WEBVTT

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Uh, I'm David Pinsov.

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I'm David Petrozowski.

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

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That's right by actual evolutionary psychologists.

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That's right.

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So yeah.

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Enjoy.

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

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

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Oh right.

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

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

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Yeah, yeah.

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

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called communication.

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

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

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

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

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Yes, yes, Tom Scott Phillips.

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Yeah, who really knows a lot about communication.

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

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

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

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way I think.

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

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understand things quite a bit differently.

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

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

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all kinds of different things.

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Yep.

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

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psychology is possible.

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Oh right.

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Yeah.

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And uh Lindy Hop.

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

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tuned.

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

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Oh yeah.

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Or for the next little uh segment of music.

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Yeah, dance dance to the music.

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It's pretty danceable.

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It's got a beat.

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It does, yeah.

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Okay.

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Sounds good.

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All right.

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We'll see you in a second.

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See ya.

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

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Um, really nice to have you here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oh right.

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

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Yeah.

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

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

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

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things and they learn something.

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

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

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

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

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

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taught me something about the life and the world.

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

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

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

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really subtle.

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It's kind of like theory of mind.

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

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that?

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

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

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

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talked about instinct blindness.

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

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instinct blindness?

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What is ostensive communication?

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

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Yeah.

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So there's many ways to answer this question.

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

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So you have to stop me at some point.

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That's great.

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Yeah.

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

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Uh I think the useful analogy is with locomotion.

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So locomotion is a super basic biological task.

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

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

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

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

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different ways, arguably.

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

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It's an uncontroversial concept.

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We don't have to say anything more.

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

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I think communication comes in more than one variety.

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

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distinctive variety.

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

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they wouldn't be species.

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

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jargon is, as you say, ostensive communication.

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

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on expressing and uh recognizing mental states.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That's what computers do.

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

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

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thing that you can put in anything.

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

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

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use, just to take the most obvious example.

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

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

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encoding decoding machines, right?

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

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

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ways of doing ways of expressing and recognizing mental states.

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

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light.

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Right.

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

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

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Yeah.

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Right.

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

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

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Absolutely.

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

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

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reason why we're here is to see animals.

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I'm pointing there.

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

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know where it is.

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

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

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Absolutely.

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

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

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thing that people actually say is super sparse.

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

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

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pragmatic cues.

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

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mental state attribution and intention.

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Is that sort of what you're saying?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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

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

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Right.

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Yeah.

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

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Yeah.

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

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

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

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occur without a recognition of mental states.

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

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

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

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

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thinking, and so forth.

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

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situated context.

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I think that's absolutely right.

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

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

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

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

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intending about the child's mental states.

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

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These many layers.

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Um I think that that objection is misplaced.

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

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

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do with Descartes and Berkeley and theory of vision.

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

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

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

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right?

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How does depth perception work?

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

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

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say, banger philosopher.

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Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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around the world.

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

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Yeah.

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

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Yeah.

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

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

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Vision science is complex.

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The study of human communication is complex.

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But phenomenologically, it's utterly trivial.

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Yeah.

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

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

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need to have simple explanations of the underlying cognitive processes.

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

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

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corresponds to how it works.

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

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And yeah, no, for sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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are things that have had a super long evolutionary history.

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there's a ton of RD from natural selection.

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

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

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

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

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

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theory of humor.

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

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

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

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things that feel simple.

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

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

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physical and the social world.

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Yeah.

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Mathematics.

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

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

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complicated task.

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

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Totally.

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

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of grammar and language acquisition.

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

00:14:04.510 --> 00:14:06.110
I'm a l evolutionary psychologist.

00:14:06.270 --> 00:14:10.990
The Chomskyan view is that, you know, language is an adaptation and it must be innate to

00:14:10.990 --> 00:14:11.310
some degree.

00:14:11.470 --> 00:14:15.950
You know, I bought into the the the pinker uh language instinct argument.

00:14:16.110 --> 00:14:19.790
I just assume, yeah, obviously, you know, we have innate hardware, we have an innate

00:14:19.790 --> 00:14:23.630
grammar, and um and and that allows us to to speak language.

00:14:23.790 --> 00:14:29.680
But um reading you um disabused me of that perspective and made me

00:14:29.680 --> 00:14:34.560
realize that no, uh grammar doesn't have to be innate.

00:14:34.960 --> 00:14:36.720
Uh it probably isn't.

00:14:36.880 --> 00:14:39.440
It's probably better understood as a byproduct.

00:14:39.600 --> 00:14:45.600
And language itself may not even be that clearly delineated as an adaptation in

00:14:45.600 --> 00:14:50.320
its own right, as opposed to lying on a continuum with other kinds of social conventions

00:14:50.320 --> 00:14:54.720
and social norms and social cognition more broadly.

00:14:55.210 --> 00:14:58.410
And so that was a really cool perspective shift for me.

00:14:58.890 --> 00:15:04.410
I'm curious where where you stand on the perennial debate, you know, between Chomsky and

00:15:04.410 --> 00:15:04.650
the others.

00:15:05.370 --> 00:15:07.530
How quote unquote innate is language?

00:15:07.610 --> 00:15:10.570
Do you do you know take that to be a serious question or not?

00:15:10.970 --> 00:15:14.170
Where do you uh situate yourself in the linguistics debate?

00:15:14.890 --> 00:15:15.930
Definitely a serious question.

00:15:16.090 --> 00:15:19.580
It's an enormous one that's taken up the time of many, many careers.

00:15:19.660 --> 00:15:21.180
So I'll try and do it in a few minutes.

00:15:21.500 --> 00:15:22.380
You have two minutes, Tom.

00:15:22.460 --> 00:15:22.780
Two minutes.

00:15:29.260 --> 00:15:35.180
So Chomsky has the you know a well-known view uh that um he would say language, it might

00:15:35.180 --> 00:15:40.700
be better characterized as um syntactic structure of some kind or another is innate.

00:15:41.550 --> 00:15:46.190
Uh and Pinker, uh, along with Paul Bloom, who was a relatively junior colleague at the time

00:15:46.270 --> 00:15:50.830
in 1990, they published a very influential paper, Natural Language and Natural Selection.

00:15:50.990 --> 00:15:53.790
Um, where they dis well, I should have given a bit more context.

00:15:54.030 --> 00:15:58.270
Chomsky believes there's something innate, but he's pretty hostile to adaptationist

00:15:58.270 --> 00:16:03.950
perspectives on the mind in general, and he speculated through the 80s

00:16:04.160 --> 00:16:08.560
uh, that you know, perhaps it's you know incidental transmutation, we can't really know too

00:16:08.560 --> 00:16:09.040
much about it.

00:16:09.120 --> 00:16:11.120
There's not much point to the speculation.

00:16:11.360 --> 00:16:14.960
And Pinker being on the one hand a Chomskyan, but on the other hand, an evolutionary

00:16:14.960 --> 00:16:18.640
psychologist, publishes this paper that says, no, there's no contradiction here.

00:16:18.720 --> 00:16:20.720
You can believe both things at the same time.

00:16:21.120 --> 00:16:26.960
Uh and yeah, so I I and I started my when I started my PhD 15 years

00:16:26.960 --> 00:16:29.120
after that, um, I was definitely an adaptationist.

00:16:29.280 --> 00:16:33.120
My part of my origin story, I've I've listened to other podcasts, and part of my origin

00:16:33.170 --> 00:16:36.850
story is you know involves some similar stories.

00:16:36.930 --> 00:16:40.290
And I was an adaptationist because partly because of Pinker, partly because of other

00:16:40.290 --> 00:16:41.490
popularizers.

00:16:50.770 --> 00:16:52.130
It's a very, very slippery concept.

00:16:52.450 --> 00:16:57.170
What is this thing that is supposed to have to be designed in some way or another?

00:16:57.570 --> 00:17:02.740
And I ended up being I ended up actually finding you know adaptationist perspectives of uh

00:17:02.820 --> 00:17:05.620
to be of use when thinking more broadly about communication.

00:17:05.780 --> 00:17:10.340
And so for many years, like 15 years really, I was agnostic about the questions you're

00:17:10.340 --> 00:17:12.740
asking me about, David, like the nature of grammar.

00:17:12.820 --> 00:17:18.020
And I was writing, thinking, researching much more on communication and its many

00:17:18.020 --> 00:17:18.740
manifestations.

00:17:18.820 --> 00:17:23.060
You know, there's aspects of children's development, this connects to things like

00:17:23.060 --> 00:17:26.260
commitment to art theory, it connects to lots of domains.

00:17:26.420 --> 00:17:32.100
Um, and but only recently, last five years or so, I've started thinking more about grammar.

00:17:32.150 --> 00:17:36.870
uh, and I've been persuaded by the arguments of those who disagree with the Chomskis and

00:17:36.870 --> 00:17:37.990
the Pinkers of the world.

00:17:38.150 --> 00:17:41.910
Um so now I'm gonna oversimplify, and many linguists are gonna hate this

00:17:41.910 --> 00:17:42.870
oversimplification.

00:17:42.950 --> 00:17:47.830
But um on the one side you can put um what you could all call words and rules approaches,

00:17:47.910 --> 00:17:49.590
which is what generative grammar would be.

00:17:49.670 --> 00:17:53.270
So you have a you have words and you have rules for combining them and you have some

00:17:53.270 --> 00:17:57.760
awareness of which rules you know allowed and which ones are not and so on.

00:17:57.920 --> 00:18:02.560
And the other side is an is an approach some commonly called construction grammar.

00:18:02.800 --> 00:18:07.680
It's a lot more under the surface, but the basic idea is that there's a single unit that is

00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:10.640
a foundation of languages, which is called constructions.

00:18:10.880 --> 00:18:14.880
And constructions can be concrete, they can be words, but they can also be quite abstract.

00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:18.240
So my my go-to example is like what's X doing Y?

00:18:18.480 --> 00:18:19.920
What's Tom doing with that girl?

00:18:20.080 --> 00:18:21.920
What's this fly doing in my soup?

00:18:22.080 --> 00:18:26.130
What's David doing chatting to John, right?

00:18:26.290 --> 00:18:30.530
And you can put another construction inside the empty slots, inside the X and the Y.

00:18:30.690 --> 00:18:34.530
And by doing that construction allows you to ask for a resolution of some incongruity.

00:18:34.610 --> 00:18:35.330
It has a function.

00:18:35.490 --> 00:18:39.970
So all constructions are mappings between a form and a function, some communicative

00:18:39.970 --> 00:18:40.450
function.

00:18:40.610 --> 00:18:46.100
And in that way, you can you using language is throwing constructions together and

00:18:46.340 --> 00:18:49.940
throwing all these micro convention the these micro functions together.

00:18:50.740 --> 00:18:53.860
One quick question is that Minsky had this idea of frames.

00:18:54.180 --> 00:18:55.620
Is that sort of related to that?

00:18:56.020 --> 00:18:56.340
Maybe.

00:18:56.500 --> 00:18:57.380
Can I come to that in a moment?

00:18:57.620 --> 00:18:58.260
Please, yeah, sorry.

00:18:59.220 --> 00:19:01.700
So because I'm I'm gonna come back around to David's question.

00:19:02.580 --> 00:19:08.500
So that way of that constructionist approach, the work I've done recently pairs

00:19:08.500 --> 00:19:10.740
that with the adaptationist approach to communication.

00:19:10.900 --> 00:19:15.970
And I the the argument I'm developing is that constructions are conventions for doing the

00:19:15.970 --> 00:19:20.850
adaptive task that human communication is designed to do, which is expressing and revealing

00:19:20.850 --> 00:19:21.490
intentions.

00:19:21.650 --> 00:19:26.370
So all this stuff in grammar are cultural conventions that we've built as communities that

00:19:26.370 --> 00:19:30.450
allow us to do the expression and recognition of mental states much more easily, much more

00:19:30.450 --> 00:19:34.850
efficaciously, much more micro precision than we otherwise would do.

00:19:35.140 --> 00:19:38.260
Otherwise, we'd be pointing at some, but we can be able to do that.

00:19:38.420 --> 00:19:43.460
I want to unpack just the the depth of that idea because I see it as kind of a mind-blowing

00:19:43.460 --> 00:19:43.700
idea.

00:19:44.500 --> 00:19:50.420
This idea that um grammar um is not innate, but is a set

00:19:50.420 --> 00:19:51.700
of social conventions.

00:19:52.020 --> 00:19:56.980
So uh where we situate the verb and the noun and the adjective, the these are social

00:19:56.980 --> 00:20:01.710
conventions that are essentially no different from driving on the same side of the road, or

00:20:01.790 --> 00:20:06.430
you know, saying bless you when a person sneezes, uh working from nine to five using the

00:20:06.430 --> 00:20:07.230
metric system.

00:20:07.470 --> 00:20:13.470
These are all part of the same category of social conventions that allow us to uh

00:20:13.470 --> 00:20:17.550
uh mutually benefit uh from interacting with each other.

00:20:17.710 --> 00:20:23.320
Uh uh and um in the same way that uh social conventions differ uh across

00:20:23.320 --> 00:20:26.280
cultures, grammars might differ across cultures.

00:20:26.440 --> 00:20:29.400
Uh is that is that is that basically the idea that you're proposing?

00:20:29.880 --> 00:20:30.120
Yes.

00:20:30.280 --> 00:20:35.240
Uh the the short answer is yes, the longer answer is yes, but so uh so so yes, that's all

00:20:35.240 --> 00:20:35.400
right.

00:20:35.480 --> 00:20:36.920
There's a there is a key difference.

00:20:37.000 --> 00:20:42.810
Um, and that is that by using these conventions in this communicative

00:20:42.810 --> 00:20:48.410
way, uh, it's so, it's so this is a Pinker-esque thing to say, it's so obviously powerful,

00:20:48.570 --> 00:20:53.370
useful, it completely changes the nature of an organ, you know, that species' existence.

00:20:53.530 --> 00:20:58.090
That you, you know, it's not a surprise that there'll be downstream adaptations to do this

00:20:58.410 --> 00:20:59.610
more efficaciously.

00:20:59.690 --> 00:21:03.450
Now, those downstream adaptations don't need to be the structure of syntax.

00:21:03.530 --> 00:21:07.980
There's no particular, I don't see any particular reason for that, but they will be an

00:21:07.980 --> 00:21:09.500
enhanced memory for constructions.

00:21:09.580 --> 00:21:15.340
We all know to know a language is to know a vast number of constructions, um, all sorts of

00:21:15.340 --> 00:21:21.340
computational um capacities that enable us to use them very far, you know, to pick

00:21:21.340 --> 00:21:26.140
up on them, to produce them extremely fast, instantaneously, and also things involved in

00:21:26.140 --> 00:21:30.390
interaction like fine-grained precision or fine-grained sensitivity to timing and

00:21:30.390 --> 00:21:31.750
contingency and interaction.

00:21:31.830 --> 00:21:33.910
There's pauses, all that sort of stuff.

00:21:34.230 --> 00:21:37.750
Maybe even the white slare of the eye so you can catch people's attention more easily.

00:21:38.150 --> 00:21:43.510
Fine-grained control of the motor motor apparatus of hands and the mouth.

00:21:43.750 --> 00:21:46.790
There's lots of stuff that enables us to do these tasks.

00:21:46.950 --> 00:21:49.910
Well, once we're doing it, once we're doing it linguistically, we'll then do it

00:21:49.910 --> 00:21:52.840
linguistically in a very um finely designed way.

00:21:52.920 --> 00:21:54.840
You know, you know, it's a very Darwinian thing to say.

00:21:55.080 --> 00:21:55.160
Yeah.

00:21:55.240 --> 00:21:58.680
So sort of that's not true of driving on the left-hand side of the road.

00:21:58.840 --> 00:21:59.000
Right.

00:21:59.080 --> 00:22:01.000
That's yeah.

00:22:01.160 --> 00:22:05.160
And so just like to understand it's the idea is that sort of like the fact that it's

00:22:07.160 --> 00:22:08.760
there's open parameters.

00:22:08.920 --> 00:22:14.440
So it could be that um that it could be like, for example, this is how you get sign

00:22:14.440 --> 00:22:15.320
language, right?

00:22:15.640 --> 00:22:20.930
Where the the fact that it's with our hands, the machinery for sort of these are the

00:22:20.930 --> 00:22:26.210
conventions or these are the this the things that stand for this communicative attent

00:22:26.450 --> 00:22:28.450
intent, that's an open parameter.

00:22:28.530 --> 00:22:30.610
So it's not specific to like one modality.

00:22:30.690 --> 00:22:36.530
And that openness is itself evidence, if I understand the claim, that it's this

00:22:36.530 --> 00:22:41.490
higher level sort of point system that then has concomitant adaptations.

00:22:41.650 --> 00:22:42.770
Is that fair?

00:22:43.250 --> 00:22:45.260
That I don't know if I completely follow that.

00:22:45.420 --> 00:22:48.140
Maybe that may be a good gloss of what I'm saying.

00:22:48.300 --> 00:22:51.580
Um, I'll try and put it in different words and you can tell me if it's similar or not.

00:22:51.820 --> 00:22:57.340
So humans, when they communicate, they can use any any like anything they have, right?

00:22:57.420 --> 00:23:00.460
I could use I could use this banana if I wanted to make a certain point.

00:23:00.540 --> 00:23:01.980
I I am actually or it's code.

00:23:02.060 --> 00:23:04.060
We could tap on yeah, we could tap on a desk.

00:23:04.300 --> 00:23:07.100
We can use our bodies, we can point, we can and we can do it in an improvised way.

00:23:07.180 --> 00:23:10.460
If my mouth is full because I'm chewing and I and my arms are full, I might point with my

00:23:10.460 --> 00:23:10.940
nose or something.

00:23:11.020 --> 00:23:11.660
We you know we can't.

00:23:11.820 --> 00:23:13.850
You're describing my time in Germany not speaking Germany.

00:23:14.090 --> 00:23:14.890
There we go, exactly.

