0:00

Welcome to

0:04

the Psych Podcast, the podcast

0:07

all about intro

0:09

psych.

0:16

I

0:18

am joined as always by my friend and colleague, Paul

0:20

Blum. Paul, welcome. Hi, David. Good

0:23

to talk to you. We have an unusual episode today.

0:26

Yeah, it's not. Usually we've been

0:28

going through every chapter of your book

0:30

Psych, but today we have a surprise

0:33

for those people who are old enough to watch David

0:35

Letterman. It's viewer mail. It's

0:37

viewer mail, mailbox. Yes.

0:40

So Paul solicited on Twitter questions

0:42

for listeners to write

0:45

into us

0:46

and you've compiled a

0:48

whole bunch of questions. So we're going to try

0:50

to go through a few of the questions.

0:53

We can't do all of them, of course. Apologies

0:55

for those we missed. Some

0:57

we missed because they were, well,

1:00

the ones we missed were ones we couldn't answer either

1:02

because they were unanswerable or sometimes

1:04

they were actually excellent questions that neither

1:06

one of us had much to say about.

1:08

So it's not as if we're fluent,

1:10

we're going to give wonderful answers to all the ones we did accept,

1:13

but at least we have a shot at them. You know,

1:15

the way that I approached this particular

1:17

episode anyway is like getting

1:19

questions at the end of a class where

1:22

we're kind of forced to speak

1:26

from what we know,

1:27

but we don't have like unlimited time to do the

1:29

research. So we'll begin all of our answers

1:31

with excellent question. You

1:34

know, the way to stall for time. So

1:37

we're not mentioning the names of the people who

1:39

wrote us unless they specifically

1:41

said that it was okay. So the first question

1:43

is,

1:44

if the unconscious is so important for

1:46

cognitive science in general, what is the relevance

1:49

of the conscious mind? What was the evolutionary

1:51

advantage of processing information consciously?

1:54

Couldn't it all be done unconsciously in the same

1:56

way, say, that a lot of thinking already is since

1:59

it tends to be... faster and reasonably accurate

2:01

to be useful in our ecological environment.

2:04

That is actually an excellent question. There's

2:06

a lot of debates over the function of consciousness. And

2:09

one thing to keep in mind is that consciousness

2:11

has different meanings. So

2:14

one sense of consciousness is qualitative

2:16

experience. And we've talked about this

2:18

before, it's the experience of stepping on

2:20

a thumbtack or getting your first

2:22

kiss or, you know, eating some

2:25

spicy curry, just feeling. And

2:28

the question as to why we have that is

2:30

a matter of tremendous debate. Why

2:32

aren't we just zombies running around

2:35

doing things without qualitative feelings?

2:37

But there's another notion of consciousness

2:40

in which we sometimes say, well, somebody who's awake is

2:42

conscious, somebody who's asleep is unconscious. You're

2:45

conscious of something. If you could talk about it, if

2:47

you could reason about it, if you could think

2:50

about it.

2:51

You're so, for instance, right

2:53

now, I'm conscious of looking

2:55

at you over, over Zoom. But

2:57

I'm not conscious of my blood pressure and my

2:59

heart rate.

3:01

And the reason why we have

3:03

that kind of consciousness seems to

3:05

be that it's useful

3:08

to have some sort of information available

3:10

to all parts of the brain.

3:11

It's useful to be able to take

3:14

information I have, say something I've seen, think

3:17

about it, make a decision, tell

3:19

you about it.

3:20

You hear what I have to say. You think about

3:23

it. You, you store it in your memory.

3:25

You make plans. And as such,

3:27

it makes global reasoning

3:29

possible. It connects reasoning with perception.

3:32

It connects reasoning with action. So

3:34

I think that's the simplest story for why we

3:36

have consciousness. In the sense

3:38

of consciousness, that means access.

3:41

What the philosopher Ned Block actually calls

3:43

access consciousness, distinguished

3:45

from phenomenological consciousness, which is more mysterious.

3:48

Yes,

3:49

that's a great answer. I was going to say

3:51

something along the lines of

3:54

the ability to make

3:56

plans for the future seems to require

3:58

that kind of access consciousness. you alluded

4:01

to this, it doesn't seem

4:03

like we'd be animals capable of

4:05

anything like future

4:08

thought or

4:12

setting aside our current interests for

4:14

the sake of our future interests and making plans like

4:16

that, let alone sharing those plans,

4:19

talking about why we did things, explaining,

4:22

justifying our behavior to others, all that

4:24

seems to require some kind of access

4:27

to certain

4:28

thoughts. That's right. And that raises

4:30

the question of what creatures have this consciousness

4:33

and what don't. I think that certainly

4:36

any animal that's capable of planning and some

4:39

degree of strategy, you know, certainly other primates,

4:41

for instance, almost certainly have it. But

4:43

then as you get to, you know, I don't know, mice

4:45

or cockroaches or worms,

4:48

it becomes more of an open question. And

4:50

the perennial question now is what

4:52

about, you know, chat GBT? Does it

4:54

have that sort of consciousness? And

4:57

in some sense,

4:59

well, in some sense, I think it does. I think we could argue

5:01

a lot about phenomenological consciousness, but

5:04

it is able to take the same bit of information

5:06

and use it and transfer it from one system

5:08

to another and analyze it and

5:10

go back to it and so on. So you could have a conversation

5:12

with it and then conversation maybe

5:14

in quotes, and then it stores some information

5:16

and memory and can retrieve it.

5:18

Well, you know, it reminds me of something

5:21

that you said in one of our previous

5:23

episodes about the difference between computer

5:25

memory and human memory. In

5:28

some way, if we restrict the

5:30

definition of consciousness to this form of access

5:32

consciousness, and we say that a computer

5:35

has it, chat GPT

5:38

or whatever computer actually has

5:40

access to all information

5:43

in it,

5:43

right? So there is no, even if

5:46

it has subroutines running in the background,

5:49

it can pull those

5:52

and let you know exactly what's going on. Yeah.

5:55

So in some sense, it's conscious of

5:57

just about everything that's ever happened on the web. for

6:00

instance, because that's part of its training

6:02

material. Okay, this one's for

6:04

you. It's often said, and we said this

6:07

on our podcast, that once you reach a certain

6:09

household income, additional income doesn't

6:11

move the needle for happiness. However,

6:14

Sapolsky

6:16

writes about how we get dopamine

6:18

when we're basically doing better than our peers. Do

6:20

you think the research suggests we're only happy when we out-earn

6:23

our neighbors or have I misread the research?

6:26

Again, excellent question. And it turns

6:28

out that this is a matter of some debate.

6:31

I think that what

6:32

is true that

6:35

we can say the research definitely shows

6:37

is that happiness does increase with absolute

6:40

income on average, making more

6:42

money up to a certain point does seem

6:44

to improve happiness

6:46

independent of whether or not people

6:49

around you are making more or less.

6:51

But there is evidence that

6:53

at some point the relative income

6:56

also matters. And so there seem to be

6:58

two effects here. One is the absolute

7:01

income and one is the relative income, and they don't necessarily

7:03

conflict with each other. There's some suggestion

7:06

that the relative income

7:09

effect

7:10

shows up more in developed

7:13

countries that is where the average income is

7:15

higher. So we're going to talk about this

7:17

in our happiness episode. There's all

7:19

sorts of things that matter deeply for happiness

7:21

that can be taken care of with a minimal amount

7:24

of income. Once you get above

7:26

that level though, it doesn't

7:28

seem to matter so much. And in

7:30

countries where most people are above

7:33

that level,

7:34

maybe how much your peers earn

7:36

actually ends up mattering a bit more. I'm

7:39

sure that there is still debate about

7:41

the size of these effects, like which one

7:44

outweighs the other, but I'm pretty confident

7:46

that both effects are there.

7:47

Yeah, I am too. And it's

7:51

not controversial that at the low levels more

7:53

money makes you happier in absolute sense. And it would

7:55

be bizarre if it didn't. Money buys

7:57

you food and shelter and medical care.

7:59

and safety and schooling for your children

8:02

and so on. And

8:04

then again, not surprisingly, there's diminishing

8:06

returns. If you're making 50,000

8:08

a year and you make another 10,000, that's a big

8:11

difference. If you're making 250,000, you might not even notice

8:13

another 10,000. But

8:16

I think, and this is controversial,

8:18

but I think the study suggests that even

8:21

as you go up to making a million or more, there's

8:23

still a mild happiness boost

8:26

from the extra money. It's

8:28

not there, but it's there. And I

8:31

don't think that we should think that this is best thought of

8:33

as, well, somebody who makes $2 million

8:36

can buy more great stuff than $1 million

8:38

sort of happier. I think rather,

8:41

as the questioner points out, it's an aspect

8:43

of status.

