[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist David Pizarro having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing

[00:00:14] my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:16] I thought it took God seven days to make the world.

[00:00:20] He rested on a seventh.

[00:00:22] I always thought he should have put the extra day in instead of half asking me.

[00:00:27] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:01:17] I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:20] Dave, the actress Michelle Rodriguez defended Liam Neeson saying he can't be racist because

[00:01:27] of how he kissed Viola Davis and you don't make out with the race you hate.

[00:01:32] Not like that.

[00:01:34] By that standard are you racist?

[00:01:42] By that standard, unfortunately I hate most people in the world.

[00:01:51] I'm not going to air my dirty laundry.

[00:01:56] You're not going to say which people you hate exactly?

[00:01:59] No, no.

[00:02:02] But you know, in my life experience, I blame society.

[00:02:08] They set a standard of beauty for me and especially as like a light-skinned Latino male, like the

[00:02:17] colorism that I was just raised with, I'm entrenched into my psyche.

[00:02:23] I don't endorse it.

[00:02:25] I don't want it to be my true self.

[00:02:27] It's just my, perhaps you could call it my system one, just acting up.

[00:02:33] I would call you a light-skinned quote unquote Latino male.

[00:02:37] Well, your use of quotes is just what a Jew would say.

[00:02:45] What you're doing is essentially the Liam Neeson thing where you're sort of confessing

[00:02:50] something you're not particularly proud of.

[00:02:55] I try.

[00:02:56] I try it.

[00:02:57] I just didn't have enough.

[00:03:02] I've tried to make out with people of all people.

[00:03:12] Really I tried to make out.

[00:03:14] What happened?

[00:03:15] They just slapped me, you know?

[00:03:17] Yeah.

[00:03:18] They're like, who are you?

[00:03:19] Like, who are you?

[00:03:20] Like, why are you walking up to me?

[00:03:21] This is turning.

[00:03:22] I didn't expect it to go this direction, but it's turning into a kind of Harvey Weinstein

[00:03:26] kind of.

[00:03:27] It's a no, but there is an interesting discussion.

[00:03:29] I don't remember if we've ever talked about it.

[00:03:34] I think that if you ask most people and they're being honest, I could be wrong.

[00:03:38] I don't know.

[00:03:39] I don't have hard data on this, but I think that people have preferences for particular

[00:03:46] looks and particular races.

[00:03:49] There is evidence actually from speed dating studies that I think we've mentioned before.

[00:03:54] The question of whether it's racist to prefer one race in terms of sexual attraction is an

[00:04:02] interesting one to me.

[00:04:05] I want to defend people's ability to say that I'm only attracted to, say, black men and

[00:04:11] not call them racist against Asian men.

[00:04:14] I don't think that equality in that sense requires that you be attracted to everybody.

[00:04:20] If so, then I would be like a horrible anti-male.

[00:04:27] The drummers in the woods are worried about.

[00:04:35] I totally agree with you.

[00:04:38] You can't control what you're and who you're attracted to.

[00:04:45] I was reading something and I forget where.

[00:04:48] I don't know to what extent this is true, but apparently there's a certain segment of

[00:04:51] the transgendered community.

[00:04:54] If someone is a lesbian, they want them to still be attracted to someone who just transitioned

[00:05:00] into a woman or transitioning and they say it's transphobic if you make a distinction.

[00:05:09] I was reading something and she's like, I'm a lesbian.

[00:05:13] You have a penis.

[00:05:14] This isn't complicated.

[00:05:21] I think that's fine.

[00:05:22] I defend the lesbian's right to not be attracted to someone with a penis and I defend your

[00:05:27] right to only be attracted to Hitler youth.

[00:05:33] People who look like Hitler youth.

[00:05:37] The Liam Neeson thing, which I know barely about.

[00:05:40] I didn't really read too much about it.

[00:05:45] I think it's fair to say that he was totally being racist when he did what he did.

[00:05:51] Whether or not he is racist now, I don't know.

[00:05:54] But definitely whether or not he kissed a black woman is not.

[00:05:59] Imagine all those clubs that white people used to attend back in the day and they

[00:06:08] were plenty of white men who totally were attracted to black women and they were still

[00:06:14] fucking asshole race.

[00:06:16] They weren't marching.

[00:06:17] They weren't like marching with Dr. King.

[00:06:19] No, but I do think it does say something about a person if they're willing to, not

[00:06:26] willing but even eager to be intimate with a person of a certain race that there's

[00:06:34] a way in which it doesn't obviously say for sure, it's not overriding.

[00:06:40] It's not absolute that they're not racist.

[00:06:42] But it speaks to something.

[00:06:45] I think it does speak to something.

[00:06:48] I don't think it's.

[00:06:49] It speaks to Bill Burr that he's married to a black woman.

[00:06:51] You know, he makes a lot of sort of race on the borderline kind of, you know,

[00:06:55] quit and like, I think the fact that he's married to a black woman and like

[00:07:00] credentials him.

[00:07:02] So OK, so that's a different claim.

[00:07:04] But but but the first one that it's that it's signal something about you.

[00:07:12] I think it might.

[00:07:14] So like, I I I grant that it's like information that could be on your side

[00:07:21] here, but I do also think that it's possible, like set aside the marriage

[00:07:25] thing, so I think if you're married to somebody from another race and

[00:07:27] you're constantly interacting and you're, you know, treating like you're

[00:07:31] learning things that you might not have known about their experience,

[00:07:34] that's one thing. But like, just say, like making out a white man,

[00:07:37] making out with a black woman.

[00:07:39] I don't think that it requires any sense of equality or non-racist.

[00:07:44] I think that you can fully be racist in in a fundamental sense

[00:07:50] that doesn't require disgust at at like the physicality of them.

[00:07:55] I know that some people are racist like that.

[00:07:58] They, you know, old timey white people might say like, oh,

[00:08:01] like they might actually respond with disgust at like non-white people.

[00:08:05] But I don't think that it requires it now.

[00:08:06] You might in fact, you could marry somebody and treat them like shit.

[00:08:10] Right. And and there's of course, like the horrible ugly history

[00:08:14] of the slave and the plantation owner or whatever.

[00:08:19] And you know, right.

[00:08:20] But yeah, Ice Cube has a great great song back when he was not

[00:08:25] making kids movies called Horny Little Devil, which is all about about

[00:08:30] like white men doing exactly that.

[00:08:33] And it's actually hilarious, really offensive if you're the kind of white

[00:08:37] person who thinks that that people shouldn't talk bad about you.

[00:08:40] But but also really funny.

[00:08:43] So yeah, I don't.

[00:08:44] So can we just talk one second about Liam Neeson?

[00:08:47] So here's the thing that I agree that I agree with what you've said,

[00:08:53] certainly at that time, I think him talking about it

[00:08:57] 30 years later is is overall kind of a good thing that he would bring it up.

[00:09:04] And the the rate, you know, anybody and I don't know to the extent

[00:09:07] to which this is a huge story and people are wanting to like not see Liam Neeson

[00:09:13] movies is probably not that big a deal.

[00:09:15] But to the extent that it is, I think it shouldn't be like that's counterproductive.

[00:09:19] It's yeah.

[00:09:21] I and I didn't hear like his comments about it.

[00:09:24] Like if he was talking about like the unfortunate way in which he acted,

[00:09:28] then I think it's actually it.

[00:09:31] I think we don't have enough of those conversations.

[00:09:33] In fact, like when I'm talking to students in intro,

[00:09:36] psych this and this makes my fellow professors nervous were largely white.

[00:09:40] I try when talking about race.

[00:09:44] I try to like diffuse the situation by just admitting

[00:09:49] the ways in which I'm racist.

[00:09:51] And and I feel like that that opens up a little bit.

[00:09:56] It makes people less defensive, like if if somebody is willing to say

[00:10:00] that they themselves have thoughts or or feelings that are racist,

[00:10:05] even though I reject them, they exist.

[00:10:08] And actually talking about that,

[00:10:11] I think is the only way we're going to get past some of some of the things

[00:10:14] like some of the ills with society.

[00:10:16] It's just that it's very difficult to do so when

[00:10:21] when you don't have a relationship of trust with somebody, right?

[00:10:24] And the media is not the kind of trustworthy partner

[00:10:27] that you want to be talking to about this stuff.

[00:10:29] Yeah, and social media also.

[00:10:32] And yeah, right.

[00:10:36] All right. So I had said system one

[00:10:38] to give a segue into what we're going to talk about today

[00:10:41] so that you can say yes.

[00:10:42] So segment two, we're going to talk about

[00:10:45] actually like inspired by a suggestion

[00:10:48] that didn't make our finalists because we didn't.

[00:10:52] But it was it's about this idea of conceptual binaries

[00:10:55] and the degree to which we're wired to see things in terms of binaries

[00:11:00] and how that plays out in philosophy and psychology.

[00:11:03] And you found a really good paper

[00:11:05] about how this is played out in psychology

[00:11:08] and the problems with that.

[00:11:10] So that's what we'll talk about in the in the second segment.

[00:11:14] First segment we're going to do our another suggestion,

[00:11:17] Moral Pet Peaves.

[00:11:19] Before we even get to that, I know this has been all preludes.

[00:11:24] But since our last episode, you have you are now like the star,

[00:11:29] the headliner of the Atlantic

[00:11:33] math, Atlantic monthly, if they still call it that, the Atlantic.

[00:11:37] That's that's that's right.

[00:11:40] I'm actually too big for this podcast now.

[00:11:43] Yeah. No, no, no.

[00:11:44] Thank you.

[00:11:45] Yeah, there was a really nice article written up by a woman named

[00:11:48] Kathleen McAuliffe about about disgust and politics.

[00:11:51] And but I just wanted to give a shout out

[00:11:54] to the graduate students who did a lot of the work.

[00:11:58] So Yol and I have been doing this.

[00:12:00] Yol and Barb, some of you may know him from his

[00:12:02] from when he used to be a friend of the podcast,

[00:12:06] have been doing this work on political orientation and disgust.

[00:12:09] But this a couple of grad

[00:12:11] grad students, Benjamin Roush, who's mentioned in the article

[00:12:14] and Rajan Anderson, who isn't unfortunately mentioned in the article,

[00:12:18] spearheaded this work.

[00:12:19] It's on taste sensitivity and and political orientation.

[00:12:23] And it's a really cool finding.

[00:12:24] But but like as always, the professors get the book of the credit

[00:12:28] and the grad students get a little bit shit on.

[00:12:31] So for all the grads, we're Raj Rajan.

[00:12:34] What's his name?

[00:12:34] Poor Raj Raj Rajan Anderson.

[00:12:38] He's he's one of my students.

[00:12:40] Great, great guy.