00:23:15.290 --> 00:23:18.890
I mean, my mouth was full of uh pretzels and sausage when I was in Germany, so yeah.

00:23:20.490 --> 00:23:21.530
We can use anything.

00:23:21.610 --> 00:23:26.090
Um, it just so happens that the the if you share a language with someone, then the most

00:23:26.090 --> 00:23:31.130
convenient thing to use uh isn't a part of my body, it's it's shared knowledge of a

00:23:31.130 --> 00:23:34.650
convention, um or a whole world of conventions.

00:23:35.290 --> 00:23:38.810
Uh and that that's just what we happen to have to hand, but it can be, um, you know, and

00:23:38.810 --> 00:23:42.860
those conventions, if you're using spoken language, those conventions are spoken, but they

00:23:42.860 --> 00:23:45.340
can be gestured as well if you're using sign language.

00:23:45.660 --> 00:23:47.260
Yeah, let me can I just like push on this?

00:23:47.340 --> 00:23:49.340
Because I think people might have like uh questions.

00:23:49.500 --> 00:23:51.420
And so let me just sort of push on this a little bit.

00:23:51.580 --> 00:23:57.420
So like one question is sort of what work is is the idea of constructions doing?

00:23:57.580 --> 00:23:59.100
So what exactly does that mean?

00:23:59.180 --> 00:24:05.100
And if there is design for basically what people might intuitively think

00:24:05.100 --> 00:24:10.330
of as like language in the downstream, does that amount to the same claim that that

00:24:10.330 --> 00:24:12.090
language is an adaptation?

00:24:12.250 --> 00:24:15.610
Um, and then what is up with over like things like over-regularization?

00:24:15.690 --> 00:24:18.970
Like kids say goad and nobody has taught them to do that.

00:24:19.050 --> 00:24:22.490
So this is part of this argument that kids are learning rules of grammar.

00:24:22.890 --> 00:24:23.130
Yeah.

00:24:23.290 --> 00:24:26.410
So a construction is, I mean, it's a very odd idea in language science.

00:24:26.490 --> 00:24:28.330
It's blossomed in the last 30 years or so.

00:24:28.410 --> 00:24:29.530
But it's an old idea.

00:24:29.690 --> 00:24:32.330
Um, it's a mapping between a form and a function.

00:24:33.860 --> 00:24:38.500
And as I said earlier, I gave gave a few examples, words and what's X doing Y.

00:24:38.660 --> 00:24:40.260
It can be even more abstract.

00:24:40.340 --> 00:24:44.900
So subject, verb, object, transitive actions.

00:24:44.980 --> 00:24:46.660
And you just plug other things in.

00:24:46.740 --> 00:24:51.140
And the complic complicated sentences have all sorts of constructions plugged into one

00:24:51.140 --> 00:24:53.060
another and interacting with one another.

00:24:53.220 --> 00:24:53.540
Right.

00:24:53.860 --> 00:24:55.780
And their functions are complementary.

00:24:55.860 --> 00:25:00.100
The functions are working with it of the each individual construction is working together

00:25:00.100 --> 00:25:02.990
to build up the meaning right sentence.

00:25:03.310 --> 00:25:07.390
Now is the idea that those construction systems evolve for other functions and that's why

00:25:07.390 --> 00:25:08.670
language is not an adaptation.

00:25:09.230 --> 00:25:13.630
So those those those those that those constructions are all conventions.

00:25:15.230 --> 00:25:19.550
The word banana is j it's nothing more than a conventional way that you and I have to ref

00:25:19.870 --> 00:25:21.790
to raise the salience of objects like this.

00:25:22.110 --> 00:25:22.350
Right.

00:25:22.430 --> 00:25:26.990
But the st what I mean is like the machinery for sorry like like the example you gave where

00:25:26.990 --> 00:25:30.620
there's sort of like why like why X is X or something like that.

00:25:30.780 --> 00:25:31.500
What's X doing Y?

00:25:31.820 --> 00:25:32.860
What's X doing Y?

00:25:33.180 --> 00:25:39.180
The machinery that represents that is the idea that that machinery was

00:25:39.180 --> 00:25:40.460
for some other function.

00:25:40.860 --> 00:25:44.940
It evolved because you you need them in that machinery in order for all that content to get

00:25:44.940 --> 00:25:45.340
plugged in.

00:25:45.660 --> 00:25:51.260
Yeah, I'm suggesting that the machinery to um host form function pairs and to indeed not

00:25:51.260 --> 00:25:55.180
just to host some but a vast number of them and to plug them together.

00:25:55.370 --> 00:25:59.530
Yeah, that to me is most plausibly explained as an adaptation to the fact that humans are a

00:25:59.530 --> 00:26:00.810
linguistic species.

00:26:01.130 --> 00:26:05.930
So we become a communicative species.

00:26:06.250 --> 00:26:08.490
Humans they develop conventions super fast.

00:26:09.050 --> 00:26:13.210
Once they're using conventions regularly, they're gonna, you know, the the world, the

00:26:13.210 --> 00:26:15.370
ecology, the social ecology has changed.

00:26:15.530 --> 00:26:19.610
There's going to be selectional pressure on using those conventions quickly, easily,

00:26:19.770 --> 00:26:20.810
fine-grained manner.

00:26:20.970 --> 00:26:25.780
So you you get selection for the capacity to host uh enormous number.

00:26:26.180 --> 00:26:26.500
Right.

00:26:26.660 --> 00:26:32.340
So there are the idea is that the language communication system, there are

00:26:32.340 --> 00:26:38.260
evolved structures, but they're much more compositional than this old view.

00:26:39.140 --> 00:26:40.820
The word composition was a tricky one.

00:26:41.540 --> 00:26:44.900
So there's a sense in which what you're saying is true, but it composed composition was a

00:26:44.900 --> 00:26:46.660
tricky word with within linguistics.

00:26:46.740 --> 00:26:50.740
It has a bunch of overlapping and not all overlapping and not all the same meanings.

00:26:50.900 --> 00:26:51.140
Okay.

00:26:51.380 --> 00:26:54.390
So I'm a bit I I can hear the linguists in the background.

00:26:54.790 --> 00:26:55.510
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

00:26:55.590 --> 00:26:56.710
Yeah, there's all the audiences.

00:26:56.950 --> 00:26:57.030
Yeah.

00:26:57.270 --> 00:26:57.430
Yeah.

00:26:57.590 --> 00:26:58.710
But roughly, yes.

00:26:58.950 --> 00:26:59.190
Okay.

00:26:59.590 --> 00:26:59.830
Yeah.

00:26:59.910 --> 00:27:05.350
I mean I th the way I sort of think of your work is is s situated in a larger trend where

00:27:05.350 --> 00:27:10.390
we've sort of gone from this view as as man the rational animal, that we're solitary,

00:27:10.630 --> 00:27:14.550
intelligent thinkers, that we just puzzle things out individually in our heads.

00:27:14.710 --> 00:27:20.160
Uh and um so, you know, uh it used to be thought that the the reason why human brains were

00:27:20.160 --> 00:27:24.640
so big is is so that we could reason and use tools and and figure things out.

00:27:24.800 --> 00:27:29.920
Um and increasingly the uh a more popular and I think more more plausible given the

00:27:29.920 --> 00:27:35.920
evidence view is that uh really we're it's it's better to think of of humans not

00:27:35.920 --> 00:27:39.360
as the rational animal or as the intelligent animal, but as the social animal.

00:27:39.520 --> 00:27:44.870
Um and so one of the biggest predictors of uh primate brain size is not

00:27:45.270 --> 00:27:47.910
whether they use tools or something like that.

00:27:48.070 --> 00:27:53.190
It's how big their group is, what the social challenges uh there are in the primate's

00:27:53.190 --> 00:27:53.830
environment.

00:27:53.990 --> 00:27:59.990
Um and humans have extremely large uh groups, extremely complicated social environments.

00:28:00.230 --> 00:28:05.190
Probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, causes of human brain expansion was just

00:28:05.190 --> 00:28:08.310
the immensely complicated social lives that we have to navigate.

00:28:08.470 --> 00:28:13.320
There's of course recent work by uh Hugo Mercier arguing that reason, reasoning, our

00:28:13.320 --> 00:28:19.000
ability to think through uh syllogisms, if P then Q, uh that this uh uh

00:28:19.080 --> 00:28:24.360
faculty did not evolve for helping us make better decisions or or uh uh think more

00:28:24.360 --> 00:28:25.160
rationally.

00:28:25.400 --> 00:28:26.840
It evolved in a social context.

00:28:26.920 --> 00:28:31.320
It evolved to help us convince other people who we might uh have conflicts of interest with

00:28:31.480 --> 00:28:35.950
and justify uh our behaviors in a way that might defend our our reputations.

00:28:36.110 --> 00:28:40.510
And so even, you know, reasoning, this sort of quintessentially uh a solitary, rational

00:28:40.510 --> 00:28:42.750
thing, is actually a deeply social uh thing.

00:28:42.830 --> 00:28:46.110
And I th and I see what you're doing with language is is is very much analogous.

00:28:46.270 --> 00:28:51.630
Where it used to be believed that, you know, um language is about transmitting a a piece of

00:28:51.710 --> 00:28:56.360
uh of information from one head to another so that we could all understand the world uh

00:28:56.360 --> 00:28:57.400
more accurately.

00:28:57.480 --> 00:29:03.320
And so I'm sending you the code, you have to decode my code so that you understand uh uh uh

00:29:03.320 --> 00:29:04.840
the world around us.

00:29:05.080 --> 00:29:09.640
But you're basically taking that view and saying, no, um, we have to understand this as

00:29:09.640 --> 00:29:15.320
being situated within our social niche and uh uh and view it as

00:29:15.480 --> 00:29:19.990
as not necessarily transmitting information, but trying to get inside another person's

00:29:19.990 --> 00:29:20.470
head.

00:29:20.630 --> 00:29:23.750
Um and get inside their head getting inside your head.

00:29:23.830 --> 00:29:29.670
And in many ways, trying to uh manipulate what's inside their head uh for your advantage,

00:29:29.830 --> 00:29:34.790
uh uh or or to mutually manipulate the contents of each other's head for for mutual

00:29:34.790 --> 00:29:35.190
advantage.

00:29:35.350 --> 00:29:38.310
Um so that's sort of how I see your work.

00:29:38.470 --> 00:29:41.830
Would you buy that that overarching uh framework?

00:29:42.070 --> 00:29:42.230
Yeah.

00:29:42.470 --> 00:29:43.430
Yes, absolutely.

00:29:43.590 --> 00:29:48.280
So um, you know, uh well, if I can find the time and the space to do it, one of my

00:29:48.280 --> 00:29:53.560
ambitions for the future is to, you know, maybe a special issue, maybe that I mean I think

00:29:53.560 --> 00:29:57.160
there's much work to do getting the people, the sorts of names you just mentioned together,

00:29:57.320 --> 00:30:00.360
and articulating in detail the idea of social mind.

00:30:00.520 --> 00:30:04.840
So it's I mean, you mentioned Hugo Mercier and his work on reasoning.

00:30:04.920 --> 00:30:09.160
Um, there's plenty of work these days on emotions as well, some of emotions which were

00:30:09.160 --> 00:30:12.200
historically called self-um, what are they called?

00:30:12.280 --> 00:30:13.400
Uh self-conscious.

00:30:13.650 --> 00:30:14.610
Self-conscious, thank you.

00:30:14.690 --> 00:30:18.610
Yeah, self-conscious emotions, having rethought as social adaptations.

00:30:18.770 --> 00:30:23.570
Um there's a guy who did his PhD at CEU at Central European University called Johannes Maa,

00:30:23.890 --> 00:30:26.050
and he's done work on um episodic memory.

00:30:26.210 --> 00:30:31.810
So rem remembering events and making arguments a lot to the effect that that is we we do

00:30:31.810 --> 00:30:35.810
that not in order to sort of recall the past for our own internal purposes, but so that we

00:30:35.810 --> 00:30:41.020
can act well in in future cases of persuasion and argumentation and and managing social

00:30:41.020 --> 00:30:41.660
relations.

00:30:41.900 --> 00:30:47.100
Um I think yeah I I do think that most I don't know if it's all but certainly a very large

00:30:47.100 --> 00:30:51.180
amount of what's distinctive about our species comes down to the complexity and the size of

00:30:51.180 --> 00:30:52.700
our of our social groups.

00:30:52.940 --> 00:30:53.180
Yeah.

00:30:54.060 --> 00:30:58.540
Let me just try one more uh a different tack to make sure I understand.

00:30:58.700 --> 00:31:03.580
So one of the bringing back to Minsky, one of Minsky's criticisms of Chomsky.

00:31:03.660 --> 00:31:08.030
So Chomsky this sort of narrative is you know sort of started the cognitive revolution.

00:31:08.110 --> 00:31:09.630
And I'm a big fan of Chomsky.

00:31:09.710 --> 00:31:14.430
I mean, everybody, you know, huge contribution and arguing that this is part of our natural

00:31:14.430 --> 00:31:14.990
endowment.

00:31:15.070 --> 00:31:18.510
It's part of our species, typical, readily developing stuff.

00:31:18.750 --> 00:31:22.510
It's just part of our biological endowment, like a trunk or a trunk and an elephant or

00:31:22.510 --> 00:31:22.990
something.

00:31:23.310 --> 00:31:25.070
And that was really controversial, really important.

00:31:25.150 --> 00:31:31.020
But Minsky's argument was Chomsky by sort of starting the cognitive revolution

00:31:31.180 --> 00:31:33.020
in contrast to the behaviorists, right?

00:31:33.180 --> 00:31:34.620
Chomsky was arguing with Skinner.

00:31:34.780 --> 00:31:39.980
It was a great that that review is a great thing to read, by the way, Chomsky's criticism

00:31:39.980 --> 00:31:40.780
of Skinner.

00:31:42.620 --> 00:31:46.220
Minsky's argument is that what Skinner did was actually behaviorism.

00:31:46.460 --> 00:31:51.030
Because what uh Chomsky was doing still at the end of the day was sort of giving people

00:31:51.030 --> 00:31:53.990
sentences and asking them to say, is this grammatical or not?

00:31:54.230 --> 00:31:59.910
And it was sort of the the latent structure of what theories are

00:31:59.910 --> 00:32:04.470
necessary to explain the behavior of people saying this is grammatical or not.

00:32:04.710 --> 00:32:10.310
And and Minsky's argument is that that that misses the entire hard problem

00:32:11.200 --> 00:32:14.000
of whether it's grammatical, it doesn't matter at all.

00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:18.400
What matters is exactly what you're describing, Tom, which is sort of the communication.

00:32:18.560 --> 00:32:22.640
And I think like the Minsky's frames, and this is why I'm like, you know, thinking about

00:32:22.640 --> 00:32:27.120
this is like Minsky's idea about frames, which is like from the 70s, which was just that

00:32:27.360 --> 00:32:31.920
these are different sort of like cribs or ontologies for sort of like it's almost like this

00:32:31.920 --> 00:32:37.120
form structure thing where it'd be sort of like there's a frame for sort of like physical

00:32:37.120 --> 00:32:37.920
transitions.

00:32:38.000 --> 00:32:40.050
So like an occlusion event, right?

00:32:40.450 --> 00:32:45.730
That um that uh when occlusion is detected, there's a there's a system for

00:32:45.730 --> 00:32:51.170
representing what happens, you know, like it's and there's cues for detecting occlusion.

00:32:51.330 --> 00:32:55.570
Uh there's clue there's there's an there's frames for temporal changes.

00:32:55.810 --> 00:33:01.490
And so Minsky's claim is that we have all of these frames that are sort of what make our

00:33:01.490 --> 00:33:04.300
ability to do things like navigate a room.

00:33:04.380 --> 00:33:07.340
Like if you don't represent occlusion, all of a sudden you're just like, oh my God, like,

00:33:07.420 --> 00:33:08.460
you know, the hallway is not out there.

00:33:08.620 --> 00:33:09.980
I would never go to the hallway, right?

00:33:10.060 --> 00:33:11.740
Like if I never thought it was still there.

00:33:11.980 --> 00:33:17.900
And so all this machinery for representing things like the passage of time, what happens

00:33:17.900 --> 00:33:21.660
when an event, a physical event happens, what happens when a social event happens, in his

00:33:21.660 --> 00:33:27.590
argument was the hard part of communication, and what communication really

00:33:27.590 --> 00:33:33.590
is is the communication or getting people coordinated about the content and frames that are

00:33:33.590 --> 00:33:34.470
being activated.

00:33:34.630 --> 00:33:38.950
And it almost sounds like maybe Tom Scott Phillips is sort of picking up the Chomsky or

00:33:39.190 --> 00:33:39.830
sorry, the Minsky.

00:33:39.910 --> 00:33:40.790
I meant Minsky.

00:33:41.110 --> 00:33:42.070
The Minsky claim.

00:33:42.150 --> 00:33:43.430
Is that is that sort of fair?

00:33:43.910 --> 00:33:44.310
May maybe.

00:33:44.390 --> 00:33:46.470
I have not read Minsky since I was a grad student.

00:33:46.870 --> 00:33:49.350
Some time some many years ago now.

00:33:49.510 --> 00:33:53.400
Um maybe, but you you uh you've persuaded me that I I should go back to that exactly.

00:33:53.560 --> 00:33:53.880
Okay, great.

00:33:54.200 --> 00:33:58.760
But what you're saying sounds um a lot uh yes similar lines to what I'm saying.

00:33:59.240 --> 00:33:59.480
Fantastic.

00:33:59.560 --> 00:34:00.600
Okay, so now I understand it.

00:34:00.680 --> 00:34:00.920
Thank you.

00:34:01.080 --> 00:34:03.880
Sorry for yeah, it's it's uh it's wonderful.

00:34:03.960 --> 00:34:05.800
So uh I mean it it may be the case.

00:34:05.880 --> 00:34:10.280
So I I I'd need to do my reading to check, but it may be that one can understand a

00:34:10.280 --> 00:34:14.890
construction uh as a my as a frame of a of a very specified kind.

