Episode 177: Pure Linguistic Chauvinism

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] You're teaching us to lie! All of that! But it's not! It's the nurturing! The Queen in Oz has spoken! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man! I'm a very good man. Good man.

[00:00:46] And we're no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man! Anybody can have a brain? You're a very bad man! I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:16] Dave, apparently the social science menarche literature has some fundamental flaws. Did you even know there was a social science menarche literature? Are you talking about menarche? On set of menstruation? Is that how it's pronounced? Is there a replication crisis in the literature on periods?

[00:01:44] Is it all just one big question mark? I don't know the details. This is from Twitter. But apparently there's sampling errors. Not taking into account certain ages. I don't know the deal. So it's menarche? That's my understanding, but now you have me doubting.

[00:02:08] The last time I heard that word was spoken out loud was in my adolescent development class. I took in college. I think a lot of guys have memories of reading that book and liking it a lot.

[00:02:37] It's very strange, but it made me too interested according to my daughter when she would get her period back when that happened. Weirdly, she didn't want that to be a part of our relationship. I have obsessively focused on her period. Have you gotten it yet?

[00:02:58] You probably really want to have it. You're probably jealous of your friends. It's like, no, not at all actually. Nobody feels that way. I feel like I was interested in it because we were in a religious school and they kind of didn't...

[00:03:16] They didn't forbid us from reading it, but they had the boys book and the girls book. I was like, well, wait, I'm not supposed to read the girls book? I'm going to fucking read the girls book. The reason I think that it goes beyond just you, me...

[00:03:30] It was in Deadpool. There was a reference to it in Deadpool, you remember? South Park has had a couple references to it in their episodes. I don't know, maybe it's just our generation, the Karens. So well, I was not aware of the controversies in the literature.

[00:03:50] I wonder if it's just about estimating the age. I don't know if this is what's at question, but there was this thing called a secular trend in the onset of menstruation

[00:04:03] that over time it appears as if girls are getting it earlier and earlier for a variety of reasons. Maybe that's all fake. I think you're right. I'm looking at the... That's monarchy?

[00:04:18] That's so funny because I can't tell the story, but it involves me yelling out this word in an inappropriate time. In an inappropriate time. But it was just... But it's a proper French accent. Rechercher le menarché. Why would it be monarchy? It's not it. It's probably Greek.

[00:04:45] I guess, yeah. I'm just surprised there is a whole social science literature on it, which is like... I would think it would be a medical thing and it's really not something that social science would be involved in. This is at the expense of research on wet dreams.

[00:05:05] It's like when's the last time you read a paper on wet dreams? Exactly. It's the guys, the war against boys. Christina Hoffsummer's. By the way, she'll be joining me for our Thanksgiving. For your annual Thanksgiving? Yeah, next episode. Exciting. I look forward to stopping it halfway through.

[00:05:27] She'll be trying to whip up hysteria about the latest crisis at Oberlin. Alright, so what are we talking about? Today. Oh, we have a good paper to talk about by Alan Fisk called... This was brought to my attention at first by Neuroskeptic but then you suggested it.

[00:05:51] Because of Neuroskeptic as well? Coming through with some serious articles. The lexical fallacy in emotion research mistaking vernacular words for psychological entities. This year, right? Psych Review? Yeah, brand new Psych Review paper. By Alan Fisk. What do you think about this?

[00:06:13] He might be the most underrated researcher right now. You know, I love him so I'm very happy to say great things about him. I don't know him personally. I don't know how much... He's an anthropologist so I don't know...

[00:06:31] In my mind he's like a huge deal but maybe for all I know in anthropology he's like this red-headed stepchild who deals with social psychologists all the time. His sister is a social psychologist as well. Is that Susan Fisk? It seems like everybody's named Fisk.

[00:06:46] It's like Susan Fisk, Alan Fisk, Donald Fisk. Is Donald Fisk related to them? I'm embarrassed to not know. Like I suspect that it's their dad but... They're like the Kennedys of social sciences. Yeah, yeah, he's their father. Wow.

[00:07:04] I thought Joe Henrich had this title for a long time but now he seems... Everybody loves Joe Henrich, everybody knows about him. Yeah and there's a guy named Dan Fessler who also does great work from an anthropological tradition.

[00:07:18] But Alan Fisk, his relational model stuff and then he wrote the book on violence with Tage. Right. So I don't know, I hope he gets all the credit he deserves.

[00:07:28] We've talked about that paper and I talked about it in the Very Bad Wizard book with him and Tage. I think that stuff is awesome but I think it gets totally overlooked in favor of the Moral Foundations theory. Yeah. But...

[00:07:45] And to be honest I think that this, the relational model is on much firmer ground. Like you know... You're must Jesse Graham. I know that they're necessarily in conflict but I think that...

[00:08:01] Yeah and we'll get into, I think one of the reasons that he should be so well respected is just the sheer, the scope of data that he is bringing to the other social sciences.

[00:08:14] Honestly it's hard for us to have somebody from anthropology bridge the gaps between psychology and anthropology. It is very different cultures and I think he's done more in that way than most people. Maybe Rick Schwader. Go ahead, just announce your dog on the podcast.

[00:08:32] People love to know that it's... This is my fucking dog. There's a UPS truck outside right now that's just kind of crawling along the street trying to mess up this podcast. It's like you might as well just take out a leaf blower right now.

[00:08:45] I think the two psychologists for beers have sent the UPS truck to sabotage our numbers. They did, they're just sending packages. Not even to me but just to my neighbors. Charlie shut the fuck up! No. That was a little like... No, fuck you. Soft testing. Yeah.

[00:09:11] For those listening still, Tamler is having a heart attack in front of us. This is. This probably will be this or like when I look and see my daughter on her phone. Like again, just suddenly grabbed my heart. You should train your daughter. You should.

[00:09:30] Oh yeah, you want to give a dog update before we get to our opening segment? I have a brand new puppy. I actually calculated he's barely 11 weeks old and we named him Ozzymandias. Actually, like after at least three different references.

[00:09:43] So I am under slept and I am currently hating puppies because they're fucking handful. Why do people include like when they say rainbows and puppies? Puppies aren't all that great unless you're just looking at them on a video.

[00:09:58] They're so cute, but yeah, they're a bit of a handful. You're also like a germ freak. Yeah dude. And also I can't wait till we cut off his balls. Yeah. You could just do it right now like germ freak.

[00:10:15] So for our yeah, for our intro segment I take it we're going to talk about two main things. The impeachment hearings and the democratic debates. Yeah, exactly. This is your dream opening. Where do you want to start? There was a funny tweet I saw.

[00:10:31] It's like Sondland's testimony was devastating according to many faculty members I've spoken to. Scott Shapiro, that's his name on Twitter. It was just like nobody's paying attention to this stuff. But I had about five different faculty come up and said, Holy shit, you should have seen the hearings.

[00:10:52] He's a goner for sure now. This is going to do it. Sick burns. Trump is out of here. The Republicans can't support him anymore. Even the Republicans. They'll finally have to admit. Yeah, we were wrong the whole time. You can have Merrick Garland on the court.

[00:11:14] And then the democratic debates. Yeah, what did you think of Cory Booker's performance last night? Fascinating. Which one is he? The black guy? Yeah, good. And I know Andrew Yang is the Asian one. And I know Elizabeth Warren is the woman one. The Native American candidate. Your favorite.

[00:11:42] She is actually my favorite, although I'm a little cooler than I was before. In any case, we're not going to really talk about that, right? No. No, although we pray... But the way that this episode has gone, we might as well. At this point, yeah.

[00:11:59] I don't know if we should mention that you... Didn't you send like four dick pics to Amy Klobuchar? Is that what we're going to talk about? Is that my brother? I don't know who Amy Klobuchar is, so I'm just going to yes and your reference.

[00:12:13] I'm not sure that's yes anding to say I don't know who that is. She sent them back. Returned to sender. It's actually my brother. He likes her. He has a weird attraction to her. Anyway, so let's talk about our real opening segment, which was a shower idea.

[00:12:36] It was an idea I came up with in the shower because we didn't like our opening segment ideas. It also sounds like an idea that I would have on Adderall. So maybe a shower Adderall.

[00:12:48] The idea was to connect the various social political factions in our current culture with the factions in our field. So to find the analogs, the equivalent for me and in philosophy, you in psychology. And I texted it to you. You said, oh yeah, that'll be great.

[00:13:13] I said it could be fun. And then I started trying. This required me to Wikipedia various things like quote political factions. Unquote. Yeah, you're really not qualified for this exactly. But should we get going with it? Let's get going. You want to go first? Sure.

[00:13:33] Let me let me start by saying that there the areas in psychology are super nebulous. So just be bare with me.

[00:13:45] But I think the clear, the only one in fact, one that you mentioned in your text to me that has to be characterized in some manner or another is not an area.

[00:13:55] It's just a group of people and that group of people are the open science proponents of the world. And the Twitter heavy correctors of all wrong.

[00:14:05] The people who like to talk about p hacking, not being a moral flaw, but nonetheless treated as a moral flaw every time they accuse somebody. These these are clearly the antifas of my field. Oh, wow. Now you're by this you mean like the Sanjay, Sirvastava.

[00:14:29] Sanjay, the methodological terrorist number one. I mean, Daniel Lakin's Daniel Lake and Samina's year. You're a Simon's and all the people that you've taken a following. And this is why they're antifa.

[00:14:44] They are antifa because the establishment loves to point to them as as people who have lost their way in the quest for something good. They have become the very thing that they might hate and maybe not the very thing they might hate.

[00:15:04] But but in this case, they clearly have lofty goals and then they spend their time making other people feel really bad about the errors that they may or may not have made in all of my pre 2002 papers. I mean, in all of their pre.

[00:15:20] I think antifa is a little strong like I am being hyperbolic. Very much on purpose because I love all the people that I just mentioned. I would give them a different label. See, I was considering going all the way right, but they're not that way.

