Do Asians Have 'Arctic Instincts'？ Exploring The New Theory
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
178.20212
Summary
In this episode, Simone and I discuss the controversial article by David Sun, Arctic Instincts: How Asians Adapted to Their Local Climate, and How They Adapted To Their Local Environment. We talk about how Asians adapted to their local climate, and how they adapted in terms of psychological and other capacities.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be with you today. Today, we are going to be going over an article
00:00:06.780
called Arctic Instincts by David Sun, which covers how Asians adapted to their local climate or
00:00:14.300
Asians did in terms of psychologically and in terms of other capacities. It's a spicy article.
00:00:22.580
The guy who wrote it is Asian. So I don't know, I guess that can...
00:00:28.060
You know, he was interested in studying, like, why are his people different from other people?
00:00:32.240
Like, because... And specifically in the context of why are they different from other people in ways
00:00:36.520
that Native Americans are also different from other people, because they're closely related genetic
00:00:40.620
Yeah, though, of course, implied differences on its own is terribly dangerous. So I get the
00:00:48.600
The paper has this big part at the beginning, which I'm taking out, where he's explaining that,
00:00:52.340
you know, he's been in academia for a while, and he's been working on this for a while,
00:00:55.300
and he hasn't been able to publish it, because he's afraid of losing his job. But now we're in,
00:00:59.480
you know, the new era, blah, blah, blah. And so it was in Aporia, obviously. Great paper.
00:01:06.720
My paper falls within the discipline of cultural psychology, which seeks to understand people's
00:01:11.540
culture and personality by examining the socio-ecological factors that they experienced
00:01:16.600
over the past 10,000 years. Many interesting findings have already been made. As recent literature
00:01:21.900
review documents, population density predicts collectivism, tightness and future orientation,
00:01:28.580
and frontier regions are characterized by individualism and high agency.
00:01:33.560
So let's unpack every one of those. If historically, over the past 10 years, an area was
00:01:38.480
really heavily populated, it is going to be more collectivistic, and people who are from that
00:01:44.300
genetic population are going to be more collectivistic. They would have, of course,
00:01:47.560
succeeded at a higher rate was in a dense area. So what regions would that be? Just, you know,
00:01:52.120
off the top of your head, you're probably thinking India, China. And then he's like, okay,
00:01:56.160
and then you have the frontier regions, which are more associated with individualism and high agency.
00:02:02.660
What are the, like, the biggest frontier area is obviously going to be the American West.
00:02:07.920
Oh, I was thinking like Mongolia, but sure. I mean, I think like Asian populations have seen a lot
00:02:12.240
of both, which is interesting, but go ahead. Yeah, well, no, Mongolia wouldn't really be,
00:02:18.580
I mean, I can look at the way the paper looks at it. But if you're looking at selective pressures,
00:02:22.940
the frontier regions that are opt-in frontier regions, rather than frontier regions you're
00:02:27.300
just born into, are going to have a much higher genetic effect. Because if you talk about the
00:02:33.200
American West, the reason why it's selected for individualism and agency at such a high level
00:02:37.460
is first to immigrate to the United States to begin with the population group, you have to have
00:02:42.860
very high levels of, you know, agency. It's a very big decision. It's a very risky decision.
00:02:48.580
And then these visions sorted for people who immigrated over and then likely in multiple
00:02:53.260
waves over multiple generations kept moving further West. Like, okay, well, we're in Boston now,
00:02:58.980
but I don't like this. It's still too civilization. Let's go.
00:03:02.280
Let's go to the mountains of the Appalachians. Okay. Okay. I like it here. Oh,
00:03:07.460
no. Too many people are coming. Let's go further. Let's go all the way out to, you know,
00:03:12.800
so it makes sense. And it also makes sense why that would give these regions some economic
00:03:18.980
advantage over sort of global economies because agency, like there was one thing that you really
00:03:23.320
pointed out to me recently, which is if you're talking about social status in the existing system,
00:03:28.500
like global system, the one that we're entering into, at least it just seems to be a combination
00:03:33.200
of IQ and agency and being agentic. And that that's why it's so important because you can't
00:03:39.360
influence your kid's IQ that much, but you can, I believe, influence their level of agency.
00:03:43.720
100%. Though I'm sure there are genetic components there as well.
00:03:46.600
No, I mean, this, this is documenting that there's genetic components and so what selects for them?
00:03:50.340
Um, I don't know. Tightness and future orientation is interesting, but that's what you get in terms of
00:03:55.540
heavily dense areas. Yeah. I don't, what does tightness mean in this context?
00:04:00.100
Tightness? Rigidity? Maybe the closeness of social relations? How internet a society is?
00:04:07.240
All right. So tightness refers to the degree to which a society has strict social norms.
00:04:13.660
Tolerance for deviation in behavior. In a tight culture, there are strong social norms and
00:04:17.980
little tolerance for behavior that deviates from these norms. Rules tend to be clearly defined and
00:04:23.660
strictly enforced. There's a greater emphasis on conformity and social order. Punishment for
00:04:27.880
violating norms is typically more severe. So these are in areas that are more populated,
00:04:32.480
makes sense that you would need stronger social cohesion in a place that's more populated.
00:04:36.580
And you have more diversity in a place that's less populated. Future orientation refers to the
00:04:41.360
extent of cultural emphasizes planning for the future rather than focusing on immediate outcomes.
00:04:45.180
High future orientation involves delaying gratification, prioritizing long-term planning
00:04:48.880
and investment, emphasizing saving rather than immediate consumption, and valuing preparation
00:04:54.040
and prevention. Interesting. Interesting. So let's keep going here. Oh, by the way, the paper that he
00:05:02.400
is read for thing, if anyone wants to look it up, is a sociological genetic framework of culture,
00:05:06.940
personality, their roots, trends, and interplay. And then he's saying frontier regions also have
00:05:14.060
passage in prevalence predicts... Oh, sorry. And that then passage in prevalence in a region over the past
00:05:20.120
10,000 years predicts collectivism, rice farming, and is associated with tightness and higher nepotism.
