Episode 298: Pass the Peace Pipe

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

[00:00:17] I know it. They're born that way, right? It's not their fault. Frankly, I think they go about in pity for themselves.

[00:01:14] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:18] I can't believe I keep saying that. Stop saying Cornell.

[00:01:24] I made it a point this time. I was like, this time I'm going to say I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University.

[00:01:30] In any case, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston, proud cougar.

[00:01:35] Dave, a nice young woman named Allie Lukes, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, tweeted to say she passed her PhD examination with her thesis Olfactory Ethics and a culture war firestorm erupted.

[00:01:51] Where do you stand on the politics of smell and the politics of PhDs?

[00:01:57] I wish I could say I'm only on Blue Sky and I hadn't seen that, which is the eventual goal.

[00:02:04] But no, I saw it. And even on Blue Sky, people were like posting like screenshots of it.

[00:02:09] And my immediate reaction was to defend her. I mean, not to actively do anything because I never do anything.

[00:02:15] But to like, this is like this woman should be her knight in shining armor.

[00:02:21] Exactly. And just like go to sleep.

[00:02:26] Yeah.

[00:02:26] Yeah. Fucking any dissertation abstract that you read sounds crazy.

[00:02:31] I don't care what field it's in. It sounds crazy that this woman is in English, English PhDs.

[00:02:38] Like they sound crazy to most people.

[00:02:40] Yeah. I don't know what triggered people so badly about this.

[00:02:43] That's what I was going to ask you. What, what do you think? Why this?

[00:02:47] I think it's, she was like a young, attractive woman posting something successful about like something that sounds bullshitty just makes people so mad.

[00:02:56] They're like, how could she get a PhD and not me? You know, I've been welding for 42 years or whatever.

[00:03:01] Right.

[00:03:04] David Pizarro in touch with the working class.

[00:03:07] I think he just has his finger on the pulse.

[00:03:10] Uh, like I think that picture, like you said, she's, uh, very pretty, but she also like the way she was dressed.

[00:03:18] It's it codes trad wife.

[00:03:21] Oh, they were missing out on.

[00:03:23] And I think that triggered them.

[00:03:25] Like, you know, you should be having my babies essentially.

[00:03:28] Like you should be home cooking and like, that's where the smells should come from.

[00:03:32] It's our kitchen, you know, like while I post and like eviscerate people on Twitter.

[00:03:37] While I weld.

[00:03:38] Yeah.

[00:03:41] I think actual welders don't know about this.

[00:03:44] No. In fact, in my head, it was more, more like the hipster guy who welds iron shit together in his garage.

[00:03:51] Wait, where's my PhD?

[00:03:54] Yeah, it was, it was weird.

[00:03:56] Like, you know, I read it and it's like, sure, we would make fun of a paper.

[00:04:00] You know, we've made fun of papers that sound ridiculous, but like, it's an English PhD.

[00:04:04] It's not even like it's trying to be science.

[00:04:06] Like she's just analyzing some interesting shit about how smell is talked about in literature.

[00:04:11] Yeah.

[00:04:12] Like, this seems so reasonable.

[00:04:14] Yeah.

[00:04:14] Yeah.

[00:04:14] And there's some jargon.

[00:04:16] There's some stuff like that, that if you really wanted to like whine about it, you could, but it's not like compared to like a lot of PhD theses.

[00:04:25] That's just how it's going to be.

[00:04:26] I agree.

[00:04:27] And I do think it was just, who knows how these things like, cause you've got to think that so many people have posted.

[00:04:34] Yay.

[00:04:35] I got my PhD, uh, so many times and like, it was a perfect storm.

[00:04:41] My best guess is that that photo played a big part in it.

[00:04:45] Yeah.

[00:04:45] It must have.

[00:04:46] Meanwhile, by the way, did you see that the Haktoah girl is in trouble for, pumped and dumped some fucking, like whatever the Haktoah Dogecoin equivalent is.

[00:04:58] Right.

[00:04:59] Which, and I don't know, like I just glimpsed at this before recording, but like, it's something like everyone knew to immediately sell off once they had convinced a bunch of dopes to buy into it.

[00:05:12] It's a common scheme, unfortunately, with all this cryptocurrency to do this.

[00:05:17] And like, you know, dear audience, we've been doing this for 13 years and we have not grifted you yet.

[00:05:22] No.

[00:05:22] Like, you know, whatever.

[00:05:23] No, although we do have a very bad wizard Dogecoin coming up.

[00:05:28] Um, but that one you actually should buy.

[00:05:31] That one will actually be the future currency of most of the internet.

[00:05:36] Yeah.

[00:05:36] We're a decaying country.

[00:05:39] Like we're, we're not in a good place as a country.

[00:05:42] And, and like normally I think, but that's always been true.

[00:05:45] I mean, but like, I feel like there's something worse in terms of just like, it could all completely fall apart.

[00:05:53] But maybe that's not true.

[00:05:54] Yeah.

[00:05:54] Like physically, like we're like a rickety bridge in the middle of New Jersey.

[00:05:58] Yeah.

[00:05:59] Like our infrastructure is no longer sound.

[00:06:02] You know?

[00:06:06] Our poor kids.

[00:06:07] Yeah.

[00:06:08] Yeah.

[00:06:08] The antinatalists were right.

[00:06:11] All along.

[00:06:13] It's the antinatalists you met along the way.

[00:06:17] Okay.

[00:06:18] What are we talking about today?

[00:06:19] So second segment, and I read this title to Jen and she said, oh, sounds fascinating, but it actually is.

[00:06:28] It's called punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small scale societies.

[00:06:35] What was that?

[00:06:37] I don't know.

[00:06:38] Don't.

[00:06:38] Voice is not recognized.

[00:06:40] Jesus.

[00:06:42] That was fucking like, I was in a dystopian movie cause it was like deafening in my ears.

[00:06:48] Voice not recognized.

[00:06:50] It's it.

[00:06:51] Okay.

[00:06:52] Sorry.

[00:06:53] By Leo Fatucci and Mon, Mon Veer Singh.

[00:06:57] And it's a really actually just kind of fascinating paper.

[00:07:01] Like I'm excited to talk about it just cause it's, it's just a good example of how, even if you have like some issues with how they were approaching or defining things or some methodological concerns, whatever those might be.

[00:07:15] You just learn a shit ton of cool stuff.

[00:07:19] Yeah.

[00:07:19] Totally.

[00:07:20] About the world.

[00:07:20] And I just love that kind of paper.

[00:07:23] So, you know, don't judge everything by its title, Jen.

[00:07:28] But first, speaking of good topics for our beloved Patreon supporters, every six months or so, we ask all of our patrons to suggest topics.

[00:07:40] And then our $5 and up per episode patrons get to vote on an episode topic that we will definitely do after we have narrowed this whole list in this case of like 150 or suggestions that we've narrowed it down to five or six.

[00:07:59] I don't know what you thought, Dave, but like, I think this is the best list of topics we've ever gotten.

[00:08:06] I agree.

[00:08:08] Sometimes it's a struggle to like get a list I'm happy with.

[00:08:11] Mm hmm.

[00:08:11] And this time I was like, well, like how many do I need to cut this down to?

[00:08:16] Cause it was, yeah, like 140 something comments and multiple people like suggesting multiple things.

[00:08:22] Right.

[00:08:22] Okay.

[00:08:22] We always play this game of like how much overlap do you think we're going to have?

[00:08:26] I think we'll have, we'll have overlap, but I don't think for any special reason other than that there's things that always come up that we both kind of like.

[00:08:33] Yeah.

[00:08:33] Which I was, yeah, that haven't won yet.

[00:08:35] I haven't like, I don't even have a narrowed down list.

[00:08:38] I have like, normally I narrow it down to like seven.

[00:08:40] I have like 19 right now.

[00:08:43] It was just so much fun to go down various rabbit holes for things that I just had never heard of.

[00:08:48] Or if I'd heard of it, I hardly know what it's about.

[00:08:52] And yeah, I really appreciated that.

[00:08:54] Like it was really fun looking through all of these.

[00:08:57] Yeah, it was more fun this time.

[00:08:59] And as we always say, we like keep, we hold onto these lists and we dip back in.

[00:09:04] Like sometimes we're just struggling to find a topic in the middle of the week.

[00:09:08] Totally.

[00:09:08] I would say probably 20% of our episodes are ones that just came up.

[00:09:13] For example, our last episode, which I think both of us really enjoyed on a good man is hard to find was exactly that.

[00:09:19] Yeah.

[00:09:20] Yeah, for sure.

[00:09:21] All right.

[00:09:21] Okay.

[00:09:22] Stop kissing their ass and do the thing.

[00:09:25] Figure out the finalists.

[00:09:27] So here's my first one.

[00:09:29] And I think this is a good one that we'll probably do, but it would be nice to just get it nailed down right now.

[00:09:36] This is from Kate, Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey, potentially combined with Kurt Vonnegut on narrative structure and the cognitive biases and mechanisms that drive us to make meaning and narrative out of sometimes random events and experiences.

[00:09:52] Yeah.

[00:09:53] I don't know about that last part as much, but I would love to do Joseph Campbell on myths and archetypes and that whole, like we've, we've certainly, yeah.

[00:10:05] And the hero's journey and the various different kind of union archetypes that he talks about.

[00:10:10] Yep.

[00:10:11] It's on my list too.

[00:10:12] Yeah.

[00:10:13] Scratching that off.

[00:10:14] And this isn't Kate Rodriguez.

[00:10:16] I think we have another Kate who spells her, her name the same way.

[00:10:19] Yeah.

[00:10:19] I couldn't tell, but yeah, that's good.

[00:10:21] Two Kates.

[00:10:23] Two Kates.

[00:10:24] Two Kates.

[00:10:24] So while we're talking Kates, Kate Rodriguez suggested Grice and conversational norms.

[00:10:29] Yeah.

[00:10:29] I don't think, I don't think we've done anything on that.

[00:10:32] Yeah.

[00:10:32] We've referred to it probably like a hundred times.

[00:10:36] Exactly.

[00:10:37] That should be one of our foundational ones.

[00:10:38] Yeah.

[00:10:39] Yeah, exactly.

[00:10:40] I think it should.

[00:10:41] It would be foundational for me too.

[00:10:43] Cause while I know the whole idea of it, I never read anything about it.

[00:10:48] So yeah.

[00:10:49] Like those two are the same.

[00:10:50] It'd be funny then if it's two different Kates.

[00:10:52] Cause it's like, how have we not done these two?

[00:10:56] You know?

[00:10:56] All right.

[00:10:57] So we're, we're on board there.

[00:10:59] What else do you, Oh no.

[00:11:00] Is it my turn?

