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Jan. 21, 2016 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:12:00
2016 Personality Lecture 04: Piaget Constructivism
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Okay.
So we're going to talk about Piaget today.
And as I believe I mentioned to you before, Piaget was perhaps the 20th century's foremost developmental psychologist.
He didn't really regard himself as a psychologist, however.
In fact, a lot of the people who've been great psychologists have come in from outside the field.
It's often engineers, for example.
Engineers have helped us establish most of our statistics.
Anyways, Piaget, I suppose, would have regarded himself more as a biologist.
He called himself a genetic epistemologist, and by genetic he didn't mean the genes that organize your cells and spin you up out of nothing.
He meant beginnings.
As in Genesis.
And then an epistemologist was someone who was interested in how structures of knowledge emerge and how they're constituted.
So he actually thought of himself as a biological philosopher.
Now, you know, one of the things that's kind of sad about learning about Great theories is that you hardly ever learn about how peculiar the people who formulate them are, because generally they're extraordinarily interesting people, you know, and in some ways that often—they get sanitized in some way once they've become respectable, and that's really quite unfortunate.
Piaget was really a genius.
He was offered A position at a large museum, and if I remember correctly, perhaps it wasn't director, but it was a position of approximately that stature.
He was offered that when he was ten years old.
He'd written a paper on mollusk behavior, which was published, and his parents told the museum people that he, of course they didn't know he was ten, You know, that he probably wasn't up for the job at that time.
But that gives you some example, some idea about the magnitude of his intellect.
And Piaget wrote a lot, and you know, usually what you hear about if you study Piaget in North America, if you hear about Piaget, you hear about his stages of development, his sensory motor, etc.
That really wasn't what Piaget was all that interested in.
There was something about the idea of countable stages that seemed to appeal to North American developmental psychologists, but Piaget didn't really regard that necessarily as either the central or the most important part of his theoretical edifice.
And, you know, part of what Piaget has been criticized for in recent years is that the stages don't necessarily occur either as he described or in the order that he described, but In some ways he wouldn't have found that particularly distressing, because it was more of an attempt to explain how the personality emerged out of nothing in some ways.
Because in some ways you kind of emerge out of nothing, you know, and it's not that easy to figure out.
For Piaget, in some ways you sort of boot it up, although he wouldn't have used that metaphor, obviously, having existed in the time before that was a commonly known phenomenon.
He also was concerned about high-level metaphysical problems, and so one of the things that really motivated Piaget was the contradiction between science and religion.
That was very painful for him, and one of the things that he had set out to do as a young man was to bridge the gap between science and religion, and in some ways you might think about that in relationship to the sorts of things we talked about last class, is that He was attempting to bridge the gap between a description of the world and a proscriptive description of the world, which means what the world is and how the world should be or what the world is and how you should act.
I think that's the most straightforward way of thinking about the division between religion and science, because you need to know how to act.
You can think about it as a division between morality and science, or you can think about it as a division between behavioral wisdom and science, which I think is even a better way of thinking about it, because it takes the specifically religious element out of it.
But anyways, Piaget wanted to devote his life to solving that problem, and I would say that's what he did.
He also identified an interesting stage that you also hear very little about, but seems to be something worthy of note and also worthy of consideration.
He thought that many people in their late adolescence went through a messianic stage, And what he meant by that was that when late adolescents or young adults were trying to orient themselves in the world, they were trying to figure out how they might plot their path forward in life so that they actually made a difference, you know?
So they started to become concerned about the state of the world and about their role in Determining that state and getting interested in and perhaps involved in large-scale political or social movements.
And he was the only psychologist that I've ever seen who actually identified that as a stage.
But it's worth thinking about, you know, because it certainly is the case that many young people do pass through a stage that's something like that, and it's interesting to speculate on it as a standard part of human development.
Now, I think it's probably more characteristic of people with certain personality types, so I suspect if you're more extroverted and you're more open, particularly more open, which is the creativity dimension in the big five, that you're more likely to be politically and socially compelled.
You know, so we know, for example, that openness is a very good predictor of things like political liberalism and, you know, certainly a lot of the The millennial movements and the religious-like movements that you see on campus that have what would arguably now be a political base seem to be associated with high openness.
So maybe that stage doesn't occur in everyone's life, but it certainly seems to occur in many people's lives.
Now, you might ask yourself, well, what was Piaget up to?
Well, he wanted to figure out a lot of things, and he was interested in very, very fundamental issues.
So, for example, his theories dealt with things like number and space, You probably can't see that very well.
It doesn't matter.
I'll tell you what it says.
Time and speed.
Permanent objects.
How did a person develop the notion of what constituted a permanent object?
How do you know when one thing is the same when it changes into something different?
So for example, if you pour one bit of liquid from one container into another, how do you know that the amount of liquid is the same?
How do children develop their ideas of chance and causality?
How do they develop their concerns about morality and their moral knowledge?
What are they doing when they're playing?
And I think actually Piaget's most fundamental contribution, as far as I'm concerned, came in his studies and analysis of play and also, to some degree, his analysis of dreams.
And he also spent a lot of time giving serious consideration to the role that imitation played in The scaffolding of the human personality.
And so, some of the… so… Piaget believed that… well I think this is the easiest way to talk about it actually.
We'll use this little diagram here.
So I'll shut this light off.
There.
It took me a long time to construct this diagram, so not because it's all that technically difficult, but it took a while to think it up.
So I want to give you a little bit of a background to it.
So imagine that One of the things that distinguishes a human being from a computational device, say, or at least the standard sort of computational device, is that our primary cognitive problem is how to perceive the world so that we can act in it, so that we can get what we need to have or want.
Okay, so all three of those things are roughly of equivalent importance, right?
You have to be able to perceive, and you have to be able to act, because if you can't act then you can't get what you need, and if you can't get what you need then of course there isn't any you.
We're trying to always solve those problems simultaneously, and we're also trying to do it in a way that's sustainable.
Now, what that means in part is that the knowledge structures of human beings are organized or they're organized along those three dimensions, and those three dimensions also constitute the problem space in some sense that has to be addressed for a solution to be useful.
Not only do you have to be able to perceive in some accurate manner, but the accuracy is determined in part in terms of whether or not the way that you're perceiving helps you pursue something that you want to pursue, and then the utility of wanting to pursue something is dependent to some degree on the relationship between the utility of that and the things that you need to continue to survive.
Now, some psychologists have addressed that by thinking about such things as fundamental drives.
You know, and that was mostly a behavioral idea in some ways, and a drive might be hunger.
And the idea of a drive would be that hunger is a motivator that helps you put together strings of motor behaviors that are sort of run out in automatic sequence so that you can get the end that you want and continue on, perhaps, to fulfill another drive.
But the idea of drive is a little bit on the oversimplified side, although it has its place.
