Right. Nobody responded to it saying, oh, well, here's an opportunity because Tom is a Tom is an

able scientist and it would be great to have him here. Nobody's yet done that. And let me make it completely clear to anybody listening that that is those those sorts of approaches are absolutely welcome. That hasn't happened. But I've not really had any proper pushback on it at all. Nobody's saying you're mischaracterizing the way things are um etc etc. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to be explicit, we do this occasionally. It's the only commercials we ever have. If you want to support Tom, please reach out uh to Tom directly. He uh it's uh don don't be um don't be reluctant, please. I mean maybe just just just for those that haven't read the essay, the the the the short version is I got my PhD in uh linguistics in two thousand and nine.

Uh, held fellowships in my own name and linguistics in Edinburgh for a while, then in anthropology at Durham University. Then in 2017, I moved to Budapest to work on a big uh European Research Council project in a department of psychology on social minds. Uh so and that took me to 2021. So it's now 12 years after my PhD. Great jobs. Um I mean, I they were very good jobs, but they were always in the background was the fact that they were temporary jobs. Um I I achieved a lot, I think, um uh made some useful contributions, I hope. Uh and then I got a post um uh in Spain and that did not work out for a number of reasons that I go into in detail in well not detail actually but I outline in the essay.

Um uh and so you know it became clear I had to leave that job after a while. Um so right now um you know I'm financially okay for the short term but I do need to work again. Um yeah. Yeah, I'm back, you know, I'm back in my apartment with my partner, it's great here. Just gotta work out what's next in life. Yeah, and I just want to say because like I think, especially for people on the outside who don't know, and I think I I'm sure this will be okay to say, like, even Lita Cosmedys and John Tuby struggled financially in the beginning, and they are like one of the founders of this field. Right. And so, like, I mean, Lita talked about this often where you and they were like down to one salary. Annie Wirtz and I were down to one salary at one point.

Like, people outside should just be clear. Like, I want to be very clear that the difficulty of this that Tom is experiencing is in no way an indication or is unique to, you know, it's not like, you know, it's it's really like objectively, like the best people in the field went through this same thing. So it's really, I just want to like clarify that for people who might not know that and who might be thinking, well, it sounds fair, but like really you wouldn't have this issue if you were actually good. And I can like no, like that's just not true. Right. You're very kind. Um I think uh I I have two weaknesses in inverted commerce. And I don't they aren't weaknesses, but that they they are in terms of science.

But I think they are weaknesses on the job market. And that is that I'm not easily identifiable as a psychologist or a linguist or an anthropologist, um, but I'm a bit of each of them, or even and even philosophy. And also that I'm very theoretically minded for reasons we talked about five or ten minutes ago. Um those things together, the interdisciplinarity, the theoretical orientation, um, I think that sort of work should be I mean, obviously I think this I'm biased, but I think that's hugely useful and positive for science. Um but it's not incentivized. It's not necessarily it's not that individuals are out to get me or anti this agenda, but it's not, but but it is the case that job panels and grant panels are not much incentivized

to um promote that sort of work. And I was quite slow in my career to realise that this was this was the case. Um but I think it is. I mean, so maybe just one thing to say then to sh sh transition from like the the negativity to just like without sort of I mean assuming things could just change, like pretty simply, what would be some ways to sort of change the problem? I mean, this this is a very big and complicated question, I think. Just to throw out some utopian ideas. I would love for there to be um so so many science labs, they have um they have permanent staff who are administrators and technical staff. Those people are given permanent contracts. And of course the funding of that job is dependent on future funding streams for the

university, for the lab, from the PI, and so on. But we don't give permanent jobs to scientists. You have to take on a temporary job as a postdoc and then become the head of a lab somewhere else. What we don't have is just a permanent research scientist like a permanent administrator. And I think there's a lot of people who have got their PhD and they're qualified and able people who don't necessarily want to take on all the responsibilities of faculty. They want a steady income and a steady job, and they want it over the long term, and they'd be brilliant at it. And that job literally doesn't exist. Yeah. Like I think the closest thing is Yeah, the Mox Planck Institute. And it's a temporary the all but even then it's temporary.