[00:11:01] Cause you have way more.

[00:11:02] I have like nine or 10.

[00:11:04] Jao Pedro Lima Delgado gives two movie ideas that I just absolutely love both of them.

[00:11:11] Like I don't think it's going to go on the list.

[00:11:13] So I'll move along, but Banshees of In a Sharon, which we have talked about you and I on another podcast and decision to leave the Park Chan-wook movie, which I really think is the most underrated movie of, uh, I think it's 2022.

[00:11:27] Like I think that movie fucking kicked ass and it just kind of got overlooked, but I love both of those movies.

[00:11:35] They're both from the same year.

[00:11:36] I think we should do them at one point, even if they don't go on the list.

[00:11:40] Yeah.

[00:11:41] Paul is on record as saying he wants to discuss Banshees with us.

[00:11:44] Oh yeah.

[00:11:44] Okay.

[00:11:45] We could put that, that could go Paul doing Banshees.

[00:11:48] Yeah.

[00:11:49] No, I'm super down.

[00:11:49] I have not seen decision to leave, but I've heard you masturbate to it.

[00:11:53] Right.

[00:11:54] I do.

[00:11:55] Just how good it is.

[00:11:56] You would love it.

[00:11:58] I'm sure I would.

[00:11:58] Yeah.

[00:11:59] Okay.

[00:11:59] I like, I think it's, it's, I want to say a meta thing about books.

[00:12:03] I almost feel like they should be in a different category kind of, I don't know, not, not really

[00:12:08] not for voting, but in my head, like there's just like, there's books that people suggest

[00:12:13] that I put as potentials for like summer episodes or whatever.

[00:12:17] Yeah.

[00:12:18] But there's a lot of good book recommendations.

[00:12:20] So many.

[00:12:20] And so the next thing on my list is just an item that says a bunch of people saying Nabokov

[00:12:27] and some people said short stories.

[00:12:29] Like somebody said signs and symbols.

[00:12:31] I have that one actually.

[00:12:32] And then somebody Lolita and you and I have already talked about doing pale fire.

[00:12:36] So I just think we should do, we should pick an Nabokov and put it on the list.

[00:12:42] Like, but a, but a novel or a short story.

[00:12:44] That's what I'm not sure.

[00:12:45] Yeah.

[00:12:45] You know, something like pale fire would probably have to not come during the semester.

[00:12:49] Did you have signs and symbols?

[00:12:51] You said I did.

[00:12:51] Yeah.

[00:12:51] By Gabriel.

[00:12:53] I had that recommended.

[00:12:55] Yeah.

[00:12:55] Okay.

[00:12:56] Let's have it as a, you know, tentative on the list.

[00:12:59] Yeah.

[00:12:59] Yeah, exactly.

[00:13:01] All right.

[00:13:01] Speaking of, this is a short story too, although it's a longer short story, I think, than signs

[00:13:06] and symbols.

[00:13:07] I think it might've been on the previous finalist.

[00:13:11] Franz Kafka is the hunger artist.

[00:13:14] This came late in the process, but I would love to do that.

[00:13:18] I'd love to do Kafka, more Kafka.

[00:13:20] I think Kafka is so up our alley in so many different ways.

[00:13:24] Yeah.

[00:13:24] I'd be down.

[00:13:25] It's not on my list, but yeah.

[00:13:26] Speaking of that, Kurt Vonnegut, a few people mentioned.

[00:13:29] Slaughterhouse Five.

[00:13:31] Slaughterhouse Five.

[00:13:32] Yeah.

[00:13:32] A couple of people mentioned Slaughterhouse Five.

[00:13:34] I don't have their name.

[00:13:35] Alex Corley is one of them.

[00:13:36] Yeah.

[00:13:37] Good job this time around, by the way.

[00:13:38] Me?

[00:13:39] Yeah.

[00:13:39] Keeping track of names.

[00:13:40] Yeah.

[00:13:41] Yeah.

[00:13:41] Yeah.

[00:13:41] Because it's usually me.

[00:13:42] No, it's usually me.

[00:13:44] It's usually me.

[00:13:47] I live in the present, so what's past is bad.

[00:13:51] Yeah.

[00:13:52] Slaughterhouse Five, I think, would be my natural pick.

[00:13:55] I think that might also...

[00:13:56] I mean, it's a shorter book and it's a fairly quick read, but I think, like, to really

[00:14:01] do it, that would have to be a summer one.

[00:14:03] So, you know, we could just do like a crazy thing where we do two.

[00:14:07] Like, we literally put out two polls.

[00:14:10] One for like right now and one for the summer.

[00:14:13] And then that's it.

[00:14:14] That's a good idea, actually.

[00:14:15] I like that.

[00:14:16] Because I have a bunch of books on my list that are meaningfully on my list and I don't

[00:14:21] want to just have to discard them from a poll.

[00:14:25] Yeah.

[00:14:26] So, speaking of one of those, Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.

[00:14:30] Yeah.

[00:14:30] Fareed.

[00:14:30] On my list too.

[00:14:31] Fareed.

[00:14:34] Avari recommended that.

[00:14:35] James Cornelius Bowie, the third also.

[00:14:38] We should do that at some point, but it's a novel and it's not that short.

[00:14:42] I started reading it actually.

[00:14:44] Me too.

[00:14:45] Yeah.

[00:14:45] But I, for some reason, I was listening to it as an audio book during a trip and then

[00:14:49] I lost the thread.

[00:14:51] Yeah.

[00:14:52] But I was liking it.

[00:14:53] Yeah.

[00:14:53] Yeah.

[00:14:53] I liked it too.

[00:14:54] I stopped because I was like, you know what?

[00:14:56] We're going to do this and so I'll just read it then.

[00:14:59] Yeah.

[00:15:00] Okay.

[00:15:01] Dave suggested Paul, how do I pronounce this?

[00:15:07] Firebond.

[00:15:08] Firebond.

[00:15:08] Oh yeah.

[00:15:09] Science in a free society and or against method.

[00:15:13] Maybe shed light on society's profound alienation from science and all of its consequences.

[00:15:18] I've been listening to Paul Meehl's lectures on philosophical psychology and he talks a bit

[00:15:23] about Firebond and Matt and it just brought me back to my philosophy of science class that

[00:15:31] I took in grad school.

[00:15:33] And I think all that stuff is fascinating.

[00:15:35] And I know you will be butthurt by some of his claims about science, but you will respond

[00:15:43] forcefully.

[00:15:43] I'm sure.

[00:15:44] I believe I have a list with a line on it and Firebond has always been below that line.

[00:15:50] Right.

[00:15:50] Kuhn was just above it.

[00:15:53] Yeah.

[00:15:53] He was kissing it.

[00:15:56] But hey, I'm an open-minded.

[00:15:58] All right.

[00:15:58] So speaking of books, I've never read 100 Years of Solitude and it's been recommended to

[00:16:03] me.

[00:16:03] I know.

[00:16:03] Like a gajillion people.

[00:16:05] Anna Collins, Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity.

[00:16:10] Now this is one and there are a couple like this that would overlap with what I'm teaching

[00:16:16] in my great books course, which I teach in the spring this year.

[00:16:20] We're doing that.

[00:16:21] So I always like to double dip.

[00:16:24] And so many people have recommended this as stuff that we would really like to dig

[00:16:30] into.

[00:16:30] So much so that I was convinced that we had already done it.

[00:16:33] Oh, really?

[00:16:34] Yeah, no.

[00:16:36] I have one like that where I honestly, even right now, don't know if we've done it or

[00:16:41] not, but it wasn't that one.

[00:16:43] I knew we hadn't done that.

[00:16:45] It's long, but it might be doable, especially by me since I have to do it anyway.

[00:16:54] Think about it.

[00:16:55] Yeah, I'll think about it.

[00:16:56] Solaris book slash movie.

[00:16:58] Another one.

[00:16:59] Yeah.

[00:16:59] Yeah.

[00:17:00] See, I read the book and watched the movie.

[00:17:02] You read the book?

[00:17:03] Yeah.

[00:17:04] I read the book and watched the movie a couple summers ago and I loved it.

[00:17:09] And the differences between the two are just like among the things that would be super

[00:17:14] fun to talk about.

[00:17:15] I've never read the book.

[00:17:17] Like the movie.

[00:17:18] It's good.

[00:17:18] It's a quick read.

[00:17:19] Yeah.

[00:17:20] But so that's how we should do it then is just like a double episode where we take

[00:17:24] both of them into account.

[00:17:26] I think so.

[00:17:26] I would love that.

[00:17:27] I don't even think we need to put it on any list just because we're doing, we're

[00:17:30] going to do that as soon as we have a chance.

[00:17:33] Yeah.

[00:17:34] Yeah.

[00:17:34] And this was Noah Silbert and Wondermute both suggested.

[00:17:38] Nice.

[00:17:38] There you go.

[00:17:39] You're kind of rebounding now.

[00:17:43] Christopher Irving suggested Byung Chul Han's The Burnout Society.

[00:17:49] Now, this was a rabbit hole I went down and it sounded super interesting.

[00:17:54] Did you look into this?

[00:17:56] What is that?

[00:17:57] No.

[00:17:57] All right.

[00:17:57] Here's the Amazon thing.

[00:17:59] Our competitive service oriented society are taking a toll on the late modern individual.

[00:18:05] Rather than improving life, multitasking, user friendly technology and the culture of convenience

[00:18:11] are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder.

[00:18:19] Byung Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise or malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences

[00:18:26] in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods.

[00:18:33] Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomenon as well,

[00:18:39] denouncing a world in which every against the grain response can lead to further disempowerment.

[00:18:44] He draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences.

[00:18:50] Social science is a little iffy.

[00:18:52] To explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

[00:19:00] Yeah.

[00:19:01] Sounds interesting.

[00:19:02] Sounds interesting.

[00:19:03] Yeah.

[00:19:03] Something to at least like look into.

[00:19:05] Yeah.

[00:19:05] So for your constant digs at social science are really bumming me out.

[00:19:10] Imagine if I was just like cinema, you know?

[00:19:13] Pffft.

[00:19:13] I mean Avengers.

[00:19:14] You also believe that.

[00:19:16] That's the difference.

[00:19:17] We believe that there's plenty of good social science.

[00:19:19] Well, I do too.

[00:19:21] We're going to talk about one in the...

[00:19:23] Okay.

[00:19:25] I feel like it has to be on your list because I read it and I was like, well, this is a Tamler.

[00:19:29] Yeah.

[00:19:29] Nicholas Contos, The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher.

[00:19:33] Yes.

[00:19:33] A hundred percent.

[00:19:34] This is on my list.

[00:19:35] And these are just...

[00:19:36] I had never heard of this and they're essays.