[00:12:41] But, you know, he's not the lead.

[00:12:43] You know, though, like that's kind of precious to be named Rajan.

[00:12:50] His he's half Indian, half white, dude.

[00:12:52] Oh, that's OK.

[00:12:53] I didn't know that because I thought Anderson bastard.

[00:12:56] No, Anderson is not a particularly Indian name.

[00:12:59] I know there are biracial people, Tim.

[00:13:02] You know, God, I'd love to love to be with one of them.

[00:13:08] I wanted to know where that one was going to end.

[00:13:12] All right, let's talk about moral.

[00:13:15] But thanks for letting me talk about my own shit.

[00:13:18] But you want to talk more pet peeves?

[00:13:20] Sure. Yeah.

[00:13:21] So we've come up with some moral pet peeves.

[00:13:25] This was sort of something that you.

[00:13:28] Express interest in.

[00:13:29] So maybe talk about why you want to do it.

[00:13:31] OK, let me get I feel like I'm very, very tolerant of people's

[00:13:35] immorality. So like I'm happily friends with people who are shady.

[00:13:39] Like, why no have done shit.

[00:13:41] That's bad.

[00:13:43] Not that I endorse it, but like I don't.

[00:13:45] I think I'm not a judgmental person.

[00:13:49] But what I realize is that I'm a moralizing person in my everyday life

[00:13:54] and that like bulk of my moral cognition and emotion

[00:13:58] comes from everyday interactions with people that like anger me to a degree

[00:14:03] that is probably well, not probably completely unjustified.

[00:14:08] And so so I wanted just a chance like in some of these we've mentioned before.

[00:14:14] Yeah, like I think like well, returning the car.

[00:14:20] Yeah, I'm running the car.

[00:14:21] Returning the car at the supermarket parking lot, the people who don't do that.

[00:14:25] I think we both agreed they should be like lined up and shot.

[00:14:28] Like it should be a fuck proportionality.

[00:14:30] Well, no, no, that is.

[00:14:34] That is Lex Talion.

[00:14:36] And then last episode we talked about people, people who go to the 10 items

[00:14:40] or fewer line with like 20 items and don't seem to have like.

[00:14:47] Like it'd be one thing if they were turning around

[00:14:49] and being like, I'm really sorry, I'm in a rush or something.

[00:14:51] I'd be like, oh, yeah, fine.

[00:14:52] But like they just know like no indication that they think anything is wrong.

[00:14:56] It's totally shameless.

[00:14:57] Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:58] It's like it's so so my moralizing is what led to this to this top.

[00:15:03] My hyper moralizing, but I take it that you.

[00:15:06] Yeah, I do this.

[00:15:07] I was good.

[00:15:08] You know, it was harder than I thought to think of this even.

[00:15:11] And I think that like, you know, I've been meditating now for three and a half

[00:15:14] years, I think if there's one thing meditating is good for it is not getting

[00:15:20] as irritated and angry about these kinds of things because actually one

[00:15:26] of my pet peeves was people who talk about meditation.

[00:15:28] Yeah, no, I totally get that shit.

[00:15:31] But if you meditated, then it wouldn't bother you that much.

[00:15:37] Well, I kissed I kissed a girl who meditates.

[00:15:39] So, you know, you must not be a meditationist.

[00:15:45] All right.

[00:15:46] Sorry, one thing is my difficulty was distinguishing between bad manners

[00:15:51] and what might be called an actual moral pet peeve.

[00:15:54] And I don't know that there's a good line.

[00:15:56] And I think that part of my problem is that I blur the line,

[00:15:59] but we can get right into it.

[00:16:00] No, yeah.

[00:16:00] And don't even think about it in terms of binaries like that,

[00:16:03] like moral conventional.

[00:16:05] You want to start?

[00:16:07] Sure.

[00:16:09] So this still can get me pretty worked up and furious and yelling.

[00:16:16] And like when you're on with somebody in customer service at a,

[00:16:22] you know, like a big company and they are telling you that they

[00:16:28] can't do anything to help resolve the issue.

[00:16:31] And there's telling you that when you know with 100% certainty,

[00:16:35] they absolutely can that they're just choosing not to.

[00:16:38] And they know that you know that.

[00:16:41] And it's just a massive insult to your intelligence.

[00:16:45] It's just a game that they're playing like.

[00:16:47] Exactly.

[00:16:48] Like, like toying with you, like you're a mouse and they're a cat.

[00:16:53] I like, I, that drives me absolutely crazy.

[00:16:56] You're like, you realize like I could call, I could just hang up,

[00:16:58] call back, get somebody else who for whatever reason just decides

[00:17:02] that they do want to help me.

[00:17:04] Like we all know that that's how this works.

[00:17:07] Like so like that, I hate that.

[00:17:09] I hate people who insult your intelligence in that kind of

[00:17:12] release.

[00:17:13] And is your certainty because you have had it happen before?

[00:17:17] Like, how do you know for sure, for sure that they can?

[00:17:19] Because like every single time, like you get another person

[00:17:22] who has that same position and they're able to magically like

[00:17:27] make your problems go away.

[00:17:29] Like I do think it is a choice on their part, you know?

[00:17:33] I don't know what it would entail, but it's a choice on their part.

[00:17:37] Yeah.

[00:17:38] They probably get disincentives to like say credit someone's

[00:17:43] account.

[00:17:43] Like they probably are on this like horrible like spreadsheet about

[00:17:47] like how much they.

[00:17:48] So that's fine.

[00:17:49] And so I understand that.

[00:17:50] No, no, I agree with that.

[00:17:51] Just tell me that's the deal.

[00:17:53] Like I'm not helping you because I already helped two guys today

[00:17:57] and like so you sorry, just be upfront.

[00:18:00] I can actually take a real setback if I feel like the people are

[00:18:04] just being honest with me about what caused it and what's the

[00:18:08] deal going forward.

[00:18:10] Right.

[00:18:10] Yeah.

[00:18:11] No, I totally agree with you.

[00:18:13] The flip side is I've had like wonderful discussion.

[00:18:15] Sometimes like I get on customer service and like the person

[00:18:18] is really nice and we end up just just shooting the ship for a

[00:18:21] while.

[00:18:22] This one time I was on with Verizon and I don't know what the

[00:18:26] problem I was having.

[00:18:27] I don't, it wasn't about my bill or anything.

[00:18:29] I think it was about service or something like that.

[00:18:31] And like I was just like actually having a fun conversation.

[00:18:36] And at the end she was like, sweetie, is there anything else

[00:18:39] I can help you with today?

[00:18:40] And I was like, yeah, like could you just like cover my

[00:18:43] bill for the next year?

[00:18:45] And just joking, obviously.

[00:18:47] And she started laughing and she goes, no, but I'll tell you what,

[00:18:50] I'll credit your account with $100.

[00:18:54] I was like, oh.

[00:18:57] That's what I mean.

[00:18:58] I think they, when they're good people because you have such

[00:19:02] nightmares, Kafka-esque experiences with the ones who are actually

[00:19:06] really helpful, you feel like they're the best people in the

[00:19:09] entire world.

[00:19:10] Okay, I'm going to work my way from least disgusting to most.

[00:19:15] One thing I hate, hate is behavior in airports when you're at

[00:19:21] the gate and you're waiting for your flight and there's never

[00:19:24] obviously enough seats to accommodate the number of people

[00:19:26] who are on a plane.

[00:19:28] And so you're just looking for a place to sit and somebody has

[00:19:32] decided that their bag and their coat like require one or two

[00:19:38] extra seats and you're walking by clearly looking for a

[00:19:41] place to sit and they don't even make eye contact.

[00:19:44] Like they don't, it's not even entered there.

[00:19:47] They're not saving that for anybody.

[00:19:49] They're just being dicks or even just like when they have their

[00:19:52] carry on in the middle of the row and you're trying to get

[00:19:56] around it and they're not even bothering to move it.

[00:19:58] It's like those little things make travel.

[00:20:01] Travel is just like one whole set of minor annoyances.

[00:20:07] Yeah.

[00:20:07] Like please just be kind.

[00:20:09] Yeah, just don't add to them.

[00:20:11] Like we're all in this bullshit together.

[00:20:14] I mean, that's one that I like I'm like Stockholm syndrome to

[00:20:18] I just expect it.

[00:20:19] Like I don't expect it to get better.

[00:20:21] I just yeah, I'm resigned to it.

[00:20:25] Well, it's so bad that actually so I should say that like

[00:20:29] I'm sure I engage in a lot of the behavior that I'm

[00:20:31] currently I do all of except probably the I've never worked

[00:20:34] in customer service.

[00:20:36] Sure, I've done something like that.

[00:20:38] Right.

[00:20:38] And sometimes you just genuinely don't know so I can

[00:20:41] like give people a benefit of the doubt.

[00:20:42] All right.

[00:20:42] My second one is people who don't control.

[00:20:46] I wrote this down and what I wrote is people who don't

[00:20:50] control they bratty fucking kids.

[00:20:54] Why did it control your race?

[00:20:56] Is that you were thinking?

[00:20:58] No, no, no.

[00:20:59] I actually think that actually it's the opposite.

[00:21:02] Like this is very common in the white community and

[00:21:05] probably more so.

[00:21:06] Like it's race agnostic.

[00:21:09] Yeah.

[00:21:10] I mean, like I think if anything it's more common

[00:21:13] like among white.

[00:21:15] So actually the example I had was on an airplane and

[00:21:19] there's a kid in back of you and the kids just

[00:21:21] kicking the seat over and over again and the parents

[00:21:24] just started not saying or doing anything.

[00:21:27] And then also the ones who like bring their kids

[00:21:29] over to your house and they're yelling free rain

[00:21:34] banging on the piano and like like making huge

[00:21:38] messes and just we're both.

[00:21:39] Parents.

[00:21:40] So I feel like we have some right to complain about this

[00:21:45] because you know, although Eliza was kind of an angel

[00:21:49] that you know when she was at this age.

[00:21:51] Sure, sure.

[00:21:52] Like so was my daughter.

[00:21:53] But yeah, partly because of what what we did.

[00:21:56] Right.

[00:21:56] Yeah.

[00:21:57] Like well maybe in our parent in our parenting

[00:22:00] episode.

[00:22:01] Yes.

[00:22:02] Well, we have a big announcement to make after the break.

[00:22:06] So yeah, like and you know, on the rare occasions

[00:22:11] where Eliza did act up in ways that other people

[00:22:15] had to suffer like we'd stop what was going on.

[00:22:18] Like we'd take care of it.

[00:22:20] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:22:21] Like if there's like a general principle I have

[00:22:24] of like respecting other people's shit.