[00:15:36] They're they're they're disruptors within a field of people who already might have considered themselves good scientists and they are they're calling us to to attention with the occasional Molotov cocktail. Yeah, although they were working within the paradigm.

[00:15:55] That's how that's the reason I antifa is not working from within a paradigm and Tifa is they're trying to destroy the paradigm. They're not what would you have gone with for them? I actually this idea came up.

[00:16:09] I was talking with one of yoels and Mickey's guests, Jessica Flake, and she was saying how yoel is kind of woke about some of the methodological problems in psychology.

[00:16:22] And I was like, yeah, there's woke, but there's there's also like, I think he's more like a white feminist like he's still working from within the establishment still bound by a lot of the same premises, a lot of the same privilege.

[00:16:37] So yeah, actually, I might as well just say who my white feminists are because I think it's similar. It's the experimental philosophers, right?

[00:16:44] They kind of pose as these rebels and Mavericks challenging the establishment, but at least more than they like to admit they are still working within the same kind of boundaries of what's possible.

[00:17:00] And this is unfair, but they're they're doing their part to prop up the status quo, even as they seem to be challenging it by accepting the terms of the debate by accepting the terms of say of the knowledge debate and then checking to see if you know,

[00:17:17] cross culturally people have the same intuitions or whatever.

[00:17:21] Right, right. They're like, well, you know, one outstanding question that has not yet been answered is what the ontological status of tables is since time immemorial philosophers have been talking about this, but nobody's bothered to actually ask members members of the Trobriander tribe,

[00:17:39] what what they thought about the ontological so we asked them three items. What is the ontological status of tables?

[00:17:47] And whereas they're not questioning whether we should be asking what the ontological status of tables is in the first place or whether, you know, what the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge are and all of that. So they are the white feminists. And so is yoel.

[00:18:07] By the way, I am almost saddened that you had to caveat with this is unfair. This is profoundly unfair. This is an intro segment. This is not even close to to fucking caveats for this. No, I am directly insulting people that I respect deeply.

[00:18:27] Speaking of people I respect deeply and people who made it in both categories. I am now you may not know this, but I am friends with some personality psychologists. And Sanjay has made it into two to two lists of mine now the personality psychologists.

[00:18:44] This is actually much more kind characterization than my Antifa comments. Personality psychologists are like Gen Xers. They've been around and they've seen right.

[00:18:59] They had to watch all the controversy happen about personality psychology back in the 60s when it was taken to be damning criticisms from social psychologists who, you know, the newcomers who said personality psychology is full of shit. The power of the situation. They just lurked.

[00:19:21] They just took a step back into the background, worked their asses off, developed new tools, new methodologies. They basically they're the Larry and the Sergey. They built Google and they're the Nirvana. They changed the face of music.

[00:19:37] They have given us a whole bunch of wonderful things and now they have to sit and watch like as social psychologists fight with the methodological terrorists and they can just say like, well, fine, you guys go at it. We've solved a lot of these problems already.

[00:19:53] So so they're the lurkers. They're not there. They they smirk as we fight over p-hacking. Yeah, although they might not smirk after our second segment on the lexical fallacy. But I guess we'll see. That's just that's just what ISTJ would say. No, just kidding. What is ISTJ?

[00:20:15] I don't know. It's my Myers-Briggs typology. Right. All right. Well, I haven't my neoliberal establishment. You know, these are like the centrists like Biden and Hillary and your girl, Clay Klobuchar and and also like never Trumpers, you know, the David Frums.

[00:20:41] They they've been in charge for a long time. They're a little complacent, but they still have way more power and sway than we like to think. And they are in my field the analytic, the armchair analytic philosophers.

[00:20:56] You know, they still kind of like we can all talk especially online about all the different ways in which philosophy is getting challenged. But they still have a lot more power than you would think from blogs and Twitter and philosophy Twitter to the extent that that's a thing.

[00:21:11] You know, maybe they're not as active on social media, but they still run a lot of they have more power than anybody else. It's true. They're like the they're like the Mr. Robot opening the doors to the boardroom and everybody's looking at you.

[00:21:24] They're going to make the decisions about whether or not you have a career. Exactly. They don't need to they don't need to show you how much power they have. They just do have it. And you can have a five nine.

[00:21:35] You can have like a big hack or whatever. They're still going to end up on top, you know, there's no beating them. Yeah.

[00:21:47] This is a little too close to home because I don't know at what point this is a metaphor anymore, but social psychologists are very much the SJWs of the world.

[00:21:56] I mean, they they are progressive to the point where progressive is a goal rather than a means to an end. Social psychologists will jump to remind everybody the deep deeply important values of inclusion and the proper pronunciation of ethnic names.

[00:22:21] They will ask you your gender identity, then ask you again to just make sure you're comfortable with the one you expressed the first time. They'll have like he him in their Twitter profiles. They have even a Twitter profile.

[00:22:33] They they are very much desiring to bring a bring about deep changes to the structures of society. One linguistic correction at a time. So like they whine a lot.

[00:22:56] Like they're constantly whining about how hard their life is and their and the job is and and they get mad at at Mickey and Zlat if he says I actually like my job. That's because you don't understand where they're coming from. That's clear.

[00:23:13] From such a place of privilege and philosophy that I couldn't understand what a social psychologist has to go through. That is true. We do get jobs at like three times the rate.

[00:23:26] Yeah, no, that's that's it's true that it's hard to know where one begins in the other ends. All right, so for the technocrats. These are people and their policy wonks, you know, and they tend to be Silicon Valley people.

[00:23:42] They have all these high tech solutions for societal problems. I have as their analog, like the kind of hardcore philosophy of science people, not the big broad question philosophy of science people that I read and enjoy.

[00:23:59] But these are people who are they're deep into the weeds, you know, it's philosophers of biology of cognitive science, computer science. And like so they're the writing there is dense and it's complex and it's steeped in all sorts of terminology.

[00:24:19] And it's very hard to know with them if they're doing really good work with really cool ideas or if they're full of shit. And I imagine it's some like element of both in that in that group, but it's it's like the technocrats, you know, like a few.

[00:24:37] I don't know. Like I can't put in the effort of trying to figure out like to what extent they're on to something or not. But I have a little bit of an aversion to them. It's probably just my bias and not anything grounded in something real.

[00:24:53] Well, it's hard to know you know we've talked about like it's hard when when we're incapable of evaluating papers in our own field that can be frustrating. But like I think that your your description is very much like a certain kind of cognitive psychologist.

[00:25:05] You mentioned kind of science. Like there are people who plug away at doing say like, you know, computational models of neural networks and I don't know if they're right or not. I have no fucking idea. And like they've they've machine learning.

[00:25:20] Yeah, or they're studying some, you know, some super specific aspect of memory or attentional processing. And I understand that much and it's interesting, but the world never took interest. So they don't but they don't care.

[00:25:35] They're just plugging away at their research that they're not Malcolm Gladwell isn't writing about them. No, right. But they've never wanted to be written about in that way like some people.

[00:25:45] No, they're just happy going to their conferences usually somewhere and like some awesome place in Eastern Europe or Germany. They can understand each other presumably. And so good for all of them. I have no they're probably secretly making more progress than will ever. Exactly.

[00:26:02] All right, my my next one possibly my last one is the the cognitive neuroscientists and social neuroscientists in my field. They're the chads and stasis of my field. They are widely viewed as the cool ones.

[00:26:23] They get to study the brain and every psychologist, whenever they're pressed for for defending their their field as a science, they can just quickly point to a brain.

[00:26:36] But they are the chads and stasis in the sense that while everybody understands that they get all the attention and that people people think of them as awesome and true scientists, most psychologists view them with deep suspicion and resentment.

[00:26:55] So while while being at the same time envious of the the attention and the grant funds that that are given to these chads and stasis neuroscientists, they secretly think that it's a mistake to even be approaching the field through the lens of a neuroscientist because behind closed doors.

[00:27:16] They'll just complain that chads and stasis are stupid. So OK, just to get clear on who this is. I like that a lot. I like that analogy. Is this like the Josh Greens, the Rebecca Saxes? Exactly.

[00:27:31] There's a whole because they're cognitive neuroscientists who might fit more into your technocrat mold and then there is the ones who who emerge sort of it that integrated social psychology with kind of neuroscience.

[00:27:45] And so they're studying, you know, like, did you know that when that your self esteem is located in your left, you know, orbitofrunal cortex? Right. Like because we did an fMRI. So for a long time, they were getting all the money and all the attention.

[00:27:58] And then and then for a long time people were were secretly like they were hiring them and they were like lauding them as the savior of our science and then secretly behind their back resenting them and hoping that their funding would drive.

[00:28:14] I don't know who that makes the rest of us in cells. Yeah, no, but that's actually such a good analogy. I don't know if we have chads and stasis. I don't think philosophy because they're if we did. Yeah, I don't know.

[00:28:32] Like I think we used to before all the chads got accused. Let's let's be honest. You never had stasis. You had chads. We've definitely never had stasis. And without stasis, maybe it's hard to have chads too. I don't know. I have a couple other quick ones.

[00:28:50] Do you have any more? You know, I was trying to characterize evolutionary psychologists at least of a certain ilk because there are certainly a lot of evolution psychologists who just look at say animal evolution in that.

[00:29:01] But but the kind that we know that we're talking about like the kind who who who. I think this is obvious. What do you have for them? I don't know. I, you know, I put them.

[00:29:13] I was going to say they're in the they're the alt right, but that's just on the nose. This is no, I think they're more like the Ben Shapiro Dave Rubin. That's why I met my that's why I met by all right. I think they're all right.

[00:29:28] They you don't think or maybe Sam Harris and certain other intellectual dark web. Yeah, they're intellectual dark web. Exactly. They're IDW people. That's right. Yeah. So secret alt right people. Hi Christina.

[00:29:44] So they're like they're like Scooby-Doo villains at some point they will reveal that they are all right when their emails, you know, decrying, decrying the. I mean, I think that really like I think that might be the most accurate one evolutionary psychologists are the IDWs.

