In this episode, Dr. Mark Canghisi joins Dr. Kelly to discuss the evolution of perception, emotion, language, and the behavior of mass groups. They discuss evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology in general. They also discuss the role of evolutionary theory in understanding perception and emotion, and why evolutionary psychology is important in understanding the function of evolved traits like perception. Dr. Canghisisi is the author of the book, Expressly Human, and a number of other books. He is an evolutionary biologist and psychologist, and is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, where he is the Director of the Centre for Evolutionary Psychology at the Department of Cognitive Science and Behavioural Biology at the Jacobs School of Psychology. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times bestselling book, "Evolutionary Biology: How We All Became Homo sapiens," and a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post and The New Yorker. Join us if you're interested in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology and evolutionary theory, and other topics related to perception, emotions, language and communication, as well as the behavior and communication in mass groups, and how they play a role in our daily lives. Visit lumenus.ca/Autism to learn more about autism support and how you can support your child's journey to success in life and success in school, work, and at home. To find out more about the program, visit luminouscommunity.ca.org/autism and other resources that support autism educators across the globe. Thanks to Lumenus for sponsoring this podcast, and for supporting autism support, we're making a difference in the field, here's a link to support autistic children and families across the world. We're all of us are here to help you learn and support you, not just in the world, not only in school and in the classroom, and we're here to support you! . I hope you learn something new about autism. Thank you for listening to this podcast and share it on social media and support it. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts and sharing it on the podcast. If you have a question or suggestions? Tweet me on it! Timestamps: or post it on Insta: , and if you'd like to support the podcast? I'll be listening to it on your own podcast post it in the comments section?
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00:00:30.000Hello, everybody. I'm going to start today with a couple of announcements.
00:00:38.460The first is that I published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, Perceptions of the Divine.
00:00:43.680It came out November 19th. It's number one on Amazon right now, which I'm pretty happy about.
00:00:48.640And it's also the basis for a tour, which I started in November, continues through December, then January through April as well.
00:00:57.460You can find information about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com.
00:01:01.940It's about this new book, which is about biblical stories, but you should also understand that I'm doing the same thing with these stories that I did with the other tours that I had conducted before and the other books for that matter,
00:01:13.460which is to take high-level abstract ideas, in this case foundational narratives, to explain what they mean, but also to explain why knowing what they mean can make a real practical difference in your life.
00:01:26.820You know, I want to bridge the gap between the abstraction and the reality so that you can put into operation the principles that I'm discussing so that it does produce a tangible improvement in how you attend to things and how you act.
00:01:38.720So come out to the lectures if you're interested in continuing with that.
00:01:42.440Today, I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Canghisi, who is an author of this book, Expressly Human, and a number of other books.
00:01:51.620And I wanted to talk to Mark for two reasons.
00:01:54.440One was because we share an interest in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology,
00:02:00.320especially with regards to perception, emotion, language, and mass group behavior.
00:02:08.200And so I've been trying to wade through the literature on perception.
00:02:13.440Mark is very interested, as an evolutionary biologist slash psychologist, in the function of evolved traits like perception.
00:02:22.140And one of the hypotheses that we discussed, which is a very interesting one, was his explanation, rather unique explanation for the evolution of color vision.
00:02:30.220And he believes, for example, that we have additional color vision, not so much so that we can detect ripe fruit, for example, which was one hypothesis,
00:02:39.340but so that we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as a consequence of alterations in their circulation, especially displayed facially.
00:02:49.960So we have color vision so that we're better at detecting signs of health or ill health as a consequence of skin tone, but also detecting and reacting to emotional displays.
00:03:01.940And so join us if you're interested in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, emotion, language, communication, and the behavior of mass groups.
00:03:12.460So I think we'll start our discussion by talking about perception, and you've studied visual perception for a long time.
00:03:21.200And so I'd like you to outline, if you would, what you understand about visual perception, and then we can contrast our viewpoints and see where we can go with that.
00:03:31.500And I think we'll segue into emotion and language from perception.
00:03:35.240Yeah, I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics, and I went into cognitive science, and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist.
00:03:44.580And so one of the areas that I worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision.
00:03:48.320So I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruny fingers when you're wet.
00:03:56.120They're actually optimized to be rain treads so that when you don't want a hydroplane, so they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible.
00:04:06.620So these are the sorts of things that I was always dealing with.
00:04:10.540So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way.
00:04:22.020And strangely, I mean, this is more of the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection.
00:04:36.100They nod to it, but if you actually do a paper that argues, here's why it evolved to be this way, here's the functional reason for why it's this way, they'll say, you're doing a just-so story.
00:04:45.920You're not allowed to make hypotheses about design.
00:05:32.840And so it's a very small community, and it comes across as, you know, they attack sociobiology, EOE, and it goes on the same kind of basis.
00:05:40.300You start wanting to be – it happens not just when you enter into human behavior and human psychology.
00:05:45.040It happens even generally when you're talking about even rain treads, you know, rain tread pruning fingers like I did or any of the stuff that I do.
00:05:51.440Okay, that is a just-so story, and it is not allowed, right?
00:05:55.000Now, it's true that you can't study design the way that you study mechanisms.
00:05:58.720You can't do a lab experiment in quite the same way.
00:06:01.040You have to ask it in different kinds of ways.
00:06:02.240You have to say, if this is really designed for what I'm claiming it's designed for, let's say, you know, if the pruning fingers are designed to be rain treads, well, then here's – let's derive what the optimal morphology would be.
00:06:13.980What should the wrinkles actually look like?
00:06:15.320So that's one kind of prediction, looking at the morphology or the shape.
00:06:18.160Another might be, if it's really the case that it's for design, well, it should only occur in animals that, you know, have wet, dewy conditions, whereas certain kinds of animals that are never in wet, dewy conditions shouldn't have this, you know, this morphological feature shouldn't appear.
00:06:30.200There's different kinds of predictions you can make, but they're often phylogenetic predictions, morphological predictions.
00:06:35.760Sometimes you can do behavioral – they actually behave – perform better in wet conditions when they're wrinkly versus when they're not wrinkly and all the kind of combinations of these things.
00:06:43.060What you don't – you can't typically do the mechanism kinds of experiments.
00:06:46.160It's just a whole different kind of thing.
00:06:48.680But the strange, weird thing in incredibly far-left communities as they are is that they somehow have thrown Darwin out entirely, and you can't talk about natural selection,
00:06:58.980which was an incredibly bizarre thing.
00:07:01.640So, okay, so I can think of a variety of possible reasons for that, and I'd like your opinions about those reasons.
00:07:08.800I mean, you tangled together a couple of things.
00:07:13.000You said that even as an evolutionary biologist, if you start to tread in the water of teleology or purpose, you receive pushback from your colleagues.
00:07:22.480And then you mentioned that that was also a far-left phenomenon.
00:07:26.020And so I'm curious about – it seems to me that the relationship with the far-left is likely the fact that the far-left political philosophy is predicated on a radical social constructionism, essentially.
00:07:42.100That every single thing that everyone does, especially human beings, but to the degree that the same thinking paralyzes speculation about animal evolution, there's an insistence among those on the far left that there's no essential human nature.
00:08:00.400Everything's infinitely malleable, and I see that as a reflection of an incredible intellectual arrogance because the reason for the insistence that everything is socially constructed is because that allows for the possibility for everything to be 100% modifiable by those, for example, who would like to modify human behavior and the image of their own philosophy.
00:08:24.260Do you think there's – is there anything else do you think that's going on with regards to the rejection of purpose or so-called design?
00:08:32.920I mean, my pet assumption has been that their hair stands on end or they get – they feel backed up against the wall.
00:08:41.720When you get to human behavior, there's Stephen Pinker and Blank Slate arguing this as well, the idea that there's any notion of instinct or a human nature is against something – they really want to push back on that because they want to think of us as infinitely malleable and subject to socialism and whatever policies that they have where they can shape us however they wish.
