Episode 113: Evolution, Collective Minds, and Static Societies

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:02]  Peter: This week, Bruce takes a deep dive into anthropologist Joseph Henrich's book, Secret of Our Success, where he outlines his hypothesis that human evolution occurs at the level of culture as much as genes, and that this collective brain may be far superior to any individual. Bruce considers the way this theory may or may not be consistent with David Deutsch's ideas on static and dynamic societies. I found this to be another fascinating deep dive by Bruce, and I hope someone out there enjoys it too.

[00:00:44]  Unidentified speaker: Welcome to The Theory of Anything Podcast.

[00:00:46]  Bruce: Hey, Peter.

[00:00:47]  Peter: Hello, Bruce.

[00:00:48]  Unidentified speaker: How are you today?

[00:00:49]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:00:51]  Bruce: Today, we're gonna talk about Joseph Henrich's book, The Secret of Our Success, which I thought was an interesting book. I kind of suspect most crit rats would kind of hate it, but I felt like it brought to light observations, evidence that have relevance to a discussion about the nature of static societies and may change our opinions of them somewhat. I found it also to be strongly in alignment with Deutsch's theories about static societies, for the most part, with some nuanced differences, if that makes any sense. So this could be considered maybe, like we did an episode on Deutsch's ideas of static societies. This is gonna be like part of that ongoing series where we talk about static societies. We got quite a number of those that we're gonna eventually do. So without actually challenging his theory, which I think Deutsch's theory is at least partially correct, I did point out how pessimistic it was that for 200,000 plus years, probably more like a million years, our creativity was blocked by mere finely tuned memes. Moreover, according to Deutsch, these memes could easily have been disposed of by nothing more than taking a critical attitude and allowing critical discussion. So is that even a realistic theory? How could a non-creative, non-thinking meme be so finely tuned that it could overcome creativity for over, for probably a million years, right, of universal explainers existing, or at least 200,000 years? And not a single universal explainer realized how easy it was to escape the hold of these evil, irrational memes.

[00:02:42]  Bruce: Okay, but as a critical rationalist, I believe in the what I would call the put up or shut up principle, aka Popper's Ratchet or the No Ad Hoc Rule, if you prefer. An attitude of incredulity is meaningless. We would need to offer an actual testable alternative theory. So, Joseph Henrich's book, The Secret of Our Success, is going to be our first quote, alternative theory. So, I think this is a good starting point for a couple of reasons. As I mentioned, it mostly confirms Deutsch's theory, though it challenges it in a few ways. Second, it offers empirical details about how it came to be that we got locked out of progress for so long. So, Henrich's theory is likely going to bother many crit rats, even though he mostly agrees with Deutsch's theory. And even produces evidence for Deutsch's theory. But I think the reason why crit rats will hate it is because it has a really Evo-psych flavor to it, which many crit rats a priori just reject up front. But agree or disagree with Henrich, he offers hard evidence for his alternative theory that must be contended with. So, Henrich tries to set up a mystery of sorts. And this is my wording, not his, but the mystery is something like this. Here we have this funny hairless ape, and it isn't very strong or fast. It can't even digest its own food. By all rights, this ape should be the bottom of the food chain, yet somehow it thrives beyond reason. Of course, I'm talking about humans. Now, of course, the crit rat standard response here is, it's because humans are universal explainers.

[00:04:24]  Bruce: We made the jump to universality, and therefore we're way above all the animals. Now, Henrich argues against this point of view, which is why I don't think crit rats will like this part of his theory. He argues that our intelligence is not well adapted for our environment, at least not at the individual level for natural survival. Now, this may surprise crit rats at first, but he does give quite a bit of evidence that this is the case, which it's interesting how it nuanced my own thinking on this subject. Believe me, I still very much believe humans are universal explainers. It's not like he's talked me out of that. I don't think he is trying to talk you out of that. But he forces you to come to grips with certain truths about how we relate to animal intelligence that I guess I didn't necessarily foresee. So let's go over some of the experiments that Henrich covers with mixed results that followed. Okay, so it involves competitions between humans, often human children, and chimps to determine how quickly they can learn various kinds of learning. Okay, so humans ended up winning some of the competition and chimps ended up winning some of the competition. That's probably no real surprise. So here's what I'm going to ask the audience to do. I'll ask Peter to do this too. Peter's going to be the audience surrogate here.

[00:05:53]  Unidentified speaker: Uh-oh.

[00:05:55]  Bruce: Which is probably good. You didn't actually read the book. I want you to use your CritRat Deutschian knowledge to determine in advance which of the experiments, the games and the experiments, chimps went at and which ones the humans went at. Okay, so I'm going to give you an experiment. Then I want you to make a guess as to who won.

[00:06:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:06:16]  Peter: Are we talking fully grown humans or children?

[00:06:19]  Bruce: I think usually it was children that they were competing against chimps. Sometimes it was fully grown humans. It depended on which experiment.

[00:06:27]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:06:29]  Bruce: So experiment one, I think this one was done with adult humans.

[00:06:33]  Peter: Because human children are pretty stupid, right? I mean, compared to other animals, like we, it takes us a lot. It's one of the interesting things about our species, isn't it, that it takes us so long to really do anything? I mean, we can't not only physically, but mentally too, we're just so helpless.

[00:06:53]  Bruce: So here's the first experiment.

[00:06:55]  Unidentified speaker: This is an experiment is testing raw memory.

[00:06:58]  Bruce: So we don't even have the exact details of the experiment. But in an experiment where we're testing raw memory, who wins, humans or chimps?

[00:07:08]  Unidentified speaker: Who?

[00:07:09]  Unidentified speaker: That's chimps?

[00:07:11]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:07:11]  Peter: I'm 50-50 on that.

[00:07:13]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:07:14]  Bruce: So let me ask you this. Let's say chimps win.

[00:07:18]  Unidentified speaker: Does that surprise you?

[00:07:21]  Peter: I guess it would depend how much, if we're talking about what kind of memory, and I mean, if we're remembering where, like, the bananas are in that forest or something like that, I mean, chimps have got to win that. But I mean, I'm sure there's certain kinds of tasks that humans are better at, too, related to memory, I would suspect.

[00:07:44]  Bruce: You're actually given a pretty good answer, because the outcome of the memory tests was that chimps could often beat humans in terms of raw cognitive tasks around memory, but humans are pretty competitive. However, Ayumu the chimp beat all humans across the board in terms of memory tests. So there was, like, at least one chimp that was just really good at memory tests and could beat any human at it. This isn't probably too shocking. You just kind of explained why, right? That we would almost expect chimps to be pretty dang good at memory, right? They got to remember where the banana is in the forest, right? So this isn't too out of whack with what we might have expected. Okay, so good guess. Okay, now here's the next experiment. It's an information processing speed test. And there's numerous ways they tested this, but the one I'm going to discuss is the matching pennies game. So the matching pennies game, I won't give you the exact details of how it works. I'm not even sure they gave it in the book, but the game has an optimal strategy. It has a Nash equilibrium. Are you familiar with the idea of Nash equilibrium, at least from having watched the movie, A Beautiful Mind?

[00:09:00]  Peter: It sounds awfully familiar. Remind me, though, what it is.

[00:09:03]  Bruce: So when you're doing game theory, there's like, you're trying to figure out what the optimal strategy is for a certain game, okay? And typically, the optimal strategy will be some level of randomness, okay? Unless it's like a purely, even if it's like a purely deterministic game, there's often a, the optimal strategy has some level of randomness to it, where you have to, if your opponent knows exactly what move you're going to make, they can always beat you. So you have to randomize your moves to some degree.

[00:09:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:09:36]  Bruce: So how much to randomize your moves is determined by the nature of the rules of the game. So the Nash equilibrium is to find the right amount to randomize your moves, so that you will get the best expected outcome in the game.

[00:09:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:09:55]  Bruce: So mathematically, we can calculate exactly what the Nash equilibrium is for many games. And if you're play exactly that strategy, you will maximize, you're guaranteed to maximize your outcomes.

[00:10:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:10:12]  Bruce: Now this is of course, assuming that your opponent is also trying to play well, right? Actually, that's not true. I take that back. If your opponent isn't trying to play well, you'll dominate them using this strategy. It is true that if your opponent were to always play the exact same move, the Nash equilibrium isn't necessarily the best strategy. It could be that a non-Nash strategy would beat someone who just never deviates their moves. Imagine that you have to pick left or right.

[00:10:47]  Unidentified speaker: You always pick right.

[00:10:48]  Bruce: And so your opponent knows how to exactly beat you every single time, something along those lines, right? So the Nash equilibrium isn't necessarily the highest payout, but it is the highest payout assuming under the assumption that your opponent is going to actually try to competitively play against you.