00:05:25.820
Hmm. Very interesting. You'd higher nepotism in those regions. I suspect it's also highly passage
00:05:31.520
in prevalence would be highly tied to population as well. So it's probably also tied to the high
00:05:36.040
population regions. Yeah, that makes sense. The exact mechanisms by which sociological effects,
00:05:42.740
culture, and personality are not always clear. They may be purely cultural. They may result from
00:05:47.760
selective migration. They may be the product of natural selection acting on genes, or they may represent
00:05:53.200
some mix, as in gene-cultural co-evolution. However, humans did not parachute into their
00:05:58.680
various homelands precisely 10,000 years ago. The 60,000-year migratory period that began when
00:06:04.500
humans left Africa has been assorably neglected in human psychology. Ancient Siberian extreme cold
00:06:11.540
adaptation is already frequently invoked to explain East Asian genomics and physiology. I therefore
00:06:17.540
examine whether it could explain their culture and personality, and I found that it could. My paper documents
00:06:22.700
that, in terms of psychology, East Asians bear a striking resemblance to indigenous Inuit and
00:06:27.600
Siberians. All three groups exhibit high emotional suppression, in-group cohesion, unassertiveness,
00:06:34.520
introversion, indirectness, self-consciousness, self-sensitivity, cautiousness, perseverance,
00:06:41.540
and video-spatial abilities. Crates that would have enhanced their ancestors' survival in the
00:06:49.100
No, these are not the things I would invest in in a post-AI age, so this is making me nervous.
00:06:55.400
Yeah, that's a really good point. A lot of these mismatches. Well, I mean, high emotional
00:06:59.980
suppression should be generally a useful thing, if you're able to do it.
00:07:03.880
Yeah, I would say in general, it's highly adaptive.
00:07:08.420
But outside of that, and keep in mind, they would have lower agentic-ness due to the other things he was
00:07:14.040
mentioning. That is not great for a post-AI age. Like, cautiousness and unassertiveness,
00:07:22.840
slash introversion, indirectness, self-consciousness. Again, and I also would say-
00:07:26.680
I mean, I think introversion doesn't help or hurt in an AI age, because I think extroversion actually
00:07:31.580
is really for a pre-AI age. You need autistic, special interest, lopsided geniuses in a post-AI age
00:07:40.060
who are very highly agentic and take a lot of initiative. Maybe a lot of that can be trained,
00:07:44.620
like, to your point, right? This is also a population that, on average, is known for higher
00:07:48.820
levels of intelligence, at least in some domains. So maybe they can leverage that, which is more,
00:07:54.760
we would posit genetic and teach more agentic behavior and patterns.
00:08:00.120
Yeah, and I would say that these stereotypes that he's pulling up here fit my lived experience of
00:08:06.140
interacting with various ethnic groups. So I don't think that he's wrong to make these assertions.
00:08:11.680
And again, he is Asian, making these assertions about Asians. I particularly note the unassertiveness.
00:08:17.980
I've mentioned before, but I can think of very few Asians I know who like arguing for the sake of
00:08:22.640
arguing, which is rare in our social circles, because most people in, like, conservative intellectual
00:08:28.920
social circles like arguing for the sake of arguing.
00:08:32.540
Brian Chow does not like arguing for the sake of arguing. I've never-
00:08:35.160
He loves debating. He loves bringing up subjects. He loves talking about controversial things.
00:08:40.200
What's the difference between that and arguing?
00:08:42.040
That's very different than, like, okay, think of, like, the way a Jewish person would debate,
00:08:46.300
where they, like, really want to persuade you of their perspective.
00:08:50.660
Oh, like, winning for them matters. Whereas, like, Brian is just expressing the truth as he says it.
00:08:57.520
Brian is expressing the truth, and he finds it odd that you don't see the truth.
00:09:02.600
Yeah, like, what are you missing, you sad idiot? Versus, like, I've got to convince-
00:09:09.540
He does- I mean, not in a derogatory way, but definitely-
00:09:12.840
But definitely the weight when he is- has a difference of opinion is very different than
00:09:18.660
the way that Jews or Catholics, when they debate, have differences of opinion when I think
00:09:26.640
And not that Asians can't be Catholics. I'm just, you know, thinking here the way that
00:09:31.080
I, like, subdivide populations, because we argue, as anyone who reads this podcast, that
00:09:35.320
this past, like, I'd say 500 years of someone's evolutionary history is way more important than
00:09:47.620
Right, because, I mean, small bottlenecks and evolutionary pressures can make a huge difference.
00:09:53.680
I mean, you could have, you know, huge, huge swaths of a population die off just to-
00:09:57.820
I mean, who knows how different the European population is post-plague?
00:10:02.140
Like, who knows what other traits got wiped out with susceptibility to the plague?
00:10:06.620
And who knows what traits got suddenly skyrocketed because they correlated with whatever it was
00:10:14.780
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and this is why when I'm looking at genetic groups, I typically do not
00:10:19.680
look at ethnicities, but I look at religions, because I think that they're more predictive
00:10:23.360
of personality. And, yeah, that's just where I disagree with this, but I do agree with
00:10:30.040
everything he's saying here, and I think it works. And with Asian populations, they haven't
00:10:33.340
been susceptible to multiple religious frameworks that genetically isolated them in the same way
00:10:41.200
Anyway. My paper documents that in terms of psychology-
00:10:46.100
Oh, no. I already read that. Okay. My paper also documents that Arctic environments
00:10:49.940
necessitate these very traits in polar workers and expeditioners. Scouting the literature on
00:10:55.980
personal psychology revealed that the relevant traits are so consistently predictive of success
00:11:01.040
in polar environments that they have been refined into the personal selection criteria
00:11:04.740
for many countries' polar research programs. Here we see human selection conveniently mirroring
00:11:13.020
What are polar environments like? Basically, all the threats that the typical hunter-gatherers face
00:11:18.460
are exacerbated in the Arctic, where the average temperature is leacely cold, the visual landscape
00:11:23.980
is blank and featureless, the ecology is devoid of vegetation, and where the ground might suddenly
00:11:28.620
collapse underneath you or drift away via ice flow. Mistakes are very severely punished by the
00:11:33.680
environment. Meanwhile, poor visuospatial ability, lack of group cohesion, or reckless emotional
00:11:38.960
behavior can be instantly fatal for the group. You know, it's interesting that he notes the
00:11:44.800
reckless emotional behavior, because in Arctic communities, there was this form of madness where
00:11:50.700
people would like- and this was an Inuit community specifically, so like these ethnic groups,
00:11:55.260
where people would like freak out and like start murdering people or like-
00:11:59.960
Really? Where did you hear about- I've never heard of this before. This is crazy.