8:44

If I'm making more money than all

8:47

the people around me, even if we have

8:49

the same lifestyle, still,

8:51

I could say to myself, I'm above,

8:53

I'm higher on the status hierarchy indexed

8:56

by money.

8:57

And independent of the effects

8:59

on happiness, there is research showing

9:02

that people

9:03

explicitly say that they would prefer

9:06

to live a life in which they earned slightly

9:09

more than the people around them than they

9:11

would making more

9:13

money, but equivalent to those around them.

9:17

Yes. It's a classic psych question,

9:19

which is, would you rather make a certain

9:21

amount of money

9:22

that's less than

9:24

the people in your office? Or

9:26

would you rather make more money

9:29

than the people in your office, but in an absolute

9:31

way is less than option one.

9:34

And you feel, no matter

9:36

how you answer that, you feel the pull. On

9:38

the one hand, more money is better than less

9:41

money. You can buy goods

9:43

and services with it. But

9:45

on the other hand, we compare ourselves. It

9:49

matters a lot. It's very painful

9:51

to know that the person next to you and the person

9:54

on the other side, they get the same and then and they get

9:56

paid more than you. And maybe it's somewhat

9:58

satisfying to know that it get paid less than.

9:59

Good. Okay.

10:02

Next question. Paul, could

10:05

you comment on the ubiquity of quote

10:07

unquote trauma in pop and clinical

10:10

psychology at the moment? Is this just

10:12

the latest flavor of blank slatism?

10:16

It's interesting. By blank slatism,

10:19

the questioner is referring

10:21

to the notion that everything is

10:23

learned. Stephen Pinker

10:25

wrote a very well-known book called

10:28

The Blank Slate, where he talks about ideology,

10:30

that nothing is inborn, nothing's innate. And

10:33

people who agree with Pinker's take on it, and

10:35

kind of our take as well, would call

10:37

that a blank slate idea. There's

10:40

a rich and complicated literature

10:42

of trauma that runs through clinical

10:44

psychology and it runs through actually a lot of the

10:46

humanities, a lot of discussions

10:49

of literature, discussions, broader

10:51

philosophical discussions over a meaningful

10:53

life. And all

10:55

I have to add to

10:57

that is that I think

11:00

we overstate the

11:02

effects, the traumatic

11:04

effects of bad events

11:06

in our lives. So people talk

11:09

about post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a

11:11

psychological disorder that follows

11:13

traumatic events. And this definitely

11:15

exists. And many people are

11:17

scarred to varying degrees by terrible

11:19

events that have happened in their past. But

11:22

it turns out, and the psychologist

11:25

George Bonanno has a really

11:27

good discussion of that in a recent book, it

11:30

turns out that we are much more resilient

11:32

than expected. So for instance,

11:35

PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, is

11:37

the exception. It's not the rule. You have cases

11:40

where people go through immense

11:42

trauma of various sorts, and

11:45

most people are resilient. It's

11:47

not that the events aren't horrible. It's not that

11:49

they don't cause pain, but it does

11:52

seem to be that as time goes by, people

11:54

recover and get back to normal.

11:56

So I don't want to say trauma plays

11:58

no role in our psychological life. I don't want to, I'm not

12:00

a trauma denialist. But I

12:03

do think that along with the story of

12:05

the effects of trauma comes, I

12:07

think, a really important story of resilience.

12:10

Yeah, I completely agree with everything

12:12

you said. And it is important

12:14

to highlight that, you know, there are people

12:17

who,

12:18

for instance, have researched the

12:20

resilience of survivors of sexual

12:23

abuse, and they have been accused

12:25

of minimizing the impact of

12:27

sexual abuse. And I think it's, should

12:30

be very clear that whether

12:33

or not people are okay after terrible

12:35

things have happened to them does not

12:37

mean that those terrible things are in any way

12:40

okay to do. And I think people

12:42

get confused about that. And people, I think people

12:44

often think, well, to say

12:46

that something, people recover

12:48

from something, is to say that that something

12:51

isn't serious or has something, if it's done by a person,

12:53

isn't immoral. But it's fully compatible,

12:56

saying, you know, you do terrible things to a person and

12:58

a person could recover and yet they're still,

13:00

they're still terrible.

13:02

Okay, this one's for you. In chapter

13:04

seven, you mentioned that memory is essentially

13:06

limitless, but note that the brain is a limited

13:09

physical object. My concept

13:11

of memory is more like computer memory with garbage

13:13

collection. I studied geophysics in college, but

13:15

after reading software for a decade, I don't remember

13:17

anything about the earth. My mind seems

13:19

to nearly turn over

13:21

every five or so years. We know that

13:23

memory is flawed and distorted over time. Is

13:26

our mind compressing the memory, reducing it

13:28

to fewer story beats? It could then

13:30

uncompress it later, interpolating

13:33

the gaps with whatever trope from recent

13:35

lived experience snugly fits.

13:38

Simply put, what are the limits of memory for

13:40

normal non-savant person doesn't train for memory

13:42

competitions?

13:44

I like taking the computer metaphor seriously

13:46

and asking about compression. So

13:49

I'll attempt an answer that I

13:51

think is understanding of

13:53

what is being asked here. We

13:56

do know that memory is not like

13:59

computer storage. for the reasons that

14:01

the questioner says. We can't access

14:04

our memories perfectly like a computer can.

14:07

So there is some decay

14:09

of information, whether it's because

14:12

of interference, and there's more

14:14

information kind of crowds out, the

14:17

information that you stored, or whether

14:19

it's because things were never stored

14:21

in long-term memory to begin with. The

14:24

things that you remember are never

14:26

going to be sort of a perfect record

14:29

of the things

14:29

that happened to you. Now, compression.

14:32

I don't know if the

14:35

metaphor of compression is something that researchers

14:38

in memory use directly,

14:40

but the idea here is that you

14:42

take

14:44

whatever large amounts of information

14:46

are

14:47

being encoded, and

14:50

you reduce those somehow

14:52

algorithmically in a way that they

14:54

can be reconstructed perfectly

14:56

at the time of decompression. That

14:59

is what compression would do in a computer.

15:02

It's lossless compression. I

15:04

don't think that the brain could

15:06

work that way. I don't think it does work that way.

15:09

So there's a distinction that some memory

15:11

researchers make between verbatim and

15:13

gist memory. Verbatim would be,

15:15

as

15:17

it sounds, you remember every

15:19

bit of information

15:21

that you're trying to. So memory champions

15:24

have to. Verbatim, repeat

15:27

the order of every card in a deck of 52 cards.

15:32

Gist memory is

15:34

when you just remember the gist of the

15:36

thing that happened to you. And that, of course,

15:39

seems like an efficient way to store events

15:43

for which details don't matter.

15:45

And I think that over time, what you

15:47

can retain much more easily

15:49

is the gist of something that happened

15:51

to you. Now, when you

15:54

recollect it

15:56

and you infuse information

15:58

from things that were...

15:59

after that event and

16:02

memory gets distorted. I don't

16:04

think that's the same thing as decompressing,

16:07

because you actually are filling it up with stuff that

16:10

never was there to begin with, and that's

16:12

what memory distortion is. So I wouldn't call

16:14

that decompress it, but I think that it's very true

16:16

that, as the questioner says, you

16:19

interpolate the gaps with whatever trope

16:21

from recent lived experience snugly fits. Maybe

16:24

trope isn't the right thing to say, but we definitely

16:27

infuse our memory with details

16:30

that may not have been there to

16:32

begin with. Yeah, I think that's

16:35

exactly right. The examples

16:37

abound. I forget who

16:39

said this, but they were describing having read war

16:42

and peace, and then said, well,

16:44

I remember who was about Russia. And,

16:47

you know, we retain it. Just,

16:50

I mean, a more personal thing, I think a lot of people

16:53

will have some sympathy with is arguments

16:55

with your partner or your spouse, where

16:58

you have an argument some time ago, and, you know, if we

17:00

have minutes afterwards, of course, you'd remember everything very

17:02

clearly,

17:03

but all you remember later is that

17:05

person was mean to me and wrong, but

17:09

then you're reliving it, and then

17:11

all of a sudden you say, I remember what you

17:13

said, you said, and then you kind

17:16

of switch, and they say, I didn't say that, no, instead

17:18

you said, and what you're doing now

17:20

is you're not, you're not like you have the perfect memory

17:22

and you're bringing it all back, rather you're infusing

17:25

it with whatever you feel at the time,

17:27

you know, the tropes, as the person said, and your

17:30

own bad feelings. There is a famous

17:32

study in memory

17:33

where you show people a picture

17:35

of a professor's office, and then

17:37

you have them recall the

17:39

details of that picture. And

17:42

in the original picture, there are no books in

17:44

the office, but when people

17:47

report their memory for that picture, they

17:49

say there were books, and that's because there

17:52

is a prototypical notion

17:54

of a professor's office that we have culturally

17:58

in which

17:59

professor's office.

