Podcast appearances and mentions of joe henrich

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we reflect on how places, people, and experiences shape our perspectives. The conversation begins with casual observations, from warm weather making transitions easier to memorable encounters like “Spam Man,” a mysterious figure spotted at the Hazleton Hotel. We also explore the impact of changing landscapes, both physical and cultural. From real estate in Toronto to how cities evolve, we discuss how development can shape or diminish the character of a place. This leads to a broader conversation about timeless architecture, like Toronto's Harris Filtration Plant, and how thoughtful design contributes to a city's identity. Technology's role in daily life also comes up, especially how smartphones dominate attention. A simple observation of people walking through Yorkville reveals how deeply connected we are to our screens, often at the expense of real-world engagement. We contrast this with the idea that some things, like human connection and cooperation, remain unchanged even as technology advances. The discussion closes with thoughts on long-term impact—what lasts and fades over time. Whether it's historic buildings, enduring habits, or fundamental human behaviors, the conversation emphasizes that while trends come and go, specific principles and ways of thinking remain relevant across generations. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In Phoenix, during a rooftop party, we witnessed a surprise appearance of a SpaceX rocket, which sparked our discussion on extraordinary events blending with everyday life. We explored the curious case of "Spam man," a local legend in Hazleton, whose mysterious persona intrigued us as much as any UFO sighting. We shared our fascination with the dynamic real estate landscape in Hazleton, discussing new constructions and their impact on scenic views. Our conversation touched on unique weather patterns at the beaches near the lake, emphasizing the influence of water temperatures on seasonal climate variations. We delved into the topic of warmer winters, reflecting on how both humans and nature adapt to milder temperatures, particularly during February 2024. Our discussion included insights from Morgan Housel's book, which inspired our reflections on nature's resilience and adaptation over millions of years. We highlighted local activities like windsurfing and kite skiing, noting the favorable wind conditions at the beaches, a rarity in Canada's cold-weather climate. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Mr Jackson. I hope you behaved when you were out of my sight. Dean: I did. I'll have to tell you something. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the arrangement of this warm weather. For me, it's made the transition much more palatable warm weather. Dan: for me it's made the transition much more palatable. Dean: I mean our backstage team is really getting good at this sort of thing, and you know when we were in. Dan: we were in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago and we had a rooftop party and right in the middle of the party we arranged for Elon Musk to send one of his rockets out. Dean: I saw that a satellite launch yeah. Dan: Yeah, can you imagine that guy and how busy he is? But just you know, just to handle our request he just ended up with, yeah, must be some money involved with that. Dean: Well, that's what happens, Dan. We have a positive attitude on the new budget. Dan: Yeah, and you think in terms of unique ability, collaboration, you know, breakthroughs free zone you know, all that stuff, it's all. Dean: it's the future. Dan: Yeah. So good Well he sent the rocket up and they're rescuing the astronauts today. Dean: Oh, is that right? How long has it been now since they've been? Dan: It's been a long time seven, eight months, I think, Uh-huh, yeah and Boeing couldn't get them down. Boeing sent them up, but they couldn't get them down. You know, which is only half the job, really. Dean: That was in the Seinfeld episode about taking the reservation and holding the reservation. Yeah. They can take the reservation. They just can't hold the reservation yeah. Dan: It's like back really the integral part. Back during the moonshot, they thought that the Russians were going to be first to the moon. Kennedy made his famous speech. You know we're going to put a man on and they thought the Russians, right off the bat, would beat him, because Kennedy said we'll bring him back safely and the Russians didn't include that in their prediction. That's funny. Dean: We had that. We're all abuzz with excitement over here at the Hazleton. There's a funny thing that happened. It started last summer that Chad Jenkins Krista Smith-Klein is that her name yeah, yeah. So we were sitting in the lobby one night at the Hazleton here and this guy came down from the residences into the lobby. It was talking to the concierge but he had this Einstein-like hair and blue spam t-shirts that's, you know, like the can spam thing on it and pink, pink shorts and he was, you know, talking to the concierge. And then he went. Then he went back upstairs and this left such an impression on us that we have been, you know, lovingly referring to him as Spam man since the summer, and we've been every time here on alert, on watch, because we have to meet and get to know Spam man, because there's got to be a story behind a guy like that in a place like this. And so this morning I had coffee with Chad and then Chad was going to get a massage and as he walked into the spa he saw Spamman and he met him and he took a picture, a selfie, with him and texted it. But I haven't that. His massage was at 10 o'clock, so all I have is the picture and the fact that he met Spamman, but I haven't that. His massage was at 10 o'clock, so all I have is the picture and the fact that he met Spam man, but I don't have the story yet. But it's just fascinating to me that this. I want to hear the story and know this guy now. I often wonder how funny that would appear to him. That made such an impression on us last summer that every time we've been at the Hazleton we've been sitting in the lobby on Spam man. Watch, so funny. I'll tell you the story tomorrow. I'll get to the bottom of it. Dan: It's almost like UFO watchers. They think they saw it once and they keep going back to the same place you know hoping that'll happen again, yeah. Dean: Is there a? Dan: spot. Is there a spot at the Hazleton? Dean: There is yeah. Dan: Oh, I didn't know that. Dean: So there's some eclectic people that live here, like seeing just the regulars or whatever that I see coming in and out of the of the residence because it shares. Dan: There's a lot, you know, yeah that's a that's pretty expensive real estate. Actually, the hazelton, yeah for sure, especially if you get the rooftop one, although they've destroyed I I think you were telling me they've destroyed the value of the rooftop because now they're building 40-story buildings to block off the view. Dean: I mean that's crazy. Right Right next door. Yeah, yeah, but there you go. How are things in the beaches as well? Dan: Yeah. You know it's interesting because we're so close to the lake it's cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, you know. Dean: Oh, okay. Dan: You know, because controlled by water temperatures. Dean: Water temperatures. Dan: Yes, exactly, I mean even you know, even if it's cold, you know the water temperature is maybe 65, 66. Dean: Fahrenheit, you know it's not frigid. Dan: It's not frigid. Dean: They have wintertime plungers down here people who go in you know during the winter yeah, but this is that you and babs aren't members of the polar bear club that would not be us um but anyway, uh, they do a lot of uh windsurfing. Dan: There's at the far end of our beach going uh towards the city. They have really great wind conditions there. You see the kite skiers. They have kites and they go in the air. It's quite a known spot here. I mean, canada doesn't have too much of this because we're such a cold-weather country. There isn't the water, it's pretty cold even during the summertime yeah exactly yeah, but the lake doesn't freeze, that's oh, it does, it does yeah, yeah we've had, we've had winters, where it goes out, you know, goes out a quarter mile it'll be. Dean: I didn't realize that Wow. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but not this winter. It never froze over this winter, but we have, you know, within the last two or three winters, we've had ice on the. We've had ice, you know, for part of the winter. Dean: It's funny to me, dan, to see this. Like you know, it's going gonna be 59 degrees today, so, yeah, it's funny to me to see people you know out wearing shorts and like, but it must be like a, you know, a heat wave. Compared to what? You had in the first half of march here, right, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, so that's good. Dan: Yeah, last February not this past month, but February of 2024, we had 10 days in February where it was over 70. Dean: And. Dan: I often wonder if the trees get pulled, the plants get pulled. Dean: It triggers them to like hey, oh my. Dan: God. But apparently temperature is just one of the factors that govern their behavior. The other one is the angle of the light. Dean: And that doesn't change the angle of the sunlight. Dan: Yeah, so they. You know I mean things work themselves out over millions of years. So you know there's, you know they probably have all sorts of indicators and you have 10 boxes to check and if only one of them is checked, that doesn't, it doesn't fool them. You know they have a lot of things that I sent you and I don't know if we ever discussed it or you picked it up after I recommended it was Morgan Housel, famous ever. Dean: Did you like that? Did you like that? Dan: book. I did, I loved. It was Morgan Housel famous ever. Did you like that? Did you like that book? Dean: I did, I loved it. I mean it was really like, and I think ever you know, very, very interesting to me because of what I've been doing, you know the last little while, as I described, reading back over you know 29 years of journals, picking random things and seeing so much of what, so much of what, the themes that go that time feels the last. You know 30 years has gone by so fast that I, when I'm reading in that journal, I can remember exactly like where I was and I can remember the time because I would date and place them each journal entry. So I know where I was when I'm writing them. But I thought that was a really, I thought it was a really interesting book. What stood out for you from? Dan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that really great things take a long time to create. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Because they have to be tested against all sorts of changing conditions and if they get stronger, it's like you know they're going to last for a long time. Dean: And. Dan: I'm struck by it because the book, the little book that I'm writing for the quarter, is called the Bill of Rights Economy and the Bill of Rights really started with the United States. It was December 15th 1791. So that's when, I think, washington was just inaugurated at that time as the first president. But, how durable they are, and you can read the newspaper every day of things going on in Washington and you can just check off the first 10 amendments. This is a Fifth Amendment issue. This is a second amendment you know and everything like that, and it's just how much they created such a durable framework for a country. They were about 3 million people at that time and now there are 300 and whatever probably upwards of 350 million. And basically, the country runs essentially according to those first 10 amendments and then the articles which say how the machinery of government actually operates. And it's by far the longest continuous governing system in the world. That's really interesting. But that's why you know I really like things that you know, that you know that have stood the test of time. I like having my life based on things that have stood the test of time. And then I've got, you know, I've got some really good habits which I've developed over the last 50 years of coaching. Got, you know, I've got some really good habits which I've developed over the last 50 years of coaching and you know they work. You know I don't fool around with things that work. Yeah Well, I want to bring in something. I really am more and more struck how there's a word that's used in the high technology field because I was just at Abundance 360. And it's the word disruption and it's seen as a good thing, and I don't see disruption as good. I don't really see it as a good thing. I see it as something that might happen as a result of a new thing, but I don't think the disruption is a good thing. Dean: Yeah, it feels like it's not. It seems like the opposite of collaboration. Yeah, it really is. It feels like the negative. You know the I forget who said it, but you know the two ways they have the biggest building. Dan: I really mean Chucky movie. Dean: Yeah, there was somebody said the two ways to have the biggest building in town, the tallest building is to build the tallest building or to tear down all the other buildings that are taller than yours, and that's what disruption feels like to see in the real estate industry is always one that is, you know, set up as the big fat cat ready for disruption. And people have tried and tried to disrupt the real estate industry and, you know, I came away from the first, the first abundance 360, realizing that, you know, perhaps the thing that same makes real estate possible is that you can't digitize the last hundred feet of a real estate transaction. You know, and I think that there are certain industries, certain things that we are, that there's a human element to things. Dan: That is very yeah, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting just to switch on to that subject. On the real, estate. If you take Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street, who are the richest people in the area Silicon? Dean: Valley. Dan: Hollywood and Wall Street. Who are the richest people in the area? Dean: Silicon Valley Hollywood and Wall Street. Dan: Who are the real money makers? Dean: Yeah, Wall Street. Dan: No, the real estate developers. Dean: Oh, I see, oh, the real estate developers. Oh yeah, yeah, that's true, right, that's true. Dan: I don't care what you've invented or what your activity is. I'll tell you the people who really make the money are the people who are into real estate. Dean: Yeah, you can't digitize it, that's for sure. Dan: Well, I think the answer is in the word. It's real. Dean: What was that site, dan, that you were talking about? That was is it real? Or is it Bach or whatever? Or is it Guy or whatever? What was? Or is it AI or Bach? Dan: Well, no, I was. Yeah, I was watching. It was a little, you know, it was on YouTube and it was Bach versus AI. Dean: So what they've? Dan: done. You know you can identify the. You know the building components that Bach uses to you know to write his music and then you know you can take it apart and you know you can say do a little bit of this, do a little bit of this, do a little bit of this. And then what they have? They play two pieces. They play an actual piece by Bach and then they play another piece which is Bach-like you know, and there were six of them. And there was a of them and there was a host on the show and he's a musician, and whether he was responding realistically or whether he was sort of faking it, he would say boy, I can't really tell that one, but I guessed on all six of them and I guessed I guessed right. Dean: I know there was just something about the real Bach and I think I think it was emotional more than you know that could be the mirror neurons that you know you can sense the transfer of emotion through that music, you know. Dan: Yeah, and I listen to Bach a lot I still get surprised by something he's got these amazing chord changes you know, and what he does. And my sense is, as we enter more and more into the AI world, our you know, our perceptions and our sensitivities are going to heighten to say is that the real deal or not? Dean: you know yeah sensitivities are going to heighten to say is that the real deal or not? You know, and yeah, that's what you know, jerry Spence, I think I mentioned. Dan: Jerry Spence about that that Jerry Spence said. Dean: our psychic tentacles are in the background measuring everything for authenticity, and they can detect the thin clank of the counterfeit. Yeah, and I think that's no matter what. You can always tell exactly. I mean, you can tell the things that are digitized. It's getting more and more realistic, though, in terms of the voice things for AI. I'm seeing more and more of those voice caller showing up in my news feed, and we were talking about Chris Johnson. Chris Johnson, yeah, yeah, chris Johnson. Dan: This is really good because he's really fine-tuned it to. First of all, it's a constantly changing voice. That's the one thing I noticed. The second version, first version, not so much, but I've heard two versions of the caller. And what I noticed is, almost every time she talks, there's a little bit of difference to the tone. There's a little bit, you know, and she's in a conversation. Dean: Is it mirroring kind of thing, Like is it adapting to the voice on the other end? Dan: Yeah, I think there's. I certainly think there's some of that. And that is part of what we check out as being legitimate or not, because you know that it wouldn't be the same, because there's meaning. You know meaning different meaning, different voice, if you're talking to an actual individual who's not you know, who's not real monotonic. But yeah, the big thing about this is that I think we get smarter. I was talking, we were on a trip to Israel and we were talking in this one kibbutz up near the Sea of Galilee and these people had been in and then they were forced out. In 2005, I think it was, the Israeli government decided to give the Gaza territory back to the Palestinians. But it was announced about six months before it happened and things changed right away. The danger kicked up. There was violence and you know, kicked up. And I was talking to them. You know how can you send your kids out? You know, just out on their own. And they said, oh, first thing that they learned. You know he said three, four or five years old. They can spot danger in people. You know, if they see someone, they can spot danger with it. And I said boy oh boy, you know, it just shows you the, under certain conditions, people's awareness and their alertness kicks up enormously. They can take things into account that you went here in Toronto, for example. You know, you know, you know that's wild. Dean: Yeah, this whole, I mean, I think in Toronto. Dan: The only thing you'd really notice is who's offering the biggest pizza at the lowest price. Dean: Oh, that's so funny. There's some qualitative element around that too. It's so funny. You think about the things that are. I definitely see this Cloudlandia-enhan. You know that's really what the main thing is, but you think about how much of what's going on. We're definitely living in Cloudlandia. I sat last night, dan, I was in the lobby and I was writing in my journal, and I just went outside for a little bit and I sat on one of the benches in the in front of the park. Oh yeah, in front of the hotel and it was a beautiful night. Dan: Like I mean temperature was? Dean: yeah, it was beautiful. So I'm sitting out there, you know, on a Saturday night in Yorkville and I'm looking at March. I'm just yeah, I'm just watching, and I left my phone. I'm making a real concerted effort to detach from my oxygen tank as much as I can. Right, and my call, that's what I've been calling my iPhone right, because we are definitely connected to it. And I just sat there without my phone and I was watching people, like head up, looking and observing, and I got to. I just thought to myself I'm going to count, I'm going to, I'm going to observe the next 50 people that walk by and I'm going to see how many of them are glued to their phone and how many have no visible phone in sight, and so do you. Dan: What was it? Nine out of 10? Dean: Yeah, it wasn't even that. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was 46, but it wasn't even 10. Yeah, it was real. That's exactly what it was. It was 46. Dan: It wasn't even 10%, it was 19. It wasn't even no, it was 19 out of 20. Dean: Yeah, I mean, isn't that something, dan? Like it was and I'm talking like some of them were just like, literally, you know, immersed in their phone, but their body was walking, yeah, and the others, but their body was walking. But it's interesting too. Dan: If you had encountered me. I think my phone is at home and I know it's not charged up. Dean: Yeah, it's really something, dan, that was an eye-opener to me. It's really something, dan, that was an eye-opener to me, and the interesting thing was that the four that weren't on the phone were couples, so there were two people, but of the individuals, it was 100% of. The individuals walking were attached to their phones. Dan: Yeah. Dean: And I think that's where we're at right now. Dan: No, yeah, I don't know, it's just that. Dean: No, I'm saying that's observation. Dan: It's like Well, that's where we are, in Yorkville, in front of Okay, right, right, right yeah. No, it's just that I find Yorkville is a peculiarly Are you saying it's an outlier? It's not so much of an outlier but it's probably the least connected group of people in Toronto would be in Yorkville because they'd be out for the. They don't live there. You know most don't live there, they're and they're somewhere. There's probably the highest level of strangers you know, on any given night in toronto would probably be in yorkville I think it's sort of outliers sort of situation. I mean, I mean, if you came to the beaches on a yeah last night, the vast majority of people would be chatting with each other and talking with each other. They would be on their phones. I think think it's just a. It's probably the most what I would call cosmopolitan part of Toronto, in other words it's the part of Toronto that has the least to do with Toronto. Dean: Okay. Dan: It's trying to be New York, yorkville is trying to be. Dean: New York. Dan: Yeah, it's the Toronto Life magazine version of Toronto. Dean: Yeah, you idealize the avatar of Toronto, right yeah? Dan: In Toronto Life. They always say Toronto is a world-class city and I said no. I said, london's a world-class city. Dean: New. Dan: York is a world-class city. Tokyo is a world-class city. You know how, you know they're a world class city. Dean: They don't have to call themselves a world class city. Dan: They don't call themselves a world class city. They just are If you say you're a world class city. It's proof that you're not a world class city. Dean: That's funny. Yeah, I'll tell you what I think. I've told you what really brought that home for me was at the Four Seasons in London at Trinity Square, and Qatar TV and all these Arab the Emirates TV, all these things, just to see how many other cultures there are in the world. I mean, london is definitely a global crossroads, for sure. Dan: Yeah yeah. And that's what makes something the center, and that is made up of a thousand different little non-reproducible vectors. You know just, you know, just, you know. It's just that's why I like London so much. I just like London. It's just a great wandering city. You just come out of the hotel, walk out in any direction. Guarantee you, in seven minutes you're lost you have the foggiest idea where you are and you're seeing something new that you'd never seen before. And it's 25, the year 1625. Dean: I remember you and I walking through London 10 years ago, wandering through for a long time and coming to one of these great bookstores. You know, yeah, but you're right, like the winding in some of the back streets, and that was a great time. Yeah, you can't really wander and wander and wander. Dan: Yeah, it was a city designed by cows on the way home, right, exactly. Yeah, you can't really wander and wander and wander. Dean: Yeah, it was a city designed by cows on the way home, Right exactly. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, that brings up a subject why virtual reality hasn't taken off, and I've been thinking about that because the buzz, you know how long ago was it? You would say seven years ago, seven, eight years ago everything's going to be virtual reality. Would that be about right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Dean: That was when virtual reality was in the lead. Remember then the goggles, the Oculus, yeah, yeah, that was what, yeah, pre-covid, so probably seven years ago 17, 17. And it's kind of disappeared, hasn't it compared to you know? Dan: why it doesn't have enough variety in it. And this relates back to the beginning of our conversation today. How do you know whether it's fake or not and we were talking on the subject of London that on any block, what's on that block was created by 10,000 different people over 500 years and there's just a minute kind of uniqueness about so much of what goes on there when you have the virtual reality. Let's say they create a London scene, but it'll be maybe a team of five people who put it together. And it's got a sameness to it. It's got, you know, oh definitely. Dean: That's where you see in the architecture like I don't. You know, one of the things I always look forward to is on the journey from here to strategic coach. So tomorrow, when we ride down University through Queen's Park and the old University of Toronto and all those old buildings there that are just so beautiful Stone buildings the architecture is stunning. Nobody's building anything like that now. No, like none of the buildings that you see have any soul or are going to be remembered well and they're not designed. Dan: They're not really designed to last more than 50 years. I have a architect. Well, you know richard hamlin he says that those, the newest skyscrapers you see in Toronto, isn't designed to last more than 50 years. You know, and, and you know, it's all utilitarian, everything is utilitarian, but there's no emphasis on beauty, you know. There's no emphasis on attractiveness. There's a few but not many. Attractiveness there's a few but not many. And, as a matter of fact, my favorite building in Toronto is about six blocks further down the lake from us, right here. It's called the Harris Filtration Plant. Dean: Oh yeah, we've walked by there, right at the end of the building. Dan: Built in 19, I think they finished in 1936. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And it's just an amazing building. I mean it's on three levels, they have three different buildings and it goes up a hill and it's where the water. You know, at that time it was all the water in Toronto that came out of the lake and they have 17 different process. You know the steps. And you go in there and there's no humans in there, it's all machinery. You can just hear the buzz and that's the water being filtered. It's about a quarter of the city now comes through that building. But it's just an absolutely gorgeous building and they spared no cost on it. And the man who built it, harris, he was the city manager. They had a position back there. It was city manager and it was basically the bureaucrat who got things done, and he also built the bridge across the Down Valley on Bloor. Dean: Yeah, beautiful bridge Right. Dan: He built that bridge and he was uneducated. He had no education, had no training, but he was just a go-getter. He was also in charge of the water system and the transportation system. And you know he put in the first streetcars and everything like that, probably the greatest bureaucrat toronto ever had, you know in the history of toronto this is the finest what year is that building from? yeah, the filtration plant was started in 29 and it was finished in 36 and wow they yeah, they had to rip out a whole section. It was actually partially woods, partially, I think, you know they had everything there, but they decided that would be the best place to bring it in there. Dean: You know it's got a lot more than 100 years. Dan: Yeah, but it's the finest building it's it's rated as one of the top 10 government buildings in north america yeah, it's beautiful. Dean: And that bridge I mean that bridge in the Don Valley is beautiful too. Dan: Yeah, it was really interesting. He put the bridge in and the bridge was put in probably in the 30s too. I mean that was vital because the valley really kept one part of Toronto apart from the other part of Toronto. It was hard to get from one part of Toronto apart from the other part of Toronto. You know, it's hard to get from one part of Toronto to the next. And so they put that bridge in, and that was about in the 30s and then in the no, I think it was in the 20s, they put that in 1920, so 100 years. And in the 1950s they decided to put in their first subway system. So they had Yonge Street and so Yonge Street north, and then they had Buller and Danforth. So they budgeted that they were going to really have to retrofit the bridge. And when they got it and they took all the dimensions, he had already anticipated that they were going to put a subway in. So it was all correct. And so anyway, he saw he had 30 or 40 years that they were going to put up. They would have to put a subway in. So it was all correct and yeah and so anyway he saw I had 30 or 40 years that they were going to put up. They would have to put, they're going to put the subway and it had to go through the bridge and so so they didn't have to retrofit it at all. Yeah, pretty cool. Dean: What do you think we're doing now? That's going to be remembered in 100 years or it's going to be impacted in 100 years? Dan: Well, we're not going backwards with technology, so any technology we have today we'll have 100 years from now. So you know, I mean I think the you know. Well, you just asked a question that explains why I'm not in the stock market. Dean: Exactly. Warren Buffett can't predict what's going to happen. We can't even tell what's going to change in the next five years. Dan: I don't know what's going to happen next year. I don't know what's going to happen next year. Dean: Isn't it interesting? I think a lot of the things that we're at could see, see the path to improvement or expansion, like when the railroad came in. You know it's interesting that you could see that that was we. You know, part of it was, you know, filling the territory, connecting the territory with all the, with all this stuff, and you could see that happening. But even now, you know, this is why warren buffett, you know, again with the, probably one of the largest owners of railroad things in the states, him, yeah, and because that's not changed in 200, yeah, or whatever, 150 years anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah, most of the country probably, you know, 150 years at least. Yeah, and so all of that, all those things, and even in the first half of the 1900s, you know all the big change stuff, yeah, yeah. Dan: Yeah. Dean: So it's funny because it's like I can't even see what categories are the biggest. Dan: Well, I think they'll be more intangibles than tangibles. For example, I think all my tools work 100 years from now. Yeah, I think all my thinking tools work 100 years from now. Dean: Well, because our brains will still be the same in 100 years. Yeah, all that interaction, right, the human behavior stuff. Dan: yeah, yeah yeah I don't think human behavior, um I think it's really durable you know, and that it's very interesting, um, and there was a phrase being used at Abundance that was used about four or five times during the two days that we were becoming godlike, and I said, no, I don't think so. Dean: I guess are they saying in that we can do things because of technology, we can do things. Dan: And I said nah, it's just the next. It's just the next new thing. You know that we've created, but human nature is, you know, there's a scientist, Joe Henrich, and a really bright guy. He's written a book you might be interested in. It's called the Secret of Our Success. And he was just exploring why humans, of all the species on the planet, became the dominant species. And you wouldn't have predicted it. Because we're not very fast, we're not very strong, we don't climb particularly well, we don't swim particularly well, we can't fly and everything like that. So you know, compared with a lot of the other species. But he said that somewhere along the line he buys into the normal thing that we came from ape-like species before we were human. But he says at one point there was a crossover and that one ape was looking at another ape. And he says he does things differently than I. I do. If I can work out a deal with him, he can do this while I'm doing that and we're twice as well. Dean: I was calling that. Dan: I've been calling that the cooperation game but that's really and that's playing that and we're the only species that can continually invent new ways to do that, and I mean every most. You know higher level. And mammals anyway can cooperate. You know they cooperate with each other. They know a friend from anatomy and they know how to get together. But they don't know too much more at the end of their life than they knew at the beginning of their life. You know in other words. They pretty well had it down by the time they were one year old and they didn't invent new ways of cooperating really. But humans do this on a daily basis. Humans will invent new ways of cooperating from morning till night. And he says that's the reason we just have this infinite ability to cooperate in new ways. And he says that's the reason we just have this infinite ability to cooperate in new ways. And he says that's why we're the top species. The other thing is we're the only species that take care of other species. We're the only species that study and document other species. We're the only species that actually create new species. You know put this together with that and we get something. Yeah, yeah and so, so, so, anyway, and so that's where you begin the. You know if you're talking about sameness. What do we know 100 years from now? Dean: What we know over the 100 years is that humans will have found almost countless new ways to cooperate with each other yeah, I think that that's, and but the access to right, the access to, that's why I think these, the access to capabilities, as a, you know, commodity I'm not saying commodity in a, you know, I'm not trying to like lower the status of ability, but to emphasize the tradability of it. You know that it's something that is a known quantity you know yeah. Dan: But my sense is that the relative comparison, that one person, let's say you take 10 people. Let's take 100 people that the percentage of them that could cooperate with each other at high levels, I believe isn't any different in 2024 than it was in 1924. If you take 100 people. Some have very high levels to cooperate with each other and they do, and the vast majority of them very limited amount to cooperate with each other, but are you talking about. Dean: That comes down, then, to the ability to be versus capability. That they have the capability. Dan: Yeah, they have the capability, but they don't individually have the ability. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah, and I don't think the percentage changes. Dean: Yeah, that's why this whole, that's why we're I think you know, the environment that we're creating in FreeZone is an ecosystem of people who are, who get this. Dan: Yeah, well, I don't think they, yeah, I don't think they became collaborative because they were in free zone. I think they were collaborative, looking for a better place to do it. Dean: Yes, yeah, it's almost like it's almost so, just with the technologies. Now, the one thing that has improved so much is the ability to seamlessly integrate with other people, with other collaborators. Dan: Yeah, now you're talking about the piano, you're not talking about the musicians, that's exactly right, but I think there really was something to that right. It's a good distinction. Dean: It's a really good distinction that you've created. Yeah, I should say yesterday at lunch you and I were talking about that I don't know that we've talked about it on the podcast here the difference, the distinction that we've discovered between capability and ability. And so I was looking at, in that, the capability column of the VCR formula, vision, capability, reach that in the capability column I was realizing the distinction between the base of something and the example that I gave was if you have a piano or a certain piece of equipment or a computer or a camera or whatever it is. We have a piano, you have the capability to be a concert pianist, but without the ability to do it. You know that. You're that that's the difference, and I think that everybody has access to the capabilities and who, not how, brings us in to contact with the who's right, who are masters at the capabilities? Dan: Yeah, you're talking about in. You know the sort of society that we live in. Yes, Because you know there's you know there's, you know easily, probably 15% of the world that doesn't have access to electricity. Dean: Yes exactly. Dan: I mean, they don't have the capability, you know, they just don't have yeah, yeah and yeah, it's a very, very unequal world, but I think there's a real breakthrough thinking that you're doing here. The fact that there's capability says nothing about an individual's ability. Dean: Right, that's exactly it. Yeah, and I think this is a very important idea, but I'm not going to write a book on it. Oh, my goodness, this is example, a right, I had the capability, with the idea of the capability and ability. Yeah, yeah, I didn't have the ability. Yeah, I've heard, do you know, the comedian Ron White? Dan: Yeah, I have the capability to write a book and I have the ability to write a book, but I'm not going to do either. Dean: So he talked about getting arrested outside of a bar and he said I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability that's pretty funny, right. But yeah, this is really like it's exciting. It's exciting times right now. I mean it really is exciting times to even projecting for the next, the next 30 years. I think I see that the through line, you know, is that you know that a brunch at the four seasons is going to be an appealing thing 30 years from now, as it is now and was 30 years ago, or three line stuff, or yeah, or some such hotel in toronto yes exactly right. Dan: Right, it may not be. Yeah, I think the four seasons, I think is pretty durable. And the reason is they don't own any of their property. Dean: You know and I think that's. Dan: They have 130 hotels now. I'm quite friendly with the general manager of the Nashville Four Seasons because we're there every quarter Four Seasons because we're there every quarter and you know it's difficult being one of their managers. I think because you have two bosses, you have the Four. Seasons organization but you also have the investor, who owns the property, and so they don't own any of their own property. That's all owned by investors. Dean: Right. Dan: Yeah. Dean: So go ahead. When was the previous? I know it's not the original, but when was the one on Yorkville here Yorkville and Avenue? When was that built? Was that in the 70s or the 60s? Dan: Well, it was a Hyatt. It was a Hyatt Hotel. Dean: Oh, it was, they took it over. Dan: Yeah, and it was a big jump for them and that was, you know, I think it was in the 60s, probably I don't know when they started exactly I'll have to look that up, but they were at a certain point they hit financial difficulties because there's been ups and downs in the economy and they overreach sometimes, and the big heavy load was the fact that they own the real estate. So they sold all the real estate and that bailed them out. Real estate and that bailed them out. And then from that point forward, they were just a system that you competed for. If you were deciding to build a luxury hotel, you had to compete to see if the Four Seasons would be interested in coming in and managing it. Okay, so they. It's a unique process. Basically, it's a unique process that they have. Dean: Yeah. Dan: It's got a huge brand value worldwide. You're a somebody as a city. If the Four Seasons come to your city, I think you're right. Ottawa used to have one. It doesn't have one now. Vancouver used to have one. It doesn't have one now. I think, calgary had one. Calgary doesn't Because now Vancouver used to have one, doesn't have one now I think Calgary had one. Calgary doesn't Because it was a Canadian hotel to start with. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And Belleville had one at one time. Dean: Oh, really yeah. Dan: I'm one of the few people who have stayed at the Belleville Four Seasons. Dean: Hotel the Belleville Four Seasons. Dan: Yeah, of all the people you know, dean dean, I may be the only person you know who stayed at the belleville four seasons now, what they did is they had a partnership with bell canada. Bell canada created the training center in belleville oh and uh, and they did a deal four seasons would go into it with them. So they took over a motel and they turned it into Four Seasons, so they used it as their training center. Okay, so you know, it was trainees serving trainees, as it turned out. Dean: I forget who I was talking to, but we were kind of saying it would be a really interesting experience to take over the top two floors of the hotel beside the Chicago Strategic Coach, there the Holiday Inn or whatever that is. Take over the top two floors and turn those into a because you've got enough traffic. That could be a neat experience, yeah. Dan: It wouldn't be us. Dean: Oh well, I need somebody. You know that could be a an interesting. I think if that was an option there would be. Dan: Probably work better for us to have a floor of one of the hotels. Dean: That's what I meant. Yeah, a floor of the the top two floors of the hotel there to get. Yeah, there's two of them. That's what I meant. Yeah, a floor of the top two floors of the hotel there to get. Dan: Yeah, there's two of them. There's two of them. Dean: Oh, yeah, yeah. Dan: There's the Sheraton, and what's Sinesta? Sinesta, right the. Dean: Sinesta is the one I'm thinking of. Dan: That's the closest one right, the one Scott Harry carries in the Right, right right. There you carries in them, right, yeah, well, it's an interesting, but it is what it is and we're, yeah, but we have almost one whole floor now and I mean those are that's a big building. It's got really a lot of square footage in the building. That's what. Is it cb re? Is it cb? You do know the nationwide. Dean: Oh yeah. Dan: Coldwood Banker. Oh yeah, yeah, coldwood Banker, that's who our landlord is. And they're good they're actually good, but they've gone through about three owners since we've been there. We've been there, 25 years, 26. This is our 26th year. Yeah, and generally speaking they've been good landlords that we've had. Yeah, it's well kept up. They have instant response when you have a maintenance problem and everything. I think they're really good. Dean: Yeah, well, I'm going to have to come and see it. Maybe when the fall happens, maybe between the good months, the fall or something, I might come and take a look. Dan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dean: Well, I'm excited and take a look yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Well. Dan: I've been there. Yeah, we have our workshop. We have our workshop tomorrow here and then we go to Chicago and we have another one on Thursday and then the second Chicago workshop for the quarter is in the first week of April. Oh, wow, yeah, yeah, and this is working out. We'll probably be a year away, maybe a year and a half away, from having a fourth date during the quarter. Oh, wow. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Do we? Dean: have any new people for FreeZone Small? Dan: Don't know Okay. Dean: No one is back. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I don't really know, I don't really know, I think we added 30 last year or so it's. The numbers are going up. Yes, that's great. Yeah, I think we're about 120 total right now. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's fun, though. It's nice people. Dean: Yeah, it's nice to see it all. It's nice to see it all growing. Very cool, all right well, enjoy yourself. Yes, you too and I will see you. Tonight at five. That's right, all right, I'll be there. Dan: Thanks Dan. Dean: Okay.