[00:30:01] You know, like because they also kind of frames their views as brave like it. Right, right. And they are doing the Lord's work by telling everybody how polyamory is perfectly reasonable. Yeah.

[00:30:16] So I have like there's this kind of philosopher like the Notre Dame has a lot of these that are they're not exactly establishment because they're working on philosophy and they're still just.

[00:30:30] Just focused on philosophy that's kind of outdated like old metaphysics debates, philosophy of language debates that are kind of old news. But there's like if you talk to one of them, it'll be like you're in a time machine traveled back to like the 70s. It's like J.

[00:30:51] It's like J store stopped updating for them. Exactly. They're like the neocons for me of philosophy because they still have some power, but kind of the debate has moved on and even the establishment has kind of moved on. Right.

[00:31:11] Well, I found this whole conversation deeply offensive on many, many levels as well almost everybody who listens to it is well, especially since I am actually a social psychologist. I've damned myself for I don't know who what I am.

[00:31:25] Well, you are you're weirdly secret people may not know this but you're also a weirdly secret. You have weirdly secret SJW concerns and weirdly secret continental philosophy affinities. Affinities. Yeah, for sure. Is it that secret? No. But you know maybe first time listeners. All right.

[00:31:52] We'll be back to talk about if there are any listeners left, we have not burned every single bridge. We either burned a bridge or we profoundly bored people who know nothing of the stereotypes that we're discussing. Exactly. This is nothing for no people.

[00:32:10] All right, we'll be right back. Okay, let's take a quick break to talk about give well.

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[00:35:05] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the very predictable time in the episode where we tell everybody how thankful we are, especially now that Thanksgiving is coming up, because we're extra grateful because it's official.

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[00:37:21] Like Dave said, there's a whole holiday just created to honor how grateful we are to you for what you do and for the support that you give.

[00:37:33] And we try to reciprocate a little bit as much as we can with some bonus material on our Patreon page for our Patreon supporters. Dave, you just did one. You said you were going to do it and I didn't know that it was going to happen that quickly.

[00:37:51] It was very quick. It was the most efficient recording I've ever had because Barry Lamb is a professional. More efficient than this recording? Slightly. Yeah, so Barry Lamb and I talked about an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation.

[00:38:05] Barry Lamb is the host, actually the producer of Hi-Fi Nation, a philosophy podcast that's now on Slate's network that is way, way, way better produced than anything I could ever do. But we talked about one of our favorite Star Trek episodes.

[00:38:23] Ship in a Bottle has to do with transport or with holodex and simulations and the nature of consciousness and reality. Super fun. And we're going to do more probably. All right, good. Wow.

[00:38:37] So I want at least one Twitter user said it was her favorite bonus episode ever, which I take deep offense to and I think Jesse Graham and Natalia Washington should take offense to it as well given the six hours of Twin Peaks bonus material.

[00:38:56] She was definitely trying to hurt you. Don't take it personally. Because she was just trying to hurt me. That's right. But we appreciate that. We also have one once you get back from Dubai, is that where you're going? Qatar. Qatar. Menarsh. Once we get back from Menarsh.

[00:39:15] No, Menarsh, I can't believe it. You're going to watch The Remainder of Dark, right? While you're there and on the plane. On the plane. And then we're going to do a bonus episode as soon as you get back. In all German with subtitles. Excited.

[00:39:30] I follow through the very bad Wizards account because I don't have my own Instagram account. I follow the showrunner and creator of Dark. This was a tip from my daughter. And he posts pictures of the third season, which is going to be released I think in June.

[00:39:47] And it was a wrap for Mikkel today. When is Mikkel? And we've been really enjoying Mr. Robot as well. We're not going to do a Patreon yet on Mr. Robot, but I think I have to talk to Tamler about it.

[00:40:05] So we figured we might as well record it. So if you stick around after the theme music, we're going to have a little mini, mini Mr. Robot discussion of season four, episode seven. Cool. So thank you again everybody for all your support. We really appreciate it.

[00:40:22] And let's get on to the main second. Okay, now let's talk about our main topic of today and that is this paper that we mentioned before by the psychological anthropologist from UCLA, Alan Page Fisk, who we both already gushed about,

[00:40:39] called the Lexical Fallacy in Emotion Research Mistaking Vernacular Words for Psychological Entities. I think this is, so this is a paper in psychological review, which is our biggest, well actually oldest I think journal in the field.

[00:40:56] So this is where you publish theory articles that would cut across, be of importance enough to cut across various subfields that would be of interest to everybody. So it's like a, it's probably the most prestigious outlet we have for what it's worth.

[00:41:12] And this is an article that is focused on what I think is a straightforward problem, but one that I think has been ignored as he points out.

[00:41:23] And that is when you're studying, if you decide that what you want to do is understand human emotions and you decide like how you're going to carve up the emotional world.

[00:41:38] You think to yourself, okay, like I want to study Emotion X. Emotion X? What is it? It's an emotion that you have in your language. So you say, well, I want to study anger. I want to study fear. I want to study jealousy.

[00:41:51] What Fisk is arguing is that we are making a deep mistake by relying on our language to point us in the direction of what is scientifically true.

[00:42:02] So he calls this the lexical fallacy. He says we're relying on the words for emotions that we have in our language and in implicit, sometimes explicit way, but often implicit way.

[00:42:12] We're assuming that if our word, if our language has a word for an emotion, then that emotion is the right unit to study. Our language carves nature at its joints, right? What philosophers would call natural kind.

[00:42:26] So if you ask the question, how many emotions are there, you would simply look at all of the emotion terms in your language as lexicon and maybe narrow them down into a family and say, well, clearly there are whatever, six, seven basic emotions.

[00:42:42] He thinks that this is a mistake because for one, there are 7000 languages on this planet who's to say that our language happened to capture the right unit of analysis. And it turns out when you look at other languages, they carve up the emotional space very differently.

[00:43:04] So it's not at all clear that every language shares a word that would encode for the emotion anger in the way that our languages do.

[00:43:16] And it turns out there's not a whole lot of research on this. This is something that has been deeply concerning to me as somebody who studies emotions because the question of how many emotions are there and how we categorize them is one that's actually, you know, at least

[00:43:33] at least since the Greeks, Descartes famously made a list of what he thought were basic emotions. And we've been using these categories of emotion ever since by saying, oh, what emotion do you study? I study anger or I study love assuming that it is actually capturing something real, right?

[00:43:52] Real here meaning universal like an actual aspect of psychology when in reality we might just be reifying our emotional concepts, the ones that are idiosyncratic to our language.

[00:44:03] What I call disgust might be a whole set of emotions and what some other language calls disgust might not be any of those.

[00:44:11] Or maybe they have a word that if you had to pick a word it was to translate as disgust, but it picks out all these other different features of human experience.

[00:44:22] So yeah, this is like right before we start this I just want to emphasize how deep and distressing a problem. This is for a field like ours, like and it goes beyond just studying emotions. We can't look at emotions through microscopes or telescopes.

[00:44:43] We don't see the boundaries of emotions like we would of rocks or atoms. What we have are a set of methods that may be leading us astray quite a bit.

[00:44:56] So I think one of the things I'd like to talk about is what if he's right, you know? What it would really mean from within the field as a psychologist as you are studying emotion like what would you do? So should we talk about his opening example? Yeah.

[00:45:15] The emotion that he discusses? Yeah. So he says he was noticing that he felt this way and a colleague felt this way that he was watching movies with his daughter and he found himself kind of tearing up at certain scenes.

[00:45:32] I know you and I have talked about this how we'll start crying during like a Simpsons or something or picks our movies. I can be a basket case.

[00:45:42] The closest kind of word that we have to describe that feeling is to be moved. It's not, it's the best we can do to describe that feeling and to try to figure out like sort of what it means because it can come at displays of acts of courage or acts where family is coming together

[00:46:01] or it's not so much what this feeling is. It is how he wants to or how he has approached studying it and one of the first things he does is choose a different term.

[00:46:17] So he intentionally chooses a term comma muta, which is I guess a Sanskrit term. He says this is what I'm calling this phenomenon that I think might be a real natural kind but I'm not sure.

[00:46:34] So for now it'll be a construct that I will call comma muta and by calling it that it allows him to stipulate the features of this emotion without inviting any kind of confusion because we don't have any associations with comma muta.

[00:46:56] And so he then can stipulate what it typically is and so he does that. He says it is evoked by a sudden intensification of communal sharing relationship. It is momentary. It is subjectively positive in various senses yet to be resolved when sufficiently intense often characterized by some of the following sensations and signs, a warm or pleasant

[00:47:23] or other pleasant feeling in the center of the chest, tears or most eyes being choked up, goose bumps feeling buoyant, making an exclamation such as aw like with your puppy, putting one or both palms to the chest and it generates motives to devote and commit to communal sharing.

[00:47:44] And that is one of Alan Fisk's frameworks. What's interesting about this is A, I think he is onto something about this phenomenon but B, the way he goes about trying to study it, labeling it as something that doesn't correspond to an actual word that we have in our language.

[00:48:02] You know, I don't know whether he named it this before, before embarking on his naturalistic observations but at least potentially before he mentions in the paper one of the first things that he did was one start asking people about instances in which they were moved.

[00:48:22] Like what kinds of things do other people report? Like are other people saying similar things to me? And then he actually started doing ethnographies. So he got his students to do 10 week focus participant observation studies and practices and institutions where we expected to find such an emotion.

[00:48:42] So all just pure observation and this paper just is a nice compliment to the paper we read. Yeah, the rosin.

[00:48:51] The rosin paper on methodology, right? So like, and one of my favorite parts of this paper is him saying like let's take seriously the need to first of all go look at people in a careful detailed way and see if they are at all experienced.

[00:49:11] And so we're experiencing seeming to experience similar kinds of emotions. And only then I think can we say, well this, this is a candidate for being something that we should put a term to.

