Monsters, Spotted: The 229th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 229th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss empathy, sympathy, and theory of mind; corporate personhood, psychopathic behavior, and the limitations of humans; kin selection, and reciprocity, both direct and indirect. Then: utopias, and why they fail, from the hero of Er in Plato’s Republic to the Singularity. And we discuss the h...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream 200 and some odd.
It is odd.
It's even prime.
Wow.
229.
229 is a prime.
Okay, good.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
No Q&A today because we have a plane to catch.
But we are ready to... I have no idea.
We're ready to do what it is that we do, which is to engage complex issues and try to make them intuitive and straightforward.
Hi all.
Today we're going to be talking about hypothesis and apparently conspiracy, according to what I see on Brett's screen, and utopias, and human nature and story, and the 21st anniversary, the 50th anniversary of the 21st anniversary of the discovery of the double helix, and what nature the magazine, the scientific journal, has to say about that.
Do that again?
The what anniversary of the what?
So, nature, and I think science does this too, although I don't remember at the moment, in every issue has a throwback, and they say, hey, we're going to go and look at what happened 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
And for a while now, I've wanted to talk about something that Darwin said about primroses a long time ago.
We're still not going to do that today, but I went looking at that link today.
And I find nature going back to 1974, which is 50 years ago, in a special issue dedicated to the 21st anniversary of the discovery of the double helix.
So it's 21 plus 50.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
Oh, did you think I had a bi in there?
Yeah, I thought there was a multiplier in there, which was going to put it way into the deep past.
71 years ago.
Well, I'm relieved.
Double helix.
But yeah, so we're going to do a little bit of all that today.
And we encourage you to join us on local.
So there's a watch party going on now.
And without any further ado, we will start.
Do we have any further ado?
I don't think there was any ado to begin with.
No.
No ado.
No ado whatsoever.
With no ado.
With no ado whatsoever, we are going to begin with, as usual, our three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
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CB Distillery.
Not distillery.
It's definitely not distillery.
Sorry.
What would that mean?
It wouldn't mean anything, but it would be a different pronunciation.
It's CBD and they're a distillery.
So is it CB distillery as it is spelled or would they have you double up on the... Or CBD distillery.
Yes.
Right.
I hope you all feel for me sometimes.
They do.
I hear from them so I know.
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All right.
Nope, not your turn yet.
Not my turn.
Didn't think it was my turn, but if it was, I was going to roll with it.
Wow.
Yep.
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Apparently.
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Now, it is so your turn.
Okay.
You want to live a long and prosperous life.
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What?
Who wrote this?
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Oh, I gotcha.
Yeah, you did, didn't you?
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Momentous than whom?
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All right, it doesn't actually say that, but it should, I feel.
Wow, that is a lot of silence.
No, no, I just, uh, I'm a little embarrassed because I admitted that I had already written, I admitted that in the script.
Oh, and then I was off script and it, uh, it was compromising your reputation undeservedly.
Well, I agree with that.
That's the problem.
Okay.
Momentous than whom?
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I see.
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Oh, I already said that.
Yeah, you did.
Wow.
Reading.
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Oh, I see.
It's on a different line, but the punctuation suggests you just roll right from one end to the other, which us dyslexics have trouble with, but I did it, sort of.
You've run into written text before, right?
Every now and again and it's... I've collided with written text before.
Okay.
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You think it's a plasma?
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Or coffee, which is a liquid.
Actually...
Not always.
Not until you add the water.
It's the water that's the liquid that you're right about that.
All right.
This definitely needs a rewrite.
Or just plain water, which is definitely a liquid at standard temperatures.
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You made it to the end of the ad.
Yes.
If you had told my grade school self that some fraction of what I was going to end up doing as an adult was reading things out loud, I would have... On camera to a live remote audience?
Yes, that didn't... that would have seemed very unlikely.
Yeah, it still does.
Seems unwise, but unlikely.
Very likely.
Yes.
Yes.
Where would you like to start?
Well, let's see.
Why don't we start with an upgrade to our toolkit?
All right.
All right.
So we, in our last episode, discussed the concept of, I don't know if they are doing X, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Wouldn't put it past him.
Wouldn't put it past him.
Which I think is a very useful construct because in general we have a deficit of information about what is actually being done and it's very easy to impose a perspective on evidence that makes it seem of some nature that it actually isn't.
But it also doesn't presume.
That someone is up to something but it also doesn't preclude that they aren't just because you don't understand what mechanism they might possibly be using.
Right.
And it presumes or precludes.
So I guess I guess there are a couple of pieces of toolkit that I want to build out explicitly so that people have them.
One of them is surrounding the question of empathy and This is one of these terms that I have redefined to make it more useful and I have to remind myself that I use it differently than other people in order that I don't confuse things by just simply speaking of empathy and triggering people to imagine they know what I'm saying.
So perhaps this will be clear in what you're about to say, but on the face of it, Redefining a term that is in common usage and commonly understood.
Unlike consciousness, which we define precisely and somewhat differently than many people use it in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, but we do that in part because consciousness is used by everyone, but almost no one has a working definition or agrees on what exactly they mean.
And so we say, you know, if we're going to talk about this, we have to have a definition, so here's ours.
Right.
Whereas empathy, most people have an understanding, so why not create a new word?
Great, great question.
I believe what I'm actually doing is recovering the true meaning of the term, and what I'm going to argue happens inherently when you have a large number of people speaking a language in common, and you have terms
uh that are supposed to connote something important but they are in common usage is they get dulled by the fact that many people use them imprecisely and so what I'm going to claim has happened to the terms sympathy and empathy is that the distinction between them has been lost and sympathy has come to mean in general something kind of trivial like a sympathy card is sympathy
And empathy has been, has taken over the role of what sympathy, I believe, should mean.
And so anyway, my rule for redefining terms is don't do it unless you have to.
When you redefine terms, A, don't forget that you did it because you will create confusion if you don't tell people I'm using it in a particular way.
But the other thing is at the end of the day everything that needs a term must have one and they need to be defined precisely enough that we can speak in a way that's useful.
So my claim is the most useful way to define sympathy and empathy is according to the following model.
Empathy is a technique.
Empathy is a mechanism for predicting what somebody else is going to feel or more importantly do based on what you can infer from their predicament.
The simplest way we do this is we take the data of their circumstance and we run it through our own mind as if we were in their shoes and we think, what would we feel?
And if you take a great narrative, you know, a Shakespearean narrative, you can imagine, you know, the anguish of Romeo and Juliet unable to be together, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, A, that fits very well with where we'll go later, talking about story, but it also sounds like there's near but not complete overlap then with theory of mind.
Well, except the theory of mind can also deal with the non-social parts, like, oh, I see that you're standing over there.
I can infer that you can't see the thing that I can see from here.
I think theory of mind is an assumption of the model of empathy that I'm arguing for.
The idea that some other creature is not just an object that behaves, but it's an object like me, and therefore I can understand something about what it would be like to look through its eyes, you know, yes, closely related.
The theory of mind applies to humans, and I mean, it's not...
Why are we referring to other humans as other creatures at this point?
Like I guess I'm now... Well we talk about whether animals have a theory of mind and a few do and most don't as far as we can tell.
Right but like the theory and theory of mind empathy are both used both in the non-human animal behavior world and and among humans.
Right but I think theory of mind you carry those of us who are Not broken and have lived a certain amount of human life we've developed to adulthood walk around with the understanding that other people are To one degree or another, like us, that their experience of the world is similar.
So that's theory of mind.
Empathy is then an activity that we engage in on top of that.
Right?
Where we are trying to deduce what somebody else is going to do based on what we would do in their circumstances.
There's an assumption built into that.
Which is that their mind is similar enough to yours that that works.
And I would argue that one thing that we need to understand with respect to empathy is that the quality of our empathy First order is a question of how similar our mind is to somebody else's.