  On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Conn Carroll, the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy. Caroll is currently an editor for the Washington Examiner, but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for Townhall.com and a reporter at National Journal. Carroll wrote Sex and the Citizen in response to what he felt was misleading and biased reporting in the mainstream media on the origins and implications of marriage and monogamy. Razib asks Carroll how he refutes the ideas presented in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn, which argues that prehistoric humans were non-monogamous. Carroll outlines the current mainstream thinking in evolutionary anthropology and primatology, and all the biological reasons that indicate that Homo sapiens is far more monogamous than our common chimpanzee and gorilla cousins, most clearly in our reduced sexual dimorphism. But while our hunter-gatherer past was defined by monogamy, Sex and the Citizen argues that the rise of agriculture resulted in the explosion of polygamy, as high status males in societies defined by incredible inequality began to monopolize access to women, culminating in the explosion of Y chromosomal “star phylogenies,” where supermale lineages exploded all over Eurasian 4,000 years ago. Carroll then explains that the Romans and Greeks took steps toward enforcing monogamy as a legal institution, and Christianity introduced the idea of sexual fidelity upon men. After Christianity popularized egalitarian monogamous marriage, Sex and the Citizen follows in Joe Henrich's wake in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Carroll discusses the Catholic Church's strict policies on incest and adoption, which destroyed the power of elite related clans in the West, and hastened the emergence of the Western European marriage norm of independent and separate nuclear families, rather than extended families as the primary unit of kinship in society.   In the second half of Sex and the Citizen Carroll addresses the social history and policy changes in relation to marriage in the US. While Western European societies took a significant step away from familialism, Carroll explains that American marriage was even more individualistic and radical, as nuclear families spread out to the frontier, away from their extended kin networks. He also contextualizes the rise of the 1950's nuclear family, which some scholars have argued was an aberration in American history. Carroll argues that actually it was an extension of earlier American norms, but the rise of the wage-based capitalist economy allowed for couples to set up separate households earlier in their lives. Carroll concludes the discussion outlining the 1970's policy changes in welfare provision that discouraged marriage, noting the decline of the institution across American society over the last 60 years, and how government policy might reverse it.

David and Tamler lead off with a breakdown of the new commercial for “friend (not imaginary)” a new AI necklace that takes hikes with you, interrupts your favorite shows, and will be there for your first kiss. Then we talk about a new paper co-authored by VBW favorite Joe Henrich that challenges cognitive science for pretending to be universal without offering evidence. A good discussion punctuated by David's new theory of the rise of the autism. (TLDL the nerds are having sex).  Friend Reveal Trailer [youtube.com] Kroupin, I., Davis, H. E., & Henrich, J. (2024). Beyond Newton: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them. Psychological Review. [harvard.edu]

Joe Henrich is a professor and the author of multiple best-selling books, including The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World. During our conversation, Joe talks about the interplay of genes and culture in human evolution, the importance of our "collective brains," what we misunderstand about human nature, what he's learned from visiting other indigenous cultures, how culture influences testosterone levels in men, how we might help modern, struggling western men, what we've learned about menopause from grandmother killer whales, the frontier of knowledge in human nature, and more.------------Book a meeting with Dan------------Keep Talking SubstackRate on SpotifyRate on Apple PodcastsSocial media and all episodes------------Support via VenmoSupport on SubstackSupport on Patreon------------00:00 Intro00:37 We're not individually intelligent 02:49 The reason for green and blue eye color in humans 06:01 A unique psychological aspect of status and prestige in humans 08:55 Human's competitive superpower: our ability to sweat 11:53 A story from Joe's experience with the Machiguenga in the Amazon 16:37 The variability and stability of human nature 18:37 What Westerners misunderstand about human nature 21:23 The link between prestige, good information, and human survival 23:41 Ideas to help modern men 28:21 Where Joe thinks our culture is heading with dating and mating 32:18 We have far more female ancestors as male ancestors 34:07 Testosterone in men in monogamous and non-monogamous cultures 37:02 Big 5 personality traits are not found in non-WEIRD cultures 40:53 Gerontocracy mating cultures in Africa 43:56 What we learn about menopause from grandmother killer whales 46:39 Joe's views on cultural relativism 51:23 Why Joe is so interested in human nature 56:19 What is our best understanding of what it means to be human? 59:10 Joe's forthcoming new book