17:59

has books in it. And so we just kind of

18:02

fill in those gaps. And it's not as

18:04

I think as we say in our in our memory episode, this

18:07

is not an unreasonable strategy. Oftentimes

18:09

that will yield a true memory.

18:13

There's a million examples

18:16

like this you from psychological experiments.

18:18

This is a very robust field of psychology.

18:20

But there was a study that there's something like got

18:23

people to remember a series of words and

18:25

the words are, you know, chapter,

18:27

title, cover, reading,

18:30

and so on. And then later you ask

18:32

them what words were part of

18:34

your list and you put in the word book and

18:36

they always say yes. But book

18:38

wasn't part of the list. Rather book is

18:41

just very associative of all of these things. So you tend

18:43

to remember this.

18:45

You know, I have a question and I'm

18:47

springing this on you because maybe you have no idea.

18:49

But I've been every time

18:51

I read books about memory or I listen

18:54

to lectures on memory, it's always you throw

18:56

away the specifics and you retain the gist.

18:59

And this seems right almost all the time. But

19:01

except when I read

19:03

a passage from a book I've

19:06

read before or a

19:08

podcast or an audiobook I've heard,

19:11

I often remember exactly where I was

19:13

when I heard that, when I read that.

19:16

It just comes back to me.

19:18

And that seems to violate everything we know about memory.

19:20

No, you're

19:22

what you're describing is a very

19:24

real effect. First

19:26

of all, that task that you described

19:28

with the chapter book or whatever,

19:31

that's a famous protocol known as

19:33

the

19:34

Deas-Rodeger-McDermott task, which

19:37

is used for

19:40

this very thing to show false memories.

19:43

The effect

19:46

of

19:47

geographical location

19:49

on our memory is a strong one.

19:52

And I have the same thing that you have,

19:54

which is when thinking about,

19:56

say, a podcast episode, I remember exactly

19:59

where I was.

19:59

when I heard it. And that is just

20:02

because our brains seem very

20:04

specialized for spatial memory.

20:07

So we seem to recruit

20:10

that ability to remember spatially

20:12

by association.

20:15

So it's actually one of the tasks

20:17

that memory champions use

20:19

is

20:21

to harness the geographical,

20:25

the specialization of our brain for

20:28

geographical memory and create these

20:30

memory palaces in their mind with geographical

20:33

layouts.

20:34

That's fascinating. So maybe spatial memory

20:36

in some way is more specific and

20:38

more verbatim in a sense in these other forms

20:40

of memory.

20:41

Yeah,

20:42

yeah, I think that must be right. Cool.

20:45

Okay, this comes from a data

20:47

scientist who asks, I

20:50

listened to your episode on behaviorism and I couldn't

20:52

help but think that operant conditioning is analogous

20:55

to how many machine learning algorithms work,

20:58

statistical learning.

20:59

My view is current machine learning algorithms

21:01

are the behaviorism of artificial intelligence.

21:04

If their purpose is to produce artificial general

21:06

intelligence then these systems will never be sufficient.

21:09

Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot wrapped

21:12

up in that and it's not my field but I

21:15

think that the analogy is correct.

21:17

In fact, one of the methods that's

21:19

used by an AI particularly

21:23

for sort of statistical learning is

21:25

known as reinforcement learning, reinforcement

21:27

models.

21:28

And what they do is the models sort

21:30

of send out a hypothesis and then

21:32

they get corrected in some way. Either they

21:35

often as compared to the input how well they

21:37

managed to map some part of the input. And

21:40

it's often explicitly,

21:41

there's explicit shout out to Skinner

21:44

for that idea. And Skinner's

21:48

own idea, this idea you throw at a lot

21:50

of stuff and some of it comes back with

21:52

a gold star and some of it doesn't and that

21:54

shapes you is itself and he was

21:56

very explicit about this, rooted in

21:58

Darwinian.

21:59

theory. And he made the analogy

22:02

between

22:06

his work

22:06

and Darwin's theory of natural selection

22:09

in a science article called Something Like Selection

22:12

by Consequences. So he said that just

22:15

as a story, the Darwinian story is you

22:17

have all of these random mutations and

22:19

random interaction through sexual intercourse

22:22

leading to sort of different animals have different

22:25

collections of genes. Some of them do well,

22:27

some of them don't. Those that do well

22:30

themselves reproduce more and so on and so

22:32

on.

22:32

Similarly for behavior, you

22:35

throw out a lot of random behaviors in the world. Some

22:37

of them get reinforced, some of them don't. Those that get

22:39

reinforced get built upon. And in

22:42

natural selection, you develop incredibly

22:44

complicated organisms in

22:47

human action, you develop incredibly complex

22:50

behaviors.

22:51

And, and so in another way to

22:53

make the analogy

22:54

would be genetic algorithms,

22:57

which are explicitly designed to mimic natural

23:00

selection. Now you might

23:02

say, well, we were kind of harsh on Skinner and said, this

23:04

is a terrible theory of human development.

23:06

There's a lot more going on and say, well,

23:09

I mean, AI is doomed if they rest too much

23:11

on this. But

23:12

the problem, one of the problems with Skinnerian

23:15

theory is that the sort of

23:17

consequences that the rein, the

23:20

data necessary to shape behavior doesn't

23:22

seem to exist in the human environment.

23:24

So for instance, kids, children are not, you

23:27

know, reward and punished for obeying

23:29

syntactic rules. Maybe when you develop

23:31

an AI system, you really do set it up. So the

23:33

reinforcement is there,

23:35

in which case I wouldn't necessarily,

23:37

you know, insist that it can't work.

23:40

Yeah. You know, I recently

23:43

finished reading this book by

23:45

Stephen Wolfram on chat

23:47

GPT.

23:48

And I bring it up, because there's

23:50

a relevant discussion at the end where he

23:53

says that these large language

23:55

models suffer for the,

23:58

for the

23:59

reason.

23:59

reason that they don't have symbolic

24:02

knowledge. And so he

24:05

proposes that in order to get a

24:07

really smart AI, you need to

24:09

combine a

24:10

set of concepts

24:13

that provide a true accurate

24:15

representation of the world. And

24:18

you

24:19

feed that combined with the

24:22

large language models that are all based on statistical

24:24

learning. And there you can get,

24:27

he believes, a really smart

24:29

engine. And

24:30

whether or not that's artificial general intelligence

24:33

or not, I don't know, but

24:35

it seems that that would be mimicking

24:37

the way that we learn in a better way. I

24:40

think that's right. Gary Marcus has been arguing

24:42

for many years that models

24:44

that just work on statistics alone will

24:47

always fail. The

24:48

human mind uses symbols implicated

24:51

in logic and mathematics and other

24:54

forms of complex reasoning. And unless

24:56

you equip these machines with the ability to do symbolic

24:59

reasoning, they're not

25:01

going to behave in a sophisticated human-like

25:03

manner. And this shows up in

25:06

certain ways. So the systems

25:08

we have, Bing, Jad G. B. D.

25:10

Ola, are in some way extraordinarily

25:12

impressive. I'm totally blown away by

25:14

them. But they also have certain glitches.

25:17

So

25:18

Gary points out they have problems with multiplication.

25:20

You multiply two four-digit numbers because that's

25:23

a very symbolic activity and it's hard to do just

25:25

based on associations. Also

25:27

more generally, I've been playing with this

25:29

a lot, and they hallucinate

25:33

and they make up stuff. And

25:35

it doesn't seem to be an easy problem to

25:37

fix because if you just a statistical

25:40

machine, there's no

25:42

real sharp distinction between something which is

25:44

true versus something which is sort of

25:46

true

25:47

or could be true or seeming truthy.

