The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - July 08, 2025


The Singular Exemplar Bias - Death by Suicidal Empathy (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_846)

Topics
singular exemplar bias
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Suicidal Empathy Ahmad Margo Wilson Martin Daly Aunt Mary Uncle
Japanism, Finnishism, and Bolivianism Are Evil Ideologies (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_845) Is Woke Dead？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_847)

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

135.24

Word count

1,152

Sentence count

67

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dr. Aaron Sorkin discusses the phenomenon of the singular exemplar bias and how it manifests itself in suicidal empathy. He explains how this bias can be traced back to evolutionary psychology and explains how it can be applied in the context of his new book, "Suicidal Empathy."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.200 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad for the Sad Truth. I'm going to give you a little preview of a topic that I'll be covering in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, which I hope that you will all go out and pre-order once it's ready for pre-order.
00:00:15.640 And before I start on today's topic, please head off and subscribe to the channel and to my podcast. It's free. Just press the subscribe button, press the bell icon, and it really helps in terms of making my message more visible to a greater number of people.
00:00:35.680 In any case, today I want to talk about something that I call the singular exemplar bias. This is something that I first discussed in the context of my work in evolutionary psychology, where I was trying to explain what are some of the cognitive and emotional obstacles that cause people to always try to offer some rebuttal to evolutionary psychology.
00:01:02.220 So one of which is the following. If I were to say homo sapiens are a sexually dimorphic species, whereby males in that species are on average bigger than females. Many species are not sexually dimorphic in terms of their size. Human beings are.
00:01:21.560 That statement is absolutely a veridical fact, notwithstanding the fact that your Aunt Mary is bigger than your Uncle Roscoe.
00:01:35.100 So the fact that you've identified a singular exemplar that seems to go contrary to the statement that is true at the population level does not falsify how veridical the statement is at the population level.
00:01:50.640 Right? That's why we have statistical distributions that overlap. On average, men are taller than women, even though most female players in the WNBA are taller than many men. Right? One does not falsify the other.
00:02:10.380 So now let's apply that to how this manifests itself in suicidal empathy.
00:02:16.780 So I recently came back from a trip where I delivered some lectures in London and in Buckingham at the University of Buckingham.
00:02:27.980 But first, I went to Reykjavík, Iceland, where I delivered a lecture there on both the parasitic mind and suicidal empathy.
00:02:36.500 And during the Q&A period, where I was talking about, you know, if you had a daughter or a child that you would like to have to find a babysitter,
00:02:50.280 statistically speaking, would it be safer for the babysitter to be a 17-year-old girl or a 37-year-old male?
00:03:00.680 And I was trying to explain that to try to demonstrate that statistical regularities exist and are coded in our brain for a reason,
00:03:10.020 because they allow us to optimally navigate through the difficulties of life. Right?
00:03:16.480 That's why we have the capacity to engage in inferential thinking and reasoning and statistical reasoning.
00:03:23.360 And so two people, very, very empathetic, very, very kind, one of whom said,
00:03:27.880 well, I too am a psychologist and I vehemently disagree with your position.
00:03:33.180 By the way, I hope that I was told that the lecture and the Q&A period was taped and will eventually be shared with me.
00:03:41.000 So when that does happen, hopefully you'll be able to see the actual raw exchange.
00:03:46.420 The person said, well, that's not, no, I wouldn't, that's not true that you should, you know,
00:03:53.700 be more likely to have your children babysat by a 17-year-old girl.
00:03:59.880 I said, how is that? Why is that?
00:04:01.600 He goes, well, because, you know, I'm 37 years old or whatever, and I never would abuse anyone.
00:04:08.380 And I know many 37-year-old men that are perfectly, have zero chance of abusing someone.
00:04:17.320 So do you see it?
00:04:19.140 So I said, so then what you're saying, so is it not true, though, that the statement that,
00:04:26.820 statistically speaking, your child is less likely to be molested by a 17-year-old girl than a 37-year-old man,
00:04:35.640 does that not hold true?
00:04:38.380 And, you know, the person simply wasn't willing because he's 37 and he wouldn't molest anyone,
00:04:43.460 and he knows 37-year-old men who wouldn't molest anyone.
00:04:47.580 Just a few minutes ago, I posted a clip, or actually, I posted this yesterday,
00:04:57.360 where a woman approached me at the cafe saying, oh, I just watched a TikTok clip
00:05:02.980 where you were explaining that the number one greatest predictor of abuse in a home
00:05:09.520 is if there is a step-parent in the home.
00:05:12.460 And this finding that I was discussing stems from the work of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson,
00:05:18.700 two of the pioneers of evolutionary psychology,
00:05:20.700 where, by the way, that fact that having a step-parent in the household
00:05:27.240 is a 100 times greater predictive factor of child abuse than any other predictor.
00:05:36.180 Again, for those of you who don't understand what that means,
00:05:38.520 typically in science, if you've got a 1 to 1.2 odds ratio,
00:05:44.240 1 to 1.2, that would be a statistically significant finding.
00:05:49.200 So you're checking the efficacy of a drug versus a placebo,
00:05:52.460 and the efficacy of the drug has a 1.2 to 1 odds ratio.
00:05:57.120 That would be a big, big deal.
00:05:58.800 This is 1 to 100.
00:06:01.560 So the statistical significance of that, the step-parent effect, is astounding.
00:06:09.200 It's in the order of 100 times greater than the typical findings
00:06:12.440 that you see across all sciences.
00:06:16.040 Guess what someone just posted?
00:06:18.500 Well, dear God, please don't tarnish the name of all step-parents.
00:06:24.620 I am a step-parent, and I've never abused anyone.
00:06:27.700 Oh, got it.
00:06:30.480 So the statistical reality that's a 100 times greater predictor to any other predictor
00:06:38.860 that having a step-parent in the home increases the likelihood of child abuse
00:06:44.120 is negated by the fact that you're a step-parent and you didn't abuse your child.
00:06:52.260 Do you see how impenetrable the mind is to human reason and why the West is in its current problem?
00:07:02.920 So Islam has certain tenets that are perfectly antithetical to Western values. 1.00
00:07:10.940 You couldn't come up with any value system that is more incongruent
00:07:16.100 with some of the enshrined personal liberties and freedoms in the West.
00:07:20.320 But somebody says, but my friend Ahmad is married to a Jewish man. 0.76
00:07:27.220 He loves black dogs.
00:07:29.060 He eats prosciutto and drinks whiskey.
00:07:32.480 So it's not true that Islam forbids eating of pork and forbids alcohol drinking
00:07:39.940 and has injunctions against dogs in general, but black dogs in particular, 0.95
00:07:44.800 and has a astounding canonical hatred of the Jew.
00:07:50.000 Because Ahmad, my friend, has never uttered a word that's bad against the Jews. 0.99
00:07:54.940 As a matter of fact, he's gay and he's married to a Jew. 0.89
00:07:58.760 So how could you think of a religion that is more pro-homosexuality than Islam? 0.99
00:08:05.320 This is what I fight for against every day. 0.96
00:08:09.140 This is why I wrote The Parasitic Mind.
00:08:11.560 And this is why Suicidal Empathy will soon be released.
00:08:16.660 Please make sure to go ahead and subscribe to the channel.
00:08:20.980 It helps. It really helps.
00:08:23.480 Do your part in contributing and elevating voices that are fighting
00:08:27.700 for the future of you, of your children.
00:08:30.480 Take care, everybody.