Episode 209: Basic Instincts (with Paul Bloom)

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues and 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.

[00:00:53] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, we're kind of like a non-romantic couple. Are you up for some orgasmic meditation and genital touching later? As long as I wear gloves before I rub your clip. I just think that's not going to...

[00:01:39] The intimacy, we won't be able to establish that if you wear gloves. You didn't read the paper, that's a requirement for orgasmic meditation. Is gloves? Do you? I did read it. I think I skipped over the gloves part. It's a requirement.

[00:01:56] Even if you're in a romantic relationship with a person. You can choose the material though. Oh, see like a little leather or spandex or I don't know. This is a whole new thing. I have to put on my to-do list now. Quarter-oil would be my...

[00:02:14] Get a little friction. Get some friction burns. For the clip, yeah. So what we should say that in the second segment, we have Paul Bloom coming on the episode to talk about William James chapter instinct. Yes, from the wonderful principles of psychology.

[00:02:35] But the... oh wait, I want to say this, I have to say this. The audio is fucked for that segment. I mean, not though, it's not terrible like you can hear it, but we had to use Skype audio for me and Paul.

[00:02:46] I'm not going to say who's fault it is. Yeah. But yeah. So good of you. Yeah. All right. So before we get to Paul, neuro critic? Neuroskeptic. Sorry. Neuroskeptic. How could you forget that? I know. I'm sorry there's a neuro critic. Sorry, neuro skeptic. Gavus...

[00:03:07] No, we're genital touching for you and neuro skeptic after this or maybe you need it. You put this in our little file for opening segments. Wow. You... so this is a paper called partner intimate touch is associated with increased interpersonal

[00:03:31] closeness, especially in non-romantic partners and it is authored by Nicole Prouse, Greg Siegel and a friend of mine actually James Cohn who hosts the circle of willis podcast. So I'm sure he'll be a good enough sport to... The circle of willis? Yeah, circle of willis.

[00:03:47] I'll put a link to it. Is it named after or like... Well, I don't know if it's... Different strokes. I don't know. It was going to be the what you talking about podcast. What you talking about willis for them. Yeah.

[00:04:01] Then they realized that would be appropriation so they wanted to do it. But yeah, so this paper... Okay, I'll give just like a brief synopsis. Can I just say before you give this synopsis that you said like why did I put it in Slack?

[00:04:18] I feel like this paper, this idea, this study, like maybe even the researchers careers were all put on this earth to just give us this episode. So like this opening segment to talk about. They don't know it but that's why they exist. Exactly. They have purpose.

[00:04:39] That whole discussion we had about the absurd and life being meaningless but for them it's not. It's not. It's just for the rest of us. So yeah, so this is a paper where... I mean, I actually think it's motivated by a good question.

[00:04:59] So they say look, sex is associated with all sorts of good stuff, sex and sexual touching and all that is associated with all sorts of good stuff in romantic relationships. So like satisfaction with relationships, overall happiness, like all that stuff.

[00:05:15] Good health outcomes if you have sex although apparently not more than benefits tail off it over once a week. So all you need is once a week and you're getting all the positives. I mean that's so pretty good.

[00:05:29] But they review the literature and argue that non-romantic relationships are like sex with people who are your friends or just a hook up. That kind of sexual contact is actually associated especially in women with all sorts of bad outcomes.

[00:05:43] So non-romantic sexual contact is not only stigmatizing in many cases but it's also associated with just poor mental health outcomes, I guess as a generality. And so what they wanted to see is if they could get the benefits of sexual touching

[00:06:03] for non-romantic relationships without all of sort of the risk and the bad outcomes because as they say a lot of the risk for women in these non-romantic hookups is issues of consent. You don't know, you know there's risk in catching diseases or getting pregnant.

[00:06:20] There's issues if you're out there hooking up with people. There's issues of consent. You're more likely to put yourself in a situation that might be bad for you. There's all sorts of reasons why it's risky for women and so they wanted to see

[00:06:31] if they could come up with a way to have sexual touch in non-romantic relationships without all that risk. They turned to orgasmic meditation which is a guess. Had you ever heard of this?

[00:06:43] Not only had I not heard of it but I was completely shocked that this is a thing. Like I had no idea like if somebody, like it seems like it's kind of out of a Charlie

[00:06:54] Kaufman movie or something like at least because that's like I just didn't know that this was something that like is established. It's not like they made this up. Like this is an established like therapy technique right?

[00:07:06] Yeah because they were able to recruit 125 couples through a variety of means who are already regular practitioners of this. So yeah I'd never heard of it before but it's like a standardized procedure where it's always the woman getting touched hence my quick jokes at the beginning

[00:07:22] because there's no dicks being touched. Where a partner, romantic or not, female or male brings their partner, the person getting touched and they sit down. It wasn't clear to me if this is in a group. I don't know if it's like...

[00:07:40] Yeah or are they doing it just like giving them the time signals and stuff? Right, right. Maybe there's like a little ding or something I don't know. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say should we just read it? It reads like a bad erotica. Exactly.

[00:07:59] I had the same thought exactly. Like it's bad erotica exactly. You want me to read some of it? Yeah just read some highlights of it. This is why I say that I'm really surprised that this is the thing is how detailed and how ritualized it is.

[00:08:14] I guess standardized in ways. It's standardized. And this is one of the reasons they use this as the procedure because it is so standardized but yeah. So here's... I'm going to read just some of the key parts. Orgasmic meditation is a practice where partners engage

[00:08:28] in a practice series of consent, safety signals, and 15 minutes of manual genital stimulation. The person getting stroked, the strokey gets naked from the waist down. They take off their shoes. The stroker takes off their shoes as well. The strokey lays down with their legs.

[00:08:45] They let their knees fall to the side and the stroker sits right next to them. And here's where it starts. Next, the stroker announces that he or she is about to rest their hands on the strokey's thigh. The stroker then briefly describes the appearance of the woman's vulva

[00:09:01] using value neutral terms such as its shape, color or texture. The strokey acknowledges the observation... Not Sam. No, that's value laden. Typically by responding thank you. Then the stroker dons gloves of agreed material to provide a physical safety barrier regardless of the status of the couple.

[00:09:19] The stroker applies lubrication to the left index finger and right thumb. At this point the stroker announces that he or she is about to touch the strokey's genitals. The stroker places the right thumb at the introitus not inside the vagina where it remains throughout the stimulation period.

[00:09:33] The purpose of this placement is to aid the stroker to feel contractions or other movements. The stroker places the left hand with the thumb holding back any clitoral hood and the left index finger stroking besides the clitoral shaft. So this goes on for 13 minutes

[00:09:46] and a key crucial in this is that they get feedback from the person getting stroked and they can request like fast or slower or touch their touch rate. The strokey may request adjustments at any time which are always followed by the stroker

[00:10:01] and are acknowledged by the stroker saying thank you. It sounds like getting your tires rotated or something. You're just like, this one feels a little wobbly still. Can you just... Yeah, or like some kind of medical procedure or something like that. Yeah.

[00:10:17] And then at 13 minutes there's a two minute warning which just reminded me of like the old Laker games where you say two minutes. And they go into the no huddle offense at this point. Take a knee, man. I mean audibles are kind of like adjustments. Yeah, exactly.

[00:10:42] Oh, I think key to this is that any additional contact like hugs or anything that is prohibited during orgasmic meditation, they... The only thing they're allowed to say is the feedback, the direct feedback and they're allowed to moan or pant, etc. They're allowed to moan or pant.

[00:11:03] What were they going to do like like panting, prohibited? But they are allowed to... Yeah, they just have to be biting their tongue. The outcomes. Also like it's so detailed at the end of two more minutes the stroker covers the vulva with both hands with gentle pressure

[00:11:19] allowing the vulva to close. The stroker uses a clean washcloth to wipe up once over the vulva to remove any fluids but just once. The strokey sits up. I feel like if I were writing this I would be getting a little turned on.

[00:11:33] Or like I would never want to have like sexual contact with anyone again. But they... And then they take turns describing the like the things that occurred. Afterwards. Yeah, that's right. The stroker and strokey take turns describing a concrete bodily sensation

[00:11:49] because you're supposed to focus, you know, just like other meditation. Focus on the sensation. So temperature, vibration, location that occurred during stroking. Yeah. And then they throw away the gloves and washcloth. The gloves and washcloth are discarded. Like what if they asked like this was really important,

[00:12:05] this was really meaningful and I feel much closer already like my partner can we just keep the gloves and washcloth? Nope. Nope. No? Absolutely. No, absolutely not. You have to... Those people were eliminated from the sample.

[00:12:21] They didn't say this but it was like seven couples refused to discard the gloves and then were thus removed. Give me the gloves. Give me the fucking gloves. So key... I don't even know if the results matter that much.