[00:19:38] So like we could tackle essays from this.

[00:19:39] Yes.

[00:19:40] This should go on the list.

[00:19:41] He says there's chapter on Lynch, on Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Nolan.

[00:19:48] He says, not sure if it's conceptual analysis.

[00:19:51] It's too engaging.

[00:19:52] See, he takes a shot at philosophy and I don't get defensive.

[00:19:57] But...

[00:19:58] Because you also are a self-hater.

[00:20:00] Yeah.

[00:20:02] But does try to define, distinguish the nature and feels of each thing, largely through examples of art.

[00:20:09] So he's going to just try to figure out like what's weird, what's eerie.

[00:20:13] That sounds so cool.

[00:20:15] Yeah.

[00:20:15] And apparently it's divided into two sections, like essays on eerie stuff and essays on weird stuff.

[00:20:22] The guy apparently died in 2017 right as this book was getting published.

[00:20:27] So...

[00:20:27] I know.

[00:20:27] We should do this.

[00:20:28] It's a book though, right?

[00:20:30] It's a book, but like I'm sure we could do...

[00:20:32] Yeah.

[00:20:33] I mean, I haven't read any of the essays.

[00:20:34] No, that's right.

[00:20:34] But like it seems like something we could totally like pilfer.

[00:20:37] Yeah, let's do.

[00:20:37] Let's put it on.

[00:20:38] I think that's like, if anything should go on that ship.

[00:20:41] I'm so glad that's on your list because I wasn't sure if it would be.

[00:20:44] Yeah.

[00:20:45] So Jeffrey Watermill, you know, uncharacteristically concise suggestion, said Macbeth and or Kurosawa's

[00:20:54] Throne of Blood, which is literally like my next Criterion like movie to watch, or Joel

[00:21:01] Cohen's The Tragedy of Macbeth.

[00:21:03] So we could even do the movie and just have like the play as reference or whatever.

[00:21:08] But I think that would be really fun.

[00:21:11] I would be super down for that because I've never read a single Shakespeare play in my

[00:21:17] life.

[00:21:17] Really?

[00:21:18] Oh yeah.

[00:21:18] Yeah.

[00:21:19] Macbeth is good.

[00:21:20] And I want to watch the Joel Coens.

[00:21:22] And the Kurosawa.

[00:21:24] Yeah, for sure.

[00:21:25] Yeah.

[00:21:26] Do we put this on the list or do we just put it on our personal list?

[00:21:29] That's the question.

[00:21:30] Let's put this on the list.

[00:21:31] Okay.

[00:21:32] What do you got?

[00:21:33] I have one more.

[00:21:35] My last one.

[00:21:36] Yeah.

[00:21:36] Dakota Dalton says Akira.

[00:21:38] Do you know the movie?

[00:21:39] Yeah, I've seen it.

[00:21:40] It's weird as fuck.

[00:21:42] Yeah.

[00:21:43] But when's the last time you saw it?

[00:21:44] No, that's right.

[00:21:45] And I haven't seen it in the movie palace.

[00:21:47] You know, I was excited to see it.

[00:21:49] I just remember being a little underwhelmed, but you know, I was probably watching it in

[00:21:53] the day with the glare on my shitty TV downstairs.

[00:21:57] So I would see it again for sure.

[00:21:59] Yeah.

[00:22:00] So why don't we not put it on the list and watch it?

[00:22:02] Okay.

[00:22:02] Because I haven't seen it in years and I remember being so perplexed like by what was going on

[00:22:08] that like watching it with an eye for the kind of thing that we talk about might help

[00:22:13] me, but it might not.

[00:22:15] So.

[00:22:15] All right.

[00:22:15] Let's put it on our list to watch.

[00:22:17] That sounds good.

[00:22:18] Okay.

[00:22:19] I have a couple more.

[00:22:20] So this has been recommended a couple of times.

[00:22:23] Calvino, Italo, Calvino, either Invisible Cities or Cosmicomics.

[00:22:29] Yeah.

[00:22:29] This is Ian Bronstein, by the way.

[00:22:32] Yeah.

[00:22:32] Not If I'm a Winter's Night of Traveler, which is, I totally agree with this because I've

[00:22:36] read that.

[00:22:37] While well-crafted, kind of simple in its postmodernism.

[00:22:41] I don't think it's simple because I don't know if it's simple or not, but like I, it didn't

[00:22:46] totally work for me like some of his other ones have.

[00:22:48] I haven't read though Invisible Cities and I would love to, everyone says to read that.

[00:22:53] Yeah.

[00:22:53] He says he's Borges plus emotions, which is a funny way, even though I love, you know,

[00:22:58] I revere Borges.

[00:22:58] Like, I think that's fair.

[00:23:01] No, it totally resonates.

[00:23:01] Yeah.

[00:23:02] Yeah.

[00:23:03] No, for some reason I forgot to put him on my list because I think Invisible Cities should

[00:23:07] be something on the final vote list.

[00:23:10] Yeah.

[00:23:11] Okay.

[00:23:12] Here's the one that I feel like we did.

[00:23:15] I have either a false or true memory that we did it.

[00:23:18] Nicholas DeLon said, Daniel Dennett's Where Am I?

[00:23:22] Immensely fun and creative paper on body and mind consciousness and personal identity.

[00:23:27] Did we not do that?

[00:23:28] I looked it up.

[00:23:29] I tried to like, I Googled it all.

[00:23:30] I didn't find anything.

[00:23:32] No, we've not.

[00:23:33] No, we've never done that.

[00:23:34] Are you sure?

[00:23:35] Yeah.

[00:23:36] So then I, okay.

[00:23:37] I'm reading 1Q84 by Murakami like right now.

[00:23:43] And like now I realize I'm in an alternate universe cause I can picture us talking about

[00:23:48] it.

[00:23:48] Like I know where I was recording.

[00:23:50] I was in the living room because we were having work done on the garage apartment, but

[00:23:55] it didn't happen.

[00:23:56] Nikki by the other way, the other day had a full on argument with me that we had done

[00:24:00] a Sopranos episode that I was like, we never did it.

[00:24:03] She's like, no, you're wrong.

[00:24:05] Like, I was like.

[00:24:08] And, and she, but she, but she was wrong.

[00:24:11] She was wrong.

[00:24:12] Yeah.

[00:24:14] It's like, what do you do with like such a clear memory that never happened?

[00:24:19] Like, how do you interpret that?

[00:24:21] It's very weird.

[00:24:24] I mean, we should just do this.

[00:24:25] It's like a short essay.

[00:24:26] Yeah.

[00:24:27] Like I think it almost like.

[00:24:28] Let's just put it on our thing to do.

[00:24:29] Yeah.

[00:24:29] Like we just won't put it on the list cause we'll just do it sometime in the next couple

[00:24:33] months.

[00:24:33] Okay.

[00:24:34] Uh, Desi recommended Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.

[00:24:39] I think he's French.

[00:24:41] Sounds very interesting.

[00:24:43] Did you look into that at all?

[00:24:45] No, no.

[00:24:46] All right.

[00:24:47] Well, I'm not going to describe it because we're running short on time.

[00:24:51] Derek Bain, Capitalist Realism.

[00:24:54] Is There No Alternative?

[00:24:55] This is again, also by Mark Fisher.

[00:24:58] Sounded very cool.

[00:25:00] The second one by Fisher.

[00:25:01] And the last one that I have is from James.

[00:25:07] In the Mood for Love.

[00:25:09] The Wong Kar Wai movie.

[00:25:11] One of the most interesting and innovative love stories I've ever seen.

[00:25:14] I don't want to spoil it, but it deals with time, regret, loyalty, and pride.

[00:25:20] So Dave.

[00:25:22] Yes.

[00:25:22] I remember sending you a beautiful 4k criterion.

[00:25:29] Oh, you did.

[00:25:31] It's right here.

[00:25:33] Have you watched it yet?

[00:25:35] No, I have not watched it yet.

[00:25:37] Unbelievable.

[00:25:38] You know, because of that, I'll put it on the list for you.

[00:25:41] No, it's not going to win.

[00:25:42] But you should watch it.

[00:25:44] It's beautiful.

[00:25:44] Oh, it will.

[00:25:45] It's a beautiful movie that I think you would enjoy.

[00:25:48] You have to watch it in good lighting environment.

[00:25:51] Yes.

[00:25:52] At night.

[00:25:52] The criterion of it is awesome.

[00:25:54] You will like it.

[00:25:55] All right.

[00:25:56] Awesome.

[00:25:57] I can never send you something that, like, if I want you to actually...

[00:26:01] Oh, watch.

[00:26:02] Literally, it was going to be the first movie I watched.

[00:26:04] I said you never let me go, like, five years ago or something.

[00:26:08] That's why I said you whiskey.

[00:26:09] I used...

[00:26:10] Yeah, I drank the whiskey.

[00:26:12] I didn't just leave it there.

[00:26:17] No, what you've given me is a gift for life.

[00:26:19] I will have that in my collection forever.

[00:26:21] Hanging over your head is like a burden, a sword of Dan Cleese.

[00:26:26] All right.

[00:26:27] We'll be right back to talk...

[00:26:29] No, no, wait.

[00:26:30] We have to narrow down.

[00:26:35] Okay.

[00:26:36] Let's see.

[00:26:37] We have...

[00:26:38] Joseph Campbell.

[00:26:39] We have Joseph Campbell was on both our lists.

[00:26:42] Grice.

[00:26:43] Grice.

[00:26:44] Signs and symbols?

[00:26:45] Did we decide?

[00:26:46] I feel like that's on the border.

[00:26:48] Okay.

[00:26:49] Same with The Hunger Artist, I think, right?

[00:26:51] Yeah, right.

[00:26:53] Firebond, below the line?

[00:26:54] Below the line for me.

[00:26:55] Just less fun for this.

[00:26:57] But I'm not saying I won't do it.

[00:26:59] I'll have to do some more work to convince you.

[00:27:01] What about Simone de Beauvoir?

[00:27:04] I'd put that up.

[00:27:05] Okay.

[00:27:06] What are we thinking about Dispossessed then?

[00:27:08] I'm thinking we're not going to do it.

[00:27:10] That's got to be a summer one.

[00:27:12] Just because it's like 400 pages.

[00:27:14] Yeah.

[00:27:14] Weird and eerie, we said.

[00:27:16] That's going on for sure.

[00:27:17] And like, we'll do essays from it.

[00:27:19] Maybe one, maybe two.

[00:27:21] Maybe the whole thing.

[00:27:23] Who knows?

[00:27:23] Right.

[00:27:23] Exactly.

[00:27:24] Calvino?

[00:27:25] Oh yeah, I want Calvino on there.