[00:49:22] Right, but do you see a connection between that and intentionally not labeling it with a word that we have in our language?

[00:49:32] I think so. I think that there we bring to bear so much conceptual knowledge that is probably like a lot of which is just cultural that he probably as soon as he could avoided right, avoided calling it moved.

[00:49:50] Moved is an interesting case because we don't have the baggage that we might have with an emotion like anger or fear or sadness because we use that word a lot.

[00:50:00] Moved isn't isn't so much like that. So I think he had a little bit more leeway to start studying instances of this without having the baggage of a cultural concept.

[00:50:12] So here's the way I understand this approach is it's when you're studying it, you can and you're interviewing people and you're just observing you're doing your ethnographies, you're doing these very unstructured interviews.

[00:50:28] You can use whatever terms you think are helpful. It's just when you start doing it in a more formal scientific context for scientific journals and for running controlled experiments that you want to avoid labeling it because that's when the lexical fallacy is most damaging.

[00:50:52] And he goes through a list of why it's potentially misleading or distorting. For one thing, it makes researchers think that self reports are going to be more accurate than they really are.

[00:51:05] But I think in that initial stage, it would make no sense to try to talk to people about Kamamuta and them having any knowledge of what that is. So I think Kamamuta is for them. It's for the scientific communication. Exactly. Yeah, the communication.

[00:51:25] Let's talk about why he wants to do that. What's wrong with just describing this as the emotion of being moved and studying it in that way, but then using that term rather than Kamamuta as your initial construct?

[00:51:43] It's such a tricky field, but I think that the reason to pick a word that does not exist allows people the freedom to report because let's get straight what the claim isn't. The claim isn't that we can't talk about our emotional experiences.

[00:52:02] He specifically believes that we may very well have universal emotional experiences. It's just that when we report those, if we rely on the single word descriptions of emotion, we might be bringing a whole bunch of other information to bear and we might be

[00:52:21] missing distinctions or we might be actually combining things that could be distinct feelings. So he wants people to be able to talk about the causes, like what happened that made you feel moved, what happened while you were feeling moved, what happened after, what was this specific

[00:52:42] bodily feeling that you had and all those might be distorted if you put a label that's already used onto it. So we have a very clear script of what it means to feel anger or what it means to feel jealousy and we might be unreliable narrators of our own emotional

[00:52:59] experience when we are talking about a word like anger, like we might be actually less objective. I think at the heart of it it's that it's like in order to be really objective let's remove the influence of this cultural knowledge because what we want to know is what's universal

[00:53:18] to human experiences. In a culture there could be one thing if every single language had the word that encoded for that very specific thing but that's just not the case. So we want to try our best to find all of the more objective criteria that might be evidence for whether or not being moved in this case of emotion.

[00:53:39] When you're honing in on an emotion it totally makes sense that you might have disagreements about what its various features are but there can be productive disagreements about that and unproductive ones and the unproductive ones are when you're actually talking about two different things.

[00:54:01] So he gives an example of a blackbird and their properties like are they omnivorous, where do they put their nests and if British and American biologists or ornithologists, if one of them uses the term blackbird to refer to one kind of bird

[00:54:27] and another one use the term blackbird to a different species of bird then their disagreements over what the blackbird does and what their behavior is are is going to be unproductive because they don't know that they're talking about two different things.

[00:54:44] And I guess what I understood this terminology to do this not using your own words allows you to do is be very careful about stipulating what you think the construct is once you go outside your own language to to label a phenomenon that you think might be an emotion but you're not sure

[00:55:12] that allows everybody to know that this is purely stipulatory. I don't know if that's a word. It just makes the lexical fallacy not possible because nobody has any associations with what comma muta would be.

[00:55:29] Is it just that what you see it is a that the word is useful because it's merely stipulation? Yes, that's what I understood that it's apparently like everybody knows that it's mere stipulation.

[00:55:41] Yeah, but at this at the point at which they move beyond what they consider mere stipulation, which is where he is at the stage with comma muta where he thinks he has sufficient evidence, then that term is serving to not confuse the construct by not using a

[00:56:03] term that's common to a language in their emotional lexicon because then they won't assume a whole other host of things about the thing that you're studying.

[00:56:12] And this happens with disgust, right? This like some people really do mean disgust to be this broad social emotion and some mean it to be merely grossed out.

[00:56:22] And when I give talks about disgust, like I'm trying to say, well, by disgust, I mean this very specific grossed out emotion, not the like, you know, I'm disgusted at the actions of our president.

[00:56:35] But people leave remembering that kind of disgust because it's so like it's such a part of our language and so it does a bad job of communicating even though I already believe that there's evidence of disgust.

[00:56:47] So I think it's serving multiple purposes. And I think you're right that that it helps at the stipulation stage, but I also think it helps even once you believe you've collected enough evidence.

[00:56:58] Can we say just for our listeners and possibly also for me because I think I understand it and then I sometimes think I don't. But what psychologists mean when they call something a construct?

[00:57:12] So that's a good question. Our use of the term construct is pretty broad. But what we tend, what we what we want to discover are true features of psychology.

[00:57:26] So when we stipulate that something like extraversion exists, we want we really want to believe that what what we're studying is a true thing in the world that there is this actual distinction that is present in nature that some organisms, particularly humans are more exuberant than not.

[00:57:45] But we can't measure that directly. Like there is no there's no direct measurement of it. There's no blood test for there's no blood exactly. And so we have to we have to essentially say, well, what what would be decent evidence that this exists?

[00:58:01] And so we come up with measures. But we know we're dealing with a theoretical construct in the same way that before we had actual evidence of seeing atoms or electrons or whatever.

[00:58:11] The atom was a theoretical construct. It just it seems to fit the data. It seems to be useful when telling this causal story about what goes on.

[00:58:18] Psychologists are trying for that. But unlike atoms, there's no hope of like actually of actually having a microscope that will show us an atom.

[00:58:30] And so often we mean some sort of variable some some feature of psychology that we have to use multiple methods to triangulate and kind of discover that it might be underlying everything even though we don't have a direct measure of it.

[00:58:46] So it's a theoretical entity that you believe exists would like to provide evidence that it exists knowing that you'll never be able to establish it like you can establish the existence of atoms.

[00:59:00] But so then something like comma muta could be a construct and then also something like disgust could be a construct, right? That's right. Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, extroversion, neuroticism, right? These are all constructs. Self-esteem.

[00:59:23] Self-esteem, grit, right? I guess given that you that's what you're working with always you have to by necessity is working with constructs, right? As a social psychologist. Yeah.

[00:59:36] So the debate then is over whether to use when you're labeling the construct, whether to use terms that are very familiar to everybody like disgust or whether to do something else.

[00:59:51] And I guess the worry with a lexical fallacy is you pick a term like disgust by just picking that label to describe the phenomenon that you're talking about.

[01:00:01] People are going to think that it exists because we use that word all the time as a natural kind of some sort because we call people neurotic, we call people extroverted, we say we're disgusted by things.

[01:00:17] When in fact it might be that or at least our terminology for it might be covering all sorts of different incoherent things and it doesn't all, it doesn't carve nature at the joints. So yeah.

[01:00:36] No, I was going to give a concrete example of this problem in emotion research. So if you're a Spanish speaker, there is one word that means both shame and embarrassment.

[01:00:47] So if psychology had been developed by largely Spanish speaking populations, when they made their list of the kinds of emotions that we have, they would put that on the list. And they would include instances in which you felt shame and instances in which you felt embarrassed.

[01:01:05] Now, are shame and embarrassment actually two different emotions that are failing to be distinguished by the one label, Beduensa? I would think so.

[01:01:15] Like I think that what that label is doing is it's collapsing, it's hiding the fact that there might be two constructs that lump together as individual constructs that are shared with one label and that we might meaningfully make progress by understanding them as two separate constructs.

[01:01:35] So the word itself, like how would you ever think to distinguish those if you are encumbered by the word? So if you're them, you wouldn't distinguish those two. And for all we know shame, we could get much more fine grained about what we're talking about, right?

[01:01:52] Right, right, exactly. And so it would be, I think here's what everybody's on board with. It would be a shame.

[01:01:59] It would be terrible if there were real distinctions to be made, real progress to be made in studying something like emotions that we had never even thought about because we had missed the distinction because our language just simply hadn't labeled it.

[01:02:17] The enemy here is the lexical fallacy and it seems like the solution is to turn away from our ordinary words when we're labeling a construct. And I guess I'm wondering like how that will work. I mean he gives this extended example, Kamamuta.

[01:02:40] And I guess the idea is by studying that he is able to give a theory that can be falsified and can be studied without unnecessary confusion and without begging any questions about whether this exists or doesn't. So it allows for a cleaner sort of scientific investigation.

[01:03:04] Right, that's right. Like clean is a nice way of saying it. You start with a really basic question, how many emotions are there? At the heart of what Fiske is saying is, well you won't get the right answer if you just count the emotion terms in your language.

[01:03:22] That's it.

[01:03:23] And so once you accept that that step isn't the right step, the whole process now lets you focus on things like the appraisals that give rise to the emotion, what context that emotion is likely to occur in, what the physiological or the subjective feelings associated with that.

[01:03:43] All of those things you get sort of a clarity because you realize you can't just ask people, hey did you feel moved? Because that answer to that just means something really different in different contexts.

[01:03:56] So I think that it's a nice way of side stepping a whole bunch of bias in measuring something as complex as an emotion. Yeah. So it prevents you from assuming that just because the word exists, the emotion exists. It prevents you from over-relying on self-reports.

[01:04:19] At some level though, right, isn't self-report going to be even with, you know, you say, okay here are the stipulated aspects of this. You still have to rely on self-reports for, you know, feeling kamamuta, right? Yeah.

[01:04:39] He gives an example I think is informative here because you're right that at some level self-report of certain things is going to be vital in gathering the evidence for other emotion exists. And so he points to the case of envy and jealousy. So envy and jealousy.