00:12:07.780
Yeah, it's a culture-bound cabin fever unique to these regions. I collected in an episode I was
00:12:15.580
Did it happen like during the darkest parts of the winter when people are really, really,
00:12:20.580
No, what's interesting about it is we're not sure if it's a real behavior or it was something
00:12:24.120
that was being caused by the researchers in some way.
00:12:26.700
Oh, wow. Like a- right, like fan death and penis stealing where people- it was like a shared
00:12:31.940
delusion that because people said it was real, it became real?
00:12:34.960
Yeah, the researchers somehow made it real for short periods of time where data was being
00:12:44.980
Frequent blizzards and lethal windstorms necessitate prolonged group confinement, traditionally in
00:12:50.760
igloos or tents, now in small, smaller stations. Indoor adaptive changes include staying emotionally
00:12:57.420
stable, controlling aggressive impulses, and being able to complete complex tasks in extremely
00:13:02.440
adverse conditions. As evacuation is not possible during deep winter, and social expulsion into
00:13:08.200
the outdoors is fatal. A recent news story about a South African scientist trapped in Antarctica
00:13:13.220
with a violent team member illustrates the importance of adaptive traits it listed earlier.
00:13:17.940
Oh, gosh. Nightmare scenario. I was just thinking about this documentary that I watched
00:13:22.760
on giving birth in these environments, which, oh my gosh, no, but bad.
00:13:28.320
Think about it. Think about like the argument trait I was just noticing before.
00:13:33.520
Not getting into heated arguments with people is going to be-
00:13:36.640
Yeah, being very avoidant with arguments. Let's go.
00:13:38.580
It's going to be very important if you're in an environment like this where being expelled
00:13:42.860
gets you killed. Same with being, you know, not aggressive or not overly pushy about your
00:13:48.560
opinions or perspectives, which I hadn't considered, but he's absolutely right. That would have had
00:13:53.340
a really strong genetic effect. Anyone who at any point during the winter pissed off anyone
00:13:59.100
enough that they needed to be in two separate rooms was removed from the gene pool.
00:14:02.400
Yeah, because it was just that deadly in those close quarters with nowhere to run or hide.
00:14:10.200
I guess in a temperate climate, even if your entire tribe kicked you out, you could theoretically
00:14:14.480
survive foraging and hunting and fishing. Not here.
00:14:20.600
Yeah. Those traits which are shared by East Asians and the Inuit and polar workers of all ethnicities
00:14:27.340
appear to be critical for staying alive and accomplishing tasks in the harsh Arctic environments.
00:14:34.640
Arcticism theory of East Asian psychology, which positives that psychological adaptations to Ice Age
00:14:41.140
Siberia predate and likely influence later ideologies like Confucianism.
00:14:45.560
And so here he has like a little chart where he shows how this works. And he's like, oh, oh,
00:14:51.120
a, I don't know what that's, oh, out of Africa. And then you have the Arabian standstill. So the
00:14:55.320
southern root, tropical South Asia and subtropical East Asia and the temperate mixed range Eurasia
00:15:00.580
pre-LGM mammoth step. And then you have this period here where they antagonized by Inuit
00:15:07.480
replicated in modern polar person. Sorry, not antagonized. Analogized by Inuit and replicated
00:15:13.780
in modern polar personnel, intensified harmony and cohesion, emotional suppression, perseverance,
00:15:18.800
multi-crop rice farming and agricultural Japanese natural disasters, further intensifies
00:15:24.640
collectivism. Xi Zhang, Su Zhou's dynasty's values, Confucianism. You get harmony, cohesion,
00:15:31.600
emotional suppression, perseverance. And then you have Taoism, Shintoism, Tengrenism, Korean
00:15:36.880
Shamanism, Holism, Animism, Harmony, Balance values. Interesting.
00:15:43.220
Anything you want to say before I go further? No, I want to hear more.
00:15:50.180
Arctism theory has already yielded some successful predictions, such as the observation that East
00:15:56.360
Asian polar explorers have had an easier time and are more psychologically stable than their
00:16:01.360
North American counterparts. Oh, really? Like someone systematically measured this? And
00:16:05.280
how do you even measure it? Like number of discoveries, progress made before they die?
00:16:09.100
There was a study called Psychological Adjustment During Three Japanese Antarctic Research Expeditions.
00:16:15.960
That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, you only hear the documentaries about
00:16:19.660
English guys for the most part, but I guess that's because we're...
00:16:23.280
They say the psychological profile of the subjects was relatively stable and comparable
00:16:27.680
to the standard means of Western sojourners. The results showed the subjects were generally high
00:16:32.300
in stress resistance. I don't know, pretty much anyone who opts into that, I feel like the selective
00:16:36.320
pressures of just being an Arctic researcher going to select for people who are very rugged
00:16:41.340
and patient. Was saying that they were relatively more so than the Westerners who did the same
00:16:46.460
thing. Anyway, another successful prediction is that in Singapore, East Asians have significantly
00:16:56.260
lower rates of claustrophobia than South and Southeast Asians when accounting for national culture
00:17:01.880
and farming ancestry. That's so interesting. So this whole shoving people onto the peak commute
00:17:09.980
hour subway in Japan thing, I mean, they were designed for it. That was what happened.
00:17:16.960
Yeah. It's a funny, it's an interesting point that you make. Actually, oh, hold on. Side theory.
00:17:23.280
Side theory here. It goes urbanization because of these traits happened at a much higher rate in these
00:17:31.200
cultures. Oh, like they just didn't viscerally feel uncomfortable with it. So they weren't,
00:17:36.220
they didn't need to spread out as much because they weren't. They didn't need to spread out,
00:17:39.180
which allowed for these ultra dense cities. Because I was just thinking like, I think most
00:17:43.240
Westerners, if they were like in one of those trains where like everybody's like crowded and
00:17:46.940
shoved on. Yeah, one of those micro apartments, you've seen them in Tokyo and Beijing.