00:34:15.370 --> 00:34:15.930
Exactly.

00:34:16.090 --> 00:34:16.330
Yeah.

00:34:16.410 --> 00:34:16.890
And yeah.

00:34:16.970 --> 00:34:21.210
And I think this is just this is a good example of science where like what do different

00:34:21.210 --> 00:34:22.650
scientists mean by different words?

00:34:22.810 --> 00:34:26.650
We even you and I, as close as we are, Tom, like, you know, there's just d we have

00:34:26.650 --> 00:34:27.770
different reading histories.

00:34:27.850 --> 00:34:29.930
And so yeah, this this is this is great.

00:34:30.010 --> 00:34:30.650
Yeah.

00:34:32.010 --> 00:34:32.250
Good.

00:34:32.650 --> 00:34:33.530
Should we get into art?

00:34:33.930 --> 00:34:34.170
Please.

00:34:34.520 --> 00:34:34.840
Oh, sure.

00:34:35.800 --> 00:34:35.880
Yeah.

00:34:35.960 --> 00:34:36.120
Yeah.

00:34:36.200 --> 00:34:36.680
Yeah.

00:34:37.160 --> 00:34:38.680
Um, my my thing with art.

00:34:38.760 --> 00:34:41.640
So this thing, let me just like fill this in and you please talk about it.

00:34:41.800 --> 00:34:43.400
It's like I always found it weird.

00:34:43.640 --> 00:34:47.800
Like you go into a a place and there's like nothing on the walls.

00:34:47.960 --> 00:34:50.920
And then there's like an object in a glass case, you know?

00:34:51.080 --> 00:34:56.120
And being an anthropologist about like human existence, I was always like, that's weird,

00:34:56.200 --> 00:34:58.600
and it really makes this thing seem like important.

00:34:58.920 --> 00:35:02.360
And I would always like, you know, and this idea of like, you know, you pop a urinal to

00:35:02.360 --> 00:35:02.840
make the point.

00:35:03.000 --> 00:35:07.390
Um, But it always struck me as sort of weird, but I never went further than that.

00:35:07.550 --> 00:35:10.030
And then this paper on art was amazing to me.

00:35:10.350 --> 00:35:13.870
Can you sort of tell people who haven't read the paper or even who have?

00:35:14.030 --> 00:35:17.470
Can you remind them sort of like what is this thing about art?

00:35:17.550 --> 00:35:17.950
Yeah.

00:35:18.430 --> 00:35:18.670
Yeah.

00:35:18.750 --> 00:35:21.550
So well, the paper itself is called The Art Experience.

00:35:21.630 --> 00:35:24.910
And I, you know, I should immediately give credit to the first author, Kate McCallum.

00:35:25.470 --> 00:35:27.310
You know, she definitely led the work.

00:35:28.350 --> 00:35:34.320
So I work with mostly not entirely, but um, when I think about human communication, I

00:35:34.320 --> 00:35:36.880
work with a framework that's commonly called relevance theory.

00:35:36.960 --> 00:35:42.960
Uh, and the central idea, one of the central ideas in relevance theory um is that what

00:35:43.040 --> 00:35:47.680
audiences do when they pick up on a communicative stimulus, uh technically an ostensive

00:35:47.680 --> 00:35:50.960
stimulus, as we talked about earlier, when they pick up on an ostensive stimulus, well,

00:35:51.200 --> 00:35:54.410
your basic problem is how what is this, what does this thing mean?

00:35:54.490 --> 00:35:55.690
What is this thing doing in the world?

00:35:55.770 --> 00:35:59.050
How can you know there's an infinite number of things someone might mean by this?

00:35:59.450 --> 00:36:02.970
And what you uh and the answer to that question is you you assume that it's the most

00:36:02.970 --> 00:36:06.890
relevant thing that the communicator could have done, given what they want to do to your

00:36:06.890 --> 00:36:09.450
mind and given all the communicative tools available to them.

00:36:09.610 --> 00:36:14.970
And that's there's a lot packed into that, but uh that that the the essential idea is um

00:36:17.160 --> 00:36:19.000
we are predisposed as audience.

00:36:19.080 --> 00:36:24.120
Well, when we pick up on the fact that some something, some agent has re has raised bought

00:36:24.120 --> 00:36:29.640
our attention to some stimulus in the world, then we presume that it's especially

00:36:29.640 --> 00:36:32.520
relevant for us, given what they want to do.

00:36:32.600 --> 00:36:36.680
And our our job is essentially as as audiences, and we do it, you know, it's spontaneous.

00:36:37.000 --> 00:36:38.520
You can't turn it off even if you want to.

00:36:38.600 --> 00:36:41.960
So if you think about film spoilers, someone can tell you they're about to spoil the film

00:36:41.960 --> 00:36:45.630
that you don't want them to spoil, and you can't turn off your comprehension process.

00:36:45.710 --> 00:36:49.710
You will assume, you will interpret on the basis of a presumption of relevance, even though

00:36:49.710 --> 00:36:50.670
you don't want to.

00:36:50.830 --> 00:36:54.350
Um, and what we think is that that's what essentially what's going on in certainly

00:36:54.350 --> 00:36:55.550
contemporary art galleries.

00:36:55.630 --> 00:37:01.070
So they're these white cubes, these white walls, high ceilings, and so on, quite commonly.

00:37:01.150 --> 00:37:05.390
And then as you say, something is presented, it draws your attention, it's there for a

00:37:05.390 --> 00:37:07.870
reason, it's there for you in some sense.

00:37:08.030 --> 00:37:13.860
And so by being there for you, uh, it uh it triggers that that search for

00:37:13.940 --> 00:37:18.100
for some notion of some interpretations that are worth processing.

00:37:18.580 --> 00:37:23.060
The interesting thing about art, so think the think of a continuum.

00:37:23.220 --> 00:37:26.500
Language is somewhere in the middle or maybe slightly towards one side.

00:37:28.260 --> 00:37:30.340
Even further down, more even more precise.

00:37:30.500 --> 00:37:34.100
We use these constructions in very precise ways, for example, when we do mathematics,

00:37:34.180 --> 00:37:34.420
right?

00:37:34.500 --> 00:37:40.450
It's hyper precise and we yeah that's what at the other extreme you can you you can raise

00:37:40.450 --> 00:37:45.410
expectations of relevance but not provide much guidance right about exactly what it is your

00:37:45.410 --> 00:37:46.530
audience should take away.

00:37:46.610 --> 00:37:48.210
And I think that's what good artists do.

00:37:48.290 --> 00:37:52.930
They produce stimuli that if the they're put on the white wall and then if you engage with

00:37:52.930 --> 00:37:56.450
them, presuming that they're relevant in some way and you search for some interpretation,

00:37:56.610 --> 00:38:00.400
what I take away may be very different to what you take away, but whoever whoever it is

00:38:00.400 --> 00:38:02.880
that comes into contact with it takes something away.

00:38:02.960 --> 00:38:05.040
And that's the skill of a modern artist, right?

00:38:05.200 --> 00:38:09.520
To produce something that when it's engaged within those terms, uh produces something

00:38:09.520 --> 00:38:11.360
worthwhile for the audience.

00:38:12.240 --> 00:38:12.800
That's interesting.

00:38:12.960 --> 00:38:16.960
I mean, could w would you view it as sort of analogous to a game?

00:38:17.120 --> 00:38:21.430
So we can think of games as sort of practicing our our cognitive skills.

00:38:21.590 --> 00:38:25.350
Um, you know, if you're doing a word search, you're practicing your visual search

00:38:25.350 --> 00:38:25.990
abilities.

00:38:26.070 --> 00:38:29.830
Um, if you're playing, you know, a a physical sport, you're you're practicing how to

00:38:29.830 --> 00:38:33.110
maneuver your body through space or throw a projectile or or or whatever.

00:38:33.190 --> 00:38:37.030
And these are pr presumably, you know, useful school uh useful skills to be able to

00:38:37.030 --> 00:38:37.430
practice.

00:38:37.510 --> 00:38:40.950
If you play wrestling, that's going to be really important for in the future if you if you

00:38:40.950 --> 00:38:41.830
get into a fight.

00:38:42.070 --> 00:38:47.030
Um so um it could be that, you know, since language is is such an important skill for us to

00:38:47.030 --> 00:38:50.320
master that we get pleasure from practicing it.

00:38:50.640 --> 00:38:56.240
And it could be that art is one way of practicing the skill of trying to

00:38:56.240 --> 00:39:01.200
infer someone's intentions when they might might otherwise be opaque or uncertain.

00:39:01.440 --> 00:39:05.200
So you could think of art as a kind of challenge where like the artist is presenting you

00:39:05.200 --> 00:39:09.040
with something, uh, you know that they're presenting with you with something, and you know

00:39:09.040 --> 00:39:12.720
that it's going to be relevant in some way, otherwise they wouldn't be putting it in front

00:39:12.720 --> 00:39:13.040
of you.

00:39:13.270 --> 00:39:15.670
And the puzzle that you're trying to solve is, well, why?

00:39:15.750 --> 00:39:17.190
Why are they putting this in front of me?

00:39:17.350 --> 00:39:18.870
What are they trying to tell me?

00:39:19.110 --> 00:39:23.510
And there's a kind of pleasure we get in playing that game and practicing our ability to do

00:39:23.510 --> 00:39:27.990
that kind of detective work of, you know, what what is the meaning of this stimulus?

00:39:28.150 --> 00:39:30.950
Um would you buy that uh uh lens?

00:39:31.350 --> 00:39:31.990
Yeah, I like that.

00:39:32.150 --> 00:39:37.240
I haven't thought about um about art in terms of of puzzles and games, but I quite like

00:39:37.240 --> 00:39:37.320
that.

00:39:37.400 --> 00:39:42.120
And it reminds me of um if you read, you know, uh a popular book that's sort of how how to

00:39:42.120 --> 00:39:46.600
navigate an art gallery, you know, it's plenty of people interested and find the world a

00:39:46.600 --> 00:39:47.320
bit opaque.

00:39:47.480 --> 00:39:52.040
And it's very common advice to almost verbalize for yourself, what do I see?

00:39:52.200 --> 00:39:56.600
And I remember doing this myself, well, you know, in my early 20s and looking at uh going

00:39:56.600 --> 00:40:00.440
to big art galleries and being a bit confused, but just trying to like say to myself, okay,

00:40:00.520 --> 00:40:06.170
that's there, that's there, this is connected to that, and and by by doing that, I suppose

00:40:06.250 --> 00:40:11.690
as practice in a way, I I found I enjoyed modern art more and more than what I did that.

00:40:11.770 --> 00:40:13.850
So that that meshes with what you're saying, yeah.

00:40:14.250 --> 00:40:19.450
And and it's a it's a beautiful illustration of the fact that language is on a continuum

00:40:19.690 --> 00:40:22.170
with many different kinds of communication.

00:40:22.410 --> 00:40:27.450
So just as the words I'm saying can can communicate information about my intentions and

00:40:27.450 --> 00:40:31.960
motives and beliefs, you know, the paintings on my wall are are are also a similar are are

00:40:32.200 --> 00:40:36.600
directly analogous to the words coming out of my mouth and in terms of it's trying to you

00:40:36.600 --> 00:40:39.560
know send certain signals to you about the kind of person I am.

00:40:39.720 --> 00:40:45.720
Um and and and so uh viewing you know looking at a painting uh as

00:40:45.880 --> 00:40:51.000
you know kind of linguistic in in terms of the exercise, I think is a is a is an insightful

00:40:51.000 --> 00:40:56.450
way of understanding what what communication is and that it's not just uh uh words and

00:40:56.450 --> 00:41:00.850
their direct uh meanings, but it's it's much more uh nuanced and rich than that.

00:41:01.250 --> 00:41:02.370
Yeah, and there's two things to say.

00:41:02.450 --> 00:41:04.930
So one is that when we wrote the paper, Kate was very keen.

00:41:05.090 --> 00:41:09.410
Whenever we came close to saying anything like what you did, to be careful, because there's

00:41:09.410 --> 00:41:13.970
a history of people saying, Oh, you know, art is like a language and that that history

00:41:13.970 --> 00:41:17.570
involves people talking too much about codes and thinking the meanings are encoded in the

00:41:17.570 --> 00:41:18.050
artwork.

00:41:18.210 --> 00:41:22.980
And that is that you know that's not a well received view in um in art theory.

00:41:23.060 --> 00:41:26.260
And as you know, we have a different take on what's going on in language.

00:41:26.340 --> 00:41:28.260
And as you say, there's a continuum.

00:41:28.340 --> 00:41:30.100
I mean, it's clearly a multidimensional space.

00:41:30.260 --> 00:41:34.180
Humans have cognitive adaptations to express and recognize intentions.

00:41:34.260 --> 00:41:35.540
And they do this in all sorts of ways.

00:41:35.700 --> 00:41:38.660
By far the most salient is language use, but there's many others.

00:41:38.740 --> 00:41:43.700
And taxonomizing that space of the different ways we do things, um, that's work that hasn't

00:41:43.700 --> 00:41:43.940
been done.

00:41:44.180 --> 00:41:45.060
I'd love to do it.

00:41:45.140 --> 00:41:51.110
Um and maybe just useful to even just to zoom in on language, you can see the take a

00:41:51.110 --> 00:41:53.510
word uh a word like uh seven, right?

00:41:53.590 --> 00:41:57.670
That's a pretty pre it's not a completely precise, but it's pretty precise as a notion.

00:41:57.830 --> 00:42:03.510
Like it's quite hard to um, you know, maybe in some context we'll use it atypically, but

00:42:03.510 --> 00:42:04.790
seven's moderately precise.

00:42:04.870 --> 00:42:07.350
Then you take a word like effervescence or love.

00:42:07.750 --> 00:42:09.910
Like these are much more open-ended.

00:42:09.990 --> 00:42:15.680
Um, and I I in some ways what I'm saying, what you've just glossed, is we can push beyond

00:42:15.680 --> 00:42:16.800
language to extremes.

00:42:16.880 --> 00:42:20.640
I think if we push beyond the precision, we get towards mathematics, which is hyper

00:42:20.800 --> 00:42:21.360
precise.

00:42:21.440 --> 00:42:24.000
And if we go the other way, we get towards modern art.

00:42:25.200 --> 00:42:27.920
And as I say, I think there's more than one dimension there.

00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:30.240
But that the essential idea is there's a big space.

00:42:30.640 --> 00:42:30.800
Yeah.

00:42:30.880 --> 00:42:35.840
And then just uh what what given that it's communicative, it's also then interesting to the

00:42:35.840 --> 00:42:41.250
extent that you're interested in what's being communicated, if that's your interpretation.

00:42:41.410 --> 00:42:47.330
So for me, for example, you know, if I go to art museum in Berlin and it's about like

00:42:47.410 --> 00:42:52.370
1930s Berlin before the Third Reich, it's communicative, but it's communicative about like

00:42:52.370 --> 00:42:55.330
a past time that's really interesting for me to think about.

00:42:55.490 --> 00:43:00.610
Because then you're thinking about what is the artist um communicating and what what

00:43:00.610 --> 00:43:01.090
content.

00:43:01.170 --> 00:43:05.340
And that's a way to sort of time travel to a different time or place.

00:43:05.580 --> 00:43:09.260
So all the things that function for communication, right?

00:43:09.420 --> 00:43:14.140
Of this is a different human with a different experience talking about or describing a

00:43:14.140 --> 00:43:19.980
different time or experience, those things are opened up

00:43:19.980 --> 00:43:22.700
to the extent that that's what you and how you interpret it.

00:43:23.020 --> 00:43:24.700
Yeah, that I agree with that.

00:43:24.780 --> 00:43:25.900
But you can go further.

00:43:25.980 --> 00:43:31.500
Um, and you can include not just the painter of those paintings as an expressive agent, but

00:43:31.500 --> 00:43:33.020
also the curator of the exhibition.

00:43:33.470 --> 00:43:36.990
And they're two, they're both expressive agents with their own goals who are trying to

00:43:36.990 --> 00:43:40.750
raise the manifestness of certain representations and ideas and histories for you.

00:43:40.910 --> 00:43:41.070
Yeah.

00:43:41.390 --> 00:43:45.150
And even just the actual, and not even the current, but everyone who is producing the

00:43:45.150 --> 00:43:45.390
thing.

00:43:45.470 --> 00:43:50.190
Like, you know, the Michelangelo David, like the story about like the granite stone, you

00:43:50.190 --> 00:43:52.670
know, or like even any artifact, right?

00:43:52.750 --> 00:43:57.440
Like just thinking about like I like the idea of like learning about like where, you know,

00:43:57.520 --> 00:44:00.400
like I have this like ceramic coffee mug like made in France.

00:44:00.480 --> 00:44:05.520
And like the idea that it was like made in some foundry with like a salts or sand cast in

00:44:05.520 --> 00:44:05.760
France.

00:44:05.920 --> 00:44:08.480
Like and just thinking about that makes me appreciate this cup more.

00:44:08.640 --> 00:44:13.040
Like there's something about our as a species, like, you know, to represent an artifact is

00:44:13.040 --> 00:44:15.760
like the causal history of what led to it.

00:44:19.120 --> 00:44:19.440
Yeah.

00:44:19.770 --> 00:44:25.370
I mean I'm I'm wondering if if the um the uh

00:44:25.850 --> 00:44:31.290
vagueness for lack of a better term, or the the the difficulty of of figuring out the

00:44:31.530 --> 00:44:34.650
meaning of a of a work of art is is kind of a design feature.

00:44:34.890 --> 00:44:39.370
That if it were all very upfront and on the surface and easy to to decipher, then like

00:44:39.450 --> 00:44:41.450
there would be no pleasure in looking at it.