[00:11:08]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:11:09]  Unidentified speaker: That's interesting.

[00:11:10]  Bruce: And if they're not trying to competitively play against you, you'll still beat them, but it won't necessarily be the highest possible payout.

[00:11:16]  Unidentified speaker: I see.

[00:11:16]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:11:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:11:18]  Bruce: So the experiment is to see which species learns this Nash equilibrium first. So who do you think won in the matching pennies game, figuring out the Nash equilibrium first, chimps or humans?

[00:11:34]  Peter: Well, for that one, it seems to it has a there's some kind of a, what do you call it, like theory of mind involved with that, where you got to try to think about what someone else is thinking.

[00:11:48]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[00:11:48]  Peter: Seems to me humans are better at that. So I'm going to go humans on that one.

[00:11:54]  Unidentified speaker: Wrong on this one.

[00:11:57]  Unidentified speaker: Chimps dominated on this one.

[00:12:01]  Bruce: Here's the thing that's interesting about this. In the matching pennies game in particular, chimps quickly learned the game and reached Nash equilibrium, which is the optimal strategy before humans. And in fact, humans struggled to reach the Nash equilibrium at all. And this was because chimps are better than humans at randomizing their behavior, which is required to reach a Nash equilibrium.

[00:12:29]  Peter: Okay.

[00:12:29]  Bruce: So I was a little shocked on this one. I would have, using my crit-rat, Deutschian knowledge, universal explainers, theory of mind, exactly what you just did, I absolutely would have assumed that humans would dominate this game, and they didn't.

[00:12:43]  Unidentified speaker: The chimps beat the humans at this game.

[00:12:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:12:48]  Bruce: So I'm surprised at that. I'm hoping that the audience will be surprised too, but I guess I'm surprised, but maybe not like overwhelmingly surprised at it, if that makes any sense. So here's the next one. So this is the one that was played with human children against chimps. It's called Artificial Fruit. So this one's interesting. You can see why they picked children for this one. The goal is to see how well human children can learn via observing someone else skilled in relationship to, like, understanding the physics of the situation. So basically, what happens is you've got a model. That would be the person who's running the experiment. That's what they call them, the model. And they use a rod to access a reward in an quote-unquote, artificial fruit box, okay? So now the box has multiple steps to be able to get the fruit out. And the model models the steps, but includes irrelevant steps that actually slow you down, okay? So then, as part of the experiment, you're given two versions of this experiment, one with an opaque box and one with a clear box. So the idea here is that you're trying to get the fruit out of the box and you have to like fish inside or tip the box or whatever. And if you have the clear box, you can see the mechanism inside, you know, the passageway or the connections inside, that allow you to understand what moves you need to do to get the fruit out, okay? So in theory, when you're looking at the clear box, you could figure out which of the models steps that they're demonstrating to you don't matter, okay?

[00:14:38]  Bruce: You can't figure that out with the opaque box though, all right? With the opaque box, you have no real choice except to follow exactly what the model is showing you because there's no way to know or to understand what the connections are inside the box and how the moves affect getting the fruit out. You're trying to get fruit out of a box. You either have an opaque box and the model shows you how to get the fruit out, but he's including, he or she is including steps that aren't relevant.

[00:15:11]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:11]  Bruce: But, okay, so let's say he gives you ten steps to get the fruit out, but you'll need five of them.

[00:15:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:17]  Unidentified speaker: The other five do nothing.

[00:15:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:20]  Bruce: With the opaque box, you have no choice but to follow all ten steps because you have no way of knowing which steps are relevant and which ones aren't.

[00:15:28]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, got that.

[00:15:29]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:30]  Bruce: Then they give you a clear box version of it. Well, now you can see what's going on inside the box.

[00:15:35]  Unidentified speaker: I see.

[00:15:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:15:37]  Bruce: So you can, if you are able to think about what is the meaning of the connections in the box and the mechanisms in the box and how they relate to the moves that the model is showing you, you can work out for yourself inside your head, you can work out which steps are irrelevant and you can drop the steps.

[00:15:57]  Unidentified speaker: Got it.

[00:15:59]  Bruce: So the point of the game is to gauge how well the younger members of each of the species can understand the physics of the situation, they can see via the clear box which moves are unnecessary and drop the necessary moves. So note that this directly tests understanding and being able to have an explanation of how the connections work in relationship with the moves.

[00:16:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:20]  Bruce: Place your bets, which species won?

[00:16:22]  Peter: Well, I think that why questions seem to be something that humans excel at. I mean, it might be our most defining characteristic. So I'm definitely going to go with humans. I'm feeling pretty strong about this one.

[00:16:39]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:16:40]  Bruce: I think most crit rats would agree with you. In fact, this follows directly from Deutsch's discussion about how animal intelligence works, which I've criticized his treatment of Byrne's theories in Beginning of Infinity. But he actually makes the case that animals are incapable of understanding, and they're incapable of having why questions like this, and that therefore they should not be able to win an experiment like this, according to Deutsch's theories. And he is wrong. The chimps absolutely dominate this game. Now, keep in mind this is children, so adult humans would undoubtedly beat the chimps.

[00:17:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:17:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:17:23]  Bruce: But the chimpanzees immediately dropped all relevant actions the moment they saw the clear box and could understand how things connect. And this does fit Byrne's actual theory. If you look back on episodes 37 to 40, where I talk about Richard Byrne's theory and I explain how they differ from Deutsch's treatment of Richard Byrne's theory and how Deutsch had misunderstood certain aspects of Richard Byrne's theory. Chimpanzees are animals with insight, and animals with insight do understand why questions and can work things out in their heads. A dog could not do this game, but a chimp could.

[00:18:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:18:02]  Bruce: And this is one of the things that I've brought up, and I know that this is not well received amongst the crit rat community. But the idea that humans uniquely have explanatory power isn't true. There's actually some animals that have at least a limited form of explanatory power, which now the question that you should be asking is, okay, well then why are we universal and they aren't? Well, we don't know that answer, right? Like if we did, we'd probably be able to solve AGI. What we can do though is we can do a test like this, and we can see that some animals can pass tests like this.

[00:18:36]  Unidentified speaker: And other animals can't, right?

[00:18:40]  Bruce: So the animals that have insight, according to Byrne, are great apes, not monkeys, not dogs, not cats, not any of your pets. Elephants have passed these tests. Parrots have passed these tests. Gray parrots, ravens have passed these tests. They can't test dolphins very well, but they think dolphins would pass these tests. I don't think they have tested octopuses. So I don't know if they would pass or not. Octopuses are famously quite smart.

[00:19:15]  Unidentified speaker: Oh yeah.

[00:19:18]  Bruce: So by comparison, the human children continued to copy the irrelevant actions as much with the clear box, as much as they did with the opaque box. This is, so Byrne's theories, he actually claims that great apes have involved what he calls insight, which he calls a shrewd kind of understanding. So he is talking about understanding things. He has a theory worked out as to what the limit is. So he has a testable theory. Go back and if you're curious about this, go listen to my episodes 37 to 40, particularly episode 40, where I compare Deutsch's theory, Deutsch's interpretation of Byrne's theory with Byrne's interpretation of Byrne's theory in detail, okay? So he actually has worked out what the testable limit of animal intelligence is, what an animal of insights intelligence is. He actually thinks that there was three leaps, kind of regular animal intelligence, which would be classical conditioning slash trial and error learning. Then you've got animals with insight, which is this ability to work things out in your head through trial and error in your head. And then he thinks animals had a limited form of it, and then humans had another deeper form of it, okay? Byrne's theory was built around this idea that the animals don't necessarily understand the individual movements. This experiment maybe challenges Byrne a little on this. And also Byrne's theory had this idea that the individual movements, they learn statistically. This is the part that David Deutsch put into his book, because it kind of matched his own theory of animal intelligence.

[00:21:04]  Bruce: He kind of ignored the parts of Byrne's theory that didn't match his theory, and he put in the parts that it's a little bit of confirmation bias going on, unfortunately. But so Byrne had this idea that you got these complex movements that you have to do with your hands to be able to get the thistles out of the seeds, out of the thistles so you can eat them.

[00:21:23]  Unidentified speaker: This is for the great apes, for the chimps.