00:17:51.320
I'm just thinking the trains themselves, most Westerners would just be like, I need to get out of
00:17:55.420
here. Like I can't do this. And, and when I think about the regions of the world where you see
00:18:00.380
these ultra dense trains, like you see this in India, you know, those pictures you see of India
00:18:04.460
where it's like people like hang. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. They are from areas that had really high
00:18:10.340
population density and potentially went through an Arctic period in their, in their migratory
00:18:17.260
patterns. I don't know if Indians did, did they? No, not at all. So what's up? I mean,
00:18:23.720
just must be the totally separate evolutionary pressures, but yeah, I wonder what drove population
00:18:29.520
density in India where it's not necessarily then that must have, right? I mean, there's
00:18:36.340
Yeah. Well, I mean, Indian populations have been really heavily influenced by the caste system.
00:18:43.280
They are due to the caste system as genetically different from each other as people from like
00:18:48.460
Denmark are from people from Greece. And to be clear, like that's really big genetic difference.
00:18:54.700
Like even at the sociological level for people who have done much traveling in those two countries,
00:18:58.660
the Greek have a quite different, like if you think of them as broadly European, they have a quite
00:19:03.780
different perspective. Then you think like you get to Northern European. Yeah. And so I think
00:19:09.120
what's in India, a lot of it has been, you know, psychological differences that are the result of the
00:19:15.440
environment and been partially hidden by psychological differences that were driven by caste systems.
00:19:19.060
Hmm. And in, in the, in the, in the United States, the problem that you have when you're building
00:19:25.000
stereotypes around Indians is that you are predominantly going to be interacting with
00:19:29.920
Brawans or, or just like way more than you would if you were in India. I can't remember what it was.
00:19:34.260
It's like 20% of the Indian immigrants or something. Um, so it really heavily affects the way that
00:19:40.040
they act. Yeah. Anyway, I plan to test novel predictions in future studies by comparing
00:19:46.760
Mongolians to Cossacks, Pervers, and Somalis, thereby controlling for Holocene pastoralism and by
00:19:53.240
comparing other Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans to Malays, Indians, and Northern Italians,
00:19:58.220
thereby controlling for Holocene rice farming. Oh.
00:20:01.600
Um, lessons of studies. Cultural psychologists must expand their scope of inquiry beyond just the
00:20:07.320
Holocene all the way back to 70,000 years ago when humans left Africa. Okay.
00:20:11.720
They have helped approach the Total Evolutionary Ecology's TEE model. The idea being that to
00:20:18.680
understand a local population, one must examine all the environments and selective pressures
00:20:22.520
against the state instead of arbitrarily limiting oneself to the Holocene. It seems obvious in hindsight,
00:20:27.720
but prior research advances in archaeogenetics and paleoecology, the pre-Holocene period was mostly
00:20:34.760
hand-waved away by psychologists due to lack of data. It's really interesting to me the way this is
00:20:42.200
he is looking for different populations that experienced one historic ecology, but not another.
00:20:50.120
So he's like, okay, what, what populations experienced the same, you know, pre-Holocene
00:20:55.720
environment and a different post-Holocene environment and see if they have any traits that
00:21:01.400
are similar across them? And can we sort of look at like what specifically these post-Holocene
00:21:06.520
environments are adding and what the pre-Holocene environments are adding? Obviously his TEE model
00:21:10.600
works very different from our model. Our model is that the, the vast majority, I'm going to say like
00:21:15.240
80% of psychological effects from evolution occur within the past thousand years. And I would wait them
00:21:26.120
And it's, it's just because when you have migration now, this, this again is uniquely true when I, I
00:21:34.280
should say that my theory is really focused on the United States because that's where I live. And that's
00:21:39.560
where migration was going to play a really big role in genetic sorting. So if I'm going to give you an
00:21:44.840
example of what I mean by this, if you look at Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley genetically and culturally
00:21:51.240
seems to have produced a hugely disproportionate amount of global innovation over the past 50 years.
00:21:58.360
I don't think anyone like, like nothing even comes close. And so the question is, okay, well,
00:22:03.880
what were the recent evolutionary pressures for, for migration or disproportionate migration to the
00:22:10.040
Silicon Valley region historically? Well, what you had was first, first you could say, well,
00:22:15.080
what led to Silicon Valley? Well, it was, it was really high risk taking behavior for, for high risk,
00:22:21.560
high reward, potential payoffs. The Silicon Valley area was historically settled during the, the gold
00:22:28.120
mine rush, the, what were they called the 49ers. And you can, that was a complete population that was
00:22:34.360
just like, we're going to go to this region based on high risk, high reward, potential outcomes. And that,
00:22:39.320
that's what drew the seed population there, which made the population one, both more high risk,
00:22:44.840
high reward, but in line was also expeditionary forces. And what's the word I'm looking for here?
00:22:50.120
Regions of high frontier regions, like basically an ultra frontier region, which also meant that they
00:22:56.520
were more okay with cultural diversity and had less cultural tightness. And you can see this within
00:23:02.520
the culture of that region, you know, the hippie movement, et cetera. It's not just like the modern
00:23:07.000
iterations of like proto woke culture or proto like cults forming there all the time. This is where
00:23:13.560
Simone's ancestors migrated to, by the way. So you can see the, your ancestors who would have migrated to
00:23:19.240
that region would have had much more of these high risk, high reward traits than people in other,
00:23:24.840
the regions where they already were. And they were already in frontier regions when they made this
00:23:29.240
migration. You're right. Chicago, the great plains, et cetera. Yeah.
00:23:35.720
Any, any thoughts before I go further? I mean, I'd also point out like when, when you're looking at
00:23:39.560
people who migrated to America before 1850, you're already getting people who are extremely risk
00:23:47.320
taking. I mean, just getting on one of those boats to cross the Atlantic. Yeah. One of the things I
00:23:53.640
point out is a lot of people don't realize even when things were like horrifyingly bad,
00:24:00.120
my point is that was the Irish and they had the coffin ships. You're like, I'm not getting on that
00:24:03.800
boat. And like half the people would be dead. Well, yeah. You're going to chance it with this
00:24:07.480
starvation here. A lot of people would die on the boats. Yes, they did. Yes. And so you'd be coming
00:24:13.000
over with like months, with dead bodies, but I think they threw them overboard, but yeah. Yeah.