Yeah, even though it's a long term. No, that's right. And we've talked, I mean, David and I have talked about how we the if you have a theoretical perspective and you want to take that on, oftentimes there's just more data than you can sort of collect, you know, like there, or there's just more predictions than you can even test. And so you've got this sort of tragedy of coordination, I feel like, in psychology, especially where there's people with really great methods and data, but they're sort of like in a holding pattern. And I I mean, I will say this, like, you know, dear friends of mine do this work, but like frankly at the end of the day, a lot of like these sophisticated methods, they're not

really testing particularly sophisticated theories. There are exceptions, but it's sort of like they're just sort of refining methods. And the so there's really just like a ton of people who are like good at doing methods, and there's people who are doing a good theory, and there's this coordination problem of not connecting up. Yeah. The other thing to say is um so this is this is in one some ways why I think the issues uh you're raising are uh to do with you know economics um and accountancy to an extent. Um it's quite revealing to me that when people get big grants, they're very you know, they're often celebrated, you know, meet in the common room and announcements are made. Um and they're often you know very much in the foreground of people's CVs.

I don't know why my camera's doing that. Um I have one of those too. It's kind of weird. Sometimes it just does that. Yeah. Grants are celebrated. And to some extent I understand why, but another to another extent, I don't understand why. Because that grants are the means. The ends is the science. The ends is the answers to questions. And we don't celebrate that. It doesn't seem to me institutionally to the same degree. So scientists have internalized that grants are a goal, not a means, but a goal. And I think it see I I don't know why scientists well I I have a hypothesis about why scientists have internalized that, and that's because it's incentivized at the career level, because the university wants to grants, because the university needs the grants to

pay for the debt that was incurred when it built the building in which we're doing the work. Right. So and I don't I don't have enough expertise in finance and accountancy and so on to detail that argument. But it does strike me that the way universities finance themselves and their infrastructure feeds into the incentive structure that acts on academics, which means that they prioritize grants rather than answers. And that has a downstream effect that theoreticians are less valued than empiricists. Yeah. So theory is cheap. So you would think cheap and brilliant would be valued, but it's not. Right. Right. expensive and brilliant is what's most valued. Yeah. And there's also this weird thing of like, so when we if we want to make fun like

fundraising, we'll do a lottery, right? Because the lottery is lots of people put their money in and only a small number of people actually get the valued thing. And so what that is is a really efficient way to sort of like multiply the contribution of each individual and actually minimize the the cost you have to incur. Now flip that. That is what writing grants and contract, like you know, applying for grants are. And John Tubi once described this as, and I know there's empirical work on this, is like if aliens wanted to design a system to waste scientist time as much as possible, what it currently is would be. He was like, this might be evidence of aliens who don't want us to learn anything.

Because it's exactly this thing of so you have a competition, which is like a lottery. So a a ton of people all use their time to apply for something only a small number of people have. So you've multiplied the cost and you have a minimal benefit. It's exactly the structure you would want to maximize the time cost of scientists for minimal benefits. It's it's exactly as an institutional structure, the exact worst way to uh give resources to scientists. I know there are some funding bodies that are experimenting with actual lotteries, and I'm I find that quite an interesting innovation. So it's much cheaper to enter. You know, you you've got to pass the threshold, you've got to be a scientist of a certain

caliber, with a certain background. Yeah. So it's efficient expertise. But after that, just yeah uh this is good enough and then we'll we'll throw out throw out the lottery yeah and and some people get it and it if if that's available to all edible eligible scientists we'll all get it once in once once in five, once in ten. Right. Uh yeah. And there are other things like like I think like Templeton does a good job of like minimal uh effort up front unless and so I like like there are sensible ways to do it. But I've often thought like I wonder too like and I I kind of hate to say this, but I will say this like, how much it is the ego of the funding agencies, where it's sort of like people are coming to me and it feels really good, as opposed to really like, and I maybe

this could be gamed, but like funding agencies going out and like finding out like who do people think is doing the best work? And I mean, that can be gamed, but but it's a very different way of sort of approaching it, which is sort of like, I'm not gonna take up their time. I'm gonna like observe this community and see who could use the funding as opposed to having people come to me. Um, and maybe that's naive, but that is that's a very different way to think about how to uh send resources to um to people. Yeah. I'm certain that all sectors have challenges like this. We just don't we're not privy to the ones that are going on in journalism or other sectors. But I'm sure we know I mean the the the the gi everybody knows the dynamics are off.