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dumbing down, published by Martin Sustrik on June 9, 2024 on LessWrong. In past few years I've been blogging in Slovak, that is, downscaling from writing in English, a language with 1457 million speakers to a language with 7 million speakers. From the point of view of the writer, this has been a very different experience. It's not only that for a topic that interests one million English speakers, the equivalent is five thousand in Slovakia, scaling down by factor of 200. It's also that topic that interests 100 English speakers, interests one half of a hypothetical Slovak speaker, that is, nobody. In fact, not everybody reads blogs, so the population in question is likely smaller by an order of magnitude or even two, resulting in even more fractional Slovaks... In other words, the reader population is not as big as to fill in all the possible niches and the writing thus has to become much more generic. It must also be "dumbed down". Not because Slovaks are less intelligent than other nations, but because the scale of the existing discourse is much smaller. While in English, not matter how esoteric your topic is, you can reference or link to the relevant discussion, in Slovak it often is the case that there's no discussion at all. The combination of the two factors above means that you have to explain yourself all the time. You want to mention game theory? You have to explain what do you mean. You want to make a physics metaphor? You can't, if you care about being understood. You want to hint at some economic phenomenon? You have to explain yourself again. And often even the terminology is lacking. Even such a basic word as "policy" has no established equivalent. I had to ask a friend who works as a translator at the European Commission, just to be told that they use word "politika" for this purpose. Which is definitely not a common meaning of the word. "Politika" typically means "politics" and using it for "policy" sounds really strange and awkward. (All of this gave me gut-level understanding of how small populations can lose knowledge. Joe Henrich mentions a case of small Inuit population getting isolated from the rest and gradually losing technology, including the kayak building skills, which in turn made it, in a vicious circle, unable to import other technology. This kind of thing also tends to be mentioned when speaking of dropping fertility rates and possible inability of a smaller global population to keep the technology we take for granted today. Well, I can relate now.) Anyway, it's interesting to look at what kind of topics were popular in such a scaled-down environment. Interestingly, the most popular article (17k views) was a brief introduction to Effective Altruism. I have no explanation for that except that it was a chance. Maybe it was because I wrote it on December 29th when there was not much other content? The readers, after all, judging from the comments, were not convinced, but rather experienced unpleasant cognitive dissonance, when they felt compelled to argue that saving one kid at home is better than saving five kids in Africa. (From comments:) Nice article. I've decided to support charity on regular basis, but here in Slovakia, even if it's more expensive, because I think that maintaining life forcibly in Africa, where it is not doing well, goes against the laws of nature. I can imagine Africa without the people who kill each other in civil wars, who are unable to take care of their own offspring and the country. If someone wants to live there, mine diamonds or grow coffee, they should go there and start life anew, and perhaps on better foundations than the ones damaged in Africa years ago by the colonizers. A series of articles about Swiss political system (all together maybe 10k views). Interestingly, the equivalent in English was popular o...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dumbing down, published by Martin Sustrik on June 9, 2024 on LessWrong. In past few years I've been blogging in Slovak, that is, downscaling from writing in English, a language with 1457 million speakers to a language with 7 million speakers. From the point of view of the writer, this has been a very different experience. It's not only that for a topic that interests one million English speakers, the equivalent is five thousand in Slovakia, scaling down by factor of 200. It's also that topic that interests 100 English speakers, interests one half of a hypothetical Slovak speaker, that is, nobody. In fact, not everybody reads blogs, so the population in question is likely smaller by an order of magnitude or even two, resulting in even more fractional Slovaks... In other words, the reader population is not as big as to fill in all the possible niches and the writing thus has to become much more generic. It must also be "dumbed down". Not because Slovaks are less intelligent than other nations, but because the scale of the existing discourse is much smaller. While in English, not matter how esoteric your topic is, you can reference or link to the relevant discussion, in Slovak it often is the case that there's no discussion at all. The combination of the two factors above means that you have to explain yourself all the time. You want to mention game theory? You have to explain what do you mean. You want to make a physics metaphor? You can't, if you care about being understood. You want to hint at some economic phenomenon? You have to explain yourself again. And often even the terminology is lacking. Even such a basic word as "policy" has no established equivalent. I had to ask a friend who works as a translator at the European Commission, just to be told that they use word "politika" for this purpose. Which is definitely not a common meaning of the word. "Politika" typically means "politics" and using it for "policy" sounds really strange and awkward. (All of this gave me gut-level understanding of how small populations can lose knowledge. Joe Henrich mentions a case of small Inuit population getting isolated from the rest and gradually losing technology, including the kayak building skills, which in turn made it, in a vicious circle, unable to import other technology. This kind of thing also tends to be mentioned when speaking of dropping fertility rates and possible inability of a smaller global population to keep the technology we take for granted today. Well, I can relate now.) Anyway, it's interesting to look at what kind of topics were popular in such a scaled-down environment. Interestingly, the most popular article (17k views) was a brief introduction to Effective Altruism. I have no explanation for that except that it was a chance. Maybe it was because I wrote it on December 29th when there was not much other content? The readers, after all, judging from the comments, were not convinced, but rather experienced unpleasant cognitive dissonance, when they felt compelled to argue that saving one kid at home is better than saving five kids in Africa. (From comments:) Nice article. I've decided to support charity on regular basis, but here in Slovakia, even if it's more expensive, because I think that maintaining life forcibly in Africa, where it is not doing well, goes against the laws of nature. I can imagine Africa without the people who kill each other in civil wars, who are unable to take care of their own offspring and the country. If someone wants to live there, mine diamonds or grow coffee, they should go there and start life anew, and perhaps on better foundations than the ones damaged in Africa years ago by the colonizers. A series of articles about Swiss political system (all together maybe 10k views). Interestingly, the equivalent in English was popular o...

Jim talks with Simon DeDeo about their wager concerning the likelihood of civil violence and mass killings in America in the next decade. They discuss the terms of the wager, the appropriate orders of magnitude, Alex Garland's Civil War, the American readiness to use violence, honor cultures, the movement from violence to political violence, industrial mass murder, polarization, the one-dimensionality of current elites, basins of attraction, statistical distributions of violence, Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire, measuring political distance, the constant motion of contemporary American political views, tribalization around red-blue politics, door-holding & just-so stories, sexual signaling, the unreality of woke debates, accumulating factors that could lead to a brushfire, gun rights, the dilettantism of extremist groups, 3 specific scenarios of inciting conflicts, making sense of a post-ideological world, the question of who rules, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 1 - Simon DeDeo on the Evolution of Consciousness JRS Currents 001: Simon DeDeo on University Censorship JRS Currents 028: Simon DeDeo on Explaining Explanation JRS EP 202 - Neil Howe on the Fourth Turning JRS EP 190 - Peter Turchin on Cliodynamics and End Times JRS EP 104 - Joe Henrich on WEIRD People JRS EP 230 - James Lindsay on a National Divorce JRS Currents 058: John Robb on Russia-Ukraine Outcomes Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the research strategies of Charles Darwin, the insurgency of modern-day Afghanistan, the emergent bureaucracy of Wikipedia, the creation of power hierarchies among the social animals, and the collusions and conspiracies of petrol stations in the American Midwest. They combine data from the contemporary world, archives from the deep past, statistical tools from cosmology, and models of human cognition from Bayesian reasoning and information theory to understand how cultures grow, flourish, innovate, and evolve.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Epistemic Hell, published by rogersbacon on January 28, 2024 on LessWrong. I. From Scott Alexander's review of Joe Henrich's The Secret of our Success: In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multi-day processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten. Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting). So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She'd find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning. Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque - an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology. Scott continues: Humans evolved to transmit culture with high fidelity. And one of the biggest threats to transmitting culture with high fidelity was Reason. Our ancestors lived in epistemic hell, where they had to constantly rely on causally opaque processes with justifications that couldn't possibly be true, and if they ever questioned them then they might die. Historically, Reason has been the villain of the human narrative, a corrosive force that tempts people away from adaptive behavio...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Epistemic Hell, published by rogersbacon on January 28, 2024 on LessWrong. I. From Scott Alexander's review of Joe Henrich's The Secret of our Success: In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multi-day processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten. Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting). So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She'd find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning. Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque - an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology. Scott continues: Humans evolved to transmit culture with high fidelity. And one of the biggest threats to transmitting culture with high fidelity was Reason. Our ancestors lived in epistemic hell, where they had to constantly rely on causally opaque processes with justifications that couldn't possibly be true, and if they ever questioned them then they might die. Historically, Reason has been the villain of the human narrative, a corrosive force that tempts people away from adaptive behavio...

For the first time ever, parents going through IVF can use whole genome sequencing to screen their embryos for hundreds of conditions. Harness the power of genetics to keep your family safe, with Orchid. Check them out at orchidhealth.com. On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Michael Muthukrishna about his new book, A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going. Muthukrishna is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, an affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD and Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Religious History, a fellow at the Charter Cities Institute and board member of the One Pencil Project. Of Sri Lankan extraction, he trained as an engineer in Australia, but later became interested in anthropological and cultural questions. He studied for his Ph.D. under Joe Henrich in Canada. Like his mentor, Muthukrishna cross-applies toolkits from evolutionary biology and population genetics to questions of variation and change in human cultures. A Theory of Everyone is an ambitious book with arguably galactic ambitions. The chapters jump from topics like the Cambrian Explosion to the ever-increasing amount of energy needed to get at the fossil fuels that power our civilization. But to start off, Razib asks Muthukrishna about his background as a “third culture kid” and how that might have influenced his anthropological interests. Muthukrishna observed firsthand social and political chaos in Papua New Guinea, while his family's background in Sri Lanka illustrated for him the salience of ethnic tensions, even when differences might seem minimal to outsiders. Then Razib talks about A Theory of Everyone's fixation on energy and its role in powering organic life, about our technology-driven civilization and about our potential interplanetary future. Here, Muthukrishina thinks like an engineer, albeit with a broad historical and evolutionary perspective. He and Razib also discuss the problems of “degrowth economics” and why it is a dead-end for a dynamic civilization's flourishing. Razib also probes Muthukrishna for his views on IQ, its utility as a psychological measure, the variation between individuals and groups, and how those might relate to cultural evolutionary frameworks for considering cognitive aptitudes. The conversation concludes with a consideration of future possibilities as we hurtle past our current energy constraints as a civilization (Muthukrishna is bullish on nuclear), and the role of decentralized political experimentation in improving our social technology.

He's fascinated by how culture has shaped our evolution – not only changing our bodies and expanding our brains but even expanding our ability to cooperate. And the more diverse a culture, the better its ability to innovate.

In this episode of the Life Itself Podcast, Rufus Pollock sits down with Professor Joseph Henrich to continue the discussion on the study of cultural evolution. In this second part of the conversation continuing from episode 3, Rufus Pollock and Joe Henrich discuss the implications of cultural evolution in relation to modern challenges. They explore the potential for intentional experimentation in creating cultural norms that promote trust, cooperation, group cohesion and a sense of community and belonging.  Rufus and Joe touch upon the idea that Western societies might be running on old values and norms cultivated by historical religious practices. They discuss the need to find ways to renew and revitalize these values, potentially by experimenting with intentional communities that incorporate elements of shared meaning, trust-building, ritual and cooperation. The talk moves on to discuss the idea that by allowing a variety of intentional communities to form and observing which ones thrive, societies could potentially find ways to address current challenges and promote positive cultural evolution. This conversation forms part of the Cultural Evolution: A New Discipline is Born Series. You can learn more here https://lifeitself.org/learn/culturology Joseph Henrich is a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is author of several books, most recently 'The Weirdest People in the World' and 'The Secret of Our Success'. His research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions. Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author. He has founded several for-profit and nonprofit initiatives including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age. Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500s as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge. Find out more about his work on his website: ⁠⁠rufuspollock.com⁠⁠.

Joe Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of Why Humans Cooperate, The Secret of Our Success, and The WEIRDest People in the World. He joins the podcast to talk about his work. Topics include:* The implications of Henrich's theories for the debate over AI alignment* The nature of intelligence* Whether genetic differences between populations explain societal outcomes* If the Ancient Greeks and Romans were already WEIRD* How to understand the group selection debate* Why Islamic familial practices may have stunted economic development and growth* The political and ideological reaction to his last bookListen in podcast form or watch on YouTube. A transcript of the podcast can be found at the Richard Hanania newsletter.Links:* Joe Henrich, “The WEIRDest People in the World.”* Joe Henrich, “The Secrets of Our Success.”* Richard Hanania, “How Monogamy and Incest Taboos Made the West.”* David Epstein, “The Sports Gene.” * Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “Don't Trust Your Gut.” * Elizabeth Shim, “North Korea finishes fourth at International Mathematical Olympiad.” * Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.* Bryan Caplan, “The Wonder of International Adoption: Adult IQ in Sweden.” Get full access to Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology at www.cspicenter.com/subscribe

Mark Koyama is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason. Mark researches comparative national state economic development and the rise of religious tolerance. He is interested in how historical institutions functioned and in the relationship between culture and economic performance. Transcript: www.thendobetter.com/investing/2022/10/9/mark-koyama-how-the-world-became-rich-economic-history-intangibles-culture-progress-podcast I ask why it has taken economists and historians so long to form central views on how we have become rich? Mark discusses what historic progress might tells us about economic development today. I ask about the interaction between the main factors behind economic progress such as: institutions, culture, infrastructure, geography, energy. I question the role of common law and ask about living constitutions. Mark discusses his reading of the literature and how the UK is relatively unique in its living constitutions. I query the role of intangibles and the patent system and briefly lay out the case (after Brad De Long) for importance of industrial labs and the corporate form. Mark discusses these factors and their importance from the 1870s but also what was important pre-1870. We chat about culture (using Joe Henrich's terms) as a set of heuristics. Mark discusses the literature on the importance and role of slavery (probably not the most major facotr in the UK's industrialization, but still heavily argued), and the role and roots of social progress such as women's rights. We cover impacts of war and also the black death from an economic history view and we discuss the challenge on climate. We play over/underrated on : GDP, carbon tax, representative democracy governance mechanisms, universal basic income. Mark ends with current projects and advice. "….So podcasts; everything is online basically. The young person who's ambitious and interested can actually get to speed quickly. So you can teach yourself econometrics by watching tons of YouTube videos. Most people won't because there's other stuff to watch on YouTube, there's other stuff to do. I could be teaching myself foreign languages on YouTube and I'm not doing it because my opportunity costs I guess is maybe high. But if you're young and wanted to study this stuff, you can get a huge head start just by use of the internet cleverly. Tyler Cowen's advice is find the right mentors. Find some people and learn from them. But you get a huge amount early on to give yourself a head start before you go to university because to be honest, the university experience isn't necessarily going to be all that…"

Joe Henrich is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and is the author of the book "The WEIRDest People in the World."During our conversation, Joe talks about his interest in human nature, how cultures change people biologically, how the mating laws of the Roman Catholic Church and the literacy imperatives of Protestantism changed Western civilization, cultural limitations on the Big 5 Personality traits, monogamy and polygyny, modern dating, objective truth, right and wrong, and what UN parking ticket data tells us about different countries in the world.WEIRD stands for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic," and if you're listening to this episode, you likely fall in that category. Joe is an encyclopedia of information about human beings, who we are, how we're different, and how we got this way. He offers advice for struggling young men, political leaders contemplating foreign intervention, and on how to think clearly about ethics and moral relativism.------------Support via VenmoSupport on SubstackPatreon------------Show notesRate on SpotifyRate on Apple PodcastsSocial media and all episodes------------(00:00) Introduction(03:04) Interest in evolutionary biology and human culture(04:50) The effect of culture on humans(08:04) Culture changes people biologically(11:21) WEIRD vs. non-WEIRD people(13:34) How the structure of the family effects Han Chinese(14:26) The effect of the Catholic Church in Germany(15:08) Scotch-Irish segmentary lineage culture(18:56) How the Catholic Church's rules unwittingly fueled Europe's rise(21:53) How Protestantism's work and word ethic drove Europe's prosperity(25:20) What a kin-based society looked like before the Catholic Church(27:49) Ways that culture changes people's brains(32:26) Testosterone does not go down post-fatherhood for men in polygynous cultures(39:01) Failing young men, dating technology, and modern dating(41:48) What can go wrong in polygynous societies?(43:56) How can we help young men prosper?(47:36) The Big 5 personality traits may be culturally-specific to WEIRD people(51:54) Making sense of human nature(54:16) Evolutionary psychology and human culture(56:46) The future of dating and mating in the West(59:46) Different cultures and American foreign policy mistakes(1:02:56) Joe's advice on American foreign policy(1:04:36) China's male gender imbalance and future societal problems(1:06:28) Advice for struggling young men(1:09:46) United Nations parking tickets data(1:13:51) Moral relativism and Ayaan Hirsi Ali(1:19:41) Truth and science colliding with postmodernism(1:22:26) What's next for Joe

Dr. Jared Rubin is the co-author of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, which he wrote with Mark Koyama, a previous guest on the podcast. We are so happy to welcome Jared to the show today to discuss the thesis of his book, and what he and Mark aimed to add to the literature on the subject of economic growth in the contemporary context. This is a fascinating and thoughtful conversation, packed with insight and nuance on important arguments of the past, what is needed to broaden and enhance our understanding of economic growth, and how far these projects might go towards enabling us to see a better future. Dr. Rubin answers some questions about geographic, legal, and technological explanations for growth, and stresses the importance of synergy and interplay between these theories for a more illuminating picture. So to hear all this and a whole lot more, including many reasons to pick up his latest book, tune in today!   Key Points From This Episode:   •   Introducing the role of culture in economic growth, and tracing the roots of this inquiry. •   Positioning How the World Became Rich in the lineage of literature on the subject of growth.  •   Looking at England and the emergence of modern growth; arguments over the most important factors. •   Why Dr. Rubin tried to bring different theories into conversation through writing this book. •   Unpacking the argument for the role of liberal speech norms in the history of development, proposed by McCloskey. •   Technological progress and geographic endowments; why this relationship is worth exploration. •   Dr. Rubin's perspective on the role of law and legal systems in the growth trajectory of a country. •   Discussing the relative slowing of growth in the Western world and what this may mean. •   Dr. Rubin briefly comments on an argument for total factor productivity growth being linear. •   Thoughts on big picture topics through a micro lens. •   The lessons we can take from history for the most impactful policies for growth in the future.     Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   https://www.jaredcrubin.com/ (Dr. Jared Rubin) https://www.chapman.edu/ (Chapman University) https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Became-Rich-Historical/dp/1509540237 (How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth) https://twitter.com/jaredcrubin?lang=en (Dr. Jared Rubin on Twitter) https://economics.gmu.edu/people/mkoyama2 (Mark Koyama) https://chartercitiesinstitute.org/podcast/charter-cities-podcast-episode-16-state-capacity-religious-toleration-and-political-competition-with-mark-koyama/ (Charter Cities Podcast Episode 16 with Mark Koyama) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1995/lucas/biographical/ (Robert Lucas) https://economics.northwestern.edu/people/directory/joel-mokyr.html (Joel Mokyr) https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Growth-Origins-Schumpeter-Lectures/dp/0691168881 (Culture of Growth) https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/ (Joe Henrich) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Weber-German-sociologist (Max Weber) https://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Ethic-Spirit-Capitalism/dp/1603866043 (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1992/becker/facts/ (Gary Becker) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5970597.html (Culture and the Evolutionary Process) https://press.princeton.edu/our-authors/o-grada-cormac (Cormac Ó Gráda) https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/ (Deidre McCloskey) https://growthecon.com/ (Deitrich Vollrath) https://www.amazon.com/Fully-Grown-Stagnant-Economy-Success/dp/0226820041 (Fully Grown) https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/thomas-philippon (Thomas Philippon) https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Cage of the Language, published by Martin Sustrik on April 13, 2022 on LessWrong. Wittgenstein: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. Passer-by: Where's that guy from? Is he Dutch? I've never thought much of the Wittgenstein's argument. First, there's non-verbal thinking that can be used to escape the limits of the language. Second, once the knowledge is gained by non-verbal thinking, it can be used to extend the language itself and thus extend the limits of everyone's world. However, I've been writing newspaper articles and a blog in Slovak lately and the experience made me think of the Wittgenstein quote. Namely, I had hard time expressing some ideas and making some arguments. Slovak, you see, is a language of 5 million speakers, with ~200 years of history as a literary language. A lot of terms that one can use in English simply do not exist. I can't say, for example: I support policy X because it enables economies of scale and I am against policy Y because it introduces a single point of failure. There are no widely accepted equivalents to "economies of scale" and "single point of failure". I can say: Som za X, pretože umožňuje úspory z rozahu a som proti Y, pretože zavádza jediný bod zlyhania. It's hard to relate how that sounds. Enough to say that "úspory z rozahu" doesn't literally translate to "economies of scale" but rather to "savings from the extent". One gets an impression of a crackpot speaking gibberish, making a crackpot argument. It should be said that this is not a problem in one-to-one conversations. One can use the English term if the other is aware of it, or, if not, he can clarify the meaning of the term in advance. Where the problem hits is the public discussion. There you can't expect the prior knowledge or afford extensive explanations. Attention span in public discussion is, after all, very limited. If you waste your one minute of public attention by explaining what a single point of failure is, you've already lost. It can be argued that the problem lies not with the language, but rather with the language speakers: Slovaks are simple people, uneducated, they don't have the concept of economies of scale. Therefore, they should be educated and the term would force its way into the language all by itself. But that, while true, is missing the point. Most English speakers don't know what economies of scale are either. Yet, with 1.5 billion English speakers there's a large enough minority that does. They use the term, they write about it, they discuss it. If you encounter the term and you are not sure what it means you can google it and find out that there's a lot of hits, that some pretty serious people are discussing it, you can even learn what it means yourself. In any case, there's none of this "lonely crackpot" perception that you get if using a small language. All in all, in small language communities, the limits of the language are the limits of the Overton window. Some policies are not on the table not because people are opposed to them but because they can't even discuss them. It reminds me of what Joe Henrich says about small populations: There are these great cases in the ethnohistorical record of groups like the Polar Inuit who get cut off from the rest of the Inuit population. Then they begin to lose valuable tools and technology because their own brains remain the same size, but their collective brain became severed. They're not able to maintain as much know-how in the population. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Cage of the Language, published by Martin Sustrik on April 13, 2022 on LessWrong. Wittgenstein: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. Passer-by: Where's that guy from? Is he Dutch? I've never thought much of the Wittgenstein's argument. First, there's non-verbal thinking that can be used to escape the limits of the language. Second, once the knowledge is gained by non-verbal thinking, it can be used to extend the language itself and thus extend the limits of everyone's world. However, I've been writing newspaper articles and a blog in Slovak lately and the experience made me think of the Wittgenstein quote. Namely, I had hard time expressing some ideas and making some arguments. Slovak, you see, is a language of 5 million speakers, with ~200 years of history as a literary language. A lot of terms that one can use in English simply do not exist. I can't say, for example: I support policy X because it enables economies of scale and I am against policy Y because it introduces a single point of failure. There are no widely accepted equivalents to "economies of scale" and "single point of failure". I can say: Som za X, pretože umožňuje úspory z rozahu a som proti Y, pretože zavádza jediný bod zlyhania. It's hard to relate how that sounds. Enough to say that "úspory z rozahu" doesn't literally translate to "economies of scale" but rather to "savings from the extent". One gets an impression of a crackpot speaking gibberish, making a crackpot argument. It should be said that this is not a problem in one-to-one conversations. One can use the English term if the other is aware of it, or, if not, he can clarify the meaning of the term in advance. Where the problem hits is the public discussion. There you can't expect the prior knowledge or afford extensive explanations. Attention span in public discussion is, after all, very limited. If you waste your one minute of public attention by explaining what a single point of failure is, you've already lost. It can be argued that the problem lies not with the language, but rather with the language speakers: Slovaks are simple people, uneducated, they don't have the concept of economies of scale. Therefore, they should be educated and the term would force its way into the language all by itself. But that, while true, is missing the point. Most English speakers don't know what economies of scale are either. Yet, with 1.5 billion English speakers there's a large enough minority that does. They use the term, they write about it, they discuss it. If you encounter the term and you are not sure what it means you can google it and find out that there's a lot of hits, that some pretty serious people are discussing it, you can even learn what it means yourself. In any case, there's none of this "lonely crackpot" perception that you get if using a small language. All in all, in small language communities, the limits of the language are the limits of the Overton window. Some policies are not on the table not because people are opposed to them but because they can't even discuss them. It reminds me of what Joe Henrich says about small populations: There are these great cases in the ethnohistorical record of groups like the Polar Inuit who get cut off from the rest of the Inuit population. Then they begin to lose valuable tools and technology because their own brains remain the same size, but their collective brain became severed. They're not able to maintain as much know-how in the population. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Joe Henrich is Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and an author. Humans like to think that we're sovereign individuals with agency over our preferences and actions. But we are also a part of our social environment and Joe has teased apart some fascinating trends which explain how our location and culture have huge impacts on the way we behave, our preferences on everything from dating to work and family life to religion. Expect to learn why the things we consider to be human nature could just be cultural conditioning, the dangerous future if there's lots of sexless men, how the choice between growing rice and wheat impacts family life, what having diplomatic immunity from parking tickets can teach us about human nature, how Joe's lab can use language to archaeologically tell us about social trends from history and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy The Weirdest People In The World - https://amzn.to/3F3wUY7  Follow Joe on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JoHenrich  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ 