00:24:17.560
But a lot of people, even when their tickets were paid for, the reason why a lot of Irish who stayed in
00:24:22.040
Ireland stayed in Ireland was not that they didn't have the money to leave during the famine.
00:24:27.080
It was that they just refused to leave because a lot of the landlords in Ireland offered to pay
00:24:33.720
for them to leave. And they said, no, I won't. I know as to why the landlords, evil landlords
00:24:39.160
offered to pay for them to leave is because they kept forming gangs when the landlords couldn't pay
00:24:43.880
them, the people on his property and killing the landlords. And so the landlords wanted to lower
00:24:48.120
the number of people. Yeah. They didn't want that social unrest. No one wants starving
00:24:52.920
people with no work on their land. Yeah. Especially when the people are expecting you
00:24:58.120
to pay them. Yeah. That's, no, you're going to do a lot to get them out. And yet, and I don't blame
00:25:03.800
these people, but I just, I want to, I want to highlight the fact that when you look at people
00:25:09.160
who migrated to the West after 1850, you already have some very intense risk takers. And then you just,
00:25:16.120
they're like people now who are clearly addicted to risk and who just can't stand being around other
00:25:20.520
people. So you've got this hyper, hyper selective series of events. And I think you see this around
00:25:28.200
the world with a lot of different populations. Yeah. Actually, you know, speaking of like the
00:25:32.760
Irish immigration wave, and we did our video, the great replacement has already happened on the
00:25:37.480
various Catholic immigration waves, the Irish and the Italian immigration wave, and point out that this
00:25:41.240
was just not a large population in the United States pre these waves. At the time of the revolution,
00:25:45.640
they only made up 1.5% of the population Catholics. And even in the Catholic state,
00:25:49.640
Maryland, they are only 10%. But the, I think an interesting point here, I've got over this with
00:25:55.400
you before, but an interesting point here is I actually think culturally speaking, the pressures
00:26:01.400
that led to the Irish and Italian immigration wave cause the American descendants of these two groups
00:26:09.480
to be, I would argue the most culturally distinct American group, more distinct than the Hispanic
00:26:16.840
American immigrants, which are actually, I'd say closer in personality and, and proclivities to the
00:26:24.520
OG Americans, largely because they are immigrating from company countries where the immigrant waves to
00:26:30.920
those countries mirror the immigrant ways to the United States, you know, immigrating to America versus
00:26:37.720
immigrating to Mexico historically versus immigrating to, you know, one of the South American colonies
00:26:42.280
historically, not that different from immigrating to the United States. You had to be like really
00:26:46.680
risk-taking. Whereas the Irish and the Italian immigration waves, they were basically forced out
00:26:55.000
Yeah. It was more of a refugee situation and not, it, it was reactive, not proactive.
00:27:00.040
Yeah. Yes. They were, they were, they were refugees more than voluntary immigrants.
00:27:04.120
Mm-hmm. And so they maintained a lot more of their historic culture.
00:27:10.680
And, and, and, and, and that's why I think looking at the why, looking at the why behind selective
00:27:14.520
pressures is important because just migrating, just going through a certain environment doesn't
00:27:20.440
explain all of it. Yeah. And that's why I, they disproportionately hold positions within
00:27:26.520
bureaucratic organizations in the United States. We pointed this out before that the Irish and Italian
00:27:31.640
descendants disproportionately, if you're looking at like lawyers, judges, it's the Supreme Court.
00:27:37.000
If you're looking at the, the, you know, government agencies, police forces, historically, they were
00:27:42.600
famously like overly Irish or overly Italian, which is really interesting. And, you know, I'm not saying
00:27:48.680
that this is a bad thing. Like I'm not saying them being different from other American populations.
00:27:52.040
It's just interesting to me, the reactive freak out Americans have to the Hispanic immigration waves,
00:27:58.520
which like the Irish and Italian are Catholic waves, but they're not, they're, they're chosen
00:28:03.640
immigrant populations. They're not like refugee populations. Anyway, to continue, evolutionary
00:28:09.000
psychology traditionally had all the limitations of historical science. There was no time machine
00:28:14.040
one could use to go back to the Pleistocene Africa to observe the long process of natural and
00:28:18.520
sexual selection for universal human cognitive mechanisms. There was also no way to get a control
00:28:24.200
group and an experimental group as the process of universal human evolution takes far too long.
00:28:29.640
Although Janet Song's lab is doing some interesting work on genetic brain evolution. These limitations
00:28:34.920
apply far less to the TEE model. That is when investigating psychological traits that represent local
00:28:40.840
adaptations to environments humans have inhabited since we left Africa. Ironically, then the most taboo area
00:28:48.920
of cultural psychology is the most empirically robust. Take my analysis of personal psychology,
00:28:55.800
psychology data. Here we do have the luxury of control groups and experimental groups, civilians,
00:29:00.120
pre winter personnel versus polar veterans, post winter personnel. This allows us to track psychological
00:29:06.600
changes throughout a winter over a polar trek, and then use the resulting success and failures to learn
00:29:11.880
about the processes of natural selection in the past. Although some expeditioners actually die or get severely
00:29:17.080
injured, most failures result in evacuation or being rated low by peers and supervisor. Polar psychologists
00:29:24.200
have also conducted extensive psychological testing of personnel, and by using the traits to predict success
00:29:29.800
and failures, they have identified successful selection criteria for polar candidates. This has greatly enhanced our
00:29:35.800
understanding of the kinds of personalities a polar environment select for." So interesting, because a lot of
00:29:41.000
times that, you know, this is just like just so stuff. This is just theorizing. This is how it's thought of as the
00:29:45.080
outside. And now that we're reopening this area of potential investigation, I think we can learn really
00:29:51.240
interesting things about ourselves. The interesting thing is, is I think that when a lot of people hear
00:29:56.520
about people doing work on like, why do certain groups have certain traits, what they think is that the
00:30:02.280
primary motivation to do this is going to be to learn about out groups, i.e. and to categorize out groups in
00:30:08.520
ways that are potentially deleterious, i.e. the same like white people doing like race science on like
00:30:13.880
black people. When in reality, the most curiosity and most benefit from this is going to come from
00:30:19.080
the groups themselves. You know, this guy is Asian, and he wants to understand like, why am I like this?