I think that you can Conceptualize the relationship between all of these by thinking in the following manner.
So, imagine first of all that people are after something, generally speaking.
Now, if you look at us you can kind of tell that we're the sorts of creatures that are after things, and the way that you can tell that is first of all that we can move and do so frequently.
So we're always on a voyage of some sort or a journey of some sort from point one to point two or from point A to point B. I would say as well that that's also the hallmark of a simple story.
If you're telling someone a story, generally what you do is you tell them about a time that you were somewhere and then you did some things and you went somewhere else.
It's a very, very simple story.
Now, the advantage of thinking about it as a story is that it helps you understand that the entire cognitive structure Can't be reduced to necessarily anything that's, for example, that's drive-like.
You have to think about it as more personality-like.
And so you want something.
You orient yourself towards it.
Now, the way you do that, generally speaking, is with your sensory and your conceptual systems, right?
So, for example, if you want to walk towards the door, then you turn your head, and you make yourself a model of the door, and that model has to be bounded by its relevance to your actions.
So, you know, the things that are going to be relevant to you about the door, for example, might be whether or not it's tall enough for you to walk through, or whether or not the door is open or closed, so that you can As you're walking towards it, you can organize your body so that you can interact with the object as you see fit.
You pick your goals for all sorts of different reasons, and some of those reasons are more fundamental than others.
So for example, fundamental.
By fundamental I would mean, likely what I mean by fundamental is something like evolutionarily ancient.
You know, so the older the necessity, or the older the system that's evolved to To allow you to pursue the necessity, the more fundamental it is.
There's ways of identifying what constitutes the fundamental elements of goal-seeking behavior, and you can do that in part by comparing yourself to other animals.
And so mammals, for example, all seem to experience something that you might regard as anger, or at least defensive aggression.
They're all hungry.
They all act as if they're They highly value sexual behavior and so forth, and so you can't really think of those things as specifically human.
They're lower level than that.
Now, so at a fundamental level you have biological systems that are Setting forth what might constitute a goal, and you can think that what the system is doing is setting the goal, or you can think that the system is driving behavior.
But a better way of thinking about it is that the fundamental motivational system sets up a framework that's like a personality that then acts in the world.
And so this personality has something in mind that it wants, It has a collection of perceptions that organize itself around that thing that it wants, and then it has a plan or associated motor behaviors that it can lay out in the world that will take it from the point where it is to the point that it wants to be.
Okay, now, so once you know that, then you can start to think about these plans or these goals or these stories or these frameworks.
I think those are all—you can even think about them as games in some ways—you can think about them at different levels of complexity.
Now, what Piaget was trying to do, in part, was to describe how a framework of this sort, or a sub-element of personality, might develop itself in complexity over time.
So, the diagram I have here before you shows these little oval-like figures, and in the bottom left-hand corner There's a box that says what is, and in the top right-hand corner there's a box that says what should be, and then there's some arrows showing a planned sequence of behavior.
And the idea is that you have a sense of where you are and you have a sense of where you're going, and that constitutes the framework within which you're looking at the world, and then within that framework there's different things that you can do with your body in order to advance from the first point to the second point.
Now, it's important to understand that this sort of thing is grounded in behavior and not in conception, because it helps you also understand the nature of these fundamental elements of personality.
The fundamental elements of personality are not descriptions of the world.
They're tools for acting in the world, including the associated behaviors.
Now, whether they're behavioral or conceptual to some degree depends on their level of abstraction.
So, here's how to think about that.
So, imagine that you say that someone's a good person.
And you might say, well, that's a description of them.
And when you think about description, you tend to think about description the way that you would describe an object in the world, like a scientific description.
But when you talk about someone as a good person, you're actually not describing them as an object in the world.
You wouldn't even describe yourself as an object in the world that way.
What you're doing is using a shorthand to represent The hierarchical arrangement of their personality.
And you can get away with it because when you say good person to someone they already have an understanding of good person and they know what that hierarchy is and so you don't have to explain the whole thing to them.
And you can understand each other without even necessarily knowing exactly the details of what you're talking about.
But I'm going to tell you now what I think you mean when you say that sort of thing.
So imagine that A good person is a description at the top end of a hierarchy, okay, because the good is a very high-level philosophical abstraction.
It's a high-level value.
Be good.
Okay, so what does that mean if you decompose it?
Well, we'll do it in a relatively straightforward manner, one that isn't really—it's more observational than philosophical.
So let's say you take someone who's 40-year-old mother, for the sake of argument, and who will say she also has a job.
So if she's a good person and she's a mother, you might think that one sub-element of her personality, if she's a good person, is being a good parent.
Right?
And I think you put person above parent in the hierarchy.
Because to be a good person, you can be a good parent without being a good person, but it's hard to see how you could be a good person without being a good parent.
So, and maybe if you're a good person, you're more than a good parent, you know, you're probably a good partner, and maybe you're good at your job, and like there are large domains of activity That you're good at or good in, and if you sum your behavior across that or average your behavior across that or something like that, then you end up reasonably being described as a good person.
Maybe you're a good friend as well.
And so good person has levels of hierarchy underneath it, and then each of those things that have levels of hierarchy, each of those Entities at the level of hierarchy right underneath good person can also be decomposed.
So we're going to decompose them and we're going to see what happens.
Because partly what happens is if you decompose them, you get right to the bottom.
It's not an infinite decomposition.
And so I also think this is one way that you can think about the relationship between the mind and the body.
Because the relationship between the mind and the body is a very tricky thing, because the mind seems to be made of stuff that's other than the body.
And I think there's some truth to that, partly because we don't really understand consciousness.
But that's a complex problem, and I think you can get a fair ways in addressing the mind-body problem without having to drag in the problem of consciousness.
Okay, so we could say, well, good person, sub-element of that is good parent.
Then you might think, well, what is it that you need to be doing to be a good parent?
And we might say, well, you have to have a good job—maybe that's one up in the hierarchy, but whatever—you have to have a good job because otherwise you can't provide for your children, and you have to be able to care for the children.
You might say, well, someone's good at caring for children.
And then you might ask them, well, what does it mean to be good at caring for children?
And then you have to sort of think of the sub-elements that would go into caring for children.
And so one of them here is, you have to know how to cook a meal, or complete a meal, and then you also have to know how to play with the baby.
So we could concentrate on playing with the baby.
And so what do you do when you're playing with the baby?
You might play peekaboo, you might tickle the baby, and you might clean the baby.
Okay, now you start thinking, well, Obviously, once you're starting to get down to that level of detail—so that's a high-resolution model, right?
You're starting to move from a low-resolution model, good person, to a high-resolution model, which are what are precisely the multitude of elements that make up being a good person.
Well, if you're playing peekaboo with a baby, for example, all of a sudden you're doing something that's not exactly conceptual.