[00:27:26] I think we would love Calvino.

[00:27:28] Oh, and Macbeth.

[00:27:29] Yeah.

[00:27:30] Slaughterhouse Five, that's a summer one.

[00:27:32] Yeah.

[00:27:33] How many is that?

[00:27:34] We have Macbeth, Grice, Campbell, Beauvoir, Weird and eerie.

[00:27:41] And...

[00:27:41] Calvino?

[00:27:42] Calvino.

[00:27:43] Is that six?

[00:27:44] Yep.

[00:27:44] I like that.

[00:27:45] No Nabokov, no Kafka.

[00:27:48] No Nabokov, no Kafka.

[00:27:49] No Banshees, but we'll probably do that.

[00:27:51] Yeah.

[00:27:52] That's right.

[00:27:53] As long as people understand that those are kept off because of the high likelihood that

[00:27:56] we're going to do anyway.

[00:27:57] And then we might do just like, while we have all these awesome book things, we might

[00:28:02] do another poll without fully committing.

[00:28:05] Let's just say we might.

[00:28:07] Right.

[00:28:07] Summer pick.

[00:28:08] Summer book pick.

[00:28:09] All right.

[00:28:10] That was quick.

[00:28:11] That was...

[00:28:12] That was the last part I mean.

[00:28:13] Yeah.

[00:28:14] It actually was much easier than I thought it would be.

[00:28:16] All right.

[00:28:17] We'll be right back to talk about some really fun punishment practices and rituals and kinds

[00:28:24] of crimes in small scale societies.

[00:28:27] After this beat by David Pizarro.

[00:29:27] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:29:28] This is the time of the episode where we like to take a moment and thank everybody for

[00:29:31] all their support.

[00:29:32] You can tell also that it's a time that we record that's different from the time we recorded

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[00:29:40] Um, um, so I apologize.

[00:29:42] Um, but I still wanted to get on and, and express our sincerest thanks to all those who

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[00:30:37] Hopefully that's something everybody can manage.

[00:30:40] But when you do that, if you're in that tier, you'll get access to all of our bonus

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[00:30:51] I'm including Tamler's other podcast, the non-zero that he does with Robert Wright from the non-zero

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[00:31:02] Yeah.

[00:31:03] All the bonus content is available to you and you get to listen to our ask us anything audio

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[00:31:36] Um, yeah, I don't know who watches, but there you go.

[00:31:40] So thank you to everybody.

[00:31:42] We really appreciate all the support you've given us.

[00:31:44] Um, we wouldn't be doing this without you.

[00:31:47] Um, yeah, onto the episode.

[00:31:49] All right, let's get to the main topic of this episode.

[00:31:52] We're talking about punitive justice in small scale societies.

[00:31:58] And I'm excited that I think, I think you like this because when I read this paper, I

[00:32:02] was like, this is right up your alley.

[00:32:04] So this is a paper that came out in 2023, trying to understand what it is about the human

[00:32:10] mind that motivates punishment, why we do it, how it evolved, like what kind of punishment

[00:32:14] we engage in.

[00:32:15] There's been like a lot of discussion and use of economic games to try to model, I guess,

[00:32:22] the evolutionary mechanisms that might've given rise to our punitive practices, which

[00:32:29] makes sense.

[00:32:29] You know, game theory has been very useful for helping understand how cooperation and altruism

[00:32:34] might have evolved or could have evolved.

[00:32:36] I think maybe starting, especially in the real early two thousands, there was a lot of work

[00:32:41] taking some of these economic games and modifying them to look at third party punishment specifically.

[00:32:48] So third party punishment is when a person that has nothing to do, who wasn't personally

[00:32:53] harmed by a transgressor steps in to punish at some cost to themselves.

[00:32:58] And so some of this work by Ernst Fair back in the early two thousands, I think got this

[00:33:04] going and then stuff by, by Boyd, um, where the idea was that, Hey, punishment could have

[00:33:11] really evolved as a way to enforce norms, like norms, moral norms, especially exists all over

[00:33:17] the world.

[00:33:18] One of the ways that you get those norms to stick is to punish people who violate them.

[00:33:24] Um, and maybe one of the ways we get that punishment really sticky is by engaging in punishing transgressors,

[00:33:32] even if they didn't transgress against you.

[00:33:34] So there was a bunch of work and there still is a bunch of work referred to in this paper

[00:33:39] specifically as well, arguing that third party punishment is kind of it's, it's built in

[00:33:44] to the punishing moral mind of humans and that we would have evolved this as a way to enforce

[00:33:53] norms.

[00:33:53] This is the Richardson and Boyd stuff.

[00:33:55] We evolve this general mechanism of punishing to enforce norms and also have mechanisms to

[00:34:03] transmit the norms from person to person.

[00:34:05] But the way that can manifest is variable and is, will be attuned to whatever the cultural

[00:34:12] environment happens to be.

[00:34:14] Right.

[00:34:14] And I think more forcefully people have argued recently that third party punishment is just

[00:34:19] one of the ways that, that norm enforcement gets off the ground to begin with.

[00:34:23] But in all of this work, so there's been recent work by Jillian Jordan and David Rand, for

[00:34:29] instance, looking at third party punishment as a sort of a signal of one's own moral character

[00:34:35] or one's trustworthiness.

[00:34:36] So like if I see you bringing down punishment on somebody who didn't even do anything to you,

[00:34:40] then I'm like, Oh yeah, Taylor's a good guy.

[00:34:42] Which is crazy.

[00:34:44] Mind your own fucking business, you snitch.

[00:34:46] Yeah, we'll get into that.

[00:34:48] Exactly.

[00:34:49] Yeah.

[00:34:49] Yeah.

[00:34:50] But as Fattucci and Singh in this article point out, like you really want to be able to demonstrate

[00:34:55] that if you're going to tell an evolutionary story about third party punishment and the

[00:34:59] crucial role it might've had in this norm enforcement, then you'd want to see that kind of

[00:35:05] behavior in small scale societies to the extent that you believe that small scale societies

[00:35:10] are a kind of reflection of our evolutionary ancestry.

[00:35:16] These small scale societies might be like the societies that evolutionary psychologists talked

[00:35:22] about where we did the majority of our evolving, I guess.

[00:35:28] Exactly.

[00:35:29] So I had heard before reading this, like I had just, I don't think I'd ever really read

[00:35:34] too much into it, but I had heard that there's debate about just the prevalence of third party

[00:35:39] punishment in societies in general.

[00:35:41] Like, is it really as common as it seems from data that we get, you know, getting like

[00:35:47] M Turkers playing economic games?

[00:35:49] Right.

[00:35:49] And that's what I want to get into that too, because I'm not sure what those data are telling

[00:35:53] us about like our deep psychology.

[00:35:56] Um, and you know, I, and I say that as someone who has appealed to a lot of that research in

[00:36:02] my own stuff.

[00:36:04] Yeah.

[00:36:04] You read something like this and it makes you think, wait, why did I think because like

[00:36:10] these people did this in the ultimatum game that I'm supposed to think like that is a,

[00:36:16] like a deep signal about their beliefs about punishment and justice and fairness.

[00:36:22] And you know, this is a lot of the Henrik stuff that I revered and you know, still do.

[00:36:27] And I felt a little defensive of at times reading this paper, but like, it's a great question.

[00:36:33] Why everyone just kind of uncritically accepted that these insanely artificial and completely

[00:36:40] kind of outlandish, especially to a small scale society, but even to like a college undergraduate,

[00:36:46] it's just like, why do we think that says anything about their views on punishment?

[00:36:50] Yeah.

[00:36:51] When we get to it, I think it might reflect something real in large scale societies, but

[00:36:56] I'm not sure.

[00:36:57] Yeah.

[00:36:57] But I think there's a story there that makes it not inconsistent, but yeah.

[00:37:00] So this paper that came out in evolution and human behavior is looking at data from

[00:37:04] three separate small scale societies.

[00:37:07] So the Kiowa, I'm sorry if I'm not saying it wrong.

[00:37:10] Kiowa, which are indigenous to the Americas data from before they were in reservations.

[00:37:16] So from 1875 and before, uh, Menta, why these, an Indonesian group of hunter gatherers or

[00:37:23] foragers, I don't remember that are gathered, uh, recently data has been gathered from them

[00:37:27] recently.

[00:37:27] And then the newer from like right around Sudan, this, uh, uh, Nylotic peoples where they got

[00:37:35] secondary sources from anthropological accounts across all of these three, we can talk about

[00:37:40] the quality of the data, but they have rich descriptions of actual punitive practices in

[00:37:45] these small scale communities.

[00:37:47] And that richness is really what drew me to this paper where we're now not looking just

[00:37:52] at an experimental task.

[00:37:54] We're looking at what people did, what they did and what, what, what happened to them as

[00:37:59] a result and who it was that made that thing happen.

[00:38:02] And what was the extent of it?

[00:38:04] How is it with resolved?

[00:38:06] Was it resolved?

[00:38:07] Like, yeah, totally.

[00:38:09] Uh, that's what I love about like a lot of these kinds of papers.

[00:38:12] Like, even if you're like, I have reservations about the math, uh, bringing in the math into

[00:38:19] this, you know, given that the data is often just like a book or a couple books by a single,

[00:38:25] you know, anthropologist from the forties or something like that.

[00:38:29] It's just silly to then run T tests or whatever with, with your coding of the book.

[00:38:35] But it's so fascinating, you know, like all the different practices.

[00:38:39] And that's one of the things I'm, I'm really excited to talk about.

[00:38:42] Can I just back up first though, and just say like their hypothesis versus what they take

[00:38:48] to be the normal hypothesis.

[00:38:51] So what they say is right now, people think third party punishment is this indispensable

[00:38:58] way of enforcing norms, making sure people follow the rules of the society.

[00:39:04] And that's why punishment evolved.

[00:39:06] That's why people punish, you know, it's a means of norm enforcement.

[00:39:10] And they say that in these small scale societies, anyway, their hypothesis is norm enforcement

[00:39:17] is not like the primary.

[00:39:19] And in some cases, even just any kind of goal for a punishment.

[00:39:24] Rather, the goal is to bring about some kind of reconciliation.

[00:39:30] Broadly speaking, figure out a way where these two feuding parties can find a way to live

[00:39:38] together without any more violence and without anyone feeling like they got fucked over and that

[00:39:45] their reputation is shot as a result.

[00:39:49] Admittedly, by them, the norm enforcement accounts, as opposed to what they call the relation restoration hypothesis that you were just mentioning, those both predict that punishment will occur for transgressions and that this punishment ought to be proportional.

[00:40:05] You know, they both like there's a lot of overlap in what you would think these two.

[00:40:10] That's why I was focusing on the third party punishment, because I think that is like the biggest chance of teasing these apart.