00:09:03.380And so even when we're in things like pruning fingers, it's as if they've taken that kind of prohibition of human psychology and pushed it into any realm at all and have a general admonition not to do any kind of design or research that concerns the design of animals and themselves.
00:09:23.460So I'm not sure what else it could be.
00:09:25.480But at any rate, it's a bizarre thing because the only way that –
00:09:30.140Maybe it's something like – there's a lot of reasons for rejecting the idea of purpose.
00:09:37.340One is to reject the idea of an ultimate designer.
00:09:40.380So there's a religious argument, say, lurking at the bottom of that.
00:09:43.220But it's also very convenient to reject the notion of purpose or meaning because it also allows you to reject the idea of any kind of implicit responsibility.
00:09:53.020Like if nothing has any meaning, the disadvantage to everything being meaningless is that things are meaningless.
00:10:00.300But the advantage to everything being meaningless and purposeless is that you can do whatever the hell you want.
00:10:07.220And so it's a very good rationalization for like short-term hedonistic power-mad behavior.
00:10:12.680And if you combine that with the problem of like infinite social constructionism, then you have a real problem.
00:10:17.980But it's a weird thing that you would encounter that among – at least among hypothetically evolutionary biologists and thinkers.
00:10:24.700Because why would they be concerned with evolutionary biology if they are going to toss out Darwin, for example?
00:10:31.140But most of them don't really have to think about Darwin because they're doing mechanistic experiments.
00:10:36.020They're not doing hypotheses about this design.
00:10:38.900I'm one of the rare people – back in the 1920s, you had the ethologists who did a lot more thinking in terms of the design and the function,
00:10:44.880really thinking about their evolutionary connection.
00:11:31.020And maybe that's part of its – there's tons and tons of mechanistic behaviors that it has that have nothing to do with what it's in fact for.
00:12:01.360In relationship to function at the top.
00:12:02.980And so they're throwing out the very thing that allows you to understand, even if they are only interested in mechanisms, which my eyes glaze over with mechanisms, you can't understand mechanisms without inherently understanding the functions.
00:12:15.180Okay, so that's a very interesting place to segue into perception itself because I got very interested, I don't know, probably 20 years ago in pragmatic philosophy, the pragmatic philosophy of William James and Peirce.
00:12:30.880And they were all part of the metaphysical club in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th century.
00:12:39.480And they were also extremely influenced by Darwin.
00:12:44.440And the pragmatists have been deemed the only genuine American stream of philosophy.
00:12:51.860And the pragmatists were very concerned with function.
00:12:54.980In fact, their definition of truth was essentially function.
00:12:58.320That we determine what's true by examining the concordance of a proposition even in relationship to its effectiveness with regard to purpose.
00:13:11.860And they've made a case for that on the scientific side of things.
00:13:15.460That things that we regard as true, we regard as true because they provide an effective means for us to move towards a desired end.
00:13:22.580So for the pragmatists, there was really no separation of truth itself, even at the level of perception of fact.
00:13:29.440There was no separation between that and functional purpose.
00:13:32.980And I'm curious about your opinion in that regard in relationship to perception itself.
00:13:39.800Because the best models of perception that I've encountered, the ones that seem to make the most sense in keeping with everything else I know about psychology, are pragmatic models.
00:13:49.620And that they're predicated on the idea that what we perceive, and this is part of the thing that I've argued about, for example, with Sam Harris, is that the radical empiricists who believe that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts,
00:14:06.920don't take into account the fact that when we perceive a fact, we're actually perceiving something much more akin to a function.
00:14:15.560So, for example, I was very influenced by visual approach to ecological perception.
00:14:24.360Not in all regards, but I found much of Gibson's work extremely useful.
00:14:28.100That his sense is that when we're looking at the world, we're seeing something like, I've broadened it a bit, but pathways to a desired destination, tools that can facilitate our movement forward, obstacles that might come up in our path, and a vast domain of irrelevance around that.
00:14:48.100And that's true for every perceptual act.
00:14:50.520It seems to be particularly evident in the case of vision.
00:14:53.840A vision is something like a navigation aid.
00:14:57.600So, I'm curious what you think about that, and, well, with any of those ideas, how those ideas might be related or not related to the manner in which you're conceptualizing object perception, let's say.
00:15:09.200Well, I mean, ecological, capital E, ecological perception, ecological vision with Gibson, ended up biting onto a whole lot of philosophical baggage that I never bought into.
00:15:20.440I consider myself, I consider myself a lowercase e, ecological vision person, in which case you can't understand what vision or any mechanisms are doing unless you understand what it was functioning for in the natural environment for all of those millions of years.
00:15:33.280And so, let me just give you some specific examples.
00:15:37.140So, one of the things that I had noticed was that people had talked about color for 100 years and color vision.
00:15:43.400First of all, to back up, we primates, we and some other primates, have a third dimension.
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00:18:10.320Okay, so that's the problem you're trying to address.
00:18:12.180All right, so I realized later that when you look, you know, I've noticed that one of the things that matters is blood under the skin, blushes, blanches, health modulations.
00:18:21.960All of these kinds of motions, signals that humans and other primates are doing on bare skin is shown by virtue of the blood of the skin.
00:18:28.940And it's by virtue in particular of the oxygenation, deoxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin.
00:18:35.380And it turns out that when you're looking at the completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin, which is a bunch of – it has a little W in this one part.
00:18:44.500So it goes like this, and there's a little W.
00:18:46.360And when it's – that's when it's oxygenated.
00:18:48.240And when it deoxygenates, that W in that little region turns into a U.
00:18:51.420And so these little peaks right there in the W part, if you wanted to be sensitive to this oxygenation, deoxygenation, you actually have to have two cones right there.
00:19:01.580So the little W peak in the middle as it goes down in terms of U and the other parts that go up, you have to sense it.
00:19:07.200You have to have a peculiar spots of two cones in this exact spot.
00:19:10.320So I was like, oh my god, exactly where you'd have to put cones to be sensitive to the only spot where you could tell that it's getting oxygenated versus deoxygenated is exactly in the spots where we have our cones.
00:19:21.180Okay, so let me sum up that just so that I make sure I'm following you.
00:19:25.420So the first – the objection you have to standard theories of trichromat perception is that the two of the color spectra that we see are so close together on the electromagnetic spectrum that there's no advantage to distinguishing them that's clear in the natural world as such.
00:19:46.060And you're associating that with the enhanced ability to detect difference in oxygenation in the skin, and you're going to associate that, I presume, with emotional display.
00:19:57.340In short, our color vision, our primate color vision is an empath sense.
00:20:01.380It's only by virtue of that that we can see these blushes and blanches, and it's only by virtue of that that you can actually see veins at all.
00:20:07.840The veins, of course, are the deoxygenated parts, and the more fleshy red parts are the more oxygenated parts.
00:20:13.200This stuff is completely invisible if you're colorblind.
00:20:15.360If you're a colorblind doctor, even going back to Dalton, he had complained about his complete inability to see if someone had infected in one eye versus the other.
00:20:31.520As soon as you're color deficient, you're missing one of those.
00:20:35.380Now it's just – you can't distinguish these things at all.
00:20:37.540Do we know if people who are colorblind are deficient in facial emotional processing?
00:20:43.200We – that has been very hard to test because – but what we do know is that there's a long history of medical doctors who have known problems in just detecting blood state-related diagnosis, symptoms that are recognizable by blood state.
00:21:06.340There's a lot of – my dad's colorblind and he's emotionally dense.
00:21:09.400Even if you did rapid presentation of angry faces like almost at a subliminal level, do you think that people who were colorblind would be less able to detect the difference between angry and non-angry faces if – at least to the degree that that's signaled by facial flushing?
00:21:27.420Well, I mean, you can certainly mimic on screen.
00:21:33.680You could try to mimic the spectral difference in some sense so that – first of all, just to back up.
00:21:40.440One of the interesting side effects of this is that your camera doesn't show you color vision.
00:21:45.100Your TV doesn't show you color vision.