00:30:23.240
Why are Asians like this, disproportionately speaking? That would be interesting for me to understand,
00:30:28.120
because in understanding that I understand myself better. If you look at the types of research that we
00:30:33.720
do obsessively here, we focus much more on our cultural group, the greater Appalachian cultural
00:30:41.080
group that we both come from, than other cultural groups. Like, hugely disproportionately, we talk and
00:30:47.000
research and investigate our own culture, because it is more interesting to us than other cultures.
00:30:52.760
Yeah, and what are we supposed to do about other people's cultures? Groups that we don't have any say in,
00:30:58.520
are not part of, can contribute to. Well, they can be interesting to understand American trends,
00:31:05.720
you know, and trends in American politics and the electorate and everything.
00:31:08.760
And you can learn about pitfalls to try to avoid or replicate. Yeah, but I mean, for the most part,
00:31:14.200
I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, understanding distinctions, and we've talked
00:31:19.320
about this in other podcasts, distinctions like the, the, when you think about the American Republican or
00:31:24.120
Southerner or, or rural person, right? The two large groups, or three large groups hit this,
00:31:30.600
the greater Appalachian cultural group, the far west cultural, or the western frontier cultural
00:31:36.040
group, and the, the cavalier cultural group. And many people confuse the cavalier cultural group
00:31:44.120
with the, the Appalachian cultural group as a single culture, when they are like radically different
00:31:50.600
from each other in almost every single metric. And I would say this as having a family where I come
00:31:56.120
from the faction of the family that married into other greater Appalachian cultural group people,
00:32:01.240
and then other people in my family married into the cavalier, the cavalier cultural group,
00:32:06.760
and the cultural expectations of these groups are radically different. The cavalier cultural group is
00:32:12.040
very obsessed with manners, being gentlemanly, proper form, doing aristocratic looking things,
00:32:19.400
like they spend a lot of money on a risk, like country clubs, boats, boats, you know,
00:32:24.920
the, the, although the faction that you're thinking of, the boats faction, they, they married into
00:32:29.080
They're super waspy. I don't know. I, I, I think they're more Boston province than anything else.
00:32:34.040
They're not exactly. Yeah. But they're not either. The, the, but, but just like when I look at my family,
00:32:42.120
the, the, the, the biggest cultural friction is between the cavalier aristocratic deep South
00:32:50.920
culture and genetic selection events and the backwoods, you know, like F you to authority.
00:32:57.000
Like, I don't care what anyone has to say. Like, I'm going to live my way cultural group.
00:33:01.000
But, and I would say that this is like an active or hot conflict. It's just like a,
00:33:04.440
in terms of preferences, they find the way that we act to be very strange and sometimes even
00:33:10.360
inscrutable, especially given that we have all of the, you know, shiblet we need to be accepted by
00:33:18.600
aristocratic society. You know, I've got a Stanford MBA, you've got a Cambridge graduate degree. Like,
00:33:23.320
why are we going out there saying stuff and, and, and talking in a way and, you know, calling people
00:33:28.760
retards if, if that's, you know, what it's, it's, it's, it's not a proper thing to do, but I, I will say,
00:33:35.640
I do appreciate, and you should see our video on why, why people have manners. I do appreciate it.
00:33:40.040
One thing I did take from their group was manners in interacting with women. I was like, you know,
00:33:44.760
this is actually a thing of value that I should make a point of, of, of learning and remembering.
00:33:50.840
You mean in that? I don't remember this episode. It gives our, it would give our sons a competitive
00:33:54.840
advantage in the dating world. Cause it totally would.
00:33:57.880
Yeah. Well, it's a competitive advantage in the dating world. People actually do appreciate and
00:34:01.960
notice good manners. 100%. Well, they show inhibitory control and self-discipline. They
00:34:07.720
show that you are capable of delaying in the moment gratification and, or a desire for laziness
00:34:15.240
or energy conservation in favor of making other people comfortable. Because in the end, etiquette
00:34:20.040
is about making for smooth social transactions and making other people comfortable. But doing it in a way
00:34:26.120
that also other you, I think is really important. I think a lot of people drop manners when manners
00:34:30.840
start to other them. It's something that, that I, you know, was, was, was taught to me as a kid by
00:34:36.360
this cultural group is no, that's when it's most important to have manners. Although, I mean,
00:34:41.640
I don't follow manners as strictly as they do. For example, they will, when a woman gets up to like
00:34:46.920
use the restroom or leaves the table. They'll stand up. Yeah.
00:34:49.480
And I think that that's just a little too much for, for, for me. I've, I've never really
00:34:55.240
Malcolm, you can't even use silverware at a restaurant. I think, and that's an interesting thing is that
00:35:00.600
you were essentially trained in, in boarding school to not show manners because I don't know,
00:35:07.560
that lowered your status in middle school. So now you literally, instead of using a knife,
00:35:12.520
use your freaking forefinger to move food around on a plate at fancy restaurants.
00:35:21.560
But I will, I will strive to have better manners. Are you going to teach our kids manners?
00:35:30.120
Yes, of course I am. So both our sons are already like, where am I going to find a wife? I want a
00:35:37.080
wife. Part of it's because they really want rings. Like they're very inquisitive, little covetous
00:35:41.640
dragons and they want rings. And we're like, well, you, you get a ring when you get married. And they're
00:35:45.960
like, how do I get married? Well, you have to find a wife. Well, where do I find a wife? I'll never
00:35:50.120
find her. You're also really obsessed with having kids, not because of our prenatalist talk. And I
00:35:55.640
realize that this likely affects how many kids people have severely, but because they are in a
00:36:00.120
family where Simone's like always pregnant or has a baby and they see you focusing on the baby and then
00:36:05.560
their caregivers who they stay with during the day are also were recently pregnant and had a baby.
00:36:10.600
I think it's also just kind of a cool superpower that like, oh, women can 3D print humans.
00:36:17.320
And therefore Octavian says that women are, are better because they can, because I only like
00:36:23.080
women. Yeah. I only like women. I'm the king of all women. He told me one day. What did he say?