So men and women will frequently trip over each other because they may have wide overlap in how they see the world.
And then you get to issues that are different for men and women.
And a man will misunderstand a woman and vice versa.
So that's a failure of empathy local to certain topics.
So I know you're going somewhere.
I don't want to derail us, but let me just say that I actually understand.
I've thought a lot more about the concept of theory of mind than I have about the word empathy, and I understand it to have much more nuance and, you know, to be actually exactly in the same place you're describing empathy.
So, I think that there's a semantic problem that we'll run into here where you use the word that you want to use, but I think you've way undersold what theory of mind is and given it short shrift.
Maybe.
I don't think it matters here necessarily, but, you know, empathy feels to me like it emerges mostly out of a sort of a social science psychology context, whereas theory of mind has been, there has been rigor attempted over in sort of anthropological
neurobiological evolutionary biological space to understand, you know, what is it that you could know that you might infer about another organism, both based on what you are and also based on what your perspective is given how you have developed.
Okay.
Well, ultimately I do want to know how my model of empathy and sympathy integrates.
It's possible that empathy is a synonym.
I don't think so, but you do know more about theory of mind and the literature on it, so maybe it is.
At the very least... Let me just... One more thing.
When I brought it up, I said, I don't think it's fully overlapping, largely overlapping.
I don't think it's synonymous because I think theory of mind is a bit larger because it includes things like I can tell perspective and that, you know, there's no empathy and like, oh, you can't see the thing.
Actually, that's interesting.
Like, yeah, we don't talk about empathy.
If we're trying to understand.
You know, yeah.
Standing where he's standing, he can't see what's over there.
We don't typically think of that as an act of empathy.
Empathy is more at the level of motivation and emotion.
As you're describing, I feel like it's a subset, a large subset, but a subset of theory of mind.
Okay.
All right.
So I will also argue there's another distinction, which is the theory of mind is a term of art.
Whereas empathy and sympathy are terms in common parlance.
And I think we need to we need to sharpen them because we so often talk about these things and the danger of getting them wrong.
Yeah, but I mean, I guess precisely because of that distinction, linguists would say, you know what, terms in common parlance do change.
Language changes as the users use them, because that's what language is.
And so terms of art, you can be more precise and say, actually, I'm going to razor this.
I'm going to make this precise, and I'm going to hold it steady, because I'm allowed to, because we understand that this is a term of art, as opposed to words that everyone uses that are understood to be part of common parlance.
You know, just like Um, those are the woke attempts to change language and make all of us into racists and such, like, you know what, actually, language doesn't work that way.
And, you know, like, and everyone's beautiful.
Nope.
You know, you just can't change how people understand that word or how people understand what beauty is, you know, at a moment's notice.
So it is, it is harder, and I would say, um, less obviously Doable or warranted to attempt a precise restructuring that you expect everyone to accommodate for a word in common parlance.
Maybe you would say that as a woman.
Driver.
I don't know what any of that means.
No, it meant nothing.
No.
Just a joke.
Okay, so.
I don't, so I think the distinction between a term of art and terms in common parlance isn't so much whether, yes, terms of, because terms of art are terms of art, they're explicitly defined so that we know as they change and we change them consciously.
Language evolution causes things like sympathy and empathy to evolve.
But, again, my claim is going to be virtually every important term that we use in common parlance gets blunted by the fact that a large population is using it and many people use these things imprecisely without a deep understanding of what they're supposed to refer to.
So, anyway, that's evolution, but it's evolution in the direction of imprecision, which is not desirable.
So, no, evolution in a direction is one thing.
But this is what happens to language.
Of course.
Evolution in a direction is how languages come to describe things that they can't describe to begin with, but evolution... Words lose precision, and if they lose so much precision that they become meaningless, they drop out of use.
Yeah, but all of our words lose precision.
So what we have is no way to talk in common parlance about things that matter because everything is a is a is a blunt tool.
So anyway, empathy in my schema is running the data of somebody else's circumstance through your own mind so that you can see what they're likely to feel, what they're likely to do, and that is advantageous.
Now I will Put a little asterisk on this and I will say one of the reasons that I believe human beings are obsessed with fiction, also with history, but more with fiction, is that You can upgrade your empathy software by looking at narratives that you haven't lived.
If you read a great novel seen through the eyes of a character of the opposite sex, you may learn a great deal about how the opposite sex sees things.
That can be useful to you when you're trying to engage in empathy and understand what somebody of the opposite sex might see in a circumstance that would be different than what you would see.
This is precisely where we're going later.
I don't know if you want to jump into that or you want to continue with what you're doing.
I don't know.
I don't know where we're going later.
So we will just say you've got empathy, which is a tool.
It is a tool for figuring out what others will do.
The key thing is empathy is useful whether the person that you're trying to predict the behavior of is a teammate, a spouse, a friend, another player on your soccer team, Or an enemy, right?
If it's an opposing general, you want to understand how they see the battlefield, so you know what they're going to do next, so you can outflank them, right?
So empathy, in my schema, carries nothing of the desire for the person engaged in whatever you're trying to predict to succeed.
You may be hoping for exactly the opposite, and that may be why you're using empathy.
Sympathy, same pathos, means it's empathy plus you're actually rooting for the person who you are empathizing with.
So you are looking into their mind and you're also hoping that they succeed in what they are doing.
By using those two things So given that formulation that you just made, are you suggesting that you cannot have sympathy for someone if you do not have empathy for them?
Because people certainly claim to have sympathy for people whose conditions, whose circumstances they don't necessarily understand.
I think it's a question of quality, right?
If you do not understand the mind of the person in question, then you will do a very crude job of the empathy part, and your sympathy may actually land flat, right?
So there are those of us, for example, who do not want to be comforted in the face of misfortune.
I don't want to hear that things are better than they are, right?
Knowing that somebody understands that they're not good, that I'll gladly accept.
So the point is, somebody's sympathy with me, if they try to tell me that things aren't as bad as I think they are, and I think I've done a pretty good job of figuring out, How bad they are falls flat so I'm not saying sympathy requires the quality of your sympathy will be directly correlated to the degree The quality of your empathy your ability to understand that the mind of the other Okay, so
Why was I defining those terms?
I was defining those terms because we were going to talk about another piece of the toolkit.
We had talked last week about the idea that I don't know if they are up to X, but I wouldn't put it past them.
And the relevance of the sympathy and empathy piece is that This is one of these places where I will speak.
I know it's a fraught term, but I will speak of normies, right?
I'm a normie in the sense that I have normal human emotions.
I'm sure they don't map perfectly on to what other people experience, but I'm not lacking some large category of emotion.
So if I run up against somebody Who is of a fundamentally different nature.
If I run up against, let's say, somebody who is sociopathic, right?
So they are lacking in what I would call sympathy, what others often call empathy.
I will misunderstand their behavior until I correct for that, right?
Because I will expect them to do what I would do in their shoes, and they have a whole range of things they can do that I can't.
So, the importance of the concept we introduced last time, I don't know if they're doing X, but I wouldn't put it past them, is that if you recognize that there are two questions on the table when we're trying to figure out, you know, why
Why did the official bodies recommend shots that they misportrayed as vaccines that did a tremendous amount of damage?
Just in error?
Did they fail to see it?
Or were they willing to do damage?
And the answer is, I don't know the answer to that question, but I wouldn't put it past them, right?
So the point here, the piece of toolkit that I want to add this week, is there is something that I would call a simplifying assumption.
A simplifying assumption is some assumption that when you map it onto a set of observations, it makes explaining what you see easier rather than harder.
It doesn't add another layer of complexity.
Complexity drops away.
And so the idea of, if I say, I don't know if they are doing X, but I wouldn't put it past them.
Does that actually allow me to understand my world better if I imagine that they are de facto sociopathic and that they may not be doing X because they lack the capacity or they think they would get caught, but there's no limit to their willingness to do the kind of harm in question?