00:44:41.610 --> 00:44:47.580
That the the joy is is is trying to solve the puzzle um uh and and maybe maybe there

00:44:47.660 --> 00:44:51.820
isn't a correct answer and that maybe that's part of um the the pleasure we we get out of

00:44:51.820 --> 00:44:54.860
it i don't know do you uh do you think that there's something about the mis the

00:44:54.860 --> 00:44:58.860
mysteriousness of a work of art that that is appealing to us i don't know about if

00:44:58.860 --> 00:45:03.180
mysteriousness is the right word but openness definitely yeah yeah there there there there

00:45:03.180 --> 00:45:07.500
needn't be a definitive interpretation and this connects to I mean maybe I should I think I

00:45:07.500 --> 00:45:12.890
should have said this already but um well one of the one of the innovations, KK's

00:45:12.890 --> 00:45:18.650
innovations in this paper is to connect this uh cognitive approach to human communication

00:45:18.810 --> 00:45:24.570
with ideas that come from classical art theory, very famously Danto and Dickey, and the

00:45:24.570 --> 00:45:29.610
idea that what is art is nothing more than making the

00:45:30.650 --> 00:45:33.130
I forget exactly who it is, but making special.

00:45:33.300 --> 00:45:35.860
I think that may be dissonant as an anthropologist.

00:45:35.940 --> 00:45:39.940
But in this, there's the anthropology, there's the art theory, and there's also the

00:45:39.940 --> 00:45:42.580
cognitive approaches to relevance and communication.

00:45:42.740 --> 00:45:47.460
All of them are saying you make something in some way attention grabbing, or you raise

00:45:47.460 --> 00:45:52.820
expectations of relevance of if you engage with this, you'll get something back out of it.

00:45:53.060 --> 00:45:57.470
That's what we do in ordinary communication, but it's also what's distinctive about art.

00:45:57.550 --> 00:46:00.670
It's what distinct arguably what distinguishes art from aesthetics.

00:46:00.830 --> 00:46:03.630
It's saying this is worth engaging with in some way.

00:46:03.790 --> 00:46:07.710
And but exactly what a given audience takes away, obviously in the case of art, I think it

00:46:07.710 --> 00:46:09.950
can be very open and can be very different across different people.

00:46:10.030 --> 00:46:11.310
And that's totally fine.

00:46:11.630 --> 00:46:11.870
Right.

00:46:12.030 --> 00:46:16.750
And and something that's really understudy about this is the immense social consequences

00:46:16.750 --> 00:46:20.180
that occur if you violate these principles of relevance.

00:46:20.340 --> 00:46:23.940
So if I'm chatting with you and I say something that's completely irrelevant or

00:46:24.340 --> 00:46:29.220
indecipherable, you're going to view me as a bad social partner.

00:46:29.380 --> 00:46:30.580
You're probably not going to like me very much.

00:46:30.660 --> 00:46:32.260
You're not going to want to hang out with me again.

00:46:33.060 --> 00:46:38.740
In a highly interdependent species such as Homo sapiens, that would be an immense cost.

00:46:39.140 --> 00:46:44.500
If I'm bad at language or bad at communicating or bad at reading between the lines, that's

00:46:44.610 --> 00:46:47.250
pretty close to a death sentence for me.

00:46:47.410 --> 00:46:53.010
Um, so what I what I like about tying language to to uh these social challenges is that it

00:46:53.010 --> 00:46:57.970
really raises the salience of of the the fitness implications of being able to do this

00:46:57.970 --> 00:46:59.890
stuff well versus doing it poorly.

00:46:59.970 --> 00:47:03.890
And you could imagine um this also mattering from a sexual selection perspective.

00:47:03.970 --> 00:47:08.450
You know, a huge part of mating is just talking with someone and seeing if you vibe and if

00:47:08.450 --> 00:47:11.490
you're if you're good at communicating and coordinating with one another.

00:47:11.650 --> 00:47:16.340
Like people say that sense of humor is like a really important part of what they're looking

00:47:16.340 --> 00:47:17.380
for in a mate.

00:47:17.540 --> 00:47:22.100
Um, if you if you talk to someone and the conversation isn't good, like that's that's over,

00:47:22.180 --> 00:47:23.220
that's it, right?

00:47:23.620 --> 00:47:29.060
Um and so you could imagine this stuff having you know huge uh uh Darwinian implications.

00:47:29.220 --> 00:47:32.580
Um so I'm wondering if if if you thought about that aspect of your work, if you've if

00:47:32.580 --> 00:47:37.060
you've maybe thought about uh trying to uh test some of those implications uh socially.

00:47:37.380 --> 00:47:42.340
Yeah, so so the uh the Darwinian

00:47:43.220 --> 00:47:44.010
a key insight.

00:47:44.090 --> 00:47:49.050
So in the expression on each paper, which we talked about earlier, um one of Christoph's

00:47:49.050 --> 00:47:53.130
key insights, contributions to that paper is is to oversimplify a bit.

00:47:53.290 --> 00:47:57.290
Every time you try and communicate, every time you behave ostensibly, you draw someone's

00:47:57.290 --> 00:48:01.530
attention, you are making a commitment, and you're making a commitment to the relevance, to

00:48:01.530 --> 00:48:04.810
the worthwhile of engagement with for the other person.

00:48:05.220 --> 00:48:09.380
Like to draw someone's attention is to announce that it's worth their engaging with.

00:48:09.540 --> 00:48:13.540
And if it turns out that they engage with it and they don't get anything out of it, then

00:48:13.540 --> 00:48:16.340
that's gonna, as you say, come with social costs for you.

00:48:16.500 --> 00:48:21.700
And and that that fact is uh we think a very important selection pressure in the evolution

00:48:21.700 --> 00:48:23.940
of the cognitive capacities that we're talking about.

00:48:24.340 --> 00:48:30.050
That's why modern humans I say I don't I don't mean modernity, I think since the eighteen

00:48:30.050 --> 00:48:31.970
hundreds, I mean I mean living humans.

00:48:32.370 --> 00:48:33.330
Sixty thousand, yeah.

00:48:33.490 --> 00:48:34.370
Yeah, exactly.

00:48:34.530 --> 00:48:40.450
Uh they we we just presume that what others do is optimally relevant because it had

00:48:40.450 --> 00:48:41.970
to have been in the in the distant past.

00:48:42.050 --> 00:48:45.170
And so our cognitive apparatus have been selected to just take it that way.

00:48:45.330 --> 00:48:49.330
And of course, that can then be exploited or things can go wrong by people who say things

00:48:49.330 --> 00:48:51.650
which aren't worth paying any attention to, and so on.

00:48:51.810 --> 00:48:56.280
Um, but uh that I don't I don't think you can understand the design of human communication

00:48:56.280 --> 00:49:01.000
without um without that perspective that you know it there there's a commitment to it to

00:49:01.000 --> 00:49:03.480
relevance on behalf of everybody who ever talks.

00:49:03.640 --> 00:49:08.520
Um yeah there's a passage I mean I actually like it's it will this is from the paper.

00:49:08.680 --> 00:49:14.120
Um it will hence be an informer's uh own interest to actually be relevant for their

00:49:14.120 --> 00:49:19.240
audience because those who intentionally attract attention but fail to do so in ways that

00:49:19.240 --> 00:49:24.830
are useful or relevant will in time incur costs to their reputation and lose their

00:49:24.830 --> 00:49:28.030
capacity to manipulate their conspecifics' attention.

00:49:28.190 --> 00:49:32.030
In other words, there will be selection for behaviors that intentionally attract others'

00:49:32.190 --> 00:49:36.830
attention only when it is likely to be worthwhile for the audience to indeed pay attention.

00:49:37.230 --> 00:49:37.710
Precisely.

00:49:37.870 --> 00:49:38.110
Yep.

00:49:38.270 --> 00:49:38.510
Yeah.

00:49:38.910 --> 00:49:39.550
That's fascinating.

00:49:39.790 --> 00:49:45.580
Have you thought much about like this idea of being an attention seeker and why

00:49:45.580 --> 00:49:47.660
we view that negatively.

00:49:48.300 --> 00:49:52.060
And and just in general, the idea of intention as a limited resource that we often compete

00:49:52.060 --> 00:49:52.220
over.

00:49:52.300 --> 00:49:55.500
I mean, you could think, you know, cognitive scientists tell us we can only keep like seven

00:49:55.500 --> 00:49:57.900
or so things in working memory at a time.

00:49:58.140 --> 00:49:59.820
That is in effect a limited resource.

00:49:59.900 --> 00:50:04.060
And you could imagine other people in the social world competing for uh access to those

00:50:04.060 --> 00:50:05.260
seven slots and they're limited.

00:50:05.340 --> 00:50:07.660
If I'm paying attention to you, I'm not paying attention to someone else.

00:50:07.820 --> 00:50:09.900
If I'm helping you, I'm not helping someone else.

00:50:10.060 --> 00:50:12.350
Um if I'm listening to you, I'm not listening to someone else.

00:50:12.430 --> 00:50:16.830
And so attention really is a is an evolutionarily relevant resource that you could imagine

00:50:16.830 --> 00:50:17.630
competition over.

00:50:17.710 --> 00:50:23.070
And you could imagine um, you know, huge reputational costs if I try to greedily hoard

00:50:23.230 --> 00:50:27.550
attention uh without providing anything of value in in in return.

00:50:27.870 --> 00:50:31.630
Because if I grab other people's attention, I'm I'm preventing people from paying attention

00:50:31.630 --> 00:50:32.350
to other things.

00:50:32.830 --> 00:50:35.710
And so have you have you thought about that uh aspect of of your work?

00:50:36.110 --> 00:50:36.270
Yeah.

00:50:36.350 --> 00:50:39.640
So so attention is is plainly super, super basic.

00:50:39.800 --> 00:50:41.960
All organisms have to do it in some way, right?

00:50:42.200 --> 00:50:47.960
Um it's very important, I think, to distinguish um so so the questions that I've been most

00:50:47.960 --> 00:50:51.560
engaged with, and certainly the work we've been talking about so far, is concerned with, is

00:50:52.040 --> 00:50:56.680
um how communication even works in the first place, which does turn on attention and

00:50:56.680 --> 00:50:58.360
relevance and commitments and so on.

00:50:58.600 --> 00:51:02.200
Once it's up, you know, once it's working and it's running and everybody has these basic

00:51:02.200 --> 00:51:06.710
cognitive capacities, it's part of the ordinary, ordinarily developing phenotype of humans.

00:51:06.870 --> 00:51:07.430
It's true.

00:51:07.510 --> 00:51:10.630
Some people draw attention and just too much.

00:51:11.030 --> 00:51:13.910
Some people actually do the opposite and they draw attention too little.

00:51:14.550 --> 00:51:16.230
Not as many of them, but there are a few.

00:51:21.190 --> 00:51:22.230
Possibly so, yeah.

00:51:22.390 --> 00:51:23.510
Speak up, speak up.

00:51:23.670 --> 00:51:29.600
Um I don I don't think I have too much uh insightful to say about uh about

00:51:29.760 --> 00:51:35.360
the personalities that that that demand too much attention relative to what they actually

00:51:35.360 --> 00:51:35.920
have to offer.

00:51:36.080 --> 00:51:39.920
I think that's a slightly I mean that's clearly an interesting question, but that's it's a

00:51:39.920 --> 00:51:42.160
slightly different one to the ones I've been focused on.

00:51:42.240 --> 00:51:42.400
Yeah.

00:51:42.800 --> 00:51:42.960
Sure.

00:51:43.200 --> 00:51:46.470
I mean you could imagine there are there are trade-offs there which would create, you know,

00:51:46.550 --> 00:51:50.230
uh balancing selection or you know, a variety of different phenotypes that hit different

00:51:50.230 --> 00:51:51.030
ends of the trade-off.

00:51:51.430 --> 00:51:51.750
Absolutely.

00:51:51.830 --> 00:51:55.430
It strikes strikes me as much as anything about per as a personality question rather than a

00:51:55.670 --> 00:51:57.190
cognition of communication question.

00:51:57.830 --> 00:51:58.310
That makes sense.

00:51:58.550 --> 00:52:03.510
One one question, and then I just thought of this is like there's a uh um kids are often go

00:52:03.510 --> 00:52:06.550
through a transition period of becoming very shy.

00:52:06.790 --> 00:52:11.190
Um, and I was just thinking through like, you know, I think one of the claims of this is

00:52:11.190 --> 00:52:16.900
that the systems involved should sort of intrinsically understand that attention

00:52:17.220 --> 00:52:23.140
is important and of value, and drawing attention without it paying

00:52:23.140 --> 00:52:29.060
off for the other is a is a will be a cost to you and to be careful about

00:52:29.060 --> 00:52:29.860
drawing attention.

00:52:30.020 --> 00:52:31.460
I mean, there's other things too, right?

00:52:31.540 --> 00:52:37.460
Like, um, but that's I wonder, I'm just thinking out loud about um, you know, the

00:52:37.700 --> 00:52:43.250
the the the idea that part of shyness or not wanting to seek

00:52:43.250 --> 00:52:48.610
attention is in some sense an acknowledgement kind of baked into the system that

00:52:48.770 --> 00:52:54.290
attention is a really powerful but also sort of dangerous thing to elicit in

00:52:54.290 --> 00:52:55.090
others.

00:52:55.810 --> 00:52:56.530
Yeah, I agree.

00:52:56.690 --> 00:53:00.530
I think that's part of the same box of personality questions.

00:53:01.490 --> 00:53:02.130
Yeah.

00:53:02.370 --> 00:53:02.610
Yeah.

00:53:02.840 --> 00:53:03.800
No, I mean I love that idea.

00:53:03.880 --> 00:53:08.040
I've been thinking about that a lot because I've been thinking about alliances and how uh

00:53:08.040 --> 00:53:12.120
witch hunts are a kind of alliance where we form an alliance to accuse someone else of

00:53:12.120 --> 00:53:16.280
witchcraft which um gets the which which deflects blame off of us.

00:53:16.440 --> 00:53:19.640
And so that's the benefit we gain from participating in in the witch hunt.

00:53:19.800 --> 00:53:24.050
Um but you could you know you but if we're in the middle of a witch hunt, you definitely do

00:53:24.050 --> 00:53:25.810
not want to be the center of everyone's attention.

00:53:25.970 --> 00:53:31.090
Because if you are, you that creates a really uh nice focal point for everyone else to

00:53:31.090 --> 00:53:33.730
target you uh uh in in the witch hunt.

00:53:33.970 --> 00:53:34.050
Right.

00:53:34.210 --> 00:53:37.810
Uh and so you could imagine there being benefits to being the center of attention, but also

00:53:37.810 --> 00:53:40.050
really big potential costs, really big risks.

00:53:40.210 --> 00:53:41.490
It's a kind of risky strategy.

00:53:41.650 --> 00:53:41.810
Yeah.

00:53:41.970 --> 00:53:46.530
Um Yeah, Aaron Lukashevsky, uh like the costs and benefits of extroversion, right?

00:53:46.610 --> 00:53:49.730
Like this is an early HB paper from a bit ago.

00:53:49.810 --> 00:53:50.290
Yeah.

00:53:51.010 --> 00:53:51.650
Yeah.

00:53:52.220 --> 00:53:58.060
Um well I want to transition into uh one of my favorite papers of yours, um, which is uh Is

00:53:58.220 --> 00:54:00.620
non-evolutionary psychology possible?

00:54:01.420 --> 00:54:01.660
Yeah.

00:54:01.820 --> 00:54:02.540
With Dan Nettle.

00:54:02.700 --> 00:54:06.140
Um with Dan Nettle, uh who's uh we should also probably have on at some point.

00:54:06.220 --> 00:54:07.420
He's does great work.

00:54:07.580 --> 00:54:11.820
Um so I will just ask you the question is non-evolutionary psychology possible?

00:54:12.140 --> 00:54:13.260
Not really, no.

00:54:14.780 --> 00:54:17.020
Um I again I should give credit where it's due.

00:54:17.420 --> 00:54:22.550
I mean it's that Daniel's paper first, and he invited me on um to join uh because he

00:54:22.550 --> 00:54:26.230
thought I had some useful things to say about about Bayesianism and other approaches to

00:54:26.230 --> 00:54:32.070
doing psychology, which um are sometimes contrasted with evolutionary psychology.

00:54:32.230 --> 00:54:37.990
Um but yet seem it seems to me certainly to have similar

00:54:37.990 --> 00:54:39.510
goals to evolutionary psychology.

00:54:40.710 --> 00:54:45.340
And so yeah, as you say, the question okay, the I mean it's a very Daniel thing to do to

00:54:45.340 --> 00:54:46.060
sort of invert the world.

00:54:46.140 --> 00:54:48.780
Everybody says, Well, evolutionary psychology, is that is that a good idea?

00:54:48.860 --> 00:54:49.500
Do I believe in that?

00:54:49.580 --> 00:54:50.060
Blah, blah, blah.

00:54:50.220 --> 00:54:52.700
And you've talked about that in some of your past podcast episodes.

00:54:52.940 --> 00:54:57.340
We can invert the question and say, Well, is anybody doing non-evolutionary psychology?

00:54:57.500 --> 00:54:58.700
Is that even possible?

00:54:58.860 --> 00:55:03.500
Um, and to answer that, we sort of delineate different commitments of different types of

00:55:03.500 --> 00:55:04.460
psychology.

00:55:04.700 --> 00:55:08.270
Um, And it's true, there are different varieties of evolutionary psychology.

00:55:08.350 --> 00:55:12.270
There are especially strong forms that have particular commitments to certain architecture

00:55:12.270 --> 00:55:12.990
of the mind.

00:55:13.470 --> 00:55:16.910
But to be properly non-evolutionary, you don't just have to drop that, you have to drop

00:55:16.910 --> 00:55:19.150
notions of mechanism and notions of function.

00:55:19.310 --> 00:55:25.070
And you end up with something that's so diluted that it's very hard to imagine anyone could

00:55:25.070 --> 00:55:26.350
possibly believe in it.

00:55:27.230 --> 00:55:31.790
You know to be, I mean, yeah.