[00:12:34] The key dependent variable is this measure called inclusion of self and other where it's a scale that's been used by a ton of researchers but basically it's thought to reflect interpersonal closeness. Two circles are labeled as self and other. The circles begin as non-overlapping and progressively overlap

[00:12:56] until the two circles overlap almost entirely. Participants are instructed to select which of the seven images best portrays their relationship with their orgasmic meditation partner before beginning then after the orgasmic meditation and so what they found was that closeness went up a lot for the non-romantic partners

[00:13:14] more than for the romantic partners. However, if you look at the graph, the romantic partners are all just higher in both conditions. Obviously, they're closer to each other. So the big increase was... Yeah. Yeah. I better feel closer to somebody.

[00:13:31] So I have a few questions just about the whole setup of this and the fact that so many people went into it. Like if you're a non-romantic partner, it feels like part of being not romantic is that you wouldn't sign up to do this.

[00:13:46] That's what seems odd to me too. But apparently some of the people even are in a romantic relationship but they go to this with someone else which I think qualifies as cheating but I'm not going to judge. That's interesting. I mean they might be in a polyamorous relationship.

[00:14:05] And you have compersion for her as she's getting her genitals rubbed for exactly 13 minutes. For exactly 13 minutes. 15. Oh no, 15. Right. Two minutes. Then it gets really vigorous. Yeah. And the goal they say, I think... I didn't say this, the goal is not...

[00:14:25] They say physical climates may happen but it is not a goal of your orgasmic meditation process. Maybe they shouldn't call it that. I would feel a little disappointed if I didn't get it done. That's exactly why they have the two minute warning. Like get your fucking ass rubbing.

[00:14:45] Yeah, 125 partners did it and half of them were non-romantic. Right around. It's weird, would you do this even with a romantic person? No. I don't think my partner would want me to. You know who these people are. What? We know who these people are.

[00:15:07] The room smells like patchouli and lube. These are people in their 50s and 60s, I'm sure. We have the age data here. One of the things that they don't really talk about... Well, they talk about it as a limitation. There's a great limitation line.

[00:15:29] Does it have to be no touching or like clitoral stimulation? They should have a control group where they just shake hands for 15 minutes and maybe you might get the same thing. Right. Yeah.

[00:15:40] I mean, of course, if you just went through the weirdest, creepiest experience of your whole life, that is going to bring you closer. But if you just shake hands and talk, it's like, well, it's like you're meeting in a bar or whatever. Correct.

[00:15:54] So in one of the limitations, this is what I wanted to read. Additionally, only women received the stimulation, although the stroker could be male or female. Therefore, the generalizability of this result to male strokies remains unknown. So that's the very bad wizard study that we have now.

[00:16:13] I feel like you could just... You could just stand outside certain massage parlors and get into questionnaires. Yeah, maybe. Josh, no, just handing people coming out of the... I feel like that joke used to be clarified because John was very likely to hand out

[00:16:31] questionnaires in public, not because we know that Josh is outside massage parlors. He's there anyway. Yes, that's what I meant. That does require context. So yeah, by the way, the average age was 42 years old. So we're on the old age of the sample.

[00:16:54] We're on the old side of the story. We've wasted our life not doing this. I don't know, it's weird, but maybe it seems like it's an established something. I feel like for someone who's so into meditation, you should be pro this.

[00:17:07] Yeah, I mean the kind of meditation that I've been doing involves just me and not like... Selfish. Gloves. I wear gloves when I jerk off because I... How would you not crack up during it? I don't know, man. Do you have like a clock?

[00:17:27] Is there like a clock like in a basketball game where they're just like a... They said that the time was kept by a computer and announced by a computer. So it's like an exam. You're like 20 minutes. Well, good for them for doing this. Yeah.

[00:17:48] I hope this helps non-romantic couples get closer. It is weird because I feel like if you were already going to do this with somebody who's a non-romantic partner, I feel like you would already be pretty close. I don't know. Exactly.

[00:18:08] They didn't just grab them from the parking lot. Hey, you guys hooked up like last Saturday night at like 5 CIG. So here, come do this. That's like they're just like... What are you talking about? I agree.

[00:18:24] It's hard to imagine not being a romantic partner with somebody but you're having sex and you're willing to do this. That's I think. Yeah, well, they weren't necessarily having sex with each other. Oh, they weren't. They just know.

[00:18:39] So they definitely had done at least one orgasmic meditation with each other before. So we know that actually the response options are how would you describe your relationship with a person you're doing orgasmic meditation with today?

[00:18:54] And the options included a male or female who is also my primary romantic partner, a male or female who is a previous organic meditation partner but not my primary romantic partner. Someone I am considering as a potential romantic partner or other. Okay.

[00:19:10] But I don't think the data is broken up that way. They only break it up into current romantic partner or not. So we don't really know if they've had sex. But they've done orgasmic meditation before? Yes.

[00:19:24] It's this weird, like there's this weird mirror world out there of like these kinds of things that you run into every so often where it's like, I had no fucking idea that this went on in the world that I live in. Yeah.

[00:19:37] Like, you know, like I know people will do fucked up sexual things. But like, combines like that with like being in like a scientific study or just a clinical environment. I will say I think I'm just, I think I'm actually,

[00:19:52] this is a result of my puritanical upbringing that I mean maybe this is just, Hey, it's just touching. Yeah. It's not, it's not, it's, but it's touching in a lab like with like these time, like time limits and like, like clothing requirements and you know, I don't know.

[00:20:11] And for that, if we could keep the washcloth maybe I would do it, but I have to discard the washcloth. You have to keep buying. Keep buying. It's not worth it. Right. If I could go home with like a new washcloth, which you could always see,

[00:20:26] you can always use in the house. I might be open to it. Dust rags come from somewhere. All right. When we come back, we'll talk to Paul Bloom about instincts. It's too bad that he didn't, he couldn't have been a part of this. All right.

[00:20:48] This episode of Very Bad Wizards is sponsored once again by our friends at BetterHelp. Tamler, I know you and I know you probably have a list of people that you wish would use BetterHelp. How many people are on that list and is it me?

[00:21:06] Well, let me go down to the peas. Hold on so I can see if they're... You know, no. Because I feel like I'm your BetterHelp. That's true. For people who don't have a Tamler in their life though,

[00:21:24] if you're feeling anxious or stressed or angry and you can't let it all out on your podcast co-host or if you're having trouble in your romantic relationships, don't do orgasmic meditation. It's better that you go to BetterHelp online counseling. No gloves required. No, yeah. You don't need gloves.

[00:21:45] All you need is your fingers to dial the telephone and that's all you need your fingers for. BetterHelp lets you get help from a professional counselor in a safe and private online environment at your own time, at your own pace, on your own schedule.

[00:22:00] You can get therapy over video chats. You can get them over the phone. You can text with your therapist. All of this you'll be up and running in under 24 hours talking to somebody who can help you with your specific needs. BetterHelp is available in all 50 states and worldwide.

[00:22:18] So there's really no reason to not connect with a licensed therapist if you're feeling like you need to. It's secure, it's convenient, it's professional. It's even affordable but if you can't afford it, they have financial aid. So why not get started today? Go to betterhelp.com.vbw

[00:22:37] All you'll need to do is fill out a questionnaire. They'll assess your needs and put you in touch with a therapist. So that's betterhelp.com.vbw Our thanks to BetterHelp for sponsoring this episode of Very Bad Wizards. Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

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[00:27:47] So yeah. On to our conversation with Paul Bloom. All right. So we're very happy to bring in Paul Bloom, our most popular guest. So Paul, you... We had a little exchange, I guess, on Twitter that I thought was fairly innocuous. I was making fun

[00:28:07] of Richard Dawkins for this tweet that he tweeted, science is not a social construct. Science's truths were true before there were societies will still be true after all philosophers are dead, were true before any philosophers were born, were true before there were any mines, even trilobite or dinosaur

[00:28:27] minds to notice them. I just quote, tweeted it, although I did actually quote, tweeted and didn't just take a picture of it. Because this is what it reminded me of is Denzel Washington at Lonzo at the end of training day just kind of

[00:28:43] ranting. He runs shit. He's the police. You just live here. I'm going to put cases on all you motherfuckers. You're all going to be playing basketball. And then you responded to it. Well, he's right, isn't he? I mean, like, what's the biggest problem?

[00:28:59] All of your followers attacked me. Which I will, to be fair, I didn't look at all of what they said but maybe you can summarize. So I said, then somebody said very sensibly, look, his first claim, the first sentence about science not being a

[00:29:15] social construction is very poorly put because there's in some sense of where science is a social institution. We didn't always have it under some sense of social construction, plainly a social construction. And I said, yeah, but the rest of it's fine.