[01:05:00] If you just ask people, they very often say jealousy when they probably mean envy and envy when they probably mean jealousy. And so he's saying if you just relied on that, like are you feeling jealous?

[01:05:13] You might actually fail to realize that there really are these two distinct kinds of emotional events. And one has a whole host of features that the other one does not.

[01:05:27] And even though we're not good at distinguishing it in English or at least Americans aren't very good at distinguishing it doesn't mean that you can't collect a whole bunch of evidence around that emotion. So what makes you feel this way?

[01:05:42] What like what are the specifics about how you feel? So jealousy for instance is often taken to be a fear that you're going to lose what you already have whereas envy is that you really want something that somebody else has.

[01:05:56] And those it turns out if you look at the way that people describe what they felt and why they were feeling that way, it does collapse into two buckets. Those two emotions do. It's just that people's labels for them are bad.

[01:06:08] So if all you relied on was self-reported of the emotion with those words, you might lose that. So there's some recent work by Jim Russell who is an emotion researcher on discussed faces.

[01:06:18] And he says, you know, everybody has been talking about the expression of disgust as if it's one thing. But in reality there seem to be two faces associated with feeling disgust.

[01:06:29] One is the sick face like you're going to gag like you're kind of feeling sick to your stomach. And the other one is that the like wrinkled nose like your nose turned up.

[01:06:42] And those seem to be both in English at least we call those both discussed faces, but not in every language. Right? In some languages they would consider those two very different faces. They're not called the same emotion when you show those two different faces.

[01:07:02] And it could very well be that discussed there's a cluster of things that we call discussed that are about, you know, nausea and sickness. Another one that revolves around just rejection of something that looks disgusting.

[01:07:18] It could be that their sexual disgust is yet another kind but we call all of those things discussed. And so we might be losing out on what the real, by the way this is what I really also want to talk about.

[01:07:28] What does it mean to be a natural kind? But at least that's what Fisk keeps saying. He says we want to get to the natural kinds, we want to get to carbonate at its joints and the words we use are getting in our way.

[01:07:40] Yeah, I had that question too. One of the just interesting parts of this paper is the different translations of anger in other cultures. And so if you translate culture, anger, the term anger in the Inuit Eskimo language that I won't try to pronounce.

[01:08:01] It means to feel express or arouse hostility or annoyance. It could also be translated as kikuk whose literal meaning is to be clogged up with foreign material.

[01:08:13] And that means in that translation they believe that angry thoughts can kill and that there's a wish to harm that's potentially lethal. And so it's purely negative. It's purely something that is meant to harm somebody. Whereas in a Micronesian ifeluc it might translate to song

[01:08:42] which is more like what we would call righteous indignation and it is something that is to advance the possibilities for peace and well-being to identify instances of behavior that threaten the moral order.

[01:08:58] And so it has this much more positive community building connotation rather than the word in the Inuit which is purely negative and is something that is a threat. And then he goes through just a bunch of them and all of them have these different connotations.

[01:09:15] They're picking out different features and at the end he says well our use of language and the way we define it to just assume that that is the basic emotion rather than any of these other ones, that's the one that carves nature at the joints.

[01:09:33] That presumes that English alone among many languages fortuitously captures a scientifically valid taxonomy of emotions. And that's just linguistic chauvinism he says. Yeah I love that sentence. Pure linguistic chauvinism. What do you think about that? I mean I think there's something deeply right about it.

[01:09:53] I think that he goes out of his way to at least make some distinctions about what he's not saying. And I think that there's an interesting debate in emotion theory. On the one side you have people who have argued for a universal set of basic emotions. Like Ackman.

[01:10:15] Like Ackman and these people, Fisk thinks they've reified what we mean in English by anger and they have gone about trying to show that every other culture in this case faces, recognizes emotional faces is anger.

[01:10:30] And then we make our lists of basic emotions where we think nature has been carved at its joints. Anger is one of those emotions. So you have those universalists. And then you have sort of on the way other side you have people who are social constructionists about emotion.

[01:10:52] These people I think, on first read you might think that Fisk is arguing something like this. That there are no universal emotions. That emotions are fundamentally socially constructed out of some basic material like valence or arousal. Some just real basic quasi-emotional reactions that our body has.

[01:11:19] And then layered with concepts from culture and language. And that's what an emotion is. So those people would look at this and say, well, yeah, anger is a different emotion in the Alangot of the Philippines and it's different in the Ifa Luke and it's different in Americans.

[01:11:38] Your mistake is to think that there ought to be any commonality. That's what emotions are. Emotions simply are that layer of cultural knowledge including language. So it's the layer of cultural knowledge including language over whatever the affect is.

[01:11:57] And you can't expect it to be universal because everyone has different language and different cultural norms. Right. And it could be universal but it would be universal contingently upon everybody finally adopting the same culture and language. And Fisk thinks this is wrong as well.

[01:12:18] He thinks that no, there are very clearly feelings that are likely universal like moved or what? Wait, I'm not using it. What's that? A new French. Yeah. That are universals and just because you don't have a word for it doesn't mean you're not feeling it.

[01:12:41] Which I think is right. I think that like is analogy that Fisk makes in the paper as well. Like with color perception, we all have eyes that roughly see the same spectrum of light give or take. Some people with poor eyesight or color blindness.

[01:12:59] But very obviously it's been shown quite a bit that different languages encode for different chunks of that spectrum. So some languages have one word that covers green and blue what would be green and blue for us.

[01:13:13] He thinks that if you're a complete constructionist, you're basically admitting that green and blue aren't a distinction to be made. That these people are their whole color experience is just what their language and culture tell them.

[01:13:30] So they look at grass and the sky and it looks the same or it looks like this? Yeah, they're like yeah same color. That's right. And he thinks that that's not right.

[01:13:39] He thinks that the things that constitute a color experience are features of our biology that are independent of whatever language you have. And he thinks the same about emotional experiences. So, you know, I didn't know the word Chaudhain Freud.

[01:13:57] But once it was explained to me, I was like, oh yeah, I've totally felt that. It's not like all of a sudden I had a new emotion when I learned the word. I think that's kind of an absurd view.

[01:14:11] So the two different Eskimo words that could translate anger, the debate is over where is the proper place to cut nature at the joints? That's at the heart of it. That's at the heart of it.

[01:14:27] And so if the Inuits have two or three different words for it, maybe they're right that that's where you should cut it. Or maybe like if it's the Micronesians with song that that's a distinct emotion of its own.

[01:14:42] And if they were doing a theory of emotions, that would be a basic emotion. It's not that culture doesn't influence how we group the terms. He thinks that it does.

[01:14:52] So yeah, this is where maybe where we should start talking about natural kinds because what does he mean then by a natural kind? If you think if you're a Universalist and think, you know, we're all feeling the same feelings and there is a right way to distinguish them.

[01:15:10] And what does that mean even? Right. Yeah. He points to hints. He says, you know, at this point he says, well, I'm not an emotion theorist. So I'm not here to tell you exactly what features ought to collapse into one construct.

[01:15:26] But here's what he definitely wants to avoid. Right? So suppose there are, you know, there are 7000 languages. 7000 languages. Suppose there are thousands upon thousands of words for anger that each pick up on something specific. So road rage, right? Road rage we might call it.

[01:15:51] We have a very clear understanding culturally of like when people get road rage, what kind of people they are, what happens when they get road rage, what they look like, what you feel like when you experience it.

[01:16:00] He doesn't want to say that there is a single emotion for every possible feeling that we're having. Right? He really wants to find a way to collapse these. Road rage would be a subset of some other. A subset of anger, right?

[01:16:17] It is anger under these conditions but it's not not anger. I think that he thinks that if you take a look at the appraisals, it is the kinds of judgments that tend to lead to anger in this case.

[01:16:35] And you look at a particular kind of physiological arousal and you look at a particular kind of consequence that like we should be able to find that there are common features to.

[01:16:49] To a whole bunch of instances of anger like there would be for kamamuta where we don't have a word, a good word for it. But this might include being moved at a Pixar film or being moved at the kindness of a stranger or whatever.

[01:17:04] And that if you then upon looking at all those data you say, oh, there's something really common to all of these experiences. They seem to be evaluating what somebody did as bad or wrong and they want to bring that person to justice.

[01:17:24] If you find that then that might be a criteria for carving nature at its joint. And again, he's very under, he under describes this because he admits that there is no, like not every emotion is going to have a distinct physiology.

[01:17:38] No one criteria is going to be, he doesn't want to go down just to making the claim that it's all just physiology because he thinks that that's missing something important at the higher level of organization of the mind.

[01:17:53] But I think he leaves it open as to what those criteria would be. So what do you think about that? Like something like disgust?

[01:18:02] Honestly, I have an increasing problem with reliance on natural kinds as a concept, as a term, as something that we should be looking to find because the more I've read and the term natural kind is obviously a much broader term about about just the way nature organizes itself.

[01:18:23] But it has been tossed about a whole lot in emotion research. And I think that it is really misguided to think that emotions will ever be a thing like rocks and atoms and H2O, which are what people might describe as natural kinds.

[01:18:42] I think that to think that we are somehow not imposing organization upon nature by our categories, that we are uncovering the true way that nature divides itself for something as complex as psychology is just wrong.

[01:19:04] I think that when we find things like extraversion where we have this cluster of behaviors and feelings that stick together, then we're just making a statistical claim about how organisms with this kind of organization tend to, you know, how those behaviors tend to cluster. There's nothing magical.

[01:19:24] There's nothing like ontologically pops into existence when we describe that. It's super contingent. If there were organisms that had slightly different biology, we might find that every time they experience anger, they smile. Right? And I wouldn't think that that ruins our emotion theory.

[01:19:39] I think like what role is the term emotion and this specific emotion trying to do in a theory of yours? And if it's trying to say, explain why a boy in the elongot of the Philippines goes head hunting, then that serves a useful role.