00:36:28.360
I'm the king of all women. He just said that. He was talking about a woman that he thought was
00:36:35.960
attractive humorously, his teacher, you know, the way young kids are. He's like, oh,
00:36:39.240
is that Mrs. Whatever? I don't know. And I was like, and then he, and then he looks for a bit
00:36:44.120
and he answers himself. He goes, no, she doesn't have beautiful enough hair. And then he's continuing
00:36:50.680
to think for, he goes, Mrs. Whatever has very long and beautiful hair. And then he stops and he thinks
00:36:56.280
for a bit, he goes, I'm the king of all women. That was, that was what he said, right? Like that was the
00:37:01.480
chain of, I so wish I could have gotten it on video. It was so hilarious. I am the king of all women.
00:37:07.960
Once he has manners, he will be. We'll see. But I, but I also love the way that I could so see
00:37:15.400
one of these like, you know, groups that tries to like target kids for transition in school. Cause
00:37:19.080
you know, he's autistic and everything targeting him. And he's like, okay, so I'm going to be able
00:37:22.360
to have babies, right? Like that's the point of being a woman. You're going to so trigger someone
00:37:27.000
who's going to be like, well, no, I mean, there's other reasons to have kids, be a woman other than have
00:37:31.560
kids. He's going to be like, no, there isn't. No, there's, there is not one. He's like, he's like,
00:37:37.960
if I become a woman, because he knows he needs to get a woman to make kids. That's like, which is very
00:37:43.480
important to him. Yeah. He wants to be thinking right now. Yeah. I, I, he'll, he'll be a ladies
00:37:48.520
man though. He, he looks like the type of kid who's going to grow up to be very attractive.
00:37:51.400
Already all of his friends in class are girls who really like him.
00:37:54.520
So that's what they told us on the school of call, but I don't think, you know, how a guy's
00:38:00.600
going to do his girls until a girl start going through puberty because girls go through puberty
00:38:04.680
before guys do. Um, so then you can be like, okay, it's, he's still interacting in this, this,
00:38:10.120
he's very like obsessed with like being the good guy and like keeping order. So I can see that
00:38:19.160
I have a question for you growing up. Did you ever notice cultural differences between,
00:38:27.560
because you had a very like, you know, ethnically immigration diverse group of friends in the Bay
00:38:34.200
area in the Asian friends you had versus the other friends. Yeah. Did I notice cultural differences?
00:38:42.600
Not really. It's, it's more that I noticed there were some friends maybe who were either less
00:38:49.160
integrated than others or just from weirder, or I don't know how to say it more, more strict
00:38:54.840
families than others. So there was one girl in my middle school or high school class who was just
00:39:01.720
like, yeah, my mom tells me she doesn't love me. Like just actively, like not even tiger momming,
00:39:07.560
just being like, yeah, I don't love you. And that was really hard for me to understand.
00:39:13.640
There was another Korean girl who was very, very clingy and very, very Christian and extremely
00:39:20.200
docile. So like that came across as sort of weird and different, but then a bunch of my other Chinese
00:39:26.120
and Vietnamese friends were just super normal and fun and like a little quirky maybe, but like I was a
00:39:31.480
little quirky too. And my other European descent friends were also quirky. So it's, it's weird that
00:39:38.120
there wasn't, you know, like, yeah, my Asian friends on average are like this, or like my
00:39:43.320
Korean versus Chinese versus Filipino versus Vietnamese friends are like this and this and
00:39:47.880
this and this. There really wasn't much of that. And there were very different degrees of parental
00:39:51.960
involvement between families, but definitely you, you know how in, in childhood cartoons,
00:40:02.200
like parents just aren't there. And a lot of them, it's just like, what parents? They just never
00:40:07.640
there. Like there's, there are scenes at the kid's home and just, there's nothing, there's no parent.
00:40:12.280
That was kind of how it was with my Asian friends. I barely if ever met their parents, which was really
00:40:19.800
weird because I spent a lot of time with them and sometimes even went to their house. Whereas with my
00:40:25.320
Western descent friends, parents were just there all the time. Like in Mean Girls, like the mother
00:40:32.760
who's just like, Oh, how are you doing? Hey, how are my best girlfriends? Hey, Mrs. George. This is Katie.
00:40:40.440
Hello, sweetheart. Welcome to our home. I just want you to know if you need anything, don't be shy.
00:40:47.320
Okay. There are no rules in this house. Hey, you guys. Happy hour is from four to six.
00:40:55.320
Thanks. Um, is there alcohol in this? Oh God, honey. No. What kind of mother do you think I am?
00:41:03.880
Why do you want a little bit? Cause if you're going to drink, I'd rather you do it in the house.
00:41:07.400
No, thank you. Okay. So you guys, what is the four one one? What has everybody been up to?
00:41:16.600
What is the hot gossip? I mean, when you talk about cultural differences that are going to lead
00:41:21.480
to differences in adulthood, like this is obviously going to have a big effect parental
00:41:25.080
involvement. Yeah. The, the, the, the, well, and the ways that parents have involvement,
00:41:30.200
is it, you know, about sitting down with a kid during time that's just parent kid time,
00:41:35.000
or are they bringing the kid along with them during their regular daily routine?
00:41:38.520
These are two. If you look historically at the different American styles of parenting,
00:41:42.760
um, the, the backwoods, greater Appalachian region, the way that parental involvement worked,
00:41:46.920
it's the kids would follow the parent around. Whereas if you go to the Puritan or Quaker regions,
00:41:52.280
it was more that the parent would set aside like unique time to interact with the kid,
00:41:58.360
which is a very different way of interacting with, with people depending on the region.
00:42:06.040
Was that the way it worked with your parents or were they more like, just follow me around on when
00:42:10.440
I'm doing business and work? They refer to it as parallel play. And I loved it, which is just,
00:42:14.280
we all kind of ignore each other and did our own thing, but in close proximity. So yeah,
00:42:18.360
it would be that Appalachian model of like, I'm going to do my work or do my thing.
00:42:22.360
They also brought you on lots of business trips as I remember.
00:42:25.080
Yeah. I loved that. That was great. Yeah. Which I guess is very much that Appalachian model.