25:49

Yeah. And it's not

25:52

as if we can't get for many

25:54

problems like 95% of the way there. Visual

25:58

object recognition is one of these.

25:59

where if you just train up

26:02

the model,

26:03

you get really close, but there's

26:05

always that just little bit missing that

26:08

human brain seemed to do better.

26:10

The question is whether we can, just

26:12

through sheer computational

26:14

power, get anywhere closer, whether

26:16

it is a barrier, a natural barrier to these

26:19

statistical approaches. It could be argued

26:21

that they are all the shiny stuff, but until they

26:23

add symbols, you're missing that little part.

26:25

Yeah. And to be fair,

26:27

there are people who disagree with us. This is not like a

26:29

settled. Yes, but

26:32

as, yeah, okay. I

26:34

was going to insist that we're right, but of course

26:37

that has nothing to the conversation. Okay,

26:40

we got a meta one. This one is actually quite a bit of

26:42

fun. How do you guys as non-specialists

26:45

go about researching and talking about topics and

26:47

papers outside of your field? I imagine

26:49

there's a big risk of a Dunning-Kruger problem.

26:52

And this is a famous claim

26:55

that people

26:56

who know the least about the topic

26:59

are most confident of their knowledge. A

27:01

Dunning-Kruger problem where you wander into,

27:03

say, a psychopathology journal, read a couple

27:05

of papers, and think you have the topic down and go write

27:07

your chapter on psychopathology, only to have

27:09

a specialist in that field come up to you later and tell you

27:11

you are a sophomoric idiot who wrote about

27:14

your field of no depth or understanding.

27:16

Do you have specialists review your chapters

27:19

or lectures? How do you handle this?

27:21

First of all, I often am

27:23

a sophomoric idiot. That's true. Well,

27:27

let's take the latter one first. I think it's

27:30

absolutely the case that you have specialists

27:32

review what you write. And

27:35

I know for a fact that you, Paul, had

27:37

specialists review some of your chapters,

27:39

right? Particularly for the psychopathology chapter,

27:41

actually, because it is a topic I'm not a clinician.

27:44

I don't study mental illness. And

27:47

I think I had four

27:49

people who each who is

27:51

a deeply respected specialist

27:53

in the field, give me comments. And I think

27:55

that's the responsible thing to do whenever you're, even

27:57

when you're not stepping outside, you're.

27:59

your field. I mean, that's why presumably peer

28:02

review is important for publication.

28:05

This is a concern always, at

28:07

least in my mind, that when I wander

28:10

into domains that are outside of

28:12

my area of expertise, which is 99.9%

28:14

of the

28:18

field,

28:20

that I might get something wrong. I'll say a

28:22

few things. One is that

28:25

one of the things that you

28:27

get trained on that I believe

28:29

is one of the most important things to learn

28:31

when you, say, go to graduate school, is

28:34

a

28:35

set of tools,

28:38

ways to evaluate research, knowledge

28:41

about things like statistics

28:44

and experimental design, and

28:46

even knowledge about journals,

28:49

which journals are good and which journals aren't, that

28:52

I think get us quite a bit of the way

28:54

there and being able to give good answers

28:57

about areas that are outside our direct

28:59

expertise. So if you ask me about

29:03

visual cognition, even

29:06

if I weren't able to ask some of my friends who do

29:08

visual cognition, I think I could

29:10

look up papers and evaluate

29:13

the research to a certain extent, just

29:15

because a lot

29:17

of the knowledge that we have about

29:19

how to do psychology is general, and

29:21

it allows us to evaluate

29:23

good from bad. At that

29:25

point, if I'm not sure, I just straight up have

29:27

to rely on experts, and if I don't know experts,

29:30

I'm willing to cold call one.

29:32

Yeah, there's a skill

29:34

we have. We don't boast

29:37

very much about our training, our skills,

29:39

but there is a skill that most people in the

29:41

sciences and the humanities have,

29:44

which is how to start from scratch.

29:46

And you see that it's the skill when

29:48

you see people who don't have that training who are bad

29:51

at it. And so sometimes

29:53

you encounter people who are self taught in an

29:55

area. And sometimes they're absolutely

29:57

brilliant. They know

29:59

a lot about the area, maybe have a perspective on the area,

30:02

which is original and creative. But

30:04

sometimes you see people are self-taught and

30:06

they just started with the wrong thing.

30:08

And they ended up with some crackpot

30:11

theory and crackpot analysis that nobody

30:13

takes seriously, nobody should take seriously. The

30:15

way I address a new issue is actually

30:18

similar to what you're saying. This

30:21

morning, I started to work on this article

30:23

that's going to have some discussion of the alignment

30:25

problem in artificial intelligence. I

30:29

don't know what the problem really is.

30:31

I know very little about it. So I

30:33

did two things. One thing is

30:35

I emailed a friend of mine,

30:37

actually a student who

30:40

works in the alignment problem. And I said, I

30:42

want to learn more about this. What do you recommend? And

30:44

the second thing is I go to Google Scholar and

30:47

I look for review articles that are

30:49

in recent review articles

30:52

in respected journals or sometimes

30:54

in respected popular sources. You

30:56

know, I wouldn't turn away from a discussion in

30:58

a New Yorker, for instance, because it tends to

31:00

be well researched and well fact checked.

31:03

And I might end up thinking,

31:05

I don't buy the establishment view on this

31:07

topic. I want to go in a different direction.

31:10

But you start off by finding out what the establishment view

31:12

is. I

31:14

remember when I was a graduate

31:16

student, early on

31:19

I wanted to learn more philosophy,

31:21

specifically ethics, narrative ethics.

31:24

And I would

31:26

go to the library and

31:27

I would just go to that section and

31:30

I would look at the books and I would pull

31:32

out books and I would check them out and I would try

31:34

to read. And it turns out that

31:36

this was a terrible way

31:38

to start learning about the field. It wasn't until

31:41

I took a course from somebody who knew

31:43

normative ethics very well, who

31:45

was able to tell me, no,

31:47

that's not good. This

31:49

is good. Start here. Don't start there.

31:52

You always run the risk of having, maybe

31:55

missing out on stuff that you should read,

31:58

that may be the establishment.

31:59

rejected and is actually brilliant,

32:03

but by and large, expertise

32:06

matters

32:07

and finding an expert

32:09

will get you a lot

32:11

of the way there. And I'll say something which I

32:14

guess may be obvious, which is this

32:16

is an easier process if what

32:18

you're interested in learning is visual

32:21

perception

32:23

or short-term memory sticking within our field.

32:26

If what you're interested in learning about is

32:28

what's a very politicized

32:30

issue, then it gets harder. Because

32:34

if it's an issue, for instance, where there's

32:36

sort of a received view on it and

32:39

people get in a lot of trouble, that verging can receive

32:41

you, you run

32:43

the risk that even experts

32:45

are somewhat biased against the

32:47

truth. You also run the risk of finding

32:50

some sort of crackpot because there'll be far more crackpots

32:53

in an area such as, I don't know,

32:55

climate change than an area such

32:57

as auditory perception

32:59

because people have strong feelings and strong

33:01

investments and strong political commitments. Okay,

33:04

this one's for you, Paul. Would

33:06

people really care about turning off

33:09

a conscious MacBook Pro?

33:11

We live in a world where around 98% of

33:14

people, including psychologists and philosophers, report

33:17

the confinement, torture, and mutilation

33:19

of 70 billion sentient farm animals

33:22

every year

33:23

asking for a radical vegan friend. This

33:26

is a short question, but it troubled me

33:28

and made a really good point. I'm

33:31

promoting my book Psych and I'm often on podcasts

33:34

and we often end up talking about AI as

33:36

we've been talking about here because everyone wants to talk about it,

33:39

and about the consciousness of AI,

33:42

which is a topic I get to in a book and

33:44

we've talked about on this podcast. And

33:47

I end up saying something like,

33:50

if we ever encountered an

33:52

intelligence that looked like

33:55

a person, acted

33:57

like a person, and displayed

33:59

emotion...

33:59

and so on. It would be

34:02

irresistible. We

34:06

couldn't help but think of it as a conscious

34:09

sentient being deserving of

34:11

rights, deserving of privileges and so on.