I would argue that we understand recent history vastly better.
Now somebody will likely raise the objection to this, that actually I've cheated.
That if the point is, if I imagine that they are lacking moral constraint, if the competing hypothesis of I wouldn't put it past them, they're capable of anything morally speaking, is that they live by a moral code, right?
So, the question is, which of these two assumptions explains the world we now live in better?
And it may be that vast sections of the world are explained by one and you get to some zone and it turns out that the utility of that model breaks down and you need to imagine a moral code is in place.
I'm this may be very naive, but it feels to me like this is sort of at the crux of the issue from God, when is it 20 years ago or so?
The question of corporate personhood, right?
Like, so corporate personhood was objected to rightly, I think, by a number of us on the basis that individuals can have morals, but entities don't.
That they can have bylaws and regulations and rules, but that they are not held accountable internally because they are an emergent phenomenon.
All right.
It's a great observation.
Let's unpack it a little bit.
First of all, let's understand where corporate personhood came from.
Because actually, I think that that's a tremendously simplifying insight.
Corporate personhood actually goes back to the founding of the country.
And the purpose of corporate personhood was not to imagine that corporations are like people in having moral codes, etc.
It was actually to grant them the ability to sign contracts.
It was actually to constrain them.
So corporate personhood has now become abused and corporations have taken on the rights of people, which was never the intent of corporate personhood.
Now, corporate personhood, though, also makes another really interesting point in this neighborhood, which is, in the case of corporations...
If you don't have proper regulation, and that means not only regulation that attempts to regulate their behavior, but enforcement that actually succeeds in doing it, what you will get is the evolution of psychopathy.
It will evolve for a very simple reason, right?
And actually, I covered this in an animated Crude, but animated form back in my personal responsibility vortex talk in 2014 or whenever that was.
But my point was this.
Imagine three corporations.
One of which does the right thing irrespective of cost, one of which does the expedient thing irrespective of harm, and the other one is a balance that sometimes does the right thing because it's the right thing and sometimes does the expedient thing because it can't resist.
And then you start iterating through, you know, imagine that they do the same thing, they produce the same product.
Yep.
So if you start iterating through rounds of the game that they are playing against each other, what you will discover is that the one that always does the right thing goes extinct almost immediately.
Because the one that does the expedient thing can do everything that the one that does the right thing can do.
So if the right thing happens to be the profitable thing, the expedient corporation can do it.
So there's no competitive advantage to anybody.
But whenever the expedient thing, the profitable thing, is morally off-limits, the morally constrained company can't do it, and the morally unconstrained company can.
So what you get is the company that always does the right thing goes extinct.
The company that can do anything it wants profits at the fastest rate, which causes the one that can do both to evolve in the direction of the psychopathic one.
And this is true for corporations and not for individual organisms, because with corporations, all of the other entities that it is interacting with are only competitors.
Whereas with individuals, all of the other entities that the individuals are interacting with might be competitors, might be collaborators, might be a mixture of both, which is often the case, at least for conspecifics, that is members of your own species.
And so there is often advantage in iterative interactions and in not burning it all to the ground now because you're in some sort of an endgame dynamic.
Perfect.
That also means because humans exist in a lineage that goes on and on and on, and that basically the individuals are very temporary, but the lineage isn't.
There has been the evolution of a system that monitors people's adherence to shared moral codes.
So I don't want to drag us too far into the weeds, but...
Back in the day, Bill Hamilton innovated a mathematical description of kin selection whereby people behave altruistically towards each other or creatures behave altruistically towards each other based on the expectation of how many genes they share.
And so you can mathematically deduce how likely one creature is to sacrifice for another based on the likelihood that the second creature can pass on genes that are in the first creature.
Why would a, you know, parent sacrifice its life to save their offspring?
This kind of thing.
This is the 60s, 1967, I want to say.
Something like that.
Yeah, or 71.
I can't remember.
Back in that era.
Bob Trivers, who was our good friend, is our good friend, and my undergraduate advisor, innovated... I'm an undergraduate advisor.
Reciprocal altruism being another basis for cooperation that is based not on the shared genes, but also, or instead, it is based on the fact that if I do something altruistic for you now, it may come back to me in the future.
And so reciprocity evolves between individuals.
Dick Alexander, on your committee, my advisor, innovated indirect reciprocity, in which you participate in a pool of people where you don't necessarily get paid back by the individual that you did the favor for, but you get paid back in the end enough that it's worth behaving like a good person.
The iconic example being barn building in a rural community.
Right.
You get your barn built, we all come together, next month, next year, sometime, I might need my barn built.
Right.
Or it might be I need help birthing my sheep.
I need help getting to the hospital.
Whatever it is.
Right.
So you just become a good person, you do what needs to be done, and it pays you back much more than trying to do everything on your own.
Now that system is often mistaken for being synonymous with a system of reputation.
It happens that reputation is a mechanism by which indirect reciprocity, it's a necessary mechanism for most systems of indirect reciprocity.
And the basic point is if you start to cheat, right, if you participate in some reciprocity network, And you decide, well, I'm going to take from that network, but I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be miserly when it comes to giving back to that network.
You will get a reputation for not being a full participant, and that will harm you much more than if you had just put in your share.
So anyway, we were talking about that because, help me out here, We were talking about that system because we were, I've now lost my train of thought.
I don't, I don't, I don't exactly know where you're going.
Um, you, you wanted to.
Oh, you had argued.
Oh, it was about the corporations.
Yeah, you thought that was highly relevant, but I don't know why.
Right, because in the case of corporations, you get this evolution towards psychopathy.
Regulatory mechanisms are supposed to play the role of reputation in indirect reciprocity, right?
They are supposed to exert penalties on companies that break the rules, but because
Primarily of regulatory capture this breaks down and in the end what you get is The corporations that figure out how to break the rules in ways that they can't get caught or that the cost Of getting caught is lower than the profit that they make by doing so tend to profit anyway So to get back to the original point
Markets that are unregulated cause the evolution of psychopathic behavior in corporations, which is exactly why an assumption of corporate personhood that suggests a moral code like a person is just dead on arrival.
Right?
It's just not going to be right.
But I will say this then creates a caveat, which is that the reason that It makes sense to imagine that a corporation is psychopathic, is an evolutionary reason rather than a defective character.
The point is the market in question will have produced this behavior because it's necessary to compete.
Now I will take this one opportunity here.
When Volkswagen got caught gaming the regulations surrounding emissions, I thought they missed a tremendous opportunity.
This was eight, nine years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what they had done is they had effectively, my understanding anyway, is what they had done is that they had programmed the chips in the cars to know when they were being tested for emissions and to behave themselves.
So that you could get a higher performing car that when it was tested seemed to be a low-emitting car, right?
Thereby cheating the regulation intended to improve all of our air quality.
Or maybe it was fuel efficiency, I can't remember.
But I think it was fuel efficiency.
But what they should have said, in my opinion, was... What Volkswagen should have said?
Yeah.
Upon being discovered.
Yeah.
What they should have said is, You got us.
We did it.
And it's bad.
We had no choice.
The market forces you to do this.
And you will find that our competitors do it too.
If you want cars that actually meet these standards, what you need is a system that imposes a cost evenly across the entire industry.
If your enforcement mechanism doesn't do that, then you will find exactly this kind of cheating.
And I believe that we have, I have heard informally, I haven't looked into it, but I've heard that a couple other companies have been caught doing the same thing.
My guess is they're all doing it.
The ones that still exist are all doing it, right?
In order to compete, they're doing it.
But doesn't that raise the question of, this is a regulation that was being implemented across the board, but it was gameable.
It's not that it was being implemented in a scattershot way and some corporations got lucky.
Some corporations got lucky maybe in not getting caught, but if this was...
This is a gameable system that every savvy car maker could figure out how to game.