[00:22:26] And when you have kids, you bring them over

[00:22:30] to somebody's house and they start like touching

[00:22:32] the TV with their hands or that you know, or

[00:22:34] like anything like that might and you're like,

[00:22:37] are you not noticing this?

[00:22:39] Like right.

[00:22:41] I think a lot of the parents they're so it's like

[00:22:43] dead numb to they're just dead.

[00:22:45] Yeah, they're like because they have to deal with

[00:22:47] this all the time.

[00:22:49] And this is nothing.

[00:22:50] Yeah.

[00:22:51] But that's a case where you feel like

[00:22:52] you can't bring it up because like you're an

[00:22:54] asshole if you tell somebody that their kids

[00:22:56] are like behaving like could you tell your kid

[00:22:58] not to like fucking knock over my my vase.

[00:23:02] I suspect I'm more capable of actually doing

[00:23:05] that and just saying it than you are.

[00:23:09] Probably.

[00:23:11] All right, my.

[00:23:13] Mine is a puzzling behavior.

[00:23:15] It's gross, but.

[00:23:18] Like taking a shit and not flushing a toilet.

[00:23:22] Like in a public bathroom.

[00:23:23] Yeah, this is like one of those things where

[00:23:25] like the flushers in public restrooms

[00:23:29] are beautiful feats of engineering.

[00:23:32] Like I wish I had that in my home.

[00:23:34] Like now we have these low flow toilets

[00:23:36] and like sometimes it gets stuck and you have to.

[00:23:38] But like one press of that thing

[00:23:41] and it's sucking everything down.

[00:23:44] And I have to walk into like an explosive

[00:23:47] diarrhea situation or just even a big log.

[00:23:50] Like I don't what I don't understand is how.

[00:23:54] How you could just not.

[00:23:56] Think to flush the toilet.

[00:23:58] Like are they just forgetting?

[00:23:59] It seems like a weird thing to forget.

[00:24:01] You wipe your ass presumably and you look at the toilet.

[00:24:04] You put the toilet paper there.

[00:24:05] You look at the toilet.

[00:24:06] Yeah, you kind of want to review and be like,

[00:24:08] am I proud of this or like.

[00:24:11] Should I let someone else see this?

[00:24:13] Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's so beautiful that you don't.

[00:24:19] You don't want to be the only person

[00:24:20] who ever gets to see it, you know, take a picture.

[00:24:23] That's what.

[00:24:25] Yeah, I know.

[00:24:26] I have.

[00:24:27] I didn't put this on because it's not like,

[00:24:29] but my thing with public bathrooms is the people who go

[00:24:32] into a stall and piss into the stall,

[00:24:35] but they leave the toilet seat down.

[00:24:38] So like now.

[00:24:39] So yeah, now there's just like a bunch of pee.

[00:24:41] And yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:42] And so and now you are a faced if you're going in there to piss,

[00:24:46] you're faced with the do I put the toilet seat up,

[00:24:49] even though it has pee on it?

[00:24:50] Or am I going to just also piss into the toilet seat down?

[00:24:56] Yeah. You know, like the one for the that you would sit on

[00:24:59] for a shit and, you know, like I and I've done both.

[00:25:05] Sometimes I just suck it up and like partly

[00:25:07] because I don't want people to think that I'm the one that did that.

[00:25:10] Do I know? I know. Yeah. No, I play janitor.

[00:25:13] Like and I just like wipe it.

[00:25:16] But that deeply angers me.

[00:25:18] So this is a professional more,

[00:25:21] but I think it's a moral issue for sure.

[00:25:23] People who when they're giving a lecture or presentation

[00:25:27] when they run over time and in a conference conference.

[00:25:32] Yeah, like when there's like three people in the same session or something.

[00:25:35] So then it's like horrible.

[00:25:38] But even if it's just their session

[00:25:41] and they were told, you know, 45 minutes and they're going to an hour.

[00:25:45] And, you know, those same people are the ones that are like constantly

[00:25:48] shuffling papers, you know, oh, should I do this part?

[00:25:51] I don't know. Like it's like, did you not prepare for this?

[00:25:55] Like, you knew we agreed to this like three months ago.

[00:25:59] Why are you doing this right now?

[00:26:01] Like why are you making these decisions as if like somebody told you five minutes

[00:26:05] beforehand, hey, you're going to go on and do this paper in this amount of time.

[00:26:10] Go. I don't like that.

[00:26:13] So it's a disrespect for your audience.

[00:26:15] It's really yeah.

[00:26:16] And the worst is when they acknowledge it laughingly

[00:26:19] and they're like, you guys don't mind, right?

[00:26:21] Like you guys don't mind if I go a little over.

[00:26:23] Like I really want to get and I'm like, yeah, I do my I didn't even want to see

[00:26:26] the normal length version of the paper.

[00:26:31] It's funny to say shuffling papers, though, because no in psychology,

[00:26:35] everybody just uses PowerPoint like nobody actually has a paper.

[00:26:38] Yeah.

[00:26:40] Which makes but then what they do is they scroll through

[00:26:43] and they're like, do I have time for these slides?

[00:26:44] Yeah. OK, I'll do it.

[00:26:46] Yeah, it's the same principle.

[00:26:48] Um, I know I definitely.

[00:26:52] This is my final one.

[00:26:54] I wasn't sure whether to put this on and there are conditions to it.

[00:26:58] So I'm going to say it and just suspend your judgment.

[00:27:02] You're married, so this might not apply to you.

[00:27:05] Not reciprocating oral sex.

[00:27:11] So my I am of the opinion that.

[00:27:14] If you perform oral sex.

[00:27:18] That at the very least somebody should.

[00:27:22] Mention.

[00:27:24] That they might do it for you, not just ignore it entirely

[00:27:29] and just like rest on the leg on my cool.

[00:27:33] Thanks.

[00:27:35] Like I feel like there should really be some reciprocity there.

[00:27:39] Just, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to.

[00:27:41] Like maybe you hate giving oral sex and you love receiving it,

[00:27:44] which would be totally fine.

[00:27:46] But then just say that, like just give somebody a heads up

[00:27:49] that you're not just being an asshole.

[00:27:54] This is sort of like my customer service thing.

[00:27:56] Like just be on just be on.

[00:28:00] You know you could.

[00:28:04] Oh, wow. OK.

[00:28:07] Yeah, I fear that this is gendered in the opposite way

[00:28:10] that it's men are much more reluctant to like they'll take it

[00:28:13] all the time and not not give it.

[00:28:16] Yeah. In fact, I'm sure that that's the case.

[00:28:18] I'm pretty sure too.

[00:28:20] I think there's more of an expectation one way than in the other.

[00:28:24] And I just find that rude.

[00:28:26] This this is this is just.

[00:28:27] But you want true reciprocity.

[00:28:30] Well, I want there to be that I want there to be

[00:28:33] the politeness of of at least acknowledging

[00:28:37] if it's not if it's not going to happen like fine.

[00:28:40] Like there are people who don't who hate doing it.

[00:28:42] Like that's that doesn't bother me.

[00:28:44] But like, do you feel like they owe you to that information before you?

[00:28:50] No, no, no.

[00:28:52] They can bring it on you afterwards.

[00:28:57] They could spring it on you afterwards.

[00:28:58] I think that like that just acknowledging that they're

[00:29:02] you know, like, like even if somebody said like, hey, like in the airport,

[00:29:05] you know, I know my bag is here, but like I have something really valuable.

[00:29:09] I don't want to put on the floor. I'm really sorry.

[00:29:11] Like that would be fine.

[00:29:12] In the same way that like saying like, hey, man, thanks.

[00:29:15] Thanks for like the oral sex.

[00:29:17] But just so you know, like I have like a gag reflex or whatever.

[00:29:22] It does not allow me to.

[00:29:25] Just so you know, like I have no interest.

[00:29:26] There's no fucking way that I'm going to touch you after you.

[00:29:31] Do you love me?

[00:29:33] Very, very much.

[00:29:43] We kiss it.

[00:29:46] But you first.

[00:29:49] OK.

[00:29:57] But but wait a minute.

[00:30:00] So I'm trying to just pin down the parameters of this.

[00:30:05] Like, are you talking about like a one night stand or is this like even into a relationship?

[00:30:11] Like, I think that like if it goes unspoken into a relationship.

[00:30:16] So here's where where like it could happen.

[00:30:18] Like so it could happen that that one partner really loves doing it.

[00:30:22] So they always do it to to their partner.

[00:30:26] And because they love doing it and they love giving their partner pleasure

[00:30:29] or maybe it brings them pleasure to do it, they continue to do it.

[00:30:33] But then it's never mentioned why their partner isn't doing it back.

[00:30:38] Like I would worry like, dude, is like to like a do I smell bad?

[00:30:43] Like is it, you know, like is there some reason that like you just

[00:30:48] continuously ignore like my my side of thing that is hanging there?

[00:30:54] Yeah, I feel like I feel like it should just be something that's put out there.

[00:30:59] You know, like you're the married man.

[00:31:02] You tell me how it works as a married person.

[00:31:05] Is it in the contract?

[00:31:07] It's in the yeah, it's in the things that you sign.

[00:31:11] The pre.

[00:31:13] Yeah, no, I think that I always wondered what would be the episode where,

[00:31:17] you know, like we finally get in trouble and like charges brought against us.

[00:31:23] And I didn't think it would be the moral pet peeves one, but

[00:31:27] 158 the last episode.

[00:31:30] This is like, I mean, this goes both ways.

[00:31:34] There's nothing gendered or about this.

[00:31:36] Like, you know, it might be a greater problem in the gay male community.

[00:31:40] I'd love to hear what the norms are there.

[00:31:42] Like he's just expected.

[00:31:44] Like, I don't know.

[00:31:46] Yeah, well, this is an empirical question.

[00:31:48] Hit us up. Email us.

[00:31:51] Um,

[00:31:53] those reciprocity extend.

[00:31:55] Does it matter if you're kind of like the butch one or the?

[00:31:59] Yeah, like are there expectations that if you're the bottom that you're the one

[00:32:04] who's going to initiate oral sex, like, like I'm I'm actually curious about

[00:32:09] the general norms and conventions.

[00:32:12] All right.

[00:32:13] You know, one thing I was worried about is

[00:32:17] that this would just explode into you and me yelling at each other about like it

[00:32:21] would just be pet peeves about what the other person does.

[00:32:25] Like I know I was I was trying to think of pet peeves.

[00:32:28] I don't think I think that like we pretty much error our grievances.

[00:32:34] Maybe not at first when we probably like the first first bit, like there were

[00:32:39] there were things that like I'm sure I was passive aggressive about.

[00:32:42] But like now I think I'll just tell you like are you fucking kidding me, dude?

[00:32:45] Is that what you're going to do?