Nobody has the perfect solution yet. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, yeah. I mean, so uh is there anything we should have asked you? Oh um you should ask me about the history of Lindy Hop. Okay, yes. I actually did want to so please, yes. I in my cartoon bubble of view, ostensive communication and uh Lindy Hop are are are next to each other. So please tell us about that. I've listened I've listened to your past podcast, so I knew this question was coming. Okay, good, I know. Yeah. The first time I was like, I said to my partner, when he asked me that, I'm going to tell him to ask me about the history of Lindy Hop. Fantastic. Okay, so please go ahead. Uh Lindy Hop is a is a dance, is a swing dance, partner dance, uh created in

African-American communities in Harlem, well, in several places, but in particular Harlem, New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. And it has a fascinating history, um, both in that original era, and then fewer people are dancing it through the 50s and the 60s and 70s, still some. And then it globalizes in the 80s and 90s. And today it's so it was, it was in it was you know all over America in the late 30s and the 40s. It was the first pop music essentially. Um, and then as I say, other music uh you know, you know what music is like, it changes and fashion fashions change and so on. Um so it fades a bit more into the background, and then it globalizes in the 80s and 90s, and now there are little communities all over the world um dancing the Lindy Hop by far,

the strangely, by far the biggest apparently is in Seoul in Korea. There are large communities in random places. And obviously, most big cities have sizable communities. Yeah, and there's one in Budapest, and then I dance there. I'm giving a talk this time next week, I think, on the history of Lindy Hop, where I will talk much more about its origins in the 20s and 30s in New York in particular. I think it's very much connected to the advent of modernity and the machine age and the way that they transformed the landscape and the economic opportunities, particularly of African Americans. And what they do in response to that is a huge cultural moment that's sometimes called the Holland Renaissance, which has many dimensions.

It's it's books, uh, it's theatre, it's poetry, it's um it's political activism, and it's also music, and music leads to the dancing. And there's much much to say about that. Yeah. I mean, just in a really short amount, like, is there something 'cause I obviously I think like a lot of people think well like dancing uh you you like dancing and it's sort of incidental that you chose this kind. Is that true? Or is there something about this kind that is what what it what and what is it about that that I always I always wanted to dance, um, like partner dance. I didn't know how to uh as a twenty 20-year-old say. Um, and I tried a few salsa lessons that did not bite. Um, and then I went to a dance class swing dance.

I did not know what swing dance was, um, but that did bite. And I think it's not a coincidence. If you understand uh the sociology of the dance, where it comes from, and what's built, physically built into the technique of the dance, I think it's not a surprise that today's dancers are liberals, is one thing to say. I think it's not a surprise that they're um globalized individuals. I mean, I think that those values are built into the physical apparatus of the dance. Um and so I didn't know what I was going into when I went into it, but I found something that very much fitted with my values and my and my identity, my self-identity. And the fact that it's now globalized raises interesting and difficult questions.

Um, as I say a lot and very very educated, um you know the demographic uh has a high degree of education relative to the general population that's not good or bad that's just you know a fact fact of the matter um and so today most dancers are not African Americans and that's a difficult fact for you know given its origins which is absolutely in the African American communities and it comes I think it you know in some ways it goes back to the experience of exiting slavery relatively recently, uh rural uh environments in the South, and then suddenly the younger generation are in a completely a modern new modern world in the northern cities after the Great Migration. So and it's absolutely an African American story.