[00:29:27] I got different responses, including people. I love philosophers but including those like, well, you know, there's 19 forms of scientific realism in a certain complicated tension. Something could be true yet not objective and nonetheless transcendent in time but historic. Which of

[00:29:43] this in this matrix is Dawkins talking about? And, you know, there's a sort of professional jealousy that he's talking to scientific realism if I get into words right. But I think he's having a truth. You agree with him.

[00:29:55] What is interesting about the truth that he's saying? Like, who is the target here? That's my question. I think he's sub tweeting philosophers and so what he says I think I agree with is it's true that things, you know, rocks

[00:30:07] were around before. What philosophy? Like, what views he's sub tweeting? No, no, just I think philosophers. I think in the Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's just like, fuck philosophy like science is the truth. So if he's saying fuck philosophers, I'm not in his side.

[00:30:19] Philosophers are great. Tamar, do you think there exists no people or there don't exist a lot of people who would deny what he's saying? Do you think he's just straw man? Everybody has objective scientific truths in the world. You mean like that the earth revolves around

[00:30:35] like I don't know what kind of truths he's referring to but I do think that like most people are realists about the external world and if you're a realist about the external world then you think that there were facts that were true before we got on

[00:30:51] the scene. I mean, I know there are idealists and I know there are solipsists but is that all he was saying? Cause then it's like well unless you believe we're all in the matrix or unless you believe we're brains in the vat this is kind of obvious

[00:31:07] and nobody disagrees with you. But it seems like he has an agenda against some kind of like postmodern critical thought or something like that. And I just don't know what he thinks that is. So you think

[00:31:19] what he's saying is obviously true and what's annoying is that he's saying it. Because who would doubt it? Yeah, that there are facts that were true in the world before we came into the picture. Yeah I don't think people deny it. I keep bumping into people who deny

[00:31:35] it. I would say it's more, well I'm not the ideal person to present this view but they would say the facts themselves are socially constructed that are of objective truths existing independent of people and that we can grasp such objective truths as naive. Well so that's a different

[00:31:55] question, right? Like whether we can grasp it. So the fact that there are objective truths I don't think anybody really, I'm sure there are I mean there are people who have to inhabit every possible position.

[00:32:07] But like it's a very big gap between there were these truths and we can grasp them in a way that's not filtered through our own way of perceiving the world and understanding the world through the construct of science. And so if he's saying that

[00:32:23] science is actually getting at those truths right now and we're learning about them in ways that aren't filtered through this apparatus as well as our perceptual I know I sound almost Kantian here but the way that like the cat, I'll just say it

[00:32:39] the categories through which we perceive the world like it's more controversial but I don't see him saying that exactly I see him saying the more obvious or uncontroversial thing. Okay some of your followers seem to think he was

[00:32:55] mistaken not just about the first sentence but in general. But you know if you were just teasing him for saying something obvious an attempt to sort of an attack against imaginary opponents, fair enough. Well I think there is a controversial thing that he's saying there which

[00:33:11] is not just the science is a social construction I mean the science is not a social construction part but also if he's making an appeal not to the ontology not that rocks existed. I think this is what Tamler's saying but rather that our acquiring knowledge of

[00:33:27] physical laws is and like that are say understanding of particle physics given our models like that this is tapping into reality. When I think there people would say well like no theories ever can describe that external reality but he seems

[00:33:47] to think not only that science is for sure capturing that reality which I actually tend to agree with but whatever but he also seems to be saying by omission that science is the only thing that can capture truth and I think some people are

[00:34:03] sort of objecting that like well you know there are all kinds of truths that science can't capture moreover they are there are socially constructed things that are objective and true so like what the like what not only is he not saying that much

[00:34:15] in terms of like the obvious part is what people would agree with but the part that is broader and might actually be more content to what he's saying seems obviously false it would be false if he was saying science is the only way to capture truth for instance

[00:34:27] and his inclusion of like verses philosophy in there is what made me think he was sub tweeting so he's over against philosophy like you might think philosophy is acquiring truth but here's what's really happening science is you know capturing to be content the numinal realm

[00:34:43] directly with our little probes with our little devices we've cut through into the numina I mean and if that's what he's saying then it is controversial and interesting it's just not a clear there's no way to defend that position in the tweet

[00:35:03] it's not even clear that he's doing that one thing he says which I think is fair enough he's not saying that current science actually has captured the truth or that everything we're doing is right he's talking more in terms of sort of the goal of science

[00:35:15] I think it's a reasonable goal but his target is definitely postmodernist thought as he understands it as somebody said he's targeting people who think 2 plus 2 equals 4 is racist or imperialist or something and I don't think there are those people not really there was a debate on Twitter

[00:35:35] a few months ago where people said 2 plus 2 isn't 4 because you know you could put two dogs and two treats in a room and the dogs eat the treats and it's 2 plus 2 equals 2 and it was like just a neutral storm of

[00:35:51] neutral trolling yeah these are people who are on purpose not trying to understand each other which is like the original tweet was making an interesting point about like the assumptions that go into a claim like a statement 2 plus 3 equals 4

[00:36:07] but then everybody fighting against the like but no but if you give me 2 apples and then 2 more of course I have 4 apples you fuck and it's just a willful talking past each other it wasn't up to Twitter generally high quality of

[00:36:19] just to extend it because I think everybody agree everybody should agree with Dawkins when it comes to like physics but I will tell you I saw this thing on again where either Eric Weinstein or Brett Weinstein was on

[00:36:31] Clubhouse of which some of us here are members of and he was in a room and this was like recorded into clip was put on Twitter where he was a he at one point he was asked are you an evolutionary biologist and he said yes and then

[00:36:43] the response was something like no so that's just because you're a eugenicist same thing right he said no and that was the whole clip but I wonder whether Dawkins is thinking about something like that well I think

[00:36:55] once you've been the victim of unfair attacks which he was back when I think he was doing interesting work like you know selfish gene extended phenotype and like Richard Lewington and people like that to attack them for being like a genetic determinist which was totally unfair I think

[00:37:11] it does tilt you in a direction where you can go full full on crank and that kind of is what happened to him that plus his just antagonism towards religion it's it's kind of sad to me because I really you know he was a real inspiration to him

[00:37:27] to me early on and now he really just does seem like the you know get off my lawn like old guy like that's just that's just hasn't even bothered to like meet up or interest himself in anything like new that's happening but

[00:37:47] still feels like he can shit on it I have more love for him than you do I would agree his books The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype are and then those three are works of genius

[00:37:59] genius, creative genius, beautifully written thoughtful brand new ideas and everything and then there's a notion of comparative advantage which is I wish Dawkins wrote more books like that and fewer books about God just because a lot of people are writing about God

[00:38:11] and a lot of people are writing about poetry and science and social constructivism and whatever. Yeah right exactly and there are better books than him at understanding that stuff. I get the sense with Dawkins, my mild defensive Dawkins as well is that unlike

[00:38:27] someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson who I think is weirdly more trollish about philosophers and more disparaging of them I think Dawkins this is just a point of frustration sort of like Tamler was describing like he's got to a point of frustration

[00:38:43] where he's like can't I just say science is true and that's that what gets to me is, and this might sound pedantic but I think you guys will agree is that the loose use of words like science but particularly the word objective. There's where like philosophy actually does

[00:38:59] bring some use to the table. Like there are objective truths that are completely socially constructed right? Like it just is true that's three strikes and you're out of baseball. And that is objective and that kind of loose language

[00:39:15] is what makes me think man if only you just opened up a little bit like I don't need him to be a philosopher of science but just open yourself up a little bit to why people might think you're being sloppy with your language and maybe saying

[00:39:27] something that is misinterpreted it would help. Like they're trying to do philosophy. They're just there are a bunch of people who watch MMA and then go in their backyard and try to punch each other and it's like you know like the MMA not that philosophers are MMA fighters

[00:39:47] and to be fair we criticize philosophers for bringing in science irresponsibly like our sideways music. This is another case of that. Oh the sideways music episode. We get a lot of email about that like you know people who are like mathematicians

[00:40:03] who just want to tell us how extra wrong that paper was but yeah that's also a case of you know watching MMA is you know some philosophers of science who then want to toss around these words

[00:40:15] as if they mean something which is you know they're smarter than me but I'm not trying to do that. By the way that episode you also talked about a paper called something like why childhood is bad for children and as a result of that you guys were pretty

[00:40:31] negative. You put it kind of in the same category as your sideways. I think it's worth and I loved it. I love the paper. I'm motivated me to read the paper and sign it in a lab meeting. We had a great conversation about how it was really interesting.