00:55:33.260 --> 00:55:38.540
I think my I I I am one of my go-to examples for a lot of thinking about evolution is

00:55:38.860 --> 00:55:39.740
vision science.

00:55:39.900 --> 00:55:43.980
Um some people say vision science is an evolutionary psychology, and I would say yes it is,

00:55:44.060 --> 00:55:48.860
um, because vision scientists all have a fun have an assumption about the function of the

00:55:48.860 --> 00:55:49.500
mechanisms.

00:55:49.660 --> 00:55:54.220
I mean, they assume that the mechanisms exist, that there are aspects of the mind that do

00:55:54.220 --> 00:55:57.980
certain jobs, and they make an assumption about the function of those mechanisms, or maybe

00:55:57.980 --> 00:55:59.740
they think there's byproducts or whatever.

00:55:59.900 --> 00:56:03.050
Um, to do non evolutionary psychology is to drop those assumptions.

00:56:03.130 --> 00:56:06.250
And it's hard to know how I could even study vision if I didn't have those assumptions, or

00:56:06.250 --> 00:56:10.650
for that matter, personality or language, or whatever else it is that you want to study.

00:56:11.610 --> 00:56:13.450
And yeah, so we worked through a few examples.

00:56:13.610 --> 00:56:15.610
Bayesian cognitive science is one.

00:56:16.570 --> 00:56:22.570
Daniel went, you know, went and read some sociology of famous sociologists called Anthony

00:56:22.570 --> 00:56:27.300
Giddens, uh, who's got a sort of tacit theory of psychology on which he builds his

00:56:27.300 --> 00:56:28.660
sociological theories.

00:56:28.820 --> 00:56:33.540
And you know, we make the argument that even here, this tacit theory, it has to have, it

00:56:33.540 --> 00:56:38.900
does have basic notions that that in some sense make it evolutionary because they assume

00:56:38.900 --> 00:56:39.620
functions.

00:56:39.860 --> 00:56:45.540
And to our mind, the only, you know, the the the only the only innovation of Tubian

00:56:45.620 --> 00:56:49.940
Cosmedis and other evolutionary psychologists is to say, well, when we think about these

00:56:49.940 --> 00:56:55.410
topics, we should take this the evolutionary ecologies of humans, and we should take that

00:56:55.410 --> 00:56:55.890
in mind.

00:56:56.050 --> 00:56:59.810
That's part of theorizing properly about functions and mechanisms.

00:56:59.970 --> 00:57:03.090
That's the innovative that's that's to my mind the basic innovation of evolutionary

00:57:03.090 --> 00:57:03.490
psychology.

00:57:03.570 --> 00:57:04.930
And I think it's got to be right.

00:57:05.090 --> 00:57:08.450
Um, and there's an important sense in which all psychologists are evolutionary

00:57:08.450 --> 00:57:09.330
psychologists.

00:57:09.730 --> 00:57:09.970
Yeah.

00:57:10.050 --> 00:57:14.450
I mean, maybe one argument, maybe to to put it is, and you can tell me if this is right, is

00:57:14.450 --> 00:57:19.100
that there everything is implicitly evolutionary psychology, and what what practically

00:57:19.180 --> 00:57:21.900
evolutionary psychology has been is been doing it explicitly.

00:57:22.220 --> 00:57:22.700
That's true.

00:57:22.780 --> 00:57:23.020
Yep.

00:57:23.180 --> 00:57:23.580
Right.

00:57:23.820 --> 00:57:24.140
Yeah.

00:57:24.300 --> 00:57:24.620
Right.

00:57:25.020 --> 00:57:25.260
Yeah.

00:57:25.420 --> 00:57:31.340
So like a a big um way of thinking that's popular in social psychology and even even

00:57:31.420 --> 00:57:36.540
uh other branches of psychology is to view the functions of the mind uh in terms of the

00:57:36.540 --> 00:57:38.540
pursuit of hedonic state.

00:57:38.860 --> 00:57:39.900
So the pursuit of happiness.

00:57:40.060 --> 00:57:42.300
So the function of this is to make us feel good.

00:57:42.460 --> 00:57:48.370
Or it's to uh avoid negative feelings, to avoid feelings of uncertainty or anxiety or or

00:57:48.370 --> 00:57:53.650
whatever, or to pursue uh feelings of happiness or meaning or self-esteem or self-worth.

00:57:53.810 --> 00:57:58.610
And so you could think of a a large part of current psychological research as making the

00:57:58.770 --> 00:58:04.290
implicit claim that the mind is designed to seek out certain hedonic states.

00:58:04.450 --> 00:58:10.000
Um and m I can get on my soapbox now, but if you if you think about that functional

00:58:10.000 --> 00:58:15.120
claim uh f for even a brief moment in terms of natural selection, it makes absolutely no

00:58:15.120 --> 00:58:15.440
sense.

00:58:15.680 --> 00:58:20.400
Why would why would the mind be designed to seek out something inside itself?

00:58:21.120 --> 00:58:24.720
What you know, wh why why do why do brains want stuff inside our brains?

00:58:24.800 --> 00:58:30.350
We we we should have evolved to seek stuff in the world that um uh mattered for uh

00:58:30.350 --> 00:58:32.990
ancestral survival and and reproduction.

00:58:33.070 --> 00:58:37.870
And we should care about the deg the degree to which our our beliefs about those things are

00:58:37.870 --> 00:58:40.270
correct or not correct, right?

00:58:40.430 --> 00:58:42.510
We shouldn't want to just feel good for its own sake.

00:58:42.590 --> 00:58:46.750
We should want to get the sorts of things that would have enhanced survival and

00:58:46.750 --> 00:58:52.670
reproduction, like food, sex, status, uh uh group uh cohesion, things of

00:58:52.670 --> 00:58:58.260
that sort, um, that that that have a uh a real uh covariance with with biological

00:58:58.260 --> 00:59:04.180
fitness um but uh uh uh uh uh seeking out happiness itself is not a very

00:59:04.180 --> 00:59:05.300
plausible functional claim.

00:59:05.380 --> 00:59:09.140
And so you could think of a huge part of psychology as making this implicit evolutionary

00:59:09.140 --> 00:59:11.620
theory that we have evolved to seek happiness.

00:59:11.700 --> 00:59:14.980
Uh and that theory is just uh it shouldn't have ever left the gate.

00:59:15.060 --> 00:59:17.620
It's just a a completely implausible theory on its face.

00:59:17.700 --> 00:59:22.770
Uh and if and if psychologists had taken a a brief moment to evaluate the evolutionary

00:59:22.770 --> 00:59:26.770
plausibility of their theory, they would realize that it should never have left the gate.

00:59:27.090 --> 00:59:33.090
And it has uh, in my opinion, led to a lot of really um uh uh uh uh bad

00:59:33.170 --> 00:59:37.650
um, for lack of a better term, research, or a lot of a lot of um going down blind alleys

00:59:37.650 --> 00:59:41.730
and in wrong directions and thinking about the mind in in exactly the wrong way.

00:59:41.890 --> 00:59:44.930
You know, there's a leading theory of conspiracy theories that they're designed to make us

00:59:44.930 --> 00:59:50.920
feel better, to assuage feelings of uncertainty about the world, which makes absolutely

00:59:50.920 --> 00:59:51.480
no sense.

00:59:51.640 --> 00:59:55.480
Uh especially, you know, considering that most conspiracy theories are quite horrifying,

00:59:55.560 --> 00:59:59.320
and that would seem to serve the function of making you feel better quite poorly.

00:59:59.560 --> 01:00:05.400
Um, and so what I love about your paper is that it it tells anyone

01:00:05.400 --> 01:00:08.520
who's studying the mind that you're already doing evolutionary psychology.

01:00:08.680 --> 01:00:10.440
You're studying an evolved organ.

01:00:10.950 --> 01:00:15.190
You know, if you believe in the theory of evolution, if you believe that the human uh uh

01:00:15.350 --> 01:00:21.350
brainslash mind is a product of evolution and you're studying it, um uh what else

01:00:21.350 --> 01:00:23.430
are you doing but studying an evolved organ?

01:00:23.510 --> 01:00:26.790
And and if you're making claims about that evolved organ, you are necessarily making

01:00:26.790 --> 01:00:28.870
evolutionary psychological claims.

01:00:29.110 --> 01:00:32.950
And so if you're going to be making those claims, you might as well do your homework and

01:00:32.950 --> 01:00:38.230
think about how evolution works, think about the uh evolutionary history of Homo sapiens

01:00:38.390 --> 01:00:40.940
and and and do the job well.

01:00:41.500 --> 01:00:46.700
Um so I mean no I can't disagree obviously I mean that I agree with all that.

01:00:46.860 --> 01:00:49.500
There's a point in that paper that's worth making in this context though.

01:00:50.460 --> 01:00:50.620
No.

01:00:50.940 --> 01:00:56.140
I I think that um evolutionary psychology, the field has been misnamed from the beginning.

01:00:56.380 --> 01:01:01.740
I think um I I think the name mislead so a lot of people think oh no uh you know you you're

01:01:01.740 --> 01:01:07.230
m as or more familiar than I am with um the the many criticisms and misunderstandings um of

01:01:07.230 --> 01:01:08.670
evolutionary psychology.

01:01:08.990 --> 01:01:11.710
Um what it really is is adaptationist cognitive science.

01:01:11.870 --> 01:01:12.030
Yeah.

01:01:12.270 --> 01:01:18.190
So cognitive adaptationism in my mind is actually

01:01:18.190 --> 01:01:18.590
what it is.

01:01:18.750 --> 01:01:22.030
Cognitive adaptationism is is my actual word for it.

01:01:22.110 --> 01:01:22.510
Yeah.

01:01:22.990 --> 01:01:27.950
To to to think seriously about the evolutionary ecology of human minds, as you were just

01:01:27.950 --> 01:01:33.200
saying, David, um uh in you know, in our framing of our hypotheses about how the mind

01:01:33.200 --> 01:01:35.760
works, that is to be an adaptationist about cognitive science.

01:01:35.840 --> 01:01:38.960
And hence why I think it's best understood as adaptationist cognitive science.

01:01:39.120 --> 01:01:43.040
It's called evolutionary psychology, and I think that leads people to think that we're, you

01:01:43.040 --> 01:01:47.200
know, we evolutionary psychologists are trying to recreate the evolutionary history of

01:01:47.200 --> 01:01:47.760
humans.

01:01:48.000 --> 01:01:52.400
Um, you know, we're we're interested in the phylogeny question, which certainly is an

01:01:52.400 --> 01:01:56.160
interesting question, um, but it's not the defining question of the field, I think, which

01:01:56.160 --> 01:02:01.590
is which is an adaptation on functionalist and the function and mechanism questions.

01:02:01.910 --> 01:02:07.590
Um and I think, you know, uh yeah, it and it and I suppose the evolutionary

01:02:07.590 --> 01:02:13.590
psychology framing also sort of places a places an emphasis and can

01:02:13.670 --> 01:02:19.190
for some readers place an emphasis on basic biological things and leading to the contrast

01:02:19.190 --> 01:02:21.270
with culture, leading to the contrast with learned.

01:02:21.430 --> 01:02:25.600
You've talked in other podcast episodes about how those are false dichotomies.

01:02:25.680 --> 01:02:28.800
But then the I don't think the name does us any favors in that respect.

01:02:29.120 --> 01:02:29.280
Right.

01:02:29.360 --> 01:02:29.520
Yeah.

01:02:29.600 --> 01:02:33.760
And it's also, I mean, everything is sort of a it's a co it's a convention, right?

01:02:33.840 --> 01:02:35.440
And sort of a function of its time.

01:02:35.600 --> 01:02:39.520
And even on this podcast, you know, like we will actually have a ton of anthropologists on,

01:02:39.600 --> 01:02:41.600
not all of whom are cognitive adaptationists.

01:02:41.680 --> 01:02:44.720
And the evolutionary behavioral sciences are a bit different than just cognitive

01:02:44.720 --> 01:02:45.280
adaptationism.

01:02:45.440 --> 01:02:50.210
And of course, you know, you want to understand what is if you want if you're doing an

01:02:50.210 --> 01:02:55.090
adaptationism of like what does this organism or organ need, what does this brain need,

01:02:55.250 --> 01:02:59.650
understanding the natural ecology, understanding selection pressures and game theory, d

01:02:59.810 --> 01:03:02.610
evolutionary game theory, these are all related tools.

01:03:02.690 --> 01:03:04.930
And so I think there I I totally agree with you, Tom.

01:03:05.090 --> 01:03:09.490
And I I think like even just the language of sort of like, well, is evolutionary psychology

01:03:09.570 --> 01:03:13.940
or like the overarching thing, or is that evolutionary behavioral sciences, or what does

01:03:13.940 --> 01:03:14.580
that even mean?

01:03:14.740 --> 01:03:17.380
And then, like, you know, what where do all these things fit in?

01:03:17.460 --> 01:03:20.980
And you know, like lots of people like Dan Conroy Beam does like agent-based modeling

01:03:21.060 --> 01:03:25.620
selection dynamics, but then also is a cognitive adaptationist, but like then does the

01:03:25.620 --> 01:03:28.260
modeling stuff actually is that cognitive adaptationism?

01:03:28.420 --> 01:03:33.220
Well, no, but it's part of the toolkit of being that, you know, so it's it's all yeah, it's

01:03:33.220 --> 01:03:34.580
a sort of a fuzzy set.

01:03:34.660 --> 01:03:34.980
Yeah.

01:03:35.370 --> 01:03:35.690
Yeah.

01:03:36.010 --> 01:03:39.610
Another reason you should get Daniel Nestlon is I know he's done empirical work getting

01:03:39.610 --> 01:03:42.730
people's folk intuitions about what explains human behavior.

01:03:42.890 --> 01:03:48.090
And he constantly gets this division between evolution and biology on one side and cultural

01:03:48.170 --> 01:03:48.570
on the other side.

01:03:48.970 --> 01:03:49.130
Yeah.

01:03:49.210 --> 01:03:53.370
And that's part of this difference detecting mechanisms, which is part of like my idea,

01:03:53.530 --> 01:03:54.970
like thinking my thinking too.

01:03:55.130 --> 01:04:00.890
I want to push on this idea that uh and we can transition maybe to something else which is

01:04:00.890 --> 01:04:06.580
related to what we were just talking about, which is that um, you know, cognitive science

01:04:06.580 --> 01:04:11.700
or areas of psychology that are already sort of implicitly evolutionary, but they're

01:04:11.860 --> 01:04:13.300
they're doing this thing.

01:04:13.460 --> 01:04:17.060
And I'm going to characterize this thing, and I'm going to be slightly uncharitable, but

01:04:17.060 --> 01:04:22.980
it's something I think all three of us have have for been kind of brushed against, or it

01:04:23.060 --> 01:04:24.660
has been kind of ground us down.

01:04:24.820 --> 01:04:26.020
And I think it's worth talking about.

01:04:26.100 --> 01:04:31.470
And it's it's basically to put it in a really uncharitable brief way, is that one of the

01:04:31.470 --> 01:04:37.070
problems of our science is, and it goes back to this Chomsky thing,

01:04:37.310 --> 01:04:40.430
is the data is really important.

01:04:40.590 --> 01:04:45.550
And the exercise of a science of psychology, because the like Marvin Minsky talked about is

01:04:45.630 --> 01:04:46.670
like physics envy.

01:04:48.190 --> 01:04:51.950
You know, which is, and even Chomsky was like, you know, calling a behavioral science like

01:04:51.950 --> 01:04:55.630
the science of behavior, it's like this calling physics or you know the science of meter

01:04:55.710 --> 01:04:56.110
reading, right?

01:04:56.190 --> 01:04:57.310
It's not the data don't matter.

01:04:57.390 --> 01:04:58.990
It's what you're making a theory about.

01:04:59.420 --> 01:05:04.540
I think there's such incognitive science in social psychology and a lot of areas.

01:05:04.700 --> 01:05:06.700
And I think F-Psych isn't is an exception.

01:05:06.860 --> 01:05:12.700
There are other exceptions broadly, but there are generally, it's this idea that if

01:05:12.700 --> 01:05:15.900
you're doing good science, you're producing lots of data.

01:05:16.220 --> 01:05:22.060
And then maybe as a secondary thing, you describe the data or characterize the data.

01:05:22.300 --> 01:05:27.950
And what you're really not allowed to do is really say very much to the

01:05:27.950 --> 01:05:30.110
extent that you don't have data.

01:05:31.230 --> 01:05:36.750
And I think that even this point about like what David described as sort of like people are

01:05:36.750 --> 01:05:40.830
motivated to be happy, it's typically like what's done.

01:05:41.070 --> 01:05:45.630
And David, you can tell me if this is incorrect, but this is my assessment, is that in all

01:05:45.630 --> 01:05:51.230
of these areas that we sort of think aren't going very well, I believe that the bottom line

01:05:51.230 --> 01:05:56.760
thing is not appreciation of like theory-first approaches or thinking about what should we

01:05:56.760 --> 01:05:58.600
expect to find what data is important.

01:05:58.680 --> 01:06:04.360
And instead, it's saying, I'm gonna study people's satisfaction or self-esteem or

01:06:04.360 --> 01:06:07.080
happiness about this important, interesting thing of life.

01:06:07.160 --> 01:06:08.840
Like I'm gonna look people as social media use.

01:06:09.080 --> 01:06:12.120
Do people who use social media, are they happy or less happy?

01:06:12.280 --> 01:06:16.040
And then, like the idea that's sort of like implicit in it is like there's a mechanism

01:06:16.040 --> 01:06:21.960
that's motivated to like be happy is sort of incidental because the implicit game is

01:06:22.370 --> 01:06:24.770
I get status by presenting data.

01:06:24.850 --> 01:06:28.930
And the more hard it is, the more interesting it, quote unquote interesting it is.

01:06:29.090 --> 01:06:34.370
And the the more, the bigger the end, the bigger the sample size, the more

01:06:34.370 --> 01:06:36.130
geographically diverse it is.