00:21:46.580All the cameras that we use are still in some sense two-color vision because their third receptivity is way out – it's distributed way out there.
00:21:57.840So none of those cameras that we take these pictures of are able to sense these oxygenation modulations.
00:22:02.380Okay, so that's an experimental problem.
00:22:04.120Yeah, so this is what makes it deeply difficult.
00:22:06.060It also means that literally we're not seeing all of the states that we experience in real life.
00:22:11.600The glow of youth, when you see glow of youth, you're talking about the glowing of oxygenated blood on the skin.
00:22:18.420Is that – okay, so you mentioned the glow of youth.
00:22:21.480I mean, hypothetically, one of the markers that could drive transformation of color vision in the direction of emotion detection that was blood-related would be for picking up signs of fecundity.
00:22:38.600And that would be a direct association.
00:22:41.020And there is evidence that I think is quite compelling that one of the things that makes women attractive to men are signals of health that are associated with enhanced fertility.
00:22:53.080All of those signals seem to be associated with what people conceive of as feminine beauty.
00:22:58.220And you picked one that was cardinal there, which is that flush.
00:23:11.220And the other primates, the rump, become so exaggerated that they literally – the UK would take some of these – the females when they were having estrus out because it was almost embarrassing for the kids to come and watch.
00:23:22.220So, you know, there's – it's multidimensional.
00:23:44.400If it's deoxygenated blood, it's green and blue and so bluish-green.
00:23:49.140So, in fact, you end up – by virtue of concentration variations, blue-yellow, and oxygenation remodulations, red-green, you can get any possible hue at all.
00:23:56.980Which is why if you're a painter and you're trying to actually paint human faces, when we go back and look at their paintings, which I could never do, you're like, oh, my God.
00:24:04.800They're using all – they're using all the hues.
00:24:17.820You are not – skin is not – if you've ever – you know, if you get a bruise, the first thing you notice is that it's, of course, total discoloration.
00:24:24.720And so, we – you're really seeing a dynamic view into the very state and function and health of the individual.
00:24:35.080It's completely a highly transparent surface.
00:24:38.600And we're not consciously aware of it, although we're certainly reading it all the time.
00:25:01.220So, one of the things that I've read – I don't know if you believe that this is true, but, you know, because everything turns out to be debatable among scientists, just like everyone else.
00:25:11.920But, I've read that one of the things that shaped the evolution of our eyes is their shaping to be maximally visually evident to perceivers, right?
00:25:24.560We're unbelievably good at determining exactly where someone's eyes are pointed.
00:25:29.280So, even if someone is sitting across the room from you, you can tell if they're looking at your eyes or at the tip of your nose, which is such a tiny fraction of movement at the eye level or a fraction of angle that it's almost amazing.
00:25:43.220It's amazing that you can detect it at all and that we have the white background and the colored iris and the black pupil partly because that maximizes the degree to which our eyes are salient.
00:25:54.120The hypothesis being that anyone in our evolutionary history whose eyes weren't salient was someone whose intentions were very difficult to determine and was much more likely to be misunderstood, say, and killed in consequence or much less likely to find a mate.
00:26:11.880And so, our faces have evolved at least at the level of our perception of the eyes of others to ensure that we can understand intent.
00:26:21.740And we do that by inferring attention, by looking at eye gaze, and you're making a strong case in your work for the relationship between perception, color vision, and emotion perception.
00:26:35.060So, we talked a little bit about cues of health that might be associated with skin coloration and cues of fecundity, but tell me about the emotional cues that are associated with differences in color.
00:26:47.840So, you know, the first thing I think people think about with spectral skin signaling is blushes, right, and blanches and flushes.
00:26:56.920But that's really just the beginning, you know, this barely touches the surface.
00:27:00.700So, you can imagine someone's angry and they can get a red face, which is very different from when somebody blushes and they get it with embarrassment.
00:27:07.740And people actually, if I'm in front of a stage and something happens that's slightly embarrassing, and the audience is over there and I'm looking this way, you actually blush more on the side that's facing the audience.
00:27:26.020So, these are strong arguments that these are signals, not just automatic side effects of, you know, some kind of implicit side effect with no purpose.
00:27:37.080Because it opens up the question, like, first of all, not everybody blushes.
00:27:42.420And the issue is, well, what does the blush signify?
00:27:44.880And it signifies something like self-conscious shame.
00:27:48.380And then the question is, well, why would you want to signal self-conscious shame to people?
00:27:53.060I mean, because it's a shameful signal.
00:27:54.740But it does indicate that you're the sort of, one of the things that might indicate is that you're the sort of person who can't get away with, what, exactly, violating the social norm?
00:28:43.660If someone is manipulating with a smile, they don't do it the same way they do when they smile spontaneously.
00:28:49.460And so, those rapid onset implicit emotional displays are a signal about our genuine motivations.
00:28:58.880And if those signals are obvious, it's, in principle, easier for people to read us and, therefore, in principle, easier for them to engage in trusting negotiations with us.
00:29:13.460And so, I mean, other predictions that come out of this, by the way, it should be the case that if this is true, then the primates with color vision, as opposed to the primates that didn't have three color vision, the primates with color vision should have more naked spots.
00:29:30.940And, in fact, when you look, the primates with color vision are the ones with the naked faces.
00:29:34.440They often have naked rumps, you know, naked genitalia, which, because all of these things are signaling, the ones without color vision are furry face like your typical bunny rabbit, typical dog.
00:29:45.240Nakedness and color vision, three-color vision, are opposite sides of the same coin.
00:29:52.320Does the theory that trichromate vision evolved at least partly or perhaps in the main as an aid to emotion detection contradict the frugivore theory?
00:30:07.420Like, is it possible that color vision also gave us an edge, at least in some environments, with regards to the detection of higher quality food sources?
00:30:15.660It's certainly possible, but it wouldn't have driven – there's no reason to think that fruit would have driven those particular wavelength sensitivities of the middle and long wavelength-sensitive cones.
00:30:27.860Particularly given that they're so close together.
00:30:32.220And there's all kinds of things where we leverage our color vision, which is peculiarly for empath kind of health senses.
00:30:39.820But we obviously use it for lots of things, probably in nature beyond that, and in culture views all over the place.
00:30:46.560But that doesn't mean that – that doesn't amount to an explanation for what drove it.
00:30:50.920Yeah, well, I mean, part of the problem, I guess, that people have with evolutionary – functional evolutionary explanations for the purpose of any given human attribute is that there's no reason ever to assume that any given attribute is singular in its function.
00:31:08.820It's sort of like asking what the hand can do.
00:31:12.640Well, you know, the hand is for a lot of things.
00:31:15.960What's the – is there a cardinal purpose to the hand?
00:31:18.820That's a hard question to ask, but there's no reason to assume that evolution wouldn't operate so that a given biological phenomenon would be other than multipurpose.
00:31:33.300Right, well, so everything might be multipurpose, but the odds of there being two competing or multiple competing decidirata that are determining the design, that they're close to one another, are going to be typically fairly rare.
00:31:50.020Typically, one of them might be 10 times more important than the other.
00:31:53.060Usually, in my experience, it turns out that one of these is the principal drivers.
00:31:58.000It can explain first-order, even second-order properties of the thing.
00:32:01.720And, yeah, there can be other third- or fourth-order stuff, but that's mostly irrelevant.
00:32:06.040So you can get away with explaining – so, for example, another one, why we have forward-facing eyes.
00:32:09.920Standard story, and the fun thing, all of these explanations, whether it's pruning fingers, it's still probably in the Wikipedia page.
00:32:16.120It just says it's a side effect of osmosis or some bullcrap, right?
00:32:19.060It's just – it's still there to this day, these old narratives.
00:32:21.380And then for forward-facing eyes, it's always – it has something about predators want forward-facing eyes, except that every fish is a predator eating a smaller fish.
00:32:34.080By our standards, they're all sideways-facing eyes.
00:32:36.440Even all the carnivores, the paradigmatic mammalian meat-eaters, predators, have sideways-facing eyes relative to us.