[00:40:43] If we were on some like what's the not family feud match game thing or whatever where I had to predict whether you would like something I would have predicted that you would like that. It is kind of in your contrarian

[00:40:55] kind of sweet spot. I see it's like the dating game. Yeah the dating game. Alright so should we tell people what we're talking about? Yeah. So Paul this was your we wanted to talk to Paul about William James

[00:41:15] and Paul you picked his chapter in the principle psychology on instinct but give us a little bit of a background with you. You said that you hadn't really ever read William James which is weird to me because I've heard you quote him all the time

[00:41:27] so I take it you're just an irresponsible scholar. Paul rolled his eyes. There are actually 19 kinds of William James. I've read Stephen Pinker who quotes William James. There's a wonderful quote which I got through Steve and that I used. I never read William James

[00:41:43] I never sat down and read anything William James and I got into it because you guys had a great episode on Habit on his chapter on Habit which was like you know you're reading aloud from him. He had great quotes. It's a really interesting idea so I really

[00:41:55] was excited about the idea of delving in and you know we were talking about this I went through his book and some of his stuff like he has a chapter on emotions which I think

[00:42:03] he had dated yet a very particular theory of the emotions and it's not right that we still make people learn that. Yes weird yes but I think that and there's a lot of stuff to read.

[00:42:15] But I was very interested in what he had to say about instinct and I gotta say I love this chapter. I love it because it bears on contemporary debates about nativism and empiricism which continue to rage. I love it because

[00:42:27] there's all of these local insights that he has you know I was saying we could just spend the whole time reading back and forth different wonderful parts of it and I think he has some true and interesting things to say

[00:42:39] in a style and a sort of observational style that nobody writes nowadays. Yeah. And I love this style but and also because he begins he has the quote which everybody uses which is a wonderful introduction

[00:42:55] to psychology to what's going on in psychology. I don't know if one of you want to read it out or do you want me to start with it. Yeah go ahead. Yeah go for it. Yeah this is a so he starts with a series of questions

[00:43:07] why do men always lie down when they can on soft beds rather than hard floors whether they sit around stove on a cold day why in a room do they place themselves

[00:43:15] 99 times out of 100 with their faces towards the middle rather than to the wall as several goes on and then he says you know well you know nobody nobody asked these questions in everyday life you know not one man

[00:43:27] a billion when taking his dinner everything's of utility eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more and he says it takes in short what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry a process of making the natural seems strange so far as

[00:43:43] to ask the why of any human act to the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as and go why did we smile when please why not scowl why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend

[00:43:55] and then he says you know you have a person going to say well does obvious they go on to say well every animal probably thinks that we could think of it natural behaviors obvious we have to make make the natural unnatural

[00:44:07] we have to think like metaphysicians and that isn't excellent that is at the core of modern psychology you know why can't why is it why is it harder to remember 100 words hard to remember 100 words than 5 words why does

[00:44:23] the fat and sugar taste good but rocks and dirt don't you can't just say well duh you have to say well we have to do what Newton did apocryphally when he says you know why does an apple fall from the tree right yeah I like one of his

[00:44:39] examples in this vein he says why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside down the common man can only say of course we smile of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd of course we love the maiden that beautiful soul clad

[00:44:55] in that perfect form so palpably and flage flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved he's really got his pulse on the common man by the way this is none of this is just a common woman it is very clear yes a very

[00:45:11] a very cis heteromomial as his ideal listener he gets into some of those sex differences as well so I wanted to I was really interested to talk to you about this in particular because you know I think Paul you were probably my introduction to the big empiricist

[00:45:27] versus nativist arguments in cognitive science and philosophy psychology and of course you are of that crowd you're of the Chomsky pinker balloon lineage who firmly believes in a lot the mind has you know these innate probably modules

[00:45:47] but that means a lot we come into the world with a lot and I remember you know there is we often refer to James is empiricism we talk about James is empiricism and so having not read James in a long time I was actually surprised at how much

[00:46:03] he put in into this you know instinct psychology and what I was going to ask you is this at all is this capturing some of the flavor of modern day nativism yeah I think the language is very different but it captures the flavor of modern nativism

[00:46:23] in a few ways first thing it allows for learning of course and I think I think your observation is right I think it's just the fact that these are such empiricist times where everybody everybody in and most psychologists miss Skinner

[00:46:35] they would ought to bad I wish everything were learned we have a coat with alternatives and everything and he was at one at the same time deeply respective of learning but also said you know man has all these instincts way more than any other creature

[00:46:47] in fact and what goes so much goes on in our lives is overriding the instincts and adjusting them there's kind of a muddle bit of a muddle where he defines instincts in a very narrow way as triggered by certain stimuli

[00:46:59] give rise to certain behavior and then immediately gives that up and there's all sorts of examples don't fit that at all but he talks about instincts like like instinct to acquire objects the instinct for language the instinct for resentment the instincts for certain

[00:47:11] fears and so on the one hand he gets his list is a good one and another and similarly he's um I think he's sensitive to evolutionary concerns I don't agree with all of his interpretations but he says well why would this be adaptive

[00:47:23] and does not be adaptive talks about what Mr. Darwin has to say right I'm surprised that everyone thinks of him as an empiricist from this as well because it seems like even when he talks about you know sometimes we override it one instinct we do it he says

[00:47:39] from another instinct it's like they're doing battle with him right and so like he gives the example of the toad where a boy will you know do horrible things just torture a toad which I didn't know like that was not part of my

[00:47:55] childhood he repeats this over and over again I think really he's trigger warning but there's a whole lot of boys ripping apart animals and misses but then he says maybe um the first time you know when you do it once

[00:48:07] or twice and then all of a sudden as his you know it's taking its last breath and whimpering or something in a toad like way then you start to feel sympathy and then you associate that feeling with um carrying apart the toad and so next time that instinct

[00:48:27] of sympathy will clash with the instinct of wanting to tear apart the toad and maybe even override it but it's still an instinct in the end it's just now this instinct trumps that instincts so yeah I guess I sort of

[00:48:43] just to clarify so that nobody emails us in anger about my misuse of what James's empiricism is I think that when people say that James was an empiricist he was talking about sort of epistemology in the like

[00:48:59] the only way to acquire knowledge about the world is through sensory and it just turns out that by doing that we can see some of these things that are instinctual but in the I'm trying to think now in the categories of what our

[00:49:11] instincts you know he defines them kind of as behavioral impulses I don't think he's talking about innate categories of knowledge ever is he no he's not you're right you're right that's interesting there's so just two thoughts one thought is he's empiricist philosophically but also psychologically

[00:49:27] and your other episode on habit captures the sides of this where he talks extremely intelligently about how we learn things and how that works and also here talks about instinct so you know together there's sort of a nice psychological

[00:49:39] package but you're right he talked when he talks about instincts the fuzziness I talked about before is he originally defines them in terms of of determine its stimuli and contact the animals body giving rise to some sort of behavior then a few page later later

[00:49:55] few page later he gives examples of greediness and suspicion curiosity timidity coin isn't designer bashing us in vanity those are not the simple instincts but you're right he's not a nativist like like Emmanuel Kant or he does not he doesn't talk about knowledge at any point

[00:50:10] right right although so I don't know tamela your question was different but I want I interjected with was your question yeah I mean I guess I'm just wondering to what extent some of this stuff is disputed I imagine that some people will think it's too universalist

[00:50:27] that it doesn't take into account culture and environment enough but I it strikes me that no one will deny that we have some basic instincts right and then the debates have to be

[00:50:43] over the details of them and how malleable they are yeah but I mean this goes back to our Dawkins conversation almost which is that that you could say that in that some level it's true

[00:50:53] but I know a lot of psychologists who say well you have baby reflexes you know you put your finger in a baby's palm it will squeeze but instincts of the sort like an instinct to construct things

[00:51:02] that are blocks an instinct to possessing it was crazy yeah no all in that emerges through cultural experience our neural networks are predictive encoding or some single general magical bullshit that's supposed to explain everything right and I think that's I think

[00:51:17] that's the dominant view in psychology and I don't know if in developmental psychology but that is certainly so like in my in my department you know that's just what most most people believe that there is no yeah there baby reflexes but everything else can be explained through

[00:51:33] general purpose mechanisms that you know they're very sensitive to statistical regularities in the environment and you get both language and a desire to construct and greed all that stuff just comes from yeah and it's it's always it strikes me as pretty dog a pretty dogmatic view

[00:51:50] but I think it's driven in part by a desire to build computer models that mimic human thought there's a great line by Dan Dennett which I respect Dan Dennett a lot but I think this is a

[00:52:01] terrible argument where he talks about passing the buck to biology and and he says basically well you know when you say something's innate his target was Jerry Fodor here when you say something is innate you're just saying psychologists don't have anything to say about it so you're saying

[00:52:13] you're passing the buck to evolutionary biology isn't that awful shouldn't you want to sort of deal with it yourself but the obvious answer is well it's like a fact of the matter like you know

[00:52:23] it's not it's not saying it would give us less to do if x is true therefore we should believe x is false and so let me just try to like narrow like pin down this view then so what do they say about