Being a good person is conceptual, but playing peekaboo isn't conceptual, and the reason it's not conceptual is because you actually have to move your hands to do it.
So, if you get to a high enough level of resolution in the description of a personality, what you start describing are patterns of behavior.
Now, they have an associated motivational framework and a viewpoint that goes along with them, so that I would say, well, even while you're playing peekaboo with a baby, The element of you that's playing peekaboo is best described as a subpersonality.
It's a playful subpersonality, and then it's the subpersonality that specifically knows how and is motivated to play peekaboo.
But what it's composed of is no longer a subpersonality.
It's starting to be composed of actual movements So—and then underneath that, if you go to higher resolution, like, okay, what's the movement composed of?
Well, obviously you start to have to talk about musculature, and then if you go below that, it's molecular movements and so on.
But once you're down below voluntary movement, there's really no you there anymore, right?
You sort of fade into unconsciousness, because you know how to go like this, But you don't exactly know how to move the specific muscles that enable you to go like that.
Or even if you do, you don't know how to twitch the muscle fibers or something like that, right?
You don't know how to operate the cells.
There's some level of resolution underneath voluntary motor control that basically runs on automatic, and to some degree you're capable of, like, steering it, but you're certainly not capable of being conscious of it.
So the abstract moral conception, which is also a description, good person, hits the world at the level of motor output.
Even your sensory movement, a lot of that's motor output, right?
Because a lot of what you're doing with your eyes is moving them.
Now, what does that have to do with Piaget?
Well, one of the ways of understanding Piaget is that he was really interested in understanding how that entire system came to be.
And his theory is a bottom-up theory.
He says, okay, yeah, he hasn't said this, but it's a very useful way of thinking about it.
Because Piaget believed that you started with small elements of what he called reflexive behavior, and then you learned to chain them together in increasingly complex structures, and then you chained those complex structures into more and more complex structures, and so on and so forth until you built up the entire hierarchy.
But you tended to start from the bottom.
So Piaget was particularly interested in what the minimum conditions were For something to emerge into the world so that it could build itself out of nothing.
And that's really what he was interested in when he was starting to talk about infant development.
And so Piaget's hypothesis was something like this.
Well, babies are born very, very Immature.
You might even say that they're born premature.
So a human baby, if you took a mammal of about human size and you said, well, what's its average gestation period across the animal kingdom, you'd find out that for an animal of our size we should have a gestation period, a pregnancy period, of two years.
So, we don't.
We have a gestation period of nine months.
And so you might ask, well, why is that?
And the answer is complicated, obviously, but here's some of the reasons as far as people can tell.
We have big heads, and they've really been expanding rapidly, particularly over the last Two million years.
But let's say since we split off from chimps, that's about six million years.
We have very, very large heads.
And you know, if you look at a baby, a baby's head is pretty damn disproportionately large compared to its body.
A baby's like a third head.
And so even when the baby's little, nine months old, well, nine months after conception, And maybe a year and three months before it's supposed to be born, its head is already extremely big.
Now you think, well, what's the problem with that?
And the problem with that is, well, the bigger your head is, the harder it is to be born.
And you might say, well, why haven't the pelvic areas of human beings adjusted, females in particular, adjusted so that they could handle the birth with a larger head?
And the answer to that is, well, they have to some degree, which is why women have wider hips than men do.
But the problem is, Evolution is a conservative business, and it can only, in some sense, tinker with what it's already got.
And so, if you look at the basic Your basic body plan, in its most fundamental levels, was established some tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago.
And then the basic mammalian body plan was established, say, 60 million years ago.
And so, if you go—I went to the Smithsonian once and they have a skeleton museum at the Smithsonian.
It's sort of like a zoo for skeletons.
And it's a really interesting place to go because You can see much more how alike mammals are when you see their skeletons.
So, for example, if you see a bat skeleton, it looks just like a human skeleton except the fingers are really, really long.
But the rest of it's like, yeah, that's basically the same skeleton as a human being.
It's just that the pieces have blown up in size or shrunk or contorted or something like that.
But it's exactly the same damn structure.
So, as the brain was growing and the skull was getting larger, and women's bodies had to adapt to that, well, there were parameters within which the body had to work, and it turns out that if you make the hips any wider and you make the hole in the middle of them any bigger, then the hips start to lose structural integrity.
And the other thing that starts to happen is the woman can't run.
So there's this weird—you imagine that evolution takes place within this set of constraints, and so what's happened is the baby gets born way earlier, the women's hips are wider with a larger pelvic hole, but not so wide they can't run, and not so wide they're not strong, and the baby's head is collapsible, roughly, because the bones aren't completely fused at birth, and so generally, especially if it's a larger baby, if it's born when it It emerges just after birth.
Its head is quite compressed, cone-shaped even.
And that's hard on the baby, but it's not nearly as hard on the baby or the mother as not being born at all.
So anyways, babies are born pretty premature and, you know, that puts a tremendous burden on human parents because, of course, the child can't even walk for the first year, whereas You take a deer, when a deer is born or an animal like that, you know, it's three minutes later it's wobbling around on its feet and then it's running away from lions the next morning.
It's like, that's not us.
You think, why not?
It's, well, we're born very, very premature and very, very vulnerable and, you know, it's a major load on the parents.
Anyways, one question Piaget was interested in is, well, what exactly is a baby born with?
And he thought, well, they're born with a couple of things.
Here's three things, in a sense, you might think.
They're born with a couple of reflexes.
And what you might think of as a reflex is that it's a built-in module of sensory motor capability.
And maybe there's a motivational element to it as well.
So I would say it's a built-in subpersonality.
It's a very narrow subpersonality.
It has a very narrow task.
And so one thing babies can do is root.
So if you touch them on the side of their cheek, then they root, and basically what that means is that they use their mouth and their head To search for something to latch onto with their mouth, and that would generally be a nipple.
So they come pre-wired to be able to use their mouth and their tongue and certain muscles of their head in order to figure out how to feed.
And that's actually a very complicated behavior, and so one of the things you see with babies is that Their mouth and their tongue is quite wired up already.
So if you're looking at a newborn baby, the intelligent part of the baby, in some sense, like the part that's already there, is very much oriented towards its mouth and its tongue.
And that's sort of like Freud's idea of an oral stage in some sense, although, you know, you could debate that.
But that's partly why Freud thought that way.
He knew that babies were very mouth-oriented.
And once they can start using their hands, And they can pick up objects, what do they do with objects?
They put them in their mouth, right?
Why?
Well, because that's what babies do, partly, but that's not the only reason.
It's like, if you look at the—okay, so back in the 50s, 40s?
Maybe even earlier than that.
There was a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield who worked at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and he was one of the people who first did surgery, for example, for epilepsy.