[00:32:46] Yeah, like when we we would just

[00:32:49] we figured out that it was just better to air out what we were

[00:32:53] what the problem was.

[00:32:55] But I do remember like 24 hour periods where I'd be like, I know,

[00:32:58] Dave is pissed at me right now.

[00:33:00] I absolutely know and it's coming and I'd just be waiting for that text or that.

[00:33:05] And then I would come with a vengeance.

[00:33:09] I remember actually being annoyed at you because

[00:33:13] there was one time where you like got mad at me because you you thought I hadn't

[00:33:18] prepared appropriately. It was like maybe the day before or like the afternoon

[00:33:23] before we were going to record and you're like, you haven't read the article yet.

[00:33:27] Now it's like I'm going to read it like just not like you were mad at me.

[00:33:31] And then I remember just like holding on to that until until the day that you

[00:33:36] told me that you hadn't prepared just to be like, see, see.

[00:33:41] That probably didn't take long.

[00:33:42] Probably didn't take long for that day to come.

[00:33:47] It's much better to just say, say things like,

[00:33:50] like for instance, this was my way of telling you,

[00:33:53] you never fucking reciprocate.

[00:33:56] I'm sorry, I'll do it.

[00:33:58] I didn't know you felt that way about waiting for a blow job for so long.

[00:34:02] Like, how does it not enter your mind that I might want it to?

[00:34:06] I thought we had that kind of relationship was just all right.

[00:34:11] Yeah, this is it.

[00:34:12] That was our last first segment.

[00:34:14] Now we're going to go into our last second segment.

[00:34:18] We'll be right back to talk about conceptual binaries.

[00:34:24] Dave, how are your balls feeling right now?

[00:34:28] It's funny you should ask, Tamler.

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[00:37:04] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:37:12] At this time, we like to take a moment and thank all the people who have

[00:37:17] been watching this episode of Very Bad Wizards.

[00:37:20] Thank you for watching.

[00:37:24] I hope you enjoyed it.

[00:37:26] I'll see you in the next one.

[00:37:38] Bye.

[00:37:39] Bye.

[00:38:07] Thank you to all the people who get in touch with us, who email us,

[00:38:11] who tweet at us in the various ways that you get in touch with us.

[00:38:17] Email is probably always the best Facebook message, probably the worst.

[00:38:24] We really appreciate it.

[00:38:26] We've had some really nice emails lately, some really interesting emails,

[00:38:29] even some critical emails and I don't know.

[00:38:32] I really we don't have time to respond to a huge percentage of them.

[00:38:36] But we do read all of them and we really value it.

[00:38:39] So you can email us Very Bad Wizards at gmail.com, tweet us at Tamler,

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[00:39:08] Like I read it has its ups and downs.

[00:39:13] And I'd say that this is a really nice community overall.

[00:39:18] It's still Reddit, but overall it seems like a thoughtful group of people.

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[00:40:32] including the fact that our

[00:40:35] well, all of our patrons get to suggest episodes and our five dollar and up

[00:40:41] patrons get to vote on a topic.

[00:40:44] And we gave the finalists last time and it turned out to be a two topic race

[00:40:52] for the most part.

[00:40:53] There was ethics of care, denial of death and what was the third one?

[00:41:00] Oh, polyamory.

[00:41:02] And those three never really made a strong run for it.

[00:41:07] But it was self deception and parenting.

[00:41:11] Does parenting matter?

[00:41:12] And also ethics of parenting.

[00:41:15] They were kind of flip flopping for a while.

[00:41:18] It was sort of fun to watch.

[00:41:19] But in the end, parenting does parenting matter and parenting ethics is our winner.

[00:41:26] And that will and maybe we'll get Paul to talk about this.

[00:41:30] Yeah, I think it might be that he would be a great person to talk to.

[00:41:33] Yeah, I think he inspired this.

[00:41:35] Right. It's a genuine development psychologist.

[00:41:38] I was rooting for self deception.

[00:41:40] Were you though?

[00:41:41] You think you were.

[00:41:44] Yes, thank you to all of our patrons and all of the people who get in touch

[00:41:48] with us and who support us.

[00:41:50] You are what makes us do this at the increasing expense of our other lives

[00:41:58] and obligations.

[00:42:00] That's right.

[00:42:01] All right.

[00:42:02] So yeah, so this was your idea for a paper and

[00:42:09] a topic that you wanted to get to sooner rather than later.

[00:42:12] So so tell us about it.

[00:42:14] This start, you know, I've griped about this before.

[00:42:18] So I'll give a little bit.

[00:42:19] So the idea is

[00:42:22] the broad idea is that we tend to think in in sort of these conceptual dichotomies

[00:42:27] that were across many domains and like Taylor was saying, in our fields,

[00:42:33] people just like

[00:42:36] theorizing, classifying, categorizing things into two.

[00:42:39] In psychology, in my area of social psychology,

[00:42:44] the field has been sort of dominated by these dual process theories of the human mind.

[00:42:52] And they all have a very similar flavor, even though the specifics of all of them

[00:42:58] vary, but ever since like the seventies, people have been proposing that there

[00:43:04] are two primary ways in which, say, cognition works.

[00:43:09] It's con.

[00:43:10] And is it conoman?

[00:43:12] Conoman, Conoman wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow.

[00:43:15] But is that is that based on his early work, the type one, type two sort of?

[00:43:20] The type one and type two does come from Conoman's work.

[00:43:24] Conoman and Tversky and type one and type

[00:43:28] it was coined a bit later like in the nineties.

[00:43:32] But but yeah, that's one example, right?

[00:43:35] So the idea there being

[00:43:38] that there is a mental process that's associated with effort and deliberation

[00:43:43] and really, really thinking hard about something.

[00:43:47] And there's cognitive processes that are intuitive and fast and automatic and

[00:43:51] unconscious and uncontrolled.

[00:43:53] And those understanding human judgment

[00:43:57] is you can understand it as under what conditions people are making judgments

[00:44:05] specifically for Conoman and Tversky under judgments of under uncertainty.

[00:44:10] Like what whether they're stopping to think about it deeply or whether they're

[00:44:15] just like going with their gut that made its way into moral psychology as any

[00:44:19] listener of this podcast probably knows.

[00:44:22] So Josh Green's view of morality is that when you if you think hard about it,

[00:44:26] you become a consequentialist.

[00:44:28] But if you go with your gut, you're more like a deontologist.

[00:44:31] And that itself, those moral theories are also

[00:44:35] those are also dichotomies, right?

[00:44:37] Diacotomies that don't necessarily have to

[00:44:42] that's right.

[00:44:42] Diacotomy like even even before like type one, type two,

[00:44:48] there were theories of persuasion and social

[00:44:50] psychology that essentially were the same thing.

[00:44:52] So so the question was, say, Tamela, I want to convince you to stop smoking.

[00:44:58] Do I present you with a bunch of statistics about how you might die when you smoke?

[00:45:04] Or do I give you an ad with like like an attractive person telling you,

[00:45:09] like, don't smoke, I don't smoke either.

[00:45:12] And so the idea in those theories of persuasion was, well, it depends which one

[00:45:19] works depends on whether you are under the right conditions.

[00:45:23] Do you have the cognitive resources to think deeply about it?

[00:45:26] Then the statistics will work or are you just going with your gut reaction?

[00:45:30] In which case, like the celebrity ad will work.

[00:45:33] So they've been around for a long time and they've always just really annoyed me.

[00:45:39] Right.

[00:45:40] So and like my gripe with it always was

[00:45:45] that when you divide cognition into two types like Josh Green does or

[00:45:53] or the Conor Matoversky and you say one is about deliberation and the other one is

[00:45:58] about whatever that you're missing out on so much different psychology.

[00:46:03] And John Hite does this in his original paper, The Emotional Dog and its

[00:46:09] Rational Tale where when he outlines what system one, which is the fast

[00:46:15] unconscious, right? He says like this category of thinking includes emotions,

[00:46:21] intuitions, uncontrollable and unconscious thinking.

[00:46:25] And all of those things could be very, very psychologically different.

[00:46:30] In fact, even what kind of emotion is influencing your judgment?

[00:46:35] Like it matters to distinguish which emotion is influencing you.

[00:46:39] But let's just even take intuition.

[00:46:41] Right. When we use the word intuition,

[00:46:43] we might mean an intuition that has come from a whole bunch of learning.

[00:46:48] Like a chess master has intuitions about what move to perform next.

[00:46:53] That's a very, very different intuition than one that is like, say,

[00:46:57] evolutionarily evolved, say like the resistance to incest, a disgust reaction to incest.

[00:47:04] That's like an emotional response at something that that probably evolved.

[00:47:09] So if you care about what the mind is like,

[00:47:12] like how the mind works to lump everything together in that system one,

[00:47:16] I think is is ridiculous.

[00:47:18] It's doing a disservice.

[00:47:19] I'll get to maybe a defense of this view later, but like,

[00:47:24] but it was nice to find this paper.

[00:47:26] So this is a paper by David Melnikoff and John Barge called The Mythical Number

[00:47:30] Two that tries to sort of take apart this this style of theorizing.

[00:47:34] So can I just look for people like myself who are generally familiar with this

[00:47:39] type one, type two stuff, but not specifics.

[00:47:44] And just in terms of this paper, so because it talks a lot about this type one,

[00:47:50] type two distinction.

[00:47:51] But the but the idea is that in type one,

[00:47:54] judgments are unconscious, unintentional, uncontrollable and efficient.

[00:48:02] Yeah.

[00:48:02] Like all those four things.

[00:48:04] And then in the other one, it's the opposite.

[00:48:07] So non of an inefficient, controllable, conscious and intentional.

[00:48:15] Intentional.

[00:48:16] So and just the way they start out is by saying, look,

[00:48:22] if you if you even just agree that those are the only kind of those are the proper

[00:48:27] categories, there's no reason to think that all four of them,

[00:48:33] four of them are grouped in one place and four of them are grouped in the other

[00:48:37] in just two quadrants, like there's 16 possible quadrants, 16 possible.

[00:48:42] And so why would you think that they would all be grouped together?

[00:48:46] That's actually a pretty striking claim that you that would need a lot of evidence

[00:48:50] and support of it, and it doesn't have that.

[00:48:54] Right. Right.

[00:48:55] So so it's like sort of a the dual process theory has just proceeded by

[00:49:00] largely by an agreement that this assumption was OK.

[00:49:05] And I have to say, John Barge, you know, even though he's writing this critique,

[00:49:09] he's he's the person who put sort of automatic behavior on the map.

[00:49:14] He's the name associated with automaticity in psychology.

[00:49:19] But that's OK if he.

[00:49:21] Yeah, no, no.

[00:49:21] It's great that he's it's great that that he's actually writing this paper.