[00:52:36] something like fear because fear does seem like an instinct that is pretty pervasive and it doesn't seem like it's just something that babies have if anything they might have a little less than

[00:52:51] then well that comes later so so Lisa Feldman Barrett who's a friend of mine now is a very prominent motion researcher and she would say the very category fear is socially constructed

[00:53:01] the idea there's such a thing as feared at all humans possess or animals possess is just a confusion we have these broad valence to reactions to things and they get that funneled

[00:53:11] and everything and honestly I respect her work a lot but i think James is much more on the mark when he talks about innate fears and how they develop but so like fear of snakes or something

[00:53:20] like that which is something that seems pretty built into us what is the what is the counter view to to something like that that that we've overestimated that the fear of snakes so

[00:53:35] the argument is that kind of like what James is saying it seems so so natural to us to fear snakes especially as adults that it's hard for us to imagine but you know babies

[00:53:48] are fine with most things like it's now that doesn't mean it's not an instinct which is another subtlety you know like an instinct might emerge later in life but i think i think that the standard answer would be we've radically overestimated the degree to which we come into

[00:54:05] the world with fear of snakes and heights and you know there's some there's some work on that yeah and the alternate explanation is we just what like people we've learned that snakes are something

[00:54:17] to be afraid of we learned from others i mean there's a sort of regress in a lot of these arguments as well kids notice that their parents are afraid of snakes well like the visual

[00:54:26] experiments are a great or great example it's right in the visual cliff experiments where in a baby is put on a table that has a glass top but half of the table doesn't have a glass top and

[00:54:37] it has a table cloth so it looks like it's a drop off but it's not really it's safe if the if the mother looks at the baby and just says come on come on like then the baby will

[00:54:48] go like the bit and so it seems as if they're picking up you know so here's where they might say well yes there is a general adaptive mechanism of paying attention to what your parents are doing

[00:54:59] but that's just a learning right whereas james would say about that kind of example that that's just one instinct like trusting a mother overriding the other instinct which is the fear of heights

[00:55:12] which to me sounds more plausible but and i think james is more true to the facts is i don't know if james there's very sort of jamesian observation which is that adults

[00:55:21] around the world like i say adults in chicago as your study was done of high school children chicago you asked them what they're most afraid of this is like downtown chicago and it's not cars

[00:55:30] or guns it's their two most biggest fears are spiders and snakes and you think you know and i think this is natural to say this is just this instinctive pattern but but i'm still stuck

[00:55:41] on something you said before about different notions of nativism and i realize one of the weirdnesses here is that james is having a conversation that is sort of orthogonal to the sort of standard textbook debates in my field in my field the debates tend to be

[00:55:55] is language innate our understanding of objects the physical world you talk about lispelke's work on suggesting kids have innate understanding of objects and there's an enormous another and other critics who argue against their understanding of number of time sort of contian categories

[00:56:10] and there's an enormous amount of debate 90 percent of it's over is this right or is it wrong and you don't have much except for maybe moral psychology on whether children have an innate

[00:56:20] propensity to climb the eternal moral question so we ask that the parts of james's uh discussion which really rings sort of contemporary or when he talks about morality like you know schoenfreude and you know anger kindness and love those are debates we have but a lot of

[00:56:34] instincts no i don't know anybody studying whether kids have a natural instinct to climb or even collect i mean there's a lot of work on play there's a lot of work on play right

[00:56:43] and i think a lot of people do believe that just that the play is a feature of of animals in in their youth that is if that has evolved then it's good and then it probably just takes very different

[00:56:55] forms depending on what environment and what species obviously and i agree with you and the overwhelming feeling i had after reading uh the habit chapter that we discussed earlier was

[00:57:06] and i said this the tamler like it feels like he knows just as much if not more than we know now and as i was reading this you know some offensively gendered language and language about

[00:57:17] savages aside it feels like this is not a bad description of human psychology that is actually fleshed out more than most you know than like i'd say a developmental psych chapter in an intro psych textbook right and it's it's humbling because there's no experiments in here

[00:57:35] i mean occasionally mr so-and-so or mr so-and-so took some chicks and blinded them and or he tells an anecdote about a dog that was like digging around a Scottish terrier

[00:57:47] digging at a carpet but only did it for four days or yes or it has casual suggestion for a study where you you take a baby the question is if you stop the child from normally walking will

[00:57:58] they walk fine after the delay so you you blister to souls that are feats that are unable to walk and this suggests this like it is for a bachelor i think or someone who like a widower

[00:58:09] as a man a man alone of a child yeah no he says something like i can't i can't find the quote but he is like you know hopefully someone comes along and is brave enough to actually do this

[00:58:18] you know because we don't we don't know right now in light of this report one may be tempted to make a prediction about the human child say if the baby were kept from getting on his feet

[00:58:27] for two or three weeks after the first impulse to walk had shown itself in him a small blister on each soul would do the business he might then be expected to walk as well then he says it

[00:58:37] is to be hoped that some scientific widower left alone with his offspring at a critical moment may air long test his subject this suggestion on the living subject that's wonderful this is what like

[00:58:48] you know we haven't talked about human subjects committees but that gets in the way of a lot of the best for it i like the assumption there that like if the mom were alive she would never

[00:58:56] ever allow it this is well the mom were alive what would he be doing with the kid i mean he wouldn't have FaceTime you know but but he's a scientific widower he's stuck with the kid you know he has he has a little needle so you know

[00:59:13] a lot of times his observations are interesting that they don't ring true and you know your mileage may vary in us and again he's talking to this male audience but the possession of

[00:59:21] homes and wives of our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people and then he goes on you know strangers we are apt to think cannot be worth knowing especially if they come from distant cities the original impulse which got us homes

[00:59:35] wives and friends all seems to exhaust itself in its first achievement and leave no surplus energy for reacting on new cases and you know let's stay clear of this other cases you know occasionally i want a new house i know don't have like four

[00:59:52] you know i had the same thought like like with the habit one it was just i just felt like i was nodding the whole time where but this one felt like there are times where it shows the limits

[01:00:04] just observations about life and a lot of the times it just seemed like observations about like a certain aristocracy at the turn of the 19th century or something right you was writing for his audience it's in some ways it's an insensitivity of the sort that he is pointing

[01:00:23] out earlier that paul started with but he's failing to ask the question is it the case that i am just noticing people around me and universalizing so it is problem isn't that he doesn't do

[01:00:36] experiments i think his problem is that is his work is too weird as psychologists would say it now to western educated industrial rich democracy and he do well more cross-cultural

[01:00:45] though of course he says you know you know miss miss mr spindle came from the islands and told me this wonderful story about brood savages about about the broods who though they walk around naked

[01:00:56] are still you know covered with shame when a westerner guys upon that's his ethnography it's about missus seaward or but it yeah um what about these principles though of like and the relationship between instincts and habits um because he says on the one hand that instincts

[01:01:14] like the whole their whole function is to like build proper habits but then also instincts can be inhibited by habits yeah and maybe this goes back to what we're talking about him being in a pierce

[01:01:25] is where i think he tends to view the instincts often as getting things going yeah and then fading into the background they just set things up he says um that um that what goes on is the

[01:01:36] inhibition of instincts by habits is a really big thing but then he also says and i'm trying to find the quote that the goal like the whole reason we have instincts is for the formation of

[01:01:48] habit if yes i i really like you know i don't know how true it is but i really like this point because this gets us this interaction between um instincts and habits with instincts being

[01:02:02] sort of the scaffolds that allow us to even act upon the world to begin with and then once we act upon the world consequences occur and based on those consequences we shift over what

[01:02:12] we're doing that seems like such a nice account of like what's going on like and he's sophisticated he's he's sophisticated and appreciate instincts don't have to show up at birth right they could

[01:02:21] take their own development i think at one point he talks about sex and he just intelligently gives us sort of example you always give that sexual desire often emerges quite late in life

[01:02:29] after you know after the baby years yeah he also seems to think it fades away really quickly yeah there's a whole lot of stuff like how old was he when he wrote this when this

[01:02:39] was 10 20 years writing it i guess there's a whole massive industry of pills yes would support yeah but that's because we already desire it we just can't do it well that's uh now that that might be a terminology between you and james

[01:02:58] but yeah he's very he's very much and i i don't know how true this is um it's empirically true this is very much in a power of the young there's a passage i i don't know where it is where he talks

[01:03:07] about you know when you're young you could think about new ideas and you could you explore and then at fates and then at the age that we're all at um we just stuck with artificial ideas

[01:03:16] and when other ideas come we are suspicious of them so so i have this quote in front of me paul and you this is the one that you posted on twitter i did right

[01:03:26] so you say so here's here it is outside of their own business the ideas gained by men before they are 25 are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives they cannot get anything new