So if you have epilepsy, what happens is generally you kind of have a short circuit.
There's a malfunctioning set of neurons, usually in the hippocampus, and they produce like a positive feedback electrical circuit, and it's like a little electrical storm, and it'll start in damaged tissue and then spread across the whole brain.
And one of the things the early neurosurgeons were doing was dividing the brain in two to stop the hemisphere that had the damage from being able to spread pathological electricity across the entire brain.
Now, when you're doing brain surgery, you don't want to take out anything that isn't absolutely necessary.
And so one of the things the brain surgeons do and still do—did and still do—is that they do brain surgery when you're conscious.
Which is quite a horrifying thought, really, because, you know, your head is stuck in this little machine that doesn't let it move, and then they're poking around in your brain, and you have to tell them what's going on while you're doing it.
And if you stop being able to respond, then I presume they assume that they've made a mistake, and, you know, tough luck for you.
But anyways, Penfield was interested not only in, you know, conducting his surgery properly but also in mapping out the brain to figure out, well, what parts of it could you use and, you know, what do you have to keep and what parts can you maybe get rid of?
And part of that was because there was an idea for a long time among neurologists called equal potentiality, which meant that The cortex was an undifferentiated mass of tissue and you could take out parts of it without really much loss of function at all, which that turned out not to be exactly right,
although it wasn't as stupid as an idea as it might seem, because the cortex is less differentiated than other parts of the brain, but it turns out that if you take out parts of it like the prefrontal cortex The damage that it does is not immediately evident, but if you watch the person for any length of time, well, usually their lives fall apart if their prefrontal cortex is being damaged enough.
Anyway, so Penfield was trying to figure out what the brain does, and so he was using electrodes to touch the surface, and what he found If you imagine that this is the frontal part of your brain here, and it's called that because it's at the front, right?
And so the back part of it has to do more with sensory processing, and then there's a fissure down the middle.
And on the front side of the fissure, there's an area that's roughly triangle-shaped.
On the back of the fissure, there's another area that's roughly triangle-shaped.
And the front part, if you touch it with an electrode, like of the right current, obviously, then people will report feeling something on different parts of their body.
And then if you touch the part that's behind the fissure, so roughly about here, then they'll be inclined to move or feel the impulse to move.
And so what Penfield did was draw a little map of what parts of the brain were connected to what sensory sensations in the body and what parts of the brain were connected to what motor sensations.
And he built this thing called a homunculus.
It's a little picture, and the picture is of this creature that's laid out on the cortex.
It's sort of like a dismembered body in some sense.
And the size of each part corresponds to the amount of tissue that's devoted to processing that brain or that bodily area.
And what you see is very, very interesting, because if you look, there's a sensory homunculus—that's how your body looks to your brain from a sensory perspective—and there's a motor homunculus, which is how your body looks to your brain from the perspective of being able to operate it.
What you see, for example, is with both the sensory and the motor cortex, the hand The thumb is as big as the whole body, and the thumb is as big as the rest of the hand.
And then the mouth and the tongue are also that big, and so is the face.
So you've got this little itty-bitty body, because what are you going to do with your back, you know?
You can't pick up anything with your back, and you're also not very good really.
Your sensory perception on your back is not very high resolution.
So if I had one of you stand up, and I put three fingers on your back this far apart, and I said how many fingers were there, you wouldn't be able to tell.
You'd say one, probably.
But you can't tell, even if you space them out quite a bit, if you push simultaneously, whereas on the surface of the hand you can tell immediately because this is a high resolution part of your body.
And of course, you know, You can really move your little tentacle appendages here, and they're highly wired up to the brain as well, and very, very sensitive.
But the reason I told you all that, because it's also particularly true with the mouth, and the lips, and the tongue, and then also the entire face.
That's because your face is extraordinarily mobile, and, you know, you broadcast emotion with it.
So, it's a communication device of the highest order, and so it has to be really wired up.
You have so much neural control over your face that you can actually teach yourself to fire single neurons in the tissue underneath your eye.
So, which you certainly are not going to be able to do with your back, and then of course, well, why would you anyways?
So, I'm telling you that in part so that you get some more understanding of how the child is wired up, because that mouth, tongue, lip sort of arrangement that the baby is born with is a very, very powerful learning circuit, and it's established quite nicely right at birth.
And so then the baby can start exploring the world Using parts of it that are already there, and a big chunk of that is the mouth.
And you know how this works.
Some of you Have recently had dental surgery of one form or another, or at least you can remember when you had it.
Maybe you had a tooth pulled or a filling or you had braces put in or something.
So one of the things you'll notice if you lose a tooth is that your damn tongue is in there where the tooth was for the next six months, fiddling around.
And you can do it consciously, which you will sometimes, but even if you're not attending to it, your tongue will be in there checking out every tiny little crack and crevice in the new area, and what it's doing is updating the map of your body, because your mouth wants to know what part of it's you and what part of it isn't, because first of all you're not supposed to chew the parts that are you, and second of all, if there's any foreign body in the mouth, obviously you want to get that out of there for endless numbers of reasons.
You can detect surface variation with your lips and tongue with tremendous accuracy, and of course, you know, there's all sorts of uses that people put that ability to.
It's also one of the ways that people test each other out for sexual compatibility, right?
Because that's all mouth and tongue work, not all of it, obviously, but at least some reasonable proportion of it, and so that's also a part of exploratory behavior.
So you're testing for things like health with kissing and with smell.
So, anyways, it's a major part of you, you know, and not only is it a part that you That you explore the world with so that you can figure out what to eat and what not to eat, which is a big problem for omnivores, right, because we can eat damn near anything, and that's a complex cognitive problem.
But you also can use it as a tool for exploring the contours of the world.
Now, animals really do that with smell, right, because your typical animal is a smell-based creature, whereas human beings aren't really so much that, probably because we became upright and for a bunch of other reasons.
Smell is a tremendously powerful modality, and it's pretty much fully there at birth as well.
And, you know, mothers report that they can distinguish their baby by smell virtually, you know, a day or two after they're born.
They know the smell.
And babies can certainly smell their mothers and their fathers as well.
It doesn't take very long at all.
So anyways, the baby's got its mouth, and so it can start getting somewhere with that.
And then it's also got basic reflexes, you know, and now what a baby does in some sense is it starts developing from the middle and the top Downward and outward.
So, the mouth and the nose are all wired up.
The eyes start to get wired up fairly quickly.
They're not much to begin with, because a baby will move its eyes independently.
And it's not very good at focusing, although its natural focal length is pretty much exactly the distance from breast to mother's eye.
Which makes perfect sense, right?
Because the baby wants to be able to communicate extraordinarily well to produce a bond with the mother, and that happens most frequently with During breastfeeding, which is also extremely good for the baby because the baby gets touched and babies really, really, really, really need to be touched.