34:15

So this question is kind of a response

34:18

to this, which is when we're

34:20

dealing with creatures where

34:22

plainly they are sentient,

34:24

you know, I don't think anybody

34:26

denying that a cow, a pig or

34:29

a chicken could feel pain. We're

34:32

entirely comfortable, most people, 98% say,

34:34

with their confinement, torture and mutilation.

34:39

So on the one hand, you know, you might be

34:41

saying, well, people just naturally predispose

34:43

when we get conscious being to care about them and take their lives

34:45

as having value. On the other hand, we

34:48

are monstrously indifferent

34:50

to the suffering of billions of sentient creatures.

34:53

And I think the way around them is I don't

34:55

see the 70 billion

34:57

animals suffering.

34:59

It has kept away from my sight. I

35:01

have sort of plausible deniability. I

35:04

think we're very good

35:05

at averting our eyes to things that would

35:07

trouble us.

35:09

And I think often

35:11

our compassion and our empathy and

35:14

our moral concern are triggered

35:16

by face to face exposure of

35:18

a suffering creature.

35:20

I would not, I will

35:23

confess, I eat meat, but I

35:25

certainly wouldn't torture a pig, you

35:27

know, in front of me, that the idea would be monstrous.

35:29

And if you want to say that that's a

35:31

plausible psychological story, I think it is, but

35:34

a terrible moral story, we should do better.

35:36

I'd probably agree.

35:39

I have a view that you might disagree

35:41

with, and that is that what

35:44

matters for whether or not we

35:47

treat sentient creatures as deserving

35:49

of moral protection is their ability

35:52

to communicate to us, especially

35:54

via language that they would

35:56

rather not be suffering and

35:58

being tortured and mutilated.

35:59

And I'll ask you this here. Do you

36:02

think that within, say, the next 20, 30, 40 years,

36:05

there will

36:07

be substantially more vegetarians or

36:09

vegans because of this notion

36:13

that we know that animals are suffering?

36:15

I think there will be more vegetarians

36:18

and vegans, but not for that reason. I

36:20

think it's pretty clear for everybody that animals

36:22

are suffering. And you take it as a

36:24

moral test of humanity. Mostly

36:27

humanity doesn't care. Mostly humanity is willing

36:29

to go with it because we like the taste of meat. I

36:31

think what's going to cause us to change is the

36:35

introduction of meat substitutes, particularly lab

36:38

grown meat.

36:40

And so people like me

36:42

who eat meat will say, well, I certainly had

36:44

want to be a good person. So I'll move to the substitutes

36:47

and that could cause a revolution.

36:49

But, you know, since the publication

36:52

of books like Peter Singer's Animal

36:54

Liberation,

36:55

which call people's attention to the suffering of

36:57

animals in a strong moral case, I

36:59

don't think there's been a rise

37:02

in vegetarians and vegans that anybody's expected.

37:05

Yeah, certainly not

37:07

what I think you might expect

37:09

if you believe that humans had moral

37:13

compassion for the suffering of other creatures.

37:15

You know, I'm a vegetarian. I was raised

37:17

a vegetarian, so I never had

37:19

to undo my meat eating and

37:22

I don't know whether I would be able to.

37:25

But it is striking to

37:27

me that people

37:28

have seen the suffering of

37:30

animals many, many times.

37:34

And this doesn't make a dent.

37:36

So I think to answer directly

37:38

the question, I

37:40

would turn off a conscious MacBook Pro. I

37:42

probably wouldn't care. I don't think

37:44

I would care. I also

37:47

like, by the way, that it's a MacBook. If

37:50

Ian or she had asked, is it a Dell?

37:53

Maybe I would have answered. I'm

37:57

a committed Mac user and I think I think

37:59

Sentience

37:59

is going to come first to the max. The

38:03

PC is going to try to fake it, but it's not

38:05

going to maxily conscious. That's

38:08

an amusing end to a grim, grim

38:10

topic. So this is one

38:12

by, um, it's actually by somebody who was corresponding

38:14

with me and he agreed to have his name, Kyle

38:16

Miller Hesse, I hope I'm pronouncing

38:18

that right. And it was such an interesting correspondence

38:21

based on the podcast. What he said was,

38:24

um, is this, I wanted to argue

38:26

for a greater role

38:29

of language

38:29

in limiting and encouraging thought. And

38:32

I think either of you were willing to concede.

38:34

And in fact, he's talking

38:36

about the episode on language where we

38:38

were quite skeptical of the claim

38:41

that language shapes thought. And

38:43

in other, in particular, that the language you learn, English

38:45

or French or Korean or Hindi or whatever,

38:48

uh, leads people to think in different

38:50

ways. So he says, here are some examples

38:52

off the top of my head.

38:54

Words as labels without these flags.

38:56

It's harder to notice things as in like

38:58

identifying emotions, personal

39:00

experience. I often don't know what

39:02

I really think until I start putting ideas

39:04

into words. And then I may need to revise

39:07

or redefine those thoughts. Then

39:09

there's words, uh, as scaffolding

39:11

for thought.

39:12

So Sam Harris makes argument ideas

39:15

matter a lot and words

39:17

that name these ideas, uh,

39:20

you know, are important for precise philosophical,

39:22

legal, analysis.

39:25

And later on, he notes that we had a

39:27

great example in unrelated episode where we acknowledge

39:29

that how a person categorizes something has

39:32

a dramatic impact on how they experience it.

39:35

So ends by saying, I

39:36

think that language is so fundamental for how we

39:38

process the world. It's hard to imagine how limited

39:41

we would be without it, or even how differently

39:43

we might process the world for different language or

39:45

even terminology

39:47

or framework. So I

39:49

think that's a really cool set of issues and nice

39:51

challenge to what we were talking about. Yeah,

39:54

maybe it's a matter of emphasis, but I do think

39:56

that we

39:57

granted that all of these things.

39:59

matter. So what you attend

40:02

to, how you categorize, what

40:04

you remember, all of those

40:06

things really are shaped by the

40:08

language that you speak. Those are real

40:11

effects. They're true. You are

40:13

more likely to

40:16

remember colors

40:18

that you have words for. But

40:21

I think that what we're arguing against

40:24

is a fairly extreme claim

40:27

that our thinking

40:30

is constrained by language in

40:32

a way that I don't think makes any sense for

40:34

the simple reason that

40:37

all of these words have

40:39

had to be created and invented by

40:42

human beings by being thought about first.

40:45

And I don't think there's any way to get around

40:47

that. The stuff that language is made of is

40:50

stuff that has been thought about before

40:52

that language

40:53

ever came about. So what do you

40:55

think? Yeah, I agree with a lot

40:57

of that. I'll push back on one thing.

41:00

So here's the sense with all

41:02

three of us, I think agree, our questioner

41:04

and you and me. One

41:07

thing is language could convey thoughts. This

41:09

is what we're doing now.

41:11

I'm 99.9% of what I know is because somebody told

41:15

it to me or I read it. And so

41:17

language says that. The second thing is I

41:20

would agree. It

41:22

was aligned by Dan Dennett, the philosopher Dan Dennett,

41:24

which is the kind of mind

41:26

you have with language is

41:29

so different from the kind of mind

41:31

you have without language that is not

41:33

clear. The second one could be called a mind at all.

41:35

I think that's a bit too strong, but I don't

41:38

doubt that the possession of a language, a human

41:40

language, lets me do things with thoughts

41:42

I wouldn't otherwise do.

41:43

I could plan

41:46

a 10 step process just while walking

41:48

down the street in my head.

41:50

I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this.

41:53

And I don't think I'd be able to do that if I didn't have a natural

41:56

language. I don't think a chimp can do that.

41:58

Now, then there's what you talked about, which

41:59

is the differences in the different

42:02

languages and how they name things and

42:04

how we think. And everything you said is

42:07

technically correct.

42:09

The words languages use affect

42:11

memory and

42:12

they affect reaction time and they have

42:14

notable psychological effects. But

42:16

I would just emphasize the effects are tiny.

42:19

They're really subtle. So yes,

42:21

languages have different color words and this affects our

42:24

memory and effects are used, but they're,

42:26

you know, percentage point differences. They're

42:29

fractions of a second.

42:31

Then there's the big thing and

42:33

I'll raise this and we'll come back and forth

42:36

on it, which is you're right. So suppose

42:38

somebody was to say, look, the fact that we had

42:40

that, say Freudians had a term hysteria

42:43

and there's a common then shaped how

42:45

we think about certain behaviors

42:47

and certain thoughts. And without the words,

42:49

we wouldn't think that way. And

42:51

maybe a modern example of your phrase long

42:53

COVID, which people are, which

42:56

is a new phrase and it's shaped how people think.