[00:49:26] So yeah.

[00:49:27] And I remember early on before before this system, they call it type one, type two.

[00:49:32] But the Conor Mitowersky way is system one, system two.

[00:49:36] So forgive me if I float between the two.

[00:49:38] I'll forget.

[00:49:40] But you know, early on, I remember there this when I was talking about these

[00:49:44] persuasion models, there's one called the elaboration likelihood model

[00:49:49] by Richard Petty and John Casciopo.

[00:49:53] And it seemed like really complicated, right?

[00:49:55] It has all these like boxes and arrows.

[00:49:57] And it just all boiled down to sometimes you think hard and sometimes you don't.

[00:50:01] Like, it's like all of these theories boiled down to that

[00:50:04] and what it means specifically to think hard and not think hard.

[00:50:07] And and like it took it took such a hold of the field that I remember

[00:50:14] when I was in grad school, like an edited volume came out

[00:50:18] that was called dual process theories in social psychology.

[00:50:22] And I remember

[00:50:26] being like, like even at that point,

[00:50:29] this is like why would you categorize theories by the number of things in the theory?

[00:50:35] Like it was literally like, hey,

[00:50:38] the number two seems to pop up across a whole bunch of different theories.

[00:50:42] Like let's get people together and write about the number two.

[00:50:45] It has like some magic magic hold on people.

[00:50:48] So this article, the mythical number two is as you said,

[00:50:52] trying to argue that it is a bad thing to continue to talk about

[00:50:59] two systems or two types for the very reason that you said, because

[00:51:03] you can have things that are say

[00:51:08] intentional and also automatic, which I think is obvious.

[00:51:13] So so

[00:51:15] you know, you learn to drive when I drive, I am doing so intentionally.

[00:51:20] But it's pretty automatic, like me turning the steering wheel or shifting gears

[00:51:25] or whatever they taste might be.

[00:51:27] It's almost, I don't know.

[00:51:30] You as an outsider, you tell me,

[00:51:32] but it's always seemed to me like so obvious that I don't know why it took hold.

[00:51:37] Like that's just.

[00:51:38] Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's right.

[00:51:40] Like it seems very faith based, like just like a religion where people

[00:51:46] never really think to question some of the totally implausible, almost insane claims

[00:51:53] that from the outside it seems like.

[00:51:56] And from the inside, it's like, no, these are our starting premises.

[00:52:00] We've grown up with these like this is our world.

[00:52:03] Right.

[00:52:04] I think that part of it is a result of conceptual sloppiness on the part of

[00:52:10] social psychologists, because I don't think that it was

[00:52:14] that they were so insensitive to the facts of the matter.

[00:52:18] It's just that they very easily were comfortable

[00:52:22] with this slippery definitions of what automatic means and what unconscious means.

[00:52:28] And in fact, but this isn't cited because it was a paper that nobody read,

[00:52:31] but Paul Blume, Eric Ullman and I once wrote a paper called The Varieties

[00:52:35] of Unconscious Social Cognition where we were trying to point out that like

[00:52:39] oftentimes you are

[00:52:42] you you might be there's different kinds of unconscious and

[00:52:45] that the authors of this paper pointed out to you can be unconscious

[00:52:49] of the influence that caused you to have a preference, say.

[00:52:52] So like, why do I like coffee?

[00:52:56] I don't know.

[00:52:57] For all I know it's because somebody in my youth drank coffee and I liked them

[00:53:03] and the smell like made me kind of like it and that's why I enjoy it now.

[00:53:07] But I know I like coffee.

[00:53:09] That's not unconscious.

[00:53:10] Right.

[00:53:11] Like it's it's not unavailable to me to tell you that I have this preference for coffee.

[00:53:16] But but for some reason,

[00:53:19] we just as social psychologists just started

[00:53:23] lumping these concepts together and not really questioning,

[00:53:26] questioning what the differences were.

[00:53:29] And this is like again, you know, like obviously I'm a fan of philosophy,

[00:53:33] but I think a philosopher would have noticed right away.

[00:53:35] Well,

[00:53:38] like what exactly do you mean by unconscious here?

[00:53:40] Like what do you mean that it's completely inaccessible?

[00:53:45] Do you mean that you are unaware of the things that gave rise to this?

[00:53:49] Like I see.

[00:53:50] I think you're giving philosophy.

[00:53:53] I mean, we might have done that about this particular issue.

[00:53:57] Yeah.

[00:53:57] But when you look at moral philosophy and other kinds of philosophy,

[00:54:02] you find all sorts of similar analogous binaries,

[00:54:07] like just the retributivism and utilitarianism and the philosophy of punishment

[00:54:11] like just seemed like the only two conceivable approaches to punishment

[00:54:15] for for a very long time.

[00:54:18] And in the minds of some people, a lot of people still today.

[00:54:22] And yeah, you know, on the margins, people are like, well, there's this

[00:54:27] kind of retributivism and that kind of retributism.

[00:54:29] But you're still working within that framework or people who came up with

[00:54:33] hybrid theories.

[00:54:34] It's like, yeah, but you're still thinking it has to be part of this and part of that.

[00:54:41] And, you know, that's the that's like the materials that you're working with.

[00:54:46] It's yeah, it's what you're allowed to start with.

[00:54:48] Right.

[00:54:49] You know, my one of my favorite examples of this is really old and it goes

[00:54:54] crosses disciplines and it's cognition and emotion.

[00:54:58] And so yeah, or reason and emotion.

[00:55:01] And so people ever since at least I started studying emotion in grad school,

[00:55:07] it's just everybody just says, well, we know that they are not clear dichotomies.

[00:55:14] But then but then they always proceed to treat them as dichotomies.

[00:55:18] Exactly.

[00:55:20] That's what I mean by shrugging off.

[00:55:22] They're like, acknowledge at some abstract level the totally over

[00:55:27] simplification of their model and then go on to use the model.

[00:55:31] Right.

[00:55:32] As if it's not an oversimplification.

[00:55:34] I actually found this analogy that they give in their conclusion really helpful.

[00:55:38] So they say like there are two types of cars, convertibles and hard tops.

[00:55:44] And that's true.

[00:55:46] No problem there.

[00:55:47] And then we also say there is automatic and manual transmission.

[00:55:51] Yep, that's right.

[00:55:52] Gasoline and electric motors and hybrids, foreign and domestic.

[00:55:57] And then he says the point is that these are all different types of cars.

[00:56:01] We know that it's not just two types of cars overall.

[00:56:05] Convertibles have manual transmission, gasoline engines and are manufactured

[00:56:09] overseas and hard tops that have automatic like but that's right.

[00:56:13] Imagine having a theory of cars that just thought that all of those that

[00:56:17] there were only two types of cars and you know, can you imagine like that?

[00:56:22] That has that four features and this group has that four features.

[00:56:26] Can you imagine like a thousand papers on like convertibles versus

[00:56:30] hard tops and being like, well, you know,

[00:56:32] sometimes we find it different than sometimes we don't.

[00:56:34] And it's like really like, you know,

[00:56:37] sometimes we find that they both can travel at the same speed.

[00:56:42] And who knows why?

[00:56:43] This is a deep mystery for for the future of the study of cars.

[00:56:47] Further research should investigate whether what the model is.

[00:56:52] I mean, we know that it's slightly

[00:56:54] oversimplifying to say that there's only two types of cars.

[00:56:57] But anyway, we ran this experiment where

[00:57:02] we tried to open up a electric car.

[00:57:05] This is science.

[00:57:06] We like cracked open a hard top and we put a cloth thing over it.

[00:57:11] And it still drove the same.

[00:57:13] It was weird. It was very, very weird.

[00:57:15] Like it was a failed experiment.

[00:57:16] But thankfully open science allows us to report not significant results.

[00:57:22] So so what you could say is that, well,

[00:57:25] cognition is a separate thing from emotion.

[00:57:28] It's just that sometimes when we're talking about emotion,

[00:57:33] we're not realizing that cognition is also coming along for the ride.

[00:57:37] OK, fine.

[00:57:38] But you're still embracing the dichotomy.

[00:57:40] You're still saying like these are two things.

[00:57:42] These are two ingredients.

[00:57:43] And it just turns out that when you use one ingredient,

[00:57:46] the other one like either necessarily has to come along or or just

[00:57:50] contingently comes along.

[00:57:52] But but people would say like there is no

[00:57:54] just clear distinction between cognition and emotion.

[00:57:57] And it's like, well, then just fucking stop saying cognition and emotion.

[00:58:00] Like come up with another

[00:58:04] con cog emotion.

[00:58:05] I don't know.

[00:58:06] Like if you really believe that there's no distinction,

[00:58:08] it's hard to overemphasize how much these kinds of dichotomies and

[00:58:14] distinctions are at the roots, the core, the foundation of the research

[00:58:20] that is being done.

[00:58:22] Like so really questioning them is is questioning something pretty foundational.

[00:58:28] You're really bringing the house down if you start to challenge this,

[00:58:33] which is probably another reason why

[00:58:36] you're at the center of your closer to the center of that quinine web

[00:58:41] of belief than people would like because it's the quinine web.

[00:58:45] You know where it's like there's certain things core beliefs

[00:58:49] that if you if you challenge those, it'll destroy all your beliefs,

[00:58:54] your whole beliefs.

[00:58:55] And then there's ones on the fringe where

[00:58:57] if you change your mind about those, it doesn't really affect that much of the

[00:59:01] rest of the web.

[00:59:02] But if you go into the center of the web,

[00:59:04] like the whole web comes apart and you have to like start all over essentially.

[00:59:09] Right.

[00:59:10] Right.

[00:59:10] And so I can't overemphasize how much the Conor

[00:59:14] Tversky and others, the judgment and decision making folks,

[00:59:17] how much that system one system two has influenced not just the field,

[00:59:24] but applied work, the work the government is doing, work that even I do in in

[00:59:30] like consulting and it's that is the core idea there is

[00:59:39] that look, we have a number of heuristics that we use,

[00:59:43] the shortcuts to thinking that that we use.

[00:59:45] And so that's what Conor M.

[00:59:46] Tversky sort of famously introduced or at least popularized a catalog of heuristics,

[00:59:54] which are just mental shortcuts.

[00:59:56] The idea was always that, hey, your your mind, you know, we have a limited set

[01:00:01] of we have a limited amount of cognitive resources.

[01:00:04] We can't think deeply about every single decision we make.

[01:00:08] So perhaps what has evolved or maybe what we've learned are these just

[01:00:14] general rules to help us avoid making having to deliberate every time we make a

[01:00:19] decision. So I think something like a stereotype would be a heuristic.

[01:00:23] All kinds of these heuristics that influence our judgment

[01:00:29] that are automatic and they're quick.