The problem wasn't that the regulation, you know, wasn't clear enough.
Like, unfortunately, you and I keep on coming back here.
It's like, oh, you know, great idea to have some, you know, regulation that is enforceable in a uniform way, but does such a thing exist?
Well, here's the way you do it.
You have to understand that you're dealing with an arms race.
Right.
And the way to prevent your enemy from evolving a capacity that overwhelms your regulatory capacity is to set the price of gaming so high that it's more profitable to play by the rules.
So, and you know... So, you're talking about penalties.
I'm talking about penalties, which means you need a highly intelligent system that is capable of understanding what the actual violation was.
What you don't want, you know, this is a place that I have come to understand what conservatives see and I understand They're not wrong about this.
The nanny state is a real problem, right?
There are places where you just don't want the government to be, you know, micromanaging processes where the risk is low and the potential to innovate something cool is there and yadda yadda yadda.
On the other hand, you absolutely do want your air quality maintained.
The amount of, you know, the, the externality of destroyed human health is, you know, huge.
So you have to distinguish between places where you want the market market to regulate something and where the market will fail to regulate something.
And the cost is high.
And then you need the ability.
You need discretion put in the hands of people who do not have a perverse incentive, right?
And perverse incentives are their own arms race, because it may be that I have no perverse incentive as the regulator, but I do have a cushy job waiting for me when I'm no longer the regulator, if I behave in a particular way while I am the regulator.
You can build the system, but really the key point is we are dealing with highly sophisticated gamers of regulatory systems.
We built them.
We forced them to evolve.
And if you don't want them to evolve, what you have to do is set the price of attempting to game the system so high that it's just not worth anybody doing it.
Your competitor's not doing it.
You're not doing it.
It makes more sense just to behave yourself.
Right.
And then, in that circumstance, then the market actually does solve the kinds of problems that, you know, true believers in the market believe that they solve, right?
If you set the regulations, here's what we don't want you to do, within the range of what you're allowed to do, come up with the best way to do it, right?
We'll never be able to describe the thing we want, right?
We want the market to figure out what we want, and here are the, here's the sidelines, here's the bounds.
Okay, so now we keep having to find our way back to where we were.
So we were at corporate personhood.
You're correct.
Corporate personhood is a case where you should not expect a corporation to have a moral code.
Oddly, this whole nonsense about ESG is an attempt to...
ESG is environmental, social...
And governmental, I think.
This is...
Environment, social, and governance.
But these are like the standards that are being imposed on people or the virtue hoops that corporations are jumping through in order to gain investors?
Yes, yes, they are a informal, here's the world.
There's just so many acronyms now, like ESG didn't immediately trigger.
ESG is like, you know how hell is depicted as a lake of fire?
Sometimes.
That's ESG.
That's what happens to the world if you allow ESG to informally incentivize corporations to signal their virtue this way, that way, and the other way.
That's not my favorite version of hell, honestly.
The lake of fire?
I kind of like the concentric circles.
I like Dante.
I mean, that's good, but lake of fire?
Very motivating.
You do not want to end up in a lake of fire.
I mean, any hell that isn't motivating is not a very compelling hell.
Right, but lake of fire, you just, you get it like that.
You want to go swimming?
Sure.
In a lake of fire?
No thank you, right?
It's just very clear that's not a place you want to swim.
Okay, so to get back to the original point.
The original point was...
Simplifying assumption.
We are dealing with something.
We may not know who exactly we're dealing with.
We may not know whether they're doing certain things or those things are just happening of their own accord, but are the people who are steering the ship capable of doing absolutely ghastly things that a normal person would never contemplate?
Right?
I don't know if they're doing it, but I wouldn't put it past them.
And the answer is that does appear to be a functional simplifying assumption.
The world makes more sense when you imagine that the people steering it are, uh, Effective psychopaths.
Now, some will say that I've cheated because imagining that some group of people doesn't have a constraint on it seems like, well, how could that possibly, even if it's not true, it will at worst explain the world at exactly the same level.
And every so often it will explain something more because it's a lack of a constraint.
But that's not in fact true in this case.
If you, let's say you're married to a wonderful person, as I am, I am too.
We're having a lovely moment here at Dark Horse.
Let's imagine you are, as I am, and you claim to be married to a wonderful person.
And you imagine, well what if they're Really a monster.
And they're just pretending to be a good person because that's to their advantage, right?
And if you try to explain their day-to-day behavior in this way, you will find it is not a good match.
In fact, it just makes the world seem crazy.
You know, a monster who's so well-behaved day in and day out and never... And it will destroy the relationship.
Yeah.
Well, as a test of a hypothesis, it's a good one.
Go through it, and you'll find out.
Yeah, it just doesn't last five minutes, right?
It's just not a viable explanation.
So, what that proves, in addition to the magnetism of my glasses, is that it is not inherently... This is a simplifying assumption that is a fairly high bar, and the fact that it seems to match the world that we encounter with respect to major policy OK, then it's not an assumption and you're saying it's effectively a hypothesis.
It starts out as a hypothesis.
So when I say simplifying assumption, what I'm saying is you take it and instead of if you include it as an assumption and it's wrong, you're in big trouble.
So you can't do that.
So what do you do?
My point is you take what might be a useful assumption.
We're being steered by psychopaths.
And you try it out as a hypothesis and you just say, if I map that onto the world, does it make the world simpler or more complicated?
Right?
If it makes it more complicated, it's not a good assumption.
If it makes the world simpler and it's not a cheat, then that probably indicates something powerful.
And...
That is all I'm suggesting, that you in the audience take this potentially simplifying assumption, try it, convert it into a hypothesis, and walk through your life and see whether or not it predicts the behavior of the public structure better than the idea that the public structure, you know,
How likely is it that the CDC is acting out of what they call an abundance of caution and it's obsessed with making you healthier?
I don't know.
How'd they miss vitamin D?
Right?
Is it really likely that an organization that was obsessed with my health would have missed the low-hanging fruit that is vitamin D?
Right?
Never mind whether you think vitamin D supplements work, which they seem to.
Even if all the CDC did was it said, hey, check your latitude.
Just check where you live on the earth.
If you live above Whatever the line on the globe is, then you should be aware you're probably vitamin D deficient for two reasons.
One, the sun doesn't get high enough in the sky for you to be making vitamin D for a large portion of the year.
Two, it probably gets cold enough that you're wearing a lot of clothing, you're sitting inside where the climate is regulated, and these things are all interfering with a very natural process that is fundamental to immunity, right?
The CDC doesn't understand this.
It's like really, you know, interested in me taking inoculations built on novel technologies that interfere with the way my immune system works, but it hasn't noticed vitamin D. No, that is much better explained by the fact that this entity, even though it claims to be about disease control, doesn't really care to control disease.
It's more about human control or pharmacological control.
Right.
Rather than disease control.
Exactly.
Which then just, you know, the point is, OK, if I don't have to worry, if I have to worry that the CDC is obsessed with my health and that it just gets everything wrong, that's a hard thing to explain.
Everything wrong, really?
That's weird.
On the other hand, if I think, oh, well, what if actually it's under the control of an industry that profits when I'm not well?
Well, that makes a lot of sense, right?
Now, the only thing I've got to explain is how it retains the name that leads me to believe it's obsessed with making me healthy, and that's pretty easy to explain, right?
It's a much better sales pitch if, you know, these people can cloak themselves in, you know, in doctor's garb.
And that's the piece where a lot of people get stuck, right?
But it's called the CDC.
It's called the FDA.
It's called the NSF.
It's called the Government of the United States of America.
It's Stanford.
It's Harvard.
It's, you know, the NIH.
It's these bastions that are old and esteemed and important and iconic, and the label does not match the contents.
That is not exactly the phrase that you started using.
The label on the box doesn't match the contents.
Yeah.
That is the thing.