If you don't touch them, they die.
So even if you feed them and shelter them and all those sorts of things, they have to be touched and it's very good for the baby's development.
So, anyways, the baby starts out with its ability to explore with its mouth and its tongue and its ability to smell, and then it starts to develop its eyes, but it does that in concert with developing other parts of its body.
You know, and so the baby, if you put the baby on its stomach, then it starts to exercise its ability to lift up its head, and so it kind of gets that going, and It starts to learn how to use its arms and its legs, and so one thing you can do for a baby, for example, to help it get going, so let's say the baby's in its crib, and it's laying face upward, okay, you can give it a mobile.
Now if you go into a baby store and you look at mobiles, what you'll see is maybe the top part is like two coat hangers, right, it's like a cross, and then there's things hanging from it.
And the things will be, I don't know, maybe they're cute.
Who knows?
Hello Kitty things or some damn thing like that.
And they're facing you.
Well, that's a stupid mobile.
Because you aren't the person who's supposed to be looking at the Hello Kitty things.
The baby's supposed to be looking at it, so those should be facing down.
And they never are.
They're always facing sideways, so when the baby looks up, all it sees is a bunch of horizontal lines.
So let's assume that you're reasonably bright, and you get one that the baby can see, and then maybe it should be black and white, or at least really Really bright primary colors because it's easier for a baby to detect that.
Black and white's really good because baby's pretty good at detecting edges, and so that thing will move around.
The baby will lay there and watch it, you know, and babies, I think, they kind of look like they're stoned on LSD all the time, you know, and I actually think that's technically correct because one of the things that hallucinogens do is reduce the inhibiting power of memory on perception, and of course babies have no Inhibiting power of memory on perception, because they have no memory, so they're pretty much, you know, completely overwhelmed by the world all the time.
So they're laying there, watching this mobile, and you know, you can shake it, and maybe they'll have a little reflex at that, or you can interact with it in some way, and the baby will start checking that out, and it'll watch it, and watch it, and watch it, and it'll watch, partly so that it can get its eyes organized, and it does that in concert to some degree with its motor ability, you know, because you might say, Imagine you're cross-eyed a little bit, like a baby, and you're looking at that thing, and there's two of them.
And you might think, well, how do you know there's not two of them?
And the answer to that is, well, you have to whack it with your hand.
As soon as you whack it with your hand, you're going to find out if it's one thing or two things, once you figure out whether that's one arm or two arms, you know?
And so the baby is starting to whack itself against the world and watch the consequences to help it start to build up its ability to interact with the world and its ability to model the world.
And so one of the things you'll watch, for example, if you put a baby In a crib and it's got a mobile there, you want to kind of move the mobile down so that it's close enough so that the baby might be able to bump it.
Because babies, if you don't swaddle them, they lay there and their hands and legs sort of float in space like this.
And it's because they're not really very well connected to them, and that's why a baby will poke itself in the eye now and then with its thumb, and it's rather amusing to watch in a kind of bleak manner.
So, a baby will lay there and it'll poke itself and it'll go like that, and what it's just discovered is that there's some relationship between that random movement and that sensation.
Okay, now, okay, so let's say it's laying there and it's floating around in space, and it's fortunate enough so that its leg comes into contact with an element of the mobile.
Well, that'll make the mobile do something interesting and novel.
And when the mobile does something interesting and novel, that triggers a reflex in the baby, and the reflex is that the baby will orient towards it and look.
And so for Piaget, that was the circuit that was the beginning of the baby's ability to sort of start bootstrapping it up in the world.
And he thought what you needed was the ability to move, a little bit at least, so that'd be the reflex, say, or even randomness, and then you needed the ability to refine that movement So that you needed to be able to practice it, and you needed to be able to improve with practice, and you needed to be able to imitate.
And one of the things that Piaget thought, which I think is so smart, is that a lot of what babies did was imitate themselves.
So, for example, maybe they're laying in bed and they're starting to get some sense of the connection between—of how their arms and legs work, and so they can maybe start to make sort of broad gestures and that's it.
But now and then they're lucky and they're sort of flinging their arms around and they hit the mobile and they get a little Reflex out of that that's a startle and an indication of interest, and then they'll sit there and practice how to whack that thing with their hand.
And so what they're doing is they kind of accidentally produced a phenomena of interest, and they noted the consequence, and then what they do is try to reduplicate the phenomena of interest.
So basically what they're doing is manifesting different patterns of quasi-voluntarily reflex Quasi-voluntary reflexive behavior, and then if that produces something of note, they'll practice imitating it.
So, when my daughter was about eighteen months, maybe not even that old, Thirteen, fourteen months, maybe.
Old enough to sit up, anyways, and old enough to start to do some things by herself.
We bought her these books.
They were Disney books, hardcover, cardboard books, you know, five pages long or something.
Each of the pages was quite thick because it was made out of cardboard, and four of them would come in a little box, which is about four inches high and about an inch and a half wide.
And if you were really careful, you could take out the books And then you could put all of them back in.
It wasn't that easy, because the first one wasn't too hard, but they got, you know, consistently more difficult as you kept putting each of them in because the parameters of the exercise changed.
And she must have spent, I don't know, 150 hours dumping those out, picking them up, putting them in.
And you might say, well, what was she doing?
And, you know, you'd say, well, she was putting books in a box.
That's not what she was doing.
First of all, they weren't books to her, and it wasn't a box, because she didn't know what a box was.
What she was doing was practicing, going like this, you know, and matching the size of something to the size of something else.
And that's very complicated, and maybe, you know, So there's a jar of apple juice.
Okay, so you might say, well, pick that up.
Okay, well, you can pick it up like this.
You can pick it up like this.
Like, there's a lot of things to practice, and each of those movements is a different...
Sensory motor capacity that has an incredibly wide range of potential applications.
So a child will sit there and fiddle about with their hands and their arms and the rest of their body for untold hours because what they're doing is building up these basic sensory motor systems from the bottom up so that they can, you know, so they practice them in one domain where there's some challenge, and then they're starting to build new exploratory tools that they can go out and Practice on the rest of the world.
So, you know, once you can grip, let's say, once you can grip mobile, and you can let go, which is something babies actually have a hard time doing, because they have a grip reflex, and they're quite strong when they're first born.
Put your fingers in their hands, you can lift them right off the ground.
They'll cling to you, and that's probably old chimpanzee gripping behavior, because chimps grab to their mother's fur, and then they're like carrying around like that for about three years.
Now, since you don't have much fur, it's kind of useless for the baby, although they're pretty good at getting your hair, and your glasses, and your nose, and so, and you've got to get them to let go.