Joe Henrich is Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University. He has written two books that have been incredibly eye-opening for me: The Secret of Our Success and the WEIRDest People in the World. Joe has put cultural evolution on the map as the best way for understanding why the world looks the way it does today. In the interview we cover:-How cultures are a statistical concept and what philosophers get wrong when analyzing culture-What culture 'wants' -What is the speed minimum of innovation?-Are there things we can do to accelerate cultural evolution further? -How should we analyze subcultures?-Is Insurance really the fundamental application for culture?Show Notes:https://notunreasonable.com/2021/11/26/joe-henrich-on-cultural-evolution/Youtube link:  https://youtu.be/ud-1rhQHnKE

David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg's demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does Alexander's rationalist conception of human nature ignore the work of VBW favorites like Joe Henrich and Robert Frank? Is he a little too friendly to the neo-social Darwinism view of some guy named Nick Land? And oh no, why does he have to go transhumanist at the end?! Plus, we talk about the unique comic vision of Norm Macdonald and why we loved him.

Jared Rubin is a professor of economics at Chapman University. He works at the intersection of religion and economics. This is not an entirely obscure field, as evident in 2010's Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion. Nevertheless, Rubin talks about how he was somewhat of an odd duck in the field of economic history due to his interest in religion. His advisor indicated that it would be difficult to find a job. Luckily, that prediction did not come true. Most of the discussion is given over to Rubin's 2017 book, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not. He argues that the ideological content of Western Christianity matters in terms of the development of capitalism and liberal institutions. Though in the details the model is quite different from the sort of thesis promoted by Max Webber, Rubin does believe that ideas have consequences. In particular, we talk extensively about what a “legitimating ideology” is, and why Islam managed to check the rise of the capitalist class despite the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself a merchant. Rubin's argument dovetails in many ways with Joe Henrich's in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Finally, we close out the conversation talking about the book which will be out next year, coauthored with Mark Koyama, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth. You can't say that they don't have ambition. You can find the transcript of the conversation here.  

Today I sat down with Professor Joe Henrich to discuss what makes our species special—which is, by his lights, culture. Our conversation centers on how culture develops, and from this topic, we managed to hit a wide range of other subjects, including but not limited to: the validity of children as models for uncultured humans, the relevance of intelligence to human success, the potential philosophical implications of known facts about cultural evolution, neanderthals vs. humans, and the extent to which human nature is genetic. Henrich is Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and he is the author of two widely-acclaimed books, The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World. Our conversation today focused on the first book, but you can find both on Henrich's website: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/

What made some societies so individualistic, so democratic, and so rich? The short version of Joe Henrich's answer is: religion. By undermining kin-based networks, universalizing religions (especially Western Christianity) prompted the “big innovation” of impersonal trust, altered the Western brain and laid the foundations for free markets, geographical mobility and democratic institutions. In other words, some people became WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic). We discuss how the concept of coevolution helps to get us past the tired nature v. nurture distinction, the role of culture in shaping our biology, how polygamy causes a “math problem of surplus men”, the rise of the incel movement along with feminism, how monogamous marriage lowers testosterone (and why that's a good thing), The Life of Brian, morality and politics and much more.   Joseph Henrich Dr. Joseph Henrich is Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at the University of Harvard and Principal Investigator of the Culture, Cognition, & Coevolution Lab.    Joe's research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making and culture, and includes topics related to cultural learning, cultural evolution, culture-gene coevolution, human sociality, prestige, leadership, large-scale cooperation, religion and the emergence of complex human institutions. His latest book is The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020).  More Henrich The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2015). “Do Markets Make Us Fair, Trusting, and Cooperative, or Bring out the Worst in Us?”, Evonomics (August, 2016)   Also mentioned Michael Tomasello's work on humans as “imitation machines” especially his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999) Here is a good summary of Auguste Comte's “religion of humanity”  “Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males”, Lee T. Gettler, Thomas W. McDade, Alan B. Feranil, and Christopher W. Kuzawa (2011) “What have the Romans ever done for us” sketch from the 1979 Monty Python movie The Life of Brian  My previous episode on liberalizing Islam with Mustafa Akyol The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again Book by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett For a good introduction to the politics of moral foundations theory see “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations” by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek (2009) “Moral Values and Voting” by Benjamin Enke (NBER, 2018)   The Dialogues Team Creator: Richard Reeves Research: Ashleigh Maciolek Artwork: George Vaughan Thomas Tech Support: Cameron Hauver-Reeves Music: "Remember" by Bencoolen (thanks for the permission, guys!)

In this episode, you'll find, among other things: D mansplaining about his gym membership, WEIRD by Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan, when and why the Catholic banned cousin marriages (up to the sixth cousin removed) and what that led to, GameStop/vaccines/Robinhood and non-rivalrous goods, and the why holding two contradictory thoughts in your head is like understanding that there's a positive and a negative pole and a battery, and finally, some thoughts about QAnon and The Daily-episode on the QAnon conspiracy theory. The episode was recorded on 210131 Read the original paper on WEIRD: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1601785 Listen to The Daily: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/podcasts/the-daily/qanon-conspiracy-theory-trump.html?

00:00:34 What drove Joe to research and write his latest book – The WEIRDest People in the World and what it suggests about the timeline of human development00:08:10 What made us these WEIRD people? Why and how did the nuclear family emerge? How did marriage rules contribute to this? How did public markets evolve to support the growth of WEIRD people?00:13:46 What role did the Catholic Church contribute to the rise of the WEIRD people? How did the Orthodox Church help develop a similar approach?00:17:16 How early Christianity spread mostly through women in urban areas.00:20:10 What actually drives the dialectic between pleasure and moral behavior? How are religions modifying our behavior to cooperate more and behave ‘less sinful’?00:25:59 Is Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) right? Did we (the West) simply get lucky?00:30:31 What should we keep in mind if we set up a new society from scratch?00:34:47 What role should institutions play in a cultural development? Can they define the ‘ought’ but can they leave the ‘how’ open?00:38:35 Why did other religions not copy the successful innovations of the Catholic Church? Is religion developing in a similar way of ‘creative destruction’?00:44:10 Does more people (with diverse backgrounds) in the same space produce the most productivity? 00:49:29 Is our declining birth rate a bug or feature? Doesn’t it slow down or rate of innovation greatly?00:52:45 What roles does polygamy and religion have in the birth rate?00:59:01 is freedom a central part of a success of a civilization? You may watch this episode on Youtube – Joe Henrich (WEIRD people and what drives a culture’s success?). Joe Henrich is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University (and formerly a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia). He is particularly interested in the question of how humans evolved from “being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe”, and how culture shaped our species’ genetic evolution. His latest book is now available on Amazon – The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:2:19 - The Yankees beat the Indians 1-0 in Game 3 of the 2017 American League Division Series, see “2017 American League Division Series (ALDS) Game 3, Indians at Yankees” (Baseball Reference) and 2017 ALDS Game 3 Highlights3:25 - Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, August 2, 20193:34 - Yankee Stadium3:36 - We always park at the Harlem River North Lot, exit 6 off of I-87S (The Major Deegan Expressway)3:55 - It was Adam Ottavino4:52 - Watch Gleyber Torres' Grand Slam vs Red Sox | August 2, 20195:28 - Torres' grand slam leads Yankees to a 4-2 win | Red Sox-Yankees Game Highlights 8/2/19 (YouTube)8:50 - Written in 1908, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is the baseball anthem traditionally sung during the 7th inning stretch -  listen to a 1908 recording and watch legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray famously lead the singing at Wrigley Field9:18 - See “New York Yankees Team History & Encyclopedia” from Baseball Reference, the “History of the New York Yankees” Wikipedia entry, or the “New York Yankees” entry from Baseball Almanac9:45 - Thurman Munson, an avid amateur pilot, died on August 2, 1979 attempting to land his personal plane and crashing short of the runway - see “8/02/1979 - Thurman Munson dies in crash” (SBNation, 2010), “40 years on, Thurman Munson's death remains one of sports' most stunning moments” (Yahoo! Sports, 2019), and “Remembering the Great Thurman Munson 40 Years After His Tragic Death” (How They Play, 2020)10:05 - Watch Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson almost come to blows in the dugout at Fenway Park after Martin pulled Jackson from the game, which the Red Sox won 10-4, see “June 18, 1977: When Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin clashed at Fenway” (Sporting News, 2019) and “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, June 18, 1977” (Baseball Reference)14:44 - The Red Sox beat the Yankees 11-0 on Saturday September 6, 2003 at Yankee Stadium, see “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, September 6, 2003” (Baseball Reference)16:05 - The Yankees didn’t trade for Jason Giambi, they signed him to a seven-year, $120 million dollar free agent contract in December of 2001, see “Giambi tops Yankees' arsenal of new additions” (ESPN, 2001)16:18 - The Yankees traded Alfonso Soriano for Alex Rodriguez in February of 2004, see “Trades Of The Decade: A-Rod For Soriano” (MLB Trade Rumors, 2009) and “The great A-Rod trade robbery” (Bronx Pinstripes, 2020)16:34 - Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992 and was innovative and influential for being the first of the “retro” style ballparks that , see “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction” (Ballpark Ratings)20:06 - See Wikipedia’s list of current Major League Baseball stadiums and the slightly out of date article “MLB Ballparks, From Oldest to Newest” (Ballpark Digest, 2017)20:46 - See “The Steroids Era” (ESPN, 2012) and the Wikipedia entry on “doping in baseball”, also check out what is shaping up to be an excellent podcast summation of the era, Crushed from Religion of Sports20:53 - Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 60 set in 1927, watch the 61st homer with call by the former Yankee shortstop and legendary broadcaster Phil Rizzuto , and see “Roger Maris Breaks the Home Run Record” (History) or “61 Home Runs by Roger Maris” (Baseball Almanac)21:07 - See the “1998 Major League Baseball home run record chase” Wikipedia entry and “The McGwire-Sosa home run chase helped make 1998 one of MLB's wildest seasons ever” (ESPN, 2020)21:10 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 3-2 at Fenway Park on September 8, 1998, see “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, September 8, 1998” (Baseball Reference)21:44 - Watch Mark McGwire’s 62nd homer of 199822:53 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 09 - Lying About Santa: Naughty or Nice? from December 202024:38 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 5-4 in 13 innings at Yankee Stadium on Thursday July 1, 2004, this game is notable for being the famous “Jeter In The Stands” game, and is undoubtedly one of the best Yankees vs Red Sox regular season games of all time, see “July 1, 2004: Best regular season win” (Bronx Pinstripes), “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, July 1, 2004” (Baseball Reference), and watch the Yankees rally and win in the bottom of the 13th28:08 - The 2003 Yankees home opener vs the Minnesota Twins scheduled to be played on Monday April 7, was postponed due to snow and played on Tuesday April 8, the temperature was a balmy 35° at first pitch, the Yankees won 7-3, and Hideki Matsui hit a memorable grand slam in his first game at Yankee Stadium, see “Minnesota Twins at New York Yankees Box Score, April 8, 2003” (Baseball Reference)29:17 - See the referenced "poster" which was indeed created with Microsoft Paint31:27 - The Diamondbacks came back in the bottom of the 9th to beat the Yankees 3-2 in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, see the winning hit by Luis Gonzalez off of future Hall of Famer, greatest closer of all time, and absolute Yankee legend Mariano Rivera32:08 - See “Baseball History, American History and You” (National Baseball Hall of Fame) and “The National Pastime” (Our Game MLB Blog)33:05 - Watch James Earl Jones in his role as Terence Mann reciting one of the most famous monologues in movie history from 1989’s Field of Dreams, and while you’re at it watch Ray have a catch with his dad, just because...34:06 - See “Why are Sportswriters Whitewashing Baseball’s Dark Secrets?” (The Daily Beast, 2018)34:33 - See “The Legend of Mickey Mantle” (American Heritage, 2019), and with an extreme grain of salt see “Mickey Mantle’s 10 Longest Home Runs” (TheMick.com)34:40 - See “Time in a Bottle” by Mickey Mantle recounting his struggles with alcoholism from the April 1994 issue of Sports Illustrated36:39 - See the 2010 article in Sports Illustrated adapted from her Mickey Mantle biography The Last Boy, by baseball writer and journalist Jane Leavy 42:14 - See “After 1968’s ‘Year of the Pitcher,’ MLB lowered the mound. Now, the league could do it again.” (Washington Post, 2019) and “Four stats that showed why baseball had to lower the mound after 1968” (Cut4, MLB.com)43:27 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich43:32 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 128 - Joe Henrich on the Weirdness of the West from January 202144:05 - See “The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012), “A cultural species: How culture drove human evolution” (American Psychological Association, 2011), and “How Culture Drove Human Evolution” (Edge, 2012)44:42 - Watch “Why chimps don’t play baseball” (Nature YouTube Channel)50:09 - See “Stats to Avoid: Batting Average” (FanGraphs) and “Stat to the Future: Why it's time to stop relying on batting average” (Sporting News)50:16 - See “State of Analytics: How the Movement Has Forever Changed Baseball – For Better or Worse” (Stats Perform) and “Statistics ruined baseball by perfecting it” (The Conversation, 2019)54:02 - The new Yankee Stadium opened in 200955:40 - “My version” of Yankee Stadium was actually the renovated version of the original stadium built in 19231:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 20201:01:05 - Watch Trumbull, CT win the 1989 Little League World Series by beating Taiwan, 5-2This episode was recorded remotely via Zoom in April 2021The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Podcast: Many Minds Episode: Culture, innovation, and the collective brainRelease date: 2021-02-03Greetings friends and happy February! Today's episode is a conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. Michael's research takes on a suite of topics that all start from a single big question: Why are we so different from other animals? Part of the answer has to do with our neural hardware. There's no question we've got big brains—and Michael has some cool things to say about why they may have gotten so big. But Michael is just as focused on our cultural software—the tools and ideas we develop, tweak, share, and accumulate over time. You might say he's more impressed by our collective brains than by our individual brains. To study all this, Michael builds formal theories and computational models; he runs experiments; and he constructs and analyzes huge databases. We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the finding that the size and interconnectedness of a social group affects the cultural skills that group can develop and maintain. We consider what actually powers innovation (hint: it's not lone geniuses). We discuss how diversity is a bit double-edged and why psychology needs to become a historical science. And that, my friends, is hardly all—we also touch on cetaceans, religious history, and spinning plates. I've been hoping to have Michael on the show for months now. His work is deeply theoretical, advancing the basic science of what it means to be human. But it's also engaged with important practical issues—issues like corruption and cultural diversity. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy! A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 4:30 - An introduction to “dual inheritance theory.” 11:00 - A 2013 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues about the relationship between sociality and cultural complexity. 12:15 - A paper on the loss of cultural tools and traditions in the Tasmanian case. 21:20 – A 2016 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich on innovation and the collective brain. 28:30 - The original paper on the notion of cultural “tightness” and “looseness.” 30:20 - A recent short piece by Dr. Muthukrishna on the paradox of diversity. 34:50 - A 2019 popular piece of mine on the phenomenon of “global WEIRDing.” 40:27 - The so-called Flynn Effect refers to the puzzling rise of IQ scores over time. It is named after James Flynn, who died only weeks ago. 42:30 - A paper about the significance of Luria's work on abstract reasoning in Uzbekistan. 50:26 - A paper on the “cultural brain hypothesis,” the subject of Dr. Muthukrishna's dissertation. 51:00 - A paper on brains as fundamentally “expensive.” 58:00 - Boyd & Richardson, mentioned here, have authored a number of highly influential books. The first of these was Culture and the Evolutionary Process. 59:35 - A 2015 paper on head size and emergency birth interventions. 1:01:20 - The stylized model we mention here is discussed and illustrated in this lecture from the 2020 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. 1:03:15 – The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on cetacean brains and culture. 1:11:38 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on ‘Psychology as a Historical Science.' 1:14:00 - The 2020 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues introducing a tool for the measurement of cultural distance. 1:20:20 – Dr. Muthukrishna is part of the team behind the Database of Religious History. 1:24:25 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joe Henrich on ‘The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.'   Dr. Muthukrishna's end-of-show reading recommendations: Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success & The WEIRDest People in the World Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas  You can keep up with Dr. Muthukrishna's work at his personal website and on Twitter (@mmuthukrishna).   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/. You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Podcast: Many Minds (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )Episode: Culture, innovation, and the collective brainRelease date: 2021-02-03Greetings friends and happy February! Today's episode is a conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. Michael's research takes on a suite of topics that all start from a single big question: Why are we so different from other animals? Part of the answer has to do with our neural hardware. There's no question we've got big brains—and Michael has some cool things to say about why they may have gotten so big. But Michael is just as focused on our cultural software—the tools and ideas we develop, tweak, share, and accumulate over time. You might say he's more impressed by our collective brains than by our individual brains. To study all this, Michael builds formal theories and computational models; he runs experiments; and he constructs and analyzes huge databases. We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the finding that the size and interconnectedness of a social group affects the cultural skills that group can develop and maintain. We consider what actually powers innovation (hint: it's not lone geniuses). We discuss how diversity is a bit double-edged and why psychology needs to become a historical science. And that, my friends, is hardly all—we also touch on cetaceans, religious history, and spinning plates. I've been hoping to have Michael on the show for months now. His work is deeply theoretical, advancing the basic science of what it means to be human. But it's also engaged with important practical issues—issues like corruption and cultural diversity. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy! A transcript of this show is available here.   Notes and links 4:30 - An introduction to “dual inheritance theory.” 11:00 - A 2013 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues about the relationship between sociality and cultural complexity. 12:15 - A paper on the loss of cultural tools and traditions in the Tasmanian case. 21:20 – A 2016 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich on innovation and the collective brain. 28:30 - The original paper on the notion of cultural “tightness” and “looseness.” 30:20 - A recent short piece by Dr. Muthukrishna on the paradox of diversity. 34:50 - A 2019 popular piece of mine on the phenomenon of “global WEIRDing.” 40:27 - The so-called Flynn Effect refers to the puzzling rise of IQ scores over time. It is named after James Flynn, who died only weeks ago. 42:30 - A paper about the significance of Luria's work on abstract reasoning in Uzbekistan. 50:26 - A paper on the “cultural brain hypothesis,” the subject of Dr. Muthukrishna's dissertation. 51:00 - A paper on brains as fundamentally “expensive.” 58:00 - Boyd & Richardson, mentioned here, have authored a number of highly influential books. The first of these was Culture and the Evolutionary Process. 59:35 - A 2015 paper on head size and emergency birth interventions. 1:01:20 - The stylized model we mention here is discussed and illustrated in this lecture from the 2020 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. 1:03:15 – The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on cetacean brains and culture. 1:11:38 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on ‘Psychology as a Historical Science.' 1:14:00 - The 2020 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues introducing a tool for the measurement of cultural distance. 1:20:20 – Dr. Muthukrishna is part of the team behind the Database of Religious History. 1:24:25 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joe Henrich on ‘The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.'   Dr. Muthukrishna's end-of-show reading recommendations: Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success & The WEIRDest People in the World Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas  You can keep up with Dr. Muthukrishna's work at his personal website and on Twitter (@mmuthukrishna).   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