That is the piece that people will get stuck on.
They will say, well, yes, I understand.
Everyone.
Everyone will agree that systems can be corrupt, right?
That there can be corrupted systems that pretend that they are trying to help you but are actually trying to do the opposite.
Everyone knows that that is theoretically a possibility.
The place that this hiccups, that a lot of people got incredibly confused, for instance during COVID, and have failed to get unconfused, Is that they still believe that the label on the box matches what the box used to contain.
That Stanford is still Stanford, Harvard, NSF, the executive branch of the American government, the Democrats, everything.
And why?
Why do you assume that it's the same that it used to be when all of the evidence suggests that it's not?
Well, people assume, this goes back to the point about empathy and sympathy, people are Over-extrapolating from what they would do, right?
It wouldn't occur to most people if there was an entity established to help the public avoid disease.
Yeah.
It wouldn't occur to most people that if they ran a company that manufactures treatments for disease, that controlling disease would be seen as a hostile force and that Those who make those products might try to capture that entity and turn it upside down, right?
Because most people wouldn't think to wait.
You you're saying people might.
Do things that cause disease?
I'm saying you wouldn't and I'm saying I wouldn't put it past them.
That's what I'm saying, right?
So anyway, I mean.
I think we've said it, right?
We've got all the pieces of the toolkit that you want in play.
Don't over assume the content of your motivational structure looks like somebody else's, especially when that somebody else isn't even a somebody.
It's an industry or it's a company.
And once you realize, well, that means My assumption of moral constraint is, uh, on, is not, is not justified.
It doesn't mean there is no moral constraint, but it is not the way it went.
If I mean another person into the system is applying it to the system is not justified.
So then you take the simplifying assumption that morality is absent from these structures and you turn it into a hypothesis, you deploy it and you see whether things get weirder or they make more sense.
And if they make more sense.
The bell should go off.
All right.
So you're gonna go there?
I think I'm gonna hold that.
All right.
Fair enough.
Well, then, let's talk about Utopias.
All right.
And a hypothesis, I think, although it's not really framed as a hypothesis, for why they fail.
You have famously, at least in my mind, in my world, you have famously said... You mean like at dinner and stuff?
That utopia is the worst idea that humans have ever had.
And I recently was talking to a new friend here on the island who was talking to me about the devastating effect of utopian thinking in a lot of the still functional but borderline non-functional systems that he is engaging with.
And I told him your line about utopia being the worst idea that humans have ever had, and he said, yeah, that sounds right.
And so this is something that I believe a number of smart, engaged people are beginning to sense, like, oh, this may actually be at the heart of some of the problems.
So this is going to seem like a very strange segue, but there's this book, Story Thinking, by this guy Angus Fletcher.
Who is a professor of story science and, um, boy, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this today.
He's got a background in neuroscience and, um, and then has a PhD in, I think, literature and, um, with a background in both biology and literature.
He is now employed at a university as a professor of story science, and on his webpage, he proudly asserts that, yes, he made that up.
Because he can, and because he is actually trying to study the underlying nature of how it is that humans make meaning, and why narrative is so fundamental to it.
And this book, Story Thinking, the New Science of Narrative Intelligence, is really, really extraordinary.
And part of what he is positing is that rationality and analysis are not the only ways that humans are making sense of the world, which of course is something that is a It's an idea that is near and dear to my heart and to yours, and it's something that I've been thinking about and writing about a lot of late.
Not only are rationality and analysis not the only ways that humans make sense of the world, but that they are not fundamental ways that we do so, he says.
And he posits that narrative is.
Rationality and?
Analysis.
Yeah, yeah.
Logic, analysis, rationality.
You know, the sort of, you know, the enlightenment values, right?
But that story is.
And this book published in 2023 is an exploration of this.
So he recounts that at the end of Plato's The Republic, that Plato reports on the hero named Er, E-R, I don't know how to pronounce it.
Who died in battle, but whose body did not rot, and who awoke upon being placed on the funeral pyre to tell the people who were burning what they thought was his dead body what he had seen of the afterlife.
And this hero, Ur, said that the afterlife was a place of judgment, in which the just souls were sent to heaven, where they experienced delight and unimaginable beauty.
And the unjust souls were sent to hell, where they suffered quote, tenfold punishment for every wrong they had done.
Tyrants and sinners suffered unending pain.
And Plato's conclusion in the Republic is that if we are obedient to the teachings of error, which he advises that we should be, we will be saved.
So, Plato concludes, I advise you stay true forever to its heavenly way and walk with justice and virtue always.
Fletcher then says, this is an argument for effective stasis, for logical analysis over all else, for sort of, if you believe in this judgment, this afterlife, all you have to do is say, well, I know what will happen if I don't behave myself.
Therefore, I just behave myself and all will be good.
Think it through.
Know what you have to do.
Do it.
Easy as that.
Why aren't we all doing it then?
Those people who believe in that sort of judgment still don't always behave the way that they're supposed to be behaving all the time.
Letcher then says Plato's story of Ur from the Republic is adopted and adapted many times throughout the ages.
Only three decades later, it becomes the most popular religious teaching in Athens.
Then it spreads to Rome's empire, then to medieval Christianity and Islam, "going on to spin off modern materialist variants like communism and the singularity, which promise that if we stick rigorously to logic's dictates, we will engineer an earthly paradise or a digital messiah." Rationally, Fletcher continues, this has all been for the best, but biologically, it hasn't.
And so I have an extended quote from him here, following up on this analysis of where the end of Plato's Republic has gotten us in terms of the spread of this static faith, really, in logic and analysis at all costs, and why it doesn't end up winning the day.
So, here we go.
This is just a page and a half.
Two pages.
One page.
Our neuroanatomy is thus a fundamentally bad match with the logical architecture of Plato's myth.
So even if we uploaded ourselves, like Er, into a realm of immortal being, we would not achieve lasting happiness.
We'd be overcome by this blind beauty.
We'd feel a rapture of meaning.
Then, slowly but inevitably, we would get bored.
We would wonder, what other heights can I visit?
And what is happening in those misty valleys below?
We would want, that is, to adventure into the unknown.
To test ourselves in uncertain times, and above all, to grow.
As holy light glittered flawlessly, we'd thus feel the urge to escape.
Like the gods whose ennui led them to create humanity, and like the subsequent deities who decided to leave their sky mount to grapple with life's hurly-burly, we would desire more than truth, justice, and perfection forever.
We'd hunger to blow up the ideal algorithm and get out.
This is the problem with logical utopias, classical and otherwise.
Even if we managed to construct a society of absolute reason, where equality reigned and we could avail ourselves of infinite mana, ambrosia, and panacea, our brain would still want more.
Our story-thinking synapses are simply not that interested in justice, truth, and other eternally logical fruits.
What our narrative brain really craves is new challenges and new opportunities.
The only way to keep our gray matter following the rules, even when the rules are utterly enlightened, is to sedate it with drugs or with fear.
Which is why myths such as Ur and the Singularity are and were and will always be sources of human unhappiness.
Just as Epicurus perceived in his garden, logic's fables made our brains feel disconnected.
No, discontented.
They fill us with negative judgments about ourselves and others.
They trap us in a state of unhuman regulation.
They bless us with tedium unending.
I know that matches many things that we have said and we say and we have said, but it felt like just a beautiful clarifying encapsulation, in part because it does it through reference to the story that Fletcher is arguing and I have argued and such, that narrative is a way in.
um to understanding but not only that it actually creates understanding that narrative doesn't just describe what we can know through analysis and rationality but it creates understanding as well understanding that we cannot get to through logic and rationality and analysis excellent now a couple things i want to throw in here Yeah.
One, verisimilitude.
Hope I'm pronouncing it right.
But the idea that a false story can be correct enough in its underlying mechanics that it rings true.
Even those of us who know that it is false still understand it to be good enough to infer something from.