00:32:45.020I mean, they still have forward-facing eyes in terms of the big picture of things.
00:32:47.820So there's a lot of variability in forward-facing eyeness across the mammals.
00:32:51.820And the question is, why is there this variability?
00:32:55.140And so there's been multiple kinds of – one is stereoscopy, a better stereoscopy.
00:33:01.860But you even get stereoscopy in a bunny rabbit.
00:33:04.480Bunny rabbit has a very thin binocular field, and it can see stereoscopy within a thin binocular field.
00:33:08.680But it also gets the benefit of seeing everything.
00:33:10.980It can see directly behind it, below it, above it.
00:33:12.840So you've got this full panoramic vision, whereas we've chosen to lose half of our visual field or a lot of our visual field just to have better stereoscopy up in front.
00:33:25.160Now, so one of the bad sorts of – you have these two currencies.
00:33:27.940Like the standard argument is, oh, I've got this great wide stereoscopy field of better 3D vision up front at the expense of losing everything.
00:33:37.240How is that an argument that I would want more of?
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00:35:12.840Things, yeah, occlusions in front of other things.
00:35:14.700If I just do this with one eye, even with one eye, I'm getting amazing, much better than stereoscopy.
00:35:19.780All of these things, when you do, if you're a perception psychologist who creates stimuli that have competing cues of two different kinds,
00:35:26.600and they say, which one's Trump, stereoscopy loses always.
00:35:30.040All of these other ones Trump, they win if there's competing.
00:35:32.140Oh, yeah. Oh, I see. So that's a good way of testing what's the most cardinal element of the, oh, yeah.
00:35:37.420And so none of, stereoscopy always loses.
00:35:39.060And if you've played first-person shooter video games, you're, yeah, you have both eyes open, but you're being fed one image on screen.
00:35:47.200And these things are so immersive, you never are confused as to where the guys are that you're shooting, right?
00:35:51.800They're always really unambiguously in one particular spot, yet you're a cyclops, right?
00:35:56.280So it had occurred to me back then, I said, I don't think it has anything to do with stereoscopy whatsoever.
00:36:01.260And it turns out it's all about one currency.
00:36:04.300This is, again, to this idea of why aren't there three, two or three or more equivalent kinds of functions that are all competing?
00:36:10.900And then it's just some ugly mess, and it's not a good design hypothesis at all.
00:36:15.720It's going to be sort of ugly kludge that happens to – it's almost never a kludge.
00:36:20.320And so in this case, the reason that we have forward-facing eyes and the more forward-facing they are is to see better and clutter.
00:36:28.560And so what I mean by that, animals that evolved with leaves all over the place.
00:36:31.900When there's leaves, if your eyes are more widely separated than the clutter leaves, let's say.
00:36:36.660So, for example, if you've played this game, if you just – if I hold my finger up in front of you, it's very thin, and I look at you, but not my finger, I see two – unless I've got a dominant eye.
00:36:44.860But for those of you who don't have a dominant eye, you'll see two copies of your finger, and each will be semi-transparent.
00:37:04.900It's just you have this perception that combines them and creates semi-transparency so that you can see beyond it.
00:37:11.600Now, even my whole hand, I'm almost missing nothing even with my whole hand in front of me.
00:37:15.300You know, there's a little bit of a core in the middle, but I'm capturing most of it.
00:37:20.140So, for objects that are less – objects that are not as big as this interpupillary distance, the separation between my eyes,
00:37:28.300then when you're an animal in – with those kinds of eyes in a forest with leaves that are typically smaller than that, you actually get – I call it x-ray.
00:37:36.500Like, you actually can see – it's probabilistic summation.
00:37:39.360You actually can see much, much more of the environment beyond than when you're a cyclops.
00:37:44.260So, and in fact, I noticed this playing video games back 20-something years ago when I would be – you know, because you're a cyclops and you're hiding in bushes,
00:37:55.300You can't see anything because you're just looking at these – but where in real life, you're in a bush, you pretty much see the entire world outside of it.
00:38:00.000You can, you know, peek from outside of your bush.
00:38:28.920But he can't – you can actually then calculate how much of the world outwards can you see.
00:38:34.400He's actually – I can see up to – if you think about it two-dimensionally, I can see up to one, two, three, three and a half times better than him if you think about it as a two-dimensional grid.
00:38:42.340But, in fact, it's more of a three-dimensional grid.
00:38:44.080Then you have to sort of think about spheres, sphere-packing problem.
00:38:47.320And so I can see only the front half of my little sphere, but if the little – the world is sort of built out of these spheres of these little – surrounded by lots of clutter, I can see the six spheres in front of me fully.
00:39:00.900And I can't see beyond that and only half of mine, but I can see now six and a half times more of the – there's, like, simple models that you can build of simple models of forested kinds of environments where you can show that now you can see really almost an order of magnitude more.
00:39:16.820It's not a little bit more stereoscopy here, but a little bit less seeing – no, it's just see the most.
00:39:21.980And so animals have – depending on their environment, they have more forward-facing eyes the more – the greater the extent to which they're in cluttered, forested kinds of environments.
00:39:31.420And so one desideratum, see the most, suffices to explain all the variability that we find across mammals in terms of how forward-facing eyes evolve.
00:39:39.200So does that mean that our forward-facing eyes evolved when we were still in arboreal – primarily arboreal environments?
00:39:46.260And are chimpanzees still primarily in arboreal environments?
00:39:51.160I guess they're – are they – yeah.
00:39:55.420So the fact that we were on the African plain for some millions of years wasn't sufficient to –
00:40:01.540Even there, even in the African plains – so even when you have animals in the same habitat, you have some animals that find micro-niches, for example, cats, who like to hang out in the clutter and just – and wait for their prey.
00:40:16.460And then let's say the gazelles, who don't want to be anywhere near that clutter because they can't see crap when they're inside it.
00:40:21.000So they will find micro-environments within even habitats that at first glance we kind of don't think of them as very cluttery.
00:40:27.080But animals that are good at clutter will find those cluttery spots and leverage them.
00:40:35.180Well, that's an interesting account of binocular vision.
00:40:38.700And let's – if it's all right, let's turn our attention back to emotion perception and then segue from that into the development of language.
00:40:46.820In this book, Expressly Human, which was published in 2022, you talk about the evolution of language, which is a relatively new phenomenon.
00:40:57.880You date it back several hundred thousands of years, and we could talk a little bit about that.
00:41:03.920But you also make the case that our linguistic ability, although it's relatively newly evolved, is scaffolded on an understructure of emotional display and emotional language.
00:41:17.100And so this is in keeping with the notions of perception that you put forward, that our faces, our skin surface, but primarily our faces, our emotional display mechanisms.
00:41:28.480And that we can read a tremendous amount about the intent of others, intent and desire of others, merely as a consequence of reading off emotions.
00:41:41.160And that language evolved with that as its underlying axiomatic – set of axiomatic presumptions.
00:41:51.920I mean, one of the things that – I can't remember even where I read about this, but it's the problem of infinite regress in language, you know, if I – and how we solve it.
00:42:02.380If I tell you, I was angry this morning, your likely question is, what made you angry, not, what do you mean angry?
00:42:11.180And the reason that you don't ask, what do you mean angry, is because you know what it's like to be angry.
00:42:16.700And so we share the underlying psychophysiological platform and all of the experiences that are part and parcel of that platform, and then we can use words to refer to those.
00:42:27.140That's a situation where you can think of emotions, and I think object perceptions are the same, by the way.
00:42:32.740Emotions are the axioms of the linguistic – of our linguistic capacity.
00:42:36.940And you seem to be making an argument that's analogous to that in your book.
00:42:40.140Well, way before there were social animals, every animal would have had emotions, right?
00:42:51.860One way to think about emotions is just states that you're in that feel like something that motivates you to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, right?
00:42:58.320And none of the – they would have all been dead-eyed shark-like creatures that have – they're filled with lots of emotions, filled on the inside with emotions.
00:43:05.960But they're not social animals, so they never had to signal to anybody anything.