If you're reading this, you are most likely a WEIRD person. So are Dave & Ryan. But why is a Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic person odd? Only because 95% of psychological research is conducted on WEIRD populations. When trying to understand humans, it's tricky to use a subset of humanity as a baseline. Yet, here we are... Thanks to Joe Henrich for his great article which led RDQI down this path. Find his work here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201231-how-the-way-you-think-was-shaped-centuries-ago (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201231-how-the-way-you-think-was-shaped-centuries-ago)

Greetings friends and happy February! Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. Michael’s research takes on a suite of topics that all start from a single big question: Why are we so different from other animals? Part of the answer has to do with our neural hardware. There’s no question we’ve got big brains—and Michael has some cool things to say about why they may have gotten so big. But Michael is just as focused on our cultural software—the tools and ideas we develop, tweak, share, and accumulate over time. You might say he’s more impressed by our collective brains than by our individual brains. To study all this, Michael builds formal theories and computational models; he runs experiments; and he constructs and analyzes huge databases. We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the finding that the size and interconnectedness of a social group affects the cultural skills that group can develop and maintain. We consider what actually powers innovation (hint: it’s not lone geniuses). We discuss how diversity is a bit double-edged and why psychology needs to become a historical science. And that, my friends, is hardly all—we also touch on cetaceans, religious history, and spinning plates. I’ve been hoping to have Michael on the show for months now. His work is deeply theoretical, advancing the basic science of what it means to be human. But it’s also engaged with important practical issues—issues like corruption and cultural diversity. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy! A transcript of this show will be available soon.   Notes and links 4:30 - An introduction to “dual inheritance theory.” 11:00 - A 2013 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues about the relationship between sociality and cultural complexity. 12:15 - A paper on the loss of cultural tools and traditions in the Tasmanian case. 21:20 – A 2016 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich on innovation and the collective brain. 28:30 - The original paper on the notion of cultural “tightness” and “looseness.” 30:20 - A recent short piece by Dr. Muthukrishna on the paradox of diversity. 34:50 - A 2019 popular piece of mine on the phenomenon of “global WEIRDing.” 40:27 - The so-called Flynn Effect refers to the puzzling rise of IQ scores over time. It is named after James Flynn, who died only weeks ago. 42:30 - A paper about the significance of Luria’s work on abstract reasoning in Uzbekistan. 50:26 - A paper on the “cultural brain hypothesis,” the subject of Dr. Muthukrishna’s dissertation. 51:00 - A paper on brains as fundamentally “expensive.” 58:00 - Boyd & Richardson, mentioned here, have authored a number of highly influential books. The first of these was Culture and the Evolutionary Process. 59:35 - A 2015 paper on head size and emergency birth interventions. 1:01:20 - The stylized model we mention here is discussed and illustrated in this lecture from the 2020 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. 1:03:15 – The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on cetacean brains and culture. 1:11:38 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on ‘Psychology as a Historical Science.’ 1:14:00 - The 2020 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues introducing a tool for the measurement of cultural distance. 1:20:20 – Dr. Muthukrishna is part of the team behind the Database of Religious History. 1:24:25 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joe Henrich on ‘The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.’   Dr. Muthukrishna’s end-of-show reading recommendations: Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success & The WEIRDest People in the World Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas  You can keep up with Dr. Muthukrishna’s work at his personal website and on Twitter (@mmuthukrishna).   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Joe Henrich talks to Jim about some of the key insights from his book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar & Particularly Prosperous. Joe Henrich talks to Jim about some of the key insights from his book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar … Continue reading EP104 Joe Henrich on WEIRD People → The post EP104 Joe Henrich on WEIRD People appeared first on The Jim Rutt Show.

Joe Henrich is Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Secret of Our Success and The Weirdest People in theWorld. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joe Henrich is Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Secret of Our Success and The Weirdest People in the World.

Mikki Williden, PhD is a Registered Nutritionist in Auckland, New Zealand specializing in sports and performance nutrition. I met Mikki at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Boulder, Colorado in 2016, and she has recently launched a new podcast called Mikkipedia as an exploration of all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. She kindly invited me on as a guest, which of course is a role reversal for me. On this podcast, Mikki and I discuss my personal health journey and what motivated me to start NBT. We get into some detail, including what my life looked like before I knew anything about health and the specific steps that got me headed in the right direction. We talk about bike racing and business and how both have evolved for me, as well as the habits that I’ve built to maintain my current state of health and performance. Here’s the outline of this podcast with Mikki Williden: [00:00:19] Christopher Kelly on Robb Wolf’s Paleo Solution podcast. [00:01:50] Robb Wolf’s podcast, The Healthy Rebellion. [00:02:24] Chris's health journey. [00:03:18] Mikki’s interview with Greg Potter, on The Mikkipedia Podcast. [00:04:21] Book: The Paleo Diet for Athletes: The Ancient Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance, by Loren Cordain and Joe Friel. [00:05:38] Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) diet. [00:06:45] Chris Kelly on Ben Greenfield's podcast. [00:11:36] Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDS); Podcast: How to Identify and Treat Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S); with Nicky Keay. [00:14:51] Mickey Trescott’s books on AIP. [00:17:22] Framing interventions in terms of performance. [00:20:43] Diet changes over time. [00:20:59] Keto Summit; Jeremy and Louise Hendon. [00:21:59] Dom D’Agostino, PhD. [00:22:53] Problems with the Keto diet. [00:24:15] Podcasts featuring Katie compton and Jeremy Powers. [00:26:01] Racing and fueling. [00:28:25] Changing goals: from performance to healthspan. [00:30:51] Book: Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, by BJ Fogg, PhD. [00:31:04] B Strong blood flow restriction training; Podcast: Blood Flow Restriction Training for Improved Strength, Performance, and Healthspan, with Jim Stray-Gundersen, MD. [00:35:33] NBT over time - changes in approach. [00:37:44] Supervised machine learning; bloodsmart.ai. [00:40:09] Stephen Genuis, PhD; Multiple studies on toxicants excreted in sweat. [00:44:11] Identifying your values; Motivational interviewing, Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). [00:45:49] Services offered by NBT; book a free 15-minute starter session. [00:46:54] Podcast: How to Manage Stress, with Simon Marshall, PhD. [00:48:39] Intermountain Risk Score. Study: Horne BD, May HT, Muhlestein JB, Ronnow BS, Lappé DL, Renlund DG, et al. Exceptional mortality prediction by risk scores from common laboratory tests. Am J Med. 2009;122: 550–558. [00:48:57] PhenoAge; Podcast: How to Measure Your Biological Age, with Megan Hall. [00:52:32] Supplements: Thorne Multi-Vitamin Elite, Thorne Creatine. [00:54:56] A day in the life of Chris Kelly. [00:56:30] Podcast: Air Pollution Is a Cause of Endothelial Injury, Systemic Inflammation and Cardiovascular Disease, with Arden Pope, PhD. [00:59:49] California wildfires. [01:02:28] Cliff Harvey. [01:03:04] Influential podcast guests. [01:03:41] Podcasts with Malcolm Kendrick: Why Cholesterol Levels Have No Effect on Cardiovascular Disease (And Things to Think about Instead) and A Statin Nation: Damaging Millions in a Brave New Post-health World. [01:04:38] Podcasts with Stephanie Welch: Disruptive Anthropology: An Ancestral Health Perspective on Barefooting and Male Circumcision and The Need for Tribal Living in a Modern World. [01:04:48] Josh Turknett, MD, president of Physicians for Ancestral Health; Podcasts include The Migraine Miracle, How to Protect Your Brain from Decline, and How to Support Childhood Cognitive Development. [01:05:51] Book: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joe Henrich. [01:06:44] My Migraine Miracle; Book: Migraine Miracle: A Sugar-Free, Gluten-Free Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and Relieve Your Headaches for Good; Video: Migraine as the Hypothalamic Distress Signal — Joshua Turknett, M.D. (AHS14). [01:08:44] How To Win At Angry Birds: The Ancestral Therapeutic Paradigm - AHS19. Podcast: How to Win at Angry Birds: The Ancestral Paradigm for a Therapeutic Revolution; 4-quadrant model.   [01:14:05] NBT’s retainer program.

The debate between nature and nurture is as old as the hills - is genetics or cultural conditioning the key to understanding human evolution? We speak to Joseph Henrich, a Harvard professor whose fascination with human evolution and anthropology has brought him to a radical conclusion. He says Western societies preoccupied with the individual not the collective are weird, and the cultural power of the West has skewed our view of what is normal. How much do we humans really have in common?

My guest today is Joseph Henrich, a professor at Harvard and an expert on the evolution of human cooperation and culture. I am a big fan of his book, "The Secret of Our Success" and he just published a new one called the Weirdest People in the World about people who fall under the acronym WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Through his research, he explains culture's role in evolution. He shows how evolutionary theory can help us learn, innovate, and share knowledge. We begin this episode by talking about the role big Gods play in cultural evolution. Then we talk about the time Joe spent living with small-scale societies in rural Peru and Fiji. He talks about how he learns the language, plans the trips, and assimilates into societies so he can study them. Towards the end of the podcast, we talk about what economists can learn from anthropologists and the evolution of attraction. My favorite part of the conversation was learning about the tradeoffs between having an open or closed society, and how those factors contribute to innovation. Please enjoy my conversation with Joseph Henrich. ____________________________ Show Notes 2:06 - How the role of God has evolved over time and why bigger and bigger Gods have become the norm. 4:50 - Why acting as a third party for people made Gods culturally and socially so much more important. 8:36 - Marriage across cultures and religions and why they diverge sometimes wildly from what Western culture considers "normal". 13:44 - Why many religious restrictions that created the Western norm of a nuclear family also set up the stage for heightened individualism. 16:58 - How and why social safety nets transitioned from kin-based institutions to the states and governments. 18:46 - What surprising similarities and differences Joe saw between Americans and the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon. 22:22 - The role of humor in enforcing social norms, why Joe thinks it is absolutely universal, and the other universal ways trust is built-in communities. 28:35 - How narcotics and psychedelics are utilized in different cultures and the way their roles differ. 31:20 - Why cultural imitation does not always yield positive outcomes. 33:11 - How the introduction of agriculture changed family relationships and culture. 39:36 - The biggest takeaways Joe got from Guns, Germs, and Steel. 43:28 - Why Joe believes that religion is innate in human beings. 50:31 - The possible implications of losing rituals that for millennia have brought families and clans closer together. 52:24 - What the clock and a universal time have done to human psychology. 1:01:16 - What the collective brain is and why it is so prevalent throughout creative booms in history. 1:04:55 - How the proliferation of information helps and hurts creativity, and why the internet hasn't had the impact people thought it would. 1:08:26 - How information is affected by biases and manipulation and why humans are so susceptible to them. 1:11:39 - How the technology, institutions, and tools we use affect the way that we think. 1:15:12 - Why learning disabilities should not be looked at as purely negative and the benefits that cognitive diversity brings to humanity. 1:19:00 - The way gossip in a society helps define the collective philosophy of its people. 1:21:07 - How imitative education is currently at its peak and what doors it opens for people around the world. 1:24:36 - Why rituals and multiple gods were so common in the past and are so uncommon now. 1:28:40 - How Jon would alter the current research practices in the social sciences on "WEIRD" people and why. 1:31:39 - Why certain assumptions about humans are actually specific to a region or population, and why they don't represent humanity as a whole. 1:35:10 - Why the top-down lecture model is not serving education as well as it should, and why it shouldn't be replaced completely by Youtube. 1:39:20 - The selective physical and cultural evolution of certain populations and why it happens the way it does. 1:42:12 - What Jon finds to be the most interesting elements of culture to study and why. 1:45:33 - Why Jon's aerospace engineering degree is so valuable in his anthropology career. 1:47:41 - The problem with focusing solely on models in research and studies. 1:53:20 - Why humanity seems to be stagnating in intelligence but rocketing upward in cultural development.

Yoel and Mickey interview one of the most influential social scientists of our generation, Harvard University's Joe Henrich. Why are people from the West so peculiar, so different from other people the world over? What led the West to be particularly prosperous? If not intelligence, what marks humans as so special? What are the various approaches to the evolutionary study of human behaviour? Does psychology suffer from a theory crisis? Has religion been a net plus to the survival of human groups? Bonus: Who is lazier, psychologists or economists? Special Guest: Joe Henrich.

WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves — their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations — over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? To answer these questions Joseph Henrich draws on anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition — laying the foundation for the modern world. Shermer and Henrich discuss: psychology textbooks that “now purport to be about ‘Psychology’ or ‘Social Psychology’ need to be retitled something like ‘The Cultural Psychology of Late 20th Century Americans’,” Darwin’s Dictum: “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observations must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.” What views Henrich is writing for and against, evolutionary psychology and the search for human universals in the context of his thesis that WEIRD cultures are so different, Max Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and how his thesis holds up under modern studies, a 2×2 grid analysis of his thesis (what about the exceptions?): Cell 1: Catholic/Protestant Influence + WEIRD characteristics Cell 2: Catholic/Protestant Influence + non-WEIRD characteristics Cell 3: Non-Catholic/Protestant Influence + WEIRD characteristics Cell 4: Non-Catholic/Protestant Influence + non-WEIRD characteristics the problem of overdetermining the past (so many theories explaining history: Jared Diamond’s geographic models, Ian Morris’ War: What is it Good For?, Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (ideas having sex), Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, economic historian Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, Benjamin Friedman’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, normative vs. descriptive accounts of human behavior polygamy vs. monogamy, 1st cousin marriages? conformity, shame and guilt, illusions, loss aversion, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, superstitions, religion doesn’t have to be true to be useful, national differences in cultural psychology (for example: Italy a loose culture, Germany a tight culture), origin of writing and literacy rates, origin of religion and its purpose(s), the “Big Gods” theory of religion’s origin, the purpose of religious rituals and food taboos, families and kin, kin selection, group selection, meaning and happiness in non-WEIRD cultures, “Then you get Westerners who are like ‘I’m an individual ape on a pale blue dot in the middle of a giant black space” and “What does it all mean?’”, physical differences: “WEIRD people have flat feet, impoverished microbiomes, high rates of myopia and unnaturally low levels of exposure to parasites like helminths, which may increase their risk of heart disease and allergies.”, and When we colonize Mars and become a spacefaring species, what should we take with us from what we’ve learned about human history and psychology? Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist and the author of The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, among other books. He is the chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where his research focuses on evolutionary approaches to psychology, decision-making, and culture.

Razib talks to evolutionary anthropologist Joe Henrich about his new book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B07RZFCPMD/geneexpressio-20

Professor Joe Henrich (Harvard) presents his new book on 'how Westerners became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous'. He suggests that the Western Church eroded kinship in Europe, which enabled a process of cultural evolution, resulting in democratisation, innovation, and economic growth. I present an alternative hypothesis: through economic development, wage labour, non-familial employment, and rural-urban migration, people broaden their networks beyond kinship. So my suggestion is that economic development fosters cultural change. Let me know what you think!! Read more about Professor Henrich: https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/ And his book: https://weirdpeople.fas.harvard.edu/