[01:00:30] And the reason that we have them is because they work on average.

[01:00:34] But the key message is that they lead to error.

[01:00:39] So they lead to bias.

[01:00:40] So Conor M. Tversky, their career was built on showing under what conditions you

[01:00:46] could show that people fuck up really badly by relying on these heuristics.

[01:00:50] And so the goal, which is not a bad goal, like say for like public policy,

[01:00:54] why do people do why do people make bad decisions, say about savings

[01:00:59] or about whatever organ donation or whatever?

[01:01:03] It's because they're relying on these heuristics.

[01:01:05] So if only we can get people to use system two, that deliberate

[01:01:09] process, then maybe we can stop people from making errors.

[01:01:12] And that's exactly what say Josh Green believes about consequentialism.

[01:01:16] Right? If only we could get people to stop going with their gut,

[01:01:19] we could get them to realize that consequentialism is the right

[01:01:23] is the right theory to endorse.

[01:01:26] Right. On Josh Green's view, the evidence against

[01:01:30] deontological judgments is the fact that we make them unconsciously and

[01:01:36] automatically or at least that's part that's some of the evidence against them.

[01:01:41] You know, and we've evolved to do it and there's that whole element of it.

[01:01:47] But that's the idea is if this comes from this automatic heuristic

[01:01:53] that we have to save cognitive resources, then that gives us reason

[01:01:58] to doubt the truth of it.

[01:02:00] Right. And interestingly, like what got lost along the way

[01:02:05] was the claim that that the heuristics

[01:02:12] often do lead to true judgments.

[01:02:15] Right. Like, that's why they exist.

[01:02:16] And so so like that there is nothing

[01:02:21] that is inherent in the process of applying a heuristic that that means

[01:02:27] that it's wrong, right? It could be truth tracking.

[01:02:30] Like, you know, you know, it's like you need a different set of evidence

[01:02:34] to show when it's right and when it's wrong.

[01:02:37] And the flip side, which they describe very well in this paper,

[01:02:42] a lot of the time when we're reasoning and

[01:02:44] delivering, we're very prone to make errors because there's all sorts of things

[01:02:49] like, you know, reasoning errors, motivated reasoning,

[01:02:55] all sorts of different ways in which we can convince ourselves

[01:02:58] of a belief that it's true using our reason.

[01:03:03] But we won't think of it that way.

[01:03:05] We'll think of it as we are deliberating using this,

[01:03:10] using our reason, our rational capacities towards the truth when, in fact,

[01:03:16] that's not what we're doing.

[01:03:17] Right. There's somehow it got conflated that the process of deliberation

[01:03:23] is akin or equal to valid reasoning.

[01:03:27] And then that's just not as obviously not the case.

[01:03:31] And like we've talked many times on this podcast about like the stuff

[01:03:34] on motivated reasoning that when when you get people who are especially good

[01:03:39] at reasoning, they're able to convince themselves better that they're that they're

[01:03:45] right. So the bias is actually accentuated, not attenuated.

[01:03:49] So like I'm convinced by the paper that we should abandon this.

[01:03:52] And I think they oversell how much people disagree with this.

[01:03:56] I think that like a lot, a lot of people are really dissatisfied with this

[01:04:01] dichotomy in theory.

[01:04:03] It's just that and this might get us to the next topic.

[01:04:06] It's hard

[01:04:08] to think of things in like 16 cells versus two.

[01:04:16] Yeah. Right.

[01:04:17] Like it just is it's harder.

[01:04:20] And so I don't you know that this has always been my fear about psychology

[01:04:25] that if you really want to understand why, for instance, we make the judgments that

[01:04:29] we do, we're going to need to understand interactions between like 50 different

[01:04:34] variables and at that point, like only a computer will be able to to

[01:04:40] like figure out the underlying principles if there are any of our judgment.

[01:04:45] But I've been living in this world

[01:04:47] of

[01:04:49] experimental social psychology where at best you have like

[01:04:55] what we call a two by two design four cells.

[01:04:57] So you say like I gave people coffee versus didn't and I gave them an easy versus

[01:05:03] a hard test and then I put up a graph and it's really, really easy to grok

[01:05:07] because it's just like, OK, two here, two here, I can see the interaction.

[01:05:12] And that just I just don't think that that can be getting us very far.

[01:05:18] And that corresponds with the graphs, you know, of two axes.

[01:05:22] And like there's all everything like our methods and our tools are designed

[01:05:28] for things to be in twos.

[01:05:32] And that could just not be the way the world works.

[01:05:34] Like I've been looking for people to commiserate about this for a long time now.

[01:05:39] And I'll never forget one of my favorite

[01:05:42] so quotes from from a colleague of mine, Piot Winkleman, who is at UC San Diego.

[01:05:49] I was like 14 years ago, I remember, because my wife at the time was pregnant.

[01:05:54] I'm talking to him about my dissatisfaction with this

[01:05:57] and he's just thinking about it and he's like sort of tapping his cheek

[01:06:02] with his fingers, like looking away.

[01:06:04] And I'm like, oh, he's a smart guy.

[01:06:06] He's going to say like he's going to really school me.

[01:06:08] And he goes, yes, I mean, what if there are five things?

[01:06:14] Like.

[01:06:15] So let's let's let's divide the rest of the discussion into two parts.

[01:06:23] I actually didn't even mean that as a joke.

[01:06:25] So the first is like a possible defense of what people are doing,

[01:06:31] which I think you gestured and we should talk about.

[01:06:33] And I have an idea about that.

[01:06:36] And the second is where do we go from here?

[01:06:39] You know, once we recognize this.

[01:06:41] My quick defense is that when you're doing,

[01:06:45] say you are doing applied work where you're trying to get people to make better

[01:06:50] judgments, so better judgments about how they handle their finances,

[01:06:54] but about how they make choices about about what to purchase.

[01:06:59] Maybe even how they make choices about who to date.

[01:07:03] And you have evidence that people systematically make these errors

[01:07:08] that even they themselves realize are errors and say that you show that if you

[01:07:14] give them the opportunity to really think about it,

[01:07:17] that they can correct those errors, then you might be able.

[01:07:22] You can deploy this theory not as as a deep theory about how the mind works,

[01:07:28] but rather as a surface pragmatic theory about how to correct judgment under

[01:07:34] certain circumstances.

[01:07:35] So if I if I know for a fact, for instance,

[01:07:37] there's a lot of good work on on poverty by a guy named Elder Shafir.

[01:07:42] One of the things that he points out is that

[01:07:45] just being financially burdened and I think we've both been there.

[01:07:50] You're under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure.

[01:07:53] And under those circumstances, so like a lot of say single parents, right?

[01:07:58] One of the reasons that they don't even open a bank account is that they

[01:08:01] don't have time.

[01:08:03] They don't have the ability to set their kids aside to go to the bank to like

[01:08:08] open a talk to somebody about opening up.

[01:08:11] Yeah. Yeah.

[01:08:12] And and even the stress and the pressure of knowing that you're

[01:08:17] you're going to overdraft, like your check isn't going to clear.

[01:08:20] That's like an incredible amount of

[01:08:22] what we would call cognitive load, but which just means there's a lot

[01:08:25] of shit on your mind that you can't handle.

[01:08:27] And so your other decisions might suffer.

[01:08:30] So if if you really want to understand maybe the conditions under which you can

[01:08:34] maximize good decisions, but not all of them, but at least some of them,

[01:08:41] then then using a dichotomy might actually be fine.

[01:08:45] Like it might actually be the case that if so long as you specify

[01:08:48] under under which conditions thinking hard about something might lead to a better

[01:08:52] life, then you can go ahead and try to plan interventions for that.

[01:08:56] But that's that's an applied theory and not one that's discovering new things

[01:09:01] about the mind, it's just helping fix a problem.

[01:09:04] It's more of an engineering problem than it is a psychology like a psychology theory.

[01:09:10] So that doesn't seem to me to be a defense of what's happened,

[01:09:16] given that that's not how this

[01:09:20] dichotomy has operated more a way, a productive way of possibly taking some

[01:09:24] of those ideas and right.

[01:09:29] Like yeah, and I fear I actually fear that the thing that I just said is what a lot

[01:09:35] of people have in mind, but that crept its way into a true descriptive theory about

[01:09:40] the mind. I think that there was some somewhere it actually

[01:09:47] like made people think that this is this is the right way of understanding how

[01:09:52] judgment works in general.

[01:09:54] And I think that that's that's right.

[01:09:57] So it's a it's a real tepid defense.

[01:09:59] It's like only very specifically do I think that maybe it's useful.

[01:10:05] Yeah. So here's my defense, very qualified and I'm not sure if I buy it.

[01:10:10] But so here's a good example of a dichotomy in philosophy that's just

[01:10:15] really weird that so compatibilism and compatibilism about free will

[01:10:20] and moral responsibility is just weird that the camps got divided into those two

[01:10:25] things where libertarians are lumped with skeptics and compatibilists.

[01:10:33] You know, like a compatibilist like Daniel Dennett is lumped with

[01:10:37] Strossen and so that I mean it's just a silly and bizarre way for that

[01:10:43] debate to have been shaped up.

[01:10:45] But maybe the defense is look, we had to start somewhere.

[01:10:49] We had to find a way of talking about this and we can't, you know, start out with

[01:10:55] an like a massive, massively complex topology.

[01:11:00] Then we'll just never go anywhere by starting with this kind of framework that

[01:11:05] allowed us to tease out distinctions and all sorts of ways in which, you know,

[01:11:10] the different theories can be formed and the Strossonian compatibilism is

[01:11:16] different from, you know, Frankfurt's compatibilism or Susan Wolf's kind of

[01:11:21] compatibilism and but the dichotomy as sort of silly and over simplistic

[01:11:29] as it may look to us now was necessary to get us thinking about this in more

[01:11:35] complex ways.

[01:11:36] Right, maybe and it's like, do I reject or accept e-categoricalism?

[01:11:42] I mean, because we were posed with that question, now we can make real progress

[01:11:50] on consciousness.

[01:11:51] I just want to report that you I almost got a spit take out of Tamler.

[01:11:57] Yeah, no, that's interesting because I think like here's what might be going

[01:12:02] on like say we just really have the desire to think in twos

[01:12:08] and then you keep it's just essentially like a growing chart exponentially.

[01:12:13] And I think just sociologically, the problem is that now you have like 64

[01:12:21] different positions, but most people are talking to each other about that.

[01:12:25] The one versus the other.

[01:12:27] And it was really hard to integrate any of this stuff into like a general theory.

[01:12:33] You know what?

[01:12:33] Honestly, if somebody did write an article about the 64 varieties of

[01:12:37] noncognitivism, I'd be like,

[01:12:43] you know what?