[01:03:37] disinterested curiosity has passed the mental grooves and channels set the power of assimilation gone if by chance we ever do learn anything from about some entirely new topic we are afflicted with a strange sense of insecurity and we fear to advance a resolute opinion

[01:03:53] but with things learned in the plastic days of instinctive curiosity we never lose entirely our sense of being at home there remains a kinship a sentiment of intimate acquaintance which

[01:04:03] even when we know we have failed to keep abreast of the subject matters us with a sense of power over it and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale if i could write one passage like that

[01:04:14] my whole career i'd be done that that is just lovely i you know i when you first posted it on twitter my first instinct was to rebel against that and to come up with all these things that i've

[01:04:27] got you know new interests that i've gained since i was 25 and then i when i really thought about it and it's it's like i've changed my views on things but when i have it's in relation to some other

[01:04:40] thing you know that i had acquired before i was 25 and went and i was really actually struggling to come up with some brand new thing that that really gripped me since you know since

[01:04:51] that age and like a lot of the stuff that i'm just more mature about or know more about the the ground work was set and i had to kind of see his point there without kind of wanting to i had the same

[01:05:03] fucking experience and i was like oh how cute of him to completely ignore the fact that like you know so we're still learning you know we're we're surrounded by new ideas especially

[01:05:13] in an educational context and i was like you know what like the the say i say i read 100 papers on moral judgment in grad school let's just say i don't know how many right um those are the ones

[01:05:25] that shaped my views those are the one you know that like it's it's depressing and james gives us an out he says outside of your business um it's rare but even inside of my business i fear that

[01:05:38] like i don't you know i just have variations on a theme and that's why i think people's first papers are often like the culmination of what they've been thinking about for 25 years and then the

[01:05:48] rest are just variations on that but when it comes to other things like aesthetic appreciation we you know there's this there's data on like music musical appreciation right and so spot if

[01:05:59] i can tell because you have to sign up for an account they know when you were born and they know what you listen to the most and it turns out that people listen the most to music

[01:06:09] that came out when they were 14 or 15 years old yeah and that's pretty fucking depressing but it's not wrong i've i've stretched i've certainly made an effort to stretch but past 25 i don't

[01:06:21] and i was interpreting it more in terms of like some new category of thing that you're now gonna become excited about too because i wasn't even in the business that i'm in when i was 25 so

[01:06:31] it's like that part of it you know has to have changed once i got older but like yeah in terms of just my general tastes and things that i get excited about and intellectually curious about

[01:06:44] and want to pursue that's that's kind of the same like i was always kind of into music and i'm still kind of into music but not very into music i was always i really loved movies and

[01:06:55] you know maybe didn't know enough about them and now i know more about them but that's not a that's not a new thing that's just more owing appreciation and maturity in terms of how i understand

[01:07:05] these same things that i've always that i've always liked um so this guy phil corlett uh who's at Yale actually responded to my tweet with the papers uh arguing against it because it said that

[01:07:17] Nobel prize winners and it differs from area to area often get the award for projects that they began later in life but i wonder whether that really counts it's that's this is still in your

[01:07:27] own business yeah yeah like there's there is a way in which you can own like especially in today's world where where there is so much knowledge there's so much to learn in any given field i think now it might

[01:07:39] actually take you know 25 30 years in a field to even get to the point where you can make a contribution that would be deeply meaningful but that's not really what james is saying he's

[01:07:48] just saying like like you were interested in that shit when you were 25 like it's not i mean obviously there are exceptions like i think you know like i don't know i got way more into like

[01:07:58] technology later in life but interesting you had that kind of nerd yeah i was a nerd i was always a nerd but what's interesting to me is my resistance psychologically my resistance to hearing that is

[01:08:08] what's most interesting totally and like because it does it seems to close off a whole world of possibilities to you know uh do you like that after that he says whatever individual exceptions

[01:08:21] might be cited to this are the sort that prove the rule yes it's like okay so now you snack now he makes it unfalsified don't even try yeah but but but i feel there's a deep truth in it which is that

[01:08:33] i and and it makes me introspect on my own intellectual conclusion so i was making fun of a little while ago but the sort of predictive processing models of the brain but maybe i'm just responding to them negatively because they're new yeah right you know maybe it's maybe

[01:08:45] there's sort of a get off my lawn philosophy that runs through you know our work and it is interesting how much we rebel against this idea because i think it's such an in it's a constraint on

[01:08:58] our freedom and especially like americans we do not like constraints on our freedom and the way i kind of came to terms with it as i had my reckoning was yeah but there's within those things

[01:09:11] yes that i that i was curious about and really kind of passionately attached to there that's a huge world that i could live 10 lifetimes exploring i don't need to now get into like

[01:09:23] shernberg or something like that you know yeah part of it is just simply pragmatic like i i admire architecture but i'm not going to get into architecture now because like the cost of

[01:09:32] of getting into something at this stage is really high like it requires a lot of dedication and time and you kind of have to just you know pick your pick your battles when it comes to that

[01:09:43] so so learning more about things that i already know seems like the sweet spot because you know have all of this you know knowledge you're set out yeah you have like scaffold it's not a developmental

[01:09:54] term scaffolding i have the scaffolding i wonder just there are cases of people you know to use lori paul's language people have transformative experiences that actually changes them so deeply that they start getting into completely new things i don't remember if she ever discusses anything

[01:10:09] but we need to know those are good cases maybe where things happen to you there's a great little part of the malty's falcon the novel it's it's not in the movie but he tells this story

[01:10:24] sam spade of a guy who had this wife and children and he was a good family man had a good job and then all of a sudden like a beam fell from like a construction site and came within like

[01:10:38] millimeters of killing him and then he disappeared and sam spade was hired to track him down and when he tracked him down he found him in seattle with a new wife a couple of kids and like a good steady

[01:10:52] job just like before but in the meantime he had like you know he had gone a little crazy and he had traveled and he had done all these new things and and the point of the story that he says the

[01:11:02] reason i always like this story is this is a guy who lived life as if beams weren't falling on his head then all of a sudden live very briefly lives as though beams were falling on the home

[01:11:14] falling on his head and then went back to living life as if beams weren't falling on his head that was exactly the same as it was before that that strikes me as probably like some transformative

[01:11:23] experiences is it may get you to branch out very temporarily but soon it will it will fade and you'll go back to your own instincts and habits and stuff like that that strikes me as flaws

[01:11:36] i have a family member who all of a sudden through serious events decided he he's in medical profession and he wanted to give up his comfortable life and go to africa where he had been before

[01:11:47] and work in a small village and make a real difference to people and his wife was panicked who's relative might was panicked and and like oh my god we're uproot our family our kids and

[01:11:56] this is extremely serious about it and at one point somebody gave her advice just wait and in two weeks it was gone and i have a feeling that all these things people have a heart attack

[01:12:09] the people who beams just missing them that changes their life new appreciation totally noodles for a month a couple one maybe yeah and then and then they just go back to where they

[01:12:18] were that's sort of one of the upon rewatching the sopranos that's sort of one of the themes they everybody gets shaken up by death or near death and you think this is the moment where

[01:12:28] they're going to change they're going to and they just go back to being exactly who they are there's never progress made you know the character this is the moment when a j won't just stare blankly yet

[01:12:41] i've never seen a show incorporate bad acting so well into a character the yeah no i think that's probably right and of course there are exceptions but it does seem like that a lot of the time you settle back you know something ruffles you or rocks your world

[01:12:58] but then the water settles again afterwards hey i wanted to ask you guys about for some reason i was fascinated at this claim about the instinct of what he calls appropriation or acquisitiveness

[01:13:11] where he says that collecting things is an instinct and there's a sentence he says out of 100 students who my question only four or five had never collected anything who's an early social

[01:13:22] psychologist and then i was like wait is that true and then i was hard pressed to think of somebody i know who hasn't collected something yeah that's such i also sort of underlined that

[01:13:33] talks about postage stamps and so on i wonder if i think it would probably a lot of people include like a pokemon and stuff virtual collections yeah which i think is hitting the same little

[01:13:44] and and that's an example which is i bet if i went to google skull on type you know the collecting instinct i'd find nothing yeah and and it's such a great question is he right do we have an urge

[01:13:53] to collect a hoard there's there's certainly evidence you see it you like one one reason to believe something is an instinct is that if you see it as an extreme pathology you can imagine sub drive gone crazy and certainly hoarding when he talks about that

[01:14:06] that's a great example of one of those where it takes a mind debauched by learning to even ask that question but yeah i was a bit i don't even consider myself like a collector personality

[01:14:15] i don't really collect stuff now but i collected baseball cards i collected coins for a while i collected comic books for a while like uh yeah and i don't know anyone who didn't collect