01:06:36.290 --> 01:06:38.690
That gets me a science or nature paper.

01:06:38.930 --> 01:06:43.490
And really the theory or the inference about the mind is very much secondary.

01:06:43.650 --> 01:06:48.300
So I would even I would say it's even worse than like implicit of psych it's almost like

01:06:48.300 --> 01:06:53.260
there's no psychology at all like I the Virginia Wolf thing is like why are psychologists

01:06:53.260 --> 01:06:58.380
afraid to do psychology I will I will say this like I'm I really feel like there's so much

01:06:58.380 --> 01:07:02.140
of psychology that's afraid to like make climbs claims about what's in the mind.

01:07:02.300 --> 01:07:06.220
I'm curious what you guys think about that as sort of being a problem.

01:07:07.820 --> 01:07:10.140
You want me to go or do you want to go David?

01:07:10.620 --> 01:07:15.970
Go for it Tom I mean uh yeah there's there there's there's so much to say.

01:07:16.130 --> 01:07:20.450
I mean in some ways I think uh your your characterization of the of the current landscape

01:07:20.530 --> 01:07:22.210
is a sociology of science point you're making.

01:07:22.290 --> 01:07:25.970
And your characterisation, um, I I basically agree with.

01:07:26.050 --> 01:07:31.250
Um I haven't put it I haven't thought about it quite in those terms, why psychologists are

01:07:31.250 --> 01:07:34.050
afraid to do psychology, but I do rather like that.

01:07:34.200 --> 01:07:38.360
Um, one thing that I've I've written about recently, as you know, is that um if you call

01:07:38.360 --> 01:07:43.080
yourself a theoretical psychologist, it's extremely hard um to get a job to the extent I

01:07:43.080 --> 01:07:45.400
mean psychologists don't know what that is.

01:07:45.560 --> 01:07:47.720
Like that category doesn't exist in the world.

01:07:47.800 --> 01:07:49.640
They say a junk of philosophy.

01:07:49.800 --> 01:07:55.790
And there's so you know, there's there's one group of people who never ask me

01:07:55.790 --> 01:07:56.990
that question, and that's philosophers.

01:07:57.070 --> 01:08:00.270
They don't confuse the sort of work I do for philosophy.

01:08:00.510 --> 01:08:04.270
Um but but psychologists often call me a philosopher, interestingly.

01:08:04.510 --> 01:08:09.710
Um I think, I mean, exactly what is going on, why things are the way they are and how they

01:08:09.710 --> 01:08:12.750
might change, that's almost a question for historians.

01:08:12.910 --> 01:08:18.860
So I I think it actually ties to ties in with the way we fund science,

01:08:18.940 --> 01:08:22.780
the way we fund universities even, and the way that you know and and the accountancy of

01:08:22.780 --> 01:08:28.460
universities and therefore the way that grants are incentivized and treated.

01:08:29.020 --> 01:08:34.700
And I think as the the prioritization of data, data, data, I mean clearly data is huge, you

01:08:34.700 --> 01:08:36.140
know, obviously it's important.

01:08:37.580 --> 01:08:43.510
But um to but you know, as you say, arguably it goes so far that we don't actually

01:08:43.510 --> 01:08:44.230
do psychology.

01:08:44.390 --> 01:08:49.670
And why that's the case, I think is that's a really complicated sociological question.

01:08:51.430 --> 01:08:51.670
Yeah.

01:08:51.830 --> 01:08:55.190
No, I think the physics envy is probably a big part of it.

01:08:55.350 --> 01:09:00.310
That we we want to try to mimic the superficial features of a rigorous science without uh

01:09:00.390 --> 01:09:03.740
you know getting to the core of what good science actually is.

01:09:04.060 --> 01:09:07.420
Then it's it's not just about the superficial appearances, the numbers, the data, the

01:09:07.420 --> 01:09:07.900
graphs.

01:09:08.140 --> 01:09:10.780
It's about actual insight, actual understanding.

01:09:11.020 --> 01:09:13.020
Um and and I think we've lost sight of that.

01:09:13.180 --> 01:09:17.100
Um you know it it is interesting how you you can get a job as a theoretical physicist.

01:09:17.260 --> 01:09:20.060
A theoretical physicist makes sense as a profession.

01:09:20.220 --> 01:09:24.700
There are plenty of theoretical physicists who make a living doing that, but the idea of a

01:09:24.700 --> 01:09:26.380
theoretical psychologist is unheard of.

01:09:27.030 --> 01:09:30.710
I wonder if we got a theoretical if we spoke to theoretical physicists and what they would

01:09:30.710 --> 01:09:35.110
say about the funding landscape and therefore the job landscape for theoretical physicists.

01:09:35.350 --> 01:09:39.510
They definitely don't category, but I wouldn't be surprised if they it's uh the that they

01:09:39.510 --> 01:09:42.150
complain about the challenges of that's true.

01:09:42.230 --> 01:09:46.150
Yeah, it may be a problem in physics too, but it but it at least is probably less of a

01:09:46.150 --> 01:09:47.910
problem for them than it is for us.

01:09:47.990 --> 01:09:52.940
It's even it's even worse uh in psychology, which uh I think it gets it exactly backwards

01:09:53.020 --> 01:09:53.420
of anything.

01:09:53.500 --> 01:09:56.780
We need more theory in psychology because the our object of study is so much more

01:09:56.780 --> 01:09:59.660
complicated with so many different interacting variables.

01:09:59.820 --> 01:10:04.140
Um that you there's just an even greater need uh for theory to make sense of it because

01:10:04.220 --> 01:10:08.700
there's just an endless variety of empirical tests and hypotheses that you can test, and

01:10:08.700 --> 01:10:12.620
just winnowing down that space of possibilities to imaginable number is just way more

01:10:12.620 --> 01:10:16.380
important in psychology because there the the I just the possibility of going down blind

01:10:16.380 --> 01:10:18.220
alleys is just so much greater.

01:10:18.460 --> 01:10:19.610
Um so yeah.

01:10:19.850 --> 01:10:20.410
Yeah, that's right.

01:10:20.490 --> 01:10:23.530
I mean, you can collect it's not antithetic antithetical to data.

01:10:23.610 --> 01:10:27.770
It's that it tells you what data to collect.

01:10:28.010 --> 01:10:33.930
And it it what it does theory, what it avoids is collecting data, which

01:10:33.930 --> 01:10:39.770
is a really expensive, time-consuming thing that doesn't buy you

01:10:39.770 --> 01:10:40.650
anything, you know.

01:10:40.730 --> 01:10:46.680
And so in the in the in the efficacy of sort of you know, even what science

01:10:46.680 --> 01:10:52.280
is, like even from like a Pauperian perspective, like it's it's an idea that's falsifiable

01:10:52.440 --> 01:10:56.760
in the sense of it's not just you recognize this thing, right?

01:10:56.920 --> 01:11:00.840
Like that, oh yeah, this is an instant, like cognitive dissonance is a great example.

01:11:00.920 --> 01:11:05.080
Like if you can't falsify the idea, it's not a really good testable prediction.

01:11:05.160 --> 01:11:09.400
And so if you you can you can probably cash out cognitive dissonance mechanistically, so

01:11:09.400 --> 01:11:11.640
it's like a falsifiable version of it.

01:11:11.800 --> 01:11:17.490
Um, but if you don't have theory to sort of cache all that out, to then set

01:11:17.490 --> 01:11:18.530
up the data.

01:11:18.690 --> 01:11:23.730
Like it would be a very different world if psychologists were all coordinated about what

01:11:23.730 --> 01:11:29.250
data needed to be collected and which data would test between these very clear alternative

01:11:29.250 --> 01:11:29.890
ideas.

01:11:30.450 --> 01:11:32.930
And then we eventually do the data, right?

01:11:33.010 --> 01:11:34.930
Like that's not what it looks like at all.

01:11:35.090 --> 01:11:39.260
Right now it's sort of just like, here's some data, and here's maybe what it means, right?

01:11:39.420 --> 01:11:41.980
And I feel like that we've kind of kicked the can down the road.

01:11:42.060 --> 01:11:45.980
And I think I do think like there's a ton of papers about the theory crisis.

01:11:46.220 --> 01:11:52.220
But Tom, I think like you are a good example of if people's people's intentions, like the

01:11:52.220 --> 01:11:58.060
one thing we know about evolution is that, or just you know, the the logic of

01:11:58.220 --> 01:12:04.060
selective regimes is that it you everybody can have a certain intention,

01:12:04.270 --> 01:12:04.590
right?

01:12:04.830 --> 01:12:10.830
Like I want to do something that's great, but all that matters is the selective

01:12:10.830 --> 01:12:11.310
regime.

01:12:11.470 --> 01:12:17.470
So if like if I as a faculty member want people who do slow quality science, but

01:12:17.470 --> 01:12:21.310
my hiring committee chooses candidates based on the number of publications.

01:12:21.470 --> 01:12:25.950
And if the number of publications is a function of like the what we talked about, just like

01:12:25.950 --> 01:12:31.380
data and just you know how hard it was to collect the data, Your selective regime is

01:12:31.380 --> 01:12:36.900
selecting for a particular kind of science that has nothing to do with what your explicit

01:12:36.900 --> 01:12:37.940
intentions are.

01:12:38.180 --> 01:12:41.700
And so I've heard a lot of people say we should have theory.

01:12:41.860 --> 01:12:45.460
I've heard a lot of people say we should have interdisciplinarity.

01:12:46.420 --> 01:12:49.220
But is this the selective regime we've created yet?

01:12:49.540 --> 01:12:50.020
No, yeah.

01:12:50.100 --> 01:12:50.980
So there's a lot to say.

01:12:51.140 --> 01:12:55.460
So the the short answer to that question is no, but if things will change if and when job

01:12:55.460 --> 01:13:00.830
panels and grant panels um Prioritize the sort of work that you're talking about.

01:13:00.990 --> 01:13:02.830
I mean, that that's you're quite right.

01:13:02.910 --> 01:13:05.150
You know, it can be selected for.

01:13:05.870 --> 01:13:09.310
And I that's in some ways, that's why I say it's a question almost for historians or maybe

01:13:09.310 --> 01:13:10.190
sociologists.

01:13:10.350 --> 01:13:13.950
You know, there are certain dynamics on grant panels and job panels.

01:13:14.030 --> 01:13:18.350
There's even you know the way universities are funded and their resources, most most

01:13:18.510 --> 01:13:22.270
recruitment happens at department level, but the university wants interdisciplinarity.

01:13:22.430 --> 01:13:25.950
That's an inherent tension, and it's very hard to tell a department we're going to do the

01:13:25.950 --> 01:13:29.760
recruitment for you for reason old reasons of academic freedom.

01:13:29.840 --> 01:13:33.840
So there's a lot of you know, there's a lot of inter interacting factors that are um

01:13:33.840 --> 01:13:36.960
creating barriers to the sort of selective regimes you're talking about.

01:13:37.120 --> 01:13:41.760
Um I wanna I want to also um go back a couple of minutes to something you were saying

01:13:41.760 --> 01:13:42.000
there.

01:13:42.080 --> 01:13:47.440
Um and while I definitely agree with the spirit um of what you're saying, I I'm gonna sort

01:13:47.440 --> 01:13:50.160
of speak on behalf of my friends who do the empirical science.

01:13:50.240 --> 01:13:52.880
Um yeah, I do I do empirical stuff too, for sure.

01:13:53.040 --> 01:13:58.430
Yeah, yeah, well of course, of course, but um there are people who are collecting data for

01:13:58.430 --> 01:14:02.750
the purposes of description, and I think that particularly in the human science, it was in

01:14:02.750 --> 01:14:08.510
the human sciences, just you know, good quality like data that describes what humans do

01:14:08.510 --> 01:14:09.390
at scale.

01:14:09.550 --> 01:14:14.670
Um it needn't always have I mean it needn't always just saying

01:14:16.110 --> 01:14:17.310
what humans do, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:14:17.390 --> 01:14:20.670
Yeah, and I just and I'm uh I know you agree, but I just wanted to No, it's worth saying

01:14:20.670 --> 01:14:20.990
out loud.

01:14:21.070 --> 01:14:22.590
Yeah, yeah, this is pushback.

01:14:22.750 --> 01:14:23.550
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:14:23.710 --> 01:14:27.120
Description is important, But unfortunately we get the worst of both worlds because we

01:14:27.120 --> 01:14:28.880
don't get good theory and we don't get good description.

01:14:28.960 --> 01:14:30.080
We just get bad theory.

01:14:30.320 --> 01:14:30.560
Right.

01:14:30.720 --> 01:14:30.960
Right.

01:14:31.120 --> 01:14:31.280
Right.

01:14:31.440 --> 01:14:35.840
So I I would love if we just had description that was just clear about the fact that it was

01:14:35.840 --> 01:14:38.480
description and they weren't trying to make theoretical claims.

01:14:38.560 --> 01:14:43.040
It was just trying to get as clear a picture of possible as as of like what is going on,

01:14:43.280 --> 01:14:44.880
what are the facts on the ground.

01:14:44.960 --> 01:14:47.840
I think ethnography is really valuable for those purposes.

01:14:47.920 --> 01:14:51.920
You know, we've had a a few anthropologists on the podcast who've been in incredibly

01:14:51.920 --> 01:14:52.640
illuminating.

01:14:52.790 --> 01:14:55.750
So yeah, I agree that um description is is very valuable.

01:14:55.830 --> 01:14:59.190
It's just you have to be clear about what what your your goal is.

01:14:59.990 --> 01:15:00.790
And yeah.

01:15:00.870 --> 01:15:01.110
Yeah.

01:15:01.590 --> 01:15:02.870
Yeah, I I completely agree.

01:15:02.950 --> 01:15:06.950
And it the the sad thing is that it's quite it will be quite hard to get published in a

01:15:06.950 --> 01:15:11.430
high profile psychology journal saying, here's an interesting thing about humans, here's

01:15:11.430 --> 01:15:15.670
what they do, um or here's what they don't do, or whatever it is, full stop um

01:15:15.940 --> 01:15:18.420
neurotactives to wrap that in theory.

01:15:18.580 --> 01:15:21.380
Um right, or theory, and then in also data.

01:15:21.540 --> 01:15:26.580
So it's just sort of like it's almost like, you know, I appreciate Tom your point, and I

01:15:26.580 --> 01:15:28.260
completely agree, and it's worth saying out loud.

01:15:28.340 --> 01:15:32.020
The argument isn't that like it should only be what I'm describing, it's just that there's

01:15:32.020 --> 01:15:34.740
a there should be a role for this kind of thing.

01:15:35.060 --> 01:15:39.620
Like there's no physics is not just theoretical physics, it's also experimental, and it

01:15:39.620 --> 01:15:41.300
should not lose that part either, right?

01:15:41.380 --> 01:15:47.110
I mean, yeah, And so the argument is like these different entities should be allowed to

01:15:47.110 --> 01:15:48.630
exist on their own.

01:15:48.870 --> 01:15:52.470
And the argument we're making is against the backdrop of this doesn't even exist.

01:15:52.630 --> 01:15:54.550
Not that it should be the only thing for sure.

01:15:54.710 --> 01:15:55.430
A hundred percent.

01:15:55.590 --> 01:15:56.070
Yeah.

01:15:57.190 --> 01:15:57.830
Yeah.

01:15:58.150 --> 01:16:02.630
So uh so Tom, this kind of might lead into, I mean, I don't know how much you want to go

01:16:02.630 --> 01:16:08.580
into this, but but I'll open this up of like, I know you you do a lot of theoretical work.

01:16:08.740 --> 01:16:10.660
You're very interdisciplinary.

01:16:10.820 --> 01:16:15.700
Um, and I know you've sort of struggled a bit um in terms of finding positions, which I

01:16:15.700 --> 01:16:16.980
think is just insane.

01:16:17.220 --> 01:16:22.260
Um, and you have this recent uh post about sort of your experience of that, and maybe we

01:16:22.260 --> 01:16:24.580
can link that in this episode notes.

01:16:24.740 --> 01:16:29.220
Um, you know, if at all, and you, you know, if you don't want to, we can even just cut this

01:16:29.220 --> 01:16:29.300
out.

01:16:29.380 --> 01:16:32.020
But what, you know, is there anything you want to say sort of about that?

01:16:32.100 --> 01:16:33.540
Um, you know, at this point?

01:16:34.070 --> 01:16:39.990
I mean, I uh I I w I spent probably more time than I should have writing that that essay.

01:16:40.150 --> 01:16:43.110
Um so uh you know what what I have to say is there in a way.

01:16:43.270 --> 01:16:48.630
Um uh you know I or maybe i I mean maybe one thing to say then is just sort of like for

01:16:48.630 --> 01:16:54.070
people who haven't seen it or sort of what service you think it might provide more broadly,

01:16:54.230 --> 01:16:58.310
aside from maybe your specifics, just sort of like, you know, especially I think for people

01:16:58.310 --> 01:17:04.240
listening who don't know everything we know about what it's like to be in this field

01:17:04.240 --> 01:17:05.280
and like these issues.

01:17:05.440 --> 01:17:10.720
Like what what's the communicative relevance at a broader level for you know it it's one

01:17:10.720 --> 01:17:13.520
human story of the realities of contemporary academia?

01:17:13.680 --> 01:17:17.520
You know, I mean there are as many human stories as there are academics.

01:17:17.680 --> 01:17:23.230
Uh and everybody knows that there, you know, the the way the sector is structured um,

01:17:23.470 --> 01:17:26.190
creates profound uncertainty at certain career stages.

01:17:26.350 --> 01:17:28.830
And that plays out in all sorts of different ways for different people.

01:17:28.910 --> 01:17:34.910
It intersects with country, with family, planning, with you know, home buying, with uh

01:17:35.070 --> 01:17:39.870
disciplines and departments, and um plays out in all sorts of different ways.

01:17:39.950 --> 01:17:42.910
Uh in some respects I've been particularly unlucky.