42:58

And your point is, well, that can't be entirely

43:01

right because somebody must have certainly

43:03

the right story as somebody thought about the idea

43:05

of hysteria and coined a word for it. Somebody

43:08

observed symptoms that they decided to think of

43:10

as long COVID and they coined this phrase for

43:12

it. But

43:14

there may be some

43:17

room to argue that now that we have the

43:19

word as a tag, it

43:21

does, it does make it easier to think about

43:23

it. It makes it easier to communicate it about

43:26

it. And maybe it reifies it

43:28

in that for some things, you

43:30

know, say hysteria, you might doubt that such

43:32

a thing exists, but if there's a word for

43:35

it, upstas, that somebody will think that it exists.

43:37

Yeah. I mean, I agree

43:40

with that. And I think,

43:42

again, that what we were fighting

43:44

against was the most extreme of the linguistic

43:46

relativism claims. And we even gave

43:49

examples of words that,

43:52

like, I think I gave the example of the word in

43:54

Spanish that I use for wearing something for the first

43:56

time, which is just an idea that wouldn't

43:59

pop into my head.

43:59

had I not had that word, it would not

44:02

very frequently at least. And I also

44:04

do think maybe we underplayed

44:07

that Dennett point that you made, that language

44:10

does change

44:11

minds in what has

44:13

to be a really fundamental way. That

44:16

is the difference though between some language and

44:18

no language. That's right.

44:20

That's right. I think there's a profound difference in some language

44:22

and no language. I'm not sure there's such a

44:24

difference between English versus Korean.

44:27

And as a practical manner, it's often

44:29

hard to tell because on average

44:31

an English speaker will have a different

44:34

mental life than a Korean speaker regarding

44:37

foods and cultural practices and

44:39

holidays and that sort of thing. And

44:41

certainly it's conveyed by the language, but

44:43

it just has to do with the fact

44:45

that Korean speakers, Korean people speak

44:47

Korean and people in English speaking countries

44:50

speak English. It almost certainly doesn't have

44:52

to do with the structure of the language. That's

44:54

a great question and good pushback. Okay.

44:57

I got

44:57

one for you though. I'm going

44:59

to let Dan let you say the name of the

45:02

questioner. As

45:04

you know,

45:05

psychology often employs statistical measures

45:08

such as averages and correlations to capture

45:10

various phenomena. My question is

45:12

how much of a phenomena could be explained by

45:14

a given theory and how much variation remains unexplained?

45:17

For instance, a method that yields the best results

45:19

on average may not be the best fit for an

45:21

individual. So is it better to rely on the

45:23

science of psychology or to use common

45:26

sense and personal intuitions?

45:28

War regards from Prague. I'm

45:30

going to attempt the name Gizi

45:33

Vanchuda. You can tell me if

45:35

I said that right or wrong. A great

45:38

question. It is absolutely true that

45:40

so much of our science really is a science

45:42

of averages. Our statistics,

45:46

our experimental designs that

45:49

are interpreted through the use of statistics,

45:51

are often using some measure

45:53

of central tendency, the average. And

45:56

we tell the difference between two groups, an

45:58

experimental group, and a...

45:59

control group,

46:00

we look at averages. And when

46:03

you look at distributions, you

46:06

can eyeball it and obviously

46:08

see that, for instance, this

46:11

manipulation didn't

46:13

work for everybody. There

46:15

are always going to be outliers and those

46:17

distributions are always going to be overlapping.

46:20

There is, I guess, a collection

46:22

of subfields within psychology

46:24

that focus on individual differences.

46:27

You might ask the difference, for instance, about

46:29

trauma that we were discussing earlier. What makes

46:32

it so that some people who experience

46:34

the exact same event as

46:36

somebody else, what makes it so that one of those

46:39

people

46:40

is absolutely shattered and the other person

46:42

doesn't seem phased at all? That's a question

46:44

about individual differences. And if what you're

46:46

looking to do is predict

46:49

those kinds of differences,

46:51

then I do think it's dangerous to

46:53

look at averages. I don't think

46:56

that the conclusion is that it's better

46:58

to rely on common sense

47:00

and personal observation. I guess

47:02

I would push back on that and

47:04

say that, no, what you want to rely on is

47:06

a different way of looking at the question

47:09

scientifically. What

47:10

do you think? Yeah,

47:12

to some extent, psychology can

47:15

traffic in absolute principles,

47:18

maybe at the neural level. If this happens,

47:20

then this happens, boom, boom, a causal process

47:22

that we have understood. Maybe even

47:24

at the more cognitive and abstract

47:26

level, you might say, well, you remember a series of words,

47:29

this word will be forgotten more easily than that word

47:31

and so on. But when it comes all the

47:33

way up to the grand

47:35

scheme of everyday life, so

47:38

many processes interact and there's so

47:40

much having to do with history and environment that

47:43

just absolute generalizations will

47:45

never happen. We always have averages. We

47:47

always deal with,

47:48

like you say, distributions and statistics.

47:51

So I said before, most people

47:54

who have traumatic events

47:56

are resilient, but that's the generalization.

47:59

Some people aren't. for

48:02

most people apparently the best time

48:04

to work is the morning, but there's some people work in the

48:06

evening. This way of studying

48:08

will help most people, but

48:11

not others. So what do you do if you're trying

48:13

to get sort of practical advice over how

48:15

to study or what treatment to

48:18

take if you're depressed or

48:20

you know something like that. And

48:23

I would think

48:26

sometimes you'd

48:28

want to have a scientific eye. You

48:30

don't want to look at tea leaves

48:33

or ask a spiritual figure or

48:35

listen to your dreams. But careful

48:38

observation, I wouldn't call it anecdote,

48:40

but careful observation of yourself may

48:43

be a better guide

48:45

than going to a psychology

48:47

textbook. Say

48:49

if I want to know how many hours of

48:51

sleep I need to function best,

48:54

what a psychology textbook could tell me on average

48:56

how many

48:58

people tend to need, but of

49:00

course there's great variance. So if I want to know

49:02

for myself, I could probably do well just

49:04

by trying out different amounts of time and seeing how well

49:07

I fare. Yeah, I agree. I

49:09

mean, in fact, I use a sleep

49:11

tracker. So I can kind of tell

49:13

when I get certain amount

49:17

of sleep what my say heart rate the

49:19

next day is or even if I have elevated

49:21

temperature. So I guess

49:24

I would just say the closer you can get to being

49:26

rigorous in your observation, the better

49:28

off you're going to do. That's

49:29

right. You

49:31

made a point about there being so many

49:34

things at play for any

49:36

given effect that there's tons

49:38

of interactions like personality,

49:42

genetics, that

49:43

are all at work in

49:46

any decision that you make or thought that

49:48

you have,

49:49

that it does sometimes

49:51

seem a bit futile to use

49:53

any findings for specific

49:57

advice. I think that psychologists

49:59

We are often a bit too

50:02

quick to present

50:05

this information as stuff that would work as

50:07

advice to an individual.

50:09

I think that's absolutely true. It's

50:11

a sin that

50:13

people, particularly in, say, positive psychology,

50:16

are guilty of. And

50:18

I've heard some of the best positive psychologists rebel

50:20

against this, say, you shouldn't tell people,

50:22

this is what to do to be happy.

50:25

This is what to do to be productive. This is what

50:27

to do to be successful. Because you

50:29

could say, on aggregate, this tends to work

50:31

for most people.

50:33

But rather, I think the best suggestion

50:36

is try out different things.

50:38

Try out different things and see what works for you. I

50:40

like the idea of your sleep tracker, and then

50:43

it comes under life hacking, which is,

50:45

you know, there's psychology as a field, which

50:48

we're talking about. But we

50:50

can be psychologists

50:52

about our own mental life in

50:55

a sense that we take a scientific approach.

50:59

And it could involve what kind of

51:01

health things like sleep and diet and exercise

51:04

and what works best for us. But

51:07

it also involves how we deal with people,

51:09

our own psychologies. We could study

51:11

our minds in kind of a serious

51:13

sense and ask ourselves, you know, what makes me

51:15

happy? And I think

51:18

one of the lessons of happiness research,

51:20

which works for the most part, is that

51:22

we're very bad at

51:24

our gut feelings of predicting what makes us happy. We

51:26

often have the wrong theories of what makes

51:28

us happy. So the solution to this

51:31

is collect data.