00:42:30.360
Yeah. Just, and they, and then they just let you do whatever when you were in these countries.
00:42:33.560
Just, yeah, we just, I would wander the streets of Tokyo, but then it's sometimes I would come along to
00:42:38.200
business dinners and, you know, see drunken salarymen sing karaoke and, you know, I think in,
00:42:46.600
you know, we've really hurt society when progressives like tried to prevent us from
00:42:50.760
looking at these differences. There's just so much we can learn both about ourselves and about how
00:42:56.520
other people have different perspectives in us and what might be driving those perspectives by
00:42:59.880
looking at things like child rearing. That would actually be a great episode for me to research.
00:43:03.880
It's a child rearing episode. Yeah. Like cultural differences in child rearing because again, like
00:43:08.840
the, at least the averages are cultural norms of we'll say Chinese investment in children.
00:43:14.440
It's, it's kind of heartbreakingly high, but in this kind of remote way, like that allegedly 60%
00:43:21.800
of disposable income goes to rearing kids. Once a Chinese couple has kids also in all the manga that
00:43:27.320
I'd read, you know, about kids, maybe being stressed out at school or studying. It wasn't like the parents
00:43:31.960
were like sitting there next to them. It was, they would come home from school and go upstairs to
00:43:37.240
their room and study by themselves and then come down to eat dinner as a family. Sure. But there
00:43:43.480
wasn't a whole lot of side-by-side parent time spent. It was, that was relegated mostly to meals,
00:43:50.520
which is interesting because in that way, the parents are breaking their backs, raising their kids,
00:43:57.240
but not really getting to enjoy them, which might have a very anti-natal effect. Like what's the
00:44:02.520
point? This isn't even fun. I'm all, I'm spending all my time to basically contribute to an investment
00:44:08.600
asset that I'm not even enjoying, especially in a, in a, in societies where less and less so you're
00:44:17.960
depending on your children for retirement. What would the point be at all? You don't hang out with your
00:44:22.280
kids. You don't really like them. You're really stressed out about their achievement. You spend a ton of money on
00:44:26.520
them. Yeah. That's, I'm not signing up for that. That sounds terrible. I'm not doing that.
00:44:32.520
That is really interesting. It reminds me of, you know, they were, they were talking about how in
00:44:39.480
one article I was reading, how cultures you typically either go to live with like the mother's family or
00:44:45.960
the father's family, depending on what culture you're talking about. Oh, you mean like if the both,
00:44:50.920
the married couple collectively will go live with them. Yeah. And a cultural trait that you see in a,
00:44:56.200
when you go to live with the mother's family is typically women are a lot more agentic in these
00:45:01.640
cultures and have much higher status and that the rural British culture, which informed a lot of
00:45:07.880
American culture was one of these. And that's why in a lot of old timey stuff, people talk about
00:45:13.640
the, the, the, you know, the old battle axe mother-in-law is such a frequent trope because
00:45:18.600
these people are literally living alongside the young couple. Like they were going to live in the,
00:45:23.960
the, the mother's, the girl's parents' house. And so the, the mother-in-law would exert a lot of
00:45:30.200
influence that could really chafe on, you know, the, the, the young couple. And, and that makes perfect
00:45:36.680
sense. But you know, you'd also get this, this, this trope of, oh, you know, they have so much cultural
00:45:41.960
power and pressure. I mean, I love you to death Simone. What am I having for dinner tonight?
00:45:49.960
So we could do more curry, but we've been doing a lot of that lately. I know I need to
00:45:55.160
make something new for you, but you don't like Dandan noodles anymore. And you don't like
00:46:03.960
Sichuan chicken anymore. And I used to like potstickers, which I can make for you.
00:46:08.360
What kind of tickles your fancies these days? What's like, even just random grilled cheese
00:46:15.160
nights, you'd be like, yeah, let's do grilled cheese, but that's too, too basic for you.
00:46:20.200
Or something or chicken or we could do, I mean, why don't you like, look at some of the sauces that
00:46:26.280
we haven't been using and then ask an AI what can be made from them. Okay. Do you know which sauce
00:46:33.080
made your tummy hurt? No, we don't know yet, but we can look at the ones that we're not using now.
00:46:38.360
So what I would do is I would look in the fridge and be like, okay, like, I know we got some Thai
00:46:43.560
red chili sauce or something that we haven't really used on anything.
00:46:52.200
Well, you could do something with gochujang that is not gochujang chicken.
00:46:57.560
I mean, I would just put gochujang in other dishes. I don't think that like,
00:47:00.920
Oh, what's that dish you did where you made the fiery chicken? I like that one.
00:47:10.840
I think you're thinking of gochujang chicken that's first breaded in...
00:47:16.120
No, not breaded chicken. It was like a drier chicken dish.
00:47:18.920
Yeah, pretty much all of the ones are first dipped in cornstarch and then fried.
00:47:26.920
Well, why don't you try to just make up your own dish?
00:47:29.720
Because with a limited amount of time I've gotten to prepare dinner, I can't do that except for on
00:47:36.760
Okay, then just give me, you know, dumplings, okay? I don't care.
00:47:41.800
Okay. We can plan something better tomorrow if I make more. I just need preparation time.
00:47:49.880
I mean, you're going to get like an hour of preparation time today.
00:47:53.000
No, because we're going to... Well, maybe. We'll see. We'll see.
00:47:56.680
All right. I'll hop on the other call. Love you.
00:48:01.880
I was in the middle of watching that amazing link you sent about Kitochi.
00:48:07.000
I haven't explained. We had an Italian journalist team staying at our house this last weekend,
00:48:12.040
and I had to spend a long time explaining to them why...
00:48:16.440
What was his name? The Prime Minister. What is it?
00:48:24.520
But anyway, so I had to explain to them why Shinzo Abe, how he saved Trump.
00:48:27.800
And they're like, do people like actually believe this happened?
00:48:32.600
And I was like, well, I mean, they emotionally believe it happened.
00:48:46.440
Well, Toasty, that's way too close to the edge.
00:48:59.560
Mommy, I'm doing it, but I need to climb, but I need to push down me.
00:49:07.400
Toasty, come back over here and I'll hold you up, okay?