[00:21:26]  Bruce: And he had this theory that they learned those not through explanation, but through statistical, machine learning type algorithms, just statistical movements. And therefore, it requires hundreds of times watching the same movements, but same movements before you can learn them. I gave examples in those episodes where Byrne shows that that's not always true. Like Washoe the ape learned to get into a boat that had water in it, and shake the boat to get the water out of the boat. Now, clearly, Washoe hadn't watched hundreds of times humans doing this over the course of years before Washoe was able to do it himself, right? So I think what Byrne really had in mind was at the limit, they may have been able to learn it over a hundred times, but it may have been faster, and we don't know how fast they can learn, whereas Deutsch was trying to position it as, they absolutely require hundreds of times, but I don't think Byrne ever actually makes that claim, right? He just says, they have up to hundreds of times, and so Byrne sees that as maybe, Byrne always takes the stance that if it could be learned without explanation, it is learned without explanation. That's a necessary part of how he tests his theories. He can't see hand movements that the apes do as being based around explanation. Now, Deutsch gave an example of where if they lose their thumb, they continue to do the same movement even though the thumb's gone. He used that try to show that animals have no understanding. But humans make these sorts of mistakes too, right?

[00:23:05]  Unidentified speaker: Like they do.

[00:23:07]  Bruce: And so this wasn't really a convincing counter example that that Deutsch had picked. It's not a counter example at all. He's trying to use a sort of positivistic approach, where if I can show you that any animal at any time didn't understand, I can somehow conclude animals never understand.

[00:23:23]  Unidentified speaker: It just doesn't work that way, right?

[00:23:25]  Bruce: You have to actually invert everything like Byrne does. I won't go too much further into this. Check out episodes 37 to 40 if you're actually curious. And I talked through two books that Byrne wrote, Thinking Ape and Evolving Insight, where he actually goes through his theory in detail, and he goes over the body of experiments and the literature that exists. And there's tons of it, right? Like, it's just, it's overwhelming amounts of evidence that you have to sift through. And he does an excellent job with this.

[00:23:57]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:23:58]  Peter: So are these popular books out of curiosity? No, I've never heard of these in any other context.

[00:24:03]  Unidentified speaker: They're not.

[00:24:04]  Unidentified speaker: You know what?

[00:24:04]  Bruce: The only reason why I picked them up, there's kind of a history here. So Deutsch lists one of Byrne's papers in the back of Beginning of Infinity as required reading because it matches his theory of animal intelligence. So I went and I read the paper, and I didn't really get it. Like there was something off with the paper. It didn't quite match what I was expecting it to say. I was still at this point assuming that Deutsch was correct, that animals had no understanding at all, right? And so I thought what I would do is I would go buy Byrne's books and try to understand Byrne's theories better. At this point, still thinking, Byrne's theories were identical to Deutsch's. When I started to read the first book, which was Evolving Insight, I had this giant epiphany with a few pages in that Byrne was saying something nearly the opposite of what Deutsch was saying. And I was like in shock that Byrne's theories were the opposite of Deutsch's theories when it came to animal intelligence, that Byrne literally believes that there's a group of animals that have evolved insight and that it's a kind of understanding. Then he just throws tons of evidence your way. And you just, and this is one of those things, it's like when you're trying to like be a creationist, like me when I was young, and you're trying to deal with evolution. One count, one example is explainable away. You can just kind of ad hoc explain it away. You can do that with the second example. You can do that with the third example. Somewhere around a hundred or a thousand, you start to go, I feel stupid.

[00:25:33]  Bruce: It's like there's clearly some sort of need for this other explanation that I'm trying to ad hoc explain away, because there is over and over examples of these animals with insight doing things that shouldn't be possible, should just be completely impossible if they've got no understanding. And the way Byrne tests it, the way he nails it down, the way he goes about the experiments, it's pretty amazing. It's really pretty good science, right? Very critical rationalist, even though he's not officially a critical rationalist, but I've always argued that scientists are at their heart critical rationalists, whether they realize it or not. So it was really just interest in Deutsch's books that led me to Byrne's books, and I read them, and then I got another one, The Thinking Ape, and read that one and started to realize, wow, this is really interesting stuff. This is not at all what I expected. So according to Byrne, there's numerous experiments that verify that apes, great apes do understand things. And also note that contrary to both Deutsch and Byrne, that claim animals learn things via statistical induction over hundreds of observations, the chimps actually learn very quickly with only a few observations in this experiment. Even though I was aware from reading Byrne's books that chimps could pass a test like this, I would not have anticipated the chimps having a victory in this experiment. I would have expected them to do it much, much slower than humans, and they didn't.

[00:27:06]  Bruce: So if you're someone that buys Deutsch's arguments about animal intelligence in Beginning of Infinity, then you were going to guess this experiment wrong because you have a mistaken understanding of animal intelligence.

[00:27:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, last one, experiment four.

[00:27:22]  Bruce: These are the social learning experiments. So various experiments that involve trying to figure out a puzzle box, but with social helping allowed and rewards for correct moves, carrots versus stickers, the children get stickers, the chimps get carrots or something along those lines. So place your bets.

[00:27:40]  Unidentified speaker: Who won?

[00:27:41]  Unidentified speaker: Who wins in this experiment?

[00:27:44]  Peter: Oh boy, well, I've gotten everyone wrong so far, I think. But I'm going to go, I'm going to put my money on humans just because, like, it just seems like humans must be better at something.

[00:27:57]  Bruce: So yes, humans did beat out chimps hands down.

[00:28:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:28:02]  Bruce: So humans excel at social learning and use of cooperation and use of cultural learning compared to...

[00:28:11]  Peter: I guess that makes perfect sense.

[00:28:13]  Bruce: So the children enjoyed helping each other learn how to do the puzzle box, whereas chimps seem to have no concept at all of pedagogy. This is something that I mentioned in episodes 37 to 40, by the way. Part of what Byrne points out is that chimps are capable of pedagogy, but they almost never use it. So they have like one or two examples of the wild of chimps using pedagogy. What I mean by pedagogy is there was like, they'll have the baby chimp will, the mother has to like let it learn to crack a nut. So you take a rock and you crack the nut, and it doesn't know how to do it, right? And typically they just let the baby try over and over until it figures it out. They saw once where the mother picked up the rock and very slowly showed the baby chimp, the, I say baby, but it would be an infant, toddler chimp or whatever, how to use the rock to hit it, to crack it open. They said, we caught it once and it was in the wild and we have never seen anything like that since. This is something that great apes just do not do. Clearly, they are capable of it, but it's just like something's missing. They just, it never occurs to them except out of the blue, it might occasionally occur to them. That if you were to just go a little slower, the baby chimp could see what you were doing and could figure it out easier. Whereas humans do that all the time. So this then is Henrich's thesis, that humans are not individually more intelligent than other animals, except in our ability to grow and share culture, and that is the quote unquote secret of our success.

[00:30:04]  Unidentified speaker: Now, this is a stupid thesis to say the least.

[00:30:08]  Bruce: I mean, it truly is.

[00:30:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:10]  Bruce: The whole book is about this, which is why I suspect crit rats aren't going to like the book much, and it's going to rankle them wrong.

[00:30:16]  Peter: So you do not agree with this thesis. You say it's a stupid thesis.

[00:30:19]  Unidentified speaker: It is a stupid thesis.

[00:30:20]  Unidentified speaker: Shots fired.

[00:30:21]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:22]  Unidentified speaker: It's truly stupid.

[00:30:24]  Bruce: Or at least it's stupid by itself.

[00:30:27]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:28]  Bruce: Now, one of the things that you have to get used to in critical rationalism, if you're trying to do the kind of the original Popper version of critical rationalism is that a false theory can be partially true.

[00:30:40]  Unidentified speaker: And in fact, this is kind of normal.

[00:30:42]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:30:43]  Bruce: And I do think this is the right way. Like, it seems to me that the crit rats and the crit rat community that I've interacted with are dismissive of theories that are false. And you don't want to be dismissive of theories because these theories have a tendency to be partially right. And so you end up dismissing, you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[00:31:03]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:04]  Bruce: So surely he is correct that part of the secret of human success is that we are a collective intelligence and other animals aren't. But we are also considerably more individually intelligent than animals.

[00:31:20]  Unidentified speaker: That's the part that I think is stupid that he thinks it's otherwise.

[00:31:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:24]  Bruce: And Henrich's tests don't really in any way suggest otherwise to me.

[00:31:31]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:32]  Bruce: Even if it's caught you off guard that animals can beat humans at some of these tests of intelligence, it did catch me off guard.

[00:31:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:31:41]  Bruce: I don't think they really mean that really means that humans are individually less intelligent than chimps. And I don't think it really suggests that, in my opinion.

[00:31:52]  Peter: In some ways, it seems to go along with what might be a more crit rat way of thinking in that. I think most crit rats would emphasize that our evolution has moved away from biology and more towards ideas and memes.

[00:32:11]  Bruce: And memes, yes.

[00:32:12]  Unidentified speaker: Right?

[00:32:12]  Unidentified speaker: And it does.

[00:32:13]  Peter: So it kind of goes along with that. But then I hear what you're saying is that where more individualistic-minded people would object is he sort of disparaging individuals too much?