51:33

You

51:33

know, collect data. Ask yourself at the end

51:35

of a day, say, say, what part

51:37

of that day did I enjoy? What part of that day

51:39

did I not like? And

51:42

it might be after you look at two weeks of your

51:44

day, they say, oh, my gosh, I

51:46

thought I liked this, but I didn't. And

51:49

to my surprise,

51:51

I seem to be really much happier in the afternoon,

51:53

stuff like that. Not the kind of things you'd find

51:55

in a psychology textbook, but

51:57

useful for everyday life.

52:00

way, there are mood tracker apps

52:02

that you can download that you

52:05

just input how you're feeling every day and maybe

52:07

get some insight. But I'll add

52:09

this last thing, which as you were talking,

52:11

I thought about this. Sometimes

52:15

other people are better at telling

52:17

you what works and what doesn't

52:19

in your life. So anybody

52:22

who's had children knows this,

52:24

but when your child doesn't get enough

52:26

sleep and they get cranky, you can tell

52:28

them you didn't sleep. That's why you're cranky.

52:31

And they'll of course resist this because they think,

52:34

you know, there is some objective reason. The

52:36

food you gave me was actually terrible.

52:40

But we know because we can observe in

52:43

a bit more of an impartial way. When

52:45

you said everybody who has children, I was thinking of the

52:47

opposite direction, which is my children

52:50

have told me, dad, you're a real jerk when

52:52

you get tired. Right.

52:55

That's also true. Yeah.

52:58

You have to be prepared for the fact.

53:00

And this comes into a sort of a deep point

53:02

about the lack of accessibility we

53:04

have to all sorts of aspects ourselves. It's a very

53:06

Freudian point. We have to be open to the possibility

53:09

that other people might know us better than we do.

53:12

Okay. This next one comes from Tyler.

53:14

This is probably veering into the realm of philosophy,

53:16

but I know you two are open to that. My

53:19

question, what do you make of the extended

53:21

mind theory? Is it useful to think of

53:23

my phone or my notebook as actually being

53:25

a part of my mind? Does this

53:28

have implications for the study of psychology?

53:30

It's a really interesting issue. I've heard

53:33

Andy Clark,

53:34

the philosopher Andy Clark talk about this

53:36

and I don't have a settled view. I

53:39

think what is very clear

53:41

is that, you know, something like a notebook and

53:43

particularly something like Google

53:46

or maybe again to stick to a theme,

53:48

AIs will become more integrated

53:51

into our lives. So that it's

53:54

the argument that extended mind

53:56

people make is that

53:58

it may not be right to draw. a hard

54:00

and fast distinction between

54:02

the sort of memory you have between your ears and

54:05

the data that could come to you through your laptop

54:08

or your notebook if you always have them present.

54:11

I never know, I'm just going to punt on

54:13

this, I never know whether to think of that as a metaphor,

54:15

like wow, it's like the web is kind

54:18

of like as if it was like a memory

54:20

or whether

54:24

it's true as a real substantive claim.

54:27

I think there's something to the fact that

54:29

your brain is always with you

54:32

and your notebook and

54:34

the computer are contingent technological things

54:36

that you can or cannot use. I think that

54:38

difference really does make a difference. I

54:41

don't know, what's your take?

54:43

Yeah, I have a similar

54:46

poll of intuitions there. I mean, it's

54:48

something like the issue of personal identity

54:51

where it doesn't seem to me that there's a great

54:53

reason to think that

54:55

only the things that are within

54:57

my skin count as me. I

55:00

think you could make a good argument that

55:02

what is me is extended.

55:04

And here's one way, I'll take a stab

55:07

at one way in which you might seriously

55:11

view, say,

55:14

technology as part of your extended mind.

55:16

I have an iPhone and

55:20

on my phone I get

55:22

photo memories. It basically

55:24

just shows me, for instance, on this day,

55:26

five years ago, here's what you were doing.

55:29

Now we know that the way that memory

55:31

works is that the more that you rehearse

55:34

memories,

55:35

the more likely you are to remember them. So

55:38

something might escape your

55:40

memory given enough time if you never

55:42

boost it with a conversation

55:45

with somebody else who happened to be there at the moment, or

55:47

in this case, a picture reminding me

55:49

of it.

55:50

I think my mind is

55:52

substantively changed because

55:55

of technology like this. I have memories

55:58

that I probably would

55:59

otherwise. There I would take

56:02

seriously the claim that my

56:04

mind may not

56:06

be just what

56:08

is within the limits of my skull.

56:11

But again, I can't help

56:13

but think, well, what's the

56:16

difference between saying that and saying

56:18

my mind has been helped out by

56:20

these technologies? Yeah, I'm even more hardcore

56:23

than you. I don't have time for this hippie metaphysics.

56:26

What? My

56:29

personal identity is this guy standing

56:31

right here, not the clothes he's wearing

56:34

or the cherry sitting at and not the laptop

56:36

that's in front of them. And

56:38

so now I don't

56:40

want to be dismissive. People

56:42

like Andy Clark, I think David Chalmers have

56:44

thought deeply, but has made a case

56:47

that is more than a metaphor.

56:49

And Chalmers has written a lot about

56:51

virtual reality and similar

56:53

topics might say, look, whatever

56:56

you think about your notebook

56:58

and or your laptop,

57:01

soon we'll all be more integrated

57:04

in the technological world. So if

57:06

all of a sudden there's a chip in my head

57:09

that lets me access the web,

57:12

then that counts. It gets a lot more

57:15

plausible to think of the web as part of

57:17

my memory and part of me.

57:19

Yeah, what a hardcore physicalist you

57:21

are. Thank you. Thank you very much.

57:24

OK, I think this is the last one. Sam

57:27

Rosenblatt sent

57:29

us a series of excellent questions

57:32

and we're just going to deal with the first. And I think what we're going to do

57:34

is we're just going to bounce back and

57:36

forth on this until we get we get tired.

57:38

But the question is, who

57:40

are some of the greatest, however

57:42

defined living psychologists today?

57:46

Well, this is

57:48

a question that I dread answering because calling anybody living

57:51

great is just wounds

57:53

my pride. I think

57:57

of all the people we're going to insult by now. And all the people that I

57:59

I'm going to leave off the list. I'm going to insult, I'll

58:02

start with Paul Bloom. How about that? That's

58:04

a number one great, let me take psychologist.

58:06

That just goes without saying. Yes. So

58:09

I'll just mention some favorites.

58:12

Elizabeth Loftus, I think has to be up

58:14

there for me.

58:16

Memory researcher, somebody who

58:18

has made a real contribution, not

58:21

just to our understanding of the psychology

58:23

of memory, but also to the

58:25

way that law deals with things like

58:27

eyewitness testimony and

58:30

police questioning, all those sorts of things. So

58:33

she's my first vote. What about you? I

58:36

will go as a first vote with Susan Carey. And

58:38

this is a vote which I'm very personally biased.

58:41

She was my advisor last

58:43

week. I was in Boston for her retirement

58:45

party

58:46

from Harvard, but

58:48

I think it's actually, particularly in

58:51

the field of developmental psychology, it's

58:54

an easy answer. She has

58:56

an incredibly substantive work, looking

58:59

at some of the deepest questions there are, including

59:01

the question of what's the difference

59:03

between how children think and how adults think.

59:05

And I just, you know, she's

59:08

done work integrating psychology and philosophy.

59:10

She's done work connecting across the visual

59:13

sciences and cognitive science,

59:15

won every award there is to win.

59:18

And just this incredibly important figure.

59:20

My next one, I think we probably would both have on our

59:22

list, Paul Rosen. Paul Rosen

59:24

is great. What a good choice. Yeah. One

59:27

of the just most interesting minds

59:30

that I've ever encountered, I think his

59:32

body of work. It's

59:36

rare to say of somebody,

59:38

no matter how good they are,

59:40

that

59:42

without their contribution,

59:44

the field would be radically different.

59:48

It's a high bar, but I think Paul

59:50

Rosen in social psychology,

59:53

at least the field would be different

59:55

without his creative thoughts. So he's most

59:57

known for his work on disgust.

59:59

But if you just Google Scholar him, you'll

1:00:02

see how his reach has

1:00:05

extended. And he just has this talent

1:00:07

of finding things that nobody

1:00:09

else is talking about that probably

1:00:12

we should be talking about. Yeah.