[01:19:58] Like it's saying like, oh, OK, there are these things that led him to feel this, that feeling itself then led him to act in this way. And that works. That's perfectly fine. So the word natural kind is just it's a red herring.

[01:20:13] But you're rejecting the kind of social constructivist view, right? Yeah. I think there could be something very real about the way that the human mind organizes itself into these clusters.

[01:20:26] And I think that saying that people feel this cluster of, you know, experience this cluster of symptoms when they're feeling angry or whatever word we want to use is true in some deep sense. And it might be non contingent upon the word they're using to describe it.

[01:20:43] It's just that there's no magic criteria to let you know that you've discovered something real and it would be weird if there was. You know what? It's much like the discussion we had about Dennett's view of the self. Right.

[01:20:58] So the emotion is maybe a slightly more well organized way of, you know, maybe they're like one step closer to being objectively measurable than than the self. But they're right around this like the same kind of thing.

[01:21:16] So it's a theoretical fiction that is picking up on something and still has some explanatory power. But if you're looking, if you're looking to find some sort of ontological basis for it, you won't find it because that's you're making a category mistake. Right.

[01:21:35] Unless you are okay saying that something has ontological status, if it meets the criteria of being something nebulous like it, right? You could say, well, no, the self is real. I just mean like baseball is real. Like you're stupid to tell me it's not real.

[01:21:50] So what do you think Alan Fisk though thinks that there is some sort of magical ontological distinction between? Is this just a difference in terminology? How you think of natural kinds and how he's thinking of natural kinds in this context?

[01:22:08] Or do you think this is a real substantive disagreement about how nature works? My real thoughts about what's going on here is that Alan Fisk, this is not an insult to Alan Fisk because this is not what he does.

[01:22:24] But I think that he is using that term natural kind in a way that many emotion researchers have borrowed that term from philosophy. And in a way that what it betrays, it's a stopping point at your thought. It's just like I've used it that way before.

[01:22:43] Like are we carving nature at its joints when we're talking about anger and fear? I think that upon reflection you have to flesh out what you mean by natural kind and Fisk for whatever reason he might fully have a view fleshed out. I'm not saying he doesn't.

[01:22:57] It's just that he doesn't view it as his task in this paper. He wants to improve the methods by which we call something an emotion and study emotions. And maybe that ontological argument can be had in some other way.

[01:23:12] But I think that that's dangerous because he is making some clearly ontological claims. Right, right. And he's coming up with a theory of Kamamuta that if it's not falsified then he will think this is a real thing. It's a real thing, exactly.

[01:23:29] So do you think then about emotions like I think about a lot of philosophical concepts like knowledge and maybe responsibility and free will that they pick up on something for sure.

[01:23:43] But if you try to come up with some sort of theory with really defined criteria, the more fine grained you try to get, the more precise you try to get about what it actually is, then you're going to go astray at that point.

[01:24:00] It's more of a family resemblance. Yeah, I think I know it's like discussed or knowledge like anger or something like. So I think that there are slightly different problems with understanding knowledge in this way versus disgust and I think it correct me if I'm wrong.

[01:24:16] I think that you think that the concept knowledge isn't a concept that any sort of non-modern philosopher, non-modern analytic philosopher has ever really needed in that specific way.

[01:24:31] Yeah, so maybe knowledge isn't the best example because maybe that I think is in a different category than something like moral responsibility which I don't think that of. Yeah, that's a good idea.

[01:24:44] Philosophical investigation into it has born fruit and it's only when you try to get too precise with your theories that you're sort of now starting to lose the threat. Yeah, yeah.

[01:24:57] You know, we had a researcher come just a couple of weeks ago to give a talk in our department and she talked about emotions and animals and she's very much a social constructionist.

[01:25:08] She thinks that it's wrong to say that what a rat is feeling when it gets shocked is fear. She says that that's anthropomorphic, it's dumb, it's unscientific. I think that things like disgust and fear and anger, they have some family resemblance features.

[01:25:30] They're like fuzzy categories but I think that where I can say that they're real in any deep sense is that, take disgust,

[01:25:38] I genuinely believe that our response to things like putrid meat or feces, unless we've learned otherwise, is really a result of a particular set of selective pressures that gave rise to this particular response.

[01:25:54] So all human beings who are experiencing this kind of like aversive avoidance response to particular set of stimuli, I think there's something there.

[01:26:07] I think that all of the layers of cultural knowledge play a deep role in our experience, what we remember when we think we should feel it, all of the things like when we use it metaphorically, all of those things.

[01:26:19] But I think there is a core to emotional experience that's like the raw material that we can use to be on safe ground for some emotions. Weirdly, I think the category emotion is actually way more useless. Then some of the specific emotions.

[01:26:36] Yeah, because people have argued like is disgust an emotion or is it more like a biological reflex? I don't care. Like all I want to do is describe it. So are you going to call disgust something else in future work?

[01:26:49] Sometimes I actually try to resort to the Spanish term asco, which is just grossed out because it doesn't have like the moral or social connotation.

[01:26:59] And we've done some work that we never published on how different languages, like in what context different languages use their analog for the term disgust. In languages like French, it's very much can be used as a social term. It's fair to say that this con artist disgusts me.

[01:27:20] In other languages, you see the word disgust that we were translated disgust much more likely to be used in the context of food and like bathroom stuff. So I think that we've as a field completely under like understudied. It's exactly what Ross and was saying.

[01:27:43] We jumped straight to developing a theory of disgust and anger and fear without bothering to check whether or not these categories of things were shared by everybody linguistically. It's actually kind of ridiculous.

[01:27:55] And the reason that you did that according to Fisk is that you were tricked by the lexical fallacy. Well, they must be real because we have words for it. And now we can start developing theories of it by testing people and asking for self reports about.

[01:28:14] I think that's fair. I think we can be tricked in even a more pernicious way, which is that my response to understanding that there might be different like in Polish. This woman that he cites quite a bit.

[01:28:33] I can't do just her name, Werzy Biko, who's a Polish woman who wrote a book recently. I've read but she's pointed out that I think in Polish there are multiple words for the one word discussed in English.

[01:28:49] And I remember thinking, well, that's weird that they've divided the same emotion into three. It's not even just... It's like pure linguistic chauvinism. Pure linguistic, yeah. It's like, no, no, I'm aware that the Inuit have seven words for snow. That's not true, but imagine.

[01:29:12] But isn't it weird that they have seven words for the same fucking thing? Yeah. So it's interesting he then applies this to his own work with Tej Ryan Violence. He says, consequently violence is a pernicious scientific construct unless used in an explicitly stipulated, clearly delineated technical sense.

[01:29:38] And then he gives an example of his book with Tej and he says, and even then Tej Ryan I would have been less vulnerable to misunderstanding if we had avoided using a vernacular lexeme violence to denote our construct

[01:29:54] instead of calling it say, I don't know what that Greek letter is. Do you? No, a horseshoe. Looks like a you. A horseshoe. It's a horseshoe. So that's embarrassing, but... I mean, that's interesting, right? Because a lot of the book was that violence can be moral, right?

[01:30:19] And I actually think moral is the construct that they might not have thought that invited more misunderstanding than violence, right? Yeah, I think you're right. They got into trouble when they were, you know, it's like gang rape can be moral in this very strict sense.

[01:30:38] But if you say that, that is... I mean, that's an example, right? Moral is sometimes a construct and they do stipulate what moral means to them, which is essentially that it fits within one of those moral frameworks, the four moral frameworks. But we have these other connotations.

[01:30:58] And so when you're scientifically communicating with somebody else, you can do all the stipulating you want as they did and it will still invite misunderstanding. And so it will still be talking about different things and your disagreements in that sense will be unproductive.

[01:31:16] Yeah, our language is so not fit for scientific precision. You know, I was listening to another podcast that I like called Hello Internet and one of the guys was saying that he used to be a physics high school teacher and he would say...

[01:31:33] I'm just using the example in a completely different context of when you use the terms work and energy and velocity in physics.

[01:31:42] They have such a very clear precise meaning, but when you give people some examples of like, well, when this is doing work, they take a whole bunch of other concepts with them, right? So it's not that helpful when you use those in a non-physics context.

[01:32:00] And I think that's totally the case. Now, I don't know though there is something really handy about being able to use a common language and say, well, I want to talk about disgust. But by disgust, I mean, you know, and then put disgust, asterisk.

[01:32:19] Now everybody at least has some sort of clear starting point. Sure, they may misremember. They may think that I meant one thing or another. But the other error is that they just never get what I'm talking about. Like the concept, Kamamuta, like will I remember this? Right.

[01:32:39] Like next week? No, I mean, and he talks about this as the downside of this.

[01:32:43] I mean, number one, you know, from an incentive standpoint, all of a sudden you're not getting written up in the Atlantic if you're talking about Kamamuta rather than, you know, the emotion of being moved or empathy or something like that. Compersion. Yeah. Right.

[01:33:03] You might get an eon, but you... Let's not cast aspersions on that wonderful magazine. Oh yeah, we forgot to mention you have a very nice profile. It's like, are we never allowed to make fun of eon again? I know we can make fun of it.

[01:33:20] Just we just need a moment of respect. Yeah. Give me 30 seconds. Very nice article. You should be very flattered and honored by it. Thanks. Even though you were committing the lexical fallacy left and right. Clearly. Yeah, it's not only that it won't get popular.

[01:33:36] It won't have popular appeal, but it will be very hard for people to like to remember it. I mean, this is an interesting problem actually. Like just to...

[01:33:46] Like we have enough going on in our brains that we don't have to learn all these different words and this is something we make fun of philosophy a lot for.

[01:33:56] But it's kind of what he's recommending is that we, you know, instead of calling it disgust, call it shmishmashed. Shmanger, you know? And I guess that's coming from that same place, right? Is like trying to not have all these other connotations infecting your investigation. Yeah.