[00:32:28]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:32:28]  Unidentified speaker: Is that what I'm hearing?

[00:32:29]  Bruce: So now he's going to give evidence for his thesis, and we're going to interpret it differently than him.

[00:32:36]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:32:36]  Bruce: So I'm going to give it kind of a critical-rationalist gloss that I think is better than his interpretation. And he's always going to kind of look at it as that individually we're not that smart.

[00:32:48]  Unidentified speaker: And I don't think that's true, right?

[00:32:51]  Bruce: I think even individually we're pretty smart compared to an animal. Compared to an animal. Let's make sure we're keeping that in our mind that we're talking about in comparison to something. Like, I'm sure that individually we do many stupid things. I'm not trying to make some claim of, you know, huge wisdom for every individual human, right?

[00:33:13]  Unidentified speaker: That's not what we're talking about here.

[00:33:15]  Bruce: So, individually, we are just smarter than animals. And it's not merely that we somehow have memes. The reason we have memes is because we're smarter than animals. And it seems like this is the big thing that Henrich just misses.

[00:33:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay?

[00:33:34]  Bruce: Is that there's an actual tie between individual intelligence, the fact that we are individually universal explainers, and the fact that we have culture and memes. So, he tries to make the memes have all the intelligence. And I really believe that's just wrong. But I do think if we were on our own in the wild, we wouldn't survive very easily, right? And we're about to actually see experiments and situations where he proves this, okay?

[00:34:06]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I believe that.

[00:34:07]  Bruce: And that's certainly true, okay? So, we're not so smart individually, that we're just going to go thrive in any environment we want, right? Like, we need our human culture to be able to do that, okay?

[00:34:20]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:34:21]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, [unclear: “Why is having a whole collective?”]

[00:34:22]  Peter: It just makes a lot of intuitive sense. I mean, if you think about how good we are at surviving in every single climate, using our collective knowledge and tools and all that, you know, far superior to any other animal, right? But if you throw me into the jungle or something like that, I'm probably not going to live that long.

[00:34:46]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:34:46]  Unidentified speaker: You are.

[00:34:47]  Unidentified speaker: You're dead, right?

[00:34:48]  Bruce: That is the way it is. You know, it's okay. So, I say that you're dead, but actually, there are examples of humans that have survived situations like that. There are some humans that are kind of more creative.

[00:35:03]  Unidentified speaker: They go try things.

[00:35:05]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:35:06]  Bruce: They'll take more desperate moves where a lot of humans will just give up. And the ones that take desperate moves will survive longer. And, but that's totally not part of this book. That's just something I've read somewhere else.

[00:35:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:35:18]  Bruce: So, okay. So, I'm not interested in Henrich's theories the way he's putting it, but I am very interested in the evidence he comes up with and how it both at times corroborates and challenges Deutsch's theory of static societies. Specifically, Henrich gives us a peek into why it is so dang hard to get away from human reliance on long time cultural knowledge. And he gives several very telling examples of this. So, let me go over some of these examples. I actually thought, first of all, these are all very cool and they really are kind of telling, okay? So, these are examples of expeditions of highly intelligent people from advanced societies. So, one would be the Franklin Expedition. So, 1845, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror are searching for the Northwest Passage. And so, now, this is 1845. So, this is long after the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Enlightenment was 1685, and Scientific Revolution is the 1500s. So, this is a group of people from Europe who are living in a post-Enlightenment society and a post-science society. And they are an exceptionally highly intelligent group of people, okay? Which, those are the only ones that would go on an expedition like this in the first place. And they're outfitted with field-tested, reinforced ice-breaking ships with state-of-the-art steam engines, retractable screw propellers, detachable rudders. They had cork insulation, coal-fired internal heating, desalinators, five years of provisions, including the new canned food technology, and a 1200-volume library, all prepared for the arctic challenge in long winters.

[00:37:14]  Bruce: And they became locked in the ice. Franklin died. They all turned to cannibalism, and eventually the entire expedition died. Interestingly, the local Inuit thrive in this same area without any of the advanced scientific knowledge. And the Europeans ironically died in a land that the Inuit call lots of fat, referring to the abundance of seal fat that exists in this realm, okay? So despite being 105 big brained, highly motivated men with three years of arctic experience and 19 months stuck on the ice with a group size smaller than a large Inuit encampment, they vanished, defeated by the environment that sustained the Inuit, okay? So, there is something interesting about this, right? Like, we know humans can thrive in this environment. There's no doubt that with the right knowledge, you can thrive in this environment. And yet somehow these enlightened, post enlightenment, scientifically minded thinkers with lots of knowledge and preparation and technology just got wiped out there, okay? They had plenty of time to try things out and to use culture of criticism, things like that. They knew about culture of criticism. They believed in the culture of criticism.

[00:38:41]  Unidentified speaker: It didn't help.

[00:38:42]  Peter: Well, if only they'd had ChatGPT.

[00:38:44]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, if only they had ChatGPT.

[00:38:48]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:38:49]  Bruce: Burke and Willis expedition, 1860. So again, post enlightenment and post scientific revolution. They got stranded with low supplies. But in this case, they made contact with the local aboriginal group who was thriving in the area where they were starving to death. So they literally watched the locals and their techniques for fishing, trapping and making nardoo cakes. And they were even given some of the nardoo cakes by the locals. But having offended the locals, they couldn't ask them to teach them. So they had to mostly just observe what they were doing from a distance. And they couldn't figure out how to do it right. So they couldn't figure out how to actually successfully fish or trap. And they did see how they were making the nardoo cakes, and they started to make their own nardoo cakes. But they didn't understand the precise food prep process that the local Aboriginals used. So unfortunately, without this precise process, the cakes were toxic and this killed off the expedition. So again, we have culture of criticism, you know, is now zero, and non-cultural criticism is now two. So there is something interesting going on here. It's like there's something missing here, okay? So again, this is post-enlightenment. So now, Henrich's own answer to The Secret of Human Success, he roots it in an evolutionary psychology answer. Now, I know crit-rats bristle at evolutionary psychology. Unfairly so, unfortunately. So I've already made this argument on this podcast, but evolutionary psychology, for all its problems, which are many, it isn't going anywhere.

[00:40:35]  Bruce: So let me ask you a very honest question. Are you influenced by pain? If only via, say, threat of pain from someone else to coerce you. Are you, for that matter, influenced by sex and romance? Does it impact your interests and even your actions? If you answered yes to either of those, and if you're honest, you did, you have now agreed to the idea that evolution can and did evolve you psychologically. So evolutionary psychology is, at least in these two examples, it's correct.

[00:41:07]  Unidentified speaker: It's correct at a high level.

[00:41:09]  Bruce: Now this doesn't mean that individual evolutionary psychology claims might not be garbage, and a great many of them are garbage, okay? So see episodes 47 and 48 for a discussion on this in detail about how our genes influence and coerce us. Something that we have talked about previously on this show. Now, I've never been able to make sense of the Deutschian crit-rat allergy to genetic influence and its companion evolutionary psychology. So for example, does body size, on average, impact the psychology of a person across the population? It's really hard to imagine anyone arguing that it wouldn't. Obviously, someone who's smaller is going to experience the world somewhat differently than someone who's larger, okay, more muscular. So even crit-Rats would not argue with that point, okay? So are men, on average, bigger than women? Again, it's hard to imagine anyone arguing this. Does the existence or non-existence of a Y chromosome impact gender and thus size and thus over a population mental states? Even though this all follows completely from completely unchallenged theories, suddenly you get a reaction.

[00:42:29]  Unidentified speaker: No, it doesn't.

[00:42:30]  Bruce: It's like, of course, this is stupid, okay? Yes, of course, genetics can influence us. And why exactly is it better if we were influenced by memes instead of genes?

[00:42:43]  Unidentified speaker: Like, I don't get it, right?

[00:42:45]  Bruce: Doesn't this still pose exactly the same issue? Maybe worse version of it? If, as if genes, then if, just to admit that genes influence us? So let me quote Deutsch again on static societies. The strivings of individuals to better themselves were, from the outset, perverted by a superhumanly evil mechanism that turned their efforts to exactly the opposite end, to thwart all attempts at improvement, to keep sentient beings locked in a crude, suffering state of eternity. I mean, wowza, right?

[00:43:23]  Bruce: We're giving to memes a level of influence that's way more than anyone's claiming for genes, right? And so I don't understand why it's so bad if we just admit that genes can influence us. So Deutsch is forced into this position of a superhumanly evil meme that overcame the most powerful force in the universe, human creativity, for likely a million years because he's reluctant to, in part, because he's reluctant to admit to the existence of genetic influence and evolutionary psychology. But how is a superhumanly evil, irrational meme better?