I had an excellent conversation with Samo Burja of Bismark Analysis. Samo is one of the most original thinkers I have encountered in the last two years, and it was great to have him share some of his ideas here. You can follow him on Twitter, read his writing, or watch his videos on Youtube. Here is Samo on Botswana and political stability - and how Rome handled the "succession problem". The manuscript of Samo's book is here. You can find us on most podcast platforms as "Ideas Untrapped".TRANSCRIPTTobi: Welcome to Ideas Untrapped and today I am with Samo Burja. Samo is a sociologist and he is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm. Samo is also an original thinker who has come up with his own theory of history that he called the Great Founder Theory. Welcome, Samo.Samo: Thank you, Tobi. It's a pleasure to be on the show.Tobi: Briefly please, explain the Great Founder Theory. You call it the Theory of History, can you explain it, in the most simplest form, for us.Samo: Well, everyone has a theory of history. There are some people who believe that history is driven by technology, that technology is the most important thing that changes the world. There are others who think that it is the great people - the generals and individuals and scientists and artists. And still, others think it's driven by economic forces like capitalism and so on. So, everyone has opinions on it. Many historians have arguments on it. Many economists have arguments on it, and political scientists. Great Founders Theory which is my theory proposes that history is driven by the exceptional individuals who make the institutions that we all rely on - the founders of states, the founders of exceptional companies, the founders of religions, the prophets or the statesman or the industrialists of history - and that were you to remove someone from history where there to not be that particular individual, that exceptional and unusual individual, history could have gone very very differently. And also it's not just a way to interpret history it's a way to predict the future because it means that instead of necessarily looking at just the economic fundamentals or just the technological fundamentals of a country, you might actually want to look at: well, is there anyone in the country that might be a founder of new institutions? Because I think that be it a state, a company, or an organised religion, over time as you move away from their founding, these institutions can become corrupt or dysfunctional. So even if a country seems to be doing extremely well, if it doesn't have this type of person around who might rebuild the institutions or build them anew, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, it will do worse. And a country that at first might not seem promising, might suddenly, like, shift to become the centre of the world if it had enough of such people.Tobi: I found your theory on Great Founders interesting. One is that the conventional wisdom, if I can call it that, on thinking about institutions is not vested in people. There is a common saying that "oh, it's about the institutions and not the people", that's how you build enduring systems that can be fair, that can be just, that can order society. So, now, I think the fear...or in places like Africa where there is a long history of coups and bad leaders, how does [the] Great Founder Theory differ from the Great Man Theory of history?Samo: Yeah, it's an important distinction to make, because not every powerful person is a great founder in this sense. They are often people who appropriate or merely direct institutions and organisations that others created. And then at times, if they tried to create an institution, they might not be very good at it. So the big distinction that I would make is that the individuals who can be exceptional - this kind of, like, far-sighted social engineers, I think they are extremely rare. I think they are not just rare in African history, they were in European history and in Asian history but, over time the fruits of their labour accumulate. An example in SouthEast Asia I think would be Lee Kuan Yew. I think that he was an excellent founder of the city-state of Singapore, which was previously a British colony and developed it extremely well. I think in Africa there are some leaders who are definitely worthy of administration, I think that I wrote an article on Botswana for Palladium Magazine where I examined the origin of Botswanan stability and how the royal family of the country actually made extremely good decisions as to how to approach decolonialisation (sic) and so on. And then Paul... I think Paul Kagame deserves, despite his critics and his critics do have a point that he is very much authoritarian in a way, I think he's done a remarkably good job of both developing Rwanda and healing the deep social wounds that the Rwandan genocide caused in the 1990s. And I can certainly relate to that because the 1990s was also the period where - you know, I'm originally from Slovenia, it's a country in the former Yugoslavia - that country was also torn apart, right? So this kind of, like, tearing apart of societies, I think that can be done by almost anyone. The building together of societies, the re-creation of them, the healing of them, the transformation of them, that is very very rare. So I think that that would be the big distinction.Tobi: Yeah. One issue that you've written extensively about is succession, and...Samo: Uh-hmm.Tobi: This is a very important problem with institutions and leaders and founders as well. Two examples: you talked about Kagame...Samo: Hmm hmm.Tobi: I've always found Kagame interesting because Rwanda seems to be in an equilibrium where Kagame does not really trust anybody as a successor, so that's why he's been in power for so long. Some of his speeches, some of the analysis that comes from...[trails off]. It seems like he sees himself as probably the only credible custodian of that healing process, from that horrible experience; and also in Nigeria here we had a very good example when we transitioned to democracy in 1999 and we had a president who had a particularly good second term in office. There were economic reforms, and there was growth. There was some form of shared prosperity in the society and he wanted a third term because he could not trust anybody, even within a system that he built or that was built around him. So explain to us - how important is the succession problem and how do civilizations and societies that have managed that problem really well, how did they do it?Samo: It's an extremely difficult problem, and I think solving the succession problem probably distinguishes the most successful societies or the most long-lived ones from, like, the ones that struggle. In particular, I think that it has two parts: there is skill succession and there is power succession. Where skills succession means that the next person in a position has comparable skills and knowledge and ability to carry out an office. If say, hypothetically, in ancient times, a wise king is succeeded by a foolish son, right? The song can easily undo what the father had done, they can easily endanger the society. On the other hand, you might have a situation where there is a failure of power succession where, for example, there is a wise ruler but there is another wise individual who could come into power but doesn't really have the resources to reach for that position, even if the formal position still exists, it might be encumbered or disabled. There is such a thing as a powerless president. For example, today in Afghanistan, the president of Afghanistan is best understood as the mayor of Kabul. The power of this government does not extend beyond the capital city itself, with the outline regions still - 19 years after the US invasion, they're still basically governed by the Taliban or are directly governed by, like, basically US military forces. So in that case, the power just is not there to govern the space. Now, with regard to the trust between people, the trust has to be justified on a number of grounds. The very interesting thing here is if you consider [that] it's best to have a loyal competent person work with you and work for you and eventually when you have to go, as all people do, either because of old age or because of term limits or because you want to do something else with the remainder of your life, that person is the best person to hand it off to. It is, ironically, sometimes better to have someone who is loyal but incompetent than to have someone who is disloyal and incompetent, at least when it comes to politics. So, in an interesting way, as you point out, Kagame has difficulty finding someone or trusting someone. He has this fear of political opponents and I think this fear is locally rational but ideally, it would be best for society as a whole to have a higher level of trust. There are societies that have transitioned in history from lower to higher trust setups. One example I like to bring up is in the ancient Roman empire, there was a period of the so-called Five Good Emperors. One of these is Marcus Aurelius who is very famous for his stoic philosophy.Tobi: Yeah.Samo: The Roman empire was in a period of crisis then, so this is not when it was most powerful. This was when it was engaged in civil wars where generals would fight each other and direct their armies against each other to try to win in these wars and become emperor. And the solution was very interesting, perhaps a little bit a matter of happenstance, perhaps a little bit a matter of design. The Romans had this institution of adoption where you can declare someone your son and you adopt them as your son even if the person was already an adult. So there was this interesting political trick that was only possible because everyone so firmly respected [not only] family but simultaneously also this kind of strange idiosyncratic practice of adoption where you spiritually make someone your son even if they are not biologically your son. Not all societies have this, only a few societies practice this in human history. So because adoption was [a] widely spread practice, when a Roman emperor who was old would declare a general his son, the idea of killing your son will just make you so unfit to rule that whoever was adopted as the Emperor's son understood that they were most certainly safe.And on the other hand, they also understood that it's no longer in their interest to undermine the works of the previous emperor or raise themselves in rebellion because all they have to do is support the current emperor and then they get to their turn afterwards. I note for example that Botswana has a very good string of presidents where each president was the vice-president of the previous one and the vice-presidents are carefully selected for this kind of skill and partially also their friendship with the Botswana royal family, so this has helped them to avoid a lot of the troubles of other resource-rich countries. So that would be a different example than the Roman example. And a third example of a way this can be done is the Japanese practice of Moko Yoshi which is the practice of - in Japan, again there is a strong emphasis on family and there is a strong emphasis, however, also on honour and on company performance. And they well understand sometimes that your son might not always be...first of, you might not have a son, but secondly, your son might not always be the most talented at business. So the practice of Moko Yoshi is called son-in-law adoption - it means that for a wealthy industrialist or entrepreneur, they will try to find for their daughter a husband who has business sense and then the daughter marries the man with business sense but the daughter doesn't take her husband's name. Rather the husband takes this prestigious name and some of Japan's biggest companies in their past had made use of this. I think Toyota was an example and I think a few other of their household name companies. This allowed it so that the next CEO of the company, the next head of the company had reason to trust this person because this person is their son-in-law and not only their son-in-law, [but] because the Japanese put so much on to the owner of the family name, this person would be interested in supporting it and supporting the original vision of the company. So this is another way you can produce this kind of trust. These are the three interesting examples - one is through marriage, another one was through adoption, and another one was through this long period of cooperation where you have someone that is your right-hand man, that you work with for 5 or 10 years, you are the president, they are the vice-president, and you sometimes would do interesting things where I think the succession went like this ...I mean I have to possibly check my notes on this but they [Botswana] also had some aspects of this familial bond that can overcome this distrust where, you know, basically president Festus Mogae served as Quett Masire's vice-president but then...Tobi: Yeah.Samo: President Ian Khama who was the son of Seretse Khama who was the first president to try to lead this effort to leave the British empire and achieve independence. So he didn't put Ian Khama directly in charge, no, he rather put Quett Masire and this gave this opportunity that, you know... if Ian was not the best selection, you could have just gone with his vice-president but instead there was still this opportunity to rely on the family connection at the end of the day because someone who was like a close family friend, it would feel difficult for them to move against the son of someone else who was once their close friend and someone who had raised them up to the position of president. So, again, the relationship had to be developed before the country became independent in an interesting way, right? This initial friendship, because then the stakes are lower. So I would say that testing and building close ties before you are in the position of power might actually be the best way to get relationships you can rely on even after you are in power. This was a long answer and relatively involved, but I hope it laid out some of these mechanisms well enough.Tobi: Listening to that bit, I'm wondering does not democratic ideals or what we have come to define as democratic ideal not conflict with these succession strategies that you laid out. I mean I'll give you an example.Samo: Uh-hmm.Tobi: In party politics, for example, in Nigeria, politicians practice some kind of what you would call the "adoption system" but in social discourse, in political discourse, we have labelled it as "God Fatherism" and it is fundamentally perceived as unfair - that whatever comes out of that process does not represent the consensus of the people and so there's an instinctive reaction negatively...Samo: Yes.Tobi: To that. So does democracy conflict with succession in a way, the way you look at history?Samo: I think that democracy is very interesting. I will describe democracy as something that can deeply undermine trust or can deepen trust immensely. And it kind of depends [on] how well-functioning the society is in the first place. So I would say that in a well-functioning democracy, you might have people who compete and in public criticize constructively their opponents and proposed better plans for the good of the country. Yet then, when the president is elected or when the party is elected, the two parties or the two candidates who are rivals still trust the other side to adhere to [the] rule of law and believe that at this point, now that the election is over, the best course for everyone is to work together towards a better country and then you repeat this process every 4 years or 8 years or 10 years...so this is, I think, democracy at its best - where it allows you to express constructive criticism, advancement, the public good on the basis of the social fabric of already well-developed political relations, where there is a sense of shared interest among all the citizens of the country. Now, where it works the worst...I'm going to now reference back the example of the introduction of democracy in my own country Yugoslavia (I was born in Yugoslavia, I was a kid when it broke apart in the 1990s). The best way for Slobodan Milosevic who was a Serbian to win elections was to stoke the sort of resentment and anger of the Serbians that, to be honest... some real problems...there was a real conflict between Albanians and Serbians in the province, of course. But this immediately made it so that Slovenians, Croatians, Albanians, and others felt increasingly uncomfortable, they didn't want to live in a country that was completely dominated by Serbian elites in Belgrade. Before 1980, there was essentially, like, a dictatorial system where Tito was in charge. From 1980 to 1990, there was this tentative federal balance that was non-democratic, so there was this balance of power between the various wings of the Communist party, and then this balance of power was shattered by the introduction of democracy. So what I'll say here is - democracy is extremely powerful...it's a very powerful way to transform the balance of power of a society and put to the test the trust that already exist in a society or does not. So I would say that what is popularly understood as a democratic ideal which is that democracy itself will bring about higher trust, I think this is false. It is however true that high trust, high maturity, and high sense of, like, shared destiny and responsibility among a people, and among the elites of a people of a country, that this can allow democracy to express very very good government. And in fact, if you think about it, in a well-functioning democracy, the selection process should work better than, say, in a monarchy. Again, the hypothetical example of a monarchy that's hereditary, you know... the first son inherits or the kingdom is split between all the sons of the king. These were the two methods of inheritance in the ancient Middle East or Europe in medieval times.Either one of those systems is kind of a throw of the dice. It's sure that the successor will be loyal, at best, if they're good son but they might not be competent, and in a well-functioning democracy and a high trust system, you should, in theory, have this. But I think it's a very delicate machine, I think it relies on [the] rule of law, and it relies on elites that feel that there is [a] common ground. So even though it's a democracy and there is a will of the people, even in democracies some people are more powerful than others. I think this is a fact. If you look at modern... any western country you want to look at, some people are wealthier, some people are more powerful, some people are more influential, some people have more sway over the public's opinions, some people are charismatic - whether it's America or Canada or Germany or any of the Asian democracies such as South Korea or Japan, it works this way. The elites still matter. I think that in this sense, the best way to implement a democratic system is to first create this sense of shared purpose and shared destiny in a people, and to balance the interests of all the groups that live in the country. And I think here I would reference the work of Machiavelli who wrote in one of his books, I think it was on the Discourses on Livy - he said that the constitution of a country, be it a monarchy, a republic or a democracy is always the work of a single man, the single individual. I don't think that's quite true. I think it's usually a small group of people, organised around an individual, like say, America's founding fathers were... but I think it says something very real. I think democracy has difficulty producing the preconditions for its own success.The question is, do you want to be friends and do you support the entrepreneurial young man that doesn't have much money to his name? - SBTobi: That's interesting. That sort of leads me to my next question.Samo: Uh-hmm.Tobi: Are there deep roots element to having a great founder? And here is what I mean: from research in cultural evolution, I think from the works of Joe Henrich and co., societies are classified as either low trust or high trust...Samo: Hmm.Tobi: And we know that high trust societies (they) tend to handle some of these problems like (we've talked about) succession really well. So are there cultural or biologically intrinsic elements to societies that managed to invent credible institutions or produce great founders, at least, more than other rival civilizations?Samo: Well, there is an interesting question of what exactly is producing great founders, right? I don't think I really know the answer to that, I believe that an openness to exceptional skill is very worthwhile. So a society that values the great scientist or the great artist or perhaps be kinder to the great religious and spiritual leader or the wise and thoughtful political leader or the very productive and industrious economic leader, and importantly it will be open to what these people look like before they are successful. Like, everyone wants to be friends with Rockefeller when Rockefeller is already rich. The question is, do you want to be friends and do you support the entrepreneurial young man that doesn't have much money to his name?Tobi: Uh uh.Samo: I think this kindness to what the beginner's stage looks like because if you imagine someone that can go on this trajectory to shape a society - to, like, notably improve it - this person is going to be saying some very strange things when they're young. They are not going to be doing whatever everyone else is doing. His parents might be like "well, you should become a lawyer or a doctor" and instead this person has this seemingly crazy dream that just later on in life turns out not to be crazy. They might still, as part of this dream, receive a lawyer's education. But instead of, say, going to a law firm, they might create either a political party or they might start lobbying for the change of a particular law that enables a particular kind of business or city government or they might run for an office or they might spend 10 years reading books and being a scholar for some reason that's very difficult to explain to others. So there has to be in a society, I think, a desire for excellence, some tolerance for eccentricity or at least the harmless kinds of eccentricity and an encouragement or at least... it cannot be too focused on trying to stamp out creative. Now, ironically, I think some very high trust societies will actually suffer some long-term problems because they have this philosophy where, you know... you hammer the nail that stands out. I think in say modern Denmark or Scandinavia and perhaps also in modern Japan. It's actually extremely difficult to be someone that does something different. Partially because things seem to be working pretty well - there is a healthcare system, the streets are clean, the economy has been stable, everyone's been rich for as long as they can remember - so why are you being a troublemaker and saying you do everything different from everyone else? Who are you to think that you are special or that you know better?So this actually, I think, in the long run, might make Japan, again, and Denmark fragile. And I think this is an advantage to say, some other rich countries such as the US and over time more and more China [which] actually still retain this possibility of being contrarian, not in your words necessarily. It's not respect for necessarily people who are disrespectful to society at large or loud (though certainly such people that can succeed in the United States), it is more [of] a tolerance for a very different way to approach your career and intellectual and economical life. And then I'll add some more components to this - so I had this drive for excellence, this tolerance for eccentricity, the tolerance for the beginner to choose a different life path than other talented young men and women might choose. I think the availability of local traditions of knowledge is immensely important. Where, by traditions of knowledge, I mean the possibility of finding mentors who themselves are exceptionally skilled or exceptionally successful or exceptionally insightful.Historically, there were some universities that played this role and they didn't necessarily play this role through "well, you know, the students and the students are taught by the teachers", it's more as... if you went in medieval, times in England to Oxford, it was just a place where all the smartest scholars of Europe had gathered or say the Cervon in France. And whether or not you were a student of the university, if you could travel there, you could talk to them and you could write with them and you could listen to them. The availability of this knowledge immensely sped up progress and similar things can be said of Florence in the Renaissance. Florence is a city in Italy renowned for its great art. If you were a sculpture or a painter, your craft - your art - will progress much much faster if you could go to Florence and ideally apprentice yourself to someone. But even if you couldn't apprentice yourself, merely walking through the streets of Florence - they had the practice of having these workshops that were open to the street, you could actually just literally see what people are up to and what kind of stuff is produced. And it had this, again, this culture of critique where they would have high standards, so they would examine critically what artists are making and compare it to each other and they were quite direct and open about it much as Italians sometimes are even till today - they are quite disagreeable. So I think this availability of other experts, people who perhaps themselves are not great founders but have quite great mastery in things like rhetoric or law or human organisation or technology or understanding of the country and its issues. The availability of such people can greatly aid great founders. So this perhaps is just kind of the preconditions for this and I'm happy to comment on any specific countries or regions but each of those is like quite involved things... so...Tobi: Let's talk about China. Samo: Perfect. Perfect.Tobi: Interesting article, by the way, yesterday. I read it. Packed with so much insight. And of course, China, in the last decade, has been the most important economic partner to most African economies, so whatever happens in China, the extension of its global power reaches every corner of the African economy.Samo: Uh-hmm.Tobi: You talked about Deng Xiaoping and how he managed to handle the succession problem and Xi who is currently torn between keeping the fire of Marxism burning or watch it die out with modernism and all. How big a threat is the internal political contradictions that China face right now? How big a threat is it globally?Samo: Well, I think that China is facing an immense challenge, I'm very glad that you enjoyed the article. The article in Asia Times outlines my position which is that they did an immensely good job of resolving the contradiction of how to have economic growth with a Marxist ideology. But the problem is they do need the Marxist ideology to keep their political system together. So the succession problem there is driven not just by this difficulty with Marxism where it can always be interpreted in this way that actually shuts down capitalism and economic production - where if the successors of Xi don't take it seriously enough, they have no political principle with which to maintain power and perhaps this could be replaced by something like a democracy but I think that's not trivial at all. It might very easily shatter the country apart as it had numerous times in its long history. China has this long history of dividing into smaller fighting countries and then reuniting. These dynastic cycles have happened several times in the twentieth century. They had terrible civil wars at the start of the 20th century. So it's very risky to undermine the political structure of the country, it's very risky. And then on the other hand, if you take the Marxism too seriously, especially if you take the Maoism too seriously, you might end up destroying this engine of economic growth because then how can you have in a communist society billionaire's, which China obviously does, right, Jack Ma and so on. I think that civil society enables a civilization robustness. Hyper centralised systems can seem very efficient but they can be very fragile. As soon as the centre fails, everything fails. - SBThe succession problem has an even more fundamental issue where while Chinese industry allows for exceptional and strange individuals, like a lot of the billionaires are somewhat eccentric, their academic system does not. Their scientific progress is much slower and the students are very very good students but they don't pursue bold research and a lot of the members of the Chinese Communist Party go through the somewhat academic selection process. And then there is another selection process of "well, which party member advances within the Communist Party of China?" Well, it's the one that doesn't rock the boat. It's the one that's, you know, quiet and agrees with the policy and supports the policy. And in an important way, of course, you can have someone like Xi who he is very reserved in speech, very obedient, plays by the rules and when they come into power they pursue their bold plans they had all along or they acquire and grow into [the] office and become bolder. But for the most part, this is just going to be "yes men" and Xi is the last member of the generation that saw the possible failure of the Communist system. He saw the failure of it in his youth when his family and he himself were targeted by the Chinese red guards during the so-called Cultural Revolution. For a few years, he spent his childhood exiled in the countryside feeding pigs, and that probably stuck in his memory. He understands how despite, I'm sure Xi is... I’m sure he believes in Marxism but he understands this failure part of it and then later in his life he saw the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have to understand that for the Chinese, the Soviet Union in the 1980s was kind of the elder brother, just as in the 1990s Eastern Europeans might admire the wealth and development of Western Europeans. So in the 1960s and 70s, Chinese communists both admired and envied the global power and the technological development of the Soviet Union. So seeing the Soviet Union collapse was this big shock for the communist part of the world, only a few communist countries stayed communist after the fall of the Soviet Union - North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and China and that's basically about it. All of the African and European countries that had experimented with socialism basically abandoned it, it was no longer a viable system. Xi saw this again as a young man, and already on his career...so in a way, he saw both of the failures in [indistinct word].Tobi: Hmm.Samo: He is going to be in power for a while more and I don't think anyone who is of a younger generation has that sort of experiences. All they have is the experience of maneuvering in a Communist Party, ruling an already fairly developed China. So their intuitions and knowledge of what does failure look like for political system or how do unwise decisions come about? it's going to be in a way much impoverished. So I think there is a knowledge transmission problem here. I think power succession works fine because the Communist Party has such control over the country but knowledge succession is a big problem for them and they have a lot of difficulty solving it.Tobi: Somehow I wonder whether these are not (maybe they are, maybe they are not) symptoms of increasing prosperity. One very important point you made in that essay was how much order is necessary to create and maintain a market system. I think a lot of people underestimate that. We all like to believe in this Hayekian vision of an emergent market. So...Samo: Like an idealized market set of rules where people exchange goods and they, sort of, discover what's...together they discover what's the best economic outcomes through the price system and so on.Tobi: Yeah, yeah...I mean, we've been taught to believe that. So when I look at China, people like Ang Yuen Yuen have said that Deng Xiaoping reforms were based on having a decentralized approach to policy and here you have Xi, again, who is so centralised in his approach to economic management. But if you look at cosmopolitan cities like Shenzhen and every other metropolis in China that have seen incredible prosperity in the last 40 to 50 years, isn't the current tension a necessity? That is, when people make more money, when they become more successful, they demand more rights. They become less obedient, they become less conformist, what do you think of that?Samo: I think that there is a strong set of prerequisites in terms of enforcing these relatively strong rules that enable personal liberty in the first place. That you don't have to fear whether or not your store will be expropriated and that you can rely on [the] courts if someone else, say, double-crosses you in a business deal, those are absolute absolutely massive. It just means that people, once those two things become true, then the most rational course of action is to participate in the market and benefit from the market. Until those things are true it's very difficult. And again what is supporting those courts? What's supporting that political order? Well, that's not trivial at all. That took a lot of work in the first place. And I think that this development that we saw in China was that... the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution was a quiet realisation among the remaining members of the Communist Party because they had been purging each other (those internal fight), was that "you know, this got out of hand, I would like more security in my political career. I don't want to be killed on charges, I don't want to be imprisoned, I don't want to be exiled, I'm going to work together with the other people to make sure nothing like this can happen again. And as a side effect of this almost kind of self-interested political aspect, this enables a reformer like Deng Xiaoping to produce something that has not just given political safety to this party officials, but gives economic and political safety to everyone in the society, at least to a much higher degree than was previously available. I'm not ignoring at all the fact of how heavy-handed the Chinese government can be, I'm just pointing out that the mechanic of the change that enabled this broader liberty was partially driven by the people who are already powerful. You can't obviously have this be driven by everyone in [the] existing elite, but I think every reform of society has had one sub-section of the elite interested in change and bringing in new people as allies, who previously were not part of the old elite to become part of the new one. So, there is a change in the ruling coalition... that can happen. And I think often those can be very positive if designed well and can result in what's essentially this higher degree of safety. And I think once the safety is guaranteed, then there's more room for personal expression and this bottom-up order.Tobi: Interesting. Interesting, Samo. So I'm just going to toss out a few theories and framework and I want to hear your reaction to that and weather GFT affirms or refutes that. Acemoglu and Robinson talked about inclusive and extractive institutions, what do you think about that framework?Samo: I think that inclusive or extractive institutions is a good path... it's an interesting frame, right? I think that in the real world, an institution can be both inclusive and extractive. So I think there is some insight there, but I think my perspective on institutions is that they can easily combine many things that seem mutually contradictory. So I'll say it sometimes gives the correct answer but it's basically not as total as it's presented.Tobi: Hmm. In their framework, at least they've extended their theory with their new book, they talked about this narrow corridor where... I don't want to call it perfect, but this balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the civil society as this zone where prosperity sort of exists. Is that...I find that hard to believe somewhat despite all the evidence they marshalled in their book and other research papers...Samo: Uh-hmm, Uh-hmm, Uh-hmm...Tobi: So what role does civil society play in GFT?Samo: In GFT, civil society is the space where new institutions can be designed without the approval of the centre, without the approval of central power because GFT has this self component of high-medium-low...where I think civil society is the space where the middle powers can be built. In other words, to build a great successful company you ideally don't need to have that many government friends. To successfully pursue a new political ideology or new social or ethical ideology, you shouldn't necessarily have to fully wrestle with everyone in society immediately... so, again, another additional aspects of this is I think that the civil society represents this very important redundancy. Redundancy in the positive sense where if you are on an airplane and the electronics of the airplane fails while you are in the air, you really hope that there is a backup electronic system; or if you are in a hospital and you are recovering and the electricity goes out you very much hope that there is a power generator attached to the hospital allowing whatever equipment that is needed for your health to keep on running. I think that civil society enables a civilization robustness. Hyper centralised systems can seem very efficient but they can be very fragile. As soon as the centre fails, everything fails. A strong civil society on the other hand enables not only [a] healthy competition and experimentation which of course should not endanger the centre or should not endanger the coherence and common destiny and stability of the civilization or society, but it enables a backup. So if the centre fails, there is something that is not too far from being able to become the new centre.Tobi: Interesting. Let's talk about technology for a bit, Samo. One of the things that this notion of catch-up growth is built on in economic development is that if you can facilitate technology transfer between a nation that is advanced to a nation that is behind, then you can engineer some form of economic growth. But you also have this concept of social technologies that in my own interpretation do not transfer so easily. What are your thoughts on that?Samo: I think this is very much true. I think that it's very easy to transfer, say, the adoption of a physical technology. It's like not that hard to have the users...you know, everyone has then a smartphone, right? Tobi: Yeah.Samo: It's a little bit harder to have it be sold that the workers and managers exist to run a phone factory, on the other hand, that's a little bit more difficult. And social technologies play a role in this and I think the transfer of social technology is something very interesting and tricky. I feel it is important to note that naively trying to completely copy social technologies from a completely different society can have disastrous or ineffective consequences. Because, in fact, there are already social technologies in whatever society. There is no society without its own ecosystem of highly specialised social technologies. The beautiful balance happens when one is able to learn from other societies and then customise what is introduced. I'm going to use the example here of 19th century Japan. Nineteenth-century Japan, sort of, forcibly opened to trade by Admiral Perry, basically, they are behind on military technology. They understand very well in the aftermath of the Meiji restoration that it's not just the adoption of Western science nor is it the adoption whole-scale of just Western culture and views, but they are very selective. What they do is they send their most talented students to Germany and the United States with specific missions; some of are tasked by the Japanese government as representatives to learn everything they can about how the officer system work in Germany, for example, in 19th century in Germany, 19th century Prussia? How do the ranks work? What kind of discipline and training do the soldiers go through? And they return changing the Japanese army from this relatively archaic system that's feudal, that has samurai because if you arm the samurai with the machine guns and whatever, they're not actually using the artillery, the equipment well nor are they fighting coherently or employing the correct tactics. So the army would in effect be terrible. But they copied the Western system of ranks and training - everything up from the military academies to the organisation of the provisions. They go and observe it. They participate in those armies and then they return to the country, and with the full political backing produced this transformation. And then for the ones that go to the United States, they observed the organisation of railway companies and how American companies operated internally. And note this, of course, was a very different America. This was an America that was still at the frontier - the transcontinental railroad was barely built, so there were definitely people there that knew how to build a completely new railroad system, how to finance it, how to even deal with security issues - and then that transfer goes back to Japan. And then there are people who are in London just working for several years as basically shipwrights that return and then oversee the construction of the first ship. So these are not just technical skills, all them are learning some technical skills but they are also learning things like what does a relationship look like between a soldier and a commanding officer? What does the internal organisation of a shipyard look like? How do shipyards connect with funding and with resources? And how do they select skilled labour vs unskilled labour? How do they enforce workplace discipline? What do you do if the shipwrights come drunk to the shipyard, how do you respond to that? These all seem very trivial everyday problems, but for the most part, we rely on our social understanding, our cultural, our social technology to see what is acceptable and what are the expectations that should be set and should be respected and how to resolve various kinds of conflict and how to reach various kinds of decisions - these are all things that have to be patented. Yet, despite all these expeditions to do this learning, they intentionally combined this and pursue this strategy where they picked and choose which of these practices were compatible with Japanese society. So Japan stayed Japan and successfully industrialized… and it was unsuccessful during World War II obviously, but even after WWII, Japanese society remains distinct and actually in some ways functions better than Western societies. Like, if you go to their high-speed transit, it's maintained at a higher level than you see any western country. So they combine this with some of these strengths that they have... this very broad attention to aesthetics [and] this high level of politeness that they had inherited from that particular kind of feudal society. So yeah, you have to live in a new society, I think. You have to observe it happening, and then not only do you have to live there, you have to return; and not only do you have to return, you mustn't change everything. You must change just something very narrow that works on the strengths of the other social technologies available rather than trying to wholesale imitate something that ultimately has its own flaws.Tobi: Economist Gareth Jones has this concept of hive minds where he says national IQ matters more than the IQ of an individual person and these are correlated with how successful and prosperous a society is. I'm not even going to ask how true or false that is but are higher IQ societies more likely to have great founders than not?Samo: It's a very interesting question. I mean IQ is one of those things that it might not be a good measurement, it might be a good measurement in some circumstance. I think that... yeah, I think there is whatever (I won't measure it with IQ)...Tobi: Okay.Samo: But I do think societies with intelligent people or with greater respect for intelligence or with greater ability to produce intelligent people, I think they do have an advantage here, yeah. You require also other things because as I noted, you might have extremely intelligent people that are however doing exactly the same thing that everyone else is doing. If you imagine a classroom of very very diligent student that mostly to just do the same thing that all the other diligent students...like, that might result in like, say, some well-run things. It might like result in trains that go on time or on factories that can rely on a high level of skill of their workers but the problem is those same students would never have built the train system in the first place or would never have pushed for its creation nor would they have ever pushed for the creation of the factory. So there are additional factors here. I remember reading some articles about Gareth Jones's book, I will say where he's very very right is that if you have a higher culture of intelligence in a society, it becomes easy to not have to worry about things. You don't have to worry whether trivial everyday things are taken care of, you can focus on the truly difficult parts. Again, you can rely on the train that takes you to your class to be there on time, for example. That's like easier, it's not just a matter of organisations, [it's] also a matter of, like, the competence of the rail workers and so on... and these small everyday differences, if you imagine them just through the lifetime of a potential great founder, they make a massive difference.I'm not sure I think that you need to have absolutely all of society be like this, I think it's actually sufficient to have a city that's intelligent in this way. Like I give the example of medieval Europe and the city of Oxford. I think it was quite sufficient to just have Oxford where there were a bunch of smart people around. I think it didn't much matter whether the rest of England at the time was very intelligent or not.Tobi: Hmm. That's interesting. You also talked about Life Players in your book which I greatly enjoy and for the audience, I'm going to put up a link to the publicly available manuscript for the Great Founder Theory book. How can one recognise Life Players in society or in an institution?Samo: I think Life Players are going to the people that have succeeded at very very different tasks. So they are going to be these individuals that have, perhaps, either changed careers (two or three completely different careers) and have been successful at all of them; or completely changed their interpersonal style and were as successful when they were strict as when they were jovial, when they were easy-going or people who have done intellectually completely different things. So what you're looking for is not only a very high skill in an area - again, it's very possible to be extremely skilled in an area and ultimately not be that well-adapted - what you're looking for is the combination of both skill and execution, intentionally observing their environment and success at transitioning. So (a) success at transitioning to completely new strategies and this might look like an entrepreneur that has built a successful company in one industry that [they] then specialise in a different industry and very quickly build a successful company there too. Elon Musk might be a good example where he both has created this business that's a car factory that makes electric cars - Tesla - and has also succeeded in aerospace with his company SpaceX which recently brought American astronauts to space again for the first time ever on a privately built rocket rather than a rocket built by NASA.Tobi: Uh uh.Samo: A different example of a Life Player and I have to emphasise here when I say Life Player, I don't mean I agree with everything the person does. I'm just observing that they have the skill and adaptability. I think Vladimir Putin has showed over the last twenty years in Russia an extreme adaptability where Russia pursued many different strategies to try to maintain its position in the world, and Russia right now punches above its weight. For example, the annexation of Crimea was completely inspired. Nothing like that had happened in Europe before...Tobi: Uh uhSamo: And it was done with, like, killing almost no people, I think something like three or four people died. It was incredible how they orchestrated the mere surrender of the Ukrainian army because the Ukrainian army was so confused and honestly scared with the appearance of these Russian soldiers that, note, were even not officially Russian soldiers. They were wearing no official flags or patches, so they wouldn't give any answers as to who they were. They could plausibly say that they were Ukrainian because Ukrainians and Russians (they) look similar, they speak very similar language, there's a Russian minority in Ukraine and...you know, Crimea declares independence, and then immediately after declaring independence asks to join Russia and Russia says "yes". It's kind of amazing how that can happen. Not saying it was good for Ukraine, definitely, it was good for Russia, I think. And this results in this very creative process because there is no way in the world that Putin ever planned for there to be a civil war in Ukraine, but having the fact of the civil war happen, he and his team very quickly moved tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people and carried out a military operation that had never been performed before by the Russian army. The Russian army has a long history, many centuries ago but believe me they've never engaged and subtle stuff. They usually had this very overt, very heavy-handed interventions in other countries. If you think about it like this intervention in Hungary in the 1950s, in Czechoslovakia in the '60s, they just roll in the tanks and, like, assert authority. And here? No no no. Much more flexible, very subtle. And because the conditions were so unpredictable, this is how we can know that this was not planned a decade in advance. This was a quick adaptation over the course of, possibly, as little as six months to a completely changed situation. So I think that even if you were within the same industry, if this company, if this government, if this organisation, if this institution adapts quickly to massive changes, that's a strong sign that a Life Player he is at the helms. Because no automated system continues working when the operating conditions changed. It stops working if it's the preconditions are not met.Tobi: Hmm. One of your ideas [that] I've also found very interesting is the concept of Intellectual Dark Matter. How can a society benefit maximally from its intellectual dark matter - the tacit knowledge that's around?Samo: Intellectual Dark Matter refers to this concept that makes the analogy to physical dark matter because currently when the physicists and the astronomers look at our galaxy and they count all the stars and put together all the mass, they realise that there must be much more mass there than only what's visible...Tobi: Yeah.Samo: Because, otherwise, the gravity wouldn't be strong enough to keep this spinning galaxy that we find ourselves in and other galaxies together. So they don't yet know what this missing mass is but they are investigating it. And with Intellectual Dark Matter, I think if we put together all the books, all the stuff that's on the internet, all the stuff that's recorded, I think we still find that there is missing knowledge. There is knowledge and skill that we have not explicitly, formally recorded - written down or put into words that deeply matters. And once you start thinking about that, it's very easy to come up with examples of stuff that is very difficult to put into words or put into writing. The skill of a heart surgeon that saves the patient's life. Like, that's a remarkable set of skills but how do you put into words how to perform a heart surgery? Very very difficult, right? Takes a lot of words. I have an article titled "How YouTube is Revolutionising Knowledge Transfer" and I point out that...Tobi: Yeah, I read that.Samo: I point out that for a good enough camera, recording the hand movements in these very skills, and it doesn't have to be just heart surgery, it can be as trivial as cooking or perhaps the way you treat complex machinery... recording the video and others watching this video might be much much better way to convey such knowledge. I also think that we in society, in general, like seeing the results - we like seeing the finished essay or the finished theory by a Thinker. So if I go back to the world of abstractions to either philosophy or science or whatever, we like seeing the finished theory.What we don't see is all of the crazy or stupid ideas that this very intelligent person came up with before they got the right idea. They usually do that on their own or with a close circle of friends. So, one might be tempted to think and look at an extremely successful thinker and assume that they were always very polished, that they were always very eloquent, often this is not the case. Often they are immensely long learning period. Now, I admit I might be a little biased here because I did spend most of the last decade pursuing this kind of, like, thinking, reading, investigating and for most of this time period, people were not immediately interested in my ideas.Tobi: Hmm.Samo: But about two to three years ago, the material not only clicked together but I found the words to express what I, to myself, felt I had understood for several years before, I just could not really find the way to relate it and show to others in a short period of time how in fact this is useful to them. So I think all of these things form part of Intellectual Dark Matter and there is much more. There is, for example, we might not know what the exact process is that allows you...that allows Elon's team at SpaceX, engineers at SpaceX to make that rocket, and we might not even have that available anywhere because it might be classified. There are probably rules, I actually know that there are laws in the US that prevent SpaceX from simply explaining how they're making this vehicle to a company based in a foreign country. They don't want to teach all the countries how to make rockets for obvious reasons, and more importantly, SpaceX probably doesn't want to share its rocket designs with Boeing - their competitor.Tobi: Uh uh.Samo: So there is also an element of proprietary knowledge and trade secrets for stuff that is understood explicitly, stuff that can be put into words, can be put in a document but the person who has this knowledge wants to keep a competitive advantage; sometimes for very good reasons or the organisation that possesses this knowledge doesn't want to share it. So, that also forms a type of intellectual dark matter - it's knowledge we can't directly examine.Tobi: Interesting you talked about YouTube. The global pandemic has seen an increase in virtualisation, are we going to see a reform in education away from the classroom and a reduction in direct instruction? Samo: I think that we will see an increase in autodidacts - so people who know how to learn on their own. I think, however, that most people will return to the classrooms once the pandemic has died down. I don't think there will be permanent remote instructions and I think the reason for this is that the performance seems to be much worse. It seems to actually be the case that unless you are inherently interested in the material. If you're just a kid who's going to school or taking online classes because you have to take online classes or because you have to go to school, it seems your performance is going to be worse. You're going to learn less than if you physically go there. And I think that for autodidacts, there is going to be an abundance of resources - everything from recorded lectures to tests made. So it's going to improve those chances of those who are seeking knowledge out of curiosity primarily, or out of self-development and professional development; but for the majority of people learning, I think this transition is going to be temporary. I don't think it will be a permanent shift.Tobi: So, Samo, it's kind of a tradition on the show to ask this final question. What's the one big idea that you want to see spread globally? Samo: That's a great question. I think if there is one idea that I would like to put in everyone's minds or everyone's hands, it's this realisation that...I think that the surest sign of good knowledge is the ability to act on this knowledge. So I think that there is some deep confusion as to when knowing things and when doing things - how do these two relate to each other? And I think if only we understood that there are many things that have the appearance of knowledge, such as eloquent speech or perhaps particularly good writing that don't carry the substance of it. We should always observe the practice of the individuals and organisations claiming to have knowledge. For example, the WHO...I'm sure it's made of many excellent experts - they individually know many things about the coronavirus but the organisation as a whole despite claiming to know, in its public communication seems incapable of relaying that knowledge. So I think the result should be "well we should take them less seriously on the coronavirus". And if this map between who is believed to have knowledge and who actually has knowledge, if we improve that map, as a species, I think that our ability as human beings and our societies would really rise. It will be a remarkable thing to see and I think the societies that went through golden ages, I think they basically had these happy periods where the two coincided. You know, times like the Renaissance or whatever.Tobi: That's a great idea. We're sure to help you spread it over here at least.Samo: Thank you so much for having me on the show.Tobi: Yeah. Thank you so much, Samo. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