Literally false metaphorically true.
Right.
And so, you know...
Nothing drives me crazy more than bad sci-fi.
If a story, which acknowledges that it's fiction on the front end, is just built broken, then it's hard to do anything with it, even if some aspect of the story is good.
The point is, well, you built it into a universe that not only isn't right, but wouldn't make sense if it existed.
Yeah.
You're allowed to ask me to suspend my disbelief once in terms of the entire frame.
Right.
This is a magical realm.
But if you keep on triggering the suspension of disbelief in new ways over and over again because you're clumsy or uncareful or lazy, no, sorry, do better.
Especially if you keep taking it to new levels.
If you're solving Paradoxes that you've created for yourself in the writing, not in the this is a magical realm where people cast spells.
Okay, I can accept that.
That's fantasy space, but like in sci-fi space, actually, no, we can jump through space and time.
Okay, got it.
We figured that out, now you've done it, but you don't be working on that and then have someone else be doing it over here because you need that for a narrative reason.
Yeah.
Okay, so verisimilitude is really a measure of whether something adds up internally enough to extrapolate from or, you know, A fictional story, whether or not you can build it into your model of how things actually work, because it's well enough architected to be built of real stuff.
I feel like this is a match for the idea in our book, your idea, that what you should do when you find a paradox is dig there.
That's your treasure map, like dig there where there's a paradox, but Ultimately, we may never get there.
We may never have a complete understanding of our universe.
In fact, we don't expect that we will, but that is what science is for, is to get to a better and better and more complete understanding of the universe.
All paradoxes will resolve with one another.
And so, in a story where you're asked to say, well, believe this over here and this over here, and neither of which matches your understanding of reality, and they conflict with one another, sorry, no.
Then your universe that you've constructed doesn't work.
It's not plausible.
Yeah, I will add one more, just a pet peeve of mine.
There is a way in which modern people who write very good stories often trip over the fact that if they write a story, I will say Game of Thrones being one such example.
If you write a story in a technologically primitive age, You can have a lot of the stuff right, but they often get the sexual stuff wrong because they are proceeding from a mindset that was built in the post birth control era.
And so they do not properly intuit.
The stakes, as it were, and the radical difference in stakes between males and females in characters because of pregnancy and child rearing and all of these things.
So anyway, I thought Game of Thrones was fantastic, but I frequently saw, you know, a modern mindset imposed into an era where the technology that made that modern mindset possible just didn't exist.
Just point of order, we have both been told that the books were better and neither of us has read the books.
Yes, all right, so I should refer to it as the Screen of Thrones instead of, I don't know, something.
But yes, it may be that the books do a better job on this.
That wouldn't be shocking.
And it's also possible that this is a question of, you know, it would be less popular with the HBO audience if these characters were behaving according to the higher stakes in a pre-technological Yeah, so anyway, that would be a place for the books in the video version might depart.
But okay, so other things.
I find it interesting, who's the author of that?
Fletcher.
Fletcher.
Professor of Story Science.
Seems to argue if I, and this is my first hearing of that, but Fletcher seems to argue that not only are utopian plans here on earth broken, but that the idea of utopianism in the context of the afterlife is also broken.
Yes.
And I actually disagree with him here.
Yeah.
No, he puts, um, he puts, uh, religious, uh, aspirations to utopia in an afterlife in the same place as the singularity.
Right.
Belief in the singularity as some sort of, uh, you know, pursuit of a digital Messiah in his framing.
So what there's a there's a kind of a back and forth that needs to happen here because you know as we have said many times religion is the product of an evolutionary process those stories of an afterlife Even though they may differ in their nature.
Let's take, for example, the idea of reincarnation where the quality of your living now dictates what kind of being you get to be in the next life.
That's not heaven, right?
That's returning to earth again and again.
But it has this characteristic of incentivizing.
It corrects for defects in game theory that cause people to behave badly.
By positing a reward and penalty structure in an afterlife, you can get people to behave as if they understood something deep, like the tragedy of the commons.
Right the tragedy of the commons says that when people Have a shared resource that needs restraint individual restraint to protect it that people will unless certain assumptions are met will often destroy that resource because the individual deciding whether to overexploit the resource or not is in a terrible position to save the resource if the individual restrains themselves and
The resource still gets destroyed because of everybody else's exploitation and they themselves have profited less.
So everybody makes the decision to profit more than the resource can sustain and they destroy it.
A belief in an afterlife where rewards and penalties are handed out corrects that defect in the game theory.
He is not attacking a belief in an afterlife.
It is about the static nature of the reward.
It is the idea that the staticness of, in Plato's original formulation and then on down through the ages, Heaven is perfect in every regard and unchanging and hell is what hell is.
It is not the belief in an afterlife that he is.
Right, but I mean if we follow his logic through, even the staticness ought to cause the correction to the game theory to hiccup if it was really a defect.
Because the human mind would recognize what he's saying, which is actually heaven sounds boring, right?
So if heaven sounds boring means that you're not incentivized to try to get in, then it doesn't work.
So apparently people are incentivized to try to get in despite the fact that it sounds boring.
I don't think that's how it works.
For one thing, almost no one does live a life as if they are actually, you know, there are many who believe, who say that they believe, and extraordinarily few who actually live a flawless life such that they could guarantee themselves that upon death they would end up in the place they want to be.
Right.
And this, I think you would argue, but I certainly would argue, is testament to the idea not that They have thought it through and like, oh, well, that sounds sort of boring.
Anyway, for one thing, the framing is a binary.
It's not like, do I want boring or do I want eternal damnation and pain?
Like, it's not actually... I'll go with boring, thank you very much.
It beats the lake of fire every time.
Right.
Or the rings of fire, whatever it is.
But But I think more to the point, it's that the sitting, like you are doing the thing that he is saying is why this fails.
You were saying, well, I just have to think it through and go like, well, do I want that or do I not want that?
He's saying, actually, that's just not how That's not always how, and for many people it's not almost ever how, we end up making meaning of our world and come to the decisions that we make.
We do it through story.
We don't do it through, okay, I know what the choices are, let me sit down and decide and make the decision now.
Well, I mean, I need to wrestle a little bit more with where story fits in here.
Obviously, you know, the afterlife is a story and it, you know, it does, I believe it has the exact defect he's describing, but that basically it interfaces with the analytical part of the mind and that, in fact, the The facultative adherence to the moral codes that get you into heaven is a feature, not a bug.
The facultative adherence of the... say that phrase again?
The facultative adherence to the rules that are supposed to get you into heaven, which you point out, even people who believe in this stuff... The people.
The adherence of people.
The adherence of the people.
Okay, I think I'm just not hearing what you're saying correctly.
The degree to which if you actually believed that if you died having not confessed a mortal sin that You would end up with infinite penalty going on infinitely, right?
The cost is so high that it's worth living a perfectly boring life of zero violation so that you are never in the slightest danger of going to the lake of fire and nobody lives like that.
So that's interesting.
In fact, this is one of the things that David Lottie and I in our paper on the evolution of morality deal with, which is why do we spell out these absolute rules that people do not adhere to perfectly?
They adhere to them facultatively.
And so this is so I I I think this is actually in some ways perfect but I don't I don't have enough facility think like I I live in both of these realms.
Yep.
You do too to some degree but I think that you are much more You are much more necessarily speaking from the analytical, logical, rigor realm, and everything you are saying is from that space.
And I believe that what he's arguing, what I am trying to bring forth here is, That is not how most people are understanding their world.
Oh, I totally, well, so let's bring our model of consciousness into this discussion because I believe it tells us exactly how we should be thinking about this.
In our model of consciousness, you have a, the vast stretches of your mind are well trained by development in order that you can navigate your life Intuitively.
Not because intuition is some magical thing that comes from somewhere, but because your intuitions are right on target because your developmental environment looks like your adult environment across a wide range of things.