[00:43:57]  Unidentified speaker: Like, I don't get it.

[00:43:58]  Bruce: Like to say, well, humans were strongly influenced by this meme instead of saying genes played some role too. Like, how does that make the situation better?

[00:44:07]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't seem like it does.

[00:44:09]  Bruce: Wouldn't it be better to find out that our genes influenced us to be less rational in a specific way that we can, once we recognize it, overcome it? Then there's the fact that evolutionary psychology is actually gene independent. This is something that I feel like crit rats have just missed. If we were to find that genetic influence was zero on us, then we would need to credit 100% of our one million years of irrationality to memes instead, which is what Deutsch does, right? Which is also a case of something evolving our psychology.

[00:44:42]  Unidentified speaker: It's just a meme instead of a gene.

[00:44:46]  Unidentified speaker: And it's incredibly effective at it, apparently.

[00:44:48]  Bruce: Could hold us in check for a million years. So, evoPsych would still be correct. It would just be about memes instead of genes. And so, I'm not sure I see the difference, right? This is why I have always advocated for, look, let's just be open to both, right? Like, we don't know how much genes influence us. We know what they do in some cases.

[00:45:09]  Unidentified speaker: We know memes influence us in some cases.

[00:45:12]  Bruce: Let's just kind of be open about this. Let's not have an instant reaction against it just because it's called evo psych or something along those lines. So, Henrich's specific argument is frankly one that I buy, but only to a degree. I think there is an overwhelming experimental evidence that humans are mentally adapted for acquisition of cultural knowledge.

[00:45:31]  Unidentified speaker: That's what the experiment against the chimps was trying to show.

[00:45:35]  Bruce: For example, we have heuristics on who to learn from, by looking at cues of prestige or competence.

[00:45:46]  Unidentified speaker: So, even infants, this is true of.

[00:45:48]  Bruce: Infants show this ability. So, it can't be solely learned culturally. For example, if a model in an experiment acts confused and does something dumb, like maybe say putting shoes on their hands, infants will learn not to mimic that model's behavior, even if later the model starts to model correct behavior. So, this is not at odds with Deutsch's overall static society theory. In fact, I would argue it supports it. It helps explain why it is psychologically so difficult for us to break with the knowledge and tradition of our tribes. If genetic influence offends you too much, insert memetic influence in its place, and not a thing changes and we can move on. So, I'm going to be open to the idea of genetic influence, and I'm going to include that as part of the discussion. But if you disagree with that, nothing changes. It won't make any difference at all. You'll just be thinking in terms of memetic influence instead. So, we are adapted for cultural obedience. This is kind of the claim that he is making, through social pressure, so to speak. Now, again, Deutsch admits this, right? And he even gives examples of how we won't go to the store in our pajamas because of how it would impact our social status. So this would help explain why it is so hard for us to break out of the control of a static meme. Because Deutsch rejects EvoPsych up front, he has to put all the causal power into the evil [irrational?] meme instead, and it has to be this super finely tuned meme that can overcome creativity for 200,000 years.

[00:47:29]  Bruce: Now, perhaps the EvoPsych idea that we were adapted in such a way that we got stuck might [due to?] maybe [in part?] genes—you feel bad when your peers say bad things about you, say— some of the pressure on the idea maybe disappears. We don't have to put all the pressure on a finely tuned meme, although that is still part of the equation. But maybe we can accept that there's some influence, that we're adapted for social pressure, and to be a little irrational to social pressure. In other words, there was a finely tuned meme and we were finely tuned for such memes. However, by itself, I admit this isn't really a sufficient explanation. For example, even if we are adapted for obedience to culture via memes or genes, whichever, doesn't really matter, is that really a full explanation for why we got trapped by static memes for 200,000 to maybe a million years? Were there not at least one or two exceptions, if only due to mutation, just chance? Why didn't these mutations thrive and take over? So we still need an explanation for why that would be, regardless of whether we want to play the gene card or the meme card. Or, as I'm suggesting, play both. So Henrich hints at a possible answer, but in my opinion, he seems to miss the significance of it, of what to me might be a better answer. Namely, that human culture is... This is the part that he does say, that human culture is quite a bit smarter than even the collective intelligence of all the humans in the tribe. Now, again, this is not at odds with the Deutsch view.

[00:49:12]  Bruce: Deutsch very specifically called this fact out and used it to help explain why static societies tended to get stuck. So recall that he used the example of the Black Plague and how most of the new variant ideas that popped up during the Black Plague were actually worse than just sticking with tradition. Okay, that's a very common thing, and Deutsch is not denying that, okay? So Henrich gives far richer examples of what we might call the local maxima problem that our human ancestors faced. So to understand this, let's imagine what is called a fitness landscape. Now, I learned about the idea of a fitness landscape studying machine learning in school, but it actually originates from biology in 1932, dates back to 1932. The idea is that you imagine a mountainous region, and you want to live at the peaks of the mountainous region. So the higher the peak, the better your knowledge and thus better your lifestyle. So of course, the landscape is constantly changing, due both to changes in the physical environment, maybe a meteor strikes the earth or whatever, and also due to a constant stream of creative novelty that comes from evolution itself. And for humans, creative novelty did exist prior to the Enlightenment. And Deutsch admits this. It's just a very slow stream of change compared to what happened later post-Enlightenment. Okay, so the humans are also having to adapt to memes as part of their environment.

[00:50:49]  Bruce: So, Deutsch's view of the Enlightenment comes pre-packed with an implicit assumption that it's just not that hard to go up from where you are currently at in the fitness landscape, if you just criticize your knowledge and thus improve it. And I can see how that point of view certainly makes a certain intuitive sense, okay, that at any given moment, you've got a society and they just say, you know what, we could probably try improving our axes that we make. And you would expect that suddenly you would get this giant growth of knowledge and it would just explode over time. This is the argument that Deutsch used in our episode on static societies. So he's imagining that all local peaks require only a small drop before you can start to climb again. However, what if, just for the sake of argument, this mountainous region that we live in, it's got these all sorts of really steep drop-offs, cliffs, and at the bottom of each cliff is an acid lake. So anytime you are below the water line that's near you, you all immediately die. So this would make it far harder to get off your peak without going extinct, which in the language of a fitness landscape is what we call local maxima. So the local maxima are places where you can actually survive. And if you start to try different things, you fall off a cliff, fall into the acid lake, and you die.

[00:52:21]  Unidentified speaker: And that's it.

[00:52:22]  Bruce: And so it makes it a lot harder to start to experiment and to start to criticize and try to change your culture. So which of these pictures is closer to reality? So consider the specific real life examples from Henrich we just talked about with the failed expeditions. They simply could not figure out the necessary survival skills in time before they all died. This was true even when they came from a post-scientific, post-enlightenment culture with a tradition of criticism. It even happened when there were neighbors nearby that could have, if they had but asked and played nice, show them how to survive. This is why their failures seem so strange to us. So let's actually look at some examples from these cultures. And this is where I think Henrich's book particularly shines, is that he's pulling out, he's not just being an armchair philosopher where we're just going with our intuitions, he's trying to actually pull out real life examples and make you think about them. So the Aboriginal Americans commonly added burnt seashells or wood ash to their cornmeal. Now this practice is a cultural adaption that helps prevent pellagra, a disease caused by niacin deficiency. So the niacin in corn, did I pronounce that right? Niacin, in corn is bound and unavailable, but the alkaline ash or the seashells release the niacin so that you don't end up with a niacin deficiency, okay. An expedition that died did not figure out, the expedition that died did not figure out the right causal model for why this worked.

[00:54:03]  Bruce: In fact, the idea of adding non-foods like ash or seashells to food was very counter-intuitive to them. So [post-Enlightenment?] people felt they could rule out that as the correct answer using criticism. So they thought, well, it can't be that you need the seashells and the wood ash to be able to make this food healthy, because that's not even food. And so based on their explanations they had available at the time and what they thought were their best criticisms, they ended up eliminating the very thing they needed to survive.

[00:54:39]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:54:40]  Bruce: So the subtle chemical process was not obvious. And the necessary knowledge to make it obvious, the chemical knowledge, was centuries away still, even for this post-Enlightenment society.

[00:54:58]  Bruce: So, here we have a case where criticism and attempts to explain will actually undermine you and even kill you. So the traditions of their food prep effectively contained very advanced scientific knowledge centuries ahead of its time, with no one in the tribe, nor in the tribe collectively, nor amongst the post-Enlightenment society that was interacting with them.

[00:55:21]  Unidentified speaker: None of them knew about it.

[00:55:23]  Bruce: So this is a straightforward example of the culture being smarter than the people in the culture. In fact, the culture was smarter than all the humans on the earth combined.