1:00:13

I'm a huge Paul Ross fan. He's had this

1:00:15

tremendous personal influence on me and

1:00:18

shaping my work. He is, if you

1:00:20

define, you know, the best as the most

1:00:23

interesting,

1:00:24

he is both as a scholar

1:00:26

and as a person, he's just a terrific

1:00:29

fan. I will, I will take a more establishment,

1:00:31

a social psychologist as my, as,

1:00:34

as my next choice, Dan Gilbert.

1:00:36

Um, Dan is this, you

1:00:38

know, very creative, uh, scholar

1:00:41

who's had tremendous influence on

1:00:43

social psychology and also on positive psychology.

1:00:46

Uh, when we talked before about how we're bad

1:00:48

at predicting our future happiness, uh,

1:00:50

Dan's done the pivotal work here. There's

1:00:53

so many good things you can say about Dan, but one thing I'll say

1:00:55

is just, he comes out with like two or three experiments,

1:00:58

published empirical papers a year and,

1:01:01

and as the kids say, they're all bangers. They're all

1:01:03

just like, they're, they're all as really

1:01:05

cool discoveries. I always

1:01:06

have a feeling that, um, that

1:01:09

man, I wish I had thought of that. And,

1:01:12

um, and he's also one

1:01:14

of the best, maybe the best writers in our field.

1:01:16

Yes. Uh, well, I'll stick to social psychology

1:01:18

too. Um, I will nominate

1:01:22

my colleague here, Tom Gilovich. One

1:01:24

of my,

1:01:25

I think just heroes personally,

1:01:28

he's a person that

1:01:31

you never hear anyone

1:01:33

speak an ill word of him. His character

1:01:35

in general is amazing, but he also

1:01:37

has this eye for interestingness that,

1:01:40

that

1:01:41

I really envy. Um, he's

1:01:43

done a lot of great work on

1:01:46

human bias, um, in

1:01:48

judgment and decision making.

1:01:50

He has done

1:01:51

very

1:01:53

influential work on regret. Um,

1:01:56

he wrote a book on why we make mistakes

1:01:58

in the financial domain. And

1:02:01

he does

1:02:03

some of the coolest work

1:02:05

looking at sports. Does

1:02:09

the color of uniforms matter? He

1:02:12

just has an eye for field

1:02:14

experiments for sources of data that we might

1:02:16

not think about. Just again, a creative

1:02:19

mind, good methodologist, very

1:02:22

clear writer and thinker.

1:02:24

I agree. I talk about his work on the spotlight

1:02:26

effect in my book. And one of my favorite

1:02:28

sets of studies from social psychology that these

1:02:31

clever studies showing that we overestimate

1:02:34

the extent to which people focus on us.

1:02:36

It's as if there's always a spotlight

1:02:39

focused on us. And in fact,

1:02:41

people are actually not thinking about us. People are thinking

1:02:43

about themselves because they have their own spotlight. And

1:02:46

it's just imaginative and clever

1:02:48

work. I'll dart back

1:02:51

to a related field of developmental psychology

1:02:53

and put down Elizabeth Spelke,

1:02:55

who is I think our foremost. And

1:02:58

there's people, there's a couple of contenders

1:03:00

here, but I think she's one of the major

1:03:02

researchers on babies. And

1:03:05

sometimes psychology is like long on theories,

1:03:07

but short on real discoveries. But she

1:03:09

has had real discoveries about what babies know.

1:03:12

She's told us babies understand objects, the physical

1:03:14

world, the social world, and also

1:03:17

just this person of considerable brilliance.

1:03:20

I learned what a Spelke object was before

1:03:22

I knew who the Spelke was. Yes.

1:03:25

It's a

1:03:25

bounded continuous object that moves through

1:03:28

space and time or something. Much

1:03:30

like your brain. Oh, that is

1:03:32

me. You

1:03:36

are a Spelke object. I

1:03:40

realize I'm doing all social psychologists, although there

1:03:43

is a heavy cognitive influence

1:03:45

on my picks for the record.

1:03:48

Mazarim Banaji, your former

1:03:50

colleague, our friend. She

1:03:53

has done great work on

1:03:55

implicit attitudes. Her mind

1:03:58

and her influence on the field.

1:03:59

deeply respect. She is one of

1:04:02

my favorite people to talk to. I

1:04:04

always come away from my

1:04:06

conversations with her

1:04:08

feeling like I'm a bit smarter

1:04:10

than I was before because of what she said. Yeah,

1:04:13

I am a huge fan of her and she

1:04:15

is a rich and generous

1:04:18

thinker. Yeah, intellectually honest,

1:04:20

I think. Yeah, which you have to be in that

1:04:22

field. I think a lot of people are somewhat skeptical

1:04:25

of that of that area and they go in and listen to

1:04:27

a talk of hers and anything. Oh, this is just going to be some sort

1:04:29

of nonsense. And then, Jesus,

1:04:32

tremendously persuasive. I just

1:04:34

like to kind of put her in front of every TV screen in America.

1:04:37

The ability to give a great

1:04:38

talk is a category

1:04:41

of its own. And honestly, I put

1:04:44

Mausrine up there and you, Paul,

1:04:46

as two of the best speakers

1:04:49

in the field. Well, I don't know, unless most

1:04:51

of them

1:04:52

are great speakers, not all of them.

1:04:54

I'm not going to go through, but some of them

1:04:57

are terrible speakers. And

1:04:59

it's funny, some of these people we're talking about are very active.

1:05:02

They may be listening to this podcast or on, they're

1:05:04

on Twitter, they're on email. Others

1:05:07

like my advisor, Susan, I

1:05:09

can say with some confidence, she is not going to be listening to

1:05:11

this podcast. And again, she's

1:05:13

not on social media. And somehow,

1:05:15

despite this, she's been incredibly productive and

1:05:18

lived this rich scholarly life.

1:05:20

That's so strange. I'll throw, maybe this is a final

1:05:23

name, Stephen Pinker.

1:05:24

So Steve

1:05:26

is a friend. Steve was my secondary

1:05:29

advisor when I was in graduate

1:05:31

school. And I think he's this extraordinarily

1:05:34

imaginative thinker. And people

1:05:36

know him for his more and more

1:05:39

for his sort of political and social side and

1:05:42

for his big theoretical contributions.

1:05:44

But he's done some, particularly regarding

1:05:47

the decline of violence over history,

1:05:50

his defense of rationality, and

1:05:52

his defensive enlightenment values. But

1:05:54

he's also done some incredibly important empirical

1:05:56

work, both in visual cognition and most of all, in

1:05:58

language and the nature of language. language, defending a

1:06:00

theory of language acquisition, exploring

1:06:03

the use of language, exploring how language

1:06:05

works. So I think one of these rare

1:06:07

scholars who's both valuable

1:06:11

sort of bench scientists, but also a great

1:06:13

theoretician.

1:06:14

And I put them right up there with Gilbert

1:06:16

as one of the best writers in the field. Yeah,

1:06:19

absolutely.

1:06:21

You know, I'm going to tell an anecdote because I

1:06:23

don't know, I don't know if I'm going to keep it, but

1:06:25

it's a memory I have of you very early on.

1:06:28

So Paul used to attend our social

1:06:30

brown bags and there was a speaker

1:06:32

who I won't name, who came and gave

1:06:35

a talk

1:06:36

and it is one of the worst talks

1:06:38

I've ever seen in my life.

1:06:40

Inside psychology, outside of psychology, it was terrible.

1:06:42

It was disorganized. It was still using

1:06:45

overheads with just paragraphs

1:06:47

of text. It was long.

1:06:49

And I

1:06:50

believe you walked out early.

1:06:54

This is not a story that reflects well on me. And

1:06:57

so I was talking to you afterwards as

1:07:00

a, as naive, this was a

1:07:02

famous person. I said, oh, I

1:07:04

guess when you're famous, you

1:07:06

can give bad talks. And you

1:07:08

looked at me and you said, they must be really

1:07:10

famous. And

1:07:13

then I believe you followed up by

1:07:16

saying I've had more fun at the

1:07:18

dentist's office.

1:07:20

Well, so in our next episode, we'll

1:07:23

list the worst living psychologists.

1:07:27

So this was a different kind of episode,

1:07:30

but I hope it was enjoyable. I hope we

1:07:32

dropped some jam. I hope it was a banger as

1:07:34

Paul says. I've picked this up from, from the

1:07:36

kids and I want to use it every chance

1:07:38

I get. kem