00:43:10.380So what – really what Darwin was concerned about, I was like, okay, that's great.
00:43:13.320There's all these animals with all these emotions, and it feels like something to be them, and there's like all this internal stuff.
00:43:17.460And there's no reason for them to tell anybody.
00:43:19.000So why are all these social animals signaling so much to one another?
00:43:24.100So what we do here is just ask – if you're social animals and you don't have a language of any kind that we can – that we're so used to, you need to have – what is the optimal language stimulus signaling system such that you can carry out negotiations and compromises?
00:43:44.020And you can negotiate, and someone can back down, or someone can raise, and someone can do – so let me give you an example where we do – where people can come to a decision and come to an agreement without ever saying a word.
00:44:02.220You've got cards at a certain hand, and we don't know, and imagine that we can never talk about it.
00:44:05.740Like it turns out I could say, actually, it's – but imagine I've got these things that I know in the world, and you've got these things, and we're arguing over – zucchini bread keeps it.
00:44:11.680We're arguing over some particular thing that we want to split, and here we want to split the pot, whatever, the ante.
00:44:17.380There's the ante in there, and we want to get the ante out, and I can't talk, and we can even play online where we can't even talk, right?
00:44:25.060There's not even any emotional expressions there.
00:44:27.280But what I do to make my case is I just slide in a certain amount of stake.
00:44:32.160I stake something, and then you stake something, and it could be that after a while I go, okay, I think he's – Jordan's pretty confident.
00:44:52.600I'm going to – like we're going to go all in, and that means in this – in the case of poker, just laying down to see whose cards are better.
00:44:57.060And so figuring out whose cards are better in real life might be, oh, yeah, I'm a better fighter than you or whatever it might have come to, blows or whatever it might be,
00:45:05.040or something that we don't want to have to get involved with all the time.
00:45:09.020We'd like to make our lives much smoother in terms of the utility area.
00:45:15.600And so what we're able to show is that you need to have the ability – you need to have a signal that says, I think I'm really confident or really, really confident.
00:45:23.780And you do this by shoving in social capital chips, shoving in reputation.
00:45:27.420So when you signal pride or I also signal that I don't think you're confident at all, I have disdain for you.
00:45:33.980So either I'm signaling that I'm really confident or that your claims are not very – you've got a bad hand.
00:45:38.160Either of those things amounts to a certain amount of stake or betting social capital.
00:45:43.160But I can also show humility, and now I'm sort of pulling off chips.
00:45:56.100You need to be able to both make claims strong and weak or pride and sort of humility about my own confidence and also respect or disdain concerning yours.
00:46:19.900You know, that confidence must be something like the end result of an internal Darwinian competition between different competing motivational states, right?
00:46:28.800Is that – because you might ask yourself, why should I accept your confidence as a signal of your competence?
00:46:37.680And one answer to that would be, I know something about you and know that you can do things.
00:46:41.660And so that would be a consequence of me actually knowing you in a social circumstance.
00:46:45.680But another would be that if your evaluation of the situation is sufficient so that the emotion of moving forward and dominating isn't being challenged by a number of other potential emotional states like anxiety,
00:47:02.800I'm going to be able to read that on your face.
00:47:05.100And so I'm going to know that you undertook the internal computations that were sufficient to at least convince you that you're correct.
00:47:13.520Well, I mean, I think you're overthinking – here for this argument, we don't even have to – we don't have to think about it being honest signals like for color vision.
00:47:22.080Even if we were – I mean, and we're not consciously doing these.
00:47:25.620We have evolved to just do these signals often implicitly without really – and that's really when we're good is when we're not consciously thinking it through.
00:47:33.300But the reason that you're willing to believe me when I show confidence that I'm the one who should get most of the cake that mom laid out, let's say, and you're my brother,
00:47:44.660is because we're part of a social community and I'll get humiliated if it turns out that mom tells people that I'm wrong.
00:47:50.580The reason that it works is because I care about what I staked.
00:48:03.680Okay, so you're building in – I think you're building in something like appreciation for the fact that the reputational exchanges that we're making are cumulative across time in a social community that's actually continually interacting.
00:48:22.860It sometimes manages – somehow with humans, it seems to sometimes work even with one-offs, right?
00:48:26.580Like, because we're so instinctively doing – but, you know, we've been instinctively designed thinking that we're part of a single community that we're – we seem to get off – you know, we get on pretty well and we're all nice to the baristas and everybody's nice to whatever.
00:48:48.420Yeah, well, I've also been – well, I'm curious about what you think about this as well because I've been working out the idea – it's not only me, obviously, but many people work on this idea that – and I think it's associated with the – it's the same idea as the idea of natural law in more pure philosophy is that there's a pattern of ethos that emerges as a consequence of the fact of iterated exchange.
00:49:15.500You know, like if it – so I'll give you an example of this from the animal literature.
00:49:22.240So when animal behaviors first started studying rat play and were trying to understand it physiologically and functionally, one of the things they would do was match juvenile rats together so that they could wrestle.
00:49:40.120But they do one-offs and what they found was invariably that if one of the rats had about a 10% weight advantage over the other rat that he could win the vast majority of times.
00:49:52.160And so the idea of play was something like – you put two animals into a ring, they compete with one another, the larger animal can dominate the smaller animal, and the purpose of the play bout is to establish dominance without damage.
00:50:11.360But the problem with that hypothesis was that rats don't play with each other once, they play repeatedly.
00:50:20.900And it turned out that if you put rats together, juveniles repeatedly, the big rat has to let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, or the little rat won't play anymore.
00:50:37.220And so this is – it's a remarkable discovery.
00:50:41.220It's an absolutely brilliant discovery because it shows, first of all, that the purpose of play is not dominance.
00:50:46.500It also implies that the social hierarchy order isn't dominance-related, but even more importantly, it shows that reciprocity is the basis for social organization, even among rats, and not the expression of power.
00:51:03.840And that's – like, that's a radically different idea.
00:51:06.020Now, Franz DeWall has found something like that, as far as I'm concerned, found something very similar with his studies of chimpanzees because it was thought for the longest time, I think, by Marxist-oriented evolutionary biologists fundamentally, that the –
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00:51:46.180Substructure for dominance with regard to the alpha chimps was the physical expression of power.
00:51:53.000But what DeWall showed was that that happens now and then.
00:51:56.380You get a chimp troop where the major alpha is a bully and a successful one.
00:52:01.280But he tends to get torn to shreds as soon as he has a weak moment by, like, two subordinates have had enough of being pushed around.
00:52:08.740The stable alphas are often smaller males, although that's irrelevant in a sense.
00:52:14.860What they are is extremely good at continuous reciprocity.
00:52:18.520And they tend to rule over much more harmonious social troops and have a much longer reign.
00:52:23.120So, the reason I'm asking about this is because you talk about the importance of staking social capital when making a claim for confidence.
00:52:44.080You said, I'm staking something and you implied that, well, if I'm wrong in my confidence and word gets around, it's going to damage my reputation.
00:52:53.120Which means that the next time I act confidently, no one's going to believe me.
00:52:58.280So, the implication is that if you're reciprocating with people across a long span of time,
00:53:06.480then you're only going to make confidence claims where you're relatively certain that being wrong isn't going to damage your long-term reputation.
00:53:19.220And here we work out the, in some sense, argue it.
00:53:23.500Here's the fundamental and minimal signaling system that is absolutely needed for two creatures to engage in these kinds of staking conversations.
00:54:30.080So, but key here is what is the language that you need?
00:54:34.820And it turns out the language, once you work it out, it's exactly the space of emotional expressions that we have.
00:54:39.840The emotional expressions that we have are exactly what's needed to engage in exactly the kind of generalized poker game that social animals that don't have language need to actually communicate and stake things and carry out.
00:54:51.200Okay, so that would be the basis for establishing cooperative endeavors over the medium to long run, but also properly regulating competitive endeavors so that they don't end in catastrophe.
00:55:05.460That would be the negotiation landscape.