Welcome back! Today’s episode is a conversation with Cristine Legare. Cristine is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how our minds allow us to do culture—to learn it, to create it, and to pass it on. Among other things, we talk about cumulative culture and the human capacities for imitation and innovation. We talk about the power of ritual and about thorny questions surrounding human uniqueness. We touch on work that Cristine and her team have done in Vanuatu. And we muse about the problems facing psychology—in particular the so-called WEIRD problem. For those who may not know, this is the issue of psychologists unduly focusing on a thin slice of humanity—namely, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) folks. I found Cristine’s perspective on this issue—and really on all these issues—super insightful. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Cristine Legare. Hope you enjoy it! And please be well.   A transcript of this episode is available here.    Notes and links 2:35 – An article about “cumulative culture.” 3:25 –There is debate about whether any non-human animals show evidence of cumulative culture. Here is one review of the topic. 6:30 – A paper by Dr. Legare and a colleague on imitation and innovation as “dual engines of cultural learning.” 10:53 – One of Dr. Legare’s studies examining children’s flexible understanding of when to imitate faithfully. 13:07 – A popular article about the puzzle of why chimps in Zambia started to put grass in their ears. The primary research was reported here. 14:25 – The literature on so-called “over-imitation” is substantial. Here is a recent review. 19:14 – An encyclopedia article by Dr. Legare and a colleague on ritual. See also their paper on the social functions of rituals. 25:45 – Here is the original paper report on the “illusion of explanatory depth.” 28:42 – A paper on how a culture’s history of migration affects how often its members smile. 34:45 – This article describes the puzzle of chimpanzees throwing rocks at trees. 40:18 – This paper by Joe Henrich and colleagues is the source of the acronym WEIRD—that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—and is one of the most cited and discussed papers in the last decade of psychology. Here is a recent popular article on the current state of the WEIRD problem. Finally, see this paper by Dr. Legare and colleagues about the WEIRD bias in developmental psychology. 49:00 – Dr. Legare has done a number of studies in Vanuatu, a culturally diverse archipelago in the South Pacific. 49:32 – A study by Dr. Legare and colleagues comparing triadic interactions in the US and in Vanuatu. 55:51 – Barbara Rogoff, mentioned here, has done a range of important work on learning styles across cultures. See, for example, her book, The Cultural Nature of Human Development. 59:55 – A study by Dr. Legare and colleagues showing that adults in the US and Vanuatu differ in how they evaluate the intelligence of conforming vs non-conforming children. Dr. Legare’s end-of-show recommendations: A good summary of some of the research we discussed by Dr. Legare and her colleagues can be found here. See also the following books: The Secret of Our Success (2018), by Joe Henrich Cognitive Gadgets (2018), by Cecilia Heyes A Different Kind of Animal (2018), by Robert Boyd Minds Make Societies (2018), by Pascal Boyer   The best ways to keep up with Dr. Legare’s research: http://www.cristinelegare.com/   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play—or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-dissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Anchor (podcast): https://anchor.fm/thedissenter Dr. Steven Pinker is a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time and The Atlantic, and is the author of ten books, including The Language Instinct, How The Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. In this episode, we talk go through some of the main topics Dr. Pinker tackles in his work. We start by discussing a new hypothesis put forth by Joe Henrich and his collaborators, about the possible influence the Catholic Church had on the evolution of our WEIRD psychology and the Enlightenment ideas. We then talk about cultural evolution, morality from an evolutionary perspective, and human progress. We also address if our folk psychology tracks scientific findings on human behavior. We also talk about language, and AI. Finally, we go through two questions coming from a patron, about the cognitive niche hypothesis, and the WEIRD problem. -- Follow Dr. Pinker's work: Faculty page: http://bit.ly/2Nx4rC6 Website: http://bit.ly/3abIVMN ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/2RkTcxI Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2R02Er6 Twitter handle: @sapinker -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, DAVID DIAS, ANJAN KATTA, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, MAX BEILBY, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, AND MARK BLYTH! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, SERGIU CODREANU, LUIS CAYETANO, AND MATTHEW LAVENDER! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, MICHAL RUSIECKI!