[00:40:14] I agree that the third party punishment, like, you know, they show.

[00:40:18] And I think this seems like it totally makes sense based on a lot of the same research or the same kind of research that I was digging through for the honor culture stuff that I was into.

[00:40:31] Even if it's not third party punishment, which is always kind of frowned upon in honor cultures or at best thought to be kind of a last resort.

[00:40:40] Right.

[00:40:41] Right. That doesn't mean norms aren't getting enforced if it's second party punishment.

[00:40:46] Right. It could be norms with them within a much smaller community.

[00:40:51] But like so that's the other thing that like I was having trouble teasing apart is to what extent like the third party part was essential for like a Richardson and Boyd and Henrik kind of view about the role of punishment, you know, evolving in large part to enforce norms within whatever the makeup of the group is.

[00:41:12] Yeah, I think you're right. And at some point they say, look, this also enforces norms.

[00:41:16] Like we're not saying that this kind of restorative punishment doesn't enforce norms, but they're trying to make a pretty strong argument that that's not the function.

[00:41:24] Yeah. It just happens.

[00:41:26] And I was kind of won over to like a stronger version of what they were arguing than I thought I would be by the end.

[00:41:33] Yeah. But some of these I was wondering what you thought. So prediction to following a transgression transfers of benefits to victims should be preferred to brute cost infliction.

[00:41:43] Right. So brute cost infliction, meaning like you just want somebody to suffer.

[00:41:47] It doesn't it doesn't matter. The victim receives remuneration of any sort.

[00:41:51] That doesn't seem like I don't know why norm enforcement would prefer brute punishment over.

[00:41:57] Yes. No, 100 percent.

[00:41:59] Transfers of benefits.

[00:41:59] This is the straw when I think they're straw manning it.

[00:42:03] Sometimes it sounds just like a kind of classical retributivist view where the goal is just for them to suffer.

[00:42:10] And sometimes retributivists justify that view in terms of norm enforcement.

[00:42:16] But in no way does a third party norm enforcement view mean that there should just be suffering for the sake of suffering.

[00:42:25] Exactly.

[00:42:26] Like or restitution, you know.

[00:42:28] Yeah. And even in our large scale impersonal third party punitive system, remuneration is often preferred.

[00:42:36] Right.

[00:42:36] To brute force infliction.

[00:42:38] Yeah.

[00:42:38] And it's often both income, you know, hand in hand.

[00:42:41] Yeah. Right.

[00:42:42] That's the other thing is that sometimes the compensation is also a form of suffering.

[00:42:47] But I do think that is just like we do have this weird philosophy that grew entirely in the West in the last 400 years or so.

[00:42:58] Is this idea of like the purity of suffering that has to equate the quantum like wrongness of the crime in some way.

[00:43:08] Right.

[00:43:08] Even though nobody knows how you could possibly match those things.

[00:43:11] Like that's what the ideal of punishment is.

[00:43:14] Yeah.

[00:43:15] That's interesting because the thought of proportionality, it's a very clear natural thing to say if you stole three chickens, you should give me three chickens back and maybe toss in a couple more.

[00:43:27] So people see that there is a disincentive to steal chickens.

[00:43:30] That kind of proportionality you can get behind.

[00:43:34] It makes sense.

[00:43:34] What is the, as you were saying, the quantum level of proportionality when it's you're suffering for stealing my car?

[00:43:40] Yeah.

[00:43:41] Like how much suffering is the right amount of suffering?

[00:43:45] Right.

[00:43:45] That's a very culturally local, historically local phenomenon is thinking of punishments like that.

[00:43:52] And sometimes they make it seem like the, you know, like the Richardson and Boyd and Henrich norm enforcement view is committed to some of that.

[00:44:02] And I don't think that they are.

[00:44:03] But again, I think we can set that aside because there are differences between their view and the third party norm enforcement view.

[00:44:14] Yeah.

[00:44:15] And like you were saying, just reading the accounts of what kind of punishment was meted out and by whom, the general idea here is you live in a small community with people.

[00:44:27] If you fuck somebody over, like you're losing out on a potential cooperation partner.

[00:44:33] So it makes sense that all of the pressures would be to engage in practices where either you two can like make amends for what happened.

[00:44:41] Or if you need, somebody else can step in and say like, by the way, it reminded me of a whole lot of the sit downs that you see in the mafia, like in the Sopranos.

[00:44:52] It's just.

[00:44:52] What's weird about this paper is it doesn't reference honor culture, like research or literature at all.

[00:44:58] But they talk about a lot of the things that are kind of related to that, like face, you know, and reputation.

[00:45:06] Right.

[00:45:06] Yeah.

[00:45:07] Can we go through their predictions just because we mentioned some of them, but maybe just go through them quickly and then and then we can dive into some of the fun.

[00:45:17] Yeah.

[00:45:17] Sure.

[00:45:17] Prediction one.

[00:45:19] Third party should be concerned with facilitating reconciliation and limiting conflict more than with imposing costs on offenders.

[00:45:25] Insofar as they're interested in offenders accepting costs, this should stem more from an interest in reinstating goodwill than from a retributivist sentiment.

[00:45:32] So they then say they expect that third party punishment of offenses should be rare and third parties should intervene to mediate disputes, stop fights and urge reconciliation.

[00:45:42] As opposed to, I guess, just punish people proportionately, like for the sake of it.

[00:45:47] Right.

[00:45:48] Yeah.

[00:45:48] OK, that's the first one.

[00:45:50] Prediction two.

[00:45:51] Following a transgression, transfers of benefits to victims should be preferred to briefs cost infliction.

[00:45:58] Well, we talked about this.

[00:45:59] Sure.

[00:46:00] Like that would be a more productive way of settling things, especially in like you said, in a small scale society.

[00:46:07] Prediction three.

[00:46:09] Prescribed benefits transferred to victims and costs imposed on transgressors should be proportionate to the tort inflicted on the victim, as they say that they both would predict.

[00:46:20] Yeah.

[00:46:20] Prediction four.

[00:46:21] Justice procedures should be accompanied with procedures that constrain rash retaliation and protect against feuding, such as mediators go-betweens, norms distancing the quarreling parties or prohibitions or interacting while angry.

[00:46:34] I mean, that's just pure honor culture right there.

[00:46:37] You know, like that is exactly what like well-functioning honor cultures are designed to do is contain whatever feud and not let it escalate out of control to where it hurts the whole group.

[00:46:51] Right.

[00:46:51] Prediction five.

[00:46:52] Justice procedures should be coupled with ceremonial traditions that facilitate reconciliation, such as food exchange, communal feastings, marriage pacts or collective dancing.

[00:47:01] Interesting.

[00:47:02] This was what I didn't know quite what to make of this because like it didn't seem to naturally follow that like there would be rituals.

[00:47:08] But I guess if the idea is that the sentiment that is primarily being expressed here is we need to get along, that throwing a party helps.

[00:47:17] No, this is actually the one that made me like go to their side more because like that's exactly what you find in a lot of these cultures.

[00:47:25] And it's not about enforcing the norms.

[00:47:27] It has nothing to do with enforcing the norms.

[00:47:30] And this is also a big part of restorative justice, right?

[00:47:33] There is a part of restorative justice that's making people aware of like why what they did, how it hurt the other person.

[00:47:41] And but like a big part of restorative justice is this reintegration into the community after you've done your compensation, your restitution.

[00:47:52] And I just that's not about norm enforcement.

[00:47:55] It's not even secondarily about norm enforcement.

[00:47:58] It is about getting the community more whole, you know, than it was before.

[00:48:04] If anything, it's rewarding the transgressors with a party.

[00:48:06] You are.

[00:48:07] But like after they've paid for what they've done in whatever way is deemed appropriate based on, you know, like what people want.

[00:48:15] This is what I like about restorative justice.

[00:48:17] And I even think it can be you can conceptualize that in a retributive way.

[00:48:22] You can conceptualize that in a consequentialist way.

[00:48:25] But like I don't think like this is a like a separate prediction.

[00:48:30] Like it's not about norm enforcement.

[00:48:32] Now, of course, like Richardson and Boyd and Henrik could say, well, it's also good to, you know, heal the community after a crime.

[00:48:41] Like we're not denying that.

[00:48:43] But I do think that like the more that that is kind of a focus, the more I feel like the reconciliation is the primary goal of punishment makes sense.

[00:48:53] Yeah.

[00:48:54] Like I'm sort of confused about it.

[00:48:55] Like it just seems like these two are consistent in a way that like I guess it's not that these guys aren't denying that norms have to be enforced and communicated and all that.

[00:49:05] I guess they're just I take it that their claim is really about like the true function, like capital F function of punishment practices or the evolved function.

[00:49:15] But but I don't understand.

[00:49:16] So what?

[00:49:18] Well, that they're just not inconsistent, that like all of these practices do communicate and enforce norms like they just do.

[00:49:25] Even the reconciliation of like having a party?

[00:49:29] The reconciliation specifically, maybe no.

[00:49:32] But like there is also communication about the norm that happens.

[00:49:35] And like you said, yeah, no, maybe you're right.

[00:49:38] Maybe this is the one.

[00:49:39] But it never stands alone.

[00:49:40] That's what, you know?

[00:49:41] Yeah.

[00:49:41] I mean, like I just think the more central that is to the punishment practice, the more it looks like punishment is more about reconciliation than at least the norm enforcement people think it is.

[00:49:56] Yeah.

[00:49:57] And maybe that's the peace pipe.

[00:49:59] My favorite part.

[00:50:00] Oh, gosh.

[00:50:01] There's so much good stuff about that.

[00:50:03] So let's just go quickly through the last one.

[00:50:05] So prediction six, the more transgressors and victims are interdependent, for example, by being genetically related, the less important imposing costs and transferring benefits should be for relationship restoration, which makes sense because you're already in a relationship.

[00:50:18] You can't.

[00:50:18] Yeah.

[00:50:19] You're forced.

[00:50:20] And this was vindicated by the Biden pardoning Hunter.

[00:50:25] So score one for prediction six.

[00:50:28] What do you think when they say we see no reason that norm enforcement theories should make prediction six?

[00:50:34] So they say insofar as punishment functions to enforce group norms, we would expect the individuals should be punished similarly, regardless of whether they transgress on family members or strangers.

[00:50:46] Like that doesn't seem right to me.

[00:50:48] No.

[00:50:49] And this is where like the third party part really matters to me because I think it just seems to be like a fall out of what it means to be in a familiar relationship with somebody that you just don't do the same shit that you would do.

[00:51:02] To other people.

[00:51:02] Yeah.

[00:51:03] Yeah.

[00:51:04] Yeah.