[01:34:20] And really if you really just care about doing the science, probably a better idea to like make the error in that direction. Like a precision. And then later on, you know, when you're communicating, you can decide what to use. But I really like it.

[01:34:37] I'll say what I really like about this whole approach is, you know, there is a ton of open questions about what a psychological construct is, what it even means to say that we have evidence for a real thing.

[01:34:52] All of those things notwithstanding that you would take a moment to try to remove yourself from the bias that you have and just collect good descriptive data. Yeah.

[01:35:07] If that's if that's the only thing that comes from this kind of approach, then I'm cool with it because, you know, collecting unbiased descriptive data is something that I don't do well and our field doesn't do well.

[01:35:20] And when he's talking about like what was involved in this, like I'm like, wow, fuck, like I'm not. The common. When am I ever going to go spend 10 weeks and like a, you know, yeah. Well, I mean, this is part of being an anthropologist.

[01:35:35] I think that that in this article, Fisk is saying, look, you can read like not even anthropologists have been to 50 different cultures, right? Like they usually specialize in just whatever they specialize in and they rely on the ethnographies of their colleagues to, you know, bring together some theory.

[01:35:59] And I don't know like it is this is the sad sociological aspect of it.

[01:36:05] I need somebody to hold my hand to tell me what good anthropology is and where to read it and who to avoid and what's stupid and what's accepted and what's, you know, and I think we speak so much about it.

[01:36:18] We speak about interdisciplinary stuff and like we give all this like, you know, mock praise or we say that we're searching for interdisciplinary researchers.

[01:36:28] But this is the kind of true interdisciplinaryness that's going to bear fruit where somebody like Fisk has bothered to publish in a psychology journal numerous times already and give me exactly that. Yeah. Right?

[01:36:43] Like there are a lot of things that I've never heard of that he talked about here that now I know to go look up. Including like many of the words that he uses like lexical. Including all the GRE words that he uses. I get it Fisk, you're educated.

[01:36:54] Your dad was a famous professor. Do you think though that this sociologically speaking like what if let's say he's right and everybody agreed that he's right? Like could it happen? Would you stop all of a sudden stop stop labeling things according to their normal English terms?

[01:37:17] Would you stop doing so many experiments and start doing unstructured interviews which from what I understand psychologists make fun of because of all the potential for bias and subjective interpretation and stuff like that. Yeah, I save all my unstructured conversation for this part.

[01:37:41] I think that yeah, it definitely has an effect and no, I'm not going to go start doing unstructured interviews but I do I am more likely to do work on asking people under what conditions they felt this or that.

[01:37:58] And I have done more work on looking at disgust in other languages because of influences like this. In fact, Vera Zibika like had a paper that opened my eyes to this whole problem a long time ago and so I have to credit credit her now.

[01:38:17] I'm getting old so I hope that the youngins pick up more of this but at the very least I think that I know not what not to conclude based on the nature of evidence that we have.

[01:38:32] Like I think I am more likely to seek out cross-cultural evidence but it's going to be slow, you know? It's slow. Yeah, I mean that's fair. I'm bullish on it. Let's just say that like the way that Fisk's relational stuff influenced the field, right?

[01:38:51] Like a lot of people just read it inside it as if it were just anything else to read inside but I think that between Henrik, Fisk, Fessler these people have really had an influence on our understanding of human nature

[01:39:03] and they brought it over to psychology in a way that I think a new generation is getting trained to look at in that way. I think that's good.

[01:39:09] Yeah, I mean the whole weird thing that Henrik did is have a huge effect. It's like part of like interdisciplinary terminology now and everybody knows to at least pretend to be worried about that.

[01:39:22] Yeah, that's what you get a lot of disingenuous like hand waving like well we know this is a weird population. Okay, well let's I think that that's a good time to wrap it up.

[01:39:33] Okay, but before we wrap it up I want to know what you really think because I've talked a lot but I think that you probably have a different take. On this? You have 30 seconds. Oh great. You get an hour, I get 30 seconds. Yeah.

[01:39:48] No, I mean I'm really intrigued by it. I tend to think that we err too much on the side of thinking we can get more objective about it than we can rather than just admitting that there is some projection that is inescapable.

[01:40:09] I mean I don't know if this is a constructivist side or if it's more an epistemological stance where we have to study this stuff with the knowledge that the investigation itself will has a kind of perspective that we can't step outside of.

[01:40:30] So a little bit of like doing quine kind of like there's no way to step outside of the theory.

[01:40:38] There's no pure data that you're going to be able to get and to admit that but you know there are times where he sounds like he wants to deny that and just like we just need to do a better job getting at the pure data than we already have and then we'll be able to carve nature at the joints in this universal way.

[01:40:59] So when he's saying that I disagree with it but so much of what he's saying I totally agree with when he's diagnosing problems about people who are doing that just without knowing that they're doing that in social psychology.

[01:41:14] So I don't know that's my certainly a lot of the diagnosis that he makes I completely agree with. That's no big surprise. I'm not sure if I agree with what he thinks will happen once we stop doing that. Everything will be fixed. Everything will be fixed.

[01:41:34] I think that you're right in that the most modest way of that I have of understanding what this might contribute is that at the very least it shows us that we are failing or we're potentially failing by our very own standards.

[01:41:57] So if we think that the right way to do things is to be as objective as possible here's a clear way in which we are shown to not be very objective to be falling prey to this.

[01:42:09] And so if our goal and our beliefs are that we can get to cleaner sources of data then pointing to this barrier is good now you know I tend to agree with you there's no such thing as clean data. But but whatever we'll say there's less bias. Yeah.

[01:42:31] There's cleaner data. Yeah exactly. Yeah I'd love to do like a broader philosophy of science discussion about some of this stuff. I have a dream of just a perfect episode on construct validity.

[01:42:50] I feel like we could get into another fight over construct validity even if we don't totally understand it. Let's let's aim for that. How about that. Let's aim for a good. All right.

[01:43:04] Well if you want to stick around we're going to have like a 10 minute discussion of Mr. Robot after the outro. But if you're not keeping up with Mr. Robot and you should be because it's really good this season. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:44:06] Do not listen to this if you haven't seen episode what was it seven of this episode seven season four episodes.

[01:44:15] Okay yeah definitely because this is the what this is one reveal that actually it might not be the central reveal but it actually I think would impact a rewatching of the show even more.

[01:44:27] So like brilliantly acted and brilliantly directed and the structure was clever and like is gorgeously shot. Like it was just the moment that it was that it started becoming obvious that what the truth was was that Elliot was molested by his dad.

[01:44:48] I thought to myself no like I could see it for like you could it was telegraphed earlier. Not earlier in the show I mean there are no earlier in that scene earlier in the scene yeah in the scene yeah please don't make it be that like like.

[01:45:06] And it's not that I don't think it's a deep distressing revelation about Elliot and it's not even that I don't think that it explains a lot of what's gone on.

[01:45:16] It's just that like oh it turns out he was molested by his dad seems like a like a cheap move. Like it seems like like you know after school special like different strokes bicycle episode like. Different where I don't remember I don't remember Gary.

[01:45:40] There's like a really distressing getting. Or it's like he narrowly escaped getting less of I think he left Dudley in there. It was one of the most distressing episodes TV. I blocked that out but it created a new identity to forget that.

[01:46:01] And yeah that this is like oh yeah this is what what's been going on all along like it didn't seem like this was it going to be that this was even close to a show about that sort of thing that that it it's a reveals like a.

[01:46:18] Like if we found out that Bill Murray in in Groundhog Day if it was because of a brain tumor you know you'd be like I guess I guess like I guess that explains why somebody can be hallucinating this reliving the day over and over again.

[01:46:35] Like there is something just leave it at Mr. Robot and and not have this heartbreakingly emotional scene where I was molested as a kid.

[01:46:45] Well I mean okay I'm interested that you had this reaction because I didn't at all and I think most people didn't if you look at the reaction to the show and I'm trying to figure out why you had it so I.

[01:47:01] I am too because it was super it was like uncontrollable like I actually was like no no like I can't believe this and and and it was so well done I mean Rami Malik's performance and also the actress that plays Krista was just phenomenal like it felt like even though obviously there's not a guy pointing a gun at some patients head when.

[01:47:27] And Vera was great too and that whole thing I love the kind of counterpoint the comic counterpoint of his to. You know the muscle or whatever his muscle but they were very funny they were one of them reminded me of Snoop from the wire.

[01:47:45] Yeah yeah she's actually a rapper named young young. But so like all of that was really well done and then when the reveal happened which I had never predicted and I don't think many people had. I thought there's like one or two people on Reddit there's a few.

[01:48:03] You know I was trying to like I thought back and as a thought well it makes sense I mean this is a damaged guy like a really psychologically damaged guy he has created this big and identity has this massive social anxiety that has been there from the very beginning he doesn't

[01:48:24] like being hugged or touched at all he is he's paranoid he you know so there were these deep psychological substance abuse.

[01:48:37] He's a substance abuser and at the same time he's had this mother that we've known has been an abusive mother and a father that we always thought was his only friend and it was actually a really good dad taking him to movies.

[01:48:54] And and helping him deal with the his mother and the problems with her.

[01:49:01] And then you realize no well he was actually sexually abusive now the way I understand it is that doesn't mean that they didn't have at times a good relationship and that he wasn't taking him to see Pulp Fiction or taking him to the Mr.

[01:49:20] Robot store to make him feel better or that he was only doing those things so that he could groom him to be molested.

[01:49:32] It just like captures what's so fucked up about those kinds of relationships those kinds of where the father is actually does love the son and the son does love the father but the father is also doing this kind pretty much unforgivable.

[01:49:50] Thing to the child and it I don't know I thought it added a layer of cuz if we just never find out why he's like.

[01:50:00] The way he is I could live with that but I you know like to come up with something that's psychologically plausible that doesn't that when you look back at the show seems to fit pretty well with a lot of the things even though we didn't.