So anyways, they'll sit there and practice all these little subroutines, and so you'll see this too if you have a baby You've got your baby in the high chair, maybe it's nine months old, and you're trying to feed the baby, which is often very challenging because babies are very curious and annoying and troublesome and tough and ornery and exploratory and misbehaving and provocative and all those things because they need that to learn about the world.
And they'll do something, like maybe they'll eat and they'll Drop the spoon, and a mess will go on the floor.
And they think, well, gravity, that's interesting.
So then you'll give them their spoon again, and the first thing they'll do is take their food and fling it on the floor.
And then they'll do that lots, because they're kind of interested in this whole Twisting the spoon and having things fall on the floor phenomena.
And so it's part of the reason why it's often hard to feed babies is because even if they're hungry you feed them three things and then they're not starving and then they're so hyper-curious that they're gonna, you know, try to do something else.
So, but what they're doing is they're continually Utilizing their basic reflexive behavior and building more and more complex structures up on the basis of that and with each time they do that it opens up a new toolbox for them and they, you know, expand outward and start to interact with the world.
And so that's one way also of understanding where a baby's personality comes from.
Now this is complicated because There are things about babies that are sort of… their parameters of personality are somewhat determined at birth.
So I'll tell you how I've conceptualized this.
It's how you might conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture.
I don't know if this is a good metaphor or not.
It's not the most elegant metaphor in the world, but it's worked for me.
Imagine, for example, that a baby at three months of age can be a calm baby or a nervous baby.
Now, that is the case.
We know that.
Even right at birth, you can kind of figure out whether a baby is a calm baby or a nervous baby.
That's neuroticism.
That's the fundamental dimension of negative emotion.
So you might say that One baby's nervous behavior might have this range, and another baby's nervous behavior might have this range, and another baby's nervous behavior might have this range.
And most of the time it's sort of in the middle of that range, and now and then it'll manifest behaviors that are associated with what's extreme for it.
So even if you have a calm baby, sometimes it'll get upset, and even if you have a baby that's always upset, sometimes it will be calm.
So then you might ask yourself, well, To what degree can you modulate the baby's nervous behavior?
So let's say you want to have a more calm baby, and so you're going to do some things to make that baby calm.
The question is, how much transformation can you make?
And the answer to that, to some degree, is it depends on how much effort you make.
So, changes that are close to the average of the baby's natural curve of responses are fairly easy to make.
So you can shift the baby a little bit towards being more calm without too much work.
But if you want to shift it more towards being calm, then that's going to take more work, and if you're going to shift it more to be calm, that's going to take more work, and it's not linear.
So what happens is at some point you kind of reach a practical limit.
You're not going to make your baby more calm than, you know, maybe you could move it one standard deviation or two standard deviations from its natural Resting place when it first emerged as a creature, but if you're going to move it three standard deviations, like from the 5th percentile to the 95th percentile, you're not going to be doing anything else with the baby.
So you can sort of conceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture As a cost relationship.
So, for example, IQ is quite stable.
You can move IQ, but it's really expensive.
So there's a practical limit to it.
So I think if you take twins that are adopted out at birth, In order to get a 15-point difference in IQ between the twins by the time they become adult, one twin has to be at the 95th percentile for wealth in their family, and the other twin has to be at the 5th percentile for wealth.
That's a massive difference, right?
It's huge, and so, it's such a big difference, you're not going to produce that with any degree of ease in the real world.
But, so, environmental transformations of biological parameters cost.
That's a very useful way of thinking about it.
Back to the baby.
Now, the baby is starting to organize itself from the bottom up, and so here's kind of a way to think about how that works.
Piaget pointed out that—and this is quite well known in the developmental literature—that babies that are younger than three don't really play well with others.
And it's complicated because they can play some things with others.
So, for example, you can play peek-a-boo quite well with a nine-month-old.
You know, so there's some sorts of simple games that babies can play with you pretty much as soon as they get their eyes focused.
And one of the funny things about babies when they're very young, even below nine months, is that they already have a sense of humor, which is something I've never been able to figure out.
So they can play little comical games with you As soon as you're smart enough to figure out what the baby's up to, roughly speaking, as they appreciate humor absurdly early, and it's very difficult to understand why.
Anyways, it doesn't matter.
The Piagetian idea was, in some sense, that what the baby does to begin with is first plays games with itself, so it's exploring, you know, and then it produces some phenomena of interest, and then it replicates that until it masters it, and then, you know, it just keeps doing that, and it gets to be more and more and more complex, and then by the time it's about three, It's complex enough so that all of its little micro-systems are kind of integrated into one thing.
You know, so it's got a set of routines for being hungry, it's got a set of routines for being anxious, it's got a set of routines for being exploratory, it's got a set of routines for seeking attention from its parent, and so on, and then it's starting to build some overarching unity among all of those micro-processes so that It can segue smoothly between them.
And you can really see this starting to happen at two because, you know, you've heard of the terrible twos, and what happens in the terrible twos is that the child's still fairly unintegrated.
And so they'll go—they're quite a riot to be around because they're staggeringly emotional, you know.
They'll go from Giddy beyond belief to crying outrageously, to so angry that if you ever saw an adult that angry, you would immediately run away and call the police.
And they can do that like in fifteen minutes.
They just cycle through these things very, very rapidly.
And weirdly enough, Adults will notice behaviors or they'll see behaviors in children that would be absolutely outrageous in adults and they don't even really...
It doesn't phase them at all.
It shows you how well adapted we are to children.
Because, you know, a child who's having a tantrum, if the child's good at it, You know, they'll fling themselves onto the floor, which you rarely see an adult do, and then they'll pound and kick and scream, and then if they're really good at it, and some of them get really amazingly good at it, they'll hold their breath until they turn blue and pass out.
It's like, try that one night when you're, you know, when you don't have anything to do and the power's off, you know?
Just see if you can kick and scream on the floor for a while, and then hold your breath till you turn blue and pass out.
You can't.
And that just shows you how, you know, committed to the tantrum a child can be.
So it's easy to stop that sort of behavior, by the way.
So if your child throws a tantrum and says, home, just go away.
And then eventually the child will turn blue and, you know, pass out, then they'll come too, and there isn't anyone there, and that's not really an exciting outcome.
So if you do that two or three times, the child usually figures out that it's really not worth the hassle.
If you want the child to continue, wait until they turn blue and pass out, and then really freak out, especially if you could do that randomly a few times, man, you'll get that child just having tantrums, turning blue, and passing out pretty much everywhere.
Yeah, so don't do that.
That's a bad idea.
All right.
Now, so the Piagetian idea, in some sense, is the child builds up these little reflexes, and these little—we'll call them sub-personalities, because it's a better way of thinking about it—and it starts to build them around—modern psychologists would think more that it starts to build them around motivational systems.
Piaget wouldn't have necessarily said that.
And then, at some point, the child starts to enter the social world.