And yet today most people who dance it are highly educated white people. I don't think that's inherently problematic, but it does um it does, you know, I think it places responsibilities on us as contemporary dancers to new d to educate new dancers um and to keep that history in mind because otherwise we you know I think you change the dance, and then in some respects if you change the dance too much, you disrespect uh the origins of the dance. And just in terms of like itself compared to other things, it's just very acrobatic but very coordinated in the sense, or like I don't know how would you characterize the So I think the I mean there's a lot the the best thing to do is to Google it. But uh the next thing, um so it's a dance that is two

things at once. So you you do it together, but you also have individual freedom. So it's uh I'd say somewhat unlike uh say the Foxtrot, for example, which is sort of one four legged dance thing that's very coordinated, and the skill is being very coordinated as a four legged dance thing. In the Lindy Hop, you're still very you're very clearly dancing with someone else and you're coordinated, but both individuals are encouraged to be self expressive at the same time. And doing both those things, coordinating and being self expressive is that that's an advanced skill. Um it's thrilling to do when it goes well, it's completely thrilling. And in some respects I think it's true, you know, you you I don't know if it's taking the

point too far, but you can also see uh um you can almost see it as being, you know, true to the values of of America in some respects. Um you know, there's a there's a the there's an individual freedom, but there's also a recognition of collective responsibility. And you know, I mean I know um Winter Massalis, a very famous jazz musician, has spoken um a fair bit and written a fair bit about how jazz uh embodies some of the principles of the American constitution. And I think uh and swing and in swing in particular embodies some of the principles of the American Constitution. And I think you see that in the dance itself. That's fantastic. That's great. Well, um, I think you also, Tom, embody uh coordination but

also autonomy. And uh and you know, I do think, I mean, this this might be slightly, but like, you know, I think uh you know, the you said the Harlem Renaissance. I do think there's sort of a scientific renaissance happening in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, that's hope so or or or psychology behavioral sciences anyway. And I do think Tom, for your part, you are one of the the people kind of, you know, doing some of the work that's that's moving that. And um, you know, I hope I hope number one, uh, you know, genuinely like you know, as David said, like your work it it is relevant and you're we people have attention on you and I hope that uh I hope that um you know the the story you know, stories real life doesn't always work out, but uh but I hope this is an instance

where things do work out. Um but I do want to say thank you and you know your work is really incredible. Please keep doing what you're doing. And yeah, if if people are listening, please um reach out to Tom and um support him. Um it's my my pleasure to be here. I was very thrilled when I saw the podcast uh you know that on the social media feeds and that you guys are doing this. Um people should like and subscribe, as they say. Oh thanks. We couldn't have said it better ourselves. David, David, do you have any uh final final thoughts? Uh yeah, just yeah, really great to talk to you. I uh hope to have you on again at some point. And yeah, you've shaped my own thinking uh a lot about communication and and signaling and

given me some some mental tools um that uh that have been very useful. Um so I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. So if you are part of a a funding agency or academic uh coordination uh in institution, think about things, maybe reach out to Tom. And then and then everybody should go check out the Lindy Hub. Yeah. Yeah. If you're and if you're in but I don't know when you're when you're releasing this to the world, but if you're in Budapest on uh next Tuesday, is the eighth, I'm giving a talk about the history of the Lindy Hop at 6 p.m. We'll be we'll be well past that. Oh no, but that's great. Uh but yeah, but uh Tom we'll we'll we'll post post uh your your website and things like that. But thanks so much for being on and it was my pleasure.

Well, David, aside from looking into the Lindy Hop, what can people do then now that we're done with this episode? Um going forward, aside from listening to the next one. Um well they can like us, they can subscribe to our podcast, they can leave us a kind review, they can visit our Patreon page and support us there. Uh they can say nice things about us at social on social media, they can mention to a friend, hey, I'm listening to this cool podcast called Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Uh those are just some of the things that uh people can do to support us. Should we get should we get t shirts? Yeah, sure. I'd wear a t shirt, maybe a hat, maybe a fanny pack. Mm. Okay. We we should think we should maybe we should uh we can um well yeah, if people have ideas

about swag to to put Yeah, if you have swag, yeah swag ideas, um we're open to feedback. Uh maybe tell us if you'd prefer a fanny pack or a hat or maybe some underwear. Um the sky's the limit. David, do you need a fanny pack? Should somebody just send you a fanny pack? It sounds like you need a fanny pack. I could I could really use a fanny pack. Um I've been looking uh far and wide for the best fanny pack. I've been I've been reading fanny pack reviews. I'm really trying to make a good purchase. So if you if you know if you know of a good fanny pack, just you know, we'll send David an email or the podcast we'll we'll send you the mailing address. That would that would really help me out. Fantastic.

Good. Well we on that note. We'll see you next week. See you next week.