[01:14:24] something is this one i don't remember is this one where he makes these gendered claims which you know in some cases are reasonable but i don't know if this one is is one of those

[01:14:36] because he uses boys as his example so often yes it's hard to know because it would strike me maybe this is more of a boy thing than a girl thing yeah i would think so too until i think of things like

[01:14:46] you know stuffed animals dolls like yeah you know things that women are hardwired to love yeah exactly things that they ought to love normatively when when he does mention

[01:14:59] women it's it's typically not good no i'll read what quote my uh as soon as a wife becomes a mother her whole thought and feeling her whole being is altered until then she had only thought of

[01:15:11] her own well-being of the satisfaction of her vanity the whole world appeared made only for her everything that went on was about her was only noticed so far as it had personal reference to herself

[01:15:25] she asked of everyone that uh he should appear interested in her pay her the requisite attention and as far as possible fulfill her wishes now however the center of her world is no longer

[01:15:37] herself but her child which he then goes on to say it's one of the most beautiful things in the world unless the poor wench is barren but it like he must have known a lot of like paris hilton

[01:15:50] yeah uh that does not strike me as what women are all women are pre-child child is he is that tongue-in-cheek to something i don't think so i don't know like he doesn't

[01:16:04] strike me as a tongue-in-cheek kind of guy he kind of has a light tone but i don't think he's ever he's ever kidding yeah um so have you ever read his brother i haven't i have not

[01:16:14] yeah tamela was an english major i uh read the bostonians which i remember liking but i don't remember the first thing about it and i read portrait of the lady which i remember not really liking

[01:16:27] is there any similarities jump out yeah the the pro's style you know like these long sentences that occasionally have these flurries of atlic transcendent like virtuosity and brilliance but then now they're both they're both great like wonderful writers but it is of a certain style

[01:16:44] that if you might be in the wrong mood it can be a little precious or and it's easy to make fun of if you're so inclined but i am not that i'm not so inclined for most for the most part with

[01:16:55] but still i mean i know what the sentence is that you're that you're talking about but in some ways pro's is great i just i'm spinning through this looking parts i marked up he says

[01:17:04] constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible instinct in man as in the beaver or the beaver whatever things are plastic to his hands the things he must remodel into shapes of his own and the result of the remodeling however useless it may be gives him more pleasure than original

[01:17:18] thing the mania of young children were breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them a more uh is more often the expression of rudimentary constructive instinct than of a destructive

[01:17:28] one then he says okay blocks are to play a thing of which they are least apt to tire and you know it's true you have kids right you know you give them a box and then they play in a box

[01:17:37] instead of uh and they're like blocks and everything like that and and again it makes me sad for my field you know you've 99 percent of the work in development of psychology is so much less

[01:17:48] interesting than asking two kids have to sort of constructive instinct and studying and looking at variation right i mean look at this oh go ahead i just can say part of that is the

[01:17:58] emphasis on experiments right it's liberating when you don't have to organize your career and your articles around them um you can be more observational in this way and you know you know it helps to

[01:18:13] be kind of a genius when it comes to that but right i think the sad trade-off is that you have say one person who opens up a field like say Liz Spelke with object recognition

[01:18:26] and then you have just like a whole gajillion people doing stuff that she started rather than taking you know taking one of these paragraphs from James and starting something something new and but you know part of that is just so just sociologically like the incentive structure to

[01:18:43] to in philosophy i take it as well to add to the body of literature and critique and improve and refine like that's how science is supposed to be done um and so we we would discard somebody who

[01:18:56] are like this now because the burden of proof is a lot higher so his paragraph on curiosity which is wonderful as well you know that's you can't just say that you need to let you need you need

[01:19:06] a psych review article that covers the 200 articles on on curiosity which which is sad but yeah yeah and and maybe it should be that way because i don't want to read what

[01:19:18] somebody who's not William James has to say right but but you know when you both said at the end of discussion of William James's habit that it feels like this is stuff which is better than what's

[01:19:29] published now i agreed with it and it filled me with such sadness it is one would hope psychology would be a field such that we'd read the current work and say look at how we've expanded on

[01:19:40] ideas of William James look at how we understand the things he's talking about we know he was wrong there he was right there we discovered phenomena and of course we there's things in

[01:19:48] development psychology that aren't in here but it seems like this is capturing so much of what's in what's interesting and we just have not have not met up with a challenge what would you do

[01:19:59] like so like what could happen in a way because you know we've often approached this with kind of almost defeatist attitude like it's just the incentives are aligned in such a way as to

[01:20:10] make this kind of impossible but is there a way to allow for this kind of thing and allow for really talented people to approach psychology in this way i yeah i mean if i knew the answer i'd be doing it

[01:20:25] i have a kind of an answer which is that there are some people who who do do this it's just the progress is a lot slower but i'll give you an example from from paul's own lab right at

[01:20:38] some point paul switched from doing a lot of the language development stuff that he was known for and he read you know some paul rosen article on disgust and got interested in it he got me

[01:20:49] interested in it and we started doing that work that at the time wasn't you know this wasn't a whole lot of people doing it and then i was doing stuff on moral judgment which really

[01:20:57] didn't wasn't that done at the time but because paul and peter salve were both super supportive of it they encouraged it i think that as as advisors and as professors that can be our

[01:21:10] job right and i think it does happen sometimes it just doesn't happen all in one person we know so many people who have tremendously high h indexes and publish a lot and are experimental workhorses

[01:21:20] but i think some of the great people in our field are people like paul rosen we just mentioned and rosen is this guy who's very interested in food and disgust and i started off as as doing operant conditioning class conditioning studies and just a very imaginative clever person

[01:21:38] and i think our field is at a point where we benefit from such people you know it doesn't work that way in physics i'm sure in physics it's just you know experimental genius and theoretical

[01:21:46] sophistication but we are at a stage where a good eye is is really important i just wanted to say some stuff like that people you know his this modesty shame section the um curiosity

[01:22:00] and the sociability and shyness third in the play section those are great and those have been followed up quite a bit um all of those things like the self-conscious emotions and the tendency

[01:22:09] to to play and and there's been a lot of recent work on curiosity um which i don't know if it was inspired by by what william james said but at least there's some i have some optimism it's

[01:22:21] just that again it's like we you know 18 people like study one thing not not one person studying 18 things you know yeah right and and then there's a question of whether they've

[01:22:32] made progress on it so like habits people have studied habits but i had a lot of friends i have some friends in the business world and there's this new book that came out called i think

[01:22:42] atomic habits oh yeah that the my my friends who had listened to my podcast was like it sounds like he's saying the exact same thing that william james said in that article and so but of

[01:22:53] course this guy is built so you know you can do run a lot of experiments but if you end up just kind of saying the same things but now being able to cite a bunch of studies that's that's not exactly

[01:23:03] progress it might make you feel better about uh about what you know but like well it might it might be progress if in psychology there is we obviously have a lot of introspective and observational access to psychology right so it is something that so it is it's possible

[01:23:20] that somebody who's very observant and very smart like a james or even a piaget would say things that then you might say well i i want to make sure that it's right and so 100 studies get done

[01:23:31] and if you believe those studies you could be like oh wow like they were right and and i want to be able to champion that and say you know not everything has to be this completely counter

[01:23:40] intuitive stuff like a savvy observer of human nature might be able to have predicted all this stuff and i think that's what's going on here the pessimistic take is that uh we all have these kind of similar intuitions and the 100 studies are just confirmation bias experiments

[01:23:57] where we're just like seems obvious that that we have a play instinct so we design studies to show it yeah i noticed this is an over simplification my feeling is people in the hard sciences

[01:24:07] do not read work from over 100 years ago and for anything else but curiosity right because because what's the point right but we could read this and profit from it and you know i can imagine

[01:24:17] i can imagine you take the habit the advice in the habit chapter kind of revise it and send it to the you know harvard business school journal um as you know you know x five tips for improving

[01:24:27] habits totally you know but don't biologists read darwin to go back to your example about the i was wondering about that my my baby is honestly they don't yeah they i think they read him

[01:24:39] because he's very readable origin species a wonderful book but but i don't i don't think so yeah i mean it's even interesting that that the the first edition was is sort of more accurate than

[01:24:50] later editions because darwin kept amending it because he was a sort of affable guy and they talked about lamar so he changed it for me putting some lamar and so on and and that's not supposed

[01:24:58] to happen in science yeah and so i i don't i don't think so my bet is you could be a top notch evolutionary theorist and never read darwin right and it would only be out of shames you know

[01:25:11] because yes expected but they probably read darwin because like the first and reasons we read it's enriching like it's enriching your sense of the possibilities of maybe what you can do and maybe that's even true for you know like reading some 19th century physicist or something

[01:25:26] like that it allows you to reorient maybe in a way that would be healthy and get out of your own bubble and the own like fashion that your field happens to be in or your sub-sub field