00:55:08.540Okay, so why don't you tell us why you think that our emotional displays are optimized for solving the problem of cooperation and competition?
00:55:19.600All I'm saying is that my ability to, I didn't try in this book to work out what are the, what would be nice to be able to say, and here's the optimal way to use this.
00:55:29.040Or here's, let's say, several optimal strategies.
00:55:31.100That's the study of ethics in general, right?
00:55:35.840I mean, the philosophy of ethics is exactly that study.
00:55:39.880And it does have something, I think it has something to do with, it's something like optimization of reproductive strategy, but over the largest possible number of environments and timeframes.
00:55:54.920Because one of the things you pointed out with the poker example is the strategy that you use while you're playing poker is going to be dependent to some degree on how many times you're going to play poker with these people.
00:56:21.080Yeah, well, so this is a very cool thing to understand, and I think it's one of the things that's very powerful about your book, is that I have thought for quite a while that the analysis of reciprocal interactions, this is something economists did very badly for a very long period of time, because they thought of people as rational maximizers.
00:56:40.380But their notion of the timeframe across which you maximized rationally was one interaction.
00:56:46.120And that's just absolutely 100% not true, and it's also not how people behave, right?
00:56:50.640There's that famous behavioral experiment where you can take two people, and you can say to one of them, you can make one offer to your partner, you get $100, you can make them one offer, you have to give them some money.
00:57:02.160If they reject the offer, neither of you get anything.
00:57:05.280And across cultures, the standard offer is 50-50.
00:57:08.920And if you take poor people, they're even more likely to make a 50-50 offer rather than less, which is not what they should do if they're rational self-optimizers.
00:57:18.440But it doesn't take into account something you alluded to, which is we're very, very cognizant of the manner in which our decisions propagate reputationally across our social space.
00:57:31.340Because I think there isn't anything that, it seems to me that for social animals, there actually isn't anything more important than reputation.
00:57:37.600I know, for example, among hunter-gatherer hunters, there are rules for how you conduct yourself if you're a successful hunter.
00:57:46.020The rules are very interesting, and they're quite stable across different cultures.
00:57:49.200So imagine that you're the best hunter in the group.
00:57:52.700You still fail most of the time, and you would fail almost all the time alone.
00:57:57.100So even if you're the best hunter, you need all the other hunters.
00:57:59.880And so, and even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a lot.
00:58:04.800So you can't only rely on your own skill.
00:58:07.460Now, the problem with being the best hunter is that you can provoke jealousy and disruption in the group.
00:58:13.020And so people will be jealous of you, and they won't cooperate with you properly.
00:58:18.140And so even if your skills are optimized, if you disturb the skill set of the group, you're all going to fail.
00:58:23.560And so one of the rules, for example, if you're a good hunter in a hunting community,
00:58:28.500is that you don't take the best cuts of meat for yourself.
00:58:31.380You distribute them if you're the guy responsible for the kill, and you also downplay your contribution.
00:58:38.980Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, you know, you were very, very helpful.
00:58:43.940And the idea, it's quite straightforward, I think, once you understand it properly, is that you're storing the results of your current hunt,
00:58:56.220where you've actually brought down an animal that's larger than you can consume or that your family can consume.
00:59:00.960You're storing that in your reputation among the other hunters.
00:59:04.260And that's by far the best way to store it.
00:59:06.480And you can think about that as a, I think you can think about that as the basis for something like natural law.
00:59:11.560It's like, because I was thinking about that, there's an injunction in the gospel accounts about storing treasure up in heaven,
00:59:19.420rather than on earth where it can rust or where moths can consume it.
00:59:23.280And I have thought recently that that's what, a reference to the utility of storing your treasure in reputation.
00:59:32.840Because that's the best possible currency.
00:59:35.740If you have a stable social group and people think highly of you, they know that you've contributed generously in the past.
00:59:41.980If you hit a rough patch, the probability that you're going to invite reciprocity on the part of people you've aided in the past is extremely high.
00:59:50.960Okay, now, your concept of the relationship between emotion and language is that we're using, we need to bridge that gap.
01:00:00.220We're using emotion to signal our, to signal our strategies in reciprocal interactions so that they're structured optimally.
01:00:08.220How do you see language emerging out of that?
01:00:10.760We've got this emotional under structure.
01:00:13.560I mean, language is a whole other story.
01:00:15.360But, you know, one thing this does is, and I'll get to language in a second.
01:00:19.940The way that often we think of language is that you've got this really, you know, rigorous grammar, you know, these propositions.
01:00:26.480And then emotions are these little colors that they've added to, like, there's a little bit of flavor and color.
01:00:32.020Or something that's interfering with rational discourse, right?
01:00:35.960But really, I think it's the other way around.
01:00:37.600The real language that we speak, even on Twitter, even when it's just text, is ultimately, it's all of this stuff.
01:00:43.260It's all of these emotional expressions being done in very complicated ways.
01:00:47.540Nowadays, and nowadays with GIFs, and, you know, GIFs, if you look at the GIFs that we use, the animated GIFs that you use, they're all deeply, there are ways and memes.
01:00:55.340These are all ways of getting across your emotions.
01:00:59.340Really, it's all emotional expressions sprinkled with propositional-like content attached to it.
01:01:06.520Rather than propositional content sprinkled with emotions.
01:01:08.760This is the wrong way to think about it.
01:01:09.740Most of what we're doing, all of these things are amounting to pushing in chips because I've said that I'm so right about something for these reasons, or I think you're so wrong for these reasons, I'm pushing in chips, social capital chips, when I tweet.
01:01:21.840Or I'm saying, I'm not really sure, but maybe it's this, so I've pushed in one tiny little chip.
01:01:26.260So it's a betting market on the validity of propositions using social capital as the-
01:01:37.260Free speech is really a marketplace of ideas.
01:01:39.100Literally, because one of the interesting things about social capital is a decentralized currency, right?
01:01:48.760Now, most of us didn't know anything about decentralized currencies until Bitcoin came along, and now we've got all these cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized currencies.
01:01:55.900And one of the interesting things about decentralized currencies is because there's no bank with some boss looking at the ledgers of who sent money to somebody else.
01:02:05.120And so that's not going to work, because the whole point of a decentralized currency is that it's not in any one person's hand.
01:02:11.280Instead, it's spread across many, many-
01:02:15.280So this notion of a blockchain, and a blockchain is just like, okay, today, Doug sent Susie 0.3 Bitcoin, and it's just a list of all the Bitcoin transactions that occurred.
01:02:24.260And it's in everybody's computers everywhere.
01:02:26.020And when there's a new block added to the chain, there's some particular work that has to be done called proof of work, or there's proof of stake.
01:02:32.480There's different kinds of ways of adding it such that once you've built up, let's say, years worth of these sort of Bitcoin, let's say, transfers, it's impossible, practically impossible to go back and mess with the history of it.
01:02:46.900And the reason it has to be like this is because it's decentralized, and there's no other way to do it.
01:02:51.460So, well, reputation is another decentralized currency.
01:02:55.540How do you get it so that within a community, a social community, you can make sure that when I had an argument with you and you won, I don't go around later and say, oh, actually, I won that argument.
01:03:21.840So the same problems that decentralized currencies have that lead to blockchain is why we end up with social narratives.
01:03:29.400Social narratives are the answer that we already had up and running.
01:03:32.460Social narratives are the human social group's way of remembering, okay, this week Mark lost social capital to Jordan and Susie lost it to Betty.
01:03:42.520And we keep track of these little stories.
01:03:44.820The most stories that we remember are, one, stories about the argument that we had and Mark was being a douchebag.
01:03:50.060But it's also really about the Mark lost social capital to Jordan because of those things.
01:03:54.320And those things are helping me remember how much social capital that I lost.
01:03:58.200So – and there's, like, often people that are good at gossip.
01:04:01.700These are the people, like, that are good at minors.
01:04:04.100These are, like – or proof of – well, one is proof of stake.
01:04:07.600They own a lot of – they're already high-reputation people in the community.