[00:55:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:55:34]  Bruce: So, Henrich gives many other examples of this problem. So here's another one. A manioc processing. So bitter manioc is a staple requiring a labor-intensive multi-step process to remove cyanide in the manioc. The process is causally opaque. So individuals cannot easily infer the function or importance of each step in the food prep process. So sticking with the long and arduous process is non-intuitive. So individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. As with the nardoo cakes, skipping seemingly unnecessary steps can have severe, non-obvious health consequences. So historical examples show that people new to manioc, even if they come from a post-enlightenment culture with a scientific method, struggle to figure out the detoxification process on their own. So hopefully these examples will help you understand what a serious problem it was to get unstuck from a local maxima on the fitness landscape. If you simply said, You know, this tradition doesn't seem necessary to me. I'm going to improve it.

[00:56:48]  Unidentified speaker: You died.

[00:56:49]  Bruce: Because of this, and due to the evolutionary psychological adaptions humans have to be obedient to tribal identity, it shouldn't be too surprising that cultural knowledge was generally received without an explanation offered. And indeed, there was no way to offer an explanation, because the true explanation required advanced science that was centuries away. So they didn't know why this food prep process was necessary. There was no explanation available on the earth, and there wasn't going to be one for centuries. And the moment you started to question this tradition, you died. So here's another one, the Fijian fish taboos. So women in Fiji observe cultural taboos against eating certain fish, specifically during pregnancy and lactation. Now, why is this non-obvious? The taboos are a cultural adaption that protects against marine toxins present in specific fish during the vulnerable periods of pregnancy and lactation.

[00:57:54]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:57:55]  Bruce: While the taboos are effective at reducing fish poisoning, the practitioners often do not understand the biological-chemical reasons. When asked by scientists in the modern era why they do it, most of the women have never even thought to ask why. And those that did offer an explanation usually first seemed a bit confused by the question and then basically made up a post-hoc explanation. That was of course entirely wrong as to why these fish taboos were necessary. Of course, this isn't surprising. Understanding the why of the advanced cultural knowledge requires knowledge centuries away. So you either accepted the cultural knowledge on faith or you died. By the way, I'm not throwing the concept of faith here. He has a whole chapter on faith because of this argument that he's making.

[00:58:49]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:58:50]  Bruce: So those that did not accept tradition weren't necessarily the pariahs that Deutsch tries to imagine them as, being trained carefully to never doubt the knowledge of their tribe or else they're put to the thumbscrews. They may have actually been more tolerant of people who tried things and tried novelty, but those people may have died, okay? And this may have led to those who were less obedient to tradition to die out and you only ever have people who survive that were more obedient to tradition, therefore creating this genetic memetic environment that the two were playing off of together, okay? So this undoubtedly also led to a stronger vertical transmission of memes. So a family that didn't take tradition seriously died and couldn't pass their memes on, okay? So but do these tribes have a dread of novelty like Deutsch's theory predicts? So from Possible Minds, we covered this in the Static Society episode, he says, by now it is hard for us to even to conceive of the kind of relentless, finely tuned oppression required to reliably extinguish in everyone the aspiration to progress and replace it with dread and revulsion at any novel behavior. In such a culture, there can have been no morality other than conformity and obedience, no other identity than one status in a hierarchy, no mechanisms of cooperation other than punishment and reward. So everyone had the same aspiration in life to avoid the punishments and get the rewards. So let's consider some examples compared to Deutsch's theory here. So Henrich gives a really interesting example of the Ariki village in New Guinea.

[01:00:42]  Bruce: And they were a low prestige village due to weak pig production. So the senior men of the Ariki held meetings to figure out how to improve pig production. So note how this is a limited culture of criticism in a pre-scientific culture. You are actually going to find that this isn't that uncommon, okay? Not certainly the kind of culture of criticism that we would think of modernly today, but kind of a limited form of it. So there was no dread of challenging tradition here, if the traditions were failing. What they decided was to mimic the institutions, practices, rituals and beliefs of the Fore people, of people that lived near them. Notice how they aren't showing any of Deutsch's predicted dread of novelty of other cultures. They were perfectly willing to adopt other people's beliefs, if those other people's beliefs were shown to work. Notice how this fits perfectly with Henrich's claim, claimed evo-psych adaption, a willingness to mimic the competence of those with higher prestige, even if outside one's own culture. As it turned out, the Fore's beliefs, institutions, and practices actually did work. The Iriki pig production went up when they adopted the Fore culture. So let me give you what they copied. See if you, as a scientifically literate person that comes from a culture of criticism, tell me which parts of these beliefs and institutions are important and which can be done away with as just mere superstition.

[01:02:22]  Unidentified speaker: Here's the list.

[01:02:24]  Bruce: Sing, dance and play the flutes for your pigs. Feed the pigs first from the oven at feasts before people are fed. Pigs should not be killed for breaking into another's garden. The pig's owner must assist the owner of the garden in repairing the fence. Disputes will be resolved following the dispute resolution procedure used among the Fore. Sending pigs to other villages is taboo, except for the official festival feast. Women should take better care of the pigs and feed them more food. To find more time for this, women should spend less time gossiping. Men should plant more sweet potatoes for the women to feed to the pigs, and should not depart for wage labor in distant towns until the pigs have grown to a certain size. So which of those would you say are the ones that actually made a difference, and which ones are completely unnecessary?

[01:03:18]  Unidentified speaker: Like, do you know?

[01:03:20]  Unidentified speaker: I might have a couple guesses here.

[01:03:24]  Bruce: I guess, honestly, if I were to guess, I would have guessed all of them were superstitions, right? And I would have criticized all of them as being unnecessary.

[01:03:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:03:32]  Bruce: So I sort of just don't know. Like, I have no idea which of these actually caused the pigs to grow bigger. So consider what would have happened if the Ariki had decided to, not to decide to simply copy the Fore, lock, stock and barrel. What if they had decided they were going to carefully criticize each idea and only use the ones that survived criticism? So Henrich points out the fallacy of this idea.

[01:03:57]  Unidentified speaker: This is a quote from Henrich.

[01:03:59]  Bruce: He says, the village leadership chose to rely on copying institutions from other groups and not on designing their own institutions from scratch. This is smart since we humans are horrible at designing institutions from scratch. Notice also how this gets around the local maxima or die problem. They basically only adopt novel ideas if they're proven already, and then only adopt those traditions wholesale, not incrementally. Consider how this allows you to effectively teleport to a higher peak in the fitness landscape without having to explore the acid lake or the cliffs first.

[01:04:37]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:04:40]  Bruce: But was this example an isolated case, or maybe are we just cherry picking? So Henrich says this is not an isolated case. In fact, there's quite a bit of science on this. Apparently, it's pretty normal for pre-enlightenment cultures like this to adopt the institutions and rituals of another culture if the other culture is more successful than them. We can actually trace the knowledge moving from culture to culture quickly once the improvement is discovered. And this is part of what science has done, is they've actually traced out each time a new discovery happens, it very quickly moves between populaces.

[01:05:19]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:05:20]  Bruce: Henrich gives numerous similar examples of how quickly improved ideas from other cultures did in fact spread the moment they were seen as successful. Again, this is nothing like Deutsch's dread of novelty, that his theory assumes. Moreover the Ikari, I keep saying Ariki, but Ikari example shows how this supposedly static society actually had existing institutions by which to adopt change quickly.

[01:05:48]  Unidentified speaker: Here's a quote from Henrich on this.

[01:05:51]  Bruce: This transmission between groups occurred rapidly because the Ikari already had a political institution in the village, which involved a council of the senior members of each clan, who were empowered by tradition, social norms, to make community-level decisions. Okay, so note again the total lack of dread of novelty. Lacking such decision-making institution, Fore practices would have had to spread amongst households, and thus have been much slower in spreading. So ironically, it was the very fact that they had a hierarchy of leaders and an obedient populace, an obedient tradition, that allowed them to make fast changes. If they were all individually needing to decide what to do, they would have all been doomed, right? Only a few members of the society would have survived. So again, it appears, at least for this case, Henrich is right that the reason cultural knowledge persisted so long statically was because it actually was smarter than any one individual. And a culture of criticism was not a quick fix to the problem and would likely kill you. So note, I plan to offer some counter examples to this in a future podcast. But for now, we're going to explore Henrich's arguments, and so I won't challenge it too much.

[01:07:12]  Peter: So big, can I summarize what I get big picture from what you're saying?

[01:07:16]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:07:17]  Peter: So far. So humans have a built-in biological bias to want to imitate highly successful people who are around us.

[01:07:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:07:31]  Peter: Even if we don't really understand why or why they're doing what they're doing or anything, we want to imitate the people we consider cool.