Now, it's simple in some ways to think of the child before three as not social and then the child after three as social.
But it's not really accurate, right?
Because if you think about it, The child is being social right from the beginning of its development, because first of all it has to figure out, for example, how to feed.
Even if it's not being breastfed, it has to figure out how to participate in a playful and social manner around feeding, and that's particularly the case if the child has to breastfeed, because breastfeeding is a very complex Process.
First of all, you have to get the mother to cooperate, and you can't bite her, for example.
And so there's all sorts of rules about breastfeeding that the baby has to follow.
And so the baby's actually entering into fairly complex social relationships and games right from the beginning, and that's especially true if it also has siblings.
Because, you know, if you have a baby and maybe you have a two-year-old, the two-year-old and the baby are playing right off the bat.
And two-year-olds are amazingly good at playing with newborns.
It's quite staggering to watch them, and so if you're thinking about having children, I also recommend not just having one, because one child is way more work than three.
Because you have to amuse one child all the time, whereas if you have three, you can ignore them completely and they'll just raise each other.
It's actually much better for the children, you know, as long as you're there not to make sure they don't light each other on fire and that sort of thing, which is basically your job.
So okay, but we'll act for the time being as if the child isn't social till three, because that's a simplification, but it's a useful one.
So Piaget was also extremely interested in how the child became social.
And I think, apart from His ideas about, you know, the self-generation of the baby from the bottom upward using its own reflexes and its own capacity to explore.
The other thing that Piaget was extraordinarily good at laying out and remarkable at discovering was the role of games.
And so Piaget was the first psychologist, I would say, Who discovered just how important it is to have kids play.
Now the problem with play is that it's fun, and so utilitarian people, especially ones that are really conscientious, have this idea that if it's fun it can't really be good for you.
And so, because of that, the role of play in children was not, and still isn't, appreciated in the full dimensions of its importance.
So, for example, You know, we take little kids that are in grade one, they're like six, you know, and what do we do with them?
We put them in chairs like the ones you're in.
You've been in that damn chair for like sixteen years, you know?
It's like we take those little characters and we put them in chairs and we expect them to sit there and listen to adults for six hours a day.
Well, it's so idiotic that it It's beyond comprehension.
It's no wonder the little blighters are hyperactive, you know.
That just means they're alive.
They should be taken out into the schoolyard and supervised while playing until they're completely exhausted, then they should have a little nap, then maybe you could teach them something for a while.
Stopping them from playing, or not facilitating play among them, is absolutely crazy, because that's exactly how children come to become social in the world.
And the reason for that is that the games children play are analogs of the activities that adults engage in.
Well, it's not that hard to figure that out if you think about it.
I mean, think about playing Monopoly.
You're a teenager, you play Monopoly.
How many people have played Monopoly?
Great.
Everybody's played Monopoly.
Well, what are you doing?
It's like evil capitalist pig game, right?
So, you know, if you're going to grow up to be an evil capitalist pig, then you can get a good practice going by playing Monopoly, and you can become part of the one percent, which is what you have to do to win, right?
You need to have all the hotels, and so no one else has any hotels, and, you know, you play that, and it's fun.
It's an analog of real life.
Now, it's an analog of real life in many ways because most of the things that you do with other people involve adhering to a set of shared rules, and most of the things that you do with other people involve cooperating and competing with them.
So if you're playing Monopoly, are you cooperating or competing?
How many people think competing?
Okay, how many people think cooperating?
Okay, you're cooperating.
Are you playing the same rules?
Are you playing by the same rules?
Well, yes, unless you're cheating.
If you're cheating, you're not playing Monopoly, right?
You're cheating.
That's a different game.
So, to play a monopoly you have to cooperate, because you have to all agree to sit in the same place.
You have to agree not to steal the money.
You have to agree that the stupid rules, which are completely arbitrary, are the ones that are going to govern your life for the next, you know, two hours.
You have to agree to try.
You have to agree to try to have fun.
You have to agree to try to be, like, a good player, which means you don't get all snivelly and whiny when you land on someone's boardwalk and they completely bankrupt you, you know.
So you're cooperating like mad.
And another thing Piaget pointed out, which is absolutely lovely, is that you can't have a game without cooperation and competition at the same time.
So there's no such thing as cooperative games.
You have to have—for it to be a game, it has to be competition within cooperation, or it can be cooperation within competition within cooperation.
You know, these things are very complexly nested.
So if you're playing hockey, for example, is hockey an aggressive game or a cooperative game?
Well, you have to play by the rules.
So both teams agree to that.
You're on the ice at the same time.
You don't bring a basketball.
You don't bring a chess game.
You're there to play hockey.
Are you cooperating or competing with your teammates?
Well, both, right?
You're cooperating with them because you want everyone to win, plus you want everybody to get better at playing across time, but you're competing with them because maybe you could be the star of the game.
And everybody's happy about that.
And then with the other team, well, are you cooperating or competing with them?
Well, as long as you're playing by the rules, you're cooperating.
But there's obviously an element of competition.
Now, almost every human activity has those elements.
There's a body of rules underneath it, or if they're not rules, they're at least social conventions, right?
They're things that people understand are allowed and not allowed.
And then there's a competitive and a cooperative element.
All right, so that's what children start to become particularly exposed to when they're about three.
Now Piaget pointed out that there were, in some sense, two classes of children's games.
There was the games that have a really clearly defined aim, and that'd be the goal.
And that'd be like, you know, in the little circles that we were talking about, that's where you're trying to go.
Now the thing about it being a game is that all of you have to be trying to go there at the same time.
And so what Piaget realized was that just as the child is trying to integrate all their little micro games inside them into some sort of unified thing, which would be the child, a stable personality across time and capable of weathering the storms of life, when a group of children get together, they build another one of those routines, but it includes all of them.
And so the kids might say, well, let's play hide-and-go-seek.
That's a good one.
And everyone knows the rules to hide-and-go-seek.
And you can win or lose at hide-and-go-seek, but what you're trying to do is you have to bring your sub-personalities all the way up to their integrated state underneath a metastructure that's organized by the collection of children.
So the child would say, well, do you want to play hide-and-go-seek?
And you're supposed to say—you're either supposed to say yes, or Perhaps pause at another game.
You're not supposed to freak out, or get angry, or say that that's a stupid game, or run back to your mom, because then you're not going to be very popular, and you're not going to get to play.
And if you don't get to play, well then you're ruined, because if you don't learn how to play with others between two and four, you never learn.
And then you're some poor outcast, and maybe you end up in jail, or at least you end up, like, isolated and awkward and poorly socially integrated, and That's not good.
Because if you don't get into the kids' games at three, all of them start moving ahead.
And you don't.
And the farther they've moved ahead past you, the less likely it is that they're going to play with you.