[01:12:45] I'll reciprocate the oral sex.

[01:12:47] So that's fine.

[01:12:49] Just I don't want to have to read that paper.

[01:12:51] Either either you will or you won't.

[01:12:58] Yeah, you painted that as a bad cut.

[01:13:00] I mean, you could just lick it once.

[01:13:06] There's all sorts of complex shadings.

[01:13:08] That's right.

[01:13:09] If you use mostly hand and a little bit of mouth, is that oral sex?

[01:13:13] Yeah.

[01:13:14] So I don't think it's a limitation in our in our abilities.

[01:13:20] I think we can represent like just like, you know, they do in this paper.

[01:13:25] You can represent 16 different ways of thinking of the mind.

[01:13:31] I just fear that people will always fall back on on the two.

[01:13:36] They'll say exactly like as you were saying, sort of jokingly.

[01:13:39] Well, yeah, yeah, I know.

[01:13:40] But like for now, let's just think of this.

[01:13:42] Well, this is an intervention paper, though.

[01:13:45] The way they're doing it is to critique.

[01:13:48] It isn't a it is to critique a certain way of viewing the challenge will be

[01:13:54] now trying to take this more complex map and create some better

[01:14:01] framework or a way of thinking about the mind.

[01:14:04] Yeah, right.

[01:14:05] So, you know, I mean, I took it a little bit as a positive claim to say like,

[01:14:08] let's look at these 16.

[01:14:09] Right. They review research that has has sort of separated these processes.

[01:14:14] No, but that's what I mean.

[01:14:15] But it's in a critical way like to show, hey, look,

[01:14:18] you can be intentional and it's not and it's unconscious.

[01:14:25] It can be or whatever the various variations they come up with.

[01:14:29] But that's not part of a larger theory.

[01:14:32] That's to show that your theory is false.

[01:14:35] It's their counter.

[01:14:38] But but it but it's also providing a positive description of how the mind works.

[01:14:42] But you're right.

[01:14:43] It is in an attempt to show that this dual press theory is wrong.

[01:14:47] I like I wanted to say, actually, it reminds me of something that that I didn't

[01:14:52] talk about, which is there's always been in social psychology, a really dominant

[01:14:59] set of theories about attribution where the question is,

[01:15:02] right, Tamela, you behave in a certain way.

[01:15:04] Like what do I infer from your behavior?

[01:15:08] Right. So you bumped into me.

[01:15:10] Are you an asshole or not was right.

[01:15:13] And so the distinction that people have always made is something like

[01:15:21] what was it situational or dispositional?

[01:15:23] Is did it emanate from your disposition or was it just a product of the external

[01:15:29] forces working on on your action, Stanford Prison experiment?

[01:15:34] Exactly. Right.

[01:15:34] Situations or was it the fact that they were brutal people?

[01:15:38] Yeah. And social psychologists just not over this kind of distinction.

[01:15:43] And I remember feeling that like it really broke down when when I was trying to study

[01:15:49] moral judgment and I was studying how people make inferences about emotional actions.

[01:15:55] So say that you

[01:15:58] you donated to charity because you were so overcome with emotion when you saw

[01:16:04] a commercial of starving children that you gave money.

[01:16:08] Like is that a situational force or is it a dispositional force?

[01:16:14] Yeah, like it's pretty clear that it's both.

[01:16:16] Right. It's not it doesn't like an emotion can generate from the kind of person

[01:16:21] that you are like you're the kind of person who is moved by by this.

[01:16:25] And these are distinctions that philosophers have made for a long time.

[01:16:28] And yet social psychology still like like reviewers would be like,

[01:16:33] I feel like it's situational versus dispositional.

[01:16:36] Yeah. That's so I totally agree.

[01:16:39] And I certainly have, you know, I used to teach a section on

[01:16:44] situationism and I was, you know, and again, that thing of now I know obviously

[01:16:51] there's a little bit of both.

[01:16:52] So you do a little hand wavy stuff to to say that you acknowledge that this is

[01:16:57] a spectrum and not, you know, but then you then like immediately forget it.

[01:17:02] Here's another kind of thing.

[01:17:03] And I wanted to ask you about this because I was just commenting on a paper

[01:17:06] that was saying that like the emotion anger has a behavioral.

[01:17:10] That's the action tendency.

[01:17:12] Yes, action tendency.

[01:17:14] The action tendency.

[01:17:16] So anger people want to punish, make suffer, you know, engage in acts of retribution.

[01:17:24] So whenever you're angry, that is.

[01:17:25] Yeah.

[01:17:26] And I just couldn't believe that now I might be wrong and maybe I am wrong.

[01:17:33] I couldn't believe that that psychologists really believed that.

[01:17:36] Like there's so many different kinds of anger and there's a lot of times where

[01:17:40] you're angry and you don't want to hurt the person, you don't want to like them

[01:17:43] to suffer in any way.

[01:17:45] You don't want like even to feel guilty, you just are pissed off.

[01:17:49] And maybe you want something to change or maybe you want them to acknowledge

[01:17:52] something or maybe, you know, you want them to apologize.

[01:17:56] But this idea that there's only one action tendency for something

[01:18:01] like anger seemed crazy to me.

[01:18:03] Yeah.

[01:18:04] And like there, there is there's a lot of that that is is, you know,

[01:18:10] somebody

[01:18:12] spelling out like the prototypical kind of emotional response.

[01:18:17] So like fear makes you want to run away.

[01:18:20] Right.

[01:18:20] But obviously that's also not not always the case.

[01:18:25] And I think that this is so like there is this sort of self

[01:18:30] perpetuating thing where you then bring people into the lab and do an experiment

[01:18:36] where you piss somebody off and you show that they are actually more likely

[01:18:41] to be mean to somebody else.

[01:18:43] And you say this is evidence that the action tendency for anger is to punish.

[01:18:48] But you haven't bothered to test a different kind of anger, right?

[01:18:51] You've been so driven by this view that

[01:18:57] you haven't actually even thought of the variety of ways in which you could test

[01:19:01] this, you know, Lisa Feldman Barrett actually in her she she's really opposed

[01:19:05] to this view of emotion.

[01:19:06] She says even something like fear, we think of a prototypical instance like,

[01:19:12] you know, you're in the fucking savannah and you see a lion, right?

[01:19:16] That's like what we think of as fear.

[01:19:18] And she points out that that there are so many different kinds of fear experiences

[01:19:25] that I think maybe she takes it too far.

[01:19:28] But but because she she argues that maybe maybe this is just pure purely

[01:19:34] arbitrary, that we lump all of them together under a certain word.

[01:19:39] But I do take her point that it masks differences to use only one word, right?

[01:19:44] Just in the same way that calling something system one will mask differences

[01:19:49] because you've lumped it into one word.

[01:19:50] And and like the way that this gets embedded, so let's say you want to find

[01:19:56] out if somebody is angry, but you can't test their anger because.

[01:20:02] So so you'll so you'll maybe give them a questionnaire

[01:20:06] that says that they want to punish somebody and then you'll infer from

[01:20:10] that that they're angry because you've established that link.

[01:20:14] So it's like, well, the two things go together.

[01:20:18] So like if you can show one, that's a sign that they have the other.

[01:20:22] And then now like, you know, like, you know,

[01:20:24] like that's kind of stuff gets done all the time.

[01:20:27] I know I know that you probably will get this reference

[01:20:29] because you don't watch Seinfeld, but there is a hilarious episode where

[01:20:33] Uncle Leo, who is Jerry's Jerry's uncle, burns off his eyebrows.

[01:20:39] And Elaine is trying to sneak into his doctor's appointment because she can't

[01:20:44] get a doctor's appointment and she paints eyebrows on him.

[01:20:47] But the way that she paints them makes it makes him look like he's making an anger

[01:20:51] face. Yeah. And then when the doctor comes in, he's like, Leo, calm down.

[01:20:55] Like he's like, what are you talking about?

[01:20:56] He's like, Leo, why?

[01:20:59] Just reminds me of exactly what you said.

[01:21:01] The presence of a superficial feature does not indicate necessarily that feature.

[01:21:06] That's right.

[01:21:08] Yeah, no, like there's a there's a different way in which sometimes what these

[01:21:15] people who talk about action tendencies are often appraisal theorists.

[01:21:19] So they think that there are some judgments that give rise to an emotion.

[01:21:23] So what it means to be angry is that you feel that somebody has done a blame worthy thing.

[01:21:31] So you feel that they had control over what they did and it was harmful to you.

[01:21:36] And that all that sometimes they blur the line between

[01:21:42] just what anger means, like what what we generally take the sentiment anger to be

[01:21:49] describing and an empirical finding, which is when I anger somebody because

[01:21:55] because you have to make a conceptual definition or else.

[01:21:57] Like how do how do I anger somebody?

[01:21:59] So so yeah, like I

[01:22:03] it is problematic across a number of fields.

[01:22:07] And I'm sure it's true in like history or political theory.

[01:22:11] There's probably a lot of this these kinds of dichotomies that are blurring things.

[01:22:16] And, you know, I think the question is whether it's more helpful than harmful.

[01:22:21] Like I think there are probably times where it's helpful.

[01:22:23] But there are times where it's it's masking important distinctions that

[01:22:29] then just multiply like now you're linking this phenomenon with a different kind of

[01:22:34] phenomenon and, you know, the oversimplifications are multiplying to the point where

[01:22:42] you're just not you're no closer to understanding the thing that you're trying

[01:22:47] to understand than you were before you even started any of this research.

[01:22:53] Right. That's and that's a depressing conclusion.

[01:22:56] But but it might be where we are with some with some things.

[01:23:00] Yeah, yeah.

[01:23:02] So so like why so why are we like this?

[01:23:05] I think there's like a trivial answer to why we dichotomize.

[01:23:11] But then there's maybe more interesting ones like it's easy.

[01:23:15] Like that's the the simple the simplest answer is that that it's just very,

[01:23:19] very easy to think about two thing.

[01:23:23] And and maybe there's a more interesting

[01:23:27] there's an interesting body of research about numeracy

[01:23:31] that you might be familiar with.

[01:23:32] But the idea is that

[01:23:35] both some human cultures,

[01:23:40] early at least early human cultures as well, and even infants and some animals

[01:23:45] that they their their ability to track numbers is very limited.

[01:23:50] That is they don't they don't have numbers.

[01:23:52] It took human beings a long time to invent like, you know, integers.

[01:23:58] But people are able to track one, two and many.

[01:24:04] So in some cases, one, two, three and many.

[01:24:07] And and that doesn't seem to require

[01:24:11] anything like a complex numerical system.