You know what's good to eat and what you shouldn't eat.
You know who's shifty and dangerous and, you know, who is, you know, heroic and kind.
I don't know.
You intuit these things and you don't have to think about them consciously, right?
You have a feeling about that person.
You have a different feeling about this person, right?
This is all happening intuitively and narratively.
That's how we are to live.
What is the conscious analytical mind there for?
Well, it is there for the encounter with the novel where you don't have developmental experience that causes you to just simply flow through your life knowing how to feel about this and that and therefore what to do and where to put your foot and where not to and all those things.
So we live an upside-down life in which we are so drenched in novelty that our conscious mind is constantly occupied with Low stakes puzzles where we're just trying not to eat dumb stuff.
And right.
That is both exhausting and unavoidable.
If you try to live intuitively in this novel era, you hurt yourself all the time.
But intuition is not story.
So, I mean, I think you're speaking in part from I think from having talked to me a lot about what I'm thinking about with regard to oscillation between modes, right?
And intuition is one alternative to logic and analysis and rigor.
But it's not the only other thing, right?
So there's creativity over here, there's serendipity, but there's also narrative.
And I think it's actually interesting.
You are too, but you did much less empirically of animal behavior.
I think the science of animal behavior, the field science of animal behavior, which is the work that I did for my dissertation, is maybe unique Maybe.
Among natural sciences, in that it is highly rigorous and analytical and careful and prescribed in many ways.
But it is also narrative, because these are lives.
Even if you're talking about poison frogs, these are lives you're talking about that have a trajectory, that have a story from birth to death.
And part of, you know, part of the reason that people become animal behaviorists is because they're interested in the stories of the lives of others, including non-human others, right?
And I think that that instinct, if you will, that interest, is much more universal than the interest in making careful, rigorous, analytical sense of things.
And what you and I try to do is to encourage that second thing in part through an understanding that it all goes together and it's all science.
Science uses all of these things.
Science is not.
Too many people go into science because they're scared of the creative, the uncertain, the stuff that goes over in intuitive land, and they want things that are hard and fast and rules and don't change, and sorry buddy, that's not science.
That is not science.
There are pieces of science where you can get answers that seem really true and hard and fast and reductionist and quantitative right now.
And sometimes they may last for a long time, maybe even forever, but that's not most of what science is.
Science also includes all of the uncertainty.
It has to.
And so, that's part of a tell.
When you have people dressed up like scientists, whether because they are or not, and who say, trust me, I'm a scientist, I'm always right, then you know to run away the other direction.
Let me try this.
We, our younger son, Toby, just graduated from high school this weekend, you'll remember.
Yes, I do.
And for the last two years of his high school, he's been living with us on this island, the San Juans.
And his graduating class was 68.
And the graduation ceremony was unlike any that I have seen before, imagined before, really, including one particular thing that apparently is longstanding, because I've talked to a couple of other people who grew up here and who graduated from Friday Harbor High some number of years ago.
And when I started talking to them about the graduation ceremony, they said, I know the thing that you're going to point out, because when I was in kindergarten, I was looking forward to the moment that I would get to do that thing.
And it is that they have all, in this case, 68 of the members of the class sitting up there, as you do when graduating from high school.
And there's, I don't remember who it was who was announcing.
Was it the principal?
Was it someone else?
It was one of the student speakers.
Maybe it was, in which case, did he get to sit down and stand up?
I don't remember if it was the class president.
It was, but anyway, whoever it was, he starts relating tiny pieces of everyone's story, the same tiny piece of everyone's story, which is, when did you start in the Friday Harbor school system, public school system, kindergarten on through 12? when did you start in the Friday Harbor school system, It's a high school, but it's a small enough community.
And he starts with kindergarten.
He names every single person who started in kindergarten.
And it's, I don't know, two thirds of the class?
And then he says, "And then in second grade, so and so joined." And as he names the names, they stand up.
Then in second grade, so-and-so joined us, but so-and-so decided to leave for Ecuador, and he sits back down.
And then in fourth grade, these three people joined us from so-and-so, but so-and-so got bored in Ecuador and came back, and he stands back up.
And so, you know, for most of the class, they started in kindergarten, and they've been all the way through, but there's a lot of sitting down and standing up, and there's also a lot of kids, like our son, who show up for the last two years.
I think there were four or five kids who showed up in 11th grade and are then standing up only for the last two years of this.
But with every name and movement from standing up to sitting down, I had this sense of like, oh, I want to know more.
Like, what's going on there?
Like, what were they thinking?
What's the story?
What are their parents doing?
Like, what is the story there?
And for me, that's a big part of why it was so compelling.
I think I sort of, I wanted to ask you, what was your reaction to that without me giving a whole bunch of explanation of what my reaction was?
So I kind of screwed that up.
Yeah, I thought it was fascinating and unique and it did Suggest you know a it suggested that there was a kind of an emergent consciousness that you know to the extent that you showed up in the fourth grade, you know, you were joining a Cognitive Unit that existed and that explained a lot.
I mean Toby's been very popular in school But he is of a latecomer in this community that's been you know, it's a standing wave of some kind and yeah So anyway, I was I was fascinated by that too And I thought it it really made a point about something that wouldn't have been true in the giant high school that Toby was
Part of before we're just like some master people are coming and going you don't even know everybody in the class And you know that's the right thing So that so I mean I think I think this is sort of revealing just just hearing how you talk and like both you and I Spend a lot of time in a little analytical space and also narrative space I
I think that you almost always default to analytical space in terms of how you describe things, whether or not it is something narrative that you are describing, or even when it is something narrative that you are describing, and so you just did it again, right?
Isn't it interesting to compare that to what it would have been like at a school with a thousand-person graduating class?
We talked about that, and I also was thinking about that, but my overwhelming sense in the moment, and as I go back to it over and over again, was, That person sat down and stood up like three, four times.
What's going on there?
I want to know what happened.
I want to know the story.
And so many people are driven by, I want to know the story.
And I guess to sort of bring it in one kind of full circle, understanding this impulse in people, I want to know your story.
I want to free enough people from enough of the constraints of the world so that they can reveal their stories to others.
Like that, what stories do we need to be telling to counteract the tyranny to, you know, so we're not going to win with numbers.
They, you know, they managed to convince people with fear through numbers, largely during COVID.
Right.
And so numbers can be used to control people, but we're not going to.
I don't know where the phrase hearts and minds comes from.
It's probably ridiculous, but like we're not going to win hearts and minds with statistics and graphs as much as I love statistics and graphs.
Yeah.
Right?
They could be used complementarily, but we also need to be telling true, honest, glorious stories.
I don't disagree with this and I don't really disagree with your interpretation of of my default position.
I do think it's the toolkit that that I have that's useful and so I default to it while knowing it's the inferior toolkit in a world where In some context.
I don't think it's inferior.
No, it's got one value, which is dealing with novelty.
And most of our lives are not supposed to be novel.
So it is a kind of, it's a concession to the unfortunate drenching of our lives in novelty that But so I would argue that story reveals novelty.
So, I mean, I, I guess, I guess I don't want to seed novelty to the analytical realm.
Well, hold on, hold on.
Seed, C-E-D.
No, I know what you mean.
So I want to just put a couple of things on the table.
One, there's a paradox involved in language.
Okay, so if you take our definition of consciousness from the book, we say consciousness is that portion of cognition that is packaged for exchange.
It is that that you could report to somebody else if they asked you to.
Here's the interesting paradoxical bit.
Um, if you ask somebody, if somebody, an intelligent somebody, delivers a sentence that is not mundane, it's not past the salt, you know, it's, uh, you know, I wonder, uh, I wonder if most people, you know, think about their physiology even once a day.
Right?
Right?
That's good.
You did it.
Came up with the sentence.
I did.
And then you say, uh, Define physiology.
Hard to do.
Define think.
Harder.