So one of the things that's really worth thinking about if you're going to have kids is you have a job as a parent.
And your job as a parent is to make your child socially acceptable, especially to other children, by the time they're three.
And if you don't do that, well, That's not very good.
You'll pay for it, and so will your child.
And you know, there's been lots of long-term follow-ups on this sort of thing, and it seems pretty evident that if the kid isn't socialized by four, then good luck.
There's no evidence at all from the developmental literature, which is quite a dismal literature, that you can fix that.
So, anyways.
Alright, so the children all get together and they say, well here's what we're going to do.
And everyone says yes, and so they orient their personalities towards that goal.
And then they interact in a cooperative and competitive way in pursuing the goal.
And that's a game.
And what they're doing is practicing being social human beings.
And they do that with all sorts of different games, and then you might say, well, here's something really worth thinking about.
What does it mean to be a functional human being?
To me, it means to be the sort of human being that can be a good player across multiple games.
So you might think, for example, you tell your kid—I'll tell you the story about a hockey game that I saw once.
Hockey parents say 10% of them should just be jailed as soon as they enter the arena.
So when my kid played, I don't know what you call it, A-level, high-level hockey for a while when he was a kid anyways.
He was a good hockey player.
But it was really unbearable, so we didn't do it for very long for a variety of reasons.
But anyways, on his way to...
Learning how to play hockey.
He was in one of these local leagues.
We have an arena just around the corner, fortunately enough.
And he wasn't the best player on the team.
There was another kid on the team who was better, I would say.
And he was in a championship game at one point.
He hadn't been in very many championship games because his teams often weren't very good.
But anyways, it was the local championship.
We went and watched.
It was a really fun game, you know?
Like, it was really close.
I think it was 3-3 till the final 15 or 20 seconds, and then some kid from the other team scored a really good goal.
You know, it wasn't one of those things where they accidentally kicked the puck into the net or something.
It was a really nice play.
And so it was a tight game.
The teams were well matched.
The local league had made sure, like, they'd set up teams together, and then if one team kept winning too consistently or one losing too consistently, they'd sort of revamp the team so they were roughly equal, which I really liked, because You know, all the kids got a reasonably equal shot at it and everybody got to develop.
So anyways, we were watching that, it was pretty fun, and the star kid, he was skating around out there and The game ended and he went off the ice and he smashed his hockey stick onto the cement because he was all irritated and, you know, which was pretty pathetic.
And then his father came running up to him and said, oh, you got robbed, it was really terrible, you know, the reffing was bad and you played very well and you should have won the game.
And he didn't say, you know, stop being a little rat and smashing your hockey stick onto the cement like you're three, which is what he should have said.
Basically rewarded his child for narcissistic Uh, immature misbehavior.
So it was pretty pathetic.
It was child abuse as far as I'm concerned, sort of up to the psyche.
Really, man?
That's stupid.
What are you gonna do?
Are you gonna train your child to be a narcissist?
It's like, of course that's child abuse.
It's moronic.
Of course it was due to his own foolishness, but I don't know if that's criminal, right?
But it was really pathetic.
So, but think about this now for a minute.
So you might think, well what did that kid do wrong?
It's like, Well, he wanted to win, so that's okay.
You should want to win if you're playing a game.
I mean, you're not any fun if you're playing a game and you're not trying to win.
And there's nothing more miserable than playing a game with someone, and at the end they say, well, you won because I wasn't really trying.
It's like, you know, you're not going to play with them again if they do that.
And that's kind of interesting, because it means they've done something wrong.
You know, and even a kid can figure that out.
And so you might tell your kid, be a good sport.
And it doesn't matter whether you win or not, it matters how you play the game.
Now, what the hell?
A kid doesn't know what to make of that, and you hardly even believe it, right?
You think, yeah, it does matter if you win, so I don't know what this means.
But you'll tell the child that.
And so then you might think, well, what does it mean to be a good sport, and that how you play the game is more important than whether you win or lose?
Okay, so think about it this way.
What's your goal?
Well you might say to win the hockey game.
But that implies you're only going to play one hockey game.
What if you're going to play a hundred hockey games?
And then forget about that, what if you're going to play a hundred hockey games and two hundred basketball games and fifty chess games and you're going to have a bunch of jobs and you're going to have a bunch of friends and you're going to have a bunch of relationships.
And all of those have a game-like structure.
And let's say that you're a real son of a bitch when you play hockey and so no one ever invites you to do any of those other things.
It's like, well you win the game but you lose the meta game.
And the metagame is the game that's made up of all the games you're ever going to play.
And what a parent means when they say, doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game, is that the metagame is more important than the game, and you should learn how to play games so that whether or not you win or lose, people really want to play with you.
Because if they want to play with you, man, you're set, right?
So here's a cool game.
So, okay, you two are going to play this game.
Are you ready?
Okay, so here's the deal.
I'm going to give you $20.
You have to give some of that to him.
You only get to offer once.
If he rejects it, neither of you get anything.
Okay, how much are you going to give him?
Ten.
Would you take that?
Okay, you would.
Why?
I mean, like, first is better than nothing, second is a fair amount.
It's fair!
Right, yeah, yeah.
So this experiment has been done all over the world.
And so basically what they find is that people pretty much offer 50-50.
Now, here's something cool.
Let's say you go play this game and use 20 bucks, and you're playing it with really poor people.
And so you set the game up.
So you say, look, Offer him two bucks.
He's poor.
He'll take it.
So you offer him two bucks, what does he do?
He tells you to screw off.
Right, and he's more likely to do that if he's poor.
So that's pretty interesting, because like a classical economist would say, look, what you should have done was offered him a dollar.
It's like, you get nineteen, You get nineteen.
He gets a dollar, he's going to take the damn dollar because it's better than nothing.
But that isn't what people are like.
It's like you give them a dollar, and you get nineteen, they want to punch you.
Right?
They're not going to take that.
And that's because they don't want to play the game that way.
They want to play the game so that it's fair across multiple games.
Now, you might say—let's say you're playing that in front of a whole bunch of people, like we were now—and let's say all these people are going to be able to invite you to play the same game, and so maybe you're going to be able to make $400 in the next hour.
So then you might say, well, what should I do if I wanted everybody to invite me to play this game as much as possible?
Then how much would you offer?
Fifteen, exactly!
That's cool!
So that means actually you lost the game, the one game, right?
Because you only get fifteen, five, and he gets fifteen.
But like, everyone's thinking, hey, I'm going to play this game with her.
Well, that's what it means when you tell someone to play the game properly.
You say, act as if, while you're playing this specific game, that there's a higher order moral principle that has to do with the total number of games that you're going to play across your entire life, and play that game properly.
Yeah, well that's the evolution of higher moral thinking in part from a Piagetian perspective.
It's bloody brilliant.
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