[01:07:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:07:41]  Unidentified speaker: We want to be like them.

[01:07:43]  Peter: And that accounts for so much of our success as a species, is that we want to, you know, we look around at the tribe and whoever got the women and the prestige, we want to be like them.

[01:08:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:08:08]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:08:09]  Peter: And that's kind of how we, I mean, it's like a good thing and a bad thing. Because it kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years, but then it didn't, it didn't lead into a kind of knowledge explosion and culture of criticism that occurred sometime around Athens or the Enlightenment or whatever.

[01:08:36]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:08:37]  Bruce: To clarify, that's Henrich's argument.

[01:08:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:08:41]  Bruce: Don't assume I wholly agree with Henrich, but that is exactly what he is arguing.

[01:08:46]  Peter: Well, it's a little bit of a pessimistic view on humans, but I mean, doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's, I can see how that I'm starting, it's starting to make sense to me why that gels in some ways with Deutsch's ideas and some ways not.

[01:09:00]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:09:01]  Peter: But then how does, have I gotten, have you gotten to like, why, how does he explain the Enlightenment then?

[01:09:11]  Unidentified speaker: So he doesn't.

[01:09:12]  Bruce: And that's part of why I really got some struggles with his book, right? He tries to explain everything in terms of humans are individually stupid and but our culture is really smart.

[01:09:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:09:24]  Peter: But we do really care what is true and what's not true as well.

[01:09:29]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, we genuinely want to be right as flawed as we are, right?

[01:09:39]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:09:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:09:41]  Unidentified speaker: And you know what?

[01:09:41]  Bruce: That must have come from somewhere, right? Deutsch, I called that out in when we did the Static Society episode. Deutsch talks about how we have this natural tendency to want to find the truth and to want to learn knowledge and be creative.

[01:09:55]  Unidentified speaker: Well, why do we have a natural tendency?

[01:09:58]  Bruce: It can't be. I mean, like there must have been some reason why we developed that kind of impulse, right?

[01:10:06]  Peter: Well, maybe we're just copying high status people, I guess.

[01:10:10]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[01:10:12]  Bruce: So I think the other thing that we have to mention here is you mentioned one aspect, which is we copy high status people, but the other one is kind of the tendency to want to conform.

[01:10:23]  Unidentified speaker: Conform.

[01:10:24]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:10:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:10:26]  Bruce: So I think that that's the other aspect that he kind of projects, right? That humans, you know, it's one of those things where we know it's true, right? Like humans do, we are social creatures and we do want to try to conform.

[01:10:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:10:44]  Peter: But it still seems like a glass half empty view of humans. I mean, there's so many ways where we do the opposite, too.

[01:10:51]  Unidentified speaker: We want to rebel—

[01:10:52]  Bruce: That's exactly what I was going to say.

[01:10:53]  Peter: Against our society, we want to reject high status people and we think we're right and they're wrong.

[01:11:01]  Bruce: That is exactly my thinking. So I do, the thing that I would come away with from Henrich's stuff here is we're not assuming he's correct, right? But I can really appreciate the empirical evidence that he levels. And I admit that it forces me to think about all this in a more nuanced way. And I think that's what I really got out of the book. Let's talk about something though. Okay, so does this really explain why we got stuck inside of static societies? I still don't think, like it kind of helps explain it, but it can't be an explanation on its own. So let me point out a problem here. Why did the Ikari adopt the Fore’s practice and then attempt to, why didn't they then attempt to improve them incrementally by experiment? Now, it seems, at least for us moderns, like a fairly obvious way to start fast, rapid progress. Now, one obvious answer to this question is that we are talking about a pre-scientific culture. So even just the idea of improving by experiment hasn't yet even occurred in this culture, right? Now, this is a little hard for us to imagine. It may just seem so obvious that we would think every human being would just think of this. But science is actually itself an invention. So it isn't as straightforwardly obvious as maybe we would think. So another problem is that there is something big at risk. Suppose you are the family that decides to not play the flute for your pigs. As part of an experiment, some of you are going to play the flute and some of you aren't, and then you're going to see which of the families grows the biggest pigs.

[01:12:45]  Bruce: It happens to be that your pigs are the ones that don't grow.

[01:12:47]  Unidentified speaker: Then what?

[01:12:49]  Bruce: This help explains why the pre-scientific cultures really struggled to adopt incremental improvements in knowledge. They gladly adopted full cultural shifts that were known to be improvements, but they knew individual incremental improvements were dangerous. That is to say, they seems to have had not so much a dread of novelty, as Deutsch's theory predicts, but instead a dread of experimentation, or maybe we could put that as unproven culture. They wanted to see success first. This is one of the reasons why rapid growth isn't present in these cultures. It's much easier to make rapid progress when you do so incrementally instead of having to adopt a full culture. But incrementalism wasn't available to them because they did not understand why their traditions worked in the first place. But I can offer a stronger example here. Okay, so consider the Manioc food prep example where they were trying to go through food prep to remove cyanide. Now of course they don't know what cyanide is because that's centuries away for them still. Suppose you decide to work out the causal links via scientific experimentation. For the moment, we'll ignore the ethical problems of experimenting on humans. The simple fact is is that experimentation would have failed you. Simply doing the common sense thing, say boiling the Manioc, what that actually does in real life is it removes the bitter taste and it removes the acute symptoms. And thus it seems like it's a successful experiment.

[01:14:29]  Bruce: But boiling is insufficient to prevent chronic issues like goiter and neurological problems that appear much later, years later.

[01:14:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:14:39]  Bruce: So even a seemingly successful experiment would have ultimately been severely misleading. So an interesting side note, note that pre-enlightenment cultural knowledge is non-explanatory. This is something that Deutsch does bring up, right? It's explanatory knowledge that that you can improve rapidly via incremental improvements. You can't improve rapidly on non-explanatory knowledge. So this is a bit shocking that humans were disinterested in explanatory knowledge. As Deutsch correctly points out, you need explanatory knowledge to transmit complex memes, i.e. you can't merely copy a complex set of traditions probabilistically like apes can do. You have to have some sort of idea of what you are being asked to copy, and that requires explanatory knowledge, or in other words, full creativity. But the human knowledge in the memes that we evolved creativity to copy were opaque to the explanation, and so were themselves non-explanatory knowledge.

[01:15:46]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if...

[01:15:47]  Bruce: and this is something that Deutsch exactly says. There's no disagreement with Deutsch on this. The idea here is that to be able to copy the memes required explanations about what the intent of the memes were. But the memes themselves were non-explanatory knowledge.

[01:16:05]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if people can quite get the difference here.

[01:16:09]  Bruce: But this is a really important point, right? We evolved creativity to copy memes, cultural traditions that contain really important knowledge, but we also evolved a tendency to not want to question that cultural, not even be interested in questioning why that cultural knowledge worked. Because there was no explanation that was going to be had, like you weren't going to work it out in a timely manner before you died.

[01:16:38]  Unidentified speaker: It just wasn't happening.

[01:16:39]  Bruce: It was going to take a long time. So it makes sense that we kind of adapted, sorry, we evolved both. We evolved both the ability to have explanatory knowledge, but only really used it to copy memes. And the knowledge itself, the memes themselves, were non-explanatory knowledge.

[01:17:00]  Unidentified speaker: They're just traditions, okay?

[01:17:03]  Bruce: So this may seem ironic, and Deutsch surely makes a big deal out of how we evolve creativity initially only to transmit these memes, and to, as he put it, suppress creativity. But Henrich is making an adjustment to this idea. He's suggesting that there was a really good reason why we had to at first evolve creativity to copy non-explanatory knowledge, due to the causal opaqueness of the knowledge. While I'm not sure that this is a nice explanation, it does remove a lot of the pessimistic weight of Deutsch's explanation for me. Consider this quote from Possible Minds. For most of our species' history, our ancestors were barely people.

[01:17:46]  Unidentified speaker: That's Deutsch.

[01:17:49]  Bruce: These were not barely people ancestors as Deutsch had it, but our human ancestors were very human, doing their best with a bad situation and making what really was a series of fairly wise choices given the knowledge currently available to them. So their dread of experimentation seems far less evil and irrational when put in this way.

[01:18:14]  Peter: Well, it seems like Henrich's ideas fits in quite nicely with Chesterton's fence too. I mean, the premise is that there's a lot of wisdom in the traditions of our ancestors and should be respected in some ways too.