Right.
But the point is, is this person a phony?
Do they think about physiology even once a day?
You can't define two of the words in a sentence you just said out loud as if it's, you know, factual?
No.
The fact is most of the words that we use, we do not know the explicit definition of.
Does that mean that we're using words we don't understand?
No, we know perfectly well what they mean.
We have inferred that from all of the times we've heard it.
And then we throw out the outliers and we have a very good definition.
It just doesn't reside in consciousness.
So anyway, It's actually, what you just said, I know you're going somewhere, but may explain the gap between having great facility with words and doing really well on standardized tests.
I know that there, like, standardized tests are a better measure than I have given them credit for and I used to rail against them as someone who excelled on standardized tests because I felt that I was able to as in that position, but Clearly being handed words out of context and given stripped of context definitions Is not going to serve those people who are thinking more in the narrative realm actually, right?
Yeah, so the mind So the paradox I was going to point to, though, is language is inherently very closely related to consciousness, right?
That which you can report is that which is conscious.
That does not mean that the production of language is conscious.
If it was, then you'd have the definition of these words, but you can't even access it when asked, right?
So the point is, we speak, and it is, we flow through, if we speak well, we flow through the act of speaking, and we are not doing it.
We are not, you know, adding word after word consciously.
It's just happening.
That is a unconscious or subconscious phenomenon.
And so, You don't want to cede that story is unconscious, you said, I think.
I think the point is story because it comes in... No, novel.
I didn't want to cede novelty to the purely analytical realm.
Story reveals novelty.
Story reveals novelty.
Story comes in I don't want to say inherently, because you could tell a story that had no words in it.
You could tell a visual story.
As you point out, your frogs are telling you a story as they're behaving in front of you and you're deducing.
Actually, who wrote Lord of the Flies?
Gold... Gold... Golding?
Golding.
William Golding.
He wrote another book called The Inheritors, which is about Neanderthals meeting homo sapiens.
That is, if I remember correctly, we actually read this in a program I taught with a linguist.
She had us read this, the whole class.
I believe it's done... I mean, obviously it's a book, so it's done entirely in words, but it's done entirely without language of any of the characters.
But it's coming in, I would argue, it's coming into your conscious mind, having been reported.
And the point is, what's coming in, if it works correctly, you know, it becomes unconscious very quickly.
Yes.
Right.
You take it in at a deeper level.
So anyway, all that said, The reason that I said intuition and you bridled because because you you see me as being very analytical and you were talking about story and my the point I wanted to make is that that when life is normal and not novel
And you are flowing your way through it, right?
Where your emotions are telling you, you know, they're guiding you so that you, you know, the same way a tennis player glides across the court knows where to be, right?
That intuitive way of moving through life is really you're moving through the narrative of your own life.
You are living that story.
And so intuition has a very close relationship to me to story and that's not, you know.
When we read a story about somebody else, we're running it through an empathy mechanism.
I think what will happen next is a kind of trajectory, and maybe this.
Story is trajectory.
Story is a through line, a movement, right?
Narrative inherently isn't a point, whereas analysis can be a point.
You should be able to point to numbers Analytics, conclusions, and story waves in and out.
Yep.
And intuition refers to something that you think will happen.
Right.
And as you flow through that story of your own life, your story is different than all the other stories, not only because you perceive it directly, but because it's synchronous.
Yes, you live the instant of now, whereas you pick up a book at will and make progress through the next chapter.
That's an interesting distinction.
But anyway, here I am analyzing these things exactly as you said that I would.
Well, yeah, I mean, so I'll, I think it's, I think it's just fascinating.
And I think I love that there's at least one other person out there thinking about, you know, the science of story about.
About, you know, what he's called the new science of narrative intelligence.
That precisely in this moment when we have had the actual, legitimate, honorable, and important values of the enlightenment around rationality and analysis captured and co-opted and being paraded in the streets as if they haven't been and being used in combination with fear to coerce a bunch of people to do things that aren't good for them.
There is a movement against the enlightenment, which I think is wrong, right?
But also the tools of the enlightenment were never going to be sufficient.
They are not sufficient.
They are a means to an end.
They are necessary, but they are not sufficient.
Yeah.
And what is being passed off as science is not science.
What is being passed off as rationality analysis and such is not.
But we need both of these kinds of modes, what I've talked about, oscillating between these kinds of modes.
And we've got at least two separate big problems.
Right.
Um, the stuff that is being passed off over here as analysis and science and rigor isn't.
It's captured corporate control very often.
And we need, we need more than that when it's actually functioning.
That's not functioning.
And if it were, it wouldn't be enough.
All right.
Try this on for size.
Enlightenment values, including scientific rigorous thinking.
Is a means to an end.
The end is a high quality life.
I would argue that high quality life more or less means a life full of meaning, beauty, insight.
It is a life well lived.
When science gets captured by the people who apparently are not morally constrained, because that turns out to be a very clarifying assumption about why they're behaving the way they are, The cost of believing in science, that is not the process of science, which still works as well as it ever did, but the product of science, right?
When snake oil salesmen are selling you inoculations that actually do you harm while they pretend to do you good, the point is, well, believing in that mechanism is actually the route to a life poorly lived, right?
A life of ill health.
Yes.
At the very least and so not surprising to find people rebelling against the Enlightenment values because they're Really rebelling against the product that is coming out of a bastardization of those Of those values yes, and this is in fact the story that needs to be made clear is that actually the solution to our problem is to recognize
That at the very least market forces have co-opted the enlightenment mechanism and turned it on its head so it's now selling snake oil or something dressed as it is selling snake oil and that the solution to it is actual enlightenment.
Yes.
That's really the only the only path forward which is To escape from our own self-imposed immaturity, which is, I believe, how Kant framed what enlightenment is.
Right.
Which, weirdly, requires us to be very, very conscious in order to get back to a state where we don't need to be nearly so conscious all the time.
Right.
Because it's exhausting and it becomes uncreative.
Yeah.
No, it's an emergency situation and we're all analytical because the peril is great.
And the whole point is, how can we get back to a non-emergency?
That's the place where you can actually live a life.
Exactly.
Well, I feel like we're going to save the 21st anniversary of the 50th, no, the 50th It's the 50th anniversary of the 21st anniversary.
Of course, obviously.
And they did it on 21st because it was coming of age.
It could drink finally.
The double helix could finally drink.
But it's still going to be 2024 next week.
Oh yeah, I'm expecting it to be anyway.
I mean, I don't know, a lot of surprising stuff has happened.
That's true.
The space-time continuum does look like it might become a discontinuum.
Yes.
Oh gosh.
Yeah.
I haven't even stopped to worry about that one yet.
Yeah, and actually that might give me time because, um, do you know that I, and therefore we, are paying $30 a month to access nature?
And... Man, I'm just going outside.
One time in two, I'd say that I try to get Nature articles, which I tried to get several of them today.
Actually, today it was four times in five.
It's like, you're going to need to subscribe.
It doesn't think $360 a year is sufficient.
Anyway, maybe by pulling that off until next week, I will have time to get customer service, which I've railed out over email already to let me into the subscription that we actually pay for.
Customer service of nature suggests a great skit that somebody should write.
Yeah, um, and we'll have an audience of perhaps two, but I would watch.
Actual nature.
Oh, customer, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, you call it after you've gotten a bee sting or something like that.
Indeed.
All right, um, do we have any, um, any merch to show this week?
No, we do not.
I'm getting a look from our awesome producer who graduated from high school two years ago, but not this last weekend.
He says no.
So, we do have great merchandise at our store, though.
DarkHorseStore.org, I believe, is the URL, which somehow I never know.
This is just my repeated failure.
Check us out on Locals.
Go to Natural Selections.
Brett's got great conversations at Patreon.
We've got all this good stuff, but most of all, Find all of those links at our website, which is darkhorsepodcast.org.
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