01:04:11.280These are, like, people who own a lot of Bitcoin, say, or some other currencies.
01:04:14.320And then they can say, we have a higher vote as to whether a new block comes onto the chain.
01:04:19.040And they're worthy of listening to it because they care about the validity, you know, whether that currency stays good.
01:04:24.940So gossipers are typically high-ranked reputation people in the community.
01:04:29.380And they spin stories about what happens, taking – sort of accumulating.
01:04:57.340Only certain kinds of individuals are good to come up with.
01:04:59.080So these are a lot similar to what's called proof of work.
01:05:00.940Proof of works are things that are really hard to do this work to glue one block to the next.
01:05:05.240But they're really easy to verify that it's a correct solution.
01:05:08.000So you end up with these sort of analogies that we've already been using for hundreds of thousands – well, millions of years.
01:05:13.880Well, at least hundreds of thousands of years that we ended up with these social narratives that in order to have a reputation currency that is preserved over time and we can't muck with, build these blockchain-like social narratives.
01:05:28.960But the downside is that once a narrative gets up and running, just like once a blockchain gets up and running, you can't muck with it.
01:05:35.140And so if it creates something false, you're stuck with it for generations potentially.
01:05:40.300So this is one of the things that I talk about a bit here and I'm trying to work into the next book.
01:05:45.140Taking seriously some of these kinds of emergent phenomena that you have to deal with when you have decentralized currencies like these blockchain-like properties, which are what social narratives are, have these downsides of being almost unalterable.
01:06:03.700I think the Jews got added to as being the evil, you know, goblin-type group that's controlling and puppeteering everyone 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, and it just never goes away.
01:06:13.780You know, it just keeps on and it just keeps getting added to the same kind of narratives, keep moving on.
01:06:19.720So there's all these terrible things, but it's also all these great things because you wouldn't have reputation systems that work.
01:06:24.680None of our social, none of the public square would work.
01:06:26.920None of the social interactions would work at all without it.
01:06:29.160So let me ask you, one of the things that I've been concerned about for whatever that's worth is online anonymity.
01:06:38.200We know there's an endless number of, I think, valid social psychology studies, which is a very small proportion of social psychology studies, by the way, that show that when people are shielded from the reputational consequences of their actions, they're much more likely to misbehave.
01:06:56.180And that's why, for example, you know, if someone steps in front of you while you're walking down the street, you're very unlikely to curse, whereas if they cut you off in your car, you're very likely to curse.
01:07:07.080So anonymity facilitates a more psychopathic and impulsive style of responding.
01:07:15.760And one of the problems we have on the net now is that anonymity, I wouldn't say reigns, but it's very, very pervasive.
01:07:23.940And that means you can say whatever the hell you want with absolutely no reputational consequence.
01:07:28.880And so my view of the online world, this might be particularly relevant on X, is that anonymous signaling facilitates a psychopathic and sadistic form of social interaction.
01:07:55.700And the reason I don't think that's right is every day you have countless encounters with folks in real life at the coffee place or wherever it is, cars signaling to one another.
01:08:04.380And we emotionally signal them in our cars all the time.
01:08:06.720And you don't know any of these folks.
01:08:09.120And you know that you don't know these folks.
01:08:11.860And what's usually, though, there that's not there on the web is full, rich socio-emotional interactions that are allowing you to go through your day.
01:08:29.980I mean, because it's an embodied environment, you're running on the habits that are a consequence of the fact that you are in something approximating an intact social environment.
01:09:05.760And they're so mean, even though they know each other.
01:09:07.540I think that what's—and to the—I think that really what matters in both of these worlds is having some notion of identity that extends over time.
01:09:33.800You know, there's some of the best accounts of these folks, they've—once you've built up 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000, it takes years to get to this point.
01:09:56.000Well, it might even be that their pseudonymous identity is actually trumping their genuine identity if they have like 500,000 followers online.
01:10:03.520Yeah, they had all—often these people are nobodies in real life.
01:10:06.240And they—I mean, they could well have—be jobless living in their parents' bay.
01:10:32.460That's a good objection because you're basically pointing out that stable pseudonyms that extend across time and that accrue reputation then become subject to the same regulating forces as a genuine identity.
01:10:47.360Okay, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
01:10:50.200And there are anonymous accounts or pseudonymous accounts that I follow in X that I think are of high quality.
01:10:55.300So I don't think there's a necessary relationship between the use of a pseudonym and pathology.
01:11:01.760And frankly, 99% of the people who have their real names are—I don't really know if it's real names.
01:11:06.540I'm never going to meet them in real life.
01:11:26.040Okay, so let's leave out the more reputationally significant pseudonymous accounts and concentrate on the non—
01:11:35.940And so a lot of the—I read a lot of comments, partly because I find that's a very useful way of, first of all, evaluating how people are actually responding to the material that I'm putting up.
01:11:47.120And that's very necessary if I'm going to be communicating with a very large number of people.
01:11:52.800But it also gives me a good sense of the tone of the social world at any given moment around any given topic.
01:11:59.660Now, there are a multitude of accounts that are anonymous that are low reputation, no followers, no postings, right?
01:12:08.200And they're often exceptionally vitriolic.
01:12:11.560And I guess one of the concerns that I've had is that the lack of consequence that they experience because of their derisive and pathological utterances polarizes the social discussion in a manner that's genuinely counterproductive.
01:12:32.080So imagine that there's a distribution of attitudes around any given concept, right, or any given topic.
01:12:39.280And the more extreme attitudes are rarer.
01:12:42.320But if the extreme attitudes are emotionally amplified and there's no punishment that's consequential to that emotional amplification,
01:12:50.320in fact, perhaps the reverse, because if it's pithy and striking, even if it's derisive and denigrating,
01:12:58.020it's going to pick up more influence than it would under normal circumstances.
01:13:02.040So I've wondered if the political polarization that characterizes our time is partly a consequence of the exaggeration of long tail distribution opinions
01:13:15.200in a manner that would never occur in face-to-face social interaction.
01:13:36.200Or they might have two dozen accounts to begin with.
01:13:37.900They're a lot like the town drunk, for example.
01:13:40.440You know, they don't, they could cause a lot of havoc and they can enter into conversations to sort of cause havoc.
01:13:46.680But no one really would be listening to them.
01:13:49.620I suppose you could argue that they're getting their, they're, they're getting to say something with the same status as somebody else with a lot of followers right there in the stream.
01:14:02.580It could be that, that Musk has it so that often when they're, they're just not even visible and say there's more and you got to click it and then it opens up some others that it, it is suspicious whether you even want to hear.
01:14:11.720So they may be doing some mechanisms that hide the very low reputation, low follower count folks, which is probably a good idea at some point because you need to have these people earn their, earn your way to being listened, worth listening to, right?
01:14:32.580So I, I, I think there's, there's, there's that and a thousands of other issues in terms of how to optimize social networks and public squares, given that it's no longer, you know, a hundred people in your, your village or you may be 500 people in your village or kind of, or high school.
01:14:48.960Well, there's also not face-to-face emotional display as we've been discussing.
01:14:53.320So there's been an evolution towards that.
01:14:54.920Like, you know, now in the last three or four or five years, you can do different kinds of emotional expressions on Facebook.
01:15:01.000There's a lot of these, you can just respond, not just with a like or not like, and even a like is, is effectively an emotional expression, expressive response.
01:15:08.260And we manage just, just in the pros that we use, of course, we're using constantly emotional responses that amount to an emotional response.
01:15:15.000Even if you don't think of it as much, you're either, you're either showing confidence in yourself or disdain in the other, these are emotional expressions as far as, because you're staking or pulling off stake.
01:15:23.040Almost at all times, that's how you show confidence to real people, not, you know, not P values.
01:15:31.760So the way that, that hope, hopefully the designers don't need to, to, to, to fix it.
01:15:39.520In real life, the public square has local spots where people, let's say in their local village argue, and then maybe the best couple of them go to the bigger city and they argue with other people from different villages in the big city.