[00:51:04] No, I think that's right.

[00:51:06] And also norms can like differentiate between what you do for family transgressions versus what you do for transgressions against strangers.

[00:51:18] That's the other part.

[00:51:19] Totally.

[00:51:20] And then prediction seven, when costs fail to be imposed on transgressors, reciprocal cooperation should suffer.

[00:51:26] Yeah.

[00:51:26] Yeah.

[00:51:26] And they have like one example of that.

[00:51:29] I mean, like that's one of those where it's like modus poland, so modus poland.

[00:51:34] Yeah.

[00:51:35] Okay.

[00:51:35] So let's talk about some of this, like just the, your favorite, like of these stories.

[00:51:42] Yeah.

[00:51:42] Okay.

[00:51:43] So the first set of data that they look at are from the Kiowa, who were these bison hunters from the Great Plains.

[00:51:49] This is an interesting data set.

[00:51:50] So they, they're looking at data from before 1875 when they were put on reservations.

[00:51:57] So they want to know what their society was like before then.

[00:52:00] So 1935, people went and interviewed a bunch of the members of this tribe and got as much information as they could about various transgressions that had occurred.

[00:52:12] So these are people that are remembering, you know, from like 50 years ago, what might have happened.

[00:52:20] But you get report.

[00:52:21] I mean, you have no reason to believe that they're trying to bullshit.

[00:52:24] I mean, some of the, this is why I think the data, like quantifying it is silly, but you're getting really interesting insight into their practices.

[00:52:33] Yeah.

[00:52:34] The general method for all of these is that they listed all of the transgressions and they coded them for a bunch of different things.

[00:52:41] All of the predictions specifically were like what categories of action, what the, like what the transgression was, what the punishment was, who dealt out the punishment, all that stuff.

[00:52:53] So they were trying to put these into categories.

[00:52:55] So you get in the Kiowa, you get mostly, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, mostly adultery slash wife stealing.

[00:53:03] So what's your sense about the distinction between those two things?

[00:53:07] I don't, I think one might just be an affair and the other one is literally like.

[00:53:12] He stole her.

[00:53:14] Then it seems like it should be in two different categories.

[00:53:17] Like one is like kidnapping and the other is.

[00:53:20] Right.

[00:53:20] Maybe it was just like seducing her with like causing divorce.

[00:53:23] Yeah.

[00:53:24] That's what I think.

[00:53:25] Yeah.

[00:53:26] So yeah, 42 of those, 10 murders, eight.

[00:53:31] Horse stealing.

[00:53:32] Horse stealing.

[00:53:33] Marriage related violations.

[00:53:35] Disturbing public peace.

[00:53:36] Yeah.

[00:53:37] And then this other tribe, stealing or harming pigs.

[00:53:41] Yeah.

[00:53:42] So the Menta Y, which are the more modern data set from Indonesia.

[00:53:46] Yeah.

[00:53:46] Stealing or harming pigs is the biggest one.

[00:53:50] Stealing or harming chickens.

[00:53:50] Stealing or harming chickens.

[00:53:52] Sexual misconduct.

[00:53:53] Which is like, wait, what does that include?

[00:53:57] Because the next one is impregnating unmarried girl.

[00:54:00] Yeah.

[00:54:00] Why?

[00:54:00] What's sexual misconduct?

[00:54:02] I guess it's like probably rape.

[00:54:04] Well, then you have molestation at the bottom there too.

[00:54:07] Child molestation.

[00:54:09] Yeah.

[00:54:10] Threatening.

[00:54:10] In any case.

[00:54:11] And then I love black magic is smacked up in the middle.

[00:54:14] Yeah.

[00:54:15] And then they, in light of the data, you know, the data and the statistical analyses, they

[00:54:20] test their predictions on this.

[00:54:24] Yeah.

[00:54:24] And a lot of the predictions don't really even need the math.

[00:54:26] Like, so they're coding.

[00:54:28] So two authors are looking at all the data and they're trying to say, okay, was there

[00:54:32] any punishment?

[00:54:33] Was there punishment by the victim?

[00:54:35] Was there punishment by the victim's kin?

[00:54:36] Was there some other third party?

[00:54:38] And so they put those into categories.

[00:54:41] They, you know, they do the math to just make sure that they agreed with each other about

[00:54:44] the categorization.

[00:54:46] And you can just eyeball the rates of third party punishment if you're to believe their

[00:54:51] coding are super low.

[00:54:53] No, absolutely.

[00:54:54] That's like a really important like thing to find, I think, is that third party punishment

[00:54:59] was very rare.

[00:55:00] They find that across all three of these societies that they looked at.

[00:55:05] Right.

[00:55:06] I like the figure three for the Kiowa did a transgression escalate into a fight.

[00:55:12] And so what you see is that mostly no fight.

[00:55:16] Yeah.

[00:55:16] They work it out.

[00:55:17] And the Kiowa were the ones that had the peace pipe, which I'm going to read the procedure

[00:55:22] here.

[00:55:22] The legal procedure was as follows.

[00:55:24] It was possible for the relatives of any defendant fearing for his life to seek from a medicine

[00:55:29] keeper to ask and ask him to offer a pipe to the plaintiff.

[00:55:33] Smoking constituted an oath that there would be no further retaliatory action.

[00:55:37] Compensation might be stipulated by the plaintiff at that time and could not be refused.

[00:55:41] The use of the peace pipe involved no judgment as to who was right and who was wrong.

[00:55:46] Consequently, there was no loss of face on either side.

[00:55:48] This mechanism effectively inhibited a lex telonis ciphernae, which is just awesome.

[00:55:53] It's so cool.

[00:55:54] So cool.

[00:55:55] Is this the one where you could refuse up to three peace pipes?

[00:55:59] Oh, I didn't read that.

[00:56:00] Where is the...

[00:56:01] Here, they say, social norms and supernatural beliefs surrounding the pipe further illustrates

[00:56:08] its relation restoration function.

[00:56:11] Disputants were prohibited both from refusing a pipe more than three times and from attacking

[00:56:17] the other party after having smoked the pipe.

[00:56:20] Violations of these prohibitions were considered severe transgressions, triggering social ostracism

[00:56:26] and automatic supernatural punishment, bringing ill luck and untimely death to the pipe violator.

[00:56:32] Ultimately.

[00:56:33] Ultimately, to the pipe violator.

[00:56:35] Notably, the supernatural punishment of pipe violation was similar to that of the most serious

[00:56:41] crimes such as murder.

[00:56:42] First of all, I like that you can have three times where you're like, no, fuck the pipe.

[00:56:48] And so if somebody transgresses, you're like, do I want to waste one of...

[00:56:54] Yeah, do I want to use one of my...

[00:56:55] Yeah, I love that.

[00:56:58] And then I also love just the rules around it.

[00:57:00] It really is...

[00:57:01] I wish I had put this for my book.

[00:57:03] It is a containment structure.

[00:57:05] That was the whole point of the last chapter of my book was the honor needs to be contained.

[00:57:10] And so this is a way.

[00:57:12] It's like, once you smoke this, it's over.

[00:57:15] And nobody loses face.

[00:57:18] Like, that's, again, across all societies.

[00:57:20] There's concern about people not losing face, people not feeling like their reputation had

[00:57:25] suffered.

[00:57:25] And there's no moral judgment.

[00:57:27] We're just doing this.

[00:57:29] You know, like, it's great.

[00:57:31] And the one time here that gets close to third party punishment is that it was a pipe

[00:57:36] violator where somebody was like, you, like, disrespected the pipe.

[00:57:41] Like, I'm going to step in and beat your ass.

[00:57:42] But apparently he didn't have to.

[00:57:44] Well, and that makes sense, right?

[00:57:46] If relationship restoration is the most important thing, like, you can't fuck with the peace

[00:57:51] pipe.

[00:57:52] The peace pipe is the core element of what it is you're trying to do.

[00:57:55] So I think that really does support their theory.

[00:57:58] I'm sure they're cherry picking a little bit in terms of which things to focus on.

[00:58:03] But like, that's such strong support for the theory.

[00:58:06] And I buy it.

[00:58:06] Yeah, I love that.

[00:58:07] All right.

[00:58:08] So then for the Malawi, we already read their transgressions.

[00:58:12] I think there's just more data here.

[00:58:14] These were the ones where there's a lot of chicken stealing and pig stealing and duck

[00:58:17] stealing.

[00:58:18] Can I read their case?

[00:58:19] Yeah.

[00:58:20] A large male pig bursts into a village and is killed.

[00:58:25] Aman Sulu's large male pig burst into the government settlement village of Paliu.

[00:58:32] This can be dangerous for both people and property.

[00:58:35] Large pigs can attack people as well as dogs and chickens and will eat crops.

[00:58:39] Many people followed it, presumably trying to kill it.

[00:58:42] Luca Carey successfully killed it.

[00:58:44] Both of Aman Sulu's sons remarked that many people were responsible for the pig's death

[00:58:51] while specifying that Luca Carey was the one who killed it.

[00:58:56] Aman Lu retaliated against Luca Carey, killing his large male pig.

[00:59:02] The interviewers agreed that Aman Sulu also tried to kill one of Luca Carey's large female

[00:59:08] pigs, although they disagreed about whether he was successful.

[00:59:11] One claimed he was successful, two that he was unsuccessful.

[00:59:15] What does that mean?

[00:59:16] That it's just injured or like...

[00:59:20] Yeah, I don't know.

[00:59:21] Did he just...

[00:59:22] Like he lied and the pig's still alive?

[00:59:25] He's hiding him out in the basement.

[00:59:26] Right, right.

[00:59:27] Like that's...

[00:59:27] With the help of mediators, the parties resolved the conflict.

[00:59:32] Aman Sulu paid Luca two pigs, one large male, one large female.

[00:59:37] Luca Carey with contributions from other residents of Paliu.

[00:59:41] Purchased a large male pig and delivered it to Aman Sulu.

[00:59:45] So in the end, he got a female pig to compensate for his male pig that Aman Sulu had no right

[00:59:54] to kill because it was his pig that burst loose into the village, I guess.

[00:59:59] Right?

[01:00:00] Yeah.

[01:00:00] And it's like, it's a great case because what's the norm?

[01:00:03] Like if the pig bursts into the neighborhood, you're not allowed to kill the pig of the person

[01:00:08] who kills that pig.

[01:00:09] Like that's not a norm.

[01:00:11] There's no norm for what you do when like the pig bursts into like a neighboring village.

[01:00:17] You know?

[01:00:19] It's just like, the whole point is we have to like figure out how to like get along and

[01:00:24] make it so that, you know, people aren't hurting each other and we'll still want to trade with

[01:00:29] each other and like sing together.

[01:00:32] Yeah.