[01:25:37] happens to be in right now i imagine it's still profitable for that but this is different category than that because this is you're actually learning stuff about like habits or instincts or

[01:25:47] that you didn't know before um yeah and he's sort of in a you know probably the worst psychology to read is stuff between you know 1960 and 1990 because because none of it will replicate

[01:26:00] those old experiments with you know 14 subjects and and stuff you're not going to believe it's the worst of all worlds it's it's it's experimental losing a lovely anecdote but it but it lacks the

[01:26:11] power of a good experiment just getting back to the article for a second i was interested in this his claims about our fear of supernatural oh yes like he has this really cool discussion of our

[01:26:22] fear of ghosts or things that we take to be you know not of this world or they can't be explained naturalistically that strikes me also as plausible as something that's a deeply rooted instinct

[01:26:38] and i'm trying to find it now it begins with fear of the supernatural the word supernatural and he actually just kind of points out well since there are no ghosts it couldn't be an adaptation

[01:26:48] exactly how we put it yeah right exactly like well he says science has not yet adopted ghosts yes so we can only say that uh uh he says in spite of psychical research societies

[01:27:00] science has not yet adopted ghosts so i sort of use it as a sort of a perfect storm theory that that you know ghosts combine all sorts of things we've evolved for other reasons inexplicable sounds darkness loneliness moving figures have discerned but he says it produces a strange

[01:27:16] emotional curdle in our blood to see a process with which we are familiar deliberately taking an unwanted course anyone's heart would stop beating if he perceived his chair sliding unassisted across the floor i yeah i'm wondering if he's saying more than that it's more than just a

[01:27:33] combination of these other things this is like its own thing it's its own thing that we're that we're scared of for whatever reason yes and the mysterious right that sort of unexpected movement and then my professor my friend professor wk brooks of the johns hopkins

[01:27:49] university i like it's my friends talk about a large and noble dog being frightened as some sort of epileptic fit by a bone being drawn across the floor that's red oh yeah there's this great

[01:28:00] there's a great set of videos of like people showing slight of hand card tricks to like orangutans you know or like yeah and they just freak the fuck out um but but i've been told not to trust those they were stuges there

[01:28:18] but uh but tamer he does say the horror this supernatural horror is probably explicable as the result of a combination of simpler horrors so uh the dreadful must combine loneliness darkness inexplicable sounds um so i think he's saying that but okay what i what i was thinking

[01:28:34] when i read this is you know there is this subfield of the evolutionary origins of religious belief and a lot of it is sort of pointing to the the cognitive mechanisms that were adaptive in

[01:28:47] in you know across most social and other situations that we then you know like we see intentions in where there are none we see causality and animacy where there is none we make spurious correlations we you know that tree branch moved and my grandma died and

[01:29:04] that must have been a spirit um i've never really heard the fear aspect being uh mentioned as like perhaps at the heart of belief in the supernatural but it totally makes sense and

[01:29:16] i think one of the first things it's like my daughter i've raised her to absolutely not believing ghosts but like she expresses doubts sometimes because of like no no i swear there

[01:29:27] was something in the dark and like there was no explanation for it and i bet you that is a pretty strong origin for supernatural belief totally yeah i was pouring like a glass i had like a

[01:29:39] glass of like uh i was making myself i don't know like a bloody mary or a screwdriver and my daughter was there and i poured the vodka into this glass and the glass just exploded and we were

[01:29:52] freaked the fuck out by that like and i'm not i'm not as convinced as you are that there are no ghosts and i tell her that they're like i think there probably are ghosts and especially now that like

[01:30:03] glasses explode i can't do i can't continue doing a show i mean there are things there are spirits of a certain kind but i also think like he says it produces a what are you serious what's

[01:30:19] happening here do you really think there might be ghosts i'm not like totally convinced there aren't ghosts i mean i've never been visited by one um nobody you'll be happy to know that nobody has been

[01:30:30] visited by i don't know why you're so sure about the why you're so dogmatic about that there's even there's i guess my point we don't have to debate that the existence of ghosts now because

[01:30:40] that's probably a losing i mean i was gonna say it's they're they're all aliens they're tricking you into thinking they're ghosts wait but i do think it is a peculiar kind of horror

[01:30:50] that is interesting in that like and which would relate to what you're saying dave like maybe that's connected to the origin of religious belief in some way because it's so it's it's different

[01:31:04] than the kind of horror that you have from natural things that you can see or right you combine sort of the things that that that make noise in the dark with no like plausible physical

[01:31:16] explanation for it and you know along with some other cognitive mechanisms you probably get really close to their being a spirit haunting you it's a really interesting idea you know there's a

[01:31:26] read a lot from the coxswain religion everybody says why do we believe in them and then ideas once we believe in them then they're scary yeah but but this inverts it right says we have

[01:31:34] sort of fear of ghost-like phenomena and if you're afraid of something that thing right right yeah if it explodes you know yes it's a screwdriver yes you know how do you explain my glass just

[01:31:47] exploding that's a good science is still must be good science still isn't there you know i did look it up actually because we were like okay we just have a ghost like what do you do like if you live

[01:31:56] in a house with ghosts like what are you supposed to do about that like should we put the house on the market and then i googled something about and apparently like there are certain

[01:32:05] kind of cheap pint glasses that that can explode with like that's not very that's not very parsimmon like if they have different like exposed all of a sudden to different temperatures is it i don't know like i don't remember the scientific explanation but it was enough to

[01:32:23] make me not a hundred percent sure that our house was i'm not sure if this is true but i think realtors if you did say yes you'd have to disclose it there was a ghost oh no yeah i know i know you

[01:32:34] had to i would we were shopping for houses in toronto and uh it was a suicide house and then are we the real to me the point of telling us that and i think they had to huh there was a suicide

[01:32:43] so probably haunted as well actually of course yeah that'd be kind of fun your friends during lockdown why do we assume ghosts are malevolent right i know i know same i think actually the

[01:32:56] ghost in our house is more of a prank because there's other things that the ghost does it's it's like yeah kind of like you know like he'll make ice pop out of the fridge sometimes or she

[01:33:06] or she i shouldn't say or whatever thank you or or just a day i i think that your use of ghosts is much like my father's use of blaming the people who would clean our house which is like

[01:33:17] whenever he would lose something he could blame it on the woman who cleaned the house you know so like if you sat on the remote control by mistake because you just didn't realize it and

[01:33:25] changed the channel you're just like uh it was a ghost it's not my clumsiness serving a role all right i mean the glass thing was not my clumsiness like Eliza was watching as i hit it and she saw that neither of us were touching the glass so

[01:33:39] so you're like a modern day william james as i said my daughter the glass exploded and then it was a ghost playing me and i had a vertiginous baffling of the expectation that

[01:33:51] my glass would uh would stay so actually what he says not to change the subject but what he says after ghost he talks about corpses and that i found really interesting which is corpses freak us out

[01:34:02] and i wonder whether that could actually be an asperger to supernatural beliefs which is a ghost as a body without a soul yeah and by some sort of subtractive logic you might assume that souls

[01:34:11] exist separately from bodies and and maybe can bounce around yeah yeah but corpses are freaky i don't i actually outside of a funeral i don't think i've ever seen a corpse i don't even like seeing

[01:34:23] like animal corpses that's oh i find it and it's actually this is a very william jamesy in discussion but um when i lived in new haven my there was a dead squirrel my dog dragged it over

[01:34:34] and i i was frozen and i just would yell at the dog drop it drop it and i didn't know what to do because i was not going to go near the dog and displace it i found so upsetting and and

[01:34:44] and i do and i say jen the baby possum in the attic the corpse can you deal with it i'm very i'm very comfortable with dead vermin you know baby possum i just grab it by the tail whip it around

[01:34:58] smash it on the on the guitar i mean on the guitar on the garage i if you were comfortable i would pay you to fly over and get rid of something i was i had i've had to get rid of lots of mice

[01:35:12] and everybody around me freaks out but but i think like i had to get rid of a baby deer that died under my under my porch yeah and because he must have been sick and the mom leaves it and it was

[01:35:23] just like a little bambi was like a little doe with spots on it and i was freaked out at first but and i called some old guy to come help me remove it and he's like all right help me and i was

[01:35:31] like man i was paying you so i wouldn't have to touch this thing but then i did it i was did you have to touch it i did yeah i picked it up and with gloves with gloves yeah you're like a sociopath

[01:35:41] it was fine it was fine i remember when you hit a deer like right before we recorded and like could fucked up your car and then you just like i hate deer yeah i was like yeah like luci k like

[01:35:52] i want to give them aids all right should we wrap up great we should just we should have a whole series of works with all the william james it's always fun yeah thank you so much paul well

[01:36:06] thank you for having me here and uh join us next time on very bad wizard