[01:18:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:18:31]  Bruce: And the idea of incrementalism, right? That there's really no way to know what the ultimate utopian communistic or an [anarcho-capitalistic?] society is going to look like. That just isn't something that any theory can predict. Instead, you should work on local problems and incrementally improve society. A little piece at a time. So this brings us back to the faith-based nature of reality that I've talked about before. In a pre-scientific culture, you lived or died based on your faith in your culture's knowledge. Since the culture's adaptive practices are not causally transparent or intuitively understandable, you really had to accept them on faith without explanation. The true explanation was going to require centuries of scientific progress before the necessary stepping stones were even available to where you could do the sorts of experiments that you needed to, to be able to incrementally improve on this knowledge. Questioning the knowledge would literally kill you. And I think one of the things that I took away from this was that probably it wasn't so weird in these cultures to have people decide to do things at odds with the culture. It's just that that group of people probably often died, right? And so the culture had a tendency to solidify around the groups and traditions that allowed survival. And maybe you didn't hate the person who was weird, right?

[01:20:02]  Unidentified speaker: And was trying something different.

[01:20:04]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe they just died, okay?

[01:20:07]  Bruce: And then you didn't have to worry about them. And then that kind of reinforced this idea, oh, we shouldn't go against their traditions.

[01:20:13]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:20:15]  Bruce: So let's consider the complex process of Manioc again. I've mentioned that a simpler method like boiling removed the bitter taste and prevented acute symptoms, but instead resulted in long-term health issues. So sticking with the full and arduous and non-intuitive food prep process, which can take up to a quarter of a woman's day, by the way. So you've got incentive to try to get away from these traditions. It's difficult to get away from them because the benefits of avoiding chronic issues years down the line are hard to perceive or even to link directly to the practices, okay? So if you were by experiment, if you discovered you could remove the acute immediate symptoms with merely boiling, there is no way to realize that the reason you got sick and died years later was due to this new experimental practice. It would be easy to simply assume you got sick for some other reason. So a tribe that built a tradition of faith in their traditions with some evolutionary help weeding out those who didn't accept it is really the only way forward from this stuck-at-a-local maxima problem that they were facing at the time.

[01:21:25]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:21:27]  Bruce: So note how this is true for also for the female food taboos of the Fijian women. The women in Fiji observed cultural taboos against eating certain fish species during only pregnancy and lactation. It would be very hard to experiment to figure this out. And the connection was probabilistic at best. And it is food that they normally do eat that isn't against the taboo normally. So there's a certain amount of just faith and tradition required here. There's just no way to easily come up with an experiment that's going to determine whether this taboo is what's making the difference or not. So it makes sense that they would... The only way the tradition could ever get off the ground and have the benefit that it needs to have was if the populace accepted it on faith. So again, I want to emphasize this is not strictly at odds with Deutsch's theory or even arguably it even confirms Deutsch's theory. The big improvement here, or at least maybe not improvement, nuance change let's say, is that we're no longer seeing the memes as some supernatural evil that kept us from being creative by nothing more than a near perfect ability to snuff out creativity at the individual level. Instead we're being offered a more plausible explanation that until a certain level of knowledge is attained you may get stuck hard on a local maxima with no realistic chance of escaping it via something as simple as a culture of criticism. So how good is this theory compared to Deutsch's? Asking the question presumes that these are two competing theories and only one can survive the presence of the other.

[01:23:12]  Unidentified speaker: But in fact these two theories exist in a complementary fashion.

[01:23:17]  Bruce: If it is true that if Henrich's theory is true, that would be a problem for Deutsch's dread of novelty. I agree with that much, but it really only shifts it to something pretty similar, a dread of experimentation or a dread of unproven traditions. It certainly shifts my perception of our ancestors from being stupid or unwise or barely people, as Deutsch put it, to being really identifiably human and maybe not quite as stupid or as unwise as maybe I would have thought prior to reading Henrich's book. But other than those nuances, these really seem like really similar theories to me. They both still ultimately claim that humans were adapted either through memes, genes or both to accept traditions more than in a modern era would make sense. And both place these memes as our ancestors captors for at least 200,000 years. Even if Henrich makes them more benevolent parental figures, these memes are more for Henrich, they're more benevolent parental figures, and Deutsch sees them as evil.

[01:24:31]  Unidentified speaker: But outside of that, they're kind of saying the same thing.

[01:24:34]  Bruce: And it still is this situation where we got trapped for at least 200,000, maybe a million years by our memes. But even if I accept Henrich's improvements to Deutsch's theory, I still am left feeling like it doesn't really explain why we got trapped for literally 200,000 to a million years. Consider how the Athenians made incredible progress very rapidly, even though theoretically, they also presumably lived in a pre-enlightenment, pre-scientific culture. And they did so with little more than an aspiration to a culture of criticism and free speech, because they didn't really have a true culture of criticism and free speech by our standards.

[01:25:21]  Bruce: Remember, we're talking about the people who killed Socrates, right? I mean, like, this isn't really a true culture of criticism that we're talking about. But even this aspiration, even if it then took centuries to implement this aspiration, it does seem to be what then inspired the growth and eventual explosion of progress in the West. So for me, the important takeaway to Henrich's theories are, first, the idea of a local maxima and the difficulties our ancestors must have faced to escape local maximas. Second, the idea that our psychology has been adapted or evolved by genes, [memes?] or both to care about social pressure and even to the point of being a bit irrational due to these local maximas that were hard to escape. And also to care about, as you pointed out, prestige, signs of prestige, success and competence.

[01:26:16]  Unidentified speaker: I would also take away from Henrich that this wasn't a case of dread of novelty, but it was a dread of experimentation, which is kind of the same thing, just a little different, a little less pessimistic, but not too different.

[01:26:29]  Bruce: But that our ancestors also had what was really a pretty instrumentally rational reason to adopt this view. Thus they, because of the local maxima problem, thus they were not barely people. They were very much people like us. But even all of these together, they seem like really only a fairly small adjustment to Deutsch's theory. For example, just how much difference is there between a [dread?] of novelty and a [dread?] of experimentation in the long run?

[01:26:56]  Unidentified speaker: Probably none.

[01:26:58]  Bruce: This may be only a small adjustment to Deutsch's theory of static societies, yet it is one that seems meaningful to me. And it will set us up for more interesting theories in the future, when we cover other people's theories that are related to the concepts of around static societies.

[01:27:15]  Unidentified speaker: That's it.

[01:27:15]  Bruce: That's my review of The Secret of Our Success.

[01:27:20]  Peter: Well, I've enjoyed listening to you, Bruce. This seems like I'm probably going to start binging some of his work now, and I'll hope to come back to it in the future. And I hope you have a wonderful Father's Day tomorrow.

[01:27:36]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah.

[01:27:36]  Unidentified speaker: I forgot it was Father's Day.

[01:27:38]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.

[01:27:39]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:27:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:27:40]  Peter: Should be nice. I'm just looking forward to a nice date tonight, another Bumble date. I have murdered several dates now, talking about our podcast, I have to say. I've realized I've committed date murder by going down the road. You know, it just leads into talking about David Deutsch and just the many worlds interpretation. There's just so many roads that are just not productive to go down when you're trying to concentrate on a nice vibe and making someone laugh and things like that.

[01:28:19]  Unidentified speaker: I've realized.

[01:28:21]  Peter: So now I just say, if the podcast comes up, I just say, well, we have long, self-indulgent conversations about knowledge and reality and just kind of leave it at that.

[01:28:32]  Bruce: You know, you could probably get away with just saying it's a philosophical podcast.

[01:28:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:28:38]  Bruce: We're into discussing philosophy.

[01:28:41]  Peter: Something that sounds more evocative, but doesn't lead into getting in the weeds too much. So maybe a second or third date conversation will get into what we actually do here.

[01:28:56]  Bruce: But I definitely think that there's a different aesthetic for first dates versus like third dates. And honestly, I think this podcast makes you a very interesting person, Peter.

[01:29:05]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:29:06]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Bruce.

[01:29:07]  Unidentified speaker: I'm glad I have your vote.

[01:29:09]  Bruce: You're very interesting to talk to because of how much effort you've put into studying philosophy and science and things like that.

[01:29:16]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[01:29:17]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you, Bruce.

[01:29:19]  Bruce: I do think that in the long run, it will be a benefit to you, but I can see how it would be a first date killer.

[01:29:27]  Peter: Well, I appreciate that. And I learn a lot from you, maybe because you're such a high prestige person.

[01:29:35]  Unidentified speaker: I just want to.

[01:29:36]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's it.

[01:29:39]  Bruce: That's what's really going on.

[01:29:40]  Unidentified speaker: You've got it.

[01:29:41]  Bruce: Don't you forget it, Peter.

[01:29:43]  Unidentified speaker: Don't you forget it.

[01:29:45]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:29:46]  Unidentified speaker: Well, thank you, Bruce.

[01:29:46]  Unidentified speaker: Have a great day.

[01:29:47]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:29:48]  Unidentified speaker: You too.

[01:29:56]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielsen01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:30:40]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.