[01:00:32] It's a sit down.

[01:00:33] It's really...

[01:00:34] Yeah.

[01:00:35] Right.

[01:00:35] There's no like penal code, you know, there's no like statute that you can like go look up.

[01:00:40] And I love how they agreed that they were all responsible for killing them.

[01:00:43] Yeah.

[01:00:44] Oh, the villagers like, yeah.

[01:00:46] And so they chipped in to it's like, even though you did it.

[01:00:49] Like I am Spartacus.

[01:00:50] Exactly.

[01:00:55] I killed the pig.

[01:00:56] I killed the pig.

[01:00:58] I killed the pig.

[01:00:59] But Luke is really the one who killed Luke.

[01:01:08] Prediction seven.

[01:01:09] They say there are two indications that aggressors refusal to pay penalties can dissolve cooperation.

[01:01:16] And the case that they talk about was a member of the Sapolo's can killed a pig and refused

[01:01:24] to pay Tulu.

[01:01:25] The pig's owner in turn killed two members of Sapoko, then fled.

[01:01:29] The story shows how people conceptualize the choice between paying Tulu and inviting violence.

[01:01:35] M. Bacolo addressed a question to them as he was sitting next to them.

[01:01:38] Why did you not fulfill the request of the negotiators whom I sent to talk to you?

[01:01:43] Namely, that you have to pay me a pig as a replacement for the one you shot.

[01:01:47] The Sapoko deliberately ignored the request and answered him, we do not want to pay it

[01:01:51] because we do not want to do so.

[01:01:53] If you want to have it, you will have to do it with that shiny, sharpened machete and spear.

[01:02:00] That's just like a rap battle at that point.

[01:02:02] Yeah, it was sick.

[01:02:04] That's some really cool shit to say.

[01:02:07] Except for he did get two of them killed.

[01:02:09] Popping a spear in his ass.

[01:02:12] Exactly.

[01:02:14] But he did.

[01:02:15] If I'm understanding the story right, that did in turn get two of the Sapoko members killed.

[01:02:20] That's what happens when you don't.

[01:02:22] Yeah.

[01:02:23] Exactly.

[01:02:24] And again, I'd be surprised if this was not something that a Richardson and Boyd or Henrik

[01:02:31] theory could handle.

[01:02:33] But it's still super interesting.

[01:02:35] Yeah.

[01:02:36] Okay.

[01:02:37] And the newer are these Nylotic, which I believe refers to their language group, but also their

[01:02:42] geographical region, like from Sudan tribe there, that they have this interesting guy,

[01:02:47] the leopard skin chief, who kind of like kicks ass.

[01:02:51] The newer institutions of punitive justice were intertwined with procedures constraining

[01:02:55] rash retaliation and protecting against feuding.

[01:02:57] Most important in this respect was the leopard skin chief and the religious beliefs associated

[01:03:01] with his activity.

[01:03:02] He was important in three respects for restoring reciprocal cooperation.

[01:03:06] First, he was a middleman.

[01:03:08] As with the Mentawai and Kiowa 10 medicine keepers, he approached the grief party on behalf

[01:03:12] of the transgressors group.

[01:03:14] Because reputational concerns dictated that the grief party resist accepting compensation,

[01:03:19] even though they were anxious to come to an agreement, the leopard skin chief sometimes

[01:03:23] resorted to threats and curses, even on occasion engaging in a mock battle.

[01:03:28] He thereby allowed disputants to pursue resolution without provoking conflict while permitting

[01:03:32] victims to save face and give the appearance of unappeasable wrath.

[01:03:35] Yeah, that's such a, that's so cool because it's like, you know, the end of Shane where

[01:03:39] it's just like, oh, I'm tying you up.

[01:03:42] You can't retaliate because look, the leopard skin chief will kill you and contaminate you

[01:03:48] and you'll have explosive diarrhea or be killed.

[01:03:51] You know, like, there's just like, and all of that is geared to, as a way of the victim

[01:03:56] being able to kind of live with themselves by not retaliating maybe to the point that

[01:04:02] their kind of desires are motivating them to, you know?

[01:04:07] Yeah.

[01:04:07] And then the killers were supposed to like go seek refuge in his house right away.

[01:04:12] Just again, all to stop like some like cycle of violence or war.

[01:04:16] In the newer, is the newer the one where we read like that they were saying that third

[01:04:21] parties don't even really care that much when a murder is going to get involved?

[01:04:25] Like they're, yeah, they're like, my name's Paul.

[01:04:28] Yeah.

[01:04:28] And again, like, is that, that surprising, you know, in a small scale society where there's,

[01:04:35] you know, it's just like.

[01:04:37] Yeah, right.

[01:04:37] Third parties, it says by contrast, were largely indifferent to whether transgressors were

[01:04:40] punished.

[01:04:41] Quote, there appears to be no formal reaction on the part of the community as a whole to

[01:04:45] an act of homicide, nor any general expression of reprobation.

[01:04:48] Third parties may have become involved, but only when they risked finding themselves involved

[01:04:53] in a feud, which may spread along traditional lines of political.

[01:04:56] I mean, so here's where I think that doesn't mean that norms aren't getting enforced.

[01:05:01] It just means that the people who don't want to risk their lives to do it don't.

[01:05:07] But like, it's very clear that murder is a norm violation and the second party, the victims

[01:05:15] are highly motivated again, although they don't like to use the term in honor cultures,

[01:05:22] especially which distrust third party punishment because it's like a sign of weakness.

[01:05:27] It signals weakness.

[01:05:28] Like you can't handle your own business.

[01:05:29] That doesn't mean that norms aren't getting enforced or it doesn't mean that norm enforcement

[01:05:35] isn't the primary goal.

[01:05:37] Because I think in those kinds of cases, well, I guess it's complicated because sometimes

[01:05:43] blood money is paid to restore our relationships within a close community.

[01:05:50] But other times when you have second party punishment, especially for something like murder,

[01:05:56] like, no, you're not trying to like be friends with them again.

[01:06:00] You're trying to send a message that you can't fuck with your family like that.

[01:06:04] And that's a norm, I guess.

[01:06:07] You know, I wouldn't like you could conceptualize it as a norm.

[01:06:10] You could conceptualize it more in terms of just a deterrent signal or message.

[01:06:15] But I don't think the third party thing matters as much for the norm enforcement as they say.

[01:06:22] Yeah, no, the whole question of what a norm is and whether a norm is being enforced

[01:06:26] is something they don't talk about that much.

[01:06:28] Can I tell one more story?

[01:06:30] Because I remember this from the, this was this book by Elijah Anderson called Code of

[01:06:35] the Street that I read about, like inner city Philadelphia.

[01:06:40] It's a sociologist.

[01:06:41] And he talked about these two friends who are not like gang members, but they're trying to

[01:06:47] figure out ways of kind of, you know, not being victims to gang bullying.

[01:06:53] So being cool with them, but not being a part of them.

[01:06:56] And so they kind of gravitate towards each other.

[01:06:59] They're kind of cousins.

[01:07:00] And he tells the story of this one time where they're talking to some girls and one of the

[01:07:07] guys just goes a little too far, kind of making fun of his friend.

[01:07:11] And so the other one just says, we got to fight.

[01:07:15] And so they have this kind of very ritualized fight.

[01:07:18] Like at one point, like one of the kids slaps his friend by mistake during the fight, immediately

[01:07:23] apologize.

[01:07:24] Like, that's not cool.

[01:07:25] You can't like open face, slap someone, you know, they get a little bloodied up and then

[01:07:29] that's it.

[01:07:30] And the way Elijah Anderson describes this is this is a ritual that is meant to define boundaries.

[01:07:39] Like we can give each other shit.

[01:07:41] We can diss each other, but not in front of like hot girls that were, you know, trying

[01:07:47] to talk up.

[01:07:49] And so like, that's the norm of their particular relationship.

[01:07:53] It has nothing to do, like if a third party came in that it would be completely inappropriate

[01:07:59] actually to enforce that norm, which is just a hundred percent between those two people,

[01:08:05] you know?

[01:08:06] Right.

[01:08:07] Right.

[01:08:07] That's not a norm of the street.

[01:08:08] That's a norm of their relationship.

[01:08:10] Yeah, it's a norm.

[01:08:10] Yeah.

[01:08:11] And I think a lot of that is what gets done.

[01:08:13] And so the smaller the scale of the society, obviously the norms are going to be more geared

[01:08:19] specifically for those relationships.

[01:08:21] That's right.

[01:08:22] And this is just a general point.

[01:08:24] You know, I think what happens when you get to be a large scale society is you have to

[01:08:29] abstract norms and enforce universal ones because you can't have ad hoc norms maintaining

[01:08:35] society in that same way.

[01:08:36] Because we don't know each other and we don't even really care if we're reconciled, you know,

[01:08:42] afterwards.

[01:08:43] Yeah.

[01:08:43] Right.

[01:08:43] Because we're not, we don't have to see each other.

[01:08:45] Yeah, exactly.

[01:08:47] I like, by the way, how they say an exception to third parties disinterest in the private

[01:08:52] nature of law was the murder of evil magical agents such as suspected werewolves and road.

[01:09:00] But ghoulish people believed to kill people, disinterred corpses and mutilate them.

[01:09:04] Like, yeah, you did a solid solid.

[01:09:06] You killed the village werewolf.

[01:09:08] Right.

[01:09:08] If anything, like that should be, that's a norm that we should reward, not punish.

[01:09:13] Werewolves should be killed.

[01:09:14] Yeah.

[01:09:16] I also liked here that under prediction three, when they're talking about the magnitude of

[01:09:22] compensation, that the village elders or like the, there was an institutional memory, even

[01:09:27] though it wasn't written down for what an appropriate compensation would be.

[01:09:31] So it says such scales of compensation for wrongs can be quoted by the older generation

[01:09:35] of newer with surprising consistency.

[01:09:37] For example, adultery requires six head of cap cattle for restoring the relationship.

[01:09:42] Bodily injuries require compensation in proportion to the seriousness of the injury.

[01:09:46] And there are complicated scales laid down in tradition.

[01:09:48] Homicide requires the transference of 40 head of cattle from the kinsman to the killer

[01:09:52] to those of the deceased in order to restore the balance between them.

[01:09:57] And it really strikes me that, you know, you see this in obviously an old legal codes as

[01:10:02] well, like Hammurabi's code and all the biblical codes where there's just a specific like,

[01:10:07] okay, if you kill somebody from my household, you need to pay me this much.

[01:10:11] There's so much in modern psychology, modern moral psychology has focused on like these sacred

[01:10:16] values and these taboo trade-offs that it's like, how dare you put a price on the life

[01:10:22] of my child?