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-dissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Anchor (podcast): https://anchor.fm/thedissenter Dr. Herbert Gintis is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) headed a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. Professor Gintis is also author of several books including Game Theory Evolving, The Bounds of Reason, A Cooperative Species, Game Theory in Action, and Individuality and Entanglement and also coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr of Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. This interview is based on Chapter 3 (Game Theory and Human Behavior) of The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences. In this episode, we talk about altruism and self-interest, as revealed through lab and field studies of human behavior. First, we discuss what is rationality, the literature on human biases and heuristics and why that does not show that humans are irrational. We talk about the difference between self-interested and self-regarding behavior. Then, we get into how we can use game theory to study human sociality, and the aspects of it we can learn about through different game designs, like the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Public Goods Game, and the Ultimatum Game. Finally, we talk about how we can make sense of the interplay between people's social dynamics and their culture; the phenomenon of gene-culture coevolution; and the role cultural group selection might have played in the evolution of certain aspects of our sociality, like altruism and strong reciprocity. -- Follow Dr. Gintis' work: Personal Website: https://people.umass.edu/gintis/ Books: https://tinyurl.com/y6ot643p -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORDE, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BRIAN RIVERA, ADRIANO ANDRADE, YEVHEN BODRENKO, SERGIU CODREANU, ADAM BJERRE, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, AIRES ALMEIDA, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, JOHN CONNORS, ADAM KESSEL, AND VEGA GIDEY! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, ROSEY, AND JIM FRANK!

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34711]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34711]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34711]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34711]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34711]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34711]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34697]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34697]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34697]

CARTA celebrates its 10th anniversary with a whirlwind tour of anthropogeny, the study of the origin of humans, by addressing these questions across multiple disciplines: What do we know for certain? What do we think we know? What do we need to know? How do we proceed? Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34697]

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-dissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Dr. Herbert Gintis is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He and Professor Robert Boyd (Anthropology, UCLA) headed a multidisciplinary research project that models such behaviors as empathy, reciprocity, insider/outsider behavior, vengefulness, and other observed human behaviors not well handled by the traditional model of the self-regarding agent. Professor Gintis is also author of several books including Game Theory Evolving, The Bounds of Reason, A Cooperative Species, Game Theory in Action, and Individuality and Entanglement and also coeditor, with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, and Ernst Fehr, of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-scale Societies, and with Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr of Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: On the Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life. In this episode, we talk about sociobiology, game theory, and behavioral science in general. First, we talk about the historical and scientific relevance of sociobiology. Then, we go through one of the big projects of Dr. Gintis' work for the last two decades - a framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences – and the several obstacles that we have to that, including the fact that different behavioral sciences have different approaches and focus on different aspects. We also talk about the relationship between culture and biology. Finally, we go from there to the particularities of human cooperation, group selection, and the role that social institutions play. Time Links: 01:03 Sociobiology and human behavior 04:37 A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences 10:52 It makes no sense to talk about individuals or collectives 17:20 Culture and biology, and gene-culture coevolution 21:50 The particularities of human cooperation 25:55 About group selection 35:24 The function of social institutions in social species 42:30 The importance of group identity (distributed cognition) 48:50 Humans are rational, but not in the way you think 59:05 What is human nature? -- Follow Dr. Gintis' work: Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/y3xj55na Personal Website: https://people.umass.edu/gintis/ Articles on Researchgate: https://tinyurl.com/y5dzoe2l Books: https://tinyurl.com/y6ot643p Books referenced in the int

This symposium addresses the interactive gene-culture co-evolution of the human brain with tool use and technology - ranging from simple stone tools millions of years ago to computers today. Our species’ degree of reliance on cultural learning means that a population’s ability to generate and maintain complex cultural repertoires, tools and technologies, such as those commonly found among hunter-gatherers, depends on its sociality, and specifically on its social norms and institutions. Thus, our apparent intelligence derives more from our collective brains than our individual intelligence. Joe Henrich, Harvard University. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34197]

This symposium addresses the interactive gene-culture co-evolution of the human brain with tool use and technology - ranging from simple stone tools millions of years ago to computers today. Our species’ degree of reliance on cultural learning means that a population’s ability to generate and maintain complex cultural repertoires, tools and technologies, such as those commonly found among hunter-gatherers, depends on its sociality, and specifically on its social norms and institutions. Thus, our apparent intelligence derives more from our collective brains than our individual intelligence. Joe Henrich, Harvard University. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34197]

This symposium addresses the interactive gene-culture co-evolution of the human brain with tool use and technology - ranging from simple stone tools millions of years ago to computers today. Our species’ degree of reliance on cultural learning means that a population’s ability to generate and maintain complex cultural repertoires, tools and technologies, such as those commonly found among hunter-gatherers, depends on its sociality, and specifically on its social norms and institutions. Thus, our apparent intelligence derives more from our collective brains than our individual intelligence. Joe Henrich, Harvard University. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34197]

This symposium addresses the interactive gene-culture co-evolution of the human brain with tool use and technology - ranging from simple stone tools millions of years ago to computers today. Our species’ degree of reliance on cultural learning means that a population’s ability to generate and maintain complex cultural repertoires, tools and technologies, such as those commonly found among hunter-gatherers, depends on its sociality, and specifically on its social norms and institutions. Thus, our apparent intelligence derives more from our collective brains than our individual intelligence. Joe Henrich, Harvard University. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 34197]

Looking back at the past and making sense of practices from primitive societies is no simple task. It's easy to see the weird, the odd, and the seemingly barbaric as relics of a time of lesser-rationality and to dismiss them as unnecessary or backwards. Yet cross-cultural interventions by societies seemingly more advanced than others often result in chaos, bloodshed, and a price paid for the hubris of the so-called civilized. What is there for modern people to learn from dead European explorers, human sacrifice, trial by ordeal, and cross-cultural experiments in fairness? For this inaugural episode, we speak with Professors Peter Leeson and Joe Henrich, two experts at making sense of the seemingly senseless. Peter Leeson is an economist at George Mason University and the author of several books on economic explanations of weird, odd, or unusual practices like piracy and human sacrifice. His most recent book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird, takes a look at rational agent explanations for trial by ordeal, “preowned wife sales,” and other weird cultural practices. Joe Henrich brings a slightly different perspective to the table. He is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who looks at how different cultural practices lend themselves to human evolution and social cooperation. His most recent book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, breaks down how cultural practices work as a “collective brain” to help ensure the success of a society or subculture.

After hearing the Theories of Everything Part 1 and Part 2, everyone got suuuuuuper jealous that Hunter was getting Spiros all to himself. In the spirit of Mixed Mental Arts, Hunter decided to share Spiros with Dave Colan, Cate Fogarty, Andrew Hunter and Christopher Leon Price. Continuing off from the last conversation, Spiros unpacks how he thinks of truth in thinking about physical reality. Then, Dave Colan (after struggling to remember Sam Harris' name) brings up Sam's recent comments about Hunter on the Joe Rogan Experience. Sam's comments prove to be an excellent teaching opportunity because they reveal the sort of theories we form about other people based on limited and emotionally provocative evidence. The whole point that I (Hunter) was trying to clumsily make on Joe Rogan was that because of the Dunbar Number most humans are an abstraction. We have to stereotype. The question is what we stereotype around. Spending time at Oaks Christian, it was clear that the stereotype people had of scientists was formed around people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins was formed around people who insulted beliefs they did not understand. In fact, I came to realize that Jesus Christ was a better neuroscientist than Sam Harris which you can read about here. Now, Sam has proved my point. He has formed an opinion about me based on very limited evidence and his feeeeeeeeeelings about me. It's an amazing demonstration of #DescartesError and the #DunbarNumber. Is the model that Sam Harris laid out of Hunter Maats a good model of me? Well, I'll leave that for you to judge. But take a look at what he has said here. For regular listeners to Mixed Mental Arts, you'll see that while Sam's impression of me is perfectly understandable that it's a great example of what Spiros talks about with "truncate and renormalize." Sam has a truncated data set around who I am and that he has then renormalized around that very limited data. Can he justify his impression? Of course! He can point to that very limited amount of information and justify his impression. And yet, there's other data. There's over 200 episodes of Bryan and me interviewing hundreds of different scientists and then synthesizing those ideas together into a coherent worldview. Sam Harris has said I'm wrong about the "relevant biology." That's a huge problem. Whether I'm wrong or he is doesn't much matter. What matters is that the "relevant biology" has become so overcomplicated and atomized that either me (a Harvard biochemistry grad who has interviewed hundreds of scientists) or him (a neuroscience PhD) don't understand the "relevant biology." If we can't figure it out, then it's no wonder science can't win the public over. Science needs to figure out and present a coherent worldview in order to effectively win people over. The #MarchForScience is a nice show of support...but which science are these people in favor of? Is it rationalism or intuitionism? Is it the multi-level selection of David Sloan Wilson, Jon Haidt and Joe Henrich or the gene-centric model of Dawkins and Harris? And, more basically, what is science anyway? Because it's clear that Spiros, Jon Haidt and me are operating on a very different understanding of what science is than Sam Harris is. Sam Harris has painted a picture of religious people with statistics that is actually a terrible model of who they actually are. I'm an apatheist. I don't really care about God. I don't go to Church or Mosque. I care about practically improving people's lives using whatever tools are available. And that's why I'd moved on from Sam Harris and was focused on making Smart Go Pop but then Brentwood Boy got so emotional about the whole thing that he couldn't help saying Candyman five times. As Cate Fogarty points out in this article, I was just doing exactly what Joe Rogan did with Carlos Mencia. I was calling out someone who was hurting the community. Why does Joe defend Sam? Because Joe has feeeeeeeeeelings about Sam that cause him to value defending his friend over examining the evidence impartially. Sam Harris is Joe Rogan's sacred cow. And that's okay. That's the way humans work. All of us. You, me, New Atheists and old school Arabs. And if we want to have a better world, then we all have to stop pretending like we have it all figured out and start reflecting on the problems in our own culture and do the difficult work of self-reflection and calling out the Fundamentalists who have wrapped themselves in the flag of our cherished causes. As I've covered in earlier episodes, the challenge for people is to spot who is and who is not a Fundamentalist and to see who preaches our values but doesn't actually practice them. Joe Rogan's defense of Sam Harris will reveal before this community just how hard this is. Thank you, Sam Harris! You're the best. You beautifully proved my point and have created the social drama that will drive attention to the science. Don't believe me. Decide for yourself. That's what science is about. It's not about authority or Harvard or PhDs. It's about forming better Theories of Everything by breaking your old theories to make room for better and better ones. People do that all the time with TV shows. Look at Game of Thrones. People had theories about whether Jon Snow was dead. Then, they were confronted with the evidence of the next season. Many theories died and people moved on. You can't break your old theories unless you're exposed to the evidence and you can't be exposed to the evidence if the people who are the public faces of science don't tell you about it. That's why Mixed Mental Arts has branded an alternative to The Four Horsemen. We call it The Holy Trinity of Cultural Evolution. They present newer and much more powerful Theories of Everything. WE DO NOT WANT YOU TO BELIEVE US. That's not what science is about. It's not about human authority. It's about the evidence. So, examine it and draw your own conclusions and then let's hash them out and see if we can all evolve better Theories of Everything together. The internet is our intellectual thunderdome. Sam Harris just dragged his public persona into the arena when he said I was wrong about the "relevant biology." May the best ideas win. Two ideas enter. One idea leaves. Idea dying time is here. In other news, Spiros is now going to be taking any and all questions and answering them for you through Mixed Mental Arts. Send questions to @quantum_spiros! Also send him requests for more 80's cartoon theme songs in Greek. Love to all humanity - Toto

Bryan and Hunter enter the dojo of the mind with Joe Henrich, master of our first fundamental of the mind: cultural accumulation. As regular listeners will know, in his book The Secret of Our Success, Henrich lays out the case for why problem solving and critical thinking are not humanity's great superpower. Rather, our great superpower is social intelligence. It is our ability to pass on culture from generation to generation that makes us so successful and able to conquer everywhere from the tundra to the desert to being able to venture out into space. This idea is the fundamental that is going to allow all of us to make sense of the seemingly chaotic world and benefit from rather than being hurt by the clash of cultures.

A lot of people have tried to kill political correctness. Mostly, they do this by just saying racist, sexist, offensive generalizations. That's not really killing it. That's just ignoring it. To actually kill it, you have to find political correctnesses vulnerabilities and attack those. That's what this episode of The Bryan Callen show does with the help of probably two of the only men on the planet who could do it, Richard Nisbett and Joe Henrich. Though, by the end of this episode, you'll be able to do it too. To be fair though, kill is such an aggressive, violent word and Richard and Joe are both intelligent, sophisticated individuals. So, while Hunter tries to kill it, Professors Nisbett and Henrich gently euthanize it. Political correctness was a well-intentioned idea but it's well past its prime. And that gets to the heart of the true nature of culture. Culture is simply a tool that people develop to survive and thrive in different environments but it is not who we are. Humans are infinitely adaptable and when we move from place to place we change clothing, diet, building styles and as we have moved into the modern world cultures have been quick to embrace technologies like cellphones and cars that give people greater control over their lives. However, when it comes to belief, we have all been guilty of confusing tools with innate qualities of both ourselves and others. The result has been that humanity has gone back and forth between trying to destroy people who have certain ideas and being so appalled by that that we've decided to simply not have an opinion on cultures. In the wake of the Holocaust, it's understandable that political correctness developed. If noticing cultural differences and thinking that they matter a lot leads to genocide, then let's just pretend that culture doesn't matter. Of course, culture does matter. And it turns out it matters a heck of a lot. Actually, the ability to acquire culture is what allows us to adapt to literally any environment on the planet. And when we only talk about technology and institutions we're leaving out a huge piece of the puzzle. Beliefs matter. And in a world where we can't agree on global warming, gun control, abortion or where prosperity comes from that has become increasingly obvious. Islamic terrorism has made that blindingly obvious. While we could have had a nuanced conversation about the effect of cultural differences, intellectual elites have instead poured scorn on anyone who dared to say that culture matters and that some of those cultures might need to change. With the rise of far right parties like Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France and Trump's version of the Republican Party, we are seeing the consequences of that. Ironically, political correctness was designed to prevent fascism and yet it has pretty much brought us back to a significant part of the population getting behind the same xenophobic attitudes. Whether you fear the rise of the far right or you are someone who is fed up with political correctness, we need a new way of talking about culture that talks about specific beliefs, understands why they evolved and recognizes that you don't need to throw out or kill the person to get rid of unhelpful beliefs. In essence, the message of Henrich and Nisbett's work comes down to a very simple idea. Cultures aren't better or worse but they are adaptive. They help individuals thrive in different environments. Of course, the environment of the modern world is radically different from the world that most cultures evolved in with the result that many traits no longer make sense in the modern world. As Professor Nisbett has shown honor cultures are and were adaptive in herding environments with unstable property rights but lead to higher murder rates in the US South (and this interviewer would argue jihadism). On the other hand, the holistic thinking that predominates in Eastern cultures and the analytic thinking that predominates in Western cultures both have benefits and costs. Western thinking gave rise to science but unfettered individualism is unrealistic and impractical when, in reality, besides being individuals we are part of a larger society and share a planet and that in thinking purely selfishly we can end up destroying the system that helps individuals generate wealth. We would do well as individuals and as a society to learn to use both modes of thought. And, finally, as listeners of this podcast know, one of the best examples of a specific cultural trait that needs to be changed is what people believe about intelligence. The belief that intelligence is fixed (as Carol Dweck has shown) is incredibly harmful (and not supported by the latest neuroscience). Furthermore, the whole world would benefit from embracing mistakes more as cultures like Silicon Valley and organizations like the FAA do. We did the whole fascism thing once. It didn't work out well. But the antidote to that is not political correctness. It's honesty. Culture is not who we are. It's a set of tools we use to survive and thrive in different environments. Some of those tools served us in the past and no longer serve us now. It's time we learned to talk about that without threatening to kick out or ban entire groups or flipping out reflexively when someone even dares to suggest that cultural differences might be behind our different outcomes. Culture matters and some traits are more adaptive in certain environments than others. Beliefs are tools. And although they are inside of us, they are not who we are. We can choose the best tool for the job and we should. Actually, we need to. Because, currently, we're very often not using the best tools available. We all need to improve aspects of our cultures. But to do that we need to stop making it or taking it as a personal attack. Guest Promo The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South

Humans have always been pretty sure that they were special but we've never quite been sure why. Was it because we were made in God's image? Was it our opposable thumbs? Was it that we had bigger brains? Far be it for us to tell you what God does or does not look like but what Professor Joe Henrich can tell you is that it's not because we have bigger brains. In fact, when you compare the baseline intelligence of human toddlers, chimpanzees and orangutans you find out that we're really not smarter at all. Actually, in many areas we may even be dumber. The one area in which we are definitively smarter even as toddlers is social intelligence. That, it turns out, may be the secret of our success. Individually, we just aren't that smart. But, collectively, we have the capacity for genius. In his book, The Secret of Success, Professor Henrich examines how faith, imitation and trial and error have allowed peoples all over the world to evolve cultural practices so brilliant that the people who practice them very often don't understand why they're important but do them with the unwavering faith of believers. Of course, Professor Henrich's book exists within a culture of its own and although the book itself is a sensible and soundly-reasoned argument for humans' success as being heavily driven by culture it serves to challenge a whole series of cherished ideas within academia and the western world more generally. In The Secret of Our Success, religion is not the bug in the human brain that the New Atheists depict it as but a cornerstone of our ability to adopt useful cultural practices evolved through the cumulative work of people who died long before us. Henrich's book does not buy into the cultural relativism so prevalent in Western media and college campuses that argues that culture doesn't matter but instead makes the case that we ignore culture at our peril such as when Europeans transported crops like corn and manioc without also transporting the cultural practices indigenous peoples had developed to avoid potential longterm health problems from eating these foods. And while the pendulum of academic thought swung away from the blank slate towards an almost purely genetic view of human progress, Henrich reveals the next stage in intellectual thought that reveals how genetic and cultural processes can work together to allow humans to succeed. This is really an astounding book. Put it on the list, folks. Guest Links Website: http://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/joseph-henrich Twitter: @JoHenrich Guest Promo The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter

Joe Henrich joins the podcast to tell us that we know nothing about his work and that how we got to teach a class in anything is absolutely amazing.   We continue our discussion from Episode 17 about his critique of the social and behavioral sciences in "The Weirdest People in the World" and his work in small scale societies on fairness norms.  We also talk about the weird American obsession with happiness, monkeys throwing cucumbers, and why some people reject "hyper-fair" offers of more than the half the pot in the ultimatum games.  Links"I happen to have Marshall Mcluhan right here."   (From Woody Allen's Annie Hall.)  Longer HD version hereJoe Henrich UBC.ca | Wikipedia The Machiguenga [wikipedia.org] Henrich on Brosnan and DeWaal's capuchin inequity aversion study. Chicha [wikipedia.org] How much money would it take for you to kill a puppy? [liveleak.com] Relevant papers are listed in the notes for Episode 17: Learning About Bushmen from Studying Freshmen?   Special Guest: Joe Henrich.