01:17:42.990 --> 01:17:45.230
Um I've been lucky in a couple of respects too.

01:17:45.390 --> 01:17:50.030
Um uh but right now right now I'm at a quite difficult junction and so I just wanted to

01:17:50.030 --> 01:17:55.960
share that story um and and you know put a properly human yeah edge edge to

01:17:56.200 --> 01:17:59.080
I mean everybody understands in the abstract that there's a lot of uncertainty after your

01:17:59.080 --> 01:18:03.000
PhD, but if you m if you make it human, then maybe that can help advance the the discourse.

01:18:03.240 --> 01:18:05.720
Yeah, what's the feedback you've gotten from that, if any?

01:18:05.960 --> 01:18:07.000
I mean very very supportive.

01:18:07.080 --> 01:18:12.360
I mean a lot lot of people have have got in touch and said nice things and um

01:18:12.760 --> 01:18:14.750
nobody's offered me a job.

01:18:15.230 --> 01:18:15.630
Right.

01:18:15.950 --> 01:18:20.910
Nobody responded to it saying, oh, well, here's an opportunity because Tom is a Tom is an

01:18:20.910 --> 01:18:22.750
able scientist and it would be great to have him here.

01:18:22.830 --> 01:18:23.630
Nobody's yet done that.

01:18:23.710 --> 01:18:27.790
And let me make it completely clear to anybody listening that that is those those sorts of

01:18:27.790 --> 01:18:29.550
approaches are absolutely welcome.

01:18:30.350 --> 01:18:31.390
That hasn't happened.

01:18:31.470 --> 01:18:35.150
But I've not really had any proper pushback on it at all.

01:18:35.950 --> 01:18:40.110
Nobody's saying you're mischaracterizing the way things are um etc etc.

01:18:40.440 --> 01:18:40.600
Yeah.

01:18:40.840 --> 01:18:41.000
Yeah.

01:18:41.160 --> 01:18:41.320
Yeah.

01:18:41.400 --> 01:18:43.320
So to be explicit, we do this occasionally.

01:18:43.400 --> 01:18:44.920
It's the only commercials we ever have.

01:18:45.080 --> 01:18:49.000
If you want to support Tom, please reach out uh to Tom directly.

01:18:49.160 --> 01:18:53.400
He uh it's uh don don't be um don't be reluctant, please.

01:18:53.800 --> 01:18:57.080
I mean maybe just just just for those that haven't read the essay, the the the the short

01:18:57.080 --> 01:19:00.520
version is I got my PhD in uh linguistics in two thousand and nine.

01:19:01.270 --> 01:19:05.670
Uh, held fellowships in my own name and linguistics in Edinburgh for a while, then in

01:19:05.670 --> 01:19:07.430
anthropology at Durham University.

01:19:07.590 --> 01:19:12.230
Then in 2017, I moved to Budapest to work on a big uh European Research Council project in

01:19:12.230 --> 01:19:15.270
a department of psychology on social minds.

01:19:15.590 --> 01:19:18.390
Uh so and that took me to 2021.

01:19:18.470 --> 01:19:20.470
So it's now 12 years after my PhD.

01:19:20.710 --> 01:19:21.430
Great jobs.

01:19:21.510 --> 01:19:25.990
Um I mean, I they were very good jobs, but they were always in the background was the fact

01:19:25.990 --> 01:19:27.110
that they were temporary jobs.

01:19:27.190 --> 01:19:33.180
Um I I achieved a lot, I think, um uh made some useful contributions, I hope.

01:19:33.260 --> 01:19:38.220
Uh and then I got a post um uh in Spain and that did not work out for a number of reasons

01:19:38.300 --> 01:19:42.700
that I go into in detail in well not detail actually but I outline in the essay.

01:19:42.860 --> 01:19:47.660
Um uh and so you know it became clear I had to leave that job after a while.

01:19:47.740 --> 01:19:52.460
Um so right now um you know I'm financially okay for the short term but I do need to work

01:19:52.460 --> 01:19:52.860
again.

01:19:52.940 --> 01:19:54.330
Um yeah.

01:19:54.730 --> 01:19:58.410
Yeah, I'm back, you know, I'm back in my apartment with my partner, it's great here.

01:19:59.530 --> 01:20:00.730
Just gotta work out what's next in life.

01:20:00.890 --> 01:20:04.890
Yeah, and I just want to say because like I think, especially for people on the outside who

01:20:04.890 --> 01:20:10.330
don't know, and I think I I'm sure this will be okay to say, like, even Lita Cosmedys and

01:20:10.330 --> 01:20:16.300
John Tuby struggled financially in the beginning, and they are like one of the

01:20:16.300 --> 01:20:17.420
founders of this field.

01:20:17.500 --> 01:20:17.740
Right.

01:20:17.820 --> 01:20:22.540
And so, like, I mean, Lita talked about this often where you and they were like down to one

01:20:22.540 --> 01:20:22.860
salary.

01:20:23.100 --> 01:20:25.260
Annie Wirtz and I were down to one salary at one point.

01:20:25.340 --> 01:20:27.260
Like, people outside should just be clear.

01:20:27.420 --> 01:20:33.340
Like, I want to be very clear that the difficulty of this that Tom is

01:20:33.340 --> 01:20:38.940
experiencing is in no way an indication or is unique to, you know, it's not like, you know,

01:20:39.020 --> 01:20:44.890
it's it's really like objectively, like the best people in the field went through

01:20:44.890 --> 01:20:45.450
this same thing.

01:20:45.610 --> 01:20:49.450
So it's really, I just want to like clarify that for people who might not know that and who

01:20:49.450 --> 01:20:53.210
might be thinking, well, it sounds fair, but like really you wouldn't have this issue if

01:20:53.210 --> 01:20:54.170
you were actually good.

01:20:54.330 --> 01:20:56.730
And I can like no, like that's just not true.

01:20:56.810 --> 01:20:56.970
Right.

01:20:57.290 --> 01:20:58.010
You're very kind.

01:20:58.090 --> 01:21:02.650
Um I think uh I I have two weaknesses in inverted commerce.

01:21:02.730 --> 01:21:06.280
And I don't they aren't weaknesses, but that they they are in terms of science.

01:21:06.360 --> 01:21:08.280
But I think they are weaknesses on the job market.

01:21:08.600 --> 01:21:12.040
And that is that I'm not easily identifiable as a psychologist or a linguist or an

01:21:12.040 --> 01:21:15.800
anthropologist, um, but I'm a bit of each of them, or even and even philosophy.

01:21:15.880 --> 01:21:20.040
And also that I'm very theoretically minded for reasons we talked about five or ten minutes

01:21:20.040 --> 01:21:20.360
ago.

01:21:20.520 --> 01:21:26.110
Um those things together, the interdisciplinarity, the theoretical orientation, um, I think

01:21:26.110 --> 01:21:31.870
that sort of work should be I mean, obviously I think this I'm biased, but I think that's

01:21:31.870 --> 01:21:34.110
hugely useful and positive for science.

01:21:34.190 --> 01:21:35.550
Um but it's not incentivized.

01:21:35.630 --> 01:21:39.710
It's not necessarily it's not that individuals are out to get me or anti this agenda, but

01:21:39.710 --> 01:21:44.190
it's not, but but it is the case that job panels and grant panels are not much incentivized

01:21:44.190 --> 01:21:46.110
to um promote that sort of work.

01:21:46.190 --> 01:21:50.110
And I was quite slow in my career to realise that this was this was the case.

01:21:50.350 --> 01:21:51.820
Um but I think it is.

01:21:52.220 --> 01:21:56.700
I mean, so maybe just one thing to say then to sh sh transition from like the the

01:21:56.700 --> 01:22:01.820
negativity to just like without sort of I mean assuming things could just change, like

01:22:01.900 --> 01:22:05.740
pretty simply, what would be some ways to sort of change the problem?

01:22:06.220 --> 01:22:09.740
I mean, this this is a very big and complicated question, I think.

01:22:10.540 --> 01:22:12.460
Just to throw out some utopian ideas.

01:22:12.620 --> 01:22:18.110
I would love for there to be um so so many science labs, they have um they have permanent

01:22:18.110 --> 01:22:21.070
staff who are administrators and technical staff.

01:22:22.270 --> 01:22:23.950
Those people are given permanent contracts.

01:22:24.110 --> 01:22:29.790
And of course the funding of that job is dependent on future funding streams for the

01:22:29.790 --> 01:22:31.790
university, for the lab, from the PI, and so on.

01:22:31.950 --> 01:22:34.350
But we don't give permanent jobs to scientists.

01:22:35.710 --> 01:22:39.070
You have to take on a temporary job as a postdoc and then become the head of a lab

01:22:39.070 --> 01:22:39.950
somewhere else.

01:22:40.350 --> 01:22:44.860
What we don't have is just a permanent research scientist like a permanent administrator.

01:22:45.020 --> 01:22:48.700
And I think there's a lot of people who have got their PhD and they're qualified and able

01:22:48.700 --> 01:22:51.980
people who don't necessarily want to take on all the responsibilities of faculty.

01:22:52.060 --> 01:22:55.260
They want a steady income and a steady job, and they want it over the long term, and they'd

01:22:55.260 --> 01:22:55.820
be brilliant at it.

01:22:55.900 --> 01:22:57.260
And that job literally doesn't exist.

01:22:57.500 --> 01:22:57.660
Yeah.

01:22:57.820 --> 01:23:01.900
Like I think the closest thing is Yeah, the Mox Planck Institute.

01:23:01.980 --> 01:23:04.940
And it's a temporary the all but even then it's temporary.

01:23:05.180 --> 01:23:06.220
Yeah, even though it's a long term.

01:23:06.540 --> 01:23:06.940
No, that's right.

01:23:07.020 --> 01:23:11.050
And we've talked, I mean, David and I have talked about how we the if you have a

01:23:11.050 --> 01:23:15.930
theoretical perspective and you want to take that on, oftentimes there's just more data

01:23:15.930 --> 01:23:19.690
than you can sort of collect, you know, like there, or there's just more predictions than

01:23:19.690 --> 01:23:20.570
you can even test.

01:23:20.810 --> 01:23:25.130
And so you've got this sort of tragedy of coordination, I feel like, in psychology,

01:23:25.290 --> 01:23:29.530
especially where there's people with really great methods and data, but they're sort of

01:23:29.530 --> 01:23:30.970
like in a holding pattern.

01:23:31.130 --> 01:23:35.060
And I I mean, I will say this, like, you know, dear friends of mine do this work, but like

01:23:35.140 --> 01:23:38.740
frankly at the end of the day, a lot of like these sophisticated methods, they're not

01:23:38.740 --> 01:23:40.980
really testing particularly sophisticated theories.

01:23:41.060 --> 01:23:44.580
There are exceptions, but it's sort of like they're just sort of refining methods.

01:23:44.820 --> 01:23:50.420
And the so there's really just like a ton of people who are like good at doing methods, and

01:23:50.420 --> 01:23:54.340
there's people who are doing a good theory, and there's this coordination problem of not

01:23:54.340 --> 01:23:55.460
connecting up.

01:23:56.660 --> 01:23:57.140
Yeah.

01:23:57.460 --> 01:24:02.910
The other thing to say is um so this is this is in one some ways why I think the

01:24:03.230 --> 01:24:08.110
issues uh you're raising are uh to do with you know economics um and accountancy to an

01:24:08.110 --> 01:24:08.750
extent.

01:24:08.910 --> 01:24:13.790
Um it's quite revealing to me that when people get big grants, they're very you know,

01:24:13.870 --> 01:24:18.750
they're often celebrated, you know, meet in the common room and announcements are made.

01:24:18.910 --> 01:24:22.510
Um and they're often you know very much in the foreground of people's CVs.

01:24:22.590 --> 01:24:24.270
I don't know why my camera's doing that.

01:24:24.510 --> 01:24:26.380
Um I have one of those too.

01:24:26.460 --> 01:24:26.940
It's kind of weird.

01:24:27.260 --> 01:24:28.300
Sometimes it just does that.

01:24:28.380 --> 01:24:28.780
Yeah.

01:24:30.460 --> 01:24:31.740
Grants are celebrated.

01:24:31.820 --> 01:24:36.220
And to some extent I understand why, but another to another extent, I don't understand why.

01:24:36.300 --> 01:24:37.980
Because that grants are the means.

01:24:38.220 --> 01:24:39.580
The ends is the science.

01:24:39.740 --> 01:24:41.580
The ends is the answers to questions.

01:24:41.740 --> 01:24:43.260
And we don't celebrate that.

01:24:43.660 --> 01:24:45.820
It doesn't seem to me institutionally to the same degree.

01:24:45.980 --> 01:24:51.740
So scientists have internalized that grants are a goal, not a means, but a

01:24:51.740 --> 01:24:52.140
goal.

01:24:52.700 --> 01:24:57.170
And I think it see I I don't know why scientists well I I have a hypothesis about why

01:24:57.170 --> 01:24:59.970
scientists have internalized that, and that's because it's incentivized at the career

01:24:59.970 --> 01:25:03.570
level, because the university wants to grants, because the university needs the grants to

01:25:03.570 --> 01:25:08.130
pay for the debt that was incurred when it built the building in which we're doing the

01:25:08.130 --> 01:25:08.370
work.

01:25:08.450 --> 01:25:08.610
Right.

01:25:08.690 --> 01:25:14.370
So and I don't I don't have enough expertise in finance and accountancy and so on to

01:25:14.440 --> 01:25:15.480
detail that argument.

01:25:15.560 --> 01:25:19.400
But it does strike me that the way universities finance themselves and their infrastructure

01:25:19.400 --> 01:25:23.080
feeds into the incentive structure that acts on academics, which means that they prioritize

01:25:23.080 --> 01:25:24.760
grants rather than answers.

01:25:25.240 --> 01:25:29.320
And that has a downstream effect that theoreticians are less valued than empiricists.

01:25:29.560 --> 01:25:29.800
Yeah.

01:25:29.960 --> 01:25:31.800
So theory is cheap.

01:25:31.880 --> 01:25:35.000
So you would think cheap and brilliant would be valued, but it's not.

01:25:35.080 --> 01:25:35.320
Right.

01:25:35.480 --> 01:25:35.800
Right.

01:25:36.150 --> 01:25:38.550
expensive and brilliant is what's most valued.

01:25:39.270 --> 01:25:39.670
Yeah.

01:25:39.910 --> 01:25:45.350
And there's also this weird thing of like, so when we if we want to make fun like

01:25:45.350 --> 01:25:47.830
fundraising, we'll do a lottery, right?

01:25:48.150 --> 01:25:53.030
Because the lottery is lots of people put their money in and only a small number of people

01:25:53.030 --> 01:25:55.430
actually get the valued thing.

01:25:55.990 --> 01:26:01.750
And so what that is is a really efficient way to sort of like multiply

01:26:01.750 --> 01:26:06.900
the contribution of each individual and actually minimize the the

01:26:07.700 --> 01:26:09.380
cost you have to incur.

01:26:09.700 --> 01:26:11.140
Now flip that.

01:26:11.940 --> 01:26:16.660
That is what writing grants and contract, like you know, applying for grants are.

01:26:17.460 --> 01:26:22.420
And John Tubi once described this as, and I know there's empirical work on this, is like if

01:26:22.420 --> 01:26:26.900
aliens wanted to design a system to waste scientist time as much as possible, what it

01:26:26.900 --> 01:26:27.780
currently is would be.

01:26:27.940 --> 01:26:30.820
He was like, this might be evidence of aliens who don't want us to learn anything.

01:26:30.980 --> 01:26:35.330
Because it's exactly this thing of so you have a competition, which is like a lottery.

01:26:35.570 --> 01:26:41.410
So a a ton of people all use their time to apply for something only a

01:26:41.410 --> 01:26:42.450
small number of people have.

01:26:42.530 --> 01:26:45.970
So you've multiplied the cost and you have a minimal benefit.

01:26:46.050 --> 01:26:51.490
It's exactly the structure you would want to maximize the time cost of

01:26:51.490 --> 01:26:54.050
scientists for minimal benefits.

01:26:54.210 --> 01:26:59.890
It's it's exactly as an institutional structure, the exact worst way to uh

01:27:00.540 --> 01:27:03.260
give resources to scientists.

01:27:04.060 --> 01:27:08.380
I know there are some funding bodies that are experimenting with actual lotteries, and I'm

01:27:08.540 --> 01:27:10.380
I find that quite an interesting innovation.

01:27:10.700 --> 01:27:11.980
So it's much cheaper to enter.

01:27:12.060 --> 01:27:14.700
You know, you you've got to pass the threshold, you've got to be a scientist of a certain

01:27:14.700 --> 01:27:15.900
caliber, with a certain background.

01:27:15.980 --> 01:27:16.060
Yeah.

01:27:16.220 --> 01:27:17.580
So it's efficient expertise.

01:27:17.740 --> 01:27:23.730
But after that, just yeah uh this is good enough and then we'll we'll throw out throw

01:27:23.730 --> 01:27:28.130
out the lottery yeah and and some people get it and it if if that's available to all edible

01:27:28.290 --> 01:27:32.290
eligible scientists we'll all get it once in once once in five, once in ten.

01:27:32.610 --> 01:27:32.850
Right.

01:27:32.930 --> 01:27:33.490
Uh yeah.

01:27:33.890 --> 01:27:37.890
And there are other things like like I think like Templeton does a good job of like minimal

01:27:38.130 --> 01:27:42.290
uh effort up front unless and so I like like there are sensible ways to do it.

01:27:42.370 --> 01:27:46.200
But I've often thought like I wonder too like and I I kind of hate to say this, but I will

01:27:46.200 --> 01:27:50.360
say this like, how much it is the ego of the funding agencies, where it's sort of like

01:27:50.440 --> 01:27:56.200
people are coming to me and it feels really good, as opposed to really like, and I maybe

01:27:56.200 --> 01:27:59.960
this could be gamed, but like funding agencies going out and like finding out like who do

01:27:59.960 --> 01:28:01.160
people think is doing the best work?