[01:10:22] It's like market pricing framework substituted for like a communal.

[01:10:28] Exactly.

[01:10:28] Right.

[01:10:29] But this is just like, what else are you going to do?

[01:10:32] You know, you got to live with these people and like, you're not going to just not do

[01:10:35] anything.

[01:10:36] Like you're not going to ask for them to kill a member of their family.

[01:10:39] Or if you do, that's just going to be, everybody's fucked then.

[01:10:42] You know, like if you start this big feud, like that's why so much of like, again, I don't

[01:10:47] mean to keep bringing honor cultures is meant to prevent those kinds of escalations.

[01:10:53] Yeah.

[01:10:53] I find it fascinating.

[01:10:54] I feel like it's when you focus on the fact that you need to repair a relationship, it's

[01:10:59] obviously 40 heads of cattle.

[01:11:01] It's not going to bring someone back to life, but you got to do something.

[01:11:04] And again, I think it's a lot about saving face.

[01:11:07] It's like, okay, well, he, you know, he, he had his brother killed and he's not killing

[01:11:14] the guy who did it.

[01:11:16] So how are we not supposed to think less of him?

[01:11:18] Well, at least he has 40 cattle from this person and an apology and, uh, you know, they

[01:11:24] shared a peace pipe or whatever it is.

[01:11:26] It's like that allows that to be okay.

[01:11:30] That allows a balance because the balance is culturally determined, like what the balance

[01:11:34] is.

[01:11:35] And it's just about the balance is successful if the people feel it's successful, you know,

[01:11:40] like that's the only criteria in the matter ultimately.

[01:11:44] Yeah.

[01:11:44] Right.

[01:11:45] I was going to ask you what you thought of blame and resentment and what happens to those emotions

[01:11:50] here or those, those views, like the kind of deep blame and guilt that we ascribe to

[01:11:56] people, like, does that get washed away in these traditions?

[01:11:59] Like, is it understood that once the compensation is made, then we don't hold it against you?

[01:12:04] Like I won't bitterly.

[01:12:05] It's a great question.

[01:12:06] And one of the things I was thinking of reading this is like the kind of primary Iliad story,

[01:12:13] which isn't really about the battling Troy, but it's really a battle among the Greeks between

[01:12:19] Agamemnon and Achilles.

[01:12:20] Agamemnon in the beginning of the Iliad takes Achilles' slave girl just because Apollo's

[01:12:26] priest took his and Achilles was, you know, dissing him in public and talking shit about

[01:12:33] how bad a leader he was, which he was.

[01:12:36] And so he stole Achilles' slave girl, Briseis.

[01:12:40] And because of that, Achilles leaves the war and he's gone for the first half of the Iliad

[01:12:46] just by himself, sulking.

[01:12:47] He's so mad at Agamemnon.

[01:12:49] He hates Agamemnon.

[01:12:50] He has so much contempt for him.

[01:12:52] So then the middle of the Iliad, like, or, you know, close to the middle, book nine, Odysseus,

[01:12:58] Ajax, and someone named Phoenix, an old guy who knew Achilles and helped raise him, go to

[01:13:05] Achilles and say, okay, look, Agamemnon is sorry he did it.

[01:13:10] He says he shouldn't have done it.

[01:13:12] And he's offering, like, nine maidens all this treasure and we need you back in the war.

[01:13:20] Like, we're going to lose.

[01:13:21] We're getting our ass kicked, which they were, and he was their best fighter.

[01:13:25] We need you back to fight for us.

[01:13:27] And Achilles keeps resisting.

[01:13:30] And at a certain point, Ajax, who's the most kind of focused on honor and aggression and

[01:13:36] eye for an eye, he's just like, Jesus Christ, Achilles, like, someone will kill their brother

[01:13:40] and they will accept blood money, but you won't accept, like, he didn't kill anybody of yours.

[01:13:45] He just big-timed you and stole your slave girl.

[01:13:48] And now he's offering, like, way more.

[01:13:50] Like, it's like 40 cows.

[01:13:52] Like, who do you think you are?

[01:13:54] So I think it's like, he could be resentful, but that resentment has to be, like, quenched

[01:14:00] at a certain point.

[01:14:01] And, like, Achilles' rage, like, the first word of the Iliad is rage.

[01:14:05] Achilles' rage was to a point where it was beyond resentment.

[01:14:09] It was, like, not something that was stable for keeping that group together.

[01:14:14] And they get mad at him for that, even though they respect him so much as a warrior.

[01:14:19] And everyone thinks Agamemnon was wrong in what he did.

[01:14:23] You know, like, literally nobody thinks that Agamemnon was right, even from the start.

[01:14:28] But once he makes that offer, it's like, what the fuck?

[01:14:31] No, it totally makes sense.

[01:14:32] And I think psychologically that would serve to curtail resentment.

[01:14:36] I mean, I'm sure that they are.

[01:14:37] But, like, if everybody's like, dude, you saved face.

[01:14:41] Like, you're right.

[01:14:41] He was wrong.

[01:14:42] We all agree.

[01:14:43] Pretty pleased with fucking charions off.

[01:14:44] Can you come help us win this war?

[01:14:48] Yeah.

[01:14:49] And I feel like impersonal punishing of a criminal who did something to you, like, especially

[01:14:54] a personal crime, won't kill the resentment.

[01:14:58] Like, there's nothing there that will kill me from not, you know, I will want to, like,

[01:15:03] wait till that person, you know, gets released from prison.

[01:15:06] Take him out like he's a United CEO.

[01:15:08] Not if it's.

[01:15:11] Too soon.

[01:15:13] No, that's right.

[01:15:14] You know, not like if he gave you 40 cows, it would be better.

[01:15:17] But this is the promise of restorative justice is it's something closer to that where you actually

[01:15:23] can look the person in the eye and they have to either atone for it or at least apologize

[01:15:29] and say why they did it.

[01:15:31] And, you know, maybe still you'll say, no, fuck, I want this guy to go to the chair or

[01:15:36] I still want to kill him.

[01:15:37] You're going to be my third piece by refusal.

[01:15:39] I'm going to use one on you, motherfucker.

[01:15:41] I still, I could use this one and still have one left.

[01:15:44] So fuck it.

[01:15:47] Back to prison for you.

[01:15:48] But like, no, I do think like there are times where that really works and it's much healthier

[01:15:53] for everybody.

[01:15:54] It's just the problem is, is like you said earlier, we don't know each other.

[01:15:58] And so there's less incentive to want to do that, you know, in the first place.

[01:16:04] Yeah.

[01:16:04] Maybe I can read that just to wrap up, like read the last couple of paragraphs where they

[01:16:08] talk a bit about this.

[01:16:10] Yeah.

[01:16:11] Why is justice functionally different in small scale compared to large scale societies?

[01:16:14] One possibility is that higher degrees of interdependence in small scale societies increase the need

[01:16:19] for relation restoration.

[01:16:21] This need may be all the more pressing given the defenses are often committed by young people

[01:16:25] who are the future of society so that many small scale justice systems seek to restore

[01:16:28] their moral reputation and reintegrate them into the group.

[01:16:32] Another possibility is that systems of norm enforcement are difficult to maintain in

[01:16:35] small scale, politically decentralized contexts.

[01:16:37] Indeed, while third party norm enforcement would be group beneficial, it is very costly

[01:16:42] at the individual level.

[01:16:43] Punishing offenders means risking dangerous fights and losing cooperation partners.

[01:16:47] Most often then people likely see no benefit in punishing offenses that do not harm them

[01:16:51] directly.

[01:16:52] I mean, all that sounds plausible.

[01:16:54] Again, like, you know, I would waffle back and forth, but I kind of landed at they are offering

[01:17:00] something that's substantively different from the kind of Richardson and Boyd and Gintas and

[01:17:07] all that, or Ernst Faire or whatever.

[01:17:09] Like, they are emphasizing relationship restoration more than they did.

[01:17:15] And this is obviously just three societies that, for all we know, are, you know, details

[01:17:21] are being cherry-picked or just the choice of the societies themselves.

[01:17:25] But they seem representative of, like, a lot of the anthropological stuff that I looked at.

[01:17:31] And I think it's a really cool view that I'm excited to, like, bring to my punishment class.

[01:17:38] Yeah, awesome.

[01:17:39] And I'll say this, like, whatever this says for me, like, whatever it says about, like,

[01:17:45] the debate that they're engaging in, I think that if we buy that these people might be some

[01:17:51] sort of echo of our past, what it does say is that even if norm enforcement did play a role

[01:17:57] and even if third-party punishment did become important, that there is a deep part of our

[01:18:01] psychology that resonates with this way of doing.

[01:18:05] Whether or not that's, like, the, you know, sine qua non of, like, punishment in the mind,

[01:18:09] the moral mind, I don't know.

[01:18:10] But you read these and you get it.

[01:18:13] And, like, to me, that says something about how we're built, truly.

[01:18:16] So maybe, finally, in this roundabout way, you're starting to see the appeal of restorative

[01:18:23] justice.

[01:18:24] Rube Goldberg path, but.

[01:18:26] Wait, listen, I'm going to use my, I'm going to use my refusal of the peace pipe for this.

[01:18:31] All right, you only have two left, so.

[01:18:34] Yeah.

[01:18:36] Really good paper.

[01:18:37] Like I said, I love these kinds of things because, like, I could disagree with a lot more

[01:18:42] than I do with this paper and still find a lot of these practices.

[01:18:47] And we haven't, like, I urged listeners to read the paper because there's a lot of stuff,

[01:18:51] like, really interesting stuff that we didn't touch on.

[01:18:53] Yeah.

[01:18:53] And we've talked multiple times about, like, if psychology, especially social psychology,

[01:18:58] really should look more at descriptive work.

[01:19:01] And this integration of maybe theory testing with descriptive work, maybe it's not the perfect

[01:19:06] ratio.

[01:19:07] But, like, I assigned two papers on this.

[01:19:10] One was this for a guest class I recently taught.

[01:19:13] One was this one.

[01:19:14] Another one was just, like, nothing but economic games.

[01:19:17] And this one just felt so, it just felt like I was actually reading about human beings.

[01:19:21] Right.

[01:19:22] And not human beings that, like, I interact with, like, in terms of some of the specifics.

[01:19:27] No, right.

[01:19:27] But like you said, at the deep core, a lot of this stuff resonates.

[01:19:32] Very cool paper.

[01:19:33] So glad you put this in there.

[01:19:34] And we have, like, a year's worth of topics we could probably do just from the first segment.

[01:19:40] So very productive episode.

[01:19:42] Which is all we care about here at Very Bad Wizards.

[01:19:45] Productivity.

[01:19:48] All right.

[01:19:49] Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:19:51] Let's wait in!