01:15:50.780And these are just basically, and then those, some represent, it ends up hierarchical, the public square in the old days.
01:15:57.000And in, in principle, if you look at the hierarchy that happened organically through, through something like Twitter, I, I think you're going to see similar kinds of hierarchies.
01:16:08.080So it self-organizes so that it's not just a bunch of everybody talking to everybody, right?
01:16:11.780It ends up self-organizing into a kind of representative democracy kind of way so that you, you end up dealing with this.
01:16:19.300Yeah, well, Musk is gambling with X that that's what will happen organically as well.
01:16:23.840You know, I guess part of the problem there is that we don't exactly know what the algorithms that operate behind the scenes, how they're weighting the discourse in manners that we might not understand.
01:16:32.340Well, you, you ran afoul of that, which is something that we're going to talk about more on the Daily Wire side of this.
01:16:37.740So, yeah, so you, so you're not, you don't seem to be as concerned as I am potentially with the pervasive polluting effect of the anonymous troll demon types amplifying viewpoints that under normal circumstances wouldn't come, wouldn't rise to the top.
01:16:57.080Well, I'm skeptical of their ability to do any amplification because they, they have no followers.
01:17:03.400Now, you may not, sometimes I see them just because even though I don't follow them, I do go through my comments as well.
01:17:08.900So I do end up seeing some of them to the extent that they're not themselves de-boosted, but they in principle should have very little effect.
01:17:37.500Well, you certainly have to be, I mean, someone like Musk has to be aware of bot farms that create bots that can then leverage and hack, you know, some diagonalize against whatever their systems are.
01:17:48.560So that they, it turns out when you have tens of thousands of comments in the right way, it ends up, ends up doing something to the algorithm that ends up boosting the wrong, not yet.
01:17:58.140It ends up allowing them to boost things on just on the basis of a whole bunch of no follower bots.
01:18:02.340You can imagine having the wrong kinds of algorithms.
01:18:04.040So those are the kinds of things they have to be aware of.
01:18:05.620And no matter what they do, it could be that I haven't thought about this kind of problem.
01:18:09.180It could be there's ways of, of sort of always finding some new crack and they've got to come up with new measures.
01:18:14.000Well, it's going to be an evolutionary arms race, obviously.
01:18:16.400And whether the rules can keep up with the most creative trolls is, it's unlikely, I would suspect.
01:18:50.760Then there's a periphery of pathological troll types that's got to add at least another 5% or 10%.
01:18:57.040And so one of the things we might ask ourselves is, like, is that a devolution to the standard form of human interaction?
01:19:05.840Because before there were well-established, free, rule-abiding, law-governed societies, it was probably something like a quasi-criminal Wild West.
01:19:15.920And it looks like, to me, like we're duplicating that at least to some degree online.
01:19:19.980I wonder if the fact that we've removed so many of the cues that help us regulate social behavior by abstracting up our communication patterns so intensely, like narrow channeling them, these 144-character tweets, for example, whether we've lost a lot of the systems that allowed us to regulate social interaction.
01:19:44.040Like, we've stepped out of our evolutionary landscape, so to speak.
01:19:46.440So that, to me, is more important than pseudonyms are fine.
01:19:51.320To me, a lot of these small accounts that walk up with all this attitude out of the blue, if I saw them in real life, I guarantee you they would have a different behavior toward me in real life.
01:20:04.620Not to mention that I'm probably twice their age, and I've got a little bit of gray, and just younger men typically just behave a little differently to older guys.
01:20:11.900There's just something that happens in normal life when you see someone.
01:20:14.600Yeah, well, you never have an interaction like that in normal life, ever.
01:20:18.300Like, I don't think anybody has ever spoken to me once in my life the way people speak in the troll comment sections, right?
01:20:25.860So I don't know whether there's some way to, you know, I've thought a lot about how can you allow much more full expressive, you know, because I don't know what full expressive capabilities are.
01:20:36.340How can you add them so that you can actually, for example, not just like or not just happy, but you actually pull up a two-dimensional, like, array and actually just pick from at least a two-dimensional, there's a full four-dimensional space.
01:20:46.700But at least a two-dimensional quick space to give you a much more exact, you know, but still it's not going to be the same.
01:20:53.320It's going to be still some technical.
01:20:54.220Well, it's also not the same partly because, you know, you talked about the way that young men react to you or men in general.
01:21:02.040I mean, one of the things that regulates male communication, at least in the public space, is the probability if you say something sufficiently stupid, you're going to get smacked.
01:21:10.720And so, and that's definitely not something that happens online.
01:21:13.420And you might think, well, that's good because we've abstracted ourselves away from the violence.
01:22:18.160That's the value of the signal is that you think that you're right enough so that you'll take the risk that you might have to sacrifice something.
01:22:36.120Well, when you jump out of that domain, you're in another domain of stake because when I move from reputational fighting, let's say, to physical fighting, what I'm putting online is my psychophysiological integrity, right?
01:22:51.860I'm willing to say, no, I'm going to stake myself on this particular proposition even if it's at risk to my physiological integrity.
01:23:00.660And so we try to avoid that, obviously.
01:23:03.980I mean, anxiety is one of the things that helps us avoid that.
01:23:07.040Pain signifies actual physical damage and anxiety, just the threat of that.
01:23:12.020But it's interesting that just as language grounds out in emotion, negotiation grounds out in something like willingness to contend physically.
01:23:53.900But the real, and this is not just language, it's writing language and music and all of the things that make us human 2.0s, as I call ourselves.
01:24:01.080So, in my second book, Vision Revolution, in addition to some of these, you know, color and forward-facing eyes and why we see illusions, which we didn't talk about, the reason that we can read at all.
01:24:12.680So if you think about it, reading, we didn't evolve to read.
01:24:15.060You know, it's just 2,000 years old at best.
01:24:16.860Often, our great-grandparents didn't even read.
01:24:18.980Most of us have illiterate or great-great-grandparents.
01:24:22.000Reading is much too recent, and yet we seem to have visual word form areas.
01:24:26.160I mean, neuroscientists know that we didn't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains even, you know, basically reading areas.
01:24:31.240And we know that they're not actually reading areas.
01:24:53.060And so what I argued 20 years ago is that over time, cultural evolution itself shaped the look of writing to look like nature.
01:25:02.600So we already have visual systems that are incredibly good at processing natural scenes, object recognition.
01:25:08.900And so all that culture had to do was invent writing systems that looked like nature.
01:25:14.320In our case, so for example, you've got L junctions, just whenever there's some kind of contour in the world, meaning the tip of another contour.
01:25:21.960You've got T junctions, whenever something goes behind something, there's my contour here, goes up against this contour.
01:25:33.700And then you can look at all the different kinds of junctions that have three contours, let's say Y junctions and K junctions.
01:25:39.800And it turns out there's 32 of these different kinds of topologically distinct junctions with three contours.
01:25:45.440And then you can ask, well, how commonly do these things happen in natural scenes of just opaque objects?
01:25:49.900Either you can look at like different kinds of varieties of scenes as well.
01:25:52.980It just turns out it doesn't really matter where you look.
01:25:54.600It's all the same as just a world with opaque objects strewn about.
01:25:57.520It's basically that drives the same relative probability of which of these junction types happen.
01:26:03.700And then you can just ask, well, if this idea is right, then you should find that across human writing systems, writing tends to have the junction types that are found in nature.
01:26:20.180So the idea is that we read, we can only read, which is part of what we take to be central to our human nature, even, is the ability to be literate, right?
01:26:28.020I mean, of course, it's not part of our human nature.
01:26:34.380This is a cultural evolutionary process which has harnessed a visual object recognition brain for reading by tricking it.
01:26:42.580Not because we've evolved for it, but instead of evolving writing to fit us.
01:26:46.900Now, the same idea, I argued in the next book, in Harnessed, that spoken language is like this as well.
01:26:53.060So spoken language, instead of writing evolving to look like nature, it's spoken language evolved to sound like nature, in particular, sound like solid object physical events.