01:28:01.320 --> 01:28:06.120
And I mean, that can be gamed, but but it's a very different way of sort of approaching it,

01:28:06.200 --> 01:28:08.040
which is sort of like, I'm not gonna take up their time.

01:28:08.120 --> 01:28:13.490
I'm gonna like observe this community and see who could use the funding as opposed to

01:28:13.490 --> 01:28:15.250
having people come to me.

01:28:15.410 --> 01:28:20.370
Um, and maybe that's naive, but that is that's a very different way to think about how to

01:28:20.370 --> 01:28:23.170
uh send resources to um to people.

01:28:23.490 --> 01:28:23.650
Yeah.

01:28:23.970 --> 01:28:26.450
I'm certain that all sectors have challenges like this.

01:28:26.770 --> 01:28:31.410
We just don't we're not privy to the ones that are going on in journalism or other sectors.

01:28:31.890 --> 01:28:35.800
But I'm sure we know I mean the the the the gi everybody knows the dynamics are off.

01:28:35.960 --> 01:28:37.240
Nobody has the perfect solution yet.

01:28:37.480 --> 01:28:37.880
Yeah, yeah.

01:28:37.960 --> 01:28:38.920
So anyway, yeah.

01:28:39.000 --> 01:28:41.800
I mean, so uh is there anything we should have asked you?

01:28:42.200 --> 01:28:44.360
Oh um you should ask me about the history of Lindy Hop.

01:28:44.600 --> 01:28:45.000
Okay, yes.

01:28:45.080 --> 01:28:46.680
I actually did want to so please, yes.

01:28:46.760 --> 01:28:52.600
I in my cartoon bubble of view, ostensive communication and uh Lindy Hop are are are next

01:28:52.600 --> 01:28:53.080
to each other.

01:28:53.160 --> 01:28:53.960
So please tell us about that.

01:28:54.280 --> 01:28:56.760
I've listened I've listened to your past podcast, so I knew this question was coming.

01:28:57.000 --> 01:28:57.560
Okay, good, I know.

01:28:57.640 --> 01:28:57.720
Yeah.

01:28:57.960 --> 01:29:01.790
The first time I was like, I said to my partner, when he asked me that, I'm going to tell

01:29:01.790 --> 01:29:03.070
him to ask me about the history of Lindy Hop.

01:29:03.390 --> 01:29:03.710
Fantastic.

01:29:03.790 --> 01:29:05.630
Okay, so please go ahead.

01:29:06.030 --> 01:29:11.070
Uh Lindy Hop is a is a dance, is a swing dance, partner dance, uh created in

01:29:11.070 --> 01:29:14.910
African-American communities in Harlem, well, in several places, but in particular Harlem,

01:29:15.070 --> 01:29:17.550
New York, in the 1920s and 1930s.

01:29:17.790 --> 01:29:22.270
And it has a fascinating history, um, both in that original era, and then fewer people are

01:29:22.270 --> 01:29:25.150
dancing it through the 50s and the 60s and 70s, still some.

01:29:25.280 --> 01:29:27.920
And then it globalizes in the 80s and 90s.

01:29:28.000 --> 01:29:32.880
And today it's so it was, it was in it was you know all over America in the late 30s and

01:29:32.880 --> 01:29:33.360
the 40s.

01:29:33.440 --> 01:29:35.200
It was the first pop music essentially.

01:29:35.360 --> 01:29:40.960
Um, and then as I say, other music uh you know, you know what music is like, it changes and

01:29:40.960 --> 01:29:42.480
fashion fashions change and so on.

01:29:42.560 --> 01:29:46.480
Um so it fades a bit more into the background, and then it globalizes in the 80s and 90s,

01:29:46.640 --> 01:29:51.410
and now there are little communities all over the world um dancing the Lindy Hop by far,

01:29:51.490 --> 01:29:54.610
the strangely, by far the biggest apparently is in Seoul in Korea.

01:29:54.850 --> 01:29:57.170
There are large communities in random places.

01:29:57.650 --> 01:30:01.170
And obviously, most big cities have sizable communities.

01:30:02.530 --> 01:30:05.090
Yeah, and there's one in Budapest, and then I dance there.

01:30:05.890 --> 01:30:09.810
I'm giving a talk this time next week, I think, on the history of Lindy Hop, where I will

01:30:09.810 --> 01:30:15.650
talk much more about its origins in the 20s and 30s in New York in particular.

01:30:16.420 --> 01:30:21.940
I think it's very much connected to the advent of modernity and the machine age and the way

01:30:21.940 --> 01:30:26.020
that they transformed the landscape and the economic opportunities, particularly of African

01:30:26.100 --> 01:30:26.820
Americans.

01:30:27.060 --> 01:30:31.220
And what they do in response to that is a huge cultural moment that's sometimes called the

01:30:31.220 --> 01:30:33.540
Holland Renaissance, which has many dimensions.

01:30:33.700 --> 01:30:39.060
It's it's books, uh, it's theatre, it's poetry, it's um it's political activism, and it's

01:30:39.060 --> 01:30:41.860
also music, and music leads to the dancing.

01:30:42.050 --> 01:30:43.650
And there's much much to say about that.

01:30:43.890 --> 01:30:44.050
Yeah.

01:30:44.210 --> 01:30:48.610
I mean, just in a really short amount, like, is there something 'cause I obviously I think

01:30:48.690 --> 01:30:54.450
like a lot of people think well like dancing uh you you like dancing and it's sort of

01:30:54.450 --> 01:30:56.450
incidental that you chose this kind.

01:30:56.770 --> 01:30:57.410
Is that true?

01:30:57.490 --> 01:31:01.810
Or is there something about this kind that is what what it what and what is it about that

01:31:01.890 --> 01:31:06.370
that I always I always wanted to dance, um, like partner dance.

01:31:06.450 --> 01:31:08.860
I didn't know how to uh as a twenty 20-year-old say.

01:31:09.020 --> 01:31:11.660
Um, and I tried a few salsa lessons that did not bite.

01:31:11.740 --> 01:31:13.900
Um, and then I went to a dance class swing dance.

01:31:13.980 --> 01:31:16.780
I did not know what swing dance was, um, but that did bite.

01:31:16.860 --> 01:31:18.060
And I think it's not a coincidence.

01:31:18.220 --> 01:31:24.220
If you understand uh the sociology of the dance, where it comes from, and what's

01:31:24.220 --> 01:31:28.780
built, physically built into the technique of the dance, I think it's not a surprise that

01:31:28.870 --> 01:31:33.190
today's dancers are liberals, is one thing to say.

01:31:33.350 --> 01:31:36.790
I think it's not a surprise that they're um globalized individuals.

01:31:36.870 --> 01:31:41.990
I mean, I think that those values are built into the physical apparatus of the dance.

01:31:42.230 --> 01:31:46.790
Um and so I didn't know what I was going into when I went into it, but I found something

01:31:46.790 --> 01:31:50.630
that very much fitted with my values and my and my identity, my self-identity.

01:31:51.110 --> 01:31:54.870
And the fact that it's now globalized raises interesting and difficult questions.

01:31:54.950 --> 01:32:00.720
Um, as I say a lot and very very educated, um you know the demographic uh has a

01:32:00.720 --> 01:32:04.240
high degree of education relative to the general population that's not good or bad that's

01:32:04.240 --> 01:32:10.080
just you know a fact fact of the matter um and so today most dancers are not African

01:32:10.080 --> 01:32:15.120
Americans and that's a difficult fact for you know given its origins which is absolutely in

01:32:15.120 --> 01:32:18.640
the African American communities and it comes I think it you know in some ways it goes back

01:32:18.640 --> 01:32:24.270
to the experience of exiting slavery relatively recently, uh rural uh environments in the

01:32:24.270 --> 01:32:29.390
South, and then suddenly the younger generation are in a completely a modern new modern

01:32:29.390 --> 01:32:32.190
world in the northern cities after the Great Migration.

01:32:32.830 --> 01:32:35.150
So and it's absolutely an African American story.

01:32:35.230 --> 01:32:38.990
And yet today most people who dance it are highly educated white people.

01:32:39.390 --> 01:32:44.830
I don't think that's inherently problematic, but it does um it does, you know, I think it

01:32:45.100 --> 01:32:50.380
places responsibilities on us as contemporary dancers to new d to educate new dancers um

01:32:50.460 --> 01:32:53.660
and to keep that history in mind because otherwise we you know I think you change the

01:32:53.660 --> 01:32:57.020
dance, and then in some respects if you change the dance too much, you disrespect uh the

01:32:57.020 --> 01:32:57.980
origins of the dance.

01:32:58.620 --> 01:33:02.940
And just in terms of like itself compared to other things, it's just very acrobatic but

01:33:02.940 --> 01:33:07.100
very coordinated in the sense, or like I don't know how would you characterize the So I

01:33:07.100 --> 01:33:10.380
think the I mean there's a lot the the best thing to do is to Google it.

01:33:10.460 --> 01:33:16.250
But uh the next thing, um so it's a dance that is two

01:33:16.250 --> 01:33:16.810
things at once.

01:33:16.970 --> 01:33:19.850
So you you do it together, but you also have individual freedom.

01:33:20.170 --> 01:33:26.170
So it's uh I'd say somewhat unlike uh say the Foxtrot, for example, which is sort of

01:33:26.170 --> 01:33:29.930
one four legged dance thing that's very coordinated, and the skill is being very

01:33:29.930 --> 01:33:31.930
coordinated as a four legged dance thing.

01:33:32.090 --> 01:33:35.610
In the Lindy Hop, you're still very you're very clearly dancing with someone else and

01:33:35.610 --> 01:33:39.530
you're coordinated, but both individuals are encouraged to be self expressive at the same

01:33:39.530 --> 01:33:39.690
time.

01:33:39.980 --> 01:33:43.500
And doing both those things, coordinating and being self expressive is that that's an

01:33:43.500 --> 01:33:44.220
advanced skill.

01:33:44.300 --> 01:33:47.260
Um it's thrilling to do when it goes well, it's completely thrilling.

01:33:47.420 --> 01:33:51.420
And in some respects I think it's true, you know, you you I don't know if it's taking the

01:33:51.580 --> 01:33:57.500
point too far, but you can also see uh um you can almost see it as being, you know, true

01:33:57.500 --> 01:34:00.540
to the values of of America in some respects.

01:34:00.940 --> 01:34:04.550
Um you know, there's a there's a the there's an individual freedom, but there's also a

01:34:04.550 --> 01:34:06.390
recognition of collective responsibility.

01:34:06.550 --> 01:34:11.670
And you know, I mean I know um Winter Massalis, a very famous jazz musician, has spoken um

01:34:11.670 --> 01:34:16.230
a fair bit and written a fair bit about how jazz uh embodies some of the principles of the

01:34:16.230 --> 01:34:17.350
American constitution.

01:34:17.510 --> 01:34:21.030
And I think uh and swing and in swing in particular embodies some of the principles of the

01:34:21.030 --> 01:34:21.750
American Constitution.

01:34:21.830 --> 01:34:23.590
And I think you see that in the dance itself.

01:34:24.180 --> 01:34:25.140
That's fantastic.

01:34:25.300 --> 01:34:25.780
That's great.

01:34:26.020 --> 01:34:32.020
Well, um, I think you also, Tom, embody uh coordination but

01:34:32.020 --> 01:34:33.060
also autonomy.

01:34:33.300 --> 01:34:37.940
And uh and you know, I do think, I mean, this this might be slightly, but like, you know, I

01:34:37.940 --> 01:34:42.180
think uh you know, the you said the Harlem Renaissance.

01:34:42.260 --> 01:34:46.420
I do think there's sort of a scientific renaissance happening in the evolutionary

01:34:46.420 --> 01:34:50.830
behavioral sciences, that's hope so or or or psychology behavioral sciences anyway.

01:34:50.910 --> 01:34:55.950
And I do think Tom, for your part, you are one of the the people kind of, you know, doing

01:34:55.950 --> 01:34:58.110
some of the work that's that's moving that.

01:34:58.350 --> 01:35:03.550
And um, you know, I hope I hope number one, uh, you know, genuinely like you know, as David

01:35:03.550 --> 01:35:09.550
said, like your work it it is relevant and you're we people have attention on

01:35:09.550 --> 01:35:15.470
you and I hope that uh I hope that um you know the the story

01:35:15.920 --> 01:35:21.360
you know, stories real life doesn't always work out, but uh but I hope this is an instance

01:35:21.360 --> 01:35:22.720
where things do work out.

01:35:23.040 --> 01:35:26.480
Um but I do want to say thank you and you know your work is really incredible.

01:35:26.560 --> 01:35:27.600
Please keep doing what you're doing.

01:35:27.680 --> 01:35:32.880
And yeah, if if people are listening, please um reach out to Tom and um support him.

01:35:33.040 --> 01:35:34.720
Um it's my my pleasure to be here.

01:35:34.800 --> 01:35:38.560
I was very thrilled when I saw the podcast uh you know that on the social media feeds and

01:35:38.560 --> 01:35:39.760
that you guys are doing this.

01:35:39.840 --> 01:35:42.050
Um people should like and subscribe, as they say.

01:35:42.290 --> 01:35:42.930
Oh thanks.

01:35:44.370 --> 01:35:45.490
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

01:35:45.650 --> 01:35:48.050
David, David, do you have any uh final final thoughts?

01:35:48.610 --> 01:35:51.170
Uh yeah, just yeah, really great to talk to you.

01:35:51.250 --> 01:35:53.250
I uh hope to have you on again at some point.

01:35:53.330 --> 01:35:59.010
And yeah, you've shaped my own thinking uh a lot about communication and and signaling and

01:35:59.010 --> 01:36:03.570
given me some some mental tools um that uh that have been very useful.

01:36:03.650 --> 01:36:04.850
Um so I appreciate that.

01:36:04.930 --> 01:36:05.170
Yeah.

01:36:05.660 --> 01:36:05.900
Yeah.

01:36:05.980 --> 01:36:11.980
So if you are part of a a funding agency or academic uh coordination uh

01:36:12.060 --> 01:36:15.020
in institution, think about things, maybe reach out to Tom.

01:36:15.420 --> 01:36:18.380
And then and then everybody should go check out the Lindy Hub.

01:36:18.940 --> 01:36:19.580
Yeah.

01:36:19.980 --> 01:36:20.300
Yeah.

01:36:20.620 --> 01:36:23.820
If you're and if you're in but I don't know when you're when you're releasing this to the

01:36:23.820 --> 01:36:29.050
world, but if you're in Budapest on uh next Tuesday, is the eighth, I'm giving a talk about

01:36:29.050 --> 01:36:30.730
the history of the Lindy Hop at 6 p.m.

01:36:31.130 --> 01:36:32.490
We'll be we'll be well past that.

01:36:33.130 --> 01:36:34.810
Oh no, but that's great.

01:36:34.890 --> 01:36:39.130
Uh but yeah, but uh Tom we'll we'll we'll post post uh your your website and things like

01:36:39.130 --> 01:36:39.290
that.

01:36:39.370 --> 01:36:42.010
But thanks so much for being on and it was my pleasure.

01:36:46.250 --> 01:36:51.690
Well, David, aside from looking into the Lindy Hop, what can people do then now that we're

01:36:51.690 --> 01:36:52.970
done with this episode?

01:36:53.050 --> 01:36:56.170
Um going forward, aside from listening to the next one.

01:36:56.600 --> 01:37:02.280
Um well they can like us, they can subscribe to our podcast, they can leave us a kind

01:37:02.280 --> 01:37:06.520
review, they can visit our Patreon page and support us there.

01:37:06.680 --> 01:37:11.320
Uh they can say nice things about us at social on social media, they can mention to a

01:37:11.320 --> 01:37:16.440
friend, hey, I'm listening to this cool podcast called Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

01:37:16.600 --> 01:37:20.040
Uh those are just some of the things that uh people can do to support us.

01:37:20.680 --> 01:37:22.760
Should we get should we get t shirts?

01:37:23.410 --> 01:37:24.290
Yeah, sure.

01:37:24.370 --> 01:37:27.010
I'd wear a t shirt, maybe a hat, maybe a fanny pack.

01:37:27.250 --> 01:37:27.810
Mm.

01:37:27.970 --> 01:37:28.210
Okay.

01:37:28.530 --> 01:37:33.170
We we should think we should maybe we should uh we can um well yeah, if people have ideas

01:37:33.170 --> 01:37:38.210
about swag to to put Yeah, if you have swag, yeah swag ideas, um we're open to feedback.

01:37:38.690 --> 01:37:44.130
Uh maybe tell us if you'd prefer a fanny pack or a hat

01:37:44.740 --> 01:37:46.340
or maybe some underwear.

01:37:46.500 --> 01:37:47.940
Um the sky's the limit.

01:37:48.260 --> 01:37:49.540
David, do you need a fanny pack?

01:37:49.700 --> 01:37:51.220
Should somebody just send you a fanny pack?

01:37:51.300 --> 01:37:52.660
It sounds like you need a fanny pack.

01:37:52.980 --> 01:37:55.300
I could I could really use a fanny pack.

01:37:55.460 --> 01:37:59.220
Um I've been looking uh far and wide for the best fanny pack.

01:37:59.540 --> 01:38:01.140
I've been I've been reading fanny pack reviews.

01:38:02.660 --> 01:38:04.340
I'm really trying to make a good purchase.

01:38:04.660 --> 01:38:08.660
So if you if you know if you know of a good fanny pack, just you know, we'll send David an

01:38:08.660 --> 01:38:11.540
email or the podcast we'll we'll send you the mailing address.

01:38:11.860 --> 01:38:12.900
That would that would really help me out.

01:38:13.220 --> 01:38:13.540
Fantastic.

01:38:14.020 --> 01:38:14.260
Good.

01:38:14.420 --> 01:38:16.190
Well we on that note.

01:38:16.350 --> 01:38:17.310
We'll see you next week.

01:38:17.710 --> 01:38:19.070
See you next week.