[01:50:18] We didn't suspect it at the time but in retrospect is okay I can see that and then maybe Mr. Robot is a projection of the good side of his dad or the dad that he wished he had or something like that.

[01:50:32] I thought I thought all of that seems fine so I'm really surprised. The that you reacted yeah and I don't see that it's so either. Yeah okay so it's just to be clear I don't think that it was.

[01:50:51] Unfair or out of the blue I do think that as male has had this planned all along I do think that it explains a lot of what's going on.

[01:51:03] I think that my response to it was a product of a belief that it's a trophy way to reveal something about a character it's like a.

[01:51:12] If he had an identical twin and that also explained a whole bunch of things right that like it wasn't him that blacked out right it was an identical twin.

[01:51:21] That like that's the level at which like you were molested by your father like that's how it felt to me it felt schlocky and all of a sudden he's having like these deep intense emotions.

[01:51:32] The stuff about like and everybody's point is like oh makes sense he didn't want to be touched.

[01:51:38] That didn't need explaining like that is very much the kind of personality that you see amongst people who are heavily into tech and coding right this is like a characteristic spectromy behavior where you're very socially anxious you don't like to be touched your relationship is with your computer and your code it didn't.

[01:51:58] That wasn't calling out for explanation at all like it seems it seems okay fine but it was very extreme with Elliott and what did call out for an explanation was the Mr. Robot and his existence and and and this we had an explanation I guess that he died of cancer which we should talk about do we think that that he really did die of cancer.

[01:52:24] Or yeah or is he in prison I mean we saw his gravestone and people have said that he died so I think he did die and I actually think he probably died of cancer but you can look back on a lot of those conversations where he says he's sick and read it a different way now.

[01:52:43] Yeah. But so why was he intent on avenging his father's death from cancer. Well so you texted me about this Alderson loop thing. Yeah.

[01:52:55] That is a term for some sort of bug in a computer that can own that can't be it's like it puts it on this infinity loop and it only and you have to restart it to like restart the whole program. Well at the very beginning of the show.

[01:53:16] Yeah. At the very beginning of the show he doesn't know who Mr. Robot is he doesn't know that it's his father he doesn't know who Darlene is and so I think he's blocked out at that point that. I think he's yeah we catch him right after a reboot.

[01:53:35] Right. We catch him right. He had to like reformat the drive. Exactly.

[01:53:40] So so that's why he was avenging his dad because he didn't know that the dad is because he actually thought yeah and then Mr. Robot knows you get the sense that he did know because he was begging Krista and Vera not to have this come out so he does know so he is a side of Elliott that that knows this even when

[01:54:06] Elliott but he played an integral an integral role in the five nine hack. But that's presumably also the five nine hack isn't to to avenge wasn't just to a man.

[01:54:18] I mean most of his actions are to try to bring down E corp because of the killing of Angela's dad and I mean I have Angela's yeah and and that yeah so I don't know maybe he does I mean even if he was a molester it would still be bad that

[01:54:35] a chemical plant or a plant to build a whatever we don't know was giving people cancer including his dad and Angela's mom.

[01:54:48] You know I think that that that it will all make sense like I buy it and I think that Esmail will come through with explaining some of these things like whether you were asking whether Darlene knows or not which I don't think she does.

[01:55:06] I don't think so either. Yeah yeah and she was young enough not to. Yeah in the closet is very young and he was presumably protecting her right because he didn't want her to go through the same thing and that's a story of that I've heard before I don't know how clinically accurate it is but but when somebody sees that their abusive parent is about to do the same thing to their younger sibling like that's when they actually do something about it.

[01:55:32] But I. It took me out of that moment in a way that was so jarring because it seems so it seemed so tropey to me that is that much of a trope reading him out of the blue like that's what I can't tell because I definitely it definitely felt to me like a trope and so what I'm wondering whether I've just maybe been exposed to more things where that's like the the reveal.

[01:56:02] Like you know it was soap opera. Right but but there's a nod to Twin Peaks. So I don't know I don't know what what what is making me feel like it's such a trope I do know that uncontrollably it took me out and I still found it very weird that Vera would respond like he did with that compassion.

[01:56:33] And I actually thought for a moment I know other people thought this and I think I think Esme would get a lot of shit if this was actually what was happening.

[01:56:41] I thought that Elliot was faking it to bring Vera to a vulnerable moment where they could escape. Oh my God. And I thought well if he pulls that off then I respect the plot. Yeah I don't think so because.

[01:56:59] I don't think so either but I thought that might be a way to get out of the you know what I thought at the moment was.

[01:57:08] OK now that you said that Elliot has been very manipulative this season he's been like what he did with Olivia and the oxy in her drink.

[01:57:21] I just think I think he can't like I don't think it would be ballsy as hell because I think a lot of people would be angry and maybe rightly angry at him.

[01:57:33] But if the point is don't be angry at me be angry at Elliot this is this is who he is right now.

[01:57:40] This the depths of his life. Yeah this is I just don't see it because also Krista who we've we've been we were meant to think that she's really good at what she does seems to have diagnosed it already a long time ago.

[01:58:00] How very did strike me as very consistent with what his plan was he said he was going to break him down totally and then build him so that he can build him back up.

[01:58:12] And then that plus the fact that the revelation was also something that was true about Vera allowed him you know like to treat him both with compassion but also as part of his plan which is I'm going to once he's completely destroyed if I'm not going to be able to do it.

[01:58:29] If I'm the one to help build him back up then he's going to trust me and we're going to conquer all the corners and sell all the meth in New York. By all the real estate.

[01:58:42] Do you think there was being disingenuously manipulative then. Yeah I mean I think this was his plan right like his plan was.

[01:58:49] Yeah but do you think his response of tears and like I see you do you think that was genuine compassion or that was part of his act to break.

[01:58:55] I think it was both. No it was already broken like this was the building back up and so those two things can go hand in hand I think his genuine compassion and his manipulation are now geared at the same goal and so I think yeah.

[01:59:11] I mean yeah I didn't love Vera in the previous episode before this I thought he was great in this. I mean he did an amazing job in this.

[01:59:20] And just he's fine. It just yeah it just struck me as something that was very odd for him to all of a sudden. Oh wait bro you were molested like now now I'm going to cry a tear and hug you like.

[01:59:34] It seems like yeah I killed your girlfriend but like now that I know your dad touched you like it happened to me too bro like.

[01:59:42] I know I mean like but I mean he literally said that that's what he was going to do in the previous episode. He was going to be building back up once he not destroyed him.

[01:59:54] But that doesn't mean that he has to. Genuinely feel it. We will be through genuine compassion right. I believe that he could have manipulated his way through through that. There it doesn't have to be it can be both I think right.

[02:00:06] No I know but it can't be that both he was genuine and not. And what I'm saying is hard for me to believe is that he was genuine. I think he was. I think it was clear in the performance and.

[02:00:19] Yeah just makes sense like if they were if he had also been molested and then used that as some sort of engine for his anger and some fuel for his power that he could try to convey that to Elliot like that.

[02:00:34] It makes sense that he would feel genuinely moved by that. I guess I don't I just don't remember Vera being genuinely moved by anybody else's plight like that was the thing about him right like he was so fucking cold. Was he. What if Krista what if Krista was.

[02:00:55] So it clearly wasn't in his files that he was molested right. It was alluded to maybe or hinted at. Yeah. So what if Krista in the moment spontaneously came up with the abuse story to have Elliot play off of it.

[02:01:12] Like he realized what's going on because like if it was a thing that that's what yeah you'd think that it would be in the notes explicitly. I suspect he's been molested. That was another thing where I was like wait how does she know he was molested.

[02:01:28] He never told her like she's just inferring it from the baseball dad story. Yeah. But that's a big leap like unless Mr. Robot told her you're a social psychologist not a clinical therapist. I'm closer to that though than you are. I don't know.

[02:01:48] I did read somewhere that a psychiatrist or a therapist who works with people who have been sexually abused said that that was a.

[02:02:00] Yeah. As accurate a depiction of that kind of conversation minus the gun and the other person in the room that they have ever seen on film or TV.

[02:02:14] That's I don't want to take it all away from the craft with which I mean this is this is pinnacle TV. Anyway well we'll keep an eye on this. Maybe we'll do more of this. We'll just never talk about Mr. Robot except in this context. I know.

[02:02:34] I know I found myself telling like I was telling Nikki I was like wait is there any chance that you'll ever watch the show. She's like no yeah there is. I was like OK because then I can't tell you at all.

[02:02:45] Really what I'm looking for now I'm looking forward to rewatching it with all of this information in mind. It would be hard to watch this though knowing what you know and with another person that doesn't maybe we'll see. I'm excited to see where this goes.

[02:03:02] I think Christa the fact that Christa is with him you know presumably if Christa wasn't there he would do another hard reboot maybe after something like this. But now that Christa is there and the show is about to end in six episodes. Maybe that's not going to happen.

[02:03:22] So we'll see. This hasn't told us who the third is right. There's definitely some ideas that I have and it hasn't told us what White Rose's contraption is. There's still a lot.

[02:03:39] But when White Rose is saying that he needs to know we're on the same side do you think it's going to be like she was abused too. Because everybody did. Everybody did.

[02:03:47] I don't think I'll be able to stomach that like they're going to uncover a pedophile ring with their new cyclotron. I think we already found White Rose's trauma source. It's that lover she had committed suicide because she wouldn't take the job in America. Yeah so we'll see.

[02:04:13] I also think like I forgot I had to read this that the big CEO meeting, the meeting of all the dais group members is that night. It's that same night. It starts in like two hours after Vera was killed.

[02:04:30] So he has to deal with that probably next episode. It's hard to wait. Darlene is captured. I forgot about this but Darlene was captured by the Dark Army. It's just a lot of shit. Oh shit yeah it's a lot. Ah man he's doing an amazing job at this.

[02:04:46] Alright we're done. I'm stopping recording. It's elegance. Elegance. We're still not good at like being professional in that way you know.