[01:24:14] That's just sort of like our brains are capable of that without any without any

[01:24:19] real training. And so it makes sense that

[01:24:23] that we would favor the numbers two and three, you know, they pop up all over the place.

[01:24:30] Like this is something deeply embedded in us.

[01:24:34] I think the other reason is that often many of the important decisions we would

[01:24:39] have made are dichotomous.

[01:24:41] So like you have to decide whether or not to do something.

[01:24:44] Right. And so like take good and bad.

[01:24:48] I was talking recently to Molly Crockett.

[01:24:51] She came and give a talk here and she was talking about

[01:24:54] inferences, moral inferences about people and some of the work that I did with her too.

[01:24:59] Like we tend to categorize people as good or bad.

[01:25:02] And we do it really easily and we do it a lot.

[01:25:06] And the question I was asking her is like, it's weird.

[01:25:10] We both study this and we both know that people do this.

[01:25:12] But like it's also obviously true that nobody is either good like all good

[01:25:17] or all bad, like there's no such thing as just a true villain or not.

[01:25:22] And we were talking about, you know,

[01:25:24] if if the decision really is do I want to cooperate with you?

[01:25:32] Like I have to boil it down to a dichotomous decision, either yes or no.

[01:25:37] And so categorizing people into yeses and noes

[01:25:41] might actually be a very, very efficient way of maintaining sort of this

[01:25:47] your ability to to gather resources from other people.

[01:25:52] Because you do have to make decisions, otherwise you'd be paralyzed.

[01:25:55] Yeah, the analogy that I that I really like, I think I've brought this up before.

[01:26:00] There's a website, I think called Umbrella or not.

[01:26:04] Have I brought this up before?

[01:26:06] Yes, many, many times.

[01:26:08] I probably edited it out every single time, every single time.

[01:26:11] But in this case, don't edit it out because it is an exactly

[01:26:15] right kind of analogy for why dichotomous reasoning is important,

[01:26:20] because it's hard to know what it means

[01:26:24] when it says 35 percent chance of rain or 70 percent chance of rain.

[01:26:27] All I want to know is like, do I take an umbrella or not?

[01:26:31] That's like this is the decision that I have to make.

[01:26:34] It's very hard for human beings to

[01:26:37] process that well, on these kind of days, 70 percent of the time it rained.

[01:26:42] Like, what do I care?

[01:26:43] Just tell me whether or not to wear a fucking raincoat.

[01:26:48] And I think that.

[01:26:50] I've probably said this too, but maybe I added this out too.

[01:26:54] But this is the thing that drives Nate Silver crazy.

[01:26:57] Like when he says like Hillary had a 70 percent chance of winning or

[01:27:03] like people just took that as 100 percent chance.

[01:27:07] And so there was like, you got it wrong.

[01:27:09] It's like, no, I didn't like three out of ten times.

[01:27:12] This is what would happen.

[01:27:14] Of course, Nate Silver, you're just backing off for your claim.

[01:27:17] It's funny. It's funny.

[01:27:18] We are we don't understand it.

[01:27:20] And I sometimes don't.

[01:27:21] I don't understand what it means

[01:27:23] if somebody a 30 percent chance of winning in such a one time event.

[01:27:28] Yeah, you know, it's too hard.

[01:27:30] It's like it's actually kind of meaningless.

[01:27:32] Like what it means is over time.

[01:27:35] Exactly. What it means is over time.

[01:27:37] And for a lot of things, especially those things that are just a single event,

[01:27:42] it's hard to then sort of figure out.

[01:27:44] That's why it's good to have rules like when you're playing 21 Blackjack.

[01:27:49] Right? You know that it's probabilistic.

[01:27:51] You know that if you have a 16, like you may or may not win.

[01:27:55] But like to have a rule that keeps you in check so that over time you do better.

[01:28:00] Like the rule is a dichotomous one.

[01:28:03] It's like and people treat it almost as just like absolute truth.

[01:28:07] Like no, you never hit on whatever 17 or something.

[01:28:10] Yeah.

[01:28:12] So it is important for that.

[01:28:15] And then it really probably just depends on the case whether it does more harm than

[01:28:19] good to divide things up in a certain way.

[01:28:23] Like I think in the punishment debate,

[01:28:24] it's probably done more harm than good that it immediately got divided into

[01:28:30] these two kinds of approaches to the expense of all sorts of other

[01:28:36] possible ways and also, you know, in ways that are are masking how criminal justice

[01:28:44] really works and like what is actually going on, which has nothing to do with

[01:28:49] this simple dichotomy of are we pushing you in a retributive way or a utilitarian way?

[01:28:54] Right.

[01:28:54] And so but people think of punishment that way and that's been really harmful.

[01:28:59] But in other cases, maybe it's been helpful first step to divide things up

[01:29:05] pretty neatly, maybe compatibilism and compatibilism was like this where it's

[01:29:10] actually it was a necessary way to try to wrap our heads around an immensely complex

[01:29:16] problem to just start out with something and then with that framework.

[01:29:22] Yeah.

[01:29:22] Start to tease out the complexities.

[01:29:24] I mean, your field is like that.

[01:29:26] Right.

[01:29:27] The way the way that like the analogy that comes to my head is like suppose

[01:29:31] that you have like a big pile of like a bunch of different things,

[01:29:34] say Legos and you want to organize them.

[01:29:37] It's not unreasonable to start with like, OK, I'm going to just at least my first

[01:29:41] pass is going to separate like the big blocks from the little ones.

[01:29:44] Right.

[01:29:45] Like and so you start there so that you can then refine because that actually

[01:29:49] might save you time.

[01:29:50] If you have to make if you have to make a decision about whether this is one

[01:29:55] of eight things like that might actually take you a longer time than if you

[01:30:00] say to then to then to then to.

[01:30:02] Right.

[01:30:03] But I agree with you that it stifles innovation and creativity

[01:30:07] to rely on just dichotomous categories because there is always the possibility

[01:30:11] you bring a punishment.

[01:30:13] But, you know, I think in a lot of cases,

[01:30:16] it just leads people to ignore what might be staring them in the face,

[01:30:21] which is that there is a richness to to the world or to the conceptual world

[01:30:26] that is being completely ignored because of reliance on these categories.

[01:30:32] Yeah, I mean, so like that analogy, the cars, if for some reason people had

[01:30:38] grouped two types of cars convertible man, you know, the ones that are

[01:30:42] convertible and manual and American and

[01:30:48] gasoline versus electric, foreign and whatever,

[01:30:52] that wouldn't have been helpful at all.

[01:30:55] Like that would have been any further research on cars and classifying cars

[01:31:02] and would have just been completely corrupted by that just arbitrary

[01:31:08] way of grouping them.

[01:31:11] And yet, you know, so like that really would have been a just

[01:31:16] something that distorted your understanding of cars, not something that was

[01:31:21] the first step towards understanding cars better.

[01:31:24] Right, it's hard to know when it's been,

[01:31:27] when it's an arbitrary classification unless you do a little bit more digging

[01:31:31] to find like, is there anything that is generating this dichotomy that I brought up?

[01:31:37] Like, oh, this has a this is a gasoline car so we can infer from that

[01:31:41] that it's also a hard top car.

[01:31:44] And then we run this experiment about how hard top cars will just say

[01:31:49] this is true of gasoline cars, it would just be like it would and then that now

[01:31:54] that's your established finding.

[01:31:56] Gasoline cars have this feature because you're the hard top that they ran on as

[01:32:01] that feature and you make a lot of work so it makes it seem like you're progressing.

[01:32:05] I think this is what's happened in dual process theories of the human mind.

[01:32:08] Like you you catalog all this work that you've been doing.

[01:32:12] You're like, no, like, you know, like we're moving beyond just these two,

[01:32:15] but like we're making progress.

[01:32:17] Don't worry.

[01:32:18] And it's like, no, you could actually

[01:32:21] be completely fucking it up.

[01:32:22] Yeah, that's what I mean.

[01:32:23] Like this I guess it's whether it's at the core of the web or at the fringes.

[01:32:28] Like it could be at the core with dual process stuff.

[01:32:32] And if it's that then this whole

[01:32:35] edifice comes tumbling down of results and findings and because they've been

[01:32:41] relying on that dichotomy right in all their experiments.

[01:32:45] And then confirmation bias kicks in, you know, and it's really hard to discard

[01:32:51] to discard that feature of the theory.

[01:32:53] The last thing I was going to say is that like I think that thinking in dichotomies

[01:32:58] at some point in the history of humanity just was much like it was fine for a lot

[01:33:04] of things that could just be that the world was such that dichotomous decisions

[01:33:09] dominated and so we weren't making dumb mistakes all the time.

[01:33:14] But now like the world is so complex and there's so many things.

[01:33:18] That are actually, you know, they're multiple.

[01:33:22] Everything has multiple attributes, a lot of them which are continuous.

[01:33:27] And it's just really hard to come up with with like how to evaluate this stuff.

[01:33:33] This is why like the websites like the wire cutter have you ever been on the wire cutter?

[01:33:37] No, like all it if you basically if you want to know like what the best

[01:33:43] air purifier is, it just tells you.

[01:33:45] It just says buy this one, right?

[01:33:47] It doesn't like list all of them and give them ratings because that's like what?

[01:33:50] Yeah, it's a great idea.

[01:33:52] That's perfect. Yeah.

[01:33:54] Good. Yeah, I need I'm definitely going to go to that.

[01:33:57] Yeah, I mean there's a couple.

[01:34:00] So it could just be that we have these blinkered lenses on now and we're too

[01:34:06] deep in to do anything about it.

[01:34:09] You know, we could start being like

[01:34:11] contians and start to think, no, this is our conceptual way of understanding.

[01:34:16] Like this is our conceptual framework that

[01:34:19] and so it's transcendentally true of like because these are our categories or

[01:34:25] something like but in terms of really understanding it the way we like to think

[01:34:32] it could literally be that that's not like we're not capable of at this point

[01:34:39] fixing this.

[01:34:40] This is like the truth will come from

[01:34:43] from machines and algorithms and we'll just be slaves to the truth that they're

[01:34:49] tracking, like they'll be right more and more often than not.

[01:34:52] Like now we're relying on models to predict

[01:34:55] that way do way, way better than human judgment.

[01:35:00] And this is like for a conversation for another time.

[01:35:03] But when we get back to the question of justice and punishment and the legal

[01:35:06] system and we talk about the role of machines in in actually making decisions,

[01:35:13] say about parole, I wonder if you'll be more open to to an algorithm that can

[01:35:21] take into account a lot more information to generate an optimal judgment.

[01:35:27] Well, we will have to see.

[01:35:31] All right, we've been going on way too long.

[01:35:33] So join us next time on Very Bad with it.

Episode 158: False Dichotomies and Oral Reciprocity